EXCERPT:Saturday, November 17, 2018
Race and politics, 2018
"I have written here a number of times about postmodern ideology, which in my adult lifetime I have watched take over university life in the United States, becoming the dominant approach to the study of history and literature, and which has now become extremely influential among most liberals, many of whom probably don't understand what it is or where it came from. Its dominant tenets, I would argue, are more or less as follows.
Human society is defined by struggles among different demographic groups contesting for power. White people--especially straight white males--have traditionally dominated society, oppressing women, LGBTQs, and nonwhites. Each of us carries in our genes either the sins or the victimhood of our ancestors. All right-thinking people have a duty to reduce the imbalance between straight white males on the one hand, and everyone else on the other. A key aspect of white male oppression is visibility. We need far more nonwhitemales in visible positions--such as positions of power--to correct for centuries of oppression.
Given this mindset, Democrats have easily adopted the equation, white people bad, nonwhites good, with the corollary (sometimes) that the really bad white people are men. In another manifestation of this tendency, when a few white men commit terrible crimes, commentators (and Facebook posts) immediately cite them as proof of the intrinsic, evil nature of white men. When President Trump does this about immigrants, we accuse him (rightly) of racism, but doing it about white men is quite acceptable in liberal circles. Those who hold these views are also entirely intolerant of those who don't, which is why many liberal women view the 50% of American white women who voted Republican this month as traitors to their sex and are not afraid to say so.
The postmodern ideology, to a surprising extent, has convinced a lot of us that American politics are fundamentally about a racial divide. I would like to present some figures from the election to suggest that this ideology has made it impossible to see reality clearly.
What triggered this post was a story about Congresswoman Marcia Fudge of Ohio, a black woman who is talking about challenging Nancy Pelosi for speaker. An interview quoted her as follows.
"Instead, Fudge said [that her possible candidacy] was about a fresh start in Congress, making sure that Democratic leadership reflects the voters who gave Democrats the majority ― specifically, African-American women. (Fudge pointed out that while women have gotten a lot of credit for ushering in the Democratic majority, white women are still broadly supporting Republicans. She mentioned that Stacey Abrams lost white women by 76 percent in her bid to be governor of Georgia, and that were it not for black women in Alabama, Roy Moore would now be a senator.)"
The big problem with this statement is that it is not true. The following figures are based on CNN exit polls The question I used the polls to answer was, who voted for Democratic candidates?
The CNN polls showed that 53.2% of the electorate voted Democratic. That's very good news, even though the Democratic failures in Ohio and Florida suggest that it doesn't guarantee a win in 2020. 60% of all Democratic votes came from whites, 19% from blacks, 14% from Latinos (CNN's word), 4% from Asians, and 3% from other races. Despite everything you have led to believe, most Democratic voters were white--even though 54% of whites voted Republican. All the talk about demographic change, particularly among Democrats, seems to have obscured simple mathematics: 71% of the electorate remains white...." DK
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