One of the best ways to think of “Woke Right” without getting into the philosophical and technical weeds is “same energy, opposite direction.” That is, the Woke Right has the same motivating worldview and activity as Woke Left but pointing approximately in the opposite direction, very crudely.

Ultimately, Woke Right is a reaction to Woke Left in very similar fashion to how Fascism was a reaction to Communism in Europe in the early 20th century. The Woke Right sees the Woke Left succeeding at taking power and destroying society, and it also agrees that the Woke Left is as successful as it is in these two endeavors because it must have some things right. The Woke Right therefore adopts much of the foundational worldview, most of the tactics, behaviors, and strategies, and the same disposition toward the centrality of power in the world as does the Woke Left but seeks to drive its own conclusions. As commentator Carl Benjamin put it, the Woke Right realizes that “the problem with the Woke Left wasn’t the Woke part; it is the Left part.”

Since the Woke Right sees the destruction the Woke Left is causing, it naively assumes that doing roughly the opposite must be the right thing to do. When the Woke Right perceives the Woke Left promotes “anti-white racism” as part of its Race Marxism agenda and praxis, for example, it replies with a pro-white racialism. Since the Woke Left is concerned about radical egalitarianism for all of humanity through its twisted doctrines, the Woke Right replies with a radical intolerance that sometimes combines with cultural chauvinism or even racialism that takes the form of ultranationalism.

In this way, Woke Right has the same energy as the Woke Left; it just points that energy in an opposing direction. That opposite direction is called reaction, and the Woke Right players are reactionaries.

The Simple Example of Racialism

Understanding this issue properly is probably easiest through race, but it manifests in every dimension. With race, it’s pretty obvious.

Woke Left says “don’t be racist” but enables “reverse racism,” so to speak. That is, Woke Left does two things (doublespeak) with regard to racism: decries racism (in general but in practice only from dominant groups) while encouraging and enabling racism (against majority or dominant racial groups). Put even more simply, Woke Left basically says “all racism is bad except our racism.

Woke Right takes this energy and points it the other way. In some sense, it does reverse-reverse racism as a reaction to the bogus Woke Left “anti-racialism” program. In the simplest expression, the Woke Right replies to the Woke Left’s “all racism is bad except our racism” with “actually, racism is actually good (or normal), especially our racism.” That is, Woke Right racialism embraces racism as normal, universal, beneficial, or at least strategically necessary (“if everyone can do group identity politics and racism except whites, we’ll lose” is the logic) and encourages (rewards, incentivizes) and enables racism against minority or marginalized racial groups as a reaction to the obvious, and obviously bogus, double standard from the Woke Left.

The consequence is that reaction gives us obviously similar energy in the opposite direction, but the fact is that the energy isn’t just similar. It’s the same. It’s Woke in both cases.

To get under the hood, we have to ask why each side does this.

What’s Under the Hood?

Woke Left insists that its racial program (“antiracism”) is built off the idea of dismantling systemic racism with is unjustly imposed upon “minoritized racial groups,” alienating them from themselves and society. They don't believe in racism, they claim, and racism is not our natural state as people, but it is forced upon us all by the existing racial power structure. The “system” forces the racialist game on everyone, so that’s the game that must be played in order to “dismantle” racism. That’s the Woke Left’s “liberating tolerance” logic, just like it was Marx, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao’s “dictatorship of the proletariat” logic.

Of course, everything goes wrong because the Left’s conflict-theory approach to race stratification in society cannot fix race stratification in society or attitudes related to it, including racism. It can only make these issues worse. That is, they do not have “mostly right analysis, effective tactics, wrong solutions.” They have wrong analysis all the way down to the core too, and their tactics are actually evil.

In fact, their solutions are crude redistributions of opportunity that ultimately place unqualified “DEI hires” (Affirmative Action) into positions they shouldn’t occupy, so things start going wrong in consequential ways. Meanwhile, the “dominant racial group” is discriminated against and genuinely “minoritized” (made into a group with minority status in society) by the logic of “liberating tolerance.” As Herbert Marcuse said it, “liberating tolerance would me extending tolerance to movements from the left and withdrawing tolerance from movements from the right.” People notice this bias and reject it eventually.

Woke Right observes this state of affairs and decides things worked better without these Leftist manipulations, but we can’t go back. They don’t believe we can simply stop doing the Leftism and liberating tolerance because that genie is out of the bottle. There’s no going back; there’s only going through and forward. In this way, Woke Right reaction is actually a form of right-wing progressivism.

In many cases, the Woke Right decides that “repressive tolerance,” which “liberating tolerance” was meant to break, was actually a good thing. Society worked better, they observe, back when society was more racist, so racism must be good. In greater generality, the Woke Left would say that society is made of oppression and that’s why it’s terrible, so we need to overthrow oppression. The Woke Right would react and reply that society is made of oppression and that’s what made it work, but we lost that in the name of tolerance so we need to restore oppression to stabilize society.

The Woke Right response then goes on to justify a racial hierarchy with themselves on top by observing the problems equity programs cause and blaming it on the minorities rather than the programs. They further justify it by saying racism is normal and natural as the now-obvious “reverse” racism of the other groups demonstrates. Therefore, there’s not just reasons to be racist (it’s natural), but it was apparently holding society together (it’s good). Same energy, opposite direction.

Based on Woke Origin

In pursuit of establishing their fundamental worldviews, both Woke Left and Woke Right write elaborate fictional histories of their people and countries to justify their ridiculous beliefs (here: about race).

Woke Left tells a story about an idyllic State of Nature in the distant, lost past that was destroyed by the imposition of the majority race and its evil racial ideology. We were all “antiracist” by nature until the white man came along and imposed white supremacy and made us all racialists, and we can return (on a higher level) to this antiracism in the future, bringing with us the developments of the periods of segregation.

