Reasons for not moving right like young men

[Warmlight1]

Are women put off the right because of outright boorishness and right wing female Mps who are promoted withing a very constrained patriarchy and consequently end up not making sense? Is it also to do with the ingressing on women's right by the ultra religious?
Are public services more important to women than men? Was specifically female leadership significant in New Zealand during the pandemic and ultimately safer and was that about gender?
Or something else?
Brexit?
Why is there a difference of direction?

The traditional left were about economic equality. Modern progressivism is about everything equality except that. They're about economic opportunity, not outcome, and it's a very American idea.

Yes, I think that is true, there is the perception for women, especially where men are not reliable, that state support increases their choices and independence.

OTOH, the conservative would say that what happens is that you end up with more unreliable men who don't feel that caring for their children, or those children's mothers, is really their primary responsibility, it's the job of the state. But the fact is that even if they give significant financial support, they can't replace a father and his role in the family.

This is a really typical argument of black conservatives in the US who see the welfare state as something that significantly destabilised black communities by causing a massive drop in single parent families, and interrupted what had been an upward trajectory for black families prior to that. Some think that was the point, to create a set of voters who will always vote dependants on the state.

But yes, it may explain some differences in voting patterns between men and women.

I do think there is an element to the changes on the left which is about the fact that when put to the test, the attempts to create true economic equality not only failed, they failed in a pretty spectacular way which involved some of the most deadly and oppressive governments to have ever existed. Whether you want to talk about communist China, or Cuba today, they hardly come across as societies filled with equality or even equality of opportunity.

No one now is looking at planned economies in the old Chinese or Soviet style, at most you might get some elements of a planned economy, but that's nothing new - conservatives used to do that sort of thing all the time for select industries.

So there seems no one with a plan to really opt out of capitalism, and the most globalist sort of capitalism too in many cases. So how do you act like a lefty in that world?

It’s a favoured (and misused) term with all the recent ploppers 🤔🤔

Just because you weren’t following that SWP scandal when it became public knowledge doesn’t mean the rest of us are also unaware of what happened to those young female activists.

It was examined and reported across all the papers and discussed on MN by both people it directly affected and people whose friends were directly affected.

What I’m trying to say is that if you personally don’t know anything about something that happened it doesn’t mean it didn’t actually happen.

Things that you don’t know about, or don’t like hearing about, are not automatically unfounded political flack or untrue.

Conservatives do make the argument that the presence of a safety-net weakens the strength of the family. But there will always be some men (and some women) who are violent to their dependents, with or without the possibility of their partners making a state-assisted escape. To the question of how many families should justifiably be left to endure abuse, so as to keep government small and taxes low, conservatives never have an answer.

Parish records are one of my areas of expertise

In medieval/early modern times widows, bastards, single mothers were part of the "deserving poor" and had to be supported by the parish. How that worked varied- you can see sometimes the parish was extremely reluctant and sometimes more sympathetic. And there were always chaotic people. One example is a child who was born out of wedlock and raised by his father and stepmother. When they both died the Parish went and asked the mother to raise him but she would only do so if they paid her a certain amount to support him which they ultimately said they would as it was cheaper than finding alternative provision. There were all sorts of shenanigans with women in labour being pressured to name the father (so a different parish would be responsible for the cost) or women in labour being hustled over parish lines.last minute.

Societies have changed but there's never been a golden age of traditional society where the nuclear family provided all for all children. Some father's always abandoned their children even in olden times, some women were feckless, some women were raped. And parents (mothers and fathers) were much more likely to die leaving children orphaned or fatherless.

During the massive social upheavals of the Victorian time and the industrial revolution when the poor law was enacted, the old system was replaced by workhouses. This was partly justified by the idea that providing to much support was encouraging feckless behaviour. But the end result of removing parish support and introducing workhouses wasn't less children born out of wedlock. It was more dead children, more abandoned children, and more women working as prostitutes to support their children.

The question should be, how can you not? Trickle-down economic liberalism has failed in spectacular ways as well. The collapse in living-standards hasn't even required an aggressive state, Beijing-style: all the UK state had to do was shrink away.

There are good reasons to be suspicious of the authoritarian tendencies of the left, but for the right to use this as cover for its own negligence is very weak.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/jun/21/children-raised-under-uk-austerity-shorter-than-european-peers-study

Apart from various kinds of fecklessness there are always accidents, disabilities and illness.

