The “woke right” smear is just the new version of an old tactic the conservative establishment uses to try to marginalize critics to their right. This time it won’t work.

A damning accusation has been heard that resounds throughout the establishment conservative stratosphere. True conservatism, we have learned, is being threatened by a “woke right.” Supposedly, this unfortunate development shows a frightening resemblance to the woke left and, in fact, looks like a rip-off of that more widespread phenomenon. Like its leftist counterpart, this woke right is critical of American culture and profoundly pessimistic about the possibility of saving it. It also calls for radical change in our political life and rejects the moderate piecemeal approach to political problems that characterizes Burkean gradualism or Kirkian cultural conservatism. 

Perhaps the most damning thing about this woke right is that it borrows some of its critical observations from leftist thinkers. These suspect inspirations include the Italian proto-Marxist Antonio Gramsci, Karl Marx as an analyst of class war, and at least the first generation of Frankfurt School Critical Theorists. The fact that those on the right who have come under attack have incorporated these leftist sources selectively does not detract from their sin of having shamelessly consulted enemy thinkers whom the movement has declared to be off-limits. If our minds were less tainted by evil, we would only be citing those sources that bear the imprimatur of the conservative establishment.

But this may be a case of the pot calling the kettle… (no, I won’t stray into politically incorrect similes!) Over the last 30 to 40 years, polite American conservatism has absorbed so much from the social and political left that having paleoconservatives quote Gramsci seems, by comparison, small potatoes. Conservatism Inc. has already more or less signed off on gay marriage, adult sexual transitioning, various forms of feminism, the state worship of Martin Luther King Jr., and most of the anti-discrimination regime, (that is, up until the recent descent of that dispensation into total madness).

Over the last 30 to 40 years, polite American conservatism has absorbed so much from the social and political left that having paleoconservatives quote Gramsci seems, by comparison, small potatoes.

We won’t hide the fact that we on the traditional right have sometimes turned to long-dead leftist thinkers to understand the managerial, therapeutic left which has taken over contemporary Western societies. But, more importantly, we have resisted that regime far more doggedly and at greater personal sacrifice than those who now call us “woke right.” Our critics have often justified their efforts to marginalize us by citing our stubborn opposition to what they view as social progress. 

Those who fling the label “woke right” at us and everyone who holds a political position to the right of classical liberalism include the term’s originator, James Lindsay, as well as the editors of mainstream conservative or neoconservative publications such as Law and Liberty, Commentary, and the Babylon Bee. Those battling the “woke right” know what they hate, but they don’t seem to be able to define that enemy in a consistent way. In an appearance on Roseanne Barr’s podcast, Lindsay and his hostess discussed how this enemy on the right is anyone who strays from certain libertarian premises into something that looks like social conservatism. For Michael Lucchese at Law and Liberty, the enemy is right-wing populists and supposed “right-wing Marxists” like me. For his colleague John Grove, the woke right consists of those whom the German philosopher Eric Voegelin would have considered “gnostics” and who were tied to an ancient Jewish and later Christian heresy. Finally, for the neocons, the woke right includes anyone who disagrees with the neocons’ foreign policy—particularly Tucker Carlson, who regularly pillories neocon talking points on The Tucker Carlson Show.

Another frequent target of attacks on the woke right is the “neoreactionary” Curtis Yarvin, who has been widely discussed and interviewed across the political spectrum. Yarvin’s appeal may derive from the fact that what he says often sounds like a put-on. If you’re looking for a right-winger who seems to dwell on another planet, then please start here. Yarvin likes to lecture on how he plans to restore feudalism, turn Trump into a king for life, and bring back his own version of the Middle Ages, but without a Christian slave religion. For the conservative establishment and their talking partners on the left, this romantic reactionary stands for a right they have no qualms about publicizing. Why not? He serves their purpose in making the right seem laughably archaic, and he does so much better than, say, paleoconservatives at Chronicles, who draw upon an intellectually rich and still very relevant conservative tradition. 

For me personally, it is mind-boggling to be lumped together with Carlson and other so-called woke rightists, although I don’t know most of my alleged collaborators in infamy. I’ve also stated my policy differences with others on this list, but no matter. Once put in bad company, I am required to stay there. It is also hard to locate a unified argument in the scolding of the woke right because, as far as I can tell, one doesn’t exist. Instead, we have the belittling or demonization of individuals and tendencies that offend the latest generation of self-appointed conservative gatekeepers such as Lindsay, who not too long ago was a man of the left.

