The Democrats have become the Party of feminine cruelty

They started as the Party of masculine brutality

…Meanwhile, a policy regime is running out of puff.

The US Democratic Party—founded in 1828—claims to be the oldest political Party in the world. While formally true, the UK’s Conservative Party—founded in 1834–was built from the Tories, which date back to 1678.

The Democrats were the Party of the slave-owning plantation elite, and then of Southern Jim Crow segregation. It was never just the Party of those things, but they were large parts of its history.

The Jacksonian Democrats were also very much a Party for the dispossession of the Amerindians. Then again, so were the Northern Yankees. In the end, Amerindians fought more for the losing side in the American Civil War, much as they did for the losing side in the American War of Independence. The Antebellum Democrats also tended to favour US territorial expansion, so were the foreign intervention Party.

Slavery is classic masculine brutality. Slavery is built on the twin humiliations of physical brutality and sexual exploitation.

[This being the modern world, I now have to state the obvious. Many women were perfectly happy to go along with the regime of male-typical brutality, just as many men were repelled and appalled by it. Similarly, in contemporary regimes of female-typical cruelty, many men are happy to go along with such, while many women are repelled and appalled. Insert your own “not alls”.]

The slavery of the Antebellum South has left a continuing legacy. One is that the churn of Transatlantic transportation and commerce in people separated the slaves from their cultural heritages. Another is that it was a process of negative selection—selecting for folk of more physical robustness but lower executive function—through who was enslaved (and survived the Atlantic passage). The experience of slavery itself was also a process of negative cultural selection—selecting against trust, a sense of personal agency, and in favour of an in-the-moment hedonism.

All things considered—and despite the oppressions of Jim Crow—there was a lot of triumph in the post-slavery history of the former slaves and their descendants. The level of literacy shot up, there was considerable valuing of education and they developed a high level of employment and intact families. All this, while there was systematic under-policing of their communities.

The Sexual (and social) Revolution of the 1960s undermined a great deal of that social achievement. In part as consequence, the triumph of the civil rights movement failed to lead to the equalisation of social outcomes between groups that had been anticipated.

The adoption of equalitarianism—the doctrine all human groups had equal distribution of capacities, and equally successful sets of life strategies—meant that that failures to achieve equal outcomes had to have maleficent causes. In particular, racism—either overt or through the invisible sociological gremlins of “disparate impact” and “structural racism”—became the default explanation among liberal-progressives for the failure of outcomes to equalise across “races”. African-Americans became a sacred “marginalised”/“oppressed” group, against whose claims no trade-offs were permitted (because sacred).

This in turn meant that liberal-progressives were willing adopters of variations on the Marxian oppressed/oppressor template that flowed from Critical Theory. The notion of various demiurgic social Powers—white supremacy, patriarchy, cis-heteronormativity…—fulfilled the role of imprisoning social demiurge that Marx originally assigned to the bourgeoisie.

The various manifestations of Critical Social Justice blended together the (secularised) gnostic notion of living in an all-encompassing (social) prison that stopped people realising their true social nature with the Hermetic notion of hidden knowledge, the ability to see the oppressive social truth that others could not.

Given it also demanded people with such profound understanding be granted the social leverage to fulfil their trumping moral purpose, the various updatings of Marx’s metaphysical template—bound together through the notion of intersectionality—became the perfect secular faith for an expanding professional/managerial class in increasingly bureaucratised societies. Hence the evolution—in networked, cancel culture versions, rather than centrally-directed, mass-murdering versions—of the same mechanisms of social control (DEI commissars, Zhdanovism in arts and entertainment, genderwoo Lysenkoism) as in Marxist tyrannies.

There is nothing that expands the ambit of bureaucratic action—while undermining accountability—as well as some trumping moral project. The Activist’s Fallacy can be wielded against any attempt to force accountability.

We are doing X for Y moral purpose.

You are criticising X.

Therefore,

You are against Y.

This is more effective when it’s wielded on behalf of some sacralised identity group, against whose claims no trade-offs are permitted (because sacred).

The power of belief—particularly networked, so mutually reinforcing, belief—to excuse or enable vile actions should never be underestimated. Someone who later became a dissident wrote of himself—as a young Communist activist in the 1930s—taking food from literally starving families during the Holodomor because he and the other activists were convinced they were building a transformative future.

