The Woke Right and Its Discontents

Lindsay, the postwar mind prison, and the dialectic from hell

For those who haven’t followed the “woke right” debate at all and need some context, you’ll find a brief primer in this footnote.¹

No doubt, James Lindsay’s campaign to establish “Woke Right” as a slur, and use it to queer the Dissident and Populist Right, has had some success.

It’s an insult that sticks, and no wonder: people have suffered so much from the Woke Cult over the past decade that being associated with it in any way feels disgusting. And so, many on the receiving end seem to be stirred and confused by it, often reduced to simply throwing back the insult: “nooo Lindsay and gang, you are the Woke Right!” Which kind of misses the mark and only perpetuates the whole idea. Let’s break that cycle by taking a deeper look at what’s going on here.

The dynamics at play are simple enough to understand: Lindsay and the others mistake the postwar consensus for hard features of reality. To them, casting doubt on any of its tenets is akin to proclaiming the sky is green, or that men can become women. The reason is that postwar talking points are part of what R.G. Collingwood called “absolute presuppositions:” unconscious assumptions about reality that are invisible to them. Lindsay and gang are operating from a locked-in frame of reference from which their utterings flow: ranging from vulgar pearl-clutching at anything that disturbs what they take for objective reality, to obnoxious Theorizing about how the entirely natural move away from the postwar consensus really is hErmEneuTic GnosTicism.

Thing is, we can’t perceive the limits of our perception. The stuff of which these limits are made appears to us as a priori truth; it is the stuff that forms the invisible guardrails guiding our thought. And guide our thought they will.

When someone does bring up people’s “absolute presuppositions” in any way other than taking them for granted, they react emotionally: fuelled by a deep sense of uncomfortableness, their minds seize any means necessary to make it all go away. In this particular case, the way Lindsay and gang go about it is calling those who cause that uncomfortableness “Woke Right,” formulating elaborate treatises about how the offenders parallel woke leftist thought — all to get their minds back to that sweet, peaceful homeostasis of arrested development.

From their perspective, this makes sense: parts of the left as well as parts of the right question some of the talking points that have emerged and solidified over time from the postwar situation. This makes both sides their enemies, so why not slap the same label on both — woke? It’s their way of embodying the friend-enemy distinction, although they can’t see it this way: since they believe the postwar consensus as they believe the sky is blue, they just think everybody who questions some of it is insane, or dangerous, or dangerously insane. (“Not normal,” as Lindsay says.²)

This also explains Lindsay’s boneheaded epistemology, which he thinks of as “realism:” there is a hard reality out there that can solve our disagreements, a reality that eventually reasserts itself no matter what, crushing those who go against it. “Eventually” being the operative word here, since said reality sure seems to assert itself in the form of flooding Lindsay with disagreeable comments. (Must be CCP bots, I suppose.) The problem is, he doesn’t understand that in this sort of “realism” reality is just what the limits of his perception yield. Again, we are not aware of the guardrails of our thought, and so we mistake the pond we’re swimming in for the whole of existence. Embracing naive metaphysics is both a consequence of that pond-existence and makes sure that’s where we’ll remain.

Think about it this way: there is a reality, to be sure, and that reality does assert itself; we are not making it all up in our heads, as some have caricatured certain more humble philosophical positions. But what we see, how much we see, and what we can see depends on our minds: a more highly developed mind sees more, but such a mind cannot be recognized by a lesser mind.³ The fish in the pond can’t see the guy who made it out. Greater understanding doesn’t come just from looking at facts, in a circular cluster jerk of seeing what the limits of your perception allow you to see which then reinforces those limits: it comes from transcending the limitations of your being. To the less developed being, operating within stricter limits, greater minds can appear insane and evil, just as the guy outside the pond appears to the fish as a disturbing, menacing shadow.⁴

Now, how does this particular set of guardrails, the postwar consensus mind worm, work? Simple: in the wake of WWII we have come to accept a list of things that supposedly “paved the way for Hitler.” Whether this is actually true for Germany or not is beside the point; the point is that we have constructed and internalized universal laws of Hitler-way-pavingology.

Antisemitic comment on X? Next week Kristallnacht. Isolationism and non-interventionism? Operation Barbarossa tomorrow. The word “nigger” uttered in any way or context? First step towards genocide. Talking about ethnic homogeneity? Nürnberg Laws around the corner. Mentioning Allied war crimes and complicity? That’s a Hitler-enabling dog-whistle. Using the executive branch a bit boldly? Machtergreifung! (Except when it’s done to prevent the Machtergreifung of course, then it’s “strengthening democracy.”)

