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This extraordinary profile of Clarence and Ginni Thomas—he a Supreme Court justice, she among other things an avid supporter of the January 6 insurrection—is a masterclass in everything from mustering archival material to writing the hell out of a story:
There is a certain rapport that cannot be manufactured. “They go on morning runs,” reports a 1991 piece in the Washington Post. “They take after-dinner walks. Neighbors say you can see them in the evening talking, walking up the hill. Hand in hand.” Thirty years later, Virginia Thomas, pining for the overthrow of the federal government in texts to the president’s chief of staff, refers, heartwarmingly, to Clarence Thomas as “my best friend.” (“That’s what I call him, and he is my best friend,” she later told the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol.) In the cramped corridors of a roving RV, they summer together. They take, together, lavish trips funded by an activist billionaire and fail, together, to report the gift. Bonnie and Clyde were performing intimacy; every line crossed was its own profession of love. Refusing to recuse oneself and then objecting, alone among nine justices, to the revelation of potentially incriminating documents regarding a coup in which a spouse is implicated is many things, and one of those things is romantic.
“Every year it gets better,” Ginni told a gathering of Turning Point USA–oriented youths in 2016. “He put me on a pedestal in a way I didn’t know was possible.” Clarence had recently gifted her a Pandora charm bracelet. “It has like everything I love,” she said, “all these love things and knots and ropes and things about our faith and things about our home and things about the country. But my favorite is there’s a little pixie, like I’m kind of a pixie to him, kind of a troublemaker.”
A pixie. A troublemaker. It is impossible, once you fully imagine this bracelet bestowed upon the former Virginia Lamp on the 28th anniversary of her marriage to Clarence Thomas, this pixie-and-presumably-American-flag-bedecked trinket, to see it as anything but crucial to understanding the current chaotic state of the American project. Here is a piece of jewelry in which symbols for love and battle are literally intertwined. Here is a story about the way legitimate racial grievance and determined white ignorance can reinforce one another, tending toward an extremism capable, in this case, of discrediting an entire branch of government. No one can unlock the mysteries of the human heart, but the external record is clear: Clarence and Ginni Thomas have, for decades, sustained the happiest marriage in the American Republic, gleeful in the face of condemnation, thrilling to the revelry of wanton corruption, untroubled by the burdens of biological children or adherence to legal statute. Here is how they do it.
“Fearless progress toward justice often meets ferocious pushback from the oldest and most sinister of forces,” President Biden told Howard University’s graduating class.
The election of Donald Trump in 2016 presented mainstream America with a shocking wakeup: right-wing extremism, with its dimensions of Christian nationalism, white supremacy, racism, and anti-LGBTQ bigotry, had somehow wound up on the carousel, and was now in control. This shouldn't be a complete surprise, since the Tea Party and the rantings of Pat Buchanan in the previous decades had written many of the scripts of the president with the orange hair. But we need to know more about how the extreme right came to be a mainstream political ideology.
Matthew Dallek's Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right provides one important strand of that background. Dallek argues that the John Birch Society managed to deeply radicalize the Republican political movement from its founding in 1958 to the 2010s. Dallek provides a narrative of the formative years of the Birch Society in the 1950s when activists like Robert Welch marketed an extreme anticommunism among wealthy, conservative businessmen (often including leading members in the National Association of Manufacturers). A striking feature of this story is the speed and virulence with which right-wing activists established new chapters of the John Birch Society in cities throughout the country. And it was largely a white-collar and professional group of men and women who became true believers.
By the time of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963, the society had declared itself around strident themes of anticommunism, opposition to the civil rights movement, alliance with segregationist politicians (p. 99), alignment with fundamentalist Christian groups, conspiracy theories (fluoridation of public water supplies), and unhinged attacks on school teachers and libraries thought to harbor "un-American" ideas. When the struggle for civil rights intensified in the 1960s, Dallek documents the alliances that existed between the Birch Society and the segregationist governors George Wallace and Lester Maddox (191, 199).
What is especially striking about the account Dallek offers is the "no-holds-barred" tactics used by the Birch Society in attacking its enemies. Ruining careers, threatening violence, and making unfounded accusations against their opponents were all in a day's work for this movement completely certain of its moral correctness. The recklessness and malevolence of Joe McCarthy continued in the Birch Society.
Dallek's narrative makes it apparent that there is a great deal of continuity from the early political extremism of the John Birch Society and contemporary right-wing GOP talking points -- anticommunism, conspiracy theories about public health measures, the language of white supremacy, xenophobia, and a propensity towards guns and violence. And, as Dallek demonstrates, many of these themes became talking points for Donald Trump in his first presidential campaign, and central to MAGA political speeches. But there is another similarity as well -- the behind-the-scenes alliances that existed in 1958, and continue to exist today, between highly wealthy donors and the political strategies of extremist politicians.
Pat Buchanan was not a member of the John Birch Society, so far as I know. But his influence as a far-right advocate of conservative issues -- as an opinion writer, as a presidential assistant, as a speech writer for Nixon and Agnew, and as a serial candidate for President -- has been enormous within the US conservative movement. A scan of the quotes on his official webpage illustrates these themes: Christian nationalism, extreme anti-abortion advocacy, Great Replacement Theory, racist fear of "dependent Americans", anti-immigrant bigotry, rejection of equality of citizenship, fundamental mistrust of the Federal government, anticommunism, anti-Muslim bigotry, and an apocalyptic view of the future of America. Here is one quotation from State of Emergency that encapsulates Buchanan's worldview:
If we do not solve our civilizational crisis — a disintegrating culture, dying populations, and invasions unresisted — the children born in 2006 will witness in their lifetimes the death of the West. In our hearts we know what must be done. We must stop the invasion. But do our leaders have the vision and will to do it? (State of Emergency)
Buchanan ran for the GOP presidential nomination in 1996. And, as a contemporary Newsweek profile put it, he ran on a platform of fear, mistrust, and hatred (Newsweek, March 4, 1996). Here are the closing paragraphs of the profile, illustrating Buchanan's "ethnonationalism".
