Has the right gone woke?

Kind of.

The term “woke right” has been used to refer to the conspiratorial and resentment fueled parts of the right wing movement but has also been used as a short hand to complain about right wing cancel culture and speech restrictions. The question I want to address here is: does this term draw a useful comparison? In my last post I gave a few examples of where horseshoe theory fits. But when we observe agreement at the object level of debate, it can often be a matter of coincidence, and is not necessarily suggestive of deeper similarities. What about at the ideological level?

John Arcto

argues the term “woke right” is nonsensical and strategically detrimental as it only validates the complaint that woke has become a catch all term for “anything right-wingers don’t like”. John might be right to claim the term “woke right”, at least as it’s often used, does more to obscure the underlying drivers of both wokeness and far right ideology than it does to elucidate them. There are meaningful differences between the claims and aims of the “woke left” and the groups being termed the “woke right”, but there are also some deep parallels. In his note, John defined woke as:

the belief that traditional western society is inherently and structurally oppressive to all who aren’t non-trans, straight White men, that this is all pervasive across society, and deconstruction and activism is needed to dismantle these hierarchies and establish equity.

This definition does a reasonably good job of outlining the key beliefs and aims held by the woke left, but it doesn’t get at how they determine those beliefs or how they evaluate and determine the legitimacy of evidence. And this is where we can draw legitimate parallels to some right-wing groups.

Wokism vs. Liberal Progressivism

From the perspective of many on the right, woke beliefs look just like extensions of traditional liberal progressive beliefs. They see the complaints about wokeness coming from classical liberals or those on the center left as hypocritical since we apparently bought into these ideas right up until the moment that they were inconvenient for us. As someone complained in the comments section of my recent post (emphasis mine):

In a western world where DEI ESG CRT affirmative action and intersectionality are all in play any white female advocating societal adjustments (slight ones of course) really fall into the JK Rowling subset where they've been on board with the whole agenda until something emerges that may cost them financially or offends their identity.

I also use this comment as an example because his focus on my sex and race as essential to interpreting my argument suggests another parallel with the woke left, the obsession with defining individuals by, and analyzing their speech within the context of, their identity characteristics, something I drew attention to in my post “I See Horseshoes Everywhere”.

But no, actually! Wokism is not just an extension of progressive liberal ideas, it marks a break with classic liberalism and a postmodern epistemological shift. As

Rick

explains in his post Psychomagnetic Reversals (btw Rick doesn’t post regularly, but I highly recommend the two pieces he has up, both of which are dense with insight):

Woke intolerance is rooted in a postmodern tendency to attack the legitimacy of their critics as interlocutors rather than addressing the substance of the criticism. Of course, when there is no objective reality to adjudicate disagreements, and all that’s left is power relations, why privilege evidence and data? The practical result of this, as institutions become woke, is that good-faith disagreement is met not with open counterargument but with personal attacks and behind-the-scenes chicanery — misconduct charges, investigations, administrative sanctions, termination, expulsion from scholarly and professional associations.

DON’T follow the science

Indeed, if you believe that systemic forces bias all available empirical evidence in favor of certain preferred conclusions, the ones which benefit the powerful, why would you trust such evidence to support or disprove your claims? Under those circumstances anyone with power and anything which legitimates the position of the powerful is suspect. Of course, the difficulty is that there is some truth to what they’re saying. Yes, those in power can put their thumb on the scale in various ways. But they take this fact and catastrophize it to conclude that nothing can really be trusted.

I’ve experienced this maddening dynamic in real life conversation. As you unearth various sources of evidence which fly in the face of the claim being made by your interlocutor, their never-ending cynicism invalidates each one until, exhausted and confused, you finally realize that there is nothing you could provide which they would see as legitimate evidence to falsify their claim. Because, they respond, of course that’s what the data would say because that’s what they, the powerful, want it to say!

As John suggests, wokeness implies a belief in the continued reality of systemic oppression, and the impotence of attempts to address these issues through incremental change. Despite the appearance of meaningful social progress, they call for a radical, revolutionary rethinking of society. But how can one muster up the sufficient motivation to push for this revolution considering the substantial evidence that incremental change has in fact been quite successful? As

Rick

explains:

It’s exciting for activists to think that, despite a general self-satisfaction among the public with its own newfound tolerance, it’s really just a lie — that the same ugly beasts of sexism and racism still lurk but now in some secret compartment of people’s minds — and that the old movement is still needed to root out these beasts and to expunge them once and for all by new, more radical means.

