How the Contemporary Far Right Organizes Against Movements for Equality

The apparently disconnected campaigns against wokeness, feminism, Black Lives Matter, gender studies, and diversity programmes share a single structural logic, one with a long and well-documented history: they are countermovements, formed not around a vision of the future but around the defence of hierarchies that egalitarian struggles have begun to disturb.

1. A politics increasingly defined by “anti”

Anyone who spends even a short time inside the communicative universe of the contemporary right will notice something peculiar about its grammar. Its most energetic formations name themselves, or are named by their sympathetic media, almost entirely through negation: anti-woke, anti-feminist, anti-BLM, anti-DEI, anti-gender ideology, anti-critical race theory, anti-political correctness, anti-immigration, anti-trans, anti-environmentalist. Each of these campaigns presents itself as a discrete and reasonable response to a discrete and unreasonable excess, as though a series of unrelated provocations had independently summoned a series of unrelated defences. The anti-feminist insists he has no quarrel with racial equality; the opponent of diversity programmes insists she is merely defending merit; the campaigner against gender education in schools insists that his concern begins and ends with children. Taken at face value, these are separate quarrels with separate grievances, and much of the commentary that surrounds them treats them as such, analysing each controversy on its own terms, as though the pattern connecting them were invisible or nonexistent.

The argument of this essay is that the pattern is neither invisible nor accidental. These movements are connected by a common political structure, one that becomes legible the moment we ask not what each campaign says about itself but what each campaign does, which is to say, whose position in the distribution of power, status, resources, and recognition each campaign works to preserve. Every one of the targets listed above — feminism, anti-racist organizing, LGBTQ rights movements, migrant advocacy, climate politics in its redistributive dimensions — is a project that seeks to redistribute something: political power, cultural authority, economic resources, social recognition, legal protection, control over institutions, or the quieter but perhaps most consequential power of all, the power to define what counts as normal. And every one of the campaigns arrayed against them is a project that seeks to prevent, slow, or reverse that redistribution, while describing itself in an entirely different vocabulary, the vocabulary of freedom, neutrality, common sense, biology, tradition, and order.

The proposition can be stated compactly, though its defence will occupy the rest of this essay. A historically dominant group experiences demands for equality as an attack, because equality, by definition, reduces advantages that had previously appeared natural, neutral, or deserved. What the dominant group experiences as persecution is, in most cases, the withdrawal of a subsidy it had never been required to notice.

One clarification is necessary before the argument proceeds, because without it the thesis collapses into precisely the kind of totalizing accusation it seeks to analyse. There is a categorical difference between criticism of progressive movements and countermobilization against equality itself. Progressive movements are political actors like any others; they make strategic errors, adopt alienating vocabularies, tolerate their own dogmatists, and sometimes pursue policies that fail on their own terms, and a person who points this out is not thereby a reactionary. A social democrat who thinks a particular diversity training is badly designed, a feminist who worries that a specific legal reform will backfire, a liberal who finds academic prose needlessly hermetic — none of these positions belongs to the phenomenon this essay describes. The question that separates criticism from reaction is not whether one objects to something a progressive movement has done, but what political purpose the objection serves: whether it aims to make the pursuit of equality more effective, more democratic, and more honest, or whether it uses the failures of that pursuit as evidence that the underlying inequality was imaginary and that the older order should be restored. That test will be developed in detail later, precisely because so much reactionary discourse depends on erasing the distinction, on treating every doubt about a hashtag as though it were a doubt about the moral standing of the people the hashtag defends.

To understand why so many apparently different campaigns converge on the same structure, we need a concept that political sociology has been refining for half a century, and which public commentary uses far too rarely: the countermovement.

2. What is a countermovement?

Social movements do not act in a vacuum, and they do not act unopposed. When the sociologists David Meyer and Suzanne Staggenborg synthesized the research on this question in the 1990s, they observed that opposition to a social movement tends to organize itself into a movement of its own under identifiable conditions: when the original movement shows signs of succeeding, when its success threatens the concrete interests of some population, and when that population can find political allies willing to sponsor its resistance. The resulting formation is not simply a group of people who disagree with the movement, in the way one might disagree with a tax proposal or a planning decision. It is a countermovement, a mobilization whose entire identity is constituted by the existence of the thing it opposes, and whose goals are correspondingly restorative rather than constructive: to stop the original movement’s progress, to reverse its achievements where possible, to delegitimize the language in which it describes the world, to weaken or capture the institutions it has built or influenced, and ultimately to re-establish the balance of power that prevailed before the movement forced the question open.

The sequence through which this happens has been documented so many times, across so many countries and so many decades, that it can almost be written as a formula. A marginalized group identifies a form of inequality that the surrounding society treats as unremarkable. It develops a language capable of describing that inequality — sexism, racism, homophobia, structural discrimination — because an injustice that cannot be named cannot be contested. It organizes politically, and after a period in which it is ignored or ridiculed, it begins to achieve visibility, legal victories, or institutional influence. At that point, and usually not before, the groups whose relative position is threatened by the change begin to mobilize in response, and they do so, crucially, not under the banner of hierarchy but under the banner of neutrality, presenting themselves as defenders of freedom, order, families, children, merit, or the nation against an aggressive ideological insurgency. The countermovement, in other words, almost never says what it is. Its self-description is drawn from the vocabulary of the very universalism it is organizing to contain.

This produces the central paradox of reactionary politics, one identified as early as 1958 by Herbert Blumer in his account of racial prejudice as a sense of group position. Established hierarchies are rarely experienced by their beneficiaries as political arrangements at all. Male authority within families and institutions presents itself as tradition; racial stratification presents itself as the natural output of meritocratic sorting; heterosexual norms present themselves as biology; the cultural authority of dominant groups presents itself as common sense; inherited advantage presents itself as individual achievement. Because the hierarchy is experienced as the background condition of ordinary life rather than as a distribution that someone, at some point, arranged and enforced, the movement that challenges it appears as the only political actor in the room. Feminism is ideological; the gendered division of labour it criticizes is simply how things are. Anti-racism is divisive; the racial ordering it names was, until the moment of naming, invisible. The power to define one’s own position as neutral is the deepest privilege a dominant group possesses, and it is the privilege that countermovements fight hardest to retain, because a hierarchy that has been successfully described as nature no longer needs to be defended as politics.

Albert Hirschman, in his study of two centuries of reactionary argument, noticed that the rhetoric deployed in these episodes is remarkably repetitive. Against every wave of egalitarian reform, from universal suffrage to the welfare state, opponents have advanced the same three theses: that the reform will produce the opposite of what it intends, that it will endanger previous accomplishments, and that it will change nothing because the underlying order is immovable. What Hirschman called the perversity, jeopardy, and futility theses recur today with almost comic fidelity — affirmative action harms its supposed beneficiaries, gender recognition endangers women’s hard-won protections, inequality is written into human nature and cannot be legislated away — and their recurrence across such different controversies is itself evidence that we are dealing with a durable rhetorical technology rather than with a series of fresh empirical discoveries.

It is worth insisting, finally, on the distinction between conservatism and reaction, because the two are routinely conflated by friends and enemies alike. Conservatism, in the tradition that descends from Burke, is a disposition toward the preservation of existing institutions, a preference for gradual adaptation over rupture, and a suspicion of schemes that promise to redesign society from first principles. Reaction is something else. As Mark Lilla has argued of the reactionary imagination, and as Corey Robin has argued of the conservative tradition’s recurring core, reactionary politics is organized around the conviction that a rightful order has already been lost — betrayed by elites, corroded by movements, stolen by the undeserving — and that the task of politics is restoration. The conservative wants to keep what exists; the reactionary wants to recover what has been taken, and this difference in temporal orientation explains why reactionary movements, for all their invocation of tradition, are so often insurgent, transgressive, and contemptuous of the actually existing institutions that conservatism would defend. A politics of restoration needs an account of the theft, and the account of the theft requires enemies, which is why the countermovement’s list of adversaries — feminists, activists, professors, journalists, bureaucrats, migrants — is always more vivid and more detailed than its description of the world it intends to build.

Several questions follow from this framework, and they will organize the sections ahead. When exactly does conservatism shade into reaction, and what pushes it across the line? Why do gains in equality so reliably generate countermobilization, rather than the acceptance one might expect once a reform has demonstrated its harmlessness? Why are dominant groups so often genuinely unable to recognize their own position as political, such that their sense of persecution, however analytically mistaken, is subjectively sincere? And why is the reduction of privilege experienced, again sincerely, as discrimination? The best place to begin answering is the historical episode that produced the template for everything that has followed: the backlash against the Black civil rights movement in the United States.

