I debated James Lindsay about the "Woke Right"

Here's how it went...

To be honest, it was really more of a panel discussion.

James is touring New Zealand with the Free Speech Union, speaking at events in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch. I’m a former Free Speech Union employee and have made critical comments on social media about James’ use of the term “woke right”, so the FSU invited me along to the Wellington event, which was held in a room within the New Zealand’s Parliament building complex called the Legislative Chamber (which is where our politicians used to meet to debate legislation, but is now used to host meetings and events). After James’ 30 minute speech on the topic of “wokeness”, I joined him for a panel discussion on the appropriateness of the term “woke right”, moderated by FSU Chief Executive Jonathan Ayling.

It’s important to say at the outset, (and this is something that I DID say in my opening comments at the panel discussion) that there is more agreement between James and I on matters “woke” than there is disagreement. Woke capture of our institutions is a significant problem that I have been attempting to raise awareness about for quite some time, including while I worked for the Free Speech Union. So I’m grateful that someone with a public profile like James would come to New Zealand and help us highlight the issue and build momentum for our Government to do something to address it.

Our key disagreement, and what the panel discussion was about, is James’ use of the term “woke right”. I made two broad criticisms of the term:

• Firstly, that it is inaccurate: wokeness arose out of postmodernism and cultural Marxism, and the people on the Right James refers to as “woke right” are traditional religious conservatives, nationalists, immigration restrictionists and race-realists. These groups aren’t postmodern or cultural Marxist in any real sense: the term confuses more than it clarifies.

• Secondly, I think the term is unhelpful - the people James is referring to as woke right often make good empirically-based arguments - I think they’re even right about many things, particularly wokeness itself, where these groups have had the correct analysis all along. Labelling them with a term like “woke right” tars them and encourages offhand dismissal rather than thoughtful engagement with their ideas. If we want to build a genuine free speech culture, thoughtful substantive engagement is what we ought to be encouraging rather than labelling and dismissal. What matters most is whether ideas are “right”, not whether they are “woke right”.

The reason I thought it was important to emphasise the empirical arguments being made on the right, is to head off the accusation that these arguments are postmodern and based on lived experienced rather than data, like the woke left’s arguments are. Part of James’ analysis is the idea that there’s a symmetry between the woke left and woke right in terms of reliance of “lived experience” over empirical data, and that these groups are crowding out the rational evidence-based arguments in the centre. I wanted to counter that framing by showing that it is actually the people he is calling “woke right” that are bringing the data and evidence to the critique of wokeness, and implicitly show that it is actually James relying on a non-empirical, relativistic and postmodern argument - namely that the people on the right are too “extreme”.

By using empirical arguments rooted in social science I wanted to demonstrate that it’s not just that woke ideology is unpopular, disliked, or perceived as oppressive or extreme by large parts of the population: I wanted to show that key woke beliefs are false, and key woke policy prescriptions harmful, not just subjectively, but in an objective and empirically demonstrable way, AND that it is the people being labelled by James’ as “woke right” that are actually bringing these arguments to the table.

So what are these empirical arguments against wokeness? I made three claims (I could have made more, but due to time constraints, this is what I set out during the panel discussion):

Firstly, take the woke view that our societies suffer from “institutional racism” and “systemic bias”. The evidence woke people cite for this view is the disparate socioeconomic outcomes we observe between ethnic (and other) groups. However, anyone with a measure of intellectual curiosity and open-mindedness who examines the literature can readily find another explanation for these socio-economic disparities: the existence of innate biological differences between groups, including in factors like average IQ, impulse control and time preference. The importance of average IQ differences is particularly well-evidenced in the literature: there is a very strong correlation between IQ and socioeconomic outcomes like average income. If the IQ gaps are causing the disparities, then you can’t blame it all on discrimination. The woke view is false.

Another area is immigration and diversity. The woke constantly assault our ears with the phrase “diversity is our strength”. But in this area as well, the empirical evidence suggests the opposite - all factors being equal, more diverse communities tend to have lower social cohesion, worse social trust and they do worse on all the normal measures of socio-economic wellbeing: poverty, crime, drug abuse, etc. The evidence suggests that woke policies around immigration and multiculturalism, which are aimed at increasing diversity, are harmful to our society and are making it a worse place for everyone to live. Again, the woke view is false. Our immigration system really ought to aim to make the population more ethnically, culturally, religiously, and linguistically homogenous, rather than diverse.

