Craigp asserts that men and women are fundamentally the same:
I hold that these voting patterns backup my idea that women and men vote PRETTY MUCH equally, and that the idea that women are going to usher in massive socialism is overstateed I think one can fairly say that women are a LITTLE BIT more likley to vote socialistic but not all that much at all.
Of course, that seven-to-eleven percent gender gap between support for the openly socialist faction and the secretly neo-socialist faction in the USA is nearly triple the entire Jewish vote and comparable to the entire Black vote, the latter of which, thanks to the laws against prisoners and ex-felons voting, is heavily female. It’s worth noting, too, that the concept that women vote very differently than men for reasons solely relating to their sex is hardly new as it has been the position of feminists since the nineteenth century.
“In continental Europe, some socialists saw the demand for the women’s vote as being unnecessarily divisive in the working class movement, while others successfully fought for it to be accepted as a necessary part of a socialist program.”
– A History of International Women’s Day
It’s hard to be much more clear than that.
“Women’s support gave Blair the edge. It was women voters who last Thursday delivered a comfortable majority for Tony Blair. That is the clear message from a detailed analysis of nearly 18,000 MORI interviewees weighted to the final result. Thirty-eight per cent of those women who voted gave their support to Labour, 32 per cent to the Conservatives and 22 per cent to the Liberal Democrats. By comparison, men voted 34 per cent each for Labour and Conservatives and 23 per cent for the Lib Dems.”
– The Guardian (UK)
This doesn’t include the three percent of the vote that went to the anti-EU UK Independence Party and British National Party, both of which the British press presumes to be heavily male. There’s the magic 7 percent again, which appears to be the minimum gender gap.
“The Nazis projected themselves as a youthful, dynamic party, and Nazi members were younger than those of other parties. Yet the Nazis were also successful in picking up the votes of pensioners and the elderly, especially those whose pensions and savings had been eroded in value. This group, especially elderly women, were a reservoir of previous non-voters to whom the Nazis made a real appeal…. People were more likely to vote Nazi if they were Protestants from rural areas and small provincial towns, especially if they were from the middle classes and if they were female and young.”
– History Today
Playing off the fears of the elderly while being fundamentally dependent on young unmarried women… that does sound rather remniscent of a certain American political party, does it not?
“On the one hand, the women who voted for Hitler at the time were in the majority. Without them, he may not have come to power. They had surrendered to him like a bridegroom, just like religious women in the Middle Ages who worshiped Jesus as their bridegroom. Hitler’s success was to a large extent based on this love—the dedication and enthusiasm of German women.”
– Margrethe von Trotta, German filmmaker
A common mistake made by those who attempt to study women and left-wing totalitarians is that they concentrate solely on how the Fascists and National Socialists turned against women once in power in defining the relationship between the two as inherently negative. This is true, but ignores the critical fact that the men in the totalitarian parties are dependent upon their demagogic appeal to women to obtain the position of power required to alter the system to their advantage in the first place. For example, contrary to what most Americans would assume, the largest Islamist party in Turkey, (Refah Partisi, which means Welfare Party), has a majority of female members and is the party most popular with Turkish women.
Female representation in national legislatures:
Sweden 41%, Finland 39%, Norway 36%, Switzerland 17%, Ireland 12%, United States 11%
Pop Quiz: Of the six countries listed above, which three are more heavily socialist? And which three are relatively less socialist?
I am, of course, opposed to every part of the socialist program, most particularly the necessary ones. If you wish to fetishize some non-existent “right” to vote, that’s up to you, but doing so at the cost of destroying your country’s wealth, sovereignty, birth rate, environment and liberties while risking the murderous governance in which socialists so often engage strikes me as borderline insane.
I do, however, agree that the Revolutionary principle of no taxation without representation is an important one. Therefore, my suggestion is that if women should ever be denied the vote, they also be exempted from all income, property and capital gains taxes.
None of this is to say that women are to blame for socialism. Socialism was created by men, socialist parties past and present are led by men and men have engineered every one of socialism’s greatest atrocities. But if evil men are the socialist internal combustion engine, it is their support from women that appears to be the gasoline required for it to run in peaceful societies.