Let's talk about white men
I know that a favorite of the cognoscenti after 2016 was blaming white women for Trump's win. I won't even go into the 52% canard. (A Pew Research study found that Donald Trump's margin among white women was 47% to 45%. Still not a good look, but reflecting the closeness of the election. And I'll take a Pew study over, well, notoriously unreliable exit polling.)
The "white women gave us Trump" bromide elides the group which really gave us Trump: White men.
According to this same study, white men favored Trump over Hillary Clinton by 62% to 32%. White men comprised 33% of the electorate. (White women, conversely, comprised 41% of the electorate.) When you have the GOP winning white men by 30 points, and they comprise a third of the electorate, well, even innumerate me can do the maths.
However, on social media and in newsrooms, it's white women who get the shank, while white men are excused for their choosing a fascist charlatan. Why?
Could it be because, as many strides as women have made since the 1960s, it's still very much a white man's world?
Could it be because those white men who run news organizations may not want to look too closely in to why their peers uniformly rejected Clinton? A bit too close to home?
Could it be just the garden variety misogyny which, like racism, subsumes the very fabric of this society?
If the Washington Post and the New York Times, as well as the myriad other thought leaders, asked "What's the matter with white men", you can be sure there would be a hue and cry from the hurt little dears, weeping about "reverse discrimination" or "reverse sexism", or some such tripe.
White men—even those which the leadership of the media wouldn't deign to meet in a Wisconsin diner for a coffee and pie—get a pass because of their white maleness. It's always much easier, and more profitable, to blame the woman, whether white or not.
This fetid misogyny is baked into Western civilization. (Of course, it exists in most cultures, but we're not talking about them right now.) From the moment that the Church Fathers thought up of original sin, and knew that it was Eve's fault for tempting Adam into the Fall, women were not going to have a good run of it in our culture. The history of the Christian West has been, in part, one of a constant suppression of the female. Whether by putting them under the "protection" of a man, denying them property rights, or just killing them under the guise of "witch hunting", the lot of women has not been one which commends itself highly to a neutral observer. The gambit of white male Western culture has been to find the Other in order to oppose itself to it: Muslims during the Crusades (and now); "subhuman" Africans ready to be enslaved; and always women.
As has been said in this space, people who wouldn't even dream of saying the N-word freely use "bitch", "slut", "cunt". The dehumanization is constant, and purposeful.
The same white men who will say the N-word are, of course, not averse to using those derogatory terms for women. But it's not limited to the right. This extends across the ideological spectrum.
And yet those white men will get 1,000-word write ups about how much they love Trump, and will be treated as the "real America". Meanwhile, they caravan into American cities and assault protesters.
Yes. Too many white women cling to the same fetid beliefs. I'm not excusing them. But the focus on women to the exclusion of men is, well, indicative. And as women of all colors and ethnicities turn against Trump, where are the articles asking why white men aren't? Or, more precisely, where are those articles, and why aren't they asking what's wrong with white men? The media treats white men like amoebae who just operate on instinct and aren't responsible for their own actions, while every other group is judged by the actions of a few. That, my friends, is what power looks like.
I think it's past time that the same questions asked of Blacks, Latinos, Asians, Muslims, Jews, women, and every other group gets asked about white men. No more free rides.