JENNIFER MACLEOD'S FEMINISM

THEIR RANTERS – ‘OUR’ ADVOCATES

Comes one Jennifer MacLeod, writing "Equal Rights Amendment Still Brings Out Ranters".

I do this to demonstrate just what public deliberation hasn’t been done and isn’t being done and – much worse – perhaps cannot or can no longer be done. Once that’s been demonstrated, especially in an area so profoundly significant for American public discourse, society, and polity, then perhaps it will become clearer just what has happened to Us in the past few decades.

She is – yes – on about the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). The Amendment passed Congress in 1972, but failed by three the requisite number of State ratifications. Everyone who still (after almost 40 years) disagrees with ERA, is a ‘ranter’ as far as she’s concerned.

She presumes that the ERA is harmless enough, and straightforward: “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any State on account of sex”. This, she assures, will “make it clear that the United States stands for the full equality of all its citizens, female as well as male”. And that sounds straightforward and harmless enough.

But with ‘advocacy’ writing now – whether it be a ‘study’ or ‘scholarship’ or ‘report’ or ‘story’ – you can no longer tell. And We should not assume it; ‘strict scrutiny’ is recommended to all Citizens. Personally, I now treat the stuff the way I treated Pentagon press-releases about the successes in Vietnam and the brilliance of the government’s plans and goals.

I think that I lost my ‘virginity’ – as it were – in the Sixties (and who didn’t?) with the USS Liberty incident in June of ’67: Vietnam still seemed like a working plan, and Tet was half a year into the future. The Liberty incident made me wonder, and ask myself: How could a professional – certainly a heavily-armed – military ‘mistake’ that big ship for a short-haul tramp steamer in the bright light of day? And then, as things unfolded from Washington: How could the US government not only ‘accept’ the Israeli explanation ( ‘story’ was more like it) but also call off the US jets sent to fight off the ship’s attackers?

I didn’t know at that time what We now know*, but I got the distinct impression that ‘the government’ wasn’t telling anywhere near the truth. From then on, and reinforced by Solzhenitsyn’s revelations in the early 1970s, I decided it would be a good idea to read government stuff as the Soviet citizens used to read Pravda and Izvestia: with a sharp eye to what was not there.

Well, so here We are and I’m doing this with this ERA material since apparently the lobbies – ‘advocates’ they’d like to be called, no doubt – are hoping to drum up support to push this thing through.

“Full equality” is a fine phrase, simple and seemingly forthright and honest. But you have to stop yourself and think: but women got the vote right after World War One. What more can be done along those lines? That, of course, is where the ‘code’ comes in: they aren’t talking about ‘political’ rights, for which they already have equality. They are after something else.

It would be too simple to say that they were after ‘equality of outcomes’, though in this ‘affirmative action’ era that’s always at work deep down in the operations of the thing, if not actually maximized for projection onto the screen.

They are after an equality of opportunity, I guess it could be said. Nice enough. But if that phrase is unpacked, it turns out that in order to get that, their vision will require that females be just like guys, with all the opportunities that guys have, It’s not so much a feminist vision unique to itself and based on any qualities of the female as such, as it is a sustained reach for – in the phrase Jesse Jackson made famous in an unguarded moment – “a bigger slice of the pie”. Ah.

That’s where it gets tricky, on so many levels. For a female to be able to do that, she needs to be much more free of such things as ‘family’, ‘raising children’, and even ‘marriage’, while also requiring much more government protection from ‘sex’. Well, that seems logical, although that’s a verrrry tall order, requiring profound changes in the fundamental structures of societal arrangements not only in this county or in Western civilization, but in almost all previous world civilizations. Whew.

Oh, and ‘babies’ – they will need to be as free of them as guys are. Which really, really raises a couple of problems, since babies are something only women can actually bring to term so it’s not like the guys can pick up the slack the same way they might learn (or be made to learn) how to keep house and change diapers. How will that work?