3. The historical model: the backlash against Black civil rights

The American civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s challenged an entire architecture of racial domination: legal segregation, systematic voter suppression, exclusion from housing and employment, unequal schooling, and the routine violence of police forces that functioned, in much of the country, as the armed wing of the racial order. Its victories — Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 — were real, and they were experienced by a substantial portion of the white population, in the South and well beyond it, as an expropriation. The instructive question for our purposes is not why that population resisted, which requires no great theory, but how the form of its resistance changed over time, because the transformation of segregationist politics between roughly 1955 and 1980 created the rhetorical template on which nearly all contemporary reaction still runs.

In the first phase, resistance was explicit. The Southern Manifesto of 1956, signed by more than a hundred members of Congress, denounced desegregation in the open language of regional custom and constitutional grievance; the doctrine of massive resistance closed public schools rather than integrate them; governors stood in schoolhouse doors. But explicit defence of racial hierarchy carried a rising cost as national and international opinion turned, and the movement’s opponents discovered, with remarkable speed, that the same objectives could be pursued in a language that never mentioned race at all. States’ rights, law and order, neighbourhood schools, freedom of association, property values, the rights of taxpayers, the dangers of welfare dependency, the tyranny of forced busing and government overreach: each of these formulations allowed a speaker to oppose the practical mechanisms of integration — school desegregation, fair housing enforcement, voting rights supervision — while claiming, often with genuine conviction, to hold no animus whatsoever. The historian Kevin Kruse has shown how white flight from Atlanta converted segregationist commitments into an ostensibly colour-blind politics of suburban secession, private schooling, and hostility to taxation, and Matthew Lassiter’s work on the suburban South demonstrates that this new politics was in some respects more durable than the old, precisely because it had detached the defence of racial advantage from the increasingly indefensible vocabulary of race. A Republican strategist would later describe this evolution with unusual candour in a 1981 interview, tracing the movement from open slurs to abstractions like busing and tax cuts, in which the racial content survived as outcome rather than as utterance. The legal scholar Ian Haney López has given the technique its now-standard name: dog-whistle politics, the art of activating racial resentment through terms that provide their speaker with deniability.

The career of “law and order” deserves particular attention, because it accomplished something subtler than evasion. Faced with a movement protesting state violence — lynching tolerated by local authorities, police brutality, the murder of activists — the emerging countermovement succeeded in reversing the direction of the accusation, so that the disorder requiring political attention became the protest rather than the violence being protested. Urban uprisings were narrated as criminality without context; demands for accountability became hostility toward the police; the state’s violence receded into the invisible background of normal life while the response to it occupied the foreground as a threat to civilization. Richard Nixon’s 1968 campaign, and George Wallace’s more openly demagogic one, institutionalized this reversal, and the decades of punitive criminal justice policy that followed — mass incarceration, militarized policing, the war on drugs — can be read as the material continuation of a rhetorical victory: once the problem had been successfully defined as Black disorder rather than as racial domination, the solutions followed with grim logic. Stuart Hall and his colleagues, watching a parallel process unfold in 1970s Britain, described in Policing the Crisis how a moral panic around mugging, racially coded from the outset, prepared public consent for a broader authoritarian turn; the mechanism was not uniquely American.

The electoral dimension of this transformation, conventionally summarized as the Southern Strategy, completed the template. The regional realignment of white Southern voters after the civil rights legislation, the migration of racial appeal into facially neutral campaign themes — crime, welfare, busing, quotas — and the perfection of the coded political advertisement demonstrated that racial resentment could be harvested at scale without explicit racial language, and indeed that the deniability was itself part of the appeal, since it allowed voters to act on resentments they did not wish to acknowledge holding. Ronald Reagan could open his 1980 general election campaign near Philadelphia, Mississippi, a town known nationally for the murder of three civil rights workers, with a speech endorsing states’ rights, and the message required no elaboration. The template that emerged from this quarter-century of adaptation can be stated as a single instruction, and it is the instruction that every subsequent countermovement has followed: translate the defence of hierarchy into the language of freedom, order, local control, and opposition to government coercion, and let the outcomes do the talking that the words no longer can.

That template did not expire with the twentieth century. It evolved, and its most faithful contemporary application is the reaction against Black Lives Matter.

4. From civil rights to Black Lives Matter

Black Lives Matter emerged in 2013, after the acquittal of Trayvon Martin’s killer, and expanded into a mass phenomenon through the protests of Ferguson in 2014 and the extraordinary mobilization that followed the murder of George Floyd in 2020. Its founding claim was never that only Black lives matter, a proposition no one involved ever advanced; it was that Black lives were being treated, within policing and criminal justice, as though they mattered less, and that this differential valuation was measurable in stops, searches, arrests, sentences, and deaths. The claim was specific, institutional, and empirically tractable, which is precisely what made it dangerous, and the countermovement that formed against it followed the historical template with a fidelity that would be almost pedagogically convenient if its consequences were not so serious.

The first response was the universalist counter-slogan. “All Lives Matter” presents itself as a broadening of moral concern, and its rhetorical genius lies in the fact that, as a freestanding sentence, it is unobjectionable; the political work it performs lies not in what it asserts but in what it dissolves. The familiar analogy — responding to a burning house by insisting that all houses matter — captures the surface of the mechanism, but the mechanism itself deserves precise statement, because it recurs everywhere. A movement identifies a specific institutional inequality. The countermovement rejects the specificity, restating the problem at a level of abstraction at which the inequality disappears and no differential action is required. The public argument then shifts from the original question, whether police violence falls unequally, to a second-order question, whether mentioning race is itself divisive or racist, and in that shift the institutional inequality exits the conversation entirely. The universalism is not a moral position; it is a solvent. “Blue Lives Matter,” which followed almost immediately and acquired legislative form in state laws classifying attacks on police as hate crimes, completed the reversal by relocating victimhood from the policed to the police, converting an occupational category, and the most heavily armed one in civic life, into a persecuted identity group.

The second response reproduced the reversal of responsibility that had served the opponents of the civil rights movement so well. In this construction, racism ceases to be the structural inequality and becomes instead the act of discussing structural inequality; division is produced not by unequal treatment but by those who name it; the person who introduces race into the conversation is the racist, regardless of what the conversation was about. The formulation sounds like satire until one notices how much mainstream commentary it organized, and how effectively it shifted scrutiny from institutions to vocabulary.

The third response applied selective standards of conduct. The 2020 protests were, by the systematic counts available, overwhelmingly peaceful — the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data project placed the share of demonstrations without violence or destructive activity above ninety percent — yet media and political attention concentrated so heavily on property damage that the exceptions became, for large audiences, the phenomenon itself. The questions this asymmetry raises are rarely asked aloud. Must a movement be perfectly peaceful before its claims deserve consideration, a standard no state and no police force is ever asked to meet? Why do isolated acts within a protest delegitimize the entire movement, while decades of documented institutional violence delegitimize nothing? And, more uncomfortably, would a movement that inconvenienced no one and disrupted nothing ever have forced the question onto the agenda at all, given that the entire history of civil rights suggests otherwise?

The trajectory of public opinion after 2020 completes the picture. Support for Black Lives Matter spiked across racial groups in the weeks after George Floyd’s murder, reaching levels that surprised even the movement’s organizers, and then declined steadily among white respondents as the countermovement’s narrative — riots, lawlessness, anti-white ideology, corporate capitulation — took hold, eventually falling below its pre-2020 baseline in several tracking polls. What followed was no longer directed at an organization but at an explanatory framework. The campaigns against critical race theory that erupted in 2021, engineered with acknowledged deliberateness by activists who described their intention to turn the term into a container for every racial grievance of the moment, and the subsequent wave of state laws restricting how schools and universities may discuss racism — laws that PEN America, tracking them as educational gag orders, counted in the hundreds — were not criticisms of one theory’s academic merits. They were an attempt to render structural explanations of racial inequality unspeakable in public institutions, which is to say, an attempt to win by legislation the argument that had been lost in the streets: the argument over whether the inequality exists at all. Anti-BLM politics, viewed whole, was never a quarrel with a slogan. It was a campaign against the legitimacy of the explanation the slogan compressed.

5. Anti-feminism as a defence of gender hierarchy

If the reaction against racial equality supplied the template, the reaction against feminism demonstrates the template’s portability, because anti-feminism has passed through exactly the same transformation from open defence of hierarchy to coded defence of the same hierarchy, and it has done so within living memory. Feminist movements, across their several waves and internal disagreements, have challenged the distribution of a remarkably comprehensive list of goods: paid and unpaid labour, political representation, economic independence, reproductive control, sexual autonomy, authority within households, cultural legitimacy, and protection from violence. Each of these is a redistribution, and each redistribution has a counterparty, which is why the response to feminism has never been merely intellectual disagreement about the nature of the sexes; it has been organized countermobilization by those whose relative position the redistribution reduces.

