Conservatives complain MAGA has morphed into everything it hated

Progressive Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) sounded a lot like "Real Time" host Bill Maher when, on August 9, she criticized the excesses of the "woke" movement and told ABC News' Jonathan Karl, "Woke 1 was crazy." Maher believes that political correctness and the "woke" movement have been as terrible for the left as MAGA has been for the right, and AOC's comment (which was quoting a New York City Council member) was not unlike something Maher would say. But according to a biting op-ed for the New York Times op-ed, "wokeness" is a problem for the right as well as the left.

In their Times op-ed, Gregory Conti (a professor of politics at Princeton University in New Jersey and a fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute) and the Washington Free Beacon's Aaron Sibarium argue that right-wing critics of "wokeness" are becoming every bit as rigid and dogmatic as the leftists they condemned.

"Over the years," Conti and Sibarium explain, "Republicans have portrayed Democrats as beholden to bespoke identities (they/them), obsessed with an alleged genocide (Gaza) and in thrall to anti-American revisionism (see the efforts to recenter our national narrative on slavery). We are critics of diversity, equity and inclusion programs who largely agree with that characterization. We believe the Republicans' war on woke has made America a fairer, safer place by checking some of the worst excesses of modern progressivism, from anti-white discrimination in Corporate America to biological men competing in women's sports. But we are also concerned that this backlash is morphing into something darker, dumber and ultimately self-defeating."

The Princeton professor and Washington Free Beacon staffer lay out a variety of ways in which "the right has begun to resemble its depiction of the left."

"There are invented identities like heritage American, claims of white genocide in South Africa and arguments from right-wing influencers that the Allies weren't the good guys in World War II," Conti and Sibarium warn. "The rise of this so-called woke right is sometimes blamed on the ability of podcast bros and online streamers to circumvent official GOP messaging. But it also reflects the way the Republican Party transformed in reaction to the woke era, moving further to the right on race and gender and losing its immune response to genuine cranks."

Conti and Sibarium continue, "In practice, anti-wokeness has eroded taboos against open bigotry in a party that is losing Latinos ahead of the 2026 midterms. It has made it harder to frame the GOP as the moderate option in a year when candidates who have called for defunding the police are winning Democratic primaries. And it has widened the gap between the two parties, leaving less room for a truce in the culture war…. To thread the needle, the right will need to erect a firewall between anti-wokeness, which is more than justified by progressive excess, and actual bigotry, which is not."