Yes, the "Woke Right" is real

And it's more correct than the mainstream

Everyone beware! For the Bad Stuff those evil commies tried in the USSR is coming for your culture, through something called “Cultural Marxism”. And, worse still, their worldview is creeping into conservatism, in the form of the dreaded “woke Right”.

And if we accept both that the Right is defined by its opposition to communism, and that “wokeness” really is just communism in the guise of “Cultural Marxism”, then the existence of a “woke Right” really would be bad - not to mention absurdly self-contradictory. Those at whom this assertion is directed, meanwhile, typically reject the framing entirely as a stupid effort to smear, slur, gatekeep, or otherwise unacceptably constrain the parameters of Right-wing thought. But what if the “woke Right” is not just real, but a good thing? What if it’s more correct than the woke Left, which in turn is (as the meme has it) more correct than the mainstream?

Someone I suspect would vigorously dispute this suggestion is anti-woke commentator James Lindsay. Lindsay took aim at the world of Left-wing academic critical theory in the Sokal Squared hoax, back in 2018, and now believes he’s identified the same intellectual deliquescence on the Right. His latest wheeze on this front reworked a passage from the Communist Manifesto, so it referred to “liberalism” rather than “capital” or whatever, then got it published by the Christian Nationalist journal American Reformer. Ho ho, says James: look, the Right is woke, because what could be more woke than the Communist Manifesto, and look, they published it! Cue an internet army of boomercons surfacing to chortle at this shameful wokeness.

Now, to be clear, I have never read American Reformer and don’t really have a stake either way in the worthiness or otherwise of its output. But nor do I have any interest in disavowing the term “woke right”. Rather, I want to show how positing the existence and badness of something called the “woke Right” is an angry (and in a narrow sense classically conservative) rearguard action against the re-enchantment of politics, which is an aspect of the re-enchantment of everything.

And once we see it in this light, what gets decried as “woke” does indeed appear as an epistemological wrong turn. But not, as the “muh Enlightenment values” guys usually imply, because wokeness rejects objectivity and empiricism. Rather, it’s a wrong turn because it offers an account of why objectivity and empiricism should be rejected (or at least complicated), that is directionally correct, but fails to escape materialism. And because it can’t let go of materialism, it has no means of explaining what it perceives except through nihilistic conspiracy theories about ideology and power. And yet here there very often is a difference between the woke Left and Right. Both are “woke” in the narrow sense the Lindsayists decry. But the latter is (at least potentially) in a far better position than its woke Left antagonists to grasp at the good, the true, and the beautiful.