Seriously, What is Going Wrong With the Anti-Woke?

Part 2 of 2: The illiberal Anti-Woke Backlash

(Audio version here)

In the first part of this piece, I wrote,

It seems that many people who recognised the extremism, authoritarianism and irrationalism of the Critical Social Justice (woke) movement and supported those of us who criticised it on those grounds are currently feeling quite disillusioned. This is because there are a significant number of people ranging from politicians to political pundits to various kinds of public figures to large social media accounts to general members of the public who are active on social media who have become extreme and authoritarian and vengeful themselves in the name of anti-wokeness.

This is a worrying development on two grounds. Firstly, it is worrying because it is true. We are indeed seeing a rise of highly illiberal, censorious and vengeful attitudes, much of it aimed at anybody known to be a Critical Social Justice (woke) activist or to have engaged in authoritarian DEI initiatives. However, much of it is also aimed at people who are perceived, assumed or imagined to be (including by the President of the United States) on very little evidence, sparking many liberally-minded people’s concerns that we are seeing the start of a ‘witch hunt.’ Most worryingly of all, some of it is aimed at whole demographics of people for whom the CSJ movement claimed to speak, including those who really didn’t want it to and objected to it - black and brown people, same-sex attracted people and, occasionally, women. Replacing one kind of cancel culture, grievance-based narrative and demonising , divisive identity politics with another is not going to remotely improve our situation.

Secondly, it is worrying that so many liberally-minded people, while feeling, rightly, that they should be concerned about this, are also inclined to feel, wrongly, that perhaps they should never have supported critics of wokeness in the first place. Our tendency to think groupishly, even when the said group is defined by beliefs and values they don’t hold rather than those they do could easily lead to wholesale dismissal of all critics of wokeness and reignite sympathies for the Critical Social Justice movement.

When I speak of ‘the liberally-minded’ I am speaking of people who do not necessarily have a clearly thought out set of liberal principles that they hold themselves to but whose moral intuitions and cultural heritage as citizens of liberal democracies lead them to react negatively against authoritarianism. They are, thus, liberal, but not necessarily in a consistently strategic way. This, I believe, defines most people. These liberals thus have a tendency to rally against whichever faction appears to be denying freedom of belief and speech and collectively demonising whole demographics most intensely at any time. Given that it took liberal critics of wokeness so long to fully convince other liberals that the Critical Social Justice movement was doing that and was not just a movement that advanced social justice, it is insanely counterproductive to give them cause to surge back in the other direction.

This second part of the piece intends to make the case that, “Yes, there is definitely a surge of illiberal and vengeful anti-wokes. Yes, they are a problem that must be addressed. The problems they present are a continued threat to freedom and truth, the swapping of one authoritarian moral orthodoxy for another, collateral damage to people who were never authoritarian woke activists, an undermining of the credibility of critics of wokeness and a resurge of sympathy towards the woke.”

Since writing the first part of this piece yesterday, the most common comments I have received here and on X have been from liberals who have allied themselves with critics of wokeness saying that they are indeed feeling this way. However, several other people have asked me to identify precisely which groups are responsible for this illiberal anti-woke backlash. Of course, I can point at the Christian Nationalists whom Christian conservative Neil Shenvi has so well identified as part of the “Woke Right” by pointing out their explicit use of Critical Theories. Equally, I think few people would deny that the overtly white supremacist, antisemitic, misogynistic “Groypers” are a particularly egregious example of the far-right “anti-woke.” Neo-Nazis and the KKK could also certainly be described as ‘anti-woke’. However, aside from unambiguous far-right groups who can justifiably be identified collectively as illiberal, I would suggest we should not think of this problem in terms of a group but as a mentality.

At the end of the first part, I wrote:

The big divides right now are between those who care about what is true and those who prefer emotionally resonant narratives that suit their agenda; those who want a society that protects individual liberty and to use that freedom of belief and speech to meaningly resolve conflict and those who want a society where their beliefs are imposed on everybody and dissent is squashed out of existence.

In short, the problem is “authoritarians who favour ideologically-biased narratives over the truth.” These people are always the problem whether it is authoritarian postmodernists on the left or authoritarian post-truthers on the right. It may feel unsatisfactory or even evasive to ask people who want a clear tribe to point at to look instead at principles and epistemology among various factions on the right, but this is how the culture wars are playing out on that side of the political spectrum right now.