The Woke Left’s is not a story about an awful past but a past that was ideal and then forced into a Fall by an evil Alien power, which is awful after that up to the present day. It’s a rotten twist on the story of the Fall in Genesis 3. It’s a story of the alienation of man from his true ideal nature, to which he must return by going forward and through, not backwards. Oppression is the Original Sin of man, and man alone can work to overcome it.

Woke Right tells a similar story, though with important differences. It looks less far back and tells a romantic story about a previous Golden Era when the majority race was much more dominant and the social order was more stable and prosperous for the people who really matter in society (themselves, the “heritage” people). Man does not have an ideal State of Nature but a brutish one (Hobbes) we climbed out of by tooth and claw into fragile civilization, and then the Left burst onto the scene and broke the social agreements that made it all work.

Their story is therefore also one of a Fall by an evil Alien power: the inclusion of the inferior and degenerate, general weakening and corruption, and then the eventual displacement (alienation) of the superior from its heritage inheritance, which is civilization itself. Civilization was progressing (it’s progressive!) away from its brutish Hobbesian State of Nature until it became too tolerant and broke the spells that bound civilization together, and by restoring those conditions, by state force if necessary, and ending the foolish tolerance, we can get back on track toward the Golden Era we (those who count) should already be inheriting. Tolerance is the Original Sin of man, and man alone can work to overcome it. Again, this is same energy (Woke), opposite direction.

This Is an Old Story and a Woke Story

Both of these stories are fantastic distortions that serve their ambitions and ideology. They’re also both stories of Gnostic alienation in the social domain (Sociognosticism), though they choose their starting points, thus solutions, differently and according to their need.

Sociognosticism refers to the old Gnostic alienation myths playing out through sociological means rather than spiritualist means. Rather than an evil creator demon alienating us from our godlike state and from union with the true God, we have various sociological phenomena and forces alienating us from the rightful trajectory our lives should be taking and a demand to transform society into what it always should have been. In Sociognosticism, this will not be achieved through right spiritual belief but through right social and political belief and action.

Obviously, the morals of the stories are superficially opposite but profoundly the same: the Alien must be displaced to return us to our true inheritance. The energy of the Fall must be resisted and, through power, dismantled. Oppression must be defeated by the Woke Left, and tolerance must be defeated by the Woke Right. Then man can return to his true inheritance. Same energy, opposite direction.

Same Toxic Methodology

It isn’t just that the ground beliefs between Woke Left and Right are essentially two takes on the same toxic story structure. Where the “same energy, opposite direction” phenomenon of Woke Right and Left really becomes apparent is in their core methodologies, which are flattening and transgressing.

The transgression part is easy to understand: the existing boundaries enforced by the existing sociognostic powers have to be transgressed in order to open up space for the liberation of the people trapped by them.

The thing is, really understanding the transgression part requires understanding the (dialectical) flattening part. Flattening refers to flattening out the political universe from either Woke view into “our side” versus “their Woke.” It is the sociopolitical extension of the psychopathological phenomenon called “splitting.” Splitting separates the world into all good (my side) and evil (against me) with virtually no middle ground (middle ground is not fully on “my side” so it is “against me”). In early Christian Gnostic terminology, it is called Manicheanism.

From the Woke Left worldview, everything that isn’t Woke Left is somehow Woke Right, no matter how tortured the explanation has to be for how that is. Everyone who disagrees with them is “racist,” “fascist,” “Nazi,” “Alt Right” (Woke Right), or whatever. Their main targets are members of the center left who can be radicalized through the menace of the expansive “Far Right.” Those who cannot be radicalized will be marginalized as “complicit” in oppression. Their worldview is flattened into a Manichean struggle of themselves versus the evil oppressive Other—liberating tolerance versus repressive tolerance. The reason for this is because it’s how the dialectical perspective (Woke conflict model) views the world.

From the Woke Right worldview in reply, everything that isn’t themselves is somehow Woke Left, no matter how tortured the explanation has to be for how that is. “Liberals” and “centrists” and “neocons” and “shitlibs,” “cuckservatives,” “Jews,” and “moderates” are all somehow crypto-Leftists. Their main targets are members of the center right who can be radicalized through the menace of the expansive “Far Left.” Those who cannot be radicalized will be marginalized as too weak (tolerant) to fight effectively. Their worldview is flattened into a Manichean struggle of themselves versus the evil tolerant Other—repressive tolerance versus liberating tolerance. The reason for this is because it’s how the dialectical perspective (Woke conflict model) views the world. Same energy, opposite direction.

Mao Zedong (Communist dictator) split the population into “the people” and “the enemies of the people” in this way. Carl Schmitt (Nazi political theorist, favorite on the Woke Right) called this the “friend/enemy distinction” and claimed it’s the “essence of the political” (that is, what makes politics political in the sense of explaining what politics really essentially is). These are two manifestations of exactly the same thing. The Woke Right adopting the friend/enemy distinction as a reaction to Woke Left Maoism is just another way of picking up Woke Maoism. From a Woke perspective, all politics is just the friend/enemy distinction, whatever they call it. The result is a complete flattening of the world into “(Not Woke!!!) us” versus “Woke them.”

This is the essence of Woke flattening, which can be seen as Sociognostic Manicheanism or as sociopolitical psychopathic splitting. It’s the same thing either way.

From Flattening to Transgression

Flattening is really crucial to properly understanding transgression. The point of Woke transgression is to transgress against the norms of prevailing mainstream society by acting as though you’re defiantly transgressing against the other side’s radical, artificial, imposed (repressive or liberating) norms.

The transgressive activity on the Woke Left is frequently just called “transgression” openly in general (e.g., bell hooks’s Teaching to Transgress). It is also called “queering” in a particularly blatant specific.

