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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!
I don't think the side that is theoretically less capable of violence at full mobilization would actually be less capable of violence in practice. Civil unrest very rarely results in full mobilization. The vast majority of the people involved in the conflict would not be directly involved in the fighting. Having more money to arm and pay your paramilitaries would be enough to secure victory in most cases, even if your pool of potential combatants is a little bit smaller.
Men and women are basically fungible as long as they're equally committed. A woman willing to donate $X is worth just as much to the cause as a man willing to fight for Y days, for some value of X and Y.
In the Byzantine Empire men who refused to serve in the army had to pay a fine. As time went on, more and more men chose to just pay the fine to get out of service. The Empire didn't mind this because they could use the revenue from the fines to hire Armenian mercenaries, who made better soldiers than the conscripted peasant farmers would have anyway. Even thousands of years ago, being unable to mobilize your supporters to actually fight for you wasn't a death blow as long as they were willing to contribute in other ways.
Remember that the Western Roman Empire did the same thing with the Franks and the Goths, and that directly led to the Fall of Rome because the Franks and the Goths eventually decided to cut out the middleman.
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