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What Is the ‘Woke Right’?

What Is the ‘Woke Right’?

Gregory Hood

If there is one phrase that sums up the American conservative movement, it is “our principles forbid us from pursuing our interests.” For many years, before joining American Renaissance, I worked in Conservatism Inc., a term I may have coined. In campus activism, in campaigns, and in conservative journalism, I always marveled at the complicated ideological rationalizations the movement used against its own activists, lecturing them why they were not allowed to pursue power. Instead, conservatism seemed almost designed to lose in slow motion. This was coupled with a cynical pursuit of material gain. Joe Sobran said conservatism had become a “game, a way of making a living,” and he was right.

Mainstream American conservatism in the Ronald Reagan tradition was libertarianism awkwardly mashed together with a hawkish foreign policy. The incoherence of this approach, despite Frank Meyer’s attempts at “fusionism,” reflect American conservatism as an ad hoc political coalition against the Soviet Union. Not surprisingly, after the end of the Cold War, it fell apart. After the fall of Communism, Russell Kirk and Pat Buchanan — the closest the movement had to great men — were pushed out of respectability.

This is changing, thanks to Donald Trump. While MAGA populism may draw groans from those who consider themselves to be “elite human capital,” the American Right is growing more sophisticated in how it understands power. It is seriously grappling with power’s effect on culture, the potential dangers of mass democracy, and the false promise that liberalism — classical or otherwise — can lead us to the End of History and freedom from conflict. It is not surprising that Sam Francis is finding a measure of postmortem respectability and that Steve Sailer has found it in this life. A rapidly multiplying network of presses are also republishing overlooked books and original works that challenge the dogmas of our age.

No honest critic can say things are worse than they were under George W. Bush, when we were told that Islam means peace, they hate us for our freedoms, and democracy will bring stability to the Middle East. Things are changing.

Unfortunately, one thing that hasn’t changed is gatekeeping. David Frum’s “Unpatriotic Conservatives” in 2003 is the standard, an ostensible criticism of antiwar conservatives that veers wildly off track into an attack on paleoconservatives and libertarians who didn’t worship the civil rights movement — among their other sins against the respectable right. That attack has not aged well since the catastrophic Iraq War and the miserable Bush Administration. There is a similar effort underway now.

James Lindsay, Konstantin Kisin, Joel Berry, and Seth Dillon are among those trying to promote the term the “Woke Right.” Mr. Lindsay defines it:

A refusal to believe in one’s own agency is obviously destructive. It is one of the most important things driving modern leftism and the underclass. Theodore Dalrymple, in his writings about the British (white) underclass, said that many seemed to believe things just “happened” without their own involvement. A person who stabbed someone would say, “The knife went in.” JD Vance described the same pathology in the white underclass in Hillbilly Elegy. Some blacks seem to believe that there is crime in the inner city because unknown whites drop drugs and guns onto black street corners.

Yet this does not mean that there are no differences in power: some people have a lot more of it than others. We are not autonomous agents with unlimited control over our circumstances. Our identities are mostly unchosen and inherent, and we do not control the way power acts on us. When it comes to race, it doesn’t matter if white people refuse to see themselves as white. Government, media, academia, big business, and other races treat them as whites. That is a more authentic reality than “American,” whatever that means today.

If white people have grievances, airing them doesn’t make them “victims,” as David French and others claim. Their grievances may be real. The cure for powerlessness is power, and that means conflict. That is what politics is.

Consider what Mr. Lindsay says is a free society.

 

That’s all very well, but it’s illegal. The Civil Rights Act makes it impossible for whites or anyone else to choose his community. The lives of whites are dominated by attempts to escape the consequences of forced integration, mass immigration, and dispossession. Look where whites live or send their children to school. Government and powerful private institutions have established a complicated racial caste system of rewards and punishments. Any interracial interaction at work can literally become a federal case. If a company sets up any kind of test or standard that leads to racial disparities, that is proof of racism under the doctrine of disparate impact. Many people on the Right have been discussing this for many years; Mr. Lindsay ignores it.

 

Last year, in my American Renaissance conference speech, I said that Critical Race Theory can be useful to the Right because leftists do not practice what they preach. They never turn their analysis on themselves and are blind to the power they hold. This, I suppose, makes me part of Mr. Lindsay’s Woke Right. I recognize that manipulating language can shape society, not just analyze it. To his credit, at some level, Mr. Lindsay may recognize this too.

 

Like a leftist, he seems to think he’s exempt. Language is a weapon. Russell Kirk famously defined conservatism as the negation of ideology. Yet to claim one’s own views as free of ideology is itself ideology. There are degrees of fanaticism, and certainly the classical conservatism of a Kirk is not the same as the political religion of a Bolshevik. However, analyzing and judging the world is a way of exercising power, not just describing reality.

