Usage
On the realization that the Right isn’t liberal. 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.
…
As I noted on Twitter, the Right Wing is being called the “woke right” because its detractors cannot think outside the hegemonic presumptions of liberalism, which is grounded in individualism. Whenever you look beyond the veneer of modernity and recognize politics as the clash of elites or emphasize systemic dynamics, you are engaging in “Critical” analysis. This has been a methodology of political science for hundreds of years.
…
But Liberalism is not in reality the way our institutions function. The fact of the matter is that they now serve the overall leftist agenda. The Right can see this very clearly and understands that power is needed to confront new this Leftist hegemony. Liberalism cannot be defended because liberalism itself was always just a veil—all political societies have their hegemonic aspects.
Source: C Jay Engel, “Is There a Woke Right?” American Reformer, May 28, 2024.
New Discourses Commentary
Woke Right refers to right-wing people who have adopted the characteristics and underlying worldview orientation of the Woke Left for putatively “right-wing,” “conservative,” or reactionary causes. They are, as reactionaries, the image of the Right projected by the Left made real by players claiming to be on the Right. That is, they’re right-wing people who act and think about the world like Woke Leftists.
What this entails can be understood on multiple levels, some more superficial than others more profound, some practical and others theoretical or ideological. On the surface, Woke Right are “right-wing” people who have mostly adopted an identity-based victimhood orientation for themselves to bind together as a class (intersectionally) so they can take power from a perceived hegemonic systemic power structure. They claim to do this for a greater good, often called “the common good,” which they believe they uniquely understand by virtue of their alleged outsider status in the prevailing cultural milieu, which represents an oppressive status quo.
This obviously mirrors the circumstance of the Woke Left which sees racial and sexual minorities, women (sometimes), immigrants, trans-identifying people, indigenous peoples in colonized or postcolonial countries, Leftist radicals, etc., as excluded from the central aspects of social, cultural, political, and economic power and seeks to center them for the greater good, which they understand through “double consciousness” as a result of suffering being oppressed. Woke Right relocates this intersectional identity hierarchy in the historical majority groups such as whites, men, straight people, Christians, Rightist radicals (including white nationalists, racists, homophobes, antisemites, Fascists, and Nazis), Establishment figures, etc., which it views as oppressed due to dispossession of their inherited status because of Leftist intersectional activism like DEI.
Going deeper, this “Woke” orientation on the Woke Right describes specifically the awakening to a view of themselves as unjustly alienated cultural elites who alone have the correct understanding of the circumstances to seize and wield power for the common good. They describe themselves as such as uniquely “knowing what time it is” and indicating that there are no ways to fix our current problems, including those caused by the Woke Left, without “a lot of pain,” which we must presume they will be happy to inflict on our behalf. Like the Woke Left, then, they happily offer the trade-off usually used to describe Marxists: people who will ask you to trade some of your liberty so that they might hurt your enemies for you.
The source of their special insight is located, as with the Woke Left, in their identity as an alienated but elect member of society. “As a white Christian male…” is a declaration of positional importance that runs in mirror image to “as a black lesbian socialist,” for example. Believing identity confers a sort of authority in Woke Right constructivism is slightly different than in the Woke Left version. While suffering the injustice of unjust alienation is ultimately what confers the “double consciousness” in all Woke, on the Woke Right the indignity of alienation is more a justification for their right to rule and punish while their “traditional” or “heritage” status is deemed to be the anchor for their superior epistemology and status as knowers and rulers. The Woke Left, by contrast, holds up the outsider status, not a romanticized claim to rightful-insider status, as the basis for epistemic and moral authority. This is because the Woke Right represents a reactionary vein of self-enlightened thinking that identifies with romanticized and mythic heroes and depictions of a past Golden Era (“heritage America, pre-WWII,” e.g.) they could have inherited if not dispossessed from their rightful seats at the center of society.
As a result of their enlightenment-by-dispossession, the Woke Right tends to evaluate positions based on the degree to which one is “allowed” to hold them under the current (Woke Left) hegemony and the broader (classical and modern liberal) status quo they believe upholds that hegemony. The current hegemony suggests, they believe, that one is not allowed to be racist, but it has abused the definition of racism, therefore one should not only be not-racist but also a little, or a lot, racist, for example, though only in ways that are defiant to either or both of the Woke Left hegemony and the “liberal” status quo. This rebellious stance applies also to other taboos, like hating gays, Jews, women, (legal) immigrants, people of non-Christian religion (particularly atheists and Hindus, and strangely not often Muslims), and so on, and blaming their inclusion and participation in society for society’s problems. Woke Right logic would hold that one should be proudly Christian, for another example, not because Christianity is necessarily true or good but because it is supposed to be dominant and “not allowed” or repressed by their enemies. Thus, their Woke enemies set the terms for many, if not most, of their beliefs and behaviors.
