Only Schmucks Would Use The Term “Woke Right”

Until recently, “woke” was a term that anti-Marxist liberals, nationalists, and conservatives had in common. It was a term we could use to communicate with one another and understand one another in our desperate post-2015 battle against a virulent and ascendant strain of neo-Marxist revolution. In other words, the term “woke” played an important role in building a broad coalition that looked like it could be strong enough to defeat this enemy.

It was a pretty big achievement for such a small word.

But now a handful of anti-woke liberals have decided to turn this formerly unifying, coalition-building term into a weapon to use against the right.

True, some of the most malicious liberals are intentionally using “woke right” to cover just about the entire nationalist right; whereas other, more naive liberals, having taken the bait, are trying to apply the term “woke right” only to what used to be called the “alt-right” or “white nationalists.”

I get it. I really do. I understand that some of the liberals who’ve been pumping up the term “woke right” are deceitful scoundrels, and that others are just honestly, nerdishly trying to work out a way of understanding real questions in political theory that are bothering them.

But for present purposes, it doesn’t matter if you’re a deceitful scoundrel or an earnest nerd. Every liberal using the term “woke right” is being a shmuck. Because what they are all doing is taking a flag and a symbol that for 10 years was highly effective at rallying opposition to the neo-Marxist revolution—and worked well to cement a coalition that could defeat it—and throwing that flag to the ground and trampling on it so it can’t be used any more.

Yes, you shmucks, “woke” always meant exactly one thing: It referred to that part of the Left which anti-Marxist liberals, conservatives, nationalists, Christians, and Jews had to join forces to defeat. And by repurposing that term as a weapon against parts of this coalition, you’ve turned it into gall in our mouths. You’ve taken a shared term of discourse, gutted its common and universally accepted meaning, and mangled it so we can’t use it to talk to one another anymore.

This is why so many on the nationalist right are so amazed by the treachery of certain anti-Marxist liberals who’ve been promoting the theory of the “woke right”—and by the wretched folly of so many other liberals who’ve walked right into the trap. Turning the term “woke” on the nationalist right isn’t just re-defining any old term. It’s a betrayal. A betrayal which, if it goes through, will mean the termination of the anti-woke coalition that looked, for a few short months, like it could actually win.

Sure, there were always different streams on the right. There was always an “alt-right” (as Richard Spencer called it) or a “white nationalist” right that set itself up in opposition to mainstream nationalist conservatives. There was also the “dissident right,” which had a somewhat broader reach. And of course, there were terms like the “illiberal right” and “Christian nationalist right”—which were usually used even more broadly when the idea was to deplore just about all nationalist conservatives.

In other words, there were plenty of terms available for those anti-Marxist liberals who just wanted to criticize various parts of the right. Those terms existed and everyone knew what they were referring to.

So why weren’t all these existing terms good enough? Why did some of the super-geniuses who spend their time competing for the title of Grand Poobah in the anti-Marxist liberal camp feel like they had to manufacture this entirely new term— “woke right”—and work day and night to get it to take off?

So here’s the answer. Obviously, it’s because, in the eyes of a few anti-Marxist liberals, “woke right” has advantages that more accurate terms like “alt-right” or “white nationalist right” don’t have.

Let’s count the advantages these aspiring Poobahs thought they could milk out of using “woke right” instead:

