An Interesting Question

Rich Lowry, in his latest piece, poses a really interesting question.

The Bush/Kerry tie among women has engendered much commentary about how "the gender gap has disappeared." Actually, the gap is as yawning as ever. Bush still leads Kerry among white men by double digits, a considerable "gap" among a certain "gender." But the media has never dubbed the GOP lead among men a "gender gap" quite worthy of endless commentary and dozens of Kennedy School panels.

Yeah, if we are going to focus endlessly on why women (or Blacks, or Hispanics, or Muslims) are going to vote a certain way, why don't we devote an equal amount of time to analyzing the White Male and why he votes a certain way.

Well one reason is that we White Males (in the interest of full disclosure I am in fact a White Male) are allowed to be individuals. As a White Male I am allowed to vote based on my analysis of the candidates and which one of them will do a better job. All the other genders (and races and ethnicities) have to vote based on their allegiance to their category. That doesn't mean like they can't influence their decision and vote against what the majority of their category want, but in general they are influenced by their race or gender to vote a certain way.

Let me give you a visual metaphor. Imagine two pie charts one for the White Male, and one for Women. The charts measure ideas and influences that push a person to vote a certain way. The White Male chart is empty, he is free to be pushed or to push himself any direction he likes. On the other hand the Woman chart has a big slice of pie, maybe 35%, already taken out (which says, apparently, "Women Vote Democratic"). So she only gets to fill 65% of her pie with other influences and decisions.

White Males, as we see, are just not influenced at all by their societal position or their race. Frankly it's just coincidence that many White Males (but not me) are going to end up voting for President Bush. It's almost like we were influenced by our societal position to vote Republican. But clearly that's not the case.

I'm going to turn the glib sarcasm off for a moment and state the obvious. Everybody feels some pressure based on their skin color or their gender (not to mention region and religion) to look at issues a certain way, and that includes White Males. Due to centuries of being at the top of the heap, however, White Males are pretty well conditioned not to think about those pressures, but to assume whatever decisions they make are based purely on reason (unlike the more emotional women or ethnicities). This is crap. White Men are just as irrational as everyone else and in some cases more so.

The reason we look at why Black voters or Women voters act a certain way, but don't care why White Men vote a certain way, is because that's the way we've set up the Game. White Men are rational, nobody else is. The other side to the issue is that Republicans obviously don't want to be known as the "White Male" party. It makes them look like jerks.