All of this is boomermind 101, and we still live in boomerworld. We run these talking points as unconscious background programs. If we did spell them out and mustered the courage to think about them for a moment, it would be easy to see that Hitler-way-pavingology is demonstrably false: all of these things — racism, anitsemitism, isoloationism etc. — in various forms have been part of the discourse around the world before WWII, and indeed are in most parts of the world today, without any Hitler-way-paving taking place.

With this framework in mind, if you read Lindsay’s various ramblings about the Woke Right, it should be quite obvious what’s going on. The postwar consensus talking points are never discussed or argued for, only taken for granted in the background. For instance, he claims that what makes both left and right woke is that they embrace racism. But he doesn’t define what he means by racism: hatred for other groups? Ranking groups according to some criteria, and if so, which? Denying universalism, and if so what aspects? Solidarity with one’s own group? Claiming there are differences between the groups? Are those cultural, biological, spiritual? Racial double standards? Is race a “vibe” we all know but can’t define, or hard biological fact, or historical? Can or should ethnicities strive to preserve their group — biologically, culturally, and to what degree? Should they have any kind of identity, and where does it begin and end? Where to draw the various lines morally? And so on. The implicit assumption is just that racism, left dangling as a vague and shapeshifting concept, is horrible, no matter all the nuances and conundrums around race, ethnicity, culture and our ideas about a good life. The operating thought motif here of course is that racism, however ill-defined and vague, paved the way for Hitler, will do so again following the Iron Law of Hitler-way-pavingology, and must therefore be stamped out from public consciousness. A giant sleight of hand, disguised as caring and “telling the truth” — the truth of the pond. The truth as produced by the guardrails.

One of Lindsay’s rhetoric tricks is that he equates Left and Right by accusing them of using the same tactics — as if bad tactics (by all who hold these ideas?) alone can discredit the substance. What’s more, since the postwar consensus appears to his mind as a priori truth, he is not aware that he uses some of these same tactics himself: you don’t know that you are arguing for the limits of your own perception if you can’t see them, which you can’t. And so, for instance, you could easily turn his “Gnostic” shtick around and apply it to him: the Alien Powers of Russia, China and Qatar have subverted society and alienated him from the Lost Golden Age of postwar liberalism in its peak 1990s form; as a member of the Elite Elect he’s going to reclaim it by using his Secret Knowledge of Gnostiology to defeat his enemies on the Left and Right who are just too Unconscious to see the Light.

Lindsay accuses the Right of “basing,” in analogy to the leftist “queering,” that is, performative disruption of the status quo. Supposedly this makes one “Woke” regardless of goals and intent. Which is absurd: shouldn’t it matter whether such performative disruption is geared towards truth or falsehood, towards good or evil? Besides, it’s rich coming from Lindsay, whose claim to fame was precisely that: he playfully published nonsense articles in leftist journals to shake people out of their slumber, to bring unquestioned assumptions into focus about academia, the validity of neo-Marxist “Theory” and so forth. Back in the days, Lindsay was queering the queers.

“Basing” or “queering,” or making any kind of argument for that matter, cannot be judged as if we live in a vacuum (leaving aside limit cases). Why? Because no matter what you say, you leave out an infinite number of caveats, an infinite number of true things that could be said. Hence the relativists do have some point: when it comes to more than trivial statements — and the bulk of our political, historical and philosophical discussions are anything but trivial — truth depends on context. It is best thought of as a process, as something relating to us and pointing in a truthful direction, rather than abstract statements.

What’s more, the history of thought is not a progression of giving better and better answers to timeless questions, but giving answers to the very different questions of each period, as R.G. Collingwood argued. Given our historically shifting absolute presuppositions — the guardrails of our thought we can’t see — it is often difficult to even grasp the questions people in the past were grappling with. But this we must do to understand the merit of their answers, rejecting the progressive “whig history of philosophy” while hoping to make some progress precisely because of this rejection. Such an endeavor also helps us see our own historically conditioned limits of perception. In other words, whether something is true or not depends on the kind of question this something seeks to answer. Which obviously depends on the circumstances, on “what time it is.”

An opinion that seems to violate good taste in one context could be a necessary pointer towards truth, implicitly giving the correct answer to a question thrown up by our time, in another. It may drag you downwards towards confusion, hatred and chained existence, or be an expression of a sentiment hailing from the world of Bigger Truth.

