Failed woke leaders are beginning to exit.

Two authoritarian wokeists have stepped down in the past month.  Formerly lionized by the left-leaning mainstream media, both New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern, and now Scotland’s Nicola Sturgeon have now stepped away from the theater of power, contemplating the failure and rank despotism of their reigns.  

From Two Woke Authoritarians Make Their Exit by Joanna Williams.  The subheading is New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern and Scotland’s Nicola Sturgeon preferred pandemic-era politics-by-decree to the inconvenience of persuading voters.

Williams does a good job of succinctly summarizing what won't elsewhere be said - that these two leaders sought to impose bad economic and public health policies on their citizenry and used the guise of a pandemic to skirt constitutional safeguards.  Now that the pandemic is over, the nonsense of the policies more clear, and the scope of the cost of failure becoming more apparent, both have chosen to end their careers.  They go out trumpeting their so-called successes but Williams is clear about what is happening and why.

First New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern, and now Scotland’s Nicola Sturgeon: the world’s chief nannies are quitting before voters have a chance to push them out. The pair thrived off imposing Covid restrictions, only to find far less sympathy for their blend of woke politics and authoritarian control in 2023. It seems that, freed from lockdowns, many people are no longer willing to be nudged, cajoled, hectored, censored, monitored, checked, and approved. Nor are they willing to sacrifice their rights, their children’s safety, and their standard of living to appease a leader’s appetite for hollow displays of virtue.

In Scotland, Sturgeon’s commitment to transgender ideology proved her undoing. Having been first minister for almost a decade and, for much of this time, placed on a pedestal by a British media looking to contrast her favorably to Brexit-backing Conservative prime ministers based in London, Sturgeon naively assumed that she could push a Gender Recognition Reform Bill through the Scottish Parliament without much difficulty. Her proposed legislation would make it easier for people to pursue gender transition by removing the requirement for a medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria and by reducing the length of time that applicants are expected to live as a member of the opposite sex. The law would also lower the age at which people can apply for a gender-recognition certificate from 18 to 16.

Sturgeon’s views on gender are out of kilter with those of the Scottish public. Opinion polls have repeatedly shown that a majority of citizens oppose her reforms. Women, in particular, have expressed concern about the threat to single-sex spaces such as public toilets, domestic-violence refuges, and prisons, if men can access them by self-identifying as women. A UN Special Rapporteur intervened to warn that the proposed changes could endanger women and girls. What’s more, Sturgeon’s plans put the Scottish Parliament on a collision course with the government of the United Kingdom. If the bill is passed, being a woman would legally mean different things in different parts of the U.K., undermining national equalities legislation.

None of this bothered Sturgeon. She described critics of her proposed reforms as “bigots” who “cloak themselves in women’s rights to make it acceptable,” but are actually “deeply misogynist, often homophobic, [and] possibly . . . racist as well.”

But reality struck back.

And when political leaders fail, it is the ordinary citizen who ends up paying the consequences.  

Good riddance to bad authoritarians.