When you think of great female leaders of Anglophone democracies, who comes to mind? Margaret Thatcher: a conservative. Today, many conservative parties are lead by women: Giorgia Meloni, Marine Le Pen, Kemi Badenoch.
Indeed, the UK Conservatives have produced three women PMs, with, it must be admitted, varying success. Meanwhile British Labour have never had a female leader. Not even close.
But if a Theresa May is the worst the conservatives have given the UK, the best (and only) Labor in Australia have managed was the hopeless Julia Gillard. New Zealand, of course, has had Jenny Shipley, Helen Clark and Jacinda Ardern. I’ll leave it to Good Oil readers to pass judgement.
Then there’s the US Democrats. What’s the best they’ve had to offer? Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris.
And they’re astonished that both lost.
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 […] 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.
Yet, in the same week, Kemi Badenoch was elected leader of the Conservatives in Britain.
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.
Which, almost every commenter continues to overlook, was mounted in defense of her own Speaker, under siege from both corruption and sexual harassment allegations. Gillard was weaponising false claims of misogyny in order to defend her own corrupt misogynist.
It’s telling that Gillard’s proximal excuse for the attack on Abbott was that he had been photographed at an anti-Gillard rally where, briefly, a banner reading ‘Ditch the Witch’ appeared. Yet, when Margaret Thatcher died, the left rallied around the slogan “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.
We need only ask Australia’s Jacinta Price just how viciously the left will attack ‘women of colour’ on both gender and racial grounds. Warren Mundine, as well, has been subjected to brutal racially based attacks from the left.
Because if there’s one thing the left really hate, it’s when their pet identity groups dare stray off the reservation.
Most especially because, those who do, do so when they realise just how awful the left really are. And how weak and retrogressive their ‘progressive’ ideology really is.
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.
The great bogeyman of leftist women, the ‘patriarchy’, is damned for supposedly wanting to keep women barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen. In reality, it’s the left who want to keep women blue-haired and miserable in the office.
Women of the left rise up! You have nothing to lose but your blindfolds.