The (now sacked) FEMA supervisor who directed staff not to help Trump voters in the aftermath of a destructive hurricane displays exactly the same mentality. This is also how the hormonal and surgical mutilation and sterilisation of minors gets passed off as “care” and “compassion”.

Cruelty and aggression in a sexually dimorphic species

The clear, and extensive, empirical evidence that there are identifiable statistical differences between male and female cognitive traits and behaviour patterns does not require some strong notion of “hard wired” differences in male and female human brains. On the contrary, that is not what the various patterns indicate.

All the observable statistical differences require is that we be embodied strategic actors with biologically different bodies and hormonal patterns. So, with that throat-clearing—necessary in an age where, if you criticise men, it’s feminism, and if you criticise women, it’s misogyny—there are differences between more male-typical aggression and brutality and more female-typical aggression and cruelty.

That a lot of modern left-progressivism is strongly female—even apart from the gender gap in voting—is something many folk have observed. Josh Slocum has drawn attention to how much modern left-progressivism is built around the identifiable archetype of the scold or nag. Evolutionary social scientist Gad Saad has described transing one’s child as a form of Munchausen by proxy. Michael Malice—bad man that he is—refers to Affluent White Female Liberals (AWFLs) and how a Trans child wins for their mother the left-progressive (i.e. intersectional) status lottery. (See also.)

Psychologist Jordan Peterson has discussed the social and political implications of the archetypal devouring mother, particularly among childless women. These include infantilising everything, over-identifying predators, seeing disagreement as predation, and punishing dissent as if it were predation.

The soaring increase in prejudice terms (racism, sexism, transphobia, etc.) in scholarly abstracts corresponds quite directly with the sharply declining public standing of higher education in the US. The similar surging use of those terms in mainstream media coincides with the collapse of US mainstream media audiences.

These prejudice terms do not correspond to trends in wider society. On the contrary, what they represent is an increase in the use of terms of moral abuse to elevate one’s own status and de-legitimise dissent and disagreement. Hence we get the burgeoning phenomenon of the hate crime hoax, as demand for bigotry greatly exceeds the supply.

It’s also led to a situation where almost two-thirds of Americans report they have political views they are afraid to share. This naturally leads to a lot of preference falsification—a problem for pollsters, among others. It also leads to a lot of resentment, which a media-savvy politician can tap.

When we look at mobbing and shunning, and the dynamics of cancel culture, we can see patterns—now enabled and facilitated by social media—that first manifested in their modern form in the women’s movement in the 1960s and 1970s. The organised, networked form of targeting folk for what they say—attempting to destroy reputations, careers, livelihoods—was then pioneered by activists claiming to operate on behalf of Jewish communities. (The hostility this activism generated in countries without the First Amendment has quite a lot to do with why Jews find themselves increasingly friendless now they have lost cultural power.)

What women and Jews have in common is a vision of themselves as peaceful people. It is self-delusion: there is nothing peaceful about attempting to systematically hound people, to deny them a voice, to seek to destroy their careers, reputations, livelihoods—particularly not for things they merely said.

While humans in general have considerable capacity for self-deception, a key feature of both female aggression and female cruelty is that it typically cannot see itself. This flows directly from women being the physically weaker sex with—if they were to have any genetic legacy—bubs in tow. Aggression (and cruelty) had to be hidden to avoid provoking retaliation to which they were very vulnerable.

Moreover, only a fraction of our cognition is conscious. To lie consciously requires a lot of cognitive effort. The right sort of self-deception enables much more cognitively-coherent sincerity in one’s actions. The way to engage in aggression and cruelty without it seeming to be such—even to oneself—is to dress it up as moral concern, as social concern. Intensifying the aggression—and the cruelty—requires wielding the weapon of stigma.

Wielding moral/social concern as a form of aggression in such ways means that it is much more likely to be effective. It is also much easier for it to spill over into cruelty. This self-deception is much of the basis of the claim that cancel culture does not exist: it is just moral concern, just social concern.

Prestige, propriety, stigma and devoted agents

Prestige is status and admiration: it comes from doing things which are clever, skilled, or risky. It mobilises status as social currency to reward—and so encourage—folk to engage in activities which generate positive externalities: actions that benefit third parties, such as strengthening social connections and capacities.

