Dark Jester: Is There a Woke Right?

In an interview with Konstantin Kisin, James Lindsay described the rise of what he called the ‘woke right’. This was a term he used to describe a right-wing version of ‘wokeness’, in which people on the right are adopting the tactics of the progressive social justice warriors, including cancel culture, grievance and victim mentality.

In researching this, one of the things I discovered was that James Lindsay and liberals of his ilk did not have a fixed definition, with James changing his definition in various interviews and podcasts. The working definition of the term appears to be an adoption by some on the right towards what is called wokeness but choosing to focus on different injustices and identities than perhaps the left focus on. In one interview, James Lindsay appears to use this term to describe what is known as the ‘New Right’. To prove his point, James Lindsay rewrote parts of The Communist Manifesto and submitted it to be published to a conservative magazine, which proceeded to publish it and defend it when a reader pointed out the source material.

What appears to be the case is an inconvenient truth on the right that does occasionally bubble to the surface: the political and cultural right is not a monolith. Unlike the left, they are not unified in their ideas. What has been the opposition to all things woke has been what Milo Yiannopoulos once described as “a loose confederation of conservatives, libertarians and classical liberals”. I believe it is this divide between traditionalists and individualists that is becoming more pronounced.

Should we be surprised? This coalition came out of necessity to fight against the groupthink of progressivism and wokeism that have dominated our cultural institutions for the last few decades. But what happens when the tide turns as it has now? Now that progressivism is slowing eroding away from our cultural institutions and the dial is swinging back the other way, we appear to have come to a crossroads as to the way forward for culture and society. Unfortunately there are different visions as to what this post-progressive world could look like. For the liberals, it would seem to be an enlightenment utopia with a cult of reason and where people would be free to do as they please as long as it didn’t harm anyone else. For the conservatives it would mean a return to a traditional society of faith and family that would bring goodness, truth and beauty.

It is important to note however that both liberalism and conservatism both have virtues. Conservatism is about preservation, to maintain the Garden of Eden as much as possible and prevent chaos. Liberalism in its pure form focuses on dignity: to take the slaves out of Egypt and lead them to the Promised Land. And so a marriage of the two is possible. The perfect example being the American Experiment. The original settlers would not have been able to survive in the New World if they didn’t have the liberal ideas about personal responsibility and free enterprise while also recognising the conservative virtue of protecting these ideas and civilisation.

Now it seems that this coalition is breaking apart because, for the first time, conservatism is entering the mainstream. Conservatives are retaking the cultural institutions, the government agencies and the centres of power. With conservatism becoming popular again, liberals fear that this will bring forth a new authoritarianism. After all, enlightenment liberalism was all about emancipating from the repressive structures of the church and of tradition. The fact they are calling it woke right is them saying the quiet part out loud: that they reject both progressivism/socialism and conservatism as both authoritarian ideologies.

Fundamentally, this goes back to a difference in the understanding of ‘freedom’. The conservatives see freedom as the freedom to serve and to do what is good and just, but they believe that total freedom can lead to anarchy and destruction. Liberals see freedom as the freedom to do what they want, to pursue happiness as long as it doesn’t harm anyone else and any restriction on that is a path to authoritarianism. Before, both these freedoms were being threatened by the progressive left who saw these freedoms as harmful to the minorities they were attempting to protect. Hence this fragile alliance between the conservatives and the liberals. However, despite their opposition to the progressives, it is still for very different reasons.

What’s important to understand is that the conservatives should have expected this. The traditionalist right should have expected the liberals to turn against them once the tide had turned. After all, the alliance was only convenient when interests were aligned. Now that the relationship has served those common interests, the liberals have to consider their own interests even if it includes going against the conservative interests.

So in the end, in some way there is a woke right. A woke right of liberals focused on protecting their identity and using language to express their grievances about their freedoms. As William McGimpsey recently pointed out, this is deliberate language, as wokeness is now a toxic term that everyone is trying to distance themselves from (you only have to ask Bud Light). However, it seems to me that the liberals project on the conservatives what they have always done, which is attempting to preserve their identity and fight what they perceive to be oppression. I suspect this will be more pronounced in the new conservative age.

Dark Jester is political scholar with an interest in foreign interference. Traditional conservative. Came out of a family that fled communism and improved themselves thanks to capitalism but would consider himself a distributionist. This article was first published HERE