printThe 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.
I think that this might just be Ilana Mercer’s finest, most pungent column to date. [Rob, that you have said this to me on at least 2 more occasions is more than I could have hoped for. Thanks much. And for the quote below.]
Interestingly, G. K. Chesterton, who was rather more indulgent to the French Revolution than he should have been, made a point not wholly different from Orwell’s and John Derbyshire’s. In his book on Bernard Shaw, Chesterton wrote: “When women have fought in revolutions they have generally shown that it was not natural to them, by their hysterical cruelty and insolence; it was the men who fought in the Revolution; it was the women who tortured the prisoners and mutilated the dead.”
I am reminded of this article here.. Apparently, libertarians are rather masculine thinkers, which would explain the high percentage of men among us.
On a personal note, I’ve yet to attend any libertarian gathering which wasn’t a sausagefest.
Well, the reason I praised each of the columns as representing your work at its best, is that they do represent your work at its best. Many writers, after a certain time – Orwell put it at 15 years – simply get ever feebler. This can happen to authors who started with truly outstanding talents (e.g. Hemingway) quite as much as to those who were never more than sixth-raters to begin with. But although I imagine that sometimes you must want to abandon the struggle, you still keep on smiting civilization’s enemies (and they always seem to be the same enemies!). I don’t know how you retain the stamina, really I don’t.
It should be mentioned that part of the problem is the distorting nature of federal income tax policy that makes employer payment of health care benefits in pretax dollars and employee payments in after tax dollars. Most people get health insurance supplied by their employer as a benefit. Since it is not counted as wages the cost of the health insurance is not taxed. When people pay for health care out of their wages the government has already taken money out in taxes. This creates a financial incentive for the employee to become dependent the employer’s greater effective spending power. It erodes self reliance leading to a sense of entitlement which of course is exactly what the profligate popinjay in the White House wants.
Memo to Erudites the Umpire:
You hit this one out of the park dear. As to Rush… No one bats a thousand and he struck out as spectacularly as he ever has. “With great power comes great responsibility” and he couldn’t have made a bigger hash of it. That said, his mistakes shouldn’t have the last say in his legacy. He has thousands of sterling monologues that correctly and constitutionally skewer statists throughout his long career and is hated by the left far more for the light he has shed upon them than for his blunders. But he fanned this one badly and you called it! I hope he reads this and learns from you… It is to be hoped he’s already figured this out.
Thanks again and keep up the hardball!
Through the 19th Century, women relied on sweaty, smelly, beer-guzzling, Archie Bunker to provide and protect them. But the Progressive Era offered to replace caveman Archie with Uncle Sam and an array of feminized social workers. Teddy Roosevelt or Barack Obama would man the bully pulpit and swing the big stick and Archie can be sent packing back to his cave. [See Post Update.] That was the essence of Aid to Families with Dependent Children. Channeling my caveman Santorum: in 2012, only 1 of 7 black pregnancies result in a baby born to a married couple. Most black men and many white men are merely superfluous roaming sperm donors. Who needs these Neanderthals when Uncle Sam will take care of the fairer sex – send them back to their cave (or jail).
Crossing the Vulgar River with Rush, I concede there is nothing in John Galt’s pants to compete with an ICBM – who needs a husband with a gun when there is a hyperactive SWAT team???? Who needs a father to discipline your son when you can have Marxist pedagogues emasculate them???? Even a poor impoverished Georgetown Law Students can’t rely on her boyfriend for birth control – no, that’s Uncle Sam’s job as well.
A few additional remarks – in an earlier age, one might have thought that white Europeans would lift up blacks by serving as role models but (as you and Murray point out) blacks are just showing white families their future. There is a growing white underclass with seemingly science and engineering as a nerdish hiding place for white men!
Reality vs cynical jesting – sometimes I don’t know where one starts or ends …
Not that I advocate going back to some old age of wifebeating male domination – but one would think that a society based upon the sanctity of individual rights and responsibilities could function but then I depart too much from reality!
Well said by all. Take a look at the films of some of Hitler’s speeches, esp. at the crowd pans. Male audience members merely receptive, femmes orgasmic. In contemporary terms, imagine Ann “nuke the goathumpers from orbit” Barnhardt…actually getting hold of a nuclear weapon.