The Politics of Backlash

How the Left Makes Populism Popular

“They drew first blood, not me.” — every reactionary since the dawn of time. Source: Sceneprints

Politics is a dialectic, not a monologue. Actions trigger reactions that trigger more actions and reactions. There isn’t necessarily progress, but there is adaptation: the actors and reactionaries are influenced by each other, even if only negatively. For example, a New York Times article argues that Donald Trump has joined a global war on “gender ideology,” defined as “a kind of catchall for anything associated with the idea that gender is a social construct and therefore malleable.” The article quotes a speech by Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s prime minister, in which she asks, “Why is the family an enemy? Why is the family so frightening? There is a single answer to all these questions. Because it defines us. Because it defines our identity. Because everything that defines us is now an enemy.” Clearly then, from the perspective of the right, the battle over gender ideology is a defensive struggle. Meloni would surely agree with Captain John Rambo that “They drew first blood, not me.” The Times article notes that “many conservatives view ‘liberal creep’ — feminism, gay rights, the legalization of same-sex marriage, trans rights and gender-affirming care for minors — as a civilizational threat.” But equal rights for women and sexual minorities extend the protections of civilization, at least in its Western sense. That’s why most conservatives consider the prosecution and even execution of homosexuals in Muslim countries to be barbaric. Same-sex marriage, too, permits gays to participate in a long-standing, civilizing institution. It does not fundamentally challenge that institution or the deeper values—family, commitment, social stability—on which it rests.

Gender-affirming care for minors is clearly the odd “man” out on the liberal-creep list, for a couple of core reasons.¹ First, even the liberal idea of universal rights has typically drawn a line between children and adults. For example, minors don’t have the right to vote, drive a car, or consent to sex at any age, because the law recognizes their developmental limits. The novel idea that they should, nevertheless, have the right to irrevocably alter their bodies is thus disquieting for many liberals as well as conservatives. Should we be surprised at the backlash against what

Andrew Sullivan

calls “a vast, new experimental treatment on children with drugs that were off-label and without any clinical trials to prove their effectiveness and safety”? Second, the sex binary, like the developmental difference between children and adults, is rooted in nature. Most non-trans people (that is to say, most people) either support or can be reasonably persuaded to support equal rights and dignity for a minority who are discomfited by their biology. However, acceptance of a sexual minority is different from acceptance of a biological sex–denying ideology. When this ideology spreads to children—and, in extreme cases, causes them to make life-altering decisions they may later regret—parents are naturally (there’s that word again) going to react. Perhaps Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban is disingenuous when he says, “Hungary is a free country where adults can decide how they want to live, but children — that’s a red line.” Nevertheless, it’s the proponents of “gender ideology” who’ve allowed him to stake out such a reasonable-sounding position.

Or take immigration. The percentage of foreign-born Americans reached a record 15% under President Biden. Annual net migration averaged 2.4 million newcomers from 2021 to 2023, which is the largest surge since at least 1850. Of these recent immigrants, around 60 percent entered the country illegally. Donald Trump was not re-elected in 2024 because most Americans hate immigrants. That he won nearly half of the Latino vote rather proves this point. Instead, most Americans are concerned about the destabilizing pace and chaotic nature of mass immigration. Elsewhere in the West, too, the backlash against immigration is largely driven by its scale and impact on society. For example, Germany’s populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party was formed in 2013 out of opposition to the European Union. Its focus became mass immigration because mass immigration itself became a focus for many Germans. Over 5 million immigrants arrived in Germany since 2014, including more than a million from Syria and Afghanistan. In 2023, around 41% of crimes were committed by foreigners, with knife attacks and gang rapes triggering public outrage. For understandable historical reasons, the tandem of “German” and “far-right” sparks Nazi suspicions. But Stefan Möller, an AfD politician, sounds eminently reasonable when he says the party will differentiate integrated migrants from threats to society: “no AfD voter expects the AfD . . . to deport doctors, engineers, or some mailman from Ghana.” Again, as with Orban, you can question Möller’s sincerity, but it’s the mainstream parties who’ve allowed the “extremists” to seize what used to be the middle ground.

To recognize that politics is a dialectic should be to act in a way that minimizes backlash. For example,

Joseph Heath

notes the tendency of “people who have objectively unpopular views, or who claim to be defending the interests of vulnerable minorities, but who happen to occupy a position of some influence and authority, to engage in what can only be described as rage-baiting the majority of the population.” In the above cases, this rage-baiting often means accusing critics of gender ideology of being sexist or transphobic, and critics of mass immigration of being racist or fascist. As Heath writes, “Calling one’s political opponents racist has become equivalent to sticking your fingers in your ears and saying ‘la la la’ while they’re talking.” Since opposing open debate is itself an objectively unpopular position, the effect is, again, to make the “extremists” seem moderate and the “moderates” seem extreme. In the 2024 American presidential election, the Democrats attempted to portray themselves as the party of norms. But what if many of their norms are actually abnormal?

Richard Dawkins

, the eminent evolutionary biologist, writes that “Donald Trump is a loathsome individual, utterly unfit to be President, but his statement that ‘sex is determined at conception and is based on the size of the gamete that the resulting individual will produce’ is accurate in every particular, perhaps the only true statement he ever made.” Is Dawkins engaged in the far-right “global war on ‘gender ideology’”? Or is he part of a rearguard action, uniting rationalists and cranks, against a brazen assault on scientific truth and common sense?

Of course, there are actual bigots who oppose gender ideology and mass immigration. But accusing everyone who questions the left of bigotry only makes bigotry seem more respectable.

David Frum

writes that “If liberals insist that only fascists will enforce borders, then voters will hire fascists to do the job liberals refuse to do.” There is nothing inherently fascist or even right-wing about limiting immigration to sustainable levels and adhering to the scientific definition of sex. In 2015, socialist Senator Bernie Sanders called open borders “a Koch brothers proposal” and said, “You're doing away with the concept of a nation-state, and I don't think there's any country in the world which believes in that.”² Insofar as broadly held, formerly bipartisan positions are shunted off to the populist right, the populist right will gain in popularity. But equally, the populist right risks losing popularity when it trades, say, the defense of the nation-state for a strictly racial definition of nationhood. As an explanation for Trump’s increased popularity among minority voters, the term “multiracial whiteness” has been rightly mocked. But it does point to the inclusive nature of his support base. Internationally, too, populism is most successful when it doesn’t set rigidly identitarian limits to its popularity. In Italy, the “war on gender ideology” is being waged by Meloni, a single mother, while Germany’s AfD is led by a lesbian with a Sri Lankan–born partner. The Times quotes Darren Beattie, acting undersecretary of public diplomacy and public affairs, as saying “Competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work.”³ But populism itself works best as a broad coalition that doesn’t trigger its own backlash.

1. Feminism is more ambivalent. If the term simply means equal rights for women, it’s broadly accepted in the West. But insofar as it denotes a zero-sum, nature-denying approach to relations between the sexes, the label becomes toxic. For example, a YouGov poll found that only 32% of Americans described themselves as feminists, while 77% agreed that both sexes should have “equal rights and status in society, and be treated equally in every way.” Clearly then, many “anti-feminists” only reject what Christina Hoff Sommers calls “gender feminism,” and not equality between the sexes.

2. Or consider Denmark’s leftist Social Democrats, who’ve avoided a populist backlash by adopting a restrictive immigration policy.

3. Somewhat ironically, Beattie himself is a self-described “proud Jew,” so not quite white by the standard of online chuds.