Their explanation for this unkind treatment is (let me guess!) that we are extremists who must be isolated. They even try to group all the baddies to the left and the right of the establishment by embracing a once-popular notion that I heard from my college instructors in the early 1960s. According to these teachers, the “extremes come together” and there is more that these extremes have in common with each other than with those nice people in the middle who reject them. Further, those who represent the extremes don’t believe in “liberal democracy,” as my pedagogues defined that term based on their allegedly superior wisdom. 

The notion that extremes touch may be true in some cases, but what strikes me as more pertinent is how different these extremes usually are. As a historian, I would never mistake 19th-century conservatives who favored a traditional hierarchical and preferably agrarian society with socialist revolutionaries. Entities that may be equally unacceptable to later historical critics do not become similar in nature by that fact. And with due respect to the painfully conformist Conservative Inc. editor of National Review, Rich Lowry, I would never mistake the half-naked hellraisers who torched Los Angeles in June for the “catastrophically wrong” Southern states-rights advocate John C. Calhoun, or for Senator Harry Byrd of Virginia in his defiance of the Supreme Court’s decision on segregated schools in the 1950s. (See Lowry’s June 13 op-ed in the New York Post, “Anti-ICE rioters are just as out of line as anti-black racists in ’62”.) Just because the two chronologically, culturally, and socially separated groups opposed the American central government, does not mean that they were in any other way alike.

Even a callow youth can realize that not all figures past and present with whom one disagrees were saying or doing the same things. Drawing parallels only works if they show striking likenesses. Otherwise, they are clumsy or tendentious nonstarters. Even if I spent a week pondering this problem, I couldn’t explain why the LA hellraisers or the Seattle Autonomous Zone that soared into existence during 2020’s Summer of Love should remind me of the antebellum Southern planter class. But allow me to guess! The simplificateurs terribles who engage in this nonsense are showcasing their rejection of white racists by beating up on long-dead white slaveowners and their fellow white Southerners.

The conservative establishment likes the “woke right” smear because they want us to believe the woke left and the woke right are more alike than different. Of course, those who tell us this really don’t believe it. They habitually try to coax members of the woke left onto their channels and websites, in a desperate attempt at dialogue. It is not the woke left, but the unauthorized right, that these critics loathe and have tried to marginalize. As justification for this ostracism, those who conjure up an invented woke right throw all their hated targets into the same “extremist” dumpster. 

The conservative establishment habitually tries to coax members of the woke left onto their channels and websites, in a desperate attempt at dialogue. It is not the woke left, but the unauthorized right, that these critics loathe and have tried to marginalize.

Why this is happening should be clear. Those who talk out of turn on the right must be denied respectability, and every now and then, the well-heeled conservative movement takes special steps to further delegitimate these troublemakers. We’re supposed to discern in these denunciations not an internal purge, but the removal of an impurity trying to attach itself to the one and only conservative faith. The target of this Con Inc. attack, we’re supposed to conclude, cannot be truly conservative, for conservatives like to claim that they are known for tolerating a wide diversity of views.

In fact, according to this Con Inc. interpretation, what distinguishes “conservatism” from the other side is its amiable tolerance. Guests on Fox News can debate those of differing opinions and then shake hands and remain friends. But let’s be honest about this! That circle of tolerance doesn’t quite embrace everybody. None of the approved conservatives on Fox News would ever hang with those labeled “woke right.” 

Yes, I know we’ve been around this block before, but this time it looks different. We are witnessing not a replay of the purges that delighted neoconservatives, their sponsors,  and their hangers-on in the 1980s and 1990s, but what may be a less promising situation for the winners in that war. Today, it is the younger generation that is opposing an older ossified establishment, and it is allied to a populist right that has the wind at its back. Disparaging this new generation as “woke right” isn’t going to be as effective as past purges.

Our conservative gatekeepers have tried to live with these unavoidable changes, but they’ve closed ranks against anything on the right that they’ve not yet been forced to accept. They therefore continue to rail against certain undesirables on the right, whom they implausibly depict as imitations of the left. While there is a real, highly intelligent opposition to these powerbrokers and their handservants on the right, it is not the confused images of a boogeyman that they’ve manufactured. Moreover, if the paleo losers in the conservative wars of the 1980s were generally viewed (albeit not always correctly) as the older combatants, now the “ woke right” has youth and vitality on its side. An imaginatively and spiritually desiccated conservative establishment is therefore getting desperate in its attempts to stop it.