On 7 January this year, the alt-right insurgent Steve Bannon turned on his TV in Washington DC to watch the Golden Globes. The mood of the event was sombre. It was the immediate aftermath of multiple accusations of rape and sexual assault against film producer Harvey Weinstein, which he has denied. The women, whose outfits would normally have been elaborate and the subject of frantic scrutiny, wore plain and sober black. In the course of a passionate speech, Oprah Winfrey told the audience that “brutally powerful men” had “broken” something in the culture. These men had caused women to suffer: not only actors, but domestic workers, factory workers, agricultural workers, athletes, soldiers and academics. The fight against this broken culture, she said, transcended “geography, race, religion, politics and workplace”.

Bannon, Donald Trump’s former chief strategist, was one of 20 million Americans watching. In his view, the scene before him augured the beginning of a revolution “even more powerful than populism”, according to his biographer Joshua Green. “It’s deeper. It’s primal. It’s elemental. The long black dresses and all that – this is the Puritans. It’s anti-patriarchy,” Bannon declared. “If you rolled out a guillotine, they’d chop off every set of balls in the room … Women are gonna take charge of society. And they couldn’t juxtapose a better villain than Trump. He is the patriarch.” He concluded: “The anti-patriarchy movement is going to undo 10,000 years of recorded history.”

Until very recently, “patriarchy” was not something rightwing men were even supposed to believe in, let alone dilate upon with such apocalyptic relish. It was the sort of word that, if uttered without irony, marked out the speaker as a very particular type of person – an iron-spined feminist of the old school, or the kind of ossified leftist who complained bitterly about the evils of capitalism. Even feminist theorists had left it behind.

Nevertheless, “patriarchy” has, in the past year or so, bloomed in common parlance and popular culture. Once you tune into it, you cannot escape it: it is emblazoned on banners and T-shirts; it is an unexpected recent addition to the vocabulary of the red-carpet interview; it is there in newspaper headlines, explaining everything from the Irish abortion vote to the recent murder of 10 people in Toronto in a van attack, allegedly by a violently misogynistic “incel” – a man who believes he has been denied a right to sex with women. Outside the anglophone world, the Spanish patriarcado has been getting a workout; so too the German Patriarchat, the Italian patriarcato and the French patriarcat. As the #MeToo campaign has grown, so has the use of “patriarchy”. It has burst its way out of the attic of half-discarded concepts to greet a moment – one of fourth-wave feminist ferment – in which there is a newly urgent need to name what women are still struggling against.

The resurgence of the term is all the more surprising when one considers the forces ranged against it. Many people would question the existence of something called “patriarchy” to begin with – pointing to the strides made in gender equality over the past century, and insisting that instances of sexism are individual and isolated, destined to fade further over time, rather than evidence of a persistent structure of inequality. There are others, meanwhile, who regard the term’s very reappearance as another sign that #MeToo has “gone too far” – and see “patriarchy” as the hysterical war cry of McCarthyite feminists determined to hunt down men who are guilty of nothing more than past behaviours once considered perfectly acceptable.

For some sceptical liberals, there is a resistance to the ideological implications of grand concepts such as “patriarchy” (or “neoliberalism”), which are seen as oversimplifications of a more complex reality. Among gender studies academics, it is no longer in wide use. Once a term debated in endless articles, conferences and books, many theorists now regard it is as too blunt and monolithic to capture the nuances of oppression. Paradoxically, some on the right have enthusiastically taken up the term – regarding it not as an evil to be stamped out, but as a “natural” difference between the genders, ordained by God or biology, to be protected against rampaging feminism.

But for those who have lost a basic trust in the forward motion of human progress – or who were born too recently to have known it – “patriarchy” seems exactly the word to explain the continued existence of pervasive, seemingly ineradicable inequality. The moment of #MeToo brought this into relief: it revealed to many feminists that despite all those years of working hard, of leaning in, of waiting till unfairness gradually ebbed away, of absorbing and internalising sexism, of building starry careers or else toiling away in menial jobs in the hope that their children would have it better, you could still be pinned to a bed or cornered at a party or groped, or leered at or catcalled by a man – simply because of your woman’s body.

In this moment, the concept of “patriarchy” has offered itself as the invisible mechanism that connects a host of seemingly isolated and disparate events, intertwining the experience of women of vastly different backgrounds, race and culture, and ranging in force from the trivial and personal to the serious and geopolitical. For it allows us to ask, according to the philosopher Amia Srinivasan, “whether there is something in common between the Weinstein affair, the election of Trump, the plight of women garment workers in Asia and women farm workers in North America, and the Indian rape epidemic. It allows people to ask whether some machine is at work that connects all the experiences they’re having with all the experiences others are having.” The return of “patriarchy” raises the question: does the naming and understanding of this invisible mechanism offer the key to its destruction?

For much of human history, the persistence of male domination was so much part of the oxygen of life that patriarchy was not even identified as a concept – unlike democracy, autocracy or oligarchy, whose relative merits were vigorously debated by the Greeks. The notion that male supremacy was “natural” was self-fulfilling, since those who wrote the laws, the poems, the religious books, the philosophy, the history, the medical treatises and the scientific texts were, very largely, men writing for the benefit of men. As Jane Austen’s character Anne Elliot says: “Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands.” You might even say that patriarchy’s particular power is its capacity to make itself as invisible as possible; it tries very hard not to draw attention to the means of its endurance.