How to Banish the Term "Woke Right"

Stop "woking" while right

Photo by Alex Shute on Unsplash

(Audio version here)

I am glad the term ‘woke’ became established as the critical way to describe the Critical Social Justice movement. I wasn’t at first. It seemed too imprecise and derisory to address the specific beliefs about power, knowledge and language underlying the worldview in a stable way that could be commonly understood. When the movement first emerged as a distinct cultural phenomenon, there was considerable difficulty in discussing it due to confusion and conflict over what to call it. Unlike other schools of thought like conservatism, (at root, the drive to conserve traditions and norms), liberalism, (at root, the defence of freedom from coercion) and socialism, (at root, the drive for social ownership of the means of production), the Critical Social Justice movement presumptuously called itself “Social Justice” as though everybody else wanted something entirely different. In reality, ideas about how to produce a just society are key to all political philosophies. We disagree on what that would look like.

The tendency of the Critical Social Justice movement to give itself names that essentially mean ‘good things’ and thus make all critics of it “opponents of good things” made it difficult to challenge. How does one object to Social Justice without appearing to be arguing for an unjust society? How can one criticise Black Lives Matter while being clear that one does indeed believe that black lives matter? How can one oppose a movement abbreviated from anti-fascism (Antifa) without appearing to be pro-fascism? For some time, terms like “Social Justice Warriors” and “SocJus” were used to indicate reference to an authoritarian activist movement and not the concept of social justice, but it was “woke” that stuck.

The Critical Social Justice movement, drawing on the postmodernists, held that what we consider knowledge is actually a construct of power established by the powerful in their own interests and that this oppressive power is then perpetuated by the common ways of talking about things that result from this. Most people, it claimed, don’t critically analyse power in society, but just accept the current reality as the way things are and should be. (This came as something of a surprise to politically-engaged people from all over the political spectrum who wondered what it was the activists imagined them to have been engaged with.) CSJ activists believed that people disagreed with them because they had been socialised into having unconscious biases in favour of the very systems of oppressive power they posited to dominate society and that this led them to speak in ways that upheld these unjust power systems. They needed to get everybody else to dismantle their biases until they saw that they were right and affirm that in their speech.

It was this arrogant belief of the Critical Social Justice movement that everybody apart from them was asleep and that they themselves were uniquely awakened to social reality that led people to pick up on the term ‘woke’ to describe them. This was a positive development because it enabled people to point to a mentality - a way of thinking - and an epistemology - a way of deciding what is true - rather than seeming to oppose the very concept of social justice or write off the entirety of left-wing thought. While the tendency of ideological tribes to believe that they alone have seen the light and must enlighten everybody else who is either ignorant (if unfamiliar with their worldview) or evil (if continuing to dissent after having been informed of it) certainly does not originate with the ‘woke,’ the postmodern underpinnings of that movement gave it a distinct flavour that was recognisable. “Woke” got at the anti-empirical, anti-rational, endlessly deconstructive and problematising, moral-outrage-driven storytelling nature of the Critical Social Justice movement and distinguished it from more serious, thoughtful, reasoned and coherent forms of political thought to be found all over the political spectrum.

I have often joked on X that speaking to traditional Marxist and economic libertarian thinkers is a very similar experience in that they both tend to enter into a conversation politely, earnestly and unemotionally, immediately dive single-mindedly into the weeds of theories of economic systems and societal structures, speak relevantly and at length and then leave one with an extensive reading list. Of course, I was being affectionately facetious but also gesturing at a similarity in mentality and epistemology that can be found among thinkers who are utterly opposed in their vision of what would make society better. This is, perhaps, unsurprising, because Marxism arose as a reaction to ‘liberal economics’ and engaged with it on its own terms. They are both products of modernity who focus on material conditions and governing systems. They both believe in the obtainability of objective truth and that language can be used fairly straightforwardly to make reasoned and evidenced arguments. Because of this, they can talk to one another productively and though this seldom results in either of them changing their mind, their input is also valuable to those of us who take neither position but do share their premises on objective truth defined as “correspondence with reality” and the obtainability of it via reasoned and evidenced debate. As one Marxist going under the tag of “ClassFirst” ( I think) said to me, “I don’t think you’re evil. I just think you’re wrong.”

