With no apology, a return to the issue of why James Lindsay, Jordan Peterson and other classical liberals are wrong about the ‘Woke Right’.
The man pictured above in the pose of a Roman Emperor is James Lindsay, the primary originator and spreader of the term Woke Right. Lindsay has been described as a Conservative. Some have called him Far Right. But he is really a Classical Liberal.
It must be nice being a classical liberal or a political centrist.
You get to stand in what you assume to be the Middle, looking down on everyone else.
A Facebook friend of mine recently shared an anecdote about a poster they refer to often in political teaching. The poster shows an eagle. The wing on the Left is the ‘Left Wing’. The wing on the Right is the ‘Right Wing’.
So far, pretty easy to follow, right?
And in the Middle is both the Head and the Heart. In the middle is Centrism, the Classical Liberal says, holding all the brains and all the compassion. Now, being Centrists, the anecdote goes on to say of course there are good things on the Left, and of course there are good things on the Right. It asserts too that the Left and the Right are needed to check and balance each other.
Who does the checking and balancing? Who is the unbiased judge, the objective reporter, who decides when the Left is too passionately incoherent, or when the Right is too coldly pragmatic? Who chairs the discussion, brings healing and moderation, and with a polite but condescendingly superior smile supervises the triumph of compromise?
Why, the Classical Liberal Centrist of course!
The problem with all this is the suffocating lack of self awareness. Centrists invariably consider themselves the most moderate, the most rational, the most balanced, and the most decent of us all. And they show little to no grasp of the fact that this superiority complex is a dangerous one, and just as prone to extremisms of its own.
So it is centred on believing oneself smarter and kinder than Left or Right. It is not based on a superiority of race identity or a radical notion of grievance. But it is inherently rather pleased with itself, and rather prone to the assumption that its conclusions are more educated and more fundamentally decent than those which occurred to ‘the Left’ or ‘the Right’.
Imagine thinking that you are innately more reasonable than anyone else, automatically more educated, inherently more rational and moderate. Wouldn’t this attitude make you at best an insufferable bore, and at worst a particular kind of monster unaware of your monstrousness?
And isn’t this the attitude that university educated middle class liberals possess, to an extraordinary and self contradicting ‘degree’, so much so that for many people the word liberal became a synonym for arrogant political madness?
Think of the smarmy, snarky, achingly superior tone of the worst people you have argued with online, the ones who sneered at independent research, thought and critical risk awareness during COVID, or the ones who invented such social media gems as “educate yourself”, “read a book” and “trust the Science” and you invariably found, did you not, that these arrogant wankstains would describe themselves as liberals?
Is it not true that the parties that most modern classical liberals supported were actually leftist parties? These people were voting Democrat and Labour, were they not, and even parties that claimed to be Centrist, like Britain’s Liberal Democrats, were parties in which it would be very hard to find a right wing principle or a right wing person welcomed and accepted?
The truth is that in modern times at least, and certainly on everything regarding social attitudes, cultural attitudes, economic views on the size of the State and the purposes of the State, all of our alleged classical liberals and centrists spent years advocating things and believing things which were much more closely entangled with the parties of the Left than the parties of the Right.
While telling us in things like the Eagle anecdote that both wings play their part and Centrism respects both while limiting both, the truth is that virtually every self-identified classical liberal of the modern era was much, much more comfortable with the Left than they were with the Right.
The claimed Centre was not in the centre. It was way off to the Left. And happily so.
And when we think of modern classical liberals who turned against wokeness or the Democrat Party, we see that this is true. Because they were invariably Democrat voters. Matt Taibbi was an Establishment Democrat friendly journalist, working at the newspapers that saw themselves as bastions of Classical Liberal moderation even as they became more and more obvious propagandists of radical social theories and partisan total alignment with the Democrat political party. James Lindsay prior to 2020 voted Democrat and was a keen Barack Obama supporter. Naomi Wolf was a feminist academic working entirely within a discipline created by leftist social and gender assumptions. More overtly political heavyweights of course came directly from the Democrat Party, most notably (very late in the day) Tulsi Gabbard and Robert F.Kennedy Jnr.
All of these people would happily describe themselves as liberals, including past the point where other people called ‘liberals’ were acting exactly like Marxists. Several of them have spoken about not leaving the Democrat Party and not changing, but of being pushed out or forced to leave by their party becoming extreme. I haven’t seen any of them wonder whether the extremism they identified in the modern party, and the things they identified as wokeness and authoritarianism, might not be total departures from or contradictions of the prior attitudes in leftist parties, but simply a kind of excess that could turn those existing attitudes into hideous vices.
When they left or were pushed out, they were happy to declare that the Democrat Party had gone mad, that their former colleagues were authoritarian zealots and fanatics obsessed with identity issues and motivated by both corruption and hate. They were all far less likely to acknowledge that classical liberal views and centrist politics had been sitting, for a long time, comfortably alongside the Left, with almost no input from the Right.
The Eagle had been unbalanced for a long time before it crashed into the dust. The vaunted Centrist head and heart had been listening almost exclusively to the Left, and almost exclusively defending the Left, for decades. Even the most cursory examination of who classical liberals were voting for or whose views were being driven from polite and educated circles confirms this. In terms of social and identity issues, we had a whole century in which it was hard to place an atom’s width of difference between the Left and the Liberal. They were analogous, by their own choice.
