How the ‘Manosphere’ Is Winning Young Men: Why Liberal Individualism Fails to Counter the Extreme Right
Learning From Chega's Rise in Portugal
The most urgent contemporary crisis facing the revolutionary left is the systematic capture of young men by the extreme right, powered by the manosphere—an online ecosystem saturated with misogyny and the cult of masculine supremacy. This is not merely a cultural phenomenon; it is a meticulously coordinated political strategy designed to exploit the material failures of late capitalism.
The goal of revolutionary organizers today must be to understand how the extreme right is winning the organizational competition for young men’s allegiance and to build a competing ‘anti-machista’ collective power capable of offering a genuine material and political alternative.
The Crisis Defined: A New Base for the Far-Right
The extreme right, exemplified by Chega in Portugal, achieved significant electoral success in the 2025 legislative elections, emerging as the most voted choice among men in all age brackets below 55 years.
This trend, symptomatic of a broader political failure, requires a granular analysis:
Women’s Resistance: In the 2025 European elections, only 13.9% of women aged 16–29 voted extreme-right, compared to 21% of men across all age brackets. This suggests that the emancipation struggle is creating a resistant base among the young.
Precarious Capture: However, this resistance is fragile, particularly among segments facing economic hardship. In the 2025 Portuguese legislative elections, Chega garnered nearly 30% of the vote among women aged 25–35 with secondary education, indicating that the gender gap is narrowing in segments affected by lower economic stability and precarity.
This rise is powered by the manosphere, which operates as a “catapult for male indoctrination” into far-right politics. This ecosystem is organized by “mercenaries who occupy the throne” whose clear agenda is to exploit the idea of masculine dispossession, creating an “army”.
Strategic Failure and Theoretical Resonance
The dynamic finds deep theoretical resonance in Wilhelm Reich’s sexual economy. The analysis, provided by militants of the Rede Anticapitalista, suggests that generalized neoliberal precarization (such as stagnant salaries, job insecurity, and housing crises) violently clashes with the persistent social expectations of traditional masculine roles (success, strength, provider status).
This clash generates a strong sense of crisis and loss of status among men, which is then interpreted as an individual failure due to the late-capitalist fetishism. The extreme right exploits this resentment by blaming women and feminists for these perceived losses, thereby breeding the authoritarian personality that Reich identified as submissive to rigid order.
The fundamental strategic failure of the left is rooted in its organizational vacuum. The left often responds to structural sexism with demands for individual “deconstruction,” a response that is fatally flawed because “Individualism as a recipe is liberalism’s eternal trap” (O individualismo como receita é a armadilha de sempre do liberalismo). The manosphere succeeds because it offers a collective political organization (however toxic), while the left fails to organize young men around their shared material conditions collectively.
Crucially, the manosphere coordinates its strategy by using transphobia as a core mechanism for discipline. The crusade against the so-called “gender ideology”—a concept manufactured by reacionary sectors—operates as a “ghost word”, transforming the existence of trans people into a diffuse threat to order. This pedagogy of exclusion teaches who must be discarded and who can be protected, functioning as a powerful tool to discipline all bodies toward a rigid patriarchal gender order.
Crucially, defending trans rights is not secondary to anti-capitalist organizing; it is a front line in the battle for working-class liberation. When the extreme right weaponizes trans panic to discipline all bodies toward rigid gender hierarchy, the revolutionary response is not to concede on this question but to expose how the right uses gender panic as a substitute for addressing material crisis. The left that can articulate how trans liberation and sexual freedom enable all workers—men, women, trans people—to organize collectively without the constraints of patriarchal discipline will be stronger.
Strategic Lesson: Building Collective ‘Anti-Machista’ Power
The revolutionary anti-capitalist struggle requires ‘anti-machista’ collective political organization—that is, collective power explicitly rooted in fighting masculine supremacy and patriarchal discipline.. Since oppression is structural, relying solely on individual psychological change fails. The revolutionary movement must build rival collective organizations that address material precarity while simultaneously refusing the gendered scapegoating logic that the far-right uses.
This involves integrating the fight for sexual liberation and gender justice directly into the anticapitalist strategy. This requires providing a material basis for liberation, such as the socialization of housing and support for economically independent women. Ultimately, the challenge is to mobilize for the construction of a common project that is explicitly feminist, anti-racist, decolonial, anticapitalist, and ecologist.
This article is based on a special issue of Anticapitalistas, the magazine of the Anticapitalist Network in the Portuguese section of the Fourth International.