Ed Trimnell follows through and posts an admirably substantive critique of what he describes as my sexual determinism:
Vox took issue with my earlier statement that “Conservatism is for men as well as women.” He is also on record as being opposed to female suffrage. Now, before you ask, “Why bother to refute such ideas?” let me inform you that Vox Day is not some babbling nut job. On the contrary, Vox is highly articulate, and the author of a number of successful books.
However, Vox has been seduced by the doctrine of sexual determinism—and the notion that one’s sex determines one’s ability to function in the political realm. Like most false ideologies, this one, too, is based on an initial premise of truth that is over-extrapolated to a false conclusion.
I think it can be reasonably said that I subscribe to the doctrine of sexual predilection and predictability, thought not absolute determinism, and I readily assert that one’s sex can be used to reliably predict one’s ideological and political predilections, as well as many other things. I should note here that one of the things that often trips up my critics when they attempt to attack my positions is that they tend to operate in binary terms whereas I always think in terms of probability even if my rhetoric often sounds superficially binary. Since binary-based attacks are necessarily crude in comparison and therefore off-target from the start, they are easily defeated. As for whether that doctrine is false, or over-extrapolated, let us see if Ed is able to adequately support those assertions.
Ed begins with an analogy.
Vox is Tom Peters in reverse. The mistake that Vox commits is to interpret female differences as weaknesses (rather than the strengths that Peters claims them to be). Vox asserts that:
“…women would not be permitted to vote in any society that wishes to sustain itself…”
According to Vox, the proof is in the pudding. The Western democracies introduced female suffrage around one hundred years ago. And in the intervening years, most have adopted some form of the welfare state.
Women—given their predisposition toward cooperative, group-directed activity—may be more susceptible to the arguments of Democrats, socialists, and similar collectivists. Perhaps. (Of course, Tom Peters asserts—relying on the same data—that these traits make women better corporate managers!)
How can deterministic arguments be turned against men? Men are by nature more aggressive, and more prone to violence and antisocial behavior. Most violent crimes are committed by men; and almost all rapes are committed by men. Compared to women, men are far more inclined toward violent, sexually aggressive, and antisocial behavior.
This is an excellent of example of reason needing to be silent when experience gainsays its conclusions. Ed makes a basic logical error here in attempting to equate my logical and empirical argument with Tom Peters’s logical argument. I am not familiar with Mr. Peter’s post-In Search of Excellence work, so I don’t know if he empirically proves his case that women are better corporate managers or not. But it should be obvious that if Peters has done so, then Ed has shown my argument to be correct, analogically speaking. If Peters has not, then it has absolutely no relevance to my case that women’s suffrage is inimical to human liberty, national sovereignty, and the survival of Western civilization because I have provided empirical evidence to prove my case by a variety of metrics.
Ed goes on to provide a historical metric of his own:
However, history proves that sex does not equal destiny at the voting booth. In the close election of 1976, the gender gap was nil. Reagan’s “gender gap” was in the single-digit range in 1980. In 1988, George H.W. Bush actually captured a majority of the female vote.
So much for the argument that women are destined to vote for the Democrats.
Why then, has the political gender gap become so pronounced in recent election cycles? It might be because women (along with other groups) are voting according to their biology, whereas they mysteriously weren’t in the 1970s and 1980s.
Ed’s error here is caused by the erroneous equivalence he makes between voting Democratic and voting against human liberty. He is assuming that the Republicans are the pro-liberty party, which is simply not true. Because women are smaller, weaker, more emotional, more fearful, and have a more active left amygdala than men, (to list only a few of the sex differences relevant here), they reliably throw their political support to the party who more adeptly plays upon their fears.
This is not an abstract argument, it is observably a political practice that has been in use since the beginning of the 20th century, which just happens to coincide when women received the right to vote in many countries. Note that women’s suffrage is literally the very first plank in the Manifesto of the Fascist Struggle, which in its demand for proportional representation is more radically pro-female than any current Western political party outside of Scandinavia.
Here is the program of a genuinely Italian movement. It is
revolutionary because it is anti-dogmatic, strongly innovative and
against prejudice.
For the political problem: We demand:
a) Universal suffrage polled on a regional basis, with
proportional representation and voting and electoral office eligibility
for women.
The party that plays most upon female fears in the USA is usually the Democratic Party, but was the Republican Party at the time of George H.W. Bush’s first campaign. The Republicans were offering more credible security promises in a perceived time of global insecurity. UPDATE: as one reader comments, we should not forget either “Willie Horton” or “Dukakis in the tank”.
The Republican security case was trumped in 1992, when Bill Clinton played upon economic fears and made an overt play for female voters by “feeling their pain”, because the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and the Gulf War turned out to be considerably less apocalyptic than anticipated. The Republican Party’s objectives have since been significantly feminized, even though they have been trumped by the Obama Democratic Party’s abilities to one-up them. The reason the political gender gap has become increasingly pronounced is that in an environment of increased economic fear, the party that does a better job of appealing to the more fearful portion of the electorate will inordinately prosper from its advantage in that regard.
Consider the fate of Switzerland. Women were not permitted to vote there until 1971, much later than the rest of Europe. This is the primary reason why Switzerland retains its sovereignty whereas neither democracy nor national sovereignty presently exists in any of the member states of the European Union, which is ruled by an unaccountable, unelected European Commission. But even in Switzerland, it only took 28 years post-suffrage for the national constitution to be modified to permit the passage of gun laws, and for extensive restrictions to be placed upon the ownership of firearms. As for the EU, note that in Italy, even the pretense of popular rule was abandoned in 2011 as the government is headed by an unelected, EU-selected Senator-for-Life.
It is easy to establish an objective metric to consider the effect of female suffrage on a nation without waiting to see how long it takes for female suffrage to be followed by the complete cessation of democracy or the loss of national sovereignty, which I note took as little as 19 years in the case of the German Weimar Republic. A law is, by definition, a restriction on a human activity. So, to prove that female suffrage is not inimical to human liberty, all that is necessary is to show that the number of laws being passed post-suffrage is equal to or less than the number of laws being passed pre-suffrage. Alternatively, one could compare the lifespans of sovereign democracies and/or republics where women are, and are not, permitted to vote.
So my question to Mr. Trimnell is if he accepts the number of laws and regulations in effect as a reasonable metric for measuring human liberty in this regard? And if so, what are the historical cases he believes favor his anti-determinism case?
