Why can’t the left produce successful women leaders like the right?
Gillard said her exit from politics was inexplicable without taking gender into account. So did Clinton. Perhaps the reason is that the progressive faith in gender before talent has given us women who just aren’t very good.
In the US presidential election campaign there were several decisive moments when you knew Donald Trump had won it, and Kamala Harris had lost it. What was yours?
The “Harris is for they/them; Trump is for you” viral ad? The refusal of Harris to podcast with Joe Rogan? Trump’s “Fight! Fight! Fight!”? Harris not being able to explain how her presidency would differ from Joe Biden’s?
In my home, it was when the Democrats aired the commercial they called “Julia Roberts Reminds Us – Your Vote, Your Choice”. It will be remembered as possibly the most ill-conceived 30 seconds in campaign history.
Two couples are about to enter the semi-privacy of the voting booth. One of the MAGA husbands is certain his wife will do the right thing but encourages her just to be sure: “Your turn, Honey!”
But the two 50-something women, while they are wearing Trump merch, are secretly pro-choice. This is the brilliant Democratic twist.
Using telepathy and a nod, the women vote for Harris-Walz. Their husbands need never know. The right of their daughters to abort any grandchildren moves stealthily a step closer. They will make abortion great again.
“Did you make the right choice?” asks hubby. (“Choice”. Geddit?)
“Sure did, Honey.”
“Remember,” says Roberts, reaching peak condescension, “what happens in the booth, stays in the booth.”
My Texan wife, a centre-right Trump sceptic, felt caricatured and infantilised by the ad. While she has never liked Trump, multi-millionaire actress Julia Roberts guaranteed that she would vote for Harris “over my dead body”. And that we can never again watch the Pelican Brief (good film, underrated).
Harris went on to lose women aged 45-64 by a point (49 to 50 per cent). She lost white women by eight points (45 to 53 per cent). She lost white women without a college degree (which we assume were those targeted in the Roberts commercial) by a stunning 28 points (35 to 63 per cent).
How is it that a campaign fronted by a woman of colour had such little appeal with women of pretty much any colour? Compared to Biden in 2020, Harris lost ground among every demographic. Sixty-five per cent of Native Americans voted for Trump. Voice proponents in Australia take note.
In the same week Harris lost the presidential election, another woman of colour, Kemi Badenoch, was elected leader of the British Conservative Party.
The Tories are the most successful electoral machine in European history. Four women have led them. Three have been prime minster. One was a great, world historical figure: Margaret Thatcher. Two have been failures: Theresa May and Liz Truss.
The British right has become comfortable about the sex of its leaders. In contrast, the British Labour Party has never had a woman lead it. But, like progressive parties all over the West, it is obsessed with gender politics. Ditto Australian Labor.
Julia Gillard both bucks and confirms a truth about the left and gender. She was our first/only female PM. But Australians were never quite able (or allowed) to see her without using some gender lens. Her greatest moment was a complaint about Tony Abbott’s misogyny.
When Kevin Rudd toppled her, Gillard said her fate was inexplicable without taking gender into account. Hillary Clinton’s failure in 2016 was similarly excused: Americans were just not ready for a woman president (despite more voters backing her than Donald Trump; she lost in the electoral college). Perhaps the more obvious reason is that the progressive faith in gender before talent has given us women who just aren’t very good and/or aren’t very popular.
Harris was next into the trap set by her base. Unlike Clinton, she was savvy enough to suppress her claims to power based on identity. Like Clinton, she still presented an unpersuasive case for her leadership skills.
I grew up in 1980s Britain. While the left lacked all cohesion, it was united in a deep and enduring hatred of Thatcher. What drove it into frequent two-minute hates was Thatcher’s gender.
When she died in 2013, her left-wing haters declared, vocally and in graffiti: “Ding dong the witch is dead.” If Kemi Badenoch becomes PM, gender will be multiplied by race and the left will demonise her on two metrics. Badenoch will become – for some, she already is – a race and gender traitor.
These identitarian loyalty tests are not applied by the right to its female leaders. Sex and race matter much less to a conservative. “Can she do the job?” is often the first question.
To be woke is to sacralise women, people of colour, LGBTQI+ people, Indigenous people and the disabled. This has created an impossible standard for an aspiring leader, who happens to belong to any one of these groups, to pass: “they/them” must advance a progressive social justice agenda and be electable. The US presidential election exposed the weakness of this strategy.
The Democrats needed Harris’s race and gender to do the heavy lifting that her basic competencies could not. The ready-made progressive excuse for her electoral wipe-out was that American voters were not worthy of the Era of Joy she would initiate. They were variously too misogynist, deplorable, racist, victims of misinformation … to get on the right side of history.
The sanctimony needed to maintain this interpretation is a big ask. But the left keeps paying it. The consequence is an electoral strategy that does not work. Voters just don’t prioritise identity in the way the left needs them to. Woke politics is an election loser. Progressives cannot easily translate cultural power (in schools, universities, Hollywood and the media) into political power. This drives them nuts.
The dominance numerically of women in schools and universities, for example, should supply endless great left-wing women leaders. It hasn’t yet. Leaders in the European Union increasingly represent a gender parity. But it is the conservative values of women such as Giorgia Meloni in Italy, Marine Le Pen in France, Beata Szydło in Poland and Badenoch that confound left-wing identity politics.
How we educate girls might have something to do with this. Progressive educators do a lot of head-patting: “It’s great you march for Palestine!” “Your climate activism is inspirational!” “Smash the patriarchy!” “You go girl!”
Young conservative women, on the other hand, must learn how to argue against this faux-liberation orthodoxy. They learn the art of politics and how to lead in a way too many progressive women do not. Conservative women may be fewer in number than their opponents on the left. But they may be better trained.
The great progressive betrayal of progressive women is to render them less resilient. As left-wing doctrines have secured campus dominion – from DEI and decolonisation to safe spaces and preferred pronouns – the mental health of young women has collapsed. There is credible evidence that young conservatives are happier in life than their liberal peers. There is a tragic irony in that.
The centre-right Angela Merkel was schooled in how to survive the infantilisation of East German socialism; she became the most powerful woman in the world.
Harris was raised in the warm bosom of Californian progressivism; she became the weakest presidential candidate in American history – and Julia Roberts’s contracted sanctimony was no help at all.
Timothy J. Lynch is professor of American politics at the University of Melbourne.
