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New York Post
17 hours ago
- Politics
- New York Post
‘Woke right' influencer bullies aren't just fringe — they're a true political danger
In 2018, some activists, appalled by woke nonsense being published by academic journals, submitted nonsensical research. One paper claimed researchers 'closely and respectfully examined the genitals of . . . ten thousand dogs' to learn about 'rape culture and queer performativity at urban dog parks.' Some journals published it. Advertisement But one of the hoaxers, James Lindsay, claims this 'woke virus' now has spread to the right. 'There is a radical segment embedded within MAGA . . . that acts the same way, uses the same tactics, acts like the woke left,' he told me. I was skeptical. But to make his point, Lindsay pulled off a new hoax. Advertisement He rewrote parts of 'The Communist Manifesto' and, using the pseudonym Marcus Carlson (a play on Karl Marx), submitted it to the conservative magazine American Reformer. His article criticized classical liberal ideas like free markets, global trade and individual freedom, like Marx did. Yet the conservative magazine published it. Even after a reader pointed out that it was 'The Communist Manifesto,' the magazine kept its article up, writing, 'It is still a reasonable aggregation of some New Right ideas.' Advertisement The New Right, says Lindsay, acts like the woke left: 'There's the victimhood mentality, the cancel culture, struggle sessions. They bully people online with swarms; they rewrite history.' The New York Times' 1619 Project rewrote history, claiming America was founded to protect slavery. Today's woke right says Hitler 'was trying to encourage community . . . family values' (social media influencer Dan Bilzerian). 'I want total Aryan victory . . . the only way we are going to make America great again is if we make this country Christian again,' says white supremacist Nick Fuentes. Advertisement Fuentes' videos have received more than 30 million views. On his show, he says, 'Jews better start being nice to people like us because what comes out of this is going to be a lot uglier and a lot worse for them.' Influencer Andrew Tate won 10 million followers largely by attacking feminism: 'I am absolutely sexist.' ''Men should be in charge, knock the women down,'' sighs Lindsay. 'The woke right literally becomes all the caricatures that the woke left said conservatives are: 'racist, sexist, homophobes.'' Keep up with today's most important news Stay up on the very latest with Evening Update. Thanks for signing up! Enter your email address Please provide a valid email address. By clicking above you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Never miss a story. Check out more newsletters 'They're fringe,' I say to Lindsay. 'No real threat.' 'That's what everybody said about woke kids on campuses,' he replies. Advertisement That shut me up. I admit I thought brainwashed college progressives would drop 'safe spaces,' trigger warnings, speech codes and other silly ideas once they had to earn a living. But I was wrong. Most didn't. Those kids brought about lots of change. Advertisement Their preferences got many companies to mandate DEI training and led many employees to fear speaking honestly at work. But today, says Lindsay, the energy is on the right: 'It's great that we're having a conservative revival . . . but there's also [something] called 'falling off the cliff.'' Elected officials now say things like, 'We should be Christian nationalists!' (Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene) and, 'I'm tired of this separation-of-church-and-state junk' (Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert). Advertisement 'Your ability to believe as you will,' says Lindsay, 'worship as you will without state interference, is a bedrock idea of the American experiment. Woke right, like the woke left, is this litany of bad ideas.' He fears that next election, the woke right will elect the woke left. 'The left is going to say, Hillary Clinton was right to call [people on the right] 'deplorable,'' he says. 'Then the left will sweep back in and dominate.' John Stossel is the author of 'Give Me a Break: How I Exposed Hucksters, Cheats, and Scam Artists and Became the Scourge of the Liberal Media.'
Yahoo
26-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
What America Made of Marx
The young cigar maker in New York City attended a few socialist meetings in the 1870s. But he longed to hear 'constructive' ideas about how to achieve a better life for himself and his fellow workers. Then an older craftsman, who was a veteran of the European left, offered to take him through 'something tangible' that 'will give you a background philosophy.' That something was The Communist Manifesto. The document, recalled his untutored protégé, 'brought me an interpretation of much that before had been only inarticulate feeling.' Reading that Marx and Engels hailed 'the ever expanding union of the workers' as 'the real fruit' of class struggle encouraged him to organize a durable labor movement. After the ambitious cigar worker left his rolling bench to become a full-time union leader, he would always be suspicious of intellectuals, socialist or otherwise, who believed they had a duty to tell wage earners how to liberate themselves. All his life, he adhered, in effect, to Marx's 1864 motto, 'The emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves.' That erstwhile cigar maker was Samuel Gompers, founder and longtime president of the American Federation of Labor—the organization that evolved into the AFL-CIO and has dominated American unionism for well over a century. Gompers became a harsh critic of Marxian radicals: He thought their desire to yoke the labor movement to the fate of a socialist party would violate the independence of unions and lead them into a dead end of sectarianism, repression, and defeat. Still, the inspiration the young Gompers drew from the Manifesto appears to support the argument Andrew Hartman makes in his sprawling, often provocative new survey, Karl Marx in America: 'Marx gained purchase in American life because he offered a powerful theory of freedom—one that doubled as a map of an alternative American future.' If the bearded German icon left a strong imprint on organized labor—the movement he believed would be pivotal to overthrowing capitalism—then it must have shaped the views of millions of ordinary Americans who burned to change their society in fundamental ways. Hartman sweeps with gusto through over a century and a half of U.S. history, revealing the influence of Marxism on dozens of institutions, individuals, and events, obscure and famous. Did you know that the revolutionary sage wrote or co-wrote nearly 500 articles for the New-York Tribune during the Civil War era, when it was one of the most popular newspapers in the nation? Or that at least two of his disciples were officers in the Union Army? Or that Franklin D. Roosevelt's 'political philosophy rhymed with Marxism'? While Hartman might overstate the importance of these political details, he largely succeeds at a different, if lesser, mission: to narrate how vital arguments about Marxist thought were to men and women who spent their lives battling about two distinct clusters of well-educated Americans, Marxism has long been a fruitful subject— either a set of ideas to think with or a cudgel to wield against ideological foes. In