How Dramatically Did Women’s Suffrage Change the Size and Scope of Government?

Democracy, Elections, Feminism, Gender, Political Economy, The State

In 2007, I ventured that, “I’d give up my vote if that would guarantee that all women were denied the vote.”—ILANA Mercer (August 8, 2007)

Coming from the anti-statist stance, the sentiment is a solid one. It’s anchored in data.

One only has to trace the statistically significant correlation between women’s suffrage and the change in the size and scope of the state, as did John R. Lott, Jr. (Yale University) and Lawrence W. Kenny (University of Florida), to realize that the female suffrage has undermined the small-government project.

“How Dramatically Did Women’s Suffrage Change the Size and Scope of Government?” is in the Journal of Political Economy (Vol. 107, Number 6, Part 1, pp. 1163-1198, December 1999).

Of course, the tipping point has long been reached, so my altruistic gesture would be in vain.

Naturally, some will laud the growth of government under female tutelage; others will lament it.

Abstract

This paper examines the growth of government during this century as a result of giving women the right to vote. Using cross-sectional time-series data for 1870 to 1940, we examine state government expenditures and revenue as well as voting by U.S. House and Senate state delegations and the passage of a wide range of different state laws. Suffrage coincided with immediate increases in state government expenditures and revenue and more liberal voting patterns for federal representatives, and these effects continued growing over time as more women took advantage of the franchise. Contrary to many recent suggestions, the gender gap is not something that has arisen since the 1970s, and it helps explain why American government started growing when it did.

And look at these excerpts with their bold deductions. The following writers would have been “canceled” by the bumper crops of cretins who control the American intelligentsia (that is not very intelligent).

It is not really surprising that this welfare state should breed a politics not of “justice” or “fairness” but of “compassion,” which contemporary liberalism has elevated into the most important civic virtue. Women tend to be more sentimental, more risk-averse and less competitive than men—yes, it’s Mars vs. Venus—and therefore are less inclined to be appreciative of free-market economics, in which there are losers as well as winners. College-educated women—the kind who attend Democratic conventions—are also more “permissive” and less “judgmental” on such issues as homosexuality, capital punishment, even pornography.

—Irving Kristol, “The Feminization of the Democrats,” The Wall Street Journal (September 9, 1996): p. A16

Citing marriage as “a very important financial divider,” the American Enterprise Institute’s Doug Besharov suggests more married women did not vote for Dole because of a widespread sense of societal insecurity: “It is not that they distrust their husband, but they have seen divorce all around them and know they could be next.” The Polling Company’s Kellyanne Fitzpatrick is categorical: “Women see government as their insurance.” (Perhaps significantly, of the 24 million individuals working in government and in semi-governmental non-profit jobs, 14 million—58 percent—are women.)

—The Richmond Times Dispatch, December 5, 1996

THE REST.

UPDATED (7/9): RIP, GOP: Tucker Has Officially Canceled The Republican Party

Conservatism, Crime, Elections, Law, Republicans

Fox News’ Tucker Carlson has just gone and canceled the Republican Party in a monologue, in front of one very large TV audience indeed. He’s made it safe for all those who’ve gotten impaled for doing so over the years. CANCEL the GOP can now go mainstream. It may just become a reality.

“RIP, GOP.”

In last week’s June 11 column, “The Barbarians Are In Charge: Scenes From The Sacking of America,“ I concluded:

Across the United States, the message to law-abiding Americans, from city, town, county council members and other legislators came loud and clear: You’re on your own. Neither police nor politicians are coming to protect what’s left of your businesses or your banal, bourgeoisie little life.

In his June 20 monologue, Tucker inveighed:

You vote for Republicans to protect you from this. But when the moment of crisis came, Republicans ran away.

Property was looted, people were beaten and killed and Republicans joined the side doing the looting, beating and killing. President of the Heritage Foundation and think tanks on the right climbed into … law enforcement and ordinary Americans, calling them racists, ignoring the damage done to their property and person.

TREASON?

“Republicans refused even to defend the principle of equality under the law, the foundation of this country, the most important thing we have. Not defend it. Really, in the end, the only people who gave anything in the revolution were the ones waging it. Our leaders, very much including a Republican leaders, shamefully, were focused on meeting their demands. So what should we conclude from what we just saw? The message unfortunately could not be clearer. Voting is for fools. You vote, you put these people into office with their votes, and in return they patronize you and when it matters, they abandon you. They have contempt for you, you know they do, you can smell it, it’s obvious. Voting doesn’t work. But when you riot and you burn things and you hurt people, you get a very different response.”

“Republicans have let millions of Americans down.”

MORE: “Tucker Carlson Goes Off on Republicans for ‘Abandoning’ People in ‘Moment of Crisis’: Now ‘We Know Who They Are.’”

UPDATED (7/9): To Destroy respectfully.

On Fox New a Republican, a Senator #Capito, is discussing how to remove the country's statues "respectfully," procedurally, through committee. As an afterthought this Republican detritus mentions that people's #Property should be respected. #CancelTheGOP

— ILANA Mercer (@IlanaMercer) June 24, 2020

NEW COLUMN: Guess Which Surrender Monkey Won the Battle Of The Monuments?

Britain, Conservatism, Founding Fathers, Republicans, Secession, States' Rights

NEW COLUMN is “Guess Which Surrender Monkey Won the Battle Of The Monuments?” It’s currently on WND.COM and The Unz Review.