Well, yes but capitalism isn't exactly winning the argument right now either
After the second world war the alternative to communism was dominated by Keynesian thinking. Effectively, capitalist but also trying to save capitalism for eating itself. After Thatcher/Reagan this fell out of fashion, and neo liberalism seemed to have won, especially after the collapse of those communist economies which as you say don't work. But arguably the neo-liberal.economic order of things has been dying a death since 2008. If Communism was proven ultimately unable to survive then the same can be said of the more modern iterations of Capitalism. Trump supporters as well as lefties are quite aware of this fact. And you could argue that, in contrast to the "decadence" of the West, China which has a centralised planned capitalist economy is winning the argument. Whether the argument is that neo-liberalism is bad or that democracy is bad is not agreed.

I don't think we should go all Chinese. I also don't think that communism is a good idea or even a return to old Keynesian principles. But there needs to be some.sort of change because the EU in particular never recovered from 2008 and in the current system young people.cant even afford houses. I think a proportion of people on the right (Farage) and the left (TRAs) sort of realise this but are in denial, chasing after diversions like social justice causes or blaming immigration. Both of which are important issues in their own right but won't solve the central contradictions in the economy. And MAGA addresses it by embracing rejection of some aspects of neo-liberalism (tarifs rather than free trade) and exaggerating to other parts (trickle down wealth) to the point it's an ideology.

I feel like I'm writing an essay but I don't think it's fair to write everyone voting further left of as being hopelessly deluded about communism/part of a cult. Any more than it is to write all Reform voters of as stupid either. Some of them, on both sides, probably are a bit culty/deluded, but equally they're reacting to a problem the centre doesn't have an answer to at the moment.

You put it much more succinctly than me!

Oh also, on the subject of black conservatives in the US and their arguement that state support was used to weaken black families. They probably have a point, there were some very specific policies brought in that made it genuinely much more affordable for fathers to live away from their children than with them. That's not really the case elsewhere to anything like the same extent. There's a danger in copying American talking points too exactly I think although it's always useful to look at what is similar.

Fascinated to learn more about the mediaeval approach to social welfare. As you say, there has never been a “golden age” of stable, self-sufficient families. Even at the top of the social ladder, life could be incredibly insecure. Researching the life of Margaret Beaufort at the moment - what a turbulent time she was born into. Her mother, the Duchess of Somerset, had nine children by three fathers. Wonder what the gingham-apron parade would make of that.

Going back to mediaeval social welfare: I read once that following the dissolution of the monasteries, vulnerable people also lost a major source of support in the form of the Church.

Please send me links to any papers you could recommend (or have authored!), I would love to read them.

Watching the British right echoing American politics is like watching a beloved old uncle dressing up in chaps and a silver lamé Stetson, and hoping it makes him look cool and young. It’s a bit pitiful, a bit hilarious, and very sad.

I think that's quite a dismissive way to think about it, with an assumption of moral high ground. As if people only think intact families are important for some arbitrary moralistic reasons. Because obviously conservatives don't give a shit.

It's a fact that the largest risk factor for poverty is a one parent family, and there are other risks attached to it as well, where even at the same income level the risk factors are lesser for the intact family.

So you could turn your question around and say, if you create a culture with low expectations of fathers because you want easy access to social welfare in order to help those who would otherwise suffer, how many families with uninvolved fathers can you justifiably allow as collateral damage to balance against whatever the material the benefits of greater social welfare are?

That's without considering what the long term effect will be in terms of increasing social costs for society as a whole.

In the specific American case, there is some pretty reasonable evidence that the introduction of social welfare in the 60s had a significant effect, it's not something that has just been dreamed up as an imaginary objection.

A lot of it's paywalled but this is a good intro and is quite balanced on the issues of social.stigma etc.https://jarm.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/jarm/article/download/39335/35663/47556 there's also books like "the legitimacy of bastards" which are interesting although more of its focus is on the upper classes. Or I think radio 4 has some podcasts. But if you ever get the chance to look at Quarter sessions/petty sessions from the early modern period go for it. There are really silly dramas and scandals and family drama and basically people acting as badly as people do now.

