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As Donald Trump is set to resume the presidency in January 2025, U.S. democracy looks fragile and contested. Over the past decade, researchers have tracked a worrisome trend of democratic erosion, manifested most clearly in heightened political violence, rampant disinformation, and authoritarian attacks on electoral integrity and the rule of law. This trend has unfurled in parallel to wide-ranging and escalating attacks on reproductive rights and LGBTQ rights as well as intensified political mobilization for traditionalist and heteronormative gender norms.
These two trends are not always understood as connected. Funders and advocates working on democracy reform in the United States have traditionally viewed battles over abortion access or trans rights as partisan policy debates, divorced from the broader fight for democratic renewal. Yet this view misses the critical ways in which gender issues play into the anti-authoritarian playbook, both in the United States and globally. A growing body of evidence suggests that patriarchy and authoritarianism are not just related phenomena, but often operate as mutually reinforcing political projects. Particularly where threats to democracy emanate from far-right populist movements and leaders, attacks on women’s and LGBTQ rights and appeals to traditional gender hierarchies are important and often overlooked elements of illiberal discourse, mobilization and coalition-building strategies, and ideology.
This article unpacks these linkages, highlighting four major points of intersection. It focuses primarily on the United States but draws on comparative examples from other contexts, including Brazil, India, Poland, and Türkiye.
1. Voters with sexist views are more likely to vote for far-right authoritarian parties and leaders—and the authoritarians are leaning on this link.
A significant body of evidence shows that right-wing authoritarian views—which are associated with an embrace of traditional values, submission to authority, and a perception that the world is a dangerous place—are linked to both paternalistic attitudes about women (“benevolent sexism”) and feelings of antipathy toward women who seek equality (“hostile sexism”). The same link exists for individuals who display a strong social dominance orientation, defined as a preference for inequality and group-based hierarchies.
Illiberal, far-right parties and candidates that reject feminism and espouse rigid gender hierarchies, often in conjunction with ethnic nationalist ideas, thus make a “comfortable home” for individuals with traditionalist gender attitudes. For instance, an analysis of the 2017 European Values Study shows that holding traditional views on gender increases an individual’s likelihood of supporting the radical right across twenty-three European countries. Importantly, the study finds that gender traditionalism heightens the already strong connection between nativism and the radical right while also drawing in some non-nativists. Another study conducted in Spain found that sexist attitudes were key to explaining the surge in popular support for the far-right Vox party following widespread feminist mobilization in the country in 2018 and 2019.
A comparable pattern is evident in the United States. In the 2016 election, both hostile and benevolent sexism among voters fostered opposition to Hillary Clinton and support for Donald Trump. This link held even after controlling for political ideology, authoritarianism, and the voter’s gender, though it was most consistent among White voters. In fact, several studies suggest that hostile sexist and racist attitudes more powerfully predict positive attitudes toward Trump among White voters than do other often-cited factors such as economic dislocation. More recently, researchers have found that individuals who support the “Make America Great Again” movement and slogan not only are overwhelmingly White and male but also tend to subscribe to sexist beliefs. These findings suggest that particularly among White Americans, hostility toward women and feminism and a desire to return to traditional gender norms operate as important and distinct conduits of support for Trump and his allies.
For illiberal movements and leaders, leaning into misogynistic tropes, traditional gender hierarchies, and heteronormative masculinity can thus be an effective way of growing and consolidating their constituency. By promising to return to a long-lost sense of order, they cater to voters who worry about increasing racial and religious diversity alongside shifting gender roles. Focusing on divisive cultural and social issues like LGBTQ rights allows them to paint a stark dichotomy between “us” and “them,” thereby polarizing the electorate, raising the perceived stakes of elections, and ensuring continued partisan support even if they engage in democratic norm- and rule-breaking. It can also enable them to divert attention from less politically favorable economic and social issues.
Trump already embraced a hyper-masculine strongman persona during his 2016 presidential campaign, regularly perpetuating sexist tropes about Clinton’s lack of qualifications and equating stereotypically masculine qualities with good leadership. Eight years later, Trump once again surrounded himself with symbols of hyper-masculinity and he and his allies advanced crude, sexist tropes about Vice President Kamala Harris.
However, the campaign not only relied on surface-level sexism: it also sought to broaden Trump’s appeal to the wider group of voters who feel threatened by rapid changes in gender norms or feel that society—and the left in particular—no longer values men and masculinity. Trump made concerted efforts to appeal to young male voters especially, tapping into their economic anxiety and sense of cultural dislocation and taking advantage of liberals’ general reluctance to speak to the struggles of men. At the same time, Trump framed himself as a “protector” of women and picked a vice president who has openly spoken about his traditional views of marriage and childbearing. Republicans also poured millions into election ads that sought to stoke voters’ fear of transgender women and girls in sports and state-funded gender transitions in prisons.
