Why We Reject Smart Women and Elect Incoherent Men.
It is a sentence that lingers like a painful truth: “I’ve seen two viable female candidates run for president in the last decade – and both lost to a man who can’t make complete sentences.” In its plain directness, it is an indictment – not of Hillary Clinton or Kamala Harris, but of us. Of a society that claims to want progress, but repeatedly falls back into the reflexes of the past.
Because what does it say about a democracy when rhetorical incompetence, aggressive masculinity, and deliberately staged ignorance are apparently more appealing than competence, experience, and intelligent ideas? When a man who regularly loses himself in incoherent half-sentences, who demeans women, denies science, and openly shows disinterest in institutional responsibility, is more successful than two women who possess everything a president – or a president-to-be – should have?
It would be too easy to explain this with sexism alone. And yet sexism is part of the answer. Women in leadership positions are still not perceived as equal political actors. They must prove twice what is assumed for men. Their voices must not be too firm, not too soft, not too shrill, not too assertive. They are expected to be empathetic but forceful, educated but approachable, combative but motherly – a balancing act that hardly anyone can fulfill, because it is inhuman.
But it goes deeper. It is about a collective acclimation to the devaluation of thought. About the glorification of instinct over intellect. About the disturbing craving for chaos that makes populist figures like Donald Trump into projection screens. We live in an era where determination is often confused with volume, authority with interruption, truth with repetition.
And so deeper questions arise:
Why do we believe the one who yells rather than the one who reasons? Why does a society trust a man who can barely organize his own thoughts over a woman who speaks with analytical clarity? Why do we care less about missing content than we do about the wrong tone?
Warum vertraut eine Gesellschaft lieber einem Mann, der kaum seine eigenen Gedanken ordnen kann, als einer Frau, die mit analytischer Klarheit spricht? Warum stören uns fehlende Inhalte weniger als eine falsche Tonlage?
Maybe it’s a fear of change that doesn’t unfold through political positions, but through symbols. The female body on the stage of power disturbs because it subconsciously challenges the familiar structure of dominance. Maybe we’re not as advanced as we think. Maybe we’re tired of progress. Maybe it’s easier to submit to a roaring caricature of leadership than to open our minds to the idea that competence, integrity, and forward-thinking might come with a different voice.
This society has had the chance to make a historic decision – twice. Twice it chose the familiar – and rejected the future. Not because these women failed. But because these voters did.
And that is the bitter truth.
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