The Anti-Woke Reactionaries

The 21st Century’s Useful Idiots of Fascism

There are few spectacles more contemptible than that of intellectuals who have convinced themselves that their principles require them to abandon their principles. Yet this is precisely the performance we have been treated to by a certain class of self-appointed defenders of liberal democracy, who have spent the better part of a decade warning us that diversity training and pronoun etiquette represent existential threats to Western civilization, while providing sophisticated justifications for ignoring the actual dismantling of democratic institutions by oligarchs and authoritarians.

I speak, of course, of the anti-woke reactionaries—that curious breed of intellectual who has made a lucrative career out of fighting the previous war with meticulous precision while the current one rages unnoticed around them.

Consider Yascha Mounk, whose book The Identity Trap represents perhaps the most sophisticated entry in this genre of misdirected alarm. Mounk, who is clearly intelligent and genuinely concerned about democratic health, has produced an entire theoretical framework about the civilizational threat posed by identity-based reasoning. His analysis is careful, his concerns are real, and his commitment to liberal pluralism appears sincere.

He is also completely wrong about where the danger lies.

Mounk writes as if “wokeism” were some kind of self-replicating ideological virus that will continue expanding until it consumes democratic discourse entirely. But anyone who has spent time in progressive institutions over the past few years knows that these ideas were already hitting their practical and theoretical limits long before external critics needed to step in. The contradictions between different identity-based claims were creating paralysis rather than revolutionary momentum. The institutional capture Mounk worries about was producing bureaucratic sclerosis, not ideological transformation.

In short, the patient was already dying of its own internal contradictions. Mounk’s elaborate diagnosis arrived just in time to treat a corpse.

But here’s where intellectual sophistication becomes political naivety: by treating campus activism as an existential threat requiring systematic refutation, Mounk provides sophisticated ammunition for right-wing reactionaries who have no interest in the liberal pluralism he’s trying to defend. Tucker Carlson doesn’t need to do the intellectual work—he can simply point to Mounk’s Harvard credentials and declare: “Even the liberal professors agree that wokeness is destroying America.”

Meanwhile, the actual threats to democratic institutions—the systematic capture of courts, the weaponization of government power, the open corruption of public office—proceed without the kind of sustained intellectual attention Mounk brings to diversity training seminars.

The same dynamic plays out with even greater institutional force in the empire that Bari Weiss has constructed around The Free Press. Here we find an entire media operation dedicated to the proposition that progressive overreach represents the primary threat to liberal civilization. Weiss and her team produce sophisticated reporting, employ serious journalists, and demonstrate genuine intellectual engagement with complex questions.

They have also built their entire editorial framework around a category error of staggering proportions.

Weiss treats university speech restrictions and corporate diversity initiatives as if they represent five-alarm fires for Western civilization, demanding our focused attention and sustained outrage. She asks readers to concentrate on the tyranny of land acknowledgments while federal troops deploy against American protesters. She warns about the authoritarianism of faculty diversity statements while Supreme Court justices openly accept bribes and presidents suspend constitutional rights through executive order.

It is rather like running a sophisticated fire safety operation focused exclusively on kitchen grease fires while the rest of the house burns down around you. The grease fires are real, they do require attention, but your sense of proportion has been so thoroughly warped that you cannot distinguish between minor hazards and existential threats.

What makes this particularly maddening is that neither Mounk nor Weiss appears to be engaged in cynical grifting. They seem genuinely convinced that they are defending liberal values against their greatest enemies. They have simply been so captured by this particular threat assessment that they have lost the ability to distinguish between irritating cultural trends and systematic attacks on democratic institutions.

The result is that they function as what Lenin would have recognized immediately: useful idiots. Not idiots in the sense of lacking intelligence—both are clearly bright people—but idiots in the sense of being useful to forces whose ultimate goals they would find abhorrent.

Their sophisticated critiques of progressive excess provide intellectual respectability for authoritarian movements that care nothing for the liberal pluralism these critics claim to defend. Their elaborate warnings about campus speech codes distract attention from the systematic dismantling of democratic norms by oligarchs who find academic freedom just as inconvenient as any other form of institutional independence.

Most cruelly, their genuine concern for liberal democracy has been weaponized against liberal democracy itself. Every carefully reasoned essay about the dangers of identity politics becomes ammunition for demagogues whose actual project involves destroying the universities, the press freedoms, and the democratic institutions that make such criticism possible in the first place.