The older anti-feminism said what it meant. Women’s subordination was defended as divine ordinance, natural law, or social necessity, and the arguments against suffrage, against married women’s property rights, against female education, were arguments for hierarchy as such. Phyllis Schlafly’s campaign against the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s, studied by Susan Faludi as part of the broader backlash she documented at the end of the 1980s, already marked a transition: Schlafly defended the older order, but she defended it in the newer language of protection, arguing that equality would strip women of privileges — exemption from conscription, entitlement to support — and that feminism was therefore the true enemy of women. Contemporary anti-feminism has completed the migration. It rarely announces itself as a defence of male authority; it presents itself instead as a defence of biological reality against denial, of family stability against dissolution, of children against confusion, of men’s mental health against neglect, of open debate against censorship, and, in its most inverted form, as resistance to female privilege in courts, universities, and hiring. The vocabulary is protective and even therapeutic; the political function, the preservation of a gendered distribution of authority and labour, is continuous with what came before.

The treatment of men’s genuine difficulties is where the countermovement’s method is most visible, and it deserves careful handling, because the difficulties are real and dismissing them is both analytically lazy and politically disastrous. Men die by suicide at several times the female rate in most industrialized countries; boys underperform in many educational systems; male-dominated occupations carry the majority of workplace deaths; male social isolation is rising; family-court disputes produce durable grievances; and entire regional labour markets built around male industrial employment have been dismantled within a generation. A serious politics would trace these problems to their plausible causes, which are, in most cases, precarious employment, weakened welfare systems, the collapse of community institutions, rigid masculine norms that punish the seeking of help, and the chronic underfunding of mental health services. Anti-feminist politics performs a different operation: it begins from the conclusion that feminism is responsible and works backward, so that every genuine male difficulty becomes evidence in a case that was closed before the evidence was gathered. The attraction of this move is that it provides an enemy with a face, whereas deindustrialization and austerity have none, and it spares its audience the discomfort of noticing that the policies most hostile to struggling men — the erosion of labour protections, the gutting of public services, the casualization of work — have been enacted, in the main, by political actors who also market themselves as defenders of traditional masculinity.

The victimhood reversal that anti-feminism performs is structurally identical to the racial one. Women’s historical exclusion is declared resolved or irrelevant, a matter for the archives; contemporary corrective measures, from parity rules to harassment procedures, are reinterpreted as female domination; women’s increased autonomy, particularly their reduced dependence on marriage, is experienced and narrated as male dispossession; and equality comes to be judged not by any measurable social outcome — pay, representation, violence, the division of care — but by the subjective discomfort of those whose authority is no longer automatic. Michael Kimmel gave this condition its most useful name, aggrieved entitlement: the experience of losing advantages one had been raised to regard as a birthright, which registers, from inside, not as the arrival of fairness but as the infliction of injustice.

The digital ecosystem has given this reversal an industrial base. The loose archipelago that researchers call the manosphere — pickup artistry, men’s rights forums, self-improvement channels, incel communities, masculinity influencers of varying extremity — converts diffuse male distress into a structured worldview with astonishing efficiency, and it does so through a recognizable pipeline: a young man arrives with dating anxiety, economic insecurity, or ordinary loneliness; the content he encounters names women and feminism as the cause; recommendation systems, optimizing for engagement, escalate him toward increasingly totalizing accounts; and the political networks downstream stand ready to convert misogyny into a general reactionary orientation, since a person who has accepted that one egalitarian movement is a conspiracy against him has little difficulty accepting the same about the others. Researchers who have traced user trajectories across these platforms have documented the migration pathways empirically; the pipeline is not a metaphor. The point, again, is not that the young man’s distress was irrational. It is that his distress was harvested, and directed at a target that guarantees it will never be relieved, because women are not the cause of his precarity and defeating feminism would leave every one of his material conditions intact.

Reproductive politics exposes the stakes with a clarity that the softer vocabulary elsewhere conceals. Control over reproduction is the hinge of gender hierarchy, because a woman who cannot decide whether and when to bear children cannot reliably control her education, her employment, her income, or her capacity to leave a dangerous relationship, and the history of women’s economic emancipation tracks the history of contraception and legal abortion with a closeness that no serious scholar disputes. The test of the anti-abortion movement’s self-description — that its concern is the protection of life — is behavioural: one asks what else the movement supports. Where the political formations that pursue abortion bans also pursued generous parental leave, subsidized childcare, universal maternal healthcare, and robust child benefits, the self-description would be plausible; where those same formations reliably oppose every one of these measures while imposing the full economic and physical consequences of pregnancy on women, the pattern indicates that the operative concern is not life but the regulation of female sexuality and the restoration of maternity as destiny rather than choice. The reversal of Roe v. Wade in 2022, and the cascade of state bans that followed, did not occur in a vacuum; it was the harvest of a fifty-year countermovement that had learned to speak of protection while pursuing control, and its aftermath — women denied care for miscarriages, physicians afraid to treat, maternal mortality already elevated in the most restrictive jurisdictions — has made the distribution of its costs empirically visible.

Anti-feminism, in sum, does not merely dispute particular feminist claims, some of which are certainly disputable. As an organized political phenomenon, it seeks to re-establish a social order in which gender roles are less negotiable, in which the division of labour and authority between the sexes is restored to the status of nature, and in which male authority, in households and institutions, is once again the unmarked default that requires no defence because it faces no challenge.

6. “Anti-woke” as an umbrella ideology

Every coalition needs a banner, and the banner under which the various reactions of the last decade have assembled is a single, endlessly elastic word. The trajectory of “woke” is itself a compressed history of the countermovement’s method. The term originates in African American vernacular English, where staying woke meant maintaining alertness to racial injustice and the dangers it posed; it circulated in that protective sense for decades, surfaced in the Ferguson era as a watchword of the new racial justice movement, and then, in the span of a few years around the turn of the 2020s, was captured, inverted, and converted into the master pejorative of reactionary politics, applied with equal enthusiasm to feminism, anti-racism, LGBTQ rights, immigration advocacy, university research, diversity programmes, environmentalism, public health measures, inclusive language, critical historiography, and casting decisions in films. A word that named vigilance against oppression became a word that names the oppressor, and the inversion is the countermovement’s signature move performed at the level of the lexicon itself.

The analytical temptation is to complain that “woke” has no stable definition, and the complaint is accurate, but it mistakes the term’s weakness for what is in fact its function. A precise accusation can be evaluated and therefore refuted; a vague accusation can be expanded indefinitely and therefore never loses. Because “woke” can mean, depending on the speaker and the moment, excessively progressive, bureaucratic, elitist, censorious, racially divisive, sexually permissive, anti-national, anti-family, irrational, or simply threatening, it permits audiences with entirely different grievances to believe they are fighting the same enemy, and this is not a bug in the discourse but the discourse’s central achievement. Political theorists following Ernesto Laclau would call it an empty signifier, a term whose emptiness is precisely what allows it to stitch heterogeneous demands into a single antagonism. An anti-woke coalition can therefore contain racial conservatives, religious traditionalists, secular libertarians, anti-feminists, conspiracy communities, nationalist parties, disaffected sections of the working class, wealthy donors whose real quarrel is with regulation and taxation, media entrepreneurs whose business model requires a permanent enemy, and ordinary people alienated by the moralized vocabulary of activist and academic circles — groups that agree on almost nothing programmatic, and that do not need to, because their unity is constituted entirely by opposition.

The coalition requires an enemy commensurate with its own breadth, and so the discourse constructs one: the woke elite, a formation depicted as simultaneously controlling universities, journalism, entertainment, government agencies, schools, corporations, social media platforms, and the professions, an empire of ideological administration against which the coalition casts itself as insurgent. The construction accomplishes something remarkable, which is to allow the most powerful economic and political actors in a society — media proprietors, billionaire donors, governing parties, heads of state — to present themselves as a persecuted resistance, punching upward at schoolteachers, librarians, junior academics, and diversity officers. The asymmetry is worth stating plainly. In the actually existing distribution of power, the commanding positions — ownership of capital and media, majorities in legislatures and courts, control of police and borders — are not held by gender studies departments. A politics that identifies the gender studies department as the seat of power in modern society is not describing the world; it is redirecting attention away from where power sits.

