Postwar Consensus (Postwar Liberal Consensus; PWC)

Woke Right Usage

As the New Christian Right continues to blossom and absorb the literature and philosophy of Right-wing thought from over the centuries, they are taking on a much more self-consciously anti-liberal framework. While the postwar liberal consensus would emphasize things like individualism, ethnic neutrality when it comes to culture, and America as a nation of universal propositions, the true Right has long opposed all these things.

This was actually one of the key objectives of the liberal consensus in the first place: to counter fascism on the extreme Right and Communism on the revolutionary Left in the aftermath of the Second World War. It needed to adopt for itself an alternative mythos of the political state in the West that might serve as a unifying framework for the objectives of the new US-led Western world order. America as a propositional nation made up of individuals from any background who believed in American ideals… is the framework that served that role. The Conservative Movement—as an actual movement—served to cover the right flank of this new consensus. This is why Bill Buckley had to purge the Old Right.

In any case, what is happening now is that the true Right is emerging, coming forth to take up its eternal function in the dynamics of political discourse: which has always been, in every political epoch, to confront the Left.

…

Now, we live in a world that has been created by this Left-Liberal dialectic. In a sense, the Bill Buckley conservative faction of the Postwar Liberal Consensus did better in shoring up the Right and purging it from polite society than did the liberal faction of the Postwar Liberal Consensus, who fell early on to the New Left. Thus, we find ourselves in a world where the Right has no power, and the Left has nearly completely reached par with the power of the Liberal Establishment.

Source: C. Jay Engel. “Is There a Woke Right?” American Reformer. May 28, 2024.

New Discourses Commentary

The systemic power dynamic currently claimed by the more mainstream currents of the Woke Right as marginalizing them from full participation in society is called the postwar liberal consensus (or sometimes just the postwar consensus), often abbreviated PWC. The war it refers to is World War II, and the consensus it claims is both a national and international consensus to exclude the “true Right,” as they see it, from mainstream politics so that it cannot perform its essential function of restraining the Left. It is, overall, a self-serving Woke (Right) conspiracy theory about the organization and operation of society and thus the unjust marginalization of their own brand of Right-wing (or Rightist) politics.

Like almost all Woke beliefs, the “postwar consensus” touches reality while being a conspiracy theory about an oppressive system of power. One place the idea touches reality is that the postwar (liberal) consensus was allegedly established following World War II with the hope of preventing the rise of either Fascism or militaristic imperialism in the world again. That much is true. There was a concerted effort following World War II to make sure nothing like World War II happened again. Serious discussions were had about the excesses of hypernationalist and ethnonationist projects, including Fascism and National Socialism, and their future prevention, as well as blunting the possibility of a militaristic empire like the Nazis attempted in a world equipped with nuclear weapons.

The PWC is said to have both national and international aspects as well as economic and sociopolitical frameworks. For the international and sociopolitical, the belief is that an international order, largely organized in and around the United Nations and, later, various objects of the Western Alliance (including NATO, particularly), was established specifically to prevent the circumstances listed above while doing nothing to curb Communism, globalism, or “neoliberalism,” which roughly refers to the economic theories of Milton Friedman and their political apparatuses. In deeper versions of the postwar consensus narrative, this international order was always either a Communist or joint “liberal” and Communist plot to slowly take over the world.

On the national level in the sociopolitical dimension, Western Nations under the postwar consensus were expected to limit and expel from the mainstream various aspects of the “true Right,” including nationalists (namely, hyper- and ethno- types), Fascists, racists, and to some degrees isolationists and protectionists, as well as most social conservatives and theocrats.

In the United States, William F. Buckley, Jr., usually referred to as “Bill Buckley,” is alleged to have been a CIA operative who was tasked with this effort through the establishment of an illegitimate conservative movement called “neoconservatism” through his establishment of the National Review and other activities that would define American conservatism ostensibly around liberty and freedom but actually around liberalism, construed as the opposite of conservatism. Here, again, the conspiracy theory touches reality but with the usual narcissistic bent of Woke belief structures. The Woke Right earnestly believes this was done specifically to keep people like them, as the “true Right,” out of mainstream conservative politics so that there would only be “controlled opposition” to Communist/Leftist expansion. Deeper versions of the postwar consensus narrative, this was a deliberate long-term plan to make America and the Western democratic-republics Communist by the end of the 20th century.

