The Emerging Bipartisan Wokeness

Back in May, for the third time since the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel, a trio of university presidents was marched in front of Congress for a round of hearings on campus anti-Semitism. Congressional Republicans peppered the heads of Northwestern, Rutgers, and UCLA with queries: Is “From the river to the sea” not code for the slaughter of Jews? (Eric Burlison, Missouri). Why were universities’ anti-Semitism centers and Jewish faculty not more involved in decision making? (Elise Stefanik, New York). Why is anti-Semitism “institutionalized” in university policy? (Kevin Kiley, California). Why did universities abandon their mission of keeping students safe? (Aaron Bean, Florida). Listening to the hearing, I was struck not so much by what conservative representatives were saying, but by how they were saying it. They sounded a lot like those liberal “snowflakes” they love to castigate.

Underlying their questions was a set of assumptions that we normally associate with the progressive left: The slow and established mechanisms of institutional justice must give way to swift, righteous punishments for prejudice. Identity-based bureaucracies should dictate university policy. Opponents’ political slogans are thinly veiled messages of racial hatred. Bigotry is a near-mystical force that suffuses every nook and cranny of our institutions and can be ameliorated only through systematic overhaul. And emotional security is no less important than physical security and supersedes free speech.

[Read: You can’t define woke]

Over the past six months or so, commentators have been engaged in an ongoing debate about whether we are past what’s been called “peak woke”—whether, that is, the worst excesses of post-2020 performative progressivism are now in the rearview. The consensus seems to be that we are lurching, if somewhat haltingly, to a world where American educational institutions, corporations, and media are less hemmed in by progressive niceties. And this may well be true: DEI offices are closing; diversity statements are going the way of the dodo. But if the “peak woke” conversation gets some things right, it also misses a more subtle yet ultimately more consequential transformation within the American political arena, one on vivid display in that congressional hearing. Wokeness did not disappear. Wokeness has become bipartisan.

Arguing that conservatives have become “woke,” given their vocal anti-wokeness, admittedly sounds strange. And if you define wokeness as a set of specific beliefs about anti-racism, gender, public masking, open borders, prison and police abolition, and so on, then Republicans don’t fit the type. But wokeness doesn’t just have readily identifiable content—a set of opinions that leave adherents in good progressive standing. It also has a readily identifiable form. Writing in Harper’s in 1964, the historian Richard Hofstadter argued that the American political tradition was defined, particularly on the right, by a predilection for conspiracism. Hofstadter famously called this “the paranoid style in American politics,” which was also the title of his landmark essay. As the dust has cleared from the multiyear bout of hysteria that defined political life post-2020, it is now possible to see that wokeness is today the dominant style in American politics.

The conservative version is hiding in plain sight. Representative Dan Crenshaw of Texas spoke of an emerging “woke right” back in 2022, and the term has since kicked around the blogosphere. The writer Katherine Brodsky has argued that the hallmarks of the phenomenon are an embrace of cancel culture, white identity politics, and a victim mindset. Discussions of this trend took off last week when a conservative social-media account got a low-level Home Depot employee fired after she made a joke about Trump's assassination.

Right-wing wokeness is Elon Musk critiquing “heterophobia” and classifying the word cis as a slur on X. It is conservative social media melting down and calling a Navy Seal Facebook post about Pride month “a threat to national security.” It is Florida pushing to prevent teaching slavery in a way that might make white students “feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other forms of psychological distress.” It is the NYPD deputy commissioner asserting that a widely used textbook about terrorism is actually a terrorist manual, and that common bike locks—sold by Columbia University’s own public-safety department—are evidence that “professional” agitators had infiltrated recent campus protests. It is pretending that ChatGPT refusing to say a racial slur is a literal threat to the human race. It is crying crocodile tears over Jeopardy and Star Wars asking about pronouns. It is fomenting an airline-safety panic around “diversity hiring” of Black pilots. It is “canceling” the New York Times columnist David French, a lifelong Republican until Donald Trump’s arrival on the political scene, because he’s not conservative enough. These culture-war installments, and the many others like them, share the same kind of emotional infirmity, hyperbolic invocations of violence, and punishment of wrongthink that characterizes left-wing wokeness at its most unhinged.