Some of these strategies appear to have paid off. So far, there is little systematic evidence indicating that anti-trans messaging had a strong mobilization effect, though further research may dig deeper into the role these messages played in shaping some voters’ perceptions that Democratic politicians are culturally out of touch. However, Trump significantly improved his support among younger men and made clear gains among Hispanic men in particular. At a time when traditional masculinity and masculine behavior are under greater scrutiny than in the past and many young men report feelings of hopelessness and disillusionment, Trump’s unapologetic machismo and strongman persona are clearly resonating with a significant share of voters.
2. In the United States as well as in other democracies, illiberal drift is powered by movements and ideologies that endorse and promote traditionalist gender norms.
Although leaning into machismo and traditional gender norms can be an effective voter mobilization strategy for illiberal parties and candidates, it would be wrong to frame such messaging as purely instrumental. Patriarchal and heteronormative gender hierarchies also represent an important ideological pillar of far-right populist movements and leaders that have come to power in recent years by tapping into widespread mistrust of establishment actors and institutions. Although these movements vary in their political orientation and specific policy prescriptions, they are united by a shared commitment to restoring a particular (often ethnic and/or religious) idea of the nation—a nation that is reproduced through the heteronormative and, in many cases, “ethnically pure” family. Realizing this specific religious, ethnic, and cultural vision of the nation becomes a justification for undermining existing democratic processes and institutions, which are painted as captured by an unaccountable and elitist minority.
Even antidemocratic leaders who themselves may be power-seeking opportunists rather than committed ideologues often rely on appeals to the heteropatriarchal family to build broader governing coalitions, particularly with ultra-religious organizations and communities. Once in power, these leaders cede these religious actors and ideas significant institutional power, particularly in matters related to gender, reproduction, and the family.
The example of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil illustrates this point. Although Bolsonaro was never known as a particularly religious person before his rise to power, his electoral victory in 2018 was powered by a conservative alliance that prominently included the country’s evangelical churches. He charted his path to the presidency by collaborating with evangelical lawmakers to block legislation that they viewed as threatening conservative values, publicly converting to Protestantism, and blending nationalism and religion in his anti-elitist and anti-pluralist political rhetoric and platform. Once in office, Bolsonaro proceeded to appoint various religious figures to influential positions in his administration: in fact, six out of his twenty-four cabinet members were practicing evangelical Protestants. Although their power was limited to certain policy areas, they exerted significant influence over state policy and discourse on issues like LGBTQ rights, abortion, and sex education. For instance, under Bolsonaro, the Brazilian government cast doubt on the need for targeted gender equality policies, stripped LGBTQ rights from the mandate of the Ministry of Women, Family, and Human Rights, banned mentions of gender in the classroom, and defunded efforts to combat gender-based violence.
In the United States, meanwhile, Trump himself is often cast as an ideologically flexible and erratic political figure. In fact, many voters view him as politically moderate. Over the past several years, he has indeed wavered on some of his political positions to stay in line with the national mood, as evidenced by his recent equivocating on abortion rights. Yet his own fluidity helps obscure the allied political movements that have been critical to his ascent to power—movements for which the patriarchal family stands at the center of their ideological project.
Mirroring the pattern observed in Brazil, the Christian nationalist movement has served as a critical pillar of Trump’s organizational and ideological base. Various think tanks associated with the Christian far right, such as the Center for Renewing America and the Society for American Civic Renewal, have positioned themselves as key shapers of a second Trump administration’s ideological and political priorities and as suppliers of senior administration officials. Trump himself has promised to use his second term to defend Christian values, casting himself as a savior from the threat of a radical left that wants to “tear down crosses.” He has declared that one of his first acts will be to set up a task force to root out “anti-Christian bias” in U.S. society and pledged to protect “pro-God context and content.”
Yet at the core of the Christian nationalist political project is both a rejection of key democratic principles and a belief in highly traditional gender roles and expectations. Christian nationalists’ central concern is the protection of symbolic boundaries: who should be considered American as well as which families count as legitimate and moral. Adherents believe that the decline of the traditional patriarchal order undermines the family and thus the basis of social stability. However, the movement is characterized not only by ultra-conservative views on social and cultural issues but also the belief that the U.S. government should endorse and enforce those values, thereby abandoning the traditional separation of church and state. Survey research shows that Christian nationalist beliefs are strongly linked to a preference for racial and gender hierarchies that posit White, Christian, heterosexual men as the divinely ordained ruling class—as well as a greater belief in political violence being justified to advance this ideological vision.
