Third Worldism? Race Communism? WOKE?

Conservatives struggle to define the ideology they’re up against

American conservatives know they oppose something bad coming from the Left. But what that exact thing is prompts debate over what to call it. Leftists themselves usually refuse to give themselves a convenient name. Sometimes they go with progressive or some other benign formulation. A decade ago, they proudly called themselves woke. Now they pretend they never did that.

The Right has to give their foes a name they don’t identify with. Calling them progressives is too dull and unthreatening. Woke has been the favored term, but its users often struggle to define it and it’s been diluted enough to even attack the Right. Some conservatives revive old enemies to describe their new foes, with “communist” seeing a resurgence.

The goal is to paint a frightening picture of the Left, one that sees our foes as hel-lbent on civilizational destruction. Woke no longer conveys that sense of danger, and conservatives struggle to find a replacement term.

Some conservative intellectuals have settled on two competing labels to solve this dilemma: “third worldism” and “race communism.”

The chief advocate for third worldism is Hudson Institute fellow Zineb Riboua. The primary proponent of calling the Left race communists is author Helen Andrews. Both terms seek to describe the same thing and convince conservatives to replace woke with either label.

Both are fine as attack slogans against the Left, but both still lack enough popular currency to replace woke as the preferred epithet. Woke, for a lack of a better alternative, will stick around for the time being.

What’s needed is to define the traits the Right opposes and to make whatever term apply to these developments.

These are four core features supported by the modern Left that threaten our civilization:

1. Support for mass immigration that demographically replaces the majority population of America and other western countries.

2. Support for policies, such as affirmative action and DEI, that intentionally discriminate against whites.

3. Support for ideas, such as the 1619 Project, that subvert America, paint the founding population as villains, and imagine the country has always been a multicultural state defined by minorities.

4. Support for massive wealth redistribution and other radical proposals to correct the “structural inequalities” of American life.

These are the traits that animate the Left. One could call this woke, third worldist, or race communist. But all terms have their issues.

Woke is, by far, the most popular and it’s the one the Left actually called themselves–until it became a political liability. It’s still a common term for the Right, as I can attest. In order to generate attention for an article about Iran’s appeal to western leftism, I titled it “Woke Iran.” The Islamic Republic isn’t actually woke, of course. But its propaganda repeats many woke talking points about Indians and Black Lives Matter to gain western sympathy. Its leaders are also heavily influenced by left-wing, third worldist intellectuals. “Woke” here doesn’t mean liberal.

But that’s part of the problem with woke. It’s an amorphous term that conservatives often struggle to define. Conservative Bethany Mandel famously couldn’t define it during an interview about her book on wokeness. For many on the Right, woke just means a worse version of political correctness. The overuse of the term has diluted its potency as a barb. Calling something woke in 2026 is just as likely to draw eyerolls as concerns. If everything is woke, nothing is.

It’s felt there’s a need for another term to better describe the traits listed above. Enter third worldism and race communism.

Zineb Riboua gives a clear definition of third worldism, giving it an advantage over “woke.” She defines it as “a postcolonial moral project born in the mid-twentieth century that recast politics as a global uprising against Western hegemony.” Its chief characteristics are anti-imperialism, anti-bourgeois, anti-capitalism, and antisemitism. The “world’s oppressed peoples,” rather than the western working class, becomes its revolutionary proletariat. Riboua sees Zohran Mamdani as one of the western exemplars of this ideology. She also uses this framework to connect these western leftists to Iran, Hamas, and Venezuela.

Aspects of the modern Left resemble this description. It’s also fair to call Iran and Venezuela third worldist. But, as I argued in The American Conservative last year, it’s too concerned with foreign affairs to accurately describe what we face. Unlike Iran, Mamdani and other American leftists support western hegemony. They just want our domestic and foreign affairs to be “woker.” Iran and Hamas are separate from what we face in domestic American politics. As we’ve seen in the current conflict, many of the Islamic Republic’s biggest fans come from the Online Right rather than the Woke Left.

Third worldism is still useful to describe elements of the Left, as well as western decline. But it’s not the most accurate term for our domestic opposition.

Helen Andrews offers race communism due to her own issues with third worldism and woke. Third worldism is inaccurate because:

1. Its enemy is not just the West but white people explicitly.

2. “Third Worldism” sounds foreign and it’s not. It’s the ideology of the American empire.

I disagree with the assertion that it’s the ideology of the American empire as there are multiple ideologies in conflict over control of the empire. Andrews asserts it was inherently decolonialist, but that ignores America’s support for certain colonial governments and white settler states in Africa. However, it is true the leftism she opposes did at times shape American foreign policy. In any case, that’s a topic for another article or podcast.

Andrews doesn’t like woke because “it sounds frivolous. It makes you think of diversity seminars and college professors.” She prefers race communism because it accurately illustrates the dire threat the modern Left poses to our civilization:

The ruling ideology is just race communism. Taking stuff from the bad class and giving it to the good class is its central purpose as much as it was for the Soviets. Who gets board seats, jobs, college spots, loans, housing—it’s all about the allocation of resources by race.

Just like the other terms, there are issues with it. Race communism doesn’t actually derive from Marxism but liberalism. It’s also touted by a number of people ostensibly in support of capitalism. Highly Respected guest Peter Nemets contends that it’s a poor term because:

[I]t implies formal, hierarchal, & centralized structure parallel to & integrated with regular political & economic structures. Actual phenomena we see are results of distributed, non-hierarchal structures created to mitigate legal risk.

But out of all the choices, it’s probably the best. It’s more accurate than third worldism and has a clearer, more threatening meaning than woke.

We’re never going to settle on a perfect term. Our enemies refuse to give us one and we’re going to have come up with something on our own. All three terms are fine to use, so long as they’re describing the four principles listed above. We’re not going to wean people off woke for the time being. It’s important to give them a clear framework for what it means in order to make conservatives build a coherent agenda to counter the leftist agenda.

The Right needs to be clear about what it stands against. It’s a race-based ideology that wants to transform the West through mass immigration, anti-white discrimination, cultural policy, and wealth redistribution. You can call it woke, third worldist, or race communist. What matters most is understanding those key points.

You can now preorder Scott Greer’s new book, “Whitepill: The Online Right and the Making of Trump’s America,” from this link.