As always you are very good at clarifying the terms. Maybe it is because you approach the woke right from a different perspective, but I appreciate that you could make their "woke" behavior clear. Thank you for the aid. Now I must go back and read it again and again.
Thank you, both of you. I needed that. I now have a load of people seeming to be very confused and arguing against things I didn’t say and don’t think. I’d now be wondering if I am just a terrible communicator if it weren’t for comments like this.
You’re not a terrible communicator. I think you need to have curiosity and analyze what your critics say to get to the hidden meaning of what they say, instead of assuming your critics are willfully confused or argumentative. I also think it’s important that you keep explaining what you mean and don’t mean, even if both seem annoyingly obvious. That way, you can prevent too many tangents by giving people clear insight into your motivations for arguing in the first place, and by setting the limits of the argument so that it fits the topic at hand. Does that make sense?
I still follow Carl Benjamin’s work though not like I once did since his ideological shift. His anti James Lindsay crusade is quite interesting. I left my own comment which was a series of questions:
What do we call it if a person uses postmodernist methods to define or defend their chosen worldview, be that progressivism or traditionalism?
What do we call it if someone uses top-down control to redistribute ownership of things?
What do we call it when folks are pushed out of groups or smeared with lies or cancelled by swarm tactics because they break with a given orthodoxy?
What do we call it when someone awakens to a system of oppression and views the current system as operating a dialectical conflict between an oppressor group and an oppressed group?
What do we call it when we require people to be morally onside?
What do we call it when someone advocates for an ideology which is identity + nationalism, or ideology or religion + nationalism?
What do we call it when politics and political ideology is centered on grievance?
That post garnered a “fair” from one reply. Other conversations I participated in were either in agreement on the woke right matter or immediately ad hominem in nature; which further reveals the similarity to the woke left.
Either way I have to remain thankful to Helen for her templates. back in 2021 I adapted one for an American audience when I had to express my concern for choices my company made at that time. They decided to bring in a firebrand of a DEI trainer for some seminars, and he was the exemplar of we’d have expected.
Loved your bullet list, especially the paragraph about decisions based on political allegiances rather than knowing anything about the subjects. Just read your 'Counterweight Handbook' by the way, learned a lot from it. Thanks.
Can you give me an example of a contemporary thinker who you believe is clearly a member of the Woke Right (i.e. they fulfill all the bullet points in your article). I don’t mean just random posters on social media, but someone who writes books or long essays.
The only real example that I saw in the linked articles was Pat Buchanan, who ended his political career before Woke ever existed.
Thank you for your measured approach to describing the problem of Woke. You take the concept from the realm of theory to reality so beautifully. Thank you for preserving truth where it counts :)
I think you're confusing those who reject the liberal paradigm for ideological reasons, and reflexive contrarians with piss poor epistemology, of which the latter group unfortunately does define many in the 'MAGA Big Tent' including Trump himself.
To me, Wokeism doesn't mean 'contrarianism', 'tribalism', or 'poor epistemology'. I absolutely agree that the 'right' has a problem with those things. It doesn't make them Woke.
You wilfully lump in together, as your examples of 'Woke Right', genuine epistemological problems with the 'right', and also... any opposition to the post-war civil rights liberal consensus (despite those things having Wokeism literally baked in from the beginning, with Title II and Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and disparate impact coming shortly afterwards). If you want a consistent, coherent advocate of 'colorblind meritocracy' and 'classical liberalism' that you say you advocate, it was much better represented by Barry Goldwater than Martin Luther King.
Wokeism is an ideology that believes that traditional Western society is structurally oppressive to all who aren't straight White men, that this oppression is intersectional (affecting different overlapping groups differently) and pervasive in all aspects of the culture, and that constant vigilance, deconstruction, and social levelling is required to dismantle these hierarchies of oppression and establish 'equity', using the tools of critical theory, postmodernism, and intersectionality, which are a fulfilment of the promises of post-war civil rights liberalism.
