Self-styled classical liberal and sworn enemy of Christian nationalism James Lindsay published a piece in the American Reformer last week titled “The Liberal Consensus and the New Christian Right.” In the piece, Lindsay inserted heavily edited selections from Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto in an attempt to score points on the kind people at the conservative Protestant publication and to bolster his argument that a certain subset of the right has become just as “woke” as the left.

For some time now, Lindsay has attempted to popularize the term “woke right.” He believes that many of the definitional aspects of the woke left can also be found on the right. His ongoing crusade against the so-called woke right has mainly served to expose his own flawed understanding of wokeness, however.

After the American Reformer posted his article, Lindsay took a victory lap on X. “The flagship Christian Nationalist Woke Right publication has published part of the Communist Manifesto,” he wrote.

That post went viral, amassing nearly 2 million views. But Lindsay’s characterization of his textual Trojan Horse is misleading. One is unlikely to read Lindsay’s piece and conclude that it is anything other than a compelling case for Christian nationalism. Much of it reads like a standard critique of liberalism’s role in the decline in traditional values:

“We can therefore see that modern liberalism—along with its current post-war world order—is itself the product of a long course of development in society, politics, and economics: a series of revolutions in culture and against tradition, but these all share a common theme. In fact, the post-war liberal consensus owes its very existence to that foundation which it now demands we abandon in the name of its inexorable pursuit of what it calls ‘progress.’”

Admittedly, the reference to “a series of revolutions” has a bit of a Marxist twang. But Marx was by no means the only thinker to write on the significance of revolutions and upheavals in history. And while the article does begin similarly to the Communist Manifesto—“A rising spirit is haunting America: the spirit of a true Christian Right”—it is by no means unusual for a non-communist to appropriate Marx’s infamous opener.

In stripping Marxism from Marx’s words, Lindsay’s essay is no longer Marxism—even if it is using the same rhetorical structure. One could perform a similar exercise and transform the Communist Manifesto into a defense of Lindsay’s so-called classical liberalism. Form and content are two very different things, so this isn’t quite the achievement Lindsay seems to think it is.

The extent to which Lindsay modified what he nevertheless shamelessly characterized as “part of the Communist Manifesto” cannot be understated. A detailed post on X from Jim Hanson makes this evident. In the first few paragraphs, for example, few of Marx’s original words remain.

Still, Lindsay was convinced of the existence of a woke right long before attempting this stunt. Let us examine why.

Lindsay boils wokeness down to the oppressor/oppressed dichotomy. This doesn’t mean that he believes wokeness is only this dichotomy, but he regularly points to it as an essential element. In a post on X, he wrote, “Villain: Oppressor. Victim: Oppressed. Hero: Allies in solidarity. That’s what the woke narrative is.”

Lindsay believes that this dichotomy can also be found among a subset of the right, hence his crafting of the cringeworthy neologism “woke right.” In an article on his website, he recounts his recent stunt and further explains his reasoning. Lindsay claims that after reading a few American Reformer articles, it became clear that the publication identifies the primary sources of civilizational decline as “liberalism, liberals, classical liberalism, or their real and mighty bugbear that they call ‘the post-war liberal consensus,’ which they believe oppresses them.”

In other words, Lindsay believes that conservative critiques of liberalism qualify as “Grievance or Woke architecture”—that wokeness is defined by the oppressor/oppressed dichotomy, regardless of the oppressor in question.

There is a glaring problem with this lazy attempt at intellectual history. To consistently adhere to this framework, one would have to characterize many groups throughout history as woke. The Founding Fathers, for example, regularly railed against British oppression. In Common Sense, Thomas Paine writes that “the good people of this country are grievously oppressed” by the British government.

Was Thomas Paine woke? What about the rest of the Founding Fathers, who viewed the British empire as an oppressive force from which they sought to free themselves?

One could also point to Jewish suffering during World War II. Were the Jews in the Nazis’ concentration camps—people who clearly were oppressed by a totalitarian government—thereby woke for happening to notice that they were oppressed? Lindsay, who has also deemed libertarian critiques of U.S.-Israel policy “woke,” might want to tread carefully here.

Lindsay is half-correct, however. Wokeness is defined by an oppressor/oppressed dichotomy. What he misses is that this dichotomy is a specific one: Whites, traditional Christians, men, and heterosexuals are viewed as the oppressors, and minority groups of various stripes are considered the oppressed. To the extent that other groups, such as Jews, have come under fire from the left, it is because they are viewed as a mere subset of the larger group of white oppressors. Asians and Indians, who have been discriminated against as a result of DEI and affirmative action, are similarly collateral damage in the left’s crusade to elevate minority groups allegedly oppressed by whites. Non-whites who vote for the GOP are attacked because they are seen as supporters of a white supremacist system. It all comes back to hatred of whites.

But James Lindsay’s political agenda—the defense of liberalism—takes precedence over accurate analysis. Of course, Lindsay’s liberalism isn’t the bourgeois liberalism of the 19^th century, which Paul Gottfried details in After Liberalism. It is the liberalism of the civil rights era, which, ironically enough, is the origin of much of what we refer to as wokeness today.

Pointing out this obvious hole in James Lindsay’s theory is itself a woke act, according to the man himself. After all, who would criticize liberalism but a woke leftist? This explains his insistence that Marxism, not liberalism, is the root cause of wokeness.

Marxism undoubtedly has played some role in the rise of wokeness in America, as many communists were involved in the civil rights movement. But that movement, like today’s woke left, is more in line with the mass democracy form of liberalism that developed during the 20^th century.

I wouldn’t expect Lindsay, who received a Ph.D. in mathematics (and subsequently went to work as a massage therapist) to have an academic-level understanding of these various political ideologies. Intellectual history is admittedly complicated business, and it is best left to the experts—myself excluded.

Fortunately, Lindsay needn’t look far to rectify his misunderstandings: Chronicles Editor-in-Chief Paul Gottfried wrote a piece just last year in which he judiciously outlined the differences between wokeness and Marxism. But given that Lindsay denied himself a chance to discuss these matters with Gottfried, as Lindsay said, “because he [Gottfried] appears to be an idiot,” the errors of this massage therapist-turned-intellectual historian are unlikely to be remedied anytime soon.