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Grim is hosting a discussion on “reasonably talk[ing] through the idea of limiting the franchise.” I won’t be participating - I explain why below - but I want to address a couple of points he made about my writing.
First, I was apparently unclear on principles and pragmatism. To me, a principle is something you stand by regardless of whether it benefits you or your “side”. If you truly believe women are temperamentally unfit to vote and you stand by that even if allowing them to vote would benefit you or your side, you are acting in a principled fashion. You’re a jerk but you’re a principled jerk. If, however, you believe women are temperamentally unfit to vote when their voting disadvantages you or your side but believe the opposite when their voting advantages you or your side, you are not acting on principle. “Pragmatic” was John Derbyshire’s word for his stance; I would have done better to use “opportunistic”. So a Democrat who states that he absolutely supports women’s suffrage because they lean Democratic is no more principled than a Republican who opposes women’s suffrage because they lean Democratic. To extend this to its logical conclusion, it will be interesting to see if anyone in Grim’s discussion comes up with principles for limiting the franchise that would eliminate him or herself from the pool of acceptable voters.
I do not, in fact, oppose any and all limits to the franchise. For example, I specifically referred to “non-felonious Americans” in one of my diatribes. The franchise is already limited by excluding - to greater or lesser degree - those who have committed a felony and I agree with that limitation (although I am not firmly decided on whether felons who have served their time should be able to vote).
It is this very agreement on my part that creates the danger for me in participating in this type of discussion. It would be remarkably easy for me to start with the premise that preventing felons from voting is reasonable and move to the argument that if I am content to take the vote away from those who chose not to obey our laws, why should I not go further and take the vote away from those who choose to engage in other activities I find objectionable? And, beyond that, to grant the vote only to those who engage in activities I find desirable? And to slide into what seems the only possible answer: “Well, okay, I guess it’s pretty much the same thing. So why not?”
Logic, especially logic that walks me from one innocuous step to another, is hard for me to resist even if my ultimate destination is no place I would have gone if I’d seen my destination beforehand. My beliefs about right and wrong don’t stand a chance against it.
Before the evening was half over, Jo felt so completely disillusioned, that she sat down in a corner to recover herself. Mr. Bhaer soon joined her, looking rather out of his element, and presently several of the philosophers, each mounted on his hobby, came ambling up to hold an intellectual tournament in the recess. The conversations were miles beyond Jo's comprehension, but she enjoyed it, though Kant and Hegel were unknown gods, the Subjective and Objective unintelligible terms, and the only thing `evolved from her inner consciousness' was a bad headache after it was all over. It dawned upon her gradually that the world was being picked to pieces, and put together on new and, according to the talkers, on infinitely better principles than before, that religion was in a fair way to be reasoned into nothingness, and intellect was to be the only God. Jo knew nothing about philosophy or metaphysics of any sort, but a curious excitement, half pleasurable, half painful, came over her as she listened with a sense of being turned adrift into time and space, like a young balloon out on a holiday.
She looked round to see how the Professor liked it, and found him looking at her with the grimest expression she had ever seen him wear. He shook his head and beckoned her to come away, but she was fascinated just then by the freedom of Speculative Philosophy, and kept her seat, trying to find out what the wise gentlemen intended to rely upon after they had annihilated all the old beliefs.
Now, Mr. Bhaer was a diffident man and slow to offer his own opinions, not because they were unsettled, but too sincere and earnest to be lightly spoken. As he glanced from Jo to several other young people, attracted by the brilliancy of the philosophic pyrotechnics, he knit his brows and longed to speak, fearing that some inflammable young soul would be led astray by the rockets, to find when the display was over that they had only an empty stick or a scorched hand.
He bore it as long as he could, but when he was appealed to for an opinion, he blazed up with honest indignation and defended religion with all the eloquence of truth--an eloquence which made his broken English musical and his plain face beautiful. He had a hard fight, for the wise men argued well, but he didn't know when he was beaten and stood to his colors like a man. Somehow, as he talked, the world got right again to Jo. The old beliefs, that had lasted so long, seemed better than the new. God was not a blind force, and immortality was not a pretty fable, but a blessed fact. She felt as if she had solid ground under her feet again, and when Mr. Bhaer paused, outtalked but not one whit convinced, Jo wanted to clap her hands and thank him.
