Conservatives have long criticized left-wing progressives for being “woke,” a term social justice activists use for waking up to the systemic oppression of marginalized groups by those in power. Now an anti-woke critic is saying that conservatives have also become woke.
James A. Lindsay is the scourge of wokeness, having written searing critiques of cultural Marxism, critical race theory, LGBTQ ideology, and what he calls “grievance studies.” He was one of the hoaxers who wrote bogus papers, such as one on “rape culture” among dogs, which were published in peer reviewed academic journals.
Now he is claiming that many conservatives are thinking and acting in the same way as the cultural Marxists. Kathleen Stock examines this claim in her article for Unherd entitled The Truth About the Woke Right. Here is her summary of Lindsay’s argument: “In his words, the Right has gone ‘woke’: cancelling their enemies, obsessed with identity politics, and conjuring hidden structural forces responsible for oppressing them.”
Members of the radical Right act like woke social justice warriors at their worst. Just like their Left-wing counterparts, they brim resentfully with a sense of grievance and victimhood, banging on about how straight white conservative males suffer under the status quo. They, too, favour free speech for friends not enemies, and “react to disagreement with name-calling, ostracism and bullying”. . . .
Like the Woke Left, the Right believes in the existence of hegemonic power structures, hidden to most people, resulting in the systematic oppression of particular groups. The paranoid structure of choice, according to Lindsay, is the “post-war liberal consensus”, introduced with the sort of elaborate scare quotes and ironic tone he formerly reserved for the existence of things like “the patriarchy” and “systemic racism”. Right-wingers think that the function of this concealed power structure has been to marginalise true conservative thought, plus the groups that conservatives tend to stand up for. It is therefore attempting to raise “critical consciousness about the way the world is organised” — an activity otherwise known as red-pilling on the Right, and awokening on the Left — in order to overturn liberal and Left-wing structures and regain power for themselves.
What do you think about this? Does Lindsay have a point?
He himself is a conservative in the “classical liberal” vein, believing in liberty, individual rights, democracy, and other tenets of American constitutionalism derided by the “new right.”
I would say that what Lindsay describes as the woke right is not the same as the woke left. They may seem like mirror images of each other, but mirrored images are reversed. And yet they may partake of the same. postmodernist worldview, since worldviews permeate the whole culture regardless of political ideology.
Those who stand against postmodernism, both classical liberals (a.k.a., classical conservatives) and orthodox Christians, should be on guard lest they too fall into the temptation of reducing the world to a power struggle of who gets to oppress whom.
Stock, the author of the article, is skeptical of Lindsay’s claims. She thinks the behavior he describes is just human nature. All political ideologies think this way. Even “classical liberals” like Lindsay, who spins the narrative of elite, university-educated “neo-Marxists” exerting power to oppress everybody else.
But what if there really are sinister groups trying to exert power over others? If there are, how are we supposed to talk about them without being some version of “woke”?
Photo by waltarrrrrr via Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
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