Last week on CBS Radio, Buchanan defended his columns that helped free wrongly accused Nazi war criminal John Demjanjuk as "the best journalism I ever did." The critics were "fly-specking," he said. But in his March 17, 1990, column on Demjanjuk, the mistakes were hardly trivial. In arguing that diesel-engine gas could not have killed the Jews at Treblinka, Buchanan ignored evidence of deadly Zyklon B gas at Treblinka (where more than 850,000 Jews died), accused survivors of "group fantasies of martyrdom and heroics" and essentially bought the line of those who minimize the Holocaust.
His old words on immigration may pose an even larger problem in the campaign. "The central objection to the present flood of illegals is that they are not English-speaking white people from Western Europe, they are Spanish-speaking brown and black people from Mexico, Latin America, and the Caribbean," he wrote in 1984, stressing that the issue is "not about economics." (26)
(Here is the entry on Treblinka on the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum website. The historical evidence concerning the use of diesel-engine carbon monoxide as a lethal gas at Treblinka is unambiguous, and was documented in Vasily Grossman's initial reporting on Treblinka in 1944 in The Hell of Treblinka; link.And here is an article Dallek contributed to the Atlantic that does a good job of formulating his key findings; link.)
The election of Donald Trump in 2016 presented mainstream America with a shocking wakeup: right-wing extremism, with its dimensions of Christian nationalism, white supremacy, racism, and anti-LGBTQ bigotry, had somehow wound up on the carousel, and was now in control. This shouldn't be a complete surprise, since the Tea Party and the rantings of Pat Buchanan in the previous decades had written many of the scripts of the president with the orange hair. But we need to know more about how the extreme right came to be a mainstream political ideology.
Matthew Dallek's Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right provides one important strand of that background. Dallek argues that the John Birch Society managed to deeply radicalize the Republican political movement from its founding in 1958 to the 2010s. Dallek provides a narrative of the formative years of the Birch Society in the 1950s when activists like Robert Welch marketed an extreme anticommunism among wealthy, conservative businessmen (often including leading members in the National Association of Manufacturers). A striking feature of this story is the speed and virulence with which right-wing activists established new chapters of the John Birch Society in cities throughout the country. And it was largely a white-collar and professional group of men and women who became true believers.
By the time of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963, the society had declared itself around strident themes of anticommunism, opposition to the civil rights movement, alliance with segregationist politicians (p. 99), alignment with fundamentalist Christian groups, conspiracy theories (fluoridation of public water supplies), and unhinged attacks on school teachers and libraries thought to harbor "un-American" ideas. When the struggle for civil rights intensified in the 1960s, Dallek documents the alliances that existed between the Birch Society and the segregationist governors George Wallace and Lester Maddox (191, 199).
What is especially striking about the account Dallek offers is the "no-holds-barred" tactics used by the Birch Society in attacking its enemies. Ruining careers, threatening violence, and making unfounded accusations against their opponents were all in a day's work for this movement completely certain of its moral correctness. The recklessness and malevolence of Joe McCarthy continued in the Birch Society.
Dallek's narrative makes it apparent that there is a great deal of continuity from the early political extremism of the John Birch Society and contemporary right-wing GOP talking points -- anticommunism, conspiracy theories about public health measures, the language of white supremacy, xenophobia, and a propensity towards guns and violence. And, as Dallek demonstrates, many of these themes became talking points for Donald Trump in his first presidential campaign, and central to MAGA political speeches. But there is another similarity as well -- the behind-the-scenes alliances that existed in 1958, and continue to exist today, between highly wealthy donors and the political strategies of extremist politicians.
Pat Buchanan was not a member of the John Birch Society, so far as I know. But his influence as a far-right advocate of conservative issues -- as an opinion writer, as a presidential assistant, as a speech writer for Nixon and Agnew, and as a serial candidate for President -- has been enormous within the US conservative movement. A scan of the quotes on his official webpage illustrates these themes: Christian nationalism, extreme anti-abortion advocacy, Great Replacement Theory, racist fear of "dependent Americans", anti-immigrant bigotry, rejection of equality of citizenship, fundamental mistrust of the Federal government, anticommunism, anti-Muslim bigotry, and an apocalyptic view of the future of America. Here is one quotation from State of Emergency that encapsulates Buchanan's worldview:
If we do not solve our civilizational crisis — a disintegrating culture, dying populations, and invasions unresisted — the children born in 2006 will witness in their lifetimes the death of the West. In our hearts we know what must be done. We must stop the invasion. But do our leaders have the vision and will to do it? (State of Emergency)
Buchanan ran for the GOP presidential nomination in 1996. And, as a contemporary Newsweek profile put it, he ran on a platform of fear, mistrust, and hatred (Newsweek, March 4, 1996). Here are the closing paragraphs of the profile, illustrating Buchanan's "ethnonationalism".
Last week on CBS Radio, Buchanan defended his columns that helped free wrongly accused Nazi war criminal John Demjanjuk as "the best journalism I ever did." The critics were "fly-specking," he said. But in his March 17, 1990, column on Demjanjuk, the mistakes were hardly trivial. In arguing that diesel-engine gas could not have killed the Jews at Treblinka, Buchanan ignored evidence of deadly Zyklon B gas at Treblinka (where more than 850,000 Jews died), accused survivors of "group fantasies of martyrdom and heroics" and essentially bought the line of those who minimize the Holocaust.
His old words on immigration may pose an even larger problem in the campaign. "The central objection to the present flood of illegals is that they are not English-speaking white people from Western Europe, they are Spanish-speaking brown and black people from Mexico, Latin America, and the Caribbean," he wrote in 1984, stressing that the issue is "not about economics." (26)
(Here is the entry on Treblinka on the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum website. The historical evidence concerning the use of diesel-engine carbon monoxide as a lethal gas at Treblinka is unambiguous, and was documented in Vasily Grossman's initial reporting on Treblinka in 1944 in The Hell of Treblinka; link.And here is an article Dallek contributed to the Atlantic that does a good job of formulating his key findings; link.)
Early last year Rana Sulaiman Alogaily, then a Ph.D. candidate at Claremont Graduate University, published her doctoral dissertation—a wide-ranging series of Essays in Behavioral Economics and Neuroeconomics. One explored “vaccine hesitancy,” another considered the “neurophysiologic predictors of mood in the elderly”. But a particular essay caught people’s eyes beyond the tiny circles that usually read niche research by early-career academics: Testosterone Administration Induces A Red Shift in Democrats.