the first camp are radical and reform-minded intellectuals who take Marx's ideas seriously—even as they ceaselessly dispute, revise, and apply them to explain the evolving forms of American culture, economics, and politics. In the second camp thrive officeholders and propagandists on the right. For them, the old Rhinelander's name and a crude or false version of his doctrines serve as a perennial bogeyman to scare the public away from a welfare state and movements on the left. The Trump administration's recent vow to cancel federal funding that allegedly promotes some evil known as 'Marxist equity' fits a line of attack that has been around since Lenin occupied the Kremlin. Hartman's treatment of both left literati and right-wing witch-hunters brims with insight, cogently presented. In his most original foray into the burned-over ground of left intellectual history, he brings to life a number of thinkers about whom even most academics know little or nothing. There was Friedrich Sorge, who immigrated to New York from exile in Europe after fighting in the revolution of 1848 and 'was arguably better versed in Marx's writings' than anyone in his new country. Sorge, who helped found the nation's first socialist party—the Workingmen's Party of the United States—in 1876, argued that competing in elections would accomplish nothing unless wage earners first organized into powerful unions. Although neither of the parties that flew the Marxist banner across the country in the twentieth century won more than a handful of offices beyond the local level, both the Socialist Party and the Communist Party stamped their mark on American thought and culture. The SP nurtured such writers as Jack London and Helen Keller. During his five campaigns for president on the Socialist ticket, Eugene Debs articulated the need for a 'cooperative commonwealth' in terms borrowed from the Bible as well as the gospel of historical materialism. And while American Communists never abandoned their fealty to the tyrannical rulers of the Soviet Union, they did inspire such famous critics of class oppression and white supremacy as Woody Guthrie, Dorothea Lange, and Angela Davis. Among the more obscure figures whom Hartman profiles is Raya Dunayevskaya, a Ukrainian émigré, who created, after World War II, a fresh variant of the old doctrine she called 'Marxist humanism.' Her aim was to rescue a philosophy of human liberation from the Communists who had converted it into 'the theory and practice of enslavement.' Together with the great Trinidadian writer and organizer C.L.R. James, Dunayevskaya argued that Marx had sharply criticized all forms of labor under capitalism—enslaved or waged—as assaults on individual freedom. Departing from an orthodox focus on white industrial wage earners allowed them to broaden the definition of the exploited to include women, racial minorities, and students. 'Her Marxist theory of revolution was tailored for the 1960s,' Hartman aptly observes. But the radical feminists who coined the phrase 'the personal is political' grasped the same insight without seeking legitimacy in Marx's Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. Both James and Dunayevskaya arrived in the United States in the 1920s, before the Great Depression, when Marxists of all stripes understandably viewed that long downturn as proof of the chaos and misery endemic to capitalism. Surely, Americans would be open to a theory that would now seem like common sense. Organizers who happened to be Communists or Socialists played a major role in mobilizing the big strikes that birthed the unions of the Congress of Industrial Organizations in the factories where cars, steel, and refrigerators were made: Members of the Communist Party were the chief architects of the sit-down strike in Flint, Michigan, during the winter of 1936–1937 that established the United Auto Workers as a power in the land. Yet Marxists gained more influence among writers and artists in the 1930s than among ordinary people. For all their fervor, leftist intellectuals struggled to understand why their message often failed to resonate more widely. At the polls, workers spurned Marxist candidates in favor of those from the party of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the patrician-turned-populist. One worker acclaimed FDR as 'the only man we ever had in the White House who would understand that my boss is a sonofabitch.' Bowing to reality, Socialist and Communist organizers narrowed their goals to union recognition, job security, and higher wages instead of a society run by and for the working class. The larger message of Marxism wasn't getting through: As Hartman remarks, 'Either there was something wrong with their theory, or there was something wrong with the working class.' The literary critic Kenneth Burke argued that paying closer attention to how Americans actually talked about their problems could help Marxists appeal to them in terms they might grasp. Poetic discourse, he mused, would advance the class struggle better than alien-sounding jargon. In his landmark 1935 history of the Civil War and Reconstruction, W.E.B. Du Bois hailed Black people for engaging in the biggest 'general strike' in U.S. history when they fled to Union lines, depriving Confederate planters of their labor. If white workers had only shed their racial privilege, he contended, they could have forged a potent alliance across the color line. Alas, 'not enough … were familiar with Capital,' Hartman says, and so they embraced the new Jim Crow order. Du Bois remained a Marxist all his life, but some talented younger leftists soon abandoned their faith in what they took to be a failed theory and became liberal proponents of American exceptionalism. In his immensely popular 1948 book, The American Political Tradition, the historian Richard Hofstadter maintained, a bit sadly, that radical dissenters had never made much headway against a consensual culture that was 'intensely nationalistic and for the most part isolationist … fiercely individualistic and capitalistic.' Whereas the Marxists of the '30s and '40s may have failed to convert the working class, their successors in the '80s and '90s didn't even attempt as much. As conservatives from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump tore away at the legacies of the New Deal, the Great Society, and the New Left, American Marxism entered a newly insular phase. A number of scholars took refuge in spinning out new versions of Marxism whose only audience was inside academia. The literary theorist Fredric Jameson sought to unmask the alienating function of 'commodity fetishism' with 'real thought' that 'demands a descent into the materiality of language and a consent to time itself in the form of the sentence.' Hartman aptly comments, 'Cultural theory made a fetish of difficult language.' In their tome Empire (2000), Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri aimed to give left anti-globalizers an updated version of The Communist Manifesto but managed only to float an abstract hope that 'the multitude's ultimate demand for global citizenship' would be realized through discrete acts of resistance in locations scattered around the world. 