12/13/2004

KUFM / KGPR

T. M. Power

The Democrats’ Male Gender Gap

One of the interesting aspects of American presidential voting patterns over the last four years has been the difficulty that Democrats have had in speaking to male voters, especially white male voters. This last November Bush had an 18-percentage point advantage over Kerry among white male votes.

Howard Dean, the original Democratic frontrunner, identified this problem early on and got hammered by liberals for even mentioning it. Dean said that he wanted “to be the candidate for guys with Confederate flags on their pickup trucks."

In stating things that way, he implicitly hit three nails on the head. First, he correctly identified a geographic and cultural problem for the Democrats, the South and its outposts throughout the West and rural America. Second he identified a gender problem, males, who make up half of the voters. And third, he identified a looming racial divide among males: black males overwhelmingly support Democrats; white males, beginning with the emergence of the Reagan Democrats, have increasingly voted for Republicans.

Some of this Democrats brought on themselves because they stood on their principles while Republicans abandoned theirs. Almost a half-century ago the Democratic Party, somewhat reluctantly, embraced the civil rights movement and the Civil Rights Act. Led by a southerner, Democrat Lyndon Johnson, the executive and congress finally followed the Supreme Court and declared an end to the Jim Crow laws that had enforce the America version of apartheid.

What had been the “solid south” of the Democrats immediately began to unravel. Republicans, perversely “the party of Lincoln,” saw an opportunity and sided with the segregationists. Shamelessly they cashed in on white fear, caricaturing black males as violent predators and black women as “welfare queens.”

As historical happenstance would have it, the economic status of less educated white males began to collapse at about the same time. The working class path to a middle class life style that had developed during the Second World War and the early cold war era, built around unionized manufacturing jobs, began to be dismantled. Young white males with limited education saw their economic fortunes go into freefall. It did not take much to identify scapegoats: Blacks, women, scruffy rebellious over-educated kids, and liberal-dominated government. The fact that it was conservative economic policies that had pulled the economic floor out from under young white working class men seemed to be politically irrelevant.

On top of the civil rights and feminist revolutions, the Democrats also had to digest our ignominious retreat from Vietnam. Before the image of the hijacked planes plowing into and incinerating the World Trade Center, the most troubling symbol of American helplessness had been the panicked helicopter evacuation of our embassy in Saigon as we abandoned our Vietnamese allies to the victorious Viet Cong. Democrats (and, of course, many Republicans, too) had pushed for an end to that hopeless war. As political and cultural twists would have it, the aggressive conservative architects of that failure quickly recovered from it and saddled the Democrats with the political burden of the failure of that sad military adventure.

The party that had led the country through World War One, World War Two, the Korean War, and actually initiated the Vietnam War was now portrayed as the passive party, unwilling to defend the nation. The very rational caution to avoid another Vietnam-like quagmire became a serious weakness for Democrats, especially among male voters. The Democrats appeared to have no foreign policy to deal with threats to America.

Conservatives, with familiar ideological focus, had no such problem even though it was their policies that had failed in Vietnam. They simply insisted that we had to strengthen our military, be confident in projecting our power, and take the offensive against our enemies: a traditional masculine stance. Reagan, Bush, and Son of Bush pursued such policies with considerable political success at home even if they did not do so well abroad.

Howard Dean, despite his disquieting howl, had it right. Democrats cannot win national elections if they ignore the South, Inland West, and rural areas. They cannot win if they ignore the concerns of white males. They cannot win if they are perceived as not having the conviction and fortitude to face down our enemies.

That, of course, does not mean that they have to abandon their principled stance on equal opportunity for women and minorities or their caution about costly foreign military adventures. It simply means that Democrats can no longer count on the patchwork coalitions of the past. They have to tell a convincing story about why inequality in this country has increased so dramatically, primarily at the expense of young working class males. They have to project a confident foreign policy that has us working cooperatively with a hundred nations around the world to isolate and root out terrorists and quarantine rogue states.

They have a lot of communicating to do, communication that has to take place long before the mind-numbing sloganeering of another election year rolls around.