What has become known as ‘the postmodern turn’ marked a radical departure from these shared premises which can be understood as a product of the Enlightenment and thus be held all over the political spectrum from the most conservative seeking to conserve Western Civilisation to the most progressive seeking to build on progress enabled by it. Most political philosophies that have been established in modern liberal democracies and guide political discourse do hold the premises that objective reality exists and that we can use language to argue with each other effectively about how to work with it. Postmodernism was a form of Counter-Enlightenment thought that gained traction. Defined as a ‘skepticism towards metanarratives,’ postmodernism sought to “deconstruct” both liberalism and Marxism, but also science, reason and the very notions of ‘truth’ and ‘progress’ and much else that forms the underpinnings of modern Western liberal democracies. While the ‘post’ in “postmodernism" is often used in an artistic sense to indicate that it came after modernist art, postmodernism is best understood as a rejection of modernity. “All that naive nonsense about progress being achieved via science, reason, the creation of liberal institutions of governance and the free exchange of ideas to establish what is true? We’re over it.”

Postmodernism was radically skeptical of the obtainability of objective knowledge and of the ability of language to refer to reality rather than the narratives understood to be constructed in the service of ‘the privileged’ or ‘the elites’. It was, however, very fond of narratives, provided that they could be considered to be the ‘authentic’ ‘lived experience’ narratives of those oppressed by these shadowy powers and posited as resistance to them. It mattered much less whether these narratives corresponded with reality than whether they served the purpose of disrupting theorised oppressive systems of power. We cannot trust what we believe to be reality, it held, because that has been constructed by the privileged/elites to serve their own interests. To be truly awake is to recognise this, be radically skeptical of experts of all kinds but particularly scientific ones, and deconstruct everything that is commonly held to have been established as true but not does fit the preferred narrative of one’s tribe, and assert that instead. Anyone challenging this narrative can either be held in pitying contempt for their blindness to the power structures that have brainwashed them (but expected to overcome this and see the light) or, if persistent, be accused of knowingly upholding the oppressive power structures because they benefit their group or because they are part of the oppressive conspiracy.

The postmodern turn, therefore, is most clearly visible in the identitarian Critical Social Justice movement and in identitarian right-wing populism. Whether this manifests as what has come to be known as the ‘woke left’ or as ‘red-pill’ rhetoric (from the film The Matrix based on the work of leading postmodern philosopher, Jean Baudrillard) or from the “post-truth” phenomenon associated with the first Trump administration and defined as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief,” the postmodern influence is clear and its assault on truth, reason and the underpinnings of liberal democracies is very much the same. A battle is fought on the grounds of narratives that frequently bear little correspondence with reality, dissenters are dismissed as ignorant or vilified as evil, reasoned discussion is eschewed in favour of propaganda, misrepresentation and character assassination and adherents to the narrative compete with each other to find more things to deconstruct and problematise and thus signal themselves to be more enlightened than everybody else.

For the last decade, public political discourse has been very much focused on the manifestation of postmodern ideas coming from the woke left and the impact of this on society. This is also where its intellectual origins can be most directly traced in an almost straight line. All roads lead to Foucault! However, most people being impacted by this, including the majority of activists imposing it, know and care very little about Foucault or postmodern philosophy more broadly. It has been incorporated into an evolved and bastardised form of activism. What most people see and care about is the manifestations. They see the rejection of objective truth and reasoned arguments in favour of ideological narratives, a reading of social reality as operating in systems of power in which the privileged oppress the marginalised, an intense focus on collectivist identity politics and standpoint epistemology, a preference for censorship over good faith debate, the chilling of viewpoint diversity, the policing of language and the rapidly escalating in-group purity spirals. They see the proponents of all this believing their own narrative to be factually and morally right and themselves to be uniquely enlightened and everybody else asleep. They call it ‘woke.’

The woke did not appreciate this appropriation of their term for critical purposes, of course. They protested that this was abuse of a Black American word that gained prominence in 1931, following the incident of the “Scottsboro Boys” and referred accurately to the need to stay alert to systems of racial injustice. Alternatively, others claimed it referred to simply caring about everybody and being kind to others and were then accused of appropriation and “white-washing” the concept. Nevertheless, it was pointless to try to reclaim the narrative about woke by reclaiming the word whether it was to argue that the activists were right to continue to see the oppressive racial power systems that saw nine young black men and boys falsely accused of the rape of two white women operating covertly via language in society today, or to morph and sanitise the concept into simply being a decent human being with a social conscience.

