The book and the lecture “Radicalised Conservatism – An Analysis” focus on a development of contemporary conservatism in political parties. This strand of conservatism is developing into a definable and thus new phenomenon. It occupies an intermediate stage between state-supporting post-war conservatism and the established, popular extreme right. It draws its dynamic from the raw bourgeoisie described by Wilhelm Heithmeyer. Radicalised conservatism is the mirror image in party politics of the bourgeois part of the New Right at the extra-parliamentary level. It is a movement towards the extreme right – strategically, rhetorically and ideologically. However, radicalised conservatism is not indistinguishable from the traditional far right, but can also be distinguished from it, for example, by its self-image and the resources of a large popular party. There are six elements that distinguish radicalised conservatism from other political groups: deliberate rule-breaking, polarisation, the role of the leader, the anti-democratic restructuring of the state, politics in permanent election campaign mode and the creation of parallel realities.

Deliberate rule-breaking describes not only the breaking of laws, but also the breaking of unwritten rules. The actors of radicalised conservatism use this rule-breaking for the permanent and calculated production of excitement. Furthermore, radicalised conservatism relies on a politics of polarisation, especially along the themes of asylum, migration, and unemployment and the welfare state. The role of the leader is particularly important, as he or she is both victim and martyr figure. The real goal is the anti-democratic and irreversible restructuring of the state, be it in the institutions of justice, parliament or even the free media. In the process, radicalised conservatism engages in a new kind of media staging – the entire political-media complex is kept in permanent campaign mode. This ultimately leads to the creation of parallel realities in which there is no longer a reality shared and understood by society as a whole.

However, this is not really a new phenomenon. In the Weimar Republic or in Vienna between the wars, there were similar developments in conservatism with the “Conservative Revolution” or what Janek Wasserman called “Black Vienna”. Alliances were formed with the popular part of the extreme right because agreement could be reached on the enemy images. Currently, this dynamisation can be found at the party-political level. Radicalised conservatism is a right-wing radicalisation of conservatism. It raises the question of whether this is even a fascisation of conservatism.

1. Why is ‘gender’ important to objectively examine and solve current problems?
2. How can a good life for all genders be achieved in a democratic Europe?

I want to say something about these questions from the perspective of the sociology of conflict and the sociology of inequality.

The sociology of conflict shows that the two parties involved in a conflict deal with each other, but at the same time try to deal with a ‘third party’ – namely all the people who live in the political community. The parties involved thus try to reach the media, the internet, the parties and these people and to influence or convince them with their contents and demands. This is usually only possible in the medium term if these demands appear to be fair. And that, in turn, requires the liberal and progressive movements to reflect on this and to be able to justify it convincingly. In other words, they have to become reflexive – also with regard to themselves and exclusions or injustices they may be committing.

In recent decades, following Michel Foucault, feminist and queer movements have linked justice primarily to the fact that no one should be excluded, and they have been widely successful in doing so. At the same time, queer and immigrant people have been included in capitalism, for example through diversity policies. In contemporary modernisation, with its various insecurities and inequalities (recognition, employment, violence, housing), social justice needs to be thought more broadly and diversely than just by the yardstick of exclusion and inclusion. Intersectional approaches, in which inequality is examined according to gender, class, migration and sexuality, are fruitful.

Furthermore, designs and visions of what a good life can and should look like for all genders (also in relation to the body) are also useful: Sexual and reproductive health, for example, means in practice good counselling and care for childbearing/pregnant women, abortions, homosexuals and trans*.

However, liberal and progressive movements must also implement gender democracy in the sense that they discuss and realise these approaches democratically. They have to make clear why this means a better life and more freedom, equality, security and participation in everyday life. In democratic processes, they must then win broad majorities for this and they must develop and apply the ways and methods for this.

Immediately supported by right-wing and far-right politicians, this group (which later became Family Generation in 2016, and then Pro-Life and Family in 2019) was born to oppose public policies, laws, and bills concerning women and LGBTQI+ rights. In their eyes, those are the result of the spread of a new form of totalitarian and anti-natural ideology, which they generally call “the theory of gender” or “gender ideology.” The first phase was focused on building a movement of protest in the streets, particularly by the organization of several local and national demonstrations, such as the so-called Family Day, in 2015 and 2016. Taking advantage of the political opportunities offered by some national and European elections and thanks to the close alliance with the League and Brothers of Italy, the anti-gender movement has become a political actor, able to influence populist right-wing forces’ ideology and programs. But also, decisions and debates on gender, sexuality, and family in Italy.

To summarize, this movement has been able to renew the modalities of action of an area of radical Catholicism through 1. an extra-ecclesiastical positioning out the spaces of the Italian Catholic Chruch; 2. an extra-Catholic positioning beyond the religious-based traditional pro-life movement; 3. a political positioning in public arenas as the spokesperson and representative of a new course of secularized Catholic politics.

The anti-gender movement is the instrument that a new entrepreneurial class of Neo-Catholic activism has strategically designed, in Italy, to face the challenge posed by the democratic paradigm to an ex-politicized and de-politicized religion. The politics of these movements claim an ability to act within a democracy, challenge democracy itself, and establish a new counter-democratic, perhaps even anti-democratic, paradigm, based on the “natural” values of the tradition that challenge the “anti-natural” values of civil rights.