(From Little Women by Louisa May Alcott)
In the aftermath of ”Unprincipled”, ”Six”, and ”Once more, with feeling”, there are two posts and one comment I believe are well worth reading.
The comment is by Cassandra at Villainous Company. It is one of the best descriptions of what it means to be “the Other” that I have ever read. Perhaps it is the very fact that Cassandra does not consider victimization to be either an art form or a political stance that makes this so powerful. One key sentence:
There is a common theme to wholesale disenfranchisement of entire classes of people.
It’s the August 25, 2010, 09:10pm comment on this post. Read it, skip all the other comments.
Deafening Silence has two old posts that cover the same topic. One, from July of 2009, is called ”They’re All Sotomayor Now”:
Daydreaming about denying voting rights to others is a very popular activity on political blogs.
The other, from October 2008, is called ”Yes, We Should Vote. ALL of Us.”:
In each of these cases, 'wiser' hands took the vote from the unworthy. In each case, the reasoning at the time seemed sound: unlettered men with no property to protect had no real stake in the new nation; women were too emotional; recently freed slaves couldn't possibly understand politics and Native Americans were not 'real' citizens.
If you do read through the other comments at the Villainous Company post, you'll see they're running toward considering who should - or rather who shouldn't - be allowed to vote. This is ironic in light of the oft-repeated conservative claim that Democrats are elitist snobs who think they know better than “the people”. At this point, we’d all do well to remember what Deafening Silence said in the comments to “Once more, with feeling”:
The ugly elephant in the room here is that there are a lot of people who only want people like themselves to vote. It's that simple.
I’m hard put to think of a better definition of “unprincipled”. And I'm also hard put to think of anything sadder than feeling the need to write posts defending the right of all adult, non-felonious American citizens to vote. What the hell has happened to us?
[Update: Please see this post for my apology to Kevin Williamson.]
Cassandra at Villainous Company is writing again about (sort of) the unprincipled Kevin Williamson National Review Online post regarding women’s suffrage. I started to comment over there and realized I was writing way too much for a comment so here’s a post.
First - and a point I also made in the comments at Grim’s - let’s stop pretending that Williamson has linked to a “joke” video about how girls or people or whatever are dumb enough to sign petitions they don’t understand or will sign anything they think is protest-y. The video Williamson linked to is entitled “End Women’s Suffrage” and the final frame reads, “We rest our case.” The video is explicitly advocating ending women’s suffrage. It requires the cephalic flexibility of Regan MacNeil to spin this video any other way.
Second, John Derbyshire. Cassandra is inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt because of an NRO video is which he asserts that he believes equity outweighs pragmatism and therefore is not advocating for the repeal of female suffrage. Sounds good but this is a walk-back of Obamaian proportions. Leave aside that Derbyshire could have entitled his book sub-chapter, “Why Female Suffrage Is Bad For Conservatives” rather than “The Case Against Female Suffrage.” Where he really shot himself in the foot was in an interview with Alan Colmes the week before the damage-repair NRO video was made.
You can listen to the Colmes interview here. (The transcript in the post is correct but incomplete. There’s a full rough transcript at the bottom of my post.) Here’s the foot-shot from Derbyshire:
Among the hopes that I do not realistically nurse is the hope that female suffrage will be repealed. But I’ll say this – if it were to be, I wouldn’t lose a minute’s sleep.
The rest of it - that we’d probably be a better country if women didn’t vote because women “lean hard to the left” - can be explained away (not adequately to my mind but your mileage may vary) as Derbyshire merely pointing out - as he says in the NRO video - the “downside” to women voting. But the statement that he “wouldn’t lose a minute’s sleep” if female suffrage were repealed is plainly and simply a statement that the “equity” he is careful to laud in that video is simply damage control. Or perhaps a statement that he is utterly unruffled by equity being thrown under the bus of pragmatism.
A later exchange is equally enlightening:
COLMES: What’s next? You want to bring back slavery?
DERBYSHIRE: No, no. I’m in favor of freedom personally.
COLMES: Okay, but women shouldn’t have the freedom to vote.
DERBYSHIRE: Well, they didn’t [for 130 years] and we got along ok.
