Is there a right-wing version of “woke”?

Earlier this week, Rod Dreher used the term “woke right” in a worthy essay for the Free Press warning against the emergence of a dangerously radical trend that inclines right-leaning young people toward overt racism and antisemitism.

Almost immediately, however, Dreher repented of his use of the term. He had not realized that it was also used by people like James Lindsay, Konstantin Kisin, and others to criticize his own political friends. He quickly clarified that all he meant to include in the category were “the new racialists and anti-Semites of the right, especially the very online right, who I regard as malicious would-be totalitarians.” Not National Conservatives, postliberals, or Matt Walsh. And definitely not J.D. Vance!

In Search of Woke

It’s certainly fine for Dreher to clarify his meaning, but it’s hard not to chuckle at the fact that he redefined the term simply to match his own prior assessment of who does and doesn’t seem to be a racist and a “malicious would-be totalitarian.”

The affair reveals a problem with the “woke right” discourse generally. Plenty of people seem to think there’s something there worth examining (even if they use different terminology), but most are just looking to find a new name to call a group of people they already dislike without having to undertake any broader assessment. While some, like Christian apologist Neil Shenvi, do seem genuinely interested in understanding a phenomenon, far more are merely looking to command an epithet. Instead of asking what is going on, they just ask who deserves my indignation.

If we focus on the phenomenon itself, we might find that the lines are less clear than Dreher suggests. “Woke” is a term that captures vague sentiments better than concrete meanings. It is also a phenomenon with several elements, which can then be organized in a number of different ways. And people may share certain qualities and tendencies, but not others. Dreher wants to boil it down to an essential characteristic that makes it easier to point a finger at some people without having to examine others that he’s already committed to. Others, like Lindsay perhaps, define it more broadly because they do want to point their finger at Dreher’s friends. For Dreher, the essence of woke is “racism” (possibly combined with a subjective assessment of malice). Others, though, could say it’s the use of critical methods. Or an oppressor/oppressed framework. Or its shutdown, bully tactics like cancel culture. Which is the defining woke value?

All of that is to say that there are significant problems with pretending “woke right” is an unambiguous category. There is, however, an interesting angle to the discourse that makes it worth pursuing. When applied to the left, “woke” has always evoked something beyond a set of political preferences, aims, or tactics. At its peak, at least, wokeness seemed to cut to the very being of its adherents. It seemed to define entirely their sense of self and their orientation to the social, ethical, and even spiritual order of the world. Thus, it has often appropriately been seen as having a quasi-religious character. The year 2020 saw public ceremonies with liturgies, confessions, creedal statements, etc. There was ecstatic emotionalism; a rigid and sometimes violent demand of conformity; a puritanical moralism that often accompanied a lack of basic personal morality and decency. Wokeness was an all-consuming Cause that gave people a sense of meaning that they had not found elsewhere in the world around them, which they believed to be evil beyond redemption.

Is there a similar tendency in pockets of the right? To treat their Cause not just as a worthy endeavor, but as existential? To believe that only in their Cause can they find personal meaning and, indeed, salvation? That was, according to the great political theorist Eric Voegelin, a key quality of modern ideology. And Voegelin may help enlighten us on the qualities of left-wing wokeness and the right-wing counterpart that so many have been trying to define.

Escape from the World

Somewhat controversially, Voegelin framed his critique of ideology in terms of its conceptual and historical linkage with the ancient heresy of Gnosticism. Regardless of how helpful the historical “gnostic” connection itself is, Voegelin’s use of it undoubtedly provides a powerful framework for understanding radical ideology—and it’s one that seems to have the “woke” phenomenon pegged.

Voegelin’s concept of gnostic political ideology is mostly associated with the utopian or semi-utopian end at which it aims—the attempt to “immanentize the eschaton,” in his memorable phrase.

