In the lead-up to the 2024 US presidential election, a pro-Democrat campaign group released an advert voiced by Julia Roberts. “In the one place where women still have the right to choose, you can do the right thing,” it said, which of course meant voting for Kamala Harris, a barely sentient candidate with bad ideas, just because she was a woman. The subtext was that oppressed female voters could only give voice to their inevitably Left-wing opinions in the privacy of the polling booth.

At the time, some wondered if the advert was a joke. But these people exist – the ones who believe that anybody who votes differently or thinks differently to them must be dumb, racist, misogynistic, evil or abused. Sometimes, they hold the most influential jobs in the country.

This week, former Biden press secretary Jen Psaki appeared on a podcast to discuss US Vice President JD Vance, and in doing so, revealed just how deep this condescension runs.

“I always wonder what’s going on in the mind of his wife,” Psaki mused, in that smug, brunch-with-the-girls tone peculiar to the hosts of The View. “Like, are you OK? Please blink four times... We’ll save you.”

What Psaki seemed not to know – or worse, not to care about – is that Usha Vance is not some docile appalachian Stepford wife cowering behind a wood-burning stove. She’s a Yale-educated lawyer who clerked for both Chief Justice John Roberts on the US Supreme Court and Brett Kavanaugh. She has three children, a formidable CV and a life that suggests she could probably argue most people in Washington DC into intellectual submission before breakfast with her beautiful family. She could certainly outwit the quivering, bumbling, pathetic excuse of a press secretary that was Jen Psaki.

To assume that Usha Vance has been brainwashed, bullied or captured by her husband’s politics is more than insulting, it’s revealing. It tells us that Psaki, and the many who nodded along to her “blink if you need help” joke, apparently cannot conceive of an intelligent, successful woman choosing conservatism freely. The liberal imagination has its limits, and one of them is the idea of female agency existing outside progressive orthodoxy.

This is what makes Psaki’s comment so much worse than a cheap laugh line. It’s a confession – not about Usha Vance, but about the patronising world-view of a certain class of feminist who cannot imagine disagreement without dysfunction. If you’re a conservative woman, they assume you must be brainwashed. If you’re married to a conservative man, you must be terrified.

There’s also a less serious point to the Psaki controversy: the desperation for attention among the former Biden alumni now hustling for relevance after they were exposed as complicit in what should be considered one of the biggest cover-ups in American history – Biden’s cognitive decline. Psaki, with her MSNBC gig and podcast appearances, seems locked in a competition with Karine Jean-Pierre, another former Biden press secretary who is also now on the self-promotion circuit. This begs the question: who can be the most victimised by their own mediocrity?

Jean-Pierre’s new book, Independent: A Look Inside a Broken White House, Outside the Party Lines, appears to be a case study in self-pity disguised as progress. In it, she laments that she was criticised as “too wooden” and lacking policy depth, which, she explains, must have been because “no one has ever looked like me that has been at that podium”. She insists that as a black woman, things are “just different”. She writes that the Democratic Party ultimately failed black women, who she seems to treat not as individuals with agency, but as a monolithic voting bloc to be flattered, guilted and “seen”.

That’s the thread connecting Psaki and Jean-Pierre. This instinct to infantilise women by insisting that the world is rigged against them and that their only protection is allegiance to the Left. Someone like Usha Vance shatters that illusion simply by existing. She’s not a victim, not a symbol, not a sob story. She’s a wife, a mother and a lawyer, in that order, perhaps, and she seems perfectly fine without Psaki’s rescue mission.