Following their party’s crushing defeat at the polls, some Democratic strategists are now claiming that it is Democrats’ “failure to communicate” with white men that accounts for their dramatic reversal of fortunes.
In contrast, Republican talking heads insist upon either trivializing or entirely neglecting the pivotal role of white men in catapulting the GOP to victory.
Instead, Republicans have been as giddy as schoolgirls over the fact that Democrats received only two-thirds of the Hispanic vote, 90 percent of the black vote, and 51 percent of the Asian vote! Of course, it hasn’t been spun exactly this way, but the point remains the same: Even now, most nonwhites continue to pledge their allegiance to the Democratic Party.
Moreover, they continue to do so in numbers that aren’t appreciably lower—if they’re lower at all—from those in which they routinely endorse Democrats.
In the light of this election, the elephants no less than the donkeys need a reality check.
First, without white people generally and white heterosexual men specifically, a Republican politician would have as difficult a time getting elected dogcatcher as he would getting elected to any higher office. The Republican Party’s days as a major national party would come to a grinding halt.
White men make the world of the GOP go round.
While it is true that white men may not be sufficient, they most certainly are necessary.
Secondly, Republicans should indeed try to make their message (whatever that is) heard as widely and clearly as they possibly can. However, given both the indispensability of whites to their political fortunes and the ease with which they attract these voters, it is wildly irrational for Republicans to spend precious resources reaching out to blacks and Hispanics who aren’t likely to vote for them when a fraction of those same resources could be directed toward achieving the infinitely less ambitious goal of garnering an ever larger share of the white vote. For instance, just a few more percentage points worth of white voters than he received would’ve made all of the difference for Mitt Romney in 2012.
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Thirdly, those Democrats who lament their “failure” to communicate with white men are self-delusional. The party’s problem is that it has communicated all too well with white men. For decades, its message to white men has been unmistakably clear: “Drop dead!”
In the leftist imagination of the Democrat Party, white men are the worse of the worst, the only beings in the cosmos capable of “racism,” “sexism,” “homophobia,” and every other “ism” that belongs to our Politically Correct culture’s catalogue of crimes against humanity. Every policy aimed at ostensibly benefitting minorities, every protection and privilege denied to white men while extended to women and the members of every other racial demographic, expresses this view.
For white men, the Democratic Party has unmitigated contempt.
Finally, this being said, Republicans have been only slightly less contemptuous of white men than their counterparts have been. Actually, in a significant sense, it’s arguable that they’ve been more contemptuous, for Republicans take their white voters for granted, in spite of having regularly advocated on behalf of legislation that has undermined the liberties for which white Americans—beginning with America’s founders—have fought long and hard.
And yet white men continue to vote Republican.
But, as the presidential election of 2012 taught us, when enough of those white men who would otherwise have voted Republican believe that their party is abetting its rival in waging a sort of racial and gender war by other means against them, they stay home.
And when this happens, then it won’t matter if Republicans raise their shares of the black and Hispanic votes by 1 percent and 5 percent, respectively.
When enough white Republican men avoid the polls, the GOP loses.
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