But equally important—and particularly intriguing with wokeness in mind—is the way these ideologues confront the world in which they currently live and operate. All gnostic movements, he argued, start with a radical alienation from the actual order of the world as experienced, generally resulting from a sudden collapse of cultural and institutional authority. For the gnostic man, “the world has become a prison from which he wants to escape.”

This means the ideologue’s dissatisfaction is rooted in a belief in the complete “wickedness of the world” as it is experienced, rather than any flaw in himself or human nature. In contemporary terminology, he understands the world in terms of a “hegemonic” power that entirely imprisons the thoughts and actions of all except the few enlightened. It is thus something that must be entirely overcome and replaced, rather than something to be mitigated, sidelined, or worked through. In the modern context of political gnosticism, the structure of social order is so overpowering, that only a revolutionary (or counterrevolutionary?) movement can break through its spell.

This (dis)orientation of the human being to his moral context seems to capture the woke political phenomenon, which takes extreme forms of critical theory as its conceptual starting point. Racism, for instance, is redefined from being a personal fault to a “systemic” one that necessarily infuses all aspects of common life, even if no one is actually doing or saying directly racist things. In that sense, it is commanding—it infuses our reality so fully that even those who do not want to be racist and do not think themselves to be racist actually are. No one is capable of resisting its evil influence except those who have the “secret knowledge” (gnosis) and work to destroy it in favor of a different, equally closed system of values.

Many “alt-,” “dissident,” or “new” right thinkers also tend to speak in such terms. They often present the various maladies of the modern world not as discrete pathologies flowing from the flawed nature of human beings, but as closed, commanding systems—structures that trap modern men and warp their minds in unperceived ways.

Consider the concepts and metaphors that are often deployed in online discourse. The “red” and “blue” pills of The Matrix offer the choice to continue to live in the false, constructed reality or to gain secret knowledge that reveals true reality; references to “the regime” (relying on a tortured reading of Aristotle) suggest that all societies are governed by a coherent and closed system of values backed by power, and that political conflict consists in titanic clashes over which closed system we shall adopt. Alt-right celebrity Curtis Yarvin speaks of “the cathedral,” and masculinity advocates use the “longhouse”—both architectural metaphors that suggest the horizon is utterly closed around us, except for those few who have escaped; everyone is unknowingly dominated by the system.

Most of these are revolving around the idea, also prevalent in more mainstream discourse, that “liberalism” (broadly construed to include classical and progressive forms) is a kind of essence that infuses our reality rather than a pattern of behavior or a set of concepts that—for both good and ill—have emerged in response to the Western experience. Thus, in the balance of partisan conflict hangs not only offices and policies, but our very state of being. If the hegemonic forces are not defeated and replaced, we are cut off from living the good life.

It seems to me that this belief—that the world as we experience it is utterly alien, all-powerful, and destructive of our ability to live a good life—does represent a kind of perverse common ground between some pockets of today’s right and the woke. Precisely how that vision manifests when it comes to race, “oppressor” categories, or precise political tactics are less essential questions. Both translate politics into a religious endeavor, with salvation depending on collective human action. It is not hard to see how such beliefs lead to rampant conspiracy-mongering, the impulse to rigorously police words and deeds, and the belief that political action ought to aim at a comprehensive control of private life and civil society, either by expanding government or by collective pressure campaigns. It also combines a rigid moralism when it comes to demands on others with a complete lack of self-reflection or self-restraint. Everything is permitted for me, since my Cause is just.

Whether or not such tendencies on the right amount to a “woke” right seems to me a trivial question of labels. But the mirror ideological approach is important and troubling.

The Freedom to Respond

This way of understanding the world has at its core a denial of human freedom—not freedom in a moralistic sense that demands everyone must be free to think or do this, that, or the other. Rather, the freedom being denied is the capacity human beings always have within them to respond to the world in which they operate in light of truths and traditions that may be widely denied. The imminent order in which we live—including social and political life—certainly has a powerful influence on the way we understand the world. We are historical beings who understand ourselves by engaging and reacting to the symbols of our time and place. But does the social and political framework around us entirely bind our moral and intellectual horizon?