Later, I will look at worrying signs of the Trump administration being authoritarian and not caring about what is true, but does this define all Trump voters? No. Many are liberal conservative who support truth and freedom and felt Trump was a better option than Harris. I disagree with their reasoning but they are liberal and will be the most effective at identifying and addressing these problems as and when they arise provided they recognise the need to do so. Many already are in my notifications & substack comments. The most common way anti-woke liberals who voted for Trump have phrased this is by stressing the importance of "not becoming what we hate." This is good. It was the liberal left who had the best shot at reining in the woke left and many of us tried, but not enough. Much harm was done was done by the Critical Social Justice movement and it led to a massive backlash. The liberal American right - the people who hold these founding principles of all people being created equal with the same right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness close to their hearts - must not make the same mistake if they do not want to achieve the same results.

This is extremely important. When wokeness on the left was on the rise, I and many others on the liberal left were pointing it out but too many liberal lefties felt that we were overstating the problem and that it was only a lunatic fringe and that our criticism of elements of the left only gave strength to the illiberal right. They were wrong. It was not addressing the rising illiberalism and irrationalism on the left that enabled it to spiral out of control, do considerable harm and ultimately give strength to the illiberal right. The liberals on the right must take lessons from this and not succumb to the temptation to ignore or minimise the rise of the illiberal elements on their side. To say that there isn't a rising, authoritarian, identity-politicking, vengeful anti-woke right is to be willfully blind at this point.

Firstly, lets look at the ‘vibes’ and the social media discourses using only those who have been critical of left-wing wokeness and woke DEI initiatives. (This section uses abridged parts of The Counterweight Handbook) Very many of us have been observing an increase in overt racism, homophobia and misogyny online and justification for it as “anti-wokeness”. Because the Critical Social Justice movement has taken great efforts to conflate its own theories of race with black people and its own theories of “queerness” with LGBT people, it has enabled people to make racist and homophobic assumption under the guise of being “anti-woke” when they are, in fact, being anti-black or anti-gay. The black conservative Adam Coleman, addressed ‘the anti-woke right’s race consciousness problem” following a widespread assumption that a conference of black physicians were all diversity hires, saying,

In their desperation to fight the left, [some of the anti-woke] became just like them. They're now race-conscious and they still think they're winning the culture war. But when you discard your principles, you lose every time. Quit staring into the abyss because it always stares back.

At the same time, anti-gay sentiment has increased, evidenced by a dramatic 7-point drop in the percentage of Americans who believe same-sex relationships are morally acceptable. As the political writer and podcaster Alexander Von Sternberg wrote,

It’s clear that the worldview emerging from this reactionary backlash is one that does not merely resist Critical Social Justice but also devalues sexual freedom, LGBT rights, and women’s rights. We need better than one sick, illiberal cult mentality supplanting another.

Despite having been one of the earliest and most persistent critics of wokeness, I have been accused multiple times now of being complicit in the woke “feminisation” of society, purely, it seems, because I have ovaries. Ironically, the men making this accusation of my complicity in systems that oppress them by simply existing while female did not appear to regard this or their own grievance narratives and identity politics as a symptom of the ‘woke feminisation of society’ at all. (We shall get to the ‘woke right’ later.)

These reactionary attitudes have the potential to have consequences that impact the liberal commitment to treating all people as equal under the law. Consider how the founder of Turning Point USA, a group originally formed to protect conservative students’ interests on university campuses, went from supporting the “color-blind” approach of Martin Luther King Jr. to launching a campaign to overturn the Civil Rights Act of 1964, claiming that it ushered in the DEI bureaucracy of wokeness Should we not be alarmed that this is now a view that has a place in mainstream conservative discourse? Meanwhile, anti-gay politicians are gaining strength from legitimate anti-woke objections to trans activism that impinges on women’s rights and children’s bodies to threaten Obergefell v. Hodges. If this were to be overturned, the thirty-five U.S. states that still have same-sex marriage bans on the books would be reactivated.

Are these not strong indicators of an illiberal anti-woke backlash?

Secondly, let’s consider the patterns of behaviour that have caused so many critics of left-wing wokeness to identify a ‘woke right’ element among the anti-woke. Following the attempt on Donald Trump’s life on July 13th 2024, there arose a rhetoric from the illiberal anti-woke right that this was caused by left-wing claims that Mr. Trump was a threat to democracy. Not only did this rhetoric closely resemble woke claims about language being violence and that disbelief in gender identity causes trans people to be murdered and so must never be expressed, it was astonishingly unAmerican. The US Constitution, especially the 1st Amendment, is designed to protect free speech from government specifically so that citizens are free to criticise the government. It seems particularly important that if US citizens believe a presidential candidate to be a threat to the continuance of their democratic republic, they are able to say so, even if other citizens believe those claims to be false and hyperbolic. This principle must also protect the rights of those who believe (with absolutely no evidence) that the 2020 election was stolen from Mr. Trump by the Democrats to say so without attempts to silence or punish them on the grounds that this could lead to the murder of Mr. Biden. Words simply are not violence and people must be able to say if they think government corruption is happening, even if they are wrong.

