MICHAEL LIND: Attack of the Crypto-Nazis!
If racism and white nationalism are motivating voters who prefer Republicans to Democrats, how can progressives explain the fact that the Democratic Party is getting whiter and richer, while the Republican Party is getting browner and more working class? One option is to define Blacks and Hispanics who refuse to vote for Democrats as self-hating. Another is to claim that Blacks and Hispanics and Asian Americans are not authentic members of their groups. Candidate Joe Biden in May 2020 chose the latter strategy during an interview with the popular Black drive-time radio host Charlamagne. When the host said he had more questions, Biden snapped, “You’ve got more questions, but I tell you … if you’ve got a problem whether or not you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t Black”—compounding the damage of his patronizing remark with his use of the faux-Black dialect that white Democratic politicians of a certain age often employ when addressing Black Americans.
Fortunately for gentry liberals, there is now a third alternative to the discredited white nationalist and economic deprivation theories of why working-class Americans vote for Republicans—the “precarious manhood” theory of Harold Meyerson and others. If “[y]ounger working-class men of all races” increasingly vote for Republicans, then the reason must be sexual frustration.
It’s not nonwhites whom the multiracial working class resents; it’s women! The Republican Party is not the Ku Klux Klan after all; it’s the He Man Woman Haters Club from The Little Rascals (NO GURLZ ALLOWED).
The partisan gender gap between young men and young women, and men and women of all races in general, is an interesting political phenomenon. But the data suggest that the greatest emotional maladjustment is not on the side of “younger working-class men of all races.” According to a recent study by epidemiologists at Columbia University, depression rates have risen the most for young progressive women. A March 2020 Pew study reported that 56% of young white liberal women, said they had been diagnosed with a mental health condition, compared to only 28% of young white moderates and a mere 27% of young white conservatives.
Although Donald Trump will eventually be gone from the scene, elite center-left fear and loathing of the multiracial working class seems unlikely to change. Today’s heirs of anti-populist and anti-egalitarian Progressives, Mugwumps, Whigs, and Federalists will continue to insist that working-class Americans and rural Americans are dangerous cretins who threaten to destroy democracy by putting their grubby fingers on the voting levers and committing an unforgivable crime: voting against gentry liberal candidates.
Not to mention the former “punch a Nazi” crowd on the left don’t care that the calls are coming from within the house these days: Columbia Protestors Are Above The Law Says Alvin Bragg.