When Did Old White Guys Become Jokes?

White professional women like Julie Klausner (and her audience) are not the only ones with a disdain for beta male White guys. Other beta male White guys have internalized the idea that being White (and also, old) is to be laughed at. An object for derision. Fresh off his observation of Hillary's balls (yes, really), James Carville and Stuart Greenberg muse that Mitt Romney is a joke, because he's an old White guy (like McCain) and therefore an object of derision?





Now, recall that Democratic Senatorial Candidate in South Carolina, one Alvin Greene, was not laughed at in the media for being a stupid Black guy. No, that was never in the cards. James Carville never laughed at Alvin Greene. But Mitt Romney, ex-Bain Capital, one very rich, powerful, and smart White guy, is an object of derision. For being an Old White guy. Look at the video. Other old White guys themselves laugh at him.

Old White guys who would by that standard be no longer part of any credible attempt to be President would include George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, FDR, LBJ, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Harry S. Truman, Andrew Jackson, John Adams, and Ronald Reagan. Some of the most important, and for Democrats like Carville, idolized Presidents.

The entire press briefing was filled with middle aged and older White guys. No people of color, or hip young women present. Yet is remarkable that all those White guys laughed at the idea, the very thought, that a White guy older than they were could be President again. That Barack Obama broke the chain of history and now ushered in a new hip, young, and non-White requirement for future Presidents.

They cannot be old. And they cannot be White Men.

Again, I want to point out how remarkable this new standard is. How different it is from American history, and how it plays out against a White majority, even in Democratic politics. All the men laughing were White. Most of them middle aged or older.

The number of hip young non-White men and women, who have a brain in their head and the character to lead (without punishing reflexively ordinary Whites to retain approval from their communities) can be numbered on the fingers of one hand. While it is wise to nominate in lesser races, whoever is the most youthful and handsome MEN, because the feminized media and key, White female voters are influenced by youth, vigor, and looks in male candidates, and no one hates conservative women quite like … female White professional women voters, this hits a snag when considering the Presidential races.

Yes, perhaps Republicans would be wise to nominate Bobby Jindal or better yet Marco Rubio, and be done with it. Barack Obama, unless facing a very handsome and youthful, and vigorous man such as Rubio, or Scott Brown, will win because he will take a great deal of the White female vote and almost all of the non-White vote. Like it or not, this is how White women vote. And with Whites only 65% of the population, achieving White bloc voting (as the way Blacks and Mexicans vote) is key to booting out Obama.

But winning the nomination requires construction of a powerful political machine. It requires raising money (or your own fortune), ground operatives in key states, ability to get endorsements through horse-trading, and powerful allies or key voting blocs in the early primaries. For Obama that was Blacks, and SWPL caucus voters. For McCain, that was military voters, and social conservatives wary of Huckabee and Romney. Even able politicians like Mayor Guiliani and Fred Thompson were no match. Not even wealthy Romney could buy victory, or Hillary for that matter, or even Edwards, himself a wealthy man.

In this case, because America cannot afford Barack Obama as President for another four years, Republican voters must educate themselves on Demographic Reality and how White women vote. Which is basically a variation of the old Saturday Night Live Skit: "Who Es More Muy Macho?" It is sad but true.

But this brings up the other question. When did White and Old become an insult? An identity prone to derision, in the media and political world?

In my view, this is a function of a feminized West. One shaped by the need to appeal to female consumers and voters, as the key or swing voters who give victory to candidates or domination for consumer products sold in the marketplace. White women don't like old White guys very much (nor younger beta ones either). They view indeed Whiteness itself as a mortal sin, one that should be punished (they themselves are of course, honorary non-White by virtue of being female). It is not uncommon for liberal White women to prefer say, Mexican or Black candidates be hired as teachers over their own sons, on the basis that those communities deserve to be hired more than their own flesh and blood, aspiring teachers. I know of at least one such case personally. You can see this attitude all the time in the columns of Maureen Dowd, herself White and from a large Irish-American family. I can recall riding in one elevator, on the Westside of LA, with a Black woman dressed fairly ridiculously, in some faux-leopard print African dress and headrap (for Kwanzaa). Akin to myself wearing a kilt on St. Patrick's Day. A White woman in her fifties got on the elevator and gushed over how awesome the woman's idiot outfit was, in a way that made me embarrassed for her. It was indeed pathetic.

