One of the most fascinating examples of how the Democratic Party relies on reactionary, even fuddy-duddy, ideology to maintain power is their conception of the role of women in our society.

The party and their media minions treat (or pretend to treat) women like an oppressed class when the female population in our colleges and graduate schools (notably law and medicine) has already outstripped or will soon outstrip the male in almost every area save engineering and science, and they are gaining in those. They are also invading the boardrooms and the political arena as never before.

And this has been going on for some years. Soon enough, as more women matriculate, they will dominate many fields of endeavor in our country and salary inequalities that remain will vanish or be rationalized through maternity or childcare leave. It’s beyond anything the women’s movement ever conceived and is happening naturally.

Extrapolating even slightly, our society seems headed for a quasi-matriarchy. Leaving aside whether this is good or bad — I don’t think it’s necessarily either — it’s a reality.

But it’s a reality the Democratic Party is desperate to ignore, since the oppression of women — certainly true in the past and still obviously true in other cultures today — is their most important ideological pillar. In fact, they could not possibly win a major election without it. They would lose in a landslide even if they were still able to Balkanize the black and Latino votes.

Hence constant appeals are made to the lowest common female denominator in an attempt to terrify single women and soccer moms, etc., that their “reproductive rights” are being violated or someone is about to deprive them of birth control pills or force-feed ultrasounds in their private parts.

It’s absurd, if you think about it — but the Democrats don’t want you to. They just want women to feel deprived or manipulated.

In truth, the last place government should be sticking its nose is an individual’s private life. Most Americans, in recent polling, are anti-abortion except in extreme cases (I am too), but most Americans want this kind of thing dealt with, as much as possible, away from the intruding hand of the state (ditto).

Democrats and liberal/progressives/whatevers appear to want to keep as much as possible about our personal lives in the hands of the state. Some Republicans and faith-based conservatives are their unwitting allies in this. Unlike the Democrats, who are doing this largely for power purposes (sometimes masked as “social justice”), these Repubs are traditional “values voters.” But they are open to charges of hypocrisy as well because these values voters very often advocate the state staying as far as possible from their economic, but not their social, lives, thus trying to have it both ways.

Both sides also erroneously assume that the state could do a good or even decent job of legislating private morality. It never has and it never will. Abortions will still occur no matter what happens to Roe v. Wade, and gay marriages (or their equivalent) have existed all over America for decades, probably more than that, and are not about to disappear.

The solution of course is to leave these issues, again as much as possible, in the hands of voluntary private institutions — churches, synagogues, community groups, societies of atheists, deists, or whatever.

Meanwhile, in the real world, the number of abortions is going down, reflecting public disapproval as well as, I would imagine, more effective use of birth control. The family may be in trouble, but those worried about its decline would be much better served and be more successful promoting it through those same local religious and community-based organizations.

The Democratic Party will not and cannot let that happen. They need their version of values as a national wedge issue to hold onto that crucial woman’s vote. So look for them to seize on any bogus opportunity in this election season, as in the ginned-up “binders full of women” controversy from Tuesday night’s debate replete with its gonzo Twittersphere reaction.

Could anything have been more ridiculous?

What we are really witnessing here is the reverse of what it appears. It is a conscious/unconscious attempt to keep women down by Democrats, camouflaged as on attack on Republicans who, in Democratic eyes, regard women as 1950s Leave-It-To-Beaver homemakers all sitting in their laundry rooms waiting for the next sewing bee.

That’s again absurd to anyone familiar with the makeup of today’s Republican Party. But what these Democrats and so-called liberals really want to do is convince women they are oppressed so the poor, shivering females will vote for the Democratic Party.

Not surprisingly, these Dems convince themselves this is true in the process. It’s a form of self-hypnosis. Or as Pirandello famously wrote, “It is so if you think so.” This same attitude, and its consequent behaviors, becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, making matters worse and indeed oppressing women.

This is exactly the same vicious cycle the Dems use with blacks and Latinos, which has been truly reactionary and destructive to the people involved for decades. Little has improved in their communities from it. This strategy is a little more complex with women since they are so numerous and, as Mao reminded us, “they hold up half the sky”… And they would, maybe more than half, if the Democrats would only let them.