Post-Liberal on Both Sides
Putting the Woke Right to Bed
Strictly speaking, there isn’t a “woke right.” According to linguist John McWhorter, the term “woke” originated in Black English to mean “understanding that there are larger forces operating to keep power unequally distributed in our society, disfavoring especially the poor and people of color.” Needless to say, few MAGA supporters accept the narrative that systemic racism disfavors people of color. But many do agree that an often-hidden superstructure (call it the deep state, the liberal establishment, or the Cathedral) keeps power unequally distributed so that coastal elites, or globalists, or cultural Marxists, dominate politics and culture at the expense of conservatives (or Christians, or the white working class, or “Heritage Americans”). Many also support activist measures to reshape that superstructure and redistribute its power, as progressives attempt to accomplish through DEI programs. Thus, per McWhorter, it’s no surprise that the term “woke” has broadened to “refer more generally to a conspiracy-focused and punitive orientation to social change,” which is not specifically left-wing.
For example, in a New York Times piece called “My Brush with Trump’s Thought Police,” Professor Joseph Stiglitz writes about how government funding was pulled from his lecture. For the funding to be released, the lecture’s organizers were asked to sign “a statement essentially saying they were in compliance with a U.S. executive order banning diversity, equity and inclusion.” According to Stiglitz, “It was a head-spinning turn of events; under President Joe Biden, attention to D.E.I. issues had been a requirement for receiving the grant.” Though Stiglitz doesn’t make the point explicit, by his own account, the professor was subject to two separate visits from the “thought police”: first from the woke left and then from the anti-woke right. The Trump administration could have simply struck down Biden’s DEI requirement and announced a return to official neutrality. That they implemented an anti-DEI requirement instead points to a shared position with their ideological enemies.
“Woke” is not the correct term for this shared position because it’s indelibly associated with social-justice activism on behalf of racial and sexual minorities. Instead, I’d use the term “post-liberal” to describe the common assumption of both the woke left and much of the anti-woke right: that “official neutrality” is impossible and undesirable. Thus, in the case of Stiglitz, it wasn’t enough for his government grant to be open to all qualified recipients. Rather, funding was contingent upon his affirmation of DEI. Subsequently, the Trump administration’s response to this ideological litmus test was the imposition of yet another ideological litmus test: a commitment to not supporting DEI.1 Similarly, the administration demanded that Harvard “cease all preferences based on race, color, national origin, or proxies thereof,” but also hire more right-wing professors: a form of DEI for conservatives. For the post-liberal left, ostensible neutrality perpetuates social injustice. For the post-liberal right, it invariably leads to ideological capture by the minoritarian, norm-subverting left. The center cannot hold, so it must be pushed in our direction.
For old-school liberals and conservatives alike, colleges should be truth-seeking, journalism should be objective, the state should be non-partisan, and justice should be blind. That institutions commonly stray from these ideals does not negate the ideals themselves. Debates over the role of government or social policy happen within this shared liberal framework. At least rhetorically, Trump himself often espouses liberal values, promising that “We will forge a society that is colorblind and merit-based” and “Never again will the immense power of the state be weaponized to persecute political opponents.”2 Here, it’s important to note that “liberal” is not synonymous with “leftist.” Liberalism is rooted in the Latin word liber, meaning “free,” and took on its political meaning during the European Enlightenment. America’s Founding Fathers were influenced by Enlightenment ideals like individual liberty, limited government, freedom of religion, representative democracy, and the rule of law. Thus, the tradition that American conservatives classically seek to conserve is itself liberal, while liberals seek to update or extend those same principles (conservatives would say “stray from”).3
Of course, the man who declared “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” also owned slaves. As Samuel Johnson wondered in 1775: “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?” For the woke left, such hypocrisy is a defining feature of liberalism. Racism, sexism, homophobia, and colonialism are embedded in our history, language, institutions, and way of life. It’s not enough, then, to extend legal equality to the groups once deprived of it. Equity—equality of outcomes—must take the place of equality of opportunity. Lived experience and social justice outweigh objectivity and truth (which are masks for power anyway). The right not to be “triggered” supersedes freedom of speech. Identity, not abstract principle, determines morality; so that the actions of the “oppressed” are justified by their “marginalization,” up to and including the murder of children on October 7.
On the right, an avowedly post-liberal intellectual movement argues that the state should pursue a vision of the common good, rather than espouse a false neutrality that only disguises globalist technocracy and ever-more radical leftism.4 But sheer animus toward the left, often coupled with a mirroring of its tactics and conspiratorial thinking, tends to overshadow any positive communitarian vision. For example, the New York Times’ 1619 Project argued that the year enslaved Africans first arrived was America’s “true founding.” Historians largely criticized the essay collection for its historical inaccuracies and ideologically motivated attempt to rewrite the past as a woke narrative. On the right, podcaster Darryl Cooper argues that Winston Churchill, not Adolf Hitler, was “the chief villain” of World War II.5 His distorted history has its own ideological motivation: to prove that the post-war liberal order was built on a lie. Contempt for experts and facts, rooted in epistemological nihilism (everyone is biased, knowledge is just a power game), connects these otherwise opposed attempts at historical revisionism.
The post-liberal consensus, as it were, rests on a universal, self-evident truth: that whoever speaks of universal, self-evident truths is just a particular person in a particular place with a particular conception of truth. Since institutions are largely made up of people, they, too, are subject to the human condition and can never be truly neutral. The realist conclusion is that of Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant: “Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.” The cynical interpretation is that of Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt: “Whoever invokes humanity wants to cheat.”6 For the woke left, white people who claim to be impartial are disguising their implicit bias. The Volk right agrees, but proposes that white people express their bias explicitly instead. Perhaps, after the struggle sessions of the Great Awokening and Great Anti-Wokening have flamed out, we can reach an accord. Neutrality is impossible in practice but indispensable as an ideal. Society requires non-liberal sources of meaning to function properly. But those sources, in turn, require a liberal order to co-exist peacefully. To be woke all the time is tiresome, so let’s agree to give it a rest.
Though, ultimately, the funding was withdrawn entirely.
“Hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue.” — Francois de La Rochefoucauld, Maxims and Reflections
America’s classical liberal origins mean that a truly illiberal right is, ironically, a foreign form of American nationalism. An analogy is the Nazi attempt to de-Judaize Christianity by promulgating an “Aryan Jesus.” When you strip Christianity of its Jewish influences, you end up stripping it bare. Likewise, American identity is inseparable from classical liberalism (which is distinct from modern liberalism), although it’s not reducible to abstract principles, either.
There are some avowedly left-wing post-liberals, but the term is most closely associated with the anti-fusionist political right. My argument here is that the woke left is also de facto post-liberal, which reflects a bipartisan decline in the legitimacy of the broadly liberal center. Institutional failures have contributed to this decline, as has a collapse in social trust accelerated by technology.
Cooper’s woke-left soulmate is Professor Kehinde Andrews, author of The Psychosis of Whiteness: Surviving the Insanity of a Racist World, who claimed that the Churchill-led British Empire was “worse than the Nazis.”
Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political (1932), p. 54.
I actually think the administration's action in the case in question were perfectly acceptable given the presumption that any grants approved by the previous administration were likely for woke BS.