The text recounts a 2011 experiment: Researchers tested 136 healthy young men’s testosterone levels, asked them about their political party affiliations, then gave them either a placebo or ten grams of AndroGel one percent, a high-end dose of a common form of testosterone often used in hormone replacement therapies. The next day, they tested the men’s T levels and asked them about politics again. Their baseline measurements found that staunch self-identified Democrats had lower T than anyone else in their sample pool. And after dosing the guys, they found that men who’d previously expressed weak affinity for the party felt even less connected to it—and warmer towards Republicans. (They observed no change in firm Democrats’ or any Republicans’ stated positions.)
Alogaily and the paper’s co-authors argued that this is “evidence that neuro-active hormones affect political preferences”. And perhaps it implies, they added, that “political advertising depicting emotional themes that raise T could influence swing voters and perhaps elections.”
Given how many people twist this generally reasonable premise into sinister knots, the concept is worth grappling with.
Several experts on testosterone who weren’t involved in this study told VICE it’s too weak to base meaningful conclusions on. The sample was small and narrow. The experiment was brief. And the potential confounding variables were numerous. Paul Zak, Alogaily’s Ph.D. advisor and the paper’s designated corresponding author, didn’t reply to a request for comment. Neither did Alogaily. But the text of the study acknowledges its limitations openly. It also offers alternative explanations for the results of the experiment, such as the possibility that weak Democratic party supporters secretly preferred the GOP to begin with, and rather than altering their politics, T just made them more honest about their views.
Of course, none of that has stopped the far right from jumping on the paper. In recent years, many in this world have become obsessed with the idea that conservative guys are jacked, masculine, high-T GigaChads while liberals are weak, emasculated, low-T Soy Boys. That progressive men are literally sick—victims of a hormonal pathology. That addressing this supposedly widespread hormonal deficit will halt the world’s alleged liberal degradation. These testosterone thumpers have repackaged and exaggerated the study, with a credulity born of zealotry, into articles with shitposty titles like “Trust The Science: Study Links Left-Wing Politics to Lower Testosterone,” casting it as hard proof of their hormonal theories of healthy politics.
The far right’s testosterone hot takes are, unsurprisingly, utter nonsense. “I treat thousands of men for low testosterone every year in Los Angeles,” says Jesse Mills, a urologist with expertise in T-related health issues and director of the Men’s Clinic at UCLA. If boosting men’s testosterone levels did shift their politics towards the right, he adds, “the red wave Republicans were hoping for would have crashed on the shores of Malibu. But it didn’t.”
Between its methodological weakness and apparent appeal in the world of far-right gender panic and pseudoscience, it’s tempting to write this paper off as the academic equivalent of outrage clickbait. But the premise of the experiment isn’t actually farfetched. There’s a small but growing body of research on how our biology (and changes in it) can affect our politics. And we know testosterone plays a notable role in shaping our overall moods and behaviors. Might it not also influence our political behaviors to some degree? Given how many people twist this generally reasonable premise into sinister knots, the concept is worth grappling with. So rather than dissect one anemic and overhyped study on the subject, VICE decided to dig into all we know about how T might affect people’s politics.
Spoilers: The hormone almost certainly doesn’t cause a reliable “red shift”. And any effects it does have are likely weak, contextual, and easily mitigated.
Humans drew a connection between testosterone and masculinity long before we knew what hormones were, by observing the effects of injuries like a horse kick to the testicles—where testosterone is produced—and procedures like castration. Testosterone plays a major role in the development of male sex traits during puberty, so without it, people don’t develop body and facial hair, a deep voice, or a conventional male frame and muscle-and-fat distribution. And when people with testes lose most or all of their testosterone, they often lose energy, stamina, muscle and bone strength, libido, and a degree of competitiveness. In other words, they lose their virility. Hence, when researchers first identified testosterone (as part of a larger project to identify and define the essence of masculinity), they called it the “male sex hormone”.
As we learned how to manipulate and dose people with T, we learned more about its behavioral effects. Experiments seemed to show that reducing T levels increased empathy, whereas increasing T levels seemed to increase appetites for risk, novelty, and strenuous activity—while decreasing sensitivity to stress and anxiety. “There was a fun study years ago that looked at floor traders,” Mills recalls. Researchers found they could “predict how risk-taking they’d be based on their T levels, and traders with higher T levels made bigger-risk investments”.
Modern American politics “have always been ‘gendered’”, says Michael Kimmel, a sociologist and expert on the intersection of politics and ideas of masculinity. Party values and priorities have shifted over time and vary between different intra-party factions, but most Republicans have traditionally painted themselves as advocates of militarism, individual freedom, and competition. Republican men stereotypically try to project their party’s ostensible core values via explicit, aggressive macho-man posturing. On the other hand, Kimmel explains, commentators often characterize Democrats, who’ve traditionally branded themselves as the party of equality and social safety nets, as competition and risk-averse – as soft and feminine. All that has led to a longstanding seed of obsession with testosterone in certain GOP circles, where it’s used as a concrete metric of and justification for their supposedly innate and healthy masculine-conservative values.
“Can you paint the stereotypical behavioral effects of testosterone into a picture of you being more likely affiliated with one party or another? Sure,” acknowledges Justin Houman, a urologist who treats men with clinically low testosterone levels. “But it is a stretch.”
Like many other worrisome latent trends within American politics, the 2016 presidential election season turbocharged the depth, salience, and visibility of popular connections between T, masculinity, and conservatism. As he leveraged American misogyny by flinging gender-based attacks at Hillary Clinton on the campaign trail, Donald Trump bolstered his masculine bona fides by going on The Dr. Oz Show and smirking as the eponymous host rattled off and praised the T levels recorded in candidate Trump’s medical records. A doctor ran ads suggesting men thinking of voting for Clinton might be suffering from low T and offering to test and treat them to uncloud their judgment. And Americans learned a whole new lexicon of testosterone and virility-based insults as the worst elements of the right moved from the digital fringe into the mainstream.
Associations between T, masculinity, and hard conservatism only grew more pronounced after that. Far-right voices now bash people they don’t like as “low-T”—one congressman even used this term to describe and disregard Trump’s first impeachment. Conspiracy theories about supposed plots to emasculate American men into small-dicked, liberal servility by pumping them full of estrogen and systematically suppressing their testosterone moved from the confines of paranoid outlets like InfoWars and into mainstream public awareness. And last year Tucker Carlson released a full “documentary” about the supposed testosterone crisis in America and its threats to men, promoting pseudoscience like sunning your balls as so-called solutions.
