On an Empty Catch Phrase
In light of James Lindsay’s recent prank, some Christians and conservatives in America have been introduced to the phrase “Woke Right.” In fact, if Lindsay is to be believed, the specter haunting America today is not simply unhinged leftism, but the equally deranged (and equally powerful?) reaction known as the Woke Right.
What is the Woke Right, you might ask? To answer this, I’ll use Neil Shenvi’s explanation. First, he defines the position of wokeism as the argument that:
1) society is divided into oppressed/oppressor groups along lines of race, class, gender, sexuality, etc, via 2) hegemonic power. But privileged people are blind, so 3) we need to defer to the lived experience of the marginalized to 4) dismantle unjust systems.
Lindsay, Shenvi, and others have recently claimed that the New Right is itself woke because it, too, adheres to this exact analytical framework.
How should one evaluate this claim? Perhaps Shenvi may be of service again. In a co-authored American Reformer article, Shenvi argued that certain aspects of “antiracist criticism” can be profitably employed by Christians:
Although [George Yancey] acknowledges that we can’t assume that all disparities are caused by injustice, he rightly argues that injustice – both past and present – can contribute to disparities. Because all of these effects are conditioned on race, Yancey correctly argues that a ‘colorblind’ model which ‘ignores race’ is inadequate to address the complexity of racial issues that exist today.
Elsewhere, Shenvi has stated that “critical theory can provide an insightful analysis of the ways in which power can corrupt relationships and institutions,” while rightly warning that “it often functions as a worldview – an overarching narrative by which we interpret all of reality.” Others have argued similarly. Carl Trueman, for example, has stated that we could employ something like Marx’s critique of religion in service of critiquing modern identity politics:
[I]t is noteworthy that Marx considered the criticism of religion foundational to making people face up to the reality of their lives. We should similarly consider the criticism of identity politics to be central to our task in this present age.
Tim Keller once wrote that
Karl Marx was the first person to speak of ‘alienated labor’ in the heyday of the early-nineteenth century European industry… The great shift from an industrial economy to a knowledge and service economy has improved the immediate working conditions of many but has locked countless others into low-paying service sector jobs that experience the same alienating disconnectedness from the fruits or products of their work.
Whether one agrees with Shenvi (or Keller or Trueman) on the benefit derived in this particular instance from the employment of critical methods, it is clear to me that Shenvi does not adopt the entire worldview of antiracist critics. He simply argues that one of their analytical tools can be profitably employed in service of Christian truth.
Now back to the Woke Right. It is just as true that the major voices of the New Right do not adhere to the worldview of the Left. This is what made Lindsay’s stunt so silly: we all hate communism too. We even hate the entire materialistic worldview that stands behind it, which is more than could be said for Lindsay. A good faith effort to understand figures on the New Right might at least attempt to see if what they are doing is nothing other than what Shenvi contends for, namely “provid[ing] an insightful analysis of the ways in which power can corrupt relationships and institutions.” Etc., etc. I don’t actually find that many figures on the New Right even focused on that kind of analysis, but I don’t see how it must be ruled out a priori.
It seems so obvious as to hardly need saying that the intellectual substance of one’s political and cultural thought is what matters, not specific “analytical tools” used to argue for that position. If one is, for example, committed to a wholesome Christian influence in state and society, laws supporting God’s design for the family, law and order, anti-neocommunism, and the like, it would be exceedingly bizarre to claim that that person is basically identical to the Woke Left simply because he employs certain intellectual tools to make his case. Or is it that such tools are acceptable, but only if remaining within the framing of leftist usage?
The problem, if there is one, with Shenvi’s (or anyone else’s) use of these analytical tools, is not that he asks questions about unjust power dynamics, etc., but the use to which those tools are being employed. I think the same could be said about every aspect of Shenvi’s definition of wokeness. It is easy to superficially claim, for example, that someone lamenting present reverse discrimination against white people is dividing the world into oppressed/oppressor groups in exactly the same way as woke critical theorists, and so on.
In fact, the label Woke Right can easily be applied to anyone on the right because it is an empty and vacuous descriptor with no objective content. It is simply based on a vague, but very negative, association with the Woke Left. And that, in the end, appears to be the main impetus behind its use: it evokes the fear and loathing that most conservatives and Christians already (rightly) have for leftist wokeness, shutting down reasoned discussion before it can even begin. There are all sorts of critiques that could be lodged against New Right political and religious beliefs, but it is far easier, and no doubt polemically and rhetorically more effective, simply to sweep away the need even to engage in such critiques with a wave of the hand: “Oh, that’s Woke Right. And you know what that means.”