In the economic dimension, the focus of the Woke Right narratives about the postwar consensus is primarily on global trade and “unfettered” capitalism, both of which the Woke Right is suspicious of, if not hostile to. Global trade is seen as a form of internationalism that undermines and sells out the national interest, so the postwar consensus is believed to have been erected specifically to accomplish this end against Western nations and nationalists. Of course, the conspiracy theory again touches reality. Multinational corporations, offshoring of jobs and production, and international trade agreements and imbalances all have a number of consequences which exist as tradeoffs. Cheaper goods, for example, comes at the expense of manufacturing jobs domestically, and trade deficits are part of a stronger dollar at home and yet remain inequalities, for another example.

These tradeoffs, like all tradeoffs, have to be weighed in the balance and operate on scales that are both typically slow and always complex—but not in the conspiracy theory or its economic isolationist conclusions. The postwar-consensus-as-oppression narrative holds that the negative aspects of these tradeoffs are all a deliberate plot against our nation and its people and interests while the positives are not necessarily even positive to begin with. For example, having cheaper goods is frequently construed by the Woke Right as generating exactly the same kinds of cultural issues in the market and of commodification obsessed about by the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory on the Woke Left, offering “solutions” like declaring that “the age of cheap goods is over.” Wealthier and more comfortable voices on the Woke Right will indicate that it is a patriotic and nationalistic duty to have a higher cost of living, again in parallel to the “champagne socialist” phenomenon on the Woke Left. One of the greater ironies of the Woke Right is the way in which their critique simply reinvents the Woke Left countercultural and Critical Theory movements of the 1960s and 1970s—notably because the Woke Right often has read these Leftists and agrees with them about their analyses of capitalism, liberalism, and global trade.

Also in concert with the Woke Left, the Woke Right typically blames “unfettered capitalism” as the root cause of these problems (see, for example, Hillbilly Elegy). One claim is that capitalism itself, as it has developed and been encouraged through the postwar consensus economically as well as culturally, has created not just a commodification of everything and commodity-driven culture (exactly like the Frankfurt School). Another is that it has led to the hollowing out of jobs and opportunities due to international agreements and multinational corporate structures, particularly citing the collapse of the manufacturing power of the Rust Belt. A third critique is that unfettered capitalism produces an ever-increasing, unsustainable, soul-destroying proliferation of unnecessary goods and services (what arch– Critical Theorist Herbert Marcuse referred to as the proliferation of “false needs” in One-dimensional Man in 1964, where he leveled the identical critique) rather than directing people toward their “true needs” and some concept of the “common good.”

Thus, the postwar consensus is a systemic power–based obstacle in the Woke Right mind against a “common good” economy, which can go more than one way—and does in differing factions of the Woke Right. That is, they agree with Herbert Marcuse’s analysis but not his solution that we should see a “liberated socialism.” (This agreement is specifically what makes them “Woke Right,” by the way.) Instead, the “common good” is defined differently than in either the Critical Theory literature or the Marxist literature, including Marx himself on the early end or “Degrowth Communists” like Kohei Saito on the contemporary end, while the analysis and big-picture conclusion is the same: capitalism is the problem.

Different factions of the Woke Right propose different solutions to this. The general economic post-liberal (post-liberty) faction embraces as doctrine a Catholic economic model from the 19th century called “distributism” as the economic answer to the postwar consensus. The idea of distributism is that the means of production are “distributed” to the furthest reaches of the economy, which is to say that they are not amassed in large corporations beyond necessity. Distributism is often posited by the Woke Right as an ideal, not as a policy, but to implement it will require it being put into policy like antitrust laws on steroids. The rub for state control lies in deciding which large corporations can stay large “by necessity,” which will always be defined by “stakeholders” who understand the right view on the “common good” and the “national interest.” While not Fascism itself, this practical consequence of the distributist ideal is why distributism lends itself to a Fascist socioeconomic and political organization of society.

Thus we see in the moderate wings of the Woke Right the direction pointed to explicitly by the radical wings, whom the moderates rarely if ever openly criticize (under a loose doctrine of political expediency called “NETTR: No Enemies To The Right”). Some openly call for the Fascist economic organizational structure that indicates that corporations can only be as large as benefits the state, with which they must become intrinsically enmeshed through the “stakeholder” model with the “common-good” state and “the people” or “folk” it serves as the primary stakeholders, represented by the ruling party, of course. Others are more extreme still and openly call for socialism explicitly, but not the “liberated” socialism of Herbert Marcuse or Karl Marx. Instead, they indicate that nationalism and kin relations are a necessary ingredient to making socialism work and thereby openly call for a “national socialism” or “nationalist socialism” to make the socialist redistribution model work. These things are necessary, we’re told, because capitalism itself has failed in all the ways the Woke Left 1960s radicals and Karl Marx said that it would or has, and it has done so finally under the postwar consensus model that has oppressed their political, social, cultural, and economic—including distributism, Fascism, and national(ist) socialism—off the table so that another world war won’t break out.

