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Notes -
Does "We" mean men, or do you think that removing women's liberties is compatible with a free society?
As for safety, I'm living in a massive, diverse, multicultural city where families can hang out safely in amazing public parks late into the night, and a hot woman can walk down the darkest, dingiest alleyway at 3 am in the morning without as much as fearing being cat-called. On the other hand, it's also a society run by rich people unprincipled enough to work with commies, whose main legitimation from the socially conservative masses is that the police will be badasses if someone does as much as play loud music too late at night in a ghetto, and even the dumbest semi-disabled old man can (and probably must) get a job sweeping leaves under the supervision of a pedantic harpy or something similarly simple in those amazing public parks.
In short, there are many social models, but there isn't one which is both free and massively restricts the freedom of 49% of the population.
I agree with you that modern society is overly empathetic, but this is a trend that goes back to the 18th century, as the intellectual classes began to promote the idea that benevolence is the ultimate virtue. It predates the decline of patriarchy and organised religion, and it's at least as notable in e.g. the upper echelons of the Catholic Church hierarchy (all-male and all-religious, more or less) as in a multi-gender corporate boardroom.
Additionally, as I recall personality psychology, the vast majority of men are about as empathetic as most women. The aggregate differences are at the margins, e.g. highly trait-disagreeable people are overwhelmingly men.
To be clear, I don’t think voting is a freedom issue. Voting is a tool to create good social outcome; it is not an end upon itself.
"End in itself" and "freedom issue" are two different things, though. If you have one system where an individual can choose to vote or not, and another system where an individual has no choice (mandatory voting or mandatory non-voting) then the first is a system that gives that individual more choices (positive freedom) and doesn't stop them doing something (negative freedom).
Voting in America is an illusion of choice. Your vote doesn’t matter except for perhaps the most local of races and even then pretty unlikely.
But to me, the key takeaway about American ideas of freedom is the foundational statement of America — we hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal and are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable right, that among them are the rights to life, liberty and happiness.
Shortly thereafter TJ explains that government is created to protect those rights. We settled on a democratic Republican form of government because we thought it was the best way to secure our unalienable rights; not because democratic Republican governments was an important right per se.
So if the government created a law banning you personally from voting in any election, you wouldn't consider that an abridgement of your freedoms?
Me personally, for no reason? Probably.
Revoking the franchise from some group of which I am a member(the unmarried, non veterans, whatever)? Quite possibly not.
Why do you draw the distinction?
Impartiality of the law matters even when it doesn’t particularly help you. A law like ‘only married people/veterans business owners/people with college degrees can vote’ might not be to my benefit, but it is an objective and consistent standard. On the other hand ‘only people not named hydroacetylene can vote’ is not an objective and consistent standard, it’s just formalized corruption.
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