Reality dictates how our discourse moves, for better or worse. That people have started breaking with the postwar consensus doesn’t come out of nowhere: our absolute presuppositions started straining, shifting, as events played themselves out: mass migration and the change of Western societies into “multicultural” melting pots has also melted away a lot of “Hitler-preventing” talking points, just as it has melted the vibe in many a European town center. People began wondering whether perhaps wanting to live in a more ethnically homogenous space isn’t Hitler-way-paving after all, but simple common sense. Similarly, as Israel behaved in ever-more chauvinistic and aggressive ways, backed by a powerful lobby in the West, people started wondering if perhaps not everything negative one says about Jews and Jewish organization should be considered beyond the pale. The US has fought an endless string of disastrous wars, sold to us again and again as another Hitler-stopping necessity with no alternative, and so people started asking questions about whether there may have been an alternative to WWII after all, something the postwar consensus religiously denies because it would invert the entire field of Hitler-way-pavingology. In fact, people started looking into the history of those sacred twelve years and began to wonder if perhaps the whole thing was just another episode of history, with many historical debates around all kinds of aspects and plenty of blame to go around, as is commonly accepted for almost any other period, and therefore doesn’t fully deserve the special status and enshrined narrative on which so much of the postwar consensus depends.

To put it differently, when your country, your social system, and your sense of belonging are being attacked by unprecedented mass migration of complete foreigners, maybe this is not the time to point out what all races have in common when there are clearly things they do not — things that are causing problems in front of your eyes. When a state in the Middle East that your government supports financially, politically and diplomatically is mass-killing people, but pointing this out is considered Hitler-way-paving, maybe you’d be forgiven for not focussing on the historical or present grievances of Jews for a second but talk about Jewish influence. When your country calls every world leader it doesn’t like Hitler to justify another bloody war, maybe it’s understandable that people stop talking about how evil Hitler was for a moment, and start wondering about the evils committed by the Allies — it is no surprise, really, that this endless abuse of the name Hitler to get people bloodthirsty would eventually hollow out the postwar consensus as a whole. Collingwood has been proven right: the absolute presuppositions of an era always come “under strain” eventually, revealing their internal contradictions, giving way to a new era operating under different assumptions, whose initial motivation eventually fades into the background once again, becoming the transparent water we’re swimming in.

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Such is the dialectic of history, the Weltgeist moving forward, whether there is some intent behind it or just some weird law of the universe, or both.

Oh yes, I must be woke, talking about dialectics and guiding principles of history and such. Which brings us to another interesting product of the postwar era: in this case, Hitler-way-pavingology hasn’t produced just one talking point; it has split into two. Roughly, the overall thought motif goes as follows: how could Hitler have happened in the culturally and scientifically super-advanced Germany? Two answers have been given: it was Enlightenment rationality and positivist science, says one camp. After all, if we take Darwin seriously, what prevents us from practicing eugenics? And if we accept eugenics, why not commit genocide if it strengthens our bloodline? All of this seems rational. Hitler, in that narrative, just took science and ran with it, drawing the conclusions from its premises. To counter such rationalist escapades, we need a solid foundation of myth, art, ethics and a more poetic philosophy, embracing the Vibe Side of Life.

No, says the other camp, quite the opposite: the Nazis developed out of Romanticism, Romantic anti-Enlightenment philosophy, and irrationalist turn-of-the-century Lebensphilosophie. There is a direct line between Skepticism/anti-empiricism, Hegel, Spengler, völkisch mysticism, Heidegger and Hitler’s Mordor. We therefore need more rationality, more Enlightenment, if we want to prevent another Hitler-way-paving. A lot of the philosophical fault lines between postmodernism and the “Enlightenment warriors” become more intelligible when seen in this light. Yes, this includes the battle between Lindsay and the New Right: from Enlightenment warrior Lindsay’s perspective, the New Right’s partial embrace of postmodern ideas, of German post-Enlightenment philosophy (including Spengler, Jünger, Jung, Heidegger etc.) and of more mystical, “wholesome,” right brain hemisphere ideas brought to bear against hyper-rationality and technocracy, must appear woke. This is another reason why he started talking about “woke right.”

The dialectical nature of thought and history will move us forward. We once believed different things than the postwar consensus, and we will believe different things again. It’s inevitable.

