The real threat isn't a 'woke right' – it's conservatism's old demons

Kenan Malik

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Last month, Tucker Carlson, former Fox News presenter and now working independently, invited Nick Fuentes, a neo-Nazi provocateur and Holocaust denier, on to his show for a soft-soap interview. The platforming of Fuentes generated considerable criticism within US rightwing circles. In response, Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, one of America's most influential conservative thinktanks, came out swinging in defence of Carlson, dismissing the critics as “venomous”.

An even fiercer row erupted, with several members of the foundation’s antisemitism taskforce resigning, followed by a number of academics. Roberts was forced to apologise.

The controversy highlighted an ongoing civil war within America’s Maga movement, between those who see themselves as mainstream conservatives, following in Ronald Reagan’s footsteps, and those they label the “woke right”, hostile to liberalism and globalism, and supportive of white identity politics.

Critics of the woke right accuse it of aping the left. “Like its antithesis on the left,” the liberal writer Thomas Chatterton Williams observed earlier this year, “the woke right places identity grievance, ethnic consciousness, and tribal striving at the centre of its behaviour and thought”. James Lindsay, one of the most influential “anti-woke” warriors in America, claims it can be “more accurately understood as revolutionary progressives in conservatives’ clothing.” Many also worry about the conflict crossing over to this side of the Atlantic. “What starts there always comes here,” Times columnist Danny Finkelstein warned last week.