Affirming Democracy, Gathering Resistance

Following up on Dan’s important post about The Sorrow and the Pity, I’d like to draw attention to this piece by Seva Gunitsky at Persuasion: “The Incels are Taking Over.” Gunitsky, the George Ignatieff Chair of Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Toronto, reviews the new documentary Inside the Manosphere, not entirely favorably, but not unfavorably. I have not watched the documentary, but it’s Gunitsky’s analytical gloss of the film that I find important. 

(Toronto, by the way, with the recent move there from the US by Timothy Snyder, Marci Shore, and Jason Stanley is emerging as a center for democracy-affirming political theory. Something to keep an eye on.)

Gunitsky writes that the “convergence between male grievances and far-right personalist politics is probably the defining element of modern politics”: 

Among young men who aspired to traditional masculinity but thought they hadn’t achieved it, Trump led by 22 points in 2024. Men who identified as “completely masculine” and scored high on masculine norms favored Trump by a huge 50-point margin.

He notes that there are many dynamics involved in the MAGA movement and in support for Trump. But why, he asks, “does twenty-first century authoritarianism so consistently perform masculinity as its defining aesthetic across vastly different cultures?”

And he says:  

The answer, I think, is that the emergence of far-right personalist rule is not just a symptom but a direct result of the crisis of gender politics: the collision between global gains in women’s status since the 1960s, and the psychological and material displacement of men who had organized their identities around traditional gender hierarchies.

This reactionary movement is directed against the “feminization” of society:

This is sometimes awkward for progressives to admit, but modernity feminizes society. In fact they shouldn’t have to admit it; they should assert it. It’s a good thing. Modernity feminizes society by empowering women to become full participants in economic and political life. The elevation of women is the great achievement of modernity, and probably what makes modern life tolerable compared to much that came before. But it also by definition requires the partial feminization of traditional social structures.

Gunitsky goes on to draw out the form that the reaction against this takes, and I encourage you to take a look. 

I find his analysis convincing, though I don’t know how to weigh it against other narratives that seek to explain the reactionary, anti-democratic moment that we are in. Many of them are also plausible. And I doubt it matters that we “pick one,” so to speak. I’m enough of a post-modernist to be suspicious of grand narratives — while also thinking that they can be very useful heuristics.

Gunitsky calls the elevation of women “the great achievement” of modernity, and I have no argument with that. The liberation of half the population is hard to beat. We might also point, though, to the economic democratization wrought through the progressive era, the labor movement, the New Deal, and the rise of democratic socialism; the long and ongoing effort to overcome slavery and its aftermath through the civil rights movement, DEI, and anti-racism; the extension of rights and privileges to the LGBTQ+ communities; and so on.

One thing these movements all have in common is the “elevation” and extension of human dignity in both public and private spheres. Modern American democracy as it has developed at least since the mid-19th century is inherently, not accidentally, progressive. A political conservatism that does not recognize this will almost certainly have a tendency to become reactionary. And, we need a political conservatism that does recognize it, that is not reactionary. More on that in another post.