Importantly, Christian nationalist ideas have risen in prominence within conservative political circles in ways that reach far beyond Trump himself. A broader movement of ultra-conservative Christian groups has developed a concerted strategy to infuse hardline religious views into state politics, through bills lifted from model legislation disseminated across the country. These efforts range from largely symbolic measures, such as new initiatives to display religious mottos in public institutions, to farther-reaching bills that make it harder for LGBTQ people to adopt children, restrict same-sex marriage and transgender healthcare, or enshrine “fetal personhood” at conception into law. Empowered by a Supreme Court that has weakened precedents on church-state separation, various groups are also advancing new legal cases that seek to further erode the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. Exemplifying this trend, the Alabama State Supreme Court recently gutted the right to in vitro fertilization in the state, drawing on biblical concepts to argue that frozen embryos should be deemed children in need of state protection.
Beyond the Christian nationalist movement, a broader spectrum of far-right extremist ideas has also taken hold with U.S. state legislatures. For instance, one survey of state legislators serving in the 2021–2022 legislative period found that at least 875 lawmakers—or 11.85 percent—had joined far-right Facebook groups often linked to COVID-19 denialism, election-related conspiracy theories, paramilitary groups, and school-focused activism (such as Moms for Liberty). The same analysis showed that legislators belonging to these groups have sponsored and helped pass a wide range of bills restricting not only voting and protest rights but also LGBTQ rights, the teaching of critical race theory, and reproductive rights.
For instance, in 2022, at least 247 anti-abortion bills—including total abortion bans—were proposed in state legislatures across the country; of these, 66 percent were sponsored by lawmakers who were members of far-right Facebook groups. Sixty-two percent of the 132 anti-LGBTQ bills put forward across the country were similarly sponsored by far-right group members. These findings further underscore the intimate ideological link between far-right, antidemocratic politicians and movements and deeply conservative views of gender norms and gender relations. Far-right politicians may capitalize on some voters’ discomfort with progressive gender norms to get elected. Yet once in office, they often advance gender-related policies that go far beyond what most voters support.
3. The distortion of democratic institutions facilitates attacks on women’s and LGBTQ rights and gender equality.
The ideological coalitions driving many recent examples of democratic erosion help explain a third intersection: in the United States as well as in other countries, antidemocratic actors rely on the erosion and distortion of democratic processes to advance extremist gender-related policies and legislation. As a result, organizations and advocates that have traditionally worked on women’s rights, LGBTQ rights, and gender equality are pushed to confront challenges of democratic backsliding to continue advancing their advocacy agenda.
Take the example of Poland. After coming to power in 2015, the country’s Law and Justice party began systematically targeting the independence of the judiciary, including by imposing new cumbersome procedural rules, empowering a disciplinary chamber to sanction judges for questioning the ruling party’s platform, and packing the courts with politically loyal appointees. For instance, the government filled fourteen out of the fifteen seats on the country’s Constitutional Tribunal. In 2020, the politically compromised Constitutional Tribunal proceeded to eliminate one of the last remaining legal grounds for abortion in Poland, namely abortion in the case of severe fetal abnormalities—provoking mass mobilization by angered Polish citizens. The government also used newly instituted judicial appeal powers to obstruct LGBTQ-related court cases, thereby making it harder for LGBTQ rights activists to advance their cause through litigation.
A similar pattern unfolded in Türkiye, where the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) has over the past decade made sustained efforts to extend its control over the judiciary. In 2010, the government passed various constitutional amendments framed as democratizing the judiciary, which in practice enabled the AKP to increase the number of friendly judges through new appointments. In 2015, the now significantly more conservative courts reversed Türkiye’s commitment to secular marriage by annulling a previous requirement that all religious marriages be preceded by a secular ceremony. Women’s rights advocates saw the move as a step back for gender equality, as it has weakened the secular framework that had governed family law and opened the door to underage marriages, polygamy, and other discriminatory practices.
