The Next Awokening

Will AI Job Loss Trigger a New Cycle of Wokeism?

The “Post-Woke” Age

This is Part 3 of my Genealogy of Wokeism Essay series (not including my Anti-Social Socialists essay, which is separate but related). In Part 1, I established the definition: wokeism is a post-materialist, consciousness-first style of politics that presupposes that the awakening of a correct consciousness is the prerequisite for political solidarity and political action. A fundamental tendency of the woke mentality and the woke approach to socio-political change is assuming that the masses must be re-educated and awakened to (or simply made to conform to) a set of correct ideas, rather than building movements by meeting people halfway. While wokeism is most prevalent among left-wing spaces, it is not exclusive to them, nor are all left-wingers “woke” in the sense that I define it. What defines wokeism is not a coherent doctrine or ideology, but rather a consciousness-first mode of socio-political thinking, marked by a particular mentality and approach to thinking about change and justice. Woke people carry a distinct type of attitude that you can identify and discern from non-woke people, regardless of whether they are left or right.

Wokeism is a mindset and mode of approaching socio-political change that envisions radical change as a process of gradual consciousness-raising, culminating in a cultural revolution that later manifests as a political one. It prioritizes shared consciousness over shared class interests. Wokeism is linked to things like cancel culture, political correctness, and language policing because what defines wokeism at its core is the commitment to wake people by changing their thoughts, which is seen as a prerequisite to political solidarity and social change. This is why people in woke-dominated spaces are obsessed with demonstrating one’s own virtue and with politically correct signs (language, etiquette, attitudes, etc.) rather than with objective shared interests, regardless of political disagreement.

The tendency of woke people to be especially intolerant of views they disagree with, and the recurring behavioral tendencies in woke people, all start to make sense once you get to the root of what woke thinking is based on. The woke approach to socio-political action presupposes that mass awakening to a new sensibility is necessary before radical change is possible. Central to the woke mentality is the underlying assumption that cultural change must precede political change, and that enough people must wake up to a set of new sensibilities that the woke people in question assume are politically correct in order for the social change they want to see to manifest. Wokeism is a barrier to mass politics, which is why I think it should be of concern to leftists, especially those who believe in a class-first anti-establishment politics, which requires a mass base. It is often the case that woke people are not interested in large-scale political change at all, or are not serious about it, and are more interested in social change, hence why woke people tend to get associated with “social justice warriors.” This is part of why a large part of Part 1 (especially the end) is devoted to the “anti-political” tendency in woke thinking, which is one of the most interesting paradoxes about it, given that it often appears to involve the hyperpoliticization of everything.

The “woke people” usually come from a similar habitat. They are usually college-educated and are socialized to be aspirants of the Professional Managerial Class, particularly the symbolic capitalists in academia, media, art, entertainment, and the legal sector. Drawing on American sociologist Musa Al-Gharbi’s pincer-like, well-researched book We Have Never Been Woke, in Part 1, I showed how the primary carriers of wokeism are the “symbolic capitalists,” the stratum of the professional managerial class whose work involves the production and manipulation of discourse, rhetoric, and cultural meaning, and demonstrated that these awokenings erupt cyclically during periods of elite overproduction.

In Al-Gharbi’s framework, an awokening does not arise merely because bad ideas spread through elite institutions. It emerges when a society produces more credentialed elite aspirants than the available elite positions can absorb, especially in symbolic-capitalist fields like academia, media, art, entertainment, law, nonprofits, HR, publishing, and the broader institutions that manufacture discourse. That is why AI matters for this essay: if AI collapses the credential hedge that once made STEM, law, consulting, and other white-collar professions seem safer than the humanities, it could intensify a new crisis of elite overproduction across a much wider class terrain.

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, the rise of identity politics and intersectionality, and its institutional capture through universities, corporations, and the expanding professional managerial class. That genealogy revealed how a style of politics organized around awakening, conversion, and the policing of belief became embedded in American political culture, and why it has proven so effective at capturing institutions while so incapable of delivering material change.

In this installment, I turn from genealogy to diagnosis. If the consciousness-first template has exhausted itself, what comes next? What is replacing wokeism, and what structural conditions are producing a potential new awokening cycle? To answer these questions, I examine the current crisis of woke politics, the structural conditions producing a potential Fifth Awokening, and the return of class politics across both left and right. I also examine whether the right produces its own version of the woke dynamic, and what the return of class-centered populism on both sides of the political spectrum actually amounts to when examined structurally. The strategic question, what a genuinely post-woke left politics actually requires and why the answer is not agnostic tolerance of the woke tendency but its outright rejection, is taken up directly in the fourth and final installment of this series.

Is Woke Dead, or is it Coming Back?

