In recent elections, parties of the Right have been doing rather well. FDI in Italy (Meloni’s party). PVV in the Netherlands (Wilders’ party). AfD in Germany. In the European Parliament elections, many parties of the Right were successful, with the performance of the National Rally in France triggering a French Parliamentary election. Trump may yet win in the US.

The precise domestic issues in each of these countries are different, of course. And some of these parties are much more beyond the pale than others — AfD in particular has raised concerns for the German security services. But there is something they have in common, a binding theme for the successful Right: they are overtly and unapologetically anti-woke.

Originally the doctrines of the identitarian Left were anti-Establishment. The claims that our major institutions, such as the police, the education system and our corporate sector, along with mechanisms such as markets and capitalism, are profoundly and ineradicably infected with systemic racism, sexism, homophobia, gender-phobia, a fear of the neurodivergent and the legacy of slavery, were unorthodox once upon a time. The notion that those whose views one disagreed with on moral sexual conduct, the ontology of gender or the merits of Empire needed to be ostracised instead of argued against initially seemed quirky rather than threatening.

At some point in recent decades, however, the identitarian Left, declaring itself the people who were awakened to the realities of injustice — thus “woke” — achieved sufficient power to shift from radical rebels to suppressors of opposition. If you did not submit to the woke, allowing them to circumscribe what you were allowed to think and say, surrendering to their continually-shifting prohibitions on certain terminology and behaviours and insistence on their moral guidance, you could not work as an academic, could not survive in the corporate sector, could not participate in policy-making and would have to be lucky even to be published. To defy meant to risk your speaker meetings facing loud, violent protests, your home and children being picketed, your students having to accept ostracism in turn, your products being boycotted and your publishers facing online death threats. And that was all in the unlikely event you were not simply fired and never heard from again.

The woke never won the intellectual argument, because they simply refused to participate in it. The only way to counter them is to defy them. And that is what today’s counter-revolutionary movements of the Right have done. The ways they have done that have not always been wholesome. The fellow travellers they have attracted have often been positively odious — frequently even less pleasant than the wokefolk they opposed. But their defiance has tapped into a public appetite for resistance.

Woke orthodoxies have frequently produced damaging results — on immigration, on criminal justice, on economic growth, on education, on social integration. But woke policies in these areas never came to dominate through argument, so it is futile to imagine that argument alone can defeat them. What is required first is defiance, the insistence on being heard, on the contention that the woke view is one amongst many and needs to stand on its intellectual merits. Only once one is permitted to challenge the woke view can one gain the right to critique it.

For a time in the late 2010s, it seemed as if the UK might avoid the woke vs anti-woke struggles that were developing elsewhere. Brexit seemed to have provided the anti-woke with an outlet for their frustration that didn’t require them to vote in a government of the anti-woke populist Right. Instead, our more traditional Conservative Party would, as it had so often in political crises over the past couple of centuries, provide just enough to placate the forces of Right wing populism without itself representing the cause. But then, as we know, Conservatism imploded in a morass of self-destructive failure.

The Tory Party itself may never recover to once again be a party of government. But there will, in due course, be a government of the Right. And the current Tory leadership election provides us with an early taste of a key split. Some candidates, such as Robert Jenrick, warn that the true priorities of the electorate are practical matters such as crime, the economy and immigration. They see making being anti-woke a key focus as a distraction from these bread-and-butter issues. Other candidates, such as Kemi Badenoch, are eager to say they have a practical offering — in her launch on Monday she pitched herself as an “Engineer”, solving problems, telling truths and placing answers within a clear theoretical framework. But her startpoint, even in her teaser video announcing her launch, was that she is the candidate the wokefolk want to suppress and that she will refuse to submit to them.

… it is the defiant, unapologetic anti-woke populist Right that represents the way forward

I suspect Badenoch will win. I doubt she’ll ever be PM — though perhaps some kind of “Unite the Right” move is yet possible. But when there is, eventually, another UK government of the Right, I expect being anti-woke to be its central feature. The Right can only get a hearing for its critiques of woke positions on the economy, crime, immigration, education, the NHS, gender issues, the NHS, Islam or any other topic if it first insists on its right to put forward its own view and on its right to participate in commercial society and politics even if it does not submit. Defiance is the sine qua non.

I don’t expect to like the populist Right that will eventually emerge in Britain. I, like many who used to be British Conservatives, am a classical political liberal who finds much of the Continental and US populist Right ghastly and distasteful. But my politics had a good run, dominating for much of the past 350 years. Clearing the field of the woke may let the likes of me back in, one day. But in the meantime it is the defiant, unapologetic anti-woke populist Right that represents the way forward.