This redirection is visible in the coalition’s peculiar economics, which might be called anti-woke capitalism. The movement’s tribunes attack cultural elites with genuine ferocity — professors, teachers, artists, activists, civil servants — while displaying an equally genuine reticence about economic elites, having remarkably little to say about wealth concentration, corporate power, tax avoidance, monopoly, the private ownership of the media through which the movement itself is amplified, the role of political donations, or the conditions of labour. Some of its leading figures are themselves billionaires, or are financed by them, and the campaigns against diversity programmes and university funding have been underwritten by donor networks whose other commitments — deregulation, tax reduction, the weakening of labour law — are matters of public record. The question that this pattern forces is the organizing question of the whole phenomenon: is anti-woke politics a rebellion against elites, or is it the mechanism by which economic elites redirect popular anger toward cultural minorities and the professional institutions — universities, public broadcasters, courts, an independent press — that occasionally constrain them? The evidence assembled in the sections that follow points steadily toward the second answer, but the first answer’s emotional plausibility, for the millions who hold it sincerely, is itself a fact requiring explanation, and it will receive one.

7. The inversion of victim and oppressor

Beneath the particular campaigns runs a single rhetorical mechanism, and it is time to examine it directly. The mechanism is inversion: the reconstruction of historically dominant groups as persecuted minorities, and of historically subordinated groups as the new holders of illegitimate power. Its instances, once one has the pattern, multiply without effort. White majorities become the victims of anti-racism; men become the victims of feminism; heterosexual families become the victims of LGBTQ visibility; Christian majorities become the victims of secularism; national majorities become the victims of immigration; police become the victims of demands for accountability; billionaires become the victims of proposals to tax them; and speakers accustomed to defining the terms of public conversation become the victims of requests to share that power, which they experience and describe as censorship.

The inversion is not, in most of its carriers, a cynical lie, and treating it as one misses what makes it politically formidable. It rests on a genuine psychological process, one that social psychology has measured with some precision. Michael Norton and Samuel Sommers documented in 2011 that white Americans had come to perceive racism as a zero-sum contest that they were now losing, rating contemporary anti-white bias as a greater problem than anti-Black bias, a belief that no measurable disparity in income, wealth, incarceration, health, or treatment by institutions supported then or supports now. Diana Mutz’s analysis of the 2016 American electorate found that the strongest predictors of the decisive vote shifts were not personal economic hardship but perceived threats to group status. The pattern these findings describe is intelligible once one grasps the position from which the perception is formed. A group that has occupied the unmarked centre of a society — whose language is the default language, whose history is the curriculum, whose image is the national self-image, whose access to institutions has never required justification — does not experience its position as advantage, because advantage, to be experienced as such, must be visible against an alternative, and for the dominant group there has never been an alternative. When equality begins to arrive, what such a group perceives is therefore not the loss of a surplus it never knew it held, but a series of novel and apparently gratuitous injuries: competition where there was preference, criticism where there was deference, presence where there was exclusivity, negotiation where there was command.

This is why the distinction between losing rights and losing relative advantage is the analytical hinge of the entire subject. In the controversies this essay surveys, it is remarkably difficult to identify a legal right that members of dominant groups have actually lost. They vote, speak, publish, worship, assemble, own, and stand for office exactly as before; no statute has curtailed them. What they have lost is relative position: the guarantee of being first in the queue, the assumption of authority in mixed company, the monopoly on defining what is normal, reasonable, and beautiful, the comfort of institutions built around their image and staffed in their likeness. The loss is real, in the sense that relative goods are real goods and their withdrawal is genuinely felt; the political question is whether that loss constitutes an injustice, and the answer depends entirely on whether the previous advantage was just, which is the question the inversion is designed to prevent anyone from asking. Losing exclusive access is experienced as exclusion; losing unquestioned authority is experienced as humiliation; being criticized is experienced as censorship; being required to compete is experienced as discrimination; being asked to accommodate others is experienced as coercion. Each sentence in that series describes a subjective experience accurately and a distributive reality falsely, and the gap between the two is the space in which the politics of reaction lives.

The language of persecution that results has become the vernacular of an era, and its recurring formulas repay analysis rather than mockery, because each encodes the inversion in a testable form. “You cannot say anything anymore” is uttered, without apparent irony, in books, broadcasts, and parliaments, by speakers whose audiences number in the millions; what it registers is not silencing but the novel experience of contradiction. “White men are now the real minority” converts numerical majority and institutional overrepresentation into demographic siege. “Traditional families are under attack” describes the extension of marriage and recognition to others as an assault on those whose own arrangements remain legally untouched. “Children are being indoctrinated” relocates a dispute among adults about curricula onto the terrain of innocence, where compromise becomes complicity. “Merit has been replaced by diversity” presumes that the prior distribution of positions measured merit, an assumption the entire history of exclusion renders unavailable. The claims differ in content but share a grammar, and the grammar is the important thing: in each case, a change in relative position is described as absolute persecution, and the direction of existing inequality is reversed in the telling. The contemporary far right, it must be noticed, has largely stopped denying that inequality exists; its distinctive claim is that the inequality now runs the other way, and this concession is in its own manner a tribute to the movements it opposes, since it accepts their moral framework — inequality is bad, victims deserve redress — and contests only the identity of the victim.

8. Moral panic and the manufacture of threat

Inversion establishes who the victim is; the next mechanism establishes how much danger the victim is in, and its classical description belongs to Stanley Cohen. A moral panic, in the account Cohen built from the British press’s treatment of youth subcultures and which half a century of research has refined, occurs when a person, group, or social change is portrayed as a fundamental threat to societal values and interests, its menace amplified far beyond any measurable reality by media, moral entrepreneurs, and authorities who benefit from the alarm. The concept has been diluted by casual use, but its technical core — the disproportion between the represented threat and the demonstrable one, and the political productivity of that disproportion — describes the reactionary media economy of the present with uncomfortable precision.

The recurring targets form a recognizable procession across the decades: Black protesters, feminists, immigrants, Muslims, gay men, transgender people, teachers, academics, asylum seekers, climate activists, public health officials. The procession changes costume but the narrative structure through which each target is processed barely varies, and it can be stated as a sequence. An unfamiliar or socially contested group is identified. An extreme or wholly unrepresentative example of its behaviour is located — one activist’s absurd statement, one contested medical case, one violent incident at the margin of a vast peaceful mobilization. The example is presented as typical, then as the hidden norm. Institutions — schools, hospitals, broadcasters — are accused of concealing the truth, so that the absence of evidence becomes evidence of the cover-up. Children, women, or the nation itself are declared to be in danger. And extraordinary intervention is demanded, in the form of bans, surveillance, investigations, or emergency legislation, whose extraordinariness is justified by the manufactured scale of the threat.

The strategic centrality of children in this structure is not new — Anita Bryant’s Save Our Children campaign deployed it against gay rights in 1977, and the anti-gender mobilizations of the 2010s rediscovered it independently across a dozen countries — but its current intensity deserves attention, because the child performs unique rhetorical work. The child is innocence itself, cannot speak politically in its own name, and therefore can be conscripted to authorize almost anything: censorship of curricula, the banning of books by the thousand, as the American Library Association’s tracking has documented in recent years, restrictions on what teachers may acknowledge about the existence of gay and trans people, the surveillance of educators, prohibitions on medical care whose actual clinical evidence base is contested in venues far from the shouting, and the general conversion of schools into the front line of a civilizational struggle. A society genuinely organized around child welfare would exhibit certain measurable behaviours — investment in child poverty reduction, in paediatric mental health, in schools themselves — and the consistent absence of those behaviours among the political formations most vocally invoking children indicates that the child in this discourse is not a beneficiary but an instrument, the unanswerable premise from which otherwise unacceptable conclusions are derived. Distinguishing genuine safeguarding from the political use of innocence is therefore not a rhetorical nicety; it is the analytical task the situation demands, and the test, as always, is behavioural rather than declarative.

Why does moral panic work so reliably? Because it meets psychological and political needs that sober description cannot. It simplifies changes that are genuinely complex and disorienting into a single legible threat; it produces emotional urgency, which crowds out the patience that nuance requires; it supplies identifiable enemies, who are more satisfying than structural causes; it justifies exceptional measures that would be rejected in calmer weather; and it converts political compromise, the ordinary mechanism of democratic life, into moral betrayal, since one does not negotiate with those who endanger children. And it is protected by a durable asymmetry of evidence: progressive reforms are required to demonstrate in advance that they will produce no negative consequence anywhere, a standard nothing can meet, while reactionary alarms are permitted to rest on anecdote, viral clips, and hypothetical dangers, a standard everything can meet. The panic thus converts ordinary disputes over policy — how schools should teach, how medicine should treat, how police should be overseen — into an existential conflict in which one side defends civilization and the other menaces it, and in such a conflict the question of what is actually true about the original dispute stops being asked, which was the purpose of the conversion.

