'Woke Right' is the New 'Paranoid Style in American Politics'

James Lindsay, Konstantin Kisin & the Hofstadter school of regime polemics

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Like poetry, history rhymes

One of the more startling aspects of this past election cycle has been the way in which it repeated the dominant themes and challenges from 2016. Trump as a beleaguered challenger; a demographic crisis continually spiraling out of control; America and its working people betrayed by an unaccountable and decadent elite; a world on the brink of war; and so on. 2024 has proven to be a sort of funhouse mirror version of Trump’s first White House run, and just like the previous iteration, we are once again stuck relitigating the thorny issue that is White identity politics (i.e., identitarianism).

Sure, the verbiage has changed (e.g., we’ve traded ‘Build the Wall’ for ‘Mass Deportations Now’, and more relevant to this essay, ‘SJW’ for ‘Woke’), but the fundamental question – whether the racial stock of this country has the right, let alone the ability, to advocate for itself in plain and non-euphemistic terms – was never actually answered. Not in the affirmative, anyway. The greatest victory of Trump’s 2016 campaign (the emergence of a racial consciousness amongst White Americans and the ensuing call to political action), has since become his greatest failing seeing as, upon taking office, DJT abruptly did an about-face on the subject and never looked back. Once more, it is on us to answer this question.

Perhaps you disagree, but to my mind the most important exchange of the 2016-era identitarian debate transpired on Warski Live between Carl Benjamin (Sargon of Akkad) and Richard Spencer. It was not so much the case that Spencer won decisively due to the strength of his argumentation as it was that Benjamin obviously could not mount any kind of defense for his anti-racialist liberal worldview. The reason for this is quite simple: anti-racialist liberalism is an expression of false consciousness. It is not just factually wrong – though that is also a problem – rather, to accept its premise one must engage in self-deception. Dishonesty, whether directed externally or internally, is the critical problem with this paradigm.

Now, to Benjamin’s credit, he was not trying to deceive others into accepting anti-racialist liberalism. Quite the opposite, for he was a true believer. So committed was he to this paradigm that Benjamin spent several years testing the merits of his worldview – both in theory and in practice. He has since come around to a more racial way of considering politics. Like many public-facing personalities from that period, those who could not defend their anti-racialist views either defected or disappeared from prominence altogether.

Unlike the 2016 era, however, fresher-faced influencers and public personalities who are now pushing an anti-racialist liberalism do so with the intention of deceiving their audience. Owing to their dishonesty, they don’t speak frankly about the strengths or weaknesses of their position nor their motivations for holding it. This is because they speak for the regime which does not need to justify itself to the masses. It simply seeks to discipline them (hence why I’ve taken to calling this style of argumentation ‘regime polemics’).

James Lindsay and Konstantin Kisin are among the most prominent voices of this new anti-racialist liberalism, taking up the same strategy employed in 2016 to smear the opposition by appropriating anti-Liberal rhetoric and using it against the Right (in the same way that ‘SJW’ was used against the Alt-Right, ‘Woke’ is now being levied against the new identitarians).

While I don’t expect we’ll see James Lindsay appear in a reboot of the Sargon-Spencer debate, we must nevertheless force a confrontation on this issue. One reason why I don’t foresee such a debate happening is due to a critical difference between Lindsay and Sargon – and indeed between the 2016 moment more generally and our present one – which is that Sargon/Benjamin was an outsider while Lindsay is a consummate insider. Moreover, the regime has learned to keep its assets away from unscripted exchanges which might expose their inadequacies.

Since a direct confrontation is not likely on the horizon, I will do my part to force the issue. Before making my case for why I believe Lindsay and Kisin are engaged in regime polemics, and explaining how their approach is a continuation of Richard Hofstadter’s polemics against ‘pseudo-conservatism’ and ‘the paranoid style’, it is only appropriate to explain what is meant by ‘the Woke Right’.

What is meant by ‘the Woke Right’?

Rather than attempt my own definition of the term, let me defer to the man most responsible for popularizing the term: James Lindsay.

