No post-Woke, only post-Chud

In the face of reactionary woke, the post-chud right will emerge to shape the world to come

It has to be said, I loathe the term ‘Woke’. I suppose it is better than the conspiratorial ‘Cultural Marxism’ that preceded it, but it has always seemed to me to be an inherently silly turn of phrase, like the name of a puppet on a CBeebies show. There’s a strange dissonance between the red mist that descends upon boomers as they read every headline and their insistence on scoffing at their opponents with silly nicknames. Are the left a civilisation-ending force that threatens our national future, or are they delusional kids with ridiculous ideas? You can’t have it both ways. Nevertheless, no better term has gained any traction — so continue with ‘Woke’ we must.

Much of the right are tempted to describe the formulation of the left that has started to coagulate in the aftermath of Trump’s victory in 2024 as ‘post-Woke’. Pointing to the pivot to economic populism represented by Zack Polanski or Zohran Mamdani, or the more explicit countersignalling of woke from figures such as Ash Sarkar, Aaron Bastani, or The Young Turks, there is apparently great temptation to claim that the left has abandoned its old ways in the face of total electoral defeat.

Of course, none of these examples show a genuine change in perspective from the left. The Left may have stepped back from asserting the importance of declaring pronouns at every possible occasion — but the desire they have to affirm and normalise transgenderism is no weaker today than it was two years ago. They have toned down their attacks on white people, and white men specifically — but they still believe that all racial differences in outcomes can only be fundamentally explained by discrimination and historical injustices which must be redressed. They have been cowed into a more conciliatory position within immigration discourse — but they still believe that there is no reason other than bigotry to oppose the demographic transformation of our country. They have not, and will not, abandoned internationalism, egalitarianism, and social liberalism. These are all defining characteristics of Woke, so what has changed? There are still certain beliefs which are foundational to what it means to be left-wing. These are no different from last year.

This highlights one of the problems with ‘Woke’/‘anti-Woke’ discourse. For many, ‘Woke’ was a transient phenomenon defined by a certain style of communication, rather than an inevitable flowering of the ideas which have motivated much of the left since the middle of the twentieth century. Much as a genuinely post-socialist left emerged in Britain after two decades of Thatcherite electoral and cultural dominance, it is possible we will see a genuinely post-woke left emerge in the future after a similar period of new right political primacy — but we certainly haven’t done so yet.

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This strange rebranding of the Left, imposed entirely externally by the Online Right, stems more from the Right’s own triumphal sense of victory than from anything within the Left itself. It is interesting that the Right now has the cultural strength to achieve this. Of course, if Woke has been popularly rejected, it is also a huge misstep to allow the Left to escape this label without abandoning any of the views it represents. The acceptance of ‘post-Woke’ framing therefore shows a Right which is culturally ascendant, but lacks the sophistication to understand its opponents and the strategic intelligence to deny them an advantage.

Indeed, a new, pernicious cultural force has been developing within right-wing politics since at least 2019, and has now reached peak metastasis. It is the bastard child of an old Toryism; a new chauvinism, conceived in the victory of some (but not all) of the dissident ideas which gained prominence within the online right of 2007 to 2017. It is a coagulated mass, a burdensome horde that dominates the ‘For You’ page and Instagram reels. Its catechisms can be heard across the internet and, increasingly, from the mouths of old media commentators and politicians. Its footsoldiers embrace some of our positions, but repeat them ad nauseum in the least convincing, least compelling way possible. Their sickly-sweet tang covers almost all cultural expression, much like that of the ‘Woke’ left did in the 2010s. We are now suffering under Chud Hegemony.

This can be partly attributed to Elon Musk’s acquisition of X/Twitter, and the combined effect of his successful transformation of the platform into an overwhelmingly right-wing space and his restructuring of the algorithm to suppress anything which inspires thought in favour of the worst slop available. Not to sound like James Lindsay, whose own theory of the ‘Woke Right’ is nonsensical, but these circumstances in many ways mirror those that led to the development of the ‘Woke Left’ on sites such as Tumblr in the aftermath of Obama’s re-election in 2012.

What is this ‘Chud Right’ that has become so dominant online? The term has a similarly convoluted cultural history to ‘Woke’, but just as Woke never simply meant ‘extremely left-wing’, it is important to recognise that, similarly, ‘Chud’ never simply meant ‘extremely right-wing’. The Chud is defined by his reactionary attitude, perpetually in opposition, frothing with rage as the battle goes on — a soldier of the culture wars always looking for enemy combatants. They aren’t clearly for anything new, but rather against everything that has come before.