A recent book by Jeremy Carl, a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, displays this emergent style. Titled The Unprotected Class: How Anti-White Racism Is Tearing America Apart, the book features a cover image showing Kill All Whits [sic] graffitied on a fence, and is endorsed by fellow firebrand Christopher Rufo. Despite its superficial similarities to earlier screeds about “reverse racism,” this new book is to a remarkable extent—whether its author realizes it or not—influenced by post-2020 wokeness. It onboards many of the rhetorical tricks and ideological assumptions of recent progressive discourse.

Like any good woke writer, Carl castigates colorblindness for being insufficiently attuned to systemic racism. “The default Republican response to repeated racial insult,” he writes, “has been to say, ‘I don’t see race/color,’ even in the face of obvious anti-white animus.” He insists that after “decades of anti-white teachings in schools,” the educational system upholds institutionalized racism. He argues that “anti-white rhetoric can be found throughout the entertainment industry” and that this hidden bigotry must be weeded out of Hollywood. He claims that the media covers victims of crime differently on the basis of race. And this is all ratcheted up to a matter of life and death: “For middle-class and working-class whites, and even for an increasing number of upper-class whites,” he writes, “this anti-white discrimination and racism is deadly—we might even say the problems it causes are intersectional.” If you swapped white for Black, there are more than a few passages in The Unprotected Class that would sound like they could have been written by Ibram X. Kendi or Robin DiAngelo.

My point here is not to roast Carl or his book. My point isn’t even that we should dismiss his arguments out of hand. For what it’s worth, I do think it’s bad that the media tends to ignore white victims of police brutality, and I agree that anti-white and anti-male sentiment sometimes flows freely in academia in ways that would be unacceptable if directed at any other demographic group. My point is simply to highlight the remarkable degree to which conservatives have taken to appropriating progressive rhetoric and strategies, giving them a reactionary reinterpretation. If many of the talking points we find in The Unprotected Class are warmed-over rehashings of decades’ worth of “reverse racism” discourse, the style in which these talking points are presented is resolutely new. And resolutely woke.

[Read: America’s real ‘wokeness’ divide]

There’s nothing new about conservatives adopting left-wing rhetorical fashions. The right in general, and the far right in particular, has long indulged the same kind of crusading fragility—once more commonly called “political correctness”—that they accuse liberals of exhibiting, particularly in regards to race. As the popular Substack writer John Ganz notes in his new counter-history of the 1990s, When the Clock Broke, arguments about reverse racism, affirmative action, and institutionalized bigotry against white Americans were already firmly ensconced in the national discourse by that decade. David Duke, a former grand wizard of the KKK and a onetime closeted neo-Nazi, ran a disturbingly successful campaign during Louisiana’s 1991 gubernatorial election on these very premises. Duke, who founded an organization called the National Association for the Advancement of White People—a white-supremacist version of the NAACP, ostensibly advocating civil rights for whites—ran on a platform promising to eradicate anti-white racism. “I just think white people should have equal rights too,” the not-so-reformed klansman said in one TV interview.   

It was a message that found purchase with voters. As Ganz notes, Duke was able to break “through to people who would not necessarily move in the Holocaust denial and KKK subcultures,” in part because he gave voice to roiling fears that minorities were being granted preferential treatment over Caucasians. Ganz quotes a retired schoolteacher who told The Boston Globe: “I like the fact that [Duke] thinks that everyone else should get an even break—white or black or Jewish or anything else. I think we have had a lot of antiwhite racism.” Today’s reactionary wokeness amplifies this long-running reverse-racism bugaboo. But it departs from earlier political-correctness panics by adapting these older talking points to both contemporary argumentative styles (emphasizing “safety” and emotional “violence” rather than the “fairness” of yesteryear) and institutional strategies that embrace straightforward white identitarianism (as Duke always dreamed) rather than limpid appeals to colorblindness.

