The Race Gap and the Sex Gap

A point that I did not get around to making explicitly enough in my piece today on why whites and men vote Republican but non-whites and women prefer Democrats: The fact that blacks do not vote for Republicans is treated in the media and in our political discourse as a moral judgment on the Republican party. “See, African-Americans won’t vote for you! You must be racists!” Likewise, the fact that women broadly prefer Democrats is presented as a moral judgment on Republicans: “See, you must be sexists!” Etc. But there are the obvious flip-sides, though it never occurs to anybody to ask whether the fact that white voters have preferred Republican candidates since Lyndon Johnson, and that men have preferred Republican candidates for decades, also is morally significant. In our discourse, only the political preferences of women and non-whites are considered to have moral weight.

Conversely, the ugly anti-Semitism of the Left (Al Sharpton’s “bloodsuckers,” Jesse Jackson’s “Hymietown”) is treated as something that the Democratic party is inoculated against because of the fact that Jewish Americans broadly prefer the Democratic party. Both things are true: The Democrats do tolerate insidious anti-Semitism, and Jewish Americans do nonetheless prefer the Democratic party. That the latter should be considered some magical proof against the former is somewhere between naïve and dishonest.

The race gap and the sex gap probably isn’t really a moral question at all, but rather simply a reflection that different groups of people in society have different experiences and different backgrounds, which produce different values and, unsurprisingly, different political preferences. And that isn’t only the case for the United States: In other countries, it isn’t the usual state of affairs that members of minority groups prefer the conservative party or conservative parties.

But it’s fun and profitable for Democrats to call Republicans racists — dumb and dishonest, but fun and profitable.