Are women innately Left wing?

Lessons from Germany

An audio version of this essay – read by me – is available below the paywall.

Young German women are radicalising. As John Burn-Murdoch, chief data reporter at the FT, wrote this week:

The gender gap continues to widen, but contrary to what is often assumed, young men continue to vote roughly in line with the overall population, while young women have swung very sharply left… young women’s AfD vote is significantly lower than average (14 vs 21), and leftwing vote far higher (34 vs 9). The overall story is of young Germans rejecting the established centre-right and centre-left, but while young men are shifting to both populist flanks, young women are shifting overwhelmingly to the populist left.

Not only is German politics become less stable and more extreme, it is also driving men and women apart.

I wrote an essay last year about the political importance of average psychological differences between men and women – specifically, the fact that women are more likely to tell white lies for the sake of preserving relationships, are generally more selective about who they will permit into their social networks, will often punish other women who are regarded as overly ambitious or successful (tall poppy syndrome), and tend to be maternal towards those they perceive as vulnerable.

As a result of the sudden influx of women into professions like academia and journalism in recent decades, these psychological phenomena in combination have produced what is commonly referred to as cancel culture: that is, the use of a feminine style of aggression to enforce political conformity in the workplace and other areas of public life. The reigning ideology to which we’re all asked to conform – wokeness, for want of a better term – is much more popular with women (specifically young women) and these women will often vigorously defend the ideology using tools that we are all by now familiar with: social ostracisation, name calling, rumour mongering, and other “you can’t sit with us” mean girl behaviour.

I was at pains in the last essay to emphasise that these sex differences are average ones, and I’ll keep emphasising that as we go on. There are outliers, both male and female: plenty of men who participate enthusiastically in woke cancel culture, and plenty of women who don’t.

Nevertheless, one conclusion you could draw from these observations is that women must be innately more Left wing than men. Perhaps the gender gap is explained by women’s greater sympathy for the vulnerable – in the German case, refugees and sexual minorities – combined with a preference for egalitarianism within their social networks. This theory would explain why men and women are diverging so sharply: their political preferences are fundamentally at odds.

I want to propose a subtly different explanation for what we’re seeing. Women are not more Leftist, per se. Rather, the specific variety of Leftism that is currently riding high is extremely well suited to feminine preferences. That does not mean that a new style of Right wing feminine politics couldn’t displace the current one. Nor does it mean that men and women can never be aligned on politics – really successful political movements tend to succeed because they work in both masculine and feminine registers.

These are the features of a political cause that make it attractive to someone with a typically feminine personality:

1. A cause that appeals to compassion for the vulnerable (the care/harm foundation, to use Jonathan Haidt’s expression), tapping into women’s greater average agreeableness.

2. A cause that emphasises fearful threats, tapping into women’s greater average neuroticism and risk aversion.

3. A cause that offers collective emotional experiences, given that women are more vulnerable to social contagion, and particularly to outbreaks of mass hysteria.

To return to Germany – and at the risk of kicking the Germans while they’re down – Nazism is an example of a political movement that worked in both masculine and feminine registers, and provides a strong counterexample to the argument that women are innately Left wing.

We’re all familiar with the masculine components of Nazism: Hitler as strongman, military aggression, the valorisation of youthful masculinity, the emphasis on Germany’s glorious past, the opportunities for both street violence and homosocial camaraderie. These are the sort of political themes that men are likely to be attracted to, particularly young ones.

But Nazism appealed to women, too. In A Social History of The Third Reich, Richard Grunberger offers some very interesting insights into the feminine qualities of Nazism that are often overlooked.

For instance, Grunberger writes of Nazism’s ability to harness a kind of “unfocused religiosity” in women:

… dormant impulses that Hitler activated to a pitch of unprecedented intensity. Already in January 1932, during the meeting at the Düsseldorf Industrial Club between Hitler and the Ruhr tycoons, the assembled ladies paid the cloakroom attendant a mark apiece for the privilege of sniffing the bouquet that had been presented to the Führer on entering.

On public occasions in the Third Reich the female section of the crowd often exhibited a form of mass hysteria known as Kontaktsucht or ‘contact-craving’, an uncontrollable urge to touch him physically; at mass meetings Rauschnigg noted the eyes of women listeners ‘filming over and glazed with a religious sort of exultation.’

At the end of the war, too, more women than men preferred self-immolation to living in a world devoid of the Führer’s presence; their suicides ironically corroborated the received Nazi truth about the congenital difference between reason-motivated man and emotion-guided woman. (p. 339)

More examples of women’s Hitler-worship:

Hitler constantly received basketfuls of letters from female admirers, many of them married, imploring him to father their children; some pregnant women cried out his name as an analgesic reflex during labour pains. The extraordinary dissociation of consciousness that Hitler-worship induced in the female mind was exemplified by the reaction of the mother of a Hitler Youth who had been killed by Storm Troopers in an inter-party squabble. Hitler had sent her a wreath with a message, “I weep with you for this young martyr to Germany.” She proudly showed everybody this letter. (p.118)

Women were also some of the most enthusiastic participants in the enforcement of political conformity. Grunberger again:

The emotional tension brought about by war naturally intensified the mood of suspicion and increased the flow of denunciations. Women tended to take the lead both because there were more of them about, and because many thought that prying into their neighbours affairs contributed a female contribution to the war effort while their menfolk were at the front. Women were capable of informing the Gestapo about someone giving a crust of bread to a starving Russian prisoner, and of threatening to report lodgers who preferred not to sleep in the air-raid shelters, so that in the event of death no compensation would be paid to next-of-kin. (p.153)

Nazism was not good for German women. Even before the war delivered death, destruction, and sexual violence on an almost unimaginable scale, German women suffered the indignities of being driven out of the professions, barred from political leadership of any kind, and targeted with an anti-feminism so intense that Grunberger describes it as “a non-lethal variant of anti-Semitism.” Many people on the Right have been publicly wondering this week why young German women are so eager to support a political cause that puts them at risk of sexual violence. But then couldn’t we ask the same of their great-grandmothers? Sometimes people support causes that hurt them.

To be clear, I’m not pulling that tired old trick of comparing my political opponents to Nazis in an effort to discredit them. Wokeism is not Nazism. I mention them in the same breath only to point out that both are examples of political movements that channel a kind of “unfocused religiosity”, inspiring a very intense and contagious emotional response in their most committed adherents.

But here’s one instructive difference: wokeism doesn’t work in a masculine register. To borrow more terminology from Jonathan Haidt, most men don’t have the psychological tastebuds necessary to savour a political movement that appeals most to a feminine palate. After all, this is an ideology that has specifically chosen masculinity as its symbolic opponent, and attempts to convert people to its cause using feminine social weapons that don’t work as well on men. To put it crudely, men like political movements that permit them to feel good about themselves and to beat people up. They were never likely to get onboard with this one.

Political movements that do manage to inspire fanatical devotion in both men and women are almost always bad news. We should be grateful, on balance, that the fanaticism that has swept over the West during our lifetimes is persuasive only to one sex, or its destructive effects might have been far worse.