In an extremely normal turn of events, a far-right magazine recently published an essay consisting entirely of edited passages from The Communist Manifesto.
American Reformer is a prominent evangelical magazine — one whose politics are extreme enough that calling it “Christian nationalist” might be a bit mild. Its co-founder, Josh Abbotoy, once called for an authoritarian to seize power — a “protestant Franco,” as he put it — in order to “reestablish order” in America.
Last week, we learned the magazine had been the victim of a prank. James Lindsay, a prominent right-wing pundit, had submitted the aforementioned adaptation of Marx and Engels’s work and gotten it published. The essay’s publication, per Lindsay, is proof that the far right is basically the same as the far left: that it is, in his words, part of a “woke right” corrupting conservatism from within.
The Manifesto prank was fairly silly, as is the “woke right” concept in general. But it points to something bigger and more important: a struggle over what exactly the Trumpist revolution in conservative politics is supposed to accomplish, and how philosophically ambitious its war on the American status quo ought to be.
Fundamentally, this a version of the same fight the right has been having since Donald Trump entered the Republican primary back in 2015: What defines “true conservatism?” Yet the difference is that Lindsay, American Reformer, and almost all of the other right-wingers who eventually weighed in on this are all Trump supporters. This is less about whether Trumpism should be the reigning ideology of the right than about what Trumpism actually stands for.
And the tensions between the sides here show just how unstable the Trump coalition truly is — and how divided it may become when forced to make actual choices while in power.
When Lindsay revealed the hoax in a December 3 essay, he made the stakes plain: His aim was to vindicate the concept that his enemies inside the broader right-wing tent are best described as “the woke right.”
These enemies include, broadly speaking, a series of radical right-wing factions of a more religious or collectivist bent, such as Protestant Christian nationalists, Catholic integralists, and white nationalists. Lindsay believes that they threaten the American project in much the same way as the left — treating citizens not as individuals but as groups to be pitted against each other.
Calling something “woke” on the right is to delegitimize it. And Lindsay wanted proof that his enemies deserved the insult.
“I suspected that the so-called Woke Right really is Woke; many people disagreed; and I wanted to test that hypothesis instead of arguing about it to very little effect,” he writes.
So he picked a prominent target — American Reformer is a well-known magazine on the Protestant far-right — and got it to publish an adapted version of what Lindsay considers the most “woke” text in history.
“I figured there’s nothing more definitively Woke than the Communist Manifesto, so I think we can … get on with calling them the Woke Right after this,” he writes.
Of course, The Communist Manifesto was written nearly 200 years before the word “woke” came into wide use. And many modern Marxists are deeply opposed to the social justice left, which they see as a form of shallow identity politics that distracts from the more fundamental class struggle.
But Lindsay, like many on the right, deeply believes that “wokeness” is a species of communism (he wrote a bestselling book titled Race Marxism). This is because he sees them as structurally similar doctrines, in that both define society by antagonisms between oppressed and oppressor groups. Lindsay terms Christian nationalism a “woke right” doctrine because it sees the world in a similar fashion. The only real difference, he claims, is who they treat as the oppressed and the oppressor.
The edits to the Manifesto are designed to underscore this point — to show how easy it is to take a left-wing worldview focusing on group conflict and restructure it to fit the Christian nationalist narrative of a white Christian uprising and liberalism.
Like much of Lindsay’s output, this claim is more than a little simplistic. Take his adaptation of the Manifesto’s famous preamble about the “specter” of communism “haunting Europe”:
A rising spirit is haunting America: the spirit of a true Christian Right. Moreover, all the existing powers of the American Regime since the end of the Second World War have aligned themselves against it and its re-emergence from the shadows of American civic life, politics, and religion—the Marxist Left and its neo-Marxist “Woke” descendant, the liberal establishment, the neoconservatives, and their police and intelligence apparatuses.
Sure, the texts are similar: Both argue that the status quo political establishment is aligned against an insurgent alternative. But any ideology that sees itself to be the enemy of the political status quo will make such claims. When you swap out enough nouns, the actual meaning of the text changes so much that it’s hard to say the ideas remain all that similar.
Despite the problems with Lindsay’s approach, it generated a huge response among online conservatives — with prominent voices weighing in on both sides.
Chris Rufo, the right’s leading anti-woke activist, argued that Lindsay and his allies were expanding the word “woke” beyond any reasonable definition. “There is nothing necessarily ‘woke’ about identity, grievance, and oppression, which are universal concepts in politics. America’s founders, for example, completed their revolution using those concepts,” he wrote.
Seth Dillon, founder of the Babylon Bee, responded with a defense of Lindsay’s position.
“Wokeness doesn’t accurately identify legitimate, real-world oppression—it points instead to intangible, unfalsifiable, elusive ‘systemic’ oppression and calls for deconstruction or revolution on a false premise,” he wrote. “There are some clear examples of this on the right, and saying so doesn’t mean we’re expanding the definition of ‘wokeness’ so broadly that it would apply even to a justified revolution.”
Dillon’s comment is revealing because it points to the real stakes of the “woke right” debate. His definition of “woke” — basically any revolutionary movement whose aims he doesn’t agree with — is less a rigorous intellectual argument than an effort at boundary policing.
In the Trump era, the right is self-consciously revolutionary. It believes that the American political status quo is rotten, and that some kind of transformative political change is necessary in order to save America from a vicious, dangerous left.
But there are profound disagreements over just how far the right-wing revolution should go.
People like Lindsay still describe themselves as liberals in the philosophical sense, committed to limited government and individual rights. For them, the Trump movement is about defending the founders’ values against an overreaching left (even if the means they employ in this fight are themselves illiberal). By contrast, the “woke right” they oppose are all avowed opponents of philosophical liberalism. Protestant Christian nationalism, integralist Catholicism, white nationalism — all of these doctrines see Trump as the tip of a revolutionary spear.
Yet merely labeling these factions “illiberal” carries little weight on the modern Trumpy right. Therefore, Trump-aligned liberals have to reach for a nastier term — one hated by everyone on the right — to try and push their foes out of the coalition.
I would expect this kind of infighting to get more intense, not less, as Trump returns to government. Governing requires policy choices, and policy choices have a way of forcing these kinds of fundamental splits to the fore. So while the American Reformer hoax may be a silly, low-stakes affair, it points to some fairly fundamental divides in the broad-tent Trump coalition — ones that will only assume more significance in the coming years.
This story was adapted from the On the Right newsletter. New editions drop every Wednesday. Sign up here.