A new term is gaining traction on social media and in political discourse that may surprise recent recruits to the conservative culture war: “woke right.” To many, this will seem an oxymoron. For most people, “wokeness” is synonymous with hard left politics, and before conservatives successfully saddled “woke” with a host of negative connotations, progressives and leftist radicals openly and proudly identified as “woke.”

Indeed, the conservative war against woke only began as a reaction to Democrats’ embrace of wokeness, which characterizes the whole of American life as a nefarious plot to enable discrimination and identitarian oppression, thus requiring “social justice” advocates to devote themselves to the cause of dismantling our society. How, then, can there be such a thing as the woke right?

There isn’t much clarity about what the purveyors of the term “woke right” mean by using it. The phrase seems primarily to be a rhetorical pejorative to condemn right-wing activists who use some of the same tactics as the political left to gain control of the nation’s institutions. These tactics include a willingness to use state power as a means to install their ideology as the “operating system” of public life, a refusal to compromise with the opposition, and a tendency to characterize those who disagree as enemies rather than as “negotiating partners.” Critics of the so-called woke right assert that the people to whom the term refers have substituted the “proper” rationalistic concerns of “true” and “false” with a form of Gnosticism that sees “good” and “evil” as the lodestars of political life.

But these accusations, in fact, are just a clever way to mask the  true frustrations of the accusers. It’s not that the right has become too aggressive—it’s that they have become too effective. As Michael Anton has suggested, conservatives are no longer playing the role of the Washington Generals, the perennial opponent of the Harlem Globetrotters whose job it is to go out night after night and accept their defeat cheerfully. The disingenuousness of their critique should make us wary of anyone who talks disparagingly about a purported woke right. These critics harbor a bizarre nostalgia for the recent past, when the left were the constant aggressors, moving our society further down the road of statist, secular progressivism.

Unfortunately for them, “we are not going back.” Still, these critics are not wrong in noticing there has been a major change on the right—a change in attitude, tactics, and strategy. But if woke right won’t do, what should we call this more muscular segment of the right that wants to make the most of what may be a once-in-a-lifetime realignment of our political reality?

Many (including me) have lamented the inadequacy of “conservative” to denote this new mode of engagement. Perhaps the best way to describe the new vitality on the right is a shift from conservative politics to “revanchist” politics.

Accordingly, revanchism should replace conservatism in our political vocabulary. This substitution isn’t merely rhetorical. The word revanchism implies a fundamentally different way of inhabiting the political sphere, one that is antithetical to conservatism. Substituting these terms in our lexicon will help us to keep their practical differences at the front of our minds, which will be essential to continuing our recent political success in a post-constitutional context.

What is revanchism? Certainly, it’s an unfamiliar term to most people. A conservative tries to keep something valuable from being lost. A revanchist, on the other hand, aims to reclaim what has already been lost. The values and ideas that made America the strongest nation on the planet are not in danger of being replaced, they have been replaced. They are now lost. If we are to have any hope of reclaiming what they took from us, we need a constant reminder of the failure of the old approach. Keeping the memory of that failure alive will press us to develop new strategies and tactics: forms of political action designed not with the goal of keeping something from being taken from us, but rather of taking back something that was (and is) rightfully ours.

The popular ignorance of the word revanchism is a benefit to us. We have an opportunity to define it on our own terms—before the Left can poison it with negative connotations, as they have done so successfully since the 1960s with “conservatism.” As an adjective, Webster’s online dictionary defines revanchist as “relating to a policy designed to recover lost territory or status.” As a noun? “One who advocates or fights for the recovery of lost territory or status.” But while the term is unknown to most Americans, it is familiar to the class of experts who work ceaselessly to consolidate the gains won by the left through their cultural revolution. Revanchist, for them, is a slur. And whether you consider yourself a revanchist or not, if you’re reading this, the global elites probably do.

Conservatism is fundamentally a defensive mode of engagement—it starts from the premise that we are in possession of something valuable, and that we are able to defend it. But sadly, that is no longer the case. Conservatism lost, and the things it was trying to defend were taken from us. Faced with that reality, it is futile to proceed from a defensive orientation. What point is there in defending something you have already lost?  

No. For those who love America’s traditions, its people, its culture, and its (former) way of life, we only stand a chance by playing offense. We need to take those things back. Thus, revanchism is the only sensible itinerary for those who oppose the radical left, which insists that our traditional norms, values, and beliefs are now part of the benighted past.

It’s worth taking inventory of what we have lost in recent years, if only to underscore that the defensive posture assumed by conservatism is a recipe for total defeat. Marriage—long defined as a sacramental, lifelong relationship between a man and a woman—has been reduced to a temporary legal partnership that can be extended to any adults, regardless of their sex or (soon) their number. Young children are being indoctrinated with a radical sexual ethic in the schools, which claims that men can become women and vice versa—while institutions encourage stiff social penalties for those who affirm the immutability of biological sex. White people—the ethnic majority of the country—are made objects of open hatred in popular culture. Voting, long an exclusive privilege of citizens, is rapidly being expanded to illegal immigrants. The Constitution and its institutions (the Supreme Court, the Electoral College) are attacked as barriers to proper governance. In short, the table of values that guided our society has been entirely inverted. What options are available to those who oppose this new reality except for revanchism?

Revanchists fight. Revanchists will not stand idly by as their opponents pilfer their inheritance, bit by bit, all while denying that their theft is an act of good will, concealing it under the banners of “social justice,” “inclusion,” “equity,” “progress,” and “multiculturalism.” It is the willingness to fight—and to recognize the thieves as such—that scandalizes the critics of the woke right. They see revanchism as political impropriety—a violation of procedural norms that the left has long since decimated. In the face of such indecision and willful blindness, freedom-loving Americans must reject the defensive maneuvers that failed us.

We must embrace the label of revanchism to constantly remind ourselves of the realities of the challenges we face and the need for offensive strategies. No longer conservatives, we must deepen our commitment to the revanchist fight. If we do, we stand a good chance of reclaiming much of what was taken from us. And when we have, we may one day again have the luxury of a conservative politics—from a restored position of power.