The murder of elderly Jews at prayer, pipe bombs, the shooting of a black man and woman in Kentucky. Everyone is asking: “Who radicalises these guys?” The easy answer is Donald Trump and his vicious political rhetoric. But is it that simple? Antisemitism was rising in Europe before Trump was elected. In 2015, Jews were killed in Paris and a synagogue was attacked in Copenhagen. A rabbi and three children were murdered in Toulouse in 2012.
Richard Spencer, the white supremacist leader who chanted “Jews will not replace us” at Charlottesville in 2017, is being divorced by his wife, who has accused him of attacking her on several occasions – once when she was pregnant. Spencer denies this. In the US, it is estimated that one in three women will experience abuse or rape by a partner in their lifetime. In England and Wales, domestic violence accounts for about 16% of all prosecutions.
Let’s join the dots. In the background of nearly every “lone wolf” attack is domestic violence, from Omar Matteen (the Orlando nightclub attack) and Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel (the Nice truck attack) to Khalid Masood (Westminster). The man accused of sending bombs to Democrats, Cesar Sayoc, has a long arrest record, including domestic violence.
What these men do to women is everyday terror, but what radicalises ordinary men to terrorise women? Yes, there is Trump’s vocabulary of violence, but there is an absence in this debate. Trump emboldened what was already there. Between 2001 and 2012, 6,488 US soldiers died in Iraq and Afghanistan. In that period, almost double the number of US women were murdered by their male partners: 11,766. These murders are apparently nothing to do with the war or terror and are not considered headline-grabbing.
A body of work, compiled by feminist activists, scholars and strategists, exists around such violence, yet every time an act of terror occurs it is ignored. None of these “lone wolves” exist in isolation. Their fear of “the other”, whether they be female, gay, black or Jewish, is not a recent invention, but the subtext of increasingly impotent official and liberal discourse.
The left is losing this battle because, as ever, it has more important ones to fight. The woke boys of Twitter get their knickers in a twist flashing their feminist credentials about sex work or anything that caters to the needs of men. Meanwhile, lists of instructions about how to fight fascism have been published since a fascist was elected in Brazil. Here is a racist man, openly anti-gay, anti-women and pro-torture, yet again there is little understanding of how feminism is central to fighting this. By failing to understand how power operates through gender and race, as well as economics, the left fragments in the face of populist discourse that emphasises all that some men have lost.
This is the “alt-right” taking power; there is a crisis of social democracy and a crisis of liberalism. But the thread that weaves through all these far-right movements? Name it. These are movements of men who want to turn the clock back to a time when women had few rights. This movement is global: look at Russia partly decriminalising domestic violence.
For the left to fight this, it must pay attention. Jewish people have been saying they feel under threat for a long time, yet this was questioned. Feminists have analysed male violence for decades, but this is somehow old-fashioned in the new struggles about the use of changing rooms.
We talk of gender as a construct precisely because we think there can be new forms of masculinity as well as femininity, new ways of organising ourselves that don’t depend on brute force. That may be optimistic as Jair Bolsonaro comes to power alongside Trump, Viktor Orbán, Vladimir Putin, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Mohammed bin Salman.
The point is that not one of these men had to actively radicalise their followers. That is what patriarchy does as it bubbles away under the surface, demonising whatever it deems different. Welcome to the new hatred, same as the old hatred. Without understanding this, the left is impotent.