Well, for openers, if you define not-yet-born humans as ‘stuff’, then you can get rid of them if you want to. Which may work, on paper anyway, but seems not to have won the approval of a lot of citizens (except in the very limited cases - genuine rape, abortion in the first-term only – that are hell-and-gone from where the lobbies now want to take the game).

The 1970s original ‘strategy’ (there seems to have been no serious critical thinking to it at all) was to run the play as just a civil-rights thing like with the blacks, and use the Supreme Court (in Griswold and especially Roe) to do an efficient end-run around the numerous States, effectively using the Federal government as an instrument for forcing everybody to go along with the ‘vision’. After all, it would be quick, efficient, and folks would just ‘learn’ to change their opinions, because – really – it was all just a matter of peoples’ ‘opinions’ and ‘beliefs’ and ‘stereotypes’ and nothing more. Wheeee! Change your mind, change the world. Or – ach! – change everybody else’s mind and change the world. It comes down to enlightened cadres and unenlightened (and thus obstructive and evil) lumpen masses. Charmingly Leninist.

As far back as Casey the Court, having already committed itself to the path, complained that folks just weren’t listening to the Court, and that if they only did, and went along, then everything would be fine. The citizenry have remained largely unimpressed, and here We are 36 years after Roe – you’d think that the lobbying Advocacies would stop to wonder: if so many folks still don’t ‘get it’ or maybe even don’t want to get it, or disagree about whether ‘getting it’ is even advisable, then maybe there’s something wrong with the original idea.

You might even imagine that The People, ridden like a beast of burden by their elites, yet display stubbornly (or 'robustly', depending on your point of view) the horsey wisdom that can intuit when a bridge that it's oh-so-clever rider wants to cross is inherently unstable and unsound. Although I doubt that Our 'elites' will be accessible to the saving revelation afforded to Balaam when his own ass started talking to him to set him straight as to just what was taking place there on the road (Numbers 22: 5-6, if you have your Bible handy).

But you don’t stay in money as a lobbyist, or in power as an ‘Advocacy’, or loyal to a ‘revolution’, by doing too much thinking. Calculating and planning and ‘strategizing’, and schmoozing and arm-twisting inside the Beltway, but not actually thinking your ‘vision’ through (and can you say War in Iraq?).

So here We are with the ERA. It is a year older than Roe. In the intervening 37 years it has gone nowhere, and indeed elicits notable opposition. Forty years later, almost. But that doesn’t slow anybody down.

They are hoping soon to gather “the needed three more states”. So an initiative almost 40 years old, that has never in all that time actually made it into law, and they want to just see if they can get it ‘in’ now.

And they expect that the votes by Congress and the approving States of 37 years ago are still valid. If in 1972, somebody were to want to get passed into law a piece of legislative handiwork from 1935 that had never managed to get itself sufficiently approved, simply assuming that such support as it had managed to get back then could be counted upon as having remained valid – some sort of theoretical static and crystallized preservation (like the theoretical ‘repressed memory’) – in the bright, cutting-edge modernity of 1972 … gee, I don’t know. That’s a little cartoonish, as thought goes.

But it is to Macleod’s credit that she is also willing to consider (she says) “starting the amending process over to attain passage by Congress and then fresh ratification by the necessary 38 states”.

Now, this is what really attracted my attention. She asks – rightly enough – “Why are we having so much difficulty in amending the U.S. Constitution in such an obviously timely and essential way?”

And in answering that question, she shares some “history”. And it gets informative.

She sets her readership (that “we” which cannot simply mean ‘all Americans’) up for a ‘story’: “To answer that question, we have to look back – way back”. So perhaps a History lesson? She hadn’t given any indication of such scholarly creds, but hey – knowledge is knowledge and you take it wherever and whenever you can get it.

