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.

Postscript: Answering Objections

Since writing this, I have received two objections that I want to address, one about Tucker Carlson, and another identity politics in general and standpoint epistemology in particular.

I described Tucker Carlson as the spiritual leader of the woke right. Reader have pointed out that my criticisms are unfair because Tucker and those within his ecosystem seem interested in the facts, even if they occasionally go too far and get things wrong, and even if much of what Tucker says is exploratory.

Given Carlson’s current wealth, influence, and independence from established media, he is in a position to pay researchers to find out genuinely interesting things that he can then talk about in his programs. This means that he routinely puts out genuinely helpful information that many people might never find out about if it were not for him. But in itself that doesn’t imply that Carlson isn’t fundamentally an ideologue or “simple” in the language of Proverbs, or even a fake reporter. It’s interesting that in a 2020 defamation lawsuit against Tucker brought by Karen McDougal, Fox News lawyers argued that Carlson’s statements couldn’t be taken as factual reporting. Summarizing the arguments of Carlson’s lawyers, the judge declared that the “‘general tenor’ of the show should then inform a viewer that [Carlson] is not ‘stating actual facts’ about the topics he discusses and is instead engaging in ‘exaggeration’ and ‘non-literal commentary.’” In other words, Carlson should not be held to the standard of journalistic ethics because he’s not a real journalist! That would be like saying a gossip shouldn’t feel bad spreading wild rumors at a family reunion because he’s a professional liar, or that you shouldn’t object to Jeremy stealing your wallet because he’s a professional thief. Those may seem like extreme examples, but Fox News essentially used the same argument, suggesting that Tucker Carlson shouldn’t be measured against the standards of journalistic integrity because he’s a propogandist not a real journalist. By contrast, reporters for CNN have been sacked for factual errors that seem comparatively minor compared to Tucker’s misrepresentations (I discussed that in my video about Fake News).

I appreciate that Tucker has supposedly taken a shift since he left Fox. Many people have told me he has become more thoughtful since he struck out on his own. But my challenge would be this: do people come away from watching his programs with more or less of the epistemic virtues – character traits such as fair-mindedness, metacognition, intellectual humility, even-handedness, reflectiveness, prudence, tolerance for ambiguity, non-dismissive consideration of arguments, charitable interpretation of opposing arguments, slowness when analyzing information, attentiveness, patience, cognitive empathy, low perception gaps, etc.?

So much for Tucker Carlson. Now concerning identity politics. It’s interesting that the push-back in my critique against identity politics is coming from the right. That shows how much the Overton window has shifted.

One person was concerned that my denial of standpoint epistemology coupled with my belief that there is such a thing as the common good, assumes a classical neutral ground, free from biases, from which to pursue the common good and construct a conservative society. But this view from nowhere—again, summarizing my interlocuters—fails to account for our embeddedness in ethnic, sociological, and economic situations that inevitably color our political and societal interactions.

I agree there is no perspective from nowhere - no neutral rationality that is free from context, whether ethnic, sociological, economic, or otherwise. On the contrary, it is only because Christ is the king of the universe that there can be a rationality, justice, and common good that is larger that mere interest groups. That is why standpoint epistemology and identity politics (whether in its right-wing or left-wing variety), ultimately fails. They fail because we worship a risen and ascended Lord who is now king of the cosmos, and who sent his Spirit at Pentecost. Christ's kingship does not abolish the distinctions between cultures and ethnicities; rather, grace transforms (not obliterates) nature, and part of that transformation is that Christianity has problematized the very notion that peoples are necessarily locked in a zero-sum competition for power, or that ways of knowing and communicating are hermetically sealed within the self-enclosed matrix of tribal identity. What complementarianism did in answering certain variants of feminism (namely, by showing that the sexes really are different but gloriously harmonious), the doctrine of Ascension and Pentecost does for culture and ethnicity, for it shows that the different cultures and ethnicities are gloriously different but can live in harmony, in complementarity. That possibility of harmony, in turn, can inform out politics, as we eschew the framework of identity-politics that would problematize the very idea of a common good.