9. The role of language: neutrality, common sense, and political correctness

The struggle described in this essay is conducted, to a degree unusual even for politics, on the terrain of language, and this is not incidental. The power to define what counts as neutral determines which inequalities remain politically invisible, and so the countermovement’s deepest investments are lexical: it fights to have its own commitments classified as reality and its opponents’ commitments classified as ideology. Reactionary argument therefore presents itself, with striking consistency, as non-ideological — as realism, biology, merit, tradition, or common sense — while presenting egalitarian argument as artifice, construction, theory, and agenda. The asymmetry is the whole game. Once the inherited arrangement of a society has been successfully filed under reality, anyone proposing to change it is by definition proposing to depart from reality, and the argument is over before it begins.

Consider the career of “political correctness,” the umbrella term’s most successful ancestor. The phrase, which exploded into Anglophone public discourse around 1990 through a wave of books and magazine covers announcing a totalitarian takeover of the universities, has always pointed at a mixture of referents, and honesty requires separating them. Some are genuine: bureaucratic language that manages rather than communicates, performative activism that substitutes gesture for substance, disproportionate social punishment for minor infractions, institutional cowardice dressed as sensitivity, and a real narrowing, in some professional environments, of what people feel able to discuss. An essay that pretended otherwise would forfeit its claim to seriousness, and the later section on progressive failures will return to these phenomena on their own terms. But the phrase’s political function has consistently exceeded its genuine referents, because it converts every act of criticism into an act of suppression, allowing public speech to claim immunity from public response. The questions that dissolve the conflation are simple to state. Is criticism censorship, or is it the thing free speech exists to protect? Is the loss of prestige the same as the loss of liberty? Does freedom of speech entail freedom from the social consequences of speech, a freedom no one at any point in history has ever possessed? And who, historically, has actually commanded the means of public expression — the presses, the pulpits, the broadcasting licences — such that their present complaint of silencing might be weighed against their past practice of it?

“Meritocracy” performs a parallel service in the economic register. The word, coined by Michael Young in 1958 as satire and adopted by its targets as self-description, functions in reactionary discourse as the neutral alternative to redistribution: positions should go to the competent, and interventions on behalf of the excluded therefore corrupt a fair machine. The objection is not to competence, which everyone requires of their surgeon and their airline pilot alike; the objection is to the fiction that the conditions under which competence is produced and recognized are equal. Inherited wealth, unequal schooling, discriminatory evaluation, the gendered distribution of care work that consumes the years in which careers are built, professional networks that reproduce themselves, geographic inequality, differential health, and the long shadow of explicit historical exclusion all enter the production function of what gets measured, at the end, as individual merit, and a rich empirical literature from Bourdieu’s studies of cultural reproduction to the contemporary economics of intergenerational mobility documents each channel. To describe the output of such a process as desert, and any correction of it as theft, is not measurement; it is the naturalization of advantage, meritocracy operating as what might be called hierarchy’s accounting department.

“Biology” completes the trinity, and requires the most careful handling, because biological research is real, human beings are organisms, and nothing in this argument entails the denial of either. The pattern to be identified is narrower and older: the recruitment of biological vocabulary to convert contested social arrangements into natural inevitabilities, a practice whose track record should induce permanent humility in its contemporary practitioners. Nineteenth-century craniometry established scientifically that the races were ordered in capacity; Victorian medicine established scientifically that education would damage women’s reproductive systems; mid-century psychiatry classified homosexuality as pathology; each establishment was, in its day, common sense armed with instruments, and each is now remembered as ideology in a laboratory coat, a history Stephen Jay Gould reconstructed in detail. The contemporary versions — rigid gender roles derived from statistical tendencies, social dominance derived from primate anecdotes, group differences in achievement derived from contested heritability estimates — repeat the structure: they proceed from real or purported biological findings, through inferential leaps the findings do not license, to the conclusion that existing hierarchies are nature’s verdict and resistance to them is denial of science. The distinction that matters is between biology as inquiry, which is provisional, statistical, and silent on questions of justice, and biology as politics, which is certain, categorical, and always, by some remarkable coincidence, discovers that nature endorses the current distribution of power.

10. The digital economy of resentment

Countermovements are as old as movements, but the countermovement of the present operates within a media environment that earlier reactions could not have imagined, and the environment is not neutral with respect to content. The recommendation systems that govern attention on the major platforms optimize for engagement, and engagement, as a growing empirical literature has established, is disproportionately produced by content that generates anger, fear, outrage, disgust, and the affirmation of group identity — William Brady and colleagues, analysing large corpora of social media posts, found that each additional moral-emotional word in a message measurably increased its diffusion. This creates a structural tilt whose political consequences are direct. A careful account of institutional inequality is long, probabilistic, hedged, and slow; a video announcing that civilization is being dismantled by an identifiable enemy is short, certain, vivid, and shareable, and the machinery that decides what several billion people see each day prefers the second on formal grounds alone, before any question of ideology arises. Reactionary politics did not create this machinery, but its message is native to it in a way that its opponents’ message is not, because grievance compresses and complexity does not.

Within this environment a new occupational category has flourished, which might be called the outrage entrepreneur: the commentator, streamer, or personality whose business model consists of the daily identification of fresh examples of progressive excess. The economics of the role deserve attention because they explain its trajectory better than psychology does. The entrepreneur’s revenue — advertising, subscriptions, speaking fees, book contracts — scales with audience arousal, and arousal habituates, so the equilibrium strategy is escalation: each week’s outrage must exceed the last, claims must grow more extreme, editing more selective, context more expendable, and the supply of enemies must never be allowed to run short. A rare event is made to appear representative through sheer repetition, and the mechanism deserves a name of its own, the viral exception: one bizarre incident at one university becomes the state of higher education; one contested lesson in one school becomes national indoctrination; one activist’s foolish tweet becomes the movement’s manifesto; one person breaking a window becomes twenty million marchers. The audience, sampling reality through this filter, comes to inhabit a world statistically unrelated to the one that exists, and does so in good faith, since each individual exhibit was, in some minimal sense, real.

The entrepreneur, meanwhile, is captured by the audience the strategy assembles. Once a following has been built on anti-woke content, moderation becomes financially dangerous — the audience has been trained to expect enemies, escalation, and moral certainty, and it punishes deviation with the withdrawal of attention, which is the withdrawal of income. Commentators who drift toward extremity are therefore not necessarily radicalizing in any interior sense; they are following a gradient, and the gradient runs in one direction. The same gradient operates on the consumption side, where researchers have traced what has come to be called the pipeline: a user arrives with an ordinary and often defensible concern — irritation at hectoring language, discomfort with a diversity training, anxiety about dating, worry about immigration, disagreement with a gender policy — and the recommendation apparatus, together with the deliberate bridging work of ideological networks, connects that concern to progressively broader narratives, until the endpoint is demographic replacement, civilizational war, and, at the terminus that court records and manifestos have documented repeatedly, political violence. Manoel Horta Ribeiro and colleagues, auditing years of trajectories across YouTube channels, found consistent migration from mildly contrarian communities toward openly far-right ones, giving the pipeline an empirical basis beyond anecdote. None of this implies that every viewer travels the full route; most do not. It implies something structurally worse, which is that the route exists, is smooth, is profitable at every station, and is travelled by enough people to have changed the composition of Western politics. The contemporary growth of the far right cannot be explained by ideology alone; it must also be understood as a media business model, one in which resentment is not merely expressed but manufactured, refined, and sold, and in which the incentives of the sellers guarantee that the supply will not diminish simply because the grievances are answered.

11. Economic insecurity and cultural displacement

An analysis conducted entirely at the level of rhetoric and psychology would invite an obvious objection: that it treats reaction as a moral failure of individuals while ignoring the material conditions in which reaction grows, and the objection is half right in a way that must be handled with precision. The material conditions are real. The countermovements described here have expanded most vigorously in societies marked by stagnant wages, housing insecurity, precarious and fissured employment, deindustrialized regions abandoned to slow decay, weakened unions, retrenched public services, widening territorial inequality, blocked social mobility, and a concentration of wealth without precedent since the interwar period. It would be extraordinary if four decades of these conditions had produced no political consequences, and any account of reaction that omits them describes symptoms while ignoring the patient.