'While the Right has been busy taking the White House,' Todd Gitlin quipped about such fanciful notions, 'the left has been marching on the English department.' Since the Great Recession, young activists on the left have turned to a more demotic style of Marxism to make sense of economic inequality as well as to protest it. Hartman points to the 'maximally accessible' prose in Jacobin, the magazine founded in 2010 by Bhaskar Sunkara, and to podcasts like Chapo Trap House, in which 'more than a hint of Marxism' flavors relentless put-downs of deluded liberals. This new generation has failed to gain more than a few slivers of political power: Its electoral victories in Washington have been limited to a handful of candidates endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America, notably Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib, and the increased prominence of Bernie Sanders. To paraphrase the famous line chiseled on Marx's gravestone in London's Highgate Cemetery: American Marxists have only analyzed the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change Hartman doesn't capture why Marxists have found difficulty in spreading the word in the United States, and often claims victories for his cherished tradition when the story is more complicated. Take the example of Samuel Gompers. What the AFL leader learned from Marx convinced him to oppose the political strategy adopted by American Marxists. A socialist attorney once called Gompers 'the most class-conscious man I know.' But that mindset drove the labor leader to avoid using socialist rhetoric or making big promises about destroying capitalism. He knew such stances would turn off most working men and women in his nation, who demanded higher wages and better treatment on the job—not a proletarian revolution. What was true of labor was even more the case for other movements on the American left whose adherents were drawn from a variety of classes. From abolitionism to the heyday of the civil rights crusade in the 1960s, most Black organizers sought legitimacy and inspiration from such texts as the Bible and the Declaration of Independence—not the words of the Manifesto. Few feminists who were not also socialists took their cues from a nineteenth-century patriarch who wrote little about women besides noting the cheap labor they provided to factory owners. And environmentalists who yearn to do away with fossil fuels know the Soviet regime that made Marxism its state religion developed some of the filthiest carbonized industries on Earth. Even those prominent American activists who did praise what Marx wrote—who included Martin Luther King Jr. in his grad-uate student days—did not employ his language or endorse his ideas as they built powerful social movements. The 'freedom' from class exploitation that Hartman heralds was not the type that motivated many Americans, other than those who joined a socialist or communist party. And the membership and electoral clout of their organizations paled beside those of parties inspired by Marxism in nearly every other industrial nation. Through most of U.S. history, influential dissenters have spoken in registers more indigenous to the republic—democratic, Christian, and populist. 'The people' was a more common, inclusive term than 'the working class,' and urgent calls to realize the promise of self-government resonated far more widely than stern attacks on the power of the homegrown 'bourgeoisie.' 'To make everything depend upon economic forces,' wrote the progressive thinker Richard T. Ely in 1894, 'is shutting one's eyes to other forces, equally great and sometimes greater.' He added, 'one must be blind to historical and actual phenomena who would make religion merely a product of economic life.' Hartman tends to disparage this tradition as 'moral leftism,' but it has been a major driver of nearly every insurgency of consequence in U.S. the right, however, the M-word has long proved an effective weapon in its perpetual war against anyone branded as enemies of liberty and the nation itself. This assault began during the presidency of FDR. 'So help me God,' Father Charles Coughlin vowed in 1936 to his huge radio audience, 'I will be instrumental in taking a Communist from a chair once occupied by Washington.' But invocations of Marx became routine during the Red Scare after World War II and have rarely been absent since then. Senator Joseph McCarthy denounced a 'religion of immoralism … invented by Marx … and carried to unimaginable extremes by Stalin.' Reagan gave Richard Nixon some advice about how to campaign in 1960 against his Democratic opponent for the presidency: 'Shouldn't someone tag Mr. Kennedy's bold new imaginative program with its proper age? Under the tousled boyish haircut is still old Karl Marx—first launched a century ago.' In recent years, Trumpist hacks with big followings gleefully slap the label 'cultural Marxism' onto any phenomena they detest, from critical race theory to teachers' unions to the alleged bias of the liberal media. In a 2021 book, the talk-show jockey Mark Levin called on all Americans 'who love their country, freedom, and family' to fight back against Marxists who 'pursue a destructive and diabolical course for our nation, undermining and sabotaging virtually every institution in our society.' What makes such attacks plausible to millions of Americans was—and remains—the public's ignorance of what Marx actually wrote and believed. Hartman takes pains to show that both liberal critics and right-wing demonizers got his favorite thinker terribly wrong. He argues, with persuasive quotations, that Marx was opposed to neither free speech nor democracy, and thus the tyrannical regimes run by his would-be followers would have appalled him. But if far more Americans think Castro, Stalin, and Mao were genuine Marxists than will ever read a page of Capital, The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, or even the Manifesto, that is just further proof of the small impression his American disciples have made on their fellow citizens. Despite the right's hostility, some of Marx's ideas still have great value almost 150 years after he died. As I wrote in these pages back in 2016, Marx 'brilliantly captured the propulsive dynamic' of the capitalist economy that has now conquered the entire world. What's more, 'our credulous addiction to the magical little computers in our pockets and purses demonstrates the wisdom of the section about 'the fetishism of commodities' in the first volume of Capital.' Anyone who cares about the multiple injuries of class can also learn from Marx's thorough dissection of the system of labor and production that generates so much wealth and so much pain. Yet, at the core of his thought is the determination that capitalism, like all earlier forms of class society, will inevitably fall victim to its own contradictions. After helping dig its grave, proletarians will begin to construct a world of caring and abundance for all. In 1938, George Orwell wrote that 'to the vast majority of people, Socialism means a classless society, or it means nothing at all.' But the gospel of self-reliance and the unions that struggle mainly for better pay and shorter hours have appealed to far more Americans than has the future predicted by Marx and echoed by his disciples. In the twenty-first century, a lot more working women and men have been willing to vote for an authoritarian billionaire who relishes destruction of the welfare state than have rallied to gain a measure of economic power for themselves. A theory that does not unravel that contradiction can do little to defeat Trumpism or build a more egalitarian society for Americans or anyone else.