Propriety is status and admiration: it comes here from adhering to wider social norms. It is hard to gain propriety. It’s much easier to lose it. The reverse of propriety is stigma: the loss of status from failure to adhere to proper behaviour. It mobilises negative status to discourage folk from engaging in activities with negative externalities: actions that harm third parties, such as weakening social connections and capacities.

Prestige has tended to be male: those who can’t get pregnant and don’t have bubs in tow can far more readily engage in the sort of obsessive risk-taking that generates prestige. Propriety—and particularly stigmatising—tends to be more female. This is so whether from seeking social safety, as a safer weapon than overt aggression, or as a better cover for cruelty. (Women are every bit as likely as men to be violent or abusive to those weaker than themselves.)

Prestige and propriety are incredibly useful social mechanisms for a species with such biologically expensive children requiring cooperative subsistence and reproduction strategies. These strategies transfer risks away from, and resources to, childrearing.

What was also useful was religious sensibility. A sense of the divine generated a shared framework of ultimate authority. Religious sensibility also generates a sense of the sacred: the realm against, or at least outside of which, trade-offs are not accepted. This then provides a resilient structure for social order—remembering that, in biological systems, efficiency serves resilience.

The sense of the sacred creates what Scott Atran and his colleagues call devoted agents. That is, folk who do not take an instrumentally rational approach to certain matters. Rather, devoted agents stubbornly resist trade-offs against things deemed sacred, to the advantage of group cohesion.

The way non-religious folk typically fail to understand religious folk, is that they fail to understand having a realm of the sacred against which one will not accept trade-offs: at least, not from outside the realm of the sacred. One of the many ways in which left-progressivism can act as a political or secular religion is in generating zealots. Zealots are notorious as both products of—and drivers for—religion becoming cruel and intolerant.

A moral caste system

One of the most obvious similarities between the masculine brutality of past Democratic Party and the feminine cruelty of present Democratic Party is both of them operate a moral caste system. In the past, it was a racial moral caste system, according to a black-white binary, which nevertheless had implicit gradings within both races.

The current moral caste system of intersectionality is more complex. Indeed, it is positively Brahmin in its complexity.

Like all moral caste systems, it is a structure of presumptive deferral. The intersectionality moral caste system operates according to oppressed/oppressor, marginalised/dominant pairs. Doctrinal adherence gives you extra credit, while doctrinal heresy or blasphemy casts you out. This is how Larry Elder famously became the “black face of white supremacy”. Meanwhile, Peter Thiel was not gay because he supported Donald Trump.

If a group is sacred, their claims cannot be traded-off. Others must give way. Trans are sacred, so women must defer to them.

Women are marginalised compared to men, so men must defer to them. It is fine to celebrate appointing a woman to whatever, not so to celebrate appointing a man. It is fine for some social good to be disproportionately female, it is a moral blot if some social good is disproportionately male. Thus, the publishing industry being overwhelmingly female is fine, STEM being predominantly male is not.

The most obvious cruelty in the intersectional moral caste system is in its relentless use of stigma. To mob someone, to attempt to destroy their reputation, livelihood, career—because they said something that you disagree with—is moralised cruelty. To shame, shun, belittle, someone because they have a different perspective, different concerns, to you, and then to do so at scale, is cruel. To seek to cut people off from their most valued connections, is cruel. (The act of official cruelty during Covid that folk most often cite is people dying alone, isolated from friends and family who were banned from being with them.)

The shaming and shunning, the belittling, the in-your-face nagging and scolding: this is classic feminine cruelty. It has elements of infantilising—dissenters are moral, cognitive and psychological inferiors to be talked down to. It has elements of overblown empathy and emotionalism—you have bad emotions, you are not deferring correctly. It has elements of misidentified predator—you are being a hateful bigot, motivated by maleficent intentions, your speech is violent, it makes me unsafe.

The oppressed/oppressor, the marginalised/dominant template provides the moralising structure for such cruelty. The invocation of that held to be sacred is no stop to the cruelty. On the contrary, it justifies and intensifies it. Devoted agents can be cruel, indeed brutal, agents.

