Bats are not Birds: : Why There is no Woke Right

A number of writers, including James Lindsay and Konstantin Kisin, argue that there is a woke right as well as a woke left in the West today. Does this claim hold water?

Short answer: no.

The woke right only exists in Pakistan and other societies where conservative radicals enforce moralistic taboos around sacred totems across society.

That’s not to say that in the Venn diagram between the woke left and MAGA right there aren’t some shared features. Both indulge in emotionalism, ad hominem attacks, cancelling enemies as disloyal, conspiracy theorizing about shadowy forces, and casting their identity group as a victim.

But a degree of overlap is not enough to make two concepts identical. Indeed, the above list would also describe extremists among sports fans (of losing teams), academic disciplinary cliques (i.e. anti-string theorists) or many other social groups. As Kathleen Stock astutely observes:

‘Such behaviour scarcely distinguishes the Right from any ill-disciplined online tribe who feels it is on a losing side. From Scottish Nationalists to feminists to Taylor Swift fans’.

That doesn’t make them woke.

Rather than speak of woke right, it is better to adopt the notion that there is a family resemblance between the woke left and sections of the right: that the MAGA right has some characteristics in common with the woke left, but not others.

‘Woke right’ is to ‘woke left’ what a bat is to a bird. Bats and birds are both relatively small and fly, but bats are mammals with fur and teeth whereas birds are not. Bacteria and viruses both cause disease and are microscopic, but only bacteria are living organisms with cellular structures while viruses are just inanimate proteins. To call a bat a bird, or a bacteria a virus, on the basis of their similarities, is to engage in what political scientist Giovanni Sartori terms ‘conceptual stretching’ - a cardinal sin in science.

Let’s start from first principles.

I define woke in my book Taboo / The Third Awokening as: ‘the making sacred of historically marginalized race, gender and sexual minorities’. The sacralization of these identity groups means that any statements which offend sacralized totemic minorities (i.e. criticizing immigration, inadvertently making the ‘OK’ sign, saying ‘you are so articulate’ to a black person or using ‘Latino’ instead of ‘Latinx’) represent a profaning of the sacred, and are grounds for excommunication from the community. In other words, being cancelled. The group at the bottom of the moral totem pole, assigned the role of the fallen in the system, is the white male.

Sacralizing particular minority groups meshes with the left-wing moral intuitions - egalitarianism and care/harm protection - to produce the inductive philosophy of woke cultural socialism. This I define as ‘equal outcomes and emotional harm protection for sacralized minority groups’.

In other words, DEI.

Equal outcomes means ‘Diversity and Equity’ (DE): affirmation action quotas and anti-white/Asian/male discrimination.

Emotional harm protection means ‘Inclusion’ (I): speech codes, political correct norms and censorship laws to punish ‘harmful’ speech, ensuring that even the most sensitive member of a protected group is not offended.

Let’s now apply this to the right.

A woke right would need to sacralize a group or its symbols, while demonizing its oppressor as fallen. Let’s say white males were made sacred. Anyone criticizing a white person, or a symbol sacred to them (Cowboys? The Mayflower? Country music?) would be accused of anti-white racism and find themselves twitter mobbed, with calls to have them drummed out of their job. Nonwhites (notably black or indigenous people) would be cast in the role of the fallen in this moral system. ‘This profession is too BIPOC,’ a woke rightist might retort.

It’s pretty clear this situation does not exist. Most conservatives who pay attention to anti-white racism, such as Jeremy Carl in his excellent Unprotected Class: How Anti-White Racism is Tearing America Apart focus on unambiguous double-standards, such as the fact only whites are prevented from openly expressing their group identity or organizing on racial lines to advance their group interests. Those who point to anti-white bias typically identify measurable and falsifiable examples of discrimination, such as affirmative action quotas which result in better-qualified whites not being admitted or hired.

Might it be that the woke right is about defending political rather than identity taboos? Donald Trump and ‘stop the steal’ rather than white people or men? Are those who question core conservative shibboleths or criticize the orange man reprobates to be cancelled? There is something there. Yet a person who criticizes Trump is not viewed by the populist right as an immoral outcast to be shunned across every aspect of their life, their reputation blackened for good.

In addition, many on the American right clearly do not hold back when they disagree with Trump, as with Laura Loomer and Steve Bannon on H1B visas. So while there is group conformity in MAGA circles, and questioning certain orthodoxies can bring down an avalanche of opprobrium, the idea that someone’s social standing across society, in terms of morality and character, will be attacked with the aim of destroying their reputation and livelihood, is less convincing.

It is also important that MAGA is not trying to universalize their orthodoxy to the level of society at large, across government and elite institutions. There is simply no parallel to the left’s attempt to institutionalize inflated anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-homophobia and anti-transphobia taboos everywhere. MAGA social conformity is about in-group particularism, not a universalist moral crusade. It is more Amish than Evangelical.

In terms of right-wing cultural socialism (equal outcomes and emotional harm protection), it is certainly true that elements of the populist right have a grievance narrative about the white working-class and demand better representation of ordinary whites in politics and advertising. They argue, quite reasonably, that conservatives are discriminated against in elite institutions. However, explicit demands for equal representation through affirmative action quotas are generally absent.

And while there is a right-wing claim that anti-white discrimination is rampant, this is usually grounded in examples that are convincing or debatable. It is difficult to find a demand for sensitivity from the right equivalent to woke left microaggressions such as ‘you are so articulate’ or ‘anyone can make it in America’. Verbalizing the words ‘white trash’ or ‘redneck’ from a work of literature does not produce the same reaction among a MAGA audience as reading the N-word from a James Baldwin novel does for the woke left.

Bottom line: the concept of ‘woke right’ doesn’t work.

It makes about as no more sense than ‘woke Manchester City fan’, ‘woke Swiftie’ or ‘woke anti-string theorist’. Within the group, there may be conformity to orthodoxy, social shunning of outsiders, conspiracy theory or egalitarian grievances against an establishment.

But there is no equivalent zeal to impugn the moral character and personhood of an individual while spreading one’s taboos across society so as to banish profaners of the sacred from all spheres of life.

Where there is a woke right is in a society like contemporary Pakistan or 17th century Massachusetts. If you insult the Koran or the Bible (or are even tangentially accused of doing so) you are considered an immoral transgressor of the sacred who should be strung up. Fundamentalists are moral universalists who want their taboos institutionalized across the entire society, including the state’s punishment apparatus.

The anti-communists of the early 50s might be considered a woke right. Communist sympathizers in McCarthyite times came close to being targeted for their lack of patriotism and immorality, though in a less extreme way than in colonial Massachusetts. Homosexuals prior to the 1960s were treated as immoral by the traditionalist right, though such attitudes were arguably widespread across all ideological segments. The patriotic 1980s right, with its ‘protect the flag’ attitude partakes of something similar, though the weight of the libertarian free speech tradition meant unpatriotic people were not viewed as quite so personally immoral and disgusting as they were under the Puritan or McCarthyite dispensations. Still, at least there was a sacred totem and an attempt to universalize this morality across the entire society. Nothing of the kind exists for the contemporary ‘woke right’.

In other words, bats are not birds. In today’s West, there is no woke right equivalent to the woke left.