The real threat to democracy: White men

D. Earl Stephens
September 25, 2024 

Republican presidential nominee and former U.S. President Donald Trump hugs Republican vice presidential nominee U.S. Senator J.D. Vance (R-OH), as he holds a rally for the first time with his running mate, in Grand Rapids, Michigan, U.S. July 20, 2024. REUTERS/Tom Brenne

At a time when we’ve never needed good to prevail over evil more, I simply don’t trust enough of my fellow white men in America to do the right thing in November

As an expert spanning 64 years on this sore subject, I want to spend a few minutes kicking that — and us — around a bit today.

And a warning: This’ll be a hard and bumpy read, but I believe a necessary one given there can’t be a one of us who has recovered fully from the whiplash of that awful evening on November 8, 2016, when we hit rock bottom with a resounding thud.

Best we head into the next six weeks with both hands on the wheel and fully understanding what we’re up against. Like it or not, many of the same elements are in place that led to that catastrophic wreck eight years ago, namely America’s most notorious rock in the road: the angry white man ...

Fact is, most American white men endlessly discourage me, which is very candidly why I spend most of my time avoiding them. It is why I have so few male friends leftover from my youth, including my very best friend, who has been lost seemingly forever to the burgeoning island of the traitor Trump’s endlessly aggrieved.

It’s a shallow pool of water that my old best buddy swims in, where fact is fiction, love is hate, and losers think they’re winners.

I miss my friends for what I thought they were 10 years ago, but not for what they have officially become. They have been exposed by the reprehensible political company they keep, and there’s only so much frustration I can expend wondering just why in the hell they refuse to see it.

Their support for an orange madman, and his grotesque party who mean so many people and things harm is simply a bridge too far. While I have spent some time the past eight years attempting to cross the span to meet them halfway, I have finally decided they are no longer worth the effort.

I could lie and say I wish them well, but the truth is I wish them nothing at all. The divide is too great — my disappointment too profound. My worries endless. There are a helluva lot of these guys, folks, and they got their little minds made up.

I saw them everywhere this past weekend on my three-day drive through the guts of America that started in the Battleground State of Wisconsin and ended in the Battleground State of North Carolina. They are easy to spot, because they like it that way. They fly hateful, racist flags and drive ridiculously loud trucks that are made for conquering mud, and drowning out all their confusion.

They wear those stupid red hats, and litter their yards one after another with gigantic signs, because there’s no sense in being a small person unless you are fully willing to overcompensate for it.


What I didn’t see during my trip south was the quieter, stuffier ones who hole up in those garish country-clubs in the woods, and believe paying their fair share of taxes are what the little people do. How many of them do you see supporting Kamala Harris?

And how about the hundreds of thousands of lost souls who pile into the white churches that are conspicuously situated in the middle of these little towns to worship an orange idol, who treats the Ten Commandments like options on a fast-food menu, where he can super-size everything, and spit out whatever he doesn’t like?

Tell me: Just what in the hell can possibly be done about them?


And if you tell me I need to stop stereotyping here, well, I’ll tell you I got this completely right. Worse, you know it. After all, I’m the unfortunate expert on white men here.

As we head into the homestretch of the most critical election in the history of the United States of America, I take absolutely no pride in telling you very candidly that fully two-thirds of the white men in this damn country are once again gearing up to do the worst thing possible, and vote for the worst-possible person who has ever headed the ticket of one of our two major parties.

You can see it in their eyes, and in the stupid shit they are saying … and maybe more important, what they aren’t. Sure, maybe they’ll surprise us, but there is absolutely nothing to recommend it.


So we will have to get this done without them, and it won’t be easy, folks.

This is what keeps me up at night when I’m trying to turn out my lights, and dream of better things to come …

I do not trust the white man to do the right thing.


Say what you want about all these endless political polls, but one thing they tell us over and over again with astonishing consistency is that the majority of the white men in this country are a unified voting bloc, and are going to do whatever they possibly can to jam the wheels of progress.

Going places scares the hell out of them. Instead of blaming themselves for the rut they seem to want to be in, they blame others for putting them there. That’s some astonishing irony, given Democrats spent close to 100 years putting in place countless programs that would lift them up and out, if only they’d grow up and knock that childish chip they lug around on their hunched shoulders.

The economy is almost always better under Democrats, but willing ignorance is a powerful drug, and can literally lead to voting against your own interests.


Truth is, these white men have spent centuries somehow thinking they are better than everybody else, even if all the evidence has pointed in the other direction for at least that long.

One of those polls I was just typing about came courtesy of NBC-TV this past weekend, and featured the American-attacking Trump leading those white men without a college education by a whopping 61%-33%.

I don’t much like poll numbers that put the emphasis on education like that, because there are plenty of smart people out there who either didn’t go to, or never finished college like myself. (That’s a real opportunity right there for a punch line if you want to haul off and take a swing …)


Point is, a lot of folks of all races and genders aren’t college educated, but are doing the smart thing and putting their country before themselves by voting for the only sane and qualified candidate in this election, Kamala Harris.

For what it’s worth, and for the sake of accuracy, white women have a lot of their own answering to do, and also pose a significant threat to all that is supposed to be good and right in this country. We need only look at the 2020 election to see when it was our white “better half” voted for the despicable Trump over Joe Biden by a not-so-insignificant 53%-46% margin.

Do I expect them to improve on that shoddy showing this time around? Yes. Do I trust them more than men? You bet I do. Is that saying a whole helluva lot? It depends. Particularly if you are looking at it through the eyes of Black women, who went for Biden by a remarkably sensible 95%-5% clip, and Black folks overall, who voted overwhelmingly, 92%-8%, for the only reasonable candidate in that election.

Proof again, that if you are looking for the real patriots in this country, you need to stop looking at white people.

So no, I don’t fully trust white women, either, but because I’m no real expert on them, I’ll stay in my lane and type what I absolutely know to be true: White men are our nation’s biggest damn problem, and have been since they began overrunning this fruited plain more than 500 years ago.

Look, I do see plenty of reasons for optimism, and even things that make me smile when I take a 30,000-foot view of this election.

Harris is running a beautiful campaign, and hauled off and belted Trump in their lone debate. There won’t be another, because he’s terrified. It seems the more people get to know Harris, the more they like her. She’s smart, tough, and isn’t afraid to smile.

I believe the Democratic electorate is energized and know the stakes. I believe a woman’s right to choose could well be the difference. We simply have to win, because none of us are built for the alternative.

That said, nothing blows my mind more than when I hear or read a Democrat say, with everything we know about the despicable Trump, and the ascending Harris, how is this race even close? How isn’t she winning this thing easy?

Well, I hope I answered those questions for you today.

D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here.