How the Right “Sets the Mood”

Annie Wilkinson: Thank you so much for joining us to talk about your work and how it can help us understand the political dynamics of our current moment. In your “Sentimentalizing Resentment” essay, you use Taylor Caldwell’s influential fiction and political activism to demonstrate how feelings of sentimentalism and resentment serve as the “twin engines of populism,” an idea you borrowed from Heike Paul. We were struck by how some of the women who consumed Caldwell’s novels or pro-colonialist newsletters felt compelled to join calls to protect White culture and communities from the federal government and social justice movements that resonate with politics today. These narratives and reports morphed into calls to protect White culture communities from the federal government, the specter of communism, and grassroots social justice movements. We want to ask, looking back over the past few years, what role do you see sentimentalism playing in the rise of authoritarian populism in the U.S. and globally today, particularly among women?

Carol Mason: I hear three questions here: What does the Right say about women, what does it say to women, and what do right-wing women say? We have sociological and political science studies that explore what the Right says about women and what it says to women.^[1] Currently, authoritarian populists see women as mere workers for—if not property of—the state. Stripping the right of pregnant people to determine their own reproductive lives is a key example. And we have ethnographic studies telling us that right-wing women take on the mantle of mothers of the nation and of the White race, protectors of children and family. Motherhood is inherently a sentimental identity, one in which womanhood and nationhood are inextricably linked. 

Mary Reynolds: Following up on that, we have been talking about how scholars and activists and the media are often paying more attention to right wing MAGA articulations of resentment. In our current context of rising authoritarian populism, scholars, activists, and journalists have paid a great deal of attention to the mobilizing force of resentment, but do you think that we might be underestimating that of sentimentalism?

Mason: There is a lot of emphasis on “hate” and resentment and not enough exploration of the sense of belonging that infuses MAGA communities.^[2] I think current portrayals convey right-wingers as menacing, mean, angry, and conniving. What such portrayals don’t show, though, is how much fun the right-wingers are having, how humor and irony are part of their training and their everyday engagement with right-wing ideas.^[3] Going to the mall for a cup of Black Rifle coffee, or wearing a T-shirt that says Deplorable University, or working out in a gym that caters to mixed martial arts are everyday examples. 

By foregrounding the sentimental rather than the resentment side of the populist coin, we can consider how to tap into what the Right enjoys rather than what they oppose.  If we do not understand the fun they’re having, the joy they get from participating, we can’t understand the strength of their ties to right-wing culture. 

Reynolds: You write about how Caldwell’s novels depict a “transnational White supremacism that right-wing forces could mobilize, ironically, in the service of White nationalism.” Then, as now, any effective movement—to quote Jean Hardisty (PRA’s founder and long-time member of the Women Donors Network)—“must resonate with the public mood, so that its messages can ‘hitchhike’ on it.”^[4] What sentimental and White nationalist narratives mobilize people today?

Mason: Writing about Caldwell helped me see that White nationalism could be and is a transnational movement. As for how transnational efforts fuel a nationalist populism, I think about how conservatives have stopped demonizing Russia and helped Putin’s oligarchs set up infrastructures and rationales for a cultural shift to family values. White nationalism and authoritarianism have for decades been making inroads to the American imagination under the guise of opposing abortion, and not just in America.^[5]

A concrete example here is how the World Congress of Families exported anti-abortion sentiment, rhetoric, and tactics from the U.S. to Russia, where the idea of the rights-bearing fetus did not exist until recently. Abortion had been a ubiquitous practice and atheism was the standard in Russia, so it was quite a cultural coup to instill in women the idea that the “sanctity of motherhood” was in their best interest. Tied into this victimization of women as child-bearers was the anti-immigrant idea that Muslims were outbreeding Russians. The feelings of cherishing and protecting White Russian mothers as the potential victims of abortion and of fearing foreigners of color were direct imports from the U.S. helped bolster Putin’s populism.^[6] 

Here in the U.S., I’m inspired by Cynthia Miller-Idriss’s scholarship. I think she is spot on when she says that we have to treat right-wing extremism not only as a law enforcement matter but as a public health crisis.^[7] Now, this is not going back to some pathologization of the Right as a bunch of paranoids and hysterics. It’s about seeing the pervasiveness of right-wing sentimentalism and not relegating it to certain far-off, isolated places that are presumably inaccessible to “regular” Americans. It has local contexts but travels transnationally. As a structure of feeling, right-wing sentimentalism is accessible to us all in a variety of settings, forms, and times of the day or week. 

