MAGA Goes Woke

Will the Real Neo-Marxists Please Stand Up?

I want to open by sharing two incidents that may not, at first, seem related. The first is the fatal air collision earlier this year. Prior to an investigation into causes, President Trump announced that the disaster, in which an Army helicopter collided with a commercial jet killing 67 people, had likely been caused by DEI hiring policies. This reflects a growing trend in the MAGA community to blame failures on DEI hires, and by extension, on ethnic minorities. In classic scapegoating fashion, the prima facie assumption is that when things go wrong, they must be responsible

The other incident comes from when I was performing qualitative research on people’s attitudes toward conducting due diligence on the controversial information circulating in 2019-20. Again and again, the conservatives I spoke with told me that when evaluating a controversial information claim—whether a video from Tucker Carlson or a podcast about what was really going on with COVID—the primary concern was not whether the facts were supported by reason, but whether the source was deemed trustworthy as determined through heuristics emphasizing conformity to the MAGA ideological tribe.

Both of these situations reflect aspects of identity politics: the first, through scapegoating and witch-hunting; the second in the assumption that ways of knowing are necessarily constructed by group identity (standpoint epistemology).

For the past eight years, I have been warning about the growing tide of right-wing identity politics. When I first wrote about the republican retreat to identity politics in February 2018, I compared our cultural moment to the ending scene in Animal Farm when the beasts who led the revolt against their human overlords come to be aligned with the ideology of their former oppressors.

When I first wrote about the republican retreat to identity politics, I compared our cultural moment to the ending scene in Animal Farm when the beasts who led the revolt against their human overlords come to be aligned with the ideology of their former oppressors.

I followed that up with warnings about how conservative spokesmen like Tucker Carlson are coming into alignment with Neo-Marxist ideology through viewing all culture through the lens of group-based conflict. I also suggested that there is a rising right-wing progressivism that cares little about the conservative principles of limited government and ordered liberty provided prosperity and ideological purity can be achieved by a Chinese-style statism. In short, I argued that this leftward creep was causing a crisis in the conservative movement that few people have accurately diagnosed.

Until now.

Suddenly, terms like “right-wing progressivism,” “woke-right", and “Neo-Marxist Republicans” are all over the public discourse, and redefining the landscape of our political debate. At the heart of this shift is the issue of identity politics.

Identity politics is a variant of postmodernism (with a particular pedigree in French philosophy, German hermeneutics, and American social sciences that I have described elsewhere) which asserts (at the risk of oversimplification) that competing interpretive communities are hermitically sealed off from each other epistemologically and rhetorically; consequently, culture is a zero-sum conflict among groups trapped within their own group-derived micronarratives. Where Marx saw culture as a theater of inescapable conflict between economic classes vying for the means of production, the Neo-Marxist sees culture as a zero-sum conflict between different groups vying for cultural capital. (Read more about Neo-Marxism of Cultural Marxism in Rod Dreher’s Live Not by Lies or in my article, “The ‘Quiet Revolution’ of Cultural Marxism.”)

When this phenomenon takes a populist term, it is often designated by the term “wokeism,” (a word that, though often dismissed as a sloppy pejorative, is actually a very useful technical term, as Konstantin Kisin explains). This conceptual framework, which James Lindsay has summarized nicely at New Discourses, alleges that a politics rooted in the common good is a mirage: all political activity is, at root, struggle for group power. Significantly, however, group power can never give way to real social justice, because all politics, language and even epistemology is ultimately rooted in power dynamics. Racism, for example, can never be eliminated; it can only be inverted. That is why we have the the curious phenomenon of leftist organizations changing their policy statements and websites to remove traditional language of social justice (an attainable goal), and replacing it with a rhetoric indicative of permanent struggle (an indefinite condition that can never reach closure).

Of course, it should be self-evident that identity politics, and the various critical theories with which it is adjacent, remain antithetical to any genuine conception of conservatism, whether that of Edmund Burke, or that of Russell Kirk, or a biblical political theology rooted in the kingdom of God. What we are really witnessing in the Republican Party is not conservatism at all, but a pseudo-conservative retreat to woke identity politics.

