In a way, the very idea of an impersonal substitute for a family is an oxymoron, since a family is primarily a personal connection to society. There can be impersonal subs for tribal versions of safety net, law and order, jobs, education etc. But not family.
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Also unlike other patriarchal institutions where power relations are legible and segmentary (bonds can be cleanly broken and remade without disturbing power structure) within a family power exists as an entanglement of lives. Quantum, not classical.
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The presence of a strong functional emotional aspect to your entanglement with your family (or equivalent pack) is not a constitutive cause but an emergent effect. Ie you can’t “substitute” the emotional “need” like backfilling a job when an employee quits.
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Emotions emerge when the family entanglement begin to function. Whether healthy or unhealthy (co-dependency, exploitation), once this kicks in, politics cannot easily split the pack. You have to appeal to its interests as a whole.
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Though the family may have a legible public “leader” (say a working father) it is naive to assume that this leader has de facto power or that the interests of the pack coincide with those of any one member.
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This was one of Hannah Arendt’s key insights: in the traditional family, the individual power of the free male head stops at the threshold of the home. Once he steps in, he may enjoy more comforts, but everybody: housewives, children, slaves, male head are fully constrained.
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So when voting members of a functioning family vote, they vote the interests of the whole (I’d be *very* surprised if more than a tiny % of married couples with kids voted diff from each other, and it is significant that young people usually leave home when they can first vote)
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Point of this thread is that when an interest group collides with a family/pack structure, the latter wins. Women who vote against supposed women’s-interests aren’t “gender traitors” (an even more incoherent idea than race traitor). Either the whole pack swings feminist or not.
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The family is far too entangled and emotionally raw a unit to survive serious induced differences from bigger but weaker political structures. Expecting a member to vote in ways subversive to the family introduces potentially fatal tensions.
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End of conversation
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Have a family, turn conservative :)
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