Of course this was a hard sell to critics. Where was the evidence that oppression remained omnipresent, rather than occasional and in decline, when people could tell from their own experience that dramatic social shifts had taken place?

Well of course the evidence doesn’t exist! It’s naïve to expect that those in power would allow it to! And this postmodern turn has afflicted parts of the right wing as well, as Rick also points out.

The Postmodern Right

While John may be correct to point out that the woke left has meaningfully different beliefs from the so-called “woke right”, they are also not opposites. A deep cynicism about the ability of the powerful to obscure the truth by manipulating evidence clearly exists on the right as well. As

Konstantin Kisin

says:

Where the Woke Left has systemic racism, the Woke Right has globalism and the WEF, a shadowy global elite conspiring to deprive us of our rights, civil liberties and bodily autonomy.

Covid vaccine skepticism is one of the more obvious examples of how this plays out. Starting from the reasonable observation that our public health authorities made many mistakes, and in some cases even attempted to obscure the truth in ways they thought would improve outcomes (such as by claiming masks didn’t work at the very start of the pandemic while also saying it was critical that healthcare providers had access to them), they catastrophize and conclude that absolutely nothing they said can be trusted… the vaccine is probably extremely dangerous, and maybe the entire thing was a plan-demic, actually!

But this thinking extends to many other areas. I once had a friend complain to me about how inflation data is “manipulated” in various ways. It’s fair to complain about the methodology and critique changes to it over time. But what I noticed during the resulting conversation (apart from the fact that this debate was well outside his realm of expertise) was the lack of impact my responses to his questions, which explained how certain choices could be seen as sensible without the need to invoke any conspiracy, had on the emotional strength of his conviction. He left the conversation exactly as he entered it, with a deeply felt sense that something very wrong was being done and being covered up to benefit the powerful and mislead the “common man”.

While the postmodern left typically blames vague but ubiquitous forces like systemic racism, the patriarchy or corporate interests, the postmodern right is more likely to imagine actual groups of evil elites are at fault. That said, the powerful enemy on the right can also be more abstract; it’s not uncommon to see feminism or even just women in general being blamed for society’s woes. But either way, they share the cynicism and mistrust of authority and evidence and both sides indulge in resentment politics and self-victimization.

How do the postmodern right and left differ?

Ok, but then what makes them different? Well one thing, which I discussed in my post “Whose welfare are we talking about anyways?”, is that they tend to focus on how cultural norms, laws and technologies affect people at different parts of the distribution. Conservatives tend to focus on how the median person is served (or victimized!) by society, while lefties tend to worry about the most vulnerable among us.

I think the leftist focus on protecting the vulnerable originates in the Christian concern for the downtrodden, which persists within the woke left. However, the focus is now directed mainly to those among the downtrodden who've been victims of oppression or historical marginalization, rather than to the unlucky in general.

Without the supernatural elements of a creator and an afterlife, where all earthly wrongs will be righted, the Christian exhortation to turn the other cheek becomes seen as an instruction to enable evil: silence is compliance (if not violence!). While the supernatural elements and demand for pacifism are dropped, the moral superiority of the oppressed is maintained. 

These values, within the secular context, imply a need to protect the weak and oppressed NOW in the earthly realm, using whatever means necessary (including violence, which is how some convince themselves that 10/7 can be categorized as an “act of resistance” rather than an act of terror). Rather than believing the "meek shall inherit the earth" and reap that inheritance in heaven, they must inherit the earth in the here and now. With no promise of another world, we must create our own utopia.

On the other hand, the right is focused on a lost time or lost values that must be reclaimed (how far back that “lost time” is depends on who you’re talking to). They may want revolution, but they want revolution to transform our society back to what it used to be at some level, rather than into something wholly new. This difference reflects the intuitive difference between what Rick describes as “creative, open-minded progressives vs. conservative protectors of social order”. Both groups play an important role in the direction and pace of cultural development, but conservatives feel the progressive side of the debate has been overweighted in recent decades.

The far right sees our current world as one in which the weak victimize the strong. Where, for instance, “superior” whites are held back by … well normally at some point it ends up being the fault of the Jews. And where strong and productive men are castrated by feminists who’ve also victimized both regular men and regular women since the sexual revolution.

So… is there really a “woke right”? Kind of. But perhaps using the term “postmodern right”, as suggested in Rick’s piece is more clarifying. The conclusion remains that those of us who hold liberal values, who believe that knowledge really can be evaluated rationally and empirically, and that progress can be made, whether we lean cognitively more conservative or progressive, do in many ways have a common enemy.