‘Woke right’? A Discussion On Liberalism And Identity Politics

After the major interview by American journalist, Tucker Carlson, with political commentator, Nick Fuentes, discussion in the US has flared up about the identity of the MAGA movement.

Critics say that people like Nick Fuentes should not have a platform because their identitarian view of politics goes against American values. Supporters emphasise the role of absolute freedom of expression. They argue that thinking about identity and self-interest is of fundamental importance for the MAGA movement. 

Even President Donald Trump felt compelled to respond. According to him, everyone deserves a platform and it is ultimately up to the voter to determine which voices they want to listen to. Yet prominent Republicans such as the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Mike Johnson and Senator Ted Cruz continue to criticise Fuentes sharply - especially his view that American foreign policy is influenced by Israeli lobby structures which push the American national interest into the background. This is an important topic which has been explored in depth by political scientists John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt in their book, The Israel Lobby. That criticism touches on a broader debate within the Right about power, identity and what to do about the political liberal order in which politics is conducted nowadays. 

With this internal struggle on the Right, it is becoming increasingly clear that a culture war is taking place on a deeper level than simply between Left and Right. The differences within the Right seem to be just as great as between the Left and the Right. A new term is increasingly making its appearance in this debate: the ‘woke Right’ 

This article aims to help the reader understand what is meant by this term, and to show that it is theoretically incoherent. To do this, it is necessary to go back to the philosophical framework of the man who coined this term: James Lindsay. 

James Lindsay, critical theory and Cultural Marxism 
Lindsay is known for his dissection of Marxism and his thesis that aspects of (Cultural) Marxism, including critical theory and contemporary ‘woke-thinking’, are variants of an ancient metaphysical tradition: gnosticism. Lindsay does this both with articles and in lectures. 

The core of gnostic thinking is that man can reinvent himself, that he can detach himself from history, nature and material limitations and that a future, Utopian society is possible when existing structures are broken down. Lindsay recognises in this the contours of Marxism: the (cultural) class struggle becomes a liberation project, hierarchies are regarded as artificial power constructions, and a new man will appear once the old order is destroyed. It is thus the belief that it is man's task to escape from the material prison of things. Dialectical change ensures that the collective consciousness of man will reach a new level: post-material and post-dualist, man as a united world soul. 

Despite his harsh statements against left-progressive and woke movements, Lindsay identifies himself with classical liberal values. In his worldview, individual rights, freedom, political equality, property and privacy are the most important values. He emphasises rationality, objective truth and reason, as a counterweight to what he sees as relativistic tendencies in postmodern and cultural Marxist ideas. 

He also regards the “woke Right” as a threat to these individualistic values. According to him, these people use the same group-orientedness, identity rhetoric and power politics as do woke groups. The ‘woke Right’ according to him, places moralistic purity and group loyalty above individual autonomy. 

What Lindsay sees as the ‘woke Right’ can better be described with the terms identitarian or anti-liberal Right. The current anti-liberal Right can best be seen as a group of right-wing people who do not simply accept the foundations of the liberal order, as developed in the post-war era. Although there are many flavours in the anti-liberal Right, and although the different groups do not agree at all on how ‘deep’ the ‘rot’ in the system is, there are also similarities. In contrast to the liberal order, which has become an increasingly universalistic doctrine, the anti-liberal Right wants to go precisely in the other direction. In times of universalism, traditional core values and self-interest should again become the foundation. The systematic peeling away of the liberal illusion of the post-war world order is central here: it is not a moral order. This idea which has been sold as a new paradise has turned out to be an illusion. Human nature never changes, whatever system there is, and universal values and human rights are precisely used in this order to strengthen the real power pyramid in the world. This is now under the guise of democracy, but in reality nothing has changed in the world. Power is still a top-down phenomenon and the rest exists only to keep people docile. The liberal system is not real.

This is not surprising either. The post-WW2 world order is (certainly after the fall of the Berlin wall) a mish-mash of, on the one hand, the economically liberal capitalism from the United States and, on the other, cultural Marxism. This is called progressive liberalism and all our institutions have this ideology as a starting point. Globalism is an expression of this ideology.

Lindsay's theory that the anti-liberal right possesses the same qualities as gnostic ‘parasitic Marxism’ is therefore quite wrong. On the contrary, the system which is criticised by the anti-liberal Right itself possesses the same parasitic qualities as Marxism.

It may be true that the anti-liberal Right in action uses critical theory to criticise the power of the liberal political system. But it also stops there. The epistemological and metaphysical position of the anti-liberal Right is of a totally different nature from that of cultural Marxism.

The anti-liberal Right precisely attaches value to identity. Identity is even its foundation. The goal of cultural Marxism is the opposite: cultural Marxism undermines the self, and the order of things, by dismissing fundamental concepts as social constructions (think of the gender discussion). With this, critical theory subverts the rootedness of a society. A man is a man and a woman is a woman because, besides the fact that it is biologically a fact, in nature everything is built up from aspects of masculinity and femininity. The traces from eternity confirm that this has been the case since the fall from paradise (and the introduction of the state of things as they are now) (in whatever cultural form you look at this).