There is a catch, however: Lindsay fantasizes that some foreign governments (Russia? China? Qatar?) are manipulating our online discourse, presumably to stir ethnic conflict and tribalism to undermine postwar-liberal talking points and taboos, in an effort to weaken the West, a grand psyop to destroy MAGA. This particular brand of Gnosticism is ridiculous on the face of it. There is a kernel of truth in it, however: the Weltgeist seems to be stirred by some force seeking to confuse us, derail us, and make us suffer in body and spirit. There is a deeper, spiritual aspect to all this that can’t exactly be boiled down to a battle between good and evil ideas. The devil knows that ideas exist in a context. Sophisticated as he is, he therefore doesn’t operate in a linear fashion: he uses dialectics.

The way this works is that we first get trapped in a stifling belief system of some sort. This leads to a backlash where people seek liberation towards truth and mental-spiritual growth, which creates suffering and conflict between the “true believers” of the old status quo and those seeking to move beyond it. The next step is to subvert this healthy reaction and turn it into a caricature of itself, only keeping the aspects that are simplistic, unhelpful or just wrong for the given context — which discredits the whole thing, including the truthful aspects. Those seeking to advance to get a bigger picture more aligned with truth are then derailed from the truthful aspects because these are tainted by association. Adherents are disillusioned and turn into cynics and nihilists. All of this creates friction and hopelessness, which makes people ripe to be manipulated into another belief system: a new system that again represents only a narrow picture of reality that people eventually will rebel against, and so the cycle repeats.

That way, the devil (or whatever Mephistopheles-like creatures take care of these things in the higher spheres) makes sure that the worst aspects of each cycle be retained, the true and helpful aspects discarded, while sowing confusion and mistrust. We are thus trapped in an eternal movement of narrow lenses, narrow windows to reality, prevented from integrating them, from getting a true, multifaceted view; at any given time, we are locked into a fixed point of reference from which to look at reality instead of moving from perspective to perspective as the situation demands, no matter how uncomfortable certain perspectives may make us feel. (In fact, that uncomfortableness is the price we pay for transcending the limits of our being.) Such a state of affairs implies that the best opportunities for true being-growth occur between the shifts of these absolute presuppositions, when the old guardrails naturally give way first to conflict and confusion, then to a new set of guardrails. Amidst the mayhem a window opens up for those surfing the wave instead of going under: guardrails weaken, perception expands. Therein danger lies, as well as opportunity. Needless to say, we live in such a moment.

People get hung up on absolute truth in idea spaces when ideas are related to situations in time and space, as well as to dialectical movements across them. The postwar consensus, if interpreted charitably, can open our mind to some truth, to a chunk of reality. But it is only one such window, inadequate to bring to light other aspects of reality — aspects that might be crucially important for the situation at hand. The “based” window to reality throws away a lot of postwar talking points, bringing into focus different things previously hidden but needed to deal with what’s happening. It is a healthy and inevitable reaction, powered by the desire for moving on, for understanding more, for a life more real, for aligning with deeper truth. But of course, a dialectical trap is already waiting.

What could happen next is this: the devil will try to turn the counter-reaction, the “world of the based,” once again into a caricature of itself, keeping all the worst and discarding all the best impulses, thereby discrediting that which was most valuable. First, basedworld might lose its playfulness and become overly serious. Humorless, power-hungry actors will try to dominate it, those who care little for the ideas and the higher dimension of this battle. Next, as reality moves on, it will lose the context in which it made sense, in which it provided the correct answers. It will then double down not on the original uplifting, liberating vibe and the spirit of nimbly moving in a truthful direction, into a state of wider, broader vision, but on hard propositions, on a set of supposedly eternally true beliefs, now inadequate and producing once again confusion and soul-suffering. This will lead to a new sort of inflexible consensus, a sort of lowest common denominator keeping things together and advancing the interests of the Weltgeist, arresting, stifling and blocking humanity’s higher aspirations and dreams. This new consensus will be taken for granted until it becomes indistinguishable from reality, suffocating mind and soul. The dialectical cycle repeats.

Maybe it will come to that, maybe not. The important point to keep in mind here is that we are not dealing with a linear quest for truth, goodness and beauty, where there is an easy, timeless objective scale against which to measure where we are. We are dealing with a dialectical maze, a set of traps, and a morality that is context-dependent.

