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Editorial See other Editorial Articles Title: Obama's White Supporters Eds.: Re the West Virginia primary, the New York Times reports that “The number of white Democratic voters who said that race influenced their choice … was among the highest recorded in voter surveys for the entire Clinton-Obama nomination fight. Two in 10 white West Virginia voters said that race was an important factor in their vote, and more than 8 in 10 of them backed Hillary, according to surveys of voters leaving the polls.” Of course, if 20% of white voters were willing to acknowledge that race was a factor to a pollster, we can assume that the actual percentage was much higher. Clinton beat Obama even among educated whites (a group he has won in other venues and in caucuses), but, as usual, her margin of victory was much higher among working class whites. Overall, educated whites have been voting for Obama in droves, while their working class brethren seem much less enthusiastic about Obama. So what’s up with educated whites? Of course, a large part of it is racial absolution. Cultural liberals think that the U.S. is irredeemably racist, so electing Obama president would go at least part of the way toward expiating their 'White guilt' and ending their nightmare fantasies about America. The liberalism of working class whites, on the other hand, is much more a matter of self interest — directed at jobs and other economic issues. They are the ones who will suffer the most from the displacement of whites and their diminishing political clout. Indeed, the big underlying story is that the cognitive elite has been pulling away from its working class co-ethnics for a long time now. This is the major theme of Murray and Herrnstein’s The Bell Curve: Since the end of World War II, education and intelligence have become increasingly important in all aspects of life. Before WWII, most people didn’t go to college and even for a long time thereafter it was easy to get a good-paying union job with excellent benefits without benefit of a collegiate sheepskin. Since then, however, the thrust of the liberal mainstream has been to advocate programs that favor themselves at the expense of hardhat America. Free trade has wiped out many good jobs that don’t require formal education. School integration and government housing initiatives have flooded working and middleclass schools with ethnic minorities that either lower the educational standards of the school (blacks and Latinos) or bring in people who outcompete them (many Asians). Affirmative action programs for blue-collar government jobs have actively discriminated against Whites being hired as fire fighters or policemen. Massive immigration — legal and illegal — has increased all of these pressures because immigration has destroyed the blue collar labor market and because immigrants frequently qualify for affirmative action and other benefit programs. Not to mention that they have less political clout as whites become a minority. The once Silent Majority has now become the Silenced Majority. Both political parties have participated in this process. The Democrats have morphed from the knights of labor into megaphones of minority grievance against the American majority. The Republicans have often made promises on cultural issues intended to appeal to middle America but have done nothing to actually help them — retreating instead to the comfortable safety of their now no longer "Gentiles Only" country clubs. So the pathetic reality is that they are reduced to voting for Hillary Clinton. Probably none of them believe that she would actually try to reverse these processes—nor should they be so naïve. Clinton has said nothing to make one believe that she of all people would be willing to try to dismantle what is at this point a hugely powerful behemoth of the liberal/left state. For whites who are in the cognitive elite, however, all is well. Having imbibed leftist racial ideology from their college professors and the mass media, they greet an Obama presidency as an act of racial redemption. Indeed, they probably look down on their relatively uneducated brethren as rednecks and racists — an equation that has become virtually a liberal mantra. (In fact, we think that for a lot of white people, looking down on their relatively uneducated racial brethren raises their self-esteem — sort of like having a taste for fine wine and reading the New York Times.) They have good jobs that allow them to move away from the problems brought on by mass immigration and schools with uneducable students. (This dovetails with the other tendency among whites who vote for Obama: They are least likely to actually live among minorities.) They don’t suffer much from affirmative action. After all, if they don’t get into Harvard Law School, they can still have a great career with a law degree from a lesser school combined with their intelligence and ambition. Life is good indeed. The only, but big and ever growing downside is that they have to try hard — very hard — not to think about the future.
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#6. To: X-15 (#0)
Bingo! I’m glad to see someone actually noted this salient point.
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