Let me begin with an observation that I read somewhere, many years ago. I believe that if we think carefully about it for a few minutes, it will help us navigate our vexed topic. That vexed topic is whether or not there is even such a thing as “the woke right” and, if there is something like that, how extensive is it?
So here is the observation: In an ethnic clash, you don’t have to choose sides. The other side does that for you. We will have occasion to hearken back to this wholesome truth.
Show Outline with LinksA Statement of the Problem
Naming is a function of dominion. In Scripture, naming is far more than a simply matter of attaching a label. Naming is an act of authority or, as it may be, an act of attempted authority.
Because of the Fall of man into sin, one of the things we do in the grip of that sin is to name falsely. Naming is supposed to clarify things and to aid us in understanding. But we either smudge everything up, or we invert things completely. The former is confusion, and the latter is deception—but neither one helps to clarify anything.
In conservative circles, the joke has long been that a racist is someone who is winning an argument with a liberal. Do really want to drift into a situation where a member of the woke right is defined as anyone who is winning an argument with James Lindsey?
I am entirely open to the idea that there is such a thing as the woke right, and am prepared to listen to arguments. But what we have going on now—at least on X—is simply dogmatic assertion, with the hope that there is enough tar on the brush. We have to do better than to say that people who question the secular experiment don’t understand Hegel. Look. Nobody understands Hegel including, as I suspect, that august gentleman himself.
Budgeting for Categories is Not the Same as Adopting Categories
Let me illustrate how easy it is to smudge this all up. Suppose someone out there were to tweet something like “I think it is okay to stand up for white people.” Ah, you might say—a clear example of this virulent woke right virus going around. To which I would reply, not necessarily. Maybe, but not necessarily. Work with me.
The beating heart of all wokeness is critical theory, and the center of all critical theory is the fundamental antithesis between oppressor/oppressed. If you are a member of an oppressed identity, then that is all the justification that you need. If you are a member of the oppressor class, then that provides all the guilt that is necessary for condemnation. So if you have a grievance, and if you are part of the designated victim class, you are entirely justified. “No condemnation now I dread, I am a lesbian priestess of color who was bullied in junior high.”
But here is the wrinkle. Just because we live in an age of grievance farming, and cultivated victimhood, and the collecting of micro-intersectional-oppressions . . . does not mean that true oppression does not exist. Let us say that a white somebody is stabbed, or assaulted, or robbed. That would be a grievance, objectively speaking.
But according to critical theory, the recipient of said knife would have a grievance (or not) depending on what color they were. If they belong to the oppressor class, they have no legitimate grievance. This is why those white South African refugees who recently arrived here have been given the cold shoulder from the compassionate ones. Rather than help out, the Episcopal Church ended its refugee-settling partnership with the government, and why? Because white people are in the oppressor class and therefore, by definition, cannot be victims.
In a biblical worldview, the antithesis is between righteousness and unrighteousness, and that means that we would recognize any stabbing victim, regardless of color, as someone who had the right to register a complaint about it.
Now let me expand this a bit. Say that there was a huge riot going on in one of our major cities, the city where this stabbing happened. Let us suppose it was a BLM-style affair, where hundreds of blacks were rioting, looting, and looking for white people to stab.
Important side note: If this illustration makes any of my white friends in the mushy middle nervous, with them wishing that I had had the good taste to pick another color for the rioters, I can only say this. You guys are a central part of the problem. As Churchill once put it, appeasers are the ones who throw everybody else to the crocodiles, hoping to be the last one eaten. In the meantime, my selection of color has a point, which you will soon discover if you stick with me. And at that point you will slap your forehead and exclaim that you really should have been more patient!
My future stabbing victim was present in that area for entirely innocent reasons. He was not being a provocateur. He was driving cross country, and his car broke down on the Interstate, and he had to walk into the city a ways in order to get help. A rioting crowd happened to spot him, and cry of kill whitey! went up. Now when our friend heard that particular phrase being shouted, he registered it as a matter of some concern, and he hightailed it. But they then caught him, and he was stabbed, and lest you get distracted from the point I am trying to make, don’t fret, he was out of the hospital in three days. He is back home with his family, recovering nicely. I just needed this situation in order to pose the question.
When he ran from a black mob just because he was white, was he using the categories of critical theory? Was he compromised in his thinking? Had he failed to understand Hegel? Or was he simply budgeting for the fact that the mob was clearly using the categories of critical theory?
You don’t have to accept critical theory to get beat up by people who accept critical theory. And if you take measures to avoid getting beat up, that is an example of budgeting, not an example of compromising.
If the mob is big enough, the other side establishes the categories for you, and they impose the categories on you. And if you look at just such a situation, and start thinking like an insurance company, and tell yourself something like “it’s okay to stand up for white people,” this could be woke right, fighting fire with fire, or it could be something more like “having eyes in your head.”
The Real Woke Right
Now I believe that someone could fairly be described as woke right if they adopted the categories of oppressor/oppressed as constituting the fundamental antithesis, and they simply tried to flip the script concerning who was the oppressor and who was the oppressed. In this new version, the commies are actually the oppressors (which is true enough), and white heterosexual males are actually the oppressed (which could be true enough, depending on which land grant university you are trying to graduate from).
