THE WOKE left – which I define as a social movement that views minorities as sacred but majorities as suspicious, if not evil – is now firmly in retreat. It has lost.
In America, Donald Trump is busily rooting out the woke left’s beliefs from universities, federal government and other public sector institutions, while reasserting the primacy of biological sex over gender gobbledygook.
In Europe, rising numbers of voters are flocking to anti-woke national populist parties, at least partly to express their opposition to the woke left’s fanatical commitment to mass uncontrolled immigration, open borders, identity politics, and hostility toward Western civilisation.
In Britain, too, while the country has just elected a Labour government, such is the new anti-woke mood that even Sir Keir Starmer and Labour are rapidly backtracking on their past commitment to the woke left gender ideology.
The new cultural zeitgeist that’s sweeping across the West, in other words, is moving firmly against the woke left, including its fanatical commitment to open borders, mass immigration, gender identity, anti-Western dogma, and the use of censorship, speech codes, and political correctness to shut down free speech and debate. And based on the findings of a fascinating report, it’s not hard to see why.
The research, by think tank More in Common, throws full light on the people who sit at the heart of the woke left, the so-called ‘radical progressives’. And it shows, clearly and convincingly, just how utterly out-of-touch they really are.
I’ve written about radical progressives before. A couple of years ago, I published a book in which I argued that radical progressives in Britain – such as James O’Brien, Emily Maitlis, Lewis Goodall, Jon Sopel, Gary Lineker, Carol Vorderman, Rory Stewart, Alastair Campbell, and many others like them – are completely and utterly adrift from the people who surround them.
Predictably, many who belong to this small but influential group, whom I dubbed the New Elite, were not exactly fans of the book, and spent months berating me for daring to suggest their views are marginal and extreme.
But now a bombshell report supports everything I was saying, showing just how out-of-touch the woke left has become from everybody else – a huge gulf that helps to explain how and why it has been completely outflanked by Donald Trump and is being rejected by millions of voters around the world.
Though representing no more than 10-15 per cent of Western nations, the woke left do tend to dominate the most important and influential institutions, which is why we need to take them seriously and study them. They routinely dominate universities, schools, museums and galleries, legacy media like the BBC, charities and the voluntary sector, the publishing industry, and more.
In Britain, for example, they only represent 8-10 per cent of the country but are far more likely to belong to the university class, to have good incomes, and to be over-represented in the public sector and the charity industrial complex.
In this way, by accumulating immense economic and cultural power, they’ve been able to exert a degree of influence that’s wholly disproportionate to their numbers.
The only problem for the woke left (which happens to be a very big problem) is that the radical if not revolutionary views they have spent the last fifteen years imposing on everybody else are completely at odds with what most people believe.
The woke left, for a start, are utterly obsessed with politics. They are, by far, the most likely to share their political views online and spend virtually every hour of every day on social media and promoting their radical views.
But their views are extreme and out-of-touch with the hardworking, tax-paying, patriotic majority. While the woke left share many economic views with the majority, for example believing that business is exploiting ordinary workers, and the economy needs radical reform, when it comes to cultural issues they are in a galaxy of their own.
As the new report shows, they are by far the most likely to feel ‘ashamed’ to be British. They are the only group who think Britain should be ‘ashamed’ of its former Empire. They are much more likely than everybody else to think, like Foreign Secretary David Lammy, that Western nations paying reparations for slavery is ‘a good idea’ —which 68 per cent of them support compared with only 32 per cent of all people.
They are also by far the most likely to think that ‘white people have privilege compared to people from ethnic minorities’, and to think white people are inherently racist. They are the only group who think people’s concerns about immigration are driven by racism rather than worries about the economy or public services.
They are the most likely to think children who want to change their gender should be allowed to do so. And they are the only group who think we should maintain or increase the amount of mass uncontrolled immigration into the country.
While most British people are becoming increasingly sceptical about mass immigration, concluding, rightly, that it’s making us poorer and less safe, the fanatical woke left want to press the pedal even harder by having more immigration.
If you want a sense of how utterly out of touch the woke left are on these cultural issues, look at the chart below. They are in a world of their own.
This is also true when it comes to their views on free speech, which really are deeply problematic. The woke left, in short, are not democratic. Far from it.
