Conversation

The most important patriarchal institution is obviously the trad family. What isn’t obvious is that this is also the strongest. Unlike others, there is no market of substitutes or an impersonal state-based alt. Exit/voice is very weak. You cannot change families like jobs.
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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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