But — and this is the point on which the analysis must not slip — economic distress does not determine its own political expression. The same insecurity that feeds the far right has, in other times and places, fed labour organizing, social democracy, socialist movements, apathy, conspiracy culture, or religious revival, and the historical record shows every one of these outcomes emerging from comparable material soil. What determines the direction is interpretation, and interpretation is supplied by political institutions, parties, churches, unions, and, above all in the present, media. The empirical literature on the populist surge of the 2010s bears this out with some force: John Sides, Michael Tesler, and Lynn Vavreck, examining the American case in detail, found that attitudes about identity, race, and immigration predicted the decisive electoral shifts far better than personal economic hardship did, while the geography of far-right support across Europe correlates with regional decline and with perceived cultural threat in ways that resist any single-cause story. The honest synthesis is not that economics explains reaction, nor that racism explains it, but that material insecurity supplies the energy and political entrepreneurs supply the target, and the target they have supplied, with remarkable consistency, is not the institutions that produced the insecurity.

This is the operation that deserves to be called the displacement of class anger. The person whose wages have stagnated, whose town has emptied, whose children cannot afford housing, possesses a genuine grievance in search of an explanation, and two explanations are on offer. One implicates the specific and identifiable decisions of the last forty years — the deregulation of finance, the weakening of labour law, the offshoring of production, the financialization of housing, the austerity applied to public services, the capture of tax policy — and points toward remedies that would cost the wealthy a great deal. The other implicates immigrants, feminists, racial minorities, welfare recipients, trans people, academics, and urban professionals, and points toward remedies that would cost the wealthy nothing. The second explanation enjoys, in the contemporary media economy, a decisive advertising budget, and its function is transparently protective: every hour of public anger spent on drag performers is an hour not spent on tax havens. The far right’s own economic behaviour confirms the diagnosis, since its governing record, across countries, combines the rhetoric of the forgotten worker with tax reductions concentrated at the top, deregulation, hostility to unions, and selective welfare chauvinism that defends benefits only insofar as they can be racially fenced — a politics that speaks in the language of labour while legislating in the language of capital.

What, then, does the insecure supporter actually receive? The answer, in most cases, is status rather than income: national pride, racial standing, masculine authority, religious superiority, cultural centrality — the assurance that whatever one’s material position, one belongs to the group that constitutes the real nation, the deserving, the normal. W. E. B. Du Bois, analysing the post-Reconstruction American South, called this the psychological wage, the compensation in public deference and social rank that white workers received in place of the material gains that interracial labour solidarity might have won them, and the concept has lost none of its explanatory power in the intervening century. Symbolic compensation is not nothing; it is a real good, really valued, and any politics that sneers at it will lose to the politics that provides it. But it is a substitute good, offered precisely where material improvement is not on the menu, and its provision requires the permanent maintenance of the hierarchies from which the status derives — which is to say that the psychological wage is paid in a currency whose value depends on other people’s subordination, and the bargain, once struck, binds the worker to the very order that underpays him. Economic insecurity does not excuse reactionary politics, and the record of prosperous reactionaries — the movement’s donors, leaders, and intellectual patrons are not, in the main, the left behind — forbids reducing the phenomenon to distress. But insecurity explains the size of the audience, and no response to the phenomenon that leaves the insecurity in place should expect the audience to shrink.

12. The alliance between traditionalism and economic power

The coalition assembled under the anti-woke banner contains a structural puzzle that its own rhetoric works hard to conceal: it yokes together cultural traditionalists, many of them economically precarious, with the wealthiest interests in society, and the durability of this yoking — visible in the American fusion of religious conservatism with donor-class economics since the 1970s, in the European radical right’s oscillation between welfare chauvinism and market orthodoxy, in the financing of anti-gender campaigns by networks whose other portfolio is deregulation — requires explanation, because on the surface the partners want incompatible things. The explanation is that the partnership is not a confusion but an exchange, and each side’s accounts can be audited.

Why do economic elites fund culture wars? Because culture war performs measurable services for concentrated wealth. It weakens class solidarity by dividing workers along racial, religious, and gender lines, reviving in each generation the oldest technique of labour discipline. It redirects popular anger from inequality’s causes to inequality’s scapegoats, as the previous section described. It justifies sustained attacks on the institutions most likely to document or constrain elite power — universities, public broadcasters, regulatory agencies, an independent judiciary — by reclassifying them as ideological enemies rather than as infrastructure. It absorbs the public agenda, so that legislative sessions consumed by curriculum panics are sessions not consumed by tax and labour policy. And it reframes redistribution itself as theft by the undeserving, attaching to every welfare proposal the face of an outgroup. These are not speculative benefits; they are the observable outputs of the think tanks, media properties, and campaign vehicles that the relevant donors fund, and the funding trails, from fossil-fuel money in climate denial to foundation money in the anti-DEI campaigns, have been documented by investigative journalism and academic research in detail, notably in Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway’s reconstruction of the merchandising of doubt.

Why do cultural traditionalists accept an economics that immiserates many of them? Because they are paid in the currency they value most: abortion restrictions, religious influence over public institutions, immigration control, expanded policing, the legal privileging of traditional family forms, and the containment of LGBTQ visibility. The exchange is reciprocal and, in its own terms, rational. Economic elites receive lower taxation, deregulation, weakened labour power, and privatization; cultural reactionaries receive symbolic recognition, legal restrictions on minority rights, institutional positions, and control over education and family policy. Each side tolerates the other’s programme as the price of its own, and the arrangement has proven stable across decades precisely because the two programmes, despite appearances, do not actually conflict: nothing in wealth concentration is threatened by abortion bans, and nothing in religious traditionalism is threatened by capital gains treatment. The case studies are abundant — the American Republican coalition and the policy blueprint assembled for its return to power, the European radical right parties whose worker-facing rhetoric coexists with anti-union practice, the transnational anti-gender campaigns whose funding networks connect American foundations, European aristocratic wealth, and Russian state-adjacent actors, the decades-long private financing of climate denial — and they converge on a single conclusion that reverses the conventional framing. The culture war is not a distraction from economic politics, as an older left critique had it, nor a separate sphere, as liberal commentary treats it. It is economic politics, conducted by cultural means: the mechanism through which unequal material arrangements purchase the popular consent they could never win on their own terms.

13. Are progressive movements beyond criticism?

An argument of this kind acquires credibility only if it can pass the test it sets for others, and the test cuts both ways: if the difference between criticism and reaction is what the criticism serves, then this essay must demonstrate that serious criticism of progressive movements is possible, necessary, and compatible with everything argued so far. It is, and the concessions that follow are not tactical throat-clearing but substantive claims the analysis requires.

Progressive movements can be, and at various times and places demonstrably have been, dogmatic in ways that treat internal doubt as betrayal; strategically inept, preferring expressive victories to material ones; linguistically inaccessible, conducting the defence of ordinary people in a vocabulary ordinary people find alienating or absurd; internally intolerant, reproducing in miniature the punitive dynamics they oppose at scale; bureaucratic, converting emancipation into compliance training; performative, mistaking the announcement of values for their enactment; captured by professional elites whose class interests quietly reshape the agenda; inattentive to class altogether, treating economic inequality as one identity concern among others rather than as the medium in which the others operate; disproportionate in punishment, ending careers over infractions that called for correction; and careless with evidence, extending justified conclusions past what the data support and thereby handing opponents legitimate grievances at no cost. Institutions, meanwhile, have learned to adopt the language of justice without adopting its substance, and nowhere more fluently than in the corporate sector, where the same firm may display diversity slogans, sponsor awareness campaigns, recolour its logo each June, and saturate its advertising with inclusion, while underpaying its workforce, avoiding taxation, fighting unionization with specialist consultants, settling discrimination claims under seal, exploiting supply chains whose conditions would not survive photography, and expanding executive compensation without embarrassment. Nancy Fraser has given this configuration a name, progressive neoliberalism, and Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò has analysed the adjacent phenomenon of elite capture, by which the vocabulary of liberation is annexed to the career strategies of those best positioned to speak it. The cynicism these spectacles produce in ordinary observers is not false consciousness; it is accurate perception, and any movement that dismisses it will deserve the audience it loses.

Having conceded all of this, the essential point can be stated: none of it converts criticism into reaction, and the boundary between the two remains exactly where section one placed it. The test is functional. Does the criticism aim to make equality more effective, more democratic, more materially real — or does it use the failures of equality’s advocates to argue that the underlying inequality is imaginary, that its measurement is ideology, and that the older hierarchy should be restored? The questions through which any given critic can be located are concrete. Does the critic acknowledge the original injustice, or does the acknowledgment quietly disappear en route to the conclusion? Is the proposed remedy more equal or less equal than the practice being criticized? Are isolated excesses treated as data points or as the essence of the movement? Is the standard applied consistently — is the critic of cancel culture equally exercised when the cancellation comes from the right, when the fired professor offended donors rather than students, when the banned book offended nationalists rather than parents? Does the critic oppose coercion as such, or only the coercion that inconveniences dominant groups? And is the argument finally about outcomes in the world — pay, violence, representation, health — or about the discomfort of those asked to share what they had not previously been asked to share? A critic can fail one of these questions and be merely careless. A discourse that fails all of them, systematically and profitably, is not criticism at all; it is countermobilization wearing criticism’s clothes, and the diagnostic labour of distinguishing the two is among the most practically important intellectual tasks of the moment, because the countermovement’s entire recruitment strategy consists of escorting people across that boundary without their noticing the crossing.