Queering means deliberately violating the norms and confusing the bases for all legitimacy through transgressive activities against them. Simple enough. The Woke Leftist will transgress against an overarching societal norm like not having sexual fetish performances in the street in front of children who might even participate during a parade, and they will do so by claiming they’re transgressing a “repressive” norm like “heteronomativity” enforced by “homophobia.” Society has all these (Sociognostic) power dynamics that “straighten people out,” and it is their obligation to disrupt and dismantle those systems to liberate people from that evil alienating power.

If we keep our eyes on the ball, though, the target isn’t “repression.” It’s society. The goal is to break the norms of society to their own advantage. The excuse is breaking free of repression. Almost no one things drag queens and fetish performances in front of children have anything to do with gay civil rights, and most people (gay or otherwise) are horrified and even insulted by such an insinuation. The idea that a child who will grow up to be gay needs a drag performer as a role model rather than a doctor, pilot, lawyer, or businessman is not just absurd and misguided but generally disgusting.

From Queer to Based

The Woke Right does the same thing, misusing the word “based” instead of using the word “queer” to do so.

It’s amusing in a way. The original use of the word “based” as a kind of slang was not from “based in reality and principle and courageous enough to tell the truth against opposition” as every healthy (normal, reality-based, principled) person today understands it. It was a slang term from a rap song about freebasing cocaine and being high out of your mind. The term was adopted to fighting back against Woke Left excesses through the mid-2010s (as when Christina Hoff Sommers, a fairly mainstream anti-feminist, stood up against “third-wave radical feminism” plainly and boldly, got nicknamed “Based Mommy”). It then took on a life of its own, especially among younger right-wingers, who started using it to mean transgressing not just Woke Leftist policing of society but also many norms of polite society itself—in the name of fighting against the Woke Leftism and going further and further.

While the Left says “queering,” nobody says “basing,” but that would be closer to the meaning the Woke Right has for its trasgressive activity. It would also be a perfect parallel to queering, so I’ll use it here to make the point. “Basing,” which could actually refer to getting high out of your mind on (your own supply of) coke, would be transgressing against the norms of society in the name of standing up to the “fake and ghey” demands imposed by Woke Leftism.

We need to keep our eyes on the ball here again. The target of this behavior isn’t merely “liberating” Leftism but also the norms of society that are implicated by Woke logic in enabling the tolerance that took us into Woke Leftism in the first place. The goal isn’t to end Woke Leftism and carry on with society. It’s to transform society on the assumption that society itself is the foundation of Woke Leftism.

This manifests the same way with our earlier example: normal society rejects racism, and Woke Leftism does this awful “antiracism” scam, so being racist on purpose transgresses the norm of society in the name of defiantly rejecting the imposition of Woke Left CRT race rules. The project is being racist and getting away with it, though, transgressing the norms of a society that rejects racism. The Woke Right call doing this “being based,” by which they mean transgressive of society in the name of rejecting Woke Left. If we use the verb form, they’re “basing” like the Woke Left is “queering.” Again, the idea that it's more like freebasing ideological and social cocaine than it is like being based in reality becomes pretty obvious. It’s clearly same energy, opposite direction.

The Anti-Jewish Elephant in the Room

It isn’t hard to come up with examples of “queering” and, if we will, “basing.” We’re swimming in them. You can probably think of dozens, including the weird elephant in the room: antisemitism.

It is transgressing societal norms (queering) for the Woke Left to support terrorist organizations like Hamas and its bid to free “Palestine” of Jews. Mountains of weird arguments can be given about imperialism and Jews being white (usurpers of dominant culture) or colonizers or whatever, and have been, but the point is transgressing society’s norms (queering) against a militant outside religion that wants death to our society too and supporting terrorism. “The issue is never the issue,” David Horowitz told us, “the issue is always the revolution.” The rationalizations are all there to cover up this fact and make it appear they’re transgressing the norms of a repressive, nationalist, racist “Far Right” (that is, “resisting").

It is also transgressing societal norms (“basing”) for the Woke Right to step out of line with conservatives over the last 75 years and hate and blame Israel, Zionism, or Jews for many of society’s problems, including the problem of Woke Leftism. Mountains of poor and corrupting arguments can be given about imperialism and Jews being usurpers of dominant culture or whatever, and have been, but the point is transgressing society’s norms (“basing,” i.e., Woke Right queering) against a minority race and defending a strategic ally in a crucial part of the world. The rationalizations are all there to cover up this fact and make it appear they're transgressing the norms of a Woke or “Jewish” plot to damage “heritage” America and its people (defending and reclaiming).

Summary

Obviously, this could go on and on and on, but the point is obvious enough. From the position of a normal person who already understands Woke Left to some degree, what Woke Right means is “same energy, opposite direction” as compared to Woke Left.

Woke Right is a reaction movement against Woke Left that adopts significant portions of its worldview, tactics, and covetous relationship to power (same energy) and points them toward the project of un-alienating the rightful inheritors of society from the oppressive consequences of tolerance (opposite direction)—engaging a dialectic of tolerance, if you want.

This isn’t hard for people to understand, though. Woke Right is people who think and act like the Woke Left but for ostensibly right-wing goals. It’s as simple as that. The Woke Right is the “right hand of the Left.”

Recently, a friend reminded me that when I hoaxed American Reformer with the Communist Manifesto, I said that the Woke Right has the same “architecture of belief” as Marxism, and he challenged me to give an analogy that clarifies what that architecture is so people can better understand why the Woke Right is “Woke.” 

Imagine we’re in a plane, say like a B-777 or something. We know flying is supposed to be safe and comfortable, and we expect our pilots are competent to provide that kind of air transport. But today there’s pretty severe turbulence, and it keeps coming up. The air isn’t smooth, and the flight is bumpy, even a little concerning. 

