HOST, Jonathan Kay: Welcome to the Quillette Podcast, which is usually hosted on alternate weeks by me, Jonathan Kay, and by Iona Italia. Quillette is where free thought lives. We are an independent, grassroots platform for heterodox ideas and fearless commentary.

And this week, I’ll be talking to Irish-English satirist and author Andrew Doyle, whom you might know better for his fictional alter-ego, Titania McGrath, the ecosexual “radical intersectionalist poet” whom Doyle has used to skewer the pieties of ultra-woke progressives.

And yes, I used the W-word—woke—which I realise has gone out of fashion lately. I mean, wokeness counter-reaction has gone out of fashion, of course—but, to some extent, so has the backlash against wokeness, especially since the election of Donald Trump. That’s because, like so many reactions and counter-reactions that take place in the endless culture war, the enemies of wokeness have created their own cultish ideology, complete with right-wing purity spirals and mobbings—the same things we hated when it was progressive radicals who were doing it.

As Doyle sees things, in fact, normal reasonable people are now being sandwiched between two competing forms of anti-liberal ideology: the one that comes from the left, traditional wokeness if you will—and the new right-wing wokeness, which is equally intolerant of dissent, and channels all sorts of deeply regressive values, such as antisemitism and homophobia.

In fact, Doyle himself, who happens to be gay, has been targeted by this kind of right-wing woke bigot, even as he’s still fending off cancel campaigns from all those old-school left-wing wokesters who’ve been targeting him for years. For traditional small-l classical liberals, it’s a two-front culture war.

As Doyle sees it, all of this points in the direction of giving up on the conventional left-right shorthand for describing the political spectrum. A better way to see things is liberals—that’s us, people who believe in free speech and viewpoint diversity and civil liberties—versus authoritarians; no matter whether those authoritarians fly the flag of MAGA or social justice.

Please enjoy my interview with satirist and author Andrew Doyle

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