The final example I gave was around the constant woke promotion of LGBTQIA+. Wokeness is all about the promotion of sexual liberation and alternative lifestyles. But the empirical evidence has been silently accumulating on the social costs associated with this as well…and it turns out the advice of the fuddy-duddy conservatives about not being promiscuous, not having children out of wedlock, the importance of marriage to a happy life, and so on, was right all along. People who abide by traditional moral norms around sexuality, relationships and marriage tend to have better life outcomes than those that don’t…and in the aggregate, the damage that has been done to our society by undermining and delegitimising traditional norms in this area has been immense. Woke ideals in this area are simply wrong and harmful.

I’ve slightly embellished the arguments above with more details than I was able to convey in my discussion with James, but this is largely what I said, at which point I paused and gave him the chance to respond. He tried to put me on the spot with a series of questions aimed at establishing that there is a group on the right - call it the alt right, or dissident right or whatever, some of whom don’t consider themselves conservative, or even consider themselves anti-conservative, and who have read and attempted to learn from and use some of the tactics of the woke left.

There is some validity to what James is saying here, which I’m happy to concede, with the following provisos:

• If James means the alt right, dissident right, or online right, he should just use one of these existing terms rather than coining something new. Calling them “woke” is confusing and I think inaccurate for the reasons outlined earlier.

• In my opinion there is a diversity of views around the status of conservatism among these groups. James is right that there is some hostility to conservatism, but this is not universal. Personally I have a favourable view of the type of conservatism espoused by Edmund Burke, Roger Scruton, Yoram Hazony or Pat Buchanan, and think modern conservatism suffers from being too much like classical liberalism, and too little like the conservatism outlined by these thinkers. Many on the online right share this view. The hostility to conservatism arises mainly from the ineffectiveness of the conservative movement over the past half century or so in combating leftism/progressivism/wokeism, and in my view this ineffectiveness has arisen in significant part because the thinkers outlining some of empirical arguments I’m making above (eg paleoconservatives like Pat Buchanan) have been repeatedly purged out of the mainstream of the conservative movement, leaving it bereft of some of its best arguments, analysts and activists. James’ warnings against the “woke right” risk repeating these same mistakes again.

• When it comes to people on the right reading and attempting to learn from some of the cultural Marxist thinkers, of course I concede this. But so what? Trying to understand those you disagree with is just good scholarship. And any good political strategy depends on knowing one’s enemy. Does James really think we should studiously ignore reading or trying to learn anything from these thinkers? If that really is his position, then he’s failed to take his own advice, as he’s evidently spent a lot of time reading about wokeness himself, has written books about it, and is now going around giving talks about it.

I take it that James was trying to defend his idea of the woke right by noting that there are some parallels with the woke left in terms of tactics and a recognition of the importance of gaining and using power. In his talk he described wokeness as ultimately being about having “a covetous relationship with power”. I can see where he’s trying to go with this idea, but I think the attitude is mistaken: an unhealthy relationship with power is where you begin to crave it for its own sake, rather than because it is a necessary tool to help people and defend the good. James seems to be saying that desiring to take and use power at all for any reason is unhealthy. I think this view is wrong, and is actually another part of the reason for the ineffectiveness of conservatism over the past half century. Power is central to politics. To abjure power completely is to abjure politics and place yourself in the position of purely an observer. This attitude reminds me of Plato’s famous quote: "One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.”

My own view of what wokeness really is, and which I set out in our discussion, is based on the distinction between two types of tolerance: the traditional Western liberal view, ie viewpoint tolerance - as opposed to the cultural Marxist view of tolerance, ie repressive tolerance, as described by Herbert Marcuse.

Under viewpoint tolerance, you tolerate all different viewpoints (duh!). Whereas repressive tolerance is based on the idea that tolerating all different viewpoints leads to the oppression of some groups, and that in order to liberate them from this oppression, criticism of them should not be tolerated. The embrace of repressive tolerance necessitates the implementation of hate speech laws to prevent criticism of so-called oppressed groups, or failing that, the use of cancel culture tactics to shut down the criticism. All the woke cancel culture terms like racist, sexist, homophobe, xenophobe, anti-semite, bigot, etc, arise out of the idea of repressive tolerance and are designed to be used a rhetorical weapons to shut down speech and criticism of these “oppressed” groups.

Only viewpoint tolerance is consistent with free speech, and my view is that wokeness can be defined as the embrace of repressive tolerance over viewpoint tolerance. My criticism of James’ is that he isn’t engaging substantively with what I consider to be pretty good empirical arguments coming from his right. Instead, he is attempting to delegitimise them through the use of labels like “woke right” and “extreme” - this approach looks very similar to the cancel culture approach taken by adherents of repressive tolerance, which ironically, would make James woke.

