Writing in Chronicles about his “alleged collaborators in infamy,” Paul Gottfried skewers the tendency to lump together all arguments with which one disagrees, and to treat them as if they were all essentially one and the same argument by dint of the fact that one opposes them all. For example, the “woke left” and “woke right” are lumped together as two types of “woke.” Critics of “woke” lump together paleoconservatives (the traditional right whom they classify as woke right) and critical theory Neo-Marxists (whom they classify as woke left). Thus, we are to understand that there is no real difference between the anarcho-capitalist Hans-Hermann Hoppe and the Frankfurt School Marxist Jürgen Habermas, and no real difference between the paleoconservative intellectual historian Paul Gottfried and the journalist Tucker Carlson. To their critics—who regard themselves as the center of all things—all these men are just different types of “woke,” though some fall to the left and others to the right. Gottfried explains:
They even try to group all the baddies to the left and right of the establishment by embracing a once-popular notion that I heard from my college instructors in the early 1960s. According to these teachers, the “extremes come together” and there is more that these extremes have in common with each other than with those nice people in the middle who reject them.
As Connor Mortell explains, these critics are “operating as if usage of the same or similar machinery means that the groups have the same or similar meaning.” Further, they treat political labels as if their meaning (that is, the meaning based on the critics’ own definition of the label) is agreed upon by everyone as the universal standard. For example, these critics label themselves “classical liberals,” but their ideas differ to such an important extent from those expressed by Ludwig von Mises in Liberalism in the Classical Tradition that the term “classical liberal” cannot be treated as a matter of universal consensus among its own adherents. A key controversy among contemporary classical liberals concerns the concepts of nationalism, the integrity of national borders, and the legitimacy of border control. As they see it, nationalism and border control impede free markets and individual liberty. By contrast, Mises’s concept of classical liberalism does not attempt to answer questions of nationhood. Mises emphasized that liberalism is a material doctrine that does not attempt to address the metaphysical needs of a people, such as the sense of belonging (or not) to a nation:
Liberalism is a doctrine directed entirely towards the conduct of men in this world. In the last analysis, it has nothing else in view than the advancement of their outward, material welfare and does not concern itself directly with their inner, spiritual and metaphysical needs.
The sense of nationhood or loyalty to a nation is one that emerges in large part from people’s “inner, spiritual and metaphysical” values, and is not based purely on an analysis of material welfare or economic outcomes. Rothbard highlights this point in “Nations by Consent”:
The “nation,” of course, is not the same thing as the state, a difference that earlier libertarians and classical liberals such as Ludwig von Mises and Albert Jay Nock understood full well. Contemporary libertarians often assume, mistakenly, that individuals are bound to each other only by the nexus of market exchange. They forget that everyone is necessarily born into a family, a language, and a culture. Every person is born into one or several overlapping communities, usually including an ethnic group, with specific values, cultures, religious beliefs, and traditions. He is generally born into a “country.” He is always born into a specific historical context of time and place, meaning neighborhood and land area.
The aim here is not to explore the Misesian definition of nationalism, but simply to highlight the point that classical liberalism cannot tell anyone whether, how, or to what extent, to care about his family, language, culture, ethnicity, or religious beliefs, nor how to express that devotion, or the importance to accord to it. Many people care deeply about such matters, while others want to live in a world without nations and without national borders. Those who insist that loyalty to nation is “woke right” call themselves the only “true” classical liberals but, ironically, it is they who have rejected a core principle of classical liberalism—the scope for philosophical and moral disagreement on precisely such matters. The gatekeepers who have anointed themselves as the arbiters of classical liberalism presume this ideology to have a specific interpretation—their own—which is based on their own vision of social progress. Gottfried remarks: “Our critics have often justified their efforts to marginalize us by citing our stubborn opposition to what they view as social progress.”
This form of social progress is now championed by what Gottfried calls “Conservative Inc.” and includes feminism, genderism, and “the state worship of Martin Luther King Jr.” These, we are told by the gatekeepers, are classical liberal values and anyone who rejects them is some form of extremist—either woke left or woke right.
Gottfried acknowledges that “the notion that extremes touch may be true in some cases.” For example, many people have highlighted the convergence of fascist and communist policies, both of which rely on tyranny to maximize the power of the “total state.” But Gottfried also highlights the differences in these extremes, which are often the opposite of each other:
As a historian, I would never mistake 19th-century conservatives who favored a traditional hierarchical and preferably agrarian society with socialist revolutionaries. Entities that may be equally unacceptable to later historical critics do not become similar in nature by that fact… even a callow youth can realize that not all figures past and present with whom one disagrees were saying or doing the same things. Drawing parallels only works if they show striking likeness. Otherwise, they are clumsy or tendentious nonstarters. Even if I spent a week pondering this problem, I couldn’t explain why the LA hellraisers or the Seattle Autonomous Zone that soared into existence during 2020’s Summer of Love should remind me of the Southern planter class.
Therein lies the difficulty, as what counts as a “striking likeness” rather depends on what one seeks to emphasize. The “centrists” who classify their opponents left or right as “woke” look for similarities in language and form, so that, for example, everyone who complains about “systemic racism” is woke—complaining of racism against black people is woke left, while complaining of racism against white people is woke right. They see all rebellions as similar, so the Black Lives Matter Summer of Love is similar to the secession of the Southern states (they are all just rebellions!). It is perhaps, to a degree, quite natural to highlight what one wishes to see and gloss over inconvenient facts. As Macaulay put it, in reference to this tendency among historians, “Without positively asserting much more than he can prove, he gives prominence to all the circumstances which support his case; he glides lightly over those which are unfavorable to it.” People will of course spin analogies and examples in such a way as to highlight the point they wish to make. But carried too far, anything could be argued to be similar to anything else, and the whole point of drawing upon analogies is lost. Rather than clarifying arguments, they serve to obscure the truth.
Gottfried argues that self-declared centrists—by drawing tendentious analogies classifying their conservative opponents as woke right—aim to ostracize those with whom they disagree, to “throw all their hated targets into the same ‘extremist’ dumpster.” Although they describe themselves as “classical liberalism,” their ranks are filled by progressive liberals of an academic bent who exclude all those who do not already share their own definitional framework. This is a weakness of all forms of progressive liberalism, a point made by David Gordon in his essay “The Problems of Public Reason”—progressive liberalism is “respectful and non-coercive — to those who accept its tenets. Those outside the ‘legitimation pool’ of these accepters do not count.” It is indeed tolerant of dissent, but only among those already within its own ranks. Everyone else is “woke right.”