In a segment released a few days ago to promote his upcoming appearance on the TRIGGERnometry podcast, after declaring that “It’s not exactly the best term” and that he uses it “too casually”, Lindsay nevertheless went on a five or six minute long monologue defining the meaning of (as well as declaring his opposition to) ‘the Woke Right’.

‘Woke Right’, another term that might work for that is woke fascism…woke neofascism…there’s two ways to look at why it’s woke, one is philosophical and one is practical.

The practical side is: look at how they behave, they behave exactly like the woke. There’s the targeted influence campaigns, the manufacturing of…what the postmodernists called ‘the legitimation by paralogy’ or whatever [the practice of establishing new norms for understanding, coined by Jean Francois Lyotard].

They create the illusion that there’s massive support for ‘this’ and massive distaste for ‘that’ using social media manipulations. They are highly invested in identity politics. The answer for them to Leftist identity politics is a reactionary identity politics - or in biblical terms, answering evil with evil (which the bible says not to do by the way, very specifically).

And so there’s this grievance identity - “everything’s bad for white Christian men - straight white Christian men”, “we’re the oppressed minority under this”, there’s an ideology - this kind of bleeds into the philosophical idea which we’ll get more specific about in a second - there’s this kind of belief that there’s this ruling class that’s erected an ideology to marginalize people like them.

That sounds very much like woke, except instead of saying that, it’s like, the White people or the White ruling class who created White supremacy to marginalize people of color, especially [the] Black and indigenous and their way of knowing - the ‘Woke Right’, or the woke fascist side, says instead that following WW2, on the back of Hitler and the idea of “never again” there was erected a postwar liberal consensus starting in the 1940s immediately, starting in 1945 - the creation of the United Nations was part of this, the signing on to the United Nations was part of this - they assigned William Buckley to having done a rout to drive the true conservatives to the margins so that a false postwar liberal consensus conservative movement could rise up - the neocons - and hold them out.

So the neocons become this kind of hegemonic force within the conservative faction which edges out so-called ‘true conservatism’ and these more dangerous, so to speak, ‘ideas’ like fascist ideas, like Carl Schmitt’s idea of ‘unbounded executives’ and ‘friend-enemy politics’ and so on, that these ideas had to be pushed aside on the pretext that a WW2 or an Adolf Hitler can never rise again. And so therefore the true conservatives who represented conservative politics and kept at bay the beast of the Left, which they say is the Right’s true function, to keep at bay the Left - in other words, to have a war between Left versus Right with everyone in the middle taking fire, in the crossfire, they believe that this postwar liberal consensus and the neoconservative movement literally was designed to marginalize their perspective and keep these more radical Right wing ideas out of play.

So this is a very woke way of thinking about the world. That there is a structural… construction… of the social, political, and cultural environment, designed to exclude people like them in order to be able to achieve certain political agendas and now they believe that they’ve woken up to these ideas - ‘woke’ - they’ve found them again. They’ve read the forbidden philosophers: Carl Schmitt, Julius Evola, James Burnham, and so on, they’ve read these things and they’re bringing back a true conservativism that was excluded from politics roughly since the end of WW2 on the bogus pretense of preventing the rise of another fascist like Hitler, or Franco, or Pinochet.

And so there’s a very practical explanation for why they’re woke - especially their behavior - lots of lying, lots of character attacks, lots of saying ‘No Enemies to the Right’ but they don’t even actually attack the Left that’s their enemy so to speak, at all, they only attack other conservatives - lots of power plays, lots of manipulative speech, and then there’s the philosophical, deeper aspect: why ‘woke’?

What does woke mean? “‘Woke’ up to a structural politics that marginalizes people like me and we need to band together in solidarity - ‘No Enemies to the Right’ - in order to be able to create a powerful enough oppressed coalition to flip over the power structure by putting ourselves at the center and claiming power for ourselves.” This is explicitly woke; having a critical consciousness about the way the world is organized.

Tucker Carlson, for example, if you listen to Tucker - and a lot of people really like Tucker - Tucker is pretty critical of America. He’s not doing a Howard Zinn critical America theory. Howard Zinn being the one who wrote “The People’s History”, a Marxist history of the United States - propaganda - he’s writing a different critical history of the United States. “Well, you know, the Constitution really wasn’t adequate to prevent all of this”; “There is a post-WW2 liberal consensus or world order that we’re all being made subject to”; “Well look at how America was involved in all these things - America bad, America bad, America bad”; “And also the UK was pretty bad, too”; “America bad, America bad”. There’s this constant critical negativity.

