PRINCETON ¨C A grim 10-year anniversary last month did not go unmarked. On July 22, commentators around the world duly commemorated the 77 victims of a Norwegian far-right terrorist who detonated a bomb outside the prime minister¡¯s office in downtown Oslo and then massacred teenagers attending a Labour Party summer camp on the island of Utoya.
Most of these analyses aimed to understand the horror by way of the perpetrator¡¯s ¡°closely intertwined anti-Muslim and anti-social democratic sentiment.¡± While some expressed relief that he has not inspired more copycats, others used the occasion to indict ¡°neoliberalism¡± and other monocausal abstractions. Strikingly absent from the punditry was the killer¡¯s evident misogyny.
After more than a decade of witnessing a global resurgence of the far-right, we continue to underestimate the importance of gender ¡ª especially defenses of patriarchy ¡ª as a bridge between extremists and the mainstream conservatives who are increasingly willing to collaborate with them.
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