Herald Malaysia
16-05-2025
- Politics
- Herald Malaysia
134 years later, Rerum Novarum inspires Leo XIV and still shapes Catholic social teaching
When Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost was elected supreme pontiff of the Catholic Church on May 8, he chose the name Leo XIV in part, he said a few days later, to honor Leo XIII and his historical encyclical Rerum Novarum, a foundational document in Catholic social teaching that addressed the challen May 16, 2025 Credit: Sach336699/Shutterstock By Tyler Arnold When Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost was elected supreme pontiff of the Catholic Church on May 8, he chose the name Leo XIV in part, he said a few days later, to honor Leo XIII and his historical encyclical Rerum Novarum , a foundational document in Catholic social teaching that addressed the challenges of the industrial revolution. Now, the new pope says, it can help us, along with the full body of social teaching, to navigate the developments of artificial intelligence. Today, on the 134th anniversary of the release of Rerum Novarum — published May 15, 1891 — CNA takes a look at the significance of this encylical. As European society was grappling with the impact of the industrial revolution and the rise of socialist ideology in the late 1800s, Pope Leo XIII issued a papal encyclical that expressed empathy with the discontentment of laborers but outright condemnation of the socialist movements of the time. The encyclical emphasizes a need for reforms to protect the dignity of the working class while maintaining a relationship with capital and the existence of private property. The message was promulgated fewer than 50 years after Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels published 'The Communist Manifesto' in 1848 and after Pope Pius IX denounced both socialism and communism in his 1849 encyclical Nostis et Nobiscum . Pope Leo XIII's teachings can still help inform readers on the proper relationship between labor and capital. Leo XIII writes of a 'great mistake' embraced by the socialist-leaning labor movements, which is the notion that 'class is naturally hostile to class' and 'wealthy and the working men are intended by nature to live in mutual conflict.' This view, he asserts, is 'so false … that the direct contrary is the truth.' 'It [is] ordained by nature that these two classes should dwell in harmony and agreement, so as to maintain the balance of the body politic,' Leo XIII teaches. 'Each needs the other: Capital cannot do without labor, nor labor without capital.' The pontiff, who reigned from 1878 until his death in 1903, saw a need 'in drawing the rich and the working class together' amid the strife brewing between these groups throughout the continent. This can be done, he said, by 'reminding each of its duties to the other' and 'of the obligations of justice.' For the laborer, this includes a duty 'fully and faithfully to perform the work which has been freely and equitably agreed upon' and to never destroy property, resort to violence, or riot to achieve a goal. For the wealthy owner, this includes a duty to 'respect in every man his dignity as a person ennobled by Christian character' and to never 'misuse men as though they were things in the pursuit of gain or to value them solely for their physical powers.' 'The employer is bound to see that the worker has time for his religious duties; that he be not exposed to corrupting influences and dangerous occasions; and that he be not led away to neglect his home and family or to squander his earnings,' Leo XIII says. Leo XIII contends that employers must pay workers the whole of their wages and workers must do all of the work to which they agreed. But, in the context of wages, he adds that this 'is not complete' because workers must be able to support themselves and their families. 'Wages ought not to be insufficient to support a frugal and well-behaved wage-earner,' Leo XIII writes. '... If a workman's wages be sufficient to enable him comfortably to support himself, his wife, and his children, he will find it easy, if he be a sensible man, to practice thrift, and he will not fail, by cutting down expenses, to put by some little savings and thus secure a modest source of income.' In certain cases, Leo XIII encourages the intervention of government, such as when 'employers laid burdens upon their workmen which were unjust,' when 'conditions [were] repugnant to their dignity as human beings,' and when 'health were endangered by excessive labor.' He adds that such interventions should not 'proceed further than [what] is required for the remedy of the evil.' Leo XIII also expresses support for 'societies for mutual help' and 'workingmen's unions' but also exerts caution against any associations that promote values contrary to Catholic teaching. He encourages the creation of associations that are rooted in Catholic teaching. The pontiff says there is much agreement 'that some opportune remedy must be found quickly for the misery and wretchedness pressing so unjustly on the majority of the working class.' Yet, he accuses socialists of 'working on the poor man's envy of the rich' to 'do away with private property' and turn 'individual possessions' into 'the common property of all, to be administered by the state or by municipal bodies.' 'Their contentions are so clearly powerless to end the controversy that were they carried into effect the working man himself would be among the first to suffer,' Leo XIII says. 'They are, moreover, emphatically unjust, for they would rob the lawful possessor, distort the functions of the state, and create utter confusion in the community.' Using this remedy to resolve poor conditions for the laborer, the pontiff contends, 'is manifestly against justice' because 'every man has by nature the right to possess property as his own.' He further argues that government intrusion into the rights of property and the right to provide for one's family is 'a great and pernicious error.' 'That right to property … [must] belong to a man in his capacity of head of a family; nay, that right is all the stronger in proportion as the human person receives a wider extension in the family group,' Leo XIII says. 'It is a most sacred law of nature that a father should provide food and all necessaries for those whom he has begotten; and, similarly, it is natural that he should wish that his children, who carry on, so to speak, and continue his personality, should be by him provided with all that is needful to enable them to keep themselves decently from want and misery amid the uncertainties of this mortal life.' Rerum Novarum set the foundations of Catholic social teaching about labor. Other popes have since built on the teachings laid out in the encyclical, including Pope Pius XI's 1931 encyclical Quadragesimo Anno on the 40th anniversary of Leo XIII's writing and Pope John Paul II's 1981 encyclical Laborem Exercens on the 90th anniversary.--CNA