You see some of these characters like Stephen Wolfe who wrote the book ‘The Case for Christian Nationalism’… he has posted multiple times on social media that he has adopted critical theory, specifically, for his own purposes and to his own ends. He was recently saying that, in fact, the critical theory he uses is not the perverted version of the critical theory that the Left has used. It’s its own more correct version of critique that goes back before the Left. And so, how do you not call the attempt to awaken a critical consciousness of the power structure that you believe has delegitimized your movement - how do you not call that ‘woke’ when ‘woke’ means having awoken to a critical consciousness that there’s a structural force that has delegitimized people in your political positionality? It’s the exact same thing, unfortunately, it’s just pushing a people-and-place-driven fascism as opposed to a “We’re going to end all oppression by becoming the oppressors” communism.

Where ‘Woke Right’ goes wrong

There are glaring logical inconsistencies in the way Lindsay presents his argument, which, for the record, is hardly a problem when you’re doing regime polemics. But we’ll tackle those inaccuracies in the following section. What is remarkable about this round of anti-identitarian polemics is how much more explicitly the regime (and its functionaries) must deliver its argument to sufficiently dismiss the opposition. This strategy of direct engagement was considered a major own-goal back in 2016 (e.g., When Hillary Clinton singled out the Alt-Right and Alex Jones by name) for it called the public’s attention to ideas and personalities previously unknown to them. I see no reason why this version of regime polemics won’t backfire in a similar fashion.

Perhaps this pivot can be explained by the fact that the usual tactics of defamation are no longer as effective (e.g., slandering and libeling people as “Nazis” and “White supremacists”), or maybe it is because the Right is now ascendant and so the regime must engineer a new fault line to prevent the country from moving even further Rightward. Of course, it could also come down to the fact that the regime has at its disposal a wide array of resources, and therefore can cycle through a variety of strategies and personnel with which to delegitimize and disempower its rivals.

Regardless of the cause(s) for this change in strategy, by adopting it the regime has unnecessarily maneuvered itself into a more precarious situation. To engage in this kind of polemical attack requires the regime to abandon its own frame, thereby conducting itself on the opposition’s terms and within their logic. By making such concessions, the regime can only stand to lose ground.

With the regime burning through its options at an ever-accelerating rate, its proxies are left with less space to maneuver and fewer opportunities to plot out a course of action. Whereas previously, the regime could simply label any subject matter which might threaten its control as taboo ‘hate speech’ and then delegate the responsibility of dispensing carefully prepared counter-narratives to an anointed ‘elect’, here, regime polemicists are forced to defang upstart political rivals by equating them with freshly defenestrated scapegoats.

To even the dimmest observer, it is painfully obvious that these new polemicists are simply airing the regime’s dirty laundry. By getting this far into the weeds of dissident critique, the regime only shines a brighter spotlight on the causes and characters responsible for our present decline, thus granting the average person further license to ruminate over the duplicity of his rulers.

Likely, James Lindsay’s audience has never heard these positions before, or at least, never as articulately as presented in this transcript from his recent TRIGGERnometry appearance. By delivering his polemic in this way, Lindsay runs the very serious risk of doing his opponent’s job for them: rather than peel away support from the radical Right or give undecided bystanders good reason for continuing to shirk from their message, he has instead built a bridge between his following and their own. (Hence why I say it is likely to backfire.) As a polemic, ‘the Woke Right’ is doomed to fail, just as its predecessor, ‘the paranoid style’ did.

The new ‘Paranoid Style’

Lindsay’s ‘Woke Right’ polemic is a high-stakes confidence game, premised on the style of regime polemic authored over sixty years ago by arch-architect of the consensus view of history, Richard Hofstadter. Allow me to expand on this.

