The first Republican Presidential debate offered a chance to think about the relationship between misogyny and certain types of opposition to abortion. PHOTOGRAPH BY BRIAN SNYDER/REUTERS VIA LANDOV

In the United States, our most successful demagogues have often become so by making skillful use of whatever the newest media was at the time. Charles Coughlin, the Catholic priest who railed against Jews and capitalism in the nineteen-thirties, did most of his railing via the radios that the American masses had just recently acquired. In the early fifties, Joseph McCarthy took advantage of television’s advent to attract gavel-to-gavel attention for his congressional hearings. Donald Trump is a celebrity demagogue, and, for the moment, anyway, the leading Republican Presidential candidate, because of reality television and Twitter.

Both forms shaped Trump’s persona: he’s their creature. On his own reality-TV show, “The Apprentice,” and now on the campaign trail, Trump displays the particular personality traits that get amped up, hyped, and rewarded on the crassest of these series: he’s as thin-skinned, tantrum-prone, “outrageous,” and narcissistic as a "Real Housewives" villain.

Trump also does a lot of his posturing on the Internet, where trollish taunts can win you a following, and where women sometimes come in for particular contempt. He has a taste for that, too, as we all know now, if we didn’t before the debate last Thursday.

Here in America, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, sexism is very much on the wane, but misogyny is not. Sexism—the conviction that women don’t deserve equal pay, political rights, or access to education—can be combatted by argument, by anti-discrimination laws, and by giving women the opportunity to prove their ability. Misogyny is not amenable to such advances; they can in some circumstances exacerbate it, though they may drive it underground. An example of misogyny is when someone online threatens to rape and mutilate a woman whose opinions that person does not like. Another is when a Presidential candidate says of a female journalist whose questions he finds impertinent, “There was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her—wherever.”

The day after Trump made his comment about Megyn Kelly, he was disinvited from the RedState network’s annual conference of G.O.P. leaders. RedState’s editor-in-chief, Erick Erickson, who is also a Fox News commentator, explained, “As much as I do personally like Donald Trump, his comment about Megyn Kelly on CNN is just a bridge too far for me.” He went on, “There are just lines of decency a person running for president should not cross.” That may have been cheering to Republican women. The defense of some sort of decorum in public life seems like a reasonable position to stake out, especially for a true conservative. Ross Perot, the last shoot-from-the-hip, vote-for-me-I’m-a businessman, Republican-ish candidate we saw on the Presidential debate stage, was not given to insulting women. So on one level, Trump’s preening misogyny and gross-out insinuations are something new—a weird product of his own personality and the id-indulging media through which he generally communicates. In their exchange at last week’s debate, Kelly reminded him, “You’ve called women you don’t like 'fat pigs,' 'dogs,' 'slobs,' and 'disgusting animals,’ ” and then asked if that called to mind “the temperament of a man we should elect as President.” It was a legitimate question, but Trump offered no real answer, let alone regret; the problem, he said, was “political correctness.” None of the other nine candidates onstage countered this interpretation. So, if a fellow Republican were put off enough to cancel a speaking invitation for Trump, that seemed promising. It was a little deflating when one considered that Erickson himself was prone to Trump-like woman-baiting. (A tweet from 2010, spotted by my colleague Ryan Lizza: “Good thing I didn't suggest the feminists ... you know ... shave. They'd be at my house trying a post-birth abortion on me”).

The Republican Presidential candidates’ debate last week, in Cleveland, provided an opportunity to think about the relationship between this kind of misogyny and the eagerness to stake out a more and more draconian position on abortion. I’ve never believed that being anti-abortion makes you a woman-hater. People hold anti-abortion views for many reasons, including, most fundamentally, the belief that life begins at conception. But it’s hard not to see some sort of misogyny in the unseemly scramble to plant a flag at the very farthest frontier of anti-abortion territory, positively eager to reiterate, as Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker did, that bans on abortion should include no exception to save the life of a woman. Rare as such situations are—anti-abortion advocates are right to say that they don’t occur often—why would you want to bar even the possibility of saving a woman’s life over that of the fetus she is carrying? And whatever their motivation or intentions, the effect of the substantial restrictions on abortion that the Republican candidates favor would be damaging to women.

Trump can only do so much harm, because his type of candidate, historically, doesn’t make it all the way to the White House. As Jack Shafer writes in Politico, “The downside of being an American demagogue is that your big head inevitably bangs against a low ceiling. There are only so many voters who will pull the lever for a Maximum Leader type.” Whether they’ll vote for any of Trump’s extreme Republican rivals is another story.