I asked Chat GPT Why Right-Wing Populism Reacts Against DEI and Wokeism

 Here's what it said: 

Right-wing populism today is a convergence of several forces, and its rise in reaction to "wokeism" and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) movements can be seen as driven by at least three intertwined dynamics:

1. Simple Backlash (Cultural Reaction)

- Emotional reaction to social change: For many, rapid cultural shifts around gender, race, and identity have provoked discomfort, resentment, or fear of displacement.

- Loss of status: Groups that were once culturally dominantespecially white, rural, working- or middle-class menperceive DEI as a zero-sum threat to their identity, values, and social position.

- Media amplification: Conservative media and pundits exaggerate and satirize progressive causes, often framing them as attacks on normal people, fueling further grievance.

- Verdict: This backlash is real but is often exploited and magnified by elites to serve other agendas.

2. Plutocratic Populism (Elite Strategy)

- Weaponizing cultural division: Wealthy elites fund and guide right-wing populist movements to distract from economic inequality and dismantle regulatory and redistributive mechanisms.

- Astroturfed outrage: Many anti-woke campaigns are strategically funded by billionaire-backed think tanks.

- Divide-and-rule politics: Populist leaders demonize DEI and social justice to redirect public anger away from the rich and toward imagined cultural enemies.

- Verdict: Anti-woke populism is often a tool of elite power maintenance, cloaked in popular outrage.

3. Crisis in Masculinity (Psychosocial Reaction)

- Erosion of traditional roles: Economic changes, educational gaps, and feminist gains have left many men feeling disoriented.

- Identity reassertion: Right-wing populism offers a sense of purpose, strength, and honor rooted in traditional, sometimes hypermasculine ideals.

- Influencers: Figures like Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate appeal by offering a narrative of redemption through personal discipline, dominance, or rejection of softness.

- Verdict: Masculinity in crisis is a powerful emotional engine behind many right-wing movements, especially online and among youth.

Why Conservative Economic Policy is the Root of our Economic Troubles

The core principles of conservative economic policy (aka neoliberalism):

1. Reduce taxes for the rich in the hope that they will invest and create jobs. WRONG: This policy has negative results in the age of automation, offshoring and financial tricks. Employees' wages cut into profits and the employers want to keep them low or non-existent. This only WIDENS the gap between rich and poor and reduces money available to the government to make needed infrastructure improvements, for education, healthcare, social support services, etc.

On Tribe and Discourse

On Tribe and Discourse Earlier blog entries in this space (Culture is Geologic [gone - eaten by former blog host], Tribalization and the Global Economy and Relativism [below], Populism and Power [also eaten]) expressed the view that industrialism, by disrupting awareness of a direct relation to nature, dislodged the web of discourse that integrated tribe and ecosystem and replaced the integrating mythos with a place holder that Lacan referred to as the Name-of-the-Father.  This place holder can now be filled, the sentiments of "tribe" artificially but all the more zealously aroused, by any number of banners.  One's sense of personal identity is wrapped up in some kind of tribal membership. I say all the more zealously because in a globalized economy, tribal connections, especially among urban or modern people, are likely to be reaction formations to some degree.  Believers of myths today believe them literally and historically, rather than heuristically or metaphorically; fans idolize teams and do battle over loyalties; patriots die for nations that never supported them; gangs fight over territories; people are relieved to be identified as belonging to a market segment.  Reaction formation is characterized by overly intense beliefs; overly intense to sustain the lie to oneself.   A little reflection and anyone can see that intense tribal loyalties are artificial yet deadly in a global economy.  The organic integrity of pre-literate tribes has long decayed, as we can see directly in the aboriginal peoples of the world whose ways have been sideswiped by globalization.  Today, the tribe as a social-psychological form is decadent.  A true way of renewal needs to be found.  Tribalization and the Global Economy Historically, tribe is a set of economic relationships between people that direct their relation to local nature; i.e., a socio-economic system.  An attendant mythology embedded in linguistic structures models the world for members of the tribe. The mythology institutionalizes kinship relations, the rites and rules of reproduction and life events in patriarchal terms.  Tribe is circumscribed by a set of proprieties and shameful transgressions (especially reproductive) that literally define its membership and its members’ sense of identity. What happens to tribe in the global economy?  In a global economy, the tribe resides in an alienated nostalgia.  There is an empty place-holder for what should be a meaningful socially-integrating force (that makes us feel at home in the world and explains our connection to nature in mythological terms), but the place-holder embodies the same amount of energy and urgency as any locally based socio-economic system.  In an unrooted global economic system, any banner can galvanize a group in the time it takes to score a goal , shout “death to infidels” or prefer one popular music genre over another.  Why? Psychologist Jacques Lacan had the brilliance to realize three things:  One, that the sense of personal identity one has is necessary for basic sanity; Two, that this sense of identity does not self-subsist in individuals but is a product of one’s linguistic place in the patriarchal-tribal system of meanings; and Three, it is necessary for there to be an integrating but intrinsically undefinable locus of navigation to this system of meanings, which he facetiously but accurately called “the name of the father.”  So the answer to the question as to why tribe can galvanize with such astounding force is that a linguistic community is deeply necessary for sanity.  There are obvious exceptions, but unfortunately until Lacan is wrong, and Carol Gilligan is right …  2016-06-08 Note: Name of the father "as the delegate and spokesperson of a body of social Law and convention", not the phallus as per Freud. http://www.iep.utm.edu/lacweb/#SH2c There are probably better sources out there. I was reading Malcolm Bowie 11 years ago in 2005 if anyone's interested.

