Why the Term ‘Woke Right’ is Centrist Shifting of Responsibility
The Right had no part in Wokeness, and still doesn’t.
Right and Left used to be easy, didn’t they?
The Right was capitalism, free trade, the party of business, conformity, tradition and respectability. The Right showed itself symbolically through patriotism and respect for Monarchy, through the old displays of flag and Crown and the old love of Nation.
The Left was suspicious of capitalism, protectionist, the party of the the workers, the common man, novelty and rebellion. The Left showed itself symbolically through the protest march and the protest song, through the self created displays of working class communities and a new sense of fellowship across Nations.
The Right was for the middle class, the Left was for the working class, and the upper class if it was smart played them off against each other (making the upper class the true birthplace of ‘centrism’).
But things got much more confusing. Right and Left were after all just inventions of the rabidly insane French Revolution, increasingly uncomfortable and inaccurate as the world changed. Politically active monarchism and nobility were removed from the equation, rendering a large chunk of the old upper class redundant and changing too what the nature of Right and Left (and centrist) really was.
The Left became more and more respectable and the Right became more and more disreputable. Parties of the Left were incorporated into the system, Unions were legalised, the working class was enfranchised with full voting rights, property requirements on voting were dropped, landed aristocracies were hit with inheritance taxes, Left wing ideology and rhetoric crept into bastions of respectability, the Long March through the institutions occurred, automatic social deference was hit by satire and change, and by the end of WWII the entire social structure was ripe for Cultural Revolution.
Especially since Marxist historians, now dominant in education and university teaching, successfully equated all right wing thought, all patriotism, all nationalism, with the exposed horrors of Nazism. Left wing thinking and rhetoric became more established and more respectable than rightwing thinking and rhetoric, ironically successfully capturing the old professions that best represented middle class respectability (teachers, academics, State employed nurses, doctors, scientists).
It turned out that the teaching profession for instance was one naturally fitted to social conformity, and it didn’t really care in which direction that was. Because the demand for Revolutionary attitudes towards social matters can itself become an Establishment vice, or a long lasting tired old tradition. Once, nearly all teachers could be described as rightwing and gave lessons on the glory and courage of The Empire. Then, in the seeming blink of an eye, nearly all teachers were leftwing and gave lessons on the shame and evil of The Empire. Teachers tend to be agents of conformity, and especially so if they think that they are agents of free thought and rebellion because that renders them blind to the fact that their lessons are inherited and their postures have been around for nearly a century.
World War One and World War Two turned the world upside down. The most successful nations on the planet had engaged in the most devastating wars. The most cultured European nation, Germany, had descended to the vilest depths of barbarity. Colonial possessions had seen the rotten core, as they saw it, of European superiority. The Japanese had shown that these nations could be beaten. The Nazis had shown that they could be the barbarians. The devastation discredited not just Nazism, but even the respectability of the nations which defeated it, because this was a conflict owned by Europeans. By white Europeans.
It becomes hard to defend tradition and patriotism and the good sense of the old order when twice in rapid succession, within the same lifetime of most witnesses, these things asked millions of men to fight and die. Even if the causes were just, there is a taint to that, the whiff of death, that cannot be quickly erased, that demands a fresh breeze from a different air. All Europe, all European and British and Western claims to have got the system right, were tainted by the death camps of Germany, even in liberating them, and Marxists made sure it was so.
Right there and then people started pretending that the British Empire was just as evil as Nazism. Modern figures described by some as the ‘Woke Right’ aren’t even that original. What Tucker Carlson or Dave Smith or Darryl Cooper have said about Churchill was said by Marxists first.
Today of course we see that Right and Left have been completely inverted. Progressive Globalism, the creation and perhaps final form of a capitalist accord with Marxism, is utterly dominant in terms of Establishment power and attitudes. The part of the Left that was still somehow patriotic has disappeared entirely. The Right is completely absent from the corridors of power, except in the US. There it has had to re-emerge, a phoenix, from the ashes of RINO conformity, as a thing called Trumpian populism. Across the rest of the western world, Globalism reigns.
A Globalism which is descended from the Left. A Globalism which labels the basic freedom and inalienable rights of its own citizens as Far Right. A Globalism backed by all the major corporations and businesses, especially the most powerful ones. Today, old Leftwing rhetoric dominates the classroom and the boardroom alike. Socially revolutionary dogma, including the destruction of such basic understandings of what is male and female and whether a family has any worth, is not just commonplace but demanded, mandated and enforced by the instirutions of our society and by the most comfortable and affluent members of it.
Today, the Right are the people who listen to the working class, and the Left are the people who control and support Big Business. Today, the Right are the ones cracked on the skull by police batons, and the Left are the ones cheering on The Man.
