Losers blame sexism

Now that Elizabeth Warren’s execrable campaign has finally ended, her media enthusiasts are trotting out the sexism excuse.

Rather than cast blame on the candidate, on her pandering and rank dishonesty (about her ancestry, about being fired from a teaching job because of pregnancy, about Michael Brown having been “murdered” by a white police officer, etc.), an article in the Huffington Post claimed that she lost because she couldn’t escape the “baggage of being a female candidate.” The Nation published a piece under the headline “Sexism sank Elizabeth Warren,” with a subtitle that read “Warren was a brilliant candidate who would have made a great president. The problem? She’s a woman—and she isn’t ‘perfect.’”

Our most famous alleged victim of misogyny, Hillary Clinton, even chimed in, blaming “unconscious bias” among the voters (presumably a cause of her own defeat, along with James Comey, the electoral college, the Russians, voter suppression …).

Like so much of which fills up the identity politics playbook, the logic in all this is as tortured as the consequences divisive.

As pollster Frank Luntz noted, “About 55 to 57 percent of the Democratic primary and caucus electorate are women, so if women aren’t voting for her, by definition, how can it be sexist?” More embarrassing still, Warren lost the female vote in her own state’s primary to both Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders.

That the typical female voter in Democratic primaries in places like Massachusetts is almost certainly much further to the left than the average American voter, or even the average Democrat, and likely therefore considers herself an ardent feminist, casts still more doubt on the sexism thesis. Indeed, if sexism were as rampant in the Democrat Party as Warren’s defenders claim, we are left to wonder how Hillary won nearly 17 million votes from mostly the same people just four years ago.

Men lose because they are bad candidates who run bad campaigns, but we are somehow supposed to believe, despite all of the societal advancements toward sexual equality in recent decades, that wonderful women candidates who run wonderful campaigns (like Hillary?) continue to lose because of sexist voters.

Along such lines, it would be absurd for a man to say elect me because I’m a man, but in a world of gender equality that feminists claim to be striving for, it would be equally absurd for a woman to say elect me because I’m a woman. The entire point is to get to a point where gender doesn’t matter, not one where it becomes the primary qualification for office. Hillary didn’t win the Democratic nomination in 2016 in spite of sexism among Democrats, and she didn’t lose the presidency that year because of sexism among the broader electorate either; to the contrary, the hunch is that her gender brought her more votes in both cases than it cost her (in the same sense that Barack Obama could never have gone from first-term U.S. senator to the White House if he hadn’t been black; far from the victim of racism he was overwhelmingly a net beneficiary of race).

The truth is that people had plenty of reasons other than misogyny to vote against Hillary, not least perhaps that she expected people to vote for her because she was a woman; that her much commented-upon sense of entitlement was intrinsically linked throughout her political career to her gender (much as Warren was attempting to exploit hers, both as a qualification for high office and an excuse when she failed to attain it).

Men will vote for a woman who is not a radical leftist, and for a woman who doesn’t make her gender an issue. Unfortunately it is leftist women candidates who are far more likely to seek votes on the basis of gender, and then blame sexism when they lose.

In the end, what the typical voter wants is someone who can make the case for being most qualified for the office, regardless of race or gender. At the least, not voting for Hillary or Warren constitutes dubious evidence of sexism.

The thought even occurs, when considering Warren’s flame-out and Hillary’s disappointing electoral results, that women candidates who put their gender first and foremost in constructing their appeals are more likely to be bad candidates because they have the scapegoat of sexism upon which to blame their defeats; they lean on that excuse like a crutch, allowing them to blame not themselves for their failures but all those sexists who supposedly oppress them.

When you have a built-in excuse for losing, losing is what you are likely to do.

One can call this the kernel-of-truth problem—the kernel being that there is still racism in America, still undoubtedly sexism too. But this doesn’t mean that every bad thing (or even most bad things) that happens to a black person is because of racism, or that every bad thing (or even most bad things) that happens to a woman is because of sexism, including losing elections.

In 1979, the voters of Great Britain gave the conservative party a majority in Parliament, making its leader, Margaret Thatcher, the new prime minister.

So are we really expected to believe that America more than 40 years later would refuse to elect someone like her?