An excerpt:

Steve Hilton is a Briton who anchors a current-affairs show on Fox News.

Mr. Hilton made the following feeble, snowflake’s case for the removal of the nation’s historically offensive statues:

It’s offensive to our Africa-American neighbors to maintain statues in public places that cause not only offense, but real distress. And it is disrespectful to our native-American neighbors to glorify a man who they see as having committed genocide against their ancestors. None of this is to erase history. Put it all in a museum. Let’s remember it and learn from it.

“What’s wrong with Camp Ulysses Grant,” Hilton further intoned sanctimoniously. He was, presumably, plumping for the renaming of army installations like Fort Bragg, called after a Confederate major general, Braxton Bragg.

Sons of the South—men and women, young and old—see their forebear as having died “in defense of the soil,” and not for slavery. Most Southerners were not slaveholders. All Southerners were sovereigntists, fighting a War for Southern Independence.

Hilton, it goes without saying, is a follower of the State-run Church of Lincoln. To the average TV dingbat, this means that Southern history comes courtesy of the likes of Doris Kearns Goodwin, a Lincoln idolater and the consummate court historian.

“Doris Kearns Goodwin,” explains professor Thomas J. DiLorenzo, the country’s chief Lincoln slayer, “is a museum quality specimen of a court historian, a pseudo-intellectual who is devoted to pulling the wool over the public’s eyes by portraying even the most immoral, corrupt and sleazy politicians as great, wise, and altruistic men.”

When Doris does the TV circuit, evangelizing for power, she never mentions, say, the close connection between her great Ulysses Grant and Hilton’s “native-American neighbors.”

Yes, Doris, Steve: who exactly exterminated the Plains Indians? …

… NEW COLUMN, “Guess Which Surrender Monkey Won the Battle Of The Monuments?“, is currently on WND.COM and The Unz Review.

A Message To America’s Anti-Trump, Never-Won-A-War, Treacherous General Officers And Admirals

Crime, Donald Trump, Homeland Security, Justice, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Military, Neoconservatism

Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, put on quite the show, with his moronic mea culpa, “declaring,” on Thursday June 11, 2020, that “he’d been wrong to stride in uniform with [President] Trump past protesters who had been cleared from Lafayette Square to a photo op at a church.”

Michael Scheuer, anti-war military analyst, former intelligence officer for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and long-time neocon slayer, has the right answer.

Scheuer offers the most lacerating rebuke to the “several dozen of these “treacherous flag officers,” to “America’s anti-Trump, never-won-a-war general officers and admirals”:

Over three or four days last week, America’s general officer corps again disgraced itself to the bottom of its never dirty or bloody combat boots. Two Marine generals, James Mattis and John Allen, the Navy’s Admiral Mike Mullen, and, most recently, Army General Colin Powell have damned with “contemptuous words” the President of the United States for trying to suppress multiple coup attempts and a broad domestic insurrection now nearing the start of its fourth year. …

… These four oily cretins bring the total of America’s anti-Trump, never-won-a-war general officers and admirals to a total of several dozen. For anyone who doubts the reality of serial coup attempts during the Trump administration, they need look no further than these treacherous flag officers. As a group, they are emitting a stench that can only remind Americans of the stink from the many Latin American and African countries that regularly have been ruined and bloodied by disloyal, power-loving, and money-grubbing senior military officers.

Americans has been lucky. For most of the republic’s history, the U.S. military has performed loyally and silently. America has had a good-long run of success at keeping the always latent threat of a military-wrecked nation at bay. There have been generals – George McClelland and Douglas MacArthur – who straddled the line that separates loyalty and coup-making, but now there are dozens.

What we are seeing today, in the retired U.S. flag officers seeking to aid the overthrow of a legitimately elected president and administration, proves the correctness of Brutus’s judgement that “perhaps a greater danger” from a standing army was that it would work at “overturning the constitutional powers of the government, and assuming the power to dictate any form they please.” Not being men of character, manliness, and moral courage such as those who predominated at our founding, these generals and admirals have aligned themselves with a Democratic Party that has pledged itself to the destruction of the Constitution and so republican government. If the Democrats succeed, they will reward the Trump-hating generals and award them with the highly-paid honor of trying to bloodily cow the citizenry into their new status as slaves to madmen.

The time has come to see these generals and admirals for what they are: time-serving, uniformed bureaucrats, men and women who live like kings while serving, and strut into corporation-provided fortunes after they retire. Americans have been propagandized into believing that these flag officers are nearly gods, and so applaud them for their service to the country and treat their words as if they were the product of savants.

In doing so, Americans seem to forget that these generals and admirals have not won a war since 1945, and that they are monumental hypocrites. When these officers attend the funeral of a young Marine or soldier killed in war, they turn, at the service’s end, to the parents of the deceased and assure them that their son or daughter had died to protect liberty in the United States. In this action, they lie like the bastards they are. No war since September, 1945, has threatened American liberty at home, though the government’s involvement in such unnecessary wars always did so, and also increased the taxpayers’ burden to extortionate levels.

Alongside the flag officers’ lies, stands their abject lack of personal moral courage. None of them, that I am aware of, have ever told a grieving parent that, while serving, he or she had been a willing gutless wonder, a man or woman ready and eager to lead their sons and daughters to their deaths in wars that they knew the commander-in-chief had no intention of winning.

Those deaths paid the price of unmerited glory for the generals and admirals who are now helping the Democrats to destroy the republic.

READ: “Some U.S. generals and admirals are trying to destroy the republic“