May 2, 2017

How the alt-right is reshaping patriarchal politics

I have a new opinion piece in The Guardian under the title "The alt-right hates women as much as it hates people of color." The article's main focus is the contrast between the alt-right's version of patriarchal politics and the Christian right's version. Here's an excerpt:
...the alt-right is reshaping patriarchal politics. Its version of male supremacy is not just more explicit or aggressive – it’s strikingly different from the version that’s been dominant among US rightists for decades.

Consider abortion. Some alt-rightists, unsurprisingly, argue that abortion is simply immoral and should be banned. Yet many others in the movement disagree – and for reasons that have nothing to do with respecting women’s autonomy or privacy. These alt-rightists support legal abortion because, they claim, it’s disproportionately used by black and Latina women and, secondarily, because they see it as a way to weed out “defective” white babies. In other words, they support abortion as a form of eugenics. Both sides of this internal alt-right debate agree that women have no business controlling their own bodies. As Greg Johnson of the alt-right website Counter-Currents put it, “in a White Nationalist society … some abortions should be forbidden, others should be mandatory, but under no circumstances should they simply be a matter of a woman’s choice”.

As far as I can tell, the only outsiders who have responded to this discussion are Christian rightists. For decades they’ve used the “black genocide” canard in an effort to smear abortion rights proponents as racist; now they have some actual racists to go after. But alt-rightists aren’t the least bit intimidated.
Note: The article draft I submitted included links to web-archived versions of alt-right and Christian right source articles (web-archived so you could see the content but it wouldn't boost traffic on their sites). The Guardian editors removed these links, because they didn't want to send readers to that kind of content, even in archived form. In the passage excerpted above, I've put the links back in.