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Notes -
I recently saw a provocative bit of 4chan greentext concerning politics and gender. I'll reproduce it here as follow -
As far as analysis goes, this is obviously not especially sophisticated or historically grounded. However, it does pose an interesting problem, which is perhaps better framed in more general terms, since it applies as much to Red Tribe and Blue Tribe as it does men and women.
Imagine that the electorate of a democratic country (call it Exemplavania) comprises two political groups, A and B, constituting 40% and 60% of the electorate respectively. As a result, Exemplavania's government is run largely in accordance with the interests of group B. However, group A is significantly more powerful than group B in terms of its capacity for violence. Under what circumstances is this arrangement sustainable?
It seems to me that it's not trivial that it's unsustainable. In particular, a sustainable model might involve the following: (i) the ongoing costs to Group A of Exemplavania being run by Group B are low. (ii) the one-off costs of Group A enacting a violent revolution to enfranchise their own power are high. (iii) all members of the polity do some form of temporal discounting. In this case, members of Group A might rationally conclude that it's not worth the hassle of an uprising.
Nonetheless, I do worry a bit that political polarisation along gender lines is unsustainable. Notably, women's suffrage in most Western countries was not the result of women using violence to coerce men into accepting them as political equals. Rather, it was the result of successful ideological persuasion of male franchise-holders, achieved in no small part via the critical contributions of women to the collective industrial efforts in World War 1. Insofar as women's political tendencies remained broadly aligned with a large proportion of men (or powerful enough men), as they have done more or less until now, this arrangement seems pretty stable. However, if we see continued political polarisation along gender lines, as we've seen in South Korea for example, and this leads to political outcomes that are strongly disfavoured by a large majority of men, then at some point the decision to enfranchise women may be in jeopardy.
Curious what others think!
It's a poor analysis, as you say, because elections are not "proxies for war." Democracy wasn't invented as an alternative to war, and obviously democracies have not resulted in the end of war. Minorities having disproportionate electoral power is a problem in a lot of electoral systems; we've debated this here quite a lot. But the 4chan argument is just another iteration of the very unsophisticated premise we see repeated here all the time: "Women are weaker than men, therefore men should control women."
The increasing hostility between the sexes is certainly a problem, but to believe that the solution is for women to accept a subordinate role without political autonomy requires believing either (a) that women could be persuaded to accept this or (b) persuading men to revert to treating women as property. If we had an apocalypse or something it would undoubtedly be a pretty rough time for women (which is why @KulakRevolt is so popular with certain types of people), but short of that, you aren't going to persuade most men, and certainly not most women, that giving women rights was a mistake.
I don't foresee the South Korean government deciding that the solution to plummeting birth rates is to take away women's voting rights or institute some sort of YA dystopian regime. It's certainly not going to happen here. I think all the trads and redpillers predicting some sort of End of Feminism are wishcasting, and they are just as ridiculous as the feminists gloomcasting in the other direction by calling every pushback against feminism an attempt to implement the Handmaid's Tale.
Broadly agree with all of the above, but I think it's a bit simplistic to suggest that the only way for Group A types to utilise their advantage in violence is to take over the government and then push for the wholesale disenfranchisement of Group B. Consider the massive and disproportionate amount of power wielded by Islamists in the West over things like blasphemy because of the willingness of a small percentage of their number to commit acts of violence when they perceive their religion to be insulted (I'm sure other similar groups come to mind). Willingness and ability to commit violence can be a political superpower when wielded in the right ways, such as in contexts that allow governments to save face by symbolically punishing the most violent elements while cutting deals with non-violent 'moderates'.
I don't think the same dynamics would work wrt to men and women, though. IMO, a lot of the strategy of placating Muslim extremists originates not from fear of violence (if the authorities really wanted to crush violent Islamists, they could) but fear of offending modern liberal sensibilities and being called racist. The equivalent would be men launching violent attacks on feminists and the government deciding they have to cut deals with the less violent elements of the manosphere. How would that work? When an incel occasionally murders a bunch of women, they are universally reviled (and every other anti-feminist is implied to be an existential threat because of them). There is nothing the government's going to offer "men" as a group to try to keep a lid on anti-women violence. I think an actual violent redpill movement would be utterly crushed and the "moderate" faction would receive zero sympathy.
Also, no group of men is actually going to embark on an organized and widespread campaign of political violence because they think women have too much power.
I think the special status of Islam in the West is only partially explained by concerns of cultural sensitivity. No other religion or faith group has the same degree of coddling, and I find it hard to see any explanation other than the fact that Islamists are willing to commit violence if they feel their religion has been besmirched (see relevant Onion image.). Similarly, when it comes to racial issues, the groups that get the greatest degree of toleration and indulgence from the state are those that are most willing and able to take to the streets and engage in civil disorder.
This is not because Western governments are supportive or tolerant of civil disorder - quite the opposite. There is a keen (if sometimes sublimated) awareness in Western governments of their weakness when it comes to combating internal disorder. Simply put, we no longer have the state capacity to engage in large scale reprisal violence against citizens, even disobedient ones. The only reason this hasn't led to the collapse of governments is that this same decline in state capacity for violence has been mirrored by a reluctance among the wider population to engage in large-scale civil disobedience. In this regard, I disagree with your claim that Western states could really crush even the violent minority of Islamists if they wanted to; policies like collective punishment, reprisal violence, mass deportation, and so on are utterly anathema to the liberal sensibilities of both the modern state and its officers. Even if it were in the interests of the state and its officers to enact such measures, we are incapable of doing so. Consequently, minority groups that have the persistent ability to commit violence against the state must be bought off by any means necessary, while more widespread currents of disorder must be preemptively quashed, because their manifestation would be fatal to the collective game of make-believe that underwrites state power.
I should also clarify that I think the real risks of a persistent gender imbalance in politics don't take the form of violence directed specifically against women or aimed against women's influence in politics. The more plausible scenario of concern is one in which a large majority of men, especially young men, feel alienated by political outcomes and take matters into their own hands - a politics of gender, but not about gender. In such circumstances, the underlying gender gap in political outlook would be an implicit rather than explicit consideration, motivating young men to violently pursue political ends that on an object-level have nothing to do with masculinity or femininity.
At risk of going off topic, I think the treatment of Islam has more to do with projection than fear or enforced groupthink. While I’m not really a “right side of history” person and I think the idea is dumb, I do think that Islam is on a similar trajectory as Christianity in the sense that for a while similar images would produce violence - but that was a few hundred years ago perhaps. So eventually there will be more tolerance and less radical extremism, but a lot of people in the West think they are already there or have somehow hoped it into existence.
I’m not totally confident however because there are some quirks of Islam that make it unique. Not only the Sunni-Shia split but also the nature of religious thought and organization as well as things like a ban on artistic representation. It still shocks me that Islamic countries basically didn’t even have theatre which most every other culture does have in some form!
Christian religious violence in the modern and early modern era was mostly state sanctioned. There really is a big difference between Christianity and Islam in terms of proclivity towards non-state violence.
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Okay, good clarification. I largely agree with this. However, I think the unwillingness to deal with violent Islamists has gone hand in hand with an unwillingness to be "racist." Muslims quickly figured out that they could get away with things that normal citizens could not.
As for a movement of seething, dissatisfied young men becoming radicalized - possible, I guess. Discontented young men are always a recipe for instability, but for all the raging about feminism from the manosphere, I don't actually think Western men are that disadvantaged or that hard up.
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