The Anti-Woke and the Anti-White

I write in response to Alexander Riley’s generous and helpful review of my book, American Multiculturalism and the Anti-Discrimination Regime (in the April 2024 Chronicles, “The Expanding Civil Rights Bureaucracy”), to address the range of competing approaches to identity politics or wokeness or political correctness that help and hinder our understanding of these phenomena. I am provoked to do so mainly by one alternative interpretation, troubling to me, now being made prominent by Jeremy Carl’s recent work, The Unprotected Class (embraced, seemingly, by Chronicles, which reprinted an excerpt from Mr. Carl’s book in its May issue).

We are beginning to see and understand wokeness rather than just react to it, the illumination being mainly the product of conservatives’ critical engagement. In our efforts to figure it out, roughly four broad schools of explanation or critical interpretation have emerged that vie for attention among conservatives. 

First are those commentators who focus on bad ideas. Recently, an army of these has lined up behind claims about how postmodernism and/or neo-Marxist or cultural Marxist theory have taken over in our universities and elsewhere.

A second echelon focuses on troubling claims and counterclaims of the contending groups: blacks versus whites, women versus men, LGBTQ versus cisgender straights, etc. (Mr. Carl’s book fits here, focusing on race and advancing the cause of whites.)

Third, borrowing neo-Marxist terminology, another approach marks the “long march through the institutions,” or, in other words, the adoption of the woke mindset in every field of human endeavor: education, business, religion, journalism, entertainment, literature, the arts, every academic discipline, the military, medicine, psychiatry, etc.

Finally, there are those who would emphasize the role of civil rights law: Richard Epstein, David Bernstein, Shep Melnick, Christopher Caldwell, and others.

Prof. Riley’s review implicitly puts me in this last group, but I would like to take the opportunity his review affords to emphasize briefly the case for an analysis that goes beyond law and bureaucracy, narrowly construed, to include the political order as a whole. I do not say this because I think Prof. Riley missed it; antidiscrimination politics, as he notes, is no respecter of any line between public and private. A broader “regime” point of view (this might sound like Gramsci but I claim to march behind Aristotle) permits all of the competing approaches mentioned above to be seen together as a unity. That is more or less immediately evident in the case of the “march through the institutions” perspective; what is on the march is the logic of an aggressive antidiscrimination principle and nothing else. 

What is needed is an account of the politics of civil rights that embraces not just law but also, and all-at-once, ideas, social institutions, and the effect of all of the above on groups—and, most importantly, upon the individual as citizen under the rule of the antidiscrimination order.

Interpretations from intellectual history in particular have done much to distract us from the main game. My book does pay attention to ideas, but as Prof. Riley points out, I focus on the ideas that arise out of the civil rights revolution itself. Despite appearances to the contrary, concepts like “identity” and “intersectionality” have a clear political origin and meaning. Likewise, a whole new moral terminology—“respect,” “inclusion,” “equity,” “social justice”—have become necessary because of the political uses to which they are put. 

All of these terms, of course, existed prior to the civil rights revolution, but they have a new relevance, and are related to one another in a clear way, because they operate within an obvious political horizon. 

Political history, not intellectual history, is key. Fixating on the influence of postmodernist theory by itself, for example, is very misleading. A merger of radical theory and antidiscrimination politics did emerge in the 1990s, but in postmodernist multiculturalism, radical ideas were parasitic on a preexisting political foundation. Today, our preoccupation with cultural Marxism misleads in a similar way.

One admitted omission: my book does not address directly the competing, and often contentious and very angry, claims, accusations, and demands of the various groups—racial and ethnic, gender, sexual orientation, etc.—put forward under the new order (though I do address the general logic of the antidiscrimination regime’s “group politics”).

There might be reasons to take that level of civil rights debate seriously, but my neglect there is at least partially vindicated by the spectacle of a call for the open racialization of politics that comes to light in Mr. Carl’s recent book. He would have conservatives adopt radical identity politics for whites. When Mr. Carl calls on whites to see themselves as victims of “anti-white racism and discrimination”—and tells them to “organize themselves,” institute boycotts, recruit allies, and “engage in civil disobedience,” he is throwing fuel on a dangerous fire. If antidiscrimination politics divides Americans and makes them turn on one another, as I show it does, the answer is not for whites to double down on its logic. 

