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Notes -
Yes, that's basically the main thing I was trying to get at, at least as far as the US political class and the Brahmin class is concerned - admittedly whatever parallels with the USSR are to be found here aren't that clear-cut in my opinion.*
I'm not a regular reader of Jim and not that familiar with his views, so I won't try defending them, but I would point out that his fundamental argument does still stand in this case. That is, the ruling class in bygone days all "politely pretended women were not like this", but they also put all sorts of social, legal, religious etc. mechanisms in effect to curb women's opportunities to be like this, so that no naive man ever realized that they are like this. One of the decisions this entailed was not permitting women to serve as guards in men's prisons, because duh, not all of them will end up helping some prisoners escape due to sexual attraction, but some of them will. Those mechanisms are long dismantled by now, but the polite pretension still lingers on, which is why there are prisoners successfully escaping with the help of their sex partner female guards.
In basically the same way, I'm sure the ideology of feminism, women's liberation and gender equality used to be propagated and continued for decades mostly by powerful men who, by today's feminist standards, were objectively sexists, rapists and phonies. But this state of affairs was never going to last; eventually the true believers gain power.
Other than this, I agree with your points.
*Gorbachev and his supporters were, I guess, true believers as well in the sense that they all grew up in late-stage socialism (heh), and thought it's stable and mature enough for it to be reformable and to be able to evolve.
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