The issue here is that women rely on men to provide and protect them, and when they don't have that, they rely on the state for provision and protection. This is what sets the authoritarian system off. Women won't stop seeking provision and protection because it is an innate ordering of preferences by women to focus on those. The allure of freedom involves the allure of the benefits of agency. Men are going to be pre-disposed towards that agency, so the concept of limiting the power of the state to allow men to succeed is appealing to men, but only appealing to married women who want their husbands to succeed.
Women, on the other hand, will not be so driven in their agency to prefer liberty over security & provision. The most liberating thing a woman can do is have a good man in her life to provide and secure for her. At that point, she will then have the ability to build a family, a home, and a community (which will be her most meaningful work in life). But, that's a long hard road, and it only works if the project can be defended while it's being done.
Authoritarianism gives women the illusion of security and safety draped in a lie of accountability. In reality, a specific man is the best way a woman can have accountable safety and security.
It's a problem with liberal ideology. It's predicated upon individual rights and social norms of treating others as individuals. Thus it has no internally consistent grounding for excluding "those" people. This is why women eventually ended up with civic participation.
Liberalism is also hostile to social norms and expectations. It compels people to maximize "do what I want" leisure time and options and thus to attack things like the gendered expectations necessary to maintain families and even, for some, the expectation to work at all.
The dirty work necessary to maintain society still needs to be done so you end up with a fractured society wherein people are trying to offload the burdens onto others in order to endlessly "liberate" themselves. The dirty work never goes away so someone is always lacking "liberation."
It's a problem with liberal ideology. It's predicated upon individual rights and social norms of treating others as individuals. Thus it has no internally consistent grounding for excluding "those" people. This is why women eventually ended up with civic participation.
You bring up good points but at the end of the day I don't think this is a problem with liberalism itself, but rather the difference between a grounded application of liberal principles versus ungrounded idealism.
Voting rights in the USA used to be tied to property ownership. This supposedly disenfranchised many women because most women didn't own property at the time, but the rational basis for limiting voting rights to property owners was sound, and it should have remained that way. This was still liberalism, but it was liberalism grounded rationally to support the American system of government, taking into account people's personal investment in the system and the rights that correspond with that investment.
The problems arose when people began to argue that there should be no restrictions placed on voting in the name of equality. This is an idealistic notion but one not grounded in reality, and we can see the fallout of this blind idealism in the political pandering to non-contributors in society, since their vote is worth just as much as those who are actually contributing and invested in this country's future.
This ungrounded idealism is the root of the problem more so than the liberal principles themselves, because every ideology suffers the same problem if you unmoore it's principles from practical reality. This is the same problem that anarchy and communism struggle with; both sound great until you try to put them into practice.
Liberal principles themselves are ungrounded idealism. Equality is a myth. Private actors are more than capable of being tyrants, as even other iterations of liberalism recognized.
taking into account people's personal investment in the system and the rights that correspond with that investment.
George Soros has more investment in the system than you. Should he get more rights?
The way people use the word "equality" nowadays is several steps removed from the liberal principles of legal and political equality. The idea that all people should be equal in every way, in every context, was never part of liberalism.
Fun fact, the word "equality" doesn't even appear in the US Constitution.
George Soros has more investment in the system than you. Should he get more rights?
Yes, if the law were written that way, but it's not, and for good reason. The US Constitution was written to find balance between the tyranny of the many and the tyranny of the few. If someone was a citizen and owned property, they could vote (because they have a vested interest in the country), but they didn't scale the political influence of voters based on wealth either.
Liberalism is concerned with equal application of the law, not making everyone equal.
The dirty work necessary to maintain society still needs to be done so you end up with a fractured society wherein people are trying to offload the burdens onto others in order to endlessly "liberate" themselves. The dirty work never goes away so someone is always lacking "liberation."
This is the harsh lesson we should have collectively learned by 1970, as the cultural revolution was petering out..
Most of that isn't true. Liberalism is neither hostile to social norms nor social expectations. Liberalism only requires that the state is not the imposer of those social expectations by taking the place of god and morality, which it can't be.
Liberalism isn't trying to manifest a civil society and maintain it, it instead allows the civil society to exist without the state seeking to fundamentally destroy it.
Frankly, if you remove the state from imposing the elites moral standards, it means the population's own moral standards will be emergent.
The entire justification for limiting the state stems from it being considered a barrier to individual freedom. If you are seeking to maximize individual freedom, you inevitably end up conflicting with social norms.
