The Woke Right and America’s Cultural Revulsion

The Left’s woke ploys to twist our history, deface our heroes, and demoralize us are well-known in certain quarters. But now we face a new threat from the right. Some rightists have assimilated the strategies and reflexes of the Left while thinking they can use them to serve their agenda.

“Scatter the old world, build a new world,” 1967 Chinese propaganda poster by the Central Art Academy Blockprint combat group (photo: chineseposters.net).

In China Marine, Eugene Sledge reported his surprise when he learned the Chinese middle class was embarrassed by their country’s Confucian heritage. Sledge, whose prior book With the Old Breed provided the content of much of HBO’s The Pacific, was sent with his marine division to China after Japan surrendered in 1945. In Beijing, in the shadow of the Forbidden City, he learned Chinese people had become disillusioned with their history and culture. That poisoning of their national memory set the stage for Mao’s triumph. China’s cultural revolution was prepared by their cultural revulsion.

Step one to take over a country is to sully its founding myths. It demoralizes the people. In the case of China, that is tragic. Few nations have a more glorious history and culture than ancient China, the inventors of paper, printing, gunpowder, silk, the wheelbarrow—a culture characterized by scholarship and meritocracy. Confucianism is a wisdom tradition, akin to Solomon’s in the Bible. The Analects reads like the biblical book of Proverbs. China’s imperial examination system allowed bright peasants to ascend to wealth and power, achieving the Chinese dream. Few nations deserved a “cultural revolution” less than China. But the forces of cultural Marxists (or its equivalent), in their headlong pursuit of “progress,” soured the Chinese on their heritage, paving the way for Mao’s murderous regime.

George Orwell said, “The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.” If the Marxists were able to disillusion a populace with such a glorious history, could the same happen—or be happening—to us?

Before the rise of the Communist Party in China, the seeds of disenchantment with Confucian culture were planted during the turmoil of the nineteenth century. The Opium Wars and the “century of humiliation” at the hands foreign incursions and bullying (like the carving out of Hong Kong) spurred angst in the once proud empire. Marxists (or other “progressives”) took advantage. They denounced Confucianism for, among other things, its exaltation of the bourgeoisie literati at the expense of the field laborer. Confucianism was wrongly accused of producing a rigid hierarchy, in order to make Chinese history fit the narrative of Marx’s theory of the oppressive bourgeoisie. In reality, Chinese culture had been remarkably meritocratic and fluid, allowing families to rise from peasantry to wealth, or vice versa, within a couple of generations. For example, Zhang Jian (1853–1926) was born into a poor peasant family in the late Qing Dynasty. Despite his destitute beginnings, Zhang excelled in his studies, passed the imperial examinations, and eventually became the Minister of Industry and Commerce and Minister of Agriculture and Forestry. His rags-to-riches story shows how Confucian China allowed great social mobility and influence within imperial China, contrary to the poisoned, Marxist historical narrative to the contrary. But Confucian meritocracy is not compatible with Marxist claims of “egalitarianism,” which were, in fact, a disguise for its totalitarianism. So, the Marxists engaged in big-lie gaslighting by baselessly claiming that Confucian culture was the Chinese equivalent of Western bourgeoisie culture. That way, the Marxist paradigm could work, at least in the imaginations of the propagandists. Hence Confucianism’s emphasis on filial piety—the prominence of familism—was charged with stifling individual expression. (That it was replaced with a Maoist system that utterly crushed individual expression is testimony to the empty promises of Marxism.) Then the May Fourth Movement in 1919 saw intellectuals and youth, tinged with Marxist and similar ideologies, challenging traditional norms. In their impulsive rush for everything modern and new, the champions of progress allied themselves with anyone who shared their enemy, traditionalism. The enemy of their enemy (what they had become convinced was the stultified culture of Confucianism) was their friend, they thought. They would think that right up until they were shot in the back of the head, starved in a dysfunctional commune, or had a dunce cap plunked on their head and were paraded through the street. But the craze for “progress” and the reflexive distrust for all the old ways was fertile ground for the appeal of Mao’s Marxism. Hence the tragedy of Mao’s revolution, which wrecked one of the world’s great cultures and killed up to 80 million people, granting Mao the rank of the world’s greatest murderer.

IT'S HAPPENING HERE

In 1935, Sinclair Lewis looked across the Atlantic to Germany and imagined how a similar reich might appear in America in his dystopian novel, It Can’t Happen Here. Today, we should look across the Pacific to China and see how a similar cultural revulsion is indeed happening here.

Like China, even more so than China, the USA does not deserve to lose its glorious history—its mythos—to the ravages of leftwing historical distortions such as the 1619 Project, claims of “genocide” against native peoples, or the obsessions about slavery and racism. Yet over the last generation, we have lived through such an attempted cultural revolution. It has so increased in ferocity over the last decade that we’ve given it a name: wokeness. It’s the last stage to disillusion us with our history and culture in the hopes that we’ll be willing to opt for a new one.