Voegelin did not think so:

The spiritual disorder of our time, the civilizational crisis of which everyone so readily speaks, does not by any means have to be borne as an inevitable fate; [ ] on the contrary, everyone possesses the means of overcoming it in his own life. … No one is obliged to take part in the spiritual crisis of a society; on the contrary, everyone is obliged to avoid this folly and live his life in order. (emphasis added)

The source of cultural renewal is in this freedom of the human being to encounter, reflect on, and respond to his circumstances drawing on alternative cultural resources that can never be fully abolished. It is precisely such a response which indirectly produces new cultural symbols.

Nothing can ultimately separate us from our ability to live in truth, and to critique and unmask the errors of the present age.

That passage quoted above also speaks to a potential counterargument. Since the right-wing figures under consideration are precisely pointing to some version of modernity and modern ideologies as the hegemonic power to be unmasked, it might be argued, they must be exempted from falling into Voegelin’s category. Left-wing wokeness, progressivism, and critical theory are indeed dangerous and powerful forces in the world. So if these are seen as the cause of the disorder, then the right is only “woke” to a very real and present problem—the same one Voegelin himself diagnosed.

There may be something to this: many of the right-wing figures under consideration are at least somewhat aware of the destruction that left-wing ideologies have unleashed on modern society. But that recognition does not prevent them from falling into the same patterns of thought. By treating these ideological forces as hegemonic and commanding, the right-wing ideologue signals his agreement on the basic, servile condition of the human person and his agreement on the power that the revolutionary thinks he possesses. Cultures are built not by tradition or reflection, but by the will to power.

Voegelin was very clear that the ideologue, no matter how successful his Cause may be, does not actually have the ability to accomplish the full transformation of human life he seeks.

The gnostic revolution has for its purpose a change in the nature of man and the establishment of a transfigured society. Since this program cannot be carried out in historical reality, gnostic revolutionaries must inevitably institutionalize their partial or total success in the existential struggle by a compromise with reality; and whatever emerges from this compromise—it will not be the transfigured world envisaged by gnostic symbolism.

Those who are attuned to the errors and danger of left-wing ideology must contend with an essential question: what exactly is the consequence of such ideologies? Did they truly succeed? Are we now morally and spiritually trapped in a world created by them? Are we “blue-pilled” or living in a “longhouse”? If so, then we must acknowledge that their advocates were correct in their assessment of the human condition—that the will to power is indeed the guiding principle of our existence. A reasonable response would be for the enlightened few to learn from and mimic the revolutionary’s course of action.

Alternatively, are we living in an order that has been disturbed, confused, and partially transformed thanks to the destructive but ultimately futile efforts of the ideologues? In this case, we should be reassured that—whatever the revolutionary may think—nothing can ultimately separate us from our ability to live in truth, and to critique and unmask the errors of the present age. The most dangerous roadblock to cultural renewal, then, would be to accept the false premises about the human condition that ideologues like Marx, Gramsci, or Evola preached. Ultimately, their way of thinking about human beings is far more destructive of a healthy culture than their political advocacy.

Certainly, not everyone on the new right falls into such an extreme “gnostic” attitude, but some of its more “dissident” figures do. And certain terms, assumptions, and rhetorical devices that reflect this basic orientation often make their way into mainstream right-of-center discourse. Coming up with a list of who qualifies as “woke right” seems less important than recognizing the ideological tendencies. In interesting and disturbed times like these, labels and partisan coalitions aren’t as important as clear thinking and self-reflection.

I have heard it said that attempts have been made at staging productions of Plato’s dialogues, but that all have invariably flopped. I can’t vouch for the truth of that claim, but I can believe it. Intellectually, of course, Plato is gripping. And yet, as great a lover of Plato as I am, I fear that even I would fall asleep watching a dramatic reenactment of the Republic. Not enough “action,” in the conventional sense.