1. “Woke right” is intentionally designed to be humiliating. The whole point of the term “woke right” is to target people who have devoted their best efforts for years—often with serious personal and professional consequences—to mounting a viable opposition to the “woke” Left. The whole point is to tell them: Sorry pal, but you’re not a whit better than the woke revolutionaries you were fighting. And coming out of the mouths of anti-Marxist liberals who were at least sometimes out there on the barricades with us, that is in fact a pretty demeaning thing to hear.
2. “Woke right” is perfect for virtue signaling. Because the term “woke right” signals a rupture and a betrayal of the coalition that some anti-Marxist liberals forged with the right, it serves as proof of ideological purity. It says: As for me, I’m still untainted. I will keep delegitimizing and cancelling nationalists and conservatives forever.
3. “Woke right” succeeds as trolling where previous terms of contempt like “illiberal right” and “Christian nationalism” failed. The fact is, the term “woke right” really has outraged many nationalist conservatives. And for a small number of especially thuggish liberal trolls, causing that upset and confusion in the ranks of nationalist conservatives is a good in itself.
4. “Woke right” is a term that neutralizes the power of the term “woke” to forge a broad coalition between anti-Marxist liberals and nationalist conservatives. The term “woke right” destroys the flag and symbol of that broad coalition and makes it impossible to rally around it any longer.
5. “Woke right” is a term that actively works to destroy the possibility of mutual respect, political alliance, and friendship between anti-Marxist liberals and the nationalist right. Because of its strong connotations of intentional humiliation and provocation, betrayal, and the destruction of shared symbols, getting this term into wide circulation is the best weapon anyone has come up with yet to make sure that anti-Marxist liberals and nationalist conservatives will truly despise one another and do everything possible to avoid working together from here on.

So that’s a lot of reasons why an anti-Marxist liberal might want to use the term “woke right.” But notice that he would only use it (instead of all of previously existing terms) if his goal was to drive a wedge between liberals and the nationalist right, increase mutual distrust and mutual resentment, and cripple the ability of the two camps to work together.

That why I say that every anti-Marxist liberal using this term is being a shmuck. Because either you are purposely trying to destroy the anti-woke coalition, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Or you are completely clueless about the damage you’re doing to the anti-woke coalition, and don’t have the political sense to know when you’re being played like a fiddle and who’s playing you.

Either way, there’s an old political term for what you’re doing. You’re being shmuck.

There are lots of things I find aggravating and distasteful about having to work with liberals to achieve common aims. But probably the worst is the way that certain big shot liberals continue to find ever-new ways of expressing their disgust and loathing for their nationalist and conservative allies—no matter how much their nationalist and conservative colleagues may have contributed to a common political effort, and no matter how recent the memory of it.

I know some of you are too young to remember the end of Cold War. So for you younger readers, let me just add a relevant historical comment.

If you want to know what happened in 1989 to transform the victorious anti-Communist alliance between liberals and conservatives into a dystopian reality in which liberals worldwide ended up trying to persecute their former nationalist and conservative allies into the ground—well it looked just like what we’re seeing with this “woke right” campaign.

What happened after the fall of the Berlin Wall was that a small number of fanatical liberal commissars decided that the victory over Communism was the perfect moment to try for a world without nationalists and without real conservatives in any positions of influence anywhere. When they talked about a “unipolar” world, they didn’t mean that America was going to be the single great power on earth. What they meant was that their liberalism was going to be the single great power on earth, so that no one with any power or influence would ever be anything other than a liberal again. Frank Fukuyama’s grotesque fantasy about banishing anyone driven by “thymos” to jungles at the edges of the political world was only the best known example of this ideal.

It seems like we’re going through an attempted replay of this same liberal fantasy now, although still on a much smaller scale.

A small number of fanatical liberal commissars are giddy with the feeling that the Berlin Wall has fallen again. They think (mistakenly) that the war on “woke” is basically over and that our side has already won. They think (mistakenly) that they can safely turn their attention to trying to remove nationalists and genuine conservatives from whatever positions influence they’ve succeeded in gaining in the last ten years.

I admit that for now, this effort still looks pathetic. For now, the anti-Marxist liberals who really believe these things are still just a fanatical few. But when you see how quickly they’ve hoodwinked so many in their camp into embarking on an immediate war against their nationalist and conservative coalition partners, it just makes your head spin.

President Trump and Vice President Vance were right to bring anti-Marxist liberals into their coalition and into their administration. They couldn’t have won without broadening their appeal and that broad coalition will be needed for many years to come if any part of the nationalist and conservative agenda is going to be implemented in reality.

But there’s not going to be much hope of holding this coalition together if certain fanatical, anti-Marxist liberal commissars continue inflating the lie that nationalist conservatives are an immanent threat to all things good and beautiful—“just like the Left.”