Caring Across the Divide: A Feminist Response to the Far-Right

As far-right violence rises, from the US Capitol attack led by supporters of Donald Trump to extremist mobilisation in Spain and Latin America, the left often responds with outrage, fact-checking, or cancellation. While understandable, these reactions can deepen division and reinforce an us-versus-them logic. We need to acknowledge that democracies cannot be rebuilt through confrontation, which means that countering hate requires care, connection, and relational responsibility.

The rise of far-right rhetoric and violence

Last year, a few Telegram and Instagram accounts connected to the organisation ‘Deport them Now’ called for an immigrant ‘hunt’ in Torre Pacheco, a municipality in Spain. The violence lasted for several days, leading to numerous victims and several detentions. These events are, to some extent, new in Spain, but the number of hate crimes was already high: almost 2300 in 2023.

The situation is no different in other countries. We all remember the fascist attack on the US Capitol on 6 January 2021. In the United States alone, more than 300 acts of extreme violence are inspired by the far-right every year, including a rising number of cases considered as right-wing terrorism. Far-right violence has also been rising in countries like Argentina, including the attempted assassination of former president Cristina Fernández in 2022. A recent publication by CLACSO calls the rise of hate politics ‘a real threat to democracy’ in Latin America.

This violence is only the tip of the iceberg; hate has become part of ‘the new normal’. Elon Musk makes a Nazi salute. Javier Milei wields a chainsaw. Far-right politicians across the globe say things like ‘immigrants steal our jobs’, ‘blacks ask for special treatment’, ‘trans people destroy family values’, and the crowds go crazy, especially online. The far-right also often directly attacks those on the left by accusing them of facilitating ‘the great replacement’, disseminating ‘gender ideology’ and a whole range of ‘dangerous’ societal changes. Hate has clearly become one of the central pillars of far-right discourse and practice.

The Case for Adopting Feminist Care Ethics 

On the left of this political divide, people tend to have adversarial attitudes towards the far-right. When they see or hear something unjust, they hit back, just like Hillary Clinton, when she called Trump supporters ‘a basket of deplorables’. Others might react by fact-checking and trying to offer rational arguments in an attempt to educate or convince. Or by simply cancelling far-right groups or individuals, even when they are family members or friends. The social bonds between the two poles (which are already weak due to the way our lives are organised) are being eroded daily, both online and offline. We do not even talk or spend time with each other, and we listen even less.

All of these reactions are more than understandable, and often necessary: the discourses and practices of the far-right trigger people in many ways. However, we need to distinguish between how we feel and how we should act. It is only human to feel anger, fear, or self-righteousness. But if we respond with confrontation, cancellation, or rely only on rational justifications, we are also using patriarchal tools. All of these tools assume all-or-nothing judgements, separation between us and them, disconnection, lack of understanding, and the existence of a moral or empirical truth (ours). If instead we were to adopt the perspective of Feminist Care Ethics, we would argue that social relations matter, in addition to being right. Through this lens, we can also start to understand why our responses to the far-right are not working.

Following Feminist Care Ethics, we should take a particular perspective in which emotions, necessity, context, and responsiveness are central. Even more importantly, this ethical perspective argues that we only exist in relation to others; we only are because they are. We are all interrelated and interdependent in myriad ways, and that is why our actions need to take into account relationships, needs, and emotions, and pay attention to how we all depend on each other. This does not mean no longer thinking and acting in terms of justice. But we also need to think and act in ways that are guided by care, even when there are tensions between the two.

Concrete Steps for Bridging the Divide

To adopt Feminist Care Ethics in our practice, we should start by listening, as suggested by Valarie Kaur, author and a victim of supremacist violence herself. Left-wing activists, politicians, and analysts are often quick to classify right-wing supporters as people who have been alienated, convinced, co-opted, or manipulated by far-right leaders. Communication strategies can indeed often be manipulative, but more than that, we need to understand why people are so frustrated and why they feel so vulnerable and hateful. Some argue that they want to belong. Deep listening (not to reply, but to understand) can give us insights that we otherwise lack and will allow us to put ourselves in the shoes of others. We should also open physical spaces of encounter to break down the media echo chambers, where we can spend time with others who hold views different from our own.

In addition to listening, we also need to take care and find strength in ourselves and our communities. Having the curiosity and the will to be with people we strongly disagree with and to listen to them is really hard for most of us. Many of us (especially activists) feel helpless, hopeless or exhausted, which makes it hard for us to empathise or change tactics. From the perspective of the nervous system, it is very hard to listen to someone if we are in fight-or-flight mode all the time. We therefore need to acknowledge and tackle our trauma and burnout individually but also collectively if we want to be in a place of openness and solidity that allows us to listen.

Finally, we need to realise our interdependence to build power. The challenge is that, even if we rationally understand that we all depend on each other, we need a deeper understanding for it to work. bell hooks discusses interconnectedness in her book All about love, and argues that we need to embrace ‘a global vision wherein we see our lives and our fate as intimately connected to those of everyone else on the planet’, including far-right supporters, we might add. She also talks about how becoming aware of our interdependence is a spiritual practice, key to building power, but not the patriarchal ‘power over others’ that is seen as an all-or-nothing competitive game, but power that allows us to collectively do things that seemed impossible before.

In the end, we cannot build democracies only for those who agree with us, even if political discourses sometimes seem to imply that. To tackle hateful rhetoric and the rise of the far-right and to start repairing the widening fractures in our societies, we need to care.

The views expressed in this post are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of the Atlantic Fellows for Social and Economic Equity programme, the International Inequalities Institute, or the London School of Economics and Political Science.