Following this event, large X accounts like LibsOfTikTok, began scouring the internet for people saying that they wished the bullet had fully reached its aim or joking about the incident, reporting them to their employers with the intention to get them fired and causing immense social media dogpiles. Vast numbers of the anti-woke right reposted these posts and also called for the individuals’ firing for their distasteful but not threatening or illegal speech on the grounds that this caused cultural harm that could lead to violence. They did this despite having always dismissed such claims from the woke left and opposed the left-wing Cancel Culture which operated in precisely the same way.

Andrew Doyle, who has now written three books critiquing the woke and dedicating his programming on GB News to it has been consistently liberal on freedom of speech and wrote a piece pointing out that Cancel Culture is always wrong. He said, quite rightly, “Whether it comes from the left or right, this form of public retribution cannot be justified.” The biologist Colin Wright, another long-term critic of the excesses of wokeism particularly in the realm of gender wrote similarly on X,

Being against "cancel culture" matters most when you have the power to cancel. As the political Right gains more cultural and political power, it's important to remain principled.If you claimed to be against cancel culture when you were powerless and being cancelled, but aren't against it now that you have power, then you were never really against cancel culture.

This pattern of authoritarian woke-like behaviour led several critics of wokeness to identify and criticise the emergence of a ‘woke right’ from among the allegedly anti-woke.

Andrew Doyle again addressed the issue identifying as characteristics of the woke right,

• A tendency to perceive humanity through the lens of identity categories such as race, sex, sexual orientation and class.

• The politics of resentment in which the woke right & left perceive themselves to be living under systemic oppression.

• The shared belief of the woke left and right that liberalism has failed and should be abandoned and freedom of speech mistrusted.

• The rejection of objective truth in favour of ‘lived experience’ on the left and conspiracy theories based on instinct on the right. A belief that they alone are awake to reality.

• The scapegoating of Jews for perceptions that they hold disproportionate institutional power.

• A disdain for the West and a belief that it is fundamentally broken

• Purity spirals and public shaming.

• A belief in the need to tie everybody into a guiding and overarching belief system. On the woke right, this is often Christianity adopted performatively.

(My summary)

Konstantin Kisin, another long-term critic of wokeness, also began posting about these patterns and the existence of a woke right which he described thus:

He also wrote a piece describing the outrage he received for criticising this subset of the anti-woke.

James Lindsay, a particularly vociferous and long-term critic of wokeness, has also been discussing the development of a woke right and delineating it with diagrams.

I, having also studied the evolution of postmodern thought through various critical theories and into wokeness in considerable depth, think that these patterns of epistemology, ethics and engagement, clearly indicate a postmodern (post-truth) style of collectivist identitarian thinking that warrants being called woke.

Is it any wonder that, when this is associated with an ‘'anti-woke’ movement, that liberally-minded people who have supported its critiques of woke authoritarianism begin to think they might have got things terribly wrong?

Thirdly, there are distinctly worrying developments from the Trump administration and from Elon Musk that fit these patterns. We have seen very recently alarming indicators of both accepting and promoting ideologically-biased narratives with no attempt to discover whether they are true. Donald Trump recently announced that the tragic air collision which claimed 67 lives was caused by DEI policies on the grounds of his gut feelings “I have common sense, OK, and unfortunately a lot of people don’t.” Investigations so far are investigating understaffing at the air traffic control and a potential misjudgement by the military in having a helicopter in that area at that time. Meanwhile Elon Musk has repeatedly been posting false or misleading claims which suit various ideological narratives he espouses to 215 million people on a platform that he owns and which dominates news distribution.

It is somewhat concerning that a significant number of Americans do not seem concerned about the potential influence of Musk and the monopoly on news that his platform now has on what Americans believe to be true. It is also somewhat worrying that so many seem to accept Trump’s gut feeling that the air collision was caused by DEI policies without any investigation having confirmed or even indicated this.

