By Rebecca Anderson
Trump’s second term has brought into sharp focus the fact that progressive changes that seemed irreversible can be reversed, sometimes with the stroke of a Sharpie marker pen.
The accumulation of rights for women and other oppressed groups is always presented as a slow but steady march from the vote to equal pay, access to abortion and same-sex marriage, etc. When the gender pay gap is reported, it includes an estimate of how many more years it will take to fully close it.
But the global rise of right wing populism is turning back the clock and under the battle cry of ‘anti-woke’ threatening everything we have achieved since the 1970s in terms of equality and affirmative action for women, people of colour and LGBTQ+ people. If it succeeds millions could lose their jobs or be forced back into the closet.
Trump 2.0
Trump issued an Executive Order on his first day in office that set out to eradicate diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) from the government. Federal workers were ordered to report all DEI-related programmes, take down DEI-related government websites and social media accounts, and place all DEI office staffers on leave. Three million workers are employed by the federal government, and this initiative will not only affect those employed directly by DEI programmes but all those who benefit from them.
The same executive order also banned federal contractors from using ‘discriminatory’ DEI policies and initiatives. Companies found to be in breach could face hefty financial penalties. One in five American workers are employed by a federal contractor, and these workers, too, are finding safeguards against workplace discrimination removed.
Fatima Goss Graves, CEO and president of the National Women’s Law Center, commented, ‘In less than 48 hours in office, President Donald Trump has eviscerated his promise to be a champion of workers, gutting basic workplace equal opportunity protections that have been in place for 60 years.’
A second executive order targeted access to abortion, removing federal funding from any organisation found to ‘fund or promote elective abortion’. This measure affects charities across the world providing contraception, abortion and other healthcare. A 2022 study by The National Academy of Sciences estimated that Trump’s anti-abortion restrictions on foreign aid led to 108,000 deaths of women and children in poor countries over the four years of his first administration.
Doubling down on this international attack on access to reproductive healthcare, the US resubscribed to the Geneva Consensus Declaration, an initiative from Trump’s first term that protests the idea that women have a right to abortion.
The Executive Order also overturned Biden’s decisions to categorise abortion as ‘healthcare’ and allow travel costs for elective abortions to be reimbursed by the Medicaid programme. These changes will make it even harder for women to travel to another state to access abortion.
The order itself celebrates Trump’s role in the overturn of the historic abortion ruling Roe v Wade saying, ‘For the first time in nearly fifty years, President Trump returned the issue of life to a vote of the people, from within the States.’
Since the Supreme Court overthrew Roe v Wade in 2022, 41 states have placed stricter restrictions on abortion; 12 prohibit abortion entirely.
Trump’s anti-abortion supporters are pressing him to go further in restricting reproductive rights, with a federal abortion ban that would cover all 50 states and a crackdown on access to abortion pills prescribed via telehealth and mailed to patients, which are a lifeline to women in more conservative states.
Rising tide of right-wing populism
Trump’s attacks on women, minorities and LGBTQ+ people mirror those of right wing populist governments across the world. For more than a decade, Hungary’s Viktor Orban has used transphobia and homophobia to maintain his grip on power while promoting conservative family values. Alongside promoting a ‘traditional’ role for women, with tax breaks for those who give birth to four or more children, he has revoked legal recognition of transgender people and defunded gender studies in academia.
Argentina’s Javier Milei cleared the path that Musk and Trump now walk, wielding a symbolic austerity chainsaw as he vowed to deliver economic ‘shock treatment’ by slashing public spending, closing whole departments, selling state-owned companies and eliminating the central bank. At a right wing rally in New York Milei handed over his chainsaw to Musk who brandished it delightedly.
Milei has cut funding to programmes supporting survivors of domestic violence, closed the Ministry of Women, Gender and Diversity and the National Institute against Discrimination, Xenophobia and Racism. He has banned gender-inclusive language in government documents.
The Argentine president declared last year that, ‘The only thing this radical feminist agenda has achieved is greater state intervention to hinder economic process,’ and has called abortion a ‘completely murderous agenda’, prompting fears that his government will bring forwarded legislation to restrict women’s reproductive rights.
With Reform polling at 24% in Britain, the nationalist AfD becoming Germany’s second-largest party and National Rally already occupying that position in France, there is a rising wave of populist reaction.
These parties whip up racism, sexism and anti-LGBTQ+ hatred to justify or distract from neoliberal economic policies and increased authoritarianism. They seek to convince heterosexual men that if they cannot get good jobs, this is because of discrimination against them by ‘feminist laws’, and likewise white men that equality legislation for Blacks and Asians is the reason they cannot get good jobs. Trump and Musk claim that inferior and incompetent candidates are promoted over the ‘best’.
They represent sections of their national bourgeoisie which demand radical and potentially unpopular action to increase profitability and strengthen the national economy in the face of stagnant economic growth and turbulent global markets. Their solution is to cut public spending, reverse redistributive tax measures, and expand their share of global markets by economically dominating other countries with tariffs, threats or even military action.
When hospital waiting lists grow, inflation and unemployment rise, and the education system declines… they will blame migrants. And they will promote conservative family values in order to push responsibility for the social safety net from the state onto the nuclear family, the burden of which will fall on women.
For working class women’s movements
The nuclear family is central to capitalism because within it children are raised, those too elderly, sick or disabled to work are cared for. If the family did not perform this function then the state would be expected to. In wealthier countries, workers and women’s liberation movements over the course of decades won reforms that transferred some of this responsibility to the state, for example childcare vouchers and adult social care.
Alongside this, attitudes towards women were challenged and changed, with sexist notions that the domestic sphere was a woman’s ‘natural’ responsibility were sidelined, though never disappeared.
The decreased centrality of the nuclear family to economic life also opened up other opportunities to challenge narrow, conservative concepts of gender and sexuality. LGBTQ+ people fought for and won the right to same-sex marriage, gender recognition and pushed back against homophobia and transphobia.
Against those seeking to turn back the clock, throw LGBTQ+ people back into the closet and women into the kitchen, we must organise to resist, bringing with us the collective strength of the labour and trade union movement.
The working class can only resist cuts to public services, rising unemployment and inflation if we resist the divisive ideology of the populists. And unlike the feminist movements of the past that so often stopped after winning rights for upper or middle class women, we need working class women’s movements that fight not only to reinstate what we have already lost but to go further.
This means an anti-capitalist struggle against a system built on the enormous numbers of women that work in production and services worldwide. Fighting the anti-woke, anti-DEI misogynistic ideology we have to take forward the struggle for women’s liberation, a goal inseparable from socialism and workers’ power.
