PERSPECTIVES ON THE ELECTION : Are Men Attacking the System? : Threatened by the whirlwind of change globally and at home, 6 out of 10 white males voted Republican Nov. 8.

Of all the digits that spilled out of computers in analysis of the last election, perhaps the most significant is the voting pattern of white males, of whom six out of 10 cast ballots for Republicans.

The number is significant because white women voted in almost precisely the opposite ratio. If women alone had gone to the polls in the last election, President Clinton’s Democrats would have won a substantial victory.

Why the huge difference?

In 1980, white men began voting against the Democrats in greater numbers than did white women. Only the overwhelming margins received from blacks of both sexes have kept the Democrats in contention.

The numbers tell us that something is going on in our society that is troubling white men but not white women--or at least is troubling women far less--and it clearly lies beneath the cover of everyday political grievances.

For starters, it seems that men were far more upset than women with Clinton’s “draft-dodging” during the Vietnam War. It also seems that men have been more disturbed by Clinton’s concern for the rights of homosexuals, in the military and out. Both issues cut to the core of men’s identity, making them uncomfortable.

But there is more. Commentators have noted that American white males sense that they are lost in a whirlwind of cultural and economic change that they scarcely understand and cannot control. Similar feelings, historians say, emerged with the dissolution of the feudal system and the rise of the Industrial Revolution. The transformation of our own times lies in the globalization of the workplace, unprecedented in human experience.

American workers once blamed their ills on faceless capitalists in New York and lashed out at blacks and immigrants for trying to steal their livelihood. That tradition remains, but now the facelessness belongs to traders in Tokyo, bankers in Hong Kong, industrialists in Munich. The workingman is more frustrated than ever at his lack of recourse.

The Toyota that the American male drives in itself confirms the power that foreign economies have over him. Global competition is real, not imagined; it exercises a serious drag on the rewards of his labor. The white male of today turns a deaf ear to old-fashioned appeals to class conflict. Instead, he senses that the North American Free Trade Agreement and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade--inevitable as globalization of the economy may have made them--will, at least in the short run, worsen his plight. American capitalism has adapted to the new conditions, but in the process the American worker has become much more vulnerable.

But are not black men equally vulnerable? Maybe the answer is that a sense of insecurity is so natural to blacks that they take it for granted and vote as they always have.

Surely, however, another factor--perhaps linked to globalization--is also gnawing away at the white male voter. A couple of decades ago, he was the sole breadwinner and the proud master of the household. Today, the two-income family has become the norm, and the wife often earns more than he does. Patriarchy is finished, and the man of the house has to learn to share not only the decisions but also the dishes.

It is the profound cultural and economic transformation of our civilization rather than specific political grievances that are at the root of the anger that voters expressed last month. A few weeks ago, a white male taxi driver in a Southern town growled to me about “your stupid president and her husband.” In pointing an irate finger at Hillary Rodham Clinton, he was conveying the anxiety that many men feel with the higher status that women have attained in our culture. No doubt the women’s movement--and perhaps the black and gay movements--have diminished the white man’s sense of himself and shifted the way he casts his vote.

Not long ago, Americans needed to safeguard the government to defend them against communists, but the Cold War is over. Now they can safely turn to candidates who promise to dismantle the institutions of the state and even to third parties that propose to wreck some of them entirely. The American male seems to feel alone and frightened. He is angry at the system for failing him, but the problem may be so far beyond the powers of government that there is little that Bill Clinton or anyone else can do to correct it.