Like their Woke Left counterparts, this preference for “outsider” knowledge, including by reaction, confers a deep distrust of expertise and rejection of due diligence. You are “not allowed,” for example, to do reporting without doing your due diligence, so doing due diligence must be an illegitimate imposition of the system upholding the status quo to keep outsider voices out. The workaround for the obvious weakness of this approach is to point to legitimate failures of expertise (critical expertise theory) without considering its broader importance which everyone assumes (qualified pilots should fly planes), to mock those who expect it, to place “outsider” knowledge and amateur research on a par with expert knowledge (both are “knowledges” or “ways of knowing”), and to frame the outsider knowledge merely as raising questions against the prevailing status quo and/or hegemony (“just asking questions”). It can even go so far as to adopt conspiracy theories that expert knowledge is deliberately wrong and misleading and accuse experts of wielding them specifically to maintain their monopoly on knowing. This is in exact parallel to the epistemological designs of the Woke Left.
As we go deeper still, we must consider the etymology of the term Woke Right. On the one hand, the anchor of “Woke Right” is “Right,” which refers to the tendency of all members of this worldview to identify themselves as right-wing. Note that not all will call themselves “conservatives,” and, in fact, many will not, blaming “conservatism” for being part of the broad status quo and irredeemable. “Woke Right” is also derivative to the term Woke, which has been a shorthand for what we must now call the Woke Left. That means the term “Woke” is centrally relevant to what makes the “Woke Right” what it is, rather than using weaker and less specific terms like “far-right” or “Alt Right.” (To be fair, “Woke Right” and “Alt Right” are effectively synonymous, and being Woke is what made the Alt Right “alt” in the first place, but the Woke Left overapplied the term “Alt Right” to everything they didn’t like and ruined that term’s usability.)
The Woke Right is “Woke” because it “woke up” to a view of the world—a specific worldview (Weltanschuuang) and its attendant philosophies, particularly its “ways of knowing” (epistemology) and sociology. The “Woke” worldview in general is that there is an oppressive and powerful “they” out there who set the status quo and control the cultural hegemony, particularly through controlling what can be known and how we know it, and those outside that arrangement have greater access to understanding the nature of reality, social and otherwise, and an obligation to overthrow the existing oppressive system to liberate people from its oppression. This is to be done through Marxist conflict theory (or post-Marxist, perhaps) and critical theory.
Critical Race Theorists believe racial minorities know about the true nature of systemic racism and therefore have to control society to rearrange it to end it, for example. Queer Theorists frame the same dynamic in terms of needing to identify and and dismantle “cisheteronormativity” or “normativities” in general in order to liberate man’s true “Queer” nature. Marxists frame it in terms of the bourgeoisie and their oppression of the proletarian workers, peasants, and “the people.” In all cases, there is a powerful “they” out there arranging society and in need of critical theory and activism: whites, straights, and bourgeoisie.
Furthermore, the “they” and the oppressed “them” othered by the dynamic of oppression are intrinsically classes and those classes are intrinsically in conflict in the Woke worldview. Society is not arranged as a large single mixture of people with various social and political locations and interests but as dualistic (in the Manichean sense) with the oppressors being evil false elites and the oppressed being divine victims alienated from their true state of Being and kept in the ignorance of “false consciousness” by their oppressors. Being “Woke” is therefore awakening out of false consciousness into some “true” consciousness. Generally, this is a critical consciousness of the arrangement of society, but it could be (critical) race consciousness, class consciousness, feminist consciousness, etc. Part of that consciousness means knowing that the duality in society represents a fundamental conflict if not a war between the false elites and the alienated true elites who must be awakened further and led by their Woke comrades who “know what time it is.”
Put more straightforwardly, Woke means adopting a critical consciousness and a Marxian or post-Marxian conflict theory about the arrangement of society and believing this represents having “woke up” to the real truth about society and its organization. The adoption of critical consciousness implies a critical constructivist (that is, Woke) view of the world that holds that reality is a consequence of consciousness, consciousness is the result of perception (these two representing constructivism), and that perception is contoured by one’s position or location with regard to sociopolitical and/or economic power in society as understood through the conflict theory at hand.
The Woke Right believe the liberal status quo of Western Civilization developed and concretized a hegemonic power structure after the ravages of World War II that they call the “post-war consensus” or “post-war liberal consensus” (or close variants). The lesser claim about this “consensus” is that after World War II the Western democracies gathered to figure out how to prevent another such calamity through ending militaristic empire and, particularly, Fascism and whatever else they might mean by “true Right-wing thought.” Thus, they set up an oppressive order to “heritage” citizens and right-wing Radicals while opening the door to constant erosion and subversion by the Marxist Left that they could have prevented, allegedly. This made all “conservatives” into de facto liberals who uphold the “liberal” status quo and maintain the hegemony against the “true Right,” which they believe they represent uniquely. The greater claim about this “consensus” that is sometimes made is that this was a deliberate pact between the Western democracies and the Marxists, perhaps facilitated by Soviet infiltration, so that by the twenty-first century global Communism would be unstoppable.
They are outsiders to this “consensus” and its meaning- and knowledge-making apparatuses, and they are so self-consciously (i.e., they’re Woke to themselves and their circumstances). This enlightened status (which is critical constructivist by definition, i.e., Woke) allows them uniquely when a claim about truth from the “Establishment” or its representatives is valid or invalid based on whether or not that claim supports or critiques the status quo and its hegemony. This is exactly how the Woke Leftists determine which scientific and legal claims, for example, are “valid” and “invalid” as well.
