Happy Monday after Thanksgiving weekend! Hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving, and no, I don’t want to go back to work either. A big thank you to Stephen Hall for today’s article.
In the recent midterm elections, over and over again there were people posting the above graphic and blaming / berating / targeting “white women” for the failure of the Democrat’s new golden child, Beto O’Rourke. The re-election of Sen. Cruz was entirely the responsibility of the white women.
Notice that they did not blame white people even though both white men and white women voted more conservative than not, nor did they choose to blame white men even though white men voted in larger percentages for Cruz than the white women; nor did they blame women in general, which would have been admittedly rather odd because women of all groups voted more liberal than conservative.
They are berating and castigating only women, not men. Why is that not sexism? They are berating and castigating only white people. Why is that not racism? By combining their “isms”, they are targeting only “white women”, and white women are a minority (less than half of the population). So why is no one decrying their discrimination?
The question is why would so many leftists chose to single out white women as a group when their split between conservative and liberal is more narrow than every other group, with only a nine point spread between the conservative and the liberal?
Take a closer look at that chart. Go on, I’ll wait. Did you see it?
Basically, they have divided the electorate into three main groups, then divided each group by gender. Relatively speaking, the ethic group division is more predictive of the voting patterns of the members of society, however gender is also predictive. So that is not quite it.
Of the three ethnic divisions, two vote liberal, one votes conservative.
Liberals do not think like conservatives in terms of a unifying ideological core around which to coalesce votes, rather they think entirely strategically and not ideologically. They may speak ideologically to recruit various isolated segments of society to their cause, but the left’s approach to politics, culture, business, law, economics, et cetera, is always strategic.
Strategically, there is only one ethnic group which votes a majority conservative, white people.
By holding “white women” up for ridicule, they seek to divide the white vote. It is as simple and as cynical as a divide and conquer strategy. If you can get the white women to turn against the white men, then white men are only remaining group which is majority conservative.
But, why not go after the white men? Division is division after all. Well there are two basic reasons for this strategy. First, as previously noted, women are, in every ethnic group, more inclined to liberalism than men. Second, women are more easily influenced and pressured to change their opinion in an effort to fit in to the larger group.
I remember watching a video on the differences between men and women involving a psychological experiment where the subject and an actor of the opposite gender would be asked to estimate the height of a tower in the distance. The interesting thing is that the male subjects were more likely to stick to their original opinion, no matter how obviously wrong, and were not easily influenced by the actor’s suggestions. On the other hand, the female subjects were more likely to change their guess to more accommodate the paid actor’s opinion, again no matter how obviously wrong the actor’s suggestion was.
In essence, women are more likely to conform and compromise their opinion to the group than to adamantly hold to their own position and opinion.
This has been noted not just in this experiment but many others. It is one of the reasons the endless meetings and committee format of modern offices often favor women over men, because they are more cooperative and group oriented and less individualistic and stubborn.
This can be a good thing if the woman’s initial opinion is wrong, but detrimental if her individual assessment is prone to be correct. Likewise, a man’s intractability is a good thing if he is intelligent and his initial assessments tend to be correct, but can lead to folly when he stubbornly refuses to rethink a wrong position.
However, this psychological manipulation becomes an effective political weapon against conservatives by repeatedly ridiculing white women as mindlessly controlled by their husbands (because married women are more conservative than single women) in order to try to get them to be mindlessly controlled by the peer pressure of the media and leftists.
The left truly believes women are weak and easily manipulated. This would be misogynistic but that they would rather take advantage of this weakness for strategic political gains. Mrs. Pinky, a frequenter and contributer to this blog, has repeatedly pointed out how the left exercises the subtle racism of low expectations regarding black people, and this is also a political tool to divide and control.
