Let the woman drive!

Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y.

If you have ever held a position with decision-making authority or even driven a car with multiple passengers, then you are surely familiar with the irritation of the backseat driver. The backseat driver likes nothing better than to issue an incessant stream of orders, directions and commands to the driver, so long as he is safe from ever being held responsible for the consequences of the actions that result from them.

For decades, women have complained that they were being unfairly oppressed, deprived of the vote and of a voice in governance. This complaint was not unfounded, as they were most certainly deprived of both. But the significant point is not whether women were deprived of political influence or not, but whether they were wrongly deprived of it.

It is an interesting fact that many of those who believe solely in the material and empirical evidence nevertheless subscribe to a strange belief in an abstract notion of equality that is entirely contradicted by observation, both scientific and casual. Once the notion that all men are created equal has been rejected on the grounds that men are not created and that the immaterial does not exist, then what is the rational basis for equality?

There is none. One cannot measure equality, weigh it or taste it. In the material sense – which we are told is the only one that exists – two human beings cannot be compared in detail without constructing a massive compendium of near complete inequality. Even the current doctrine of evolution insists on fundamental inequality at the cellular level; at any given moment, every human being is either more highly evolved or less evolved than the human beings around him in terms of the genetic mutations that are the basis of evolutionary speciation. Some of us must be, in the immortal words of Rob Zombie, more human than human. And even in the very rare case of genetically identical twins, the equal are quickly rendered unequal by the environmental factors which shape them over time.

Modern democracy not only does not require that every individual possess a voice in government, it specifically denies the principle. The technology for direct democracy is readily available, however, the West continues to subscribe to a form of representative democracy specifically in order to prevent the perfect will of all the people from being realized. Even this limited form of democracy is further curtailed by unelected elites such as the Supreme Court in the United States or the European Commission in the European Union, for the presumed good of those who cannot be trusted to make their own political decisions. There is, therefore, centuries of precedent for denying political influence to whole classes of citizens who cannot be trusted to exercise it with discretion.

I have been one of the very few retrogradists openly calling for the elimination of women’s suffrage in the interest of human liberty; besides Ann Coulter, I am unaware of any other reasonably popular columnist who is willing to publicly state such an iconoclastic position. However, once Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., is elected president with the benefit of a democratic Senate and House of Representatives, I expect that it will not be long before there are other voices joining the small choir of the inequalitarians in defense of freedom, liberty and human dignity.

America’s second president, John Adams, informed his wife that women would not be permitted to vote due to their predilection for what he described as the “tyranny of the petticoat”. Like most men over the age of 30, he was familiar with the dictatorial manner in which most women exercise whatever authority they possess; anyone who has ever heard a woman speaking to an adult in a manner better suited to small children will understand what Adams was referring to.

If one considers the tremendous violations of human liberty that have taken place since the women’s suffrage movement finally achieved success, if one thinks of the smoking bans and drinking prohibitions and hair-dressing licenses and gun registrations and then recalls that all of this has taken place when women were merely influencing the male politicians they helped elect, one may perhaps have the barest inkling of what a female-run government is likely to inflict on the citizenry. The intense public debates about acceptable cleavage that we are currently enjoying in the present campaign is merely the nipple on the tip of a very large and frigid iceberg.

The best way to shut up a backseat driver once and for all is to turn the wheel over to him and force him to live with the consequences of his own decisions. (Of course, one would do well to buckle one’s seatbelt in the interest of surviving the inevitable crash.) But it is not necessary, as Lenin advised, to accentuate the contradictions. I am supremely confident that President Rodham will show herself to be more than capable of doing her utmost on the inequalitarians’ behalf.

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