It’s been a rough week in the world of the online intellectual right, which is currently in the midst of two separate yet related blowups — both of which illustrate how the pressures of power are cracking the elite coalition that aligned behind President Donald Trump’s return to power.
The first fight is really a struggle over who should determine the philosophical identity of MAGA, pitting a group of anti-woke writers against a wide group of illiberal or post-liberal figures.
The lead figure in the anti-woke camp, the prominent pundit James Lindsay, has been attacking his enemies as the “woke right” for months. In his mind, this group’s emphasis on the importance of religion, national identity, and ethnicity is the mirror image of the left’s identity politics — and thus an existential threat both to American freedom and the MAGA movement’s success.
In response, his targets on the right — which range from national conservatives to white nationalists — have started firing back aggressively, arguing that Lindsay is not only wrong but maliciously attempting to fracture the MAGA coalition.
This might seem like a niche online fight, but given that niche online discourse has been a major influence on the second Trump administration’s thinking, it might end up mattering quite a bit.
The same could be said about the second fight, which revolves around Curtis Yarvin — the neo-monarchist blogger who has influenced both Vice President JD Vance and DOGE. A recent post by rationalist author Scott Alexander accused Yarvin of “selling out” — aligning himself with Trump even though he had long denounced the kind of “authoritarian populism” that Trump embodies. Yarvin defended himself with some fairly bitter attacks on Alexander, drawing in defenders and critics from the broader right-wing universe in the process.
Each of these fights is telling in their own right. The “woke right” contretemps shows just how deep the divisions go inside the Trump world — between anti-woke liberals, on the one hand, and various different forms of “postliberals” on the other. The Yarvin argument is a revealing portrait of how easy it is to get someone to compromise their own beliefs in the face of polarization and proximity to power.
But put together, they show us just how hard it is to go from an insurgent force to a governing one.
The “woke right” redux
The “woke right” debate first came on my radar back in December, when the anti-woke pundit James Lindsay tricked a Christian nationalist website, American Reformer, into publishing excerpts of The Communist Manifesto edited to sound like a critique of modern American liberalism.
It might seem to make little sense to describe a 19th-century text on resistance to capitalism as an example of 21st-century identity politics. But Lindsay, who sees himself as a right-wing liberal, is using an idiosyncratic understanding of “wokeness” that equates it with collectivism — the idea that the politics should be understood through the lens of interests of groups, be it the proletariat or Black Americans, rather than treating all citizens purely as individuals. Thus, for Lindsay, communism is a form of wokeness, even if the term “woke” postdates Marx by nearly 200 years.
This broad definition also allows there to be right-wing forms of wokeness. Neo-Nazism, Christian nationalism, Catholic integralism, even certain forms of anti-liberal conservative nationalism — all of these doctrines give significant weight to group identity in their understanding of what matters in the political realm. Thus, for Lindsay, they are threatening to American liberalism in exactly the same way as their left-wing peers.
“Woke Right are ‘right-wing’ people who have mostly adopted an identity-based victimhood orientation for themselves to bind together as a class,” he writes. “Like the Woke Left, then, they happily offer the trade-off usually used to describe Marxists: people who will ask you to trade some of your liberty so that they might hurt your enemies for you.”
Personally, I find Lindsay’s definition of “wokeness” so broad that it ceases to operate as a meaningful category (if it ever was one in the first place). But the charge has clearly stung his antagonists on the right, where calling someone “woke” is basically the worst thing you can say about them.
Prominent figures on the illiberal right, ranging from Tim Pool to Mike Cernovich to Anna Khachiyan, shot back at Lindsay — calling him a “grifter” out to undermine the MAGA movement. Meanwhile, Lindsay’s allies, including biologist Colin Wright and Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon, accused them of being the true traitors to MAGA.
The most interesting intervention in this debate is an essay recently posted on X by the Israeli intellectual Yoram Hazony.
Hazony’s main project, the National Conservatism conference, has served as a hub connecting various different strands of illiberalism to each other and to power. Vance, Tucker Carlson, and Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) have all given notable speeches there.
Hazony sees opposition to “wokeness” as the rallying cry that brought disparate strands of the right together. Whatever their philosophical or policy disagreements, they could all agree that the social left needed to be stopped by whatever means necessary. This term is so potent, in his mind, that deploying it in internecine warfare actively poisons the possibility for political coalition.
“The term ‘woke right’ really has outraged many nationalist conservatives,” Hazony argues. “Because of its strong connotations of intentional humiliation and provocation, betrayal, and the destruction of shared symbols, getting this term into wide circulation is the best weapon anyone has come up with yet to make sure that anti-Marxist liberals and nationalist conservatives will truly despise one another and do everything possible to avoid working together from here on.”
In Hazony’s assessment, the emergence of “woke right” as a term is a reflection of a sense of victory. Comparing the 2024 election to the fall of the Berlin Wall, he argues that Lindsay and company are engaged in a kind of triumphalism — convinced that true wokeness has been defeated and thus moving on to purging their enemies on the right from the MAGA movement.
“They think (mistakenly) that the war on ‘woke’ is basically over and that our side has already won. They think (mistakenly) that they can safely turn their attention to trying to remove nationalists and genuine conservatives from whatever positions [of] influence they’ve succeeded in gaining in the last ten years,” he writes.