Language simply does not work like that. Contrary to the beliefs of postmodernists, language does not shape social reality in this way. It is, of course, impossible to think about concepts that one does not have words for and cultural narratives really do exist and have huge influence on how we think. However, liberals are the last people to deny this. This is precisely why they defended freedom of belief and speech and promoted the free exchange of ideas. We know that language is our most powerful tool for establishing what is true, for replacing bad ideas with good ones, for advancing knowledge and reforming social systems. It is unlikely to be a coincidence that liberal democracies which have protected (always to an imperfect extent) freedom of belief and speech have done so much better at advancing knowledge and human rights than societies which did/do not.

Language is a tool, however. Humans create words to refer to things and concepts that exist, convey ideas they have, argue about them, create schools of thought and build on them. Our lexicon and the way we use it is therefore always evolving to do whatever a significant number of humans want it to do. When something emerges that we need to describe, words emerge to describe it or acquire different connotations and if this capture what it is that a significant number of people are trying to say, a consensus forms around it and that it what it comes to mean. Over the last decade, people in societies impacted by the Critical Social Movement needed a word to capture what it was about its mentality and epistemology that was a problem and the one that was chosen by public consensus was ‘woke.’ This is now so commonly understood that some people don’t even know it was ever used positively.

We don’t have to like the way that language works and might wish that humans would use language more precisely according to a consistent system and then hold terms steady, but this is not the reality of how humans or language works. We can’t change culture by changing the way people speak, even if we could intimidate enough of them into complying with that. They’ll just find another way around it, because people need words to describe what they see and think, not the other way round. We see this manifest when a term acquires negative connotations because the thing it is referring to is perceived negatively. If we try to remedy this by calling the thing something else, that will simply acquire negative connotations too as long as the thing it refers to is still being perceived and spoken of negatively. There is no rational reason why ‘colored people’ should be seen as offensive while ‘people of color’ is not. It is entirely related to the cultural context and connotations that exist or existed in that context. When an American asked me to explain why “Paki” is seen as a slur in the UK while “Brit” is a neutral descriptor even though both of them are abbreviations of a nationality, I had to tell him that there is no inherent logic to this on the level of language itself and it is entirely due to how it has been used. Similarly, the terms “queer” and “TERF” may have been reclaimed proudly by those who feel it describes them from those who used it disparagingly and thus have had much of their power as an insult removed, but they are still both referring to the same thing.

People use language to describe what they see and the connotations attached to the term reflect what they think about what they see. This is why it is entirely pointless for people to try to discourage others from using the term “woke right”. For as long as people see the mentality and epistemology that they have conceptualised as ‘woke’ coming from a faction on the political spectrum that they understand as ‘right’, the term ‘woke right’ will continue to exist. The only way to stop the concept of ‘woke right’ from existing is for people to stop ‘woking while right.’

The concept of “woke right” has arisen independently now in observations by people from various points on the political spectrum with widely diverging political and philosophical views. Their critiques differ but they are all responding to the observation of the same deeper logic. All they have in common is that they were highly familiar with and critical of the woke left on the same grounds that they now criticise mirroring developments on the right. I am a left-wing, British liberal atheist and would generally have very little in common with the American Christian conservative Neil Shenvi but we have found ourselves in almost complete agreement about the nature & workings of the woke left and the woke right. Countless people who do not have writing platforms but are engaged with political discourse on both sides of the Atlantic and from all over the political spectrum are now finding the term ‘woke right’ to be most apposite to refer to a particular form of illiberal populism rising on the right. That’s because there really is such a development on the right to be observed and observation reveals it to be distinctly woke-like. This is without some of them, like Chris Rufo, being quite open about it and writing books adapting Gramscian concepts of cultural hegemony to ‘conservative’ ends.

People on the right telling others that they are wrong to see a mentality and epistemology on the right that closely resembles the woke left are likely to be as unsuccessful as people on the left were in telling others that the problems they saw with the woke left was not really a thing and it was just about opposing racism and other bigotries and being kind to people. The only way to get people to stop identifying a problem on the right as “woke right” is for those elements on the right to stop doing things like:

• Dismissing objective truth and reasoned arguments in favour of emotionally-resonant ideological narratives

• Reading everything through systems of power and privilege in which shadowy elites are deceiving and oppressing them in convoluted, counterintuitive ways

• Rejecting the claims of science, reason and expertise not with better science, reasoning or expertise but from a principle of radical skepticism of all of the above

• Engaging in identity-based standpoint epistemology and identity politics with a strong emphasis on theorised victimhood as a form of virtue

• Seeing people as symbols of collectives best understood by their ‘positionality’ in their theorised power structures, attributing a hive mind to them and applying collective blame to it rather than as individuals whose views they could only know by asking them.

