In my recent post about Donald Trump being an authoritarian dictator, I linked to an article by Jonathan Rauch discussing the woke right. The article claims that the right has gone woke because they learned this tactic from the woke left, stating:

The notion is not that the far left and far right share the same politics or goals. Rather, it is that the far right has adopted, partially on purpose but mostly through osmosis and convergent evolution, claims and strategies that parallel the far left’s.

This is incorrect. The right has been woke since at least the late nineteenth century, likely much earlier.

What exactly constitutes “wokeness” is a bit slippery. In the article I linked to, Rauch does not give a firm definition of wokeness, but says that it is essentially the marriage of postmodernism and identity politics. Postmodernism, according to the author, “…sees reason as a sham, authority as a mask for power, and groups as prior to individuals.” He goes on to say:

Emerging in postwar Europe, [postmodernism] adopts a radically skeptical epistemology, viewing claims to capital-T truth, as [Richard] Tafel puts it, as assertions of power: efforts by dominant social actors to impose and legitimize their own, often oppressive, agendas. Wherever you see a truth claim, you should unmask it: look behind it to see whom it might benefit. Scientific modernism wants to assess claims, not claimants; postmodernism reverses the emphasis. “Who were the scientists?” says Tafel. “What color were they? What gender? What country are they in? What biases do they have?”

Those principles, in and of themselves, do not have a particular political valence. They do not seem to advance any agenda at all. “At its core, postmodernism rejected what it calls metanarratives—broad, cohesive explanations of the world and society,” wrote Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay in their 2020 history of the movement, Cynical Theories. “It rejected Christianity and Marxism. It also rejected science, reason, and the pillars of post-Enlightenment western democracy.” Indeed, “postmodernism raised such radical doubts about the structure of thought and society that it is ultimately a form of cynicism.”

While postmodernism posits all social interactions are power dynamics, identity politics concretely identifies who are the victims and who are the oppressors within these power dynamics. Rauch says:

Identity and oppression now took center stage. Society is best understood not as an association of autonomous individuals but as a congeries of groups contending for dominance and organized into hierarchies. Because some groups dominate and oppress others, not all standpoints are suspect; marginalized groups’ vision is less distorted by the dominant narrative. Identity thus confers expertise and oppression confers authority.

…

[This modern leftwing ideology] thus came to embrace exactly the sort of dogmatism and authoritarianism which the first wave of postmodernists had set out to challenge and overthrow. The end result was a bit like a battle rig in a Mad Max movie: a bolted-together, incoherent, yet potently weaponized contraption which eventually became known as Woke.

So, let’s break down what these two things – postmodernism and identity politics – mean in simple terms. Postmodernism, according to the article, consists of:

1. Skepticism: reason is a sham and claims to the (one and only) Truth are merely assertions of power.
2. Collectivism: groups are prior to individuals.

And identity politics can then be described as:

1. Groups engage in power dynamics, where some groups are oppressors and others are oppressed.
2. The oppressed groups have some sort of special epistemological insight, bestowing on them an exceptional and unquestionable authority on matters related to group power dynamics (perhaps among other things).

But what does it mean that claims to the Truth are assertions of power? Is this descriptive or normative? Postmodern thought makes this as a descriptive claim – it just is the case that anyone who says they know the Truth (or says what are the legitimate or correct ways of discovering the Truth) is not actually making a truth claim, but is enforcing power structures. The argument made by popular postmodernists like Michel Foucault is that certain groups with power get to claim, for instance, that science is the only legitimate way to find the truth about the nature of reality, a claim they make because science upholds the notion that capitalist exploitation of nature is normal, natural, and necessary. 

Then what does it mean that groups are prior to individuals? This can have multiple related, yet still distinct meanings. Descriptively it can be the idea that people are categorized in ways that serve powerful interests. The elite intelligentsia concoct (consciously or unconsciously) ways of categorizing people that are in opposition to each other – white vs. black, male vs. female, sane vs. insane, civilized vs. primitive, etc. – with one of the groups within the binary usually being seen as superior to the other in a way that conveniently upholds power structures (i.e., those in power just so happen to be on the “superior” side of the binary). Prescriptively this can be the idea that those groups relegated to the “inferior” side within these socially constructed binaries can raise within themselves a consciousness of themselves as members of these groups (and of the fact that these group categories are being imposed on them) and then use this group-consciousness to engender political consciousness among their cohorts that will lead to liberation (through praxis) from this oppressive framework. In other words, a realization that the groups are fake, but can be useful fictions for motivating political action toward receiving the recompense to which they are entitled by virtue of their status as the oppressed.

But this is a lot of five-dollar words to try describing what wokeness is. Can we distill this down to its essence? In my estimation, wokeness has three necessary (and probably sufficient) premises. Missing any one of the three might also be pernicious, but to constitute wokeness as it is currently understood it must contain these three. Likewise, other premises can accrete around these three, but the following are, as far as I can tell, the core of wokeness. I will call the three premises Awakening, Grouping, and Reparation. 

