Progressivism is, to some degree, a manifestation of dissatisfaction with the status quo. It’s also a belief that things can be made better through better governance. Conservatism is a bit more complicated. It comes in two flavors. One flavor is fairly happy with the status quo and is chiefly concerned with conserving it. Another flavor thinks things are moving in a negative direction but can be corrected by less governance. Generally speaking, conservatives are either content with the way things are, or they want things to go back to the way they were in some non-distant past.
Every president but one in the history of this country was a white male. White males have always been able to vote (although, at first, they needed some property). White males have never suffered from discrimination (except recently, to a small degree, in competing within the affirmative action paradigm). Basically, white males have had a lot of reason to be satisfied with the status quo in this country. And, if they have any complaint, they’re only beef is that their innate advantages have been diminished by progressive changes.
So, it’s no surprise that white males are not progressive. The more insecure a white male is about his own ability to compete, or his job security, or his social status, the less progressive he is likely to be. The more he needs an advantage, the more he will cling to one. The more he needs an edge, the more he will resent losing it.
I don’t really think this is unique behavior. Any other gender or color would behave similarly in a similar situation. Still, it pays to remember that the progressive movement is not a white male movement, even if it might sometimes appear that way on your intertubes. White male progressives tend to be intellectuals who have advanced degrees from elite institutions. There’s nothing wrong with that so long as they realize who makes up the bulk of the progressive movement. And it ain’t white males.
To paraphrase the immortal words of Rachel Maddow: I love white people – I am white people – yaaaay white people!
That said, one has only to look at that map and a map of the slave states and territories side by side, to gain historical perspective on this.
E.g., http://sensoryoverload.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/then_map_2.jpg
This is at best a half-truth. The two states with the lowest number of white male voters for Obama are Mississipi and Alabama, the two states with the most violent resistance, including terrorism, to the Civil Rights Movement. And even there 1-in-20 to 1-in-10 white males voted for Obama.
Florida never was more than an symbolic member of the Confederacy, just because it was less populated in 1861. But Florida also had the earliest and largest influx of people from other states of any of the other states in the Confederacy.
Texas has a large influx of non-Texans, who very rapidly get enamored of Texas’s mythical culture (and then there’s the Bush factor). In addition, Texas was and is a traditional Hispanic state. One thinks the “white male” in these statistics does not include Hispanics. And immigration issues have more traction among white males in Texas. In other words, having been a slaveowning state has less to do with the vote of white males.
But then there’s Idaho, Wyoming, and Alaska. None of them were slaveowning states.
In addition, there is a lot of diversity in voting patterns by county in every state. A similar map by county would be very interesting.
I don’t think the percentage of white males who voted for Obama has a darn thing to do with them being progressive. The statistics presented in the graph at your link quite clearly show that white males in Oregon are simply less bigoted than white males in Alabama. Period. We cannot infer from this information that they are Progressives. We know that some Republicans and many moderate Independents voted for Obama or else he would not have won.
They did so not because they woke up and embraced liberal ideals of better governance but because Obama was the SANE choice. The alternative was a crazy, old, war mongerer and his bat-shit crazier, ignorant VP. Compared to McCain/Palin, Obama actually was the more “conservative” option… if your selection wasn’t colored by prejudice.
I know it seems counter-intuitive to make this observation since Obama’s campaign was all about “Change.” The future he promised wasn’t about bombing Iran or overturning abortion law. Instead he offered the opportunity to REGRESS, back to the relative peace and prosperity of the Clinton Years, back to the pragmatism of Carter, back to the glamour and inspiration of Kennedy and, yes, back to the hope and pride Americans felt during the Reagan years. If he hadn’t had this essentially “conservative” appeal, he would not have won.
And what does it say about how progressive “progressives” are that the TV and Internet face of Progressives is a white male when the bulk of the movement is women and non-whites?
And then there’s the fact that I’m continually astounded by the number of black conservative Republicans the GOP has found to put on the air in the last year…how many elected officials are black and Republican?
More than you would imagine, especially in “nonpartisan” municipal and county elections, where those exist.
If you looked at Kerry, or Gore, or Clinton.
I agree with when you talk about Obama, but I disagree with you about relative bigotry. I believe Kerry did just as badly in Mississippi among whites as Obama did. If there is a difference between white males in Oregon and Mississippi, it is in relative self-esteem.
One group of progressive white males ignored here are men involved in the labor movement. It’s not an absolute guarantee for progressivism (neither is being intellectual), but being in the labor movement helps to strip away a lot of the bull that helps prop up the oligarchy and a great part of that bull are the hateful memes circulated throughout the working class to maintain control over the populace.
