The Woke Right Stands At the Door
Whence comes this uncanniest of all guests?
WHY LIBERALISM
“Why Liberalism” is an ongoing series by Persuasion in collaboration with the Institute for Humane Studies. Today, we are absolutely delighted to again feature Jonathan Rauch, who undertakes an intellectual excavation of the latest form of conservative thought—the so-called woke right. He unmasks the surprising parallels between the postmodern left and the far right—including a disregard for truth, a reliance on transgression and shock-value, and an overwhelming obsession with power.
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In November, James Lindsay—an independent scholar, author, and sometime prankster—decided to test his observation that the American right’s illiberalism and irrationalism have, bizarrely, converged with the woke left’s illiberalism and irrationalism. He grabbed verbiage from the Communist Manifesto, changed left-wing valences to right-wing, and submitted the result to an online conservative journal. He did not have high confidence in going undetected; after all, his opening sentence (“A rising spirit is haunting America: the spirit of a true Christian Right”) is a blatant rip-off of one of the most famous sentences in world literature. Nonetheless, American Reformer ran the piece under the headline “The Liberal Consensus and the New Christian Right.”
All good fun. But what flabbergasted Lindsay was what happened when he revealed the hoax. Instead of repudiating its inadvertent endorsement of the bloodiest left-wing ideology in human history, the supposedly conservative journal embraced it: “While we were unaware of its authorship and motive, it is still a reasonable aggregation of some New Right ideas (repackaged into Marx’s effective rhetoric), and we have corrected its authorship to properly credit Mr. Lindsay.”
Lindsay is among a growing number of scholars and intellectual historians talking about what they call the “woke right.” The notion is not that the far left and far right share the same politics or goals. Rather, it is that the far right has adopted, partially on purpose but mostly through osmosis and convergent evolution, claims and strategies that parallel the far left’s. The MAGA right has strange and sinister qualities which look nothing like the traditional, religious wing of conservatism familiar from the era of William F. Buckley, or the anti-government, libertarian conservatism of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. Its anarchic rejection of truth, its Nietzschean embrace of power as self-justifying, its unashamed anti-liberalism, and its glee in transgressing boundaries and giving offense are something new on the right: an embrace of postmodernism, which until recently was the exclusive property of the illiberal left.
A generation ago, normies in the academy and other elite cultural institutions failed to see the postmodern left for what it was. And so they were run over. But from their failure can be gleaned the postmodernism right’s weaknesses today—and we can exploit them.
From radical skepticism to dogmatic radicalism
In his 2004 book Explaining Postmodernism, Stephen R.C. Hicks posits three categories of thought about how the world has historically been ordered: premodern, modern, and postmodern. Where premodernism emphasizes faith, hierarchy, and duty to God, modernism emphasizes reason, individualism, and autonomy; postmodernism, in turn, sees reason as a sham, authority as a mask for power, and groups as prior to individuals.
A good way to think about these categories is suggested by Richard Tafel, a pastor and social entrepreneur who uses them to train organizations in what he calls “cultural translation”—helping people communicate and relate better across cultural and political divides. Each of the three worldviews, he argues, is based on a distinctive epistemology; that is, on its own conception of truth.
Traditionalism (the equivalent of Hicks’s premodernism) anchors truth in holy books and prophets; it sees people as spiritual beings in a divinely ordered world. Traditionalism is ancient, whereas modernism takes its cues from the Enlightenment. Truth is what can be seen and proved; reason and evidence supplant spiritualism, tribalism, and subjective intuition. Modernism, notes Tafel, is dominant in the United States, but traditionalism is also alive and well, and many people partake of both.
Postmodernism is the newcomer. Emerging in postwar Europe, it adopts a radically skeptical epistemology, viewing claims to capital-T truth, as Tafel puts it, as assertions of power: efforts by dominant social actors to impose and legitimize their own, often oppressive, agendas. Wherever you see a truth claim, you should unmask it: look behind it to see whom it might benefit. Scientific modernism wants to assess claims, not claimants; postmodernism reverses the emphasis. “Who were the scientists?” says Tafel. “What color were they? What gender? What country are they in? What biases do they have?”
Those principles, in and of themselves, do not have a particular political valence. They do not seem to advance any agenda at all. “At its core, postmodernism rejected what it calls metanarratives—broad, cohesive explanations of the world and society,” wrote Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay in their 2020 history of the movement, Cynical Theories. “It rejected Christianity and Marxism. It also rejected science, reason, and the pillars of post-Enlightenment western democracy.” Indeed, “postmodernism raised such radical doubts about the structure of thought and society that it is ultimately a form of cynicism.”