The usual narrative about the postwar consensus from the Woke Right is that it is a hegemonic power structure, i.e., an unjust systemic power dynamic, meant to marginalize and oppress the “true Right,” not to be confused with conservatives, from whom they distinguish themselves deliberately. It is believed to be very successful as a pervasive system of power and is in need of resisting. It is also regarded to have failed utterly and is therefore in need of disruption and dismantling. The common expression for this article of belief—which again just barely touches reality in a meaningful way—is “the postwar consensus has failed.” This statement is a linguistic Trojan-horse, though, designed to sound true superficially while expressing a suite of underlying ideological commitments the speaker or hearer is invited to investigate more deeply in order to bring them into the Woke Right worldview, which is significantly based on recognizing and resisting the PWC.

In truth, something like the PWC was established but for far simpler reasons than expressed, and Buckley mostly rightly understood that with Communism a major threat in the world that required opposition, it would have to be opposed correctly, and not with the deadly temptations of Fascism. His “neoconservatism” got a lot right—like being oriented against both Communism and Fascism and understanding that global trade is instrumental to relative global peace—but not everything. It is also correct that an international order was established in a way that was completely irresponsible against the threats of Communism and the related (or underlying) theosophical beliefs that, say, underlie the United Nations. It is also true that “neoliberalism” at home and abroad likely exceed their mandates and create negative economic externalities that are relevant particularly on a nationalistic level. These are merely the points of contact with reality from which the Woke Right narratives about the postwar consensus depart. They are, of course, the stars of their own reality show with regard to their narratives about the PWC, which was obviously all about them and their radical politics all along.

One further part of the international order part of the postwar consensus bears mentioning regarding Woke Right narratives, namely the re-establishment in 1948 of the ancient state of Israel, heavily backed by British and American efforts and interests. The rationale for the creation of Israel at the time was specifically to create an opportunity for Jews around the world to have a native homeland and thus escape the ravages of Diaspora, which had affected them quite badly in many countries including perhaps most famously Russia and (Nazi) Germany. The postwar consensus narratives in the Woke Right therefore form a basis for (and I will distinguish here) many anti-Israel, anti-Zionist, anti-Jewish, and antisemitic (conspiracy theory that Jews control the world) narratives popular on the Woke Right. The PWC narratives therefore serve as a nexus and hub for various stripes of Woke Right thought that do not fully agree on issues related to (again, distinguishing) Israel, Zionism, Jews, and antisemitism.

Overall, the Woke Right views on the postwar consensus have to be understood as a hegemonic or systemic power dynamic that unjustly marginalizes them for their politics or even for their identities (say, as whites or Christians, depending on the narrative). It tells a “counterstory” about the history of the world since WWII in a similar way to the counterstories of Critical Race Theory. Since it is a systemic or hegemonic power structure in Woke Right thinking (which is what makes their thinking Woke, by the way), it is not just to be resisted, disrupted, and dismantled, but it is also a site for raising a critical consciousness about the PWC and its effects on world and national politics. The Woke Right narratives about the PWC are a Critical Theory about the PWC, ultimately.

People who are under the sway of the postwar consensus are, therefore, from the perspective of the Woke Right, occupying a false consciousness from which they need to be awakened (Woke up). These people are regarded as complicit fools or enemies, just as with the Woke Right, and a variety of pejorative names are deployed to discredit them and their positions without substance. Some are “neocons,” “libs,” or “shitlibs,” while others are “globalists,” “sellouts,” “shills,” “war whores,” “controlled oppsition,” “on the payroll [of the Jews or globalists],” “Woke Lite,” or “containment.” Still others are “Zionists,” “philosemites,” “shabbos goys,” or just “Jews.” Only the “true Right” has an awakened (Woke) consciousness regarding the postwar consensus, while all others do not sufficiently understand global politics over the last seventy-five years to have a meaningful opinion about it.

Revision date: 6/2/25

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James Lindsay