A couple of writers for Foreign Affairs say that male nationalist leaders are scared of women. Excerpts:

The wave of patriarchal authoritarianism is also pushing some established democracies in an illiberal direction. Countries with authoritarian-leaning leaders, such as Brazil, Hungary, and Poland, have seen the rise of far-right movements that promote traditional gender roles as patriotic while railing against “gender ideology”—a boogeyman term that Human Rights Watch describes as meaning “nothing and everything.” Even the United States has experienced a slowdown in progress toward gender equity and a rollback of reproductive rights, which had been improving since the 1970s. During his presidency, Donald Trump worked with antifeminist stalwarts, including Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, to halt the expansion of women’s rights around the world. And despite the Biden administration’s commitment to gender equity at the national level, Republican-controlled states are attempting to reverse the constitutional right to abortion, which is now more vulnerable than it has been in decades.

More:

It is not a coincidence that women’s equality is being rolled back at the same time that authoritarianism is on the rise. Political scientists have long noted that women’s civil rights and democracy go hand in hand, but they have been slower to recognize that the former is a precondition for the latter. Aspiring autocrats and patriarchal authoritarians have good reason to fear women’s political participation: when women participate in mass movements, those movements are both more likely to succeed and more likely to lead to more egalitarian democracy. In other words, fully free, politically active women are a threat to authoritarian and authoritarian-leaning leaders—and so those leaders have a strategic reason to be sexist.

Understanding the relationship between sexism and democratic backsliding is vital for those who wish to fight back against both. Established autocrats and right-wing nationalist leaders in contested democracies are united in their use of hierarchical gender relations to shore up nationalist, top-down, male-dominated rule. Having long fought against social hierarchies that consolidate power in the hands of the few, feminist movements are a powerful weapon against authoritarianism. Those who wish to reverse the global democratic decline cannot afford to ignore them.

It is an article of faith among the baizuocracy (academics, NGOs, elite journalists) that to disagree with what they think is good is a sign that you are a hater. Don’t like abortion or genderfluidity? Hater! Question globalist dogma? Phobic! And so forth. It’s a way of psychologizing away political and cultural differences, so that you don’t have to engage with them.

Here in Hungary, the presidency of the nation is about to be awarded by parliament to Katalin Novak, Hungary’s longtime family minister. The Justice Minister is Judit Varga. Both women are very strong and able. I’ve never met Varga, but anybody who has met Novak knows that she is no shrinking violet. Both women are talked about in political circles here as potential heirs to Prime Minister Viktor Orban when he decides to leave politics, or is sent down by voters. You would think that these strong conservative women leaders would negate the thesis of this article … but see, its authors, Erica Chenoweth and Zoe Marks, both of Harvard, are way ahead of you:

One way that autocratic and illiberal leaders make a gender hierarchy palatable to women is by politicizing the “traditional family,” which becomes a euphemism for tying women’s value and worth to childbearing, parenting, and homemaking in a nuclear household—and rolling back their claims to public power. Female bodies become targets of social control for male lawmakers, who invoke the ideal of feminine purity and call on mothers, daughters, and wives to reproduce an idealized version of the nation. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has argued that women are not equal to men and that their prescribed role in society is motherhood and housekeeping. He has called women who pursue careers over motherhood “half persons.” Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s government has similarly encouraged women to stop trying to close the pay gap and focus instead on producing Hungarian children.

Across the full range of authoritarian and semiauthoritarian regimes, sexual and gender minorities are often targeted for abuse, as well. Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people are seen as undermining the binary gender hierarchy celebrated by many authoritarians. As a result, they are frequently marginalized and stigmatized through homophobic policies: Poland’s “LGBT-free zones,” for instance, or Russia’s bans on “LGBTQ propaganda” and same-sex marriage. Beijing recently went as far as banning men from appearing “too effeminate” on television and social media in a campaign to enforce China’s “revolutionary culture.”

Despite their flagrant misogyny—and, in some cases, because of it—some authoritarians and would-be authoritarians succeed in enlisting women as key players in their political movements. They display their wives and daughters prominently in the domestic sphere and sometimes in official positions to obscure gender unequal policies. Valorizing traditional motherhood, conservative women often play supporting roles to the masculine stars of the show.

See? To these Harvard professors, women like Novak and Varga are Uncle Toms. The Left’s playbook never changes.

The thing is, they really do believe this. They imagine that the values of elite, educated, professional-class liberals are so obviously correct that the only reason one dissents from them is that one is a fool, or wicked.

A reader of this blog suggested in the comments section that we take a look at this 2017 lecture by the journalist Christopher Caldwell, explaining Vladimir Putin’s Russia. It really is valuable. Caldwell, the veteran Washington journalist, explain where Putin comes from, and why many Russians supported him, and do support him. It mostly has to do with the way Putin restored order to the country after the crazy 1990s, which beggared millions of ordinary Russians, and allowed for the rise of oligarchs. That, and Russia’s humiliation over NATO’s Kosovo war on Serbia, Russia’s Slavic ally. I suggest watching the whole thing, but I have cued it up to a part that explains Viktor Orban, and some other nationalist leaders demonized by Western liberals:

Caldwell says that Putin is — or at least was when he delivered this lecture in 2017 — is a symbol of those who don’t agree with the international American-led system. Even if you don’t agree with most of Putin’s policies, that fact that he won’t submit to the system wins him sympathy. Caldwell: “I would say that generally, if you like the international system, if you like globalization and the new economy, you’re going to consider Vladimir Putin a real menace. If you don’t like it, if you believe it has failed, then you’re going to have a certain sympathy for him. Putin has become a symbol of the sovereignist side in the battle between sovereignty and globalism, and that turns out to be the big battle of our time, as our own recent election shows.” (Remember, this was 2017, after Trump’s election.)

This is exactly how to see Viktor Orban. If you believe in globalization, in wokeness, in the worldview of Harvard professors and multinational corporations, then you’re going to consider Viktor Orban a menace. If you don’t, then even if you don’t agree with everything Orban says, he remains a potent symbol of resistance.

What if you are a normie Republican who doesn’t agree with wokeness, but who goes along with the rest of the US establishment line? Well, what good have you been in stopping wokeness mandated by American and international institutions? Like him or not, Viktor Orban fights, and not only fights, he often wins. He’s not playing around, like so many American politicians of the Right, who sound populist themes, but who can usually be counted on to side with the Establishment, against the interests of their own voters.

Yesterday I had coffee with a friend I had made when I was here last summer, an expatriate from western Europe who moved here for business, and loves it. He said, “The truth is, Viktor Orban is the closest thing we have to the leader of the free world right now.” I asked him to explain that. He said that Orban is the most visible head of state in North America or Europe who “stands for the things the West has traditionally believed.” And then this man told me about how the conservative party in his home country capitulated on key cultural issues, because the only thing it cares about is the economy. He said it was willing to surrender to the cultural agenda of the Left because that’s what the business interests who run the party wanted. Not this man. He’s for Orban, because the people back home who are ruining his country — both the socialists and the establishment conservatives — hate Orban, and hate him for the same reason they hate men like my friend: because they are social conservatives who believe in national sovereignty, not diktats from Brussels.

Last night I went to an event where my friend Mark Krikorian, the immigration hawk, was interviewed before an audience at Matthias Corvinus Collegium. I met there an American conservative who just arrived in the city to do a fellowship. He said that it seems to him that Hungary is becoming to the American Right (and European national conservative Right) what Republican Spain was to the Left during the 1930s. I’ll buy that. Good. Come to Budapest, young conservatives, and see for yourself what’s going on.