* The decline in voter turnout has several explanations, all of which get back to one central point: the dilution and degradation of the civic sphere. Sailer and the others hint at some of the bellwethers; to distill them down, we may identify:
1. A rapid expansion of the franchise. Obviously easing immigration and citizenship requirements as well as enfranchising women and lowering the emancipation age would create a citizenry more diverse not only in age, color and sex, but also in ideas and in levels of cognition. Not surprising that many of them would fail (through their own fault or otherwise) to find a civic proposition that spoke to them.
2. The dissolution of the family as the cornerstone social unit, upon which larger geographically-based communities can be erected. The expansion of outside and fast-stimulus entertainment is not unrelated. The resulting breakdown in individual and group discipline makes it more difficult to pursue a constructive common agenda.
* Sailer: In America it was known as the Australian Ballot. It spread across the U.S. between 1888 and 1891. So the effect of secret ballots wasn’t immediate, but, yeah, it may have changed the culture with an impact lagging by about a decade and a half.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the secret ballot was deemed racist in the future and the demand grows that everybody vote via Facebook so their votes become part of their Permanent Record and they can be fired for voting for the wrong guy.
* The Brendan Eich affair foreshadowed the future. Ultimately there is no meaningful distinction between donating to a political group encouraging people to vote for a proposition, and actually voting for it.
If we can’t beat the SJWs with our game we have to beat them at theirs. Right-leaning folks have been very timid in adopting the tactics of the left, either due to ignorance of the situation on the ground, or a simple distaste for distasteful things. But taking the high ground is not always the wisest action. Dishonorable people should not be treated honorably.
* As this article observes, one of the anti-suffragette arguments was that the expansion of the franchise to women would have a deleterious effect on democracy, as each individual vote was devalued, as women were less motivated to vote (the fact that more women than men vote now may reflect something of the way that the realm of politics has been redefined since universal suffrage), as the electorate became more fickle, uninformed, and disengaged, as politics became more prone to mass advertising, and as the electorate became a less independent body of persons, encouraging a more paternalistic relationship between government and the electorate more generally. It seems to me that these concerns were not without some warrant. More generally, changing the franchise changes the character of the relationship between government and the people. It can raise levels of voter apathy. It can strengthen or weaken the civic structures of political engagement. The more diverse the electorate becomes, for instance, the harder it is for civic structures and regular forms of sociality to represent the immediacy of political discourse.
* Women have the vote. None of this will ever change as long as that’s the case. Women should never have been given the franchise, but perhaps that’s an inevitable characteristic of democracy: politicians endlessly expand the franchise until it’s meaningless.
Sounds harsh, but it’s reality. Makes me pretty angry to see Pope Francis paying lip service to feminism while keeping women out of authority in the Catholic Church. Abject hypocrisy. Make women priests and bishops and put them in charge of the Church and see how long it lasts!
Same goes for the elites. If I could craft a suitable punishment for them for what they’ve done to us, it would be to put their wives and lovers in a position of total supremacy over them and all their possessions. That’s what they’ve done to us, after all, to the severe detriment of our women and children I might add.