Again, equity has nothing to do with it. The question is whether women not voting caused any problems. In Derbyshire’s view it didn’t, so there’s no point in worrying about it. Again pragmatism trumps equity hands down.
The logic here also escapes me. We could as easily argue that we got along okay with slavery - except for those pesky abolitionists - as we can that we got along okay without women’s suffrage - except for those pesky suffragettes. And I have to say, this is very discouraging. I’ve always believed - even when I leaned left myself - that those on the Left had trouble with logic while those on the Right did not. If Derbyshire is what passes for “the Right” these days, I’m going to have to give up on both sides in this regard. Here’s another example of Derbyshire’s very trying lack of logic:
COLMES: Well, you could say we got along okay with lots ... We didn’t have the Civil Rights Act and we got along okay. Should we repeal the Civil Rights Act?
DERBYSHIRE: The 1964 Civil Rights Act?
COLMES: Yeah, right.
DERBYSHIRE: There’s a case for repealing it, yeah.
COLMES: Why would you repeal that?
DERBYSHIRE: Because I think that you shouldn’t try to force people to be good. Try to reason with them and argue them into being good, not pass laws to make them good.
Leaving aside what one thinks about the 1964 Civil Rights Act*, we see that Derbyshire is fine with legislation to force women not to vote but flinches at the idea of legislation to force people to stop discriminating against Blacks. Perhaps he does not consider forcing women not to vote as an example of forcing people to be good. Or perhaps he doesn’t think women are susceptible to being reasoned with.
Which brings me to an excellent point of Cassandra’s:
I can't argue with anything Derbyshire has to say in the linked video, but it does make me wonder why a party that advocates both freedom of expression and unfettered markets hasn't bothered to ask itself how it came to lose women's' votes? It has become axiomatic on the right to blame feminism for everything from the heartbreak of psoriasis to the bedbug infestation in NY city, but if conservatism isn't selling well in the marketplace of ideas then perhaps conservatives need to take a long, hard look in the mirror rather than blaming the customer for not buying their product.
It's easy (though more than a bit reminiscent of lefty condescension) to opine loftily that women who vote progressive are voting against self interest. Such tactics relieve the arguer of the tiresome necessity of convincing women why this might be so, the self evidently self evident truth of the conservative Weltanschauung being downright impossible to refudiate.
On the other hand, making clear, principled, cohesive arguments that convince women that conservatism better represents their interests (not to mention those of society at large) sounds suspiciously like hard work. If feminism is such intellectual weak tea, one can't help wondering why we're having so much trouble demonstrating its flaws?
I suspect Derbyshire would argue that those on the Right can’t convince women that conservatism better represents their interests because women aren’t susceptible to reason: they’re all about wanting “someone to help them raise their kids”. Or as I like to call it: The She Trapped Me Into Marriage By Getting Pregnant Explanation of Voting Patterns. Myself, I tend to think that Derbyshire himself can’t convince women that conservatism better represents their interests because they suspect he doesn’t give a damn about their interests; we know for a fact that he doesn’t give a damn about their interest in voting.
Third - and finally, I hope - I imagine there are conservatives out there asking, “What is wrong with her? Why can’t she take a joke? Surely she must know know that no one is seriously suggesting repealing the Nineteenth Amendment!” And yet it’s NRO, home of Kevin Williamson, that keeps screaming, “Sharia is coming! Sharia is coming!” I’m afraid I don’t have much faith that my Lefty brethren won’t throw my right to vote to the, er, dogs of political correctness in order to pacify fundamental Islam. After all, I saw how the Boyz of Left Blogistan trashed Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin. I’m not entirely sure my Lefty sistren wouldn’t do the same. Promise Naomi Wolf and Eve Ensler that repealing the Nineteenth Amendment means Sarah Palin can’t vote** and dollars will get you doughnuts they’ll be leading the charge. I already know at least one*** of my conservative sistren would throw my voting rights overboard with no more loss of sleep than Derbyshire.
Given all that perhaps those who think I’m humorless**** on this topic can better understand my feeling a little insecure about my right to vote. It’s not that I believe anyone is seriously advocating repealing the Nineteenth Amendment; it’s that I fear there are a substantial number of people (or at least pundits) who don’t consider women’s suffrage as inalienable a right as men’s suffrage. Given the rustling in the underbrush, I don’t find the lack of principle on this matter particularly humorous.
