Members of the MAGA Elite Have a New Favorite Slur for Each Other. It's Tearing Them Apart.

Yahoo

a day ago

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Last week, while the Republican Party reeled from a bitter and loud falling-out between the two most powerful men in U.S. politics, a much quieter dispute was playing out among the intellectual leaders of the right.
This feud would have been easy to miss, even without the Trump–Musk showdown overshadowing everything else. It involved impenetrable jargon, long-winded blog posts, hard-to-parse political factions, and a set of characters known more for quoting philosophers than for authoring the kinds of punchy, lib-owning posts that typify the right's most popular internet figures. But those inside that world who followed the conversation witnessed something significant: a sign that some of the intellectual leaders of the modern MAGA movement are becoming disturbed by parts of the movement they created.
The controversy began on Sunday, when the prominent conservative writer Rod Dreher, a close friend of J.D. Vance's, published an essay in the Free Press, the publication founded by Bari Weiss, titled 'The Woke Right Is Coming for Your Sons.'
In the essay, Dreher argued that many on the right were displaying what he believed to be ugly qualities that define the modern left: language policing (see: Trump's renaming the Gulf of Mexico to the 'Gulf of America'); rewriting history (see: a MAGA podcaster's description of Winston Churchill as the 'chief villain' of World War II); and, above all, identity-based politics. Dreher wrote that he saw white Christian men feeling disempowered and advocating for their own racial, gender, and religious interests; he was most disturbed by how often this form of 'identity politics' seemed to manifest as aggressive antisemitism.
This essay infuriated some people on the right, who complained that Dreher was slandering normal conservatives by calling them 'woke.' His mistake had been in using a term that some more-centrist conservatives have invoked to describe people such as Christopher Rufo, the man often credited with driving the campaign against 'critical race theory' in schools. Worse, the terminology seemed to imply that there was a power equivalence between the 'woke left' and 'woke right,' when, conservatives argued, the 'woke left' was much more powerful than whatever its right-wing counterpart was.
The next day, Dreher published an apology to his readers. In a 4,700-word blog post (Dreher is always prolix), he admitted that he had erred by not being 'online enough.' The term 'woke right' was excised from the piece, and the headline was changed to warn of the dangers of 'the radical right.'
The incident was not the first time the term had been the center of controversy in debates around modern conservative politics. But the episode marks a particularly heated moment for the digital elites of the MAGA movement, as Dreher's miscalculation comes at a time when the right, wielding greater political power than it has held in years, has begun to show fractures in its coalition.
The term 'woke right' has been circulating for a few years now; one of the first significant uses was in 2022, in a critical essay from a Reformed Presbyterian pastor reviewing a Christian nationalist book. The review, titled 'The Rise of Right-Wing Wokeism,' argued that the Christian nationalist book was 'woke' because it argued that 'oppression is everywhere, extreme measures are necessary, and the regime must be overthrown.' Since then, some conservatives have used the term to describe right-wing victimhood complexes (as when supposed 'woke' right-wingers characterize the Jan. 6 defendants as martyrs) and disruptive, burn-down-the-system ideologies. Tucker Carlson and Matt Walsh are often pointed to as leading figures of this 'woke right.'
But the discussion of the term has grown in the past couple of months. In late March, the Quillette podcast hosted a guest to discuss how 'the enemies of wokeness have created their own cultish ideology, complete with right-wing purity spirals and mobbings.' On May 12, the Christian Post published an op-ed arguing that 'woke right' social media users were complaining that 'straight white men are oppressed'; 'society is ruled by women'; ' 'normies' are blind to this reality'; and 'the only solution is a Protestant Franco or a Christian prince.'
The term has yet to develop a consensus definition. The psychologist Jordan Peterson, who was one of the main figures popularizing the term, told Joe Rogan in April that the 'woke right' was really a matter of 'psychopaths' on social media who care mostly about being inflammatory and publicly antisemitic and only pretend to care about the conservative movement. Peterson and those like him see this phenomenon as the bile of the internet, rather than a matter for real political analysis.
That differs from the views of James Lindsay, the term's biggest enthusiast. Lindsay is a provocateur known for a 2018 stunt in which he successfully published a number of ridiculous papers in 'grievance studies' in peer-reviewed academic journals. For people who knew Lindsay only for that episode, his current actions would seem surprising: He is now on a crusade against certain elements of the modern GOP, including techno-fascists, Christian nationalists, and national conservatives. Last year, in a sign of that pivot, he tricked a conservative Christian publication into running portions of The Communist Manifesto. It's his use that has made the term most controversial.