This power struggle — and that’s what the debate over “woke right” really is — is thus downstream from the sense that the Trump coalition is ascendant.
Is Curtis Yarvin a sellout?
Curtis Yarvin would certainly be on Lindsay’s “woke right” — indeed, he recently weighed in on the debate to denounce Lindsay.
A Silicon Valley entrepreneur who has become famous for his “neoreactionary” arguments for replacing democracy with a kind of corporate monarchy, Yarvin has directly influenced figures like Vance and Peter Thiel.
In the past week, Yarvin has gotten into his own bitter feud — this time, with someone who helped put him on the intellectual map.
The man in question is Scott Alexander, a prominent writer aligned with the rationalist and effective altruist movements covered by my colleagues at Future Perfect. Back in the late 2000s and early 2010s, Alexander wrote a series of pieces attempting to critically and fairly examine neoreactionary ideas. Alexander brought significant attention to Yarvin’s ideas — it’s how I first heard about them — and thus played a role in spreading said ideas outside of the online techie hothouses where they were born.
Alexander, like Lindsay, is a liberal deeply skeptical of “wokeness.” However, his criticisms of the left are far more informed and less fanatical. For that reason, perhaps, he has always been deeply opposed to Trump. And, he believes, Yarvin should be too.
This is the essential argument of Alexander’s blistering new essay on Yarvin, titled “Moldbug Sold Out.” He argues that Yarvin’s arguments about the nature of politics back in the Moldbug days are mutually exclusive with supporting Trump today.
Back then, Yarvin wrote quite a lot about the pathway from democracy to a kind of enlightened monarchy. He proposed that would-be monarchists begin with the creation of a “shadow government,” basically a privately created mock-up of a new political system. This shadow government would be staffed by such impressive and brilliant people proposing such good ideas that the people would voluntarily choose to shift their allegiances.
He proposed this scheme, in part, because he recognized that elected authoritarians had a very poor track record. In his view, the kind of “authoritarian populist” who could win through normal elections would likely look like a Hitler or Mussolini — a violent buffoon who could never be trusted to stand-up the well-meaning despotism of Yarvin’s dreams.
Trump, of course, is an authoritarian-inclined populist who won power through elections — yet Yarvin has boarded the Trump train anyway. Thus, Alexander charges, Yarvin has sold out: betrayed his own beliefs in order to gain access to power.
“The MAGA movement was exactly what 2000s [Yarvin] feared most — a cancerous outgrowth of democracy riding the same wave of populist anger as the 20th century dictatorships he loathed. But in the hope of winning a temporary political victory, he let them wear him as a skinsuit — giving their normal, boring autocratic tendencies the mystique of the cool, edgy, all-vulnerabilities-patched autocracy he foretold in his manifestos,” Alexander writes.
In response, Yarvin posted a long series of tweets on X that basically concede Alexander’s main point: that Yarvin’s current stance contradicts his previous one. Yarvin now believes that he used to be naïve: “a libtard and a coward,” in his characteristically insulting phrasing. The current liberal regime is so awful, so demonstrably dangerous, that the first political task should be its destruction.
“Authoritarian populism,” he writes, “is the only force with the power to end it.”
What the two fights reveal about the Trump era
Both the “woke right” and Yarvin debates revolve fundamentally around power — specifically, how it should be wielded once you have it.
The “woke right” debate is, at heart, about what the ultimate ends of the Trump administration should be. While both sides agree that the “woke left” should be wiped out, they disagree on what an alternative vision should look like. Lindsay and his allies argue for a restoration of some kind of right-wing liberal individualism; Hazony and his camp believe that the task is replacing liberalism with some kind of hazy alternative rooted in religious or ethno-cultural identity.
This debate is taking place on purely abstract grounds — there’s almost never any reference to concrete policy disagreements — but it reflects an assumption that there are very real implications of this argument for the next four years of American politics. Lindsay has repeatedly argued, in tweets and interviews, that the rise of the “woke right” threatens to derail the entire MAGA project and return power to the left.
The Yarvin debate poses a related, but more introspective, question about power: How corrosive is it for intellectuals to be in proximity to it?
Alexander, the most intellectually rigorous person in either debate, suggests the answer is “very.” In Yarvin, he sees someone who he long took seriously as tainted by access — by, for example, Vance citing Yarvin as an influence in a podcast appearance. Yarvin’s own conduct in their debate vindicates his assessment.
Put together, these debates point us to two major themes worth watching throughout the remainder of the Trump administration.
First, how much the administration’s policy choices intensify the fractures in its elite coalition.
Hazony is right that hostility to the left is what brought disparate groups together under the Trump banner. But now, in a world where the administration has to govern, some of those factions are bound to feel like they’re losing or even betrayed.
Second, how warped the right’s ideas become when they go through the policy meatgrinder.
We already saw a version of Yarvin’s original vision of a CEO-monarch in Elon Musk’s reign of terror at DOGE. But that went so poorly that Yarvin himself disavowed it. This embarrassment wasn’t enough to turn him off the Trump project altogether — power still has its lure. But the inevitable difficulty of translating ideas into actual policy, and the specific incompetencies of Trump’s attempts to do so, are already alienating some previously aligned thinkers. Yarvin may not have a breaking point, but others like him may.
This story was adapted for the On the Right newsletter. New editions drop every Wednesday. Sign up here.