Yahoo
14-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
The anti-woke right won in 2024. Now they're turning on each other.
It's been a rough week in the world of the online intellectual right, which is currently in the midst of two separate yet related blowups — both of which illustrate how the pressures of power are cracking the elite coalition that aligned behind President Donald Trump's return to power. The first fight is really a struggle over who should determine the philosophical identity of MAGA, pitting a group of anti-woke writers against a wide group of illiberal or post-liberal figures. The lead figure in the anti-woke camp, the prominent pundit James Lindsay, has been attacking his enemies as the 'woke right' for months. In his mind, this group's emphasis on the importance of religion, national identity, and ethnicity is the mirror image of the left's identity politics — and thus an existential threat both to American freedom and the MAGA movement's success. In response, his targets on the right — which range from national conservatives to white nationalists — have started firing back aggressively, arguing that Lindsay is not only wrong but maliciously attempting to fracture the MAGA coalition. This might seem like a niche online fight, but given that niche online discourse has been a major influence on the second Trump administration's thinking, it might end up mattering quite a bit. The same could be said about the second fight, which revolves around Curtis Yarvin — the neo-monarchist blogger who has influenced both Vice President JD Vance and DOGE. A recent post by rationalist author Scott Alexander accused Yarvin of 'selling out' — aligning himself with Trump even though he had long denounced the kind of 'authoritarian populism' that Trump embodies. Yarvin defended himself with some fairly bitter attacks on Alexander, drawing in defenders and critics from the broader right-wing universe in the process. Each of these fights is telling in their own right. The 'woke right' contretemps shows just how deep the divisions go inside the Trump world — between anti-woke liberals, on the one hand, and various different forms of 'postliberals' on the other. The Yarvin argument is a revealing portrait of how easy it is to get someone to compromise their own beliefs in the face of polarization and proximity to power. But put together, they show us just how hard it is to go from an insurgent force to a governing one. The 'woke right' debate first came on my radar back in December, when the anti-woke pundit James Lindsay tricked a Christian nationalist website, American Reformer, into publishing excerpts of The Communist Manifesto edited to sound like a critique of modern American liberalism. It might seem to make little sense to describe a 19th-century text on resistance to capitalism as an example of 21st-century identity politics. But Lindsay, who sees himself as a right-wing liberal, is using an idiosyncratic understanding of 'wokeness' that equates it with collectivism — the idea that the politics should be understood through the lens of interests of groups, be it the proletariat or Black Americans, rather than treating all citizens purely as individuals. Thus, for Lindsay, communism is a form of wokeness, even if the term 'woke' postdates Marx by nearly 200 years. This broad definition also allows there to be right-wing forms of wokeness. Neo-Nazism, Christian nationalism, Catholic integralism, even certain forms of anti-liberal conservative nationalism — all of these doctrines give significant weight to group identity in their understanding of what matters in the political realm. Thus, for Lindsay, they are threatening to American liberalism in exactly the same way as their left-wing peers. 'Woke Right are 'right-wing' people who have mostly adopted an identity-based victimhood orientation for themselves to bind together as a class,' he writes. 'Like the Woke Left, then, they happily offer the trade-off usually used to describe Marxists: people who will ask you to trade some of your liberty so that they might hurt your enemies for you.' Personally, I find Lindsay's definition of 'wokeness' so broad that it ceases to operate as a meaningful category (if it ever was one in the first place). But the charge has clearly stung his antagonists on the right, where calling someone 'woke' is basically the worst thing you can say about them. Prominent figures on the illiberal right, ranging from Tim Pool to Mike Cernovich to Anna Khachiyan, shot back at Lindsay — calling him a 'grifter' out to undermine the MAGA movement. Meanwhile, Lindsay's allies, including biologist Colin Wright and Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon, accused them of being the true traitors to MAGA. The most interesting intervention in this debate is an essay recently posted on X by the Israeli intellectual Yoram Hazony. Hazony's main project, the National Conservatism conference, has served as a hub connecting various different strands of illiberalism to each other and to power. Vance, Tucker Carlson, and Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) have all given notable speeches there. Hazony sees opposition to 'wokeness' as the rallying cry that brought disparate strands of the right together. Whatever their philosophical or policy disagreements, they could all agree that the social left needed to be stopped by whatever means necessary. This term is so potent, in his mind, that deploying it in internecine warfare actively poisons the possibility for political coalition. 