The Female Tradition of Delayed Concession Speeches
By Ed Dutton
For many decades, there was a rather humbling yet reassuring tradition on the night of an American presidential election or early the following morning. The loser would make a speech to his supporters conceding that he had lost, thanking them, and wishing the victor the very best of luck. John Kerry did this in 2004, John McCain did likewise in 2008 (while a tearful Sarah Palin stood nearby), and Mitt Romney delivered a similar speech in 2012.
This tradition was reassuring because it underlined the extent to which the US was a stable democracy wherein emotionally mature and mentally stable gentlemen have political disagreements, run for an election according to the rules, and, if they are defeated, they accept the result and are not bad losers: They display, by giving a concession speech as soon as they realise they’ve lost, a sense of stoicism, aplomb, and punctiliousness... They follow the rules of cricket, they gracefully terminate the brief period of uncertainty that is an election, and the democratic ship of state continues to sail; the waters calmed anew.
This is what Mitt Romney did in 2012, as had his defeated predecessors throughout the television age. But in 2016, when Hillary Clinton was unexpectedly defeated by Donald Trump, this psychologically reassuring tradition was smashed to pieces, like a mirror in the hands of a child having a tantrum. The tradition was not followed in 2020 either, but this was an exception precipitated by the rules of cricket almost certainly not being followed by the winning team. And in 2024, as in 2016, the system of a graceful and timely concession was not adhered to. As with 2016, we had to wait until the following afternoon, despite the fact that it was obvious that Donald Trump had triumphed. Why the change?
The key variable is surely obvious. The two losing candidates were female. Being a male of extremely high status is associated with the Dark Triad traits of Narcissistic Personality Disorder and Psychopathy: in essence, low agreeableness and high extraversion (feeling positive feelings strongly), meaning you relish being adored. Such men think they are brilliant, they are entitled, they ooze confidence, they are manipulative, and enjoy adoration.
However, their emotions are generally under a reasonable level of control because men are lower in neuroticism – in feeling negative feelings strongly, especially anxiety – than are women. This makes evolutionary sense because men are evolved to fight in wars, where intense anxiety is going to be crippling. Women are evolved to look after children, where intense anxiety is going to ensure that they don’t get seriously injured and, thus, they survive the perils of a prehistoric childhood.
For this reason, narcissistic females – the kind that will have a desire to be in the limelight, to be admired, and to become famous – do not tend to reflect grandiose narcissistic personality. Instead, they reflect something rather more complicated and intriguing: Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD): low agreeableness, extraversion, and neuroticism. Kamala Harris, in particular, is, in many ways, a textbook example of this condition.
As I have explained in my book Woke Eugenics, BPD is characterised by highly unstable and extreme moods, poor emotional regulation, a fundamental fear of abandonment and of being alone, extreme feelings of shame, intense and unstable relationships (including sexual risk-taking, perhaps due to a feeling that “love” may not come again), and unstable goals, due to being plagued by intense negative feelings (such as shame, anxiety, self-loathing, and self-doubt), and a weak sense of self; one that oscillates between extremes in a way that is not true of healthy people.
In that they cannot regulate their emotions, they cannot regulate their self-esteem; so it may swing between grandiose narcissism and feelings of abject worthlessness. For the same reason, their identity and goals can radically change in accordance with these swings in self-esteem. When they are narcissistic, they may decide to leave the boyfriend, upon whom they are parasitic and who they don’t really love, for their high-status lover. When they are feeling worthless and insecure, such a risk may seem intolerable, so they will continue with the original relationship, which they may have only embarked on due to being lonely.
Due to their fear of abandonment, such women will tend to idealise those with whom they have relationships. This is a way of suppressing their anxiety about potential problems in the relationship that may cause it to end. It evidences their relatively immature way of seeing the world and their desire for someone to fill the void, emptiness, and meaninglessness that they often feel. In other words, they cannot cope with their extreme negative feelings, so they create a fantasy world, which produces positive feelings; this perfect person being their rescuer. However, an element of their development is stuck at a child-like stage, meaning that people are either “good” or “evil” and they may adopt very different selves – very loving or very hateful – to deal with people accordingly.
Under stress, such women can degenerate into psychosis, where they become dissociated from reality and even have paranoid delusions that they are under threat, in which they can feel a sense of gnosis and thus control. This is a method, other than fantasy, of coping with a reality that is impossibly frightening and malevolent. They will be attracted to, and attractive for, grandiose narcissists, especially if their BPD is comorbid with narcissism, as is sometimes the case, as they desire a rescuer; a father figure, perhaps to make up for the absent or capricious father.
The condition is significantly genetic, but an unstable childhood, in which love seems capricious, can lead to it.
What do we find with Kamala? Her parents divorced when she was 7 and her mother took her to Canada, meaning she rarely saw her father. By her late twenties, she was in a relationship with the married, black, California politician Willie Brown, who is 30 years her senior.
Whereas the sense of self of a normal person will be relatively consistent and perhaps gradually move between slightly different personas, the BPD sense of self is fractured between what may seem like markedly different people who manifest to deal with different challenges, as she has learnt to manipulate in order to survive. The BPD sufferer will dissociate, adopting, without even realising it, quite different personalities in different situations. This is very obvious with multiple Kamalas, and her multiple accents that we witnessed throughout the election campaign.
But returning to the concession speech, such women would be overwhelmed by intense negative feelings in a way that would not be true of their male equivalents. Having lost the election, they would be paralysed by paranoia, anxiety, and a sense of abandonment. They would take a very long time to calm down. It would, thus, be impossible for them to deliver a concession speech on the night. They would have to wait until the next day. Originally, Kamala was to deliver the speech at 6 p.m. Notice, it was brought forward to 4 p.m., presumably as she calmed down and got a grip, understanding that the longer she delayed the speech, the worse it looked.
There are many reasons to be pleased that this woman wasn’t elected: she’s against free speech, she’s utterly Woke, and she wants to overwhelm the country with foreigners. But her inability to deliver the concession speech on the night speaks volumes about her psychological state and, thus, volumes about how dangerous it would have been to have her in the Oval Office. This failure is a female tradition and this is unlikely to be a coincidence in light of the traits that predict a desire for adoration among females.
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I am a woman, but since I was about 12 it became clear that I have a more masculine temperament. I have always been based. I find it easier to make friends with men. I cringe when I listen to Ed's analysis, because I know it's true.
While some female politicians such as Giorgia Meloni and Christine Anderson are clearly based like myself, I have to ask myself the uncomfortable question of whether female participation in politics and public affairs has actually become a net negative.
While maybe not relevant anymore, I'm curious about the psychology behind Walz. He reminds me of the doll people from Coraline. Comes off as a humble, simple, warm-hearted family man, then beneath the surface is a woke zealot who blatantly lies to convince people to give him power. Sociopathic charm?