Why some men dislike Hillary
Posted on Sunday, June 15, 2008
With her campaign finally thankfully kaput, prepare for the claim that Hillary Clinton lost because men simply weren’t ready for a strong woman. The claim is based on a kernel of truth in the sense that undoubtedly there are some men who won’t, under any circumstances, vote for a woman for public office, let alone the presidency. But to note this is to say nothing of any significance because it will be possible to say the same thing 500 years from now if America is lucky enough to still exist and still be a democracy. Such observations are irrelevant because they do nothing more than reaffirm that sexism, racism and other prejudices will always be with us. More to the point, they fail to provide much explanation for why a particular voting bloc, in this case men, didn’t provide many votes for a particular candidate, in this case Clinton, in a given election year. In reality, it isn’t strong women that men dislike, it’s radical, left-wing feminists like Clinton. Men almost certainly would have welcomed the opportunity to vote this election year for a female candidate like Condoleezza Rice, whose accomplishments are both vastly more substantial and more the consequence of her own efforts than are Clinton’s. British males, who are presumably not much more enlightened on gender issues than their transatlantic cousins, had no difficulty voting overwhelmingly in successive elections for Margaret Thatcher, not just a “strong woman,” but an actual “iron lady.” The key here is that Rice and Thatcher are women of undeniable stature and achievement who also happen to be, like most men, conservatives. Unlike Clinton, they didn’t acquire power through marriage and then contradictorily present themselves as proud symbols of independent feminism. Neither their world views nor their political appeals have anything to do with gender, and they tend be judged on their merits, apart from such considerations.
All of which is another way of saying that men are strongly skeptical of women who use their gender and charges of sexism for self-promotion. Also, white men are especially uncomfortable voting for female candidates who tend to linger in the kinds of circles that blame all of the world’s problems on white men. Such men, even liberal Democratic ones, don’t like Clinton much because they sense that she doesn’t much like them.
Finally, we come to the question of character.
Given Clinton’s (and her husband’s ) well-established problems in this area, as well as her undeniably unappealing personal demeanor, we would probably be on firmer ground in saying that the women who voted for her in recent months primarily because she is a women vastly outnumbered the men who voted against her for the same reason.
Put in these terms, the more intriguing question regarding Clinton’s candidacy was not why so few men voted for her but why so many women locked arms in militant sisterhood and did. It was female, and black, not white male voting behavior that in the recent election cycle was distressingly based on primitive notions of tribal solidarity and superficial forms of identity, so the obvious question emerges: Is it any less sexist to vote in favor of someone on the basis of gender than to vote against him or her because of it ? Going further, what are we to make of the data over time suggesting that in races between a white candidate and a black candidate, white voters are more willing to support the black candidate than black voters the white ? Or that in contests between white and Hispanic candidates, Hispanics are far less likely to vote for the white than whites are to vote for the Hispanic ? Putting all this together, is it possible that white males might, contrary to leftist mythology, be the one voting bloc whose voting behavior is least rather than most influenced by considerations of race, ethnicity and gender ? Although demonized at every turn by the identity politics crowd, it might turn out that white males are actually more willing than other groups to judge candidates on the basis of their qualifications and character rather than their gender or pigmentation. As for Clinton, no, the vast majority of men have no problem with strong women, whatever that means; they simply won’t vote for the kind of women who cry sexism whenever they lose.
—–––––•–––––—Free-lance columnist Bradley R. Gitz teaches politics at Lyon College at Batesville.
FEEDBACK:
Something to say about this topic? Submit a Letter to the Editor online