VDARE: The White Guy Gap

"The White Guy Gap" - My new VDARE column - An excerpt:

I was long baffled by the enormous, ever-growing popularity of the NASCAR stock car racing circuit. Why is watching Chevies go around and around … and around some more … so incredibly popular?

Finally, some readers pointed out that the answer was staring me in the face: because white American guys always win. Heck, the drivers are almost all British-Americans with a sprinkling of German-Americans like the Earnhardts.

In short, NASCAR is an ethnic pride festival for the one group of people who aren't supposed to hold ethnic pride festivals.

After that, I started to notice that some other institutions were in the business of providing covert identity politics for people who aren't allowed to practice identity politics publicly. Indeed, that perspective provided a novel answer to a couple of questions that a lot of people are asking:

"Why do Republicans win so much these days? But why do they then so seldom use their power to do anything recognizably conservative?"

Admittedly, this new theory is more subjective than my recent quantitative articles in VDARE.com and The American Conservative explaining the 2004 red state - blue state gap: "The Baby Gap," "The Marriage Gap," "The Mortgage Gap," and, underneath it all, "The Dirt Gap."

I guess you can call this one the White Guy Gap.

I suspect that liberals are now paying the price for decades of insulting white men. White males make up about one third of the population, but the problem with white guys, from a liberal perspective, is that they happen to be the people who get most of the big things done in this country. That's just unfair, no, that's downright evil of them.

Now, white men are probably the most tolerant and forbearing of any American group—they've been raised to take it like a man—but they are also only human. So, when they finally do get mad, they are a formidable force.

And, increasingly, the Republican Party has become a covert exercise in identity politics for white men. A peculiarly ineffectual exercise because of the Republican determination to camouflage this fact by promoting policies that obviously do white men no good.

Because white men are, on average, the best team players, the best organizers, and the best managers in America, the Republicans are now consistently beating the Democrats in the blocking and tackling departments of politics, even when the Democrats are closer to objectively correct on issues like the Bush Administration lying the country into the War in Error. The GOP can draw on more—and more motivated—white male talent. ..

There's nothing unnatural about the people who keep the country running wanting to have a large say in running the country. The problem, though, is that white male identity politics is the self-love that dares not speak its name.

So, many Republican white males studiously avoid endorsing policies that would actually help white male Republicans, such as immigration restrictions. [...More]

Steve Sailer's homepage and blog is iSteve.com