With so much else labelled ‘woke’ in recent years, it was probably inevitable that fascists would be given the label too. And so we have the ‘woke right’, a term coined by conservatives and centrists who appear to be having second thoughts about some of their MAGA allies.
The term has been knocking around on the internet for several years but the recent murder of Charlie Kirk has seen it picked up by mainstream outlets including the New York Times and the Economist. Following the assassination of the right-wing YouTuber earlier this month, various Trump supporters called for Kirk’s posthumous critics to be fired from jobs, removed from public life or worse. According to the Economist, whether they like it or not this slots them firmly into the intellectual tradition of ‘woke’:
Just as members of the woke left are fixated on systemic racism, the woke right thinks international liberalism is the structural explanation for their misfortune. This must be counteracted in strong terms, including through the use of cancellation.
The reactionary political satirist Andrew Doyle has described the woke right as ‘a kind of ideological doppelgänger, whose members exhibit the same precisionist and absolutist tendencies of their leftist counterparts’. Similarly, the pro-Trump podcaster Konstantin Kisin detects the influence of wokeness in a resurgent white nationalism. ‘The deranged worldview of the woke left, along with its disregard for truth, hatred of the West and falsification of history, is now being replicated on the right.’
If this sounds like the old wife beater defence that’s because it is. Parts of the right may be veering into authoritarianism but apparently that too can be blamed on the left, either for giving them ideas or for provoking them. Everything must be refracted through the prism of the culture wars, including a resurgent fascism. Authoritarian tendencies on the right are thus framed as a product of the campus politics of the 2010s. According to Bari Weiss at the Free Press:
‘Over the past two decades the woke left said: “Everything is taboo” - our Founding Fathers, the idea that men and women are different, the idea that wearing hoop earrings is verboten because it’s cultural appropriation, and on and on. Naturally, people got fed up. Including people like me. Then some on the right exploited that anger, and said: “Nothing is taboo” - not words like gay or retarded, but also not Holocaust revisionism or white nationalism.’
One stifling orthodoxy - of the po-faced social justice variety - has provoked an equal and opposite reaction. Such a formulation allows anti-woke culture warriors like Weiss to make the appropriate noises about developments on their right flank while still landing on their feet. The obsessive focus on leftist excess was correct all along, not least because the far-right is now the far-left. Or something like that.
Tempting as it must be for soi-disant classical liberals to blame their most repugnant pro-Trump allies on the left, it makes for shockingly bad history. In fact it’s an inversion of the truth: racial chauvinism is not a doppelgänger of leftist excess but a reaction against the unravelling of hierarchies of race and sex.
To be sure, the authoritarian temperament is not exclusive to left or right. Moreover, conservatives can at times be the left’s best students, even if this is more tactical than ideological. As Corey Robin put it in The Reactionary Mind, his 2011 compendium of conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump, ‘Some of the stuffiest partisans of order on the right have been more than happy, when it has suited their purposes, to indulge in a little bit of mayhem and madness.’
But content matters as well as form. Many of those today issuing pompous denunciations of the woke right have made lucrative careers out of depicting progressivism as a forerunner to Bolshevism. Of nobody is this truer than James Lindsay, an anti-woke provocateur for whom all reform leads to revolution. ‘Like their counterparts on the Woke Left,’ he writes, ‘the Woke Right have accepted as fact that there’s a conspiracy against people like them and that their only real hope is to lean into the [white] identity grouping and advocate for collective power under that heading’.
In other words, because of left-wing goading, white nationalists have reluctantly decided to embrace a culture of racial victimhood. Only a fool or demagogue could believe this rubbish. As to how the woke right has come to see itself as the benighted victim of anti-white racism, the works of James Lindsay may provide a clue. In his 2022 book Race Marxism, Lindsay claims that white people in America are being treated in a way that ‘parallels the Nazi scapegoating of Jews’. Anti-racist activists, he says, wish to enact a ‘total Racial Bolshevik Revolution’ and a ‘Dictatorship of the Antiracists’ comparable to Mao’s China. Indeed throughout the book Lindsay depicts opposition to racism as little more than a smokescreen for the overthrow of western civilisation. In the end, a cigarette paper separates the paranoid ramblings of the author from the paranoid ramblings of the woke right (I prefer to call them ‘fascists’).
I have my own criticisms of wokeism to be sure. It can sometimes encourage people to define themselves in terms of mutually irreconcilable ethnic groups that can never truly understand one other. It holds that words are actions; law is political; racism is permanent; and that only white people can be racist. Bashful left-wing fellow travellers would do well to acknowledge these ideological deformities along with the real world excesses that have at times accompanied them. Publishers really did pulp novels because a handful of online reviewers deemed them ‘insensitive’; businesses were shut down for serving ‘inauthentic’ food; and venues cancelled comedians because employees claimed they might express ‘dangerous’ opinions.
