I Am Woke Right

And there is nothing you can do about it

I think this was the last Current Thing before the Christmas H1-B sperg-out, so in Internet time I’m like fifty years late on this, but whatever. Last month I kept seeing this term “woke right” being spammed everywhere for a little while, mostly people were making fun of it. It seems to have come from Xitter so I didn’t immediately understand what was going on and had to do some investigation. Apparently the term originated, or perhaps was brought to notoriety, by chronically insane person James Lindsay.

This is the guy who spent 2023 spamming the term “Drag Floyd” to describe an apparent plot by the left to provoke a dramatic murder of a drag queen and set off an LGBTQ-themed version of the 2020 Summer of Floyd (this “Drag Floyd” scheme never came to fruition so far as I know, although perhaps James Lindsay would claim that he saved us from it through his relentless vigilance on Xitter). It seems like this is kind of his thing, to come up with dumb sounding catch phrases and meme them into relevance for clout. And I’m sitting here writing about it, so well-played to James Lindsay I guess. Keep on grifting buddy, you’re a better clout goblin than I’ll ever be.

Anyways, what exactly is the “woke right?” I tried to find a tweet from Mr. Lindsay himself defining it but failed. The closest I got were tweets complaining about “the woke right” in response to people posting right-wing Christian memes and things like that. I put out a note asking Substack what it meant and I believe this was the best response:

Urban Dictionary also gives us this as one of the top definitions:

“A psyop led by self-professed (classical) liberals like James Linsday and Konstantin Kisin that unsuccessfully attempted to denigrate everything like an awakening racial consciousness, any vital spirit of a shared tribe and ethnos by associating it with wokeness. This could not work because the online right immediately understood that the solution to woke power was not to deradicalizem but rather to engage in postmodern politics of our very own.”

This also seems like a pretty good definition to me. Basically, “woke right” seems to mean opposing globalism, and/or being religious. Obviously it would also contain things like white nationalism, but that falls within the broader umbrella of simply being anti-globalist. This is so because, by definition, if you are not a globalist, you must then be a nationalist (possibly you could be some obscure third option, but such people are practically non-existent at the moment, in contemporary politics all people effectively break down along the line of nationalism vs globalism). People who actually use this “woke right” term as a pejorative would probably say that they are simply against tribalism.

It's untenable to be against tribalism in any form, though. After all, globalists are themselves a tribe. By attempting to align themselves as “anti-woke classical liberals” or whatever, James Lindsay and co. form a tribe of “anti-woke classical liberals,” who are differentiated and recognized as being apart from all the other political and ideological tribes floating around the Internet. To form tribes is inherent to human nature, it’s as fundamental as things like religious beliefs and the temptation to sin. Trying to avoid it would be like trying not to breathe air.

The question then is how one should go about joining and interacting with their various “tribal” identities. The original and perhaps still most important tribe is the family, of which the nation is a natural outgrowth, as I described in my post defending national identity. Likewise, religious traditions form a very naturally occurring tribe—the people I’m most loyal to in life after my family are those in my church. I imagine that even James Lindsay wouldn’t be so deranged as to attack people’s loyalty to their families as “being woke.”

Why shouldn’t he, though? If the criticism of nationalism is that it’s wrong for someone to have any kind of privilege because they happen to be born in a certain nation, then wouldn’t the same apply to one’s family relations? After all, one’s brother and sister do not necessarily have to do anything to earn your loyalty—usually we all understand that you will show them some degree of favor simply due to the fact that they are your siblings. But that’s a random accident of the universe in exactly the same way as the fact that you were all born in a particular nation and not in another nation.

This reveals why the whole “woke right” smear seems not to have any teeth, because the worldview behind it is short-sighted and incoherent on a level that most people understand intuitively. Our naturally occurring tribal identities give us a solid foundation through which to form coherent social relations in the world around us. We on the right understand that the unmooring of these natural ties is one major cause of the spiritual emptiness and social isolation of the modern world.

Given all of that, I really don’t mind being called “woke right” at all. You’ve probably seen a meme about someone being called racist and taking it as a compliment—I’d definitely take that approach here. Being “woke right” differentiates me from James Lindsay, after all. I am happy to take that implication. As I was writing this, I saw a tweet from TracingWoodgrains which further drove this point home for me:

“I confess with some shame that I'm growing to accept the term "Woke Right" as basically reasonable populist identitarian right-wing-ism with Social Media Mob characteristics: group-focused, power-aware, and looking to cast heretics out and control the politics of the country”

Oh dear, how dare we… be “power-aware” and “look to control the politics of the country?” So you mean, how dare we participate in politics effectively? Oh, the horror! So woke, so wrong! Forgive me if I don’t feel bad about people finally learning to fight the left on its own terms. In other contexts, we would understand this mindset as simply part of Our Democracy™—after all, we’re all supposed to have a voice in politics, we’re all supposed to be informed about this stuff and vote, so naturally we’re going to organize into groups based on our interests and advocate for them in the public square.

That’s literally how our political system is supposed to work. If we don’t want masses of group-focused people exerting social pressure in order to forward their political ideology, then perhaps we should live in a system where the average person isn’t expected to participate in politics, but I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that TracingWoodgrains is probably not a monarchist. The unspoken implication of his attitude is Democracy For Me, But Not for Thee—when people TracingWoodgrains agrees with participate in politics, that’s fine and dandy, but if people he doesn’t like do it, well now they’re “woke” and bad.

The way all of this is playing out strikes me as quite amusing when we look back at the history of the term “woke.” The word was originally a term that the woke would use to describe themselves in a positive sense, and only later came to be seen instead as a pejorative (a phenomenon that also occurred with the term “fake news” in rather hilarious fashion). Being “woke” meant “awakening” to the “reality” that, as the inimitable Anita Sarkeesian once said: “everything is sexist, everything is racist, everything is homophobic and you have to point it all out to everyone all the time.”

This is a worldview that only became mainstream about two seconds ago, and has lasted for all of those two seconds before beginning to show serious cracks. Being “woke right” thus means simply “awakening” back to the state of nature in which one understands that everything is this way for reasons that are good and natural and normal, for the most part, and that whatever exceptions do exist do not in any way disprove nature’s general rules. Given this dynamic, it is inevitable that the “woke right” insult would fail in the same fashion as the suggestion that Donald Trump was ushered into power by “fake news.”

Photorealistic depiction of clowns like James Lindsay and TracingWoodgrains