Are we entering a “post-woke” age? Is wokeism finally dead? The signs of wokeism’s exhaustion are everywhere: corporate DEI retreats, public backlash against cancel culture, and institutional fatigue with constant consciousness policing.^[1] The signs of this rupture did not begin with corporate DEI rollbacks or public fatigue with cancel culture, however. They were visible as early as the COVID-19 pandemic, which produced one of the starkest real-time illustrations of the class divide between the symbolic-capitalist left and the working majority. The “laptop left,” those whose professional lives could be conducted from home without disruption, aligned culturally and politically with extended lockdowns, remote-work mandates, and a public health apparatus administered overwhelmingly by credentialed professionals with no material stake in whether or not the broader economy remained open. The people who disagreed were not primarily anti-science reactionaries. They were workers whose livelihoods depended on showing up. When Canadian truck drivers organized the convoy of early 2022, a bottom-up populist protest against pandemic mandates that had been partially co-opted by the right and drew sympathy from a substantial minority of Canadians frustrated with pandemic restrictions, the symbolic-capitalist left’s response was near-unanimous condemnation. Whatever one thinks of the convoy’s politics, the left’s reflexive opposition revealed something structurally important: the woke class habitus does not merely produce bad ideology in the abstract. It produces immediate, practical decisions about whose concerns count as legitimate grievances and whose do not. The same class contempt was briefly suspended during the pandemic itself, when the symbolic-capitalist strata were forced to acknowledge that the economy ran on the labor of people they had spent years dismissing as “low-skilled.” Grocery workers, delivery drivers, construction crews, and healthcare aides were briefly celebrated as “essential workers.” The celebration lasted until the economy reopened. Then the language reverted, almost without comment, to the familiar vocabulary of low-skill, low-status, and low-priority. That reversion was not incidental. It was a precise expression of the class order that a working-class politics must challenge.^[2]

The exhaustion of the Fourth Awokening’s cultural causes has reinforced this rupture rather than healing it. DEI programs, once absorbing overproduced elites into institutional sinecures, are being dismantled by corporate rollbacks and executive orders. The LGBTQ liberation framework, which drove much of the symbolic politics of the last cycle, has largely saturated its practical legislative content. The question of what it means to be liberated from in 2026, when same-sex marriage is legally settled and the remaining frontier is compelled affirmation of contested gender metaphysics, is one that even the woke coalition struggles to answer coherently. The trans youth issue, pushed to the front of symbolic-capitalist progressive politics in the early 2020s, proved too fringe even within that coalition to sustain. This exhaustion is not merely a sign of defeat. It is a structural forcing mechanism, displacing symbolic-capitalist political energy toward new terrain that could prove either better or worse depending on what that terrain turns out to be.^[3]

As I showed throughout the Part 1 Genealogy of Wokeism essay, there is a structural reason why the Fourth Awokening proved more damaging to left politics than the earlier cycles. In the first and second awokenings, the symbolic-capitalist tendency operated alongside a functioning class-based left, a labor movement with genuine institutional weight and working-class accountability that could counterbalance the cultural politics of educated professionals. The bohemians and far-left outcasts actually had to work with the working class if they wanted their political agendas to go anywhere. During the first great awokening of the 1930s, many fallen professionals in PMC-symbolic capitalist industries (like art, entertainment, media, academia) gravitated to leftist politics, leading to the spread of communist and far-left ideologies in Hollywood prior to the McCarthy Red Scare. In his book The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell, an anti-fascist with strong socialist sympathies who spent a lot of time with working-class movements, was one of the first people to write about the disconnects between technocratic, middle-class/well-educated socialists and the working class following the managerial revolution I discussed in Part 1.

However, during this time, there was still a powerful labor movement (and a working-class civil rights movement) that the PMCs had to work with, meaning that they could not define the politics of the left by making it all about their fringe, culturally far-left concerns. This changed significantly by the second awokening of the 1960s, as the labor movement declined and education greatly expanded, producing much higher elite-aspirant expectations and a stark educational divide in how people voted. By the time the Fourth Awokening of the 2010s arrived, there was no powerful working-class movement or socialist movement force to counterbalance the PMC symbolic capitalists, who held a hegemonic grip on the politics that defined the left. The collapse of union density, the complete capture of left-party structures by their professional-managerial strata, and the decline of any organized working-class presence within progressive coalitions meant that when the woke tendency expanded, nothing checked it. That is why it went further, lasted longer, and caused more damage than its predecessors: not because it was inherently more powerful, but because the institutional counterweights that had contained the earlier cycles no longer existed.

The Vibe Shift

Many say woke peaked in 2018, but I think that is only half true. The pandemic lockdowns and the 2020 BLM protests gave wokeism one final surge. COVID exposed the class divide with unusual clarity: the PMC laptop left could work from home, and were more likely to support extended lockdowns, vaccine mandates, mask mandates, and oppose re-opening the economy to go back to normal, while the producer class, service workers, truckers, tradespeople, and everyone whose livelihood required physical presence experienced the same politics as coercion administered by people with no material stake in reopening the world.

Biden’s victory changed the atmosphere. Wokeism did not vanish after 2020, but it noticeably died down because the more successful wing of the liberal-left symbolic class was partially absorbed back into the state, the NGO world, consulting, DEI administration, media, and the broader machinery of respectable Democratic governance. The old joke that liberals went back to brunch was not wrong, but it also applied to many leftists and left-of-center symbolic capitalists who pivoted from denouncing the status quo to defending the Democrats in the name of fighting the right. When enough elite aspirants are absorbed into the apparatus, the moral temperature of woke politics drops, because the overproduction pressure has been temporarily relieved.

This is not new. As I argued in Part 1, the Third Awokening faded partly because the Clinton era absorbed liberal-left professionals into the expanding world of education, NGOs, policy work, media, and professional administration. Clintonism treated education and credentialing as the solution to the social wreckage left by Reagan-era restructuring, but that solution also planted the seeds of the next crisis by overproducing graduates whose expectations could not survive the jobless recovery after 2008. The system solved one elite-overproduction problem by manufacturing the next one.

This also helps explain why anti-woke politics became less electorally potent around 2022 and 2023. Ron DeSantis and many Republicans tried to turn anti-wokeness into a self-sufficient political program, but the strategy did not work as well as they expected. People still disliked wokeism, but once the immediate frenzy had begun to recede, anti-wokeness alone could not substitute for a politics of wages, housing, inflation, immigration, and social order. The public was annoyed by wokeism, but irritation is not the same thing as a governing program.

Then Trump returned, and the woke reflex briefly came crawling back out of the walls. Liberal and left-wing media tried to rerun the same script in 2024: Project 2025, fascism, abortion, race, gender, identity, January 6, and the permanent emergency of Trump. But the script was overwhelmingly PMC-coded. Kamala Harris did not convincingly speak to the issues that voters actually ranked highest: inflation, cost of living, immigration, war, male alienation, and the sense that the Biden administration had become a failed status quo. Her decision to campaign with Liz Cheney only reinforced the image of a liberal establishment trying to defeat populism by embracing the old neoconservative center. Trump, for all his failures and obvious fraudulence, at least pretended to care about immigration, war, and economic nationalism.^[4]

The scale of Trump’s 2024 victory produced the actual vibe shift. Many liberals had convinced themselves that January 6, criminal charges, scandal, and Trump’s first term made his return impossible. Instead, he won more decisively than he had in 2016, including the popular vote, and the shock forced corporations, liberal parties, and the managerial class to recognize that woke politics had become a liability rather than a free status signal. Corporate DEI retreated, Meta repositioned itself around free expression and loosened content restrictions, tech executives tried to rebrand themselves in a more Rogan-friendly register, pronoun discourse became less fashionable, and liberal parties in countries like Canada and Britain began moderating on immigration and gender. Even AOC’s disappearing pronouns became a minor symbol of the shift, precisely because people were looking for signs that the old language had lost its magic.^[5]

The people who noticed first were not usually the leftists. They were business elites and liberal parties, the very people whose job is to sense which moral costumes are still profitable. The left was slower because its media ecosystem is dominated by symbolic capitalists who mistake the etiquette of their own niche class world for universal morality. But just as this post-woke atmosphere was taking shape, another structural force arrived: AI. ChatGPT began as a novelty in 2022 and 2023, but by late 2024 and especially 2025 and 2026, frontier models like ChatGPT and Claude had become dramatically more capable, while image and video generation made a qualitative leap. Whether or not there is an AI bubble, and whether or not companies exaggerate the efficiency gains, the basic fact is no longer theoretical: one worker with AI can increasingly do the work that once required several. That means real job loss, foregone hiring, and a new kind of white-collar panic.

AI and The Fifth Awokening

Any serious attempt to predict how AI-driven displacement might generate a new awokening cycle must begin by disaggregating two effects that are easy to conflate but analytically distinct: the immediate shock of job loss and the longer-term, more insidious dynamic of disappointed professional expectation. Immediate unemployment is real, and the protests and legal challenges it generates are already visible, from the Hollywood writers and actors strikes of 2023 to the wave of class-action lawsuits brought by artists and journalists against AI companies for the unauthorized use of their work.^[6] But the person who loses their job tomorrow is not, historically, the paradigmatic agent of an awokening cycle. What generates the awokening is something more chronic: the accumulation of credentialed people who did everything that was expected of them educationally, who anticipated being absorbed into the professional life their degrees promised, and who find instead that the positions are simply not materializing.

This distinction matters because it shapes the tempo of politicization, and tempo matters enormously for understanding how the cycle builds. Every economic downturn produces, eventually, a recovery, but the character of that recovery is as politically consequential as the crash itself. If the recovery is slow, if it creates positions that are precarious rather than secure, or if the professional market it reopens is structurally thinner than the credentialed population competing for it, you get the conditions Al-Gharbi identifies as the engine of awokening cycles (see The Geneology of Wokeism Part 1 for a summary of the prior four great awokenings). By Q1 2026, the indicators were unambiguous: recent college graduates faced an unemployment rate of about 5.7% and an underemployment rate of 41.5%, still elevated by post-2008 standards,^[7] while Big Tech’s hiring of new graduates had fallen by roughly 50% from pre-pandemic levels, with early-career workers in the most AI-exposed occupations experiencing a 16% relative employment decline in the Stanford/ADP payroll microdata.^[8] The paradigmatic figure this produces is not the newly unemployed but the PhD adjunct, someone who obtained the terminal credential, who is perpetually competing for a tenure-track position that may never materialize, and who, precisely while suspended in that holding pattern between credential and career, is the most vigorous producer of symbolic and totemic capital. The adjunct does not leverage victimhood as status currency out of cynicism. It is simply the only leverage available in a professional world that has closed its doors.

What is genuinely novel about the AI situation is that the population now facing this dynamic extends well beyond the traditional symbolic-capitalist fields where credential overproduction was already visible a decade ago. A decade ago, the rational response was to migrate toward Law, Business, or STEM, fields that seemed to offer the technical specificity and labor-market scarcity that would insulate against the dynamics already afflicting humanities graduates. What AI is now doing, structurally, is collapsing that hedge. The generation of students and early-career professionals who made the calculated decision to sidestep symbolic-capitalist overproduction by entering Law and STEM is discovering that the fields they entered in order to avoid precarity are now themselves generating it. Anthropic’s CEO projected in May 2025 that AI could eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar positions within five years;^[9] Goldman Sachs Research estimated that 6 to 7% of the U.S. workforce faces meaningful displacement over the next decade, concentrated overwhelmingly in white-collar knowledge work.^[10] McKinsey’s case should be stated more carefully: the firm has cut and considered cutting thousands of roles during the consulting slowdown, and by late 2025 had cut about 200 global tech jobs while reportedly assessing further AI-enabled reductions in non-client-facing functions, with parallel restructurings across the major consulting firms throughout the same period.^[11]

The political implications of this displacement diverge sharply, however, depending on whether one is looking at Law or STEM, because these two groups have a fundamentally different relationship to symbolic capital and, therefore, to the woke mode of politics. The professional power of the legal class is essentially rhetorical and linguistic: the manipulation of argument, precedent, and institutional authority through language. That is a form of symbolic production, and people trained in it are socialized in a cultural register that makes the status competition of woke discourse legible and usable as a mode of professional action. It is therefore predictable that lawyers facing displacement or underemployment would gravitate toward the woke-adjacent left, since that is the terrain on which their particular form of cultural capital can still be meaningfully deployed. The rhetorical skills that law school cultivates are precisely the skills that symbolic politics rewards. That the most AI-exposed women in the U.S. workforce are concentrated in exactly these clerical, administrative, HR, and symbolic-capitalist-adjacent roles only sharpens the point: Brookings Institution research published in 2026 found that of the 6.1 million workers characterized by both high AI exposure and low adaptive capacity, 86% are women, concentrated precisely in the credentialed professional occupations that were the primary beneficiaries of the DEI sinecures the post-2010 awokening produced.^[12] The last cycle’s institutional outputs are themselves in the AI crosshairs.

STEM graduates represent a categorically different case, and the political implications of their displacement are genuinely open in a way that the Law case is not. Their professional identity is rooted not in the manipulation of language and institutional authority but in building and deploying things that work: technologies, systems, and processes whose validation is empirical rather than rhetorical. This orientation toward practical production means that engineers and scientists do not stand to benefit from woke politics in the same way that lawyers and academics do. The game of status competition through discourse, victimhood signaling, and moralized credentialing offers them very little, because their professional world does not operate through those mechanisms. They do not possess the cultural capital that makes symbolic politics advantageous, and they have no particular reason to acquire it.

Elite Overproduction in STEM

The evidence from 2024 to 2026 suggests that STEM workers’ political loyalties are bifurcating rather than consolidating. Among the displaced credential classes, STEM workers, those trained in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, are the most consequential and least politically predictable constituency. They are not natural recruits for woke politics, because their professional identity is built around making systems work, not performing moral fluency in the language of symbolic capital. That makes them a genuinely disorganized middle: politically unattached, anxious about job security, and open to whichever force can make a credible material case for their interests. A left that is led entirely by the Luddite wing of art, media, academia, and entertainment will not reach them. A left that can speak about technology, production, and ownership without sneering at technical competence might.

We have already seen how it is a problem for a political movement that presents itself as representing the interests of the working class to be represented almost entirely by PMCs, divorced from regular blue-collar workers. However, any political movement with mass appeal will still have to appeal to at least part of the PMC. The big problem with the Left since the 1960s is that the wing of the PMC that supports and dominates it tends to come primarily from symbolic-capitalist industries, whose members are socialized very differently than technical workers are. During the last awokening, from roughly 2012 to 2024, the socio-political division between symbolic-capitalist PMCs and the more practical, hands-on PMCs in tech grew even more pronounced, as left-liberal PMCs increasingly gravitated toward anti-scientific viewpoints that dismissed hard sciences like biology and evolutionary psychology in favor of limitless social constructivism and historicist relativism. The contradictions of this worldview crystallized during the COVID-19 pandemic, when many of the same people who rejected biological sex differences and dismissed so many issues as mere “social constructs” were suddenly screaming at everyone skeptical of lockdowns and vaccine mandates to “believe in science.”

The reason this matters is that STEM was supposed to be the escape hatch from symbolic-capitalist overproduction. Once the humanities, social sciences, media, academia, and cultural industries became visibly oversaturated, ambitious students were told to study computer science, engineering, data science, chemistry, biotechnology, or some other hard science if they wanted a stable, well-paying job. STEM was sold as the rational hedge against the precarity already eating through the humanities. But the hedge was weakening before AI arrived. Recent graduates were already facing elevated unemployment and underemployment, Big Tech had already begun pulling back on entry-level hiring, and many people with hard-science credentials were discovering that the credential could be monetized more easily outside the field than inside it.^[13]

I saw this dynamic in Canada before AI became the convenient explanation for everything. Friends who studied engineering, computer science, biotechnology, chemistry, and other hard sciences expected their degrees to translate into stable professional futures, only to struggle to find work in the fields they trained for. Some ended up in government jobs, some in unrelated administrative work, and some in finance. One friend who completed a PhD in chemistry at Columbia told me that it was common for people with prestigious science credentials to end up on Wall Street or in FIRE-sector jobs, not because finance was the natural fulfillment of their scientific training, but because there are simply more jobs in those sectors and elite credentials are portable signals of competence. A degree from a prestigious university, especially a PhD, tells employers that someone can handle complex problems, grind through difficult work, and operate at a high cognitive and professional level even when the field itself is unrelated. This is why degrees are a class category, not just educational certificates: they confer qualitative advantages in the labor market over other workers and mark their holders as a higher tier of labor.

AI intensifies this problem most obviously in software engineering and computer science. Coding was supposed to be one of the safest, most meritocratic career paths in the credential economy. But AI coding tools now allow one programmer to do work that previously required multiple junior engineers, and Dario Amodei has predicted that AI could soon write the vast majority of code.^[14] Even if the prediction is exaggerated, the pressure is already real. I know people in the industry who feel it directly. A friend working in an AWS-related software-engineering role at Amazon describes the need to remain constantly productive and visibly useful, while also using Claude to perform large portions of the work. That is the structural paradox of AI at work: it helps the worker do the job, but in doing so it also teaches management that fewer workers may be needed.

This means there is an elite-overproduction crisis forming inside STEM itself. STEM workers are politically more unpredictable than symbolic capitalists because they are trained to build things that work rather than manipulate moral discourse. But they are now entering the same condition of frustrated credential expectation that has historically produced radicalization. And when STEM graduates cannot find work in the fields they trained for, many will continue to migrate into FIRE, consulting, or administrative-managerial sectors. The problem is that those sectors are also vulnerable to AI in analysis, modeling, compliance, risk assessment, contract review, and clerical work.

The FIRE Industries and Bullshit Jobs

The political consequences of AI’s impact on the FIRE industries (Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate sectors) also present a distinct and unpredictable picture. A significant proportion of the jobs it contains fall into what the late David Graeber famously termed “bullshit jobs,” positions whose social function is sufficiently opaque that even their occupants would struggle to justify their necessity. Whether the elimination of many of these positions through automation would constitute a genuine loss is, to say the least, debatable. What is less debatable is that the sector has so far proven more durable to AI displacement than many predicted, remaining one of the few labor markets still reliably absorbing credentialed graduates, including a substantial number from STEM and humanities fields who did not find positions in their trained areas. The finance route for the overeducated is a well-documented phenomenon. How long this durability holds is another question. AI is already demonstrably capable of performing significant portions of financial analysis, contract review, and risk modeling, and the possibility that a single employee with the right tools can now perform the work previously assigned to several is not hypothetical. The political implications of a disrupted FIRE sector are genuinely uncertain. Finance-credentialed workers displaced from their expected trajectories could move in almost any ideological direction: toward a structural critique of the order that rendered their training obsolete, or toward a right-wing politics of resentment organized around protecting the existing arrangements that once accommodated them. They can really go either way.

Blue Collar Workers and The Producer Class

Which returns us to the workers whose displacement AI is, at present, most conspicuously not producing: the people who work with their hands. By every credible measure, manual laborers in construction, skilled trades, healthcare assistance, and physical production face among the lowest AI exposure of any major occupational category. The irony here is structural and worth sitting with. The working class whose interests the symbolic-capitalist left claimed to represent was, throughout the Fourth Awokening, the group most consistently harmed by the woke mode of politics: alienated by its cultural register, condescended to by its epistemic assumptions, and functionally ignored by its prioritization of symbolic recognition over material redistribution. Woke politics offered manual workers nothing because symbolic capital, by definition, is a currency that people without access to the symbolic economy cannot accumulate. The status competition conducted in the language of privilege, decolonization, and consciousness-raising accrues benefits only to those positioned to participate in it, and workers who build, repair, and produce things are not so positioned.^[15]

What AI is now doing, in a profound structural irony, is reversing the class dynamics that the managerial revolution of the mid-twentieth century established. James Burnham’s insight, that capitalism was evolving toward domination by managers and credentialed professionals rather than by either workers or traditional owners, held for roughly half a century. The explosion of higher education and the symbolic-capitalist economy created a vast professional-managerial stratum whose growing institutional dominance appeared to render the classical Marxist focus on the industrial working class increasingly obsolete as a political analysis. AI is making the classical Marxist emphasis on the proletariat more plausible again, at least compared with the last half century. As white-collar knowledge work becomes increasingly automatable and PMC sinecures contract, the social weight of people who do things that AI cannot, who assemble, build, maintain, drive, repair, and produce physical goods and services, grows correspondingly. The class that the symbolic-capitalist left spent twenty years talking past is, precisely in the AI era, becoming more socially necessary relative to the class that produced all the talking.

The most natural political coalition for this moment is not the PMC-led left formation of the prior cycle but what might be called the producer class: an alliance between wage workers and small business owners grounded in their shared relationship to actual production rather than to financial extraction or symbolic-capitalist discourse. Farmers, tradespeople, manufacturing workers, independent proprietors, and those who run small enterprises all share a material stake in a political economy oriented toward production rather than speculation, and a cultural stake in a politics that does not treat their occupations as staging grounds for condescension. This is not an unprecedented political vision. It has historical precedents in various social-democratic and national-populist formations. The PMC academic left tends to dismiss it as proto-fascist, because the producerist alliance cuts across the clean ideological categories that academic Marxism prefers. But producers, by virtue of their actual proximity to the working class, have a structural understanding of working-class life that neither the PMC left nor the STEM right possesses.

The political positioning available to such a coalition is, at this moment, unusually favorable. A right increasingly defined by ideological disorder and a left still associated in the public imagination with cultural maximalism creates an opening for a politics that presents itself not as radical experiment but as restoration. The pro-labor left that could seize this moment would not position itself as the agent of transformation but as the defender of order against the agents of chaos: the force that takes seriously what most people actually care about, rather than the fixations that animated either the woke left or the neoreactionary right. This is not a posture of timidity.

AI Might Empower Blue-collar Labor, Depending on a Few Variables

The opportunity for the revival of working-class politics during this structural opening, however, is conditional. AI displacement of the PMC translates into working-class political empowerment only if both conditions are present simultaneously. The collapse of white-collar credential-based work creates elite overproduction and forces a political reckoning with PMC-dominated institutions. But if the resulting labor scarcity in manual sectors is neutralized by the same mechanism it has always been, the steady importation of migrant labor at wages below what organized workers could demand, the working class gains no leverage from it. Capitalist employers have consistently deployed this mechanism to undercut manual workers’ bargaining power, whether through H-1B visa programs, through de facto tolerance of informal labor markets, or simply through the political pressure to keep migration rates high enough to ensure wage competition. There are, however, signs that the political conditions sustaining this migration regime are shifting in ways that may prove difficult to reverse. The public backlash against mass migration policies has reached a point in most Western countries, driven simultaneously by integration pressures, economic competition, and cultural concerns, where the old policy consensus can no longer be maintained by administrative inertia alone. Whether this translates into genuine bargaining leverage for manual workers, or merely into a politics of cultural resentment that leaves the underlying labor dynamics intact, remains to be seen. The historical pattern is instructive here: the Nordic model combines unusually high union density with immigration and integration regimes that have, in Denmark especially, moved sharply toward restriction and selectivity. A pro-labor politics that is serious about working-class wages cannot treat migration purely as a humanitarian question of openness while ignoring employers’ interest in maintaining labor supply. These are not separate issues. They are structurally linked. The left that currently exists, still dominated by a PMC stratum with cultural and professional interests in cosmopolitan openness, lacks both the will and the working-class accountability to address this linkage honestly.^[16]

What AI-induced elite overproduction will force, whether the PMC-dominated left wants it or not, is a reckoning with the fact that the producer class and the manual working class matter more now than they have in decades, and that a politics organized around their concerns will look different from anything the symbolic-capitalist left has produced. The trucker convoy was a rough and politically ambiguous glimpse of this: a bottom-up assertion of working-class economic grievance that the symbolic-capitalist left reflexively opposed because it did not arrive in the approved ideological packaging. Future expressions of that same underlying energy may be less easily dismissed. The left must decide whether it will build solidarity with workers without college degrees and reject the faux-progressivism of the PMC woke formation, or whether it will continue to speak on behalf of those workers while organizing entirely in their absence.

One further structural observation is worth making before the question of right-wing radicalism is addressed directly. A new awokening cycle, if and when it arrives, will almost certainly not announce itself with the vocabulary of the current one. The historical pattern is instructive here: the Third Awokening of the 1980s and 1990s produced the same underlying dynamics, symbolic-capitalist status competition, consciousness-raising demands, institutional capture by credentialed professionals, without using the word “woke” at all. Its operative term was “political correctness,” and those who embraced it on the left and scorned it on the right were, in their structural behavior, doing precisely what the participants in the Fourth Awokening did a generation later, under a different label. A Fifth Awokening driven by AI displacement would likely produce yet another vocabulary, one that allowed its participants to sincerely believe they were doing something categorically different from what their predecessors had done. This is already visible in miniature: a growing stratum of disaffected PMC aspirants has adopted Leninist and communist frameworks whose formal content is materialist but whose political posture is entirely consciousness-first, organized around an intellectually advanced vanguard tasked with awakening the masses to correct ideas before any serious political project can commence. None of these participants use the word “woke.” The structure is the same. A Fifth Awokening could well identify itself as post-woke, while reproducing the essential features of the cycle it claims to have transcended.

The Appeal of Neoreaction

The neoreactionary and accelerationist ideologies that have emerged from the right-leaning STEM and tech PMC, from Nick Land to Curtis Yarvin, represent a parallel symptom of the same underlying condition: elite overproduction generating politically radicalized, institutionally frustrated symbolic-capitalist aspirants who channel their resentment through ideological frameworks that give their frustration a grand civilizational narrative. These ideologies are, in their structure if not their content, downstream of the same dynamics that produced the woke left. Both are products of credentialed people who expected more from the institutional order than the institutional order was able to deliver, and who responded by building alternative status hierarchies around the most extreme and iconoclastic ideas available to them. The woke left built its status hierarchy around marginality, victimhood, and moral purity. The neoreactionary right built its around vitalism, hierarchy, and the fantasy of a competent elite unconstrained by democratic accountability. This structural parallel raises a question that the trilogy has gestured toward but not yet addressed directly.

It is worth being clear at this point, however, as the following section examines directly, that these right-wing ideologies, elitist, vanguardist, and contemptuous of democratic accountability as they are, do not constitute a woke right in the sense this trilogy defines. Wokeism is a consciousness-first mode of politics inexorably tied to symbolic capitalism: the sectors of art, media, entertainment, and academia are most susceptible to it precisely because their entire enterprise is the production of discourse and symbolic meaning. Changing minds is their primary activity, and it is therefore also their primary political mode. The FIRE and STEM sectors produce their own elitist technocratic mentality: the conviction that a credentialed vanguard ought to exercise more authority than the lay masses or unenlightened elected representatives, but this does not manifest as consciousness-first politics. It does not primarily seek to awaken, convert, or police belief. It seeks, more directly, to acquire institutional power and exercise it. It is no less elitist for this distinction. It is arguably more dangerous in its frank embrace of hierarchy over persuasion. But it is a different phenomenon, and treating it as equivalent to wokeism blurs the very definition that makes the concept analytically useful.

Is there a Woke Right?

Whether there is a genuine “woke right” depends on how strictly one applies the definition this trilogy has used throughout. If wokeism is, at its core, a consciousness-first mode of politics premised on awakening the masses to correct ideas as the prerequisite for political action, then the answer is that the right, as a broadly reactive formation, does not meet the criteria in any serious sense. The nature of right-wing anti-woke politics is fundamentally reactive. It is defined almost entirely by what it opposes rather than by any coherent vision of what it seeks to awaken people to. There is no enforcement mechanism on the right comparable to the cancellation apparatus, no organizational culture of language policing, and no parallel pressure to publicly demonstrate ideologically correct consciousness before being permitted to participate in the movement. This asymmetry matters. It is why the woke tendency is a structural problem for the left in a way that has no direct right-wing equivalent: consciousness-first politics produces internal disciplinary machinery, and that machinery is what the left is currently choking on.

That said, there is a class of people on the right who operate on roughly equivalent symbolic-capitalist terrain, and whose political orientation is shaped by that terrain in ways that partly mirror the woke dynamic, even without its enforcement mechanism. Right-wing symbolic capitalists exist in media, law, marketing, and finance, and they tend to prioritize culture-war politics for the same structural reason that their left-wing counterparts do: symbolic politics is the terrain on which their particular form of capital is most advantageously deployed. The right fights the culture war in part because it is easy terrain on which to win, and those who benefit professionally from the fight have every incentive to exaggerate its stakes.

Right-wing symbolic capitalists capitalize, in the most direct sense, on the failures of their left-wing counterparts. They did not conjure the culture war from nothing. They inherited a politicized terrain that the woke left produced, and found it enormously useful. This is why criticizing right-wing anti-woke reaction without examining what it reacts to is not serious political analysis. Most people aren’t driven to the political right because they inherently love hierarchy and have an uncritical belief in the status quo. Most of the time, people who swing to the political right, particularly voters in elections who are often otherwise not that political, do so primarily due to what they oppose on the other side. Action precedes reaction. And in this case, the reaction was predictable. The production is what requires explanation. For this reason, I don’t like to spend much time and energy criticizing the political right, and if I did, I would mostly be preaching to the choir. If one wanted to “convert” right-wingers, then the way to do it wouldn’t be to tirelessly convince them that the problems that alienate them from the left don’t exist, but rather to focus on trying to build a left that people actually want to be part of.