But you IDW liberals still haven't explained why Wokeism was able to come to power? Why did the problem just grow and grow and grow, why weren't they stopped? And this preceded the Trump backlash, so it wasn't just a backlash to Trump. No elite institution ever said 'no' to the Woke activists, because with the framework of post-war civil rights liberalism and the mythologisation of the civil rights movement, where advocacy for 'historically marginalized groups' was always on the 'right side of history' (the 'history' written by them... of course), they already fundamentally agreed with the principles behind Wokeism. The ideas that would later become Wokeism were institutionalised by the 1980s, with most of the sources of legislation and precedents being from the 1950s and 1960s.
For the reasons that I have given in the piece. I am specifically identifying the influence of the specific strand of Counter-Enlightenment thought known as postmodernism in the woke right. You can divide things into those two categories, of course. Neither of them are necessarily postmodern. I focus specifically on the evolution of postmodern thought because that is what I studied for 15 years.
Postmodernism in its post-war form was always geared towards 'emancipatory' (anti-straight White male) ends.
I guess Martin Heidegger might count as a 'right-wing postmodernist', but to tell you the truth I don't really understand his work.
You can be illiberal, even 'counter-enlightenment', without being postmodernist.
Also, the fact that the academia has been corrupted by Wokeism means that if you want to restore the idea of objective truth, you have to understand that what is established as 'truth' on various issues is manufactured and manipulated by the Woke.
You don't offer any solutions on how to fight back. You just want to say 'please' to the Woke to be a bit more reasonable. Well Helen, they spat in your face the first time, and I don't think they're going to be any different now.
So what would have been your solution to get rid of the capture of our institutions from Wokeism, if the 'anti-Woke' movement had gone completely your way? Do we continue with the anti-SJW YouTube strategy where they all deplatform us, and social attitude surveys on Gen Z show how successful it was?
Every time they were offered an off-ramp they spat at us. They deserve everything that's coming. Why should we respect the free speech of those who have quite literally made it their life's purpose to deny it to others? This is the real Karl Popper 'Paradox of Tolerance' view, not the corruption of said view by Herbert Marcuse who inverted it to protect 'historically marginalised groups' instead of free speech.
I don't read Heidegger either. I have set out what postmodernism is and why this has the elements of it. I also wrote a book on the evolution of postmodern thought into wokeness if you want any more detail on that.
"You can be illiberal, even 'counter-enlightenment', without being postmodernist."
You don't say? That would be a good point if I had ever said otherwise.
Why argue against things I am not saying rather than what I am? If you don't believe the elements I have identified are postmodern, write something about why rather than this silliness.
My last book is about how to fight back. It is based on the organisation I founded to help thousands of people fight back and the work I continue to do within organisations helping people to fight back. The last chapter is more broadly about how we can fight back on a legal, institutional and social level particularly in universities, schools and workplaces.
I believe the “woke right” exists as you see it (even though I agree with Kaufmann that it’s not very accurate) but I think your list describing the woke right worldview might be seen as a bit overgeneralized in the sense that there may be legitimate reasons to be skeptical of expertise, elites, etc. For example, many ridicule the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory but when conservative whites see that they will eventually be minorities in their own homeland, they are right to wonder how this happened and/or who’s behind it. Is this the result of democracy or elite preference being imposed on the electorate?
I agree that elements on my list also apply to people who aren’t woke and also that there are reasonable versions of many of them.
There are ways to be skeptical of expertise that don’t deny objective truth itself but try to show what the problem is which requires a belief in objective truth rather than narratives, feelings and lived experience. We disprove faulty claims of science with better science, for example, rather than claiming as the Critical Social Justice movement does that science is a white, western, masculinist way of knowing and that we need to replace it with ‘other ways of knowing’ that are rooted in the lived experience of marginalised people.
