abcdavid01 wrote:publicduende wrote:abcdavid01 wrote:Okay, but if we're taking the stance that all laws are biased because they are crafted by humans then you might as well say China's divorce law is biased too because it's partial to the homeowners instead of their spouses, regardless of gender. That sort of bias doesn't matter. Women haven't changed all that much since Jefferson's time. That's the whole point of this site. The thing that has changed is that Feminism has them trying to play male roles. Most of the time they just wind up as poor caricatures. In the case of Thatcher and Merkel and women in positions of power, political or otherwise, even if they do a great job it's a damn shame that they had to step up because the males weren't acting like men. It's a little hard to examine these things because the definition of "liberal" in America is different from around the world and even our own history before the 20th Century. There's a study by John Lott analyzing the effect of grant women voting rights in America; it concluded that it lead to increased government growth both at the state and federal level irrespective of other factors. Of course other factors play a role in all human decision making. The important thing is to try to isolate variables. Single women are more likely to be liberal than married ones for example. But overall I believe women tend towards liberalism and studies like Lott's support this. I make rhetorical arguments with my own explanations as to why this is (women value security over freedom, etc.).
Let me start from the bottom. If women valued security over freedom as you say, shouldn't be voting as far as possible for any paradigm of liberalism? They would probably be conservative (republican in your country), perhaps on a social-democratic slant. Let's not forget Hitler started as a social-democratic.
May well be true, that Thatcher and Merkel stood out for the lack of a better male alternative. I would personally think even higher of them if I had the absolute certainty that no positive action or no special treatment led to their rise and success in their own political arenas. As a matter of fact the Thatcher's choice was a Tory choice to give the party a fresh face, so that much active push I can acknowledge. After that, the Iron Lady remains the Iron Lady.
OK, John Lott's study correlates the presence of a higher proportion of female vote in the states where bills favouring government spending and taxes. You could find a myriad of reasons why that happens: perhaps their innate tendency towards protection and conservation (the "Yin" of Tao philosophy) led them to believe in a more prominent state over individual wealth and privilege. Or perhaps they were asked to vote that way, who knows... Lott's stats cover the 1870 to 1940 period, after which the level of education of women has grown considerably. If the survey were based on more recent data, perhaps the spectrum of female voting preferences would reflect more variety, in line with higher levels of knowledge and critical thinking.
Perhaps the women you're talking about, who veer towards liberalism, are those women who have developed themselves as proud and fiercely independent, by nature of nurture. I have never liked Condoleezza Rice and her stance on corporatism, war etc. Yet, if you look at her humble background, her African ancestry and the way she went all the way from piano child prodigy to a PhD by the time she was 26, her solid liberal/republican stance doesn't surprise me in the slightest.
It's not single women who tend to be more liberal, it's individuals (males and females) who have learned to be independent the hard way that ultimately express that individualism at the ballot box. In isolating variables, one has to look at the ones who most correlate with the fact in hand. If you run your statistics, I would say this latter cultural aspect, more than gender, is what plays to a higher extent.
I don't know if it's a cultural issue? Conservatives in America are generally regarded as "patriots" who love capitalism and free markets and believe in things like secession. They like to think of themselves as "freedom fighters" like our Founding Fathers. They revere the Constitution as it was originally written. Liberals believe in the welfare state, which is security. They want to Amend the Constitution with Progressive legislation. That is what I mean and I would postulate most Americans mean by liberal and conservative, though as I said this is not the case internationally and throughout even our own history. Educated people do tend to favor liberalism. I believe that is because they overvalue the ability of intelligence towards running society and producing the best results. This is a fallacy called "Scientism" where the scientific method is misapplied. The economy for example is much closer to sciences like evolutionary theory and natural selection or chaos theory than physics or even rigid mathematics. Irrational actors who make up society cannot be controlled by rational means. It is for people like me to make the case for enlightened conservatism. A lot of conservatives, by nature of their beliefs being tradition-based, are not used to their beliefs being questioned. That is not to say that rationalism has no place, but traditionalism is what brought about productive societies in the first place. Rationalism is good for fixing errors and holding tradition to intellectual scrutiny, but it should not be used to throw out all traditions in a misguided attempt at creating utopianism. So I do what other conservatives have failed to do for centuries due to lack of need. I make an intellectual case for conservatism outside of "it has always been done this way."
Oh, you're right. That's interesting. From the Wikipedia entry of Liberalism (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberalism) I quote:
According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, "In the United States liberalism is associated with the welfare-state policies of the New Deal program of the Democratic administration of Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt, whereas in Europe it is more commonly associated with a commitment to limited government and laissez-faire economic policies."
We Europeans have always associated the (a-la-European) liberalism bred into US society as an ethical and moral heritage of the Calvinist ideas your founding fathers and first settlers (Puritans, Huguenots etc.) imported from Britain, the Netherlands, etc. Fast forward to the modern times, to us Ron Paul is a liberal and what Roosevelt (and Hitler) enacted were social democratic, if populist, policies.
OK, now I understand better. So let's say Condoleezza Rice is a conservative Republican, religious overtones and all.
No David. Economy is an eminently social science, that relies on analysis of human actitivies on the market and (extremely!) simple laws based on supply and demand of goods and their proxies (eg. money). It's only in the 80s that bankers decided to replace the edifice of economic policy with the monstrosity of finance and financial engineering. Using high-pitch academics, computers and mathematical models as proofs, they have had the pretense to redefine finance, and then even economy itself, as a quantitative science, revolving around chaotic yet ultimately predictable patterns, which could be tamed to maximise benefit (= profits for the few). The results of such hubris and intellectual dishonesty are before everybody's eyes. I secretly wish it won't take a full blown global economic collapse for the path of excess to lead to the tower of wisdom again. I don't have much hope though.
Look, I could even agree with you with the importance of "tradition" and "restoration" in the collective discourse on policy, social progress, moral etc. Then the biggest contradiction is exactly what you said in the same paragraph.
A lot of conservatives, by nature of their beliefs being tradition-based, are not used to their beliefs being questioned. This is the risk of being a grassroot conservative: you would lose the objective ground on which much of your beliefs lie. Not only you would end up believing in dogmas rather than facts, you would also lose the critical tools needed to tell the difference. A simple example: I'm all for solid education to moral and ethical values in schoolchidren. There are universal moral and ethical values that are held dearest by virtually any religion and spiritual philosophy known to man. In order to teach an objectively good thing, do we really need to piggyback the entire superstructure of Christian religion, which is mostly based on faith dogmas and not facts? Why didn't Republican detect a shade of hypocrisy when Bush publicly announced to the world is "war or Evil", associated to Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism? Wouldn't just saying that classify his thought as Christian fundamentalist? Where were the objective facts to justify a war to Afghanistan and then Iraq?
Such are the dangers of being a conservative. Better be open to change, open to progress, open to a continuous reassessment of one's own belief system in the light of new evidence, new ideas. This is not scientism, this is the scientific method. There's been way too much pain in the world because of the confusion between what's good for mankind and what "was said" to be good for mankind.