Why woke women make terrible leaders

It's not just their sanctimony and humorlessness. It's their insistence on feel-good nonsolutions to real problems. The backlash is only beginning.

Wir schaffen das!

In English, the words mean: We can do this! So said Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor from 2005 to 2021, as she hectored her citizens to accept 2 million refugees from Syria and other Muslim countries.

Observe, though: as calls to action go, Merkel’s was watery.

Not: “we must do this” — a categorical demand that might raise the question of why Germany, or any country, should have to house and feed another country’s citizens without limit. No: we “can” do this. That is: these people have come. Rather than looking hard at whether we should encourage them, or the costs of doing so, we’ll just deal with them. Mostly by throwing money at them.

Wir schaffen das was, ultimately, a call to bureaucracy. (In fact, the phrase can also be translated as “we can manage this.”)

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(I can do this. But I need your help.)

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Except Germany couldn’t, not really.

Merkel’s tenure as chancellor began with an explosion in German manufacturing. It ended with the country’s economy flatlining. The refugee crisis wasn’t the only reason, of course.

Another was Germany’s ruinous decision to embrace a policy of decarbonization while simultaneously closing its nuclear power plants, a key source of carbon-free electricity. Germany now has among the world’s highest power prices, a serious hurdle for a country that relies heavily on manufacturing. The crisis will only get worse as artificial intelligence datacenters become a bigger and bigger drain on the power grid.

Not coincidentally, Germany’s Covid response was also extremely strict, with harsh lockdowns and government pressure campaigns.

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(A German government ad from late 2020 — when much of the United States had already reopened.)

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In December 2021, days before Merkel left office, Germany even announced a lockdown for unvaccinated people and plans to make Covid vaccinations mandatory. Only the spread of the Omicron variant, which proved the absolute uselessness of shots, undid that effort.

Merkel’s reign ended almost four years ago, but it set Germany in a hole that the country seems unable or unwilling to escape.

In every way, her governing style crystallized the crisis of what the writer Helen Andrews called “The Great Feminization” in an opinion piece that has deservedly received attention in the last week.

Andrews argues that the rise of the political phenomenon Americans call “woke” actually reflects the rise of women in politics, law, medicine, journalism, academia, corporate America, and other power centers:

Wokeness arose around the same time that many important institutions tipped demographically from majority male to majority female.

The substance fits, too. Everything you think of as wokeness involves prioritizing the feminine over the masculine: empathy over rationality, safety over risk, cohesion over competition…

Female group dynamics favor consensus and cooperation. Men order each other around, but women can only suggest and persuade. Any criticism or negative sentiment, if it absolutely must be expressed, needs to be buried in layers of compliments. The outcome of a discussion is less important than the fact that a discussion was held and everyone participated in it. The most important sex difference in group dynamics is attitude to conflict. In short, men wage conflict openly while women covertly undermine or ostracize their enemies.

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Of course, not every woman feels or acts this way.

Margaret Thatcher, the only female politician in modern history more powerful than Merkel, fought openly and fearlessly with her enemies. But it is obvious to anyone who not entirely blinkered by ideology that, on the whole, men and women interact in profoundly different ways. Men face, and sometimes seek out, conflict; women avoid or sublimate it.

Unfortunately, avoiding or sublimating conflict does not mean ending it. This week, an old clip of NPR head Katherine Maher again popped up. In 2021, Maher said:

“In our messy human hearts, we also know that the truth is something of a fickle mistress and that the beauty of the truth is actually often in the struggle.”

Maher is an easy target, almost too easy.

She’s a living, breathing woke caricature: a white woman from a wealthy Connecticut family who is for Black Lives Matter and against homophobia. She’s against climate change but for transit justice (which I’m guessing does not include arresting riders for menacing their fellow passengers). Christopher Rufo shredded her last year in a piece called Quotations from Chairman Maher, which consists mostly of Maher’s greatest tweets.

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(Katherine Maher would like a word)

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But she’s worthy of all the scorn that she receives.

Because what Maher’s is arguing is profoundly dangerous.

The truth is not a “fickle mistress.” The “beauty of the truth” is not in the “struggle.” The truth is knowable. Not always, but usually.

The hard part isn’t usually getting to the truth (at least on a broad level).

The hard part is making decisions, realizing that you — as a person or a society — cannot have it all, that you are going to make choices and that those choices will have costs and consequences.

Consider Charlie Kirk’s painful, brutal words about the Second Amendment:

I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights.

Was Kirk right? I don’t know. Philosophically, I think so. Every time I hear about a school shooting, I wonder. (Which, of course, is why the media reports so extensively on school shootings.)

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Maher does not so much argue with her opponents as insist that she has the moral (and intellectual) high ground, that anyone who would disagree with her is a cretin. Merkel, who had the advantage of formal state power, used its levers more quietly.

But they wind up in the same place. They’re using the same strategy. What Maher pretends is what Merkel pretended: that hard decisions can be elided simply by refusing to consider the possibility that there are two sides at all.

This is a recipe for bureaucratic creep and statism.

Once the refugees have been let in, throwing them out — or even changing admission standards — requires a policy change, for a policy that was pushed through or hardly considered at all. So too with lockdowns. And climate change (though in that case, the strategy has generally been to try to delay the economic impact of the most radical policies years or decades in the future, to give woke politicians and their constituents a moral thrill while again pretending it is cost-free).

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Of course, the pretense that these choices aren’t choices at all — that, say, the only way to treat science is to “believe” in it — has now provoked a massive backlash.

The Trump and MAGA style is hyper-masculine, to look for fights large and small (“Gulf of America”), and to never back down. It’s a gleeful and frequently hilarious in-your-face posturing. The President of the United States released an AI video of himself in a fighter jet dropping feces on the heads of people who protested him.

The attitude isn’t merely rhetorical.

Trump is now strikingly willing to use military force aggressively, in a notable change from his first term or the near-isolationist principles he took as a candidate. (So far with generally positive results, most notably his bombing on Iran.)

Of course, hyper-masculinity carries its own risks.

But the choice between Katherine Maher-style smothering of dissent and Trump’s gleeful incitement is, well, no choice at all. As a society, we have difficult, consequential decisions to make. Let’s do so openly.

Let’s fight like men.