White man explains why Republicans lost

Letter to a future Republican strategist regarding white people

By Eric GarlandMay I explain why not, purely for your education, such that you might be interested in winning an election on the national level at some point in the future? It bears pointing out that I should be your Low Hanging Fruit, the easy vote to get as opposed to, say, African-Americans, Latinos, or Asians--and you’re not even speaking well to me. The reasons why ought to concern you deeply.

As a Card-Carrying White Male I love expressing my opinion irrespective of whether people care to hear it, so let’s get started.

Science--One of the reasons my family is affluent is that my wife and I have a collective fifteen years of university education between us. I have a Masters degree in Science and Technology Policy, and my wife is a physician who holds degrees in medicine as well as cell and molecular biology. We are really quite unimpressed with Congressional representatives such as Todd Akin and Paul Broun who actually serve on the House science committee and who believe, respectively, that rape does not cause pregnancy and that evolution and astrophysics are lies straight from Satan’s butt cheeks.

Climate--Within just the past 18 months the following events have come to our attention: a record-breaking drought that sent temperatures over 100 degrees for weeks, killing half the corn in the Midwest and half the TREES on our suburban property--AND--a hurricane that drowned not New Orleans or Tampa or North Carolina but my native state of VERMONT.

Healthcare--My wife and I are quite familiar with America’s healthcare system due to our professions, and having lived abroad extensively, also very aware of comparable systems. Your party’s insistence on declaring the private U.S. healthcare system “the best in the world” fails nearly every factual measure available to any curious mind.

War--Nations do have to go to war sometimes, but that Iraq thing was pretty bad, to put it mildly. Somebody should have been, I dunno--FIRED for bad performance.

Deficits and debt--Whenever the GOP is out of power, it immediately appeals to the imagination of voters who remember the Lyndon Baines Johnson (!) administration and claim that the Republican alternative is the party of “cutting spending” and “reducing the deficit.” The only problem with your claim is that Republican governments throughout my entire 38 year life (Reagan, Bush 41, Bush 43) have failed to cut spending and deficit and debt EVEN ONCE.

Gay marriage--As the child of Baby Boomers who got divorced (as was the fashion!) in the '80s and '90s, and for whom 50% of my friends had their homes broken by divorce in the critical years before age 18, I sure am unsympathetic to your caterwauling bullshit that “gays will destroy the sanctity of marriage.”His conclusion:[I]f it weren’t bad enough that your policy positions are a complete clusterfuck for the reasons I lay out in great detail, you manage to follow up the whole exercise with insulting me, my wife, and my friends of every stripe who didn’t vote for your political party--all of whom are hard-working, taxpaying, job creating, law abiding, great AMERICANS of EVERY COLOR AND CREED.

From this white, Mayflower-descended strategic analyst, allow me to offer you the three strategic options you have before you:

1. You drastically moderate your platform to harmonize with the policy positions I present above

2. You disband the party and reorganize it to reflect current realities

3. You kick and scream and stamp your feet and call me and my friends names--and submit to several decades of one party rule

While I do not want a one-party system, I also don’t particularly care which of these options you choose. If you look carefully at the numbers on Tuesday, nobody else cares, either.Comment:  For more on the presidential campaign, see Upside-Down Flag Sparks Outrage and White Men Lose to Demographic Change.