The marriage between Donald Trump and the forces of the so-called Tech Right has been one, primarily, of expediency. MAGA wants nothing short of a new American Golden Age, while tech just wants to be permitted to do things like colonize Mars. Both objectives require dethroning the viciously egalitarian and reality-defying left as it wallows in sheer mediocrity.

But apart from their agreement about the existential threat posed by the left, MAGA and Big Tech don’t have much else in common. Moreover, as the left is momentarily subdued, it is easy to see Elon Musk’s anti-Trump meltdown earlier this month as an indication that Big Tech is gearing up to take on a new foe.

“Wokeness will seem like such a joke in retrospect that many people won’t believe it was ever a serious problem. Even many of the participants will forget. But it really was a big problem,” Elon’s fellow tech overlord Paul Graham dismissively posted recently on X. In response, Elon reposted it with a lone bullseye emoji.

That one little bullseye emoji evoked nearly 30 million views on X and it indicates which way the winds are blowing. They’re moving on from attacks on the left. But tech is wrong to pivot away from a movement that would gladly send them all to the guillotines.  

On its face, there’s nothing wrong with Graham’s statement: it concedes that the left-wing cultural totalitarianism known as wokeness is bad (it is), mocks those who pushed it as clowns (they are), and optimistically awaits a world in which the memory of wokeness feels like a distant nightmare. But is it that world really just around the corner? Is it wise to laugh off a latent evil that’s been brewing for centuries? Or is it smarter to see that though it is subdued for now, the woke mind virus is just biding its time and will strike again.

“Wokeness” is not just a passing trend to look back on and laugh about like ’80s hair or ’70s bellbottoms. It didn’t start in 2012, when Obama spouted his divisive commentary about how he could have had a son who “looked like Trayvon Martin.” It didn’t start in the 1960s, when New Left riots torched America in the name of “liberation,” or at the turn of the century, when Woodrow Wilson first imagined a “living Constitution.” It doesn’t even go back to Rousseau, or to Locke, or to whichever progenitor intellectuals we prefer to assign credit or blame.

Wokeness is not primarily a philosophy, or even an ideology or a political strategy. Instead, it is a way of being. It is a part of the human condition—a permanent and visceral undercurrent of resentment from the “downtrodden,” the “marginalized,” and “oppressed” against their perceived “oppressors.” It is propped up again and again at various turns by those who find meaning and power in standing as an “ally” to the unhappy and disappointed. Moreover, after a century-long march, it has coalesced in the United States with moral and institutional scaffolding so entrenched that it’s often very difficult to see it for what it is.

It’s easy to laugh off the sillier, outward manifestations of contemporary wokeness: pronouns, land acknowledgments, and the like. But it takes an uncommon courage to confront the moral certainty of the left squarely and deny the victimhood of those they champion.

The episode through which we have passed—the one Graham calls a “joke”—was in fact just a minor outbreak of the woke mind virus that has metastasized and advanced every time there has been a perceived setback. The Soviets lost the Cold War, but the Western establishment today is governed more like the Politburo than a constitutional republic. Vietnam-era hippies grew up, got jobs, paid bills and taxes, and then streamlined their radicalism into the bureaucracies and corporations they came to dominate.

It’s easy in an era of right-wing populism to suppose that faith in the leftist worldview is waning. But there’s still much work to dislodge its manifestation in government.

The silliest aspects of wokeness start out as cultural neuroses, but come inevitably to transcend every facet of life, public and private, and after cannibalizing the Western spirit of freedom, justice, individualism, and even truth itself, it isn’t just going to go away. Sure, it’s culturally safe to laugh at the transgender movement these days, but the Supreme Court has already effectively ruled that biological gender does not exist. Let’s see where that lands us in a few decades.

Of course, MAGA and the Tech Right share a full-throated disdain for this bastardization of the Western spirit, which stands in the way of their respective socio-political aims. But it’s no secret that these two groups are ultimately at odds when it comes to the nature of  the American revival each would like to see. MAGA wants a sovereign nation for the people, culture, and historical identity of Americans; tech wants AI-supremacy, private space exploration, and a globalized meritocracy within a U.S.-dominated economy.

Often, these goals are aligned, particularly when under threat from the left: tech needs an economically powerful but laissez-faire America to give them both the resources and launch pad to accomplish their goals; MAGA needs a world-leading tech sector if America is to escape its “managed decline,” enjoy prosperity, and maintain dominance into the 21^st century.

The resentful left sees no difference between the factions on the right, sneering at any notion of American greatness, whatever its nature, with endless equity-minded schemes that strangle the American spirit just as much as it strangles the kind of meritocracy Musk knows is required to get us to Mars. Yet the tech-brain set feels impervious to their movements now.

It’s easy to see wokeness as a passing threat when you’ve become accustomed to being viewed as a member of the Golden Boys of the American revival. Tech has been in control since the ’90s, surpassing both finance and manufacturing as the critical industry. Given the esoteric nature of their field and their world-historic wealth, it’s no wonder it’s all gone to their heads. Combine that with a psychological “revenge of the nerds” complex, and it’s a recipe for the kind of arrogance that elevates one’s mission as something far more important than the squabbling of ordinary politics—no matter what side it comes from.

This doesn’t mean tech guys are inherently “bad”—they simply want different, very insular things that, while generally aligned under the banner of American greatness, do not always lead to the same concrete policy aims the rest of MAGA. Hence, Musk’s meltdown over fiscal stability and his push for a new political party.

Yet we live in a moment where MAGA-style nationalism—in other words, the attitude that moved all civilizations throughout history up until the end of the Cold War—has been deemed its own form of revisionist wokeness. A slew of ostensibly conservative thinkers routinely denounce what they call the “woke right”—the idea that a culturally-specific national revival is just a mirror image of wokeness and DEI, except for the interests of white Americans.

Those who reject MAGA nationalism on the grounds that it is “woke right” want to advance the atomized vision of the ’80s and ’90s as the baseline political paradigm, despite the reality of an opportunistic left forever out-demagoguing the right and center.

In theory, that vision isn’t a bad deal for tech; after all, it led to Apple, Microsoft, and the dotcom boom. For people always chasing the next boom, anyone who cares to prioritize the nation for its own sake becomes just as bad as the left in its willingness to accept what tech sees as potential mediocrity. If America is but a means to an end for tech, then a right that fights for America as an end in itself can become every bit the threat that the left is to their vision.

If left-wing wokeness has really become just a “joke” or a passing phase, the tech right thinks perhaps we can tolerate it. We don’t have to do anything to actively fight it or keep it at by—just sit back and weather the storm. Now, instead, it feels free to focus on what it deems the other wokeness, the one which actually controls the levers of government at this very moment and seems to care more about American sovereignty than it does about facilitating tech in its effort build an American colony on Mars.

Let us hope tech comes to its senses and drops this effort to paint the non-tech and non-atomistic elements of MAGA as the “woke right.” That effort is not good for MAGA, for an admittedly critical tech supremacy, or for America itself. If tech decides to train its considerable power against a new enemy, it can only backfire. Only one political force wants to see both America and real innovation destroyed: the original and long-standing motivations of the woke phenomenon. The seething resentment that drives that movement isn’t dying out anytime soon.

https://chroniclesmagazine.org/web/the-war-against-woke-is-a-legitimate-forever-war/