The historical parallel is not coincidental. The original useful idiots of the 20th century were often sincere progressives who genuinely believed they were defending humanitarian values while providing cover for totalitarian regimes. They were intellectuals who allowed their legitimate criticisms of Western failings to blind them to far greater dangers from the authoritarian movements they were inadvertently enabling.

Our contemporary useful idiots follow precisely the same pattern. Their legitimate criticisms of progressive institutional capture have blinded them to far greater dangers from the authoritarian movements they are inadvertently enabling. They spend their intellectual energy constructing elaborate defenses against phantom threats while actual fascistic consolidation proceeds unopposed.

The tragedy is compounded by the quality of their work. If Mounk or Weiss were obvious charlatans, their influence would be limited. But they are serious people making serious arguments about real problems. This gives their misdirected focus far more credibility and political impact than it would otherwise possess. They lend intellectual respectability to movements whose ultimate goals include destroying the very institutions that make their work possible.

Consider what has happened while these intellectuals have been focused on the civilizational threat of diversity training: Trump has openly monetized the presidency through cryptocurrency schemes. The Supreme Court has suspended constitutional rights and created doctrines of presumptive presidential authority. Federal agencies have been captured by oligarchs who use them to eliminate competitors and enrich allies. American foreign policy has been auctioned to the highest bidder.

Yet somehow, in the moral calculus of our anti-woke reactionaries, pronoun etiquette remains the greater threat to liberal civilization.

The defense they would offer is predictable: “We can care about multiple threats simultaneously.” But this misses the fundamental point about attention and resources in democratic discourse. Political energy is finite. Intellectual focus is limited. When sophisticated critics spend their time constructing elaborate frameworks to combat progressive excess, they are not spending that same time analyzing oligarchic capture or authoritarian consolidation.

More damaging still, they are training their audiences to see university administrators as the primary threat to freedom rather than presidents who suspend constitutional rights or justices who openly accept bribes. They are calibrating threat assessment in ways that make actual authoritarianism seem less dangerous by comparison.

This is not to argue that progressive institutional capture is insignificant or that identity-based reasoning poses no problems for democratic discourse. The critiques offered by Mounk, Weiss, and others often identify real issues that deserve serious attention.

But proportion matters. Context matters. Political timing matters.

And when intellectuals who care about liberal democracy spend their energy fighting the previous war while the current one proceeds unopposed, they become—however inadvertently—collaborators in their own political marginalization.

The fascists of our time do not need these intellectuals to actively support their programs. They need only for serious critics to focus their attention elsewhere while systematic institutional capture proceeds. They need only for sophisticated analysis to be directed toward cultural irritants rather than political threats. They need only for the people who should be defending democratic institutions to exhaust themselves fighting phantom battles while real power consolidates in the shadows.

In this, our useful idiots have proven remarkably... useful.

The great irony is that many of these critics got their start by noting how progressive movements had lost sight of class-based economic analysis in favor of cultural obsessions. They correctly identified how this misdirection served the interests of economic elites who were happy to embrace diversity initiatives while systematically extracting wealth from the working classes.

Yet they have now made precisely the same error in reverse. While economic and political elites systematically dismantle democratic institutions, our anti-woke critics remain focused on the cultural realm, obsessing over campus dynamics while oligarchs purchase Supreme Court justices and presidents sell foreign policy for cryptocurrency investments.

They have become what they once criticized: intellectuals so focused on cultural questions that they miss the systematic economic and political restructuring happening around them.

The ultimate tragedy is that liberal democracy deserved better defenders. It deserved critics sophisticated enough to distinguish between minor irritants and existential threats. It deserved intellectuals capable of maintaining proportional responses to proportional dangers. It deserved scholars who could defend pluralistic values without providing ammunition for movements dedicated to destroying pluralism entirely.

Instead, it got useful idiots who mistook their own sophistication for wisdom and their own principles for insight. Who spent the twilight of democratic institutions writing elaborate treatises about the dangers of land acknowledgments while authoritarians purchased the machinery of state power with cryptocurrency and Supreme Court justices suspended constitutional rights through executive decree.

History will not judge them kindly. Future scholars studying the collapse of liberal democracy in the early 21st century will marvel at how many of its supposed defenders spent their final years fighting imaginary enemies while real ones conquered the citadels of power.

They will note how intellectual sophistication divorced from political reality became a form of collaboration with the forces it should have been resisting. How genuine concern for democratic health was weaponized against democratic survival. How the useful idiots of fascism convinced themselves, right until the end, that they were defending the very civilization they helped destroy.

And they will ask: How could people so intelligent have been so blind to what was happening around them?

The answer, as always with useful idiots, is that they were too busy being useful to notice whom they were serving.