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I mentioned here many times that I consider the gender (sex) divide the greatest factor in our model of understanding modern political thought and action.
Background; middle-class male, young, Catholic family, Mediterranean, living in a big, poor city. Moved to Central Europe to work in a big èlite public institution with many young people, especially females. History of belonging to Marxist organisations in the past btw.
As a passionate about history, I normally talk about it, especially in a highly-educated environment where discussions about complex topics are the norm.
What I noticed in the past year it is astounding and moulded a lot of my thought. Every time I talk with women about history, and the topics fall on some past event/political regime/ideology/whatever, there is a lot of disinterest towards it from the women's side. Not disinterest in the sense of "I do not care", because as I said it is a highly-educated environment where being uncaring about this kind of thing is uncool, but disinterest in the sense of:
"I understand that in the past things worked a certain way, but the past is always worse than now because women had it worse".
From there, after it happened dozens of times with dozens of different women, I elaborated:
Women are the true accelerationist.
I could not elaborate or argue about past political or moral issues or ideologies or sovrastructures, because, from the other side, the argument is always that every behaviour or ideology of the past is ontologically evil because it discriminated against women.
I will never forget how when I was arguing about how 19th-century European states had probably a higher state-capacity than contemporary European states, I was accused of sexism because I expressed a preference for a non-contemporary political structure. The same happened when I mentioned how I admire Charles De Gaulle (because Macron, while being bad, is better than him because he is more feminist).
The most amazing moment was when I said to a group of women (yes, a lot of weird moments this year) that the loss of Church participation alienated a lot of people and diminished the sense of belonging and social participation of the community in the public thing. They agreed with me (!) but still for them, it is better now because they prefer a more isolated society but with more feminism.
Women are true accelerationist because the consequence of feminism has been a weirdo para-futurism philosophy but without fascism. Everything that can be conducted to the past is suspected as part of a reactionary plot to be judged on moral grounds. No detached interests in History per se, but only moral condemnation of everything that is not the "current year".
For me, it was fascinating to discover how males and females consider history, especially when the topic of "in which historical epoch would you like to live?" and every woman answer "now".
The biggest consequence of this sex divide is, imho, that a feminist liberal society has a huge gap in understanding the context when society begins to decline after drifting from some past ideology or structure. It is not possible for them that something contemporary can be worse than something present in the past.
I would like to receive some input on my "theory" from the residents of the motte, expressed in the English language which is better than mine.
PS: for people who are curious, I never received any sort of cancellation or consequence for my brazen rhetorical behaviour. Europe is not as woke as the US, and I am a kinda of "high-status male" for several reason, so I noticed that women tolerate way more whatever I say.
I’ll be honest I think most people only care about politics for social signaling purposes. It’s as you say, maybe 10% of the adult population of the country cares about politics to any level. They don’t really see it as an object level reality.
This can be most easily seen in state and local politics. To whit, the place where the average person has orders of magnitude more power than they do in federal politics. You can get infrastructure projects funded. — by the city or state government. You can affect how hard your commute is — at the city planning meetings. You can affect (especially now that the courts have send a lot of stuff back to the states) a good chunk of culture war issues. Turnout is terrible, and even fewer attend the meetings. Like, you want to keep woke out of the schools (or put it in) — the school board meets once a month. They have committees that go through and approve textbooks. Nobody goes.
It’s actually funny to me. People don’t actually want power. They don’t want their decisions to matter. They in fact want to demand things with no responsibility, which turns out to be super easy if you’re signaling with things you have little power over.
When people showed up, the Attorney General literally designated them as domestic terrorists.
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People do go, but if they actually attempt to object, the meeting gets closed, canceled, or the objectors get thrown out for disruption. Those meetings are pro forma public; the board doesn't actually want public input and knows how to avoid it.
Part of this is just normal scale impediments to organisational decision making, whatever the politics. The truth is nothing good gets done by consensus, it just ends in entropic back and forth.
Whatever the reason, it means trying to fob off the blame for wokeness in schools on people being insufficiently interested in local politics doesn't work.
That too I know. I encourage people to get on a board but public meetings with people shouting don't achieve anything for a school it has to be said.
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