Most of us don't think anything about this. We know turbulence happens, and, even though it can be scary or inconvenient (hold on to that red wine they just poured into your little plastic cup!), we don't blame the pilot for the turbulence. Sometimes, though, when there’s a lot of turbulence, more of us might start getting frustrated not with the situation but with the pilots. Maybe they should be doing more. Maybe they’re responsible. 

This analogy will give us insight into the Marxian architecture of belief.

Imagine someone in the plane (our “Marxist”) decides that the pilot really is the problem, so he asks the stewardess to go up to the flight deck and tell him how to fly the plane. He’s never flown a plane before, but he’s flown in them, maybe, or even seen some things about planes or played some video games.

The stewardess, of course, tells him this is not possible. He objects, demanding to talk to the pilot, but he’s rebuffed again. He argues. The stewardess tells him not only is that not allowed and illegal, it’s also impossible. The flight deck door is locked from the inside so that no one can enter, and the pilots are trained not to open it except under certain circumstances.

Our good Marxist is not an understanding person. He does not believe that keeping the pilots protected from passengers, whether dangerous or distracting, is for the good reason of letting them exercise their expertise in flying the plane safely. He thinks the whole setup is a rigged game to keep people who could help the pilot fly better and end the turbulence for everyone out of the cockpit so the pilot can retain his status as “captain” and the power that grants him.

As he argues with the stewardess, the Marxist becomes convinced that she’s in on the game that’s keeping the flight turbulent. She could let him into the flight deck, she just won’t, and she cites all kinds of illegitimate (to him) reasons like laws and locked doors that are all designed to keep him out and therefore keep the flight turbulent and awful for everyone. She doesn’t even care that the passengers are suffering in all this turbulence, and it’s not like the plane is comfortable to begin with! She must be in on it to retain her status as “stewardess” and the power that grants her as part of the “flight crew.”

In his mind, in the Marxian architecture of belief, there are two kinds of people on the plane: the “flight crew” and the “passengers,” and they are intrinsically in conflict that is highlighted by the less-than-ideal circumstances of turbulence. To him, there is a system of rules, regulations, norms, expectations, and “reasons” why the flight crew gets to be in charge and, ultimately, fly the plane, and the passengers do not have any input into the way the flight is conducted, no matter how turbulent or uncomfortable. But the whole point of the flight is to take the passengers where they are going, so it’s really their flight, not the flight crew’s. The flight crew is alienating them from their status as the raison d’etre for the flight and the primary sufferers of the flight’s unpleasant conditions.

So he starts thinking to himself that he could actually get into the flight deck and seize control of the means of flying if he really wanted to. It isn’t impossible, and legalities are just social fictions, and no one can say why it matters that he “doesn't know how to fly a plane.” He knows there’s turbulence, and he knows what being on a flight is like, and it sucks. He also knows the flight is only flying for people like him. He’s entitled to a say, if not control.

He realizes he could actually storm the flight deck door if he tried hard enough, or take a stewardess hostage or win her over to his side and get her to call into the cockpit for them to open it from the inside. So he could get in. It would just take a kind of violent revolution (storm the door and break it down), “revolutionary terrorism” (take a stewardess hostage), or a certain Gramscian “boring from within” with a defecting stewardess or two (create a counter-hegemony within the stewardess class).

He realizes there’s a problem here, though. The other passengers.

The problem is that they’ve been brainwashed by the pilot, the stewardesses, who are there “for your safety,” by the law, society, “common sense,” and a belief in the “realities” of the complexity and difficulty of jetliner aviation, etc.. They would thwart him in storming the door or even from taking a stewardess hostage. If he wanted to convert some stewardesses, these other brainwashed passengers would also likely object and certainly wouldn’t help. They have a false consciousness about the true nature of the flight situation. (Some of them might even be praying for smoother air or God’s Hand on the flight, thus distracting them from the full appreciation of their circumstances.)

The problem in the Marxist architecture of belief is that the other passengers, who are actually sane, have been brainwashed into the “flight crew’s” ideology, whereas he has “woke up” to the “critical awareness” of his flying situation and the dismal turbulence it’s causing. He realizes he needs to wake up the other passengers so they have a critical flight consciousness like he does: the pilots and stewardesses, laws and policies, norms and common sense are all conspiring against them in a mutually reinforcing way to keep the passengers out of the cockpit and their hands off the means of flight production.

There’s a lot more of us passengers than there are of them controlling the plane and its cabin, he reasons, and if I can get enough of the other passengers on board to help, a few more than that more to at least support the hijacking, and the rest to be too afraid to do anything heroic to stop us, there’s no reason we, the passengers, can’t take this plane over and get the turbulence to end for the good of all passengers. Even the pilots and stewardesses will benefit because they suffer from the turbulence too.

Everyone just needs to understand that the captain just wants to be “captain” so he can be special and important and remain in control of the flight situation (which he also benefits from with a handsome salary and a ton of status and good reputation he doesn't deserve). The rest of the flight crew is the same. They’re responsible for alienating the passengers from a smooth and enjoyable flight experience in the name of “safety” and “law.”

This is the Marxian architecture of belief. The plane is society; the flight controls are the “means of flight production”; the flight deck is the government and elite strata of society; the captain and co-pilots are the capitalist class; the flight attendants and maybe first-class passengers are the bourgeoisie benefiting illegitimately; the regular passengers are the proletariat; the turbulence is society not functioning perfectly and sometimes uncomfortably or dangerously; laws, norms, etc., and “flight safety” are the ideology maintaining the two-tiered, illegitimate system.

Other analogies are made clear above, like to the Marxist methods of violent revolution, revolutionary terrorism, and Gramscian counter-hegemonic activism (long march through the institutions).

