How Do You Spell S-N-O-B?

As Diana West points out in a must-read column headlined “White Men Aren’t Alone,” the left isn’t demonizing only the guys who voted for Mitt Romney. They are also treating women who voted for Mitt Romney as if they are from another planet.  Diana quotes this patronizing bit from the New Yorker magazine:

To be sure, these voters weren’t, in the main, the sort of women who write for the Times, or even read it. Among white female college graduates, Obama voters may have been in the majority. (In the versions of the national exit poll that I have seen, that category isn’t broken down.)

But the fact remains that white females, taken as a whole, went solidly Republican. While the overall gender gap played a significant role in ensuring Obama’s re-election, it didn’t have very much to do with white women, who remain one of the bulwarks of the Republican Party.

Diana asks:

How do you spell S-N-O-B? (O-B-T-U-S-E)

It is interesting, and little noted, as the piece points out, that the majority of white women did vote for Mitt Romney. But enough of them voted for President Obama so that the president carried women by eleven points. It is also interesting that Romney won college graduates over all by a slim majority. So it’s “no sure thing” that the women who voted for Romney were largely those who lack college degrees.

Diana suggests that what we are seeing is more a race gap than a gender gap. As always, she is incredibly interesting, but I do think the gender gap remains and is more significant now than ever before, even in the 1980s when it was first discovered.  The other bad news is that women have proven themselves susceptible to demagoguery. How else can we explain why so many bought the absurd claim that Mitt Romney was going to take away their contraception?

But white men have become, as Diana explains, the whipping boys of the left:

This "income gap" dovetails with the underlying reality — the American welfare state — discussed in today's column. In other words, it is not at all the case that (evil) white men, rich to boot, are the sole support of the (evil) GOP. That is a myth. But that myth is a political weapon. The Left is not going to target white women, young white people, middle class families, college graduates etc., directly. By demonizing white men, they undermine the affinity for small-"r" republican governance among all of these other people and anyone else who might want to cross the line to liberty. It is a most nefarious form of social conditioning, not at all unlike the historical treatement of Jews, kulaks and other human beings objectified in contempt inside totalitarian systems.

It is the disgrace of so-called "liberalism": White men remain the whipping boy, the ogre of "hope and change," the object of hate from — what was it? — the sort who write for the Times and read it. We've seen them and their minions in action before: the graduate-degreed and the uneducated; the Marxist elites and the wards (masses) of the federal state, the grand old Leninst coalition all over again. And they call their leader Obama.

Strong stuff—but that is what we expect from Diana West!