THE WOKE LEFT – AND THE WOKE RIGHT. Let’s start with the latter. At the Free Press, Rebeccah L. Heinrichs of the Hudson Institute outlines what she calls “The Right’s 1939 Project:”
The results of this post–World War II international order are astonishingly positive. There has been a dramatic drop in wartime fatalities as a percentage of the world population. Economic prosperity for Americans has steadily improved. Life expectancy has grown longer and of a higher physical quality.
But if the 1939 Project people are right, and Churchill was in fact the warmonger, and if Hitler really wanted peace and perhaps had a point about the outsize and nefarious impact of Jewish people, and if the United States was wrong to drop the atomic bombs, then NATO was a mistake, the ties to the nation of Israel is a mistake, and none of the post–World War II international order is worth maintaining today, let alone restoring or defending.
The moral foundation of America’s global role since 1945 has been victory in World War II. It has shaped our modern defense strategy, and asserted our moral claim for global leadership. Thus, the 1939 Project has turned its focus toward undermining the righteousness of the U.S. and America’s participation in the war itself.
They need to retcon the past in order to loosen the affection and support Americans feel for and have for our allies in Europe and Israel. This is necessary to weaken the American people’s support for U.S. statecraft in the world, whether in the form of sanctions, military deployments, or military action in defense of its allies and stated and official interests. Their increasingly casual antisemitism is not simply evil—it is strategic. It has become the glue that binds the various strains of the insurgent ideology.
Last year, Carlson called amateur historian and podcaster Darryl Cooper “the best and most honest popular historian in the United States.” Cooper, appearing on Carlson’s and Joe Rogan’s podcasts, judged Winston Churchill “the chief villain of World War II,” blaming Churchill’s stubborn insistence to free Europe from Hitler—rather than the Nazis’ conquest of the continent—for the bloodshed that followed. (To this day, Carlson persists in calling Cooper “the most august historian in America.”)
In January, Carlson speculated openly to an aghast Piers Morgan whether modern Europe would have been better off under Nazi rule: “I’m not defending Nazis. I’m just saying, where is Western Civilization? What did [Churchill] preserve?”
Implicit here is the grotesque suggestion that defeating Hitler’s Germany directly led to Europe’s modern “woke” culture—in other words, that a Nazi victory might have preserved traditional, Christian civilization. Carlson suggestively raises the question, but Cooper and others on social media answer explicitly:
Meanwhile, Patrick West of Spiked notes “The left’s reactionary turn:”
The cry that ‘left’ and ‘right’ are no longer meaningful political labels has been a feature of our yet-to-be named epoch, an era ushered in around 10 years ago – one marked by woke ideology, overclass detachment and populist insurrection. As author Michael Lind succinctly put it in his 2020 book, The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Metropolitan Elite: ‘The old spectrum of left and right has given way to a new dichotomy in politics among insiders and outsiders.’ Five years on, Andrew Doyle, author of The End of Woke, broadly agrees that ‘the terms “left” and “right” have lost much of their utility’.
Events in Britain in recent weeks appear to add weight to the argument that this simple, old division no longer makes sense. When UK prime minister Keir Starmer gave his ‘island of strangers’ speech last month, this suggested to many that he had moved to the right, or even that he was channeling the right-wing Enoch Powell. To compound the confusion, a fortnight later, Reform UK leader Nigel Farage pledged that his party would reverse Labour’s cuts to winter-fuel payments and end the two-child benefit cap.
It cannot be disputed that we live in convulsive times. But commentators have been heralding the end of ‘left’ and ‘right’ politics ever since the end of the Cold War, an era when most people understood these concepts because they could readily see which kind of country they lived in: either a capitalist democracy or a Communist one-party state. Yet still the terms persist. And they will continue to do so.
They have survived because we all intuitively know what they stand for. To be left-wing is to have an optimistic view of people and humanity, while to be a conservative is to be pessimistic and assume the worst in others. Taken to extremes, progressives believe humanity can be perfected, while conservatives maintain that to assume the best in others is positively dangerous. ‘Be Kind’ naivety will only let the worst specimens rise to power, they argue.
This is what made wokery such a quintessentially left cause, not merely because it was obviously a turbocharged form of political correctness. Some leftists, such as American philosopher Susan Neiman, author of the 2023 book Left Is Not Woke, have protested that woke is the antithesis of the old left belief in the Enlightenment values of universalism and progress. What the woke calls ‘anti-racism’, for instance, is really a reactionary sanctification of ethnic tribalism.
The left’s increasing wokeness over the past decade resulted in Trump’s second term victory. His TV commercials last fall repeating the slogan, “Kamala Harris is for they/them. President Trump is for you” was a killer elevator pitch that sealed the deal. So why are many on the right creating their own version of woke in response?