14. The internationalization of the anti-woke model

It would be convenient, for Europeans especially, to file everything described so far under American pathology, and a certain style of commentary does exactly that, treating each local eruption of anti-woke politics as an exotic import with no domestic roots. The comfort is unearned on both counts: the model travels because infrastructure carries it, and it lands because local hierarchies are waiting for it. Terms, tactics, legal templates, and entire campaign architectures developed in the United States now circulate through international media conglomerates, platform algorithms indifferent to borders, political consultants who sell the same playbook on several continents, think tanks with deliberate transnational missions, religious organizations coordinating across the Atlantic, donor networks whose money moves faster than any idea, and nationalist parties that study one another’s victories with professional attention. Researchers who mapped the anti-gender mobilizations of the 2010s, notably Roman Kuhar and David Paternotte, found not spontaneous parallel outrage but an organized transnational campaign, with shared vocabulary, shared strategy documents, and shared funding, adapting a common template to national conditions.

The adaptation is the interesting part, because it reveals the structure beneath the vocabulary. In Poland and Hungary, the template attached itself to gender, with municipalities declaring themselves free of an ideology no one could define, a university driven across a border, and gender studies erased from the register of accredited disciplines. In France, it attached itself to a phantom called islamo-leftism and to panics over American ideas corrupting the universities, pursued to the point of ministerial demands for investigations into entire fields. In Italy and Spain, parties of the radical right fused family traditionalism with anti-immigration politics and open nostalgia for regimes their countries had spent decades leaving behind. In Britain, it colonized the debate over empire and museums; in Germany, the politics of memory itself. In Brazil, a president was elected on a platform in which gender ideology in schools figured as a national emergency. The targets differ — colonial history here, Roma communities there, Islam in one country, trans children in another, indigenous rights, language policy, national memory — but the operation performed on each target is identical: a movement for recognition or equality is reframed as an attack on the national majority, and the majority is invited to experience itself as the true minority, besieged in its own home.

The Portuguese case, which the international literature mostly overlooks and which this author knows from inside, illustrates the mechanism with particular clarity precisely because Portugal long considered itself immune. The national self-image rested for decades on the myth of lusotropicalism, Gilberto Freyre’s thesis, adopted enthusiastically by the Estado Novo it had not originally been written to serve, that Portuguese colonialism was uniquely gentle, miscegenating, and free of racism — a myth that survived the fall of the regime and the loss of the empire to become common sense, the settled belief that racism is something that happens elsewhere. Against that background, every attempt of the last decade to open the questions the myth forecloses has been received as aggression: proposals to teach the history of slavery and the slave trade in adequate depth, debates over a memorial to enslaved people in Lisbon, the recurrent and repeatedly blocked discussion of whether the census should collect ethnic-racial data at all, so that the inequalities affecting Afro-descendant and Roma communities could be measured rather than disputed anecdotally, and the work of researchers and activists who document those inequalities in housing, policing, education, and employment. Each initiative has been met with the full imported vocabulary — wokeness, identity politics, imported problems, the erasure of history — deployed as though the questions themselves, rather than the conditions they ask about, were the foreign contamination. Meanwhile the radical right, which Portuguese political science long declared structurally impossible, arrived on schedule: Chega, founded in 2019, entered parliament with a single deputy that year and within half a decade had become one of the largest parties in the Assembleia da República, building its ascent on precisely the repertoire this essay has catalogued — security and crime discourse racially coded around Roma communities, whom its leader has repeatedly singled out with proposals and rhetoric that earned judicial and regulatory rebukes, hostility to a rapidly grown immigrant population that sustains agriculture, construction, and tourism, anti-corruption theatre aimed at the political class as such, the defence of national history against those who would examine it, and, imported wholesale, the anti-woke and anti-gender lexicon of the international movement. That a country with Portugal’s median wages, housing crisis, and emigration of its qualified young should have its public agenda occupied by gender ideology in schools is the displacement mechanism of section eleven operating in real time, and the Portuguese case adds one instructive lesson to the international file: the myth of exceptional tolerance is not a defence against reaction but a resource for it, since a nation convinced it was never racist experiences the mere documentation of racism as slander, and the countermovement harvests the offence.

15. What does the far right actually offer?

Strip away the rhetoric of rebellion and the question becomes unavoidable: what is the programme? What, concretely, does this politics propose to build? The difficulty of answering is itself the finding. The contemporary far right is exhaustively clear about what it opposes — feminism, multiculturalism, immigration, anti-racism, cosmopolitanism, secularism, environmental regulation, progressive education, minority rights movements, the institutions that shelter any of these — and strikingly reticent about what it intends, a reticence that is not accidental, because negative unity is the coalition’s load-bearing wall. The moment the movement specifies its positive order, the coalition’s internal contradictions activate: the libertarian discovers what the theocrat has in mind for him, the worker discovers the donor’s labour policy, the secular nationalist discovers the church’s ambitions. Opposition is the only programme on which all partners agree, and so opposition is the only programme that is ever fully stated.

The positive project nonetheless exists, and it can be reconstructed from the movement’s behaviour where it governs and from the occasional document in which its planners write frankly. Assembled, it looks like this: stronger national and ethnic homogeneity, pursued through immigration restriction and the harassment of visible minorities; more rigid gender roles, pursued through reproductive restriction and the rollback of recognition; expanded police and executive authority, with correspondingly weakened courts, press, and universities; minority protections thinned to formality; borders hardened into moral facts; the patriarchal family restored as the unit of social order; institutional pluralism reduced, since independent institutions are where challenges incubate; and deference to inherited hierarchy re-established as a civic virtue. It is a coherent order — history has seen it before, in more than one variant — but it is not a popular one when stated plainly, which is why it is almost never stated plainly, and why the movement prefers to campaign on what it is against.

The preferred vocabulary for the concealment is freedom, and the vocabulary rewards interrogation, because freedom is always a relation: freedom to do what, from which obligations, for whom, at whose cost? Examine the freedoms actually litigated under the banner and a pattern emerges. The freedom of employers is asserted against the security of workers; the freedom of speech is asserted, most energetically, as the freedom of the powerful to demean the marginal without answer; parental rights are asserted against the autonomy and occasionally the safety of children; religious liberty is asserted against the reproductive and civil rights of others; property rights are asserted against housing and against habitability itself. In each pairing, the freedom defended is the freedom of the stronger party in an existing relation of power, and the freedom curtailed is the freedom of the weaker, which suggests that the operative concept is not liberty in the republican sense of non-domination but liberty as the protection of domination from interference. And on the material questions that actually structure most lives — housing shortage, healthcare access, low wages, insecure employment, ageing populations, climate disruption, decaying infrastructure, the concentration of wealth — the programme offers, with the partial exception of welfare promises fenced by nationality, essentially nothing, because its strength was never material. Its strength is that it supplies cultural explanations for material frustration, and when the rhetoric of rebellion is finally set aside, what remains is a project of restoration: the return of authority to the groups and institutions whose dominance the last half-century of egalitarian movement had begun, unevenly and incompletely, to challenge.

16. Why this politics is attractive

Nothing in the preceding analysis explains its own most important datum: tens of millions of people, most of them neither wealthy nor cruel, find this politics compelling, and any account that treats them as dupes or monsters has abandoned explanation for consolation. The supporters of countermovement politics are political actors making choices within their circumstances, and the choices are intelligible, because the politics delivers real goods — not the goods it advertises, but goods nonetheless, and goods its opponents have often stopped supplying.

