“The woke Left may be the greatest evil of all because I don’t see how they’re going to be defeated, certainly not in my lifetime [and] maybe in the lifetime of my grandchildren,” claims political theorist and intellectual historian Paul Gottfried. The former Horace Raffensperger Professor of Humanities at Elizabethtown College, Gottfried is one of the most important conservative political philosophers alive, especially due to his involvement in helping coin the terms “paleoconservatism” and “alt-right.” Furthermore, Gottfried is the author of fourteen books, and is the editor-in-chief of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture. In the first part of this interview, Gottfried delivers indispensable insights on the pernicious and seemingly insurmountable woke movement.
Richard McDaniel (RM): You’ve argued that woke Leftism is not collapsing, but rather “continues to define American life.” How did the Left acquire cultural dominance? Furthermore, what should be done to mitigate the Left’s harmful influence?
Paul Gottfried (PG): First of all, I think, in answering this question, I would have to stress that I do not see the woke Left as being part of Marxism. I think the socialism is extraneous, although I think the Republican party dwells on that aspect of wokeism because they believe it attracts voters. It also allows them to have access, or so they believe, to people that are woke but might vote Republican for economic reasons. The communists in power were quite conservative. They never would’ve tolerated gays. [They put] gays in concentration camps. They practiced almost a kind of Islamic culture.
I think what drives the woke Left is what I call the “politics of guilt”: The rejection of traditional Western civilization with gender roles [and] social hierarchies. Certainly, Western colonialism, I think, is seen as a blackmark against the entire civilization. Although, from what I can see, the colonialism was not as harmful in its effects as these people would like to believe, and the argument that the European economy depended on nineteenth century colonialism is mostly nonsense. But, as part of the atonement for this, the Third World populations are being admitted into Europe and the United States. They’re encouraged to come because [of] the political benefits from their presence, and the managerial state [wants them] so they can create all kinds of programs to fight discrimination and to provide welfare to these people who they’re letting in.
But, I think there is a politics of self-rejection, if not outright guilt, that drives woke politics. Society is organized into victimizers and victim groups, and then the victim groups are hierarchically structured. There’s some people who are seen as more victimized than other victims. Most people grasp this: I understand if you’re a black homosexual, you’re holding the better card than Jews who complain about the Holocaust, although obviously there’s a certain resentment on the part of the Jewish Left that also wants you to notice Jewish suffering at the hands of white Christians. So, there is a struggle for primacy among the victims, and I think this causes occasional strife among the organized, designated victim groups that are basic, I think, to a woke politics, a woke political culture. But for the most part, they do seem to agree.
The way this works—I think you see this in Minneapolis, New York, London, and other places—is that Muslims, who represent the Third World and are anti-Western, manage to embrace multiculturalism, LGBTQ, and traditional Islamic culture. So, you get someone like your Congresswomen from Minneapolis, who runs around in Muslim garb and appeals to Muslim fundamentalists, but is also a woke Leftist. They can play both cards at the same time. It’s remarkable. Or, people who tell you: “Hitler was a great guy, but we also support the feminist movement or Third World revolutions.” So, what you get are people who are able to span these, what seem to be, chasms between traditionalist ideology or traditionalist worldviews and LGBTQ. This is part of the genius of wokeness, that it can blend together all these victim groups. They will cooperate, as they do in Minneapolis, New York, London, and so forth. Although what we see [as] inherent contradictions, they don’t.
Another thing, which I think is sort-of the genius of the woke movement, is that it is not really anti-capitalist. Crony capitalism is supported. I’m almost inclined toward the Marxist view that this is a trick being used by global capitalism to maintain its power. Somebody like [Zohran] Mamdani gets lots of money from rich people, and the Biden administration was supported by the upper 5 percent of the income curve in the United States. They’re fine with this because they know that the socialist stuff is fake, that if they raise corporate taxes, then they’re going to pass it along to the working class, or to the consumer, and so forth. So, the socialism [within the woke movement], I think, is mostly fake, although it’s played up by our so-called “conservative movement,” which is not very conservative, that we’re “fighting Marxism.” Even Donald Trump has been talked into believing this.
What makes these people dangerous is they’re totalitarians. They will give no freedom. They will crush traditional Western societies—their liberal traditions, their conservative traditions, et cetera—and they’re genuinely wacky. The question for me as a scholar is: “How the hell did these people take power, because they’re lunatics?” I don’t think they’re like the Nazis or communists who seem relatively rational, although they’re evil in power. These people are saying things [that are] crazy like: “There’s 50 genders, but at the same time we have to support Sharia law.” They can get away with this stuff, with these contradictions, because they’re able to somehow blend all these victim groups, so that they work together against white Christian males or whoever they’re trying to replace, or claim to be replacing, or Western imperialism. So, they do well despite, what seems to me, the contradictions and the lunacy. I don’t see them as being at the point of being replaced. I would say that the elections that took place last week—I don’t think it was just about economics because the economics were terrible under Biden, and he did very well in the midterms. I think it is the groups that are organized on the woke Left that all came out to vote: white women, racial minorities, immigrants, and the public sector. Together, they can ensure victory for the woke Left and the administrative state.
RM: You’ve consistently advocated for the paleoconservative position that the “main concern in the US should be cleaning up the moral and political mess that the [L]eft has created” over the last century. In your view, what are the Left’s most destructive policies right now?
PG: I think it’s their cultural policies. It’s their war against white males, [and] their war against white Christians. The lies they tell us about thirty or forty different genders. There’s such things as doing “sex-affirming operations” on minors, [or] on these young people with gender dysphoria. It’s unbelievable what they can get away with. And then, sticking boys in girls lockers, which women think is fine. Supposedly, they care about family issues. They don’t care about this because they’re angry at men, and I think much of what drives the woke Left is hatred: Hatred of males, hatred of Christians, hatred of whites, [or] hatred of what I call the “normies.”
Trying to fight back against it is very difficult because it’s all over the place. I think Trump has made some modest efforts, but I don’t know how you roll this stuff back. I’m being very honest. I think it is thoroughly pernicious. I think it destroys civilization. I don’t know how you [defeat it] because all of the vital institutions (cultural, political, media) are occupied by these people. My wife was receiving Smithsonian [articles]. You pick it up, it’s all woke. I mean, everything they do is social engineering messaging. I don’t even know how you can fight back against this stuff, and I appreciate any efforts by Trump to fight back against it. But, I don’t even know how you get hold of this problem that seems to be so massive.
What I have done is simply try to study how it came about. I’m 83. I will leave it to younger people to decide how you deal with it because it’s massive, and it affects every institution in our society. I’d be happy if we had a serious Right that would fight back against it, here and in Europe. In Europe, I do support the populist Right, but I don’t think they have a majority, and, as an American, the public administration, the cultural [institutions], and the media [are of] the Left. So, it’s going to be an enormous struggle to defeat this. I think what could easily happen in Europe is you could have a Muslim-majority there very soon, certainly given the disproportionate birthrate of Muslims and Christians in these countries. The Muslims may solve the problem. They’re going to govern with Sharia law when they take over. But, it’s something that the anti-fascist Left has given us. Fascism is minor, but Nazism may be a great evil. Communism is a great evil. The woke Left may be the greatest evil of all because I don’t see how they’re going to be defeated, certainly not in my lifetime [and] maybe in the lifetime of my grandchildren.
