Andrew Cuomo’s resurrection and the death of #MeToo

It’s my theory that a very large number of people were always uncomfortable with #MeToo even while it was happening. While they applauded the rightful correction taking place, they felt that the almost universal condemnation of men was going too far.

Former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo speaks at a union event on March 10. Picture: David Dee Delgado/Getty Images/AFP

Sometimes what you are not hearing people talk about at parties is revealing. I have not heard a single person at a dinner or drinks gathering expressing outrage that Andrew Cuomo is running for mayor of New York City, despite allegations that he groped or harassed women on his staff as New York’s governor. I have not seen angry tweets about this from the people who are, say, tweeting that the Oscars are going to too many actresses playing prostitutes. Nor has a spate of angry editorials materialized. Almost all news stories on Cuomo’s run mention the sexual harassment scandal only in passing.

In 2021, a 165-page report from the state attorney general outlined Cuomo’s misdeeds—including groping and making sexual comments—involving 11 female staffers. Pundits ranging from a columnist at the Daily Beast to Bill O’Reilly announced, “Cuomo’s political career is over.”

If you had told anyone at the time that in just a few years, Cuomo would be an early front-runner in the mayoral race, they would have laughed at you. It seemed like he had irreparably damaged his reputation, that he would slink off to wherever shamed #MeToo’d men slink off to.

At the time, it felt like the men disgraced in the fevered heights of #MeToo would be forever disgraced, that the exiled would be always exiled. There was a sense of inevitability to it, a casting out, a catharsis, an absolute moral clarity among a very large number of the people I knew and encountered.

People attend a protest in 2021 to demand then-New York Governor Andrew Cuomo's resignation. Picture: Kena Betancur / AFP

In certain circles, it felt like rooting out male predators was all anyone was ever going to talk about.

And yet, now it seems like no one cares. It isn’t that they approve of Cuomo’s behavior. They are just not very focused on it. Those who talk publicly about how he would be a bad mayor tend to think he would be a bad mayor for different reasons.

Could it be that people’s deep, passionate convictions were not so deep and passionate after all? Is what we are seeing, in some sense, a certain kind of moral exhaustion?

As I was pondering all of this, I was reading Curtis Sittenfeld’s new short story collection, “Show Don’t Tell.” One of her characters says, “But, as despicable as Trump is, he has made me see that so many of the things I thought people couldn’t do were just things people usually don’t do. They’re just norms. They aren’t laws.”

This assimilation of Trumpism into personal life is fascinating. A new kind of permissiveness seems to have crashed into our world, whether we like it or not. There is something shocking or thrilling, depending on one’s view, about Trump’s ascendance. He has shown that flagrantly violating norms can have zero consequences if you brazen your way through.

There is currently a kind of Wild West feeling. As a culture, we are improvising, in flux. There is a sense that anything goes. Even for those who abhor Trump, it is hard to muster up conviction about our quaint limits and decorums from a few years ago. The idea that anything at all might disqualify you from public office has become a niche view.

It may be that a sense of perspective is being thrust upon us by Trumpworld and its garish corruptions. It is hard to make the argument that Cuomo is unfit for office when a man found guilty of sexual assault by a jury of his peers holds the highest office in the country.

At the height of #MeToo, one of its most prominent figures, Moira Donegan, then an assistant editor at the New Republic, tweeted that the women working at a certain magazine couldn’t feel “safe” because the magazine allowed a man, who had been fired from another publication for sexual misconduct, to write articles from home. He didn’t come to the office or have power over anyone. He was just making the editors at the magazine feel “unsafe” by writing his articles in his pajamas at home. It is almost like we were living on a different planet then.

Al Franken, who appeared at the crescendo of the #MeToo moment to be one of its most obvious predators and toxic men, has come to seem wrongfully shuffled out of the Senate. I remember when Zephyr Teachout, a law professor at Fordham University, wrote an opinion column saying Franken deserved a full investigation before being banished from political life. She wrote, “As citizens, we should all be willing to stay ambivalent while the facts are gathered and we collect our thoughts.”

Al Franken poses at the premiere of the Netflix series ‘The Residence’ at the Egyptian Theatre in Los Angeles. Picture: AP Photo/Chris Pizzello

She was a lone voice articulating a point of view that was so out there, so beyond the pale that no other respectable person echoed it. One prominent magazine editor tweeted about this issue more generally: “I get the queasiness of no due process. But…losing your job isn’t death or prison.”

Now I think many of the same people who were quick to call for Franken’s immediate resignation would admit, if pressed, that the response was a bit extreme.

It’s my theory that a very large number of people, even blue-state people, were always uncomfortable with #MeToo even while it was happening. While they applauded the rightful correction taking place, they felt that the almost universal condemnation of men was going too far. That the urge to fire, banish, punish and moralize was a bit excessive, sweeping, that it lacked nuance, perspective, scale. There was a pitchforky, mob feeling in the air that a lot of people, even very liberal people, were uneasy about.

Did the excesses of #MeToo and the late woke era feed into our current climate of reaction? It doesn’t seem a huge stretch to argue that they did. There was a kind of overreach, an attempt to bully or pressure or police people into views they may not have been ready for or willing to accept.

I find many things about our current political moment terrifying. But if the rapid rise and dwindling of #MeToo teaches us anything it is that intensities fade. The things that people seem to care about shift, the winds change. Political fashions and obsessions that seem intractable and permanent dissolve. The things that no one could say without being pilloried become mainstream. Whatever one thinks of Andrew Cuomo, it may not be a bad thing that an exhausted New York City is beginning to believe in second chances.

Wall Street Journal