Ask A Genius 944: Canadian and American Women’s Progress

Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/06/14

[Recording Start] 

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: I wanted to talk about the comparison and contrast between American styles of women’s rights and Canadian styles, focusing on what Canadians and Americans are doing better. In my view, Canadians are probably doing better, even though the United States is a wealthier country. In the contemporary period, Canadian women seem to have a much better time than in the United States, especially in terms of foundational things like reproductive rights and privileges, where they can access many more public benefits. 

Rick Rosner: Let me set up the U.S. situation where a third of the population, when I was growing up, there was a term called “reactionary.” I don’t know where it comes from, but it basically means you’re a dick because you don’t like what’s going on. All your positions are counter to, or in opposition to, something. It’s not that you’re pro-anything, it’s that you’re anti-anything that your perceived enemies like. Is that kind of what reactionary means? It’s here and the MAGAs, which include probably close to 50% women, maybe a little less. They are against a lot of women-empowering things because that’s what the “libs” like. They hate the libs. The MAGAs are largely white, some Latino, almost no black people. More men than women, probably 60/40 men to women. Mostly less educated on average than everybody else. To be honest, dumber on average than the average IQ or average intelligence of everybody else. They support Trump because he upsets the libs and are okay with everything the people who support Trump stand for because they support Trump to upset the libs.

The people who support Trump stand for curtailing reproductive rights. There is a huge overlap between modern U.S. evangelicals and MAGAs. The modern evangelical MAGAs support the godless Trump because he appointed the Supreme Court judges who got rid of Roe v. Wade. Everybody else in America, 60% of adult Americans, supports a largely empowering agenda that they vote for in their own best interests and maybe what they perceive to be the best interests of the country. But 40% of the country, according to the polls, is reactionary and just supports stances. Maybe some of them honestly believe that life begins at conception, but most of them probably don’t have strong opinions between life beginning at conception and first trimester or abortion. They just want to say “fuck you” to the opposition. Is that reasonable? Not that they’re reasonable, but what I said. 

Jacobsen: It’s a fair characterization. How far do you think the United States is from a “Handmaid’s Tale” style reality? Or on the opposite side, how can American human rights defenders and others fight against the encroachments of that kind of life? 

Rosner: In “The Handmaid’s Tale,” a lot of stuff led to the plot. There was a coup where homegrown terrorists blew up the Capitol, took down the government, and installed their own fundamentalist government. The northeastern part of the U.S. is at war with other parts of the U.S. It’s not just that the whole U.S. suddenly became repressively religious. It’s just part of the U.S., and the rest of the U.S. is fighting. I think Canada is fighting a war. The people trapped in this part of the U.S. are under this fundamentalist regime.

The U.S. is probably far from a full-on “Handmaid’s Tale” scenario because even in “The Handmaid’s Tale,” it’s only a chunk of the U.S. that is like that. But if Trump gets re-elected and gets the House and the Senate, would he be able to pass legislation or encourage legislation in Congress to prohibit all abortions except in cases of rape and incest or to have a national law that says you can’t get an abortion after, say, 15 weeks? If states want to be more draconian than that, they can.

I don’t think so. I don’t think that Trump will win. The bookies and Vegas odds favor him, but they favor Democrats holding or taking the House back. So if you go by Vegas odds, Trump gets reelected, Democrats have the House, and Republicans narrowly control the Senate. That is not enough to turn the U.S. fully into “The Handmaid’s Tale.” Right now, the Supreme Court has a six to three conservative majority, and two of those conservatives are complete corrupt assholes, as has been revealed. If Trump got another four years, he would have the older assholes, Clarence Thomas and Alito, retire at some point so he can appoint younger crazy assholes. Or if somebody else drops off the court, it’s possible the court could end up with a seven to two conservative majority.

