It struck me when a Texas news crew stopped a primary voter on his way out of a polling place this past Friday, the young white man said, and I paraphrase, “I don’t think my vote really counts…it doesn’t seem to matter who’s in office, things don’t really change.”
Wow. To have that luxury. As any marginalized group knows full well, your vote is absolutely precious because it has a direct impact on your freedom.
Voting Trump into office in 2016 directly assaulted Native Americans through his efforts to expedite the Keystone Pipeline and weakening environmental protections on their land among other offenses.
Voting Republican governors into office directly led to voting rights restrictions intended to curtail the voting ability of Black Americans.
The assault on Roe v Wade would not be possible without the systematic efforts of Mitch McConnell and the Heritage Foundation to stack the Supreme Court in favor of the conservative agenda.
So yes, I suppose that young white man wouldn’t notice anything particularly notable about his vote.
But it’s everything. Especially if you are a woman. More especially if you are a woman of color.
Revenge of The Patriarchs in the March/April 2022 edition of Foreign Affairs by Erica Chenoweth and Zoe Marks is a stunning piece detailing the direct connection between the rising waves of authoritarianism and patriarchy. When women are silenced, democracy is in danger.
“…women’s political and economic empowerment is now stalling or declining around the world…” with numerous examples from Russia’s decriminalizing many forms of domestic abuse, the Taliban’s crushing blow to two decades of progress for Afghan women, Hungary’s attack on LGTBQ in deference to traditional gender roles, and the assault on women’s reproductive rights in America.
“Misogyny and authoritarianism are not just common comorbidities but mutually reinforcing ills,” Chenoweth and Marks contend. This can be on a grand scale, such as China’s forced sterilization of Uyghur women to more subtle shifts such as former education secretary Betsy DeVos efforts to Title IX to favor men accused of sexual assault on college campuses and Josh Hawley’s whiny victimhood blaming progressive women for men’s fixation on pornography and video games.
“Political scientists have long noted that women’s civil rights and democracy go hand in hand, but they have been slower to recognize that the former is a precondition for the latter. Aspiring autocrats and patriarchal authoritarians have good reason to fear women’s political participation… fully free, politically active women are a threat to authoritarian and authoritarian-leaning leaders — and so those leaders have a strategic reason to be sexist,” the authors write.
As Marks and Chenoweth contend, free female bodies are a threat to authoritarian leaders. When women control their choices, have control over their reproduction, participate fully in the economy and in the political sphere, that undermines the narrative that liberated women are a threat to the social order. In reality, they improve it for us all.
If Ukraine is teaching us anything, it is the inherent danger of the autocratic patriarchy embodied by Putin. Men and women together fighting tyranny. Fighting for the right to be free even at the cost of their own lives.
Having long fought against social hierarchies that consolidate power in the hands of the few, feminist movements are a powerful weapon against authoritarianism. Those who wish to reverse the global democratic decline cannot afford to ignore them.
As Americans, we must reflect on the rising tide of authoritarianism within our country. We claim to be the land of the free, and yet according to the Human Freedom Index, the global measurement of personal, civil, and economic freedom, America ranks as 15th worldwide, just ahead of Estonia. Estonia. Number one is New Zealand. Not so coincidentally, New Zealand’s Prime Minister is a woman. Go Jacinda!
We see protests against mask mandates by truck drivers crying freedom, but nary a word about voting rights or women being able to control their own bodies. Nobody likes wearing masks, but if there’s a chance we can keep one another safe, why not defer to that possibility? We have numerous restrictions in place to protect one another; stop signs, speed limits, red lights-those all hinder your freedom of movement. Or what about wearing shirts and pants in public? Why don’t you protest that infringement in your next convoy? Or why not get the memo on what basic liberties are not accorded the marginalized?
So I say to that young white man walking out of the Texas polling place, maybe think more critically about your response. Does it sound very myopic? Does it sound self-absorbed? Maybe you do not believe you are effected by voting restrictions or by limitations on reproductive health choices, but if you truly care about freedom, that means you care about everyone’s rights. Any impingement on any person is a chink in freedom for us all.
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Previously Published on Medium
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