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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   26776 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 11, 2023

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Democracy is surprisingly efficient over long timescales.

How long and are you sure? If you're thinking of the United States as the best evidence for this claim, it's important to remember that for the majority of American history, the franchise was heavily restricted. Whether democracy for all is a good idea rests on pretty thin evidence presently.

I do not desire a rollback. There's enough wrong with the past that I don't idealize it. The only way through is forward.

it's important to remember that for the majority of American history, the franchise was heavily restricted

De jure universal male suffrage was less than a century after the founding(before that it was by state, with a large majority of free white males having the franchise) and women’s suffrage was 1919.

The US Republican system and constitutionalism prevented a lot of cock-ups, and I am a supporter of franchise restriction to property-owning males, but claiming that the latter is responsible for the former when it was in the rear view in advance of the civil war is ahistorical.

You might disagree, but I’d consider lack of female suffrage to be a pretty heavy restriction on the franchise.

Was it enough of a restriction to illegitimise extrapolations from its stability to the stability of other democracies?

I am not deeply wedded to this view, but I tend to think that women’s suffrage resulted in more moral crusades and emotional appeals in electoral politics, which I think is ultimately destabilizing. It’s obviously not something that will immediately destroy a county, but I think it probably weakens it over a long time scale. I think the same holds true for allowing non-property owners and, if they are a large enough portion of the population, non-parents the vote as well.

I tend to think that women’s suffrage resulted in more moral crusades and emotional appeals in electoral politics

Do you have reliable evidence (not just particular examples of women being involved in moral crusades e.g. Prohibition) for this view?

I do not, hence why I’m not deeply wedded to my views. I’m not aware of any studies attempting to examine this question, and I’m highly doubtful that any study that came to the wrong conclusion could ever be published today. It matches some historical examples like Prohibition, and it also very closely matches my personal experiences. In almost every political discussion I’ve ever had, the men were, as a group, much better about governing their emotions and discussing an issue dispassionately than were the women. Differences like this obviously fall on overlapping bell curves, but the pattern is still clearly there. I could give dozens of examples, but they would just be anecdata. I’ll just say that I think Kipling was on to something when he wrote “The Female of the Species.”

Half the population would be enough, I reckon.

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