So where is everybody?

A Washington Post story about the demographic balance of attendees at the Yearly Kos get-together has spread through the 'sphere, generating some right-side snarkage, and a serious question.

It began with the Post quoting Yearly Kos organizer Gina Cooper:

"It's mostly white. More male than female... It's not very diverse."

[The Post writer then proceeded to describe efforts by the organizers and others to increase "diversity" and "representation" at the conference, all the while carefully identifying the gender and ethnicity of every person mentioned.]

Then La Shawn Barber turned the Post's headline back to front:

...the title of the article is, “A Diversity of Opinion, if Not Opinionators.” It should read, “A Diversity of Opinionators, if Not Opinions.” Different skin colors, not opinions, is the kind of diversity liberals obsess over.

Finally, Glenn Reynolds used the title of La Shawn's post to build his usual one-liner:

YEARLYKOS: A "sea of middle-aged white males." Not that there's anything wrong with that!

The serious question came from Bill Quick:

The single most powerful voting bloc in the country is white males, and of those who vote, middle-aged and older make up the largest sub-group. If the Kossack version of progressivism is making strong inroads into that demographic, conservatives are faced with some real problems.

Good point, but IMHO there's no reason for Bill to worry.  In fact, this datum may be indicative of an encouraging change.

Middle-Aged White Males (hence MAWMs) have always been "overrepresented" in the politics-government- lobbyist-media sphere.  Look at the makeup of Congress, or your state legislature:  Those bodies (even their Democrat delegations) remain mostly MAWMs.  This despite years of effort (by both parties) to cultivate and encourage non-MAWM candidates.

So it doesn't surprise me (much) that the attendance at this year's Yearly Kos is largely MAWMs.  MAWMs have the interest, the resources, and the flexibility to drop everything to attend a week-long political conference. And of those three factors I'd guess that interest is probably the most important:  Politics, especially at the nuts-n-bolts level, remains largely a "guy" thing.  In earlier times "women and minorities" were generally excluded.  While today the exclusions are gone, by and large the non-MAWMs are just not as interested.  (Yes, there are exceptions.)

So does the presence of so many MAWMs at Yearly Kos mark a "strong inroad" by the netroots into the traditional conservative demographic?  I don't think so.  You can only draw that conclusion if you project the opinions of the segment of MAWMs who are into political activism onto the remainder of the MAWMs who are too busy living their lives to spend time on political minutiae. Not a good idea: Your  typical "Reagan Democrat" would rather be fishing than attending some political gabfest, and your typical Greedy Capitalist Type is probably too busy running his business. You don't see those non-activists at political conferences, but they still pay attention, and they still show up at the polls. 

Is there a conclusion we can draw?  How about this:  Considering the way the netroots comes across on the web, Yearly Kos should look like an SDS convention out of the 70s.  But where are the students, the assistant  professors, the youthful radicals?   Hidden among a host of MAWMs.

Through most of the modern era, the young have been a source of supporters for the left, but since 9/11 there's been a lot of anecdotal evidence that this is no longer true, or at least not as true as before.  Could it be that the "strong inroads" that concerned Bill have indeed been made, but instead of the left capturing the  MSWM, conservativism is capturing the young?   Instead of being the wave of the future, perhaps the netroots will turn out to be the last hurrah of the 60s radical. 

Posted by: Old Grouch in In Passing at 23:56:55 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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