In a recent diary titled “Our 2020 nominee will look like the Democratic Party, and that’s not a white guy”, Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas writes:
So to the three billionaires above, as well to the nearly two dozen other white men who think they’re running in 2020? The inability to read the current climate, thus concluding that what the party grassroots is really after [is] another white guy, is disqualifying in and of itself.
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And in case you’re wondering, out of those 26 [potential candidates], 16 are white men. They won’t be in the winner’s circ[l]e.
Markos is positing that nowadays most Democrats in the grassroots will categorically not support, as their first choice, a white male political leader for our highest political office.
That seems wrong on its face.
Consider Markos’s own state. The voters of the largest and one of the most diverse states in America* just elected as their governor a white male progressive Democrat. In the Primary, Gavin Newsom received over 2 million votes, while the next highest Democratic vote-getters were Antonio Villaraigosa (who is Latino) who received over 900,000 votes, John Chiang (an Asian American), who received over 600,000, and Delaine Eastin (a white woman), who received over 200,000.
(Now you might say: well Markos wasn’t talking about California. And you’d be right: he never said a progressive white man couldn’t be in the winner’s circle in his state’s Primary or that it would be “disqualifying” for white men to even think they could. But if, as he asserts, the grassroots will categorically reject white male presidential candidates, why would they embrace a white male candidate for governor, particularly in a state like California which has not yet elected a woman, or a person of color, to the governorship?)
And in America’s second largest state, another white male progressive, Beto O’Rourke, recently rocked the Democratic grassroots.
The notion that today it’s absurd for white male progressives to even consider running for our highest political offices is not tenable.
Indeed, it gets less and less tenable, as time goes on and the arc of the moral universe continues to bend — at least on our side of the aisle — toward justice, that any person would not be considered a viable candidate among Democrats simply by dint of how they identify.
“Massive egos”
Markos writes:
There’s no shame in supporting. Presidential pretenders like Michael Bloomberg, Howard Schultz, and Tom Steyer can be incredibly helpful by funding this new generation of progressive leadership and infrastructure. It’s honorable! But white men don’t like to play supporting roles, do they? It’s not what they’re used to experiencing, or seeing. It doesn’t feed their sense of entitlement, their massive egos, or dreams of having schools and roads named after them.
Indeed, there are benign ways the very wealthy can help progressive causes, but the power of the rich — whether they are liberal or conservative — to influence elections in our country is also, to say the least, highly problematic. But I don’t want to digress from this excerpt’s larger point, because
Markos is right: We should look at why a person wants to lead.
Yes, I know that’s not precisely what Markos said; he also focused on color and gender.
But notwithstanding his sarcasm (“white men don’t like to play supporting roles, do they?”) I don’t imagine he really thinks biology is destiny — that you’re certain to be an egoist if you’re white and male and to be more humble if you’re not.
Because of course egos belong to individuals, not to groups. While none of them had any experience in government — and none are white men — billionaire business executive Meg Whitman thought she should be elected governor of California, and multi-millionaire business executive Carly Fiorina and multi-millionaire brain surgeon Ben Carson thought they should be elected president of the United States.
And of course there are progressives who are white and male who run for office and get elected who don’t want to have roads named after them, who are in politics because they have experience and talent in public service and they genuinely want to help implement positive, critically needed policies.
Democrats in the grassroots support such candidates in every election.
As does Daily Kos.
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*In 2010, non-Hispanic whites comprised 40.1% of California’s population, compared to 63.7% nationally.