Coming back to the woke right debate, the attempts by Lindsay and other neocon-adjacent types to halt the dialectic playing itself out and keep us locked in another era can only fail. They just can’t see that because they think the presuppositions of the postwar era are hard truth, unbound by time and place. They don’t believe in historical consciousness following certain patterns, or in nuances as to how truth works and the role our conscious development of being plays in it all, considering such ideas “woke” whether coming from the left or the right. They are building a fortress around a position long lost, as evidenced by an almost total loss of support.

Given all that, maybe we shouldn’t be triggered as much by the slur “Woke Right.” In fact, as the New Right has shown, there is value in some of the original philosophical underpinnings of what eventually became “woke.” Indeed, with left Wokeism, the same dialectic has played itself out, corrupting ideas and turning them into caricatures, leading to total confusion and evil. Going back to 20th century liberalism, hyper-rationalism and atheistic science worship as the crown of human achievement doesn’t cut it anymore. Seen in this light, the whole woke movement is just another trick by the devil to discredit some good and sensible ideas that should have broadened our horizon and helped us in our spiritual quest — ideas and thought forms that now seem untouchable because of their association with woke madness. This shouldn’t prevent us from reclaiming and rethinking that which makes sense in our context.

Let’s discard Lindsay’s fixed, hammered down worldview from another era. We need more perspectives, a broader vision, and for that, it is well worth sacrificing the comfort of the postwar belief system and a sacred cow or two: by conquering places that may seem dangerous, but can also offer a fresh vista, laying bare aspects of reality hitherto inaccessible.

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1. Here’s a little background. There has been a rift in what may be called the anti-woke coalition, playing itself out over the last couple of years with increasing intensity. To put it simply, one camp, spearheaded lately by James Lindsay (who became famous years ago for hoaxing “grievance studies” academic journals with nonsense articles), wants to go back to the pre-woke days, while the other camp started questioning a lot more than wokeness.

People have called the pre-woke mainstream reality the “postwar consensus” or “postwar liberal consensus,” meaning the set of ideas that emerged after WWII embracing a certain type of liberalism as the only viable option following the Nazi experience and the emerging communist bloc. Over time, a specific Overton window has developed, with Neoliberalism and Neoconservatism taking root, as well as many assumptions about race and race politics, antisemitism, Zionism, foreign policy, how liberal politics work, democracy and so on that ought not to be questioned — which is precisely what the other camp started doing.

Lindsay popularized the term “woke right” to discredit those who, in many different ways and often opposed to each other, have expressed positions that go counter the postwar consensus, especially when it comes to mainstream taboos around race, Zionism, Jews, conspiracy theories and a critique of modern liberal democracy as such. Figures like Jordan Peterson, Konstantin Kisin, Douglas Murray and of course James Lindsay himself are on one side, the others — the supposed “woke right” — include all kinds of people from Candace Owens and Iain Carrol to the very diverse New Right, that is, those on the more radical right-wing spectrum, including parts of the MAGA movement.

“Woke right” in Lindsay’s conception is anti-liberal because those he calls such supposedly embrace group identity just as the “woke left.” Confusingly, others have thrown back the slur on the basis that Lindsay and the others themselves embrace group identity when it comes to Israel and Jews, and the effort to deplatform “non-experts” critical of Israel or embracing more fringe ideas.

This rift has intensified over a few issues as events played themselves out, especially Israel and the question of race and ethnic identity. Following the Rogan show with Douglas Murray and Dave Smith (which I have written about), as well as Shiloh Hendrix’s successful fundraiser after she called a black kid the racial slur, the polarization within the conservative/right-wing movement has reached a new level. Even JD Vance has been called “woke right,” presumably because his occasional flirtation with ideas from the non-mainstream right-wing space, and lately Matt Walsh for siding with those who embraced the Shiloh Hendrix fundraiser.

2. Presumably a nod to Andrew Lobaczewski, the author of Political Ponerology, who contrasted the “society of normal people” with the psychopaths seeking to subvert and gain power over them. As well he should: there is no doubt that there are psychopaths and other deviants left, right and center who are engaged in exactly that. But gaining new perspectives outside the previous framework, messy as it may be, does not a psychopath make. Context is king.

3. One might add that the way reality reacts, asserting itself as it were, is itself subject to interpretation and therefore depends on the development of one’s being, too: one man’s confirmation that something was wrong is another man’s confirmation it was right.

4. Tellingly, Lindsay is spooked even by someone talking about Heidegger and phenomenology, lest that evil metaphysics poison the minds of good atheist rationalists and insecure Christians alike.

The schizo spiral these people are on is truly remarkable.