*****
* Based on nothing but get feeling, I think it was a good idea when the 1964 Civil Rights Act passed but the Act itself and/or its offshoots may have outlived their usefulness. Someday I may write a post on what I think we should do with affirmative action.
** Based on Article Two, Section 1, Clause 5 of the United States Constitution, I think Sarah Palin would be eligible to be elected President even if she herself could not vote. That might dampen Wolf and Ensler’s enthusiasm for repealing the Nineteenth Amendment.
*** Ann Coulter may or may not have advocated repeal of the Nineteenth Amendment. This 2000 article by her is called “Reconsidering the 19th Amendment” but I don’t read it as a call to repeal women’s right to vote. This 2007 article says she did in an interview but the link to the “complete interview” doesn’t support that claim.
**** There is a classic Ms. magazine cover on which a man is saying, “Did you know the Women’s Movement has no sense of humor?” To which a woman replies, “No, but hum a few bars and I’ll fake it.”
*****
Notes:
I hate to intrude reality into Derbyshire’s view of voting patterns but in 2008, men went for Obama 49% to 48%. In 1992, men went for Clinton 41% to 38%. In 1976, men went for Carter 50% to 48%. Disenfranchising women would not have prevented any of those Democratic Presidencies.
Furthermore, women favored Nixon in 1972 (61% to 37%); favored Regan in 1980 (47% to 45%) and 1984 (56% to 44%); and favored George H. W. Bush in 1988 (50% to 49%).
Women went Democrat while men went Republican in 1996 (Clinton won); 2000 and 2004 (Bush won). So the only time since 1972 that disenfranchising women would have changed the outcome of a Presidential election is Clinton’s 1996 victory.
*****
Transcript of the Colmes/Derbyshire interview:
COLMES: What is the case against female suffrage?
DERBYSHIRE: Well, the conservative case against it is that women lean hard to the left. They want someone to nurture, they want someone to help them raise their kids, and if men aren’t inclined to do it — which in the present days, they’re not much — then they’d like the state to do it for them.
COLMES: Well, then, do you think women should not vote?
DERBYSHIRE: Ah… I’m not putting forward a political program here. I’m trying to change attitudes, Alan, you know.
COLMES: Well, you say “The Case Against Female Suffrage” the suggestion is that them voting would not be the best thing for you.
DERBYSHIRE: Among the hopes that I do not realistically nurse is the hope that female suffrage will be repealed. But I’ll say this – if it were to be, I wouldn’t lose a minute’s sleep.
COLMES: We’d be a better country if women didn’t vote?
DERBYSHIRE: Probably. Don’t you think so?
COLMES: No, I do not think so whatsoever.
DERBYSHIRE: Come on Alan. Come clean here [laughing].
COLMES: We would be a better country? John Derbyshire making the statement, we would be a better country if women did not vote.
DERBYSHIRE: Yeah, probably. We got along like that for what, 130 years.
COLMES: What’s next? You want to bring back slavery?
DERBYSHIRE: No, no. I’m in favor of freedom personally.
COLMES: Okay, but women shouldn’t have the freedom to vote.
DERBYSHIRE: Well, they didn’t and we got along ok.
COLMES: Well, you could say we got along okay with lots ... We didn’t have the Civil Rights Act and we got along okay. Should we repeal the Civil Rights Act?
DERBYSHIRE: The 1964 Civil Rights Act?
COLMES: Yeah, right.
DERBYSHIRE: There’s a case for repealing it, yeah.
COLMES: Why would you repeal that?
DERBYSHIRE: Because I think that you shouldn’t try to force people to be good. Try to reason with them and argue them into being good, not pass laws to make them good.
COLMES: Should we repeal the Voting Rights Act?
DERBYSHIRE: Again, you know, a lot of these things that we think of and we’re told these goods came to us through government action. If you look closely, they were happening anyway. Attitudes were changing ...
COLMES: We had segregated buses, we had segregation, we didn’t have equal rights, equal schools before Brown v. Board of Education. Separate but equal didn’t work.
DERBYSHIRE: But the question is, was government action, was judicial action necessary to change that or was ...