But this would require an adoption of atheistic relativism, where all “ethical” questions are resolved by an appeal to this arbitrary oppressor/oppressed metric, with no transcendent authority anywhere to be found. The critical theory metric is imposed as a raw power move, without reference to God or to Scripture. But among those who usually get accused of being woke right, this is not true at all. True, some of them talk as though this might be the case—which is why the phrase woke right has gotten any traction at all—but the only group that I think it might apply to accurately would be the black-pilled Nietzscheans.
Inadequate Definition
So I asked Grok to define “woke right” for me. The definition sounds sensible at first, and there is a good nugget in there, but there are some problems.
“The term ‘woke right’ refers to a faction within right-wing or conservative circles that adopts rhetoric or tactics typically associated with ‘woke’ left-wing activism, such as moral grandstanding, identity politics, or performative virtue signaling, but applies them to conservative causes.”
Grok, when asked
First let’s talk about the use of rhetoric and/or tactics. Running for office is a tactic that commies use. They also have web sites. In their rhetoric, they clearly identify what their demands are. Is that to be off the table? Obviously, an evil political party would be willing to use slanderous rhetoric and ungodly tactics. When Christians fight back, we cannot use any of the sinful tools that they use. They can fight dirty, and we must fight fair. But we must fight fair as God would define “fair,” not as the enemy would define “fair.” That is because one of their ungodly tactics is to decry as unfair any measure used against them which is effective. This is why they want to define the “woke right” as anyone on the right who is fighting effectively.
And how useful are the examples of “moral grandstanding,” or “performative virtue signaling?” Not useful at all—when someone turns up an indignant nose at the woke right, could there be any virtue signaling or moral grandstanding involved in that move? We are talking about a polemical political battle, after all, and it is as though Grok told me that one particular faction was marked and identified by the fact that they all had toenails.
But the inclusion of “identity politics” is good. It does touch the thing with a needle, provided the adoption of identity politics is wholesale, down to the ground. But who on the hard right does that? Other than the Nietzscheans?
Distinguo
So unless the term “woke right” is being applied to people it actually applies to, I think we should reject it as singularly unhelpful. It is being used simply as a general term of abuse for all those on the right who are fighting, and it is not helping us to clarify anything.
But this does not mean that we should cheerfully applaud anyone on the right, just so long as they are not Nietzschean. There are certainly problems on the right. It is not like being woke is the only sin. So let me conclude with a mini-lexicon. Keep in mind that some of these categories can overlap, and sometimes alliances can be made between them. Others will have nothing to do with each other.
Burkean right—this would be the tradition outlined by Russell Kirk in The Conservative Mind. This is more or less where I am.
Libertarian right—the central concern of the libertarians would be to free up the market economy. I am with them when it comes to the manufacture and sale of widgets, but they want to turn over some things to the market that need to grounded more firmly—things like marriage.
MAGA right—this is the populist revolt against all the woke nonsense. Most of it is glorious, some contradictory and confused, and some of it immoral.
Pat Buchanan right—Buchanan is the gent who coined the term “culture war” back in the day, and I have seen a resurgence of interest in him recently. One of the advantages of being a boomercon, over against all these young-pup-cons, is that I actually voted for him.
Reactionary right—this is the “don’t tell me what I can’t say” right. Whatever annoys the libs becomes the order of the day. This can have high entertainment value, but the problem is that the agenda is still set by the commies.
Stupid right—I would encourage everyone to acquire and read Cipolla’s The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity. His second law is this: “The probability that a certain person is stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.” This means that now that we have a large population of right-wingers, all stripes, we can safely assume that a fixed percentage of them are stupid, and that that percentage will be larger than anticipated (which is the first law).
Sectarian right—this is the political theorist who has dotted all the i’s in his system, and has crossed all the t’s. He may be a theonomist, he may be a Thomist, he may be a libertarian, but he would rather fight with fellow conservatives than with anybody else in the whole wide world. He is the second string quarterback who wants to start, and so instead of watching the game film of their next opponent, he instead watches every move of the first string quarterback. No sense of proportion at all.
Click-bait right—this is driven by the idea that any attention is better than no attention. When this vibe has set in, the law of diminishing returns also sets in, and so the political antics need to get more and more outrageous. And they do. The goal is to drive traffic, and so the pressure is on to do things that are best described with words like antics.
Jew-hate right—there has always been a substrate of this kind of thing going on, naturally, but the respectability of the American establishment had been largely successful in keeping it contained. But then when the respectable American establishment decided to disembowel itself in front of everybody, in pretty much every department, this meant that everybody was forced to start rethinking everything. It was a glorious vindication of the deplorables, but which also naturally provided a golden opportunity for some actual deplorables.
Boomer-hate right—a lot of boomer fathers and grandfathers disappointed their kids. Some of that was the great failure of the boomer parenting, and some of it was the sense of denied entitlement that the kids grew up with, and which was carefully curated by the commies who educated them. One of the great boomer sins has to do with who they allowed to educate their kids. Anyhow, there is now a faction of right-wingers who think they are against the post-war consensus, but they are actually resentful of the fact that their dad was the president of the Chamber of Commerce.
Black-pilled right—these would be the aforementioned Nietzscheans. Steer clear. And feel free to call them woke right.