In an executive order dated Jan. 27, Trump declared that the Department of Defense was renewing its “singular focus on developing the requisite warrior ethos.” That mission, it argued, could not be diluted by accommodating “radical gender ideology” — and therefore transgender people were not qualified to serve.
Rhetorical and institutional brawls over “gender ideology” are, at this point, an international phenomenon, a feature of current and former anti-liberal regimes across the world from Moscow to Budapest to Warsaw to Rome — and now in Washington, D.C. The phrase “gender ideology” is often a shorthand for transgender and nonbinary people but also serves as a kind of catchall for anything associated with the idea that gender is a social construct and therefore malleable. Using the phrase is a way for the right to assert that there is a gap between how things really are and how liberals — and the institutions they seized hold of — describe sex and gender.
A pair of ads the Trump campaign ran last October showed just how effective deploying transgender issues could be in gathering support from some American voters. Using footage of Kamala Harris in 2019 promising access to surgery for every transgender inmate in the prison system, the ad, which ran during Sunday night football, proclaimed, “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.”
The radio host Charlamagne tha God expressed disbelief about the ad on his show, which is popular among Black listeners, a clip the Trump campaign quickly scooped up and put into another ad. Although Charlamagne sent a cease-and-desist order to the Trump campaign, complaining that his remarks had been taken out of context, the ads shifted the race 2.7 percentage points in Trump’s favor, according to analysis by a Harris super PAC.
The gains came largely from Black and Latino men and from suburban women, who the Trump campaign said might be concerned about the participation of transgender athletes in girls’ and women’s sports. (On Wednesday evening, Trump issued another executive order barring transgender student athletes from women’s and girls’ sports.)
The Trump campaign tapped into the feeling among some Americans that society has changed too much too quickly. In an article from 2022, the political scientists Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way cited results from a 2018 survey showing that nearly 60 percent of respondents who identified as Republican said that they felt “like a stranger in their own country.”
Many Republican voters, Levitsky and Way noted, “think the country of their childhood is being taken away from them.” They experienced recent social changes as a loss of social status, which “had a radicalizing effect.” A survey from 2021 sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute found that “a stunning 56 percent of Republicans agreed that the traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to stop it.”
Around the world, many conservatives view “liberal creep” — feminism, gay rights, the legalization of same-sex marriage, trans rights and gender-affirming care for minors — as a civilizational threat. For them, new social mores, which they regard as having been set by the mainstream media, Hollywood and the so-called administrative state, have upended supposedly time-tested values. Within the span of a decade, they claim, these norms have been rendered not just retrograde but also bigoted — the concept of the nation is racist; the traditional family is sexist; the conservative church is backward.
As Giorgia Meloni, the popular prime minister of Italy, put it in a speech in 2019 that was widely shared: “Why is the family an enemy? Why is the family so frightening? There is a single answer to all these questions. Because it defines us. Because it defines our identity. Because everything that defines us is now an enemy.”
Taking Aim at Liberal Institutions
Trump is arguably the leading light of a spate of illiberal leaders and parties flourishing in democracies around the world, in Poland and the Netherlands, India, France and Germany, Italy, Brazil, Hungary, and beyond, of whom the most extreme example is Vladimir Putin. Russia has served, intentionally so in the last 20 years, as a beacon to Europe’s far right, a countermodel to the so-called decadence of Western civilization.
In 2006, small Russian cities began passing laws prohibiting “homosexual propaganda,” bans that became federal law in 2013. Russia was selling itself as the “family values” capital of the world, as M. Gessen, now a columnist for the New York Times Opinion section, wrote at the time. Conservative Russian pundits declared L.G.B.T. Russians to be “creatures who have declared open war” on Russian society, aiming to destroy its “traditions and social institutions.”
Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orban, has long drawn inspiration from Moscow. In 2022, Orban held a referendum aimed at “stopping gender insanity” and restoring our “common sense,” a phrase that will sound familiar to Americans. The referendum was on a child protection law that banned distribution of any materials “promoting homosexuality,” meaning anything containing L.G.B.T.Q. content, to minors. “Hungary is a free country where adults can decide how they want to live,” Orban said at the time, “but children — that’s a red line.” He added, “We expect teachers and schools not to re-educate our children.” The logical endpoint of such policies is a ban on gender-affirming care for minors, addressed in one of Trump’s first executive orders.
Central European countries like Hungary and Poland eagerly joined the West after 1990. Poland, in particular, had long considered itself to have been prevented from embracing liberal democracy and the rule of law not by ideological conviction but by the misfortunes of history. Yet its reaction against liberalism mirrors certain dynamics in the United States.
During the Cold War years, Poles looked to the West and saw societies that still cherished tradition and believed in God. By the 2000s, as the scholars Stephen Holmes and Ivan Krastev have written, some felt “cheated when they found out that the conservative society they wanted to imitate had disappeared, washed away by the swift currents of modernization.” Identity, Holmes and Krastev posited, is a “compact with one’s dead ancestors,” and for conservative Catholic Poles “zealously opposed to legalizing abortion and gay marriage, accepting liberalism feels like self-betrayal.”
Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the leader of Poland’s right-wing nationalist Law and Justice party, which held power for eight years until losing elections in 2023, differs from some of his strongman counterparts in ways that are instructive. Kaczynski does not enjoy the riches that Orban or Putin (or Trump, for that matter) do. He is unmarried, lives in a small house in Warsaw with his cats and didn’t have a bank account until 2009. He worked out of a shabby office and had traditional Polish lunches brought to him, which he ate alone.
