The classic definition of politics is decision-making about the distribution of stuff or decision-making about how to make decisions about the distribution of stuff. Who decides health care? Markets? Insurance companies? The government?
Well, we are finally addressing the most important question:
Daily Wire host goes on strange sexist rant: “The central purpose of every society is to figure out the distribution of women ... Women cannot take care of themselves” www.mediamatters.org/daily-wire/d...
— Media Matters for America (@mmfa.bsky.social) Jul 29, 2024 at 10:20 a.m.
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My first thought is: well, in fantasy sports leagues, you have to figure out whether you have a draft or an auction. In a draft, "owners" of teams are allotted draft positions (due to past performance or randomly--tis another political decision) and then one owner at a time selects a player in that sport--football, basketball, whatever, to fill a specific need or to get the best athlete available, thus imitating most major sports leagues. The alternative is an auction, where each owner gets the same budget to start and then they bid on various players with the best players and those in the areas with the least depth commanding the higher bids.
So, should American society go to an auction style model to allocate its women? Or should it go to a draft? Of course, this require a lot of data gathering so that the "owners" could figure out which women they want to draft. Like in sports, in this, the various bidders/drafters would have different preferences for what "fills a need" or count as the "best available athlete."
Or am I missing the point? Most public policy debates tend to degenerate into two extremes: the private sector allocates (tis a political decision to let markets decide) or the public sector. So, should a government agency allocate women? If so, is this a state level thing or should the responsibility belong to the federal government? The GOP is always so contradictory on this, depending on what outcomes they prefer. States' rights on abortion, federal rights when Colorado thinks Trump is an insurrectionist. Anyhow, the GOP tends to oppose government allocation as "socialist." So, I guess this speaker would want society to agree that markets should decide the distribution of women.
Isn't that how it works now? Men and women meet in a variety of fora, online and in real life, they end up coupling temporarily or permanently (the GOP prefers the latter, given their hostility to divorce and casual sex--which, um, means stricter government regulation?). Hmmm, sounds like the market, except, well, the status quo gives women too much agency. Obviously, we can't let them distribute themselves--that would make women people and not property. Remember, the MAGA slogan is all about regression to a "better" time, and that better time in this particular policy realm is where women had few rights and were seen as property. Tim Walz, potential VP candidate, has been calling the GOP the "He-man woman hater's club" and that really does get at things.
The good news here is that the various folks within the Trump universe are outing themselves in a variety of ways including making their misogyny so very clear. The bad news is that they might have a great deal more power to inflict their views next year (and forever, given Trump's recent speech).
So, um, yeah, the GOP is going to have a hard time removing the weird label, because, yes, this is just frickin weird to think women are property, something that most of us got over a while ago. Hence this exercise in satire. They are weird because the mainstream of American life has moved one way, and they have moved another, back into a partly imagined past.
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