“The complexities of true science, even political science, do not easily reduce down to one variable.” —Jesse Mills
A couple of studies do suggest that Americans may be experiencing a widespread drop in their average T levels over time. But the ongoing dip they describe is far more modest than people fearmongering about a T crisis make it out to be, and likely due to lifestyle factors like sedentariness and environmental pollutants messing with our bodies. One study’s author suggests that sensitivity of the tests used to measure T levels could account for some of this drift over time, and so could something like the widespread decline in rates of smoking, a habit that may artificially boost T levels. These studies’ authors have also explained that their findings, while worrisome, still need further testing and confirmation.
In truth, Americans have likely grown irrationally anxious about testosterone thanks to one of the most successful direct-to-consumer medical advertising campaigns of all time: In the mid-2000s, T makers started telling men that if they had nebulous symptoms like low energy or libido, they might be suffering from low T. (Clinically low T is a real medical issue, but it often involves more symptoms than just fatigue and drop in sex drive, and it certainly isn’t diagnosed by those signs alone.) Alongside these ads, a massive pipeline of lifestyle influencers, self-help gurus, health startups, and loosey-goosey doctors emerged to funnel often self-diagnosed men towards cheap and quick T prescriptions that many of them don’t really need.
The FDA has tried to push back on this marketing, and the rush on T scripts has slowed somewhat. But America’s seemingly unique, existential, and deep-seated cultural fears of a loss of testosterone, virility, and masculinity may have prime some folks to lend credence to talk over the last decade of a supposed T crisis and its effects on people’s politics .
However, most of these fears—and in fact most popular ideas about the intersection between T and politics—are based on anemic understandings of the effects of what more recent research shows is actually an incredibly complex and malleable hormone.
Some endocrinologists argue that our core understanding of T, as a fundamentally male sex hormone, is inherently flawed. After all, ovaries produce T too—albeit usually at lower levels than testes—and it plays a vital, if less visible, role in female sexual development and general health. Labeling estrogen as a fundamentally female hormone is also suspect, given that that people born with testes produce it too, and men’s overall health depends on a good balance between it and T.
Average hormone levels also vary wildly from person to person according to genetics, developmental and environmental factors, and a host of other variables. So a “normal” male or female testosterone level actually describes a broad range. According to experts, it’s more a rule of thumb than a hard-and-fast metric. It’s far easier than many people seem to think to find AFAB people with naturally “male” T profiles or AMAB people with naturally “female” profiles. People’s testosterone levels also swing around wildly throughout the day and move up and down in response to developments in our lives: Men seem to experience notable dips in T while caring for a new child, for example.
Everyone’s body responds a bit differently to testosterone, thanks to natural variations in the number and sensitivity of hormone receptors, idiosyncratic developmental histories with the hormone, and the effects of natural processes like aging. It’s a threshold molecule as well, not some dimmer switch for virility and masculinity. That’s at least partially why many people with T levels consistently below “normal” don’t report any notable effects on their bodies or behavior. And why many people who take testosterone but don’t have catastrophically low T levels and related health problems don’t see much impact on their health or wellness—beyond placebo effects.
“Efforts to find a biological cause for political behavior are usually doomed to fail. But that doesn’t mean that people will ever stop trying!” —Michael Kimmel
Recent research also suggests that early findings and common knowledge about testosterone’s role in aggression, competition, and risk-taking don’t hold up to scrutiny. On its own, T can also boost altruism and even interest in cuddling in some situations. And T almost never acts alone. Other biological agents and processes, as well as culture, upbringing, and conscious choice, can modulate its effects. Recent research notably suggests: That people who take big risks in one realm of their lives, like gambling, are often risk averse in another context, like investing their savings. That, compared to men, women in America likely take fewer career risks on average—are less ambitious and assertive—not because of their hormone profiles but because they often face backlash for engaging in what many people still consider stereotypically male behaviors. And that in more gender-egalitarian countries, like Sweden, on average, men and women take on a similar approach to risks and competition.
So drawing direct lines between natural T levels and any behavior or proclivity is dubious. As are explanations for any change observed in people after they take a dose of T. Pointing back to Alogaily and her colleagues’ paper, Mills noted that a dose of T could have brightened some men’s moods and made them generally “feel warmer to puppies and apple pie as well as Republicans”.
T’s complexity may explain the squishy ambiguities in the handful of studies on the interplay between the hormone and personal politics. For instance, two studies examined the effects of watching your preferred candidate lose an election on your T levels. They monitored men’s testosterone before and after the 2008 and 2012 U.S. presidential elections, respectively, and found that John McCain supporters’ T levels dropped after he lost, while Romney supporters’ levels did the opposite after his presidential bid tanked. It’s entirely unclear what factors might account for that difference.
“Everything is unclear!” Mills says when asked what we do and don’t know about how T might affect people’s politics. To get to the bottom of this question, Houman adds, you’d need to account for so many factors, like people’s individual hormonal and behavioral baselines and all the variables in their lives that might modulate their T levels and responses—not to mention precisely what a given person means when they say, for example, they identify with one party over another. “Age, overall health, sleep, genetics, medications,” he rattles off. “The list goes on.”
(The incredible complexity of studying hormones’ multi-faceted and malleable effects on our bodies and behaviors may explain why most of the science on the intersections of biology and political views and activities focuses on static factors, like genetics and brain structures.)
None of this means that T has no bearing on our politics. It likely does—but the nature and scale of these effects may vary wildly according to an individual’s context and over time. Given the number of factors that affect our political views and actions, Houman also says he’d expect any testosterone effects to be relatively weak. And the impact of a single dose of T, or environmental factors like political ads that cause a spike in T, are usually short-lived.
Even if we could nail down one or two clear and reliable, if minor, effects of testosterone on people’s political lives, Mills cautioned against paying them too much heed. “The complexities of true science, even political science, do not easily reduce down to one variable,” he says.
“Efforts to find a biological cause for political behavior are usually doomed to fail,” Kimmel agrees. “But that doesn’t mean that people will ever stop trying!” The appeal of finding some sort of biological button for swaying people towards our views—or of finding some root pathology behind theirs—is intoxicating, after all.
