On Monday, McCain, a new mom, returned to her co-hosting slot on The View for the first time since she was born last fall. She had planned to come back before the election, she explained, but unexpected medical complications “kicked my butt” and doubled her time away from the office.
The expansion sparked a lightbulb for a moment: “When I thought about it, I got all the more angry that there weren’t any women in the rest of America who had the same luxuries as me,” she said. “Sometimes it takes personal experience to get on board.”
But now that she was fully on board, she had a request for her co-hosts: The women from “The View” should take paid maternity leave on their 2021 mission. You should put ” [politicians’] Feet to the Fire ”- particularly members of McCain’s own Republican Party who pay lip service to“ family values ”- to make paid maternity leave a legal guarantee.
McCain is absolutely correct, of course. Among the 41 richest countries in the world, the United States is the only one that doesn’t require paid vacation – leagues behind Estonia, Hungary, and the other countries that offer more than a year. Paid parental leave is good for families, good for children, and good for working parents, and America’s failure on this matter is so self-evident that we need no more than this one paragraph to emphasize it. Meghan McCain is a thousand percent right.
What interests me most is how she got there. Or rather, why it took her so long to get there. Or rather, how we can speed up this process so that not every denier has to personally give birth to a child before he or she comes on board.
Would McCain support the vacation now if she had a simple, complication-free job? She seemed to be pleading for Congress to explicitly support the time she had needed herself: three months. What if she recovered after just 10 weeks? Would that be your political recommendation then? Or conversely, what if her postpartum experience had been even more difficult, or if she lacked the husband and mother-in-law support system that she had relied on? Would she ask the women on The View to take four months of paid vacation? Five?
When co-host Sara Haines suggested that paid vacation shouldn’t just be for mothers – “Fathers need this time too, as the modern family structure changes,” McCain politely shot her down. “I think we should start with the mother,” she said.
Personal experiences can be powerful and life changing. The problem with policies guided by the personal struggles of famous television personalities, however, is that they are not based on the needs of the average citizen or are rated as optimal by experts. They are based on the solipsism of influential people who are only scandalized by injustices they personally experience.
You saw this in Senator Rob Portman (R-Ohio), who didn’t start promoting same-sex marriage until his son came out gay. Or with Jared Kushner, who decided to make criminal justice reform a signature problem because his father’s experience was convicted and imprisoned for illegal campaign contributions, tax evasion and witness manipulation. Chris Christie – who, incidentally, had indicted Charles Kushner as Attorney General of New Jersey – recently made a video asking voters to wear masks, but only after contracting the coronavirus after a maskless ceremony at the White House .
They see it when daughters support universal health care only after their fathers are diagnosed with cancer, or when fathers support access to abortion only when their daughters need one.
“It’s funny,” McCain’s co-host Whoopi Goldberg replied to McCain in a tone that did not sound amused. It sounded like she remembered not to shit a colleague on national television. “We fought for it for years. Beg. Screaming.”
Even so, Goldberg nodded to McCain’s request, as did the other co-hosts. Of course, they were on board to hold the politicians’ feet to the fire on the matter. They had been doing that for a long time.
Meekness is the only constructive answer. Of course we have to applaud people when they change their minds, of course we have to greet them wholeheartedly to the team, of course we have to bite our tongues when they discover 40 year old talking points, of course we have to recognize them that someone like McCain could be a more resonant voice for conservative viewers than liberals like Goldberg or Joy Behar. The timely scolding of stragglers is gratifying, but counterproductive for the cause – an independent step.
Empathy is a muscle. It would do us all good to strengthen it, and that means not just thinking about our experiences but exercising our imaginations. Imagine a terrible thing that happens to you and how you would like to be treated as a result. Now realize that the terrible thing is happening to thousands of Americans every day. The goal is not to run a mile in someone else’s shoes. The goal is to realize that someone else’s shoes may never suit you and still deserve to be warm and dry.
It shouldn’t take a difficult birth / gay son / woman with non-Hodgkin lymphoma / transgender parent to realize that medical bankruptcy or discrimination are horrific, dehumanizing things. People don’t deserve empathy because we see our own suffering in theirs, but because they are people who suffer.
And when a personal experience brings a particular experience of suffering into focus, you have the humility to outsource your ideas about what needs to be done to experts and activists who have thought and cared about the terrible longer than you have.
Meghan McCain’s realization about the need for universal parental leave is wonderful, and I am grateful for it. I’m excited to see how she tries to hold the politicians’ feet to the fire. And I assume that she might have another insight: It is frustrating to try to convince people to care about an injustice when they have not suffered from it themselves.
Monica Hesse is a columnist who writes about gender and its impact on society. You can find more information at wapo.st/hesse.