Individual freedom from tyranny, not from existence. That's why Rousseau goes off into pure illiberalism when he starts screaming about even bodily constraints of the mind being a form of repression. Liberalism doesn't see gravity as oppression. Individual freedom is what allows you to morally order yourself in the society you are in. Meaning you'll end up co-operating with, or even building, social norms for you and your community. Liberalism allows you to actually engage in a moral order, rather than having a tyrant proscribe morality at the point of a gun, while himself abiding by no morals at all.
The issue here is that women rely on men to provide and protect them, and when they don't have that, they rely on the state for provision and protection. This is what sets the authoritarian system off. Women won't stop seeking provision and protection because it is an innate ordering of preferences by women to focus on those. The allure of freedom involves the allure of the benefits of agency. Men are going to be pre-disposed towards that agency, so the concept of limiting the power of the state to allow men to succeed is appealing to men, but only appealing to married women who want their husbands to succeed.
Women, on the other hand, will not be so driven in their agency to prefer liberty over security & provision. The most liberating thing a woman can do is have a good man in her life to provide and secure for her. At that point, she will then have the ability to build a family, a home, and a community (which will be her most meaningful work in life). But, that's a long hard road, and it only works if the project can be defended while it's being done.
Authoritarianism gives women the illusion of security and safety draped in a lie of accountability. In reality, a specific man is the best way a woman can have accountable safety and security.
It's a problem with liberal ideology. It's predicated upon individual rights and social norms of treating others as individuals. Thus it has no internally consistent grounding for excluding "those" people. This is why women eventually ended up with civic participation.
Liberalism is also hostile to social norms and expectations. It compels people to maximize "do what I want" leisure time and options and thus to attack things like the gendered expectations necessary to maintain families and even, for some, the expectation to work at all.
The dirty work necessary to maintain society still needs to be done so you end up with a fractured society wherein people are trying to offload the burdens onto others in order to endlessly "liberate" themselves. The dirty work never goes away so someone is always lacking "liberation."
You bring up good points but at the end of the day I don't think this is a problem with liberalism itself, but rather the difference between a grounded application of liberal principles versus ungrounded idealism.
Voting rights in the USA used to be tied to property ownership. This supposedly disenfranchised many women because most women didn't own property at the time, but the rational basis for limiting voting rights to property owners was sound, and it should have remained that way. This was still liberalism, but it was liberalism grounded rationally to support the American system of government, taking into account people's personal investment in the system and the rights that correspond with that investment.
The problems arose when people began to argue that there should be no restrictions placed on voting in the name of equality. This is an idealistic notion but one not grounded in reality, and we can see the fallout of this blind idealism in the political pandering to non-contributors in society, since their vote is worth just as much as those who are actually contributing and invested in this country's future.
This ungrounded idealism is the root of the problem more so than the liberal principles themselves, because every ideology suffers the same problem if you unmoore it's principles from practical reality. This is the same problem that anarchy and communism struggle with; both sound great until you try to put them into practice.
Liberal principles themselves are ungrounded idealism. Equality is a myth. Private actors are more than capable of being tyrants, as even other iterations of liberalism recognized.
George Soros has more investment in the system than you. Should he get more rights?
The way people use the word "equality" nowadays is several steps removed from the liberal principles of legal and political equality. The idea that all people should be equal in every way, in every context, was never part of liberalism.
Fun fact, the word "equality" doesn't even appear in the US Constitution.
Yes, if the law were written that way, but it's not, and for good reason. The US Constitution was written to find balance between the tyranny of the many and the tyranny of the few. If someone was a citizen and owned property, they could vote (because they have a vested interest in the country), but they didn't scale the political influence of voters based on wealth either.
Liberalism is concerned with equal application of the law, not making everyone equal.
This is the harsh lesson we should have collectively learned by 1970, as the cultural revolution was petering out..
Most of that isn't true. Liberalism is neither hostile to social norms nor social expectations. Liberalism only requires that the state is not the imposer of those social expectations by taking the place of god and morality, which it can't be.
Liberalism isn't trying to manifest a civil society and maintain it, it instead allows the civil society to exist without the state seeking to fundamentally destroy it.
Frankly, if you remove the state from imposing the elites moral standards, it means the population's own moral standards will be emergent.
The entire justification for limiting the state stems from it being considered a barrier to individual freedom. If you are seeking to maximize individual freedom, you inevitably end up conflicting with social norms.
Individual freedom from tyranny, not from existence. That's why Rousseau goes off into pure illiberalism when he starts screaming about even bodily constraints of the mind being a form of repression. Liberalism doesn't see gravity as oppression. Individual freedom is what allows you to morally order yourself in the society you are in. Meaning you'll end up co-operating with, or even building, social norms for you and your community. Liberalism allows you to actually engage in a moral order, rather than having a tyrant proscribe morality at the point of a gun, while himself abiding by no morals at all.
I think you nailed it. Well said.