1. Awakening: there is some legal system, social construct, and/or group of people with more power than myself (or any group I belong to) that I now have become aware of (i.e., I have woken up to this reality).
2. Grouping: as a direct result of my Awakening, I am now also awakened to the fact that this system, construct, or group of people are doing something to oppress, victimize, or otherwise make life worse for some group that I happen to belong to (either because the group actually exists and I satisfy the criteria for being a member of the group, or because this grouphood has been imposed on me and people like me for some other reason).
3. Reparation: by virtue of my status as a victim of this system, construct, or group of people, I am entitled to make demands and receive concessions in order to repair the situation (i.e., balancing the power imbalance, but perhaps I am also owed something extra for damages).

Again, further premises may be present that can, for instance, add moral, or even cosmic valence to the above premises. For instance, it may not just be that the system or group is making life worse for me and the group I belong to, but that they are doing it for sinister reasons (e.g., they’re nihilistic misantrhopes who are driven purely by hatred or greed, or they’re working for the antichrist, or something like that). Or it may be that the group I belong to is being oppressed because my group is actually superior (morally, intellectually, etc.) to the oppressors and so it is the case that I and my group deserve (or otherwise ought) to be in charge. 

The Awakening premise is where a lot of the language of wokeness – both on the right and left – comes from. People can be awakened, for instance, to structural racism, or the patriarchy, or the contradictions inherent in capitalism; or they can be red pilled (a symbol from The Matrix for awakening to the reality of living in the eponymous matrix) to the oppression of men, or they might be awakened to the truth of the deep state or the globalists or satanic pedophile elites or big pharma or whatever other nefarious conspirators the political right believes are oppressing them. The point is, what all sides here are claiming is that they now see the truth – they were once asleep to it but are now awakened to it – and the truth is that there is some bigger power who runs things. More than that, they are awakened (or have had their consciousness raised) to the fact that they are among the group(s) being victimized and oppressed by this bigger power.

It’s important here, I think, to point out that this is about the victimization of groups – socioeconomic, racial, sexual, religious, national, etc. – and not individuals. It is often the case that individuals find themselves the victims of groups. So much workplace drama, or friend group drama, or becoming the target of ire for some vindictive person or group of people, can boil down to this. But I called the second premise Grouping because for wokeness, this has to be one group oppressing (usually consciously, but it could conceivably be unconsciously) another group. Thus, this takes on a broader societal significance, and not just one person being picked out for some thing that they did or are perceived to have done. They’re being victimized for what they are, not who they are.

Determining the margins of these groups will be different depending on what flavor of wokeness one is dealing with. The part that often differs between the political right and the (modern) political left is whether or not these groups are natural or are social constructs imposed on people by those who hold power. Indeed, one of the (though by no means the only) defining distinctions between wokeness on the left and wokeness the right might be in their views of whether these groups are discovered (and are therefore normal, natural, and necessary) or socially constructed (and therefore are imposed from without), with the right taking the former view and the left taking the latter.

This victimization aspect in the Grouping premise is an interesting one. In our modern society, there is a lot of social capital that can be gained by portraying one’s group(s) as the victims. This social capital acquired through one’s status as a victim is extremely important, because otherwise the Reparation premise would fail: why would a group qualify for special treatment if being a victim did not directly entail such entitlement? Thus, it’s important to examine this in a little more detail.

Victimhood culture, according to Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning, is the third iteration in approaches to conflict resolution. The first is honor culture, which is observed in times and regions where institutions are non-existent, or too weak and corrupt to properly carry out their duties. With no reliable third party to mediate disputes, people find safety in acquiring a reputation for being an honest broker when dealing with other honest brokers, but not being afraid to be pitiless and violent if they perceive their honor as being questioned. Think the cowboy in the wild west (where institutions were weak) who is willing to shoot someone for cheating at cards, but would never dream of welching on a deal they’ve agreed to with someone. Further, being part of a group of other such honorable people (who are willing to exact retribution over slights against their honor) offers even greater protection. Think of gang wars or blood feuds started over perceived slights from other gangs.

Liberal democracy and the rule of law ushered in dignity culture. This is the idea that other people (even strangers) are, on average, relatively reasonable people. Resorting to violence is undignified, and so conflicts can be resolved through discourse between rationally self-interested parties. But if that fails, then criminal justice institutions can step in and apply reliable, predictable, and fairly executed laws equally across all parties to any conflict (i.e., equality under the law). 