But some perspective is in order. Woke is self-evidently not ‘a vehicle to bring Marxist theory into the United States’, as Lindsay and others have claimed. It is a portmanteau of postmodernism, postcolonialism and critical race theory; as such it is hostile to universalist theories like Marxism.
Not that this has prevented the dauphins of Joseph McCarthy from depicting it as a front for communist subversion. But then, as the historian Richard Hofstadter once observed, ‘The right-winger needs his communists badly, and is pathetically reluctant to give them up.’
And yet whatever reservations one may have about the doctrine-dazzled left, it should be possible to make a moral distinction between those who seek to rid the world of racism (as most woke-adjacent people do) and those who try to propagate it. Or in a formulation that phoney centrists might understand, perhaps woke is an equal and opposite reaction to the decades of bigotry that preceded it. Just a thought.
Anti-woke culture warriors share more or less the same interpretation of recent history with those they call the woke right. Briefly summarised it is this: in the 2010s the United States (and Britain) was captured by an ideological fever. The apogee of this political eruption came in 2020, when protests against the murder of George Floyd swept through western cities. As the forces of law and order prostrated themselves before the new religion of wokeness, rioting and disorder broke out. Statues were toppled and the mob ran riot.
The liberal centre subsequently split as it does on such occasions: some made common cause with the reactionary camp and began to pump out agitprop for those unnerved by the potential social implications of what they had witnessed. Others sought to remain equidistant from both sides; others concluded that the main danger lay in the backlash itself (the storming of the Capitol on January 6 provided a glimpse of what genuine authoritarianism looked like).
I’m prepared to believe that Donald Trump profited from certain outbreaks of woke zealotry. Yet even this risks conceding too much. To state the obvious, white racial chauvinism anticipated woke by quite some distance1. What’s more, its historical virulence has as often as not coincided with periods of right-wing political dominance. Ku Klux Klan membership peaked at four million during the presidency of Calvin Coolidge. White power activists officially declared war on the federal government during Ronald Reagan’s first term. The former Grand Wizard of the KKK David Duke won over half the white vote in the Louisiana gubernatorial race during the George H.W. Bush presidency. Put another way, fascists have been with us for much longer than Robin DiAngelo have been shaking down guilt ridden liberals. The forerunner to the Black Lives Matter movement was the some lives matter more than others movement2.
American writers including John Ganz, Matt McManus and Quinn Slobodian have done a good job tracing how this stuff has made its way into the bloodstream of the mainstream GOP. There are good reasons to see it as a maniacal reaction to the steady unravelling of hierarchies of race and sex. Ignazio Silone’s description of fascism as ‘a counter-revolution against a revolution that never took place’ captures it better than any variant of both sidesism. Then again Silone was a democratic socialist so his work will be ignored by the purveyors of the ‘horseshoe’ theory of political life (the idea of an absolute equivalence between far-left and far-right).
While it’s true that Stalinist authoritarianism has more in common with fascism than with pluralist democracy (beware those for whom the main enemy is always liberalism), horseshoe theory is too neat and tidy for my liking. Not least because it inflicts a historical injustice on those writers of the far-left who had the measure of both Hitler and Stalin long before their more respectable counterparts. Proponents of the equivalence doctrine have never satisfactorily answered the following question: who are the fascist equivalents of George Orwell, Arthur Koestler, Bertrand Russell and Rosa Luxemburg? I’ll wait.
Back in our own time, beware of those who seek to hover above it all, casting a weary eye over the insanity below and ‘bristling at wokeness from whichever direction it arrives’. Theirs is less a fleshed out analysis of a resurgent right-wing authoritarianism than a chicken-brained attempt to pivot back to their own obsessions.
I remember having debates like this more than a decade ago with sections of the left who refused to see that jihadist murder was not solely a response to western foreign policy. Certain policies undoubtedly helped to create the conditions in which Islamic extremism could flourish; however one also had to contend with the fact that opposition to pluralism is a constant of the human condition. Interpreting everything through the lens of ‘equal and opposite’ reactions can lead you down a blind alley. Beware the politics of tidy symmetries.
In Britain we have our own version of this bullshit. The further right you go the less agency people are said to have. Racist rioters who smashed up mosques and tried to burn refugees alive in the summer of 2024 are depicted by right-wing media as responding mechanically to left-wingers ‘ramming multiculturalism down their throats’ et cetera.
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