Summary by Raquel Luna of the main insights of the interview ‘We must understand the historical span and longevity of conservative movements’, Sur Journal, issue 32, December 2022[0]. Revised by Sonia Corrêa. In this interview Corrêa describes how the advent of far-right forces across the United States, Europe, and Latin America is neither surprising nor sudden. Ultra-conservative forces never disappeared nor subsided, but have changed its workings, alliances and strategies since the 1970’s. They developed innovative mobilization strategies and alliances that researchers in the field call a Gramscian turn. Today they are disputing the hearts and minds of people over the very meaning of democracy and human rights. This text focuses on the main insights that Corrêa has brought forward.
From static reactionarism to ‘conservative revolution’
The current international conservative movement is formed by ultra-right-wing formations and religious ultra-conservatism. They include economic elites (large corporations, for example) and religious sectors (such as the Catholic church as well as other churches such as the more dispersed and heterogeneous evangelical religious forces). These conservative forces are ‘naturally powerful’. They wield strength and power, and their aim is to preserve that power. Another element is its historical span, its longevity (examples are the Catholic church and members of the European aristocracies).
In the post-World War II era, right-wing forces have by and large remained “static and reactionary, defending the current order and institutions”. They focused mostly on vertical and geopolitical strategies to defend the institutions and the current order (through politics or moral politics and rules of conduct). Starting in the 1970’s, the conservative camp in Europe and the US (initially more visible in the US) underwent an intense process of reconfiguration and reorganization. In the US, it began with “a strategy by the leaders of the Republican Party to recover credibility and political power in a crisis setting”[1] and as a reaction to liberalism and the secularization of society. Corrêa notes that, “it gave rise to the Moral Majority Movement, directed and coordinated by Baptist pastor Jerry Falwell, which brought together media-savvy pastors, social and ecclesiastic ultra-Catholic players, and also powerful secular sectors, CEOs, and think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and the International Policy Forum”. This was an ultra-conservative and ecumenical mobilization.
While the US was “a testing ground for the ultra-conservative reorganization”, communication with European ultra-conservatives developed, particularly in the UK, then ruled by Margaret Thatcher. But other ties existed, in particular through ultra-catholic channels from France, Germany, Italy and the Vatican itself. Particularly in Europe, the reorganization of the secular ultra-conservative movement in the 1970’s gravitated around the Groupement de Recherche et d’Etudes pour la Civilisation Européenne (GRECE), led by Alain de Benoist.
Latin America has also played a role in this dynamic of reorganization and reconfiguration. According to Éric Fassin, Pinochet’s regime, which had strong ties to the ultra-Catholic camp, was a testing ground, a laboratory, of the neoliberal rationality that would later be applied to the US with Reagan and the UK with Thatcher. Fassin also argues that Brazil, under Bolsonaro, had become a more recent intersectional laboratory, merging ultra-neoliberalism, anti-gender ideology, racism and fascism[2]. Brazil played a role as a hub for the coordination of transnational far-right forces and “in the production and dissemination of classic texts and in the renewal of arguments in defense of neoliberalism and right-wing libertarianism”.
This ‘hub role’ is not to be seen as something entirely new. As the historian Benjamin Cowan[3] has shown, Brazilian ultra-Catholic thinking and other Latin American connections are to be taken into account “in the gestation and maturation of the ‘conservative Christian revolution’ in the US”. In this long-standing maze, the role of Family, Tradition and Property and its founder, the Brazilian Plinio Correia de Oliveira, lies at the center (see image).
The dynamics of the far right since the 1970’s resulted in what a number of scholars call the ‘Gramscian turn of the right’. The conservative movement became “an engine of political mobilization to dispute values, political understandings, and common sense” around gender, sexuality, human rights, etc. They engaged in a ferocious dispute for ‘hearts and minds’ to neutralize or eliminate ‘threats’ from the social and political sphere. It became a derecha callejera, a right that takes to the streets, according to Pablo Stefanoni.[4]
The disputes started with those pertaining to the right to abortion and other feminist claims, gay rights as well as anti-racist, pro-migrant and environmental struggles, all lumped together under the accusatory category of ‘cultural Marxism’. And this formula would gain further traction after the collapse of Russia’s and Eastern Europe’s socialist regimes, as the Western far right found itself without its central opponent and rapidly shifted its focus to these ‘new internal enemies’. No less important, the propagation of this and other discursive scarecrows – such as ‘gender ideology’, also invented in the 1990’s- would be facilitated by globalization and the rapid digitalization of politics.