Maybe it would help to put my argument into historical context. Ancient pagans believed they were part of an unavoidable division between different races, tribes, and people groups. This came as an inevitable consequence of polytheism. In ancient polytheistic societies, each tribe, ethnic group, and nation believed themselves to be associated with particular deities that warred in the heavens with the gods of the other nations. The warfare between the gods expressed itself in fighting among the tribes to which they were attached. This is pervasive through the literature of the Ancient Near East, including Homer’s Iliad and the Old Testament. Because the gods and their associated nations were locked in a zero-sum conflict for domination, each group sought to use violence to prove that their god was supreme over the other gods. This perspective brought very specific ideas of guilt and expiation, whereby one group could only have their guilt expiated by becoming the target of cathartic rage from their rival group. Accordingly, pagan justice involved one group triumphing over another. Because races and tribes were seen to be locked in inevitable conflict, justice for one group could only involve injustice to your group, and vice versa. In this primitive perspective, there is no concept of the common good that can unite people across groups, nor a normative framework that can be appealed to in the adjudication of disputes. All that exists is raw power.

Christianity largely did away with this pagan perspective, at least in the lands influenced by Christian culture. The message of Pentecost was the unity of all men and women in Christ, and the ongoing work of creation against the forces of chaos and division. The gospel taught that a person is no longer defined primarily by their group, but by being a new creature in Christ. While Christianity did not abolish conflicts between groups (there is a long history of Christian nations warring against other Christian nations, let alone conflict between Christians and non-Christian nations), it redefined the terms of engagement. Thus, a recurring theme in political texts throughout the medieval era, which had been completely lacking in the ancient world, is that instead of justice being a zero-sum contest between warring factions, divine justice brings people of different tribes and nations to live in harmony with His order. By living in harmony with God, we are able to live in harmony with one another, at least in principle. Although the reality of worldwide harmony will not be realized until the New Heavens and the New Earth, Christians anticipate this by following Paul’s injunction in Romans 12:18 to try to live peaceably with all men.

But this Christian approach began to sustain considerable challenge during the age of revolutions that followed the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. Starting with the French Revolution through to the various Communist revolutions that occurred throughout the twentieth century, there resurfaced the pagan idea that the world is an inevitable battleground for competition between warring factions, and that we cannot escape the conflicts tied to group-identity. For example, in the French Revolution there was a zero-sum struggle for supremacy between the aristocrats and those representing the common people and citizens. The Marxist revolutions, on the other hand, organized people based on their relation to the economy (for example, proletariat and bourgeoisie), and then taught that these classes are locked in a zero-sum struggle for supremacy. The Fascist revolutions of the twentieth century taught that there was an inevitable zero-sum conflict between races (for example, between the Aryan races and those of “impure” pedigree). In all such cases, the revolutionary ideology allows no possibility, even in principle, for compromise; there is no common justice that can unite warring factions, because there can only be winners and losers. According to these post-Christian political philosophies, the group to which you belong automatically defines you, whether you want it or not. Significantly, what we know as “conservatism,” grew out of European thinkers opposing these revolutionary ideas. Men like Edmund Burke appealed to principles of the spiritual life and natural law (in the case of Burke, natural law, not natural rights - two very different things) that were transcendent and thus prior to mere group identity.

The most recent manifestation of group-based revolutionary ideas is the cluster of ideas within the ecosystem of wokeness, including identity politics and standpoint epistemology. This narrative is that we are all trapped in the micro-narrative of our particular group with no ability to pursue a common good or a common justice that can unite peoples; there is no transcendently real or objective vantage point to assess competing constructions of reality because everyone is trapped in the construction of their own group, locked in power games against the agendas of other groups, often defined in terms of race, gender, sexuality or ideology. Mutual incompressibility between different groups is perceived not as an unfortunate observation of a state of affairs that needs to be problematized, nor a phenomenon of the sinful condition that we should work to dismantle through a Christ-centered political vision, but an inescapable norm that we should flow with.

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