New Rule: Conservatives have to stop rolling their eyes every time they hear the word "France." Like just calling something French is the ultimate argument winner. As if to say, "What can you say about a country that was too stupid to get on board with our wonderfully conceived and brilliantly executed war in Iraq?" And yet an American politician could not survive if he uttered the simple, true statement: "France has a better health-care system than we do, and we should steal it." Because here, simply dismissing an idea as French passes for an argument. John Kerry? Couldn't vote for him--he looked French. Yeah, as a opposed to the other guy, who just looked stupid.Last week, France had an election, and people over there approach an election differently. They vote. Eighty-five percent turned out. You couldn't get eighty-five percent of Americans to get off the couch if there was an election between tits and bigger tits and they were giving out free samples.Maybe the high turnout has something to do with the fact that the French candidates are never asked where they stand on evolution, prayer in school, abortion, stem cell research, or gay marriage. And if the candidate knows about a character in a book other than Jesus, it's not a drawback. The electorate doesn't vote for the guy they want to have a croissant with. Nor do they care about private lives. In the current race, Madame Royal has four kids, but she never got married. And she's a socialist. In America, if a Democrat even thinks you're calling him "liberal," he grabs an orange vest and a rifle and heads into the woods to kill some
Popular magazine articles and Oprah-style television shows falsely represent work-life balance as an individual challenge, a lifestyle choice available to all women. The feminism on offer is woefully thin and unpleasurable. On the high end of the income scale, feminism seems to mean working even more than men. The media celebrate women such as Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer and former secretary of state and presidential candidate Hillary Clinton for her brutal work ethics--magazine articles report, awestruck, they they barely sleep, that their staffs struggle to match their work hours, that they've become the rare female leaders in their spheres by laboring harder than male colleagues. Mayer reported proudly that while at Google, she would sleep under her desk. By this measure, feminism, that Utopian striving for equality that we've carried through centuries of opposition, is boiled down merely to the right to work ourselves to death. If feminism means the right to sleep under my desk, then screw it. And this is a vision that can be palatable, just barely, only at the high end of the economy where work is plausibly couched in self-actualization. . . . If any feminism is going to be worth its name, it will improve the lives of all women instead of setting them in competition with each other or applying only to this or that region or income stratum. Liberal feminism would grant women the right to compete. A radical feminism would grant women a good life in which they have real power.