Today, the Right is censored, and the Left can get away with anything with the full power of both Business and the State behind them in fascist accord. Everywhere across the West, except Trump’s America, which alone calls for free speech and actual democratic rights and democratic accountability.
With such a total inversion, with populism expressing what were once the sane, sensible and standard social conclusions of most of society (the kind of thinking that built original success) but being labelled extremist by a mainstream that has gone mad, of course alternative voices rose up in reply. But they did so in a context where every Left and Right label makes increasingly little sense. We use these inherited tools unwisely. I have had to use them here, because they are the topic being discussed.
But let’s look at one way Right and Left are being used unwisely, with little recognition of the shift in relative power between Right and Left and which represents established power and which does not.
Here is the lack of wisdom in these terms I’m talking about:
The above is a glib support for the use of the term Woke Right. This has emerged recently as some supposed rightwing commentators in alternative media have shown themselves to be Jew haters. We saw that for instance with Candace Owens, and to a lesser extent with Tucker Carlson, and of course we see essentially Holocaust denial and pure Nazism from people such as Darryl Cooper.
In response to that, many centrists now label all these voices as the Woke Right. But it’s a really inaccurate and lazy definition.
We aren’t talking about a ‘Woke Right’. We are talking about Jew haters, who of course share ideas with other Jew haters.
I should add here by the way, given the graphic above, that I’ve seen nothing from Sargon that puts him in this category. Saying Marx was a good writer is not saying Marx was right, and being an alternative media voice does not make you one of the alternative media voices that hates Jews. If Sargon is in either of those places, I’ve definitely not seen it.
Which is one of the problems with the Woke Right term. It can easily smear the innocent.
I hate the Woke Right label. Its nonsensical. Because Wokeness is entirely a creation of the progressive Left.
What’s been discovered is that some alternative media figures and previous outsider voices (who opposed wokeness) hate Jews. That is of course something which renders them as believers in an evil idea and which should lessen or end the respect they previously earned fighting wokeness.
This hatred of Jews is common in the woke ranks too.
But hatred of Jews is (notoriously so) a long lasting conspiracy theory and evil. Wokeness includes many other elements, which rightwing Jew haters don’t possess (not least of which is the central importance of also hating white people in woke ideology).
What Woke Right does as a term is see everything through a very modern filter and ignore key differences to do that. It also does what a term like Toxic Masculinity does and taints everything Right with the attitudes of what are actually a small group of alternative media influencers (the way Toxic Masculinity demonises masculinity as a whole). This mirrors too the ways that Marxist historians set our overall understanding of Nazism by tainting all nationalism with Nazism and ignoring Nazi socialism.
‘Woke Right’ a creation of centrists and classical liberals who see themselves as inherently superior to Left and Right. It allows them to deny the line of descent of wokeness from classical liberalism, because while wokeness might be called a daughter of Marxism, its father is classical liberalism and wokeness can also be understood as the extreme of classical liberalism, the point where what functioned as virtues in classical liberalism become vices opposite to those virtues but dependent, for their existence, on conditions and arguments set by classical liberals first.
Wokeness is the child of Marxist Statism and Social Revolution, and the child of Classical Liberal (and Christian) lessons on incorporating and empathising and compromising with those outside your traditional ethnic, religious and national loyalty groups. The combination of the two becomes the brutal State enforced and Corporate enforced priority of minorities and hierarchy of grievance categories against the interests of the existing majority.
The Right took no part in the birth of this monster, except via the complacency and cowardice of the official Establishment Right perhaps serving as a nursemaid for it.
Both the mainstream and the alternative world, both the Left and the Right, have Jew haters. That doesn’t mean the label Woke Right is an accurate one. It’s much more Centrist arrogance and denial of their own responsibility in the birth of a monstrous movement.
Centrists and classical liberals should admit that they played a bigger part in the creation of Wokeness than anyone on the Right did. They should be more honest and less arrogant in the continued presumption that the Centre held to decency and normality.
Because quite obviously the Centre did not hold.
Thank you. 🎵 I've looked at life from both sides now, from give and take, and still somehow, it's life's illusions I recall; I really don't know life at all. I do know I worked for Joe and Abe Weingarten for 25 years, and never met anyone then or now that I admired more.
For what little it's worth, new terminologies like Woke Right, offered within an increasingly broken/redundant Right/Left paradigm, just feel like a kind of 'sophist pivot', with the intention of creating distance between observed peculiarities in a nebulous group, and the observer. This distance might be used to avoid responsibility (as this piece suggests), or it might be to simply claim that the observer is free from the characteristics which he observes...either way it's an annoying term, not a helpful one!