Posted on 10/26/2025 6:18:35 AM PDT by MtnClimber
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.
(A German government ad from late 2020 — when much of the United States had already reopened.)
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).
I can eat a whole pizza. I would get sick if I did, both immediate indigestion and long term obesity and heart disease so I should not eat it. And that's something enjoyable to eat.
One notes that the head of the European Commission of the EU was Merkel's "Defense Minister" who sent German troops into NATO exercises with painted broomsticks to resemble firearms. And that "spawn" of Merkel elevated a woman from tiny Estonia to be "High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy" as well as now von der Leyen's Vice-President.
My and my wife's take on this modern phenomenon is that in parallel there is an ongoing 'Great Feminization" of men, such that the whole is more of a "social contagion" than a true emancipation of women.
Just like woke men make terrible leaders. 🙄
There’s the right kind of girl power and then there’s the other kind where it’s okay to be wrong about everything and never measure for success or failure. With leadership like that, how can anyone ever score a win-win?
America will eventually fall due to the 19th. I think once we've passed that, we went through the civilizational cycle quicker than we would have if we did not pass the 19th in the first place. You can argue that we are in the last stages of the civilizational cycle.
I worked for one of “Grace’s Girls”. She was spectacular.
Sadly, I'm pretty sure of this.
The problem is it drives men away from wanting to be a part of the group, and has driven them away from wanting to work for police departments led by women. It is also happening in politics, where good men just don’t want to bother will all the BS.
One thing the author is NOT seeing is how men and woman are wired far more differently than how they deal with conflicts. Men (real ones, not the soy variety) gravitate toward liberty with the risks and responsibilities that come with it. Women are wired to seek safety and security while all else is secondary.
This is why most of them keep voting for skeezy Democrats despite that party's consistent failure to keep it's promises to guarantee that safety and security.
Women=Charlie Brown. Lucy=Democrat Party. Football=promises.
That they keep falling for it is the best argument for rescinding the 19th Amendment, because constantly performing a failing action expecting different results is a definite indicator of madness.
“You can argue that we are in the last stages of the civilizational cycle.”
We’re quickly becoming a matriarchy, and no matriarchy has lasted long.
The question is, are we going to be able to reverse this internally by ourselves, or will a more masculine power take over.
The prime candidates are, Islam, Chinese and possibly Russians.
What do you think?
I don’t think you are a jerk. This hole we have dug though will never be easy to get out of. Going back to two children, one car and a 1200 square foot home being a normal good life is a huge step back from where we are now.
Post war men are as guilty as the women in creating this mess. Women were economic prisoners of men who did not take care of their responsibilities correctly and the women, or at least their daughters, revolted.
I had all boys. I wonder often what I would have encouraged my children to do if they had been girls.
Grace’s girls???
One of Admiral Grace Hopper’s team members, creators of the FORTRAN compiler.
Ahh
This woman agrees with you.
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