I really want to believe that we can reverse the trajectory that we're currently on through peaceful means, be it voting or protesting or some sort of civil action. I do my best to post stories on here about people, men and women both, pushing back against this craziness. But every time I do, somebody comes back on me saying that protesting is useless, or that voting accomplishes nothing, and the thing is, you're probably right when you say that.

What a sad thing to read, even though I mostly agree.

Let me amend my statement: voting alone accomplishes nothing. You'll just get different people into office who will do the same thing. You have to change the incentives. That is very difficult to do when the elite is unified against you.

And yet... keep the faith, baby. Vasily Grossman and Martin Niemoeller did not give up under worse circumstances and with bleaker outlooks, and neither should we.

That's the real blackpill: the unprecedented period of peace and prosperity that we have enjoyed is coming to an end, and what will replace it will likely be a totalitarian hellhole in which the state employs its monopoly on violence to purge any resistance. Whether that regime lasts a few years or a few decades or longer, it will eventually collapse and what replaces that will be a period of anarchy and violence.

You are optimistic. Imagine the brutality of a Hitler and a Stalin, combined with a self-reproducing elite as we have today, which the Soviet Union lacked, and the totalitarian surveillance state that is possible. I am not sure we will ever break out of totalitarianism. Combined with the presence of atomic weapons, it will be impossible to displace the power using military force.

No matter what, we or our descendants are going to have to rebuild, possibly from scratch, some semblance of a cohesive society. When we do, we should try to avoid making some of the same mistakes next time around, and universal suffrage is one of them.

I fully concede that things have gone to utter shit under universal suffrage. But do you really think that things would be better if coal miners could not vote, and Mark Zuckerberg could? It was not universal suffrage that attempted to reintroduce racial discrimination in California. It was universal suffrage that stopped it.

I don't agree that enfranchising women was a replacement for a previous regime that had already collapsed. It was a concession that shouldn't have been made, and it weakened and undermined the foundations of a system that was, up to that point, working quite well. If we ever have the choice over whether or not to do that again, we should probably reconsider.

Let me phrase this differently. Only women voting would yield better results in 1930 than only men voting would in 2020.

Culture is king. Do not take your eye off the ball.