Alessandro Riolo
Eighty years ago, Italian 🇮🇹 women were overwhelmingly more conservative than Italian men. That was one of the political calculations behind granting them the vote, and for the Christian Democrats almost certainly the decisive one: Catholic women were expected to form a formidable electoral wall against socialism and communism – and, for some, against republicanism too. For generations, Italian male mass politics had been considerably more radical, secular and often extremist, left or right. In the cities especially, working-class and subproletarian men supplied the ranks of socialists, communists, anarchists and fascists. Women’s entry into the electorate therefore initially shifted the balance sharply in the opposite direction. That dam held for a generation. Then younger women began moving left. They changed the political landscape one eighteenth birthday at a time, while the older, more conservative generations started to disappear one funeral at a time. As that conservative female bloc thinned out, the electorate moved steadily leftward, with enormous long-term consequences – consequences that have affected several generations already and will continue to shape Italy for generations to come.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
2) This is how evolution happens: funeral to funeral. People don't change their mind. And there is an effective evolution towards more benign societies*, with occasional and reversible setbacks. People may get slightly more conservative as they age, but has a v. weak effect: you don't see slavery advocates...