Like it or not, Margaret Thatcher must surely rank as one of the most successful women in modern political history. With 11 years in office, Thatcher was the longest-serving British prime minister of the 20th century. But beyond that, she fundamentally reshaped politics in the Western world for decades. When even your political opposites end up copying your policies – as did Labor’s Tony Blair – that’s when you know you’ve really won.
Margaret Thatcher was no one’s quota selection.
Everything Thatcher achieved was won by talent and sheer determination. She rose through the ranks, often in spite of her party. Indeed, she would have been insulted by the notion of being selected only because of her gender.
There is nothing more insulting to the integrity of women in the workforce than gender quotas. They are poison – an infection that has spread out of academia, swept through the corporate world and spilt into our political system. Instead of doing something productive, these institutions spend all day congratulating themselves about the physical attributes of their staff. It is a pattern of behaviour that reduces women to points in their sick little ‘Virtue Olympics’ which does nothing but re-enforce the stigma that women are not capable of achieving without the help of the fraternal Big State.
Some feminists, like Katie Roiphe, have been pointing out since the 90s that the Third Wave Feminist narrative is an insulting infantilisation of women that seems indistinguishable from Victorian prudery or Islamic misogyny. Quotas are the practical expression of that demeaning view of women.
To put it bluntly, quotas are trash. In the fish tank of ideas, they represent that thin film of scum that sits underneath the pebbles where the snails can’t reach. If you attempt to feed off this grime, you are self-identifying as bacteria – not a big fish.
Quotas are born out of a fundamental ideological difference between the left and right of politics.
A fundamental difference between left and right is their concept of freedom. The left favour what is called Positive Freedom, the “freedom to do what you’re allowed to”; the right tend to prefer Negative Freedom, “the freedom from being prevented from doing what you choose”.
From this dichotomy flows the similarly divergent concepts of “equality”.
‘Equality’ to the right means ‘equality of opportunity’. Citizens are given the same set of rules to play by and civilisation is allowed to arrange itself depending on the skills and preferences of individuals. Freedom, by its very nature, produces unequal statistical outcomes[…]
‘Equality’ to the left means ‘equality of outcome’. It is a draconian system of thought which forces equality by implementing tyranny.
As Jordan Peterson points out, the works of just five people or so dominate the repertoire of great music. The same goes for the great masters of art. But, as Robert Hughes said, our insane, leftist culture would have us pretend that a somewhat-talented but grossly unskilled graffiti artist was the pinnacle of modern art, solely because of his “diversity” status (black, gay, drug-addicted – never mind that “he was in fact an upper-middle-class, private-school boy…whose father owned a four-story brownstone in Brooklyn and drove a Mercedes).
In the arena of Australian politics, we’re likewise supposed to pretend that a factional Labor hack who consistently loses elections only to be parachuted into yet another safe seat sits at the pinnacle of female achievement.
We can only speculate as to why it is always the least qualified female politicians who speak out in favour of quotas[…]
The Labor Party have been playing the quota game publicly for so long that their female MPs start every sentence with a declaration of merit. At least this shows that they are conscious of the quota system harming their reputation. Mind you, the Labor Party only embraces gender quotas when it suits their factional politics – that’s why neither Bill Shorten nor Anthony Albanese sport a pair of tits.
According to the Financial Review, Labor MP Anika Wells bucked the trend and came out to say that she was a proud beneficiary of Labor’s twenty-five year campaign for gender equality. Admitting to being a quota is a bit like confessing that you sat your final exam with Google open. It is an embarrassment, not an accomplishment.
If society wants more women in politics then they have to stop brainwashing them into believing that they are born as victims. Do not separate women out of the pack and coddle them in special courses and groups that confirm the stigma of their fragility.
Spectator Australia
Can you imagine telling the Iron Lady of Britannia that she was condemned by her biology to be a victim unless well-meaning men gave her a Very Special Seat?
But then, Maggie was most assuredly not a leftist.
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