The Heritage Foundation has this 900-page conservative platform called Project 2025 that lays out a very conservative draconian path for America. To get it done, the Republicans would have to own the presidency, the House, the Senate, and they would have the Supreme Court. It’s not clear that the seven members of the court, four conservatives and three liberals, would go along with it. There’s a chance that the not-crazy conservatives would go along with the liberals to stop anything too insane. We’ll find out next week whether they give complete immunity for any acts committed while in office to a president. I don’t think they will. It’s too crazy.

So I guess, in a nutshell, I don’t think the U.S. can go full “Handmaid’s Tale.” One more reason is you can’t really get a lot done in the Senate unless you have a 60-person majority out of 100. Regardless of who controls it, nobody will get 60 seats. The last time that happened was for less than a year, or maybe 14 months under Obama. Obama used that time to get Obamacare passed. That was his push. So no, I don’t think the U.S. can go full “Handmaid’s Tale.” A strong majority of the U.S. don’t want that. So that’s the end of that answer.

Jacobsen: What do you think about the repeal of Roe v. Wade? How did that come across in California, with your family?

Rosner: We don’t know, but we are looking at the electoral consequences of getting rid of Roe. In several elections, where abortion rights were on the ballot in five or six states that have had elections since Roe went away, even in conservative states, abortion rights won out. There’s some indication that the Roe issue will get a liberal majority to turn out. However, that is contradicted by what the polls say, which is that Trump has a narrow lead over Biden, and maybe more than a narrow lead in some swing states. As we’ve talked about, I don’t trust the polls. I think the polls have been corrupted. I hope that Roe leads to a strong electoral turnout for liberals, though neither side will get as many votes as they did in 2020, because that was at the height of COVID. The country made it easy to vote, especially by mail. The Republicans hated that because they lost solidly.

They’ve passed legislation in a bunch of states to choke off voting, especially for liberal-leaning demographics like black people or college students. In 2020, 160 million people voted, which is two-thirds of voting-age Americans. That’s a higher percentage than ever before. This time around, maybe only 150 to 152 million Americans will vote. The competition is to see who can hold on to more of the people who voted for them, whether it’s Trump or Biden. Also, you’ve got a strong third-party candidate this time around with Kennedy, probably getting seven to nine percent of the vote. That will cut into both Biden and Trump.

Biden won by seven million votes last time, but that’s just the popular vote. The electoral vote was 303 to 235, which is a strong showing but not overwhelming. Several states could have flipped and given it to Trump. This time around, there’s no way that Trump could win the popular vote, but Trump could lose by five million votes and narrowly win the electoral college. So there you go.

Jacobsen: What do you think was the most significant win for women’s rights in the United States in the early 21st century?

Rosner: So far, the most significant win is those special elections in five states where people voted for reproductive rights. A small win happened a couple of days ago when the Supreme Court threw out a case from a Trumpy lower judge trying to get rid of Mifeprestone, the abortion drug. The Supreme Court unanimously said that the plaintiffs in that case didn’t have standing. The arguments, like doctors being hurt by being forced to administer this drug, were crazy. That’s not a big victory because the lower court’s decision and the plaintiffs’ arguments were so stupid. The biggest victory for reproductive rights in the 21st century will be if it drives enough liberals to turn out to stop Trump from getting reelected. It hasn’t happened yet. If it happens, it’s still five months away. You want to talk about women’s rights in Canada. 

Jacobsen: In 2019, Karen Jensen was the first ever pay equity commissioner for Canada. That’s a big win. In 2019, there was the final report of the national inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, released on June 3rd, 2019. That’s a big win in terms of minority women’s rights in Canada. In 2022, there was an endorsement of the National Action Plan on gender-based violence. There have been ongoing efforts to deal with significant issues around pay and violence in Canada, specifically around women’s gender issues. 

Rosner: Canada has ten provinces and three territories, right?

Jacobsen:: Yes, three territories. 

Rosner: The territories probably don’t count much in terms of national voting. Are there any provinces like the southern states we have that are super redneck and support a redneck agenda with a redneck voting bloc?

