The Census Bureau predicts that by 2050, for example, the US population will be 23% Latino and 16% black, compared to about 14% Latino and 13% black today.
What woman would want to marry a man who’d leave her if she chose to get an education and a job? Sounds like a real jerk, doesn’t he? Unfortunately, that guy – the stubborn, insecure, socially conservative misogynist – is the man David Paul Kuhn wants the Democratic party to bend over backwards to please.
No matter that his ideology is essentially incompatible with modern liberalism. Ignore the fact that white men are demographic losers, composing just 33-36% of the US electorate, and quickly being overtaken by the burgeoning population of college-educated single women and people of color, both groups that prefer the Democratic party. To Kuhn, the white man is the “standard” American voter; or, as he put it in the Politico last week: “White men matter most.”
Once upon a time, Kuhn writes in his new book, The Neglected Voter: White Men and the Democratic Dilemma, white men voted for Democrats because they understood the importance of progressive economic policies. But since 1980 no more than 38% of white males have voted for a Democratic presidential candidate. The problem? As civil rights and women’s liberation became part of the Democratic platform in the 1960s and 1970s, white men, “Like the rejected husband … walked out on liberalism for good.” The suggestion is that uppity women and minorities drove their white male providers away.
To win white men back, Kuhn suggests, Democrats should back away from key issues such as supporting global access to reproductive health care and abortion, bridging the pay gap between men and women and alleviating the urban poverty that disproportionately affects people of color.
But if Democrats don’t stand up to those challenges, who will? If some white men can’t deal with the changing face of the Democratic party, it’s OK to let them go.