Australia - a “live free or die trying” country has devolved into a complete totalitarian administrative control nightmare. The US seems to be heading in the same direction.
We have seen something similar happen in 1919 but today is it is supercharged.
Now excuse me while I get accused of going misogynist, but this is a women thing.
1919 was the year of the 19th Amendment giving women the right to vote. Conveniently it was also the year that Congress overrode liberal Woodrow Wilson's veto of the Volstead Act which would outlaw the sale and consumption of alcohol.
And things pretty much went to hell after that.
Joseph Campbell explained a social phenom of effective childhood developing as being mother's-child, father's child and then adult. Societies more often succeeded when demonstrating this three-step process. They more often failed when they did not. Convince me I am wrong. You will fail.
Note that the father's child step follows that of the mother's control. The key is moving people along a continuum where they become independent, self-confident and bold. They basically separate from the umbilical chord and warm embrace of the mother telling them that everything will be alright and that they are loved unconditionally no matter how little they do or how much they F up.
Mothers nurture. That is what they do. They are wired to fret about the immediacy of care and safety. They generally stay back in village and care for the kids and the tent while the fathers go out to explore, hunt, work and fight. This is evolutionary and biological... tens of thousands of years, if not hundreds of thousands, caused this filtering of tendencies and views that would be a constant source of productive social conflict between women and men. Without the push and pull the males would tend to be too reckless, with a drive to take risks toward progress... the females too stifling and controlling... with a drive to eliminate: risk, unfairness and harm... and moving toward what they define as "progress".
Remember the scene in the movie "The Giver" where Meryl Streep says "When you give people the freedom to choose, they choose wrong every time." That is the view of the matriarchy.
But today is not just the mothers in charge pushing is toward administrative compliance in the name of safety. Women in general, because they are wired differently as per their science-proved evolutionary and biological traits, are rebelling against the patriarchal father's child step to increase their female advantages in the social and economic hierarchy. They are joined by weak men, and others that are hitching their wagon to this women's movement in hope of accessing the spoils.
But the private economy better-rewards the forward-thinking, bold, risk-taker that is willing to explore the unknown and fight for success. We know this because the private economy is the undisputed test bench for what works and what does not work. If social capitalism worked we would see the examples of successful companies making a go with it. We don't. There are a few niche exceptions... but mostly the woke corporation movement today is just these companies masking their profit motives with a PR game of siding with this modern female demand.
We see the primarily patriarchal approach consistently succeeding, and people that lead these organizations, male or female or non-binary, have to get on board the patriarchal method train if they want to compete in the marketplace and win.
It is a natural advantage for males, but females have proven that they can adapt and adopt.
However, females have also advanced in economic power within the burgeoning professional class while our politicians gutted our male-worker industry and manufacturing with boneheaded trade deals (NAFTA and China in the WTO were YUGE mistakes)... and also depressed the wages of the trades by allowing unchecked immigration of tens of millions of poor and uneducated people. Females also benefited from an explosion in administrative jobs in government... where they dominate and where the pay-scales never really got the downward adjustment from the political class wrecking of middle working class economic opportunity.
So today we have females, and their artificial male mommy's boys (see the male cast of CNN), with loads of social and economic power. It is the same in much of the western industrialized world. Why do you think they freaked over DJT and the "deplorables". These real manly men are the anti-prohibition types. They are not telling women to go back to the village and tend the children, they are simply telling everyone that the patriarchal approach for adults is the only one that works... the one that the country was founded on... and that EVERYONE... no matter gender, race, ethnicity... to be successful, has to adopt that traditional approach or the country will fail.
I believe is is a 50/50 match at this point. Unless more people wake up to the danger in adopting a matriarchal system, we will surely see the end of the Great Experiment.
Meryl Streep was wrong of course. When you give people the freedom to choose, they pursue their own interests and their own interests advance the overall human condition. The alternative of a totalitarian administrative state making all the choices results in misery, death and full system collapse.
Gotta say, Frank, paging through your old posts has been SUPER enlightening.
Keep it coming, buddy!