Consistently, as symbolised by the likes of Sir Keir Starmer and Yvette Cooper, they are the least likely to want to make space for debate and the most likely to say ‘we should prioritise protecting people from “hate speech” over protecting freedom of speech’.
This is a key point and one I’ve made before: the woke left are anti-democratic and illiberal because they will always sacrifice free speech, free expression and good faith debate on the altar of what they think is ‘protecting’ minorities from ‘emotional harm’.
But what the woke left perceive to be ‘emotional harm’ is, say, having an entirely legitimate debate about lowering immigration, or demanding a national inquiry into the rape gangs. And so, in turn, the woke left demand that entirely acceptable and legitimate debates are shut down to ‘protect’ what they see as the emotional safety of immigrants and Muslims. This is why the woke left are illiberal and anti-democratic.
Alarmingly, given their control and influence in public sector institutions, the woke left are also unique for thinking ‘certain viewpoints are not a legitimate feature of democratic debate’ — that some views are simply ‘too harmful’ to be given space.
What are we talking about here? Calling for murder and violence? Not exactly.
Three-quarters of the woke left consider it ‘offensive’ to say immigration is making the country worse, a view which two-thirds of British people support. Again, they are in cloud cuckoo land, which helps to explain how, over the last fifteen years, they have completely alienated the forgotten majority. They hold fanatical views that many others regard as extreme and completely out of touch, hence why many people across the West have now had enough of this movement.
The woke left’s political intolerance, which you routinely see reflected by the likes of Alastair Campbell and James O’Brien, is expressed in other ways, too.
Like the fact that nearly half of all people on the woke left would be ‘unwilling to campaign for a cause they believe in alongside a Conservative’, more than two-thirds would never be willing to campaign alongside somebody who voted for Reform, and nearly 30 per cent say the same about ‘somebody who believes in Israel’s right to exist’.
In other words, while people on the woke left like to think of themselves as the most enlightened, morally righteous and liberal of all, in reality they are deeply intolerant of people who simply hold different political views and beliefs from their own.
They’re out of touch in other ways, too. Consistently, they massively overestimate the scale of public support for woke left positions, often thinking the forgotten majority support them when, in fact, they don’t.
Again, they simply do not understand the people and the countries that surround them, which helps to explain why the BBC and other cultural institutions, filled with people from the woke left, often look adrift from the average person. And when the masses do vote for things which these activists strongly oppose, such as Brexit, the woke left are far more likely than everybody else to think this was because ‘people were manipulated by media and misinformation’.
They are simply incapable of thinking that people might have good and legitimate reasons for wanting to leave the European Union or vote for Donald Trump, a point you will hear continuously on Radio 4 Today as radical progressives struggle to make sense of why millions of people might actually want to lower immigration, restore a national democracy, and push back against radical Islam and open borders.
This is why you see people like Sir Keir Starmer and others rushing to shut down alternative views and debate as ‘misinformation’: they just cannot handle the fact that people hold different views from their own, and consider these views acceptable.
Lastly, this isn’t just about the woke left’s political opinions — they are different from everybody else in more personal ways. The research shows they are a rather depressed and negative bunch of people (as anybody who has ever interacted with them on social media or in the universities will instinctively know). Remarkably, more than half of people on the woke left say they have suffered from mental health problems and they are also much more likely than everybody else to say they feel sad, lonely, stressed, and depressed.
These feelings of pessimism and depression, I suspect, will now only intensify as the woke left, from America to Europe, begin to grasp the extent to which both they and their political views are now being thoroughly rejected by the forgotten majority.
And you know what? The woke left only have themselves to blame.
Because this is what happens when you spend years trying to force extreme, divisive, and unscientific views and beliefs down people’s throats while simultaneously telling them they cannot express their opinion, they cannot have free speech, and deriding them as misinformed fascists or bigots when they do challenge the orthodoxy.
The woke left have lost. Their movement is over. Their ridiculous ideology is being called out for what it is. And their deeply fanatical activists are now being exposed for what they are — dogmatic extremists who have completely lost touch with reality.
So let’s keep showing how out of touch they are.
Let’s keep pointing to how illiberal and anti-democratic their ideas really are.
And let’s keep throwing light on these activists and their hideous, divisive movement so that we can ensure they never return and we can finally put the so-called ‘Great Awokening’ of the 2010s behind us once and for all.