On Elitism

Ironically, populist movements in the US support the elite (creditor class, plutocrats, monopoly capitalists) and laws that increase their wealth and power, which are sold as contributing to greater individual freedom while increasing the class divide. Meanwhile the American Dream of individual freedom that began with the Age of Enlightenment has become a ridiculous caricature, as it is considered "elitist" to trust scientists and intellectuals, who are generally motivated by curiosity and concern for the public good more than self-interest.

It doesn't make sense to think of society or social institutions in terms of the original "social contract" among rational consenting individuals because, clearly, individuals maintain their identities in terms of their relationship to a real or idealized group, not by means of some inborn identity and a capacity for individual reasoning.  People are born into and conditioned into an existing culture, with its history, its images, and its language . Speech is always historically and culturally conditioned and most people welcome that conditioning, although they may tell you otherwise by way of some fantasy "lone cowboy" image of individualism or something along those lines, equally culturally conditioned.We are members of real or idealized tribes and in times of rapid change in technology, the precursor to a change in ideology, there is a culture lag. Today we see culture regression. In some years, this will pass, hopefully with less pain than in times past.

Politics is not about rational choices. It's about tribal allegiances and, in uncertain times, it's the ancient archetype of the alpha male tribal leader, perhaps updated to the archetype of a valiant king, that keeps the lines of power organized and most people aligned to the interests of the oligarchy that directs our economy, regardless of what government regulators may want to do about it. Although our contemporary stories still indicate some deformed attempts to escape some vestigial projection of feudalism, the instinct to submit to the "divine right of kings" across many domains of human endeavour doesn't seem to have abated much.

What is an economy? It is a combination of our technologies, how we are socially organized to make the best use of them (or not) to produce what we need (and much, much more) from nature, and the institutions and stories that sustain that arrangement, and the powers of those who dominate the economy, in whom our powers are vested. We, more often than not, work against our personal advantage (usually unwittingly) and instead maintain the structures that in turn maintain our investment in the powers that sanction the rules and rituals that organize our lives and public relationships. For example, mothers in certain countries make sure that their daughters are "circumcised" in order to ensure their marriageability.

Today though if you dare to dream that reason, morality, art and respect for evidence (science) will help see us through to a more just arrangement, you may be called "elitist". This label is vestige of the hatred of the privileges of the feudal lords. It has nothing to do with today's world. Populism is the vehicle that most acutely and continually sustains the elite today. The next question is, what does that mean for democracy, if the dream of the enlightenment has become something "elitist"?

Of course, it's much more complicated than dreamers of the enlightenment may care to think. There is a deep seated sense that enlightenment dreams represent a kind of hubris on the part of human beings, as if we could rationally organize ourselves or submit our wills to a rational economy (invisible hand, "free"enterprise) to best achieve our increasingly empty ends.  Of course we can't. The the complexity of the world would prevent our being able to do it - although frighteningly, the recent rediscovery of the complexity of nature doesn't prevent our ability to think it. 

What is the alternative? As many are voicing today, the solution is in being adaptive, in our responsiveness and resilience. Rather than fixed universal truths of "human nature" or visions of true science, the just beneficence of some "invisible hand" economics, or various ideological diseases that afflict us today, I think we should rediscover what it means to understand, in all its dimensions, with the proviso that human understanding is ever-provisional.

Today more than ever we need to understand our relationship to the world we burden with the polluting byproducts of our Promethean dreams and our unrelenting, culturally conditioned searches for a better life. We will never arrive at a perfect solution but we can find our way to a more harmonious one, I hope.