“By the way, Russia had the first sexual revolution. Lenin was a big homosexual; as for Karl and Marx, I think they were together. But they realized on their own it was going nowhere.”
— 3 milioane¹

On 6 and 7 October 2018, in what has become known as the family referendum, some Romanians voted on changing the definition of marriage in the Constitution, from the union between two spouses to that between man and woman. Many more Romanians abstained or actively boycotted the referendum with the felicitous result of only 21.1 percent participation, not even close to the 30 percent threshold required for validation. What are the stakes? As Cristian Lungu, senator and president of the center-right PMP Cluj (People’s Movement Party) summarizes tendentiously, the referendum is all about “reclaiming our country from the grip of the neo-Marxist–progressive–anarchist revolution that promotes moral, cultural relativism and gender ideology.”[2] His is only one of many voices on the Right identifying the referendum with a bid for independence, national sovereignty, and desirable distance from an EU steeped into the sins of liberalism and relativism. It’s no wonder that this referendum provided a domestic opening for the first public grumblings about a possible ROEXIT.

Inspired by Putin’s Russia, Orban’s Hungary, and Kaczinski’s Poland, the nominally center-left ruling coalition has skidded spectacularly to the right, embracing the fight against “gender ideology” as the ideal platform for the construction of a new hegemonic terrain (Ciobanu 2017; Poenaru 2017). In what seems to be the preferred Schmidtian move of the empowered Right in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), the war on immigration and George Soros opens a new front—that of family and gender politics (HBF 2015; Kováts and Põim 2015; Norris 2018). While the example of Romania shows clearly that referendums cannot create hegemony by themselves, anti-gender campaigns have gained regional (CEE) and indeed transnational momentum (particularly in Latin America and Africa) (Corrêa et al. 2018; Kane 2018; McRobbie 2018). Evolving from a Vatican invention in the late 1990s, “gender ideology” has become a powerful discourse that makes for strange bedfellows: left and right, anti-capitalism, nationalism, anti-colonialism, illiberalism, science, and religion (Korolczuk and Graff 2018; Kuhar and Patternote 2017). In the process, the leftist terrain of class and social inequality is becoming ever more analytically salient, though intensely locally misrecognized as one about family forms and sexuality (Kalb 2018; Ukhova 2018).

The Romanian side of the story began three years ago when the Coalition for Family, an altogether unsavory pack of more than 30 NGOs, initiated an aggressive campaign, actively supported by the Romanian Orthodox Church and by other religious denominations, further bolstered by the financial largesse of US Evangelical Christian movements, to gather signatures for the organization of a referendum in defense of “the traditional family.” Documenting the inflamed rhetoric, dubious methods, and breakneck speed of the signature gathering process, the timely play 3 Million, performed this very year, hits the mark: “The coalition creates a bridge between Romanian Christians and right extremists, Russian propaganda, and American religious fundamentalism.”

The Destruction of Reason: An Unfinished Project (photograph by Oana Mateescu).

The signatures topped at three million, which is rather close to the number of yes votes registered in the referendum (3,531,732). Of course, once they were all lined up, the referendum still needed the support of the current government. Unsurprisingly, given similar earlier developments in CEE, there was no shortage of political backing. The improperly named Social Democrat Party (PSD), galvanized into action by their leading father figure (Liviu Dragnea, of widespread corrupt fame), granted generous financing (more than 35 million euros), lowered the validation threshold from 50 percent to 30 percent, removed electronic supervision of the voting process, and allotted an extra day for voting. Most other center and right parties (PNL, PMP, PRU, PRM, etc.) also rallied behind the worthy cause, with the Save Romania Union (USR) providing the only oppositional, discordant voice in parliament, a voice amplified by the boycott campaigns of political platforms such as Demos and the Romania Together Movement, as well as various LGBT NGOs.

As the referendum failed to garner sufficient votes, the pro camp disintegrated into a show of blame and recrimination: the Orthodox Church proclaimed that popular hatred of party (the ruling Social Democrats) was stronger than love of family; the Coalition for Family took the government (the same Social Democrats) to task for insufficient support; the Liberals and even the Social Democrats themselves started pointing fingers at Dragnea. As for the Social Democrats, the apparent big losers of this electoral fiasco, they were clearly the most generous in assigning culpability: the referendum was a failure of Romanians and of Romania!

There are, of course, new proposals too. Dragnea himself would like to do away altogether with the minimal participation threshold that clearly inhibits the otherwise enthusiastic referendum voters. As for the Coalition for Family, despite previous denials of any political plans, they seem to be relishing the opportunity of organizing the 3.5 million yes voters into a spanking new righteous party. In the background, though, the way is now open for legislative proposals putting forth the idea of civil partnership alongside marriage.