'The term 'woke right' really has outraged many nationalist conservatives,' Hazony argues. '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.' In Hazony's assessment, the emergence of 'woke right' as a term is a reflection of a sense of victory. Comparing the 2024 election to the fall of the Berlin Wall, he argues that Lindsay and company are engaged in a kind of triumphalism — convinced that true wokeness has been defeated and thus moving on to purging their enemies on the right from the MAGA movement. '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 [of] influence they've succeeded in gaining in the last ten years,' he writes. This power struggle — and that's what the debate over 'woke right' really is — is thus downstream from the sense that the Trump coalition is ascendant. Curtis Yarvin would certainly be on Lindsay's 'woke right' — indeed, he recently weighed in on the debate to denounce Lindsay. A Silicon Valley entrepreneur who has become famous for his 'neoreactionary' arguments for replacing democracy with a kind of corporate monarchy, Yarvin has directly influenced figures like Vance and Peter Thiel. In the past week, Yarvin has gotten into his own bitter feud — this time, with someone who helped put him on the intellectual map. The man in question is Scott Alexander, a prominent writer aligned with the rationalist and effective altruist movements covered by my colleagues at Future Perfect. Back in the late 2000s and early 2010s, Alexander wrote a series of pieces attempting to critically and fairly examine neoreactionary ideas. Alexander brought significant attention to Yarvin's ideas — it's how I first heard about them — and thus played a role in spreading said ideas outside of the online techie hothouses where they were born. Alexander, like Lindsay, is a liberal deeply skeptical of 'wokeness.' However, his criticisms of the left are far more informed and less fanatical. For that reason, perhaps, he has always been deeply opposed to Trump. And, he believes, Yarvin should be too. This is the essential argument of Alexander's blistering new essay on Yarvin, titled 'Moldbug Sold Out.' He argues that Yarvin's arguments about the nature of politics back in the Moldbug days are mutually exclusive with supporting Trump today. Back then, Yarvin wrote quite a lot about the pathway from democracy to a kind of enlightened monarchy. He proposed that would-be monarchists begin with the creation of a 'shadow government,' basically a privately created mock-up of a new political system. This shadow government would be staffed by such impressive and brilliant people proposing such good ideas that the people would voluntarily choose to shift their allegiances. He proposed this scheme, in part, because he recognized that elected authoritarians had a very poor track record. In his view, the kind of 'authoritarian populist' who could win through normal elections would likely look like a Hitler or Mussolini — a violent buffoon who could never be trusted to stand-up the well-meaning despotism of Yarvin's dreams. Trump, of course, is an authoritarian-inclined populist who won power through elections — yet Yarvin has boarded the Trump train anyway. Thus, Alexander charges, Yarvin has sold out: betrayed his own beliefs in order to gain access to power. 'The MAGA movement was exactly what 2000s [Yarvin] feared most — a cancerous outgrowth of democracy riding the same wave of populist anger as the 20th century dictatorships he loathed. But in the hope of winning a temporary political victory, he let them wear him as a skinsuit — giving their normal, boring autocratic tendencies the mystique of the cool, edgy, all-vulnerabilities-patched autocracy he foretold in his manifestos,' Alexander writes. In response, Yarvin posted a long series of posts on X that basically concede Alexander's main point: that Yarvin's current stance contradicts his previous one. Yarvin now believes that he used to be naïve: 'a libtard and a coward,' in his characteristically insulting phrasing. The current liberal regime is so awful, so demonstrably dangerous, that the first political task should be its destruction. 'Authoritarian populism,' he writes, 'is the only force with the power to end it.' Both the 'woke right' and Yarvin debates revolve fundamentally around power — specifically, how it should be wielded once you have it. The 'woke right' debate is, at heart, about what the ultimate ends of the Trump administration should be. While both sides agree that the 'woke left' should be wiped out, they disagree on what an alternative vision should look like. Lindsay and his allies argue for a restoration of some kind of right-wing liberal individualism; Hazony and his camp believe that the task is replacing liberalism with some kind of hazy alternative rooted in religious or ethno-cultural identity. This debate is taking place on purely abstract grounds — there's almost never any reference to concrete policy disagreements — but it reflects an assumption that there are very real implications of this argument for the next four years of American politics. Lindsay has repeatedly argued, in tweets and interviews, that the rise of the 'woke right' threatens to derail the entire MAGA project and return power to the left. The Yarvin debate poses a related, but more introspective, question about power: How corrosive is it for intellectuals to be in proximity to it? Alexander, the most intellectually rigorous person in either debate, suggests the answer is 'very.' In Yarvin, he sees someone who he long took seriously as tainted by access — by, for example, Vance citing Yarvin as an influence in a podcast appearance. Yarvin's own conduct in their debate vindicates his assessment. Put together, these debates point us to two major themes worth watching throughout the remainder of the Trump administration. First, how much the administration's policy choices intensify the fractures in its elite coalition. Hazony is right that hostility to the left is what brought disparate groups together under the Trump banner. But now, in a world where the administration has to govern, some of those factions are bound to feel like they're losing or even betrayed. Second, how warped the right's ideas become when they go through the policy meatgrinder. We already saw a version of Yarvin's original vision of a CEO-monarch in Elon Musk's reign of terror at DOGE. But that went so poorly that Yarvin himself disavowed it. This embarrassment wasn't enough to turn him off the Trump project altogether — power still has its lure. But the inevitable difficulty of translating ideas into actual policy, and the specific incompetencies of Trump's attempts to do so, are already alienating some previously aligned thinkers. Yarvin may not have a breaking point, but others like him may. This story was adapted for the On the Right newsletter. New editions drop every Wednesday. Sign up here.