This seeming ideological steadfastness may help explain the merciless march of Kaczynski and his party through Polish institutions between 2015 and 2023. He set out to remake them according to his moral code, railing against “weak public institutions and the cronyism of the liberal elites” and promoting a project of national “rejuvenation,” as Dariusz Kalan wrote in Foreign Policy. Kaczynski’s party pushed a vigorously contested abortion ban through the Polish courts and sought to take control of the judiciary through radical reforms. As Dariusz Stola, a historian at the Polish Academy of Sciences, told me a few years ago, “If you really believe that there is a horrible threat facing Western civilization, anything you do is justified.”
Law and Justice also mounted a campaign that demonized L.G.B.T.Q. individuals as aggressors and corrupters of “the nation,” whose moral order, according to Kaczynski, came from the Catholic church. More than one hundred municipalities around Poland declared “L.G.B.T.-free zones” in homes, schools and workplaces and passed motions to stop the spread of “L.G.B.T. ideology.”
Declining birthrates have long been a major concern in Eastern and Central Europe, a trend that leaders have blamed on Western liberalism. Orban banned gender-studies programs in Hungary because he claimed they were teaching girls not to have babies. This, Holmes says, is an attack on “a key liberal principle, which is that a woman without babies (maybe she has cats) is just as valuable as a woman with babies.” Many officials now being elevated in the Trump administration appear to agree with Orban.
‘Feminine Needs and Feminine Methods’
For all their similarities, the culture wars of Trump and Meloni diverge in telling ways from those of Putin, Orban and Kaczynski. Post-Communist societies in Central and Eastern Europe differ significantly from the United States, where liberalism has brought certain changes that many people don’t want to see rolled back. The Trump administration includes two of the highest-ranking openly gay officials in American history: the Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, and Trump’s envoy for special missions, Richard Grenell. These appointments have not caused any special stir within Trump world.
Trump himself is hardly a picture of traditional family values. Neither is Meloni, a single woman who is separated from her former partner, with whom she had a child. Meloni has never been a regular churchgoer, despite frequently proclaiming that she is a Christian. And she hasn’t restricted Italy’s abortion laws, much as Trump has said he won’t address abortion at the national level but will leave it to the states instead. Christianity, in this regard, is more a matter of identity than religion.
Another figure who fits into this frame is the newly confirmed Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, who has been married three times and whose nomination was nearly derailed by sexual assault allegations, which he denied. Whatever the facts of his personal life, his rhetoric puts him in step with the “neo-manliness” that is part of the new administration’s ethos.
Hegseth has written extensively about the “helplessness, resignation and outrage” that he said “veterans and patriots” felt because of the defeatism regarding Iraq and Afghanistan coming from Washington. The problem, Hegseth has argued, is that men were not allowed to be men, soldiers were not allowed to be soldiers.
The military, after all, is supposed to be the one American institution where being a tough guy is the norm. Instead, Hegseth and other Trump-aligned conservatives argue, it has been feminized and emasculated like every other American institution. It is clear, Hegseth argues, that having women in combat roles weakens our fighting forces, but that the top brass overlooks this because it isn’t politically correct. “There was always some lame ‘elitist’ defense for the performance of women,” he writes in his book “The War on Warriors.”
As Hegseth’s critique shows, the attempt to root out “gender ideology” ultimately cuts to fundamental questions about the values of American institutions. One of the most influential concepts to emerge in the last few years among the intellectual right (in online circles that have been influential on Vice President JD Vance) is the “Longhouse.”
The “Longhouse,” according to one of its foremost proponents, the far-right publisher Jonathan Keeperman, known by the pseudonym L0m3z, is “at once politically earnest and the punchline to an elaborate in-joke.” It refers to the kind of communal hall that was once used in many traditional agrarian cultures as the “social focal point” of the tribe. Among the online right, it symbolizes a place where women get together and “chatter” under the “ubiquitous rule” of the “Den Mother.”
As L0m3z writes: “More than anything, the Longhouse refers to the remarkable overcorrection of the last two generations toward social norms centering feminine needs and feminine methods for controlling, directing and modeling behavior. In 2010, Hanna Rosin announced ‘The End of Men.’ Hillary Clinton made it a slogan of her 2016 campaign: ‘The future is female.’ She was correct.”
L0m3z derides the triumphalist tone with which such books and slogans were deployed, even as real changes with real consequences were taking place: institutions of higher education — including law schools, medical schools and doctoral programs — became majority female. So did Human Resources departments, through which women, he claims, have exercised “an outsized influence on professional culture, which itself has an outsized influence on American culture more generally.” These departments remade the workplace in their image, enforcing “the distinctly feminine values of its overwhelmingly female work force” — the liberal, progressive, secular values that “pervade all major institutions.”
This has resulted in what L0m3z describes as feminized “conflict resolution,” in which social resources are mobilized to “ostracize the alleged offender,” because, he says, female-dominated groups favor indirect and hidden force. “To be ‘canceled,’” L0m3z says, “is to feel the whip of the Longhouse masters.” Hegseth’s appointment might be seen, then, as an exit from what L0m3z calls the “soft authoritarianism of the Longhouse’s weepy moralism.”
As the concept of the “Longhouse” makes clear, the new administration’s use of “gender ideology” rhetoric isn’t just about trans people; it’s about the upending of traditional gender roles. In the words of Darren Beattie, who was fired from the White House in 2018 after speaking at a conference attended by white nationalists and recently appointed acting under secretary of public diplomacy in the State Department: “Competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work. Unfortunately, our entire national ideology is predicated on coddling the feelings of women and minorities and demoralizing competent white men.” Of course, another way to understand the rules of the “Longhouse” is as the type of informed deliberation and compromise that are at the heart of liberal democracy — rules that exist, or used to, for a reason.
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