But did you know that there’s a ripping good yarn contained in the texts known as Plato’s “letters”? Therein, and especially in the longest and most famous Seventh Letter, Plato writes autobiographically of his political entanglements with Dionysius the Younger, the dissolute young tyrant of Syracuse. By accepting the invitation of his longtime friend and pupil, Dion of Syracuse, to realize the ideal of philosophic rule made famous in the Republic, Plato, by his own account, inadvertently precipitated the unravelling of the Syracusan regime, which finally plunged the city into a brutal civil war. In the pages of Plato’s letters, we find Plato the teacher, the counselor, the ally, the statesman; intrigue and faction in the court of a tyrant; grand political hopes dashed as famous utopian dreams become living nightmares—it is a stunningly dramatic and dynamic portrait of Plato and his philosophy.

And yet the experience of picking up and trying to read Plato’s letters tends to disorient the modern reader. For one thing, the political dynamics and major players of fourth-century BC Sicily are not very well remembered, which can make Plato’s narrative hard to follow. And to make matters worse, the authenticity and provenance of these letters have been the subject of fierce debate for centuries, which raises questions regarding their philosophic, historiographical, and biographical value. Thus, even though the skeleton of the story they contain is probably true, Plato’s letters suffer from an obscurity out of all proportion with their inherent interest.

The task of excavating the story of Plato’s political misadventures in Syracuse, of bringing it to life for a general audience of modern readers, is extremely complex. It requires extensive knowledge of classical Greek history, politics, culture, and philosophy, the ability to judge and to synthesize the accounts of varied and often conflicting historical sources, and, rarest of all, the discernment and literary talent to provide an education in the relevant background without sacrificing liveliness of storytelling. It is a great credit to James Romm that he was up to that task. In Plato and the Tyrant, Romm weaves together the threads of history, philology, philosophy, and archaeology with a deftness and erudition only a true classicist could possess. Historical details are illustrated by images of ancient Syracusan coins, vase paintings, and Sicilian ruins, the significance of Plato’s word choices are explicated by etymological lessons on the Greek roots of English words, complex scholarly arguments over fine points of historiography are distilled and clarified with admirable brevity, and all the while the reader is borne along on a journey of great historical and human interest. One senses from reading Romm’s work how lucky his students must count themselves for having found their way into his classroom.

In the long history of the study of Plato, there has never been widespread agreement about what Plato thought or how he meant to communicate it. It is inevitable that, as a scholar of Plato, I should have my disagreements with Professor Romm’s approach to the Platonic letters and what he does with them—especially since my most recent work culminated in a monograph on the subject, containing my own new English translation of the Letters and original interpretive essay. Romm will have no trouble finding supporters on those points where I will pick nits or bones; for the most part, he sides with the majority of scholars against my dissenting views. In particular, by assessing five of the thirteen letters in the collection as authentic works of Plato and dismissing the remainder as spurious, he rejects my heterodox contention that the Letters is actually a unified, semi-fictional work of Platonic philosophy, a one-sided epistolary novel in thirteen, artfully crafted and purposefully arranged parts. In a way, Romm recognizes the possibility of what I propose: he sees Letters Three, Four, Seven, and Eight as “open letters,” of which the salutation to one or more addressees is more literary device than real indication of Plato’s intended readers. But if that’s true, why couldn’t all the letters—indeed, the “Letters” as a whole—have been intended for broader dissemination? Had Romm acknowledged Plato’s authorship of Letter Two, he would have seen the importance of the claim there that “it is not possible for things written not to be exposed”: Plato writes nothing without anticipating that it will be published. In fact, the question of why Plato wrote as he did is a pervasive theme of the Letters—fitting for a text that, by its very form, emphasizes Plato’s role as author far more than anything else he wrote.