In the post-Trump era, the right’s age-old appeals to reverse racism have careened headlong into progressive discourse about “systemic racism,” helping create a disturbing bastard child: a woke conservatism that champions anti-racism for whites, or, more precisely, anti–reverse racism. To see this new hybrid ideology at work, one need look no further than the reigning head of the Republican Party. Trump leans into the idea that pervasive structural racism exists against Caucasians, and suggests that Americans need to interrogate their implicit bias against white people. “I think there is a definite anti-white feeling in this country,” Trump said in a recent interview. “I think the laws are very unfair right now.”

Underlying left-wing wokeness, even at its most performative and excessive, is a series of partial truths about American society: Even if die-hard progressives are wrong and anti-Black racism does not explain every problem in this country, it does explain quite a few of them. And 2020’s summer of reckoning did draw much-needed attention to entrenched and structurally reinforced racial inequalities in the United States, despite the movement quickly getting derailed by “elite capture”—the tendency of radical social movements to get co-opted by corporate and other rarefied interests.

As someone who became a professor in August 2020, at the incandescent height of progressive wokeness, I have watched higher education around the country become ever more outwardly progressive. But the social-justice rhetoric that now suffuses academia has done absolutely nothing to stop the relentless pace of gigification. More and more academics every year are employed as contingent laborers rather than as tenure-track professors. In fact, a good case can be made that wokeness greases the skids for this trend by allowing universities to appear like benevolent actors, hiring greater numbers of women and people of color, even as they pull the rug out from under labor by placing those new hires in adjunct roles.  

It’s easy to argue that we should have known better, that the progressive ideas championed by CEOs and elite-university presidents were probably not that progressive after all, but the reckoning of 2020 happened for a reason. The Great Awokening was so galvanizing for so many precisely because it always had one foot in reality. The same can be said of conservative wokeness.

[Adam Serwer: ‘Woke capital’ doesn’t exist]

The right’s renewed focus on anti-white racism, its opportunistic seizing of the anti-Semitism debate, and the broader anti-DEI craze it has stirred up are also appealing to the masses precisely because they have some truth in them. For example, although it is not true that white men are unemployable in academia, the subject of a recent high-profile social-media culture-war battle, it is obviously the case that efforts to diversify the faculty at many universities mean that white candidates are viewed less favorably. The rise of racially themed cluster-hire initiatives—which allow universities to gerrymander diverse candidate pools by writing job ads for minority-majority subfields such as “decolonial theory”—are a way for academic institutions to skirt antidiscrimination laws. Likewise, although the right’s attempt to portray university students as hardened pro-Hamas, bike-lock-wielding terrorists is plainly ludicrous, it is just as plain that anti-Semitism within the progressive movement is real, however fringe these elements may be. If the ways the right characterizes these issues are often disingenuous and overexaggerated, they are not wholly fabricated either.

But as with left-wing wokeness, conservative wokeness preys on people moved by these legitimate issues to sell them on a hyperbolized politics. Woke conservatism leverages reasonable concerns about a range of issues—the plight of working-class white men, anti-Semitism, misandry, and the like—only to foment a hysteria that distracts from the fact that its principal champions are also the causes of many of the problems it allegedly seeks to solve. The primary threat to the job prospects of many working-class white men in America is not “reverse racism,” affirmative action, or pesky minorities, but accumulated decades of deindustrialization, market fundamentalism, and anti-union efforts that sent blue-collar jobs overseas and gutted the ones that remained. As for the loud warnings about left-wing anti-Semitism, the sociologist Musa Al-Gharbi has demonstrated that “liberals are consistently the least antisemitic ideological group in the US, and white liberals—the Americans most likely to embrace ‘woke’ ideology—are the least antisemitic people in the country by far.”

Wokeness is now the air we all breathe, a noxious miasma of bad faith, hysteria, and shameless opportunism that is animated by not ultimate principles but ultimate convenience. It has not peaked, and it is not peaking. Wokeness has become the status quo, a bipartisan lingua franca, the ruling style of American politics.