https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columnists/michael-barone-will-burly-men-stop-the-democrats-blue-waveStandard article about the split between college-educated white women vs. non-college educated white men.*
However, a point that I've seen before struck me:
President Barack Obama’s 2009 stimulus package was heavily tilted toward college women. As my American Enterprise Institute colleague Christina Hoff Summers wrote in The Weekly Standard in June 2009, the Obama economic team’s original idea was to finance infrastructure, construction, and manufacturing, sectors which lost 3 million jobs in 2007-09.
But feminist groups objected. Obama economist Christina Romer, Summers wrote, recalled that her first email “was from a women’s group saying, ‘We don’t want this stimulus package to just create jobs for burly men.’” So Obama ditched his “macho” stimulus plan for one stimulating creation of jobs in government and especially in education and healthcare, which had gained 588,000 jobs during the 2007-09 recession. Forget the bridge-building and electric grid modernization; let’s subsidize more administrators, facilitators, liaisons.
The results were disappointing. Sputtering growth nudged up toward 3 percent and down toward zero, which is what it was during the last quarter of the Obama administration. Administrators outnumbered teachers in higher education but added little value; government payrolls were sheltered from cuts, temporarily. There was little recovery in blue-collar jobs, and millions of men lingered on the disability rolls. Life-expectancy fell among downscale groups amid a rise in opioid dependency and deaths.
Barone here is laying out the actual numbers that created the Trump presidency. The Obama administration was poised to (attempt to) help the people who had suffered the most from the economic downturn. I would argue it would not be as effective as spurring the economy, but, taking the Keynesian or NeoKeynsian view, this is what the government ought to do during downturns.
But feminist groups
didn't care that men had suffered the most. Men don't deserve help, so women (especially white, college-educated women) who had fared pretty well during the downturn, were the recipients of most of the jobs from the "stimulus."
Obama could have been heralded as the next FDR by creating some TVA or WPA type effect for the "working class." With the "seen vs. unseen" problem, the workers would never know if they would have been better off some other way, but there would be a lot of "downtrodden" families who saw Obama as putting them back on their feet and "fixing" the economy.
But white, college-educated women had to be appeased. So Obama left the downtrodden where they were and told them they needed to learn to code because those jobs were never coming back.
And now we have Trump, who rightly saw this dissatisfaction and spoke to it. Further, he seems to be fighting specifically for these "left-behinds" (you can argue over the effects of his policies, but the target is pretty clear.)
So Democrats have ensured that their coalition will rely more and more on the vote of white, college-educated women and the Republican Party will have a much larger tent.
I'm going to have to re-examine my classification of the two parties as the Stupid Party and the Evil Party. Looks like it's the Stupid Party and the Stupid and Evil Party.
*An aside: it seems the Democrat policy has been to create both more college educated white women and fewer college educated men... which actually fits in with the entirety of my point about Democrats' identity politics killing the Democrats.
