Why There Isn’t a Woke Right, Part 2

The Oppressor-Oppressed Dichotomy

The second half of point one is the Oppressor-Oppressed Dichotomy, which Shenvi correctly identifies as a reductionist account of human nature which fails to adequately account for justice in social relations.  However, in his examples he overgeneralizes this point to reject the possibility of any kind of bi-polar power relation in society between a ruling faction and a subordinate faction.  A key point in epistemology is that we have to experience something in order to later recognize it.  Likewise, even a fallacious accusation of the oppressor-oppressed dichotomy implies an experience of (real or perceived) oppression from which we can extrapolate that conclusion.  In short, just because someone claims that “it’s us versus them” doesn’t mean that it’s untrue, only that evidence needs to be provided. 

Shenvi claims that the dichotomy is always devoid of context, merely on the basis of a handful of strawmen he constructs for himself.  In none of the quotes provided does anyone say that black people, women, or Jews are the ruling class, because the notion is absurd.  Even Wolfe’s gynocracy quote¹ doesn’t establish all women as the privileged Oppressor Class, but simply states that those people who are in our ruling class are effeminate and that they think, act, and ethically rationalize in effeminate ways.  If it is a sin to call wicked leaders effeminate, then the Apostle Paul should be the first one on the list for cancelling.  

Neither does the simple fact that some groups in society have systemic advantages establish an oppressor-oppressed dichotomy, but is a key component in the rhetoric of justice.  If one team in a baseball league is allowed to have 14-year-olds, but the rest are limited to 11–13-year-olds, this constitutes a simple injustice.  It is perfectly reasonable for the coaches and parents of the other teams to organize and lobby the league to disqualify the first team unless they abide by the age limits.  We should be more than happy to talk about job interviews or college admissions, and democracy means the freedom to organize into political factions to advocate for our interest in justice on that topic.  

Shenvi is wrongly conflating any organized opposition to injustice committed by the political representatives of a social cleavage with a particular type of conspiracy theory underlying the oppressor-oppressed dichotomy.  As mentioned in my previous essay, he conflates opposing a political faction with opposing a population group.  If Wolfe or Isker believe that a political power faction is organizing on the basis of the “coalition of the fringes” in order to secure favorable political and economic treatment for themselves at the expense of several white and Christian population groups, then the proper ground of argument is to disprove their claims.  The fact of the matter is that political factions, most of whom overlap with social cleavages, really do seek to use government power to secure privileges for themselves and that these groups use favorable treatment for their social cleavage groups as a tool of maintaining themselves in office.  This kind of ethnic, religious, or class patronage is, in fact, the very nature of government itself².  There is no government without special interest corruption, “log-rolling,” and group handouts.

What distinguishes the oppressor-oppressed dichotomy (hereafter OOD) from a simple statement of political injustice is that the two groups are fixed, ontologically opposed, and determined by political fiat.  

First, the OOD states that a member of an Oppressor group is always and eternally an oppressor, not as a consequence of an action they took but because of their very identity and existence, which stands as an existential rebuke to the ideological system³.  For example, I find no place in Wolfe’s or Andrew Isker’s work where they claim that a black person, a woman, or a Jewish person is incapable of being a member of their community or of living with them in just social relations⁴.  C. Jay Engel, who Shenvi identifies as the most extreme member of the “woke right,” is quoted in Part III of Shenvi’s essay acknowledging that African-Americans and American Indians are indeed members of the American Nation.  On the other hand, Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi are very clear that every white person is inherently and irremediably racist regardless of any action they have taken or could possibly take.  The best that an oppressor can strive towards is to be an ally, or in the older jargon, “class traitor.”  Opposing an organized political faction for their collective positions is not the same thing as opposing the existence and identity of a social cleavage as such.  This comparison between the two is a false equivalence between normal factional politics and an identity-based political religion.

Second, according to the OOD, the relations between Oppressors and the Oppressed are ontological opposition.  In layman’s terms, the Oppressors must be utterly and completely destroyed by the Oppressed in order to close the dichotomy.  In layman’s terms, the Oppressors must utterly and completely destroy the Oppressed in order to close the dichotomy.  There can be no reconciliation, negotiation, or compromise⁵.  There is a reason that many people object to the duplicity inherent in “abolish whiteness,” for example.  Given even the most favorable interpretation, “woke” policy demands that white people forever forswear any collective identities, political representation, or collective cultural traditions.  Each person of unfortunately pale skin must become a perfect social and political idiot, in the Greek sense of the term, unable to speak for anyone other than himself, produce art, practice a religion, or vote for an interest in common with another person of that skin color, unless it is done under the authority and approval of the not-white political establishment.  The perpetual punishment of those deemed Oppressors, devoid of the possibility of forgiveness and reconciliation, is not something insinuated out of abstract theory but is clearly modelled by philosophers like Jürgen Habermas, an inspiration for modern Critical Race Theory⁶.  This graphic, produced by the Smithsonian Institute, illustrates the extent to which the Critical Race Theory movement desires to negate the public life of “whiteness.”