A first point I would make, then, is that we must be careful how we use the Letters. Romm mines the text for historical details of the story he wishes to tell, juxtaposing and triangulating with the versions given by later historians, biographers, and gossipmongers, to ascertain what “really happened” in Syracuse. But I would caution that even those Greek writers whom we now describe as “historians” were philosophers and teachers more intent on providing a profound education than on making a meticulous and comprehensive record of events. As for Plato’s activity in Syracuse, our primary source of information is Plato’s account in the Letters; details found in biographies written centuries later may, for all we know, have started as speculative rumors meant to fill gaps in Plato’s narrative. Just as the Peloponnesian War is not nearly so important an object of study in its own right as it is because a profound thinker, Thucydides, made it the canvas for his pedagogical masterpiece, the story of Plato in Syracuse, I would submit, should be of interest to us above all because Plato is its narrator.

But if Romm can interest a general audience in classics by bringing this Platonic drama to life—which I believe his book will and has—why rain on his parade by insisting that he has not adequately distinguished the forms and original purposes of his various classical sources? I would be less concerned about this if Romm had not taken on a weightier responsibility for his book than the recovery of a good story for the entertainment and edification of his readers. In his introduction, Romm recounts how the “spell” Plato had cast upon him as an undergraduate gradually lifted, how he had come to question Plato’s political philosophic wisdom, and how “the questions that first troubled [him] when the spell of Plato was broken” came to “trouble [him] even more when [he] came to the letters.” He articulates the possibility that Plato, the great moralist, wound up “collaborating with evil” in Syracuse, and that the Republic is meant to “obscure” his hypocrisy. He reports the famous judgment of Karl Popper that Plato’s Republic belongs to “the perennial attack on freedom and reason.” And he concludes his introduction by saying that his book will show us how “the wise can become more tyrannical by the company of tyrants.”

Romm thus suggests that Plato’s Syracusan story helps us to see a grave problem with Platonic philosophy, that we should not so much seek wisdom and understanding from the education Plato’s works provide as we should seek to learn an object lesson from them. We must not dodge this question. To put the matter bluntly, Plato’s political philosophy long predates, and so stands outside of, the liberal tradition upon which our civilization rests. If we have something of value to learn from Plato in our political moment, it will be no defense of liberalism per se—it will, in fact, appeal to pre-liberal and perhaps illiberal moral and political principles. This is not to say that Plato will counsel a break from liberalism. I, for one, see Platonic political philosophy pointing us to the preservation of liberal democracy through a reinvigoration of its noblest principles, guided by the Platonic virtue of moderation. Such a case can indeed be made on the basis of the Letters, where Plato repeatedly makes it clear—in letters Romm acknowledges as well as in some he athetizes—that he never condoned the wholesale substitution of one form of regime for another, especially by violent revolution. In this, Romm sees a reflection of Plato’s Sparta-philia, a longing for permanence and stability in a Greek world plagued by war, stasis, and moral decay. He thus reduces Plato’s philosophic insight to his biographical circumstances. I believe that we do this to Plato at our own intellectual and cultural peril.

I don’t have the space here to remedy the excessive vagueness of the foregoing claims and critiques regarding Plato’s contemporary relevance. I will instead limit myself to describing one substantive disagreement I have with Professor Romm’s reading of Plato’s Letters, indicating how our evaluation of Plato might hang on such a point.