In both Poland and Türkiye, the increasing politicization of the judiciary has enabled new restrictions on LGBTQ and women’s rights driven by politically loyal, ultra-conservative judges. In the United States, distortions in democratic institutions are similarly facilitating backsliding on women’s rights, particularly with respect to reproductive health access. In the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, the conservative majority in the Supreme Court ruled that the issue of abortion should be returned to the states, arguing that women had the “electoral or political power” to influence state-level abortion legislation. The decision did not acknowledge, however, that state legislatures in many states are the product of extensive partisan gerrymandering, and thus far from accurate reflections of the popular vote. In a few states, such as New Mexico, these distortions have resulted in abortion protections that are more liberal than most of the state’s voters would likely favor. In other states, such as Florida, the result is a significantly more restrictive set of rules than most voters support.
Reinforcing the distortions of partisan gerrymandering are new restrictions on voting rights imposed by state legislatures since the Supreme Court eroded the Voting Rights Act in 2013. Since then, states have adopted almost 100 new laws restricting the vote—and many of those same states have also rolled back abortion rights. Texas, for example, has banned abortion almost entirely, while also having some of the most restrictive voting laws in the country. As citizens across different states have turned to ballot initiatives to push back against further erosion of reproductive rights, lawmakers have started to undermine this additional channel for influence, typically by increasing (or attempting to increase) the vote thresholds needed for such initiatives to pass. In South Carolina, a proposed law goes even further and seeks to criminalize a broad range of abortion-related speech, in clear tension with First Amendment protections. Across the United States, distortions in democratic processes produced by partisan gerrymandering and new voting rights restrictions—and more recent efforts to limit citizen ballot initiatives and First Amendment rights—have thus made it increasingly difficult to challenge extreme abortion restrictions that are out of sync with popular opinion.
It is important to note, however, that escalating attacks on and persecution of minority groups, such as those taking place in the United States with respect to transgender rights, can themselves be signs of democratic erosion. In the United States, public opinion on trans rights is more divided than on extreme abortion restrictions, for instance. Yet legislative efforts to restrict what can be taught about gender in schools, to grant religious exemptions that would allow businesses and employers to discriminate against trans people, or to prevent transgender individuals from updating their personal identity documents all suggest a decreasing respect for minority rights and a growing willingness to use the tools of the state to enforce a certain gender order. It is also telling that in a number of state legislatures around the country, far-right lawmakers have tried to pass new anti-trans measures by attaching last-minute amendments to bills about other issues, often with little opportunity for democratic input or consultation.
4. Illiberal leaders use and condone misogyny and gendered violence as tools to silence critics and opponents.
A final trend that is visible across backsliding democracies is the use and endorsement of gendered violence and hate speech as instruments to “feminize,” intimidate, and silence critics and opponents.
Despite their embrace of traditional gender hierarchies, illiberal, far-right actors often make some efforts to cultivate women’s support: conscious that women make up half of the electorate, they try to mobilize them with policies that play into women’s practical interests as mothers and caregivers, promote politically loyal women into positions of public visibility, and (as noted above) frame themselves as protecting women from various—often ethnic or religious—out-group threats. By contrast, they tend to be more direct in their targeting of sexual minorities, who constitute a much less powerful political constituency.
However, women and men who openly contest the desired political and patriarchal order—or who belong to demonized minority groups—are typically framed as enemies and targeted in explicitly gendered ways. Trump, for instance, alongside his attacks on migrants and ethnic minorities has a long history of insulting, belittling, and ridiculing female critics and opponents, often commenting negatively on their appearance and intelligence. He has also embraced “feminizing” attacks on his male opponents (such as “Tampon Tim”) and failed to condemn real-life violence against women leaders who have opposed him, making light of the attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband and downplaying the threat posed by the kidnapping plot against Wisconsin’s Governor Gretchen Whitmer. In India and Türkiye, meanwhile, women’s rights activists who have challenged government policy have been targeted with administrative harassment, disinformation, and arrests. For instance, Indian authorities arrested Muslim women protesting the government’s restrictive citizenship law for allegedly inciting communal violence.
These political statements and actions can help normalize abuse, threats, and physical violence in support of the government’s broader political project. In India, a study conducted by Amnesty International in the lead-up to and after the 2019 elections found that one in seven posts on Twitter (now known as X) that mentioned women politicians was “problematic” or “abusive,” a share that was even higher for prominent women politicians, Muslim women leaders, and women belonging to parties other than India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Indian women journalists who are perceived as liberal and secular have also experienced an uptick in online violence.
