What is “the woke right”?

A faction of “anti-woke” campaigners are now embracing their own form of identity politics.

We are now moving into a new phase of the culture war. The rise of the authoritarian “woke” movement has produced an inevitable backlash. While many of those who push back against the identity-obsessed ideology of Critical Social Justice do so through the promotion of liberal values, an “anti-woke” contingent has arisen that seeks to redress the problem by engaging in precisely the same tactics of those they oppose. As the saying has it, they hope to fight fire with fire, and as such have earned themselves the label of “the woke right”.

For the sake of clarity, I should point out that “the woke right” is not to be taken as a reference to the phenomenon of Critical Social Justice inveigling itself into the corporate sphere – as outlined, for instance, in Woke, Inc. by Vivek Ramaswamy – although this is certainly how the term was first used. To take one example, in May 2022, Kathy Barnette, a candidate in the Republican Senate primary election in Pennsylvania, described her opponents as the “woke right” on the grounds that they were too progressive.

Like all entries in the culture war lexicon, the meaning of the term “woke right” has evolved rapidly. Konstantin Kisin, co-host of the Triggernometry podcast, has adopted the phrase to refer to those who identify as right-wing but whose tactics and perspectives mirror those of the woke left. “Every retardation has an equal and opposite retardation”, he writes. “The deranged worldview of the woke left, along with its disregard for truth, hatred of the West and falsification of history, is now being replicated on the right.”

The author James Lindsay has defined it in similar terms, as “a victimhood-based identity politics” whose “victim groups are whites, Christians, men, and straight people”. He argues that the movement is “roughly intersectional” insofar as it is obsessed with identity politics and a grievance relating to anti-white racism. “Like their counterparts on the Woke Left,” Lindsay writes, “the Woke Right have accepted as fact that there’s a conspiracy against people like them and that their only real hope is to lean into the identity grouping and advocate for collective power under that heading”. In these terms, the “woke right” is a kind of ideological doppelgänger, whose members exhibit the same precisionist and absolutist tendencies of their leftist counterparts.