The White Guy Gap
I was long baffled by the enormous,
ever-growing popularity of the
NASCAR stock car racing circuit. Why is watching
Chevies go around and around … and around some more
… so incredibly popular?
Finally, some readers pointed out
that the answer was staring me in the face: because
white American guys always win. Heck, the
drivers are almost all British-Americans with a
sprinkling of
German-Americans like the
Earnhardts.
In short, NASCAR is an ethnic pride
festival for the one
group of people who aren`t
supposed to hold
ethnic pride festivals.
After that, I started to notice
that some other institutions were in the business of
providing covert identity politics for people who aren`t
allowed to practice identity politics publicly. Indeed,
that perspective provided a novel answer to a couple of
questions that a lot of people are asking:
"Why do
Republicans win so much these days? But why do they then
so seldom use their power to do anything
recognizably conservative?"
Admittedly, this new theory is more
subjective than my recent quantitative articles in
VDARE.com and
The American Conservative explaining the 2004
red state – blue state gap: "The
Baby Gap," "The
Marriage Gap," "The
Mortgage Gap," and, underneath it all, "The
Dirt Gap."
I guess you can call this one the
White Guy Gap.
I suspect that liberals are now
paying the price for decades of insulting white men.
White males make up about one third of the population,
but the problem with white guys, from a liberal
perspective, is that they happen to be the
people who get most of the big things done in this
country. That`s just unfair, no, that`s downright evil
of them.
Now, white men are probably the
most tolerant and forbearing of any American
group—they`ve been raised to
take it like a man—but they are also only human. So,
when they finally do get mad, they are a formidable
force.
And, increasingly, the Republican
Party has become a covert exercise in
identity politics for white men. A peculiarly
ineffectual exercise because of the Republican
determination to camouflage this fact by promoting
policies that obviously do white men no good.
Because white men are, on average,
the best team players, the best organizers, and the best
managers in America, the Republicans are now
consistently
beating the Democrats in the
blocking and tackling departments of politics, even
when the Democrats are closer to objectively correct on
issues like the Bush Administration lying the country
into the War in Error. The GOP can draw on more—and more
motivated—white male talent.
The Democrats are largely run by
white men, too—70 percent of
Democratic Senators, for example, are non-Hispanic
whites, even though George W. Bush beat John Kerry 62-37
among that demographic.
But to be a liberal these days,
white guys have to be a
little self-hating because these poor bastards know
they are automatically suspect and unappreciated by
much of their own Democratic Party.
Recently feminists have been
exploding in rage at white male Democrats, most
notoriously former Clinton Treasury Secretary
Larry Summers.
Soon after, veteran liberal editor
Michael Kinsley, now running the Los Angeles Times`
editorial page came under a
vituperative, unhinged attack from Susan Estrich,
best known for her dismal management of Michael
Dukakis`s 1988 campaign against the elder George Bush.
Estrich
told Kinsley that "your illness may have affected
your brain" (Kinsley suffers from Parkinson`s
Disease) because he doesn`t run enough columns by women
writers, such as—to pick a purely random example—Susan
Estrich.
Then, the liberal Washington
Monthly`s blogger
Kevin Drum asked:
"Not to
get too obsessed by the whole Estrich-Kinsley thing, but
so far no one has attempted any kind of real answer to
Estrich`s question: why are op-ed pages so
completely dominated by men?"
He immediately performed the ritual
self-abasement required of white male liberals:
"I
suppose the obvious response is that it`s for the same
reason that practically every other elite profession is
dominated by men: we still live in a male-dominated
society and probably will for at least another century."
But Drum went on to mischievously
point out:
"The
political blogosphere provides another clue. … there are
still no formal barriers to entry here, no old boys club
in the usual meaning of the word. Yet if you take a look
at the
Blogosphere Ecosystem, which for all its faults is
probably the closest thing we have to a consensus
measure of popularity for political blogs, you will find
exactly three women in the top 30:
Michelle Malkin,
La Shawn Barber, and
Michele Catalano."
"And that nearly led to his eyes
being clawed out," reported
Howie Kurtz in the Washington Post, as
obscure women bloggers denounced Drum in the
most vicious terms imaginable, causing Drum to
cravenly
shill for these talentless harridans.
To be a liberal white male, it
helps to be a masochist.
So, the white men the Democrats do
attract tend to be less effective than the more
straightforward white guys who make the
GOP political machine tick, and who have built from
scratch a massive alternative media machine.
There`s nothing unnatural about the
people who keep the country running wanting to have a
large say in running the country. The problem, though,
is that white male identity politics is the self-love
that dares not speak its name.
So, many Republican white men
studiously avoid endorsing policies that would actually
help white male Republicans, such as immigration
restrictions. They are too intimidated by fears of being
accused of bias in favor of themselves. Of course, every
other group in America is free to be flagrantly biased
in favor of its own members` welfare, but white males
aren`t allowed that freedom.
So, instead, Republican white men
meekly accept their leaders`
Invade-the-World-Invite-the-World policies to show
how unprejudiced, how self-sacrificing they are. They
send their sons to die in Iraq so that some
medieval anti-American Ayatollah can win an
election. Bush and Rove push affirmative action at
colleges and flooding the country with immigrants to
prove that their party isn`t really what it obviously
is: the white guy`s party.
Look how many white Republican men
back the
racial quota-supporting and obviously unqualified
Condoleezza Rice for President in 2008 as part of
their
Sisyphean struggle to prove to the world that they
don`t favor themselves.
From Rove`s point of view, this all
makes a certain amount of twisted sense. The more
insults get piled upon white men by the
immigration-driven growth of the diversity industry, the
more motivated they are to practice identity politics of
their own through the Republican Party. And the more the
Republican leadership betrays its main base, the angrier
that base gets – at the Democrats.
It`s a political perpetual motion
machine.
[Steve Sailer [email
him] is founder of the Human Biodiversity Institute and
movie critic for
The American Conservative.
His website
www.iSteve.blogspot.com features his daily
blog.]


