The supporters of left-wing identity ideologies – those that we have been fighting on this site for three and a half years, under the name of "wokism" – are trying hard to assimilate our approach to "the right" or even to the "extreme right". Thus, among so many other examples, a journalist from Libération wrote last year about my book Is Wokism a form of totalitarianism? that "the essay could be signed by an RN ideologue". Our adversaries are stubbornly trying to reduce us to " ad hitlerum " because they have few other substantive arguments to oppose to us, and therefore rush towards the most politically convenient and the least intellectually costly.

These allegations have, it is true, a certain number of undeniable facts in their favor: in the United States, the anti-woke fight has been essentially led by the Republican Party; in France, the RN created an association in the spring of 2023 intended to fight against wokeness, approaching some of us in passing to join it – approaches that we have resolutely refused.

Why is it so important to keep ourselves away from this party, which has tried to hijack our cause as it has done with secularism and the fight against anti-Semitism? The first reason is that, generally speaking, we have always made sure to keep ourselves away from any party whatsoever. Because our cause, if it is political in the broad sense, is not political. It concerns the defense of values ​​– universalism, the autonomy of science, freedom of expression, freedom of conscience – which are, or should be, common to all democratic parties.

There is, however, a second, more specific reason to refuse any recuperation of our fight by the RN. It is that the "identity ideologies" that we are fighting, far from being limited to their version new look driven by communitarianism Woke (obscurantist deconstructionism, inquisitorial neo-feminism, victim decolonialism, aggressively proselytizing transactivism and, Last but not least, Islamo-leftism, the enemy of secularism), have long been part of nationalist identity politics – François Rastier and Jacques Robert, in particular, have clearly shown this in their articles published on our site.

Certainly, the identities thus essentialized by these various forms of identitarianism are not the same – nationalist for some, communitarian for others – but they are, in all cases, identity ideologies, and as such they are all part of what we are fighting, even if, at the University, the latter are more relevant than the former.

It seemed important to us to reaffirm these principles in the current electoral context.