“All through the tens of thousands of years of human development and history up to only about 150 years ago …” So this is just really script-like: There’s all of human history, and then there’s the past 150 years, and apparently ‘we’ are on the cutting-edge, as opposed to all those poor, primitive, benighted schmucks and schmuckesses from the previous loooong night of human affairs. I can almost hear it: On a nice day in June, 1859, human history suddenly changed ‘totally’. Yeah. And here We are. Funny, but that’s how the Gospels set up the birth of Christ – which the feministicals often dismiss as fairy-tales. Funny, funny.

She refers to the most salient element of those “tens of thousands of years” as being “a sharp division of labor” that “existed between males and females”. She notes, accurately enough, that the cause of this division was that “only women could gestate and give birth and breastfeed infants”. And that was “essential to the generation-by-generation survival of every family, clan, tribe, and to humans as a whole” – which is not overstating the case.

But here she gets a little cagey, as does her ‘history’: “As a result, almost every woman, for the survival of her human group, had to center her life on successful reproduction”. No larger sense of ‘humanity’ – it’s just her “human group”.

Nor even of the vital ‘development’ of a human being after it’s born. But, of course, reproduction is only the first step; the young have to be cared for and nurtured so that they will develop – a complex process which in the oh-so-complex human species takes a long time compared to any other species. None of the ‘nurture’ bits here. It was simply a “survival necessity”.

So then she goes on to assert – not at all inaccurately – that human culture and civilization, including religion, “enforced the sharp division of labor between the sexes” and immediately adds the ominous “sometimes through violence”. As most readers by this stage of modern American history are aware, the explanation about to come up is that it’s all a nasty plot by “patriarchy” to keep women down. Just as race slavery – in the civil rights history – was simply an arbitrary and mercenary plot to keep African blacks ‘down’where their lives could be effectively plundered for the support of another race – which, in the civil rights situation is not at all inaccurate.

But where a ‘white man’ could – if he only wanted to – do the same field work and servant-work as a ‘black man’, this is not at all the case with the male-female divide. The male of the species cannot reproduce the utterly essential young. It’s different, rather substantially, and a simple equation of ‘women’s rights’ with the white-v-black ‘civil rights’ situation is not really accurate. Not hardly.

She continues: “These beliefs held that women were, by their nature and capabilities, suited only for reproduction and related functions”; she doesn’t mention the ‘nurturing’ but only “gathering food and water, preparing meals for the family and caring for the home”. You could, without too much of a strain on the mind, see that it might have been the case that those cultures – primitive and benighted as they allegedly were – might have been trying to build on the brute natural fact confronting them: that only women could reproduce.

And that those poor schmucks and schmuckesses might also have somehow dimly intuited that Nature – as We moderns now know from scientific research – took exquisite evolutionary steps to maximize that unique and absolutely essential female capability by adapting the female in the most profoundly complex ways to be attuned to, and attached to, her oh-so-indispensable ‘function’.

To presume that there was merely a somehow-sustained ‘plot’ or ‘conspiracy’ to make women do the job (like slavery and Jim Crow were indeed societal conspiracies to keep the blacks doing works that the whites could easily have done for themselves if they only wanted to)… is not only a ‘stretch’, but also requires a denial of the tremendous and indeed ‘focused’ ways of evolutionary development. After all, if a species is to survive, then a lot is going to depend on the nurturer of the young, so it would make great evolutionary sense to ensure that the nurturer – most efficiently the same being who gestated the youngster and is deeply ‘attached’ to the little dickens – would be as well-adapted to that primal task as possible.

That’s not to say the female is only suited for reproductive and nurturing tasks, but of the two sexes she is the only one that can carry reproduction to fulfillment; there’s more than a hint of efficiency in evolution’s or Nature’s further step in attuning the same female to attachment.

Even in modern psychological theory, ‘attachment’ studies such as John Bowlby’s tout the marvelous ways of mother and child as an interactive dyad. It used to be big and great news, a few decades ago.

