On Election Night 2008, when Obama was declared the winner, TV showed a middle-aged Chicago Black woman jumping up and down, shouting “God bless America! God bless America!” I hadn’t voted for Obama, yet this resonated for me. This was the America I loved, a country of openness and positivity, generosity of spirit.
How far we’ve fallen. Next electing an embodiment of mean-spiritedness, and we may well do it again — despite his attempted coup, only the worst of countless villainies. The uglier his picture gets, the higher in polls he rises. A defacement of American ideals that’s breaking my heart. How are we to understand this?
A host of things sour voters toward President Biden, not seeing those are molehills compared to the other side’s mountains. And mainstays of the Democratic party’s traditional coalition — the working class and ethnic minorities — have been shifting toward Republicans. Polling now shows the longtime Democratic allegiance advantage has disappeared.
The Economist magazine recently reviewed a pair of books analyzing those shifts. Conventional wisdom has Democrats losing connection with their plebeian roots, becoming instead mainly the party of educated elites. Working class economic anxieties have been played like a fiddle by Republicans — even while actually betraying them (as with tax cuts heavily skewed to the rich, and trade tariffs costing consumers money). For Hispanics, the assumption was that they’d be repelled by Republican harshness toward immigrants (like them) — but most aren’t actually recent arrivals themselves and many are culturally conservative.
Thus all the “culture war” stuff. The Economist suggests Democrats are out of touch on such matters, having been taken over by a “strange ideology” of wokeness. But in fact, those “progressives” who “speak in the language of the faculty lounge” are a fringe minority among the scores of millions of normal people who still comprise the heart of the Democratic party. As shown by their decisive rejection of all that in the 2020 primaries in favor of the most moderate, centrist, down-to-earth candidate.
So while The Economist cites the example of “rebranding” Hispanics as “Latinx” — indeed a particularly asinine instance of the woke left’s weaponization of vocabulary to assert virtue one-upmanship — “Latinx” never gained much traction and seems to have largely disappeared.
Blacks are still mostly Democrats. But here too, defections are rife, and Democrats can ill afford that vote loss in close elections. It’s perhaps especially puzzling given the Republican party’s racist heart. The Economist notes, however, that the Black Republican upsurge is largely confined to younger males, with African-American women remaining solidly Democrat — and it deems this gender divide hard to explain.
Actually it may provide a clue to the bigger picture, with a key elemental cause afoot: the macho factor. Osama Bin Laden famously said that if people see a strong horse and a weak horse, they will prefer the strong horse.
It’s a powerful psychological proclivity; human beings are, like moths to a flame, attracted to strength, or the appearance of it. Thus the “strongman” syndrome in politics. And this machoism tends to be more prevalent among males, whereas females are more into a psychology of nurturing and our softer side.
This helps explain the gender gap among Blacks vis-a-vis Republicans — and the Republican appeal more generally. Democrats can come across as the party of effete limp-wristed weenies, while Republicans pose muscularly as Bin Laden’s strong horse. This cuts across a whole range of issues. The border and immigration a prime example. Likewise crime, with Republicans prattling “law and order.”
And what’s more macho than gun culture? (However antithetical to law and order!)
Principles, ideals, values? Decency? Never heard of ’em. Truth, reality? Got my own, thanks.
So Republicans — literally — go from strength (or, again, its appearance) to strength. The seeming strength disparity psychologically shapes many voters’ deep inner take on the Trump-Biden contest. Even while in Trump’s case it’s strength in badness. If he wins, Americans may find they don’t like that strength so much after all.
