WHY SO MANY?

Dana Prom Smith

 

Why are so many white people voting against their self-interest by voting for Republican candidates?  It isn’t out of patriotism with people putting the commonweal above their own welfare.  Some say that there’s an underlying racial motif.  While that may be true, there’s something deeper.  They see in Barack Obama a country which is slipping away from them.

 

          American was once a country of white hegemony where being a white male was enough to prevail.  Barack Obama behaves and thinks pretty much like a well-educated white male, but he isn’t.  He represents all those minorities who keep pushing their way into the mainstream, uppity-like.

 

          America is profoundly different from what it once was, in some ways better and some ways worse, and those whites voting against their self-interests are voting for a return to an America that no longer exists, an America of white hegemony.

 

          When I was a boy, Chinese food was the big excitement.  Now, I can easily eat all kinds of food from all over the world.  We may be a coarser culture than before although I doubt it, but we’re certainly a more cosmopolitan culture than before.  It’s the American promise of enrichment through immigration that sticks in the craw of all these whites who vote against themselves.

 

          Oddly enough, the Republican Party which these white males prefer has chosen to be the party of ignorance and obscurity, a party of the past, a rearguard.  They scream and yell a lot of obscenities as they slowly perish.