Yes, it was partly in reaction to the dissolution of the monasteries (and the removal of social support structures) that the very first Poor Law of 1601 was introduced. It, for the first time, basically made it illegal for authorities to allow people to starve to death. Although the method of preventing this was changed through later Poor Laws (workhouses) and the welfare state. Woke Elizabethans.

The very worst example of "poverty viewed as a moral flaw" was probably the Victorian reaction to the potatoe famine of course.

I think that living with actual abuse is worse than being poor, or having a single mum. Don’t you?

The American social welfare rules specifically targeted black families and probably did help split them up. They were very specific though.
Today, if you survey social attitudes towards having children out of wedlock or single parent families you will see the groups that view it with the strongest stigma tend to also be the groups with the highest preponderance of single parent families. While more socially affluent respondents are likely to say that they view single parent family structures as no.worse than nuclear families. Basically, stigma against single parents does not seem to have much impact on the prevelance of single parents.

Even religious, traditional societies like rural Ireland had.plentunof children born out of wedlock. Or the laundries would have been empty.

Woke Elizabethans, love it!

I am not sure what you are trying to argue here.

Are you saying the left has not been affected by the failure in their attempts to create an effective non-capitalist society?

There is no one in politics today trying to create a true non-capitalist system. There aren't even many attempts to try and outline theoretically what that might look like, and none to try and implement it, or with any practical sense of how to implement it.

Even the Communist parties are not talking about anything like that.

Right now global capitalism is the only thing going, and all the political parties are working within that. The only partial exceptions might be North Korea or Iran, and I don't mean they are authoritarian, I am talking about economics. And their economies are shit.

This is a major reason that it doesn't really matter which party gets in, there isn't much chance of a really different approach - they are all heavily constrained by an economic environment they don't have any control over. The market will accept certain things, and that's that.

If people who think of themselves as on the left have to square that with accepting global capitalism, what does it mean to be on the left?

I'm not saying they are deluded, I am saying that "being on the left" doesn't mean the same thing when you are accepting capitalism. So we can ask, what do people really mean when they say that?

I think some mean " we are nice and care about people and want to help them" but that is only because they have created themselves a myth that people with other political and economic views don't care about other people. Everyone wants a society where people do well and the needy are cared for, so that really can't be the defining feature of the left.

As far as winning an argument, capitalism might be on life support, but the thing is, the other guy is dead and buried decades ago. There isn't, as of right now, any argument. No one is offering an alternative.

I think Trump is trying to work outside global capitalism actually. I disagree with his methods or his logic or what he seems to think will replace it. But I don't think dissatisfaction with the current system is restricted to the left
It's pretty prevalent all over and is what makes distinguishing what left and right means anymore quite hard The "left" did indeed accept the argument om global capitalism/neoliberalism in the 1990s with Blair and Clinton. But now, its looking shaky and everyone (left and right) is scrambling for answers. And fighting like rats in a sack while they do. Pretending that it can all be fixed if we just achieve trans liberation, or decolonise English lot degrees, or get rid of all the immigrants is magical thinking.
I dont think that means the people criticising the current system believe we can have total equality either. Thats a bit of a straw man.

Yes, but who is arguing that society never cared for those in need? That's not really the claim at all. Most conservatives aren't Ayn Rand libertarian types, quite a lot actually think the medieval model was better than either the Victorian or the modern approach.

That's the point I was making earlier when I said the overton window had shifted. Since Blair the Thatcherite ideas about the economy were accepted for a long time and became mainstream. It's only now that's being criticised but the more left wing alternatives out forward have more in common with Keynes or even one nation conservatives. Or trying to work out new answers.

So by that metric, describing the Greens economic policies or some of Labours policies on renationalisation as "far left" isn't accurate. Neither of them are far left in the sense of pro-communist. So women (or men) attracted to left wing parties because of there economic policies aren't really veering to the hard left at all. Saying it's silly to vote Green/left because communism is dead and all left wing parties accept it is quite circular.

Markets don’t decide anything. They’re not conscious. They are the place where competing interests meet, and they are a place where governments wield enormous power. Look at the strategic planning around semiconductors, rare earths and defence. Invisible hand, much?

By opposing the hard left with the (never-defined) term, “capitalism”, you miss the fact that both systems concentrate too much power in too few hands. That’s the issue. Distribute power, bring back accountability. That’s the answer.