MeToo Takes Forefront in Andrew Cuomo Scandal, While The Liberal Response to Accusations Splinters
A scandal that erupted with revelations about the governor's pandemic mismanagement has shifted into a drama about the efficacy and credibility of MeToo.
A refrain I’ve noticed during the escalating scandals involving Gov. Andrew Cuomo: “So killing old people is okay, but harassment is what takes down powerful politicians?”
Perhaps a willfully pithy and provocative way to frame things, yet it does get at a seldom spoken truth in this cultural moment: that the Democratic Party and its media apparatus consider sexual misconduct to be the knockout punch for a public figure, no matter what else that person has done.
It makes sense if you have a handle on present social dynamics. MeToo claims at once carry tremendous emotional power, land in an uncomfrotable place in a puritanical social climate that simply wants offenders swept out of sight forever, and are largely unquestioned by a public that has yet to have a thoughtful examination on how any punishment should be structured and what new norms should be put in place over the long term.
Time and again, MeToo failed to harm Donald Trump, but it wasn’t for a lack of trying. The Access Hollywood tape was supposed to derail his campaign for good in 2016. By the end of his term, it had become so accepted that Trump was impervious to any sexual scandal, from plain tawdry to criminal, that an additional credible accuser coming forward last September barely registered in the election hysteria beyond a few days. If anything, MeToo’s failure to affect Trump likely only intensified the resolve of activists to punish others.
Of course, Andrew Cuomo is not Trump in one very critical way: he’s a Democrat, among the party that is very vocal, if not always committed in practice, about its intentions to make the world safe for women, especially those of the professional class. Now seven accusers strong, Cuomo’s alleged misdeeds with subordinates seem to balloon by the day.
If he hangs on, he wouldn’t be the first Democratic governor in the last few years to weather a controversy that would have ruined the lives of less powerful men. After all, I write this from Virginia, where Ralph Northam’s blackface incident - not to mention his impulse to smooth things over by moonwalking during an emergency press conference - has been largely forgotten as his term nears completion. While the Cuomo case has spurred mentions of Al Franken, who many mainline Dems believe was railroaded out of a Senate seat and harbor sour feelings about it, I think few realize that many powerful men in liberal politics see Franken as a teachable moment in a different way: a figure in power has a much better chance of survival if they stand their ground, unlike Franken who caved to party leadership before a formal investigation was undertaken. Clearly Cuomo took the lesson to heart, since he is doing exactly that.
The truth is that Cuomo’s downfall, were it to actually happen, will have been a slightly bizarre exercise in accountability. Cuomo’s first accuser, Lindsey Boylan, was met with indifference by Democrats in December when she first came forward. At that point, Trump was president and Cuomo was still coasting off his lionized status from early in the quarantine. The wider revelations about his sending still infectious Covid patients into nursing homes during the first month of lockdown was still months away.
Days before reports began circulating in February about the nursing home decision from March 2020, Boylan took to Twitter to complain about how SNL, ever the bastion of humor-like corporate liberal propaganda, trivialized her allegation.
If SNL wasn’t treating a woman’s victimhood as a moral emergency, it’s safe to say none of the other liberal institutions were either. Not a coincidence, either, since someone connected to the Cuomo administration leaked documents to the media undermining her job performance and credibility as soon as she made the accusations public in December. Not only is the standard of evidence more difficult with accusing powerful Democrats, it’s a numbers game as well.
In the wake of the nursing home revelations, and continued inquiry into whether his administration undercounted the covid deaths of seniors, the calls for Cuomo to leave office became plentiful. However, letting Cuomo go down for mismanagement on Covid would kill a popular Democratic narrative that Trump was solely to blame for the pandemic being as bad and as deadly as it has been. No doubt, Trump deserves a hefty share, though in the early months one must keep in mind the failures and contradictions of others sources of authority, ones now interested in deflecting responsibility as well.
Roughly a year ago, Democrats did much to undermine the credibility of MeToo with a clear double standard carried out by the media and the professional activist class in response to sexual assault allegations made against Joe Biden. The timing couldn’t have been worse for the DNC - they were still fending off a strong primary challenge from Bernie Sanders, and they wanted predation of women to be an attack line against Donald Trump in the general election, despite Biden already having a detailed history of complaints about inappropriate touching. So the Democrats stalled for weeks, gave the story short shrift in a tight and terse news cycle, then never let it be spoken of again.
As additional accusations against Cuomo have steadily piled up since the end of February, the uneasiness that MeToo has pushed dead seniors to the backburner has ebbed slightly, though that has much to do with the attitude that some want to be rid of Cuomo no matter the cause. Nevertheless, this has produced a strange dynamic. On one hand, it has emboldened many New York Democrats and some national party leaders to call for Cuomo to step down immediately, among them Chuck Schumer, Kirsten Gillibrand, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
An alternate camp of influential Democrats is calling for investigations to be carried out in full before a determination can be made about Cuomo’s fitness to hold office. In this faction you can find Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, and several high-profile journalists.
Each side has its complications. Figures like Gillibrand and AOC are eager to reestablish their MeToo bona fides, since commitment to that cause is central to their personal branding, tied as they are to identity issues. AOC and Gillibrand need to shore up that perception roughly a year after both women rather sheepishly fell in line behind Joe Biden during the brief period in 2020 when his sexual assault allegation was taken halfway seriously. Prior to that, Gillibrand and AOC had been all about beliving and amplifying allegations without any formal process.
