Inside the rise and fall of the woke right as conservative politics fractures
There is a disturbing similarity in how the extreme left and right behave. But there is reason to believe this double dose of woke will inoculate America against something much worse.
The great Irish writer Brendan Behan quipped that the first agenda item of any Irish republican movement was “the split”. In Monty Python’s Life of Brian, the People’s Front of Judea shout “Splitter!” at the one remaining member of the Popular Front.
Behan and Monty Python were satirising how leftist radicals hate each other more deeply than their opponents on the right. But now the right is getting in on the act.
The Coalition crack-up in Canberra last month has been the latest to afflict the conservative side of politics.
Of the many effects Donald Trump has had on the political right, one is surely the rise of the narcissism of small differences. The concept is Sigmund Freud’s. “It is precisely the minor differences in people who are otherwise alike,” Freud said, “that form the basis of feelings of strangeness and hostility between them.”
Trump quake
Sussan Ley and David Littleproud have postponed for now any Freudian marriage counselling. But their brief separation speaks to the tensions within conservative politics more generally. Ranged against a Labor behemoth in parliament, Liberals’ and Nationals’ first agenda item was the split.
There is a fracturing along several conservative fault lines, here and abroad. The global earthquake was Trump.
Beginning in 2015, the Republican Party began to divide between a now dominant MAGA wing and the more cerebral but less effective and smaller Never Trumpers and Trump Nose-holders. During Trump 1.0 there was some jockeying for control. The Nevers and the Nosers attempted to balance Trump’s worst (and best?) MAGA instincts with a Mike Pence here and a John Kelly there. Neocon hawk John Bolton came and went.
Trump 2.0 has been a different story. The White House this time is full of MAGA loyalists. Trump’s success has been the creation of a populist right with expectations that what it has
secured politically it can now win culturally.
Conservative fracture
Trump sits atop a movement sufficiently large and unarguably successful that it will inevitably fracture. Elon Musk will not be the first to leave in a huff. Australian conservatism has been riven by defeat, American conservatism by success.
There are, of course, good reasons not to count Trump as a conservative. It is enough to say it is the right, rather than the left, that is having to deal with the wages of victory. The rise of what has been called the “woke right” speaks to what those wages might be. The American right faces a fractious future – and a possibly happy ending, which I’ll come to.
Woke right?
A 2022 book by Stephen Wolfe, a Westpoint graduate and now a Christian political theorist, argued that the right needed to awaken to its oppression by a secular, managerial elite. In The Case for Christian Nationalism, Wolfe adopts the style and tactics of the woke left. But he does so in defence of family, faith and nation. He is a Christian identitarian and, importantly, a victim.
Sound familiar? It is the kind of progressive posturing easy to find on any Western university campus, rainbow flags fluttering in the breeze. Your oppression is your strength; you are a victim of systemic injustice; you must seek redress and silence those who have silenced you; your racial identity is not a crime; we are your allies.
There is a disturbing similarity in how the woke left and right behave. Both are invested in identity politics. Each has its fair share of social media warriors. Language use is policed. The establishment, both claim, is not to be trusted.
There is even a new sub-field in political theory examining how the radical right has imbibed the critical theories of the left. “At the heart of this ideological project,” notes one of its theorists, Rita Abrahamsen, “is a critique of liberal globalisation that seeks to mobilise transversal alliances against a common enemy: the ‘New Class’ of global managerial elites who are accused of undermining national sovereignty, traditional values, and cultures.”
The debt to Marx
The woke right debt to Marxism is fascinating. In a hardly subtle rewriting of The Communist Manifesto, the anti-woke James Lindsay made Marx the inspiration for right-wing conspiracy theories: “In its precious world market – its bright Golden Calf – liberalism, however classical, sells the lie of ‘Free Trade’, but what it trades are peoples and their organic communities for its own bloody profits. In one word, liberalism is betrayal, veiled by religious and political illusions. It has substituted for life a naked, shameless, direct, brutal betrayal of everything and everyone who made its rise possible in the first place.” You get the idea. The woke right, says Lindsay, sees the world in a similarly binary and dialectical way as the woke left.
Trump, hero of this new right, apologises for US power – see his contrition in the Middle East recently – and so does the woke left. Both forms of wokeness distrust America and want to redeem it.
An inverted DEI?
This is the woke right: a mishmash of sometimes conservative and often populist preferences pursued with the zeal of the woke left. It started as the preserve of podcasts. It now commands significant political influence, if not power, in the Trump administration. Trump has not obviously disparaged it.
His ambush of South African leader Cyril Ramaphosa during a meeting at the White House on May 21 synchronises with the ethnic solidarity emphasis of the woke right: whites are oppressed, too; not all refugees are people of colour.
Among Trump’s most recent executive orders was “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History”. As a front in his bracing culture war, it takes no prisoners: “It is the policy of my Administration to restore Federal sites dedicated to history, including parks and museums, to solemn and uplifting public monuments that remind Americans of our extraordinary heritage, consistent progress toward becoming a more perfect Union, and unmatched record of advancing liberty, prosperity, and human flourishing.”