One of the astonishing features of the first operation of the original, Marxist, version of the oppressed/oppressor template in the Soviet Union was the incredible cruelty the operatives of the regime felt entitled to engage in, which extended to vicious and murderous physical cruelty.

The contemporary version of the updated template stops at the emotional, social-connection, social-standing level. It is still moralised cruelty.

Underlying all this is entitlement. We feel entitled to police all parts of your language, even in your private communications. We feel entitled to say what concerns are, and are not, legitimate. We feel entitled to police your information sources. We feel entitled to police your expression of views. We feel entitled to tell you what is, or is not, a legitimate way to vote. We feel entitled to invoke new sins, and to overturn long-established categories—;while excusing actual crimes.

What makes all this both disorienting and infuriating is how it’s all parsed in the language of ostentatious compassion. This is made worse because those involved are not able to see themselves. Which is—when it comes to cruelty and aggression—particularly (but not only) feminine.

The stupidity of arrogance is an elite-besetting sin down the ages. Covering such in the ostentatious compassion of “good feels” is more novel.

Policy regime in decay

We are also witnessing a policy regime run out of puff as it confronts problems for which it lacks useful tools. Just as the social democratic policy regime of 1945-1973 broke down in the stagflation of the 1970s and a flattening of productivity growth, so the neoliberal policy regime of c.1980-2016 is breaking down under the pressures of migration, globalisation, bureaucratisation, feminisation of discourse and institutions, and collapsing fertility.

The fundamental idea of the 1945-1973 social democratic policy regime was that the existence of a developed society generated unearned benefits, so it was proper for the state to tax—or otherwise capture—those benefits and distribute them more evenly. The fundamental idea of the neoliberal policy regime is that more transactions are good—as that means more gains from trade. Transaction costs should therefore be reduced so that there are fewer frictions to inhibit transacting. By this logic, migration is inherently positive, as it means more transactors, more gains from trade.

The problem is that migration can increase transaction frictions. Cultural diversity makes social coordination harder and increases points of potential social friction, including competition for positional goods. Migration can also degrade people’s locality-based social capital.¹ It can suppress wages and productivity growth through capital becoming relatively more scarce than labour. Migration also directly immiserates people when it means population grows faster than housing supply, driving up rents.

Having lots of housing market entrants who are not voters encourages restrictive zoning laws. Driving up land values increases the costs of infrastructure, and undermines the tax revenue benefit of providing infrastructure, while social fracturing makes it harder to get things built.

The notion that institutions and organisations work independently of the culture of people in them is flatly wrong. The work of Kenneth Pollack, from his PhD dissertation to Armies of Sand (2019), demonstrates that vividly.

People are not utility-maximising, complete-rationality, socially-interchangeable widgets. They are agents of bounded rationality with persistent cultures pursuing different bundles of life-strategies. The notion of humans as socially-interchangeable widgets generated the notion—what the UN was pleased to call replacement migration—of importing people to replace the children who were not being born.

It turns out—especially if migrants are from highly clannish cultures that have been marrying their cousins for 1400 years, and are generally low skill—they can be a net drain on the fisc. Making the fiscal situation of one’s welfare state worse via migration policies seems an act of remarkable fiscal incompetence on the part of Western European states. But academic economists treating people as interchangeable social widgets provided cover for such incompetence.

Moreover, it is not in the interest of the welfare state apparat to solve or reduce social dysfunction but to sustain and increase it, thereby increasing access to resources and the salience of their policy area. This is how we see the processes of social selection working, remembering that we Homo sapiens are every bit capable of the required levels of moralised self-deception.²

The policy point of neoliberalism was to create fiscally-sustainable welfare states. False claims about migrants and migration, along with failures to grapple with the flaws of bureaucracy, and ludicrous over-investment in higher education—which, among other effects, has led cultural conflicts to overwhelm attention to economic policy—have led to grotesque failure.

The neoliberal elevation of efficiency over economic—and other forms of—resilience, including resilience-through-connections, creates increasing points of vulnerability and alienation in social and economic systems. All this has led to working-class voters to shift towards populist parties that are willing to elevate citizenship—and the security of common heritage—over the corrosive effects of migration.