Of course, this is the best possible interpretation of “abolish whiteness” and it is perfectly reasonable to believe that the people who hold to this belief do not have the best of all possible motives.  Nevertheless, I would challenge anyone to find any comparable commitment to an ontological opposition on the part of those Shenvi  labels “woke right.”  In my experience, one would have to dredge the fever-swamps of tiny, “extremely online” cultures like 8chan or the bottom of X to find any comparable position on the right.  Say what you wish, but racial eliminationist rhetoric among mainstream thinkers has been exclusive to the Left since 1945.  

What about deportation?  Shenvi’s article cites C. Jay Engel’s advocacy for the large-scale deportation of non-Americans, and this is arguably a functionally eliminationist position.  To make this claim, however, is to presuppose an argument about who does and does not have the right to American citizenship and residency and to open a whole discussion into the meaning of indigeneity, citizenship, and national belonging, divorced from the explicitly racial framing that the “woke left” insists on imposing on these notions. Shenvi merely assumes that Engel’s use of the language of indigeneity and belonging has racial motives without engaging that subject.  If a group of people don’t have a right to be in a place, such as illegal aliens, then it is not a dehumanizing act to remove them nor is it “speculating about how he would not be your neighbor at all in your imaginary ideal society.”

Engel questions a broader group’s right to residency in the United States, taking an extreme position on a topic of current political saliency, and the proper counterargument is to dispute his claim by describing why these people are, in fact, Americans and deserve to stay.  “Abolish whiteness” is a principle with institutional cachet on the Left, demanding (at least) social death for whites as an explicitly racial program, while Engel constitutes the most extreme “woke right” position that Shenvi can find.  To be fair, Engel demands that non-Americans leave America on what could be argued as a civic and national principle, especially given that he explicitly acknowledges the claim of African-Americans and American Indians to membership in the American Nation.  This position is equivalent to DiAngelo and Kendi if, and only if, we accept a long train of presupposed arguments that Shenvi has yet to make and which this essay is not equipped to answer at this time.

Lastly, the third characteristic of the OOD is the way that membership is determined.  The origin of the OOD comes from Marx, but the best expressions of its principles are found in the writings of Vladimir Lenin and Mao Zedong.  For the purposes of this series , I’ll use the pivotal Leninist text, “What is to be Done?”  Therein Lenin establishes the principles of the OOD and how it functions as a tool of revolutionary movements.  The first and most important principle of the OOD is called Political Correctness.  Political Correctness states that what is true is defined as what is useful for the movement.  In contract, Actual Correctness is defined by non-political standards of truth.  The characteristic of the Oppressed is that they always believe Political Correctness over Actual Correctness.  Let me clarify this quickly: they do not pretend to believe, or intentionally lie, but they absolutely and totally commit to the premise that the Politically Correct is true, regardless of what is Actually Correct⁷.

When the principle of Political Correctness is applied to actual persons in the OOD, Lenin tells us that membership in either group has nothing to do with a person’s actions but is designated by the political authority.  As Lenin states, if he declares a son of a banker to be a proletarian, then the man is indeed proletarian.  If he declares a factory worker to be bourgeois, then he is indeed bourgeois.  He, through the Party, declares what is true and what is untrue, especially with regards to the distinction between Oppressors and Oppressed.  As a result, the fundamental question of politics is what he calls the “Who-Whom Question,” which states that right and wrong, true and false, depend on whether the person is a supporter or opponent of the political cause or party.  The reality of what a person does or their personal characteristics belong to the sphere of Actual Correctness, whereas the basis of judging that person lies within the realm of the Political Correctness of their attitudes, opinions, and beliefs.

There is a major distinction here between an ordinary, self-interested political actor and a member of what Voegelin calls a “gnostic political religion” in his New Science of Politics.  A rational political actor may indeed be disinterested in facts that go against his preferences.  As Bryan Caplan puts it, preferences trump belief, which means that people will by and large choose to ignore inconvenient information if they can get away with it⁸.  This is not an epistemological stance, but a practical one.  They do not deny that a fact is true, they just reject it as irrelevant, make excuses, and go about doing what they were going to do anyway.  This is simply human nature, and not especially pathological.  