The Marxist in the seat is likely to believe that the flight crew is corrupt and certainly not doing their best with the situation. He believes the pilot could be flying a smooth flight if he wanted to and just thought more about the passengers, but he doesn’t, thus revealing a “contradiction” in the system and ideology of “flight safety” that impugns the pilots and flight crew. The stewardesses, he believes, are enforcing this status quo not for safety but because of the status it confers to tell passengers they cannot fly the plane or bother the pilots in flight.

Thus, we can understand how Marxists think.

So, what about the Woke Right? How would their mindset fit into this analogy?

Our Woke Right passenger would also experience the turbulence and conclude that it isn’t just part of the circumstances of flying that day (weather) but a deliberate failure by the pilot and crew. The problem, he would surmise, is not that the flight crew is hoarding status away from passengers like him but was actually made a pilot for illegitimate reasons. Maybe he’s a DEI hire, representing the degradation of standards necessary for safe, comfortable flight, and that’s the reason for the turbulent flight.

He would also conclude that there is likely someone on the plane who could advise or replace the pilot and relieve the passengers of their suffering in the turbulence, someone who would have been a pilot, perhaps, if not for the degenerate system that gave them the pilot they have. Of course, that pilot would also recognize the purpose of the flight is to move the passengers, and he would also identify with them.

Like his Marxist counterpart, he would likely conclude that the stewardesses and cited laws, regulations, and “common sense” were arranged to secure and maintain the illegitimate regime that places inadequate pilots in positions they obviously don’t deserve, and the other passengers just “don’t know what time it is.” The whole system is against him too, just for different reasons. Maybe this plane won’t crash, but it might, and sooner or later one will.

If he conferred with our hypothetical Marxist, he would agree on many points of the problem, but he would disagree that it it is some passenger, in the generic, who should be flying the plane. That’s part of the problem. He’d agree that much of the Marxist’s analysis is right and that his general tactics for taking over the plane are generally correct, but that his solutions and appeals are wrong. There are natural elite representatives among the passengers who have taken more flights or played more video games than other people, perhaps, and they have a greater claim than the other passengers to fly the plane and run the cabin—even than the degenerate and corrupt pilots and flight crew.

Our good Woke Right reactionary, then, would agree with everything that makes the hypothetical Marxist “Woke” about the flight circumstance though not about some details of the specific nature of the problem or its solution. The analysis and solution would be, as we might say, “same in kind but different in degree,” where the kind in question is still “Woke.”

Thus we can understand the Woke Right mentality as being essentially Woke though with different particulars.

Forged in centuries of custom and compromise, liberalism now stands on trial, accused of engineering its own destruction—a charge that echoes ever louder amid the thunder of political turmoil and the gloom of cultural doubt. Few deliver this verdict with more solemn conviction than Patrick Deneen, who claims the mantle of conservatism as his basis for doing it. Though he acknowledges liberalism’s historic gains—religious liberty, constitutionalism, prosperity—he ultimately insists that liberalism has not merely faltered, but triumphed so catastrophically that it has obliterated the very foundations it once sought to secure. Liberalism, Deneen contends in parallel to Karl Marx, contains intrinsic contradictions such that by succeeding, it upends itself and “has failed.”

Let there be no confusion about the mission of these words. This essay is a challenge hurled against Patrick Deneen’s indictment of liberalism—a declaration that he has gravely misunderstood the very soul of what liberalism is, wrongly condemned it as a failure, and stands revealed not as a conservative, but as a revolutionary whose creed is the antithesis of the tradition he claims to defend.

Deneen writes, “I consider myself a conservative. I believe in preserving goods that have been inherited.” Yet his vision, as I will argue, contradicts that very conservatism at its deepest roots.

For this is not an abstract dispute. The fate of liberalism determines whether millions will live in freedom or under the boot of tyranny. What is at stake is nothing less than the liberty, dignity, and safety of ordinary human beings.

I contend that liberalism is not dead. It lives on in the habits and moral instincts of ordinary people, even when elites betray it. Deneen conceives of liberalism as an abstract, universal ideology—a blueprint of rules and rights meant to yield freedom wherever imposed. And indeed, some liberal theorists have spoken in precisely such terms. But that is not the liberalism I defend.

What I defend is not liberalism as a purely rational scheme of rights and rules, but as a covenant—a moral inheritance passed down through habit, memory, and mutual obligation. It is this covenantal liberalism that Deneen misunderstands.

And it matters profoundly that we understand the difference.

Patrick Deneen presents his indictment of liberalism in two books: Why Liberalism Failed (2018) and Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future (2023). In these works, he argues that liberalism is a tower built upon fundamental internal contradictions, and that revolutionary “regime change” toward a post-liberal order is not merely necessary but inevitable—not because liberalism has failed, but because it has finally arrived at the destination toward which it was always destined. As he puts it: “I don’t want to violently overthrow the government. I want something far more revolutionary.”

Yet here we see Deneen’s first—and perhaps deepest—failure to grasp the true nature of liberalism. What he perceives as an internally contradictory doctrine doomed to destroy itself is, in truth, a living tradition: the unfolding of a vibrant and successful culture across centuries. The thinkers whom Deneen would impugn as architects of liberalism were not inventing it wholesale, but giving language to a tradition they rightly cherished. 

That they did not capture every detail with perfect precision is largely beside the point. Liberalism is not a schematic doctrine to be imposed from above; it is a moral inheritance, shaped by lived experience and sustained by custom and character. It is easy for a doctrinaire mind to mistake this living tradition for mere ideological abstraction—but a mistake it remains in full.

Liberalism did not descend upon the world as a doctrine devised in pamphlets. It rose gradually and organically from the common life of the English-speaking peoples—from parish councils and local juries, from tradesmen who refused tyranny, from families who insisted that conscience stands higher than kings. By liberalism, I mean not a rigid ideological design, but a way of living: a delicate balance of mutual restraint and shared expectations, blending freedom with responsibility, individual rights with mutual respect, and law with moral obligation. It is the covenant of trust that binds individuals to one another and each to the shared rules that preserve freedom. What Deneen calls “our inherited civilized order” is not the victim of liberalism—it is liberalism’s cradle and wellspring.

