Ben Adler Visits Republican Women's Club in New York: Women in Denial

Ben Adler finds Republican women in denial about the deep damage their candidates' primary campaign has done to their political advantages, due to the current GOP war on women.  I find his analysis and his description of the brigade of hoity-toity platinum-blonde Republican women gathered recently at the Republican Women's Club in New York interesting.

It's interesting because I hear Adler describing what might well be called a social psychosis of denial.  When denial becomes so complete that one can't even see the facts in front of one's nose (for instance, in sound polling data), it has begun to move from ideological penchant into outright psychosis.  

The fact that it should come as a surprise to many Republicans, male and female alike, that their choice to wage a war on women during the current campaign would undermine their chances in the coming elections suggests to me how psychotic the thinking of the GOP as a whole is becoming.  It doesn't take rocket science, after all, to recognize that there's an ongoing demographic shift in the U.S. away from the very specifically socially located neanderthal thinking of the Republican party in recent years--thinking very specifically situated among white male evangelicals, largely in the American Southeast and the heartland.

When you have a shrinking demographic pool--aging reactionary white men--and when the rest of the population is growing in other directions with other ideological bents, it becomes a form of madness to keep catering exclusively to that tiny, dwindling pool of supporters.  If you want to win elections.  And to remain a viable political presence.

And it strikes me as madness compounded, for women to buy into the current rhetoric of the GOP.  I can only conclude that economic advantage and social dominance can be factors that blind one to the nature of reality--so that one will cut off one's female nose to spite one's economically elite face, if one's party dictates such a choice.

And the GOP definitely does seem to be dictating such a choice for Republican women who want to keep voting with their party this fall.