In the grand theater of American intellectual life, few moments are as clarifying—or as uncomfortable—as when a movement’s most astute observers turn their analytical gaze inward. James Lindsay’s latest cultural excavation, “OnlySubs: The Critical Theory of the Woke Right,” delivers precisely such a moment, exposing how segments of the conservative movement have unconsciously adopted the very methodologies they claim to despise.
This isn’t merely academic squabbling; it’s a battle for the soul of American conservatism itself.
Lindsay’s analysis reveals something both fascinating and troubling: the emergence of what he terms the “Woke Right”—conservatives who have absorbed critical theory’s grievance-based framework while believing themselves to be its fiercest opponents. Like a cultural photographic negative, these voices mirror the left’s identity politics playbook, simply substituting different victim groups and oppressor classes while maintaining the same fundamentally un-American methodology.
Traditional American conservatism has always stood for something far more noble: the celebration of individual merit over collective grievance, constitutional fidelity over tribal loyalty, and reasoned discourse over emotional manipulation. When William F. Buckley Jr. famously purged the John Birch Society from respectable conservatism in the 1960s, he understood that principles matter more than political convenience—that how we think is often more important than what we think.
The genius of America’s founding vision lies in its rejection of the zero-sum tribalism that has plagued human civilization for millennia. Our Constitution doesn’t guarantee outcomes based on group identity; it protects individual rights regardless of which tribe claims them. This distinction isn’t merely philosophical—it’s the difference between the American experiment and every failed utopian project that preceded it.
What makes Lindsay’s critique particularly valuable is its intellectual honesty. In an era when political movements increasingly demand absolute loyalty, his willingness to examine uncomfortable truths about his own ideological allies exemplifies the American tradition of principled self-examination. This capacity for course correction—for choosing truth over tribal comfort—has made our republic resilient for nearly two and a half centuries.
The critical theory virus proves remarkably adaptable, capable of infecting any ideological host. Its symptoms are always the same: the reduction of complex social phenomena to simple oppressor-oppressed narratives, the elevation of lived experience over empirical evidence, and the transformation of political disagreement into moral warfare. Whether practiced by campus radicals or their conservative mirror images, these methodologies corrode the civic virtues necessary for democratic self-governance.
This cultural moment offers conservatives a choice: embrace the founding principles that made America exceptional, or descend into the same grievance-based politics that have turned our universities into ideological wastelands and our public discourse into tribal warfare. The stakes couldn’t be higher, because ideas have consequences—and bad ideas have victims.
The path forward requires what Russell Kirk called “the conservative mind”—a commitment to ordered liberty, moral imagination, and the accumulated wisdom of our civilization. It means defending constitutional principles universally, not selectively. It means celebrating American excellence without descending into crude nationalism. It means choosing the harder path of persuasion over the easier route of resentment.
America’s cultural renaissance awaits, but only if we remember what made us great in the first place. Our strength has never been tribal solidarity but individual liberty, not collective grievance but personal responsibility, not ideological purity but constitutional fidelity. These timeless principles offer the only reliable antidote to critical theory’s poison, regardless of which political tribe happens to be spreading it.
The mirror of wokeness reflects only distortion. America deserves better—and so does authentic conservatism.