Intoxicating, but moronic.
One year ago, Russia launched an illegal war on Ukraine, committing horrific war crimes against the people of Ukraine. Analyses and memorials abound, and I’m probably not the only person writing about this on the Duck today.
I wanted to address a specific aspect of this war, though: why Russia’s carefully cultivated ties with far-right forces in Western Europe and the United States failed to undermine Western opposition to the war.
Last year, as Russia was about to launch its invasion of Ukraine, I was finishing a chapter on Russia in my new book. The book, forthcoming with Cornell University Press, explores how states use religious appeals as a tool in power politics (Religious Appeals in Power Politics is the working title).
As Goddard and Nexon discussed in an article on power politics—or the efforts to form or break apart international coalitions—states use more than just military and economic tools. They also turn to cultural and symbolic instruments of power. Appeals to religion—shared faith, shared religiosity—I argue, are one such instrument of power.
One chapter looks at Saudi appeals to Islam to form an anti-Egyptian alliance in the 1960s. Another explores US appeals to “moderate Islam” and religious engagement in the Global War on Terrorism. One includes brief discussions of several other cases, such as China’s Confucius Institutes, the Pope’s mobilization against military intervention in Syria, and the early 2000s border dispute between Cambodia and Thailand.
The chapter that ended up being most relevant to current events, however, is the one on Russia.
Putin has expressed desire to control his “near abroad” connected to Russia as former Soviet states and ethnic Russian ties; this is often referred to as the Russky Mir, or Russian world. As part of this, he fostered ties with far-right groups in the West, presenting Russia as a like-minded power.
Some refers to these efforts as “civilizational,” “sharp power,” “soft power,” or “traditional values” (for my related complaint about the stretching of the term soft power, see my article in International Studies Perspectives).
I prefer to call them what they are: religious appeals (I have a whole other post planned about scholars and policy experts’ allergy to just calling religion religion). For example, in a December 2013 speech, Putin pushed back on Western criticism of Russia’s anti-LGBTQ laws, attacking the West for “treating good and evil equally;” he argued that Russia’s “traditional family values” were “the foundation of Russia’s greatness and a bulwark against ‘so-called tolerance.’”
These religious appeals seemed to have worked. US conservatives see Putin as a defender of “traditional Christian values.” Far-right forces in Europe see Putin as a defender of “true” Western values.
But this hoped-for transnational far-right coalition didn’t fracture the West and give Putin an easy victory in Ukraine. Western European states, which had struggled to unite on many issues, came together to oppose Putin’s victory. Many Orthodox figures criticized Putin.
So what happened?
Some could argue this shows that cultural and symbolic instruments of power (we need a better name for that) like religious appeals ultimately matter less than material concerns. Western Europe is militarily threatened by Russia’s aggression, so even right-leaning figures won’t support Putin.
This is partly true. As I argue in the book, religious appeals’ effects depend on the interaction between the credibility of their wielder and the material incentives facing the target. I based this on Busby’s work on moral movements in foreign policy.
It could also just be bad timing (for Putin). If Putin had invaded Ukraine while Trump was still the U.S. President (or if Trump had won in 2020) the outcome may have been much different. Trump and his allies have been much more antagonistic towards Ukraine, so the US-led aid to Ukraine may not have materialized.
But I’d argue (and expand on this in the book) that it has to do with the nature of religious appeals themselves.
Religion is a powerful force (it’s hard to find a good single article overview, but you could read my summary of research on religion and terrorism). This makes it a useful tool when it mobilizes domestic publics or persuades leaders to change their policies.
But this power also makes it unwieldy and unpredictable.
Religion increases the stakes of any interaction (just think of that old joke about never discussing religion and politics at dinner). Religious arguments are complex, and can easily be reinterpreted to suit conflicting interests or even turned back on their originator. And conventional statecraft tends to be based on secular language, so religious appeals are confusing and produce uncertainty.
In my book, I break slightly with Busby, and argue that the intermediate combinations of material incentives and credibility still matter.
Material incentives to cooperate combined with a lack of credibility on religious appeals (the situation during the US Global War on Terrorism), produce convenient coalitions that can easily fall apart or be redirected against the interests of the originator. Credibility on religious appeals combined with material disincentives to cooperate lead to a tense, unsettled situation in which the appeals roil international relations.
I’d suggest this is what happened with Putin’s religious appeals, and explains their limited effect on the Ukraine war.
First, they still had some effect. As I discussed above, Putin did gain some political benefits from his appeals. And there are lower-level benefits he’s still enjoying. The recent arrest of a German government agent spying for Russia seems to be tied to his right-wing views. It’s likely Putin’s appeals generated sympathy and made it easier to recruit him.
Moreover, Putin’s appeals may have led some to sympathize with Russia, but they increased mistrust of Russia among many others. U.S. Democrats previously supported engagement with Russia, but they have grown increasingly hawkish on such efforts. Moreover, some of the opposition to Putin has drawn on appeals to Western values, suggesting part of the reaction has to do with Putin’s religious appeals.
Putin’s failure to break apart Western opposition to the war on Ukraine prevented the easy victory he hoped for. This failure arguably occurred due to the issues arising from religious appeals in power politics. I’d even argue that if Putin had stuck to conventional geopolitical discussions, Western mistrust would have been more minimal (he may have lost domestic support, but that’s another post).
We shouldn’t relax yet, however.
If it is true that the German spy is tied to right-wing parties, and if he was radicalized through Putin’s religious appeals, this is cause for concern. Even if Putin’s religious appeals never form a durable pro-Russian coalition, they will continue to disrupt and roil Western politics.
Far-right ideologies are hierarchical and exclusionary. They establish clear lines of superiority and inferiority according to race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, religion, and sexuality. This includes a range of racist, anti-immigrant, nativist, nationalist, white-supremacist, anti-Islam, anti-Semitic, and anti-LGBTQ+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and others) beliefs. At their extreme, these are ideologies that dehumanize groups of people who are deemed to be inferior, in ways that have justified generations of violence in such forms as white supremacy, patriarchy, Christian supremacy, and compulsory heterosexuality. These kinds of ideologies have imbued individuals from the dominant groups with a sense of perceived superiority over others: slaves, nonwhites, women, non-Christians, or the LGBTQ+ community. (6)
Miller-Idriss focuses on "youth" mobilization -- not because this is the only segment of population that is active in far-right activism and violence, but because success with young people lays the ground for an even greater level of activism in the future.
