Berners: Yang’s supporters are all alt-right dudes.

Joe Rogan. Sam Harris. Ben Shapiro. Not exactly a progressive feminist dream team, you got me.

Andrew Yang’s appearances on podcasts hosted by these three characters helped launch his campaign into the public spotlight, so it’s natural that some progressive women — who look askance at some of the opinions these three have expressed about feminism and women in general — might assume Yang to be a product of the alt-media boys’ (bros’?) club. The early explosion of support for Yang among young men on Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit in particular lent credence to that supposition, which I would call reasonable but unfortunate and incorrect.

Despite that, we’re out here and there are a lot of us. And I hear the claim often enough that Yang’s supporters are all dudes that I feel compelled to respond.

The first mention I heard of Andrew Yang was in a meme group on Facebook with a political makeup that can best be described as incoherent. A discussion of Yang’s appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience broke out, and I saw people I had previously considered somewhat misguided making arguments that I had been making for years as a lefty feminist. I was nonplussed.

But these are strange times, and this wouldn’t be the first time I’ve found myself in the company of strange political bedfellows, so I did this weird thing I do sometimes: I went and checked out his website for myself. My first real exposure to Yang thus wasn’t mediated by anyone’s agenda but my own (and his), and I came to the only logical conclusion possible: Andrew Yang’s platform of elegantly overlapping and interlocking policy proposals holds more promise for women in the US than any (feasible) electoral platform I had ever read in my life.

Who cares what I think? Well, maybe no one, but I have an advanced degree in comparative history with a focus on women and the law, I’ve been writing about a broad spectrum of women’s issues since the early 2000s (under a nom de plume), and I’ve spent a large chunk of my time in the past decade on feminist activism and on volunteering at domestic violence and sexual assault crisis centers and a nonprofit that provides long-term support for women exiting prostitution. One could say I’ve given some thought to the subject.

But enough about me. Let’s have a look at just two of Yang’s flagship policy proposals and their transformative potential for individual women’s lives and for gender relations in the US that have grown particularly strained in the past few years.

The Freedom Dividend and Human-Centered Capitalism

Two of Yang’s Big Three policies — the Freedom Dividend of $1000 a month for every US citizen over the age of 18 and his conceptualization of Human-Centered Capitalism that orients the economy away from simplistic measures like GDP and capital accumulation and toward the well-being of the citizenry — are best thought of in tandem.

Scarcity Politics and the Danger of Nihilism

The political polarization and antagonism that have brought us to the vertiginous precipice we’re standing on right now didn’t emerge from the ether; politicians from both parties have fomented it to keep us from peeking behind the curtain, and the mainstream media have soaked us with a constant stream of soundbite outrage for decades.

But why? To distract us from the material reality that capitalism is eating itself. Americans on the whole are broke, overcome with stress and mental health issues, and struggling just to exist while our “leaders" assure us that we’re doing great because GDP and the stock market don’t lie, don’t ya know.

It’s no wonder narratives that provide a scapegoat for frustration and the shame that derives from the belief that you’re the only one struggling are an easy sell, even when they’re wildly dishonest and destructive. Revolution and/or civil war is nigh without the specter of automation and AI and the concomitant catastrophic job loss that lies in our immediate future.

Revolution might sound like a good idea to desperate people who haven’t given any thought to what the ramifications might be. The final countdown on capitalism might thrill naive socialists/anarchists who have little to say when asked what will replace it.

Revolution and civil war both sound far-fetched to people who are doing just fine sitting atop the nest eggs they built up before our economic system ceased working for anyone but shareholders. But the public has swallowed the fictive Malthusian terror demagogues have inculcated whole and here we are. Andrew Yang is the only presidential candidate who recognizes (or will admit to recognizing) where we’re headed.

We need the Freedom Dividend and a shift to Human-Centered Capitalism immediately if we are to have any hope of heading off the very real dangers of revolution and civil war. And — accuse me of “idpol” here if you must — it is a fact that mass violence hits women, people of color, and the poor harder than anyone else. God help anyone who is all three.

I’ll cool it with the dystopian narrative now.

The Second Shift and the Revolution at Point Zero

Women do and have historically done the lion’s share of uncompensated care work in the US and globally. Reproductive labor — which includes childbearing, childcare, caring for elderly relatives, housework, meal preparation, and the instillation of social values in the home — has traditionally been valued at zero by the market.

Feminists in the US, with the aid of Italian feminist Silvia Federici (author of Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle, which I cannot recommend highly enough), launched the Wages for Housework movement in 1975 in New York, arguing that the valuation of women’s household labor at zero allowed capital to outsource the cost of rearing and caring for workers to uncompensated women and that we needed to radically rethink how we assign value as a society. They were right.

