The ‘woke Right’ is nothing new Liberal neutrality was a fantasy

The white woman in the headshot has shortish hair, and her smile reveals a row of bright, corn-fed teeth. Her LinkedIn bio indicates that she is a public defender in a Midwestern red state. And that she uses “she/her” pronouns, as if it weren’t perfectly obvious that she is a woman. A classic “hicklib” — that is, a mental denizen of the progressive coasts, marooned in America’s vast and politically benighted hinterlands.

I happened upon the portrait on my “X” (formerly Twitter) timeline this week, because the woman in it had been canned from her job. A popular Right-wing account crowed about the termination, and thousands of X users reposted the news, often accompanied by messages like, “Bye, loser” and “FAFO” (“fuck around and find out”). 

The fuck-around that led to the find-out: the woman in the photo told her small group of followers on social media that she was happy Charlie Kirk had been killed. The conservative activist had “spread harmful rhetoric about marginalised communities and actively worked to strip those communities of their rights”. His assassination, she went on, meant there would be “one less man with power and influence teaching our youth that these beliefs are OK”.

Hers is one of numerous cases of the kind: a ferocious eruption of Right-wing anger targeting Left influencers and ordinary people who greeted Kirk’s killing with chilling callousness or even outright celebration (and some who merely dared to criticise his views, even as they lamented the assassination). Many have lost jobs — not just celebs like Jimmy Kimmel, but random teachers and nurses and lawyers — while others have faced haranguing and harassment. 

The frenzy has drawn comparisons with the aftermath of George Floyd’s killing in Minneapolis that led to a similar canonisation of a victim and hysterical hunt for heretics who doubted the new public cult. Cancel culture is back, we’re told, only now it’s practised by the Right — which is much less shy about using state power, where progressives mostly relied upon corporations, colleges, tech platforms, and other “private” institutions to quash dissent. 

The woke Left, it’s tempting to conclude, has given way to the woke Right. Yet there is something too easy about these 2025-is-2020-redux takes. This is because most of the original critiques of the woke Left were themselves shallow and ahistorical. Some sharper lens is needed to understand these febrile moments, and to defuse the threat they pose to basic civic friendship and social stability.

There is truth to some of the parallels being drawn, to be sure. I’m particularly struck by AI-generated illustrations and videos showing Kirk being embraced by Jesus, or hanging out above the heavenly clouds with JFK, Martin Luther King, and other civic martyrs. These recall the religious imagery used to sacralise 2020’s holy victim, not least a pietà showing the Virgin Mary weeping over Floyd, displayed at a chapel at the Catholic University of America.

But the question we should ask about this mirroring is: so what? 

Liberal and conservative critics of wokeness have long harped on the religious dimensions of the movement. And it’s true that the woke Left had a credal aspect, a theology upheld by various liturgies: original sin (racism and colonialism); confession of said sin (white activists literally kneeling before black people); a priestly hierarchy (led by the likes of Ibram X. Kendi); the shattering of old icons (Jefferson, even Lincoln); and the persecution of heretics.

But noticing all this wasn’t exactly an earth-shattering discovery of the anti-woke mind. The religious undercurrents of modern secular ideologies has long been a staple of cultural criticism. A classic of the genre is the French liberal intellectual Raymond Aron’s The Opium of the Intellectuals, which shed light on the messianic dimensions of Communist ideology. 

Nearly two centuries earlier, the counterrevolutionary thinker Joseph de Maistre noticed that the Jacobins couldn’t rest content with ransacking churches, attacking priests and religious, and restricting public expressions of Catholicism. They also installed statues to the Goddess of Reason, who supposedly guided their cause. 

For a time, an atheistic Cult of Reason gained traction, with several Catholic cathedrals and churches repurposed to serve as its “temples”. This movement, however, was short-lived. The arch-Jacobin Robespierre soon replaced it with the state-sponsored Cult of the Supreme in Being, a more theistic substitute religion that exalted civic duty and belief in a creator.

The iconography and liturgical quality associated with wokeness today merely reaffirm Edmund Burke’s observation, prompted by the events of the French Revolution, that “man is by his constitution a religious animal”. To be shocked by the sacralisation of Floyd in 2020 or Kirk in 2025 is to betray ignorance of this basic dimension of human normality: that we members of the species Homo religiosus can’t help but erect altars, whether it’s to God or an ideology or, indeed, the suffering planet Earth.