This misunderstanding sits at the heart of Deneen’s indictment. He sees liberalism as a brittle abstraction, imposed upon societies from above, rather than as the organic fruit of cultural inheritance. He portrays liberalism not as a tradition growing from a people’s life, but as a scheme inevitably doomed to implode under the weight of the internal contradictions found in early attempts to articulate it that are fundamentally mistaken for organized doctrine.

What Deneen presents therefore more resembles Karl Marx than Edmund Burke or John Selden, nevermind Jefferson or Madison. And this is not merely a theoretical resemblance; it is the intellectual DNA of revolution resurfacing beneath a conservative cloak.

Far from being a truly conservative critique, Deneen’s analysis closely mirrors, in structure if not in lineage, the arguments of the revolutionary Left. It echoes Marx’s conviction that every social order is merely an ideological façade concealing domination and resonates with the critical theory of Horkheimer and Adorno, who likewise insisted that liberal principles contain the seeds of their own destruction. Deneen sees in liberalism little more than the infamous “dialectic of Enlightenment.”

There’s an even deeper irony in the counsel of post-liberals like Patrick Deneen. For all his invocations of tradition and conservative pieties, he stands not merely adjacent to the radical Left—but firmly within its philosophical ranks. This is the first point where Deneen’s critique betrays its own revolutionary impulse. A truly conservative mind would not place such faith in reason to dissect an entire political order and declare it bankrupt. Conservatism begins with humility toward the limits of human understanding—and with gratitude and reverence for the imperfect inheritance that time has delivered to us. It recognises that the moral and social order is not a schematic to be redrawn, but a living inheritance too intricate for reason alone to command.

Though Deneen sometimes speaks of patient rebuilding through local community and cultural renewal, his diagnosis ultimately leads him to advocate for deep systemic change—a vision that, however gradual its method, imagines society can be fundamentally refounded once the old order is swept aside. In this, he commits the very error he condemns: believing that reason can design anew what time and custom once built. That is not conservatism. It is radicalism in conservative dress.

This revolutionary impulse is not new. It precisely mirrors earlier moments when intellectuals attempted to strip institutions of their living context and rebuild society from abstract principles. Thomas Paine loved much about England’s liberties but believed that reason could isolate their true essence, purify them, and erect an entirely new social order. Edmund Burke saw that impulse for what it was: a leap from reverence into revolution. To strip institutions of their inherited context and reduce them to abstract axioms is to sever them from the living soil that gave them meaning—and that is how admiration for tradition turns, inexorably, into zeal to replace it.

And history shows what follows: not merely shattered ideas, but shattered lives.

For Burke, true conservatism meant prescription: profound caution about razing longstanding institutions, even when they harboured deep flaws. He taught that an institution might be corrupted yet still remain the vessel of wisdom accumulated across generations—and that to destroy it entirely was to gamble with forces reason cannot foresee. To put the point in contemporary context, he would look upon Harvard today and see much to lament, yet still seek to save it, precisely because it embodies memory and continuity no revolutionary blueprint can replicate. To call for total demolition because reason imagines something purer is the same arrogance that drove the Jacobins to bloodshed. But Deneen goes further. He does not merely wish to reform or replace corrupted institutions—he pronounces the entire liberal order a failure. That is not caution. That is a radical call to tear up the very roots of the political and moral inheritance that has shaped the modern West. There is nothing conservative about declaring the whole edifice beyond repair.

Deneen’s radicalism brings his betrayal of Burke, and of conservatism, sharply into focus. If Burke could revere Britain in the eighteenth century—a nation then beset by poverty, faction, and foreign threats—precisely because its liberties and institutions had evolved prudently out of the public consciousness, how much more would he revere America today, a nation vastly wealthier, freer, and more powerful relative to its rivals than Britain ever was in his time? For both Britain and America, liberalism was a political project: an ongoing effort to secure freedom under law, to reconcile liberty with order, and to build institutions that reflect the character and habits of the people. It worked imperfectly for Britain then, amid all its hardships, and it works still—indeed, more perfectly—for America now, flawed though it remains. Burke did not love Britain for standing still, but for having changed in ways rooted in custom and the genius of its people. He called for reform, never revolution. Thus, if what Burke said was true for Britain then, it is truer still for America today. And in this light, Deneen’s call to replace liberalism wholesale stands as a betrayal of the very conservative tradition he claims to inherit.

Deneen has crossed the point of no return: from cautious reform to sweeping revolution, from conservative stewardship to reckless obliteration.

Let us not be fooled by the conservative trappings, then. Deneen is no heir to Burke, but a man echoing the logic of the Brazilian Integralists—a radical 1930s movement spun off from a Catholic doctrine that rejected liberal individualism and sought to remake society into an organic national community—as well as the Jacobin Left, though he has apparently discovered these ideas from first principles, despite his conservative loyalties. His is therefore a principled conservatism that got hijacked by despair.

His arguments are not the measured cautions of a conservative mind; they resound with the same cries that fueled the French Revolution, the Bolsheviks, the Integralist Uprising, and the critical theorists of the Frankfurt School, which he has studied. He condemns liberalism not merely for its failures, but for what he sees as its very anthropological core: the vision of the human being as an unencumbered chooser, severed from tradition and community—a creed, he believes, so fatally flawed that it must ultimately be torn down to make way for something new.

By calling Deneen “revolutionary,” I do not mean he advocates mobs in the streets or immediate violent overthrow. He is, in fact, against such things. Rather, I mean it how he, himself, does. Namely, I mean that his intellectual project proposes a foundational break from the liberal anthropology and institutions that have sustained Western societies for centuries—a break that, whether gradual or sudden, is revolutionary in its nature and consequences. His vision of “regime change” is indeed “far more revolutionary” than violent overthrow, for it seeks a fundamental reconception of the entire Anglo-American tradition into something wholly new.