And that’s not only due to social media. Right-wing merch is everywhere. Their aesthetics are hip and hilarious now. The Far Right’s ideas circulate in our churches, our gyms, on bulletin boards, in our libraries, on the streets. Communities of people—not just professional experts on extremism—need to make a concerted effort to recognize and reject right-wing ideologies, aesthetics, and practices. 

Wilkinson: How does your analysis of the narratives and organizing strategies that “kitchen table activists, suburban warriors, and housewife populists” of the 1950s and 1970s invoked help us understand how their imagined granddaughters—women in the MAGA movement today—are building political power and influential networks?

Mason: First, I want to tip my hat to the scholars who gave us those phrases. Jean Hardisty coined “kitchen table activists,” Lisa McGirr gave us “suburban warriors,” and Michelle Nickerson provided the provocative phrase “housewife populists.”^[8] Second, I think what we’re really getting at is how the “mothers of conservatism”—again a phrase I borrow from Nickerson—have become anti-government warriors.

Moms for Liberty are the most recent iteration in a long line of maternalist politics on the Right. Their attacks on school curricula are reminiscent of how the Daughters of the American Revolution opposed particular school books in the post-war era. They are also a direct descendent of the White parents’ rights movement that took shape in the 1970s. You can draw a direct line from the Heritage Foundation’s support of a curriculum dispute in 1974 in Kanawha County, West Virginia, to its support of Moms for Liberty. 

One of the chapters in my book, Reading Appalachia from Left to Right, tells the story of how the Heritage Foundation came to West Virginia to learn how to shift a left-leaning protest culture that was alive and well in coal country to a right-leaning protest culture that favored conservative issues. It was an episode in American history in which conservatives learned how to stop playing the race card and play the mommy card instead.^[9] The Heritage Foundation strategists, specifically Connie Marshner, chose to make a local school board member, Alice Moore, a West Virginian woman who opposed the state-mandated multiethnic and multiracial language arts curriculum, the symbol for their parents’ rights movement. 

The same tactics that Marshner and the Heritage Foundation forged on a national level afterward are the same tactics that Moms for Liberty use. Get on the school board, demonize the teachers as elitists, and then make objections that books are anti-American, foment social unrest, are lascivious, and are part of a larger plan to undermine familial order and western civilization. 

The Heritage Foundation is now so much more powerful. They aren’t stopping at banning books and attacking curricula, they want to transform public education. 

What is different now is that there’s so much more momentum and infrastructure on the Right. Today the MAGA Right is not just objecting to books, they have a clear plan for undermining higher education. The stakes are much higher because they are poised to actually take control of public education and higher education so that teachers and professors are seen only as employees of the state and therefore expected to be mouthpieces of the rightist state.^[10]

Reynolds: You are involved in the reproductive justice movement and witness a lot of campus activism. How do you see narratives animating political action now? What is setting the mood for 2024?

Mason: I’ve been attuned to the anti-abortion movement since researching my first book, Killing for Life: The Apocalyptic Narrative of Pro-Life Politics, which is about how pro-life ideology paints legal abortion as a harbinger of the apocalypse, thereby justifying acts of violence as restoring God’s rightful order. I think reproductive justice is going to be foremost in people’s minds this year. Local battles over reproductive justice are the bellwether of populism’s authoritative power.^[11] And so the Right is going to try to draw us away from that fight with narratives about transgender people as evil “monsters” who are doing away with women’s rights and inflicting harm and injury on children. 

The power to steer our focus away from our own lived experience is one of the most obvious examples of how authoritarianism is going to impact our daily lives through narrative. This scare tactic is a deployment of cultural narratives, horror stories that resemble pop culture and resonate with old (sometimes legitimate) fears.

Once people understand that there are cultural narratives that have shaped both the mainstream and the extreme, it becomes clearer how individuals can slide into anti-government and authoritarian stances.^[12] 

But I want to twist the question a little bit and think about other kinds of histories too. People fighting the Right and seeking gender and racial justice need to understand how crucial their own histories of resistance are. Stories of how people resist the Right are so dangerous to the Right that they are attempting to systematically erase these narratives and histories. That’s what’s behind all the fear-mongering about (and banning of) critical race theory or gender and ethnic studies that only recently have been called—and demonized as—DEI [diversity, equity, and inclusion]. 

So, I would say: find ways to celebrate and amplify your own histories of resistance to inspire yourselves and others as you confront current issues. Keep alive the examples of how people have persevered and won against fascists, bullies, authoritarian strongmen, and enslavers. Study how they did it and figure out what’s the same and what’s different now.