As noted by Corrêa, “Another strategy of the far right was to densify and diversify the occupation of official political spaces.” In the US, for example, the far right systematically reorganized itself to take over the judiciary. “It managed to appoint judges to the regional circuits of the US federal courts and to influence the Republican administrations of Reagan, Bush, Bush Jr. and Trump.”; ultimately, altering the composition of the Supreme Court, which would lead to the overturning of Roe vs. Wade in 2022.
Overturning of Roe vs. Wade
One of the first targets of the mobilization of the conservative movement was the right to abortion in the US established by the Supreme Court’s decision of the case Roe vs. Wade in 1973. On June 24, 2022, the decision was overturned in the Dobbs (vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization) case, making abortion illegal in many US’ states. This dramatic reversal was the result of a 50-year investment by increasingly organized ultra-conservative forces to restrict the sexual and reproductive autonomy of women and people who gestate. For Corrêa, “this is the most compelling illustration” she can offer of “the longevity of this reorganization process and its pernicious effects”.
The key to this was the reconfiguration of the Supreme Court by Republican administrations (mentioned before) and by the US originalism, which developed from the “production of ‘knowledge’ or ultra-conservative thinking in the legal field and in the training of legal professionals in strategic human rights litigation”.
At least two of the conservative judges of the Court relied on arguments based on the premises laid down by US legal originalism, “a reinterpretation of the law in the light of the ‘original legal tradition’ of the Founding Fathers of the United States”. It is opposed to the interpretative epistemology of contemporary constitutionalism (developed after World War II), in which legal texts are “legal references that can and should be continually expanded through reinterpretations based on the principles of equality and freedom”. This expansive framework of constitutionalist interpretation “can be seen in the application of human rights to racism and social inequality” as well as in the questioning of sexual binarism.
The goal of these forces is to return to a literal logic of legal interpretation: human rights are legitimate if they correspond to the definitions of the declarations and conventions as they were originally adopted. This means that these ultra-conservative forces are not ‘anti-rights’[5]; rather, they have a specific understanding of human and constitutional rights that rejects the previously mentioned ‘open epistemology’. They vilify ‘new rights’, such as those related to sexuality, reproduction and gender.
The ‘gender phantasm’
The ‘gender phantasm’, as portrayed by Judith Butler in her latest book, erupted just as globalization and the digitalization of politics were taking off. It began to morph with the Vatican’s reaction to ‘gender’ in 1995, at the United Nations, six months after the concept had been enshrined in the final document of the UN’s Fourth World Conference on Women (WCW IV). What troubled the Vatican and its allies were “the gains and epistemic transformations in the realm of women’s rights, sexuality and reproduction”. For Corrêa, “This inaugural moment of anti-gender politics must be read as a singular and very important chapter in the trajectory of the reconfiguration of ultra-conservatism and the far right.”
Between 1995 and 2000, “systematic intellectual work was initiated to solidify the accusatory character of ‘gender ideology’”. Corrêa notes, “This language was first used in one of the interviews with Ratzinger published in 1997[6]. It was then recovered by Monsignor Michel Schooyans in the book L’Évangile face au désordre mondial[7], published that same year; and soon after in a document written by Peruvian bishops in 1998. Although the term is not used in Dale O’Leary’s book The Gender Agenda (1997), the substantive content is the same. These three seminal texts associate gender, or ‘gender ideology’, with Marxism.”
Afterwards, this language was transpositioned by the Vatican so that later theological reference documents would include it. The most important ones are Lexicon – Pontifical Council for the Family (2003) and the Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Collaboration of Men and Women in the Church and in the World. In 2008, in the papal Christmas homily, Ratzinger, now as Pope, established for the first time “a relation between the ‘effects of gender ideology’ and the destruction of ‘the ecology of man’”.[8] At the 2009 UN General Assembly, the Pope reiterated this view when he “associated gender with the destruction of forests”.
In 2013, social mobilizations erupted in Europe and Latin America that represented, to varying degrees, a scheme of ‘people against gender’. In Europe, “the icon of this new era” was La Manif pour Tous in Paris. Also in 2013, three strongholds of anti-gender politics were established: the Ordo Iuris Institute in Poland and, in Spain, Citizen Go.
