I put up another post yesterday about another academic's blog, in which he got in trouble for diminishing rape. Republican. Why? Rape is a partisan issue.
Todd Akin. Richard Mourdock. There's a record here.
Yes, Akin, Mourdock, and Langbert are men. Joni Ernst and Deb Fischer are women. And Susan Collins is a woman. I'll get back to her. And I'll keep coming back to her.
There is a common strain of thought among a certain type of feminist that if you put more women in power, less bad shit happens. My response is, really? Women like Joni Ernst?
Lord Acton. Still right. Always has been, always will be. Put anyone in a position of power, and the probability of abuse is high. With men, there is a relatively higher likelihood that the abuse will take the form of sexual harassment or assault, but that's still just probabilistic. If you aren't steeped in academic news, you may not be aware of a reprehensible shitbag named Avital Ronell. Oh, and she's a feminist too! Yeah, I'm gonna earn the "unmutual" title today. She abused her power and tried to take advantage of a male student, and... Go read about it. And of course, her University has tried to protect her, because that's what power structures do. They act in corrupt ways to protect abusers. What, you thought they'd crack down on her because she's a woman? Boy's club, or something?Nope. It's about power. It always is. Give people power, and they abuse it. Then, power structures act in corrupt ways to protect themselves. Men, women, doesn't matter. Lord Acton is still right. And when it isn't sexual, it's another form of abuse. Give people power, and they abuse it.
Power. That's all. Rape is really about power anyway.
That in mind, what is conservatism? It is really hard to define, but here's how I have been defining it, for a few years. Preservation of "traditional" power structures. That means employers are favored over employees. Whites over minorities. Men over women, and so forth. Every backlash you see, from the 1994 "angry white men" to the "Tea Party" to Trumpism can be described as the fear of loss of privilege associated with this. Even the women within conservatism are almost always white because conservatism is a white movement. It is, essentially right now, a white power movement, and David Duke's endorsement of Donald Trump, Trump's behavior regarding Charlottesville, the evisceration of the Voting Rights Act, and so forth just demonstrate over and over again the racial animosity that explain why, at the individual level, racial animus was the best statistical predictor of support for Trump in 2016. Yes, there are plenty of Republican women, and conservative-leaning women. They're white, and if they have been raped before... someone other than me is better suited to comment.
The definition of conservatism I am using here is one that should be contrasted with the fact that, last year, I wrote an extended series bemoaning the death of "classical conservatism." I'm not a PC guy (although, technically, I graduated from "Pomona College"), I bash the left where appropriate, and I think that the country is in desperate need of true "classical conservatism." The impulse that says "stop and think before you act, you arrogant prick!" However, that's not the Republican Party now, and that's not conservatism now. The Republican Party right now is a party that simply accepts rape as either male prerogative or denies its occurrence by claiming that women are just a bunch o' liars.
If you go on youtube right now, you can easily find clips of Trump supporters saying they don't care if Kavanaugh did it, and it's no big deal. The Langbert blog I linked above is to a fucking academic blog that diminished the rape accusations against Kavanaugh. This is the GOP. Ask the base, and a majority said that even if Kavanaugh did it, confirm him. They don't care about rape. Why not? The party is, at its base, indifferent at best to rape. Preservation of traditional power structures. That means men over women.
The politicians can't say publicly what the base says in response to survey questions, so they have to tell a bunch of transparent lies, and pretend that Kavanaugh is innocent. Remember, they also have to appeal to independent voters rather than just their psychopathically evil base, and they can't do that if they admit, publicly, that they don't care about rape, which their base empirically does in response to survey questions. This isn't me, some lefty academic, casting aspersions in a blog. This is them casting aspersions on themselves by responding to survey questions telling us that they don't give a flying fuck about rape.
Hence, you look at the politicians, and how they vote, and guess what predicts votes on matters related to rape? Party. Gender? My statistics program couldn't estimate a model. The model wouldn't "converge," in "maximum likelihood estimation" terminology. Why not? Party was doing too much of the work, and if all you have to try to make the argument that gender has any role at all to play at the congressional level is the two-observation set of Murkowski and Manchin, that ain't enough.