Radical skepticism is like the acid that eats through every container. And sure enough, postmodernism’s skepticism undermined itself. How could it be for anything if all truth claims, including its own, are masks for power? The answer came in what Pluckrose and Lindsay identify as a second wave of postmodernism, which—handily enough—exempted itself from skepticism.
Identity and oppression now took center stage. Society is best understood not as an association of autonomous individuals but as a congeries of groups contending for dominance and organized into hierarchies. Because some groups dominate and oppress others, not all standpoints are suspect; marginalized groups’ vision is less distorted by the dominant narrative. Identity thus confers expertise and oppression confers authority. Now equipped with a worldview which justified their own claims of epistemic privilege, second-wave activists welded onto the original postmodernist engine an assortment of progressive ideologies, including post-colonial theory, queer theory, critical race theory, and intersectionality.
This compound of radical relativism and left-wing ideology, Pluckrose and Lindsay argue, then hardened into its final form, a third wave which asserts, in practice, the absolute truth of postmodern principles and themes. The third wave thus came to embrace exactly the sort of dogmatism and authoritarianism which the first wave of postmodernists had set out to challenge and overthrow. The end result was a bit like a battle rig in a Mad Max movie: a bolted-together, incoherent, yet potently weaponized contraption which eventually became known as Woke.
Judging by its intellectual merits, one would not have imagined this jury-rigged ideology could take the progressive world by storm. Its incoherence, however, proved to be its secret weapon. Because it was unmoored from any commitment to objectivity or consistency, Woke could work both sides of every street. It was simultaneously egalitarian and authoritarian, skeptical and dogmatic, transgressive and intolerant, cynical and sanctimonious, revolutionary and bureaucratic. Whatever you wanted, it offered.
Even better, its radical skepticism, rejection of norms, and revolutionary energy made it seemingly impervious to rational arguments and moral objections: a “perfect rhetorical fortress,” as Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott call it in their 2023 book The Cancelling of the American Mind. “Anyone secured behind its walls can divert and derail any debate or discussion they’re unwilling (or, let’s face it, unable) to have,” Lukianoff writes. “Consistency of application is irrelevant, and consistency of principle simply doesn’t exist. Defeating ‘them’ is all that matters.”
Objecting to Woke’s hypocrisy, inconsistency, and empirical shoddiness got you mocked, disqualified, and personally attacked. However philosophically unintelligible Woke may have been, its rhetorical virality and sheer aggressiveness conquered the intelligentsia with astonishing speed.
Learning from the left
So where does the right come in?
Recall that postmodernism in its initial and purer form, before it committed itself to a suite of left-wing causes, had no inherent political valence. The tools it used to deconstruct authority could, in principle, have been deployed by the political right, had the political right been interested. But in the 1970s and 1980s, when postmodernism began its conquest of academia, the right was interested in Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher and their libertarian, entrepreneurial ideas; it was interested in the Cold War, the Soviet threat, and recovering from Vietnam syndrome; it was interested in promoting family values and opposing homosexuality and abortion.
Above all, conservatism in those years saw itself as intellectually constructive. Conservative publications and conversations fizzed with ideas for welfare reform, tax reform, enterprise zones, deregulation, school vouchers, constitutional originalism, and more. “Of a sudden,” Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously observed in 1980, “the GOP has become the party of ideas.” The collapse of Soviet communism spectacularly vindicated Reagan’s worldview; when Bill Clinton acknowledged in his 1996 State of the Union message that “the era of big government is over,” the left raised a white flag. Postmodernism, with its bizarre relativism and radical bent, was the last thing conservatives had any use for.
That began to change as the Reagan Revolution soured. In the eyes of the right, George W. Bush’s misbegotten Iraq War discredited Reagan’s neoconservative foreign policy; the financial crisis discredited his confidence in markets; uncontrolled borders and offshored jobs and disappointing wage growth discredited his optimism. Budget deficits soared, government grew, Obamacare passed and resisted repeal. Homosexuals won marriage, universities embraced queer studies; the left dominated the culture’s commanding heights. Conservative media inflamed fears that conventional, transactional politics was impotent against the left. Conservatives believed they were losing on every front. The right was primed for something different—something radical.
