One way men are assessed is by the quality of their mates.
Take for instance President George W Bush. George’s wife Laura is beautiful, charming, and literate. For this reason, people concluded that George W is an alpha male. Not coincidentally, he was twice elected President of the United States. Now take his brother Jeb, who will never be President. His wife Columba is ugly, much shorter than he is, low-born, and if reports are to be believed, has a poor command of the English language. Making matters worse, Jeb Bush was born into a rich and powerful family with dating options that most of us could only dream about and yet he latched on to the first unexceptional girl who looked back at him. The inescapable conclusion for many voters is that Jeb Bush is an omega male. Now it may be argued that this description is unfair to Columba. That may be true but it is also irrelevant to the matter at hand – electoral viability. And don’t feel too sorry for Columba. She came from humble origins to marry into supreme wealth and power. Making matters even worse for Jeb’s electoral prospects, his primary nemesis in this presidential cycle is a super-alpha who married a string of Eastern European babes.
Speaking of Presidential consorts, I must note what a stunning asset Michelle Obama has been to Barack. I’m sure many conservatives are scratching their heads about this assessment. The first thing they associate with Michelle is her “the first time I am proud of my country” statement. She comes across as ungrateful and bitter, with some Internet commenters even christening her, “Moochella”. To President Obama’s electoral prospects, these sentiments are irrelevant because they are made by people in the 47.1% of the electorate who never voted for him. Much more important to Obama is the African American voting block whose overwhelming support has been crucial to his success. In 2012, for the first time ever, black voter turnout was higher than white turnout. Directly relevant is this fact is that the turnout rate for African American women is significantly higher than for African American men. I think many black women fell in love with candidate Obama the moment they saw his wife.
I think they saw in Barack Obama a successful black man who did ‘the right thing’ by marrying a black woman. He did not give into temptation and get a white wife like he clearly could have. To many black women, the idea of a white woman going out with one of their men is considered an existential threat to their reproductive success. This is largely because a black husband/white wife combination is 2.3 times more likely than a white husband/black wife is.
This dynamic was visible in the OJ Simpson trial. Ivory-tower feminist Marcia Clark thought she was pulling a fast one when she packed the jury with black women (eight out of the 12 jurors were black women). Street-smart Johnnie Cochrane knew better. He understood that the black female jurors were unlikely to view the blond and beautiful Nicole Brown with much sympathy. (As an aside, this dynamic is at also at work with Asian men who resent white men who date their women. Not irrelevantly, a white husband/Asian wife combination is 2.4 times more likely than an Asian husband/white wife is.)
Now it can be objected that this kind of talk is all disturbing, nasty stuff, particularly in an era where Nobody is Suppose to Notice Anything. This may be true but the subject of this article is not rationality, virtue, nor higher moral principles. It is about the below-the-belt visceral stuff - coarse human instincts. Unfortunately, people who speak forthrightly and accurately about this sort of thing tend towards a nihilistic Social Darwinism. Their intellectual error is to assume that moral principles lie outside the human system. They are wrong. Our moral systems are just as much a part of human nature as our more basic animal urges. In fact, the reason high moral principles exist in the first place is to modulate and channel our basic urges into more socially beneficial directions.
Unlike moral systems that have developed naturally over millennia, Political Correctness assumes that basic human urges are changeable. This is because PC assumes the black-slate model of the human mind, where the human brain is considered to be like a blank chalkboard upon which one can write anything you want. For this reason, in the long term battle between PC and human nature, PC will lose (at least until the Gods of Biomechanics start fiddling with the human genome).
One reason I am a conservative is because conservatives tend to look straight into the face of unpleasant truths. Take foreign policy. About the worst thing that can befall a people is war. This gives pacifism its obvious attraction, but conservatives see pacificism for the strategic stupidity it is, and how its adoption can lead a country to the very thing that the pacifist wishes to avoid. Conservatives realize that war can only be temporarily avoided by a strong standing army and clever statecraft, and that for long-term international stability it is sometimes necessary to resort to what you most want to avoid. Grim stuff but necessary to understand if global order is to be cultivated.
Getting back to electoral politics, I think the supreme showman Ronald Reagan understood a lot of this, at least on an instinctual level. The conscientious, hard-working, and meticulous, but bloodless Mitt Romney did not. I think obliviousness to the basic principles of human nature is ultimately what did Romney in. David Axelrod fought a much more primal and instinctual campaign than Team Romney did.
So, if American conservatives want to win again, they need an alpha male at the helm. Beta male Mitt Romney and omega male Jeb Bush just can’t be dragged across the finish line. That’s because we have been programmed by our genes to despise a weak man.