Bobo in (White) America

A completely indefensible, but familiar, right-wing trope appears within David Brooks‘ tripe today. He explains why the party that has lost the popular vote once in the previous four presidential elections is near death:

This does not mean good news for Democrats. That party is at risk of going into a death spiral. The Democrats lost white working-class voters by 23 percentage points in the last election, and now the party is being led by people who are guaranteed to alienate those voters even more: the highly educated and secular university-town elites who follow Howard Dean and believe Bush hatred and stridency are the outward signs of righteousness.

OK, why don’t we re-write this:

This does not mean good news for Republicans. That party is at risk of going into a death spiral. The Republicans lost the vote of single women by 29 percentage points in the last election, and now the party is being led by people who are guaranteed to alienate those voters even more: the highly authoritarian and theocratic reactionary elites who follow James Dobson and believe women hatred and stridency are the outward signs of righteousness.

But, of course, we would never see such an argument–from a major pundit of any ideological stripe–because for some reason the white and southern base of the Republican Party is supposed to count for more. As we have heard countless times, the weakening of Democratic support in the South is a death knell, but not weakening Republican support in the northeast. Democrats losing the vote among white people is an immense problem, but not Republicans getting clobbered among the growing segment of non-whites. This selective slicing-and-dicing of the electorate makes no sense unless you think that the votes of white men are worth more than the votes of other Americans. Period.

UPDATE: Ezra has more.