You Don't, in Fact, Have to Hand it to Putin

The right keeps vindicating Judith Butler’s critique of transphobia

Vladimir Putin, foe of gender ideology (Alexsey Druginyn/AFP via Getty Images)

As the Joker is to Batman, so Rod Dreher is to Judith Butler. Dreher, a blogger for The American Conservative, is a staunch traditionalist and convert twice over (first in 1993 to Catholicism and then, in 2007 after being shocked by the child abuse scandals, to Eastern Orthodoxy). He’s a strident opponent of LGBTQ rights. The philosopher Judith Butler, of course, is at the forefront of the push to rethink and reform gender norms. When the Vatican rails against  the pervasive influence “gender theory,” they are thinking first and foremost of Butler.

But if superhero stories have taught us anything it is that you can’t have a major nemesis who is also not, in part, a doppelganger. Any movie about Butler would do well to have a scene where Dreher mutters, “we’re not so different, you and I.” Butler and Dreher understand the centrality of gender politics even if they come to completely different conclusions. 

A striking example of how the two figures are flip images came after Russian president Vladimir Putin delivered a speech last Thursday in Sochi where he denounced the rise of “a new culture, cancel culture” which was threatening to create “reverse discrimination” and, via trans rights, threaten “to eliminate the whole notions of men and women, and those who dare say that men and women exist and this is a biological fact, they are all but banished.”

In The American Conservative, Dreher responded to Putin’s speech with enthusiasm, noting it supports his contention that autocrats like Putin and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán offer a path forward for the beleaguered American right. “I’m not the world’s biggest fan of Vladimir Putin but when the man is right, he’s right,” Dreher exclaimed. 

The alternative, Dreher argues, is either a Putin/Orbán approach or the tyranny of the “Baizuocracy” (a neologism based on a Chinese word roughly meaning “woke white left”). 

Dreher writes:

Putin, Orbán, and all the illiberal leaders that our baizuocracy loves to hate are all completely clear and completely correct on the society-destroying nature of wokeness and postliberal leftism. It should not be that way, but it is. Meanwhile, our Democratic political class, and the baizuocrats throughout the American elite (e.g., those who run corporations, universities, the media, law, medicine, sports, the military), are actively destroying this country and its founding values with their ideology. The Republicans, for the most part, aren’t doing a damn thing (though good for Sen. Tom Cotton for just introducing a bill to prohibit schools from participating in the gender transitions of children behind the backs of parents; more, please). Trump talked a reasonably good game, had some minor successes, but had too little follow-through. It is time to get serious, to quit playing around, before it’s too late.

There are a lot of Americans who will look to Putin and Orbán and point to corruption they’ve allowed under their governments, and use that as a reason to dismiss everything they say about wokeness. This is a foolish error. You don’t have to endorse corruption in order to recognize that on these cultural matters, they are correct. Besides, as a young woman I shared a taxi with across town in Budapest told me, she recognized that the Fidesz Party governance had tolerated far too much corruption, but she was going to vote for them anyway in next year’s election. Why? She said that she doesn’t want her young children to grow up in a country that has destroyed the idea of man and woman, and of family. There are some forms of corruption, she explained, that are harder to recover from.

In defending autocratic governments he admits are corrupt, Dreher is laying out a logic that Judith Butler laid out well in a recent Guardian piece on the rise of a global backlash against the very idea of “gender.” Butler details the myriad of movements swept up in this backlash:

In June, the Hungarian parliament voted overwhelmingly to eliminate from public schools all teaching related to “homosexuality and gender change”, associating LGBTQI rights and education with pedophilia and totalitarian cultural politics. In late May, Danish MPs passed a resolution against “excessive activism” in academic research environments, including gender studies, race theory, postcolonial and immigration studies in their list of culprits. In December 2020, the supreme court in Romania struck down a law that would have forbidden the teaching of “gender identity theory” but the debate there rages on. Trans-free spaces in Poland have been declared by transphobes eager to purify Poland of corrosive cultural influences from the US and the UK. Turkey’s withdrawal from the Istanbul convention in March sent shudders through the EU, since one of its main objections was the inclusion of protections for women and children against violence, and this “problem” was linked to the foreign word, “gender”.

Despite their many disparate forms, Butler finds an underlying fascist impulse unifying these movements:

The anti-gender movement is not a conservative position with a clear set of principles. No, as a fascist trend, it mobilizes a range of rhetorical strategies from across the political spectrum to maximize the fear of infiltration and destruction that comes from a diverse set of economic and social forces. It does not strive for consistency, for its incoherence is part of its power.

The word “fascist” of course, has been much abused. There’s been a lively debate in the Trump era about how apposite it might be to contemporary political movements. Butler’s argument makes a compelling intervention in this debate, showing that the fusion of promiscuous ideological opportunism and authoritarianism in the anti-gender movement is a classically fascist synthesis.

At the very least, the anti-gender movement has strong authoritarian strains. To see evidence, one only needs to read Rod Dreher. 

(Edited by Emily M. Keeler)

Share and Subscribe

If you liked this post, please share:

Or subscribe: