Anti-Social Socialists

How The Left Became a Freak Show

This essay is written as a companion to my “Genealogy of Wokeism” essay series on what wokeism is, where it comes from, and what it means for left politics going forward. In Part 1 of that series, I established the core definition: wokeism is a post-materialist, consciousness-first style of politics that presupposes the awakening of a correct consciousness as the prerequisite for political solidarity and political action. Drawing on Musa Al-Gharbi’s empirical research in We Have Never Been Woke, I showed that the primary carriers of wokeism are symbolic capitalists, the stratum of the Professional Managerial Class whose work involves the production and manipulation of discourse, rhetoric, and cultural meaning, in fields like academia, media, art, entertainment, and law. These awokenings erupt cyclically during periods of elite overproduction, when the credentialed class expands faster than the institutions meant to absorb it.

In Part 2, I traced the historical genealogy of this consciousness-first template from its origins in American evangelical Protestant revivalism, through its secularization in the consciousness-raising movements of the 1960s and 1970s, through the rise of identity politics and intersectionality, and into its institutional capture through universities, corporations, and the expanding professional managerial class. That genealogy also established an important distinction: classical Marxism, at least as envisioned by Marx and Engels, was not woke. Marx’s theory of class conflict was predicated on the idea that the working class already acts in its own interest, that class conflict is already inevitable, and that the duty of revolutionary leaders was to steer already existing social forces toward emancipation rather than to awaken a passive mass to a new consciousness. Marxism was supposed to be a tool for the working class, grounded in the objective conditions of production and organization.

The Strange Death of Marxism

What happened to Marxism in practice, however, is a case study in the dynamics this essay series has documented throughout. Marxism was ultimately picked up by the intellectual class and the PMC for their careers, absorbed into the very symbolic-capitalist habitat that generates woke politics. It was symbolic capitalists, not workers, who came to dominate this field, and the result was a woke form of Marxism in which class consciousness is discussed as though it were a kind of voodoo spell rather than something grounded in objective reality and connected to the actual conditions of organization and possibility, conditions these theorists largely ignore. This is why we see Marxists who insist that mass migration harming workers is not a problem, who treat patriarchy as though it were the central axis of oppression in 2026, and who discuss the working class with all the condescension and none of the familiarity of people who have never shared a break room with one.

In cycles of elite overproduction, people gravitate toward left-wing ideologies, including Marxism. Those who are most attracted to Marxism today are often fallen professionals or underemployed graduates from the symbolic-capitalist fields: adjunct professors stuck in perpetual holding patterns, cultural workers whose industries are contracting, media figures whose platforms never materialized as expected. These individuals may feel, with some justification, that they expected more from their careers. While this does not mean Marxism has no value for the working class, the reality is that those who preach it most fervently are often far removed from the working class and carry a thoroughly woke conception of it.

Given that the cultural politics of the woke liberal era have largely played themselves out over the last eight years, I believe the next awakening cycle will include a growing contingent of so-called communists, with many politically disaffected people gravitating toward class politics. This is, in principle, a welcome development. Class politics is where the left should be. But this development carries a specific danger, because many leftists who genuinely care about class politics may be drawn into working with and enabling a certain type of communist individual who claims to support class politics but is completely divorced from them in understanding. This will lead to a counterproductive politics that is self-marginalizing and ultimately poisons the movement from within. It is this type, and this danger, that this essay addresses directly.

Revolt Against the Revolt of the Elites

There are many Leftists who do recognize that symbolic culture wars have not manifested in real political change but nonetheless refuse to acknowledge the problem with woke politics and attribute all the blame to liberal co-optation. These types of leftists, who still think that “converting people” to “the left” is the precursor to political change, are essentially doubling down on a mode of woke thinking that is already based on a completely misguided conception of how political change works. You cannot wait for people to agree ideologically before you make a decision politically, and you do not need a “cultural revolution” before you change economic conditions. Culture matters, but you cannot change it just by changing language and media.

Culture is naturally a lot harder to change than policy, and you can only influence so many people towards a certain way of thinking when the people preaching it are increasingly detached from the majority of people to whom they are trying to preach it. No matter how much liberal or left symbolic capitalists (those in the top 20%) are able to successfully capture the institutions in which ideology and discourse are generated and disseminated (media, academia, art and entertainment), there is a limit to how much social change they can shove down people’s throats, depending on how much it contradicts people’s common sense. At some point, they will vomit, or even turn violently against them.

The populist right did not emerge out of nowhere as a reaction to “progress,” and a large percentage of Americans did not just “turn far-right” to reactionary sentiments magically concocted by right-wing propagandists. As documented in my Part 1 Genealogy of Wokeism essay, Musa Al-Gharbi’s empirical research demonstrated that the “great awokenings” have been marked by major attitude changes to the left (socially) among symbolic capitalists, while the attitudes of the majority of the public have been rather stable, only changing very slowly.^[1]

Propaganda as Projection

The failure of left and liberal symbolic capitalists to understand the limits of changing culture is reflected in their misunderstanding of how “propaganda” works and why they tend to misconstrue cause and effect. It was not an “alt-right pipeline” on the internet that magically radicalized people towards reactionary politics; rather, content creators on YouTube and social media were simply supplying the demand for content that spoke to their pre-existing grievances, which the left and liberal side did not have convincing answers to, if they even acknowledged them at all. This is why, in general, leftists especially tend to overstate the role of “propaganda” in why people hold the views that they do. Propaganda only works when people either want to believe it or because there is a certain rational kernel of truth that aligns with people’s experiences, intuitions, and interests. Ordinary people are not a completely passive “mass” whose brains can be molded like clay. You cannot shape them into whatever you want them to be, and they will not change overnight. People often adapt to changing socio-economic conditions and come to adopt or tacitly accept ideologies that make sense of them.

It is also worth observing that the alternative media ecosystem that has grown up to supply this demand does not differ much, sociologically, from the mainstream media it claims to challenge. The hosts, commentators, and producers of both left and right alternative media are drawn overwhelmingly from the same class stratum as their mainstream counterparts: former journalists, credentialed academics, and PMC aspirants who found the mainstream either too restrictive or too competitive. The same class that generates the cultural problem generates the commentary on it. This does not make the commentary worthless, but it does mean that the alternative media’s own incentive structure, which rewards outrage, audience capture, and the performance of ideological commitment, reproduces many of the dynamics it claims to be correcting, simply in a less polished register.

The wild west of a deregulated internet helps weaken the control that symbolic capitalists have on “the discourse.” It is not a coincidence that liberal-left symbolic capitalists are the people who tend to be the most in favor of internet censorship and “content moderation” to police “extremism.” More unregulated social media effectively democratizes discourse and allows the voices of ordinary people outside the symbolic capitalist orbit to be heard. When people have increasingly expressed sentiments and opinions that the symbolic capitalists do not like, their inclination is often to police them rather than listen to them.

People think. They have opinions on things. While many may live much of their life on autopilot, they are not necessarily sleepwalking sheep who need to be “woken up” by leftist activists with a megaphone in order to know they are getting screwed by the system. What they want to hear are people who can actually show how their lives in that system can be made better, or at least people who understand and speak to their concerns. But so many people are used to politicians either not listening to them, lying to them, or breaking their promises, so as a result, people tune out of politics. Many ordinary people simply do not have the time and energy that woke people do to be constantly outraged about politics all the time. They could give a crap about the latest first-world middle-class problem or keep up with the latest symbolic cultural change of the day.

The attempt of disgruntled symbolic capitalists and PMC aspirants to bypass the political and advance “progress” by “changing culture” from the top down represented what Christopher Lasch called a revolt of the elites. What we are witnessing with the rise of right-wing populism is, in part, a revolt against this revolt of the elites, a reaction to the vacuous cultural politics generated by disgruntled left-liberal symbolic capitalists following elite overproduction. It is a popular reaction against what Thomas Piketty calls the Brahmin left, which has been losing to a power bloc he calls the “Merchant right” – a coalition between ultra-wealthy counter-elites, small business owners, and blue collar workers. Piketty’s research on the great political realignments of recent decades confirms the pattern: the left has become the party of the educated elite, while the right has absorbed the working-class base that left parties abandoned.^[2]

Why Marxists Act Woke too, and It’s Not New

Some people who adopt Marxism today do so as a brand identity to signal they are more radical than the mainstream democratic socialist camp. They talk a radical game and meander about principles, but when it comes down to election night, they usually rally behind a liberal party like the Democrats. They do so in the name of strategically resisting the supposed threat of “fascism” that never comes, while contributing to the very woke discourses that fuel popular right-wing reaction. They double down on the most unpopular woke positions on immigration, LGBTQ insanity, and anti-male feminist discourses that mystify the problem and fuel the gender wars. These sorts of symbolic capitalist individuals, whose commitment to Marxism often depends on the stability of their employment, often fall into the same traps, treating communism as essentially an anti-fascist radical ideology rather than building their own independent politics. They fall prey to the same PMC thinking and false narratives that progressive and PMC leftists have, particularly regarding the cycle of action and reaction and the nature of right-wing populism. Right-wing populism cannot be understood without understanding what it is reacting to: the revolt of the elites, the culture of condescension, the decades of material abandonment dressed up in the language of progress. A communist who treats Trumpism as inexplicable fascism rather than as a predictable popular reaction to the very class dynamics Marxism is supposed to analyze has already abandoned materialism for the same moralized framing that liberals use. They have not transcended woke politics. They have merely adopted its conclusions under a more radical-sounding vocabulary.

You Can’t Only Blame The Libs

It is worth recalling, before turning to the specific question of vanguardism, a point established in Part 1 of this series: the phrase “politically correct” did not originate in liberal academia. It originated in U.S. Communist Party circles in the 1930s, where it was used both sincerely, to denote genuine commitment to the party line, and critically, to mock those who were overly zealous or dogmatic in their conformity. The term was later picked up, entirely without irony, by Black Power and neo-Maoist movements in the 1960s and 1970s, who adopted it as a straightforward description of ideological orthodoxy. Anyone familiar with Maoism, whether in China or in its French and American neo-Maoist derivatives, will recognize that “politically correct” was not a slur invented by right-wing culture warriors. It was the operating vocabulary of communist vanguard culture itself. The policing of speech, the denunciation of deviationists, the insistence on a single objectively correct party line on every question: these are not innovations of the liberal PMC left. They are inheritances from Stalinized Marxism, carried forward by people who now pretend their tradition was always innocent of the very tendencies they attribute exclusively to liberals and the CIA.^[3]

This matters because many of the new Marxist-Leninist types, while happily rejecting the “synthetic” liberal left as a product of corporate co-optation, refuse to acknowledge that many of the same woke pathologies, political correctness, and cancel culture, etc., were always present inside communism itself. They often blame liberals for co-opting the left and creating a “fake left” instead of the “real left,” which they often assume to be communist. The communists who insist their tradition had nothing to do with political correctness are simply wrong. They have it backward. Communists pioneered political correctness before the liberals did. To be fair, it was particularly the Marxist-Leninists, Maoists, and pro-Stalin adjacent communists, not all of the commies. Many communists genuinely believe in free debate and are open-minded, hence why I have engaged with them as much as I have. But in most cases, where communists have actually ruled, the true believers in “real Marxism” got shot, jailed, or silenced into submission. Under actually existing socialist governments ruled by Marxist-Leninist communist bureaucrats, you did not merely get ostracized for heterodox views. You got policed, imprisoned, and in the Soviet Union, you could be diagnosed as mentally ill for failing to subscribe to the “immortal science of Marxism-Leninism.” The overlap between the worst aspects of the woke left and the worst aspects of the communist left is not a coincidence. It is a shared inheritance in a techocratic sensibility. There was always, within the communist and leftist movements more broadly, both a genuine working-class component and a PMC component, and the latter component has come to dominate them.

Vanguardism as a Technocratic Power Fantasy

As I have already established, even Marxists are not immune to woke thinking, and even their “historical materialist” ideology (which is supposed to be “scientific” in method) can be inverted to serve dogma rather than to understand the realities of the working class they claim to stand for. This is especially the case with Leninist types who believe in a conception of an intellectually “advanced” vanguard leading the proletariat, as well as those who learned their Marxism in academia.

The wokeification of Marxism is ultimately a downstream product of the fact that those who take up Marxism today tend to be PMC symbolic capitalists, not members of the traditional working class. This is why they gravitate toward consciousness politics and transform class politics into consciousness-raising exercises. But there is a debatably earlier origin of this tendency, traceable to Lenin’s idea of vanguardism itself. Vanguardism was introduced in a particular historical context: a repressive autocratic regime in which multi-party democracy was not a serious possibility and in which clandestine revolutionary organization was a practical necessity rather than an ideological preference. That idea became the dominant mode of organizing in the Soviet Union and was subsequently promoted to communist parties worldwide as the correct model for revolutionary politics, regardless of whether the conditions that produced it applied elsewhere.

Vanguardism inherently attracts a certain type of person. The Leninist fantasy is one in which intellectuals, particularly communist intellectuals, rule instead of capitalists, becoming the new ruling class. This creates a profound overlap with the technocratic tendencies of PMC leftism, and it produces serious problems when transplanted into democratic societies. Vanguard parties attract people whose primary skill is the production and manipulation of ideas, people trained in symbolic-capitalist fields like art, academia, theory, and media. Despite claiming to believe in materialist politics, they lean toward consciousness politics, which makes sense when one’s entire professional formation involves working with symbols and discourse rather than with the material conditions of production. In a context where they feel powerless and disconnected from institutional levers, spreading consciousness and correct ideas feels like the most productive thing one can do. The vanguard party becomes, in practice, a vehicle for consciousness raising, which is how most contemporary adherents experience it, even though Lenin’s original conception operated in a very different context with actual practical stakes attached to organizational discipline.

What must be stated plainly is the nature of this fantasy, because its practitioners rarely admit it even to themselves. Under communism, the vanguardist intellectual’s job would be essentially the same as it is now: reading, writing, teaching, theorizing, producing, and adjudicating discourse. The difference is that they would have power. They wouldn’t have to sacrifice any of their privilege. Their cultural capital would remain intact. Quite the contrary, in this hypothetical communist fantasy scenario, they would gain the one thing the PMC intellectual currently lacks: the authority to impose their conclusions, to punish dissent, and to compel the working class to accept their tutelage rather than merely offering it. The Leninist power fantasy has a second dimension that is even more rarely acknowledged: the purge. The cultural revolution, the anti-bourgeois campaign, and the denunciation session are not incidental features of Leninist history. They are, for a certain type of intellectual, its primary attraction. The persecution of rival intellectuals in the name of ideological purification is the ultimate exercise of the symbolic capitalist’s professional skill set: the ability to determine which ideas are legitimate and which are heretical, except that under communism, this determination carries the force of the state rather than merely the force of a Twitter pile-on. It is the PMC power fantasy taken to its logical conclusion: technocracy with teeth. The left-wing variant of “we know better, therefore we should rule” emerges from the same socialization as the liberal-left woke technocratic impulse.

While Leninists might see themselves as fundamentally different from the more “liberal” academic Marxists, both tend to emerge out of the same symbolic capitalist PMC habitat that we discussed in Part 1. Leninist fantasies tend to be particularly attractive to dissatisfied academic counter-elites and disaffected PMC aspirants in symbolic capitalist industries like art, academia, media, and entertainment. Working with symbols is all that they know, and they see themselves as part of an elite vanguard that will lead the people to liberation. In many ways, it is a more fringe version of the woke liberal priestly class who believes in policing language and socially progressive indoctrination via media. Red wokeism. They used to have a term for this archetype: a pinko.

To be fair, the socio-economic position of communists or leftists in general does not necessarily determine whether their ideas are correct or whether they are good. The problem is that communists and leftists who fall into the trap of woke politicking presuppose that they are already good and correct. In practice, materialism gets used by these types not to actually study reality, but to rationalize what they already want to believe. They assume that there already is a politically correct position that must be propagated to the masses, who they win over through consciousness raising. They already assume that the masses do not know what is in their interests and must be taught to follow the communist Brahmin caste, who know better. As is the case with most manifestations of woke politics, the wokeified Marxists assume that it is not they who must adapt to where most people in society are at, but rather to socially engineer the people to adopt their view.

Cultural Hegemony and Social Engineering

As I argued in Part 2, Marx and Engels did not envision politics in this way. Marx’s theory of class conflict was predicated on the idea that the working class already acts in its own interest, and that class conflict is already inevitable. The duty of the revolutionary leaders was merely to steer this already existing class conflict towards the goal of communism, and in a way that would be in accordance with the objective material realities at play rather than projecting utopian fantasies. Marx was writing before the managerial revolution and the creation of the PMC and symbolic capitalists, which would greatly change how radical activity manifests.

But of course, Marx was only a human, and history unfolded in a very different way than he predicted. Contrary to Marx’s prediction, the working class in most places did not choose revolution. When given the option, the working class in most places opted for reform. Many communist ideologists of the 20th century had a hard time coping with this reality, and so do the new wave of communists being created by the last cycle of elite overproduction. This is where Marxism became “woke,” although one could argue that this wokeified (some use the term “Stalinized”) version of Marxism has its origin in Lenin himself, who believed that a vanguard party of “advanced” proletarians (in practice, this meant intellectuals or class traitors) must guide the revolution, because the working class left to its own gravitates to trade union consciousness (Lenin’s term for the tendency of workers to opt for compromises that were in their material interests rather than long-term revolution).

But the real wokification of Marxism occurred after the expansion of academia in the post-war era, as more people read (and often misunderstood) thinkers like Gramsci, Lukács, and the Frankfurt School, neo-Marxist intellectuals who tried to understand the failure of the socialist revolution to manifest in the West and the rise of Fascism. Today, many of the communists who fall into the woke trap tend to use concepts like “cultural hegemony” as a rationalization for why the working class in Western countries did not opt for socialist revolution, and insist that the reason the working class has increasingly gravitated to right-wing populism is that they are simply brainwashed. They assume the barrier to people accepting their ideas is that they have been socially conditioned not to like them, so they come to the conclusion that the people must be “re-educated” in order to awaken their class consciousness. They envision that “cultural hegemony” can be subverted by capturing institutions like media, academia, art, and entertainment, or by creating counter-hegemonic institutions of their own. This is a long way of saying that the communists believe that the problem is not with their own ideas, but rather that people are socially engineered not to support them. Thus, the answer is essentially to brainwash them again, but with the politically “correct” ideas.

Reality does not align with the ideological dogmas that Marxist-Leninist communists envision as true. They blame this all on “cultural hegemony” and social conditioning. So their project becomes trying to convert students and underemployed college graduates into thinking that communism was actually good and did not fail due to its own contradictions, but because of the CIA. It is essentially the “Marxist” version of wokeism. It is based on the PMC idea that you have to “awaken” the people to your politically correct worldview via consciousness raising, because people will supposedly never gravitate to politics that benefit their class interests by themselves. The entire worldview of these PMC communists is a projection. They think that the reason the working class is not flocking to crusty communist parties, and is instead flocking to populists, is because the proles are all “brainwashed” by “bourgeois propaganda.” So the commie then thinks that “counter-propaganda” and more social engineering is the answer to everything, as long as it is coming from the “advanced,” educated people like them, who only consume material that reinforces their pre-existing beliefs.

When they eventually do accept the fact that the working class does, in fact, operate in its own interests, they blame this all on its whiteness or its supposed inherent settler Western chauvinism. They blame everything but themselves, their terrible, half-baked political ideas, and all the cope they consume to sustain them. They throw out words like “reactionary,” “tailism,” “right-deviationism,” and “chauvinism” that are meaningless to everyone except their own shrinking cadre, which shrinks faster the more they start having to pay taxes.

Race Communism

This tendency reaches its most developed expression in what can only be called the racialization of Marxism: the wholesale subordination of class analysis to a racial framework in which the primary contradiction of history is not between capital and labor but between the colonizer and the colonized, the settler and the indigenous, the white world and everyone else. This current runs through postcolonial theory, decolonization discourse, and third-worldist politics, and it has produced a body of work whose central function is not to clarify the conditions of working-class struggle but to foreclose it. J. Sakai’s Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat is the ur-text of this tendency, arguing that white workers in America have never constituted a genuine proletariat at all, that they are instead a settler-colonial labor aristocracy whose interests are structurally aligned with capital and whose class consciousness is permanently compromised by the racial privileges extracted from slavery and genocide. Gerald Horne’s The Counter-Revolution of 1776 extends the logic further, recasting the American Revolution itself not as a progressive event in world-historical terms but as a slaveholder’s counter-revolution against British abolitionism, rendering the very founding of the republic an act of racial reaction. The cumulative effect of this literature is to produce a version of Marxism in which the working class of the Western nations is not a revolutionary subject but a racial enemy, a class so thoroughly implicated in colonial extraction that solidarity with it is not merely unlikely but not worth reaching out to.

What this framework produces in practice is not revolution but paralysis: a politics of guilt for those who accept the framework, and a politics of nihilistic withdrawal for those who take it to its logical conclusion. Third-worldism offers the guilty PMC radical a psychologically comfortable exit from the difficulty of actual domestic organizing, since it redirects their political energy toward fetishizing foreign struggles, romanticizing faraway revolutions, and performing solidarity with the Global South that costs nothing and demands nothing beyond the correct posture. It is the politics of the exile who has never left home, who has simply declared their own society beyond redemption so that they never have to do the hard work of engaging with it. The self-marginalization is total, and it is chosen. These are people who have ideologically excommunicated themselves from their own countries and then wonder why nobody listens to them.

There is an additional irony that should not go unobserved. Racialized Marxism, which presents itself as the most radical critique of white supremacy available, in practice reinforces the very racial essentialism it claims to oppose. By treating whiteness as an inescapable structural position rather than a historically contingent social relation, it mirrors the logic of white identity politics from the opposite direction. The relentless insistence, from both liberal wokeism and racialized Marxism, that whiteness is the master category of American political life has done more to produce white identity consciousness on the right than any far-right propagandist could have accomplished alone. The so-called anti-racist framework generates the racial polarization it claims to be diagnosing. Once again, consciousness politics produces its own opposite.

What makes racialized Marxism especially insidious within communist and socialist formations is that it wears the costume of materialism while operating on entirely idealist premises. A genuine materialist analysis of settler colonialism would examine the specific economic structures through which indigenous dispossession occurred, the labor regimes that replaced it, and the class fractions that benefited from it, and would do so in order to identify the actual lines of solidarity available in the present. Racialized Marxism does none of this. It is, in the end, theology dressed in the language of political economy, a politics of original sin in which some peoples are born guilty and others are born righteous, and in which the path to salvation runs not through organization and struggle but through confession, re-education, and the proper performance of deference. It is the purest form of woke consciousness politics available on the radical left, and the fact that it claims Marxist credentials only makes it more dangerous, because it inoculates its adherents against the recognition that they have abandoned everything Marx actually argued for.

As I argued at length in Part 2’s discussion of race consciousness, racial essentialism is consciousness-first politics by structural necessity. Color, unlike culture, has no material substrate capable of generating solidarity organically, which means racial solidarity must always be constructed from above through consciousness-raising. Racialized Marxism inherits this structural problem entirely while adding a new layer of ideological self-deception: it claims to be materialist while performing the most idealist operation imaginable. What it shares with every other form of woke politics is the conviction that the primary obstacle to political change is that people think wrong thoughts and need to be re-educated into the correct framework before anything can be done. The framework changes, the diagnosis changes, but the underlying grammar is identical: awakening first, politics later, if ever.

The anti-solidaristic consequences of this tendency cannot be overstated. A working-class politics worth the name requires building coalitions among people who disagree about many things but share concrete material interests. Racialized Marxism makes this structurally impossible by design. It is hostile to common sense in the most literal way: it takes propositions that ordinary people of all backgrounds would find absurd (that the American Revolution was purely a slaveholder’s conspiracy, that white workers have never been exploited, that every institution in the West is reducible to colonial extraction) and treats the rejection of these propositions as proof of the very false consciousness they are meant to diagnose. Academia reinforces this dynamic through its own institutional incentives: the publish-or-perish structure of the university rewards novelty above all else, which creates a permanent demand for ever more radical reinterpretations of history, ever more granular taxonomies of oppression, and ever more esoteric theoretical vocabularies that serve no function except to distinguish the initiated from the uninitiated. The result is a factory that mass-produces alienation and calls it scholarship.

What these academic industries actually produce, when their output filters down to undergraduates and politically engaged young people, is not empowerment but a repertoire of victimization narratives that function as coping mechanisms for the politically impotent. Woke history, whether in its liberal or its racialized-Marxist variant, does not teach people how to build power or how to identify the concrete levers through which working-class interests can be advanced in the present. It teaches them to deconstruct, to reduce entire civilizations to their worst episodes, and to view the history of their own societies as an unbroken record of atrocity for which the living must endlessly atone. The student who emerges from this education has not been equipped with a political vocabulary that could help them organize a union, win a city council race, or build a tenant association. They have been equipped with a vocabulary that allows them to explain, at exhausting length, why every institution in their country is illegitimate, why solidarity with their own working class is naive, and why the real struggle is always somewhere else, somewhere purer, somewhere untainted by the settler-colonial sin. They have been given, in short, the tools to be insufferable at every dinner table and useless in every political context that matters. The misanthropy is the point, even if they do not recognize it as such, because contempt for the ordinary is the psychological consolation prize for those who have given up on the possibility of changing anything. It is not an accident that the people most committed to these frameworks are also the people most thoroughly alienated from their own families, communities, and fellow citizens. The alienation is not a bug in the theory. It is the theory’s most reliable product.

Using Minorities as Human Shields

Many white people on the left will feel uncomfortable critiquing ideas written by black authors because they supposedly cannot understand the black perspective. However, there are many black authors who do not reflect the black perspective at all, and many will hide behind race as a way to legitimize their perspective.

There is a further trap that needs to be identified and dismantled, because it is the single most effective rhetorical shield race communists possess: the claim that to criticize them is to dismiss the voices of racial minorities. This conflation of race communism with the actual interests of black, indigenous, or otherwise marginalized people is precisely the sleight of hand that makes the tendency so difficult to challenge within left spaces, and it needs to be addressed head-on. It is simply not the case that Angela Davis, who opposed wages for housework in favor of collective child-rearing and vast female integration into the workforce, represented the views of ordinary black people in any meaningful sense. Her later prison abolition work is even more disconnected from the preferences of the communities it claims to serve. As Adolph Reed Jr. has documented, one of the lesser-known facts of the 1990s crime bill era is the substantial support those bills received from black communities themselves, particularly from residents of high-crime neighborhoods who wanted more police protection, not less. The criticism from many black communities was not that policing was too aggressive, but that it was too indifferent: that the police only cared about protecting white neighborhoods and failed to provide adequate security to the communities most victimized by violent crime. Prison abolition, whatever its merits in some hypothetical postcapitalist society, is not an appealing proposition for people who live with the daily reality of crime. Advocating it now, before addressing the root causes of criminality, is like removing the imperfect cure before eliminating the disease: the result is not utopia, but the disease running rampant.^[4]

The broader point is that race communists should not be treated as though they speak for the people they claim to represent. They speak for a theory. The distance between that theory and the actual preferences, experiences, and material interests of the black working class, or the Latino working class, or any other working-class demographic defined by race, is enormous. When a race communist advocates for abolishing the police or the balkanization of America in the name of decolonization, they are not articulating a view that most black or native American workers share. They are articulating the frustrations of a credentialed intellectual class that cannot understand why ordinary people, of any color, do not share its conclusions. The race communists’ claim to represent minorities functions in exactly the same way as the liberal PMC’s claim to represent women, or the queer theory bureaucrat’s claim to represent gay people: it is a class speaking through a demographic, using the moral authority of an identity category to insulate its own ideological preferences from scrutiny.

This is also why I do not believe there is much to be gained from trying to “find common ground” with race communists or from treating their framework as a legitimate tendency within a broader left coalition. A lot of people think these individuals need to be appeased. They do not. The reason is simple: they have no interest in winning, and their politics prove it. If race communists genuinely believe that the American Revolution was entirely illegitimate, that the American working class is a settler-colonial labor aristocracy with no revolutionary potential, and that the only genuine agents of change are a popular front of the vulnerable consisting of racial minorities, indigenous peoples, trans people, and whatever other identity category currently carries the most symbolic weight, then they have deliberately constructed a politics that cannot succeed in a democracy. Unless they are genuinely incapable of arithmetic, they must know that a politics which pre-emptively alienates the majority of the population is a politics designed for permanent impotence. The only historical precedent for what this kind of politics actually produces, when it tries to act rather than merely theorize, is the pseudo-revolutionary violence of the 1970s: Weather Underground bombings, the Symbionese Liberation Army, the more adventurist wings of the Black Power movement, groups that, in the name of fighting imperialism, engaged in acts of terrorism and deeply unpopular violence that destroyed sympathy for the causes they claimed to champion. The Black Panther Party, to its credit and under the leadership of Huey Newton and Fred Hampton, largely rejected this adventurism. But the broader trajectory of race-first revolutionary politics in the 1970s went nowhere and ruined lives in the process.

If these people truly cared about the causes they invoke, they would do what Martin Luther King did: invoke the Founding Fathers, invoke the Declaration of Independence, invoke the best of American tradition and show how that tradition’s own principles demand justice for those it has excluded. They would use American history to legitimize their project rather than to demolish it. But they do the opposite. Their entire historiographic project is designed to give people the impression that any emancipatory politics is fundamentally incompatible with the West, with America, with the Enlightenment itself. They end up fetishizing movements in the Global South that they would never support if those movements operated in their own countries: the Vietnamese and Chinese communists, for instance, used nationalism aggressively to legitimize their revolutions, yet any attempt to do the same in a Western country would be immediately denounced by these very same race communists as fascistic. They romanticize liberation theology and Christian socialist movements in Latin America, yet if anyone tried to build a Christian socialist politics in the United States, the race communists would be the first to call it reactionary. They are not serious people. They are not trying to win. And that is why working with them is not a strategic compromise but a waste of political energy that could be directed toward something that might actually succeed.

The Liberal Guilt to Leftist Resentment Pipeline

In Part 1 of this series, I drew a distinction between moderate and radical forms of wokeism. The more moderate liberal variant tends to be characterized by guilt: PMC professionals who have secured a foothold in the system and use virtue signaling as a form of status currency, a way to exonerate their own privileges while competing for moral distinction within their class. The more radical leftist variant, by contrast, is driven less by guilt and more by resentment. It attracts the fallen professional, the permanent adjunct, the student who pursued a credential that delivered neither stability nor prestige, the person who wanted to become the securely tenured professor or the respected media figure and did not. The resentment is real, and it is often justified. But it does not produce good politics.

There is a specific and clarifying way in which guilty liberal historiography feeds the resentful leftist pipeline, and it is worth tracing the mechanism precisely. Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States is the canonical text of New Left historiography: a corrective to triumphalist narratives that foregrounds the experiences of slaves, workers, women, and indigenous peoples. Zinn himself was ultimately a kind of radical liberal democrat who wanted politics to happen. He invoked figures like Thomas Paine. He believed in the possibility of American redemption. But his work, by presenting American history overwhelmingly as a record of exploitation punctuated by rare moments of popular resistance, gave generations of students the impression that America is a fundamentally illegitimate project built on white supremacy and genocide. For the guilty liberal, Zinn produces guilt and a desire for atonement. For the student who is already resentful, already struggling in a contracting PMC job market, already primed for alienation, Zinn is the gateway drug to something harder: the outright nihilism of Gerald Horne and J. Sakai, who offer no redemption at all. In their framework, the West is not merely flawed. It is the motherlode of all evil. There is no salvageable tradition, no usable past, no way forward that does not begin with total civilizational repudiation. This is the opposite of the classical Marxist view, which, for all its revolutionary ambitions, praised the Enlightenment, praised the bourgeois revolutions, and saw itself as the heir to those traditions rather than their negation. The guilty conscience of the liberal historian produces the ammunition for the nihilistic leftist, and the nihilistic leftist produces a politics so alienating that it drives ordinary people into the arms of the populist right. The cycle is self-reinforcing, and the only people who benefit from it are the ones who have already decided that winning is less important than being correct, and they cannot even achieve that either.

Democrats Against the Demos

Many leftists and liberals treat populism as if it’s inherently a “threat to democracy.” But what is populism if not the popular expression of the common people against the unpopular politics of an elitist minority? There are many people on the left who still have a rather strange relationship with populism. It is correct to be critical of demagogues who opportunistically capitalize on populist movements by tapping into their concerns while making false promises and Trojan-horsing corporate policies that make the problems worse. However, to be critical of populism in general on principle, and to harbor a distrust of common sense that completely dismisses the popular sentiments in defense of highly unpopular positions that only a minority of people with a particular ideology hold, is to be skeptical of democracy itself. People who claim to fight for “the oppressed” but have contempt for the ordinary, what is normal, do not really care as much about the everyday struggles of the working majority as they do about advancing heterogeneous preferences and fetishizing novelty as such. If they were serious about fighting for those oppressed by the system, they would be working towards change that benefits the working majority, who work for a living, rather than doubling down on failed strategies that lead to the opposite. This is why one should be skeptical of people who are skeptical of populism. You cannot be anti-social and be a socialist, and you cannot disregard the common majority and be a communist. You cannot be pro-democracy and go against the sensibilities of the majority of the demos. Of course, you can, but then people will reject it, and they probably would not be wrong to do so.

How can communists, who ostensibly believe in a classless society, be against common sense? If they inherently suspect common sense as backward and in need of social re-education, then why should they be trusted to represent and govern on behalf of the common people? How can a “democratic socialist” who does not socialize with anyone outside their socialist bubble truly believe that the demos is capable of more political and economic democracy? If, according to the woke mentality, socialism is not possible until enough people are properly “re-educated” or conform to the new sensibility, and the rest of the “unawakened” reactionaries are “defeated,” then this socialism cannot truly call itself democratic. Democratic socialism must work with the demos as it is, accepting the inevitability of disagreement and the fact that identity groups (whether it be race, class, gender, or religion) are not just a bunch of homogenous blobs, but demographic categories that encompass a wide array of people with diverse opinions. To break from wokeism, we must accept the reality of deep pluralism, that deep divisions are unavoidable and that you cannot wait until you get enough people to agree on everything before political decisions can be made. It requires recognizing that political change is not about the politically enlightened or “the correct side” triumphing over the opposing sides, and that there will never be a “consensus” of “leftist unity” whereby everyone on this imagined side of “the left” comes together to “unite” against the reactionaries. The art of politics involves being able to make a decision despite intractable disagreement. Bottom-up political movements, seeking to effect serious change in the political arena, must involve rare moments of commonality among diverse groups in the demos. People can only ever temporarily come together politically on the basis of agendas focused on needs that they have in common.

There is one specific structural risk in the post-woke transition that warrants naming explicitly. As left politics returns to a more materialist register, the same elite-overproduction dynamics that generated the woke wave of the Fourth Awokening will produce a different but related influx: the overproduced elite, the underemployed academic, the exiled media figure, who gravitates toward revolutionary communism not as a serious political project but as the most available identity that signals radical commitment without requiring organizational discipline, patience, or the capacity to work with people who disagree on many things. The personality type he described has not disappeared; it has migrated. What this type introduces into a social democratic movement is not Bolshevism but something more corrosive: a culture of nihilistic critique without constructive alternative, status competition through denunciation rather than building, and the organizational toxicity that makes serious political participation intolerable for serious people. Genuine revolutionary commitment, the real thing, demands patience, discipline, and the willingness to engage with the working majority on its own terms. What the nihilistic critic offers is the reverse: contempt for the ordinary, denunciation without program, and the burning of whatever organizational infrastructure exists, because building requires compromise, and compromise interferes with the purity of the status-competition exercise. Any class-first project that fails to distinguish itself clearly from this tendency, and to say so plainly, will find its organizational culture gradually poisoned by it.^[5]

The Sociology of How the Left Became a Clown Show

What also needs to be said, because it explains much of the left’s inability to connect with ordinary people, is that the radical left does not only attract fallen professionals. It attracts outcasts. These two groups have more in common than is usually acknowledged: both are people who find themselves outside the dominant PMC orbit, whether because they fell out of it or were never admitted in the first place. The result is a coalition that might be described, in sociological terms, as an alliance of the lumpenized PMC and the socially marginal: sex workers, people in subcultural communities, individuals whose identities or lifestyles place them at the fringes of mainstream society. The radical left has become a kind of popular front of the vulnerable, an aggregation of every heterogeneous element that mainstream society has not accommodated, all mashed together under a single political banner. This might seem strategically absurd, because it is. But winnability is not the point. The point is that it offers a home to people who do not have one elsewhere. The left becomes, for these individuals, less a political movement than a community of belonging, a surrogate for the religious congregations, civic organizations, and social networks from which they feel excluded. The political project is secondary to the social function, and this is precisely why the left’s public-facing image has become so alien to the heteronormative majority it needs to win over.

The overrepresentation of visibly heterogeneous individuals at left-wing protests, communist party events, and activist organizations is not a stereotype conjured by right-wing propagandists. It is an observable sociological fact, and it has consequences. Every pro-Palestine demonstration featuring a rainbow of pride flags, every communist party Instagram account that looks more like a catalogue of subcultural identities than a political organization, every DSA convention interrupted by privilege-checking rituals and trigger-warning protocols, confirms, in the minds of ordinary working people, that the left is a freak show run by and for people who have nothing in common with them. To be clear: there is nothing inherently wrong with being trans, non-binary, queer, neurodivergent, or any other identity that falls outside the statistical mainstream. Plenty of people who carry these identities live perfectly ordinary lives and have perfectly ordinary political instincts. The problem is not the presence of these individuals. The problem is the ratio, the degree to which they have come to define the left’s public face, and the degree to which the left’s cultural codes, from pronoun rituals to the privilege-stacking hierarchies in which straight white men are perpetually last in line, have been optimized to make these individuals feel welcome at the direct expense of making everyone else feel unwelcome.

The Left Absorbs the Outcasts Who Liberals Reject

A lot of people think that wokeism is dying, and that’s largely true overall at the societal level. However, wokeism continues to permeate the left, and in some ways has gotten even worse despite the fact that it has been on the decline in the rest of society. This problem has intensified for a specific and identifiable reason: as the liberal establishment has gradually shed its most performative woke commitments, the people who built their identities around those commitments have migrated leftward, flooding radical organizations with exactly the cultural energy those organizations cannot afford. Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party in Canada successfully hoarded this constituency for years by signaling relentlessly on LGBTQ and feminist issues. When Mark Carney succeeded him and quietly shifted rightward on cultural questions, the NDP absorbed the surplus, and has become measurably more woke as a result. The evidence is not subtle. At a recent NDP convention that went viral, delegates were filmed squabbling over privilege cards like contestants in the Oppression Olympics: a trans non-binary woman, a black woman, and a woman in a keffiyeh each vying for speaking priority on the basis of who occupied the most marginalized intersection. NDP member Leah Gazan, with a totally straight face, accused Prime Minister Mark Carney of perpetrating an “ongoing genocide of MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA+ people” because of DEI funding cuts. This is what holding the bag looks like. The same dynamic is playing out in the United Kingdom, where the Labour government’s decision to legally affirm that there are two biological sexes, and the reversal of course on puberty blockers, has sent waves of displaced woke activists flooding into left-wing alternatives: Jeremy Corbyn’s independent formation (which has already imploded, with Zarah Sultana, representing the woke wing, publicly accusing Corbyn of overseeing a “sexist boys’ club”), and above all the Green Party under figures like Zach Polanski, a former hypnotherapist and upper-middle-class cosmopolitan who advocates open borders and increased immigration in a country where immigration is the single most electorally toxic issue. These parties have absorbed the woke progressives and have been left holding the bag of toxic waste they bring to the table: internal factional warfare, organizational paralysis, and a public image so thoroughly coded as culturally alien that no amount of correct policy positions on housing, healthcare, or wages can overcome it. The left has become a dumping ground for every cultural commitment that the liberal center has decided is no longer electorally viable, and it is drowning in the surplus.

The Cowardice That Keeps All Of This Going

There is another dimension to how the left became a freak show that has less to do with who joins and more to do with who capitulates. Many leftists who are not themselves woke, who privately find the privilege-checking rituals absurd and the ideological purity tests counterproductive, nevertheless go along with all of it out of a fear that pushing back will alienate minorities. They are afraid of being called racist for criticizing a black activist, transphobic for questioning gender ideology, misogynistic for challenging a woman’s political record, and xenophobic for advocating the restrictionist immigration policy that much of labor left and black civil rights activists like A. Philip Randolph held as common sense for most of the twentieth century. Bernie Sanders experienced this directly: he was warned that maintaining his earlier pro-labor restrictionism on immigration would alienate Latinos, and that criticizing Hillary Clinton too forcefully would alienate women. In both cases, the pressure came not from ordinary Latino workers or ordinary women, but from PMC operatives who claimed to speak on their behalf. Sanders partially capitulated, and the capitulation cost him precisely the voters who would have found the uncapitulated version more credible. In the name of not alienating minorities, the left alienates the majority. The people being “protected” from being offended are not, for the most part, the minorities themselves. They are the PMC gatekeepers who have appointed themselves as the spokespeople for those minorities and who benefit professionally from maintaining the fiction that any deviation from their preferred script constitutes an attack on the vulnerable. If the left were to reject wokeism, what would happen is not that various minority constituencies are genuinely at risk of being driven away, but that a small number of PMC symbolic capitalists who claim to represent those constituencies are. Alienating those people might be a good thing for the left in the long run. In the name of not alienating a handful of heterogeneous activists who claim to represent entire demographics, the left has repelled ordinary people, who find the entire performance alienating, condescending, and ultimately fake. The left’s acquiescence to this is the result of cowardice rationalized as benevolence. It is self-defeating cowardice at that, because every concession to the woke commissars pushes normal people further away while drawing the freak show further in. The left’s acquiescence to the woke minority has not produced a bigger tent. It has produced a smaller one with louder occupants. The left has not become more inclusive. It has become more exclusive in a way that flatters itself as inclusion, privileging the comfort of an overrepresented minority at the direct expense of the underrepresented silent majority.

The Wokeification of Environmentalism

The woke-ification of environmentalism also deserves brief mention, because it illustrates the dynamic at its most self-defeating. As discussed in the 1Dime Radio podcast episode featuring Matt Huber, Climate change is, at bottom, a materialist issue of civilizational importance, one that ought to be a natural centerpiece of any serious working-class politics. Yet the environmental movement has been captured by the same consciousness-first tendencies that plague everything else the left touches. Instead of organizing around concrete policy, infrastructure investment, and energy transition, the woke environmental movement has turned climate politics into a pedagogical project about “believing in science,” policing individual consumption habits, shaming people for their diets, and performing ecological virtue. The result is a movement that alienates the very working-class constituencies who would benefit most from a green industrial policy while attracting the same PMC symbolic capitalists who turned every other left cause into an exercise in consciousness-raising. That some of these self-described environmentalists cannot even bring themselves to support nuclear energy, the single most effective decarbonization technology available, tells you everything you need to know about the priority structure at work. The goal is not to solve the problem. The goal is to feel correct about the problem.

Liberal Opportunism and Radical LARPing as Careerism

The question that confronts anyone serious about working-class politics, then, is how to discern between a left politics that genuinely serves the interests of the lower classes and a kind of LARP communism that merely performs radicalism while accomplishing nothing. The distinction is not as difficult to draw as the people who benefit from its blurriness would have you believe.

If one is serious about policies that would help the working class, or about advancing a socialist or social democratic project, the measure of seriousness is simple: one would try to achieve that goal by any means necessary. The project would be oriented entirely toward achieving specific, concrete outcomes, and its advocates would judge themselves and others based on how quickly and effectively those outcomes are accomplished. The focus would be relentlessly practical. The question would always be: are we moving closer to the goal?

A PMC symbolic-capitalist leftist, by contrast, judges everything at the level of ideology and discourse. A politician or a fellow leftist is not evaluated by whether they are advancing the material interests of working people, but by whether they use the right vocabulary, hold the right positions on the right cultural questions, and demonstrate sufficient ideological purity. They are called liberal, bourgeois, reformist, or traitor, not because they have betrayed the working class in any concrete sense, but because they have deviated from the ideological script. While there are perfectly good reasons to be critical of politicians, the reasons matter enormously. The difference between criticizing a politician for voting against a living wage and criticizing a politician for insufficiently centering indigenous voices in their healthcare proposal is the difference between class politics and performance.

Someone serious about achieving working-class goals would be open to working with anyone who shares a working-class consistency on the specific issue at hand, including Republicans. They would be willing to appeal to people with different cultural beliefs, to run in districts and parties where the cultural atmosphere is not to their personal liking, and to make space for the full range of ordinary disagreements that characterize the actual working class. This means there is space for pro-choice and pro-life individuals in the movement, especially in Southern states where insisting on cultural uniformity as a precondition for economic solidarity is a guarantee of permanent irrelevance.

The typical stance from a PMC hard leftist, however, is that they should never work with any bigots, racists, or Republicans. This disagreement is not about strategy. It is about ideology. And it is, in practice, a form of self-sabotage that ensures the left remains a marginal force in exactly the communities where working-class politics would make the most difference. This is not merely radical posturing. Even politicians who should know better do it. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a prime example of a PMC leftist who embodies many of the problems this essay has described. She has, to her credit, distanced herself from some of the more cringeworthy aspects of the woke era (quietly removing the pronouns from her bio following Trump’s 2024 election victory). But she rejected the idea of working with Marjorie Taylor Greene to pass a bill to cut off funding to Israel in response to the ethnic cleansing in Palestine. Rather than collaborating across party lines on a concrete policy outcome that she claimed to care about, she rejected the collaboration on the grounds that Greene is an anti-Semite and a right-winger. The goal, in that framing, was not to stop the funding. The goal was to stop the funding in a way that did not require sharing political space with someone ideologically impure.

This is how ideology rationalizes self-interest. AOC uses purity to justify what is, in practice, a career calculation: she cannot afford to alienate the Democratic Party apparatus in which her entire political future is invested. Her journey is emblematic of this dynamic. She volunteered for establishment Democratic politicians at a young age, has maintained cozy relationships with figures like Nancy Pelosi, and has operated throughout her career as an insider whose radical branding serves the function of channeling left-wing energy into a party structure that will never deliver on its promises. AOC is a careerist. So are many radicals. The incentives and drives of status competition and egalitarian political goals often come into direct conflict, and in that conflict, career almost always wins.

Bernie Sanders, by contrast, is typically not associated with being woke. He has never been woke, and while he has at times capitulated to woke culture (as Part 3 of this series will document at length), he has always been a left-wing social democrat at his core. The core difference between AOC and Sanders lies in their backgrounds. Sanders was nonpartisan and only joined the Democrats when running for the presidency in 2015 and 2016. Before that, he was not a Democrat but was always left-wing, representing Vermont as an independent for decades. AOC, on the other hand, came up through the Democratic Party infrastructure and has never operated outside it. This is the difference between someone whose political identity was forged independently of the party apparatus and someone whose identity was formed within it.

A related problem surfaces in the alternative media ecosystem that has grown around left politics. Radical YouTubers and podcast hosts who, in the name of “holding people accountable,” use accountability as a rationale to critique and condemn everyone to their right, are often engaged in something structurally different from political analysis. They are manufacturing consent within the symbolic-capitalist space of YouTube and the media ecosystem, or simply stealing market share from competitors by performing more radical commitment than the next person. The incentive structure of audience-capture media rewards denunciation, rewards ideological policing, rewards the appearance of being the most principled person in the room. It does not reward patience, compromise, coalition-building, or the slow and unglamorous work of actually winning something.

The core way to discern genuine class politics from its performance is always to consider the implications of a policy position or a political stance. Are the people advocating it trying to move closer to a concrete goal? Or are they engaged in a status competition whose primary audience is other people in the same symbolic-capitalist ecosystem? This is the essential question. A serious left politics evaluates every decision, every alliance, and every public statement against a simple criterion: does this get us closer to winning material improvements for working people? A LARP politics evaluates everything against a different criterion: does this make us look sufficiently radical to our peers? The two are not merely different. They are, in practice, opposed, because the postures that win status among PMC leftists, the refusal to compromise, the denunciation of impurity, the insistence on ideological totality as a precondition for action, are precisely the postures that ensure the left never builds anything capable of winning.

The Leftist Industrial Complex

There is a specific personality type within the left that deserves naming directly, because it functions as the single most effective internal obstacle to the kind of critical self-examination any serious political project requires. These are the people whose primary function is not to advance the left’s program but to prevent the left from examining its own failures. Every attempt at internal criticism, whether from a left-wing perspective or any other, is met with the same response: this helps the other side. What they do not want to admit is that their side has already lost. Their program has been rejected, their electoral results are visible, and their cultural project has generated the very backlash it claimed to be fighting. What they cannot afford, psychologically, is to acknowledge this. The entire architecture of their political identity is constructed on the premise that they are smarter and more morally serious than the people around them; to admit error is not merely to revise a policy position but to destabilize the worldview that gives them what passes for a sense of moral groundedness. So they do not admit it. They blame the right, the media, the propaganda machine, the insufficient radicalism of their colleagues, anything and anyone except the ideas and strategies they themselves promoted. Their biggest victim is ultimately themselves, and their greatest service to the political forces they claim to oppose is to ensure that the left never quite gets around to understanding why it keeps losing. Yet, the left-wing symbolic capitalists, especially those in the worlds of academia & the left-wing media industrial complex, aren’t those hurt most by the left’s failure. The working class is.

The populist right’s ascendancy, if anything, gives leftist symbolic capitalists more material to constantly react to, critique easily, and profit from. After all, it is not a coincidence that “Breadtube” (the term for the trademark “leftist” side of YouTube) peaked around 2017-2019, right before many of the elite aspirants (many from academia and the art/entertainment world in this case) shifted towards manufacturing consent for the Democrats in the 2020 election. There is something quite ironic about the whole outcome of BreadTube. It really started to live up to its name. Not in the sense of Peter Kropotkin’s Conquest of Bread, but rather because it became an easy way to become a breadwinner. The top breadtubers are some of the highest earners on Patreon. The fact that the left-wing media industrial complex doesn’t get corporate funding in the way that right-wing media does has actually incentivized left-wing media people to become more clever capitalists than their right-wing capitalist counterparts. This is not to make a moralistic purity judgment, but rather to point out the obvious perverse incentives that this creates. The biggest one of all is audience capture, which creates a direct incentive for people in left-wing media spaces to not challenge leftist orthodoxy proxies in fear that they could lose a lot of their viewership and patronage. And they become more and more like an entertainer in a clown costume, having to provide their left-wing base with the entertainment they want to see that reinforces their beliefs.

You can always tell which leftist personalities have become like this based on the kind of topics they choose to cover most. If they were truly interested in advancing a movement, or even, as they often claim, trying to “convert” people to the other side, they would be trying to actually reach audiences that aren’t just leftists. But their topics tend to overwhelmingly be catered to dunking on low-hanging fruit on the right and various topics that tell leftists things they already know. Why make enemies on both sides by critiquing both your side while refusing to become a full-time culture warrior pundit on the right wing? It’s far easier to make a career out of “chud dunking” in the left-wing media space, and the oversaturation of “activist scholarship” academic dissertations critiquing the right are easy career paths, especially when they repeat the standard liberal-left talking points rather than exploring the subject more deeply. So even they fail even on their own terms. Symbolic capitalists already have a flawed understanding of political change, which overly focuses on consciousness-raising instead of coalition-building, and they can’t even do the latter properly. Instead of waking people up to join their side, woke leftists in left-wing media merely put their own side back to sleep. So in this regard, the refusal of voices of “the left” to seriously cope with failure and admit that they have lost the plot may not be totally antithetical to their own interests. They may truly believe in their causes, but if they actually want to advance them, they must reflect on which issues they prioritize and become more self-aware of how their drives for social climbing conflict with their stated political goals.

A Post-Woke Age?

As cultural-left woke politics has played itself out, the return of class politics has been one of the most promising developments. I predict this will happen a lot more in the next awokening, the 5th awokening, which may already be happening at this very moment, and I discuss in the Geneology of Wokeism Part 3 Essay. However, a promise without vigilance is simply the next opportunity for capture. The same elite-overproduction dynamics that generated the woke liberal wave of the Fourth Awokening are already producing a new cohort of radicalized PMC aspirants who will gravitate toward Marxism and communism, not because the working class has demanded it, but because it is the most available vehicle for their frustrated ambitions and their need to feel more politically advanced than the people around them. If the left does not learn to distinguish between people who want to win material improvements for working people and people who want to perform radicalism for an audience of other radicals, the next cycle will reproduce the same failures under a different banner.

The test is not complicated. Are the people in question trying to move closer to a concrete goal, judging their efforts by measurable progress toward that goal? Or are they engaged in a competition over who holds the most correct ideology, who can denounce the most people, who can maintain the most uncompromising posture in a context where uncompromising postures cost nothing because they are attached to no real political project? The working class does not need a vanguard of intellectuals to awaken it. It needs a political movement serious enough to meet it where it is, honest enough to speak in language it recognizes, and disciplined enough to refuse capture by the people who would rather be right than win. You cannot be antisocial and be a socialist. You cannot disregard the common majority and be a communist. And you cannot claim to fight for the people while holding them in contempt.

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Citations/Works Cited

^[1] Musa al-Gharbi, We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2024), chap. 2.

^[2] Christopher Lasch, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995). Thomas Piketty, “Brahmin Left vs Merchant Right: Rising Inequality and the Changing Structure of Political Conflict (Evidence from France, Britain and the US, 1948–2017),” WID.world Working Paper 2018/7, 2018.

^[3] On the origins of “political correctness” in U.S. Communist circles, see Musa al-Gharbi, We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2024), 135–38. See also my discussion in Part 1 of this series.

^[4] Adolph Reed, Jr., “Jesse Jackson’s Crossover Moment and the Dilettantish Turn in the Postwar U.S. Left (In Memoriam),” nonsite.org, April 14, 2026, https://nonsite.org/jesse-jacksons-crossover-moment-and-the-dilettantish-turn-in-the-postwar-u-s-left-in-memoriam/. Reed explicitly states: “the Clinton administration’s many tough-on-crime initiatives had considerable support from black people. Two-thirds of the Congressional Black Caucus voted for the New Democrats’ 1994 Crime Bill.” See also Adolph Reed, Jr., interview by Jacqueline Luqman, “Can Biden ‘Make America Moral Again?,’” The Real News Network, https://therealnews.com/can-biden-make-america-moral-again; Elizabeth Hinton, Julilly Kohler-Hausmann, and Vesla M. Weaver, “Did Blacks Really Endorse the 1994 Crime Bill?,” New York Times, April 13, 2016; Kevin Drum, “Who Supported the 1994 Crime Bill?,” Mother Jones, April 18, 2016, citing a 1994 Gallup poll showing 58% support among African Americans/nonwhites. For broader context, see Adolph Reed, Jr., Stirrings in the Jug: Black Politics in the Post-Segregation Era (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).

^[5] George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (London: Victor Gollancz, 1937), part 2, chap. 11.