The Wages for Housework movement ultimately fizzled out, with the women’s movement concentrating its efforts on ending sexual violence, expanding the rights of women working outside the home, and fighting for women’s reproductive freedom, but the movement’s arguments remain relevant. Though the women’s movement made it possible for us to enter the workforce, the unspoken assumption remains that unpaid care work is “women’s work” and that it must be worth nothing because the market doesn’t recognize it as work.

Arlie Hochschild, in The Second Shift: Working Parents and the Revolution at Home, drives the point home that — though women have begun working outside the home en masse — there remains a significant “leisure gap” between women and men due to the double burden of full-time employment and unpaid household labor that most women face. Things have improved somewhat since the 70s, but working women still do at least twice the unpaid care work that men do.

The Freedom Dividend — in addition to serving as a form of compensation for unpaid caregivers — provides women in dual-income households with a bargaining chip to help balance the inequities of the second shift; there is (or there should be) nothing stopping women from billing their partners for a pro-rated portion of their Freedom Dividend when they have to pick up their slack around the house.

Andrew Yang’s Freedom Dividend and Human-Centered Capitalism proposals go a long way toward not only fulfilling the aims of earlier feminist movements that sought to redress the devaluation of care work, but also toward undermining the concept of “women’s work” itself. By decoupling unpaid labor from gender, the Freedom Dividend destigmatizes care work for men, allowing them to engage in work they might find more fulfilling. The market, as Yang says, currently operates at odds with human well-being and fulfillment; the time has come to reassess how we assign value as a society, because the market is blowing it.

The “Fuck Off” Fund

Do you know a working woman who has never experienced sexual harassment? Me either.

Though Catharine MacKinnon argued in 1979 — in Sexual Harassment of Working Women: A Case of Sex Discrimination — that sexual harassment violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, it took until 1986 for the Supreme Court to agree (which they did 9–0) in Meritor Savings Bank v. Vinson, a case for which MacKinnon served as co-counsel and wrote the brief submitted to the court.

Still, 33 years later, sexual harassment runs rampant, sexual harassment cases are among the hardest to prove, and most women who experience sexual harassment avoid reporting it out of fear of retaliation. I would never discourage anyone from pursuing legal action if they’re being sexually harassed at work, but it is often the case that victims cannot afford or find attorneys willing to take their cases on spec, and not everyone has the time, energy, or inclination to get involved in a contentious and potentially humiliating lawsuit.

The knowledge that $1000 will arrive in the bank on the first of the month would make it possible for women to be more assertive in rejecting unwanted sexual advances in the workplace, or to simply tell a harasser to go piss up a rope and then walk out the door. Workplace predators rely on women’s dependence on their next paycheck to get away with unethical and piggish behavior. Their tune might change when women in the workforce have $12,000 a year to fall back on.

The Freedom Dividend would also be an invaluable tool for women trying to escape from abusive relationships. One of the chief factors that keeps women stuck in these arrangements is financial dependence on the abuser. Abusers know that what they are doing is wrong — which anyone who works with them can tell you (Lundy Bancroft comes to mind) — so they will often go out of their way to cut off their victims’ access to outside support of any kind in order to ensure that they do not have the means to leave.

I won’t pretend that an abused woman’s Freedom Dividend would never be appropriated by an abuser who insists that it be deposited into a joint account she has no access to, but the day she’s ready to leave, it would be there to help her — and her children — escape to safety.

The Holes in the Safety Net for Women Seniors

According to most media coverage on the topic, the average Social Security check amounts to $1400 a month, hardly a princely sum. But that figure is based on the average check men receive, and hence creates a misleadingly sanguine understanding of the circumstances of women living alone on Social Security. The average monthly check women living alone receive actually comes out to $1048 before roughly $135 is deducted for Medicare.

It gets worse. More than half of widowed, divorced, or single elderly women rely on Social Security for upwards of 90% of their income. For men living alone, Social Security comprises only about 35% of their income. Over 7 million seniors live in poverty in the US, and 2 out of 3 of them are women. This is unconscionable in the richest country on Earth. The market simply does not recognize the worth of human beings who exist outside of it; it’s up to us to quit worshipping the market and recognize the intrinsic value of our country’s elderly women.

An extra $1000 a month would literally double the income of the average female Social Security recipient, allow her to live in dignity, prevent her from having to choose between food and medical care, and provide her with at least some compensation for sacrifices she made during her earning years for her children and/or spouse.