This is particularly worrying given his new “Anti-DEI” executive orders. In a piece for The Bulwark, Cathy Young, another long-term critic of wokeness since it showed its first shoots in the Gamergate controversy, sets out her concerns about anti-DEI overreach by the Trump Administration and the potential for illiberal right-wing anti-woke rhetoric to bias investigations.

The first anti-DEI executive order also directs agencies to assess “the number of new DEI hires” under the previous administration. Even the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism, a civil liberties group critical of ‘wokeness’ which has expressed strong support for Trump’s “efforts to eliminate identity-based practices,” cautions that this demand “may invite speculation, without a firm basis or evidence, regarding an employee’s skills, abilities, or merit and instead make assumptions based on their perceived identity.”

Jesse Singal, a writer who has been critical of DEI policies and especially shoddy science into gender medicine and attracted much wrath from the woke, expressed similar concerns,

I’m not entirely unsympathetic to the conservative view here given my work on the lack of evidence surrounding diversity trainings, but I think this has become a witch hunt in some cases, and overall the conversation over DEI is now so sprawling, and in many cases symbolic, that it’s very important to clarify exactly what we’re talking about when we talk about it. There are some conservatives who rightly point out that certain hiring practices appear to be prima facie illegal; others are using the DEI fight to make much more questionable arguments.

While we have yet to see how these policies will be enacted in practice, the indicators of the potential for authoritarian overreach and collateral damage should lead liberals, particularly on the right, to remain attentive to the situation and be prepared to speak up if necessary. While all politicians engage in political spin and narrative building, the sheer volume of truth claims that can be easily discovered to be false or not to be supported by evidence is rather extraordinary. This should lead all of us who care about what is true to take the time to perform those fact checks before accepting anything uncritically. We should also highlight falsities publicly and try to restrengthen the social norm that providing false or misleading information undermines our trust, respect and confidence in a leader.

I recognise and share the anger and resentment so many people feel towards authoritarian Critical Social Justice activists and the instinct for revenge. I have spent over 15 years being silenced by them when they could (at university) and berated, abused, no-platformed, de-platformed and obsessively stalked including having my family members’ social media accounts cloned and attempts made to hack my social media accounts. The sheer intensity of abuse, cruelty and attempts to destroy his life and even cause him physical harm experienced by my collaborator and friend, Peter Boghossian, can never be fully revealed because of the rules of his university, but I am astonished he is still standing at all. More than that, I have been dealing every day with cases of good people having their livelihoods and reputations threatened by authoritarian ideologues. Believe me, I am no stranger to the impulse to wreak bloody vengeance on the individuals who engaged in such behaviour.

Nevertheless, we must not, as my ethical conservative correspondents so often say, “become what we hate.” While there are certain individuals who should certainly face consequences for what they have done (a particular man who liked to call all the female acquaintances of men he disagreed with and try to get them to allege sexual assault particularly springs to mind), there cannot be anything that resembles a witch hunt against anybody perceived to have supported the Critical Social Justice movement. This is for four reasons:

1. We must not continue to undermine liberal norms of freedom or respect for evidence-based epistemology.

2. We do not want to replace one form of authoritarianism with another. Even if you think yours would work & fix the world, it won’t. It never has.

3. The collateral damage would be immense and impact countless people sucked into or bullied into complying with wokeness.

4. It would undermine the credibility of critics of wokeness and reignite sympathies for wokeism.

I won’t go into 1) and 2) because nearly everything else I have ever written has done that. I will address 3) and 4) as these are things too many people seem not to consider. (This is also abridged from The Counterweight Handbook)

For at least a decade now, critics of wokeness have been pointing out the damage being done to young people being indoctrinated in schools and universities into one particular ideology and not taught to consider any other ideas. If we accept our own stated concern about university capture to be valid, we must also accept that there are now many people in their twenties who are genuinely unable to distinguish between Critical Social Justice ideas and just being a good person and who may be entirely unfamiliar with rest of the world of political and philosophical thought. This is a problem we are going to have to grapple with as a society when the Critical Social Justice movement finally falls. Any practical, ethical, and compassionate way forward will have to catch these young people and show them that other views exist and that they have a responsibility to consider them when operating in an ideologically diverse workplace.

For nearly as long, we have been drawing attention to the number of people in employment (private or public) who are being compelled under threat of their means of providing for their families to affirm Critical Social Justice ideas. If we accept our own stated concerns about this as true, we must accept that there have been a lot of people affirming things they don’t believe and signing off on DEI programs they don’t support. (There have been. They write to me. I try to help them, but sometimes this is not possible). Some might say they should have found the strength to refuse but many people will consider their responsibility to provide for their family a more central one than their responsibility to oppose an political movement. Any attempted purge of people found to be pushing wokeness would take out a lot of people who hated it.