So, let's address them briefly. Throughout this process, the one Republican I have said, repeatedly, might be the lone dissenter with the backbone to stand up to Kavanaugh and Trump was Murkowski. I doubted that she would because she would face what I called a "why bother" problem, not casting a deciding vote, but all along, I pointed to her as the one potential GOP dissenter. She surprised me, and I didn't think she was likely to do it, but I carved her out as a possibility. Yes, she is a woman. She is also a "moderate." She is also the most fearless of the Republicans in Congress, as I wrote during the healthcare debates. Why? In 2010, she lost a primary to a knuckle-dragging teabagger named Joe Miller. So, she ran as an independent. A write-in. And beat his loser ass back to the backwoods of Alaska where his loser ass belongs. Scaring Lisa Murkowski is hard. Also, she hates Sarah Palin. Why? Palin/Murkowski family stuff, and granted, that's not directly relevant, but anyone who hates Sarah Palin kind of gets some credit, right? There has been some speculation about her reasoning regarding domestic violence in Alaska, Native opinion, etc., but I never factored that in. Murkowski was just the one with a fucking backbone and the tiniest glimmer of a conscience. Not a lot, but more than the rest of the GOP delegation combined. Still, she's just one. We, in the business of social science don't hang our hats on one case. I look lousy in hats anyway. Or... lousier.
Then, there's Joe Manchin. Yes, he's a man. He's also from West Virginia. A hardcore Republican state. His voting patterns are, not surprisingly, rather different from Elizabeth Warren. Or, Sherrod Brown, Ohio not exactly being Taxachusetts. His most famous campaign tactic was to take copies of liberal bills, and show himself pulling out some big-ass rifles, and shooting them. Joe Manchin regularly votes with the GOP. Joe Manchin crossing party lines is a regular thing. Now, could you make the case that Joe Manchin is trying to show you how big his dick is with those rifles? Sure. (In other words, small penis, and I write this as a noted gun control skeptic.) Might you construct some sort of gender argument? Again, sure. Note that small penis implied by his desire to show you his big, big gun. But now you have at most two cases that there is anything more than party, and in both cases, even the gender argument is less than clear because there is so much else going on. After all, for Joe Manchin, the fact that West Virginia is such a hardcore GOP state means I can still call this party. He is giving his pro-rape state the rapist Supreme Court Justice they want like the cowardly rape apologist he is, not because he's a man, but because he is bowing before the power of a pro-rape Republican Party that dominates his state.
Murkowski is a harder case to make because Alaska is a GOP state, but then I'm down to one. You see the empirical problem. One case? Maybe?
At the end of the day, or, at the end of the country (whichever comes first...), we have a basic problem of political dialog. Anyone engaged in real, civil dialog cannot do anything but call rape "evil." We are also prohibited by general norms from calling a party, "evil," so we must avoid saying that a party is indifferent at best to an evil act. The problem, though, is that the GOP is, empirically, indifferent at best to rape.
There are gender differences in party ID at the individual, mass level. Why? Lots of reasons. But, when you get to the elected official level, pretty much everything reduces to party. And that includes rape. Estimating the proportion of women who are sexually assaulted is hard, but let's go with somewhere around 20%. Close enough. Do you believe that? Do you care? Do you want to do anything about it? One party does. There can be other reasons to support the Republican Party. If you truly believe that abortion is murder, then we have mass murder going on in this country. Infanticide. I can't argue against that very effectively because it depends on when you think life begins, and that is fundamentally separate from politics. That would put two evils up against each other. But we do need to be honest about this.
Rape is, for all practical purposes, legal in this country. Not "legal," in the sense that there are no laws against it. There are. They just aren't enforced. It's like driving four miles per hour over the speed limit. Most of the time, if you do it, you won't face any legal consequences, even though it technically violates a law. On the other hand, if you are a black man, and there's a white woman involved, the probability of facing consequences goes up, and the GOP will suddenly get all law-and-order-y on you. Rape is a difficult crime because there are rarely eyewitnesses (and Mark Judge had every reason to lie, being complicit in the act), and physical evidence requires immediate reporting, which most victims are too traumatized and scared to do. From a general, legal and policy perspective, it really is difficult. One party wants to make it more difficult. And just did. Its women helped. Including Susan Collins. I'll have even more to say about that worthless "dupeshit" soon.
