It is simplistic to believe that Kaczynski, Orbán and Trump have risen to power simply by tapping into a ubiquitous and deeply engrained hatred of women and homosexuals. Rather, for many voters, equality politics, both in the narrow sense of policies aimed at eradicating various forms of inequality, and as a symbol of a positive, progressive vision of the future, have come to signify everything that is wrong with the current state of politics.
In recent years numerous countries across the globe have witnessed the emergence of powerful, transnational social movements mobilizing against an enemy known as ‘gender ideology’, and ‘cultural Marxism’, in much of the Western world, ‘Gayropa’ in post-Soviet countries or ‘political correctness’ in the American context. These movements have successfully mobilized people against various human rights and equality issues such as women’s reproductive rights, LGBT issues, gender equality policies and gender mainstreaming, sexual education, gender studies as an academic field and political correctness. At the peak of those campaigns it was not uncommon for ‘gender ideology’ or political correctness to be portrayed as the new incarnation of Nazism and Leninism (Polish MP Beata Kempa), bemoaned for enslaving the people (Ukrainian Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk), presented as a threat to children comparable to paedophilia (Slovak MP Pavol Gorisak), or blamed for turning American campuses into ‘ivy-covered North Koreas’ (American public intellectual William Lind). [...]
In order to understand this phenomenon, and to highlight the crucial role played by gender politics in the current paradigm change, we have introduced the notion of gender as ‘symbolic glue’.
Firstly, in constructing a dynamic within which the notion of ‘gender’ is perceived as a threatening concept the right has united separate contested issues attributed to the progressive agenda under one umbrella term. ‘Gender ideology’ has come to signify the failure of democratic representation, and opposition to this ideology has become a means of rejecting different facets of the current socioeconomic order, from the prioritization of identity politics over material issues, and the weakening of people’s social, cultural and political security, to the detachment of social and political elites and the influence of transnational institutions and the global economy on nation states. [...]
Thirdly, opposition to ‘gender politics’ and ‘cultural Marxism’ has also allowed the Right to create broad alliances and unite various actors that have not, necessarily, been eager to cooperate in the past: different Christian Churches, orthodox Jews, fundamentalist Muslims, mainstream conservatives, far right parties, fundamentalist groups and in some countries even football hooligans.
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