Despite rejecting this categorization at the time, Hofstadter’s work is widely held as an integral contribution to what is often termed ‘consensus history’. Coined in 1959 by historian John Higham, Higham wrote of an emerging tendency observed in the scholarship of his day by which historians attempted to carry out a “massive grading operation to smooth over America’s social convulsions” (a tendency which he saw Hofstadter as assisting in the development of). In an essay entitled ‘The Cult of the “American Consensus”: Homogenizing Our History’, Higham somewhat ambivalently names Hofstadter’s Pulitzer Prize winning book, ‘The Age of Reform’ as aiding and abetting this move towards a consensus view of American history.

While this claim has come under some scrutiny over the intervening decades (prominent historians like Christopher Lasch have upheld it, if only in a highly qualified sense), the accusation has largely stuck. I have written this essay with the intention of affirming this charge as well, though, in my own novel way.

Hofstadter had earned this reputation, in part, due to his reformulation of historian Charles A. Beard’s theory of economic class conflict as the operating force within all historical developments. His revision of the classic Beardian hypothesis dismissed the rigid and mythologized interpretation of conflict deployed by academic historians, leading many of his peers to characterize his work as rejecting the role of conflict in historical analysis altogether in favor of an attempt to uncover latent or opaque continuities.

Though his early work was characterized by a commitment to historical materialism (that is until the ascent of Stalin, at which point Hofstadter disavowed his communist sympathies), following the publication of “The Age of Reform”, Hofstadter would come to be known as a liberal consensist par excellence.

To expound on the definition of this term: in its original meaning, ‘consensus history’ referred to an understanding of historical developments which deemphasized conflict (in particular, economic or class conflict) in favor of emphasizing a unity, or a continuity, premised on national character and shared cultural values. It is my view that while Hofstadter may have rejected this characterization of his work (in truth, he did not deemphasize conflict, economic or otherwise), his writings nonetheless helped to inform the development of a new kind of American consensus. Namely, one that would provide the ascendant progressive liberal regime with a mandate to rule by delegitimizing the so-called paranoid and parochial concerns of middle America.

So, while it was not technically accurate to describe Hofstadter as a ‘consensus historian’ – at least, not according to the conventionally accepted definition of the term in usage during his time as a working academic – by my slightly idiosyncratic re-definition of the term, it is not only fair but highly accurate to describe him as such. In many ways, Hofstadter’s academic oeuvre built the foundation upon which a progressive antipathy for all things folkish and Americana may be erected.

This new American consensus, founded on a constitution of civil rights law, universalistic egalitarian morality, and Jewish social science, has dominated Western consciousness ever since. Having provided sufficient context, let us dive into the true substance of my argument.

Published in 1964, Hofstadter’s essay ‘The Paranoid Style in American Politics’ detailed the problems posed by the John Birch Society, Barry Goldwater’s presidential candidacy, McCarthyism and the various Red Scares, as well as the broader development of populistic ‘pseudo-conservatism’. Deliberately employing psychoanalytic language in a pejorative manner, Hofstadter reduced the legitimate political and existential concerns held by large swaths of the American electorate (a demographic Sam Francis would later term ‘Middle American radicals’) as nothing more than neurotic and provincial irrationality. By accomplishing this, Hofstadter provided hegemonic progressive liberalism with the rationale it needed to guiltlessly dispossess White America.

Just as Lindsay would later do, Hofstadter rooted his theory of the paranoid style in Janus-faced descriptive analyses, superficial comparisons and false equivocations, technical inaccuracies, pejorative language, and outright mockery. I shall begin with the first charge before moving swiftly into each subsequent one – demonstrating along the way precisely how James Lindsay fits into this intellectual tradition of ‘regime polemics’.

Hofstadter referred to several events (some only in passing, while others he elaborated in greater depth) which even if taken individually, would be sufficient cause for alarm – let alone political action – and yet he hangs his explanation for the emergence of a ‘paranoid style’ on so-called status anxiety and delusional paranoia, rather than characterizing such actions as the rational observations made by different groups all vying for political dominance.

