Are White Men a Political Problem?

That white men are more conservative than Americans in general is, I think, not open to challenge.  This makes a difference in close elections, so I am not making light of the issue.  The important questions are how significantly so and why?  This map does not help much because it hides the really important cultural differences within the US that answer both questions to a large degree.

What the map does show is that Southern white men are far out of step with white men elsewhere, except for Mormon white men and perhaps a tiny number of Western welfare ranchers and such who play cowboy.  (There are very few of them, but they are common in the demographically tiny state of Wyoming and combined with Mormons, give the impression of a huge reservoir of conservatism in a state with under a half million citizens total. Number 50 out of 50.)    Minus these two-and-a-fraction groups and white men in the rest of the country, the overwhelming majority,  did not vote for Obama much less than white women.  Pooling the white men of Mississippi and the white men of Maine does a serious disservice to the latter, and disguises the realities of what is really going on.  And, of course, Southern white women do not really hold the Democratic banner all that high, either.

The South has long been the cultural and political outlier in America, its religion often out of step with American traditions, its history often a celebration of treason.  Nothing like a majority of white women in the South voted for Obama either.  There are plenty of good and reasonable people in the South, White and Black and Brown and Red, but we do not make their task of promoting civilization any easier by bad analysis and playing into the hands of authoritarian racists like Pat Buchanan and Rush Limbaugh who seek to convince white men that they speak for them.  Yglesias makes teir claims easier to accept.

Many left-liberals get uncomfortable talking about culture, but culture is what shows through in this map, not primarily race and gender.  Culture is what ails us and may yet tear this country apart.  And the Democrats and 'progressives' are scared to talk about it for various interesting but ultimately dishonest reasons.

But there is something EVEN WORSE about this interpretation.  Yglesias writes "Drawing from the relatively small pool of white male progressives means drawing from a shallow talent pool."

Part of what is wrong with this country is tied up with this statement.  It assumes that only a tiny percentage of Americans are competent, and so we need huge 'talent pools' to have a chance to get the best.  It is stupid elitism, "progressive" style.  Apparently they believe they are somehow much more competent than most everyone in the country and so need to do their thinking for them.  They are making the same mistake their corporate and political equivalents to their political right are making: over estimating their own intelligence while underestimating everyone else's.  The corporate and political ones do more damage because they are in power and the Progressives are not, but the problem is deeper than which faction holds office.

Across the board we are getting pretty low levels of talent and competence in leadership positions in this country, and the problem has nothing to do with gender or race.  Obama's people clicked it up a notch, but that's often still not very high.  This country is over centralized, and dominated by huge organizations who for the most part have insulated their leadership from being held responsible for their actions, especially incompetent ones.  A far smaller nation with a far more exclusive group of white men gave us the American Revolution.

The problem is not the size of the "talent pool" it is the degree to which millions of people of talent of all races and genders are subordinated to the ingrown leadership of giant organizations - mostly corporate but also political.  For historical reasons most of these incompetent and corrupt leaders are white men, but anyone who believes Blacks or other races are somehow less subject to these patters is fooling themselves and should read a little history.  I suspect it is no different with women, given the number of dishonest and manipulative ones that have risen in the conservative movement of today.

It is this comfortable elitism on the part of many 'Progressives' who sincerely think they are part of the solution rather than simply a more humane part of the problem that worries me even more than our cultural divisions.  It prevents them from seriously considering policies that actually empower people and weaken the power of the incompetent elite that dominates this country.