And if we look at how western society changed, it was all in one direction only throughout the 20th century, and from World War Two on very rapidly and extremely so. Even the 1980s resurgence of western rightwing confidence under Thatcher and Reagan hardly saw any kind of counter revolution reversing the sexual and social leftist radicalism of the 1960s. The once radical was now the embedded mainstream regardless of which party won elections. It’s not as if Thatcher, Reagan or anyone on the Right could ever advocate reversing 19th and early and mid 20th century changes. The idea of removing the female vote or reversing race relations legislation would not be voiced by any rightwing person taken seriously in society, but even more obviously there was no attempt to reverse even much more radical and much more controversial subsequent policies. The ‘rightwing’ 1980s did not see any feminist studies departments being closed, for instance, and still happily paid Marxist historians to write school textbooks or teach university level courses.
So the Centre was never really in the Middle. It was Left aligned. The cultural and social assumptions only changed in one direction, which was away from Rightwing attitudes. Every legal novelty and every major legislative change was in a leftist progressive direction, with none of these things ever being reversed. Education only ever became more leftist and progressive. Comedy and satire focused solely on sneering at rightwing viewpoints. Entertainment became more and more dominated by leftist social views. The Overton Window moved left, and left, and left again. Institutions fell to a Long March from the Left, and there was never an equivalent March of the Right in the Anglophone world. Leftist terrorists literally became legislators and educators. Business became another means of enforcing, policing and propagandising radical progressive social attitudes, with full corporate financial support.
Some of those pushing back against the term Woke Right are far more historically astute regarding all this than Lindsay is, and have a broader understanding of where Wokeness came from:
The idea that the Centre was balancing two extremes, meanwhile, rather than aligned with one of them, is absurd. Only the false self image of the Classical Liberal Centrist, only their own illusions, made them think they were genuinely ‘in the middle’ and genuinely the correct arbiters of what is and is not extreme.
Classical liberals are capable of admitting that they were once advocates and members of the parties and institutions that ‘went Woke’, but still deny the responsibility that entails. The truth is they facilitated the birth of Woke, and then indulged it outrageously, only stopping doing so when it attacked them. They were like parents spoiling an increasingly psychotic child and then being completely shocked when the overly indulged young maniac waves a knife in their face.
On my Facebook account I shared an imaginary dialogue which expresses how all this appears to those of us who have come to Populism from the Right, and especially having throughout that journey condemned wokeness far more than any classical liberal was doing. I should probably add too that I have always condemned extremes like Jew hatred, and will continue to do so in relation to people being described as the Woke Right.
None of that though is incompatible with recognising just how deflecting and hypocritical the Centrist Classical Liberal invention of the term Woke Right now is. Here is the dialogue I mentioned:
“Classical Liberals: Our society is so unfair. We must prioritise minorities and strangers.
Woke: OK, let’s do that a LOT.
Classical Liberals: Our history is so unjust. Let’s ignore everything good and only talk about the bad things and wallow in cultural and racial guilt as if nobody else was ever bad.
Woke: Yes! Let’s do that a LOT.
Classical Liberals: We need to radically change attitudes to male and female roles. Let’s sneer at everything traditional as far as gender goes and say that there are no differences at all between men and women.
Woke: Got it! Men and women are exactly the same and men should wear dresses! Let’s do that a LOT.
Classical Liberals: Instead of general protections for every citizen, we need special protections in law for special favoured groups based on identity. That’s the only way we can achieve social justice.
Woke: So true! certain identities deserve extra protection and that’s social justice. Let’s obsess on those identities. It doesn’t matter if this hurts other people. Let’s do that a LOT.
Classical Liberals: We are so smart. We are the only educated people,and we are the only people who are reasonable and rational. Everyone else is an extremist.
Woke: We are so smart. We are the only educated people, and we are the only people who are reasonable and rational. Everyone else is an extremist.
Classical Liberals: Christianity is all really stupid, isn’t it? Let’s laugh at it. I’ve always been fascinated with exotic Eastern religions you know. I’m not sure whether I’m a Buddhist or a Muslim but either way it’s much more beautiful than Christianity.
Woke: Yeah, Christianity sucks! Ban Christianity and laugh when Christians die. Let’s make the Pope Marxist. I LOooove Islam so much.
Classical Liberals: The Right is just the same as the Left you know. They have so much in common. So Woke.
The Right: What the fuck?”
Centrists and Classical Liberals need to drop the arrogant assumption that they are the only people pure of malign motive, and that they have nobly stood above the fray, more reasonable and moderate than the rest of us. They should recognise that they excused Communism, and employed Marxists. They should recognise that they shared with Leftists many assumptions regarding western history, identity and culture. They should ask themselves how much their own positions, taken to an extreme, define Wokeness.
They should look in the mirror a little more, and admit the things they got wrong. Was it really so wise to create legislation that ONLY protected minorities? Was it really so wise to praise early feminists who used terrorist tactics? Has sneering relentlessly at Christianity, the family and tradition made a more stable, peaceful and successful society? Dare any classical liberal centrist ask themselves if they have favoured Left more than Right, and excused social evils as they developed and became mainstream?
How many of them would even now be prepared to question whether mass scale abortion and State sanctioned euthanasia of the depressed and the elderly truly represent a healthy society in balance with itself and doing things which are good for the most vulnerable or actually compassionate?
The Centrist has a clean conscience. But perhaps he is blind to his own faults. The conscience is clean not because it is innocent, but because it lacks self awareness.
This article was first published at Jupplandia.
