The way the Others voted: Candidate Biden had a good line during Campaign 2008.
It dealt with Rudy Giuliani. "There's only three things he mentions in a sentence," Biden would say. "A noun, a verb and 9/11."
According to Biden, that was pretty much all Giuliani knew how to say. We modern liberals are like that. In our case, there are only two things we need in an essay—the name of a group we want to loathe, and any one word from the following list:
"Racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic—you name it."
That's basically all we know how to say! You saw that formula play out in Jay Newton-Small's piece in Sunday's Washington Post. She called white working-class women "sexist," then wandered about the countryside, making little sense.
Very few things she said made sense at any point. But she had the S-bomb right up front, dropped on a group of people we finer people don't like.
How little sense did her essay make on a paragraph-by-paragraph basis? Consider the passage shown below.
In this passage, Newton-Small seems to be supporting her earlier claim that non-college-educated white women were "the only demographic that moved back and forth dramatically" during the campaign. We don't think the effort goes well:
NEWTON-SMALL (5/19/19): By the first general-election debate, Trump was just 2.3 points behind Clinton in the RealClearPolitics average. Then came the “Access Hollywood” recording on Oct. 7, and by their second debate on Oct. 9, Clinton was ahead by 4.6 points. An Atlantic/PRRI poll found that among non-college-educated white women, Clinton and Trump were even at 40-40. If Clinton had held steady among this group, she probably would have won.How poorly reasoned is that passage? Let us count the ways:
Non-college-educated white women picked George W. Bush by 18 points in 2004. They chose John McCain by 17 points and Mitt Romney by 20. The idea that they’d swing 20 points from 2012 to 2016 was wild. And then FBI Director James Comey reopened the investigation into Clinton’s email in the final weeks of the campaign. Non-college-educated white women ended up voting for Trump by a historic margin of 27 percentage points.
At the heart of it was the perception that Clinton considered herself above it all...
Newton-Small starts by citing a single poll which had the race tied at 40-40 among non-college-educated white women at one particular point. She says Candidate Clinton probably would have won the election if this group had split down the middle this way.
In her next breath, she notes that this same demographic had supported Candidate Romney by 20 points back in 2012. She says "the idea that they’d swing 20 points from 2012 to 2016 was wild."
We're then told that the group ended up supporting Trump by 27 points. After that, Newton-Small mind-reads "the heart of" the reason why these millions of people cast their millions of votes as they did.
In this passage, Newton-Small seems to be supporting her earlier claim, in which she said the allegiance of this group jumped all around during Campaign 2016. It doesn't seem to occur to her that the one 40/40 poll she cites may simply have been an outlier—a statistical misrepresentation of the actual state of play.
She presents no other evidence in support of her claim that the allegiance of this demographic was jumping all around during the campaign. Nor does the following question seem to have entered her head:
If the members of this group are sexist, why would they have considered voting for Clinton in the first place? Why wouldn't they have been strongly opposed to Clinton all the way through the campaign?
Simply put, Newton-Small's essay is basically a novel outfitted with the word "sexist." Basically, this is the way our deeply unimpressive liberal tribe now plays the game.
We bring almost nothing else to the table. We're skilled at naming some group of Others, then making a sweeping statement about their very bad motives. This helps explain why we're now a nation of two tribes waiting for Mister Trump's War.
In case you're interested, this is the way non-college-educated white women have voted since Campaign 2000, according to Newton-Small:
Campaign 2000: For Bush, by 7 pointsWarning! As best we can tell, those numbers come from the nation's exit polls, which are far from exact. We aren't real sure where the numbers come from because Newton-Small doesn't specifically say, and the link she provides in the paragraph we've posted above leads to her own 2016 Time magazine piece, in which she call Candidate Clinton a "hectoring housewife" but doesn't present those data.
Campaign 2004: For Bush, by 18 points
Campaign 2008: For McCain, by 17 points
Campaign 2012: For Romney, by 20 points
Campaign 2016: For Trump, by 27 points
Newton-Small's links are persistently useless in this ridiculous way. Under current arrangements, this sort of thing is apparently "close enough for Washington Post Outlook section work." We spent a long time on Sunday with Newton-Small's essay, but we never found a link to any data set which presented those data.
For Molly Ball's discussion of the problem with the exit polls (also in Time), you can just click here. Her headline:
"Donald Trump Didn't Really Win 52% of White Women in 2016"
According to Pew's more exacting analysis of Campaign 2016, non-college-educated white women actually favored Trump by a substantially smaller margin than Newton-Small reports. Using the exit polls, Newton-Small has this group favoring Trump, 61-34. According to Ball, Pew's more exacting analysis found that only 56% of this demographic actually voted for Trump. On the bright side, that's a whole lot fewer sexists!
Newton-Small's essay was journalistically awful. Basically, you learn one thing—we liberals are supposed to deride a large group of Others as sexist.
According to future anthropologists, this is the way our war-inclined species was functioning in the years before Mister Trump's Sudden War. According to those same despondent scholars, this ugly, unintelligent behavior by our vastly self-impressed tribe helped produce the miseries of that profoundly dispositive war.