What that might be was foreshadowed in Stephen Hicks’s 2004 book on postmodernism, well before the right’s postmodern turn. Discussing the postmodern frame of mind, he observed that, along with its relativistic and egalitarian themes, “we hear ... deep chords of cynicism.” He continued:
Principles of civility and procedural justice simply serve as masks for hypocrisy and oppression born of asymmetrical power relations, masks that must be ripped off by crude verbal and physical weapons: ad hominem argument, in-your-face shock tactics, and equally cynical power plays. Disagreements are met—not with argument, the benefit of the doubt, and the expectation that reason can prevail—but with assertion, animosity, and a willingness to resort to force. ... Having rejected reason, we will not expect ourselves or others to behave reasonably.
A decade later, his description very accurately characterized what was then called the alt-right. My own first glimpse of this strange new phenomenon came in 2014 with the eruption of Gamergate, an episode in which anonymous trolls heaped abuse and threats on a female video game developer. While the campaign was not political, it coded as white, male, right-wing, and aggressively subversive. Although better-informed friends warned me to pay attention, I shrugged off Gamergate as random online craziness. In reality, it debuted the Joker-like nihilism of the postmodern right.
Someone who did notice and appreciate what was happening was Angela Nagle, whose 2017 book Kill All Normies presciently identified the convergence of the alt-right with the far left. The alt-right, she observed, “is as transgressive and rule-breaking as the new left once was.” Like the left, it gleefully subverted norms, struck smug ironic poses, and embraced harassment and bullying. When Milo Yiannopoulos, a prominent alt-right influencer, said “birth control makes women unattractive and crazy,” was he just kidding or being truly misogynistic? Was Pepe the Frog a lighthearted meme or a racist hate symbol? Was (((triple parentheses))) around Jewish names prankish trolling or veiled threat? You couldn’t tell—and really, why even ask, because lol nothing matters.
In no ordinary sense, Nagle observed, was the alt-right’s deconstructionist nihilism conservative. It owed more to the early-20th century Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci: “Although the tactics of the online right are updated to a digital age, it is hard to think of a better term than Gramscian to describe what they have strategically achieved, as a movement almost entirely based on influencing culture and shifting the Overton window through media and culture, not just formal politics.” Acting on the culture through narrative, rather than on politics through persuasion, was straight out of the postmodern playbook. Nagle’s memorable conclusion: “The libertinism, individualism, bourgeois bohemianism, postmodernism, irony and ultimately the nihilism that the left was once of accused of by the right actually characterized the [alt-right] movement.”
When I asked James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, and Rick Sint (a gifted amateur intellectual historian of postmodernism) whether the right knowingly emulated postmodern theory, they said: sometimes yes, but mostly no. Geoff Shullenberger, in a 2021 article in Outsider Theory, compiles names of MAGA allies and influencers who have studied and cited postmodernist theory. In a recent video, Carl Benjamin, a right-wing British YouTuber and commentator who goes by the online pseudonym Sargon of Akkad, explicitly acknowledges the woke right’s debt to postmodernists. “The problem with the woke left wasn’t the woke part, it was the left part,” he said.
The woke right are very much on the right. They are just postmodern. They are living in the postmodern era. We are living with the consequences of what the postmodern left did in the 20th century, and they [the woke right] have decided, Well, I think if this can be used to win, why can’t we use it to win? And the liberals’ only answer is, Well, we won’t have a liberal society at the end of that. And the woke right say, Deal!
Mostly, as Benjamin’s statement implicitly acknowledges, the postmodern right emerged less from direct philosophical influences than from cultural osmosis and observation of the far left’s success. In elite universities, postmodernism was part of the intellectual furniture by the time today’s 40-somethings came through; they could not have avoided its vocabulary and mindset even if they tried. They also beheld and admired its ability to fluster, confound, and dominate political opponents. “I don’t think it’s happening because there’s a deep intellectual connection,” Rick Sint said. “They see the tremendous energy around this oppressor-oppressed narrative. It clearly just rubs off on them, to a certain extent.”
Outdoing the OG
The postmodern right is not the same as the postmodern left; but they share a family resemblance. Like the postmodern left, the postmodern right subverts truth, traduces norms, and mocks and abuses opponents, achieving success by steamrolling its ideological rivals—both on the left and, no less important, within the conservative coalition.
