Of the innumerable insults directed at Donald Trump and his supporters, the one that seems to get under their skin the most is “woke right.” The epithet describes the Trump movement’s tendency to counter left-wing illiberalism with a mirror-image replica. “The woke right,” my colleague Thomas Chatterton Williams explained earlier this year, “places identity grievance, ethnic consciousness, and tribal striving at the center of its behavior and thought.” Right-wing wokeness appropriates techniques of the illiberal left-wing variety—language policing, historical revisionism, expansive claims of ethnic oppression—but deploys them in the service of the MAGA coalition, above all white Christian males, rather than racial and sexual minorities.
Some embittered critics of wokeness have depicted this movement as an in-kind backlash, a “meet the new boss, same as the old boss” response to a decade of illiberalism. In fact, the woke right predates the woke left. I happened to find a textual source, perfectly preserved in time.
In 2011, Pat Buchanan published Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025? (Checking in from the year 2025, I can report that the answer is a tentative yes.) Revisiting the book today is illuminating for two reasons. One is that Buchanan, as many analysts have noted, invented Trump’s shtick. The right-wing populist ran two unsuccessful campaigns for the Republican nomination, followed by another as an independent candidate, on proto-Trumpian themes of protectionism, isolationism, and nativism—themes that are elaborated at length in Suicide of a Superpower. (Buchanan announced his retirement from political commentary last year.)
The other is that Buchanan’s manifesto precedes the emergence of the pejorative left-wing sense of wokeness, which began in about 2014. And so it shows very clearly that the woke right, while drawing strength from the backlash to wokeism, does not require the woke left’s existence as a rationale.
If you’re looking for identity grievance, ethnic consciousness, and tribal striving, Buchanan has 400 pages of it. His core argument is that white people should band together to hold off the rising tide of nonwhite people who threaten to outnumber them and use their voting power to redistribute resources downward. This belief inspires both Buchanan’s model of international relations and domestic politics. Globally, Buchanan argues for a rapprochement with Russia, which he praises for having “implored the white nations to unite.”
Domestically, he castigates George W. Bush–era Republicans for “pandering to liberal minorities,” whom he sees as incapable of social or economic equality with the white majority. Buchanan urges the party to use nativist themes and other conservative messages to draw in more white voters, a strategy Trump later employed.
In some ways, Suicide of a Superpower strikes notes similar to those found in generations of conservative screeds: fretting about the pace of social change, expressing affection for the good old days—“in 1952, a Coke cost a nickel as did a candy bar,” Buchanan recalls nostalgically—and worrying that the country might not survive. But the specific elements of Buchanan’s complaints reveal the nearly unrecognizable context in which he was writing, which preceded a decade and a half of dizzying cultural change.
“Woke” ideas about race and gender emerged at the end of the Obama era, partly in opposition to Barack Obama’s relatively staid liberal values. In 2011, when Buchanan was writing, the concepts that would come to be referred to as wokeism were still confined to the fringes of academia and left-wing activism, and they were so politically marginal that Suicide of a Superpower does not reference them.
Instead, Buchanan denounces Obama-era liberalism, with its emphasis on social equality and individual rights. He rails against gay marriage, along with “individualistic hedonism,” the “Playboy philosophy,” and “MTV morality.” Tellingly, he does not even pretend to cast himself as a defender of free speech. To the contrary, he expresses indignation that liberals are permitted to insult traditional values, including Christianity, while conservative critiques of Islam and homosexuality are deemed taboo. Buchanan cites a 2009 episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, in which Larry David accidentally urinates on a painting of Jesus, setting off a wacky chain of events where a Catholic woman mistakes the urine for tears, as an example of intolerably offensive content. Without putting it quite this way, Buchanan implies that hate speech (against groups he identifies with) is not free speech.
“Another hallmark of wokeness,” writes Williams, “is an overriding impulse to contest and revise the historical record in service of contemporary debates.” That, too, describes Suicide of a Superpower. Buchanan pours derision on the Obama-era historiography that depicted American history as an imperfect, stop-start march toward a more perfect union that would finally live up to its founding ideals.
The left dissented from Obama’s optimistic analysis, seeing American history as a long and bloody reprise of racism and exploitation with no clearly defined trajectory. Buchanan adopts a similar analysis, except that he presents the qualities derided by the left as necessary, even praiseworthy. America is “the product of ethnonationalism,” he asserts without judgment. “No American war was fought for egalitarian ends, postwar propaganda notwithstanding.” Likewise, “no one would suggest the Indian wars were about equality. They were about racism and subjugation.” Lincoln, he reminds the reader, was a white supremacist. As a descriptive account, Buchanan’s history hardly differs from what you’d encounter in a text such as the 1619 Project or Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, only with the moral valence of the events flipped.
Buchanan’s interest in world events runs far deeper than Trump’s. It is difficult to imagine the sitting president ever having developed strong opinions on such subjects as, say, Austria’s cession of South Tyrol to Italy in 1918. (Buchanan remains angry about it.) And yet the general thrust of Buchanan’s belief system is strikingly familiar. He insists that all nations care only for their self-interest; international cooperation is a facade; America’s allies are parasites; and the one country with whom we should be seeking closer ties is Russia.
His domestic worldview is similarly Trumpian. The threat Buchanan discerns is not censorship or radical anti-Americanism. It is the notion that America is or can be a place in which anybody who isn’t straight, white, and Christian has an equal claim to citizenship. He does not pose as a defender of liberalism or equality but as a proud champion of hierarchy.
Trump promised to restore free speech and “forge a society that is color-blind and merit-based.” Instead, he has attacked free speech, pressured Harvard to create quotas for MAGA fans, and built the most non-meritocratic administration since the invention of the civil service, if not before. Some Trump supporters may find themselves surprised at this right-wing version of wokeness. But in the precursors to Trumpism, it was there all along.
The post The Godfather of the Woke Right appeared first on The Atlantic.