Vox
14-05-2025
- Politics
- Vox
The anti-woke right won in 2024. Now they're turning on each other.
is a senior correspondent at Vox, where he covers ideology and challenges to democracy, both at home and abroad. His book on democracy,, was published 0n July 16. You can purchase it here. It's been a rough week in the world of the online intellectual right, which is currently in the midst of two separate yet related blowups — both of which illustrate how the pressures of power are cracking the elite coalition that aligned behind President Donald Trump's return to power. The first fight is really a struggle over who should determine the philosophical identity of MAGA, pitting a group of anti-woke writers against a wide group of illiberal or post-liberal figures. The lead figure in the anti-woke camp, the prominent pundit James Lindsay, has been attacking his enemies as the 'woke right' for months. In his mind, this group's emphasis on the importance of religion, national identity, and ethnicity is the mirror image of the left's identity politics — and thus an existential threat both to American freedom and the MAGA movement's success. In response, his targets on the right — which range from national conservatives to white nationalists — have started firing back aggressively, arguing that Lindsay is not only wrong but maliciously attempting to fracture the MAGA coalition. This might seem like a niche online fight, but given that niche online discourse has been a major influence on the second Trump administration's thinking, it might end up mattering quite a bit. The same could be said about the second fight, which revolves around Curtis Yarvin — the neo-monarchist blogger who has influenced both Vice President JD Vance and DOGE. A recent post by rationalist author Scott Alexander accused Yarvin of 'selling out' — aligning himself with Trump even though he had long denounced the kind of 'authoritarian populism' that Trump embodies. Yarvin defended himself with some fairly bitter attacks on Alexander, drawing in defenders and critics from the broader right-wing universe in the process. Each of these fights is telling in their own right. The 'woke right' contretemps shows just how deep the divisions go inside the Trump world — between anti-woke liberals, on the one hand, and various different forms of 'postliberals' on the other. The Yarvin argument is a revealing portrait of how easy it is to get someone to compromise their own beliefs in the face of polarization and proximity to power. But put together, they show us just how hard it is to go from an insurgent force to a governing one. The 'woke right' redux The 'woke right' debate first came on my radar back in December, when the anti-woke pundit James Lindsay tricked a Christian nationalist website, American Reformer, into publishing excerpts of The Communist Manifesto edited to sound like a critique of modern American liberalism. It might seem to make little sense to describe a 19th-century text on resistance to capitalism as an example of 21st-century identity politics. But Lindsay, who sees himself as a right-wing liberal, is using an idiosyncratic understanding of 'wokeness' that equates it with collectivism — the idea that the politics should be understood through the lens of interests of groups, be it the proletariat or Black Americans, rather than treating all citizens purely as individuals. Thus, for Lindsay, communism is a form of wokeness, even if the term 'woke' postdates Marx by nearly 200 years. This broad definition also allows there to be right-wing forms of wokeness. Neo-Nazism, Christian nationalism, Catholic integralism, even certain forms of anti-liberal conservative nationalism — all of these doctrines give significant weight to group identity in their understanding of what matters in the political realm. Thus, for Lindsay, they are threatening to American liberalism in exactly the same way as their left-wing peers. 'Woke Right are 'right-wing' people who have mostly adopted an identity-based victimhood orientation for themselves to bind together as a class,' he writes. 'Like the Woke Left, then, they happily offer the trade-off usually used to describe Marxists: people who will ask you to trade some of your liberty so that they might hurt your enemies for you.' Personally, I find Lindsay's definition of 'wokeness' so broad that it ceases to operate as a meaningful category (if it ever was one in the first place). But the charge has clearly stung his antagonists on the right, where calling someone 'woke' is basically the worst thing you can say about them. Prominent figures on the illiberal right, ranging from Tim Pool to Mike Cernovich to Anna Khachiyan, shot back at Lindsay — calling him a 'grifter' out to undermine the MAGA movement. Meanwhile, Lindsay's allies, including biologist Colin Wright and Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon, accused them of being the true traitors to MAGA. The most interesting intervention in this debate is an essay recently posted on X by the Israeli intellectual Yoram Hazony. Hazony's main project, the National Conservatism conference, has served as a hub connecting various different strands of illiberalism to each other and to power. Vance, Tucker Carlson, and Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) have all given notable speeches there. Hazony sees opposition to 'wokeness' as the rallying cry that brought disparate strands of the right together. Whatever their philosophical or policy disagreements, they could all agree that the social left needed to be stopped by whatever means necessary. This term is so potent, in his mind, that deploying it in internecine warfare actively poisons the possibility for political coalition. 