On the other hand, the adherent to a political religion will deny that true facts are true when they conflict with the doctrine of their belief system.  To use Shenvi’s example, it is reasonable that non-black people would not get particularly emotionally invested in anti-black discrimination or to doubt a story like that of Jussie Smollett.  The way that the radical Left denies the very existence of discrimination against high-performing groups at Harvard, however, is an entirely different phenomenon.  They are not merely disinterested but in denial of reality.  For adherents to the OOD, it is simply not possible that a member of the Oppressors should suffer discrimination, any more than it is possible for the sun to rise in the West today.  The Dichotomy is a fundamental feature of the very laws of existence, as Lenin tells us.  An Oppressor can never be Oppressed, and an Oppressed can never be an Oppressor.  Whatever the Oppressor does to the Oppressed is evil, and whatever an Oppressed does to an Oppressor is good.  This is the Who-Whom Question at work; the moral significance of a person’s actions is entirely dependent on their designation and has nothing to do whatsoever with the content of their actions.

What this means is that the OOD is an entirely fabricated distinction that does not have any necessary relation to reality or the truth.  Why is it that Shaun King is black but Rachel Dolezal is not?  Joy Reid’s frequent proclamation on who is or is not really black is a great example of the behavior Lenin modelled for his readers.  For all its problems, Wolfe’s descriptions of “nation” adhere to a reality-bound model, no matter how vague.  A person is or is not a member of a nation on the basis of observable phenomena and social interactions.  While I would have preferred a more phenomenologically valid definition of nation, Wolfe’s work in no way represents anything similar to what Lenin describes here.

The Oppressor-Oppressed Dichotomy is not essential to all critical approaches to philosophy.  In fact, there are plenty of phenomenologists and critical theory philosophers who reject it.  Some thinkers like Rene Gerard link it to a perverse religious drive in the human psyche to scapegoat others for collective sins, while Eric Voegelin argues that it is a distorted, deformed imitation of the concept of the Elect.  The fact that the so-called “woke left” use the OOD indicates the quasi-gnostic religious characteristic of their belief system that happens to use critical theory justifications.  

The reason that Shenvi’s analysis of the OOD fails is that the Dichotomy is not essentially a relationship of juridical responsibility for injustice, but a distinction on the basis of ritual purity and impurity.  This can be demonstrated in the fact that membership in the Oppressor class is fixed and that the opposition between Oppressor and Oppressed is existential and ontological.  The nature of injustice implies the possibility of restoration through reconciliation or punishment at its root, as Heidegger illustrates in his discussion of Anaximander⁹, because injustice (adikia) belongs ontologically to the ordered pair with justice (dike) through punishment (tisis).  

If you can commit an injustice against someone, you must be capable of treating them with justice, which opens a path through reconciliation/punishment towards the establishment of just relations.  In contrast, the Oppressor is metaphysically and ontologically soiled and is incapable of redemption, because the impure can never be reconciled to the pure.  It has become a commonplace observation that the “woke left” possesses a doctrine of sin without possibility of redemption, and this religious principle lies at the root of this observation.  The New Civic Religion is a retreat from Christianity, rejecting the miraculous ability of Jesus Christ to overcome the pagan principle that the unholy can never be hallowed and the soiled can never again be pure.  Christ touches the leper and rather than being defiled, both become pure.  This characteristic at the center of the Christian faith explains the viciousness with which the pathological soul recoils from Christ’s offer of salvation and rabidly denies the possibility of itself, too, needing this impossible purification.

Once we understand the religious basis and logic to the OOD, it becomes much harder to apply this to anyone other than the fundamentalist followers of the New Civic Religion.  To claim that Wolfe, Isker, or Engel are promoting a doctrine of ritual purity from sin and that their opponents are incurably tainted by their status in the Dichotomy is bordering on the absurd.  So far as I’ve seen, none of them have ever denied that their political opponents can be redeemed, or that their conflict is grounded on the existence of the Other rather than the injustices of their enemies.  There is no Oppressed-Oppressor Dichotomy on the political right, only a belief in an oppositional power struggle based on the perceived injustice of their enemies.  If anyone wishes to claim that this is not true, the obligation is on him to demonstrate that their facts are false, rather than attempt to smear them with a theory that does not apply to their work in any way.

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