The following is excerpted from my new column, “Fluke’s No Fluke; Sisters Love Uncle Sam”:
… As sincere as she is in her conviction that a woman’s “reproductive rights” are the responsibility of other taxpayers, Sandra Fluke is no statistical fluke.
Sisters love the state.
Andrew Kohut, head of the Pew Research Center, dates the statism of American women to the 1980s, a function of “Ronald Reagan’s assertive foreign policy,” but also of the female affinity for bigger government. Kohut confirms that, “Then, as now, women [have] tended to favor a larger role for government programs than do men.”
John Derbyshire traces remarks about the ladies’ lack of proclivity for liberty to 391 B.C.
“That was the year Aristophanes staged his play ‘The Assemblywomen,’” Derbyshire documents in “We are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism.” “In the play, the women of Athens, disguised as men, take over the assembly and vote themselves into power. Once in charge, they institute a program of pure socialism.”
George Orwell, whose insights into these matters were very deep, also noticed this. He has Winston Smith, the protagonist of ‘1984,’ observe: ‘It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of orthodoxy’ (p. 88).
Having lived in communist China “in the years just after Mao,” Derbyshire seconds Orwell. “If you wanted to hear … utterly unreflective parroting of the Party line, a woman was always your best bet.”
Libertarians like to imagine that their constituency is differently derived than that of the Republicans. However, the fantasy that women flock to liberty is just that, a fantasy. I’ve attended those libertarian gatherings in which, after “subtracting the dragged-along wives and girlfriends from these events, the normal male-female ratio of the remainder is around ten to one” (p. 86).
Granted, among the fair sex, Rep. Ron Paul fares better than his Republican rivals—no doubt because of his trenchant opposition to the Warfare State. But Obama beats Paul handily. “Against Mr. Paul,” notes the Wall Street Journal, “Mr. Obama …wins among women by 18 points and loses among men by four points.” …
The underlying truth of this very public tiff remains this: On the whole, extending the franchise to females was in furtherance of egalitarianism, not freedom. …
The complete column is “Fluke’s No Fluke; Sisters Love Uncle Sam.”
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UPDATE (March 9): Myron is being cynical with his Archy Bunker comment, but is there any wonder millions of ordinary American men, who did the right thing for decades, and went to work to support their families, are no longer doing this? That white America is unraveling? They’ve been piled on as Myron has done in jest (I hope) repeatedly, called cavemen and primitives and worse by The enlightened Class, only to be replaced in the affections of their families with the state.