The Left’s woke ploys to twist our history, deface our heroes, and demoralize us are well-known in certain quarters. But now we face a new threat from the right. Some rightists have assimilated the strategies and reflexes of the Left while thinking they can use them to serve their agenda. They think they’ve “done the reading,” obtained the gnostic insight, and woken to the truth about American history. They tell us the American revolution was an unjust war; the constitution was a mistake; our approaches to the natives were always rapacious; the Civil War was entirely unnecessary; Lincoln was a tyrant; the USA was conned by the “warmonger” Churchill into entering World War II; our prosecution of that war was marked by “war crimes,” like bombing Dresden and Hiroshima; Brown v. the Topeka Board of Education was an error; America’s intervention in Vietnam wasn’t just incompetently led but was maliciously intended; the “postwar consensus” was a dark plot to harness our power to further “globohomo,” and so on. Like their leftist mirror images, the purpose of all this historical fiction is to make us hate our country so we’ll be willing to tear it down and start anew, with one more to their liking. For conservatives—pseudo, semi, or alt—that ideal America was lost somewhere in their imaginary past, maybe at the Constitutional Convention, maybe at Appomattox, maybe with Woodrow Wilson or the New Deal or more recently. Meanwhile, the leftists, like Kamala Harris, who share their tactic of deconstructing our history, see the ideal America in the future. To get us to accept their brand of the future, they have been poisoning our national memory. The disaffected pseudo-conservatives who tell—or buy—their deconstructed narrative of America feel so alienated from the United States as it now is that they are willing to take a wrecking ball to the whole myth. But they are the far-left’s useful idiots.

“Cooper has published zero historical books or academic articles. That’s zero, as in less than one. But Carlson presented him as an expert, telling us that the USA was a puppet of Churchill, the real “villain” of World War II.“

The fountainhead of pernicious anti-American propaganda is slavery. The torrent of anti-American propaganda from this fount flows in two directions. The first is The 1619 Project and its ilk. In August 2019 The New York Times set out to revolutionize American history by reframing the origin of the nation not as the Declaration of Independence signed in 1776 but with the arrival of the first African slaves in Virginia in 1619. Sixteen-nineteen was not just a landmark year in American history but, they declared, “the country’s very origin.” We should appreciate their honesty in exposing their agenda so explicitly. Immediately, those with even a superficial knowledge of American history should notice some problems. Sixteen-nineteen is twelve years after the founding of Jamestown. Further, Virginia had no bearing on the founding of Plymouth and the rest of New England, “the 1620 project.” The colony, though not exactly thriving, was established and surviving for a dozen years without slaves. But accuracy isn’t the point. Disillusionment is. So the conclusion is supposed to be that America is, as Matt Walsh queried, “inherently racist.” Racism is, so we’re told, America’s “original sin” and just as in the Christian doctrine of original sin, there’s no natural cure. There must be a death and a resurrection of something new.

The other direction of propaganda underpinned by American slavery is the flood of skewed history required to justify it, along with the Southern entity that was incarnated in order to preserve it. This is “Lost-Cause” Southern history, particularly regarding the Civil War, which they seriously call “The War of Northern Aggression.” When I say “they,” I mean people like me, like I used to be. I’m a descendent of Confederate soldiers, a former member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, who gather, occasionally, to exult in the glories of their lost cause to toasts of buttermilk. Non-Southern Americans tend to look on that with amusement, consistently underestimating how much distorted history is mainstreamed through Southern Lost Causism. The South was invaded, they say. Lincoln was a “tyrant,” they insist, because he suspended habeas corpus. (Never mind that the constitution specifically allowed that during “cases of rebellion.”) The problems of federal government as it exists today, with its astronomical debt, growing intrusiveness, imposition of “progressive” values, like the widespread use of abortion as birth control, are laid at the feet of Lincoln and the Union cause. Even slavery itself is softened, like by claiming “slavery produced in the South a genuine affection between the races that we believe we can say has never existed in any nation before [the Civil War] or since.”[1] The podcaster Jon Harris repeated this same sentiment as recently as August 19, 2024 (c. 7:50ff.). The conclusion they intend is that the Civil War wasn’t worth it; that it did more harm than good; that it “poisoned race relations”; and that public school propaganda has misled us into believing the traditional narrative so as to maintain the Union myth. (Wilson, Wilkins, and now Harris, should consider that what really poisons race relations is slavery.) The unintended conclusion (which they are inadvertently contributing to just as assuredly as the most outlandish claims of The 1619 Project) is that America has been corrupted at its core. They’re teaching just as effectively as woke revisionist history that the foundations are shattered.