The Archimedian point of his error, though, is that he misunderstands what liberalism truly is and what threatens it. And it is precisely this misunderstanding—and how widely it is shared—that gives Deneen’s argument its dangerous power.

The philosophical systems Deneen critiques—many rightly deserving scrutiny for their excesses—did not emerge from nothing. They were efforts to give language to customs already shaping human hearts and laws long before theorists arrived to explain them. Liberalism’s great insight was not that history had ended, but that the duty and struggle to preserve liberty never ends—and that each generation must renew the moral habits that keep it alive.

This confusion finds a ready audience among contemporary conservatives who, too, have lost touch with the essence of their own living tradition. After decades of talk radio, television, and social media echo chambers repeating that the sins of the radical Left are the sins of “liberalism,” many now regard Deneen’s conflation as more truthful than any clear articulation of their own heritage. Though Deneen often attempts to distinguish between liberalism and radical Leftism, he nonetheless indicts what he calls “general liberalism” for the failures born of ideological extremism. Tragically, his devoted followers march with him into counter-radicalism, all the while believing themselves to be resisting it.

Deneen’s confusion deepens when he blames liberalism for the betrayals committed by those who abandon its principles as well as those who deliberately sought to subvert them. He writes:

“…such a political condition was ultimately untenable, and that the likely popular reaction to an increasingly oppressive liberal order might be forms of authoritarian illiberalism… For liberals, this would prove the need for tighter enforcement of a liberal regime, but they would be blind to how this crisis of legitimacy had been created by liberalism itself.”

And it is here that his critique grows most insistent—and most dangerous.

Here Deneen performs a rhetorical sleight of hand. He condemns as liberal those who act in ways he himself brands illiberal. He names the rebels as loyalists, the violators as guardians. But if their actions are illiberal, then they are not truly liberals at all, no matter what they call themselves.

This confusion is foundational for Deneen. As he writes, explaining his appearance on Bari Weiss’s Honestly podcast to discuss Why Liberalism Failed,

“For me, however, the most striking aspect of the debate was our respective differences in views about the wellspring of contemporary ‘wokeness.’ For Bret Stephens—and, I suspect, Bari Weiss—progressive wokeness is an aberration from good, old-fashioned liberalism. What I attempted to convey to both of them, and to her audience, was that the key elements of ‘wokeness’ arise not from some successor philosophy, such as ‘cultural Marxism,’ as most classical liberals wish to claim. Rather, I argued, it is the natural and even inevitable outgrowth of liberalism’s core feature of transgression.”

Deneen largely grounds this conclusion on a single point drawn from Herbert Marcuse’s notorious essay in critical theory, “Repressive Tolerance,” wherein Marcuse engages with John Stuart Mill on the limits of tolerance. Mill, however, was grappling with one of the most difficult tensions in any liberal system—not laying down a rigid liberal doctrine. Marcuse exploits this point of stress to advance his own illiberal arguments, just as Deneen, in turn, seizes upon Marcuse to support his own indictment. By portraying culturally Marxist illiberalism as the inevitable endpoint of liberalism itself, Deneen completes his dialectic and arrives at the conclusion he always sought: that liberalism is fatally flawed and irredeemable.

As a result of this misplaced blame, Deneen continues from his earlier remark:

“Nearly every one of the promises that were made by the architects and creators of liberalism has been shattered. The liberal state expands to control nearly every aspect of life while citizens regard government as a distant and uncontrollable power… The economy favors a new ‘meritocracy’ that perpetuates its advantages through generational succession…”

This pattern runs through Deneen’s entire critique: he mistakes the failures of people and institutions for the failures of the traditions themselves. The system becomes corrupted, and he blames liberalism as the culprit. But these maladies—the swelling of state power, the concentration of wealth, the invasion of privacy—are not the offspring of liberal traditions. They are their betrayal.

Liberalism was never an instruction manual for technocrats. It does not prescribe surveillance states, nor does it sanctify an elite hoarding privilege. Liberal traditions gave birth to constitutional limits, to freedom of speech, to independent courts, and to local governance. These are the very instruments designed to restrain precisely the abuses Deneen decries. To blame liberalism for the acts of those who violate its spirit is like saying steel is the cause of rust, condemning medicine for the crimes of quacks, or blaming bridges for those who dynamite them.

But the damage is not merely rhetorical. The collapse of liberalism would mean the silencing of dissent, the persecution of conscience, and the crushing of lives under regimes that know neither restraint nor mercy.

Deneen insists:

“Liberalism created the conditions, and the tools, for the ascent of its own worst nightmare, yet it lacks the self-knowledge to understand its own culpability.”

No, it did not. What is true—and what is a fair criticism—is that some liberals became cowardly, complacent, naively convinced that all ideas would abide by the rules of civility if merely granted space in a pluralistic society. They forgot Karl Popper’s warning—that tolerance must sometimes refuse entry to those who would annihilate it, lest open societies be devoured by totalitarians posing as mere dissenters. But that is not proof that liberalism inevitably devours itself. It is proof that liberty requires courage and vigilance.

To bolster this vision of inevitable collapse, he leans on a familiar intellectual crutch.

Deneen’s argument gathers momentum when he claims that liberalism’s triumph led inevitably to a kind of universal arrogance—a belief that history itself had ended, and that liberal democracy would henceforth march uncontested across the globe. Here, his critique leans on a single, oft-misunderstood text: Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man (1992). Yet Fukuyama’s thesis was never a hymn to perfection. It argued that with the collapse of communism and fascism, liberal democracy emerged as the most viable ideological framework—but with a cautionary note. He warned that citizens living in a purely materialist, rights-based order might experience spiritual restlessness and even seek new ideological certainties in forms of authoritarianism or populist fervor. In this sense, Fukuyama foreshadowed precisely the rise of thinkers like Deneen—men who mistake liberalism’s unfinished work for fatal failure and call for replacements that remain abstractions, because no real alternative stands ready to take liberalism’s place.