And perhaps, again quite plausibly, somewhere along those tens of thousands of years, those poor schmucks and schmuckesses figured that they were dealing with a rather ‘robust’ female matrix of skills and affinities that would – with the perhaps possible exception of females born with an attraction to other females – be so deeply rooted as to resist even the preferences and willpower of the females themselves. Evolution can be pretty insistent when it feels it has to be. And in ways that flow along pathways far deeper than political expediency.

I don’t know what happened back there in the millennia before recorded history. I’m not pretending that I do. But I most certainly know that to posit a millennia-long ‘conspiracy’ of ‘patriarchy’ is more of a movie-plot mechanism. Marx at least built his ‘conspiracy’ theory on a very robust human characteristic – greed – that can be counted upon to act in every human being in any and every place and time. Societies and cultures would have to learn how to handle such perennial human short-comings, in male and female.

But then, Marx went off the rails when he arbitrarily assigned ‘greed’ to a particular socio-economic class, the ‘bourgeois’ and the ‘owners’ and – even more creatively – assigned the ‘virtue’ of not being greedy to another socio-economic class, the ‘workers’ (who thus became ‘victims’, interestingly enough). He reduced a universal human (im-)moral characteristic to a specific socio-economic class while exempting another socio-economic class from such immorality.

And then he plastered the whole thing over with materialism – that there is no ‘moral’ and ‘immoral’ and it’s all about economic stuff in the here-and-now. Or, as Lenin pithly put it: who-whom? Which is to say: who is doing what to whom? Or who is taking what from whom? Or who is victimizing whom?

Which apparently translates into Patriarchy baaad, Matriarchy goood. And that then devolves into the even more cartoonish Men baaaad, women goood. Which starts to sound like a Xena and Gabby dampdream.

But the Marxist assumptions – despite the acute insights of some of the Marxist analysis – have been rather decisively demonstrated to be insufficient, and perhaps hugely wide of the mark.

Still, the pervasive Marxist-Leninist ‘suspicion’ of somebody always ‘doing to’ somebody else has remained with Us: a usefully corrosive acid for burning away a burnished patina that covers a rotted base, but only under very careful and competently managed conditions … if the acid were simply sprayed or sloshed wholesale around the shop, baaaad things will happen.

Because at this point you’ve got the equivalent of, say, environmentalists claiming – for ‘tactical’ reasons – that horses were replaced by autos in the very early 20th century simply and totally because societies deliberately and conspiratorially wished to wreck the environment. (If you can imagine what it was like on hot summer days in cities, breathing in air greatly perfused with molecules of the dried-out dung of thousands of horses, or imagine that in the rain the ‘mud’ on those urban streets included vast quantities of liquefied horse-plop, you can see where back then those humans might have seen the gasoline engine as a decided improvement.)

Now at this point, Macleod slides into something that on its own is accurate enough indeed: “In every society, men were established as being ‘properly’ dominant over women, and the ‘owners’ and ‘protectors’ of their women and children”.

Well. There is surely no logical or rational justification for any sort of ‘essential’ dominance of the male over the female. Although rather than posit a conspiratorial motive (which is almost impossible to seriously sustain as the explanation for so universal and apparently spontaneously-developed folkways and societal structuring) you might imagine that since the woman was involved with ‘nurturing’, then the male would do the heavy-lifting and ‘protecting’ and the ‘hunting’; from which – as any military mind might see – would flow a certain responsibility and authority that the male would have to exercise.

But that still does not justify any sort of ‘essential’ male predominance over the female.

You might also ask how it could be that if one-half of the species actually did enforce a profoundly ‘unnatural’ arrangement on the other half, that somewhere back there in the time and space of history that arrangement would have collapsed on its own: after all, like trying to fly an aircraft backwards, a baaad idea that is contrary to profound realities usually manages to reveal its weakness rather clearly before too long. That such a thing did not happen leaves open the hardly outré possibility that the arrangement was not only not seen or perceived as contrary to profound natural rhythms, but was actually in sync with the profound natural rhythms.

After all, if something has been around – and universally – for at least thousands of years , you want to do a lot of careful thinking before you go and decide to have a ‘revolution’ to get rid of it. Especially if it means fundamentally altering arrangements that were put in place by others of your species, presumably with some amount of reason.

