Matt Ygelsias over at Think Progress has posted an interesting, if confusingly
colored, map showing what percentage of white men voted for Obama on a state by
state basis.  He titles his headline “White Men
Aren’t Very Progressive.”    His following discussion explored the allegedly “thin talent pool” from picking so
many candidates from such a supposedly thin selection of “liberal” voters.

This map is provoking discussion widely in the
blogosphere.

The information it provides is interesting, if poorly
presented color-wise, but the vacuity of the analysis discussing it that I have
read so far is depressing. This map provoked  a misleading discussion – which argues white men are a lot
more conservative than other Americans – that white men are a BIG PROBLEM.

That white men are more conservative than Americans in
general is, I think, not open to challenge.  This makes a difference in close elections, so I am not
making light of the issue.  The
important questions are how significantly so and why?  This map does not help much because it hides the really
important cultural differences within the US that answer both questions to a
large degree.

What the map does show is that Southern white men are far
out of step with white men elsewhere, except for Mormon white men and perhaps a
tiny number of Western welfare ranchers and such who play cowboy.  (There are very few of them, but they
are common in the demographically tiny state of Wyoming and combined with
Mormons, give the impression of a huge reservoir of conservatism in a state
with under a half million citizens total. Number 50 out of 50.)    Minus these two-and-a-fraction groups and white
men in the rest of the country, the overwhelming majority,  did not vote for Obama much less than
white women.  Pooling the white men
of Mississippi and the white men of Maine does a serious disservice to the
latter, and disguises the realities of what is really going on.  And, of course, Southern white women do
not really hold the Democratic banner all that high, either.

The South has long been the cultural and political outlier
in America, its religion often out of step with American traditions, its
history often a celebration of treason. 
Nothing like a majority of white women in the South voted for Obama
either.  There are plenty of good
and reasonable people in the South, White and Black and Brown and Red, but we
do not make their task of promoting civilization any easier by bad analysis and
playing into the hands of authoritarian racists like Pat Buchanan and Rush
Limbaugh who seek to convince white men that they speak for them.  Yglesias makes teir claims easier to accept.

Many left-liberals get uncomfortable talking about culture,
but culture is what shows through in this map, not primarily race and
gender.  Culture is what ails us
and may yet tear this country apart. 
And the Democrats and ‘progressives’ are scared to talk about it for
various interesting but ultimately dishonest reasons.

But there is something EVEN WORSE about this
interpretation.  Yglesias writes
“Drawing from the relatively small pool of white male progressives means
drawing from a shallow talent pool.”

Part of what is wrong with this country is tied up with this
statement.  It assumes that only a
tiny percentage of Americans are competent, and so we need huge ‘talent
pools’ to have a chance to get the best. 
It is stupid elitism, “progressive” style.  Apparently they believe they are somehow much more competent
than most everyone in the country and so need to do their thinking for
them.  They are making the same
mistake their corporate and political equivalents to their political right are making: over
estimating their own intelligence while underestimating everyone else’s.  The corporate and political ones do more
damage because they are in power and the Progressives are not, but the problem is deeper than which faction
holds office.

Across the board we are getting pretty low levels of talent
and competence in leadership positions in this country, and the problem has
nothing to do with gender or race. 
Obama’s people clicked it up a notch, but that’s often still not very high.  This country is over centralized, and dominated by huge organizations
who for the most part have insulated their leadership from being held
responsible for their actions, especially incompetent ones.  A far smaller nation with a far more
exclusive group of white men gave us the American Revolution.

The problem is not the size of the “talent pool” it is the
degree to which millions of people of talent of all races and genders are
subordinated to the ingrown leadership of giant organizations – mostly
corporate but also political.  For
historical reasons most of these incompetent and corrupt leaders are white men,
but anyone who believes Blacks or other races are somehow less subject to these
patters is fooling themselves and should read a little history.  I suspect it is no different with
women, given the number of dishonest and manipulative ones that have risen in
the conservative movement of today.

It is this comfortable elitism on the part of many
‘Progressives’ who sincerely think they are part of the solution rather than
simply a more humane part of the problem that worries me even more than our
cultural divisions.  It prevents
them from seriously considering policies that actually empower people and
weaken the power of the incompetent elite that dominates this country.