Gnostic cultural Marxism is in essence a liberation doctrine. Gnosticism focuses on liberation of the oppressed (classes, identities) from a corrupt world. The ‘woke Left’ deconstructs hierarchies for this Utopia. The ‘woke Right’ wants to restore hierarchies, for example the Christian-nationalist hegemony. This is not gnosis, but reactionary dualism: 'us vs. them' for dominance, not for decolonisation. Lindsay himself implicitly acknowledges this by linking the ‘woke Right’ to Alexander Dugin or post-liberalism, which is reactionary, not gnostic-liberating. Gnosticism promises a 'new heaven on earth' through self-criticism and self-undermining: the ‘woke Right’ offers no spiritual redemption in the world, only restoration and unmasking.

Lindsay is therefore quite right about Cultural Marxism. But how can he be so wrong when it comes to the anti-liberal Right? The answer lies in his own classical liberalism.

Lindsay's mistake: classical liberalism is also Gnosticism 
Lindsay claims, as previously indicated, that the ‘woke Right’ engages in group thinking. But groupthink also within classical liberalism. After all, an individual can only be free when everyone has equal rights. Classical liberalism is also an ideology and therefore already collectivistic in nature. The revolution must first take place before the individualistic Utopia can dawn. 

Now we go a step further. Lindsay’s own position is ITSELF not coherent with his own criticism of (cultural) Marxism. To illustrate this, we return to Lindsay's previously mentioned criticism and the concept of 'gnosticism'. 

Classical liberalism is itself also an heir to a gnostic way of thinking. It detaches the individual from the natural and divine connections in which it was always rooted - family, people, church, kingdom - and elevates him to a kind of abstract bearer of rights. The world thus becomes disenchanted: reduced to matter and contracts. Money and trade almost acquire the status of sacraments. 

In this liberal dream, flesh, birth and death fade into the background. It becomes a kind of market-gnosis, in which man thinks to liberate himself by abolishing everything that binds or limits him. 

Look at John Locke with his theory about the ‘tabula rasa’. Man is at birth a ‘blank slate’ who will explore the world unprejudiced. This is precisely a gnostic idea. Things have no origin and core and every generation can go into the world unrooted, detached from what binds him or her to previous generations. The individual is a person who, detached from his environment, can shape the world to his hand through his own actions. In this way, the material prison is also dissolved. Man can transcend his nature because it hardly influences him. It is therefore logical that more progressive-liberal philosophers such as John Rawls, with his theory about the ‘veil of ignorance’, base a theory of moral equality on the concept of ‘tabula rasa’. 

According to the Alexandrian gnostics, the true man has no nature, no flesh, no ancestors; he is pure potential which liberates himself from the ‘prison’ of the body, the family, the people, history. Locke secularises this and makes it the foundation of liberalism: man born without bonds, only rights, and the state as an artificial contract. That is the Alexandrian parasite (which Lindsay himself names in this way) that has disguised itself as ‘the Enlightenment’.

The Enlightenment: Rome, Judea and the parasite from Alexandria
Both liberalism and Marxism can be seen as two sides of the same ‘enlightened’ coin. It is the idea that we can create paradise on earth. This idea is as old as the story of the Tower of Babel.

The current world order, which we can see as a coming together of economic liberalism and cultural Marxist thinking, packaged as globalism, is an order in which both worst points come together. Globalism is, on a worldwide level, the implementation of the new gnostic consciousness structures. It is a worldwide uniformisation of values and cultures.

Marxism breaks down constructions in a very explicit way but liberalism does the same less explicitly. Take as an example the concept of government. A government was historically always an expression of self-interest, something which had a historical basis. Very long ago, this was the interest of the monarch. The monarch could make a historical claim to his right to rule from his birth and from divine right. When the centre of gravity shifted and the bourgeoisie emerged, the first governments arose from a very simple concept: the government should look after interests. This was lost with the further liberalisation of state structures. Self-interest gave way to universalism. This followed from the liberal value of equality. Often in the debate, it is claimed that liberalism assumes only freedom, but as Locke already noted, the condition of freedom for everyone is equality. This is where it went wrong. Governments increasingly behaved as guardians of universal liberalism. Further cultural and economic integration have ensured that universalism has made itself the goal. Borders matter less and less, the interests of people abroad are rarely subordinated to people at home. Liberalism works mainly through psychological nudging: small steps over a long period of time; however, the result is the same as with Marxism.

The whole world will, with the advent of a universal progressive-liberal order, enter a new stage of evolution, as already noted by Francis Fukuyama after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The world will with this moral new social order break free from the oppression of traditional structures. This ideal could not be more gnostic!

Conclusion 
In conclusion, the term 'woke Right' is more a rhetorical weapon than a serious analysis. It obscures the profound differences between movements which criticise the liberal order. Where progressive liberalism and cultural Marxism indeed approach reality as something that can be rebuilt according to gnostic insights, the anti-liberal Right precisely emphasises that an objective order exists - biologically, historically and culturally – and that it cannot simply be wiped away in the name of an abstract ideal. The worldview of the anti-liberal Right thus stands not next to, but diametrically opposed to the gnostic tradition which Lindsay describes, and to which ‘woke Left’ belongs. It is not aimed at liberation from the world, but at a revaluation of the world as it is, including the borders, identities and nature which define it.