Lindsay's version of the 'woke right' is defined by identity-based politics in which everything can be viewed through the lens of power dynamics. The 'woke right' seeks to destroy the left to order society by its cultural values—through any necessary means. In other words, while Dreher and Peterson used the word woke to describe, essentially, expressions of aggressive racism, antisemitism, and misogyny, Lindsay uses it to describe a larger political faction with fascist-leaning politics that he believes is taking over the elites of the MAGA movement. He is using the term against the New Right. He has even used it against Vance.
It's easy to feel lost when trying to wade through this discussion, in large part because members of the right-wing online commentariat speak their own insular language. (The term longhouse, for example, often surfaces in this debate. That one term, which, to boil it down, refers to 'female' styles of governance, warrants its own separate explainer.) But it's not necessary to understand the nuanced differences between the uses of the 'woke right' to see the underlying friction. It's clear, from all this, that some on the right are becoming so uneasy about the more militant elements of their new coalition that they are feeling the need to speak up, knowing they will give ammunition to their enemies on the left.
'I am now witnessing the deep inroads, in such a short period, that right-wing totalitarianism, expressed most often as antisemitism, has made, especially among a growing segment of right-wing males,' Dreher wrote in his essay.
Dreher is no moderate centrist. He opposes gay marriage, has been vocally critical of Islam, and has described immigration from nonwhite countries as undermining Western civilization. He is so enthusiastic about the authoritarian president of Hungary that he moved to the country to enjoy what he believes to be its postwoke society. So it's notable that, in his essay, he describes being disturbed by the amount of white nationalism, Holocaust denial, and conspiracy theories, as well as other forms of extremism he has observed among young white conservative men. And it's even more notable that he rejects the notion that it was only fringe. 'When popular online figures offering crackpot takes … find their way onto mainstream podcasts like Joe Rogan's and Tucker Carlson's, you know something massive is happening,' he wrote.
Dreher did not go so far as to equate the left and the right. He was insistent that the 'woke right' had only a fraction of the power the 'woke left' wielded. (He broke hard from Lindsay here, accusing him in his apology blog post of 'vile slander' and speculating that Lindsay was autistic.) He also expressed some empathy for the budding fascists. 'So many young men like him—white, heterosexual, and Christian—have grown up in a culture that has told them they are the source of most of the world's evils, simply by virtue of their unchosen identity,' he wrote in the original essay. 'Right-wing radicalism, including antisemitism, because some of their perceived persecutors are Jewish intellectual and cultural figures, speaks to their anger and trauma, and validates their rage.'
Still, as cautious as the critique may seem, it pointed to some fundamental tensions in the right's coalition. He wasn't alone in expressing his anxiety about extremism either. The writer Robby Soave disagreed with Dreher's use of the term but wrote on X that the 'underlying phenomenon (increased anti-Semitism, tribalism, Tate-ism etc. in some corners of the young, male online right) is real.' Rufo, similarly, wrote that 'what you're describing is a real phenomenon that needs to be dealt with,' offering that he substitute 'antisemitism, right-wing racialism, etc.,' for the word woke.
The term 'woke right' may or may not survive as a political insult past this moment. It's possible that some will continue to use it to label the group that many have, at other times, called the 'dissident right' or 'alt-right' or any number of terms to describe ugly, racist, and provocative nationalist conservatism. It's also possible it will fade away. But this small conflict, played out mostly among a tiny group of right-wing elites, reveals the natural inward turn that comes from cultural and political dominance. The right has routed the left; its individual factions do not, at this moment, need their allies as they once did. The time is right instead for them to advocate for their own political projects.
The Musk–Trump feud made it clear that the tech right doesn't always fit well within the populist MAGA movement. Nor can the libertarians, the Christian nationalists, the bigoted edgelords, the Israel hawks, the MAHA antivaxxers, and the doomsday conspiracists all be expected to get along. But with the 'woke right' fight, we saw a different kind of splintering, even among those who share political end goals: one between those who are concerned about the radicalization of young white men, and those who see it as an asset.
'Imagine you're stuck in LA today, facing certain death from the Hamas Marxist army,' one major right-wing account wrote on X on Saturday. 'Who do you want fighting next to you, the people crying about 'woke right' or the people who have been called 'woke right.' Everyone knows the answer.' The answer, of course, was the group known for its anger and resentment.
Thanks to the changes Musk has made to X, it's easier than ever to observe the swamp of far-right hatred on social media. Dreher and the others saw it themselves: Any of the posts discussing the problem of 'wokeism' in MAGA will be flooded with comments about Jews. Now that the right has room to breathe, MAGA leaders can finally turn to the issues in their own movement. And some of them are starting to become disturbed by what they've created.