Likewise, you can wonder if some powerful people are involved in a plot to replace white people rather than that way more people from poor countries are incentivised to move to rich countries than the other way round and that there has not been sufficient drive for race-based migration policies among the populations of rich countries for any politician to run on such a platform and be elected to enact those policies. But seeing as how figures and parties do arise with such goals and put themselves forward to be elected (in the UK, anyway) but never get enough votes to achieve that, I would be sceptical of this. I’d not vote for race-based migration policies and I don’t know anybody in real life who would. People are way more likely to be open to reducing illegal immigration and also having policies that consider cultural compatibility and I think speaking to this is what explains the rise of Reform in the recent general elections. Nothing prevented them from taking those seats. It is also to respond to these public concerns and counter Reform that Labour is enacting stricter immigration policies and moving rightwards. It looks to me like our politicians are still having to respond to the will of the people to be elected and I cannot see any evidence of an external, powerful force preventing this and steering policy away from what people want. Too few people want race-based policies. I certainly don’t and wouldn’t vote for it.
My issue with “woke right” has simply been the apparent cheapness and cynicism with which it became popularized, especially by figures who had been cultivating right wing audiences for years until they seemed to get buyer’s remorse. It doesn’t mean the phenomenon isn’t real, though; it absolutely is true that there are collectivist, emotionally manipulative, etc tendencies emerging on the right and they very much line up with CSJ tendencies on the left. That I don’t like the term is absolutely a “me problem” especially since the term “woke” always bothered me to begin with.
Would you agree that Zionism meets several of the bullet points you listed? E.g. turns victimhood into a virtue, accuses critics of subscribing to a hateful antisemitic ideology, tries to get people fired (e.g. Andrew Miller, the anti-Zionist equivalent of Maya Forstater, both having been fired and then established in court their opinions as protected under Equality law).
Zionism also targets children with drones, drops bombs on schools etc. It's probably the most deadly woke ideology on the planet. Yet so many 'anti-woke' critics support it, tacitly or otherwise. Why?
Edit needed: “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.”
As always you are very good at clarifying the terms. Maybe it is because you approach the woke right from a different perspective, but I appreciate that you could make their "woke" behavior clear. Thank you for the aid. Now I must go back and read it again and again.
Exactly! She possesses a rare ability to clarify without oversimplifying.
Thank you, both of you. I needed that. I now have a load of people seeming to be very confused and arguing against things I didn’t say and don’t think. I’d now be wondering if I am just a terrible communicator if it weren’t for comments like this.
You’re not a terrible communicator. I think you need to have curiosity and analyze what your critics say to get to the hidden meaning of what they say, instead of assuming your critics are willfully confused or argumentative. I also think it’s important that you keep explaining what you mean and don’t mean, even if both seem annoyingly obvious. That way, you can prevent too many tangents by giving people clear insight into your motivations for arguing in the first place, and by setting the limits of the argument so that it fits the topic at hand. Does that make sense?
Not really. I can engage with critics of what I actually say but not with people arguing against things I didn’t say.
What are some things that some are claiming you didn't say?
As always, thorough and fair.
I still follow Carl Benjamin’s work though not like I once did since his ideological shift. His anti James Lindsay crusade is quite interesting. I left my own comment which was a series of questions:
What do we call it if a person uses postmodernist methods to define or defend their chosen worldview, be that progressivism or traditionalism?
What do we call it if someone uses top-down control to redistribute ownership of things?
What do we call it when folks are pushed out of groups or smeared with lies or cancelled by swarm tactics because they break with a given orthodoxy?
What do we call it when someone awakens to a system of oppression and views the current system as operating a dialectical conflict between an oppressor group and an oppressed group?
What do we call it when we require people to be morally onside?
What do we call it when someone advocates for an ideology which is identity + nationalism, or ideology or religion + nationalism?
What do we call it when politics and political ideology is centered on grievance?
That post garnered a “fair” from one reply. Other conversations I participated in were either in agreement on the woke right matter or immediately ad hominem in nature; which further reveals the similarity to the woke left.
Either way I have to remain thankful to Helen for her templates. back in 2021 I adapted one for an American audience when I had to express my concern for choices my company made at that time. They decided to bring in a firebrand of a DEI trainer for some seminars, and he was the exemplar of we’d have expected.
Loved your bullet list, especially the paragraph about decisions based on political allegiances rather than knowing anything about the subjects. Just read your 'Counterweight Handbook' by the way, learned a lot from it. Thanks.
Can you give me an example of a contemporary thinker who you believe is clearly a member of the Woke Right (i.e. they fulfill all the bullet points in your article). I don’t mean just random posters on social media, but someone who writes books or long essays.
