Blueprint for U.S. Authoritarianism: Gender, Moral Order, and the Remaking of Democracy

Across the globe, anti-gender movements have become defining features of illiberal and authoritarian politics. In the United States, this convergence is increasingly visible in conservative policy agendas that seek to redesign state institutions, moral authority, and social order. Using feminist discourse and content analysis, this paper presents preliminary findings of a major right-wing policy corpus aimed at reshaping U.S. political institutions. Using a codebook that identifies democratic, populist, and authoritarian rhetoric, our early results reveal a statistically significant correlation between authoritarian language and discussions of gender, sexuality, and the family. While these findings are preliminary, they suggest that gender is not a separate issue but constitutive of democratic backsliding itself. In other words, gender inequality is a priori to democratic backsliding, and moreover, it is a framework on which authoritarian politics is sustained. The empirical findings show that gendered discourse operates as an important scaffolding that naturalizes hierarchies rooted strength-based masculinism, decides who belongs and who is to be left out, and legitimizes democratic erosion. Building on feminist theories of power, populism, and authoritarianism, this paper argues that anti-gender rhetoric in U.S. policy spaces functions as a design principle for illiberal governance.