By Definition, there can be no Woke Right
The excesses of Trump and the online influencer right have revived talk of the Woke Right. I get the emotion, but as a scholar who, like the political scientist Giovanni Sartori, is a stickler for the rigorous use of concepts, I must rebel.
Sartori famously warned, in a 1970 paper, against the sin of ‘conceptual stretching’.
There is no woke right even if the MAGA or online right resembles the woke left on some dimensions.
Why?
Woke refers to a very specific phenomenon: the making sacred of historically marginalized race, gender and sexual groups. This informs a moralistic worldview that judges people's core character.
A reverse wokeism would require making whites, men and straight people sacred.
Words which inadvertently insult these totems would be grounds for cancellation. Straight white men would be viewed as more spiritual and moral than others. Nonwhite LGBT women would be viewed as the fallen.
People who praised Indian cuisine or Chinese philosophy might be accused of a backhanded slight against whites, and get piled on.
Any disparity, such as boys doing worse than girls in school, would be evidence of systemic discrimination.
These would be part of a moral crusade, and those who blaspheme the sacred would be seen as morally deficient, with a stained soul. Disgusting like a sex offender. People you want to debank, unfriend and cast out of all of society.
In-group policing within a tribe is not the same as enforcing a moral order which seeks to take over the entire society.
Judging someone to be a bad Republican is not the same as saying they are a bad person you wouldn't date, hire or live next door to. They may be cast out of the right-wing tribe but not of society. The first is tribal, the second moralistic. The woke left is moralistic, the MAGA or online right is not.
Fans of a weak football (soccer) team like Bolton Wanderers who say the Premier League is rigged against them are tribal, identitarian and express grievance politics. They have a power-centred ‘oppressor-oppressed’ worldview. They are emotional and may feel virtue due to not being dominant. They may castigate those who do not share a victim narrative. That doesn't make them woke football fans.
The idea of face validity in science refers to the fact that terms have a meaning in the real world that scholars agree on and can thus recognize, measure and test when they see it. Woke has a clear meaning which is inevitably associated with the cultural left.
Woke refers to the making sacred of historically marginalized race, gender and sexual groups.
In theory, whites and men (less likely) could become historically marginalized after awhile. The left might then feel sorry enough for them to make them sacred. For example, Muslims in India were once the elite but are now subaltern enough to count as oppressed. Jews once got sympathy but are now seen as part of the oppressor class. Things could change.
But then that would likely put the right on the side of the nonwhite female oppressor class so there would still be no woke right.
By definition there can be no woke right.
I agree with you completely on this Eric.
Sometimes I think that Dr Lindsay and others are looking to extend their own relevance and tenure as influential woke dissidents with this notion. It's 'Prevalence Induced Concept Change' Eric! (I learned about that from you). As the real thing begins to show signs of waning, the definition of woke starts getting expanded in order to preserve just enough 'stock' of it for people like James to keep writing about it! Or am I being too cynical there??
Like all valuable critics of harmful social trends and problems, woke dissidents should in fact welcome, and indeed be trying to bring about, their own obsolescence.
By definition there can indeed be no woke right. I agree that this does reflect the interplay between positive and negative prejudice, sacralization being the positive form in wokeism and demonization the negative one. It is highly unlikely that any mainstream ideological movement could sacralise men and boys and simultaneously demonize women and girls. And we are certainly not seeing the rise of such a thing now.
Another thing that strikes me as significant here is the difference between 'hidden', 'systemic' and 'implied/inferred' discrimination, on the one hand, and and real, measurable, direct discrimination on the other. Wokeism tends to 'specialise', shall we say, in the former. A key part of the state of being woke is being able to "see" the hidden power grids that fall so conveniently around sex, race, gender (Patriarchy; Whiteness, cis-gender Heteronormativity etc.).
This can result in a belief and an insistence upon the existence of prejudice and discrimination even when it isn't there.
Much of the backlash against wokeism from the right is nothing like that. The woke solution to 'imagined' or 'perceived' discrimination is REAL direct discrimination against white people, men and boys etc. Just as it wasn't really 'woke' for 20th century liberal feminists and civil rights activists to call out direct discrimination against women and POC in the past, it surely also isn't woke for people on the right to be concerned about direct discrimination against white men etc today?
One of the worst things about the woke obsession with hidden discrimination, and its response to it, is that it turns something that it THINKS is unjust into something it really KNOWS is unjust.
Pushing back against that isn't woke. It's simply pushing back against an obvious injustice and unfair discrimination.
Smart analysis as ever. While the right may not be best comprehended as "woke," there are strands of the right that are decidedly illiberal. That can include people who decry woke coercion and then apply corresponding tactics when it suits their purposes and they hold the reins of power. For many on the receiving end, that understandably can prompt applying the woke label to both.