But, no, I don’t know what that means. I’ve yet to see an actual definition with substantive content. James Lindsay believes we’re a bunch of Marxists, so if the theory of Woke Right can lead to a conclusion like that I won’t hold out much hope that such a definition is forthcoming.
In the end, one of the most unfortunate consequences of the dismissal of a whole range of reasonable and carefully argued ideas, even if wrong, is that the Right spends so much of its energy attacking itself, rather than uniting to deal with the real challenges facing our country. That benefits no one. It is time to put the useless phrase Woke Right out to pasture and then duke it out in the realm of intellectual combat like men.
Image Credit: Unsplash
Perhaps, one of my favorite quotes from Martin Luther King Jr can be helpful here. In speaking against the Vietnam War, King said the following:
‘The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.‘
Now, if we replace the word ‘Western‘ with a fill-in-the-blank, it provides a useful limit for how each one of us and/or each group reacts to the ideologies and isms of others or other groups. So let’s take a quote from Shenvi cited in the article above to see how it works:
‘1) society is divided into oppressed/oppressor groups along lines of race, class, gender, sexuality, etc, via 2) hegemonic power. But privileged people are blind, so 3) we need to defer to the lived experience of the marginalized to 4) dismantle unjust systems.‘
If that quote is an accurate portrayal of wokism, then the real fault of wokism is not found in its first statement, but in its 2nd and 3rd statements. For according to that statement, we have nothing to learn from the privileged just as many of the privileged believe that we have nothing to learn from the oppressed. And so why must we commit the errors practiced by the marginalized and the privileged? Why must totally reject the views of the privileged or totally reject the views plight of the oppressed and exploited? At the same time, why must totally reject the first statement in the quote because of the failures of the 2nd and 3rd statements. And finally, don’t we see that if we reject everything is part of the above description of wokism, then we are committing the same error that statements #2 and #3 from the above quote make?
If we take Marx’s proposal of the proletariat dictatorship, we see in history a playing out of the error that is part of statements #2 and #3. And it is this employment of statements #2 and #3 which is Marx’s biggest error. That is why Marx’s only solution was for the overthrow of the bourgeoisie by the proletariat. Another option becomes the proletariat and the bourgeoisie collaborating to reduce, if not eliminate, the oppression. A real world example of such collaboration can be found in Germany’s codetermination laws that were passed in the 1970s.
We should also pay attention to another line from the above article:
‘It is just as true that the major voices of the New Right do not adhere to the worldview of the Left. This is what made Lindsay’s stunt so silly: we all hate communism too. We even hate the entire materialistic worldview that stands behind it, which is more than could be said for Lindsay.‘
But don’t we realize that starting with Baby Boomer generation, our consumer society has become just as materialistic in its influence on society as Marxism only with a different ideology? That the comparison between Capitalism and Soviet Union Communism was first based on standard of living and the distribution of material goods. And that in our Consumer Society, one’s own personal significance is often measured in the obtaining of material goods. That isn’t my observation. It was that of Martin Luther King Jr in his book Stride Toward Freedom. And if we don’t promote materialism with our consumerism, then we most certainly do so when we promote the concerns of the bourgeoisie over and against those of the proletariat.
In that same book, King demonstrated what Marxism and Capitalism have to learn from each other. According to King, Capitalism forgets that life is social while Marxism forgets that life is individual. The failure for either side to learn from the other is to passionately embrace the arrogance of feeling that King attributed to the West in his quote that came from his speech against the Vietnam War. And even if we don’t agree with King that such an arrogance of feeling is unjust, we should note that arrogance and faith have a cotoxic relationship. For arrogance says ‘I built it‘ while faith tells us that we have nothing outside of what we have received from God’s mercy and grace found in Christ Jesus.
And so is the fear and loathing of the Left that Dunson attributes to Conservative and Christians justified? I hope that is not what Dunson believes.
Thanks for this response, Ben. It seems to me like James just gets his target wrong. There is a kind of victim discourse in the racial side of the right, or the manosphere. But Christians interested in the political implications of their faith are not thereby “woke right.”
I think Konstantin Kisin has a more accurate view. His interview with Niall Ferguson was enlightening in this regard. Ferguson also wanted to label too much as “woke right,” including concerns about immigration. But Kisin seems to recognize that the line of thought that led Tucker Carlson to have on that revisionist historian is the line of thinking that is “woke” to the right.
Or I think about what Will Spencer recently discussed on the NSA podcast, men reading “far-right” sources and getting really upset. There is definitely stuff further to the right that gets people to exhibit similar patterns of thought and behavior to the woke left.
We all knew the first comment here would be from Curt.
And that it would be multi-paragraphed and overly long-winded.