In this light, the efforts of organized far-right groups to engage with young people in the spaces and places described in this book—combat sports and MMA clubs, music scenes, YouTube cooking channels, college campuses, and a variety of youth-oriented online spaces like gaming chatrooms or social-media platforms—are especially important. Far-right groups have always worked to recruit young people to their movements and politicize youth spaces like concerts, festivals, youth-oriented events, and music lyrics. These are sometimes referred to as youth “scenes”—a word that reflects a less hierarchical and more disorganized structure than traditional social movements. Today there exists a broader range of spaces, places, and scenes to engage young people in the far right. Older leaders in far-right movements rely on college students for speaking invitations and campus activism. They recruit young people to join boxing gyms and compete in combat sports tournaments. Propaganda videos featuring fit, young men in training camps and shooting ranges use music and imagery clearly oriented toward younger recruits. (23-24)
And she emphasizes that the majority of these young people are men.
It’s not only youth who drive most of the violence on the far right, of course. Mostly, it’s youth who are men. There is much to say about masculinity and toxic masculinity as drivers of far-right violence in both online and off-line contexts, through online harassment and trolling as well as physical violence against others. It’s also important to note that we have seen and are still seeing increasing participation of women in the far right, including in violent fringe and terrorist groups. Women also enable the far right in important ways, whether through YouTube cooking videos that create a softer entry or by playing more supportive roles in extremist movements as mothers, partners, and wives who help to reproduce white nations. (24-25)
Miller-Idriss describes a progression of engagement with far-right activism:
Far-right youth today might initially encounter extremist narratives through chance encounters in mainstream spaces like the MMA, a campus auditorium, a podcast, or a YouTube video. Each of those mainstream spaces, however, can act as a channel, opening the door to dedicated far-right MMA festivals, alt-tech platforms and encrypted communication platforms, and dedicated YouTube subscriptions that mix mainstream interest in cooking or music with far-right ideology. Understanding these new spaces and places—the geography of hate—is key to comprehending the far right in its modern form. (25-26)
This approach emphasizes the importance of studying the spaces within which far-right extremist narratives are conveyed and where they find the beginnings of a mass audience. And she points out that memes of "place and space" play a major role in the narratives of the far right -- in polemics and in popular culture:
Fans of one clothing brand that is well-known for its use of far-right symbols could connect with other brand fans and learn about in-person meet-ups on a now-defunct Tumblr blog. In 2016, this included an announcement of a one-week trip to the “lands of Hyperborea—a mythical pre-historic motherland of our race”—in the region of the Karelia and Kola Peninsula in northwest Russia. Hyperborea was also the name of a prior clothing product line for the German brand Ansgar Aryan, which featured website and catalog text that explained the importance of Hyperborea and described its epic battle between the people of the “light” and the “dark men.” (37)
An especially interesting feature of M-I's research focuses on clothing style within popular culture, and the symbolic importance that far-right extremists place on "costume":
For a generation of adults who grew up with images of far-right extremists as racist Nazi skinheads, far-right aesthetics had clear signals: a uniform style of shaved heads, high black combat boots, and leather bomber jackets. You would be hard-pressed to find a bomber jacket in far-right youth scenes today. The past few years have seen a dramatic shift in the aesthetics of far-right extremism, as the far right has all but abandoned the shaved heads and combat boots of the racist skinhead in favor of a hip, youth-oriented style that blends in with the mainstream. (62)
In the years since white-supremacist blogger Andrew Anglin urged his followers to dress in “hip” and “cool” ways at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, far-right fashion has rapidly evolved. The clean-cut aesthetic of the white polo shirts and khakis that drew national attention in 2017 has been supplanted by new brands marketing the far right, with messages and symbols embedded in clothing to convey white-supremacist ideology. (78)
In Northwest Washington, DC, I glanced out of my office window and saw a young man with an imperial eagle emblazoned across his jacket—part of a British fashion brand’s controversial logo, which has been likened to the Nazi eagle symbol. Later that year, I shared a campus elevator with a man wearing a “patriotic” brand T-shirt whose advertising tagline is “forcing hipsters into their safe space, one shirt at a time.” Symbols and messaging on otherwise ordinary clothing help signal connections to far-right ideology and organized movements—like the torch-bearing Charlottesville marcher, for example, whose polo shirt bore a logo from the white-supremacist group Identity Evropa. (78-79)
And what is the function of extremist branding of clothing? It is to establish "signaling" among a group of people, and to "mainstream" the messages of the hate-based extremist right.
Hate clothing celebrates violence in the name of a cause—often using patriotic images and phrases and calls to act like an American, along with Islamophobic, anti-Semitic, and white-supremacist messages. In this way, far-right clothing links patriotism with violence and xenophobia. On one T-shirt, a saluting, grimacing emoji wielding a semiautomatic gun replaces the stars in the American flag, overlaid with the words “locked-n-loaded;” on the back of the T-shirt, the text reads “White American/Hated by Many/Zero F#cks Given.” In the “about” section of the website, the company explains it was “not founded on prejudice, seperatism (sic) or racism, but simply out of pride.” (80)
M-I also notes the importance of extremist music in the mobilization of young people:
New genres of racist music—such as “fashwave” (fascism wave, a variant of electronic music) and white-power country and pop—have broadened far-right music scenes far beyond the hard rock style typically associated with white-power music. Across the globe, the commercial and cultural spaces the far right uses to reach new audiences and communicate its ideologies have expanded rapidly—aided in no small part by social media and “brand fan” image-sharing sites that help promote and circulate new products. (69-70)
And these fashions in extremist music have effect in the broader population:
Decades of research on far-right youth culture has shown how particular facets of subcultures and youth scenes—like hate music—can spread intolerance and prejudice against minorities, not only in expected genres like right-wing hard rock and black metal, but also in more mainstream genres like country and pop music. (82)
The most surprising part of M-I's book is her treatment of fight clubs and mixed martial arts. She regards these as important vectors of extremist mobilization in many countries.
