The Left is Trying to Make Sense of the Errors of Wokeness
On the other hand, the right seems to be adopting those errors
When wokeness was at its peak during 2017–2020 (coinciding with the Trump era), the right was at the forefront trying to make sense of this strange and misguided turn in progressive politics. Old-school liberals were increasingly uncomfortable with the change on their own side, but had no effective language or argument to counter it at first. It was the right that very publicly highlighted the roots of wokeness in postmodernism and critical theory, even if they used clumsy language and were not entirely accurate at first. This, in turn, gave classical liberals the ammunition to fight back, to the point that center-left journalists, politicians and institutions began to listen, and the tide began to turn. Even though I don’t consider myself to be a big fan of the political right, because it is often reactionary and opportunistic rather than genuinely conservative, I have to give credit where it’s due.
However, the years after peak woke tell a different story. While left-wing critiques of wokeness have always existed, they have long been confined to socialist circles, because the mainstream center-left wasn’t keen to take on these critiques. I guess a combination of fear of cancel culture, fear of dividing the ‘resistance’ to Trump, the dynamics of working together and socializing in the same circles as very pro-woke people, and skepticism towards narratives seen as promoted mainly by the right, all played a role in this reluctance. However, now that we have truly moved past peak woke, and the threat of cancel culture has somewhat receded, criticism of wokeness has become more and more visible in left-of-center media. It has become fashionable in the center-left to argue that the tactics used by woke activists were counterproductive, even while defending the merit of woke ideas. (I would disagree because it is postmodern critical theory itself that justified and gave rise to those behaviors, but that’s for another article.) Meanwhile, the anti-woke socialists have taken their arguments even further, all the way to highlighting Foucault’s lack of morality, wokeism’s nihilistic view of history, and the similarities between the woke worldview and that of far-right thinkers like Carl Schmitt.
I believe what’s important here is that the left is actively and seriously thinking about what went wrong to give rise to wokeness, and why woke activists’ tactics are counterproductive. They are trying to learn from the mistakes, to hopefully prevent it from happening again. Meanwhile, the right appears to have dropped the ball. Back during peak woke, at least a section of the right was willing to be more seriously intellectual, hence the brief Intellectual Dark Web (IDW) phenomenon. However, the right seems to have fully succumbed to anti-intellectual populism nowadays. The new, populist right has no time for seriously dissecting the lessons of wokeness anymore. It is more interested in winning elections, and ‘owning the libs’ along the way. The main characters who brought us the right’s useful insights into wokeness a few years ago have mostly become reactionary pundits, who I’ve found too boring and predictable to listen to. Those who have not gone down this path have faded into irrelevance, sadly reflecting the kind of voices that well-funded right-of-center outlets are willing to give a platform to at the moment. It seems that these days, if you want to have a career in political commentary on the right, you better leave your more intellectual side at the door, and get with the new populist program that dumbs things down to simple and predictable soundbites.
Meanwhile, the right’s inability to learn some lessons from the mistakes of wokeness in an intellectual way has allowed bad actors to import the very same mistakes into the right. Unlike a few years ago, when the right was actively taking a stand for things like free speech, nowadays they have increasingly adopted the tribalist, zero-sum worldview, as well as the obsessive identity politics, that characterize wokeness. The US Secret Service failed to prevent the assassination attempt on Trump because of DEI (despite there being no evidence for this). The Trump assassin was supposedly a trans woman (fake news that went viral in right-wing circles). Kamala Harris is a ‘DEI hire’, and it is important to figure out whether she is actually black or Indian. Childless cat ladies are somehow a bad thing now. Social media platforms putting their thumb on the scale is bad, unless it is Elon Musk doing it on X. Cancel culture is bad, unless it is cancelling drag queens or ‘woke corporations’. A controversy around two likely intersex athletes somehow becomes about trans women in sports, despite both of them being recorded as female at birth, and hence by definition aren’t trans. In short, the right today looks just like the left did during peak woke. I guess this is where anti-intellectual populism leads people to.
To be honest, I really miss the more rational right that used to exist, just a few years ago. A truly intellectual right-of-center point of view can provide a credible counterpoint to the left’s excesses, as the early discourse around wokeness demonstrated. As I like to say, a practical progressivism and a moderate and rational conservatism combine to make a sound and sustainable reformism, and is also the best safeguard for freedom. Now that the left appears to have found its more rational side again, I hope that the rational, intellectual version of the right can fight off the dominance of New Right populism, and find its voice again. We really need that voice to be present.
Originally published at https://taraella.substack.com.
TaraElla is a singer-songwriter and author, who is the author of the Moral Libertarian Manifesto and the Moral Libertarian book series, which argue that liberalism is still the most moral and effective value system for the West.
She is also the author of The Trans Case Against Queer Theory and The TaraElla Story (her autobiography).