'The term 'woke right' really has outraged many nationalist conservatives,' Hazony argues. '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.' In Hazony's assessment, the emergence of 'woke right' as a term is a reflection of a sense of victory. Comparing the 2024 election to the fall of the Berlin Wall, he argues that Lindsay and company are engaged in a kind of triumphalism — convinced that true wokeness has been defeated and thus moving on to purging their enemies on the right from the MAGA movement. '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 [of] influence they've succeeded in gaining in the last ten years,' he writes. This power struggle — and that's what the debate over 'woke right' really is — is thus downstream from the sense that the Trump coalition is ascendant. Is Curtis Yarvin a sellout? Curtis Yarvin would certainly be on Lindsay's 'woke right' — indeed, he recently weighed in on the debate to denounce Lindsay. A Silicon Valley entrepreneur who has become famous for his 'neoreactionary' arguments for replacing democracy with a kind of corporate monarchy, Yarvin has directly influenced figures like Vance and Peter Thiel. In the past week, Yarvin has gotten into his own bitter feud — this time, with someone who helped put him on the intellectual map. The man in question is Scott Alexander, a prominent writer aligned with the rationalist and effective altruist movements covered by my colleagues at Future Perfect. Back in the late 2000s and early 2010s, Alexander wrote a series of pieces attempting to critically and fairly examine neoreactionary ideas. Alexander brought significant attention to Yarvin's ideas — it's how I first heard about them — and thus played a role in spreading said ideas outside of the online techie hothouses where they were born. Alexander, like Lindsay, is a liberal deeply skeptical of 'wokeness.' However, his criticisms of the left are far more informed and less fanatical. For that reason, perhaps, he has always been deeply opposed to Trump. And, he believes, Yarvin should be too. This is the essential argument of Alexander's blistering new essay on Yarvin, titled 'Moldbug Sold Out.' He argues that Yarvin's arguments about the nature of politics back in the Moldbug days are mutually exclusive with supporting Trump today. Back then, Yarvin wrote quite a lot about the pathway from democracy to a kind of enlightened monarchy. He proposed that would-be monarchists begin with the creation of a 'shadow government,' basically a privately created mock-up of a new political system. This shadow government would be staffed by such impressive and brilliant people proposing such good ideas that the people would voluntarily choose to shift their allegiances. He proposed this scheme, in part, because he recognized that elected authoritarians had a very poor track record. In his view, the kind of 'authoritarian populist' who could win through normal elections would likely look like a Hitler or Mussolini — a violent buffoon who could never be trusted to stand-up the well-meaning despotism of Yarvin's dreams. Trump, of course, is an authoritarian-inclined populist who won power through elections — yet Yarvin has boarded the Trump train anyway. Thus, Alexander charges, Yarvin has sold out: betrayed his own beliefs in order to gain access to power. 'The MAGA movement was exactly what 2000s [Yarvin] feared most — a cancerous outgrowth of democracy riding the same wave of populist anger as the 20th century dictatorships he loathed. But in the hope of winning a temporary political victory, he let them wear him as a skinsuit — giving their normal, boring autocratic tendencies the mystique of the cool, edgy, all-vulnerabilities-patched autocracy he foretold in his manifestos,' Alexander writes. In response, Yarvin posted a long series of tweets on X that basically concede Alexander's main point: that Yarvin's current stance contradicts his previous one. Yarvin now believes that he used to be naïve: 'a libtard and a coward,' in his characteristically insulting phrasing. The current liberal regime is so awful, so demonstrably dangerous, that the first political task should be its destruction. 'Authoritarian populism,' he writes, 'is the only force with the power to end it.' What the two fights reveal about the Trump era Both the 'woke right' and Yarvin debates revolve fundamentally around power — specifically, how it should be wielded once you have it. The 'woke right' debate is, at heart, about what the ultimate ends of the Trump administration should be. While both sides agree that the 'woke left' should be wiped out, they disagree on what an alternative vision should look like. Lindsay and his allies argue for a restoration of some kind of right-wing liberal individualism; Hazony and his camp believe that the task is replacing liberalism with some kind of hazy alternative rooted in religious or ethno-cultural identity. This debate is taking place on purely abstract grounds — there's almost never any reference to concrete policy disagreements — but it reflects an assumption that there are very real implications of this argument for the next four years of American politics. Lindsay has repeatedly argued, in tweets and interviews, that the rise of the 'woke right' threatens to derail the entire MAGA project and return power to the left. The Yarvin debate poses a related, but more introspective, question about power: How corrosive is it for intellectuals to be in proximity to it? Alexander, the most intellectually rigorous person in either debate, suggests the answer is 'very.' In Yarvin, he sees someone who he long took seriously as tainted by access — by, for example, Vance citing Yarvin as an influence in a podcast appearance. Yarvin's own conduct in their debate vindicates his assessment. Put together, these debates point us to two major themes worth watching throughout the remainder of the Trump administration. First, how much the administration's policy choices intensify the fractures in its elite coalition. Hazony is right that hostility to the left is what brought disparate groups together under the Trump banner. But now, in a world where the administration has to govern, some of those factions are bound to feel like they're losing or even betrayed. Second, how warped the right's ideas become when they go through the policy meatgrinder. We already saw a version of Yarvin's original vision of a CEO-monarch in Elon Musk's reign of terror at DOGE. But that went so poorly that Yarvin himself disavowed it. This embarrassment wasn't enough to turn him off the Trump project altogether — power still has its lure. But the inevitable difficulty of translating ideas into actual policy, and the specific incompetencies of Trump's attempts to do so, are already alienating some previously aligned thinkers. Yarvin may not have a breaking point, but others like him may.