And that’s essentially what we’re talking about here. The unequal distribution of power and wealth and the consequences of that inequality are reflected throughout society, and work and pay are proximate to that inequality. Injustice in the workplace and how labor reacts or doesn’t react to it are models for how that’s reflected in politics and society as a whole. “An injury to one is an injury to all” is a labor slogan, but it applies throughout.
That doesn’t mean that people involved in labor don’t use accrued power against other workers, or that sometimes the racism and sexism outside the workplace doesn’t seep into the workplace and the union. But if you want to find progressives among white males, you might want to look at some of the people on the front lines of the fight.
I would like to see the map presented in this diary compared with a map of labor union strength.
A lot of the issues with the South go back to the 1938 Textile Strike in which the national unions would not support what were becoming desegregated union locals. And would not act with the same resolution in the face of company thug violence that they did in the auto industry.
There was also a corresponding lack of determination for action by FDR in the South because of the fragile alliance with the Dixiecrats. So labor in the South got sold down the river; workers never trusted unions again; the result is a string of former textile states with “right-to-work” laws and little union strength among white men. The resurgence of unions in the South is mainly the result of black and Hispanic organizing. The last major victory was with the Smithfield meatpacking company.
I disagree with your thesis. I think the fundamental difference between liberals and conservatives is how they view human nature: liberals think that most people are essentially good and decent and thus deserve help and compassion, conservatives think that most people are essentially evil and worthless and thus deserve scorn and derision. In simpler terms, both sides think that humanity is fundamentally just like they are.
I disagree with the entire premise of White men being ‘discriminated’ because of Affirmative Action.
White men have had Affirmative Action since the founding of this country.
My father, wanted to be a CPA. Did the classwork. Took the test. Scored in the top 1% of all those that took the test to be a CPA.
My father, who had donned the uniform and put his life on the line for his country, couldn’t get a job as a CPA, not even in any form of Government.
For my father was a Black man born in 1922, and the options for him were limited by that fact.
So, he went to work for the POST OFFICE, with other highly educated Black men and women, who had to feed their families.
My mother’s entire family was educated BEFORE there was a Civil Rights Movement. My grandmother had a masters degree by the time she married in 1905, but, because of the COLOR OF THEIR SKIN, what they could do with their educations was limited to a small pool of options.
When you have studies TODAY, that show that a WHITE MAN WITH A CRIMINAL BACKGROUND, will get a job before a BLACK MAN WITH A COLLEGE DEGREE, I honestly and truly, don’t remotely wanna hear about White men and ‘ discrimination’.
Get outta here.
Being white has its privileges for someone like me. Probably the most striking one is to watch how actual hiring decisions get made.
There are a lot of white men who think that they were discriminated against because of affirmative action because that is what white employers told them in their follow up to their interview as to why they weren’t hired. What they don’t know in a lot of cases is that the employer did not hire a minority or a woman but hired another white man and they have been shucked.
And then there is the little management dance about, gee, I guess we have to hire a minority to make our EEO stats look good. And all the talk about affirmative action lowering standards.
Well this white male says that there has been a lot of bullshit from employers about their willingness to hire minorities and their willingness to tell less qualified white males that the black guy got the job because he was more qualified. It’s sorta like the white male secret handshake takes priority. And in my experience, this phenomenon is not limited to the South; I have seen it played out in Chicago, for example.
Hang on, we need at least one clarifier here – White Heterosexual Males.
In some of the states, it’s very much DADT among white males. I believe the word is “closeted”. And a lot of these folks, believe it or not, vote for Republican bigots. May even campaign for them. Case study: Senator Larry Craig.
If there is a gay pride march in the county seat, this probably doesn’t apply as much. So another mapping would be against counties that have gay pride marches.
I believe Obama won roughly 46 percent of the white female vote along with 41 percent of the white male vote, so it doesn’t seem like white women are terribly progressive either.
Yglesias’ chart of white male votes for Obama would be better balanced by also providing the companion chart showing white female votes for Obama. If the hypothesis is that insecure white males who are afraid of losing their economic status tend to vote for Republicans, what is the similar hypothesis for why white females, who presumably don’t have as much to “lose” as white males, also tend to vote Republican. Simple racism? Fear of a change in the status quo?
I also think that the claim that white males have never suffered discrimination is patently false. The Irish, Italians, Poles, Germans and others experienced discrimination in the work place and in social settings. My grandfather emigrated from the Baltics as a young man. He wasn’t exactly welcomed with open arms into the white male superstructure of America.
No sensible person would argue that white males have suffered the same extent or degree of discrimination as, say, African Americans, but to claim that white men have not suffered at all from discrimination, and that “they’re [sic] only beef is that their innate advantages have been diminished by progressive changes” is simply stupid.