This is pretty much where our discussion ended (note: I’ve embellished the above with things I wish I had said, but didn’t, so this write-up isn’t a blow-by-blow of the debate, but more a recap with my reflections and analysis added). Following this we took questions from the audience. The last question stuck with me: the questioner asked something along the lines of: are the online right going to win the debate against mainstream conservatism? James said he was unsure. I said that there are a lot of views online, some of which I agree with and some of which I don’t, but that what I expected to happen was for the best views to rise to the top.

This is where our talk ended. I had a few more points in my back pocket I would have made if I had time. The most important ones were around the idea of identity politics - I’ll outline them below.

An important part of James’ analysis of the “woke right” is the idea that they, much like the woke left, engage in identity politics. There is truth in this - the right do promote ethnic, religious and national identity - however I think this is a good thing and worthy of a defence, which I’ll outline below:

The first point to make is that there is a staggering amount of hypocrisy coming from critics of identity politics (note this isn’t necessarily a criticism of James, who’s views on this I am unsure of). In New Zealand for example, many of the politicians who are the most vocal critics of identity politics and how divisive it is, spend a surprisingly large amount of their time frequenting gay pride parades. (As an aside, what is it with our politicians and pride parades? They can’t stay away. It’s seemingly like catnip to them. Very bizarre.) The point being that gay pride parades are a form of identity politics. You can’t support identity politics for some groups and oppose it for others. That is rank hypocrisy.

But furthermore, most of the post-1960s civil rights movements have been based around identity politics - the African American civil rights movement, the women’s liberation movement, gay rights, trans rights, etc. Those who rail against identity politics now need to tell us which of these civil rights movements they consider illiberal and illegitimate. Any answer other than “all of them” is hypocritical.

Secondly, what is driving the increase in identity politics in Western societies? I think there are two main causes - the policies of mass immigration and multiculturalism which have led to an increase in the number of different ethnic groups in western countries; and the constant LGBTQ activism which has led to identity politics movements for gays, lesbians, trans and other sexual and gender identities. The people being labelled “woke right” have consistently opposed mass immigration, multiculturalism and the LGBTQ movement - they can’t be blamed for these phenomena. The blame lies squarely with the woke left who have pushed these policies and mainstream conservatives who have gone along with it.

Identity politics is within the rules of pluralistic liberal democracy. It isn’t reasonable to invite all these new ethnic groups into the country, push LGBTQ activism to the hilt, and then turn around and blame the evil woke right for creating the problem when they were warning against these policies from the beginning.

…and how do the critics of identity politics plan to counter it? By taking away freedoms of speech and association? By engaging in concerted cancel culture campaigns against any groups that attempt it? It seems to me to be a very difficult proposition to try and put a stop to identity politics without endorsing measures that take away people’s freedoms, particularly free speech, in some way. How can you prevent identity politics without implementing “illiberal” measures?

But finally, and perhaps most importantly, we can look into the academic literature to give us a view on whether “identity” is really a good thing or not. And when we do we find that not all identity is equal. There is evidence in the literature that ethnic and religious identity is related to positive subjective wellbeing, positive mental health outcomes and positive life outcomes, whereas LGBTQ identities are linked to poorer subjective wellbeing, poorer mental health and poorer life outcomes.

A sane society ought to support the forms of identity shown to be beneficial and oppose the forms shown to be harmful. Our politicians, to their shame, consistently do the opposite.

Final thoughts

I was happy with how the debate went. Without the benefit of having yet watched the footage of it back, I felt like I probably won a points victory - I demonstrated there are good empirical arguments on the so-called woke right, showed myself to be on the side of free speech rather than against it, and effectively challenged James’ framing of the woke right being a mirror image of the woke left.

One of the underlying issues I’ve been thinking about for a while now is how the emerging right-wing coalition, between mainstream conservatives on the one-hand and the online right on the other, can work together when it’s obvious there are significant disagreements.

Something that occurred to me in the wake of my interaction with James is that part of the disagreement between the two sides is really a tension between controversial truths on the one hand and political moderation on the other. The online right believe (rightly in my view) that they are in possession of controversial truths that need to be shared and made mainstream in order to rescue civilisation from the consequences of disastrous policy choices made due to decades of politically correct brainwashing. Mainstream conservatives on the other hand are trying to ensure sufficient political moderation so that society doesn’t polarise and descend into tribal violence and also to ensure the right-wing coalition remains electable.

Both of these are valid perspectives and in fact necessary to a successful political movement. I think the way the two groups need to work together is that the online right sets the direction, while the mainstream conservatives act like the governor on an engine, regulating the political messaging to ensure the amount of controversial truth being distributed to the mainstream preserves social cohesion and allows the right-wing coalition to remain electable.