By the mid-2000s, MMA gyms across the European continent had developed a reputation as places where far-right youth were recruited and radicalized. This was a significant shift for violent far-right youth scenes, which had previously been oriented around soccer hooliganism and stadium brawls, but were now gravitating toward the MMA world. Journalists, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), think tanks, and watchdog groups have documented connections between the MMA world and white supremacists across Europe and North America. (97)
In retrospect, it isn’t surprising that the far right homed in on MMA and other combat sports like jujitsu and boxing as a perfect way to channel ideologies and narratives about national defense, military-style discipline, masculinity, and physical fitness to mainstream markets. Hitler himself had advocated for the importance of combat sports for training Nazi soldiers. The National Socialist Sturmabteilung (storm division, or storm troopers) incorporated not only calisthenics but also boxing and jujitsu as a core part of training for street fights. (95)
She notes that this phenomenon is under-studied in North America, but equally present.
MMA is a perfect incubator for the far right. It helps recruit new youth to the movement from adjacent subcultures, introducing key far-right messages about discipline, resistance to the mainstream, and apocalyptic battles. The combat-sports scene helps the far right motivate youth around ideals related to physical fitness, strength, combat, and violence. This mobilization calls on youth to train physically to defend the nation and white European civilization against the dual threats posed by immigrants and the degenerate left. At the same time, MMA and combat sports reinforce dominant ideals about masculinity and being a man—related not only to violence, risk, and danger but also to solidarity, brotherhood, and bonding.47 The MMA world also helps radicalize and mobilize youth by intensifying far-right ideals about masculinity and violence and the range of exclusionary and dehumanizing ideologies that relate to the supposed incursion of immigrants, the coming of “Eurabia,” “white genocide,” or the “great replacement.” (100-101)
MMA also has the advantage of a built-in structure to reach out to groups of young men through local gyms’ efforts to increase profitability and broaden their client base. Local MMA gyms in the United States, for example, regularly host live sparring demonstrations for broader communities—at open houses, martial-arts facilities, fraternity houses, and university and community centers—to promote their gyms. (104)
In addition to these aspects of cultural mobilization on the far right, M-I also sheds light on the increase that has occurred on university campuses in the open promulgation of extremist speech and mobilization and the sustained attack on the supposed "cultural Marxism" endemic in university faculties.
Propaganda, white-supremacist fliers, racist graffiti, and provocative speaking tours have brought hate to campuses across the country in new ways, exposing hundreds of thousands of students to far-right ideologies. This kind of hate intimidates and threatens members of vulnerable groups, unsettles campus climates, and creates significant anxiety around student safety and well-being. Students at Syracuse University who staged a sit-in in November 2019 following more than a dozen hate incidents at the university told journalists that they didn’t feel safe on campus. (120)
There is much more of interest in Hate in the Homeland. The book should be priority reading for anyone interested in stemming the rise of extremism in western liberal democracies.
Far-right ideologies are hierarchical and exclusionary. They establish clear lines of superiority and inferiority according to race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, religion, and sexuality. This includes a range of racist, anti-immigrant, nativist, nationalist, white-supremacist, anti-Islam, anti-Semitic, and anti-LGBTQ+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and others) beliefs. At their extreme, these are ideologies that dehumanize groups of people who are deemed to be inferior, in ways that have justified generations of violence in such forms as white supremacy, patriarchy, Christian supremacy, and compulsory heterosexuality. These kinds of ideologies have imbued individuals from the dominant groups with a sense of perceived superiority over others: slaves, nonwhites, women, non-Christians, or the LGBTQ+ community. (6)
Miller-Idriss focuses on "youth" mobilization -- not because this is the only segment of population that is active in far-right activism and violence, but because success with young people lays the ground for an even greater level of activism in the future.
In this light, the efforts of organized far-right groups to engage with young people in the spaces and places described in this book—combat sports and MMA clubs, music scenes, YouTube cooking channels, college campuses, and a variety of youth-oriented online spaces like gaming chatrooms or social-media platforms—are especially important. Far-right groups have always worked to recruit young people to their movements and politicize youth spaces like concerts, festivals, youth-oriented events, and music lyrics. These are sometimes referred to as youth “scenes”—a word that reflects a less hierarchical and more disorganized structure than traditional social movements. Today there exists a broader range of spaces, places, and scenes to engage young people in the far right. Older leaders in far-right movements rely on college students for speaking invitations and campus activism. They recruit young people to join boxing gyms and compete in combat sports tournaments. Propaganda videos featuring fit, young men in training camps and shooting ranges use music and imagery clearly oriented toward younger recruits. (23-24)
And she emphasizes that the majority of these young people are men.