Right-wing identity politics is not racism, white supremacy, nor Christian nationalism, though it is adjacent to all three and the precursor to the type of white ethnostate that people like Brother Nathanael are calling for. But strictly speaking, right-wing identity politics is not necessarily any of the above, nor is it even a posture rooted in a willingness to speak up for ourselves as Christian Americans, as Jon Harris would have us believe in his attempts to resuscitate identity politics into a conservative framework. Rather, identity politics on the right is structurally the same as what it is on the left: a posture toward society that collapses all discourse into competition for power, offering an approach to governance in which every issue becomes a zero-sum competition between winners and losers. This is an outworking of critical theory in which the victim-oppressor framework becomes the lens for understanding all academic disciplines and societal movement. Within the discipline of politics, this framework eschews classic political virtues such as consensus building, professionalism, and compromise, in favor of a rhetoric of contempt in which politics becomes a tool for the assertion of dominance. Often fueled by post-truth epistemologies like perspectivism or functional relativism this framework undermines The True by fortifying the notion that our very view of reality is necessarily conditioned by the matrix of group-identity. This idea, often referred to as “standpoint epistemology,” asserts that the only legitimate ways of knowing are from inside group ideology; consequently, the difference between what is real news vs. fake news comes down to what tribe you identify with.

But even as identity politics tethers The True to the matrix of group identity, it also deconstructs The Good. Notice how, during the COVID controversies when the woke right was still in its infancy, so many conservatives repudiated the concept of the common good (a curious phenomenon I chronicled at the time). Now under the quasi-dictatorship of the Trump personality cult, traditional common-good conservatism is being systematically replaced by a politics that eschews the common good for a Nietzschean might-makes-right modus operandi rooted in grievance narratives. Consider the curious phenomenon (which, again, I have noted elsewhere) that when President Trump is asked to defend policies or ideas, he often merely retreats to a version of Thrasymachus’s argument in Plato’s Republic: that justice is the advantage of the stronger. The reason so many conservatives see this neo-Nietzscheanism as liberating rather than merely cynical is because of the narrative provided by identity politics. The narrative—whether from the woke left or the woke right—asserts that there is systemic structural dynamic to delegitimize people of particular groups, and that this matrix of oppression renders the normal canons of fair play no longer adequate tools for redress. This, in turn, opens up space to address conflict via witch-hunting, scapegoating, mob-like behaviors, along with ever-tightening in-groups defined by ideological purity.

But how widespread is this type of right-wing progressivism actually? When James Lindsay spoke with Konstantin Kisin four months ago, the latter felt the emergence of right-wing wokery was still a fringe movement clustered around the spiritual leader Tucker Carlson. But in the momentum of the new administration, that fringe has entered the mainstream of Republican orthodoxy.

Elsewhere Kisin analyzed how leading right-wing spokespersons are increasingly adopting woke tactics and conceptualizations. Kisin is not alone. Consider just a smattering of the recent discourse. In February this year, the Atlantic ran an article claiming that the woke right has replaced the woke left. The British journalist, Mary Harrington, wrote an article “Yes, the ‘Woke Right’ is real,” while earlier this month the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College warned about the woke right. Daniel McCarthy, the editor of Modern Age, recently discussed how the American right is capitulating to the narratives of critical theory. Moreover, at the last Turning Point conference, the question of the woke-right was hovering behind all the other discussions. Meanwhile Konstantin Kisin has been using his Substack to offer an anatomy of the woke right in articles such as “Tucker Carlson and the Woke Right” and “Thou Shalt Not Criticize the Woke Right.” And on and on.

To top it all, James Lindsay made headlines after submitting a portion of The Communist Manifesto to a MAGA-leaning journal and having it accepted (you just can’t make this stuff up). Ten, even five years ago, it would have been unthinkable that a conservative journal would promote portions of The Communist Manifesto while merely updating the language and changing who the good guys and bad guys are.

A conservative text?