Instead, since a few decades ago , We have simply been bethumped with ‘emergencies’ and ‘revolutionary necessity’ and seen the government authority metastasize into what it has become today.

In fact, it’s a legitimate (and ominous) question now just how much the pols could repair even if they wanted to. Interesting times indeed.

Those profound natural rhythms make a lot more sense, given human realities and what is known of how evolution operates, than to posit a massive, species-wide millennia-long ‘conspiracy’ of one sex against another that had to have been established so far back toward the species’ beginnings that the purported perpetrators in those isolated and primitive groupings would have had not only no way of communicating to coordinate their conspiracy, but also wouldn’t have known of the existence of such ‘other groupings’ in the first place.

Like McGarrett on the old ‘Hawaii Five-0’ series, if you try to reconstruct the sequence of events according to the ‘story’ you have been given, and the scenario just doesn’t physically work out at the crime scene, then you’ve got to get Danno, Kono, and Chin and kick some tire.

And I am saying that to some not inconsiderable extent We have indeed been given a ‘story’.

So Macleod is right, I would say, when she says that “the absolute division between the two sexes, with the men completely dominant over the women” is not good.

But the weakness in the whole thing is in the quick slide over the monstrous questions: this “absolute division”, she says, “became so deeply entrenched in almost all human cultures that it continued in full strength after it was no longer a survival necessity”.

Well, how did it ‘become’ so deeply and widely entrenched? And why would it not have been resisted? And why, if it was so profoundly incompatible with essential human realities, did it remain robust for tens of thousands of years until – as the story goes – just 150 years ago? The feministical ‘conspiracy’ theory (so queasily Marxist-Leninist) is thoroughly impossible to maintain, given what would have had to have happened to make it possible.

And if men are so essentially and naturally ‘violent’, then why would modern women want to share nurturing duties with them? Why entrust the young to them? If the males are as inalterably predisposed to ‘violence’ as the story posits, then why insist that they be more deeply involved in nurturing and domestic chores?

Of course, if the ‘story’ is just that – a ‘story’ to provide some emotionally charged excuse or pretext or cover for simply making a grab for that bigger slice of the pie – then that would have some explanatory power: the ‘violence’ of males is only useful for somehow justifying the government authority and police power against them, but is not useful if it is raised in the context where it might obstruct the feministical grab for more pie.

Which starts to get into darkling, scheming and maneuvering of one interest group against another.

OK. That’s what politics often gets involved with, and what the skills of a democratic politics and the competence of a democratic Citizenry are able to deal with. But let’s not be deceived: this is a dynamic more properly classified as a Lebensraum** struggle, and absolutely not a civil-rights struggle along the lines of Martin Luther King and the American ‘walk on the dark side’ with race slavery.

Marx, Lenin, Goebbels – you have to start asking yourself if it’s no wonder that Our Constitutional ethos has been fraying so much; why that marvelous machinery of the Framers has suddenly seemed to inadequate and so ineffective. Worse, Macleod says it loud and proud: “But the established beliefs of society in the U.S. included the Constitution, which, when written and adopted by the founding fathers in 1789, codified and perpetuated what was then considered women’s natural and unchangeable subject status”.

Well. Yes, women were denied the vote in the Constitution. But then in 1920 women got the vote.

But this brings it all back to where the article started. Political equality and legal equality are not enough, apparently. Now, as best I can discern, the feministicals want the entire fabric of human societal and civilizational arrangements literally overturned.

And they want the government to do it, with its regulatory power and its police power.

And they want it done right now.

And they either think that it can be done without too much trouble and too many negative consequences, or else they are willing to ‘do whatever it takes’ – and have everybody else undergo the consequences.

And all of it on the basis of a conspiracy-theory that does not credibly correspond to the realities of human behavior, the historical realities as they are known, or the dynamics of societies and civilizations as they are known. Nor does it cohere as an explanation of both the historical development and the changes (the stunningly deep and wide changes) that are currently being demanded.