• Characterising all dissent from their worldview as evidence of brainwashed ignorance or knowing complicity in oppressive systems

• Trying to censor ideas and words they don’t like using state power, institutional capture or social pressure - social media pile-ons, trying to get people fired

• Deciding what is true on a whole gamut of issues ranging from DEI to vaccines to immigration to foreign wars to climate change based on their political allegiances rather than knowing anything about the subjects

• Engaging in constant rhetoric attacking the philosophical underpinnings of Western civilisation including the development of Enlightenment empiricism and rationalism, the formation of liberal democracies and the American constitution

• Engaging in historical revisionism and mythmaking in order to justify their own brand of religious or ethnic identitarianism

• Resorting to emotion-based appeals, lived experience, victimhood and cry-bullying whenever challenged on their principles and goals

• Having no consistent principles but engaging in motivated reasoning and tortuous apologism to justify taking contradictory positions on comparable issues depending on the identity or ideology of the people involved

• Engaging in competitive deconstructing and problematising of issues to find new things to be radically skeptical of and oppressed by and demonstrate themselves to be more awakened to the oppressive power systems than everybody else.

• Participating in purity spirals among their in-group in order to signal their own virtue and purity and expel as wrongthinkers people who say things that were perfectly mainstream for their group a few weeks ago

(See links in paragraph above for examples of all this from various critics of the woke right, including me)

It is unclear why so many on the right are keen to dismiss the existence of the woke right but it is likely to be for the same reasons that so many on the left denied the problem of the woke left. Some of them will be arguing in good faith (and this should be the assumption when engaging with individuals) and genuinely think those of us who criticise the woke right are imagining or mischaracterising the problem. It will be down to others to keep drawing their attention to examples of it and the nature of it. Others will, of course, be either of the woke right themselves or sympathetic to it and annoyed that the shared features they have with and have criticised in the woke left are being pointed out. We must keep pointing this out.

There are, however, in my observation, very many people on the right making the same mistake that so many did on the left when their version of woke emerged. They see the problem and that it is illiberal, but are much more concerned about illiberalism on the other side and feel that they must maintain solidarity with others on the right against it. They fear that by being openly critical of this development, they will undermine conservatism and give strength to the illiberal left and so they find ways to minimise or condone the illiberalism among them and urge critics on the right to shut up about the problem rather than helping them to identify the problems with it and marginalise their woke faction.

This is a fatal mistake. If more liberals and materialists on the left had been willing to face the problem of Critical Social Justice when it arose and people on the left were trying to draw their attention to it and gain their support in getting our own house in order, we could have done that. Surveys repeatedly show that the radical woke element of the left were and are a minority and yet they gained social prestige and influence and, catastrophically, came to define the left in the minds of so many of the public. A principled stand against their rejection of objective truth, reason and liberalism, their collective blame, identity politics, inconsistent principles, censoriousness, authoritarianism and purity spirals would have prevented their postmodern problematising deconstructionism from dismantling the credibility of the left as well. This would not only have strengthened the left but also avoided the current illiberal anti-woke backlash from which emerged the woke right.

Ethical conservatives have the option not to make the same mistake but to recognise and catch the problem before it escalates any further. Denying its existence in the hope that nobody else will notice is not a realistic option. Nor can minimising it, condoning it, making excuses for it or pointing at the woke left and saying “They’re worse” reassure people alarmed by it that you have everything under control. Nor can this avoidant ‘head-in-the-sand’ attitude possibly do anything to incentivise your right-wing party leaders to make policy based on an consistently principled conservatism if they wish to maintain support and will instead send a message that they can behave (or continue to behave) illiberally and the ethical conservatives will continue to pretend not to notice. Conservatives of all kinds as well as right-wing libertarians and classical liberals can all draw on their own well-established political philosophies to identify and oppose the postmodern rejection of objective truth, reason and liberalism, the collective blame, identity politics, inconsistent principles, censoriousness, authoritarianism and purity spirals that inevitably come with the woke right. Doing so cannot undermine ethical conservatism. It could, however, save it.