Author’s note: I have not written in a while. Sorry for those of you who missed me. But now that the recent election is over, I will be doing some posts about it.
The results of the 2024 election should silence the long prevailing myth that there is some kind of a socially or fiscally conservative ‘gene’ that runs with white skin, and that non-whites are incapable of understanding conservatism.
There has for a long time been an unexamined assumption – hardly anyone outside of the alt-right has said it openly – that only ‘white’ [and regardless of what the Census Bureau say, by ‘white’ we mean European-American] people are capable of believing or understanding either traditional values or free-market economics. A lot of the fear of the so-called ‘Great Replacement’ [the trend toward European-Americans not being a majority – which is already the case in five or six states] is that these values will no longer be upheld. Most of the loudest advocates of social liberalism, ‘wokism’ [which we used to call ‘political correctness’ or ‘Social Justice Warring’ – it’s been around for a while] and gender fluidity are white themselves, and very few advocates are recent immigrants, so it doesn’t look like conservatives are doing that well with a lot of the white folks either. And let’s look at actual Europe, the actual homeland, while we’re at it!
I note also that this myth has its counterpart on the left – it’s called ‘intersectionality’. According to ‘intersectionality’, every class except Gentile white heterosexual males is oppressed in some way. So, if you are, say, Black and a lesbian, you are oppressed twice in a way that white lesbians and Black straight men are not. Therefore, all except Gentile white heterosexual males should be united in solidarity against the ‘oppressor’.
Sixteen years ago, the results of Proposition 8 in California should have put an end to that myth. The definition of marriage as between a man and a woman won on the strength of Latino and Black votes. It lost among the Asians by a slim margin, and among the ‘non-Hispanic whites’ by a larger one. [The people of California, by 60 percent, voted in the most recent election to remove Prop 8 from the State Constitution by some 60 per cent; I have not seen an ethnic breakdown on this, but I suspect that Proposition 3 still won bigger among the ‘whites’ than among the people of color.)
The polarization that we have been talking about for some time, which Bill Bishop called The Big Sort, features Americans taking their political beliefs so strongly that they want to live in communities and neighborhoods that share their beliefs; that people wouldn’t want their children to marry someone from the opposite party; that political beliefs become an important factor on even dating sites. This polarization is mainly a white ‘thang’ [Democrats don’t necessarily lean secular – white Democrats lean secular].
Another major division in our society is between ‘People with Kids’ and ‘Everybody Else’. It is asserted that People with Kids vote differently, want to live in different kinds of neighborhoods, and do not socialize well with People Without Kids. [I can testify, having gotten married a lot later than many of my peers, that the ‘child monastery’ {the limitation of being able to have the social life and contacts you had before kids} is a reality.] But even that may be largely a white ‘thang’. In the Black world, and probably the Latino, while the nuclear family may be weaker, the extended family is often stronger.
While the majority of ‘people of color’ still vote Democrat, they are much less of a monolith than in the past. The gender gap is wider than ever. A large minority of Black and Latino men went over to Trump, and far fewer women; and the same gap can be seen among whites and, I assume, Asians. Men and women are different in every cell of their bodies in a way whites and Blacks are not – which is why ‘transgender’ is such a travesty.
I have long believed in the importance of racial reconciliation – which is not the same as simply inverting the hierarchy and saddling some groups with inherited covenantal guilt. And as more and more of the population is now neither ‘white’ [European descendants] or ‘Black’ [descendants of American slaves, for American descendants of Caribbean slaves, being voluntary migrants to America, and voluntary migrants from Africa in our own time are often culturally quite different], I hope the breaking of the myth of the ‘conservative white gene’, a myth shared by a lot of people who were not at all explicitly racist, will go a long way. It must be broken.