“In our case, there are only two things we need in an essay—the name of a group we want to loathe, and any one word from the following list”
ReplyDeleteSomerby hopes to prove this view by picking only the essays that, in his opinion, illustrate this, and ignoring the thousands of essays that either do not show this or contradict it.
It’s called “cherry-picking”, and it is Somerby’s specialty.
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Two nearly identical posts in one day about the same article?
ReplyDeleteSomerby seems to think that liberals only make charges of racism, sexism, etc, out of hatred, or because it is some empty rhetorical game, an exercise in “virtue signaling.” (How many times has he accused liberals of not caring about black kids?)
ReplyDeleteHe doesn’t seem to consider that, in many cases, there is a serious and sincere attempt to call out actual instances of racism, sexism, etc, and that there is a need to do so.
Not caring about black kids is a bit more contextualized. Usually it comes up in discussions in regards to our school systems. They are not just frivolous accusations of racism.
DeleteIt may have been a bit inapt, but I was thinking of his charge about black kids as an example of virtue signaling. But that was for two reasons: he says integration isn’t a workable solution, thus it is a phony solution to the problem of achievement gaps. But his other reason is that he views the term “segregation” simply as a code word for accusing the other side of racism.
DeleteThose figures are astonishing. It almost looks like most women don't exist under the victim mentality the feminists do.
ReplyDeleteOne could plausibly argue that those numbers make the feminists’ case.
DeleteDemocrats are the party of change. Liberals want change. Conservatives want to leave this as they are or return to some idyllic past.
ReplyDeleteIn order to motivate change, you must point out the need for it. That means stating reasons for change. That is going to sound like grievance to anyone who doesn't want to change. That dynamic kind of automatically makes Democrats the party of grievance.
Somerby thinks grievance is a bad thing. He thinks it invalidates one's statements to point out the need for change based in wrongness with the current situation. As if conservatives didn't also have grievances. As if conservatives were not demanding that we roll back the accomplishments of the past half century.
You'd better believe that women and minorities have grievances. And you'd better believe that it is deplorable to oppose change and to consider those grievances illogical or whatever it is Somerby keeps saying here. It is deplorable to want to continue wronging someone once that wrong has been pointed out. Yet, that is what Somerby argues for here.
He pretends that a journalist or professor has said something wrong when she claims that women's employment is unfair. It is. Look at standup comedy, for example. Look at the hazing of women by guys like Louis CK, who made them witness his masturbation while they waited in the green room for their chance to go on stage. And if they complained about it, he would use his greater status to deny them chances to perform. But Somerby thinks his nitpicks of stats negates the lived experience (all stats become anecdotal when you look at the numbers one by one) of women who have struggled to break into occupations claimed by men. It isn't really 80% it is 95% yell men, while women say "just give us a fair chance." And Somerby says "you whiney bitches have a tone of grievance you should stop calling men names like sexist." Even when you deserve it, Somerby?
Women are banned from establishing standup clubs?
DeleteWorking class women are tired of the protected white upper middle class women in safe communities telling them they can’t have a gun to protect themselves or their children.
DeleteWorking class women in these unsafe neighborhoods are sick of protected upper middle class white women denying that the lack of safety, including dozens of murders of young people every month, is a direct result of fatherlessness and broken homes, and instead choosing to focus on sporadic shootings at upper middle class schools.
Working class women are tired of the protected but angry and aggrieved white upper middle class women telling them they are wrong to understand the fact that killing someone they produced is depraved.
Working class women are tired of the protected but angry and aggrieved white upper middle class women expending energy to preach about gender pronouns when they have to use all their energy to work, either caring for children or at a difficult job.
Working class women are tired of the protected but angry and aggrieved white upper middle class women confusing their children and pushing puberty blocking hormones for little girls who are tomboys, destroying their chances to grow out of a phase and be happy women who might decide to commit the gravest of all sins in the eyes of angry white upper middle class women, marrying a man and having children.
Working class women don’t relate to Ashley Judd screaming about her period and Elizabeth Warren identifying herself as a Nasty Woman, and Alyssa Milano’s sex strike, and don’t want their daughters damaged by the unhealthy rage of privilege mixed with crazy.
Working class women are sick of that relentless bottomless toxic femininity (crazy) that protected but angry and aggrieved upper middle class white women try to push on society.
Working class women identify with men like Trump more than they do protected, crazy, angry, and aggrieved upper middle class white women. If it weren’t a myth they’d even accept a few cents off the dollar to resist the dystopia these feminists are trying to shove down their throats.
"shove down their throats"
DeleteWill the last person to realize homophobes like sucking dick, please turn out the lights.
"You're gay" is the best you can do. Wish I could say I'm surprised.
DeleteI like gay people. Conservatives? Not so much.
DeleteWhite working class women (and men) are sick of Democrats shoving the Civil Rights Act of 1964 down their throats.
Delete2:03,
ReplyDeleteYou are confusing "working class women" with "white working class women".
A Democrat hasn't won the white vote in a Presidential election sine 1964. Not coincidentally, that was the year the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was enacted.
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