With the loss of Beto O’Rourke, Stacey Abrams, and Andrew Gillum, progressives and feminists were looking to explain why far left candidates have so much trouble winning elections. The conclusion some of them reached: White women aren’t voting for their interests and are instead supporting the patriarchy. Let’s start with this tweet by the Women’s March:

There needs to be accountability and an honest reckoning. There’s a lot of work to do, white women. A lot of learning. A lot of growing. We want to do it with you.

Stay tuned. https://t.co/nN0cFqqmy5 — Women's March (@womensmarch) November 7, 2018

So the white women who voted for Rafael Edward Cruz are racist but the ones who voted for Robert Francis O’Rourke aren’t?

To say all of this is creepy and condescending is really to undersell it a bit. What kind of “accountability” does the Women’s March have in mind? The riff about a lot of learning and growing, which they want to do with these women, makes me wonder if they’re envisioning some form of mandatory re-education. Of course, the Women’s March wouldn’t call it that but what are we talking about here? It’s a little too 1984 for me.

There’s also the question of what “White women gonna white” is supposed to mean in the tweet they RTd? If you look at the numbers, it seems it was black women who voted uniformly as a block. White women split their vote, almost evenly in the case of DeSantis. So the problem here isn’t that white women voted too much the same, it’s that they didn’t do it enough, i.e. one uniform block supporting progressives. Maybe that’s because some women see things, I don’t know, differently?

Jill Filipovic immediately concluded the problem was racism.

I'll be honest that the DeSantis numbers don't surprise me. White women have long voted Republican, but have been (slowly) moving Dem, and educated white women are strong Dems. Trump had less support from white women than Romney, etc. But 76% for Kemp… racism is a helluva drug. https://t.co/8Qe0lxuB8D — Jill Filipovic (@JillFilipovic) November 7, 2018

Jesse Singal pointed out that Filipovic’s solutions seemed a bit absurd.

Yes. This idea that white women are a unified bloc, and one white woman will listen to another in a "Oh, hello fellow white woman!" is like something an 18-year-old Tumblerite came up with. That isn't how people work or understand themselves. It's totally facile. https://t.co/xWYWuRyqgE — Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) November 7, 2018

2/ The only way anyone could believe this is the only way anyone could believe that OTHER big, broadly-defined groups all have the same basic values and view themselves as a unified bloc: total lack of awareness of the actual dividing lines w/in that group. — Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) November 7, 2018

Meanwhile, former sports-talk show host Jemele Hill, who was recently hired by the Atlantic made a similar point:

59 percent of white women voted for Ted Cruz. 53 percent of white women voted for Donald Trump. So given these numbers, who is the real face of feminism? pic.twitter.com/BSCg0b5RSJ — Jemele Hill (@jemelehill) November 7, 2018

In case you weren’t sure where she was going with this “face of feminism” thing, she explained it this morning:

It’s not just Texas when 53 percent of white women voted for Donald Trump. The data shows very clearly that there are white women voting against their own best interests to preserve a patriarchy that they believe will ultimately help them. Not all, but clearly the majority — Jemele Hill (@jemelehill) November 7, 2018

Like the Women’s March, Hill also wants to make sure white women are held accountable:

I’m not here to antagonize white women at all. I just want to know why so many of them seem intent on voting against the best interest of all women. They need to be held accountable, particularly as in race after race, black women show up and vote in support of feminist ideals — Jemele Hill (@jemelehill) November 7, 2018

I wonder if there’s a corollary to this. I mean, if progressive Dems are the only party for women, doesn’t that imply men would be idiots to vote for anyone but conservative Republicans? After all, isn’t it in their interest, almost by definition, to maintain the patriarchy? I wonder if we should try to hold men who vote for the left accountable in some way. Maybe some learning and growing is needed.

Or maybe that’s just garbage thinking that treats everyone as a monolithic group based on their sex and/or skin color. Maybe we should, in fact, be glad to see people behaving as individuals rather than skin-color based collectives. I mean, isn’t that what we still want in this country?