There are people who would like to fire all those who have ever espoused Critical Social Justice views and demand “consequences” for those who have contributed to a culture of fear and cancellation. This is neither workable nor ethical, except in cases where someone has broken the law or the policies of their organization to abuse a position of power and been shielded from consequences by the dominance of the ideology. We cannot apply reforms retrospectively and the subjective nature of accusations of having contributed to a cancel culture would be likely to escalate into something that looked very much like a cancel culture. It would take out some bullies who will always be bullies but also young people sucked into an ideology and shielded from any other ideas, and those being bullied by activists and trying to keep a roof over their family’s heads, precisely as we have warned was happening.

Importantly, any suggestion of a “witch hunt” would be likely to reignite sympathies for Critical Social Justice advocates among the liberally-minded who were finally convinced that it is not simply an attempt to make society more just and that its authoritarianism does need to be checked and its social prestige reevaluated. This is something that those with a vengeful anti-woke mindset do not seem to have considered. The reason Donald Trump lost narrowly in 2020 and won narrowly in 2024 is because swing voters exist and, on the last occasion, surely sufficient people had. been convinced that wokeness was a problem to have contributed to that swing? A deluge of political commentators certainly seemed to think so, anyway. Behaving in ways that make sympathies go the other way is not a good strategy for those who want the Republicans to stay in power. It’s not a good strategy for those of us who don’t but do who want to see wokeness consigned to the dustbin of bad ideas either.

Ross Douthat addressed this well in 2023, when he wrote,

Many free-speech-oriented liberals have been eager to pivot from worrying about an illiberal left to criticizing the excesses of red-state governors and school boards. …

In the Trump years we saw that in an atmosphere of political emergency, when fear of populism or authoritarianism organized every left-of-center thought, many liberals struggled to resist demands of ideological fealty made by movements to their left.

Now the emergency mentality has retreated, and resistance and skepticism are easier. But what if it comes back, whether under a Trump restoration or in some other form?

If liberals accept loyalty oaths under calm conditions, what will they accept in an emergency? Probably too much — in which case the next peak of wokeness will be higher, the next revolution more complete.

The increasing tendency of the liberally-minded to wonder aloud on social media whether they made a mistake in believing critics of wokeness to be operating with good intentions suggests that Douthat’s prediction is accurate. The rise of authoritarian, vengeful and anti-truth anti-wokes is creating precisely the kind of atmosphere of political emergency liable to make liberals rush in the opposite direction and wokeness to resurge. Because most people are liberal in that most basic sense of being opposed to authoritarianism, this is a very real risk that should not be underestimated.

Therefore, both liberal lefties and liberal conservatives have an important role to play right now.

Liberal lefties, please resist any temptation to respond to the rise of an authoritarian and vengeful anti-woke right by rethinking your support of criticisms of wokeness and becoming more sympathetic to it in order to maintain solidarity against the illiberal right. We’ve been here before and it went very badly. Instead, continue to recognise the Critical Social Justice movement as authoritarian and having little concern for the truth while recognising the same kind of problem to be in the ascendent on the right. Oppose both consistently even if the illiberalism on the right seems to be more urgently pressing due to a right-wing anti-woke government in the US. You can still prioritise criticising the illiberal anti-woke right as long as this does not lead you to become sympathetic to the illiberal woke left.

Liberal conservatives, please ensure that you hold fast to your liberal conservative principles of conserving the good principles and traditions of your country which includes freedom. Do not be tempted to overlook problems with the authoritarian anti-woke right because you are so sick of the authoritarian woke left and want it thoroughly gone. The illiberal and vengeful anti-woke right and particularly the woke right won’t help with that aim and you are in the strongest position to critique them and remind people who are sliding towards that mentality what a reasoned and ethical conservatism should look like. We need you to be hyperalert and conscientious right now.

Liberal centrists and politically homeless, please just keep being properly liberal!

To ensure that the defeat of authoritarian wokeness, when it comes, is lasting and not replaced by an authoritarian anti-wokeness, all of us who are liberal in that broadest sense of being anti-authoritarian will need to care about what is true, expect our politicians to do so too and put our strength behind ethical policies against authoritarianism that will work in all contexts and stand the test of time.