The word itself stems from the 1984 horror film C.H.U.D. — the title being an acronym for ‘cave-dwelling underground humanoid’. The self-appropriation of the term reveals a great deal about the understanding Chuds have of their own cultural positioning. They come from below, buoyed by resentment. They represent not a new, independently imagined, social order; but an inversion of the old. This explains the growing obsession with conspiracy theories, and the endless pursuit of historical rabbit holes: what was good must now be evil; what was false must now be true. It also explains the constant dog-that-caught-the-car positioning: without an independently-constructed vision it becomes impossible to imagine what defeating ‘the regime’ and establishing something new would even look like.

The efflorescence of right-wing ideas as a culturally dominant force, at least online, has also paved the way for millions of newcomers to become the loudest voices in the room. It is not unusual that as a movement grows it will inevitably transition from the preserve of an intellectually-obsessed minority to a more popular, and hence more vulgar, phenomenon. Whilst this is in some senses unavoidable, it carries risks which need to be worked against. Firstly, many of these newcomers are markedly less political, in the strictest sense — they are far less concerned with obtaining power to implement ideas. Hence, they are satisfied to launder the political potential energy generated by the reaction to late-stage multiracialism into a self-serving, self-referential cottage industry of online content creation.

What was once punk becomes passé. A cultural space which was once vibrant and cavalier becomes hollow and priggish. There are specificities which become lost in translation — most notably, what was once an intellectual willingness to investigate the biological differences between individuals and groups, and the bravery to incorporate these facts of science into policy, has frequently degraded into purposeless bigotry. There is now an infinite stream of content which relies on the country of India as a punchline, or which revels in the idea that the poverty of immigrant minorities can be exploited to force them to deliver food in the harshest of weather conditions at the touch of a button. These forms of expression are deeply off-putting not just to the Left, but to the vast majority of people.

Dominating online culture — but only online culture — is an extremely dangerous position to be in. This is not because ‘Twitter isn’t the real world’. In many ways, the online world has become the most real, leading to a strange hyper-politics unmoored from the material realities and concerns people face in their real lives. The average person is a ‘terminally online’ content consumer who only engages with ideas in terms of their digital symbolism. Because of this, ordinary people may conflate right-wing dominance online with the assumption that the Right has meaningfully taken power, and is now the establishment status quo. We will lose the cultural capital of insurgency without the material benefits of power. It will not be any easier to be right-wing in a white-collar staff room — but the Left will once again be able to lay claim to the mantle of dissidence. This is even more dangerous because the right itself is equally online, and, combined with the aforementioned apoliticism of many of its new converts, it will itself be subject to these same confusions. When Elon Musk owns Twitter and ensures every post on the feed is discussing white genocide, does Trump really need to do mass deportations?

The Chud mind virus transforms its host into an anti-intellectual, bitter character that enjoys grumbling in quick, short bursts at the events of the day and demonstrations of factional loyalties, especially through the repetition of particular incantations — ‘You can just do things!’ ‘Remigration now!’ ‘Christ is king!’ etc. — which signal allegiance to the group and, crucially, the renunciation of independent thought. It manifests as a troubling transplant of the worst aspects of boomer political culture into the youth: narrowness of mind; untroubled scoffing at their opponents; and immediate dismissal of internal dissent, like an angry water-strider skating across the endless shallow pond of news. All intellectual vitality ceases at this point. All that is required to address any issue that emerges is the reiteration of years-old talking points borrowed from kitsch conservatism or 4chan factoids, accompanied with an amused smirk or a furrowed brow, delivered in pre-set meme formats.

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Intellectual rigidity and cultural stagnation is death for a political movement. New issues will require new thinking, and as the times change, the cultural expectations of the electorate change with them. If these attributes remain dominant, the Chud Right will soon face the same shock that the Woke Left faced in 2016, spun into stunned bewilderment as the world moves on without them. Even without any resurgence of the Left, the Chud Right will quickly outlast its welcome with the masses by posing as obnoxious, scolding, self-serious social policemen. Just as the ‘very online’ are rapidly tiring of the Chud Right’s vindictive bravado on social media, so too will the general public have little patience when Chuds emerge from their Plato’s cave to impose political incorrectness on unsuspecting normies.

Figures like Zohran Mamdani and Zack Polanski represent not a ‘post-Woke Left’, but a reactionary Woke Left that finds itself better able to flog its wares by focusing its attention on economic populism and holding expressions of their most unpopular cultural views temporarily aside. Neither have issued any kind of condemnation of the cultural moment of the previous decade, and both would be overjoyed to see the shifts of the past few years reversed. If they do achieve electoral victories, they will do so not because the public has rediscovered an enchantment with their vision, but because of the failures of the right to address the severe economic challenges faced especially by young people across the West. People will vote for Polanski in spite of his love for Benjamin Zephaniah, but they will do so without regret knowing that it will send all of the most annoying voices online into seething hysterics.

