The Real “Woke Right”

Or: why Norman Mailer was both woke and redpilled avant la lettre

Swordsman and relentless poster James Lindsay has been on the warpath against what he calls the “woke right.” He isn’t the first to deploy this phrase: It’s been used by some of Lindsay’s fellow “classical liberals” as well as some conservative Christians over the years to describe certain features of the culture and worldview of the “new” or “dissident” right. One is their commitment to a racial identitarianism that inverts the woke left’s by construing whites, and white men in particular, as the ultimate victim class; another is their rejection of the classically liberal aspiration to procedural neutrality and concomitant embrace of a quasi-Foucauldian view that power is everything; another is their annoying tendency to swarm in the Twitter replies of people who dissent from their orthodoxies. The targets of Lindsay’s polemic, of course, object to these comparisons. Because of the pejorative force of “woke,” your position on this controversy essentially will likely come down to how much you like or dislike the faction(s) in question; as a result, it will generate more heat than light.

What interests me about the “woke right” polemic is its relevance to something else I noticed a while back. This was the similarity of the meaning of two terms that came to be understood as ideological opposites in 2010s online discourse: “woke” (in the original sense of “awakened”) and “redpilled.” Both are pop versions of what Paul Ricoeur called the “hermeneutic of suspicion,” positing the existence of clued-in cognoscenti attuned to realities concealed from the somnolent sheeple. For the woke, this means “educating yourself,” “listening to [insert marginalized group],” and other forms of deference to those truly in the know; for the redpilled, it means “doing your own research,” viewing the masses as “NPCs” and the mainstream media as propaganda, and tuning into various forms of alternative media.

These positions, however, are asymmetrical in a crucial respect. “Woke” refers to a sensibility that, while derived from originally countercultural sources, has become the guiding outlook of major cultural institutions; “redpilled,” conversely, often refers to a constellation of previously mainstream views that have been relegated to the margins, such as: racial and sex differences are real; traditional family arrangements are superior; and so on. “Woke” is a dominant-culture outlook that imagines itself as radical and oppositional; “redpilled” often amounts to a nostalgic revival of aspects of the moribund dominant-culture outlook of an earlier era, framed as a countercultural insurgency.

I wrote a few things related to all of this a few years years back, partly prompted by the posthumous cancelation of Norman Mailer over his essay “The White Negro.” In late 2021, I went back and read this infamous essay, which proved remarkably interesting in the wake of the Great Awokening. In some ways, Mailer was proto-woke: His celebration of “the Negro’s” consciousness of the injustice of American society anticipated the rapturous reception of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me in the mid-2010s. “No Negro,” wrote Mailer, “can saunter down a street with any real certainty that violence will not visit him on his walk.” After a new edition of Mailer’s writings was axed by the publisher, seemingly due to his “problematic” language and promotion of cultural appropriation, Eric Kaufmann argued the late author was simply “reaping the anti-whiteness he sowed.”

But as I wrote at the time in response to Kaufmann, it wasn’t quite that simple: “Mailer cuts a more ambiguous profile, particularly because of his celebration and practice of a form of hypermasculine sexual exuberance that has once again become taboo.” If some of his views make him an ideological ancestor of 2010s wokeness, his swaggering machismo and vociferous anti-feminism also make him an unacknowledged prototype of the “redpilled” right-wing counterculture that emerged in the same era. (Mailer’s mayoral campaign in New York City was also endorsed by the radical libertarian Murray Rothbard, whose combination of countercultural sensibilities, openness to racialist politics, and skepticism of democracy make him a significant precursor of the 2010s alt-right.) Much of what Mailer cites as admirable in “the Negro,” indeed, is coded in hyper-masculinist terms.

This brings us to what I’d argue is a more important version of the “woke right.” As Richard Hanania argued a few years ago, conservatism has increasingly become an “oppositional culture,” in part due to its acute sense of exclusion from mainstream institutions and culture. This is an uncomfortable fact for right-wing elitists of Hanania’s ilk. The critique of “oppositional culture” was long central to conservative sociological accounts of the self-defeating habitus of low-status groups, especially black Americans but also poor whites. (Hillbilly Elegy was largely about this.) The 2024 election results suggest that not only is conservatism becoming an oppositional culture, with the downscaling of the GOP coalition, the denizens of other oppositional cultures are increasingly attracted to it. Notably, this includes Mailer’s predilect proto-woke/redpilled demographic: black men.

This merger of oppositional cultures isn’t all that novel, even if it is accelerating lately. Consider the longstanding simultaneous appeal of certain beliefs that respectable opinion regards as “conspiracy theories” among certain factions of the political right, but also in the black community. Milton William Cooper, a proto-Alex Jones radio host who was killed by police on his Arizona compound in 2001, would be understood today as a “far-right extremist”; he was influential on the 1990s militia movement, and Timothy McVeigh was a fan. But Cooper’s magnum opus, Behold a Pale Horse, is also often seen in Afrocentric bookstores in neighborhoods like Harlem; Cooper is also a longstanding cult figure in the hip-hop world and has been shouted out by many prominent rappers, one of whom even took his name.

The similarities between the new/dissident right and the woke left, I would argue, largely have to do with status and position. New-right types are often highly educated and familiar with elite institutions (Bronze Age Pervert has a PhD from Yale), and formed their sensibilities in hostile proximity to them. Paradoxically, their adoption of a posture of distrust toward institutions mirrors the dominant sensibility of these institutions themselves, which posits itself as radically anti-institutional. Hence, as I wrote about a few years ago, the most celebrated paper in academic anthropology in 2019 was called “The Case for Letting Anthropology Burn”; Skull and Bones now recruits its members on the basis of their marginalized identities; and so on.

What Lindsay calls the “woke right” is, again, a sort of inversion of this: a countercultural insurgency that presents itself as attempting to resurrect an older mainstream. Often, what it idealizes is the precisely the “square,” white, suburban midcentury mainstream Mailer was rebelling against in his time. But the new conservative mainstream that is coalescing today isn’t a restoration of that mainstream: It is downscale, multiracial, and profoundly oppositional. Mailer wrote in 1957: “One is a rebel or one conforms, one is a frontiersman in the Wild West of American night life, or else a Square cell, trapped in the totalitarian tissues of American society, doomed willy-nilly to conform.” It isn’t hard to imagine which of these options most of those drawn to MAGA would identify with today. In this sense, they’re “woke” in the way Mailer himself would’ve understood the term.

This week in Compact

We published two essays on the acquittal of Daniel Penny, one by me on the long shadow of antipsychiatry and deinstitutionalization, another by Aaron Renn on anarcho-tyranny and blue cities’ politicization of criminal justice.

Two more concerned alarming recent events in Romania, where an election result was annulled by a court on the basis of allegations of Russian interference and online disinformation. Sound familiar? It should, because it’s the natural culmination of the anti-disinformation crusade launched last decade in response to Brexit and Donald Trump’s victory. Read Thomas Fazi on the facts of the case, and Nathan Pinkoski on what it means for democracy.

We covered a wide variety of other subjects this week, including the forgotten America-First rhetoric of Jesse Jackson’s 1988 campaign, a UK student’s cancelation for violating gender dogmas, the cultural significance of the online celebration of murders like that of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, a new book by Compact contributor Frank Furedi, the tangled web connecting US public-health agencies with the CIA, the meaning of Assad’s demise in Syria, and a novel about Big Philanthropy.

As always, thanks for reading.