In recent years patriarchal gender norms and ideologies have become an integral part of the right-wing populist parties programs. Right-wing leaders, including Jarosław Kaczyński, Victor Orban, Jair Bolsonaro and Matteo Salvini have invested in creating their image as defenders of traditional family and the nation against the excesses of what they call “gender ideology.” Such a stance have helped them to gain public support: a 2019 opinion poll showed that when asked about the biggest threats for Poland in the 21st century, the majority of young men and older people declared that their biggest fear is the threat of the “gender ideology and LGBT movement.”

The presentation will focus on the relationship between populism and gender. Rather than looking for specific gendered aspects of populism as an ideology, it examines a growing opportunistic synergy between the right-wing parties and ultraconservative groups opposing “gender.” This synergy plays out on two distinct levels: ideological/discursive and strategic/organizational. Since populism is not a robust ideological project, it readily feeds on ideas and narrative structures promoted by the anti-gender ultraconservative movement, albeit often in an opportunistic and selective fashion. Populists also cooperate closely with the anti-gender organizations as they need new cadres in the process of a sweeping elite change. Simultaneously, the actors behind anti-gender campaigns use the organizational resources that right-wing parties offer and access to political processes, especially in contexts such as Poland where the latter are in power. What facilitates this collusion is the fact that the ultraconservative critiques of “gender” have been framed in populist terms. The movement presents itself as a necessary and courageous defense of “the people” against powerful and foreign “liberal elites,” with “gender ideology” emphatically identified as a modern version of colonialism.

A gender sensible look at these mobilizations highlights especially three dimensions:

First, for right-wing populist actors, ‘gender’ and ‘the family’ are not just two topics among others. Rather, the evoked images of the ‘threatened traditional family’ and the ‘threatened German woman’ are used to construct a threat scenario in which nothing less than the cultural and biological reproduction of the German population and society is at stake. The associated fears are one of the most important pillars of right-wing mobilizations in Germany.

Secondly, these policies should not be misunderstood simply as an attempt to ‘re-traditionalize’ gender relations. Rather, they indicate an actual and genuine re-articulation of gendered subject positions and relations. Right-wing populist gender policies do not simply promote a ‘home-and-hearth’ policy. They articulate new female subject positions, such as the ‘defensive mother’: a specific mode of identification for white women based on an image of reproductive, yet always politically mobilized and supposedly emancipated femininity.

Third, antifeminism and anti-gender politics in Germany must not be reduced to one party or party politics as such. Rather, we are dealing with a broader right-wing discourse coalition that reaches far into the broader conservative and liberal spectrum. The right-wing populist project is, thus, also already highly successful, insofar as it taps into already existent discourses around gender and the family that are popular in German society. Not least they managed to shift these discourses clearly to the right in the last years.

Questions like what a perspective could look like that addresses both – misogyny and patriarchal violence – without making use of racist instrumentalizations remained largely unanswered; it was too easy to concentrate on the “enemy”. For a long time, also the few critical (feminist) voices that addressed, for example, the global commonalities of patriarchal violence stayed unheard. Left groups not only failed to respond adequately to these right-wing instrumentalizations, for years they also understood the related issues far too little as their own. If groups that take up the cause today had consistently done so over the past few decades, it would not have been so easy for the extreme right to occupy these topics in their interest. Just as the extreme right only dedicates itself to sexualized violence when it can derive racist benefits from it, the left only reacts when right-wing groups take up the topic. As a result, in both cases, “sexual misconduct committed by marginalized ‘others’” (Dietze 2016) serves as the starting point of the different mobilizations. Furthermore, right-wing groups could fill these existing blanks with their agenda and thereby anchor their demands in mainstream political discourse and normalize them as legitimate positions.

In contrast, in July 2020 in Austria a movement was founded that has set itself the task of politicizing patriarchal violence and its extreme intensifications: feminicides. It follows on from the feminist movement Ni Una Menos, which originated in Latin America. Since then, no feminicide has been left uncommented in Austria, instead spontaneous demonstrations – unitl now more than 20 times – have been organized every single time a feminicide became known. To politicize feminicides means to find a practice that makes it possible to to overcome the purely reactive moment and thus gain agency. In the course of this politicization, important feminist debates were initiated – from the entanglements with other ideologies of inequality in capitalism to the question of which improvements would be possible under the auspices of current conditions of exploitation and to whom corresponding demands could be addressed. By answering to every single feminicide, regardless of the respective (origin) stories of the perpetrators, it is also possible to refer to the central commonalities of patriarchal violence and destructive constructions of masculinity across the globe, to counteract ethnicization and to expose the selective right-wing instrumentalizations as racist.

The conservative backlash against women is real and scary. But effective opposition requires a critical view of the larger political constellation that has precipitated it. In this lecture, I interpret the present anti-feminist backlash as a response to four decades of “progressive-neoliberal” hegemony–and to the current crisis of capitalist society generated by it. Based on this diagnosis, I propose a feminist political strategy aimed at countering not only the forces of ultra-conservativism but also their liberal enablers.