One obvious and key result of this disposition toward knowledge and knowledge seeking, authentication, and transmission that the Woke Right shares strongly (but differently) with the Woke Left is a penchant for “outsider” or revisionist history. Where the Woke Left gave us a rewrite of America’s founding in the 1619 Project, claiming America was always built on slavery and is, in fact, a “slave-ocracy,” the Woke Right is particularly interested in revisionist history around both the American Founding through pre-Lincoln years (particularly with regard to America’s status as an explicitly Christian or white nation) and World War II (particularly with regard to questioning the Allies’ motivations versus those of the Nazis and Axis), not to mention the history of European “Enlightenment” thought, which they completely butcher by blending it all together in a miasma of deliberate confusion. The goal with these endeavors is the same as with their counterparts on the Woke Left: to rewrite history so that it supports their vast conspiracy theory against their groups and positions them as the rightful liberators of the malaise of illegitimate hegemony.
The Woke Right also understands, like all Wokes, that neither theory nor practice (activism) alone is adequate, but that both are needed in tandem. That is, it is not enough for them to put forward concepts like Carl Schmitt’s “unbound executive in the state of exception,” the “friend/enemy distinction” as defining of politics, or his “total state,” or like the elitism of the Italian school of elite theory, e.g., from Gaetano Mosca. These ideas must be put into social, cultural, economic, and political practice. Thus we find Woke Right activists proudly and eagerly borrowing criticisms and tactics (“but not conclusions!”) from the Critical Theorists, Saul Alinsky (author of Rules for Radicals), Cultural Marxist Antonio Gramsci, the French Postmodernists, FDR, and Karl Marx himself. For example, there is an openly Gramscian wing of the Woke Right that seeks to recreate Gramsci’s march into the institutions to set up their own counterhegemonies within them to transform culture from within its institutions first.
As with the Woke Left, these ideas come from a variety of philosophers and theorists the Woke Right rely on that almost no one else has paid attention to or heard of. The “Crown Jurist of the Third Reich,” Carl Schmitt, takes pride of place, but so do the Italian elite theorists (Mosca and Pareto), the Scottish forefather of Fascism Thomas Carlisle, the Fascist wizard (literally) Julius Evola, and others, including contemporaries like Hans Herman Hoppe, Gladden Pappin, Patrick Deneen, and Paul Gottfried. This list also includes former Trotskyite and analyist of the “Managerial State” James Burnham, who is popular in particular with the Gramscian wing. Burnham outlined a new theory in his critical analysis of liberalism that frames the “Management Class” in the place of a new bourgeoisie, and the Gramscian Woke Right fill in the conflict theory by framing “the people” in the right-wing populist sense as their antagonistic “proletariat,” creating something of a MAGA Marxism within which some of the Woke Right operates.
Like their counterparts on the Woke Left, the primary concern of the Woke Right is power, or as they frequently phrase it, “winning.” They, they tell us, are “tired of losing honorably,” which is what they sometimes give as a functional definition of “conservative”: someone who loses by keeping to “muh principles.” They openly state that the Right needs to be willing to seek power and to wield it, and they use this to distinguish themselves from conservatives, who are, in fact, their primary targets in activism (Wokes always attack the moderates in politics closest to their own orientations).
One way to characterize the Woke Right, then, that is more blunt and to the point is to say that where the Woke Left is a form of applied neo-Marxism, the Woke Right is a form of applied neo-Fascism arising in reaction to it. Whether from drawing inspiration from Fascists (Italian or Spanish) or National Socialists, or repeating their programs and mistakes for the same bad reasons, the Woke Right’s bid to create a “heritage”-based and/or ultra-nationalistic collectivist movement centrally organized around coveting power and desiring to apply it can hardly be described in other terms. If history is any guide, we can be sure that repeating these errors will also repeat their tragic conclusions, after a fashion.
Ultimately, the Woke Right has many factions, more than are discussed here, that vary in their adherence to various views, including at times open Fascism, Nazism, antisemitism (which is their most visible feature in the broader public), white nationalism, right-wing radicalism, edgy transgressivism, and more, and it is significantly driven by a developed purity-spiral culture reminiscent of the Woke in which (mostly young) people compete to be more “based” while saying and doing things that are increasingly debased (Woke is always an inversion of reality). Here, they misuse the word “based” to mean “transgressive, but against Woke Left and liberal norms” rather than “based in reality and courageous enough to be plain about that.” Typically it involves making transgressive statements with regard to race, ethnicity, sex, sexuality, Jews, religion, or pushing the boundaries of extremism with regard to policies they want for the Trump 47 White House, typically those violating the Constitution. This is mostly a social ritual and youthful expression of rebellion and would be harmless except that it is a perfect parallel to its counterpart on the Woke Left from a decade ago.
Adjunct reading:
I strongly recommend this summary of “Woke Right” by Ani O’Brien, which is highly accessible.
Revision date: 4/30/25