In Latin America, after offensives against gender in the education system in Brazil and Paraguay and targeting sexual orientation and against gender identity in the assemblies of the Organization of American States (OAS), the anti-gender cyclones gained in size and speed, transforming themselves into a perfect electoral storm aimed at legitimizing far-right politics and bringing their leaders to power. “Brazil is the most emblematic and dramatic example”, in part because “the election of Bolsonaro transported gender ideology to state policies”.
In this transition, anti-gender assemblages complexified: first, they were no longer exclusively or predominantly religious but “highly heterogeneous and intersectional formations”. As Corrêa points out, they became “hydras that have many heads moving in different directions and drinking from contradictory ideological sources, which makes the process of reading them very difficult”. She also notes that almost everywhere “the association between gender and Marxism is very robust”, while acknowledging that this description corresponds to an ‘ideal type’ of anti-gender politics framed in a Gramscian mode that does not fit well everywhere. In places like Paraguay, Guatemala, Russia and even Hungary, it is more appropriate to say that anti-gender ideologies have been absorbed and instrumentalized as a way to gain power. In contrast, in the US, the ‘gender phantasm’ did not play a major role in Trump’s 2016 election, but is now a constant trope of many politicians and Trump. To put it another way, anti-gender politics are manifested in many countries across the Americas and Europe and have been transported to other continents, such as Turkey and some sub-Saharan countries. However, “they do not manifest themselves in the same way everywhere”.
The stakes of the dispute of the conservative revolution
Corrêa observes that “The conservative revolution is underway, and it has gained a lot of ground”. There is a “brutal inequality […] in terms of institutional infrastructure, financial resources and available time” between the conservative forces and the progressive movements. The longevity and complexity of this “conservative revolution requires new lenses or at least adjusted lenses for interpretation”. How to sustain the struggle of progressive movements? How to “situate our analyses and activist strategies within the framework of the extended temporality that is typical of ultra-conservative forces”? How to take into account the 30-50-year window strategy of conservative forces like in the overturning of Roe v. Wade?
Corrêa points out that “the grammar of human rights and their interpretative epistemology (whether the interpretation of existing rules should be literal or transformative) are under dispute in the constitutional and human rights field”.
In this dispute, the ultra-conservative camp is pushing its own conception of ‘rights’ that is deeply attached to hierarchical social orders and averse to freedom or autonomy as the founding principle of human rights. In contrast to interpretative approaches that advocate a gradual enlargement of human rights, ultra-conservative forces call for a literal reading of the 1948 Declaration and propel discourses that confound human rights with tutelage or even charity. The “deep trench of this conflict” requires major efforts on our part to consistently “transmit broader and accessible information to the human rights field about the meaning of this epistemological war”.
Further information about ultra-conservative forces in Europe:
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* Sonia Corrêa is a Brazilian researcher and activist who coordinates, along with Richard Parker, the Sexuality Policy Watch (SPW).
Footnotes:
[0] Grisales, M. (2022), ‘We must understand the historical span and longevity of conservative movements’, Sur Journal, https://sur.conectas.org/en/we-must-understand-the-historical-span-and-longevity-of-conservative-movements/ (viewed 24 May 2024).
[1] After Watergate, Nixon’s resignation, and the impacts of the Vietnam War.
[2] Fassin, E. (2019), ‘Brasil: o laboratório interseccional do neoliberalismo’, Cult, https://revistacult.uol.com.br/home/neoliberalismo-interseccional/ (viewed 24 May 2024).
[3] Mezarobba, G. (2021),’Benjamin A. Cowan: O Brasil e a nova direita’, Pesquisa Fapesp, https://revistapesquisa.fapesp.br/benjamin-a-cowan-o-brasil-e-a-nova-direita/ (viewed 27 January 2023).
[4] Stefanoni, P. (2021), ¿La rebeldía se volvió de derecha?, Siglo Veintiuno Editores, Buenos Aires.
[5] Afterall, an historical source of legal thought has been the Catholic Church (in Spain and Portugal, civil canon law were one and the same until the 19th century).
[6] Ratzinger, J., Seewald, R. (1997), O Sal da Terra: O Cristianismo e a Igreja Católica no limiar do terceiro milênio, Imago, Rio de Janeiro.
[7] Schooyans, M. (1997), L’Évangile face au désordre Mondial, Fayard, Paris.
[8] Ratzinger, J. (2008), Missa na solenidade da epifania do Senhor: Homilia do Santo Padre Bento XVI, Vatican, https://www.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/pt/homilies/2008/documents/hf_ben-xvi_hom_20080106_epifania.html (viewed 24 May 2024).