This is all, as I have said, very much the realm of a genuine political issue, where all Citizens of the modern American polis must participate in deliberation and decision, and some efficacious level of consensus.

But that is precisely what the feministicals have avoided. Instead they have limited their labors to the old Beltway game, merely to the tactical and ‘strategic’ concerns of maneuver and patching together the most convenient vote-paths for getting what they demand precisely without having to subject their entire agenda to wide and extended public scrutiny.

Conceptually, their ‘theory’ insists that a woman need not be burdened with ‘babies’ if she so wishes, yet must be given every consideration if she so wishes – while yet she need not be committed to a man and in any case should have a good job.

In the case of having children without the help of a mate, it would presumably be the State’s or Federal government’s responsibility to ‘nurture’ and ‘raise’ the children. Which shades frighteningly close to Mussolini’s insistence (at least for the militarily useful male babies) that the Fascist government would raise all the children, to ensure that they ‘got it’ as far as the Party ‘vision’ was concerned. This, surely, is a ‘forseeable’ consequence that should have required some very serious thought.

Nor is the Fascist concept of masculinity – glorying in violence and war – really a very desirable or capacious vision of what it means to be human. Though – ach! – it would come in handy for a nation that planned to do a lot of overseas military ‘stuff’. He didn’t look too much beyond that; which came back to bite him in the end. It bit him and his government to death.

The whole game-plan goes no further, no deeper, than the admittedly shrewd use of vote-hungry politicians and an American predilection to trust ‘stories’. It has undermined the strength of Our democratic politics, dangerously extended the police-power of the government, corrupted the integrity (always an ideal more than a permanent characteristic) of legislative process***, and generally created a divisive and almost paranoid schism among the citizens, male and female, that has profoundly weakened The People.

And after almost 40 years, they keep trying to run the same old game-plan, hoping that ‘this time’ it will ‘work’. Can you say Vietnam War?

Can you say Whoa?****

NOTES

*Check out http://www.ussliberty.org/ for a thorough collection of info and professional analysis.

**And I will not refrain from pointing out that the Goebbelsian panoply of propaganda techniques, adapted by the feministicals in the early 1970s, have proven themselves very apt for such a Lebensraum struggle. Which should come as no surprise, since that’s exactly what they were originally developed by that deformed genius to do.

***In this regard, one of the VAWA’s supporters wrote a revealing and verrry informative piece in the Yale Law Review. Her focus is entirely on the cleverness and industriously shrewd efforts to cobble together the ‘Law" for the thing. She evinces no interest in any larger or deeper concerns as to the foundations or consequences to the overall American ethos of the proposals she is working to get ‘passed’.

The same is true for a newly-published ‘history’ of feminism’s successes ("Equality: Women Shape American Law", by Fred Strebeigh) which, revealingly, I found not in the American history or Legal Studies section of a university bookstore, but in the ‘women’s studies’ section. It's a feel-good collection of 'dish' about the schemes and plotting involved in getting VAWA passed, with nobody giving serious thought as to consequences, except that they 'win'.

****I hope it’s clear now why I spend so much time on the various matters relevant to Ideological Feminism’s efforts. I support equality-feminism, such as that espoused by Jean Bethke Elshtain and Chrstina Hoff Sommers. And I also support the American Experiment, with its Constitution, its democratic politics, its separation of powers, its judicious balance between the Federal government and the States, and its utterly essentially role for The People. The overall goals of developing an efficacious respect for ‘women’ are laudable, and valuable and can only strengthen the American polity. But the thing has got to be done right or We’re only going to create vast and potentially lethal problems for that polity, and unnecessarily. And it’s already been going on for almost 40 years, so We have a lot to do.

And let’s be clear: if this game-plan is as contrary to profound human dynamics – individual as well as societal – as I suspect, then ‘women’ are going to suffer even more from its ‘success’.

