Ethnic diversity – traditional white Americans sliding into minority status – a balance shift from rural to urban values and trending among younger voters to let people be who they are or want to be are gnawing away at old-world GOP values and political power. Gay marriage and rights aren’t even on the radar of most younger voters, regardless of political leaning, and most have friends they care about who are openly gay, lesbian or bisexual. Traditional roles championed by the right appear to be completely at odds with reality in an economic world that has been completely reset over the last few decades, accelerated by the economic collapse.
When Lou Dobbs and his male Fox News cohorts railed at the social failure of having women leave their traditional full-time mothering roles to struggle in the workplace – reflected in a recent Pew report that tells us 40% of women are the sole or primary breadwinners in their families today – these bastions of the ultra-right found themselves at odds with their ultra-right female on-air personalities (obvious a part of that 40% statistic). Dobbs, “watching society dissolve around us,” was less-than-subtle in his reference to such “troubling statistics” as evidence of the moral erosion of America.
Erick Erickson embellished this slam with this statement: “I’m so used to liberals telling conservatives that they’re anti-science. But liberals who defend this and say it is not a bad thing are very anti-science. When you look at biology, when you look at the natural world, the roles of a male and a female in society and in other animals, the male typically is the dominant role. The female, it’s not antithesis, or it’s not competing, it’s a complimentary role.”
Uh-oh, Fox personality Megan Kelly slammed back: “In this country in the ’50s and ’60s there were huge numbers of people that believed that the children of interracial marriages were biologically inferior and that is why it was illegal for blacks and whites to marry in some states in the country up until 1967. And they said it was science and fact if you were the child of a black father and white mother or vice versa you were inferior and not set up for success.” Erickson pointed out how conservative polls overwhelmingly share the view that mothers belong at home and not in the workplace. I guess the notion is that neither society nor women have evolved. We’ve come a long way even from WWII’s Rosie the Riveter pictured above.
Taking on working women, pushing them away from conservative support, seems to be another dream come true for the Democrats, who are still trying to figure out who they are and how they fit into the future. But frankly, where there are two potential breadwinners in a family, the falling buying power for average Americans pretty much requires that both work just to maintain the income that used to be generated by just one. In single-parent households, there just isn’t any other choice.
Almost a quarter of women are single moms, and the Pew study indicates that most of the rising growth in this number comes from women who haven’t married. The study’s authors tell us that these single parents tend to be younger, non-white women without a college degree. In 1960, they represented 1% of households with kids under 18; by 2011 they covered 11% of such households.
Writing for the June 2nd Washington Post, Chris Cillizza examines the political leanings of this segment of America: “Let’s start with the fact that single moms have been a solidly Democratic group in each of the past two presidential races. In 2008, then-Sen. Barack Obama won 74 percent of single moms — defined for these purposes as unmarried women living in households with children under 18. Obama followed that by winning 75 percent among that group in his contest with former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney in November. In both of those elections, single moms constituted 6 percent of the overall electorate.
“Of course, given the ethnic, racial and age overlaps among single mothers and groups — voters under 30, minorities, women — that backed President Obama (regardless of whether they had children), the fact that single mothers tend to be strongly Democratic should not be terribly surprising… But dig further into the exit polling from 2012 and you see Obama heavily overperforming among single mothers across all demographic groups, not just those that tended to favor him in November.”
Looking at the numbers, there are increasing pockets of voters who are being alienated from the GOP right. Maybe this is a small statistic, but it is part of the aggregation of people who are finding serious issues with GOP social policies and prejudices, one that augurs badly for the longer term prospects for the Republican Party, which may ultimately be forced to break apart to cover fiscal but conservatives without a social agenda.
Cillizza: “Take white voters. Obama lost to Romney among white voters, 59 percent to 39 percent. But among white single mothers, Obama bested Romney 56 percent to 43 percent. Lower-income voters are another good example. Obama took 60 percent to Romney’s 38 percent in all households making $50,000 or less a year. Among under-$50,000 households that included a single mother, Obama took a whopping 79 percent to Romney’s 20 percent.
“To be clear, the Republican Party’s issues with single mothers — as demonstrated above — are not its first priority when it comes to demographic problems that need to be solved before 2016. The first problem is clearly the GOP’s inability to win any significant share of the ever-increasing Hispanic population.” Gee, the internal GOP battle over immigration policy, which has been a repeated blog topic of mine, suggests that the ultra-right is getting this one wrong too.
I’m Peter Dekom, and the unwillingness to embrace people of differing ethnic or cultural values from other backgrounds seems to be a parallel track to a Congress that is no longer willing to embrace compromise.
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