One of the most captivating things about history is that it’s littered with interesting people you’ve never heard of. One such man is the American mathematician Richard Hamming, who served as the chief mathematician for the Manhattan Project, programming the IBM calculating machines that computed the solution to equations provided by the project’s physicists. After the war, Hamming joined the mathematics department at Bell Telephone Laboratories and was involved in nearly all of the laboratories’ most prominent achievements, including developing the Hamming Codes, which are essential for error detection and correction in data transmission.

In a speech to Bellcore — titled “You and your research” — in 1986, Hamming asked a double-edged question that, since I heard it, has nagged at me ceaselessly; “What are the most important problems in your field, and why aren’t you working on one of them?”

It’s a question the right needs to ask itself. What are the most important problems we face? It depends, really, on who you ask.

In recent weeks, some have suggested that the biggest problem the right faces is the right itself — or rather, the section of it they term the “woke right”. Whilst the phrase has been around for a few years, it’s come to the fore again in recent weeks after James Lindsay played a prank on the American Reformer by submitting — under a false name — an article that “used a passage of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto, stripping out its ideological substance but retaining its powerful rhetorical structure”. He — and others — argue that the specter haunting America today is not merely unhinged leftism, but an equally extreme and perhaps equally influential right-wing counter-reaction that incorporates essential tenets of wokeism. 

As Konstantin Kisin of Triggernometry puts it, “The Woke Right is a section of the Right which, like the Woke Left, believes in racism for the ‘right’ reasons, has a conspiracy about how the world is systematically and institutionally against them and happily uses the tactics of mobbing, cancellation and other woke tactics to attack their opponents. They don’t believe in discussing views and ideas, only in winning.”

Do these sound like the most important problems in right wing politics to you? They do not to me.

Let us consider the first point, that the woke right believes in racism for the “right reasons”. This is a reference to the recent debate about H-1B visas in the US and, whilst there are undoubtedly people who enjoy wallowing in racialist spite, Kisin seems to be implying that this characterises that entire “woke right”, rather than engaging with their substantive argument; that the H-1B was clearly being abused. Is it racist to believe that elite human capital should be actually elite?

As for a “conspiracy about how the world is systematically and institutionally against them”, consider the likely demographics of the woke right; young, white, male. Is it really a “conspiracy” that the entire DEI industry exists to create a system of preferential treatment for people who do not fit that description? Given White British applicants have been outright prevented from applying for jobs in MI5, MI6, GCHQ, the RAF and Glasgow City Council? 

As for mobbing, welcome to being online. As for cancellation, given the hegemony of the left across the media, institutions, academia, the arts and so on, this seems… unlikely. Unless he is referring to cases such as Claudine Gay, who was “cancelled” for plagiarism. Is upholding basic standards of academic rigour in one the world’s foremost universities a woke tactic?

But it is the final point that twists in my heart. 

Is Kisin really suggesting that the a big problem with the right-wing is that we are too interested in winning? 

The West’s defence policy, cultural and physical, is shaped by people in office, which requires you to be interested in winning

With a peasant-like pride in my intellectual ignorance, I do not really care, for example, if a new immigration policy violates important tenets of classical liberalism. I care if it stops foreign rapists from entering the country. I care about winning. Arguably, it’s all I care about. If that makes me “woke right”, I’m ok with that.

And people of practical politics should be too. The West’s defence policy, cultural and physical, is shaped by people in office, which requires you to be interested in winning. What it means to be British is shaped by the people who are in Britain, so the presence of people from illiberal cultures may have already changed our society. Preventing them changing further requires control of our immigration policy, which requires you to be interested in winning. Discussions about the slave trade are not really about historical responsibility, but a means to argue for the re-allocation of money and resources in the here and now. Arguments for reparations are being advanced through both national and international institutions. Denying them requires you to be in a position to say “no” to the demand, which requires you to be interested in winning.

You can give as many speeches on “How to Save the West”, interview as many people on “What it Means to be British”, post as many clips of you shutting down leftists by arguing that “Britain Ended the Slave Trade” as you like, but if you have no path to winning, then … then what is the point of it all? 

The “woke left” have been ensconced in positions of authority for years. Through a long march through the institutions they have siphoned off public money, partitioned off political power, weaponised institutions, covered up gross indecencies and social stigmatised criticism of their failing policies. In the face of all this, Kisin offers up “discussing views and ideas”. The politics of the Oxford Union against the baying mob, of Triggernometry against the show trial, of head in the clouds against feet in the mud.

To come back to Hamming’s question, the difference in what Kisin and the “woke right” think are the most pressing problems arise partly from the fact they are in different fields. The “woke right” are interested in politics for political purposes; Kisin and the other cancelled liberals who criticise them are vulnerable to thinking of politics in the terms of entertainment. 

Ultimately, the criticism that the woke right don’t believe in discussing views and ideas, only in winning can be dismissed, not with Hamming’s aphorism, but with the more earthy wisdom of Roger Stone: “losers don’t legislate”.