After Gillibrand’s call for Cuomo to resign, which some criticized for being late to the game as she had been standing by the idea of investigations for weeks before the number of accusers passed some arbitrary line, a former staffer of hers went semi-viral with a post hailing the senator’s supposed and, in reality, rather selective bravery. To me, this shows supporters are fine letting obvious hypocrisy vis-a-vis Biden go, as it was what was necessary to oust Trump, then pretending like it never happened. Also it illustrates how potent the spell of reductive identity politics holds over the average Democrat. Those that frequently wield them can openly betray their principles, only to return to them at convenience and rarely get questioned or criticized by those on their side.
Corporate media, too, had been aggressive about litigating sexual misconduct in the court of public opinion, beginning with the explosion of MeToo following the revelations about Harvey Weinstein in October 2017, up until Biden’s sexual assault allegation in March 2020. In the immediate wake of Biden’s accusation, there were many examples of self-important and dishonest essays in corporate media stressing the need for thorough investigations and due process when it came to alleged sex crimes. That was a standard journalists had consistently flouted in the previous two-plus years, having thrown many marginal men under the bus, in some cases without examining anything or even asking for their side. That careless M.O. returned once Biden was in the clear. Now that a prominent Democrat again is accused, journos have suddenly rediscovered ethics, no doubt prepared to shed them as soon as this is over.
The liberal establishment is far more prepared to jettison Cuomo at this moment than it was to ditch Biden with Trump waiting in the general election. Cuomo is disposable and despised, which is why this has been allowed to ramp up. Still, his family power in state politics will not be so easily overcome. What’s more, Democratic operatives want to ensure they maintain control over ultimately who goes down instantly when accused and who doesn’t.
Some liberals are praising Biden for doing the sensable thing in encouraging investigation to be carried out. In a vacuum, I’d be inclined to agree, except establishment Democrats and the media have increasingly and distressingly made this once popular concept a luxury reserved for powerful Democrats. Will this change how liberals confront these matters in the future? It would be nice to believe so, but the brazen contradictions indicate otherwise.
On March 3, Slate’s legal correspondent Dalia Lithwick, with the Cuomo accuser count at three, pressed readers to consider that it would be healthy for MeToo in the long run that the idea of due process be integrated into the practice of trying to catch and hold abusers accountable. Conservatives seized on a piece Lithwick had written in September 2018 that clearly presumed the guilt of Brett Kavanaugh before any formal investigation. The GOP rushed through Kavanaugh’s confirmation, so fair to say they also lack firm convictions on the matter, though that doesn’t mean it’s not deeply disturbing that one party believes in abusers never being held accountable, while the other believes in accusations being enough to destroy most men, and that due process and fair consideration of the facts is only reserved for a powerful few.
A couple days after the Slate piece, New York Times op-ed writer Maureen Dowd dedicated her column on March 5 to the Cuomo scandal with a tone that expressed exhaustion at careless witch hunts that removed nuance from what can be complicated human interactions. She proceeded to anonymously quote “several women” who “dismissed Cuomo’s accusers to [Dowd] as ‘snowflakes.’”
In my experience, I’ve noticed stark generational differences with how women approach MeToo, with Millenials and Zoomers almost always favoring the burn-em-all approach to the accused while older women like Dowd tend to allow for the possibility of women’s agency playing a role in their interactions with men. Not flattening all offenses while also considering gray areas and proportionality seems vital to any sort of progress on this issue. That said, I cannot imagine any NYT writer suggesting, through anonymous quotes or not, that accusers are anything other than permanently damaged, put-upon victims unless of course the accused happens to be a liberal powerbroker.
The chief problem I have with all this is that Democrats, and liberals in general, view MeToo as less a movement for justice than a convenient weapon to utilize against enemies and disposable allies, as well as a sneaky method to cater to market forces. The market forces argument is evident in the Title IX debate on college campuses, where Biden has been one of the most central figures in imposing evidentiary standards that stack the deck against the accused. Advocates mask this unfair standard as simply what it takes to protect women. Perhaps they do catch some perpetrators they wouldn’t have under the old rules, but they also make victims of many falsely accused men who would have been able to better defend themselves under equal footing.
Does that have anything to do with justice? Or is it done to give preferential treatment to women, who for years now have been getting the majority of college degrees, and therefore are the biggest customer base for for-profit universities? Colleges, of course, are a key base of power for the Democratic Party. As is the mainstream media, which has numerous times in recent years (some have argued this was the inevitable result of uneven standards normalized in colleges, essentially planting the seeds for new views among the professional class) supported convicting accused men in the press, sometimes very marginal ones, without any supporting evidence.
Now that the Cuomo story has escalated to this stage, flashpoints all the way down, I worry there’s already no possibility of a satisfying conclusion. If the investigation eventually determines Cuomo has to go, Democrats will hail their responsibility and commitment to due process while as a default severely limiting who gets the benefit of it. If Cuomo is somehow able to hang on despite seven accusers and a review of his decisions with the nursing homes and covid death counts, it might only further embolden those who frame due process as an obstacle to justice. If Cuomo survives, it will have been institutional power, party corruption, and his remaining connections that saved him, not the methodology used to catalog the scope of his misdeeds.