But, Campbell and Manning argue, something that has cropped up recently is victimhood culture. This is where conflict is resolved by appealing to one’s status as a member of a victimized group (we’ll call these the capital-V Victims). This, I would argue, is parasitic on dignity culture, since Victims exploit the assumption of those inculcated in dignity culture (which we’ll call the capital-D Dignitarians) that everyone is owed dignity and a base level of respect. Capital-V Victims do this by arguing that people in a certain (oppressed) group have had their dignity denied to them by other (oppressor) groups, and they are thus owed recompense. This then exploits the natural inclination of Dignitarians to agree to the recompense in order to more democratically distribute the dignity everyone is owed by right. The Victims then see this as a winning strategy and will then continue pushing this as far as they can in order to gain more and more concessions and benefits, like a parasite taking more and more nutrients from the host.

This, to my reckoning, can lead to one of two outcomes. The first is that the Dignitarians catch on to what’s happening and push back against it. In so doing, they might even jettison dignity culture, adopting their own form of victimhood culture (even if they were not actually oppressed in any reasonable understanding of the word “oppressed”). Trump 2.0 here in the U.S. is a manifestation of this first outcome. Supporters have done away with dignified ideas like equal treatment under the law (which is why it’s perfectly fine, in their eyes, for Trump to go after political opponents, subject Democrat-majority cities to martial law, or send masked thugs into the streets to kidnap brown people), or respectability (why supporters cheer when Trump posts AI slop, or when his sycophants spend their days trying to dunk on political opponents on social media, or vandalize government websites with vindictive images), and coherent, consistent principles (why Trump, in the eyes of his supporters, is allowed, even encouraged, to do things that if any other president had even contemplated attempting would have induced those same supporters to absolutely howl in righteous fury at the immorality, unconstitutionality, or executive overreach of it all).

The second possible outcome is simply that the original Victims gain enough concessions and special treatment to acquire the political and cultural power for themselves, shifting the imbalance in their own favor until they themselves become the new oppressors (if they were not the oppressor already, i.e., one does not actually need to be a victim of oppression to be a capital-V Victim – think of the current Chinese government playing the Victim as they oppress the Uyghurs; or the Israelis, who really are legitimately victims of the October 7 attacks, but have made themselves into Victims and thus manufactured consent to commit genocide on the Palestinians). To a lot of people, having power feels good. But more than that, exacting retribution against one’s oppressors (or perceived oppressors) feels even better. Why, then, would the formerly oppressed stop demanding more concessions once cultural and institutional power were finally righted and brought into balance? This course is where the leftwing version of Victimhood culture almost certainly would have taken the U.S. had it been allowed to continue to fester. 

Victimhood culture is not new. People like Friedrich Nietzsche recognized this in his own day and blamed Christianity for it. Christianity, he claimed, with its focus on the meek and the downtrodden, engendered in its adherents a slave morality, whereby one’s ressentiment leads them to venerate weakness and define strength as evil or bad. 

Since, at latest, the nineteenth and early twentieth century, the political right has used antisemitism to make themselves into Victims of Jewish people. But this could be traced back a long time. Even Martin Luther sounds like a card-carrying National Socialist in his treatise On the Jews and Their Lies (1543), where he plays the Victim card for Christians by saying (bold added by me):

There is no other explanation for this than the one cited earlier from Moses – namely, that God has struck [the Jews] with ‘madness and blindness and confusion of mind’ [Deuteronomy 28:28]. So we are even at fault in not avenging all this innocent blood of our Lord and of the Christians which they shed for three hundred years after the destruction of Jerusalem, and the blood of the children they have shed since then (which still shines forth from their eyes and their skin). We are at fault in not slaying them.

Thus, Nietzsche might be on to something in pointing out that victimhood culture was inaugurated by Christianity. But this rightwing Victimhood is seen in places like the German Völkisch movement, which ginned up falsehoods about idealized golden ages for the German volk, and in forgeries like in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (ca. 1903) used by antisemites as “proof” of a worldwide Jewish conspiracy (i.e., Jews are the oppressors and others, like Germans or Christians or whoever, are Victims). One thing common to these antisemitic ideas, other than being primarily rightwing, is that they utilize lies in order to construct a narrative. They are not, for instance, telling a lie in order to gain some advantage in a financial transaction. No. The point is to turn the lies into reality in order to create for themselves a Victimhood narrative. Keep repeating the lie often enough, and with enough confidence, so that people start believing it, even in the absence of evidence (or even common sense). This form of deception, while not one of the core premises above, I think becomes necessary when a non-oppressed group, or even an oppressor group, desires access to the social capital gained by portraying themselves as the Victim. It is as much (probably more so) about convincing in-group cohorts of their status as Victims – to try to “awaken” them to this narrative – as it is about convincing and shaming the out-group for perpetrating the oppression. 

