Yes, the "Woke Right" is real

And no, it's not fabulous.

In the battle for the soul of this country — and make no mistake, that description is not hyperbolic — what we are witnessing is both disastrous and depressing: people who for years have been fighting to defeat the Marxist scourge are embracing, whether knowingly or not, the very left wing ideology that they claim to wish vanquished.

James Lindsay, for those who don’t know and continue to feign ignorance (I’m looking at you, Tim Pool!), did not coin the term “Woke Right”; he has popularized it, however, and he has done so explicitly in an effort to open the eyes of conservatives and classical liberals to what is being done to blunt the electoral victory of a wide-ranging coalition of voters who rejected wokeism from the left and embraced the ideas of MAGA and America first governance. Michael O’Fallon has similarly attempted to do so. Sadly, too many of said voters are either oblivious to — or dismissive of — what James continues to highlight, and that I highlighted in the run up to Trump’s first victory.

I’ve since — and quickly did, shortly after Trump took office — reversed my opinion of Trump’s core convictions. In fact, it turns out Trump greatly disappointed the intellectual leadership of what was then called the “alt-right” during his first term, with several, like Richard Spencer, returning to the Democrat Party. Trump did not, as I initially feared he might, govern like a Klan Grand Kleagle. And he rejected attempts by the alt-right to artificially re-elevate “whiteness” to pride of place in an intersectional hierarchy the left has imprinted on society as its illegitimate organizing principle. As I noted in the Federalist back in 2016:

I share many concerns with the self-styled “alt-right,” writing for years [myself] about the dangers of a superficial “diversity project” and an academically enforced “multiculturalism” that at its core is authoritarianism dressed in sanctimony. I foresaw a rekindled racial divide in this country in President Obama’s rise to national power.

I’ve openly criticized the breakdown of our immigration system and the risible claims that importing low-skilled labor into a country where leftists control entitlement programs — largely because establishment Republicans are content not to act, or will act on behalf of those who most benefit from cheap labor — would be anything other than a vote-buying scheme.

Our system was designed for assimilation and naturalization. The complete corruption of that system and the usurpation of its intent by those who redefine it in the terms of transnational progressivism are largely responsible for the resurgence of the white nationalism at the heart of the alt-right’s identitarian “philosophy.”

Concerns over a loss of sovereignty or the overdetermined influence granted preferred minority groups are legitimate, despite the putative conservatives who pretend they are not, or parrot an establishment apologia that waxes poetic about “inclusivity” and “economic growth” while Americans are increasingly self-segregating and an entire generation of young people will struggle to find a way into the workforce. I can read crime statistics, and have watched states turn blue as the result not of good Democratic Party governance but entitlement promises and the logistical changes that inevitably follow. Libertarian economist Milton Friedman knew well that you can’t have an open borders-type immigration system tied to a welfare state. That’s precisely what we now have. [my emphasis]

To read this blindly, one would readily identify me as a likely “America First” or MAGA voter — and as someone who both recognizes and is concerned by the way Cultural Marxism, and identity Marxism in particular, has infiltrated and insinuated itself throughout the architecture of our institutions. And they’d be right.

But to believe what I believe, and to correct what the Marxists have done, I likewise recognize that adopting their ideological framework — even when it’s done in an effort to blunt its advance through the trappings of promoting certain America First policy — is a mistake that only lends that framework both more power and more legitimacy. Rather than make that concession and join the left’s game, the proper way to combat cultural Marxism is to turn back to the Constitution. As I wrote back in 2016, in response to Vox Day’s “What is the Alt Right,”

There is nothing new about the alt-right. It is the same anti-individualist, identitarian collectivism we’ve always seen, only with a label change. “The Alt Right believes identity > culture > politics,” Vox Day tells us. In informing us of this, he pronounces that individualism must first occur within the confines of a pre-determined collective, that “genetic heritage” creates culture, and that politics then governs that culture and protects both the culture and the identity.

It’s a push for a kind of incestual family writ large.

Here, eight years later, we’re once again hearing the same things, only this time often purposely cloaked in very traditional Christianity. “Heritage citizenship,” which is now being pushed by the Woke Right, is no different than the “genetic heritage” the alt-right has been pushing since its days in pointy hoods and white Klan robes. It’s Father Coughlin repackaged and regurgitated. And while I can understand the frustration that engenders it, I can likewise counsel the wisdom in rejecting it. It is tribalist poison. Ethno-nationalism already exists. If that’s what you as a trad Christian want, Hungary will likely welcome you.

But you won’t take this country.

Denying the fact of a Woke Right movement that is not only real but that is being actively promoted as the solution to the problems the left has wrought throughout its long takeover of our institutions, is both shortsighted and dangerous — a behavior I’ve seen before on the right, to its everlasting detriment.

Just as most of the right blew off how crucial it is to understand how the structure of institutionalized hermeneutic is used to entrench identity Marxism — despite my repeated explications and warnings over years of protein wisdom postings dedicated to making this move explicit and obvious — many are now prepared to blow off the observation of “woke right” ascendancy, too. Because they lack either the will or the discipline to understand just what is happening and why, they lazily dismiss it with the same air of postmodern irony that the Woke Right introduces in its nativist memes.

Lindsay has explained repeatedly — and at great length, with reference to the philosophical tentacles always tickling it — what he means by “Woke Right.” From blood and soil white identitarian racial essentialists to Christian nationalists, the Woke Right exists, and it relies on the same victim / oppressor master-narrative as does, for example, Critical Race Theory.

In fact, not only is the Woke Right real, but it will almost certainly destroy MAGA and America First. It is, intentionally, anti-Scottish Enlightenment; it believes the Constitution is a barrier to defeating what it sees as the troubling consensus of its post-war liberal enemies, both intellectual and physical — in the same way Woodrow Wilson critiqued the Constitution as a messy, inorganic whole that was impossible to collect all at once to project unified executive power.

When the “right” is promoting identitarianism, rejecting classical liberalism, citing Strauss and Woodrow Wilson, trying to rehabilitate Hitler, and promoting the idea of the unbound executive — essentially, fascism, akin to monarchy — what you have is nothing like the American version of conservatism.

It is Klan ideology married to the desire for an American Franco or Pinochet.

It is regressive, tribal, and portends the full rejection of the American experiment.

If we don’t recognize it and root out those promoting it, we are done — both as a movement and as a Constitutional republic.

There are ideologies incompatible with Americanism. What both the Woke Right and Woke Left are pushing fits that description. Excise the Marxism; retain the government of law, not of “heritage,” which always relies on an arbitrary racial or ethnic stopping point for its definition.

Waiving it away because you don’t like the label is shortsighted, dangerous, and dumb. Call it something else — RedCon, Klan, neo-fascist — but know what it is, know how it works, and learn to recognize it, reject it, and be able to articulate why it is imperative to do so.

NB: There are those whose work I greatly admire and whose counsel I trust who despise the term “Woke Right”. In some cases, that hatred comes from a marketing perspective; in others, it’s more visceral. I understand their positions. I disagree with those positions. It is crucial, I believe, to understand what is animating a certain worldview — and to understand how it works, why it’s being adopted, and what is likely to happen should we follow it to its conclusion - JG

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