Infinite Monkeys

From Hillary to Patriarchy

One of the more striking lessons from the Democratic primary this year is the revelation of just how shockingly "racist" and "sexist" Democratic voters turned out to be. Who let so many slack-jawed troglodytes into the Party of Progress?

But apart from the obvious conclusion that Americans are simply too hidebound and reactionary to elect a woman or a black man, what does the 2008 election tell us about the state of the world? Mark Steyn mediates on Hillary Clinton's spectacular rise and splendorous fall and explains what it all means:

Enlightened progressives take it for granted that social progress is like technological progress -- that women's rights are like the internal combustion engine or the jet airplane: once invented they can't be uninvented.

But that's a careless assumption. There was a small, nothing story out of Toronto this week -- the York University Federation of Students wants a campuswide ban on any pro-life student clubs. Henceforth, students would be permitted to debate abortion only "within a pro-choice realm," as the vice-president Gilary Massa put it.

Nothing unusual there. A distressing number of student groups are inimical to free speech these days. But then I saw a picture of the gung-ho abortion absolutist: Gilary Massa is a young Muslim woman covered in a hijab.

On such internal contradictions is the future being built.