You might have heard of the new term: “woke right.” It’s the idea that the illiberalism that has swallowed the progressive left—what we often refer to as “wokeness”—has come for the right.
Here’s how we think about the dynamic:
Over the past two decades the woke left said: “Everything is taboo”—our Founding Fathers, the idea that men and women are different, the idea that wearing hoop earrings is verboten because it’s cultural appropriation, and on and on.
Naturally, people got fed up. Including people like Bari.
Then some on the right exploited that anger, and said: “Nothing is taboo”—not words like “gay” or “retarded,” but also not “Holocaust revisionism” or “white nationalism.”
Some of this dynamic is playing out in the headlines: The woke left changed Columbus Day to Indigenous Peoples’ Day. Then the White House changed the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America—the Trump administration even temporarily banned the Associated Press from the White House press room after it continued to publish “the Gulf of Mexico.”
When the woke left tried to change the character of our nation’s founding and take down statues of Winston Churchill and George Washington, the right took down a description of Jackie Robinson’s military service that was on the Department of Defense website because it was too DEI-coded.
On that note, the White House also recently said they would conduct a review of Smithsonian exhibitions to make sure they align with American ideals.
And when the woke left said trans, disabled, people of color are the most oppressed class in America, the woke right says white, Christian men are actually at the bottom of the totem pole—creating a new form of identity politics, in right-wing language.
It’s a fascinating and alarming dynamic. The same phenomenon on each side of the political spectrum. We would argue wokeness on the left went totally mainstream.
Rod Dreher is one of the rare voices calling attention to the illiberalism on the right—and the danger it poses. He says the right has a unique opportunity to stop this woke impulse before it metastasizes.
Rod is a contributing editor at The American Conservative. He’s the author of many books including his new bestseller, Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents. And he most recently wrote in our pages “The Radical Right Is Coming for Your Sons.”
Bari recently sat down with him to discuss why the woke right tolerates antisemitism and white nationalism, why this movement is appealing to men specifically, if it is fair to equate the woke right with the woke left, why he himself is not even comfortable with the term woke right—we’ll get into that in the conversation—and what happens if this impulse on the right goes mainstream.
This interview was originally a Free Press subscriber-only livestream, and we’re planning to do more of these. If you want to come to one, all you need to do is become a Free Press subscriber today.
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