Labelling these politicians ‘post-Woke’ may also allow the Right to rationalise future left-wing victories, in terms of growing popular support both online and in the real word and electoral wins. The narrative makes sense: ‘The left has changed! We forced them into post-Woke; even when we lose, we still win!’ — but nothing of the sort will have occurred. The left has not yet been defeated in the way Chuds like to think they have.

The Chud phenomenon exposes a crucial political divide, rooted in the underlying psychologies and personality types present in any given society. It would be wrong to suggest that these factors are entirely determinative. Nevertheless, the fact that intelligent people disagree on every matter one might care to discuss demonstrates that temperaments can play at least a significant role in shaping one’s ideological positions. The temperament that drew people towards right wing ideas online ten years ago is very different from that which draws chuds to right wing ideas today. The teenager who was drawn to Brexit against the liberal cultural hegemony of 2016 could just as easily be drawn today towards some kind of South-Korean-style radical feminism or Marxism in the face of chud cultural hegemony. Equally, those who have been attracted to right-wing ideas in the past few years may not share the revolutionary temperament which motivated us all those years ago. Many chuds are just temporarily-embarrassed normies jumping on a trend. They could just have easily have been drinking dark fruits and watching football, or collecting comic books. Chuds adopted a radical, anti-social and dissident worldview initially as a means of laundering personal resentment. Now that their positions are mainstreamed online, we’re now beginning to see a shift caused by the changing personality profiles of people who adopt that politics, much like the tone of left wing politics shifted from campus radicalism to HR lecturing as it followed its own path of adoption.

The major problem this presents for the right moving forwards is the risk of falling into a certain kind of conservatism which assumes that all that is required to fix the problems we face is a ‘restoration’ of Britain’s pre-1997 demographics, cultural values, and constitutional order. Firstly, this programme is insufficient to address the challenges of the current moment, particularly on the economic front. Secondly, this shift would represent an intolerable step back in terms of cultural positioning. There is a great opportunity for the right over the remainder of this decade to seize the future from the left, and to put forward its own account of progress around which to build it. Only in doing so can a genuine paradigm shift occur away from that which has dominated for eighty years, in which tomorrow inevitably looks more left wing than today. It was this nascent progressive tendency that drew such excitement around right wing politics in the 2014-2017 period, and which has led to a resurgence in right wing views among the young. It is crucial that this sensibility remains if the right is to redirect the future of our country and of the West in general, rather than simply winning a few elections and delaying the inevitable leftwards march.

Both woke and chud alike are upholstered by people who are conservative in personality and temperament. They like things as they are, just from different perspectives, and want to keep them that way. Britain in particular is a very conservative country by the temperament of its people. Perhaps we always have been and always will be. But if the prevailing values in the country are not those we wish to conserve, the formulation of new values will depend upon those with a revolutionary temperament taking power. Inevitably, that means heterodox thinkers and intellectuals who, just like the masses, are disillusioned with the current state of the right-wing. It’s those people who were the same ones who were at the forefront of the 2016 revolution, and it will be those people who pick up the pieces and construct new formulations as chud fades away.

The chud moment will collapse far more quickly than did its woke counterpart. Whilst both were rooted in the dominance of online spaces, woke benefited from association with every prestige institution and source of cultural cache. Chud, on the other hand, is associated with precisely the opposite end of the social spectrum. It has taken less than a year for signs of exhaustion to emerge. Once the present moment of chud hysteria subsides and the right recalibrates its disposition in the face of a reactionary woke movement (the momentum for which will only exist due to economic concerns and anti-chud cultural backlash), we can begin the process of constructing a political movement which is serious about winning, holding, and executing institutional and political power.

But before that happens, it is important that the political leadership of the right does not taint itself by too close an association to this cultural force, so that they can continue to win elections beyond the public’s exhaustion with it. What is required, what chuds stand in the way of, is the opportunity for a right-wing government to emerge that can have meaningful and enduring popular support, one which can outlast the cultural moment of today. Whilst the chuds are busy staring cross-eyed at their pocket telescreens, hooked on chudslop, the post-chud right will emerge to shape the world to come. It’s time we put the chud away. It was time yesterday. An end to the drudgery of the doppeladlered woke-chud internet period is inevitable — we must make sure that end is on our terms.

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This article was written by Bukes, an enemy of the Pimlico Journal. Have a pitch? Send it to submissions@pimlicojournal.co.uk.

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