As messy and multipolar as the struggle for Syracuse became (elegantly clarified by Romm), Plato presents it as a battle between two factions: the tyrannical party of Dionysius and the anti-tyrannical party of Plato’s devoted acolyte, Dion. Throughout the Letters, Plato presents himself as having fundamentally, if moderately and contingently, supported Dion’s side in that conflict. Given the terms of Dion’s initial invitation to Plato, Romm naturally assumes that Plato hoped Dion might rule Syracuse as a philosopher king. This involves what I see as a critical error. Even though Dion himself is keen on the idea of bringing philosophic rule to Syracuse, Plato only ever represents him as having wished for Dionysius to be educated in philosophy for that purpose. It is surprising but undeniable upon reflection that Dion is never, in any of the Platonic letters, spoken of as having taken an interest in philosophic study himself. (Letter Ten shows how willing Plato was to endorse a view of philosophy among Dion’s circle that rested on a misapprehension of what the activity of philosophy is really like. Likewise, a careful study of Letter Eight shows that Plato and Dion do not have the same counsel for the Syracusans: Dion’s overly hopeful proposals must be compared with Plato’s much more practical, down-to-earth advice in Letter Seven.)

The Letters is about how Plato sought to present philosophy to the world, with the Republic as the centerpiece of his presentation. But even the Republic allows us to see that this presentation is steeped in paradox. Romm puzzles over the question of why Plato thinks the philosopher would return to politics, to “the cave,” after he has beheld the true world of the eternal “forms.” He fails to take note of the fact that, according to Plato’s Socrates, the philosophers have neither any obligation nor any desire to do so except in the ideal city he and his interlocutors have built in speech (cf. Letter Six). Only in that ideal city will the philosophers be compelled to administer the city as a just repayment for the regime’s cultivation of their philosophic natures. All this lends itself to the view that Plato did not really believe in the possibility of philosophic rule as presented in the Republic, which means that Plato and Dion were on drastically different pages. The distance that has grown between Plato and Dion by the time the latter is waging a war for Syracuse, which is made evident in Letter Four, is the fruit of Dion’s failure to grasp the meaning of Platonic philosophy.

In my book on the Letters, I share my own speculation as to why, if not to create philosophic rule, Plato went to Syracuse at all. In brief, I believe Plato’s literary project of defending philosophy in the wake of Socrates’s death achieved a kind of political success beyond even his own expectations, and that Dion’s zeal for philosophic rule put Plato in a bind. His decision to accept Dion’s invitation, as he makes clear in Letter Seven, had more to do with what the fallout would be for the reputation of Platonic philosophy if he should turn his back on this enthusiastic follower and benefactor than with anything he hoped to achieve politically in Syracuse. To be sure, that interpretation is itself up for debate. What is important for my purpose here is simply to emphasize that, unless we read the Letters closely as a work of Platonic political philosophy, we are prone to misunderstanding Plato’s intention and misjudging his character.

It must be said that Romm never really settles the question of whether the study of the Platonic letters issues in acquittal or condemnation of Plato. He comes back to it now and again—especially in his ninth chapter—indicating where a certain construal of the evidence might point to a harsher assessment of Plato’s thought and action than has been typical. But he tends to leave things at the level of suggestive “maybes” more than he draws conclusions or lays out a case of his own. If anything, the book ends with the suggestion that Plato stood above all for a government in which good rulers are constrained by good laws—a view with which I agree, and which I am glad Professor Romm has expressed. Yet I remain uncertain whether he has handled the matter in the most conscientious and responsible way. In his attempt to present the most entertaining and intriguing version of this tale, Romm often seems to seek out and present the theories that will most excite his audience. The possibility that Plato and Dion were lovers, which adds little to the substance of the story but to which Romm devotes considerable space, is probably the best example, but many other rumors and legends from sources of greatly varying reliability are sprinkled freely throughout the book. When Romm includes a vignette of lust, jealousy, and murder preserved by “Parthenius, a collector of salacious stories,” admitting that it is “impossible to confirm but too good not to tell,” he seems to describe what led him to include a great many of the episodes recounted in Plato and the Tyrant. Is it for this same reason that he has chosen to highlight the ways in which the story of Plato in Syracuse might be seen as evidence of Plato’s moral weakness or worse? Much as I am reluctant to make that accusation, I do wish Professor Romm had given more sustained and serious attention to the very serious question he chose to raise.