The tradition of political liberalism—from Burke to Tocqueville to Isaiah Berlin—has always been marked by tragic realism, not triumphal dogma. Deneen’s portrayal, then, is a misstep: it presents liberalism as if it proclaimed itself complete and eternal. But the real lesson of The End of History is the opposite: liberal democracy, by itself, is never enough and demands renewal through moral and cultural life.

To cast liberalism as a naïve creed of universal triumph is to fight a phantom. It is to burn down a scarecrow while the real inheritance of liberal societies stands weathered but still upright. The tragedy is not that liberalism imagined itself eternal and invincible. The tragedy is that too many forgot how hard-won and easily lost its blessings truly are—Deneen among them.

Those who would torch liberalism in a fit of despair ought to name the darkness they mean to unleash in its place.

Deneen writes:

“Citizens of advanced liberal democracies are in near revolt against their own governments, the ‘establishment,’ and the politicians they have themselves selected as their leaders and representatives…”

Here again, he finds only signs of collapse where there are also signs of life. He sees citizens restless and indignant and concludes that liberalism is breathing its last. Yet in truth, such discontent is not the death knell of liberal societies—it is proof that they still possess breath enough to protest, to debate, and to demand redress.

It is true that citizens of liberal democracies grow weary of distant elites, of unresponsive bureaucracies, and of systems that seem captured by privilege. But such anger is not evidence of liberalism’s demise. It is evidence that free societies remain awake. The very act of railing against corruption, of assembling in squares and speaking in defiance, is the lifeblood of the liberal tradition. It is the spirit of a people who have not yet surrendered to silence. Authoritarians see a protest and cry “collapse.” Liberals see the same crowd and think, “Tuesday.”

For the right to assemble, to speak, to demand justice is not merely theoretical—it is the shield behind which human beings keep their dignity and hope.

When Deneen describes citizens turning against establishment power, he is describing the deepest liberal instinct: to hold authority to account, to resist new aristocracies, to protect the rights of the many from the encroachments of the few. The tumult he laments is not chaos for its own sake—it is the righteous turbulence of a society that remembers it was born to speak freely and to correct its course when justice falters.

The crises Deneen describes are real. Liberal societies are in peril precisely because too many have forgotten the civic and moral foundations upon which liberty rests. Yet the presence of protest, of public indignation, of open dissent, is not proof that liberalism has collapsed. It is proof that the inheritance of a free people still breathes—and still remembers how to fight for itself.

Even in our weariness, liberal societies remain freer, safer, and more just than any order humanity has ever known. We could drift in decline for decades and still grant our peoples a life more humane than that offered by absolutist thrones, theocratic zeal, fascist banners, communist tyrannies, or the savage tumult of warlord rule. To cast aside our hard-won inheritance for some gleaming new ideological experiment is not prudence—it is reckless oblivion.

This, then, is covenantal liberalism—a tradition worth defending not merely for its ideas, but for the covenant of human dignity and freedom it sustains.

The kind of society Deneen longs for—a place of mutual care and inherited wisdom—is not some undiscovered country waiting beyond liberalism’s frontier. It is the very soil from which liberal societies once grew. Our task is not to abandon liberalism, but to remember how it was cultivated, why it flourished, and how to mend it where it has begun to split.

To be fair, Deneen’s longing is not for chaos but for a society more rooted in virtue, community, and shared moral horizons. Yet the question remains whether his path leads toward those goods—or toward new radicalism wearing traditional dress.

So I say this: If Patrick Deneen believes liberalism is doomed, let him—and those who agree—name the alternative that could match its moral inheritance, its record of human dignity, and its capacity for peaceful self-correction—preferably one that doesn’t involve powdered wigs, pitchforks, or radical ideological abstractions.

Because the most telling thing of all is that Deneen finds fatal flaws in a system that, for all its imperfections, has delivered more liberty, dignity, and peace than any other in human history—yet can offer only vague hints at alternatives. And in this, he joins a long line of radicals, from the English Puritans to the French Jacobins to the Russian Bolsheviks to the Brazilian Integralists, who condemned flawed orders as dead while offering no clear plan for what should replace them—only to discover that wreckage is easy, but building something better is hard.

Let us be clear: Deneen is not defending conservatism as it has long been understood. Though he names himself a conservative, he wields the intellectual tools of radical critique—tools that historically belonged to the revolutionary Left—to tear down the covenant he claims to revive. In so doing, he risks replacing a flawed order with a far more perilous void.

This is the very heart of my charge: that Deneen misunderstands liberalism, wrongly condemns it as a failure, and harbours a revolutionary impulse utterly alien to true conservatism.

It is true that liberalism must remember its moral culture to endure. But only liberalism offers the space, the freedom, and the humility necessary for that remembrance to occur without tyranny. History shows that lament is easy, and demolition easier still. Yet the patient work of reform belongs to those who remember that liberty and virtue need not be enemies.

This is covenantal liberalism—the tradition I stand for.

Until then, the call remains clear: let us repair, not raze—for the covenant endures, and the story of liberty still has more plot twists than any ambitious pamphlet by Patrick Deneen.

And let us remember why we make this stand. Because liberalism is not merely an idea—it is the hard-won inheritance that shields human beings from tyranny. Because it has not failed, and is not finished. Because those who condemn it as dead misunderstand what it is, misread its trials as its grave, and mistake their own radical fervour for wisdom. Let them name what they would build in its place. For in the absence of that answer, we stand with liberalism still—for the sake of those yet unborn who will one day judge whether we kept faith with freedom.