The only real example that I saw in the linked articles was Pat Buchanan, who ended his political career before Woke ever existed.
Thank you for your measured approach to describing the problem of Woke. You take the concept from the realm of theory to reality so beautifully. Thank you for preserving truth where it counts :)
I think you're confusing those who reject the liberal paradigm for ideological reasons, and reflexive contrarians with piss poor epistemology, of which the latter group unfortunately does define many in the 'MAGA Big Tent' including Trump himself.
To me, Wokeism doesn't mean 'contrarianism', 'tribalism', or 'poor epistemology'. I absolutely agree that the 'right' has a problem with those things. It doesn't make them Woke.
You wilfully lump in together, as your examples of 'Woke Right', genuine epistemological problems with the 'right', and also... any opposition to the post-war civil rights liberal consensus (despite those things having Wokeism literally baked in from the beginning, with Title II and Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and disparate impact coming shortly afterwards). If you want a consistent, coherent advocate of 'colorblind meritocracy' and 'classical liberalism' that you say you advocate, it was much better represented by Barry Goldwater than Martin Luther King.
Wokeism is an ideology that believes that traditional Western society is structurally oppressive to all who aren't straight White men, that this oppression is intersectional (affecting different overlapping groups differently) and pervasive in all aspects of the culture, and that constant vigilance, deconstruction, and social levelling is required to dismantle these hierarchies of oppression and establish 'equity', using the tools of critical theory, postmodernism, and intersectionality, which are a fulfilment of the promises of post-war civil rights liberalism.
But you IDW liberals still haven't explained why Wokeism was able to come to power? Why did the problem just grow and grow and grow, why weren't they stopped? And this preceded the Trump backlash, so it wasn't just a backlash to Trump. No elite institution ever said 'no' to the Woke activists, because with the framework of post-war civil rights liberalism and the mythologisation of the civil rights movement, where advocacy for 'historically marginalized groups' was always on the 'right side of history' (the 'history' written by them... of course), they already fundamentally agreed with the principles behind Wokeism. The ideas that would later become Wokeism were institutionalised by the 1980s, with most of the sources of legislation and precedents being from the 1950s and 1960s.
Well, I don't know how to be any more specific on what I'm criticising. I'm critical of all forms of illiberalism, but they're not all woke.
And this isn’t Woke.
Why not just divide it into two critiques, the ‘anti-liberal right’ and the ‘moronic/contrarian/conspiracy right’?
For the reasons that I have given in the piece. I am specifically identifying the influence of the specific strand of Counter-Enlightenment thought known as postmodernism in the woke right. You can divide things into those two categories, of course. Neither of them are necessarily postmodern. I focus specifically on the evolution of postmodern thought because that is what I studied for 15 years.
Postmodernism in its post-war form was always geared towards 'emancipatory' (anti-straight White male) ends.
I guess Martin Heidegger might count as a 'right-wing postmodernist', but to tell you the truth I don't really understand his work.
You can be illiberal, even 'counter-enlightenment', without being postmodernist.
Also, the fact that the academia has been corrupted by Wokeism means that if you want to restore the idea of objective truth, you have to understand that what is established as 'truth' on various issues is manufactured and manipulated by the Woke.
You don't offer any solutions on how to fight back. You just want to say 'please' to the Woke to be a bit more reasonable. Well Helen, they spat in your face the first time, and I don't think they're going to be any different now.
So what would have been your solution to get rid of the capture of our institutions from Wokeism, if the 'anti-Woke' movement had gone completely your way? Do we continue with the anti-SJW YouTube strategy where they all deplatform us, and social attitude surveys on Gen Z show how successful it was?
Every time they were offered an off-ramp they spat at us. They deserve everything that's coming. Why should we respect the free speech of those who have quite literally made it their life's purpose to deny it to others? This is the real Karl Popper 'Paradox of Tolerance' view, not the corruption of said view by Herbert Marcuse who inverted it to protect 'historically marginalised groups' instead of free speech.
All postmodernism was post-war.