All those commercials on TV, featuring Black actors and actresses, in nuclear families doing middle class things, are not designed to reach middle class Black families. Blacks are under current estimations, 12.9% of the population. Middle class Blacks are 40% of that number, or approximately 5.12% of America. Lowe's, Home Depot, Hometown Buffet, Toyota, and the rest are not trying to reach that 5.12% of America. They are instead reaching for White women, who mostly hold that non-Whites are "authentic" and more "real" and have more value than Whites. Indeed when most White women contemplate White guys, they get as depressed as Julie Klausner.

White guys in the workplace are mostly denatured, demasculinized jokes. At best they are "Jim" from the Office, not the arrogant, obnoxious jerks most women crave. To get ahead in the real workplace, White guys cannot act the way women like them acting. They cannot be arrogant, rude, obnoxious, and dominating, except for a few at the very top, or those who rose to power from entrepreneurship, such as Larry Ellison of Oracle or Steve Jobs of Apple. This is particularly true since American culture had a decades long effort to "PC the racism out of White guys" which punished quickly from childhood onward any display of masculine aggressiveness by Whites and ignored it completely from non-Whites.

The White guys who fought in WWII, Korea, and even Vietnam, in very miserable conditions, enduring what could not but must be endured, in an environment that would have broken most other men, did not suddenly have genetic defects to create effeminate emo kids. It was instead, widespread social conditioning looking to eradicate racism (and seeing it only among ordinary White guys) by eliminating all masculine behavior. Thus over time, as White guys in each succeeding generation became more demasculinized, from the Boomers to Gen X to Gen Y to Millenials, their peer White women found them … effeminate. And "Whiteness" became an insult or a punch line.

Old is no longer a repository of wisdom and strength, of experience. No, it is now a joke about lack of sexual vigor and dominance. So FDR, Reagan, Churchill, and the like are out, and Justin Bieber, effeminate but young, is in. White guy is now an insult as well, with the assumption that only a non-White guy can be truly masculine. [Witness Michael Moore regretting that Flight 93 was not filled with Black guys, who would have by their masculine dominance deterred the jihadis.] Only a non-White guy can understand the world. White guys are idiots, while Black guys are smooth computer geniuses (Terminator 2 comes to mind) or at least middle class and authoritative.



Or, White guys are fat and feminized idiots dominated by their hot, hip and happening wives:



Bear in mind, these commercials are carefully constructed to appeal to White women, and upscale ones too. Hence the positioning on social value, denigration of nerdy White guys, as idiot doofuses, and the "colorful" White female character of "Flo." Instead of a straight out push "we are cheaper than anyone else" which is only part of the message. Instead it is "we are so hip you won't care we are cheap."

Compare Geico's masculine approach (target: White guys):



Here the old White guy is not the joke. He's the guy the target audience (White guys) is supposed to laugh with, not at.

Culture is determined, bit by bit, by what is allowed and not allowed. Much of it is created by TV, and particularly, commercials, whose logic most people absorb without thinking too much about it.

I would argue that Carville laughing at Romney for being an old White guy, and thus, "loser" came about in the early 1990's when commercials first started showing the idiot White guy and his long-suffering wife and/or Black guy co-worker. In other words, when commercials like this began appearing:



Now bear in mind, the commercial is designed to appeal to … yes, women. Who make up most of the TV audience. But these attitudes also shape that of White guys who are professional, work in the media, itself aimed at women, and shape political coverage.

This is why I write about TV so much. Obama is President, and probably odds on favorite to be re-elected, because a great many older White guys in media, and their female audience, believes that Old White Guy, or even just White Guy, is a joke. A dancing idiot with numbers, a guy who cannot order Dell ink, a fat guy carrying a man purse. And can you blame them? This is what our culture has become, a few White guy winners allowed to be masculine (Charlie Sheen, George Clooney, Gavin Newsome, Eliot Spitzer, Bill Clinton) in the worst not best way, the rest effectively neutered lest they become drooling, cross burning "racists." All pandering to the worst instincts of White women (hypergamy) not their best.

This is a disaster that must be fought, inch by inch. Not the least of which is that the quality and ability of political leadership will be mighty thin if Whites are essentially excluded from the Presidency.
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