‘Woke Right’ Is a Useless Term
The formulation doesn’t quite work, or at least obscures as much as it illuminates.
When Vice President J.D. Vance unearthed an old clip of Rep. Ilhan Omar seemingly calling for racial profiling of white men, little did he know a wave of online chatter about the “woke right” would follow.
It’s a phrase that is often used to describe resurgent racialism and its influence on more mainstream conservatism, though some people appear to mean conservatives who are particularly sensitive to anti-white rhetoric on the Left. The two groups can overlap, to be sure, but are not really the same.
Omar would say that this racialism and extremism among a subset of white men is what she wants the government “profiling, monitoring, and creating policies to fight” rather than white men in general, though it would not be surprising to learn she harbors such suspicions about most people a few millimeters to the right of Sen. Susan Collins. But “woke right” is more commonly used by conservatives to describe other people who consider themselves, or market themselves to, conservatives.
It’s a clever way of categorizing online provocateurs who range from the edgy to the genuinely bigoted, with many trying to leave ambiguous where on this spectrum they truly lie. This terminology also does capture some real truths.
Racialists of the right and left are often more alike than they care to admit. They are also mutually reinforcing. It is hard to imagine right-wing racialism having more than a marginal appeal if it weren’t for the excesses of wokeness, from self-flagellation encouraged in the academy and by corporate HR departments to the more sophisticated forms of critical race theory. Similarly, the whole cottage industry of corporate and collegiate anti-racism, with its struggle sessions and White Fragility reading groups, gains legitimacy and support from any reported increase in authentic white nationalism.
I have myself written about how some advanced modern forms of anti-racism in practice actually appear to reduce antibodies against ancient hatreds in people who might otherwise be immune to them, including antisemitism. College campuses are petri dishes in which all manner of identitarianism and illiberalism can grow.
Pace Tolstoy, racial obsessives of all stripes are the unhappy families that are alike.
It’s also true that white nationalists have been known to use the language of identity politics, though this predates wokeism. David Duke attempted to rebrand the Ku Klux Klan as the National Association for the Advancement of White People in the late 1970s and the segregationist Bryant Bowles made the same play on the NAACP’s name in the 1950s.
But there are some reasons why the woke right formulation doesn’t quite work, or at least obscures as much as it illuminates. Even as you can clearly find some similarities in their errors and collectivism, the intellectual influences, where applicable, are different. Derrick Bell and Jared Taylor are not really making the same arguments. Neither are Ibram X. Kendi and Julius Evola.
Most importantly, wokeness is meant to be a heightened awareness of social injustices, especially those involving race and gender. It is a hypersensitivity to racism. People who are drawn to the alt-right or who are alt-right-adjacent may have some kind of heightened awareness of their own identity, real or imagined. But they typically believe that to fight their ideological foes effectively, they must develop a hyperinsensitivity to racism and bigotry.
This can become attractive to normal conservatives who see accusations of racism or antisemitism primarily as political weapons wielded against them by the left or their other ideological opponents. They want to become bulletproof against these weapons, or at least rob them of their emotional impact.
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Perhaps helping internet-addled right-wingers flirting with racism or antisemitism see how similar they are to what they profess to hate the most will prove to be an effective deterrent against radicalization and racialization. If so, then so be it.
But the reason this doesn’t strike me as hair-splitting is that I think the racial hyperinsensitivity is a better explanation of what leads some on the right astray than a simple-minded eagerness to beat the woke at their own game, even if the latter motivation is surely real. They become desensitized to sensitivities and sensibilities that exist for good reason.
It’s true that in political debate, messaging and definitions don’t have to be totally precise or rigorous to be effective. Using the word woke to describe attitudes that are actually the exact opposite might be a good way to hit the alt-right where it hurts. Nevertheless, if you want to fight something, it does seem important to first understand what it is.