The apotheosis of these antisemitic lies about the Victimhood of the Germans was, of course, the demonstrably right-wing Nazi movement. From the “stab-in-the-back” myth seized upon by the Nazis, to pretty much the entirety of Mein Kampf  (1925), to Nazi propaganda films, such as the one by Eberhard Taubert titled Der Ewige Jude (translation: The Eternal Jew) (1940), all perpetrated the lie that the Germans were Victims of the Jews, using this as justification to “annihilate” them during the war. Hitler, for example, said in his January 30, 1939 “prophecy” that:

If international finance Jewry inside and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, the result will be not the Bolshevization of the earth and thereby the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.

And Goebbels, in a 1941 article in the newspaper Das Reich said (referencing the above “prophecy” by Hitler; I’ve copied this from this book):

The Jews wanted their war, and now they have it. But they also feel the effect of the prophecy made by the Führer in the German Reichstag on 30 January 1939, that if international financial Jewry should succeed in forcing nations once more into a world war, the result would not be the bolshevization of the earth, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe. … All Jews belong, due to their birth and race, to an international conspiracy against National Socialist Germany. They wish for our defeat and destruction and do everything in their power in order to realize this. Every German soldier who is killed in this war is the responsibility of the Jews. They have him on their conscience, and that’s why they have to pay for it…”

Notice in the above quotes that, in the minds of both Hitler and Goebbels, if a war started, it would be the fault of the Jews. That was because the Jews, according to the Nazis, were the oppressors, and the Germans the Victims. What this shows us is that rightwing victimhood culture – where victimhood culture is a prominent real world manifestation of the second premise of wokeness listed above – was not above using woke ideas like power dynamics and identity politics (e.g., Jewish oppressors running the world and oppressing Germans). These tactics have been employed by the political right since at least the latter half of the nineteenth century, and probably much earlier, seen most prominently with antisemitism. The right did not have to learn this from the left. If Nietzsche is to be believed, they adopted these tactics from Christianity. 

But even in more modern times, a postmodern skepticism of capital-T Truth (as a means of concocting Victimhood narratives) has been observed on the right prior to woke leftism coming to prominence in the last fifteen or so years. Even back in 2005, Stephen Colbert coined the term “truthiness” to describe the rightwing tendency to reject reason and evidence for their own preferred narratives:

We’re not talking about truth, we’re talking about something that seems like truth – the truth we want to exist. (source)

Everyone tells lies, of course, but what is important here is that these rightwing narratives are their pretense for making themselves into Victims. The shared belief in the lies determines one’s membership in the group, thus satisfying the Grouping premise from above. Telling someone they’re  wrong for believing things that aren’t true (e.g., telling them that vaccines are safe, or that anthropogenic climate change is real, or that the January 6, 2021 riots were in fact riots, or that immigrants are not causing an epidemic of crime, or that transgender people exist) is no longer viewed as correcting them for believing things that do not correspond to reality, but instead is viewed as oppressing them. This is why the right like to talk euphemistically about “viewpoint diversity” – not only to legitimize the falsehoods they believe, but also to signal their identity markers. 

The election of Donald Trump, and the continued support for Trump even as he leverages the power of the state against fellow countrymen who did not support him, is the modern right’s way of satisfying the Reparation premise – Trump is seen as a corrective against the oppression perpetrated by the left. This was seen as well in how people at the time viewed the ascension of the fascist dictators of the early twentieth century: their (Germans, Italians, Romanians, Hungarians, Japanese, etc.) status as victims meant they didn’t have to play by the rules. They, in their minds, were entitled to special treatment. The Germans, or the Italians, or in modern times, conservative white Christian men, are not only oppressed, but they are, as they see it, actually the ones who ought to be in power, because, according to them, they have the superior genetics, or culture, or values (e.g., “western liberal values”), or religion (Christianity), or technology, or whatever the case may be, which, in their minds, makes their oppression by these lesser peoples all the more egregious. 

Again, the point of this post is to argue that the political right did not have to learn wokeness from the left. One could perhaps argue that the right has synthesized some of the newer leftwing innovations in the language of Victimhood culture into their own brand of rightwing wokeness, but the right has been utilizing these tactics for at least as long as the left has (probably since any distinction between the political left and political right came into existence). 

There is much to be said about wokeness and victimhood culture and whether these tactics can lead to anything good or desirable, and of course about what it even means for someone to legitimately be a victim (i.e., what is oppression and how much of it does a group of people need to suffer to in order to be considered victims? Can victims also be victimizers? Does being a victim really entitle someone to some brand of special treatment, and if so, what sort of treatment will actually right the wrongs without just shifting the balance of power in someone else’s favor?). But, those are questions for another post. There is also the question of whether the ascendancy of rightwing wokeness and its own brand of postmodernism will preclude or delay the metamodern turn predicted by Hanzi Freinacht and Jason Storm. History, contrary to Marx, does not have to follow a determined series of epochs, and it may be that there is no predictable “next step” in the unfolding of history. To find out we’ll I suppose we’ll have to wait and see.