RUTHFULLY YOURS

If you type “Hispanic turnout 2016,” Google will churn out a series of buoyant links, all along the lines of “Latino Voting Surge Rattles the Trump Campaign” and “Trump Awakens a Sleeping Giant: Record Turnout for Latino Voters.” Should you do the same exercise about Latino support for the two candidates, you will get “Clinton Trounces Trump in New Poll” and the like.

In addition to their topic, these stories have something else in common: Almost all of them were published before the 8th of November. After the election result, which was itself the biggest story, the second biggest story was that Latino turnout had remained the same as the 2012 Latino turnout, at 11 percent of all voters. And the third biggest story was that within the Latino electorate, support for Clinton had fallen slightly from Obama’s two highs (71 percent in 2008 and 69 percent in 2012) to a respectable but not election-winning 65 percent. In line with that, Trump’s share of the Latino vote rose two points above Romney’s, to 29 percent.

These figures come from the national exit polls. Those for the share of the vote have been challenged by other pollsters, who found Trump getting a low of 18 percent of Latinos. It may be that the exit-poll figures will be corrected, as sometimes happens. Bush’s 44 percent share of the Hispanic vote in 2004 was reduced to 40 percent when the pollsters examined their data in tranquility. But other pollsters doubt that will happen in this case.

And even if it were to do so, that would have the secondary result of suggesting that candidates can win a national election with very little Latino support — the opposite conclusion of all those “surging turnout” and “awakening giant” stories that dominated the campaign coverage. So there’s an interesting story here, even if not the story that reporters and analysts wanted to write.

What makes it even more interesting, if paradoxically so, is that it’s the same sequence of stories that have been written before and after the last five or six elections. The awakening giant is always going to surge before the election but then takes a nap during it and wakes up yawning. Several analysts on both sides of the debate noticed this and wrote about it while the election campaign was still cool. Roberto Suro was one; I was another here at NRO.

The Mainstreaming of Non-White Americans

Let me very briefly rehash Professor Suro’s argument and my response. He accepted that increases in the Latino vote lagged far behind the growth in Census Bureau numbers of Latino citizens. By January this year, when Professor Suro wrote, Latinos had apparently exercised very little influence on how the election was conducted. Signature Latino issues had been eclipsed by general economic ones. And, amazing to relate, the two most prominent Latino politicians in the race were conservative Republicans, namely Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, neither of whom ran on issues identified as specifically Hispanic.

“Cleverness is not wisdom.”
— Euripides, the Bacchae

At the height of the sophistic age in classical Athens, the playwright Euripides asked an eternal question in his masterpiece, the Bacchae: “What is wisdom?”

Was wisdom defined as clever wordplay, or as the urban sophistication of the robed philosophers in the agora and rhetoricians in the assembly?

Or instead was true wisdom a deeper and more modest appreciation of unchanging human nature throughout the ages, which reminds us to avoid hubris, tread carefully, always expect the unlikely, and distrust the self-acclaimed wise who eventually prove clever fools? At the end of the play, a savage, merciless nemesis is unleashed on the hubristic wise of the establishment.

Euripides would have appreciated the ironies of the 2016 election.

Millions of Americans, far from the two coasts, kept largely quiet. They either did not talk much to pollsters or they politely declined to reveal their true feelings. They tuned out talking heads and ignored blue-chip pundits. They did not listen to the shrill bombast of President Obama on the campaign trail or pollsters who ad nauseam declared Hillary Clinton the sure electoral-college winner.

They were not shamed or much bothered by the condescension they receive from the media and the Washington elite, who proved wrong or biased or both in their coverage. They believed that free trade was not worth much if it was not fair trade, that illegal and politicized immigration was as subversive as legal and diverse immigration was valuable, that real racists were those who used race and ethnicity to encourage others to break the law for their own political and elite interests, and that it was stupid to trust their job futures to those who never lost their own jobs while often losing those of others.

So, to return to Euripides, what really is wisdom in the 21st century?

Is it to be judged according to the values of those who inhabit the Podesta WikiLeaks archive? Is being smart defined as being on lots of corporate boards, having an impressive contact list of private cellphone numbers, name-dropping one’s Ivy League degrees, referencing weekends in the Hamptons or on Martha’s Vineyard, or being ranked in the top 100, 1,000, or 5,000 of some cool magazine’s list of go-getters and “people to watch”?

What would we do without psychological studies about sex and gender? We’ve had studies that most women are “part lesbian” and a lack of access to sports bras deters girls from playing sports. We’ve had a study showing that women are more likely to become lesbian if they don’t have ready access to men and a landmark study showing that female chimpanzees are more likely to be domineering feminists.

And now we have a new study concluding that white, masculine men are more likely to be mentally ill, conducted by Y. Joel Wong, a man who isn’t white, may not be masculine, and actually…who knows if he is really a man for sure?

Men who have “playboy” attitudes and believe in power over women may face a higher risk for mental health trouble than men who don’t, a broad new research review suggests.

The finding on sexism, and other so-called “traditional views” on masculinity, stems from an analysis of 74 studies conducted between 2003 and 2013. The studies included nearly 19,500 predominantly white male participants, the researchers said.

The research “looked at expectations about what it means to be masculine, and how that relates to mental health outcomes among men,” explained study lead author Y. Joel Wong.

“What we found overall is that the more that men conformed to masculine norms the poorer their mental health, and the less likely they were to seek mental health services,” he said.

Wong’s team focused on data concerning the embrace of 11 different types of so-called “masculine norms,” including the desire to win; to retain emotional control; to take risks; to engage in violence; to exert dominant behavior; to participate in a “playboy” lifestyle; to be self-reliant; to elevate work to the highest level of importance; to retain power over women; to maintain a disdain for homosexuals; and to pursue “status.”

Desiring to win = mentally ill. Retaining emotional control = mentally ill. Making work a priority = mentally ill. But I’m glad that at least these are traits associated with “masculinity.” I’m not 100% sure what a “playboy” lifestyle or “retaining power over women” means; by these twisted standards, it may simply mean a refusal to be subservient to women like these emotionally castrated guys.