COLMES: Well, apparently so, otherwise it might not have changed.
DERBYSHIRE: How do you know it would not have changed?
COLMES: Was it changing? Did it change ...
DERBYSHIRE: If you look at the trend lines, it was already changing.
COLMES: In other words, we didn’t need the Civil Rights Act, we didn’t need the Voting Rights Act, we didn’t need a decision Brown v. Board of Education to say separate cannot be equal. Everything would have been just fine had we not done any of this stuff.
DERBYSHIRE: We don’t know that it wouldn’t have been.
COLMES: But you don’t know that it would have been. But we do know that is was because these things did change, they were legislated, and it did have positive results, and that’s verifiable.
DERBYSHIRE: But liberals always leap to government action and then claim the government action did it. We don’t know that government action did ...
COLMES: We know that government action did it because there’s a line of demarcation since 1964 where thing things, having coming to, having come to pass, became law and changed America for the better.
DERBYSHIRE: There’s a test you can apply in all kinds of sociological situations called the trend line test where you plot a graph of any kind of social phenomenon, you know, road accidents or anything like that. You plot a graph of it across time and then you stare at the graph and you try to find the point where legislation kicked in and you know what? Much more often than not, you can’t.
[Update: Please see this post for my apology to Kevin Williamson.]
Happy Women’s Suffrage (one day late). Kevin D. Williamson at The Corner celebrated with a brief post entitled “ Some Things Do Not Get Better with Time”:
If I am not mistaken, today marks the anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment. A video tribute. (Also a tribute to the glories of American education.)
The link in Williamson’s post is to a video entitled “End Women’s Suffrage”. It shows a young man at Padua Academy, an all-girl Catholic high school, asking students to sign a petition to end women’s suffrage; about thirteen young women do in fact sign and approximately seven other young women are shown not objecting to or cheering for the petition. The video concludes with the message, “We rest our case.”
The makers of this video and Williamson seem to think this proves that even the brightest women are too stupid to vote. They are wrong. What the video proves is that somewhere between 2.2% (13 out of 600) and 3.3% (20 out of 600) students at an excellent private high school do not know the meaning of the word “suffrage”. I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest that at least that many students at an excellent all-boy Catholic high school would not know the meaning of the word “suffrage” either. Of course, that’s just a guess on my part because the video makes no attempt to see how boys would do on this “test”.
Among the general public, I’m pretty sure the percentage is even higher and this is not just a guess on my part. Those who made this video were careful to include a frame twenty seconds in that defined “suffrage”. The only reason they would have felt compelled to do so is to insure that their viewers could grasp just how dumb the girls in the video were. After all, it’s not so funny if you’re just another one of the idiots who has no clue what “suffrage” means.
I don’t know whether Williamson is too stupid to realize the video is meaningless or so unprincipled he doesn’t care. What I do know is that the murmurings on the Right about repealing the Nineteenth Amendment are disgraceful. This came up in the comments to a post at Villainous Company. The blog proprietress said:
As a woman (not to mention a woman who has voted solidly Republican) it is pretty depressing to read that the world would be a better place if I couldn't vote. It's even more depressing that no one seems to see anything wrong with that stance but I guess that's just the way it is.
To which I replied:
Yes, this is depressing. It's also puzzling. I find it hard to imagine a conservative blogger or commenter being applauded for even hinting that the world would be a better place if African-Americans (who vote overwhelmingly Democratic) or American Jews (who tend to vote Democratic) couldn't vote. This is a great mystery to me: Why are comments like this acceptable when they're made about women?
And that is, indeed, something I would very much like an answer to. (Those on the Left can feel free to provide this explanation so long as they also explain their sexist slurs against Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin during the 2008 campaigns.)
But beyond the sense of puzzlement over why it’s more acceptable to trash women than Blacks or Hispanics or Jews is a deeper concern: The argument that women shouldn’t have the vote is literally un-principled. The only justification for it is that if women couldn’t vote then conservatives would always win elections. That’s not a principle; that’s a corruption.
Those on the Right properly condemn those on the Left who sometimes seem to think that only the people who agree with the Left’s agenda should be allowed to speak. But at least no respectable outlet on the the Left has suggested that only the people who agree with the Left’s agenda should be allowed to vote.
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