Perhaps fittingly, the only public referendum debate in Cluj-Napoca took place in a shopping mall. More than 250 people, most of them young and fresh (the organizer was the League of Students) gathered to applaud and laugh knowingly at jokes launched by the two neoconservative pro-referendum speakers. I must note here that all four invited speakers to this debate about the future of gender relations were unmistakably male. What was there to argue about? Everyone agreed about the juridical futility of the referendum: no point there except to establish conservative precedent. In other words, prophylaxis against what they wonderfully called “sexo-Marxism.” And here we come to the root of all evil. Sexo-Marxism is the ideal target for the vitriolic humor of the emerging Romanian Right; it’s the seasonal prêt-à-porter product of casual ideology, the catchall term for the supposedly terrifying machine of gender propaganda committed to the ultimate sin of relativizing (the family, gender, history, nature, humanity, etc.). With a double lining of simplification and obfuscation, it is pliable, portable, and eminently argument proof.

When I reported the debate to a friend in Cluj, he quipped immediately, “Sexo-Marxist, that’s you!” But he might as well have said, “Social scientist or anthropologist, that’s you.” Because what the leading public intellectuals of the Romanian Right understand by “sexo-Marxism” is, in fact, the social and social science. They do make furious attacks on feminism, political correctness, postmodernism, and all the usual suspects of the “culture wars.” These are all politically strategic targets that beg for demonization from the pulpit (literally) of intellectual conservatism. But what they actually mean by Marxism is this: any kind of thinking in social categories. Any attempt to question essentialism. Any provocation to “the natural” order of entrenched patriarchy, traditional privilege, and sanctioned violence. It comes down to a dogmatic fallacy: if it’s not theology, it’s sexo-Marxism. Only absolute truth, half-baked at proper elitist temperatures, will satisfy the metaphysical hunger. That’s all there is to the theodicy of this smug conservatism wrapped in sophistry and drenched in cheap rhetoric.

Are they good at plying their wares? They are persistent, redundant, unscrupulous, pompous, flashy bordering on aggressive. The referendum may be counted as their long-term win, despite the immediate loss, simply because it has carved out, almost unchallenged, a lively discursive space. This sprawling space welcomes every wet dream of the Right, straight out of the CEE illiberalism handbook (of which Putin may indeed be the author). It also prepares the move from the family referendum to the serious banning business (against abortion, same-sex marriage or partnership, divorce, sexual education, contraception, sexual intercourse between unmarried persons, etc.). The opposition, and particularly the boycott movement (with its occasional flights into esthetically extravagant campaigns for free love and sex). rarely deigns to engage them directly. or it strikes in self-defeating ways, in yet another knee-jerk move from the repertoire of intellectual snobbery, at the presumably duped voting masses. These voting Romanians, suckers for threadbare post-ideology, are “medieval,” “backward,” “uneducated,” and so on. Which then paves the road for the unscrupulous, backstabbing conservative joke: “I would give anything to be medieval. The Middle Ages had less harmful effects than Marx’s Communist Manifesto,” said one of the debate speakers (a medieval historian to boot).

The Right in its Coalition for Family incarnation or in the mouths of its intellectual preachers is supremely uninterested in actually existing Romanian families. Poverty, domestic violence, underage pregnancies, divided families (due to work migration), school dropout, insufficient access to medical care—such critical issues make for tough rhetorical material.[3] From this domain of analysis, of concrete engagement on the dirty ground of reality, it is no surprise that so many Romanians could not be recruited for the unwarranted fight against gender ideology. To reiterate, these are not just culture wars but also social (science) wars.

“Class struggle has become sex struggle.” This pronouncement by a Romanian ideologist of the Right is by no means singular in the CEE landscape, where gender ideology is widely presented as the “new Marxism” (Kuhar and Patternote 2017: 7). Thus is facilitated the much anticipated slide of anti-communist discourse into the new themes for the Eastern European Right. This is a double ideological win. In one rhetorical sweep, the old Left terrain of social struggle for the popular classes is assimilated to the new Right, while the new Left is (or lets itself be) pushed into what looks to be the mere cultural corner of gender politics—in other words, hardly of relevance to the masses. Exploiting these contradictions, the new Right is well on the way to articulating an illiberal “new language of anticapitalist mobilization” (Korolczuk and Graff 2018: 816).

Postscript. On the referendum weekend, I visited voting stations in Cluj-Napoca. Occasionally, I would run into young couples holding hands, sometimes even families with children in tow. But, most of all, it was quiet. Staff even sipped coffee in the sun. It was reassuring to meet the evidence of unassuming and yet perhaps assumed boycott of the referendum. On Sunday, I sipped coffee in the sun too, listening to the loudspeakers outside the Orthodox Cathedral. Ready, of course, to be inflamed by a militant service threatening people with anathema if they failed in their Christian voting duty (as indeed happened in other cases). What I heard was a plea, peppered with French existentialist quotes, against the misconstrual of tradition as unchanging and immovable and for love as the solution to the agony of the conflict between tradition and post-tradition. Well, that’s me, the sexo-Marxist, being told! But, this once, I was very happy to be in the wrong.

Oana Mateescu is a historical anthropologist with a PhD from the University of Michigan and is currently a researcher at the University of Bergen in the Frontlines of Value program, doing fieldwork on the contradictions of creative classes in Cluj-Napoca.