A similar pattern is evident in the United States. A 2023 survey by the Brennan Center for Justice showed a significant uptick in abuse directed at state and local officeholders across the country, with over 40 percent of state legislators experiencing threats or attacks. Women were not only more likely than men to report increases in the severity of abuse: they were also three to four times more likely to experience abuse that was explicitly gendered and sexualized. Similarly, people of color often experienced explicitly racist abuse. Election officials, who are overwhelmingly female, have also faced an increase in intimidation, with women encountering distinctly misogynistic threats and harsher, more menacing language than their male counterparts. Together, these findings underscore that a more permissive environment for political violence, fueled by extremist political discourse painting certain parts of society as enemies of the people, has particularly severe consequences for those who belong to traditionally marginalized social groups.
In addition to fueling extremist violence and intimidation by non-state actors, patriarchal populist politicians also tend to condone gender-based violence through state negligence and, in some cases, active erosion of policy protections. In Türkiye, for instance, women’s rights advocates have reported an uptick in gender-based violence and femicides in recent years. Rather than responding, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan unilaterally withdrew from the Istanbul Convention, a European treaty focused on fighting gender-based discrimination and violence. In India, women have taken to the streets to protest the BJP’s lack of action on sexual and gender-based violence, despite Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s repeated promises to tackle the issue. Official statistics show that sexual violence has continued to increase under his rule, and the BJP in several prominent cases has focused on protecting the accused rather than prioritizing accountability for the victims. Activists note that perpetrators close to the ruling elites or belonging to dominant castes enjoy significant impunity—particularly if the victims are women from communities marginalized by the government.
In the United States, the first Trump administration similarly took steps to weaken protections from certain forms of gender-based violence. For instance, the government limited the availability of asylum for survivors of domestic violence; narrowed the definition of sexual harassment in the enforcement of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972; halted Department of Labor efforts to decrease domestic abuse, sexual assault, and other forms of workplace violence in the healthcare industry; rolled back limits on forced arbitration for workplace sexual assault and harassment victims; and objected to increased rights for victims of sexual assault in the military. Project 2025, which may guide many of the social policy priorities of a second Trump administration, argues that the federal government should enforce sex discrimination laws only on the “biological binary meaning” of sex and threatens to treat educators who disseminate information about transgender issues as sex offenders. It makes no reference to the high rates of violence targeting LGBTQ people in the United States.
What unites these regulatory and policy efforts is a broad deprioritization of gender-based violence as a structural social problem and a reframing of the issue that denies its ties to gender inequality and other forms of social marginalization. Instead, far-right populist and illiberal politicians often depict such violence (if they do address it) as emanating only from deviant or “threatening” out-groups, including migrants or ethnic and religious minorities. In sum, they stir up and implicitly condone gendered abuse and intimidation against their opponents and often weaken legal protections while simultaneously using gender-based violence to shore up a nationalist law-and-order agenda.
Two Mutually Reinforcing Agendas
It is no accident that the current wave of democratic erosion and rising illiberalism is coinciding with a broader attack on women’s rights, LGBTQ rights, and progressive gender norms. This article has highlighted four ways in which these phenomena are interlinked:
- First, sexism and a preference for traditional gender hierarchies is an important conduit of support for antidemocratic and illiberal politicians, who can lean on this link to polarize the electorate, tap into social and economic grievances felt by male voters in particular, and consolidate their political support.
- Second, contemporary attacks on liberal democratic norms and institutions often emanate from far-right populist leaders and parties that subscribe to deeply conservative gender norms. In other cases, power-seeking leaders build political coalitions with ultra-conservative religious movements and cede these actors significant institutional power.
- Third, once entrenched in political office, illiberal politicians rely on their capture of democratic processes and institutions to push forward regressive policies and legislation on gender-related issues that are out of sync with majority opinion or threaten vulnerable minorities.
- Fourth, politicians driving democratic erosion tend to engage in and incite gendered abuse, harassment, and even violence to intimidate and silence their critics while simultaneously downplaying the importance of addressing the sociocultural roots of gender-based violence.
These linkages do not yield an automatic road map for mitigating processes of democratic erosion. Countering far-right appeals to disillusioned young men or conservative religious constituencies will require a different set of responses than resisting the distortion of democratic institutions to advance extremist attacks on women’s and LGBTQ rights or protecting vulnerable stakeholders and communities from online and offline violence and harassment. In some cases, highlighting the interplay of misogyny, traditional gender norms, and political illiberalism may not be an effective political strategy. Instead, reframing the dominant cultural and issue cleavages may prove more impactful. However, organizations focused on long-term democratic rebuilding should understand how and why gender norms and gender-related grievances factor in the antidemocratic playbook, rather than treating them as a political sideshow. If they do not, they risk missing an important piece of the puzzle.