And in the end, We are all going to wind up suffering and losing a great deal.

ADDENDUM

Let me sketch something here. The female is – not by patriarchal conspiracy but through the very focused workings of evolution – physically weaker than the male. (Do not even try to think that I am heading toward some ‘essentialist’ justification for male ‘dominance’, please.)

Consequently, even before a female encounters any experience of such superior male physical strength, she is equipped by evolution with a sensitivity in her amygdala: the abiding awareness of something more physically powerful than she is, and therefore a potential cause for concern, requiring an abiding (may I suggest ‘inborn’?) alertness, tinged with the awareness of potential interference and even physical danger. So far, so natural.

In a cultural situation where the concerns of females are more widely addressed – and since the feminist consciousness here this entails a political situation as well – this abiding awareness and alertness is going to be a factor that has to be taken into consideration in deliberations as to how to formulate national social policy and legal practice.

Matters here are complicated by the particularly political efforts of the more ideological and politically active feminists to define or spin this abiding awareness and alertness and sensitivity as ‘fear’, buttressed by ‘stories’ and advocacy-friendly ‘science’ and ‘statistics’ and ‘studies’ to the effect that males are all potentially – and most often actually – rampantly violent creatures. Vividly focusing on actual horror stories of male-on-female violence, and far more quietly expanding the definition of many classically violent terms such as ‘rape’ and ‘battering’ to include far lesser incidents of human dyadic interactions, the feminist lobbies (they prefer ‘advocacies’) effect a surge or groundswell or even stampede of popular acquiescence in increasingly ominous expansions of the government police power.

I think it is clear what some very forseeable consequences thus arise for Constitutional praxis, democratic politics, and the continued health of Our democracy in general. For if the government police power is increased to meet the ‘need’ for women feeling ‘safe’ and ‘secure’ – perhaps even to the point of ‘zero tolerance’ and thus to the point of the government totally eliminating inharmonious and violent dyadic experiences – then, since the ‘problem’ is based in an abiding predisposition of females to feel ‘something’ negative in regard to males, the government police power will need to expand continuously and even eternally.

Of course, this becomes a self-sustaining dynamic for lobbyists, which is about as close to ‘paradise’ as Beltway lobbyists can ever get.

More importantly, it results in an erosion of a sense of common identity among the citizenry, gender – more or less – against gender, which cannot but lead to the weakening of The People, which People is the ground of the entire Framing Constitutional vision and dynamic.

And a sempiternal expanding of government’s police power. Since ideological feminists – and they are politically the Beltway-anointed ‘representatives’ of all women – are agin’ marriage, family, and male-ness in general, then things aren’t going to be getting better, fundamentally.

And of course, in consequence of their agenda, the ideological-feminists at the same time increase the incidence of male children growing up without the benefit of a father who might help them master their capabilities and powers, including the evolutionarily-endowed capacity to exercise violence constructively and not inappropriately and destructively. So the very problem that ideological feminism seeks to solve will become increasingly unmanageable. Again, a case of pouring gasoline on a fire that you claim you want to extinguish.

Nobody is going to win here. Nor will it end well for anybody concerned. Especially if the very ethos of the American societal and political culture and the Framing vision are eroded to the point of collapse.

I am not claiming here to have a ‘trump’ insight. But the dynamic I limn here is one that has received far too insufficiently the attention it deserves.

And I add that it is insufficient to console Ourselves with the thought that what I call ‘ideological feminism’ is now a political phenomenon of the past, replaced by this or that next-Wave or Wavelet of ‘women’s thinking’ today. First, the laws passed (often still being expanded) in the later 1980s and the Clinton 1990s are very much on the books. Second, as Camille Paglia noted (I recall) in the Spring of 2008, the return of Hilary Clinton to the national stage has reinvigorated the ideological feminist cadres. Efforts to pass the ERA and to expand abortion-rights to the long-sought ‘abortion on demand’ option are still active variables in the national equation today.