The Insidious Mechanisms of the Far Right’s Attacks on ‘Wokeness’

It’s the final session at ECREA 2022 already, and what an excellent conference it’s been – so good to be back away from Zoom and amongst the people. This final session is on the extreme right, and begins with a paper by Bart Cammaerts on the appropriation and normalisation of fascist, extreme-right discourses by more mainstream right-wing politicians. In the process, struggles for social justice are being abnormalised in turn.

Such normalisation involves a demand side and a supply side: on the demand side, the increasing tensions arising from financial globalisation, cultural diversity, democratic deficits, and entrenched inequalities; on the supply side, internally, strong charismatic leadership as well as organisational strength, and externally, political and institutional contexts, and a mediation opportunity structure.

The mechanisms of such normalisation are the perfection of a war of position by neo-fascist actors: doing slow-paced and grinding politico-cultural work to establish their positions; and the exploitation of mediation opportunities in mainstream as well as social media. This results in a politics of provocation or scandalisation: deliberately provoking scandal in order to generate pushback that enables the perpetrators to position themselves as a victim, often using culture war language like ‘political correctness’, ‘cancel culture’, and ‘wokeness’.

This, however, is also appropriate by mainstream media and mainstream politics on the right, in borderline discourses where civility and incivility meet. The genealogy of ‘woke’ is interesting in this regard: this appropriates 1960s black activists’ language in the US, originally highlighting the pervasiveness of racism in that society; this positive attribute of ‘staying woke’ in the in-group of anti-racists was then appropriate as an indicator of identity by the racist out-group.

This links to a further mechanism, the exploitation of moral panics and deviance: moral entrepreneurs render certain behaviour deviant through stigmatisation. ‘Wokeness’ has been positioned in this way, and is being used insidiously by the intolerant farm right to accuse the tolerant mainstream of society of intolerance, creating horizontal out-groups amongst the people in addition to populism’s usual obsession with the distinction between ‘the elite’ and the ‘the people’.

Contesting such discourses in turn leads to accusations of ‘cancel culture’ where disagreement is not tolerated; this again highlights a deep sense of victimhood being expressed, of course. This also weaponises free speech discourse, by loudly claiming a divine right to offend and making accusations of censorship if that right is denied. Ultimately such claims position racist discourse as a vital contribution to society and democracy.

This effort is also a testament to the relative success of anti-sexist, anti-racist, and other anti-discriminatory struggles, however, and perhaps a sign of the naivety of such activists’ belief that their fight had already been won; identity politics on all sides has its own moral entrepreneurs and aberrations. But most centrally, mainstream media and political actors on the right of politics continue to engage in borderline discourses that mainstream such extreme-right perspectives, and we must continue to fight against this process.