Notably similar, for example, is the postmodern right’s opportunistically cynical attitude toward truth. What people call true (in the postmodern paradigm) is really whatever narrative, or metanarrative, achieves social dominance. Thus the way to establish what is true is not by reason, evidence, and objectivity, but by winning the narrative. In many cases, the postmodern right, like the left, is quite candid about this. Consider this exchange between Steve Bannon (the MAGA movement’s preeminent ideologist) and two reporters for The Atlantic:
Not long ago, we sat in Steve Bannon’s Capitol Hill rowhouse, where he records his War Room podcast, pressing him on Trump’s refusal to accept the results of the 2020 election, and his denial of what transpired on January 6. “Our reality is that we won” and that January 6 was a “fedsurrection,” Bannon said, referring to the conspiracy theory that FBI agents had incited the crowd on the Ellipse that day.
But this reality, we pointed out to Bannon, is simply not true.
“Now, here’s the interesting thing,” Bannon said. “Who’s won that argument? I think we have.”
One sees here the same subjectivism that became a hallmark of left-postmodernism: because objectivity is a fiction, there is no single reality but rather my reality or our reality contending against your reality—and, with no objective basis to choose, narratives must struggle to dominate. How to win this contest of narratives? The postmodern formula holds that language constructs discourse, discourse constructs power, and power constructs reality. Manipulating what people say thus manipulates reality itself. This explains the postmodern left’s obsession with language, from neopronouns and terms like “pregnant person” to the idea that words are violence.
Consider, in parallel, how the Trump administration controls language. According to a recent report by Semafor: “Across the government, the Trump administration has clamped down on language: multiple agencies have ordered the removal of gender pronouns from email signatures, while the White House has said it won’t respond to journalists with pronouns in their bios.” The report continues:
A State Department liaison office is instructing employees to restrict the use of identity- and gender-related terms, including common abbreviations like LGBT. In a new style guide seen by Semafor, the State Department’s Executive Secretariat directs employees to avoid using “they/them” as a singular pronoun, bars the use of “gender” to refer to people, and discourages the use of words like “bias,” “equity,” “ally,” “discrimination,” “diversity,” and “marginalized,” except in specific contexts.
The Trump administration has learned from the campus word police.
Right-postmodernism also shares left-postmodernism’s contempt for truth claims. If anything, it goes one better, thinking nothing of making false claims in unprecedented numbers and brazenly contradicting itself. What matters is not literal truthfulness but narrative propulsion. As Senator (now Vice President) J.D. Vance said in 2024 when confronted about false stories that immigrants eat pets, “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.”
Likewise, the postmodern right shares its left-wing counterpart’s contempt for expertise, which it views as a tool for elite domination of discourse. In that respect, the appointment of the conspiracy-minded Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to run the Department of Health and Human Services has a distinctly postmodern flavor; the same can be said for other Trump appointees and influencers who peddle groundless claims and conspiracy theories.
The first wave of postmodernism was interested in deconstructing power relations, not building something new or better; the second and third waves saw power as a zero-sum conflict in which yesterday’s white, male, colonialist oppressors must be supplanted by the groups they had historically marginalized. Right-wing postmodernism shares the same worldview, except with the polarities inverted: the dominant and oppressive woke left must be crushed.
Sheer aggressiveness is perhaps the postmodern left’s and right’s most salient feature. Because they are revolutionary movements, they recognize few legitimate boundaries and observe few behavioral constraints; because they are anarchic, they have no grand plan or object beyond achieving dominance. Their signature style of no-holds-barred aggression was observed on the left more than 20 years ago by Hicks, in Explaining Postmodernism: “Postmodernists,” he wrote in 2004, “are the most likely to be hostile to dissent and debate, the most likely to engage in ad hominem argument and name-calling, the most likely to enact ‘politically correct’ authoritarian measures, and the most likely to use anger and rage as argumentative tactics.” Delete “politically correct” and you have a pitch-perfect description of the postmodern right.
Weaker than it looks
The American right’s energy today comes primarily from its postmodern wing. Traditionalists who favor a Christian-dominated dispensation—whether post-liberal, integralist, or Christian nationalist—ride along behind; modernists who venerate individual liberty and free markets straggle in the rear. Together, they form an uneasy conservative coalition, held together mainly by their common hatred of Woke—much as, in the Buckley-Reagan era, anti-communism forged an alliance between libertarians, social conservatives, and neocons.
Today’s conservative coalition, however, seems less stable than the Reagan era’s. Woke, while scary to the public, was never as scary as the Soviets, who aimed 40,000 nuclear warheads at the United States and its allies. Moreover, Woke peaked in 2020. The political drubbings it has received since then—the collapse of the Black Lives Matter and Defund the Police movements, the backlash against DEI and radical gender ideology, and Trump’s victory in 2024 and his subsequent governmental assault on every Woke bastion—have left the postmodern left damaged and reeling. As its salience wanes, its power to act as coalitional glue will weaken, too.
