How the woke right gained power in the US

"I know you are, but what am I?" It's an insult that has long echoed around school playgrounds, but it is now being heard in political circles, too.

After years of the right insulting what it calls the "woke left" by charging it with cancelling opponents, focusing on identity politics, and imagining the world is rigged against it, a so-called "woke right" is now being accused of much the same tendencies.

An ideological doppelganger

The phrase "woke right" started "appearing with frequency" in 2022, said John McWhorter in the New York Times, and became "especially well entrenched" at the end of last year. This means rather than "applying specifically" to the "concerns" of the left, woke can now refer to any "conspiracy-focused" and "punitive orientation" to social change.

The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Like its "antithesis on the left", the woke right places "identity grievance, ethnic consciousness" and "tribal striving" at the centre of its "behaviour and thought", said Thomas Chatterton Williams in The Atlantic. In doing so, it tells white, male right-wing Americans that "they are the country's real victims".

So "woke right" is a "kind of ideological doppelganger", argued Andrew Doyle on his Substack, whose adherents "exhibit the same precisionist" and "absolutist tendencies" of their "leftist counterparts".

No tolerance for opposing views

An election campaign promise of Donald Trump was that he would "free Americans" from "ever having to worry about saying the wrong thing again", said Chatterton Williams. Yet, following his return to the White House, we "hardly find ourselves enjoying a culture of free speech" or "tolerance for opposing views".

Instead, the newly elected president has done the opposite of what he promised and "banned words" related to "gender and diversity", even employing "the force of the government" to enforce the bans.

Meanwhile, in Britain the "kerfuffle" about the "woke right" is only played out online for now, wrote Gareth Roberts for The Spectator, because here, "for the foreseeable" at least, there's "no chance" of the right "getting anywhere near the actual levers of power".

Still obsessed with identity

Not everyone is thrilled by the new term. Not surprisingly, it has "riled denizens of the internet" with "chiselled jaws" and "flinty conservative opinions", wrote Kathleen Stock for UnHerd, who are "outraged" at the "very idea" of it.

But, "to the extent that there is an anti-woke backlash", said Daniel Hannan in The Telegraph, all signs point to it being as "intolerant, unthinking and collectivist" as the trend it "dislikes". The woke right is "still obsessed with identity", but with the "goodies and baddies" labels "switched".