The truth is that the most important factor shaping the 2008 election will almost certainly be the same one that has been the most important in presidential elections for the past 40 years: the flight of white male voters away from the Democratic Party.Forty years ago. Forty years ago. Hmm...that was 1967. What happened in the late sixties that would lead to the GOP pulling white male voters in? Oh yeah -- that whole stupid "equal rights" thing. Of course, it's not like the Republicans deliberately set out to secure the votes of racist white men or anything, so I'm at a loss to figure out why they left the Democrats.
No, it's not that the racists bolted the Democrats for the GOP, a move that paid dividends in the short term but is actually coming back to bite them now as the country gets browner. No, it's all because Democratic women and minorities are always bagging on the men, man:
Racial animus may have been part of the problem for Democrats. At least Democrats could feel good about themselves while losing elections. But it was one of Johnson’s own confidants, Harry McPherson, who later concluded that the problem with white male voters was far more complex — not confined to the South or racial politics.Now, let's leave aside that this was written in 1972, and for someone to be using it as evidence of anything, 35 years and a massive electoral realignment later, is insanity. Because the statement by McPherson, brimming with misogyny but quoted admiringly by Kuhn, is a perfect fit for the way the typical white, male, Republican voter sees himself.
“Democratic primaries and conventions often rocked with the language of rebuke,” McPherson wrote in a 1972 memoir. “Very like, it has occurred to me, the language many wives use in speaking to their husbands, particularly toward the end of marriages. You never think of the children, or of my mother, or of me; only of yourself. Substitute the ignored disadvantaged, the homeless, people trapped downtown. The reaction among husbands, for whom read ‘white male voters,’ is what is normally provoked by attempts to burden people with a sense of guilt.”
Note the example McPherson cites doesn't deny that the white male thinks only of himself; the correctness of the challenges is not questioned. No, it's the challenge itself that is the problem. The man may be a lout -- but why do you have to say so? If you do, he's only going to leave.
It's a perfect distillation of the privilege that white men have enjoyed, and continue to wish to enjoy. The problems of women? Minorities? The disadvantaged? Jimminy Cricket, don't you ever stop nagging? Just let me watch the sports, and you worry about your stupid problems.
As Dana Goldstein notes, it would be demographic suicide for the Democrats to focus on white men when the country is growing steadily less white. More than that, morally it would be a massive failing of the Democratic party to abandon the needs of African Americans, Latinos, American Indians, women, gays, children -- anyone but the white man, whose interests are never special, because he's the default. Maybe some white men still actually believe that crap -- heck, maybe most of us do. But that's no reason to cater to them. After all, white men may make up 36 percent of the electorate, but last I checked, that means they're a minority group. And their interests are no less "special" than anyone else's.
