The twin Guardian headlines caught my eye. Featured at the top, a story on how the white nationalist group Patriot Front recruits “young members”. Just underneath, a report on President Biden’s recent speech, in which he warned that US democracy is “imperiled by Trump and MAGA extremists”.
Far-right extremism is a frequent story these days. But that label misses the mark, preventing us from seeing what is in plain sight.
The fact is that most of these extremists are not only white; they are also men. And across their minor differences – be it white Christian nationalism or similar supremacies – is another shared agenda: anti-feminism and the revival of an older patriarchal and heteronormative order. Yet we ignore the role of gender all the time.
Racism and sexism, as well as homophobia and transphobia, are not separate agendas for these groups. They are bound together by one logic: Straight white Western manhood has been wrongly toppled from its rightful pedestal, and the time has come to reclaim that perch. We can call this ‘aggrieved masculinity’, for short.
The common denominator of the hard right turn around the world today is precisely this: aggrieved masculinity, the feeling that real manhood is under attack, like an endangered species that must be revived for the sake of civilization, to save ’our way of life’. This feeling has gone viral because its compact code—MANLY RIGHT, WRONGED—is a perfect passion ‘sense bite’ for the contemporary media landscape. The code gets passed around social networks as sensation first and foremost. It circulates and swells through videos, memes, chat rooms, and more, surging into living rooms, schools, pubs, and voting booths. Aggrieved masculinity is a catchy feeling that readily adapts to local circumstances and tugs at the body, whispering insistently that something has gone wrong, enough is enough, take it like a real man by taking it no more.
Like the Patriot Front recruitment story and Biden’s speech, the explosion of recent attention to far-right extremism rarely, if ever, mentions gender. Remarkably, this remains true even when men and masculinity are crucial to the self-definition of these groups. Yes, the Proud Boys should be characterized as white nationalist and far right. Equally important, they are also anti-feminists – self-declared “Western chauvinists” – who aim to recruit young men, not simply “young members”. We must start saying so out loud.
Aggrieved masculinity is powering not only far-right extremism, but also those increasingly mainstream movements we call ‘right-wing populism’. Take Our Country Back. Make America Great Again, or whatever the slogan may be near you. Notice how contempt for feminism and disdain for LGBTQ+ rights top their culture war playlist, right up there with white racial anxiety. It’s all part of one package, and aggrieved masculinity is its name.
We hesitate to use this name when women are involved in these movements. If women are angry too, how can this be about manhood, we ask? As a woman raised on right-wing populism, I like to answer that question with another: Have you met heterosexuality? As daughters, mothers, wives, economic and intimate partners, women find all kinds of reasons to invest in aggrieved masculinity. Of course we tend to manly wounds when our own fate is tied to these injuries. Instead of letting our participation throw you off the scent, let it help you sniff out what kind of manhood needs its swagger back. Is it mostly white women who channel this anger on behalf of men in their lives? It sure is.
Aggrieved masculinity is stomping around the world and seeking to run the world. COVID-19 gave us a glimpse of why we can’t have this. Governments run by manly grievance don’t manage global pandemics, and they won’t address climate change either. Their goal is to keep stoking entitled outrage, a voltage they can harness toward a thousand selfish ends. So they will suffocate the planet to resuscitate real men. This is only the iceberg’s tip of dangers posed by aggrieved masculinity. Forget what you think of it morally or politically; the problem is more existential than a threat to democracy.
In this light, aggrieved masculinity is both a global pandemic of feeling and a global public health threat. We need to treat it as such – as viral, rather than toxic, masculinity. My new book, Wronged and Dangerous: Viral Masculinity and the Populist Pandemic, details how we can do so.
To catch and unravel the tie that binds extremist groups with right-wing populisms – and even with mass shooters (as in the US) – we must start naming what is right in front of us. By calling it ‘populism’, we disguise manly grievance in the dignified cloak of an oppressed class: The People’s rights, wronged. The populist label has become a gender-laundering service, the legitimate front of aggrieved masculinity. I say we stop playing along and rip off its cover. Stop the steal of The People’s good name.
You have a stake in doing so whether you know or care anything about gender. We all do, straight white men included. Slowing the spread – or I should say, flattening the curve – of manly grievance is urgent for our common survival. To begin, let’s start calling aggrieved masculinity by name.
Karen Lee Ashcraft is Professor of Communication at the University of Colorado Boulder. She grew up in the lap of evangelical populism, and her research examines how gender interacts with race, class, sexuality and more to shape organisational and cultural politics.
Wronged and Dangerous by Karen Lee Ashcraft is available on the Bristol University Press website. Pre-order here for £19.99.
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