The great thing about the American myth is that it is largely historical. Sure, our heroes have blemishes. But most of our myths are real. Pilgrims really did come to Plymouth to worship God, planting the seeds of the 1620 Project, the font of real American greatness. A decade later, John Winthrop, while en route for America, really did declare that the colonists were going to plant “a City Upon a Hill.” Two generations later, Increase Mather really wrote of those founders, “It was a great and high undertaking of our fathers when they ventured themselves and their little ones upon the rude waves of the vast ocean that so they might follow the Lord into his land.” America really did have a Christian founding. Washington really was great; he might not have chopped down a cherry tree and refused to tell a lie, but he really was a man of integrity. He really did ride his horse between advancing British lines and faltering American ones to rally his troops at the Battle of Princeton (January 3, 1777). He really did step aside from the presidency, creating a precedent for the peaceful transfer of power. Abraham Lincoln really did save the country and free the slaves; he had to resort to extreme measures but he did it so that a country of the people, by the people, and for the people, might not perish from the earth. Far from being a “tyrant,” Lincoln allowed a free and fair election in wartime, in 1864. He won. And contrary to what the Lost Causers say, slavery was not going away without a fight. As Robert W. Fogel proved in his Nobel-prize winning research into slavery—misinterpreted entirely by Doug Wilson, Steve Wilkins, and Jon Harris—Southern slavery was 36 percent more efficient than free Northern farms. Propelled by slavery, the Southern economy grew at twice the rate as the that of the North in the decade prior to the Civil War. Fogel concluded that if the Civil War had not been sparked when it was—when the South (I repeat for the Lost Cause propagandists and their “War of Northern Aggression” inanity) fired upon a US military base—the South would have continued to outpace the North, adapt slavery to industrialization, and been unconquerable if a later civil war had broken out. Slavery was on the ascendancy at the outbreak of the South’s Insurrection of Racist Enslavers, or IRE (which we should be calling the United States’ battle against the traitors who tried to destroy it). Likely, the South, if it hadn’t been stopped when it was, would have spread slavery indefinitely. The Lost Causers will say I’m poorly educated, indoctrinated by the traditional Union narratives foisted on me by public school textbooks. They’ll insist that they’ve “done the reading.” They’ll say, like Wilson and Wilkins, that they’ve read Fogel and learned slavery wasn’t so bad. But they haven’t really done the reading. I know because I was Fogel’s teaching assistant, entrusted by him to present the lecture on slavery, grading his students on how well they understood him. I’d give Wilson, Wilkins, Harris, and other Lost Causers an “F.” A stake must finally be driven through the heart of the as-yet undying Lost Cause, anti-American propaganda.

Recently, Tucker Carlson conjured another ghost of rightwing anti-American propaganda, that of World War II. He hosted Darryl Cooper, a blogger, whom he called “the most important popular historian in the United States.” Cooper has published zero historical books or academic articles. That’s zero, as in less than one. But Carlson presented him as an expert, telling us that the USA was a puppet of Churchill, the real “villain” of World War II. Notable historians, like Victor Davis Hanson, quickly shot down such prattle and wondered why Carlson was spending his independence from corporate media platforming it. Letting Putin ramble on about ancient Russian history is one thing. He’s a legitimately important person, even if we wish he wasn’t. But Cooper is not, and his disgrace to revisionist history was even more malignant. He seeks to tarnish one of America’s greatest contributions to world civilization, thereby, wittingly or not, alienating us from our own history.

World War II may have been, as Churchill said, Britain’s “finest hour.” But for America, it was even finer. The USA really did put down two fascist enemies at once and was so relatively humane and just that both German soldiers by the hundreds of thousands as well as Japan as a nation hurried to surrender to Americans rather than fall into the hands of the alternatives. At the end of the war, the USA really did exclusively hold the atomic bomb, the world there for the taking, yet chose instead to let peoples be free. And contrary to the poisoners of US history, the men who decided to drop atomic bombs on Japan really did make the best decision, as Eugene Sledge himself testified: “The A-bombs saved my life, saved my buddies’ lives, and most decidedly saved the lives of millions of Japanese, civilian as well as military.”[2] The USA really did stare down the Soviets at Berlin, at Vietnam, at Reykjavík, and Reagan’s challenge to tear down “this wall” was ultimately realized. When Iraq invaded Kuwait, the USA really defended its treaty partner. We really did create a global “Pax Americana.” Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew celebrated it in his farewell National Day Rally speech (1990). When China threatens Taiwan, the US sails their warships between them, telling them to settle down. When Israel is attacked by Hamas barbarians, the US sends bombs and vetoes anti-Israel UN resolutions. Todd Beamer really did say “Let’s roll” and, with the other heroes of United 93, thwarted the terrorists. Meanwhile, we really did ensure justice at home for the descendants of slaves, and now we can do so for the preborn.

Let’s heed the warning of the demise of Confucian China. Enough of the faux-conservatives judging America as not worth saving, smearing our heroes as “tyrants,” war criminals, or dupes of “villains.” Enough of the woke rightists who justify slavery so they can decry the United States for abolishing it. They haven’t done the reading. They don’t know what they are talking about. They are the dupes of the far-left’s cultural revolutionary tactics. And they are wrong.

ENDNOTES

[1] Douglas Wilson and Steve Wilkins, Southern Slavery: As It Was (Canon Press, 1996), 38.

[2] Eugene Sledge, China Marine (University of Alabama Press, 2002), xiv.