As the Republican establishment is increasingly colonized by right-wing identity politics, the Overton Window is shifting so fast you can see it in real time.

I have seen this shift in my own communities. The publisher of my first book, Canon Press, has now published a polemic for Christian Nationalism with an author who podcasts with Thomas Achord, a man who (via his Twitter self named “Tulius”) has called for white nationalists to leverage the critical theories of the left, including standpoint epistemology.

Here’s another example of how the Overton Window has shifted in my own communities. I used to attend a parish where the leadership regularly spoke up against both racism and politicized Christianity; yet in 2023 (after I had left, thank God) they brought someone in to teach Sunday School who publicly promotes street violence against liberals and racial minorities. When I returned for a visit, the very people who had once spoken out against racism warned me not to say anything against this teacher of hate.

Or again, in 2016, some prominent conservative ministries I worked with showed solidarity with Russell Moore, the previous president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission whose family received death threats following the latter’s critique of the Trump personality cult. Yet now spokesmen for these same ministries are denouncing Russell Moore and David French as essentially no different than leftists. This tendency to turn so quickly against our own people (in this case, pro-life social conservatives) for a perceived lack of ideological purity is straight out of the Marxist-Leninist playbook: the people Lenin went after most viciously were those in his own party who failed to be 100% aligned with his ever-tightening demands of ideological purity. (The fact that I am being vague and self-censoring in this paragraph is itself a sign that I am swimming in waters where the demands for ideological purity has been tightened in ways that seem eerily similar to the ideological purity cultures we have become so familiar with on the left.)

Ideological purity cultures. A personality cult. Death threats against fellow conservatives. Self-censorship. Ressourcement of Marxist texts. These are not signs of a conservative resurgence, but of the revolutionary mind.

The problem with the revolutionary mind is that it has no off-switch, but requires a condition of permanent revolution to preserve ideological purity and maintain the ingroup-outgroup binary on which the grievance narrative of the revolution ultimately depends. It’s easy enough to discern this dynamic happening on the left. Consider the ideological purity culture that surrounds anti-racism. The anti-racist movement seeks not merely to remove racists from professional life, but to remove those who, while not being explicitly racist themselves, may still be complicit in systemic racism - for example, through insufficient activism, defensiveness (did you know defensiveness is a symptom of unconscious white supremacy?) or through non-participation in whiteness-shaming rituals that are practiced in some corporations and universities. The new identity politics of the right operates with a similar dynamic, for as President Trump leads his party into ever-tightening circles of ideological purity, the dissenting conservatives (even those who fail to be sufficiently enthusiastic) can expect to be publicly shamed, vilified, abused, and—in the manner of how they treated Liz Cheney—purged.

Although the MAGA machine will likely dismiss these emerging concerns as merely leftist tu quoque, or perhaps RINO deflection techniques, behind this debate is a legitimate concern about the viability of incorporating the thought world and praxis of Social Marxism into a “conservative” context. Moreover, now that the categories of “right wing wokery” are going mainstream, sooner or later the intellectual wing of the MAGA movement will need to address these concerns. More specifically, they will need to either repudiate their neo-Marxist conceptualizations, or else have the courage to stand up and own Neo-Marxism as their new realpolitik.

As the MAGA movement takes this Neo-Marxist turn, let us not lose sight of the insight of Tolkien. In the greatest series of books written in modern times, he warned us against feeling so hopeless that we succumb to the thinking and techniques of the enemy. The Lord of the Rings offers a timely warning never to let fear drive us to wield the enemy's weapon, even in pursuit of good.

Tolkien warned us against feeling so hopeless that we succumb to the thinking of the enemy. The Lord of the Rings offers a timely warning never let fear drive us to wield the enemy's weapon, even in pursuit of good.

Further Reading

• The Republican Retreat to Identity Politics

• Josh Hawley Resurrects the Ghost of Rousseau

• Tucker Carlson - Man of the Left

• Right-Wing Violence and the Trump Personality Cult

• Paine-fully Conservative?: Remembering "Rights of Man" and the Original Left-Right Divide

• Letter to a Conspiracy Theorist