Power and Mobilized Grievance: Theorizing Revanchist Activism in Public Relations

Public relations (PR) researchers have often studied activism as a tool for historically oppressed groups and social justice efforts, which often earn left-wing labels. Although these investigations are vital for sociocultural PR theory and addressing historic injustice, scholarship has not yet wrestled with activism for socially advantaged groups, which has tended to align with right-wing interests. Therefore, this theoretical article presents a specific activist approach that often complements the political right, revanchist activism, as a phenomenon where historically dominant groups seek to reclaim sociocultural power through collective grievance. We offer revanchist tenets of traditional power structures, societal entropy, and retribution to explain how these manifest in the New Right social movement and its 1970s initiative, Stop Taking Our Privileges Equal Rights Amendment (STOP ERA). Using STOP ERA and its leader, Phyllis Schlafly, as a backdrop, we offer propositions of revanchist activism as reclaiming morality, reclaiming information, and reclaiming status. Consequently, this article contributes to sociocultural PR theory and practice about activism by layering ideology and approach for political nuance, distinguishing grievance from historical marginalization, and outlining a past, yet contemporarily and practically relevant, activist context.