From my Substack article, “MAGA Goes Woke Will the Real Neo-Marxists Please Stand Up?”
Right-wing identity politics is not racism, white supremacy, nor Christian nationalism, though it is adjacent to all three and the precursor to the type of white ethnostate that people like Brother Nathanael are calling for. But strictly speaking, right-wing identity politics is not necessarily any of the above, nor is it even a posture rooted in a willingness to speak up for ourselves as Christian Americans, as Jon Harris would have us believe in his attempts to resuscitate identity politics into a conservative framework. Rather, identity politics on the right is structurally the same as what it is on the left: a posture toward society that collapses all discourse into competition for power, offering an approach to governance in which every issue becomes a zero-sum competition between winners and losers. This is an outworking of critical theory in which the victim-oppressor framework becomes the lens for understanding all academic disciplines and societal movement. Within the discipline of politics, this framework eschews classic political virtues such as consensus building, professionalism, and compromise, in favor of a rhetoric of contempt in which politics becomes a tool for the assertion of dominance. Often fueled by post-truth epistemologies like perspectivism or functional relativism, this framework undermines The True by fortifying the notion that our very view of reality is necessarily conditioned by the matrix of group-identity, that the only legitimate ways of knowing are from inside group ideology; consequently, the difference between what is real news vs. fake news comes down to what tribe you identify with.
But even as identity politics tethers The True to the matrix of group identity, it also deconstructs The Good. Notice how, during the COVID controversies when the woke right was still in its infancy, so many conservatives repudiated the concept of the common good (a curious phenomenon I chronicled at the time). Now, under the quasi-dictatorship of the Trump personality cult, traditional common-good conservatism is being systematically replaced by a politics that eschews the common good for a Nietzschean might-makes-right modus operandi rooted in grievance narratives. Consider the curious phenomenon (which, again, I have noted elsewhere) that when President Trump is asked to defend policies or ideas, he often merely retreats to a version of Thrasymachus’s argument in Plato’s Republic: that justice is the advantage of the stronger. The reason so many conservatives see this neo-Nietzscheanism as liberating rather than merely cynical is because of the narrative provided by identity politics. The narrative—whether from the woke left or the woke right—asserts that there is systemic structural dynamic to delegitimize people of particular groups, and that this matrix of oppression renders the normal canons of fair play no longer adequate tools for redress. This, in turn, opens up space to address conflict via witch-hunting, scapegoating, mob-like behaviors, along with ever-tightening in-groups defined by ideological purity.
Further Reading
- The Republican Retreat to Identity Politics
- Josh Hawley Resurrects the Ghost of Rousseau
- Tucker Carlson – Man of the Left
- Right-Wing Violence and the Trump Personality Cult
- Paine-fully Conservative?: Remembering “Rights of Man” and the Original Left-Right Divide
- Letter to a Conspiracy Theorist