If we abandon the general level of principle—the plane of ideas, law, and the political order broadly considered—to embrace raw group conflict and a politics of angry accusation and counter-accusation, things are going to get worse, fast. It is the job of conservatives to restrain such impulses. Taking a “regime” approach to civil rights politics could help us stay on that higher plane without at the same time obscuring the other, lesser and sometimes lower, dimensions of our political order.

—Thomas Powers

---

Jeremy Carl replies:

Prof. Powers writes of his concern regarding the approach to anti-white racism as outlined in my book The Unprotected Class, which was excerpted in the May issue of Chronicles. As best I understand him, it seems that we actually have quite a bit in common with respect to our diagnosis of the problem, but differ sharply in our assessment of what to do about it.

The oddest element of Powers’ critique is that he seemingly ignores the entire central thrust of my book in favor of critiquing my suggestions for action—suggestions that I consider important, but ultimately peripheral to my book’s core purpose. Perhaps because he has spent a lot of time on the subject my book addresses, he is already convinced of its thesis regarding the existence and importance of anti-white racism. The average American, however, and even the average Republican, is still often not aware of the extent of anti-white racism and discrimination today.

So, the bulk of my book is dedicated to marshaling the evidence that anti-white racism does indeed exist, through data, anecdotes, and logical arguments. I consider that demonstration to the fair-minded reader to be my book’s primary intellectual contribution. When we have consensus on the reality of the situation for whites in America we can begin moving towards a unified political action. Of course, one is free to agree or disagree with my particular proposals for subsequent political action, but they are peripheral, not central, to my core argument. 

I strongly agree with Prof. Powers’ view that to understand the modern left one should pay far more attention to political than intellectual history—yet Powers does not seem to follow his own advice. His politics are those of the seminar room, not the situation room. I say this as someone who has regularly participated at high levels in actual political advising and decision making.

Powers claims that I “call for the open racialization of politics.” But I do no such thing. I have merely observed the open racialization of politics against white Americans that has been going on for decades. Then I have suggested that white Americans work in conjunction with Americans of other races to defend their own interests within the context of America’s traditions. Importantly, I clearly and explicitly do not suggest they do so in the name of white identity, but simply in the name of the inalienable rights that all Americans should enjoy, and of which white Americans are being deprived.

Yet, for someone who claims to be highly concerned with principle, Prof. Powers seems remarkably unconcerned with actual truth. To reduce America’s current racial disagreements to the “politics of angry accusation and counteraccusation” implies that the truth or falsity of the accusation is somehow irrelevant. If my claims of anti-white discrimination are false, then they are indeed pernicious and need to be aggressively refuted. If they are true (and they are), we need to pursue a strategy to vindicate them politically.

Prof. Powers’ notion that “it is the job of conservatives to restrain such impulses” betrays a “true conservative principles” style of political naivete that is dangerous in the current year. Prof. Powers pretends that “principle,” “ideas,” “law,” and political order can be divorced from actual political realities. Conservatism, Inc. has been trying Prof. Powers’ strategy for decades now and has been absolutely routed. We will continue being routed until we try a more effective strategy.

Furthermore, Prof. Powers, like most conservatives in traditional academia, seems terrified of an interlocutor to the left who might call him a racist. He suffers from no fear of any equivalent censure from the right.

Prof. Powers’ passivity is shocking given that he is based in Kenosha, arguably  ground zero of recent anti-white activity. Perhaps he should explain to the six people killed and 62 people injured in the 2021 Christmas parade in nearby Waukesha that we are not allowed to discuss the explicitly racist motives of the attacker for fear of “throwing fuel on a dangerous fire.” This occurred in the same jurisdiction that came close to putting Kyle Rittenhouse, a white teenager, in jail for the crime of successfully defending Kenosha from violent felons who threatened his life.  It is not “racializing” the issue to point out the left’s anti-white racism and to attempt to organize politically to counter it.

As Alexander Riley wrote in his review of Prof. Powers’ book on civil rights in the April Chronicles: 

Given Powers’ account of this massive apparatus and the nearly unanimous support it receives from elites, the reader may be forgiven for finding it difficult to see how he manages to end as optimistically as he does. “We are … compelled to hope,” he intones, that the antidiscrimination regime can be thwarted. Yet he gives no real foundation for his hope.

And this is indeed the problem. When all we have are the paltry bag of tricks that Prof. Powers wants the right to play with (and worse, attempts to police others on the right to play with), there is no real foundation for hope—just the same sorts of “beautiful loser” strategies that Conservatism, Inc. has pushed for decades, leading to defeat after defeat.