Some of the most dangerous people in the world right now are those normalising and sanitising fascistic politics. It was not just in the banal media discussion that preceded Donald Trump’s re-election; it can also be found at the ABC, including on Radio National lifestyle programming. One of the tropes to look for is the placing of the concept “woke” in counterpoint to “traditional” and “Christian” values.
“Woke” has become the radicalising rightwing catch-all term to demonise everything inconvenient to their goals. It must no longer be used naively to describe people who are alert to systemic injustice (as its origins in Civil Rights politics denoted). It is now a poisoned term, deployed as slander against any selected enemy in the right’s efforts to build coalitions to hold power.
Its predecessor “political correctness” contained many similar facets, functioning to ridicule politeness and kindness particularly to those who remain disempowered within Western society. “Woke” is, however, much more broadly useful. It can be summoned to demonise pandemic health measures, which, not coincidentally, interfered with the corporate interests that also happen to fund this movement. Wearing face masks, for example, became a despised “woke” symbol.
Climate science and action are also ridiculed as “woke.” This provides not only cover for an unrelenting fossil fuel sector, but also helps generate votes for the sector’s preferred political parties. Fossil fuel money pervades the culture wars against modern inclusiveness and democratic projects.
Recently Andrew West of the Religion and Ethics Report program went to Hungary where he, very politely, and no doubt accidentally, helped make the global National Conservative (NatCon) project sound safe to his middle-class Australian audience. West funded his own trip, rather than travelling on bursaries as Tony Abbott, Nick Cater and West’s former colleague at News Corp, Greg Sheridan, have done.
One of West’s interviewees was Ernst Hillebrand of the German social democratic thinktank, the Friedrich Ebert Foundation. Hillebrand is stationed at its Budapest outpost and has been a guest speaker at Viktor Orbán’s Mathias Corvinus Collegium. Hillebrand spoke, apparently approvingly, of the upswing of National Conservative politics across Europe. He condemned the European left and social democrats for falling prey to “postmodern liberalism.”
In discussing Orbán’s illiberal democracy, Hillebrand elided the many society-wide steps taken by Orbán along the competitive authoritarian path so that, while elections continue, it is virtually impossible for any other party to succeed. Instead, Hillebrand celebrated Orbán as a freely elected leader. He described, with apparent approval, that the “liberalism” Orbán has rejected is American “social liberalism” rather than philosophical political and economic liberalism.
The overlap between neoliberalism’s borderless economics and privatisation with a politics that promotes removing government from people’s bedrooms has made the latter a target for socially-conservative thinkers from the left. Apparently promoting economic nationalism is a sufficient goal, making it acceptable to ignore the endangerment of vulnerable groups.
The NatCon movement is strongly in favour of nationalism and feigns promoting workers rights, even while it continues to promote the extreme free market politics that grinds workers into the dirt. It’s a trap. Furthermore, in disdaining the protection of people genuinely endangered by NatCon’s political goals as “woke politics,” it is possible for people emerging from leftist traditions, such as Germany’s Sahra Wagenknecht, to become allies for the authoritarian right.
West asked whether Wagenknecht provides a “successful model that the mainstream left should be trying to understand.” He overlooked the oppression of LGBTQIA people underway in rightwing Europe. Hillebrand appeared to approve of Wagenknecht’s dislike for “this whole middle-class wokeness agenda,” as though we cannot have justice for workers alongside equality for marginalised minorities.
In their conversation, West unknowingly sanitised NatCon’s pronatalist politics as a response to brain drain and emigration. He naively stripped them of their strong link to ethnonationalism and coercive reproductive policy.
West spoke in intellectual terms of Orbán placing himself at the frontline of a new stand against a quoted Ottoman invasion and an Islamic invasion. Hillebrand commented on the Christian national identity being (re)forged against the Others of the “left liberal” movement and “Islam.” It is crucial that we recognise this Othering as the step on a very dangerous path that it has always been: religio-ethnonationalism is no better than racial ethnonationalism.
West’s other interviewee is far more partisan and also interconnected with the NatCon movement: Gladden Pappin, an American post-liberal thinker, who is part of the Western thinktank circle around Orbán. Pappin also defined Orbán’s illiberalism as opposing diversity: West responded, “It’s libertinism not liberalism that he’s rejecting.” Thus West appeared to define LGBTQIA+ existence – one of Orbán’s most consistent targets – as “libertinism” rather than as a different way to be.
Pappin celebrated that Hungary is now a “Christian democracy” with “guardrails.” In Hungary, “We preserve the traditional family. The father is man, the mother is a woman.” The “cloud of fear” as Hungarian LGBTQIA+ people are “pushed into the shadows” by law is not addressed for the ABC audience.
West questioned Hungary’s lacklustre religious observance. Pappin responded that it is “nice” when religious practice is a factor but that Christian nationhood is about identity rooted in history. This is the use of Christianity (and affiliated faiths in the NatCon movement) as a trope not a faith. “Christianity” is deployed to stand in contrast to “woke” ideas. When West asked “What is the point of a strong Christian national identity if Christian observance – and religious observance for that matter – is on the wane?,” he is asking the critical question.
The point is generating a coalition of conservatives, fascists, conspiracists, misogynists and social media trolls to support the entrenching of power for reactionary and corporate factions. Drawing in the socially-conservative left is a bonus. By labelling bigotry or anti-science ideas as religious beliefs, gravitas is conferred too.
West spoke politely to his interlocutors and, in the tradition of the marketplace of ideas, trusts that his audience will perceive the deeply racist politics that West characterised as politics with an “ethnic tinge.” He also trusts that the audience will understand the frightening context, when he asked Pappin to explain the “intellectual project” underpinning Trump’s “unorthodox, confrontational style.”
A decade ago, this might have been good journalistic and intellectual practice. With the worldwide surge of fascistic politics and the crisis of knowledge in the civic space, it might be seen as journalistic failure in someone promoting knowledge rather than an ugly ideology.
West celebrated Texas Monthly’s labelling Pappin as belonging to the “High Tory” tradition as one that is “very honourable.” Pappin explained that the expected political civility applying to the label had been killed not by the right, but by the liberals who removed “the true, the good, the beautiful, the nation, family” from politics. Returning to this base structure would reinstate civil politics, he asserted.
The rest of us should accept NatCon oppression so “Christian” White men can have their power and civil politics back?
Such conversations cannot be delivered without context.
All of us should be alert to the well of toxic energy being exploited from the tropes of “woke” and “Christian.”
Lucy Hamilton is a Melbourne writer with degrees from the University of Melbourne and Monash University. She is a doctoral student at the University of Technology Sydney.
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