Has the Right gone woke? Spencer Platt/Getty Images
The feminist writer Audre Lorde famously observed that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house”. She was wrong, though. Sometimes appropriating the master’s tools can come in very handy. Already accustomed to the sound of falling masonry, onlookers may not even notice who now wields the sledgehammer.
In recent days, commentator James Lindsay has been on various podcasts, claiming that the radical Right has been nicking the master’s tools — or at least, their make-up brushes. In his words, the Right has gone “woke”: cancelling their enemies, obsessed with identity politics, and conjuring hidden structural forces responsible for oppressing them. Attempting to prove the point, he has also revealed that last month he duped conservative Christian website “American Reformer” into publishing an amended section from Marx’s Communist Manifesto; an apparent counterpart to the hoaxes on progressive academic journals he co-authored with Helen Pluckrose and Peter Boghossian in 2018.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, all of this has riled denizens of the internet with chiselled jaws and flinty conservative opinions, outraged at the very idea of Volk-gone-woke. As any playground brawler knows, when an insult is hurled at them, the first line of defence is the “no, you are” reverse attack. Accusations that self-styled classical liberals like Lindsay are the real woke offenders have duly followed.
But is he right? The hoaxing of “American Reformer” shows little, since the amendments Lindsay made to Marx’s original text are so heavy — and in any case, the fact that both radical Right and Left hate many aspects of bourgeois liberalism is hardly breaking news. Those already familiar with Lindsay’s intellectual hammer-wielding with respect to postmodernism and critical theory might suspect that to him, everything looks like a nail. He is, after all, someone who can smell “neo-Marxism” in capitalism-friendly identitarian posturing of the most superficial kind, and who traces the alleged roots of irrational wokeism as far back as that famous “Counter-Enlightenment” figure, Immanuel Kant (albeit that he helpfully adds “This point is complex”).
The book he co-authored with Helen Pluckrose, Cynical Theories, although instructive about the way academics steeped in race and gender studies manipulate language in order to make various political power-grabs, is sloppy on some of the details. And it also posits a naïve dichotomy between, on the one hand, postmodernism and the idea that truth is relative, constructed through language (bad); and on the other, classical liberalism and the idea that truth is objective, accessed through free speech and debate (good). What seems to go unacknowledged is that, even in a perfectly liberal society, there would be many debates about reality that no amount of reason and evidence could ever definitively settle: most obviously, about the nature of moral and political reality itself. Background values are going to be relevant here, and there will be no simple rational adjudication between them.
True to form, on closer scrutiny, the positive arguments offered by Lindsay for the existence of the Woke Right also turn out to provide scant justification. There are two prongs to these: behavioural and ideological. The first says that members of the radical Right act like woke social justice warriors at their worst. Just like their Left-wing counterparts, they brim resentfully with a sense of grievance and victimhood, banging on about how straight white conservative males suffer under the status quo. They, too, favour free speech for friends not enemies, and “react to disagreement with name-calling, ostracism and bullying” as pundit Konstantin Kisin — also a fan of the Woke Right theory — puts it.
All of this perhaps sits as oddly with Nietzschean virtues of honour and nobility as the behaviour of feral Left-wingers does with their championing of kindness and empathy. But, still, such behaviour scarcely distinguishes the Right from any ill-disciplined online tribe who feels it is on a losing side. From Scottish Nationalists to feminists to Taylor Swift fans, the problem here is less likely to be substantive political allegiances than human nature and the dynamics of social media, bound to drive most people insane sooner or later.
Indeed, no better evidence could be offered here than the existence of the part-time internet troll James Lindsay, a man apparently obsessed with the idea of having sexual relations with the mother of every one of his intellectual foes. And as has been pointed out this week, classical liberals tend to get partisan when it comes to the free suppression of political enemies, most notably on the pro-Palestinian Left.
The ideological story Lindsay offers us is scarcely more compelling. Essentially this says that, like the Woke Left, the Right believes in the existence of hegemonic power structures, hidden to most people, resulting in the systematic oppression of particular groups. The paranoid structure of choice, according to Lindsay, is the “post-war liberal consensus”, introduced with the sort of elaborate scare quotes and ironic tone he formerly reserved for the existence of things like “the patriarchy” and “systemic racism”. Right-wingers think that the function of this concealed power structure has been to marginalise true conservative thought, plus the groups that conservatives tend to stand up for. It is therefore attempting to raise “critical consciousness about the way the world is organised” — an activity otherwise known as red-pilling on the Right, and awokening on the Left — in order to overturn liberal and Left-wing structures and regain power for themselves.
It is not as if all of this is obviously false as a broad-brush summary of some Right-wing thinking, though Lindsay’s treatment of the idea that there is a post-war liberal consensus as theory about a deliberate and sinister conspiracy against the Right seems forced for the sake of a neat comparison with the Left. The bigger problem is that it is hard to imagine a modern political worldview anywhere on the ideological spectrum that does not contain the supposedly “woke” elements to which he alludes.
Described abstractly, these are: a vision of society as systematically distributed into winning and losing groups along some dimension of value, in a way perhaps “hidden” to the naked normie eye; the production of conflict and resentment as a result; the telling of some background narrative, perhaps with added historical elements, to explain how the winning groups came to win and the losers lose; and attempts to rectify the situation in favour of the losers.
Put this skeletally, the schema applies as much to Ba’athism as to Blairism. And it also applies fairly easily to Lindsay’s own framing of Anglophone society in recent times: divided into university-educated “neo-Marxists” with hegemonic cultural power, and everybody else; and with a whole background story supplied about the nefarious means by which the former got that power, and what sinister ideas sustained it. As a good classical liberal squeamish about the idea of group rights, Lindsay may be too fastidious to focus on the groups that lost out during this period — working-class people being an obvious candidate — but it doesn’t mean there aren’t any.
If every possible political outlook ends up counting as “woke” according to a given definition of the term, the definition was faulty in the first place. But it doesn’t follow that there must be some objectively true definition we should look for instead. The real truth about wokeness is that rationality and debate alone can never conclusively determine its real nature.
As with other political concepts that imply value or disvalue in the mouths of those who use them — such as “social justice”, “the Left”, “the Right”, and indeed, “liberalism” itself — “wokeness” is what philosopher W.B. Gallie called an “essentially contested concept”. Though there are applications of a concept like “woke” which are obviously wrong and do not hit the target, equally, there is no single objectively “right” definition. Rather, an inherently contestable concept like “woke” is permanently open to the possibility of new interpretations, partly in light of speakers’ background value commitments and the uses to which the concept is being put. And in this sort of case, there is no rational way of deciding an outright winner. To argue this way is not particularly “postmodern” — there are red-blooded analytic philosophers with a great respect for scientific truth and a perfect horror of modern French philosophy who would readily agree that noticing some bits of reality partly depends on prior value judgements, making the truth about them relative rather than objective.
Personally, I like Eric Kaufmann’s definition of “woke”, understood as “the sacralisation of historically disadvantaged race, gender and sexual identity groups”. You will have your own preferred version, and both of us might be equally “right”. The meaning of wokeness will be intractably tussled over by adversaries for as long as there is a need for the word, each participant likely wishing the concept to explain somewhat different things.
And it’s worth noticing that Lindsay’s own definition of “woke” has changed significantly over time too. Formerly confined explicitly to Leftist thinking and activism, in adapting an existing conceptual tool to aim it derisively towards rivals on the Right, he is apparently aiming for the subjugation of whole new territories. When you think about it, it’s almost like someone is manipulating language in order to execute a political power grab.