Mr. Lindsay may believe he’s not doing this, but he is. This is especially clear when he writes about race. For example, he claims that believing in “structural power” means you’re woke. “You could also believe in romanticized historical or traditional values, or in right wing beliefs, that you believe have been illegitimately suppressed by a prevailing power structure that primarily exists to maintain itself by excluding those beliefs,” he says. “That’s Woke Right.”

Of course, the objective existence of deplatforming campaigns, government restrictions on free speech, and antifa attacks on dissidents suggests that such a power structure exists. Believing that everything is just narrative leads to the madness of looking for power imbalances behind every sentence. This has happened to the modern Left, when it tries to deny realities such as the differences between men and women. However, even if language is imprecise and subject to manipulation, it is also the best tool we have to describe reality. Nature withstands the most extreme attempts at manipulation.

By definition, race realists believe race exists and has consequences. One does not need to be a white advocate or even like white people to acknowledge this. Mr. Lindsay takes refuge in race denialism. He inverts the classic progressive case that race was “invented” by oppressors and implies anti-white racism is somehow fake and invented by Communists. Race itself is apparently fake.

There is a saying on the real Right that the “woke are more correct than the mainstream.” This does not mean that the far-left’s policies are better or less destructive, but that they are at least taking their premises to logical conclusions. They try to solve a problem. Moderates may roll their eyes when the “woke” claim that math and science are racist because blacks aren’t good at them. Yet progressives at least recognize that if you have any kind of objective standards, the races won’t be equally successful, and that if you insist on equality, you must see discrimination everywhere. If you disagree, you must defend inequality. All the high-minded slogans about individualism won’t make racial disparities go away.

Of course, most mainstream conservatives are not confident enough to defend inequality, so they fall back on unconvincing explanations, such as “culture,” “low expectations,” or the welfare state. Many intelligent people choose far left “woke” beliefs because they are at least trying to end racial inequality, but inequality is not a problem; it’s a simple fact, like aging, physical needs, or differences in talent. Inequality can’t be “solved” without overwhelming repression.

Egalitarianism is politically powerful because it is impossible. Since races are unequal, discrimination must be everywhere, hidden in institutions or private behavior, and so must constantly be rooted out. A truly free or “classically liberal” society will be an unequal society. Libertarians such as Murray Rothbard argued that race realism predicts such an outcome. A truly “classical liberal” society would have no forced integration, much less the foolishness of “disparate impact.”

Assuming James Lindsay really believes what he is saying about wanting a classical liberal society, it would look a lot like white nationalism. It would look a lot like what America was before 1964 and certainly what was envisioned by the Founders who passed the Naturalization Law of 1790, which limited citizenship to “free white person[s]”. The Founders recognized race and thought it was important; they must have been part of the Woke Right.

Mr. Lindsay is a classic example of what he claims to oppose. There is a long history in the conservative movement of using language games to disguise the nature of politics and justify purges. There is no secret Marxist plot to invent white racial grievance and a complicated ideology. Interests come first and ideology comes later. Politics is about who holds power and whom it is used against. It is less about what — that is to say, the ideological castles in the sky used to justify the exercise of that power.

Patrick Casey writes:

Wokeness is defined by an oppressor/oppressed dichotomy. What he [Linsay] misses is that this dichotomy is a specific one: Whites, traditional Christians, men, and heterosexuals are viewed as the oppressors, and minority groups of various stripes are considered the oppressed. To the extent that other groups, such as Jews, have come under fire from the left, it is because they are viewed as a mere subset of the larger group of white oppressors. Asians and Indians, who have been discriminated against as a result of DEI and affirmative action, are similarly collateral damage in the left’s crusade to elevate minority groups allegedly oppressed by whites. Non-whites who vote for the GOP are attacked because they are seen as supporters of a white supremacist system. It all comes back to hatred of whites.

Why are whites hated? That is a different question with many answers. The simple truth is that we will be hated by someone because conflict between different groups is inevitable. Race is part of human existence and the way we view the world. Just as competition over power is inevitable and so we are doomed to always have politics, we also are biological creatures and part of nature. Politics therefore is partly about biology. Nature is impervious to our wishes and our arguments.

We who write can only try to describe reality as accurately as possible. We have a bias, but nature tests biases. If the world does not reflect our analysis, our analysis fails. Race realism is a powerful explanation of why the world is the way it is. Race denialism isn’t, despite the most powerful forces in the world endlessly pushing it. Ignoring reality to build an imaginary rhetorical wall to keep out the “Woke Right” does not help. In fact, it sounds like the kind of manipulation Mr. Lindsay claims to oppose.

John Adams famously told us that facts are stubborn things. Wishes will not alter the consequences of the biological reality of race and human inequality. Anywhere in the country or the world, in vastly different economic, political, and geographic circumstances, we see the same racial patterns. To be an adult is to accept reality, like it or not. We can do great things for people of all races, but we help no one by lying to them. Perhaps some who lie are well-meaning. I do not think Mr. Lindsay is.

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