Ditto for the mania for smoking out heretics, which elicited so much hand-wringing from critics of Left woke-ism in the movement’s heyday, who would describe themselves as “actually liberal, what it used to mean”. The linguist and New York Times columnist John McWhorter, for example, wrote a whole book to explain this phenomenon as a betrayal of Enlightenment values and a reversion to pre-Enlightenment unreason and barbarism.

Yet as I noted at the time, the author displayed a serene unawareness of how Enlightenment values generated persecution (cancellation by guillotine, if you will); and equally, of how the world’s great religious traditions have served, at their best, to  harmonise belief with reason and philosophy — and to regulate a community’s expression of its values. The “real”, “old-fashioned”, “Enlightenment”  liberals are too prone to write off all aspects of religion as fanatical and mindless — ignoring the labours of Aquinas, Averroes, and Maimonides — and then to class Left wokeness as an instance of religious superstition.

It will be even easier to do the same thing in regards to the “woke Right”, since the conservative iteration of the movement is often married to the precepts of more traditionally familiar faiths (hence, those AI pictures of Kirk hugging the Lord Jesus). 

But what such analyses miss is the fact that all culture is, to some extent, cancel culture. The word “culture” has roots in cult (the Latin cultus), which in turn comes from colere, meaning care, cultivation, tending to a garden or an ancestral hearth: acts that involve, among other steps, pruning, rejection, throwing out. It takes an especially pinched view of cultural history to imagine that the only people “guilty” of doing such things were those mad witch-burning medievals — and racial progressives in 2020 or Trumpians in 2025.

In reality, not even the most supposedly high-minded, coolly disinterested liberals can avoid some degree of cancellation (or excommunication, if you insist). The liberal philosopher John Rawls, for example, had his infamous footnote excluding from the realm of public reason “any comprehensive doctrine that denied this right [abortion]”, i.e., easily a good chunk of the world’s population. More sensibly, even anti-woke liberals generally exclude overt racists and antisemites from their mastheads and conferences.

The point is this: if you noticed a religious and cancel-culture aspect to 2020’s Left woke-ism, and you now see the same forces at work in Charlie Kirk mania, it might be worth wondering if these movements merely instantiate fundamental, enduring and necessary human qualities. Not an abnormality or deviation from the ordinary course of things, but only the latest expressions of deeply normal patterns. I, as a practising Catholic, find comfort in my tradition’s acknowledgment of these necessities, and the centuries of wisdom and scholarship brought to bear on them. 

This isn’t to discount the achievements of modern democratic pluralism: the way it allows multiple expressions of these cultic impulses to share the same community in relative peace; the procedural protections it affords heretics and dissidents; and the demands of public reasonableness it imposes on all — even if, as Pope Benedict XVI insistently argued, the moderns have defined “reason” too narrowly to mean only that which can be scientifically measured and mathematically expressed, leaving out the great metaphysical questions.

Still, if the passion to sacralise holy figures, invent ersatz cults, and persecute dissidents continues to erupt with regularity in democratic, pluralist systems like America’s or Britain’s, then it suggests that some fundamental itch isn’t being scratched.

Is it the case that, having dethroned the authoritative religious traditions, the ones that spent millennia grappling with the tension between faith and reason, Western societies are now menaced by more unreasonable faiths, a more pitiless breed of Homo religiosus? Or could it be that our present social and economic arrangements are so brutally competitive that many people, especially the striving professional classes, are compelled to use quasi-religious victimologies to attack rivals and bolster their own position — whether the religion in question is Black Lives Matter, gender ideology, or cornpone MAGA evangelicalism?

Which brings us back to the woman in the photo. That smile, those words, her repellently cheerful disposition towards murder — these things stir two sets of incommensurable reactions in me. The first is bad memories from half a decade ago, when people like her had the whip hand and scourged those even slightly to their Right: mainly liberals and Leftists who rejected full-spectrum 2020-style progressivism, but also conservative friends who lost jobs and book deals. I also remember the well-founded anxiety that my own book contract with one of the big imprints was one woke campaign from being cancelled. “Fuck around and find out” — now others have the whip hand.

This bundle of dark recollections and vengeful yearnings is met by countervailing intuitions, however: pity, or something like it, for that dumb fanatical smile; the conviction that we can’t go on treating each other this way. I can’t give myself credit for this generosity, however. It arises from my Christian faith. It’s had its own fanatic eruptions across two millennia, to be sure, but I see no other way. 

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