A couple of years ago, Leslie Rosenblood of CFIC worried that concentrating on the Woke campaign against Steven Pinker, whom we had just interviewed, would give oxygen to Florida governor Ron DeSantis and a broader assault on gay rights. He saw the “far right” as the more substantive threat to human rights. In a two-party election that logic becomes what Country Joe and the Fish called “disgruntled politics”: you vote for the lesser of two evils. This is not that election. We can define our own program, but where does that place us on the political spectrum or do we need to place ourselves on that spectrum at all?
DeSantis was, and remains, a voice of right-wing Puritan politics in the United States. In the last Republican cycle, his camp even attacked Trump for supporting the inclusion of gay rights in human-rights legislation. That fact is invisible to anyone who needs Trump to be the most extreme right-winger imaginable. Disgruntled politics has no room for nuance.
If we fixate on DeSantis, or on some proverbial Klansman with a post-office box in a dusty town in southern Alberta (a nod, I am afraid, to a familiar political tactic – Tamara Lich who was castigated as a right-wing antivaxxer is from southern Alberta), we look away from teachers and principals in Ontario schools who have been intimidated by activists promoting what journalist Jonathon Kay calls “genderwang.” We minimize the position of British Columbia lawyers such as Carey Linde and Shahdin Farsai, who have faced an identitarian takeover of professional regulation. We would be better served, I think, by showing how identitarian ideologies feed from the same stock and reinforce each other by offering a false choice.
Chris DiCarlo’s observation still holds: we do not need a special campaign against Christian hegemony. Kicking a dying cat is a waste of humanist energy. The electoral strength of Christian conservatives in places such as Florida, Georgia, and North Carolina is not quite a “dead-cat bounce.” The dying animal was reanimated by the oxygen Wokism supplied. Fundamentalists are not suddenly converting new masses to old-fashioned homophobia. They are recruiting people appalled at graphic sexual material presented to elementary students as education, and at the policy of placing intact males in girls’ washrooms and sports. While the religious right is energized by genderwang, the Woke are energized by fear of “Christian Nationalists.” The losers in that false dichotomy are people who still hold Enlightenment values—Pinker, Dawkins, Harris, and the many lesser-known humanists pushed to the margins by fear of the other. Fear of the other is what totalitarians use to justify harsh measures.
The sociology of fundamentalism has not reversed. Conservative churches still draw some members from collapsing mainline denominations, but political entanglement, and earlier still, the hard line on gay marriage, drove many younger evangelicals out. A number of them found a home in Woke language. Wokism then handed its opponents a stick by taking an uncompromising line on the medicalization of gender-distressed children. Those terrible public-relations choices support the view that Wokism behaves less like a coherent political program than like a mind virus that mutates irrationally.
If the phrase “political spectrum” still has any use, and that is debatable, the NEP either belongs on the far left, in the original sense of that term, or not on a political spectrum at all. Historically, the left–right spectrum was used to keep monarchists and reformers from coming to blows in the French National Assembly by seating them to the right and left of the speaker. On the left side were democrats, capitalists, and the people Marx later dismissed as Utopian socialists. They agreed that the divine right of kings was bunk, and they defined progress as based on empiricism and reason as opposed to revealed truth. The spectrum has shifted. Capitalists are now conventionally placed on the Right. But there are also people who call themselves Left while treating some doctrine as an unchallengeable absolute, calling science and reason a “white, male way of knowing.”
The Enlightenment only partly freed individual knowing and volition from religious shackles. Religionists have been trying to put the genie back in the bottle ever since. Similarly, Wokists treats people as members of collectivities defined by identity. In that respect it is not far from the Nazis’ racial taxonomy (Aryans, Jews, Gypsies, Slavs, Orientals, Negroes), giving rise to the view that the political spectrum is a horse shoe. Alternatively, we could view any attempt to enforce a collective will, like that espoused by those who argued for the divine right of kings in a bygone age, as “right wing.” Like Christian fundamentalism, Wokism asserts a revealed truth that may not be tested by science or reason. Authoritarians want professional associations, media, and journals to conform. The Woke follow that script and go further: they seek to police discourse and, through language, thought itself. If successful, they will have re-imposed pre-Enlightenment shackles.
The NEP’s place follows from that history. We stand with individuals over tribes, evidence over revelation, open argument over compelled speech, universal human rights over ranked identities. I do not think this places us at the centre between competing collectivities. The real choice is between us and identitarians. We stand for individuals over tribes, evidence over revelation, open argument over compelled speech, universal human rights over ranked identities. We reject the false choice between Christian nationalism and identitarian capture. Where does that place us on the political spectrum?