Meanwhile, the mutually repellant forces within the contemporary conservative coalition are stronger than they ever were in the Buckley-Reagan era. Christian nationalists, libertarians, and MAGA populists share no common view of the role of government or the common good. Traditionalist conservatives’ call for a Christianized, post-liberal order is thoroughly incompatible with modernist conservatives’ embrace of individualism, freedom, and dynamic entrepreneurship. And both sit crosswise with the postmodern right’s leering nihilism.
The modernist right draws on a tradition dating to the Magna Carta, and the traditionalist right on a tradition dating to Plato. Like them or not, they have been around a long time and will be around a lot longer. By contrast, because right-wing postmodernism is cynical and anti-rational, attempts to theorize it will fail, just as attempts to theorize left-wing postmodernism have failed. The postmodern mindset is inherently parasitic and opportunistic, good at shocking its opponents and manipulating language but not good at building and governing. The very features which give postmodernism its supernova energy when it bursts upon the scene—its ability to be all things to all people and to bulldoze but not build—require it to win victories quickly, before it falls apart. Today, the postmodern left clings to sinecures in humanities departments but is a spent force intellectually, its methods exposed as a tired bag of tricks. The postmodern right’s performative outrages are likewise quickly becoming formulaic and self-parodic.
The game plan for the postmodern right, then, is not to earn a place in the philosophical firmament, build a durable coalition, or prove itself in government. It cannot make a coherent case, play well with others, or run anything well. Instead it relies on shock, surprise, and aggressive disregard for norms to neutralize opposition, then embeds itself in institutions to stay in power. That was the game plan of the postmodern left, which used tactical momentum to take over university departments and bureaucracies and then excluded competitors. The postmodern right has the same general idea.
Whether it succeeds is path-dependent. That is, the longer-term outcome depends on what happens in the shorter term. In one future, the postmodern right overreaches, splinters its coalition, is exposed as a fraud, and suffers political defeats in 2026 and (more importantly) 2028. That provides time for opposing forces to slow it, expose it, and defeat it. In another future, the postmodern right wins those elections and uses the period to 2032, and possibly beyond, to consolidate its power, corrupt or demolish institutions that stand in its way, and use coercion to neutralize political opposition.
In “Journey to Babel,” an episode of the original Star Trek series, the Enterprise encounters an alien spacecraft whose unprecedented speed of attack the Enterprise cannot match. Eventually, Spock figures out that the enemy ship’s advantage is not technological but tactical: the aliens are on a suicide mission and therefore can use speeds that will destroy their ship. The postmodern right is a bit like that. It can win by doing what no one else in politics will do, but it must win quickly, before its momentum stalls, its coalition ruptures, and its failures become glaring.
For liberal and traditionalist opponents of the right-postmodern onslaught, the imperative now is to do what liberals and moderates failed to do when the postmodern left rushed academia: recognize the radicalism, nihilism, and revolutionary ruthlessness of the postmodern phenomenon; organize aggressively to stall and then defeat it; and tirelessly expose it as self-serving, parasitic, and hollow. In other words, as postmodernists love to say—unmask it.
Jonathan Rauch is a senior fellow in the Governance Studies program at the Brookings Institution, and a member of the Persuasion Board of Advisors.
The “Why Liberalism” series is a project by Persuasion in partnership with the Institute for Humane Studies (IHS). IHS is a non-profit organization that promotes a freer, more humane, and open society by connecting and supporting talented graduate students, scholars, and other intellectuals who are advancing the principles and practice of freedom. For additional information and details, media, programmatic, and funding opportunities, visit TheIHS.org.
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A first-rate piece of work. It is not only a „must read,“ it is a „must share widely“ with friends, family, and colleagues, and yes, even those who are woke and arguably need to read this most!
One last thing, it is also a „must save!“ I will be referring to Mr. Rauch‘s article frequently in the future, in fact, I will probably start by rereading it tonight.
Well I'll be danged. Maybe I'm a liberal again. Rauch makes a lot of sense out of the ideas behind classical liberalism and leaves room for those of us who are at least partially traditionalist, as well. Ideas, ideology and muscularity all in one swipe. What's not to like? Nihilism is popular on either edge of the spectrum and its fatal weakness is clear: it is "against" rather than "for." Societies are not built that way and I pray that the younger among us, who were raised with "woke" ideology, will learn to think constructively. I agree with them; there is a great deal wrong. We simply have to pay attention to what deserves to be built upon. That, after all, is the original concept behind "progress."