Are Libertarians “Woke” (or is James Lindsay)?

Anti-woke provocateur James Lindsay has set his sights on libertarians.

The Cynical Theories co-author had previously earned comments and retweets when he turned on some of his conservative supporters by accusing a portion of the movement of being the “woke right.” This sparked a lively debate about “woke” really is, and whether a right wing version of it can exist. For Lindsay, wokeness includes a lean into authoritarian ideology and any kind of positive use or appreciation for the views or methods of those who influenced critical theory (such as Herbert Marcuse or Karl Marx).

But at its core, Lindsay defined wokeness, and its “woke right” variant in particular, as the belief that “people in your particular identity group are oppressed and need to band together in your identity group to fight back and take power against your enemies.” In doing so, Lindsay deflates right wing identitarians like white nationalists for being the mirror image of left wing identity politics.

Since the left and right are both playing the same identity politics game, the only real alternative to this bipartisan “wokeness” would be an individualism which rejects collectivism, zero sum thinking, and the machinations of one group over another to “get them” before they “get us.” Or, in a word, libertarianism. One would therefore expect Lindsay to find in libertarianism the best and most consistent application of the classical liberal tradition of individualism, cosmopolitanism, and the rejection of aggressive violence. Unfortunately, that has not been the case.

In a number of recent tweets, Lindsay turned on libertarians like Dave Smith for their criticism of certain Israeli policies toward Palestinians, parodying the term Critical Race Theory to smear Smith as a “Critical Government Theorist.” In an earlier criticism of anarcho-capitalist economist Murray Rothbard, Lindsay defined his “critical government studies” perspective in this way: “government power always seems to maintain itself and is always corrupt.” In other words, as CRT tells a simplistic story about ongoing racial oppression, CGT tells a simplistic story about ongoing state oppression.

In tweets from a few years ago, Lindsay more understandably critiqued Rothbard’s later divergence into building coalitions with non-libertarian paleo-conservatives and how this helped create a path to MAGA. However, Lindsay has since become a believer in Trump’s policies as a bludgeon against the woke left and its America First belligerence. In January, Lindsay tweeted that “we want Trump racking up wins” and “we want peace through strength.”

Just as Lindsay used “woke right” to taunt right wing identitarians and draw a wedge between the mainstream and the alt rights, he is now using “Critical Government Theory” to shame libertarians into joining his camp. The psychological power of this rhetorical tool is not difficult to uncover. Many libertarians have decided that it is not our principles that are central to our cause, but merely our opposition to the left. Therefore, this defining oneself by opposition makes the political right the natural next home. If it turns out that, as Lindsay is charging, we are engaging in a form of left-wing thinking just as much as the “woke right” do, then perhaps we should abandon libertarianism altogether and just become right wing.

I don’t think it’s giving too much away to admit that Lindsay is actually beginning with a valid observation–libertarians have something in common with the left that they don’t have in common with the right. But what is that thing we have in common?

The economist Arnold Kling noted that the left, the right, and libertarians see the world through three different dichotomies. The right interpret most political issues through a civilization/barbarism dichotomy, the left through an oppressor/oppressed one, and libertarians through a liberty/coercion lens. If you spend a few moments comparing these different axes, you’ll notice that the libertarian dichotomy shares with the left a concern that those who have power will harm those who don’t. On the contrary, the right sees the powerful in a positive light–as the gatekeepers and enforcers of civilization as they define it–so they are necessarily suspicious of those who lack it and oppose it, often seeing them as the barbarians at the gates. For libertarians, true barbarity is defined by aggression instead of by divergence from conservative cultural norms.

If the left and libertarians share that concern over and against the right, what makes us different? The difference lies largely in our definitions: what is oppression, what is coercion? The left tends to define oppression very broadly (e.g. ending an entitlement is violence but extortion through taxes isn’t) and therefore are far more open to violence as a means to right perceived social wrongs. Through a left-wing lens, oppression is wide and explains much of the human experience. On the contrary, libertarians define violence in its more strict, obvious sense–as uninvited force against the person or property of another. Another important difference is that libertarians reject the “identity” component of leftism which Lindsay highlighted in his definition of wokeness above. From a libertarian perspective, the initiation of violence against any person is bad, regardless of their identity group–and the state is not an identity marker so much as it is a political force.

In conflating libertarianism and the left, Lindsay is playing a shell game. He hopes that libertarians will be so focused on not wanting to be perceived as left-wing that they will abandon their core libertarian values and join the right. He is counting on a personal dislike of the left to overrule a principled commitment to just because being principled may sometimes mean that we share something (even something superficial) with the left. But any mature person whose political views are built on anything more sophisticated than the connection of pins with string on a conspiracy theorist’s bulletin board will understand that this is not how truth works.

Thus, when libertarian Dave Smith sees Palestinian women and children being blown to bits by Israeli overreach he sees a violation of freedom. When James Lindsay sees the same thing, through the lens of his own right wing identity politics, he sees civilization winning out over barbarism. Anyone who sees the opposite is “woke.” Ultimately, that’s what Lindsay means by woke–seeing oppression as a bad thing. He is not primarily criticizing identity politics, or else he would be critiquing the notion of a Jewish ethno-state. For Lindsay, Israel cannot be woke, despite its foundation on identity politics, for one reason and one reason alone: Israel is powerful and Palestine is not.

This filter of civilization versus barbarism may occasionally tell us something true or useful, but it is useless for allowing us to clearly see reality when the powerful actually do harm the weak. Narratives like Lindsay’s can sometimes help us to connect dots we might not otherwise see, but they are often misleading or restrictive. They stop us from seeing connections we should notice, or lead us to make connections which are spurious and immoral–like the idea that being against state violence is “woke.”