The very real clash of civilizations between Protestantism and Catholicism, for instance, is treated as a tit-for-tat exchange of paranoid delusions. McCarthyite anti-communism is similarly held up as a fiction of the mind despite the well documented history of socialist and communist maneuverings inside the American government. Hofstadter’s passing reference to the biopolitical use of fluoride is pathologized as well; he argued that even if fluoridization of the water supply was performed to achieve certain political aims, that middle Americans ought still to be considered paranoid and delusional for conceiving of such a thing before evidence came to pass. Hofstadter cited the People’s Party’s belief that bankers used bribes to influence 19^th-century monetary policy as proof of a long-running paranoid style in American politics. Unfortunately for Richard Hofstadter, this paranoid delusion was proven to be a matter of factual occurrence (we may credit the 2011 article entitled ‘Populism, Paranoia, and the Politics of Free Silver’ written by Samuel DeCanio for providing the receipts necessary to disprove Hofstadter’s fallacious argument). Throughout the essay, Hofstadter detailed the nature of competition between groups, sometimes getting deep into the details of a given rivalry, before declaring the entire debacle to be a fanciful and irrational artifact of the mind. His ‘artful appropriation’ of psychiatric language, which is – inexplicably – not intended to be understood in conventional terms, allows him to psychologize away the legitimate political concerns of the American population, effectively reducing such insights to mere spooks in the mind of an unsophisticated rabble.

When Lindsay describes the cultivation of a postwar liberal consensus, or how Buckley’s National Review overtook the conservative movement, and so on, he similarly puts together a factual narrative of history only to declare the facts invalid by labeling such an intellectual exercise as ‘woke’ (and therefore illegitimate). A coherent (and accurate) narrative is laid out only to be discredited using appropriated, pejorative language (for Hofstadter, ‘paranoia’ and ‘anxiety’ being appropriated from psychiatry and psychoanalysis; for Lindsay, ‘woke’ being appropriated from popular culture).

Hofstadter attempted as well to delegitimize the inductive conclusions of folk Americans (to be understood synonymously with White America and middle America) by superficially comparing their cognitive and behavioral habits to those of their rivals, thereby ‘eliminating’ any difference between the two, thus reducing a very real political conflict to the level of petty envy and feelings of inferiority (or insufficiency). The Ku Klux Klan donned ornate uniforms and organized hierarchically just like the Catholics. Members of the John Birch Society operated clandestinely and fought a zero-sum ideological war just like the communists. Christian anti-communists were as psychically and intellectually vigorous as their communist foes – wow, what profound insight! Such trifling arguments are only given weight and credibility by the fact that they are supported by a dominant regime.

James Lindsay’s similarly impotent comparisons between ‘the Woke Left’ and ‘Woke Right’ do nothing to deflate the merit or existence of either group. The fact remains that despite the appearance of similarity (real or imagined), there are significant differences between the two groups which not only justify their respective causes but also legitimate them as discrete political and social entities. The ‘Woke Left’ represented an insurgent coalition made up of Jewish radicals, Gentile liberals, and their client-networks who opposed the White Christian-led bourgeois capitalist order. To the extent that we ought to reify a ‘Woke Right’, we could say they are comprised of the grandchildren (and great-grandchildren) of the old Western hegemony. To say that they are indistinguishable from one another because they conduct themselves in a similar manner is like saying that the members of a local gang are indistinguishable from the members of law enforcement because they both wield firearms and organize themselves using advanced communications technology. Such logic is beyond ludicrous – it is positively self-discrediting. Or that Hamas is no different from the IDF because both sides manipulate public opinion via social media and they both attack civilians. Again, such argumentation avoids widespread scrutiny because it is wielded in service of the regime. Hence, I term it regime polemics.

There are other, equally grievous fallacies and inaccuracies in Lindsay’s logic (for instance, if it is ‘woke’ to come to a critical consciousness of structural politics, is Lindsay ‘woke’ for having uncovered the roots of ‘Woke Marxism’?) but I feel that my position has been made quite clear at this point. Regime polemics in the Hofstadterian style are premised on the pejorative use of appropriated language, superficially descriptive analyses, false equivocations, and, of course, the resources and support of a dominant hegemony. Based on the observations I have laid out here, we can comfortably place James Lindsay within the liberal tradition of consensus history, as a regime polemicist who has merely updated ‘the paranoid style’ for a 21^st century audience.