It delivers, first, explanation. The transformations of the last decades — deindustrialization, migration, the reordering of gender and family life, the visible diversification of formerly homogeneous societies, the digitalization of everything — are genuinely disorienting, and the countermovement offers an account of them that is simple, causal, and narratable: your world was taken, by identifiable people, on purpose. The account is false, but it is an account, delivered with confidence, in ordinary language, by people who appear to like their audience, and it competes in many lives against no alternative account at all, the parties and unions and churches that once supplied interpretation having withered or departed. It delivers enemies, which are more bearable than abstractions; moral certainty, which is more bearable than ambivalence; and community, which may be the most underestimated item on the list, since the forums, channels, movements, and marches of the reactionary world offer belonging, recognition, and shared purpose to people whose other sources of all three have thinned. It delivers permission — to feel the resentment one was feeling anyway, to say what one suspected but had learned to suppress — and permission experienced after suppression feels like liberation, whatever it is permission for. It delivers nostalgia, the emotional restoration of a remembered world in which one’s place was secure, and it delivers, remarkably, the sensation of rebellion, the pleasure of transgression against official pieties, so that the defence of the oldest hierarchies arrives wearing the costume of punk.

Two of these rewards deserve closer inspection because they do the deepest work. The first is what might be called the promise of innocence. Anti-woke politics tells members of historically dominant groups that they bear no responsibility for inherited inequalities, that the past has no purchase on the present, that their advantages are entirely earned, that demands for reform are personal accusations, and that they are victims rather than beneficiaries of the arrangements in question. This is, among other things, relief from a genuinely uncomfortable form of knowledge — the knowledge that one’s ordinary life is entangled with injustices one did not choose — and the discomfort is real even though the reactionary resolution of it is false. The egalitarian tradition has often handled this discomfort badly, moralizing where it should have organized, and the countermovement has monetized the mishandling: where one side offers implication, the other offers absolution, and absolution sells. The second reward is the promise of restored centrality. Social equality requires dominant groups to accept that they are not the universal norm — that their language, history, image, and preferences are one particular among others — and that requirement, however just, is experienced by many as displacement, humiliation, invisibility, decline. Arlie Russell Hochschild, listening for years to Tea Party sympathizers in Louisiana, reconstructed the deep story through which they understood their lives: waiting patiently in a long queue toward a promised reward, watching others — helped, it seemed, by the government — cut in ahead. The story is empirically wrong about who has been cutting and who has been holding the door, but it is emotionally coherent, honestly held, and politically decisive, and the movement that took these people seriously as narrators of their own experience won them, while the movements that informed them their story was a privilege performed did not. The far right succeeds, in short, not only because it lies, but because it attends — to distress, to status, to the need for dignity and belonging — and its opponents will not defeat it by refuting its claims while ignoring its customers.

17. How democratic movements should respond

If the analysis is right, the response follows from it, and the first requirement is to avoid two symmetrical mistakes that between them exhaust most current practice. The first mistake treats every anti-woke concern as evidence of irredeemable hatred, collapsing the crucial distinctions this essay has laboured to maintain — between the movement’s entrepreneurs and its audience, between reaction and criticism, between the person who profits from the pipeline and the person being carried along it — and thereby completing the countermovement’s work for it, since nothing confirms the narrative of persecution so efficiently as being treated as irredeemable. The second mistake, marketed as realism, accepts the reactionary framing and retreats: softening commitments to minority rights, muting the documentation of inequality, discovering that this year’s scapegoats are indeed electorally inconvenient, in the hope that concession will drain the opposition of material. The record of this strategy is unambiguous. Countermovements are not appeased by the surrender of their targets; they are confirmed by it, since each concession certifies that the previous alarm was justified, and the frontier of demands moves accordingly. A democratic politics can hold its commitments while contesting the framing, and must, because abandoning either loses everything.

The constructive programme begins with reconnection. The countermovement’s greatest strategic achievement has been the separation, in public perception, of cultural equality from economic equality, so that the two could be played against each other — workers against minorities, class against identity — while the same interests defeated both. The answer is to make the connections explicit and material, because they are not rhetorical: racial inequality has economic foundations in housing, credit, labour markets, and inheritance; gender inequality is inseparable from the organization of labour and care, from who works unpaid and who is paid for what; immigration is a phenomenon of labour markets, demography, and foreign policy before it is a phenomenon of culture; LGBTQ rights are an instance of the universal civil liberties on which everyone’s security rests; climate policy is health policy, employment policy, and infrastructure policy wearing an abstraction. Nancy Fraser’s old formulation remains the correct compass: recognition and redistribution are not rivals, and a politics that pursues either alone will be defeated through the one it neglected.

The programme continues with language, and here the progressive side must accept an uncomfortable finding of its own recent history: vocabulary that functions within universities and movements has repeatedly failed, and sometimes backfired, in general publics, not because the publics are incapable but because abstraction is a tax on communication that the countermovement does not pay. The remedy is not dilution of substance but concreteness of expression — who has power, who pays, who benefits, what changes, what the evidence shows — the questions any household understands, applied without euphemism in either direction. It continues, further, with a defensible universalism, because the countermovement has been permitted to claim universalism’s prestige while practising its opposite, and the claim should be contested rather than conceded. A serious democratic universalism does not pretend that everyone begins from the same position; it recognizes that equal treatment of unequally situated people preserves the inequality, and that the genuinely universal commitment — everyone counts the same — therefore requires attention to the specific conditions under which some are counted less. Universalism against difference is the countermovement’s parody; universalism through the honest accounting of difference is the tradition worth defending.

And the programme culminates in institutions, because the deepest vulnerability the countermovement exploits is the gap between progressive language and material delivery. A politics that speaks of justice while presiding over unaffordable housing, degraded healthcare, insecure work, and immobile prospects will lose the argument to anyone offering explanation and enemies, however fraudulent the offer, and no quantity of discursive victory compensates. The credibility of egalitarian politics is built, where it is built at all, out of housing constructed, healthcare delivered, employment secured, education funded, transport that arrives, childcare that exists, labour rights that bind, and channels of democratic participation that demonstrably respond — the unglamorous infrastructure through which the abstract proposition that everyone matters becomes a verifiable feature of daily life. One refusal, finally, must anchor everything else: the refusal of false neutrality. The order that preceded the present conflicts was not neutral; it was a distribution of power like any other, merely less contested, and the demand to return to it is not a demand for peace but a demand for the silence of one side. The goal of democratic politics cannot be the restoration of a supposedly apolitical past that never existed. It can only be the construction of institutions in which power is more equally distributed and its distribution is permanently open to challenge — which is, in the end, all that the movements under attack have ever asked.

18. Conclusion: the politics of restored hierarchy

The argument can now be stated whole. The campaigns that occupy so much of contemporary politics — anti-woke, anti-feminist, anti-BLM, anti-gender, anti-DEI — are not isolated controversies, each requiring its own bespoke explanation, and they are not, whatever their self-description, independent political projects with programmes for the future. They are episodes of a single, old, and well-theorized phenomenon: countermobilization against movements that challenge established hierarchies, conducted according to a template perfected during the backlash against Black civil rights and refined continuously since. The sequence is consistent enough to be predictive. A movement exposes an inequality. The inequality is denied or minimized. The movement nonetheless gains influence, at which point denial becomes untenable and the claim shifts: equality has now gone too far, has overshot into its opposite, and the formerly dominant group is the true victim. The restoration of the prior hierarchy is then pursued under names that never mention hierarchy — freedom, neutrality, common sense, tradition, the protection of children — and the cycle stands ready for the next movement and the next.

The conflict beneath the noise is therefore not, as the countermovement frames it, a conflict between the friends of freedom and its enemies. It is a conflict between two understandings of freedom that have contended with each other since long before the present vocabulary existed: freedom as protection from domination, the equal standing of persons none of whom must live at another’s discretion, and freedom as the protection of inherited authority from democratic challenge, the liberty of the established to remain unquestioned. Every controversy this essay has examined, from policing to pronouns, resolves into that older argument, and clarity about which freedom is actually at stake in each case is worth more than any volume of commentary on the controversies themselves.

The contemporary far right presents itself as a rebellion against ideological conformity, and the presentation is its most successful product. Yet beneath the language of rebellion lies a profoundly conservative demand: that societies stop questioning the hierarchies through which power, legitimacy, and visibility have historically been distributed. Its movements are named anti-woke, anti-feminist, anti-BLM because their unity is primarily negative; they are held together not by a serious programme for a more equal future but by resistance to those who insist that the past should no longer determine who is heard, protected, respected, and allowed to govern. The question worth carrying away is therefore not whether progressive movements make mistakes. They do, abundantly, and this essay has catalogued the kinds. The question is why those mistakes are so reliably, so profitably, and so internationally used to argue that equality itself has become the danger — and what it tells us about the present distribution of power that so many find the argument convincing.

Diogo Ribeiro is a mathematician, researcher, and instructor at ESMAD — Escola Superior de Média Arte e Design (Instituto Politécnico do Porto) and Lead Data Scientist at Mysense.ai. He writes on statistics, political economy, and the philosophy of science. ORCID: 0009–0001–2022–7072.

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