It’s not only youth who drive most of the violence on the far right, of course. Mostly, it’s youth who are men. There is much to say about masculinity and toxic masculinity as drivers of far-right violence in both online and off-line contexts, through online harassment and trolling as well as physical violence against others. It’s also important to note that we have seen and are still seeing increasing participation of women in the far right, including in violent fringe and terrorist groups. Women also enable the far right in important ways, whether through YouTube cooking videos that create a softer entry or by playing more supportive roles in extremist movements as mothers, partners, and wives who help to reproduce white nations. (24-25)
Miller-Idriss describes a progression of engagement with far-right activism:
Far-right youth today might initially encounter extremist narratives through chance encounters in mainstream spaces like the MMA, a campus auditorium, a podcast, or a YouTube video. Each of those mainstream spaces, however, can act as a channel, opening the door to dedicated far-right MMA festivals, alt-tech platforms and encrypted communication platforms, and dedicated YouTube subscriptions that mix mainstream interest in cooking or music with far-right ideology. Understanding these new spaces and places—the geography of hate—is key to comprehending the far right in its modern form. (25-26)
This approach emphasizes the importance of studying the spaces within which far-right extremist narratives are conveyed and where they find the beginnings of a mass audience. And she points out that memes of "place and space" play a major role in the narratives of the far right -- in polemics and in popular culture:
Fans of one clothing brand that is well-known for its use of far-right symbols could connect with other brand fans and learn about in-person meet-ups on a now-defunct Tumblr blog. In 2016, this included an announcement of a one-week trip to the “lands of Hyperborea—a mythical pre-historic motherland of our race”—in the region of the Karelia and Kola Peninsula in northwest Russia. Hyperborea was also the name of a prior clothing product line for the German brand Ansgar Aryan, which featured website and catalog text that explained the importance of Hyperborea and described its epic battle between the people of the “light” and the “dark men.” (37)
An especially interesting feature of M-I's research focuses on clothing style within popular culture, and the symbolic importance that far-right extremists place on "costume":
For a generation of adults who grew up with images of far-right extremists as racist Nazi skinheads, far-right aesthetics had clear signals: a uniform style of shaved heads, high black combat boots, and leather bomber jackets. You would be hard-pressed to find a bomber jacket in far-right youth scenes today. The past few years have seen a dramatic shift in the aesthetics of far-right extremism, as the far right has all but abandoned the shaved heads and combat boots of the racist skinhead in favor of a hip, youth-oriented style that blends in with the mainstream. (62)
In the years since white-supremacist blogger Andrew Anglin urged his followers to dress in “hip” and “cool” ways at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, far-right fashion has rapidly evolved. The clean-cut aesthetic of the white polo shirts and khakis that drew national attention in 2017 has been supplanted by new brands marketing the far right, with messages and symbols embedded in clothing to convey white-supremacist ideology. (78)
In Northwest Washington, DC, I glanced out of my office window and saw a young man with an imperial eagle emblazoned across his jacket—part of a British fashion brand’s controversial logo, which has been likened to the Nazi eagle symbol. Later that year, I shared a campus elevator with a man wearing a “patriotic” brand T-shirt whose advertising tagline is “forcing hipsters into their safe space, one shirt at a time.” Symbols and messaging on otherwise ordinary clothing help signal connections to far-right ideology and organized movements—like the torch-bearing Charlottesville marcher, for example, whose polo shirt bore a logo from the white-supremacist group Identity Evropa. (78-79)
And what is the function of extremist branding of clothing? It is to establish "signaling" among a group of people, and to "mainstream" the messages of the hate-based extremist right.
Hate clothing celebrates violence in the name of a cause—often using patriotic images and phrases and calls to act like an American, along with Islamophobic, anti-Semitic, and white-supremacist messages. In this way, far-right clothing links patriotism with violence and xenophobia. On one T-shirt, a saluting, grimacing emoji wielding a semiautomatic gun replaces the stars in the American flag, overlaid with the words “locked-n-loaded;” on the back of the T-shirt, the text reads “White American/Hated by Many/Zero F#cks Given.” In the “about” section of the website, the company explains it was “not founded on prejudice, seperatism (sic) or racism, but simply out of pride.” (80)
M-I also notes the importance of extremist music in the mobilization of young people:
New genres of racist music—such as “fashwave” (fascism wave, a variant of electronic music) and white-power country and pop—have broadened far-right music scenes far beyond the hard rock style typically associated with white-power music. Across the globe, the commercial and cultural spaces the far right uses to reach new audiences and communicate its ideologies have expanded rapidly—aided in no small part by social media and “brand fan” image-sharing sites that help promote and circulate new products. (69-70)
And these fashions in extremist music have effect in the broader population:
Decades of research on far-right youth culture has shown how particular facets of subcultures and youth scenes—like hate music—can spread intolerance and prejudice against minorities, not only in expected genres like right-wing hard rock and black metal, but also in more mainstream genres like country and pop music. (82)
The most surprising part of M-I's book is her treatment of fight clubs and mixed martial arts. She regards these as important vectors of extremist mobilization in many countries.
By the mid-2000s, MMA gyms across the European continent had developed a reputation as places where far-right youth were recruited and radicalized. This was a significant shift for violent far-right youth scenes, which had previously been oriented around soccer hooliganism and stadium brawls, but were now gravitating toward the MMA world. Journalists, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), think tanks, and watchdog groups have documented connections between the MMA world and white supremacists across Europe and North America. (97)
In retrospect, it isn’t surprising that the far right homed in on MMA and other combat sports like jujitsu and boxing as a perfect way to channel ideologies and narratives about national defense, military-style discipline, masculinity, and physical fitness to mainstream markets. Hitler himself had advocated for the importance of combat sports for training Nazi soldiers. The National Socialist Sturmabteilung (storm division, or storm troopers) incorporated not only calisthenics but also boxing and jujitsu as a core part of training for street fights. (95)
She notes that this phenomenon is under-studied in North America, but equally present.
MMA is a perfect incubator for the far right. It helps recruit new youth to the movement from adjacent subcultures, introducing key far-right messages about discipline, resistance to the mainstream, and apocalyptic battles. The combat-sports scene helps the far right motivate youth around ideals related to physical fitness, strength, combat, and violence. This mobilization calls on youth to train physically to defend the nation and white European civilization against the dual threats posed by immigrants and the degenerate left. At the same time, MMA and combat sports reinforce dominant ideals about masculinity and being a man—related not only to violence, risk, and danger but also to solidarity, brotherhood, and bonding.47 The MMA world also helps radicalize and mobilize youth by intensifying far-right ideals about masculinity and violence and the range of exclusionary and dehumanizing ideologies that relate to the supposed incursion of immigrants, the coming of “Eurabia,” “white genocide,” or the “great replacement.” (100-101)
MMA also has the advantage of a built-in structure to reach out to groups of young men through local gyms’ efforts to increase profitability and broaden their client base. Local MMA gyms in the United States, for example, regularly host live sparring demonstrations for broader communities—at open houses, martial-arts facilities, fraternity houses, and university and community centers—to promote their gyms. (104)
In addition to these aspects of cultural mobilization on the far right, M-I also sheds light on the increase that has occurred on university campuses in the open promulgation of extremist speech and mobilization and the sustained attack on the supposed "cultural Marxism" endemic in university faculties.
Propaganda, white-supremacist fliers, racist graffiti, and provocative speaking tours have brought hate to campuses across the country in new ways, exposing hundreds of thousands of students to far-right ideologies. This kind of hate intimidates and threatens members of vulnerable groups, unsettles campus climates, and creates significant anxiety around student safety and well-being. Students at Syracuse University who staged a sit-in in November 2019 following more than a dozen hate incidents at the university told journalists that they didn’t feel safe on campus. (120)
There is much more of interest in Hate in the Homeland. The book should be priority reading for anyone interested in stemming the rise of extremism in western liberal democracies.
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