The Regrettable Rise of “Right-Wing Wokeism”

Left or Right, Orwell's dictum holds true: “The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.”

From The Imaginative Conservative

By John Carpenter

The greatness of the American myth is that it is mostly real. Enough of the faux-conservatives, these woke rightists, judging America as not worth saving and smearing our heroes as tyrants or war criminals.

On December 3, 2024, James Lindsay, rightish provocateur, revealed that he had “very lightly edited” “several thousand words straight out of” the Communist Manifesto and submitted it to the on-line journal American Reformer. He considered it the primary voice of the Christian nationalist “woke right.” Mr. Lindsay, under the pseudonym “Marcus Carlson,” swapped out the term “bourgeoisie” with liberalism, liberals, or “the post-war liberal consensus,” among others. He then sent this screed to American Reformer to prove the existence of “the woke right.” He succeeded. They published it, duped by the Communist Manifesto dressed in the thin rhetorical garb of Christian nationalism.

Mr. Lindsay, and others, like Christian apologist Neil Shenvi, had been arguing that there’s a “woke right” which reasons exactly like the woke left, only with different heroes and victims. I’ve argued that the woke right uses history in exactly the same way as the left, re-inventing it to alienate us from our mythos in hopes we’ll embrace their vision for the future.

George Orwell said, “The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.” If you want to take over a country, first sully its founding myths. It demoralizes the people. Revolutionary Marxists did exactly that in China, inciting a “cultural revolution.” Their first step was to plant the seeds of cultural revulsion: make people hate their own culture.

The United States least deserves to lose its glorious history—its mythos—to the ravages of left-wing historical distortions, like the 1619 project, claims of “genocide” against native peoples, the obsessions about slavery which fail to acknowledge the obvious: the United States ended slavery. Yet we’ve lived, over the last generation, through such an attempted cultural revolution. It’s so increased in ferocity over the last decade, we’ve given it a name: wokeness. It’s the last stage in disillusioning us about our history and culture in hopes we’ll be willing to opt for a new one.

For example, Ben Garrett, cohost of podcast The Haunted Cosmos, proclaimed a professor “doesn’t know much about Churchill.” The professor was lauding Winston Churchill, and Mr. Garrett claimed he knew better. Mr. Garrett has “done the reading,” or so he says. He knows that Churchill was the villain of World War II, or something like that. He’s received the gnostic insight. He’s arrived at a higher level of understanding than the rest of us simpletons indoctrinated by the “post war consensus” in service of “globohomo.”

Such rightists have assimilated reflexes of the Left while thinking they can use them to serve their agenda. They think they’ve woken to the truth about American history and now are crusading to win us over to their vision of a glorious American past, so that we’ll join them in reviving it. They tell us that

• the American revolution was an unjust war;
• the Constitution was a mistake
• “slavery produced in the South a genuine affection between the races that we believe we can say has never existed in any nation before [the Civil War] or since” (Douglas Wilson and Steve Wilkins, Southern Slavery: As It Was, p. 38)
• Abraham Lincoln was a tyrant
• the United States got conned by the “warmonger” Churchill to enter World War II (according to Darryl Cooper)
• our prosecution of that war was marked by “war crimes,” like the bombing of Dresden and Hiroshima
• Brown v. the Topeka Board of Education was an error
• the “postwar consensus” was a nefarious plot to harness our power to further “globohomo”

…and so on.

Like their Leftist mirror images, the purpose of all this historical fiction is to make us hate our country so we’ll be willing to tear it down and start anew. For conservatives—pseudo, semi, or alt—that the ideal America was lost somewhere in their imaginary past, maybe at Appomattox, maybe with Woodrow Wilson or the New Deal or more recently, whereas Leftists, like Kamala Harris, who share their tactic of deconstructing our history, see it in the future. Hence, Ms. Harris beckons us, like Mao’s “four olds,” to be “unburdened by what has been.” These disaffected pseudo-conservatives feel so alienated from the United States as it now is that they’re willing to take a wrecking ball to the whole myth. They don’t realize, however, that they are the Left’s useful idiots.

The greatness of the American myth is that it is mostly real. Sure, our heroes had blemishes. But Pilgrims really did come to Plymouth to worship God, launching the 1620 Project. A decade later, John Winthrop, sailing toward America, really did declare that they were going to plant “a City Upon a Hill.” Two generations later, Increase Mather really declared, of those founders, “It was a great and high undertaking of our fathers when they ventured themselves and their little ones upon the rude waves of the vast ocean that so they might follow the Lord into his land.” America really did have a Christian founding. Washington really was great; he may not have chopped down a cherry tree and refused to tell a lie, but he really was a man of integrity who rallied his troops by riding his horse between advancing British lines and faltering American ones. He really did step aside from the presidency, creating a precedent for the peaceful transfer of power.

Lincoln really did save the country and free the slaves; he might have had to resort to some extreme measures, like suspending habeas corpus, but the Constitution specifically allowed that during “cases of rebellion”; he did it so that a country “of the people, by the people, and for the people might not perish from the earth.” The United States really did put down two fascist enemies at once, was so humane and just that both Germans armies and Japan as a nation hurried to surrender to Americans rather than fall into the hands of the alternatives; America alone held the atomic bomb, having the world for the taking and yet let peoples be free. She really did stare down the Soviets, at Berlin, at Vietnam, at Reykjavík, and created a global “Pax Americana.” Todd Beamer really did say “Let’s roll” and, with the other heroes of United 93, thwarted the terrorists. Meanwhile, we really did ensure justice at home for the descendants of slaves, and now we can do so for the pre-born.

Enough of the faux-conservatives judging America as not worth saving, smearing our heroes as tyrants or war criminals. Enough of the woke rightists who justify slavery so they can decry the United States for abolishing it. They’ve been discipled in the Left’s cultural revolutionary tactics and are now its dupes. And they’re wrong.

The featured image is “Liberty Displaying the Arts and Sciences” (1792) by Samuel Jennings, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.