Jacobsen: I do not want to stereotype any particular province in that way. However, when issues typical of American southern states, like immigration, Muslims, women’s rights, and abortion arise, Alberta tends to be the place where that becomes a significant problem. There is a push for having wide provisions of free prescription contraception for women across the country. This was a big win in British Columbia recently. There is a national prescription contraception plan broad-based. The only province with significant pushback, and that may go to court, is Alberta regarding free contraception. So you have one province out of ten. It’s a big province though.

Rosner: Another major difference between the US and Canada is that you guys don’t have Fox News constantly propagandizing your population. We have some entities like it, but they don’t have nearly the heft of Fox News in the United States. The U.S. has nearly half the states significantly rednecked. They don’t have half the population, maybe 40% of the population, but the Senate is divided where each state gets two senators. It’s not by population in the Senate. The Senate is legislatively more powerful than the House. You need both to pass legislation.

Redneckism is harder to fight in the U.S. politically because the nation was set up to give disproportionate rights to smaller states to make the union possible. This problem dates back to the original 13 colonies, where the compromise was that the House is apportioned by population and the Senate is just everybody gets two senators. That has caused issues, and the electoral college, where each state gets a number of electors that equals the number of senators plus the number of representatives, gives voting power disproportionately to smaller redneck states. As a result of this bad deal, the U.S. is a powerful unified country instead of a bunch of disjointed nation-states. I don’t see how a president could get away with appointing or creating a cabinet department for wage equality. We tried to pass the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s, but you need a large fraction of the states to approve an amendment to the Constitution. It fell two states short in the 70s when conservative women like Phyllis Schlafly rallied conservative women to not ratify it in states like Florida.

Only in the past three years did a couple more states vote to ratify it, but the time expired. I think you have a limited amount of time to get your states to do that, and that expired 30, 40 years ago. I don’t even know why states are voting on it now. Legislatively, we can never have as much equality for women as you do because the redneck states have too much power.

Jacobsen: In the southern states, do they view women as lesser than men? The application suggests they do based on the outcomes. Do they in fact vote?

Rosner: I don’t think it’s that women are seen as lesser than men. The view, which many people in redneck states disagree with, is that there is a place for women, and that place is a traditional one as a wife. You can work, but in a traditional family that’s heterosexual, you maybe go to church, and you don’t believe in feminism. You may believe in feminist ideas but don’t know it because you have a warped idea of feminism. It’s not that women are less than men, it’s that they disapprove of feminism and don’t see their role as being firebrands.

Jacobsen: What do you see as the challenge for women right now in the United States and in Canada? 

Rosner: There is a Pew study from 2022 that shows that the Republican Congress and Senate have drifted four times as much rightward as the Democrats have drifted leftward. The Democrats have pretty much stayed put. The issues around trans people have been propagandized to make it look like the Democrats are radical, but trans issues only affect a small percentage of the population. On major issues, the Republicans have gone completely crazy. The Republican Party has become corrupt and dishonest, not responsive to the majority of voters, spouting a ton of Russian propaganda controlled by rich conservative billionaires.

That’s the major obstacle. The people who support that party, which is 30 to 40% of voters, are also a problem. Conversely, the major advantage for Canada is you don’t have that level of bullshit. You said you have one province that’s a little bit redneck. We have 24 states, sometimes more, and the Republicans have learned how to manipulate the system. The system is already pre-manipulated in favor of Republicans based on the Electoral College and the Senate. More recently, the Republicans took over state legislatures in 2010, and they can wield power even in states where they have minority support.

So that’s the major thing—Republican politicians. Second, being a problem for women, is the Republican base. Conservative propagandists also don’t have good arguments to offer. They have dumb arguments, but they have a dumb base to listen to those arguments.

Jacobsen: The end. 

Rosner: Oh, the end.

[Recording End]

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