Destructively divisive entitlement

The notion that the Republicans are the Party of the middle class and the Democrats are the Party of everyone else does not describe contemporary US politics.

Source.

Under Trump, the Republicans are reverting to what they were in the 1850s: a protectionist party resting on working-class votes mobilising against an exploitive and contemptuous elite. In a case of history rhyming but not repeating, the original Republican Party was against an elite of masculine brutality; it is now against one of feminine cruelty.

Isn’t this a spiralled-up new version of US politics as it was in the lead-up to the American Civil War? Not a repeating, but a powerful rhyming? Yes, it absolutely is. This in a situation where, just as mass migration in the lead-up to 1860 fractured the American Republic along its fault-line of slavery,³ mass migration is nowadays fracturing the American Republic along its metro/provincial and college educated/non college-educated fault-lines.⁴

The politics of cruelty are the politics of entitlement: both over and against the choices of others. When the election of Abraham Lincoln as US President threatened to create and empower the coalition seen as an existential threat—between the slaves and the “masterless men”, the “poor white trash”—the then practitioners of the politics of masculine cruelty felt entitled to reject the act of democratic choice that was the1860 Presidential election.

A similar wave of rage and entitlement is being played out against the act of democratic choice of the 2024 US Presidential Election. Like the politics of brutality, the politics of cruelty is showing itself to the politics of entitlement both over and against the choices of others. This goes beyond the embracing of the politics of censorship—of “words are violence”, of “silence is violence”, of the censoring in the name of blocking “dis- mis- and mal-” information. It extends to rage and contempt at those who “chose wrongly”, who “chose vilely”.

From The 1619 Project to attacking the US Constitution, the politics of feminine cruelty has shown itself to be very willing to attack what holds the remarkably diverse country that is the US together.⁵

Source

Their ultimately narcissistic rage is intense. Their politics previously burnt US cities down in the cause of the lie of murderous police racism. If the liberal-progressive reaction is somewhat less feral than it was in 2016, this is down to decisive electoral defeat (both houses, the electoral college, the popular vote) and perhaps, too, a dim awareness of rhetorical failure.

The mid C19th politics of masculine cruelty was a politics of honour. Shifting to a military choice, a warrior choice, came readily to them. The C21st politics of feminine cruelty? A shift to some mobilised violence seems less of a natural option. But the possibility for it to lead somewhere destructively ugly is still there.

——

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1. A 2012 study, co-authored by someone since honoured with a Nobel memorial in Economics, manages to shoe-horn in a term—compositional amenity—as a belittling “explanation” of its results while completely failing to notice that what folk covered by the study were actually complaining about was the degrading/dilution of their local social capital (a term that appears nowhere in the paper). But there are few things that are more appealing to contemporary academe than sneering at the concerns of working class folk, especially working class men, especially about migration. Conversely, this 2010 study (published in 2013) found that strong local social capital led to greater political accountability. The appeal of migration to the political class becomes less surprising.

2. This is how we get nutrition guidelines not grounded in good science and which do not make any evolutionary sense. As, however, mechanisms for degrading the metabolic health of society—allowing our collective ill-health to be colonised by the public health apparatus—they make perfect functional sense. Similarly, the policy responses to Covid made little scientific sense, but the one-size-fits-all policies were simplifying ways of maximising the reach of the authority of public health apparats. In the race of life, back self-interest, it’s the only horse that’s trying.

3. The movement of Palestinians into Lebanon fractured that country along its ethno-religious fault-lines, leading to the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990), having previously provoked a brief civil war in Jordan (1970-71). This record, along with Palestinians siding with Saddam Hussein when he evaded Kuwait—leading to the Kuwaitis expelling Palestinians after the War—is why no Arab country will take Palestinian refugees.

4. The movement of Germanic peoples into the Western Roman Empire fractured it along the fault-lines of the centralising bureaucracy versus local (and localised) interests.

5. If Israel is illegitimate because it is a “settler-colonial state”, then the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, Mexico, Guyana, Argentina—all the states of the Americas and Antipodes—must also be illegitimate, as—unlike Israel, which is mostly a refugee state—they are settler-colonial states. Then again, if you go back far enough, so are all Arab states outside the Arabian peninsula, so is Turkey, so is Thailand, so is Japan, etc.