Male Supremacy is at the Core of the Hard Right's Agenda [View all]

[Nevilledog]

https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2023/04/18/male-supremacy-core-hard-rights-agenda

Hard-right movements are based on exclusion and the construction of hierarchies.

Christianity, many members of the American hard right contend, should hold a preeminent place in our society and even form the basis for our laws. White people, they (often implicitly) suggest, deserve to hold a dominant position in society because of their supposed innate superiority.

The hard right, in other words, wants to revive an older social order, before the Civil Rights Movement, women’s and gay liberation movements, and other social and political transformations upset what was a thoroughly white-dominated, patriarchal society. Gender, then – how it is understood, practiced and described in our laws – is clearly of central concern to the hard right. Their goal is to uphold male supremacy, a movement that scholar of right-wing movements Chelsea Ebin describes as “a complex system that serves to assert, support, and promote the supposed superiority of men,” and subjugate women, trans, nonbinary and gender-nonconforming people.

But in most scholarship and media focused on the hard right, the movement’s gender politics are taken for granted or given secondary importance. Writing and commentary on the Jan. 6 insurrection, for instance, has lifted up the role of white supremacy in the attack, but usually fails to explore the fact that the insurrectionists were not only overwhelmingly white but also overwhelmingly men (with some notable exceptions).

White supremacy is central to the hard right, but so is a desire to maintain a patriarchal society where people adhere to strictly defined gender roles and men act from a position of dominance.

Given the hard right’s actions over roughly the past year, it’s impossible to ignore the centrality of male supremacy in the movement. Even far-right extremists have noted the shift. “I’ve noticed in the last three or four years, there seems to be a lot of generalized resentment of women on the right, like beyond typical,” white nationalist podcaster Joseph Jordan said in a July 2022 podcast, calling the Republican Party’s positions akin to the “Reddit Manosphere,” a violently misogynistic online community.

*snip*