I typically avoid Twitter skirmishes, but James Lindsay’s diatribes against key dissident thinkers such as Paul Gottfried and Hans-Hermann Hoppe warrant scrutiny. As someone who knows Paul Gottfried personally, I can confidently clarify a few points. Yes, he was under the tutelage of Herbert Marcuse, but the Old Right has a greater influence on him than Marcuse. Paul is fond of people like M.E. Bradford, Wilmore Kendall, and Southern conservatives. Secondly, he is not preoccupied with white identity politics and IQ gaps. I have personal correspondence from him that demonstrates that he has no animus for minority groups. As for Hoppe, his intellectual lineage is rooted in the work of Murray Rothbard, and his thinking on monarchy was probably influenced by Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, considered by many to be the smartest man on the right. Hoppe also revived the writings of Karl Ludwig von Haller.
These details, however, seem to escape Lindsay, whose critiques of the dissident right reveal a shallow understanding of its thinkers. Mundane thinkers like Lindsay have nothing to offer other than banal critiques of their opponents, so if wokism is receding he has to find another target to remain relevant. Lindsay is a grifter who became famous for trumpeting DEI as a vehicle of anti-white discrimination. So, one would think that he would be elated that the DEI edifice is crumbling. However, as a grifter without valuable ideas, he has chosen to make the dissident right his new object of derision without taking the time to study the beliefs of people like Hoppe and Gottfried.
Unsurprisingly, his incurious followers lack the intellectual fortitude to investigate these thinkers, so I will help to enlighten their ignorance. Hoppe and Gottfried do not espouse woke ideas. These thinkers oppose the co-optation of the state by crony capitalists, unaccountable bureaucrats, and left-wing intellectuals. This stance puts them in alignment with Lindsay. Lindsay is frequently in the spotlight with his psychotic rants about the WEF and the New World Order. Furthermore, the oppressed/oppressor dialectic is not peculiar to wokeness. Notably, Lindsay has done much to expose the anti-white agenda of DEI and has certainly been more prominent than Hoppe and Gottfried in turning the tide against it. So, if white Americans are rallying together in the face of toxic woke ideologies, it is largely due to the alarmism generated by the consistent ranting of Lindsay.
Lindsay’s derangement is clearly on display when he compares the slogan “America is for Americans” with Black Lives Matter. Comparing this slogan to Black Lives Matter is an unfounded and dishonest analysis. “America First” is not a Marxist or anti-family slogan. It is distinct from the anti-Western, anti-conservative agenda of BLM. While “America First” may have statist elements, it is not inherently Marxist, and it is not incompatible with Western values. Prioritizing the interests of American citizens over foreign powers does not necessitate nationalism, nor does it imply the superiority of one nation over others. You don’t have to believe your country is superior to combat globalism. Lindsay expresses support for America First when he launches his tirade against the climate policies of globalists.
Similarly, there is nothing sinister about America granting preferential treatment to its citizens. America is considerably more liberal than other countries where foreigners are not allowed to own land. All countries prefer their citizens to foreigners. The state’s obligation must be to its citizens rather than foreigners because they are directly affected by its laws and are compelled to obey them even when they incur costs. “America is for Americans” does not mean that private employers lack the right to prefer foreign employees. Rather it is an admonition of those who exploit the law to displace American workers. Further, Hoppe and Gottfried arguments against open borders do not make them woke. Irrespective of the benefits of immigration, the influx of foreigners can amplify social and economic tensions. Lindsay’s propensity to malign his critics becomes even more puzzling when he draws nonsensical parallels between the dissident right and Marxism. Gottfried has illustrated in several essays that Marxism is not woke.
The tribal sentiments of wokism undercut Marxism by deterring class solidarity. Gottfried often elaborates in his essays that Marxism was infiltrated by the cultural left. Instead of fixating on Marx and communists, Lindsay should redirect his energy to Antonio Gramsci because his anti-Christian and ultra-liberal views are more relevant for assessing wokism. Unlike Marx, Gramsci felt that the utopian ideal could only be achieved by uprooting the cultural foundation of the West. Lindsay would have known that Gottfried’s argument is that the pollution of Marxist thought by the cultural left renders cultural Marxism as a counter-philosophy if he had spent more time reading him. Because Lindsay refuses to immerse himself into the writings of dissident scholars, he can only resort to gross mischaracterizations of their ideas.
Moreover, recently, Michael Rectenwald criticized Lindsay for describing libertarian economist Murray Rothbard as woke. Lindsay shared a snippet from a 1992 article where Rothbard outlined a strategy to rescue Americans from a corrupt state that had been co-opted by special interest groups, such as globalists and media elites—the people who are always being chastised by Lindsay. Rectenwald’s critique reminds Lindsay that libertarian class-caste analysis preceded Marxist class analysis. Right-wing thinkers depicted the state as an instrument of bourgeois and elite activism long before Marxist writings emerged.
If he had read the book, A Requiem for Marx, he could have spared his followers from the displeasure of misinformation. Additionally, Lindsay singled out distributism as the philosophy that best describes the economic system of the woke right. Popularized by G.K. Chesterton, distributists prefer an economic system that’s dominated by small businesses and cooperatives to one ruled by mammoth corporations. Distributists are not socialists, clamoring for the redistribution of wealth, but often Christian leftists who want laws to empower laborers and small corporations by promoting competition. Indeed, distributism is a left-leaning economic philosophy, which Lindsay has classified as an important hallmark of the woke right, so should we simplistically equate distributist sentiments with support for the woke right?
Economist Alexander William Salter and mainstream conservative Ross Douthat are the people usually associated with popularizing distributism, not the individuals dubbed “woke right” by Lindsay. Woke right is an umbrella term coined by Lindsay to smear critics of the Israel lobby, defenders of white identity politics, and his ideological opponents. As such, it is too ambiguous to have conceptual value and ought to be discarded.
Despite working overtime to marginalize people like Pat Buchanan, Lew Rockwell, Murray Rothbard, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, and Paul Gottfried, mainstream conservatives have failed to prevent their ideas from shaping politics. James Lindsay and the other court jesters are upset that they are unable to control the debate, that’s why they coin derisive terms to silence opponents into obscurity. Thankfully, however, instead of bolstering the influence of Lindsay and his minions, it is only fueling well-deserved contempt for “Conservative, Inc.” Lindsay is doing excellent advertising for dissident scholars, so eventually people will realize that they are right, and Lindsay is simply a gatekeeper with nothing to contribute other than cheap insults.
