It’s been a rough week in the world of the online intellectual right, which is currently in the midst of two separate yet related blowups — both of which illustrate how the pressures of power are cracking the elite coalition that aligned behind President Donald Trump’s return to power.

The first fight is really a struggle over who should determine the philosophical identity of MAGA, pitting a group of anti-woke writers against a wide group of illiberal or post-liberal figures.

The lead figure in the anti-woke camp, the prominent pundit James Lindsay, has been attacking his enemies as the “woke right” for months. In his mind, this group’s emphasis on the importance of religion, national identity, and ethnicity is the mirror image of the left’s identity politics — and thus an existential threat both to American freedom and the MAGA movement’s success.

In response, his targets on the right — which range from national conservatives to white nationalists — have started firing back aggressively, arguing that Lindsay is not only wrong but maliciously attempting to fracture the MAGA coalition.

This might seem like a niche online fight, but given that niche online discourse has been a major influence on the second Trump administration’s thinking, it might end up mattering quite a bit.

The same could be said about the second fight, which revolves around Curtis Yarvin — the neo-monarchist blogger who has influenced both Vice President JD Vance and DOGE. A recent post by rationalist author Scott Alexander accused Yarvin of “selling out” — aligning himself with Trump even though he had long denounced the kind of “authoritarian populism” that Trump embodies. Yarvin defended himself with some fairly bitter attacks on Alexander, drawing in defenders and critics from the broader right-wing universe in the process.

Each of these fights is telling in their own right. The “woke right” contretemps shows just how deep the divisions go inside the Trump world — between anti-woke liberals, on the one hand, and various different forms of “postliberals” on the other. The Yarvin argument is a revealing portrait of how easy it is to get someone to compromise their own beliefs in the face of polarization and proximity to power.

But put together, they show us just how hard it is to go from an insurgent force to a governing one.

The “woke right” redux

The “woke right” debate first came on my radar back in December, when the anti-woke pundit James Lindsay tricked a Christian nationalist website, American Reformer, into publishing excerpts of The Communist Manifesto edited to sound like a critique of modern American liberalism.

It might seem to make little sense to describe a 19th-century text on resistance to capitalism as an example of 21st-century identity politics. But Lindsay, who sees himself as a right-wing liberal, is using an idiosyncratic understanding of “wokeness” that equates it with collectivism — the idea that the politics should be understood through the lens of interests of groups, be it the proletariat or Black Americans, rather than treating all citizens purely as individuals. Thus, for Lindsay, communism is a form of wokeness, even if the term “woke” postdates Marx by nearly 200 years.

This broad definition also allows there to be right-wing forms of wokeness. Neo-Nazism, Christian nationalism, Catholic integralism, even certain forms of anti-liberal conservative nationalism — all of these doctrines give........

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