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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 4, 2025

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There's probably a defensible, if aggressive, claim that the universal suffrage has proven more dangerous (in terms of deaths per capita) than (universal) firearms ownership. Definitely some error bars on the hypothetical impact of more gun ownership, and exactly which government actions are attributable to "voters" specifically --- How many bodies sit at the feet of voters in the 1932 Weimar Germany elections? Every victim of state violence in democratic states? Do we count communist "elections"? --- but I think the Libertarian premise that "nothing is more dangerous to a people than their government" has at least some academic merit.

Not only would I not count Communist "elections", I'd point out that if Communist countries had had genuine free elections, most of them would be gone pretty fast. Which makes all the deaths caused by them attributable to not having universal suffrage.

Of course, this means that even counting Germany, the deaths from not having suffrage exceed the deaths from having it (especially if you count the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact as starting WWII and making some of the deaths the fault of lack of suffrage.)