Progressives are starting to get worried. They should be.

One of the unspoken assumptions behind democracy is that the proportion of violence-capable males on either side of a policy question is similar. So long as that is the case, it is better to count heads on bodies rather than heads chopped off of bodies, because if both sides have the same proportion of violence-capable males, the larger side is likely to win if it comes to a fight.

This is why early democracies limited the franchise to men, or even to land-owning men. If you were no good in a fight, either personally or via your ability to rally others, your opinion was fundamentally irrelevant to a political question.

As long as the franchise was limited to men, this assumption could go unspoken. Indeed it's so basic we forgot about it. That's starting to change.

We're now entering a period in which political questions are divided along sexual lines. One side is composed of a preponderance of women, while the other has a majority of young, fighting-aged men. Under the current rules of democracy, everyone gets the same vote, so all that matters is which side is larger.

But.

What happens when side A is 55% of the population, but 80% women, and the 20% of men are the least virile of the population? While the other side is say 45% of the population, 80% of men, but contains effectively 100% of the fighting aged men who are actually capable of fighting? Side A will keep outvoting side B at the ballot box because it is larger. But eventually side B realizes that if they just … take over … there is absolutely nothing, from a purely realpolitikal standpoint, standing in their way.