Trump took special aim at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington: “The National Museum of African-American History and Culture has proclaimed that ‘hard work’, ‘individualism’ and ‘the nuclear family’ are aspects of ‘White culture’. The forthcoming Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum plans on celebrating the exploits of male athletes participating in women’s sports … Museums in our Nation’s capital should be places where individuals go to learn – not to be subjected to ideological indoctrination or divisive narratives that distort our shared history.”
Marching back through the institutions
There is a crude logic to this assault: if the progressive left has marched through the institutions, our task, Trump’s culture warriors say, is not to snipe from the sidelines but to march back through them. The right lacks the cultural footholds that the left has been hammering away at for decades. It now has the political power to change that. Trump’s wars on Harvard and Hollywood have an underlying strategy.
And the strategy is not without some virtue.
The commanding heights of American culture are mostly in progressive hands. Ideological diversity in classrooms is essentially non-existent. Movies preach the pros of left-wing social theory, rarely its cons. Have you seen the new Snow White?
Yet dataset after dataset reveals an American population more miserable, more prone to mental ill-health, more opioid addicted than any in history. These maladies especially afflict the young, the generation most subject to a progressive cultural hegemony. So why not seek to change the culture?
What the woke right gets right
The woke right has got on to the agenda questions that have been suppressed for too long. Is America really structurally racist? Is gender infinitely flexible? What price has the black family paid for Democrat welfarism? Is masculinity toxic?
Trump’s 2024 victory has empowered men such as JD Vance and Christopher Rufo to address these questions. Importantly, their mandate (inside and outside the White House, respectively) is to help move the culture in a new direction. Why not? Since when was American democracy not a contest of ideas? Will the Democrats lie supine in the face of this challenge? The game’s surely afoot?
Is the woke right really a thing?
My caution about all this is two-fold. First, semantics. Is the “woke right” really a thing? As dissident Canadian academic Eric Kaufmann has warned, we are at risk of “conceptual stretching”. “Woke refers to a very specific phenomenon: the making sacred of historically marginalised race, gender and sexual groups,” Kaufmann says. “This informs a moralistic world view that judges people’s core character. A reverse wokeism would require making whites, men and straight people sacred.”
There is no evidence in the MAGA movement of this inverted sacralisation. Consider how that would play out in the mind of a woke right activist: “The left sacralises women of colour, I’ll do the same for white men.”
Trump could carve out a 51st state for white refugee farmers from Transvaal. That would still not be making them sacred.
There is no intersectionality league table on the right. The woke left has become obsessed with measuring identity points. A gay black woman is worth more than a straight white male. A poor trans man gets the job over a rich black lesbian. You’d be in neo-Nazi territory before finding a part of the right that mimics this bizarre approach to human worth.
Negative impacts
Second, consequences. If the style and tactics of this new right-wing movement ape its self-declared enemies on the left, we could well end up in a worse place.
I work on a university campus. If the end of progressive hegemony necessitates its replacement by a right-wing one, I’ll defend the former. The latter is a practical impossibility anyway. Like the great conservative thinkers Russell Kirk and Michael Oakeshott, I believe in a diversity of ideas, not the certainty of my own. I want a campus full of ideological competition. Wokeness of any stripe negates that.
Chamberlains, not Churchills
More than my discomfort, though, is the impact of a woke right on America as a democratic project. David Brooks, the bestselling conservative columnist, has called them “catastrophising narcissists. When I look at Trump acolytes, I see a swarm of Neville Chamberlains who think they’re Winston Churchill.”
There is an irony, mostly missed, that the questioning of Churchill’s legacy is now being undertaken by far-right activists such as Ian Carroll (a crackpot) on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast. It was the social justice left that defaced Churchill’s statue; now elements of the right have joined in metaphorically.
This querying by both woke wings of some bedrock assumptions about Western democracy is bad news. It tempts further conspiracy theorising. It is no coincidence that the woke right has decided, like its left-wing peers, that democracy is not the answer and is rigged. The US presidential election results of 2016 and 2020 were rejected by too many in both camps.
Peak right woke?
Wokeness is not a conviction one arrives at through common sense. It requires ideological conviction, a suspension of reality. These tend to peak. If Queers for Palestine was peak woke – that is, the point of maximum cognitive dissonance and absurdity for the left – what might constitute peak woke for the right? Possibly the embrace of Vladimir Putin and his war on Ukraine, by conservatives such as Tucker Carlson, is that peak. Please God, Trump will now become a bit more Churchill and a little less Chamberlain on the Russian threat.
The emergence of the woke right may be evidence of Trump’s creeping failure. Like going bankrupt, this failure will happen gradually as the President ages into his 80s, and then suddenly when he leaves office in 2029 – under 45 months away – with any successor likely deficient in the charisma that holds MAGA together.
Trump as vaccine
Between now and then, various ideological entrepreneurs of the right (and we can assume of the left when the Democrats get their mojo back) will rise and fall. There will be much weeping and gnashing of teeth. Parties of the right will split and shed support. Conservative politics will fracture as it tries to appease its multiplying wings.
There is a case for optimism. The rise of left and right wokeness, their shared absurdities and exaggerations, banalities and conspiracies, create an opening for a more commonsense politics.
This is what Trump presages. As he passes from the field, the forces he has unleashed will oblige both sides to return to the middle ground. Trump was a vaccine. American politics needed a double dose to inoculate it against something worse.
Timothy J. Lynch is professor of American politics at the University of Melbourne
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