I don't read Heidegger either. I have set out what postmodernism is and why this has the elements of it. I also wrote a book on the evolution of postmodern thought into wokeness if you want any more detail on that.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Cynical-Theories-Scholarship-Everything-Everybody/dp/1800750323/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0
"You can be illiberal, even 'counter-enlightenment', without being postmodernist."
You don't say? That would be a good point if I had ever said otherwise.
Why argue against things I am not saying rather than what I am? If you don't believe the elements I have identified are postmodern, write something about why rather than this silliness.
My last book is about how to fight back. It is based on the organisation I founded to help thousands of people fight back and the work I continue to do within organisations helping people to fight back. The last chapter is more broadly about how we can fight back on a legal, institutional and social level particularly in universities, schools and workplaces.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Counterweight-Handbook-Principled-Strategies-Surviving/dp/1800751087/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&dib_tag=se&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.pwgvq0njfCqEX6Hun0-Krw.cjByFGpvvm2-aNRu30snqNVbT4-za0WA5qxP2OekkFo&qid=1747354106&sr=8-1
You clearly want to argue with someone who isn't me and is arguing things I am not arguing and it's tiresome. I'm done now.
I believe the “woke right” exists as you see it (even though I agree with Kaufmann that it’s not very accurate) but I think your list describing the woke right worldview might be seen as a bit overgeneralized in the sense that there may be legitimate reasons to be skeptical of expertise, elites, etc. For example, many ridicule the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory but when conservative whites see that they will eventually be minorities in their own homeland, they are right to wonder how this happened and/or who’s behind it. Is this the result of democracy or elite preference being imposed on the electorate?
I agree that elements on my list also apply to people who aren’t woke and also that there are reasonable versions of many of them.
There are ways to be skeptical of expertise that don’t deny objective truth itself but try to show what the problem is which requires a belief in objective truth rather than narratives, feelings and lived experience. We disprove faulty claims of science with better science, for example, rather than claiming as the Critical Social Justice movement does that science is a white, western, masculinist way of knowing and that we need to replace it with ‘other ways of knowing’ that are rooted in the lived experience of marginalised people.
Likewise, you can wonder if some powerful people are involved in a plot to replace white people rather than that way more people from poor countries are incentivised to move to rich countries than the other way round and that there has not been sufficient drive for race-based migration policies among the populations of rich countries for any politician to run on such a platform and be elected to enact those policies. But seeing as how figures and parties do arise with such goals and put themselves forward to be elected (in the UK, anyway) but never get enough votes to achieve that, I would be sceptical of this. I’d not vote for race-based migration policies and I don’t know anybody in real life who would. People are way more likely to be open to reducing illegal immigration and also having policies that consider cultural compatibility and I think speaking to this is what explains the rise of Reform in the recent general elections. Nothing prevented them from taking those seats. It is also to respond to these public concerns and counter Reform that Labour is enacting stricter immigration policies and moving rightwards. It looks to me like our politicians are still having to respond to the will of the people to be elected and I cannot see any evidence of an external, powerful force preventing this and steering policy away from what people want. Too few people want race-based policies. I certainly don’t and wouldn’t vote for it.
My issue with “woke right” has simply been the apparent cheapness and cynicism with which it became popularized, especially by figures who had been cultivating right wing audiences for years until they seemed to get buyer’s remorse. It doesn’t mean the phenomenon isn’t real, though; it absolutely is true that there are collectivist, emotionally manipulative, etc tendencies emerging on the right and they very much line up with CSJ tendencies on the left. That I don’t like the term is absolutely a “me problem” especially since the term “woke” always bothered me to begin with.
Would you agree that Zionism meets several of the bullet points you listed? E.g. turns victimhood into a virtue, accuses critics of subscribing to a hateful antisemitic ideology, tries to get people fired (e.g. Andrew Miller, the anti-Zionist equivalent of Maya Forstater, both having been fired and then established in court their opinions as protected under Equality law).
Zionism also targets children with drones, drops bombs on schools etc. It's probably the most deadly woke ideology on the planet. Yet so many 'anti-woke' critics support it, tacitly or otherwise. Why?
Edit needed: “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.”