All of those “isms” the left pretends to condemn, those same leftists believe and exploit any time that such belief can be used to gain a strategic advantage. They accuse their opponents of “isms” to shut down their opinions, as well as to get their own supporters to not listen to those “ists”
Leftist excel at creating policies and positions to drive in wedge issues in the electorate, to divide and chip away at their opponent’s base. Leftist excel at strategy. Of course, this creates ideological fissures within any leftist structure which continues to undermine holding their coalition together.
This is easily illustrated by the environmental leftists going after coal and oil industries when many of their early conscripts to leftism were the workers in unions in these very industries. Or their constant appeals to the poor belittling the 1%ers when their own political leaders, contributors, and idolized celebrities are all part of that very same 1%.
People on the right mistake merely pointing out these glaring contradictions as a form of strategy, but it really isn’t and it’s not effective. Conservatives fail entirely at strategy and fail to even consider strategy. Conservatives do not create or exploit the natural divisions in their opponents, rather they often vainly hope that other people will simply be persuaded by their rational arguments.
However, people do not take up sides based upon reasoned arguments but through emotional responses and broad categorizations of issues and people, the “isms” and the labels. “Racism” becomes bad and rejected, and the left suddenly and magically goes from being the party of slavery and Jim Crow to champions of “civil rights”. How? By constantly and repeatedly that the other side are the racists, highlighting and repeating any instance where a racist is on the other political side, and by publicly speculating that any racist event is associated with the other side.
Strategically speaking, the first impression is the lasting impression. A school shooting occurs and immediately the media is speculating that it must be a “right wing gun nut”. The fact that it later proves to be a “left wing gun control nut” will never make an impression on the public mind because that first impression has already been set in their minds.
The label of “ism” is more important to the public imagination than the actual “ism”. This is why conservatives keep losing the public relations strategy, because they are not acting strategically. The “isms” have been turned into political weapons so effectively that to point out that a man pretending to be a woman winning a women’s sporting event is sexism even though you are criticizing a fellow man.
It is not just that leftist throw out insults based on “isms”, “ists”, and “phobic” so oft that people have come to believe that they don’t actually know any other words, it is their collective belief that the first person to draw their “ism” weapon wins the duel.
The real danger for the left is that certain ideological elements of their party become more concerned with advancing their ideology than they do winning by strategically dividing their opponents. This ideological purity has the opposite effect of dividing their own coalition rather than that of their opponents. The more the leftist attack white women, the more likely their own white people, men and women, will push back against these racist attacks, and the more women of all races will start to push back against these sexist attacks.
Leftist have a hard time reigning in their ideologues in order to divide their opponents rather than their own constituencies, particularly the socialists; meanwhile the Rightists ostracize their ideologues, particularly the conservatives, because they don’t appear to want to win by any coalition at all.
There is a natural human tendency for good people to project their own perspectives onto others with whom you agree just as much as there is for bad people to project their bad motives upon their opponents. This blog has many contributors and readers who, though being female, are not so easily persuaded and persuadable as the typical or average woman. The men are conditioned to deal with strong willed women who are typical of women who are inclined to publicly discuss politics.
This creates a strategic blind spot for conservatives that they do not recognize the effectiveness of the weaponization of “isms” to divide their ranks and influence the average voter who might be otherwise inclined to support conservative beliefs. Until the right begins to understand the strategic weapons of politics, they will continue to struggle unable to figure out how they are unable to make inroads into certain demographics.
Conservatives flatter their own egos by pointing out the exceptional individuals who break free of the general pack of their demographic background as proof that their ideas can appeal to such groups. However, they fail to understand that the exception is the exception for a reason: they do not think like the majority of their fellows within that demographic.
To fight weaponized “isms”, one needs to understand how it works, why it is effective, and either be able to defeat the label and the division, or to counter with labeling and division strategies of their own.
Oddly, as disparaging as we tend to be, those who have been most effective at understanding this are the conspiracy theorists. The first thing a conspiracy theorist will do to anyone who questions their own particular theory is to label them a “shill” for that very conspiracy. An effective and illustrative weaponizing of the “ism” to attack the very credibility of their critics.