It is tempting to try to fit a notion of “the woke right” into my theory of wokeism in order to simply get stubborn leftists to listen to it; however, trying to equivocate “both extremes” here does very little to help us understand the issues at hand. The more structurally interesting question is not whether a woke right exists in the left’s image but whether right-wing elite overproduction generates its own distinctive form of ideological radicalism, one that functions analogously to woke leftism without reproducing its specific consciousness-policing forms. The answer is already visible in the essay’s account of the Fifth Awokening. The appeal of neoreactionary “Dark Enlightenment” ideologies of Yarvin’s monarchism and Land’s accelerationism is, structurally, downstream of similar frustrated credential dynamics that produced woke leftism among humanities graduates. Both formations are built by people who expected more from the institutional order than it delivered, and who channeled that resentment into frameworks positioning a self-appointed vanguard as the bearer of truths the corrupt mainstream suppresses. The woke left framed this vanguard in the language of marginality and oppression; the neoreactionary right frames it in the language of hierarchy and civilizational vitality. The content is opposite. The structure is recognizably the same.

Curtis Yarvin’s vision of Neoreaction (NRx) is kind of like Bolshevism for people with money: a technocratic ideology for nerds who imagine themselves as enlightened trailblazers of progress. Where Leninism envisioned a dictatorship of the proletariat led by an intellectually advanced vanguard party, Yarvin envisions a CEO-monarch, an enlightened administrator who cuts through democratic dysfunction by virtue of competence unencumbered by popular accountability. The arguments these two traditions deploy in defense of dictatorship are, examined side by side, remarkably parallel in form, differing mainly in which class they imagine at the apex of the resulting order.

What this suggests is not that left and right are mirror images. They are not. But elite overproduction under conditions of credential saturation generates ideological radicalism across the political spectrum, and the specific form that radicalism takes depends on the symbolic-capitalist habitat in which it emerges. The humanities and social sciences produce woke leftism. The technical and financial PMC produces its techno-authoritarian counterpart. Both are products of frustrated aspiration dressed in the grammar of civilizational emergency.

Rise of Class Politics Across Left and Right

What’s replacing woke politics? Increasingly, we’re seeing a return to class politics across both left and right. Bernie Sanders’s phenomenon represents the return of economic populism on the left. Trump’s working-class appeal represents economic nationalism on the right. This dimension of Trump’s popularity is often not acknowledged by liberals and leftists who attribute it solely to cultural or aesthetic factors. However, if one examines the 2016 campaign, which was widely accepted as driven by anti-establishment sentiment, and the 2024 campaign, the most frequently cited reasons people voted the way they did were immigration and cost of living. Immigration is directly an economic issue. Donald Trump, whether or not his policies actually delivered results, promised to bring back jobs and industrialization. Restrictions on immigration may not affect PMC workers in high-skilled industries, but they directly affect workers without college degrees in blue-collar labor markets, where wage competition from cheaper labor is an immediate material concern rather than an abstract policy question.^[17]

Material concerns are reasserting themselves, with politicians across the political spectrum increasingly framing their appeal around cost of living and the populist conflict between ordinary people and entrenched elites. This resonates far more broadly than the woke narrative of the oppressed versus the oppressors, whose ill-defined categories float amorphously, perpetually contested as movements dispute who is most oppressed and most deserving of political priority. This return to material politics does not mean the concerns that motivated wokeism disappear. Women still experience real issues that require particular attention. Trans people are still more likely to experience violence, discrimination, and serious issues with mental illness. But the question is: what do we actually do to make all of these problems better without making them worse by fostering reaction and resentment? Merely changing the way people talk about these issues will not address these problems. A class-centered economic program that addresses the common concerns that people from all these groups share would do far more to address problems and build solidarity than whatever the woke left has done so far. And no, the answer is not another rainbow coalition again, which keeps failing because it tries to build a popular front around minoritarian concerns, surface-level solidarity between identity groups unified by nothing other than a personal ideological (rather than material) claim to victimhood and vulnerability. This means putting class issues front and center, appealing to objective common interests, rather than merely adding class to the equation at the level of rhetoric, like “intersectionality” discourses tend to do.

Don’t Mess With The Zohran

The clearest sign of a post-woke shift toward class-first politics is Zohran Mamdani’s 2025 campaign for mayor of New York City. Mamdani demonstrates that elite-aspirant energy, the same overproduced symbolic-capitalist disaffection that drove the prior wave of awokening, can be channeled into a non-woke, cost-of-living-focused politics rather than inevitably reproducing the consciousness-policing tendencies of the Fourth Awokening. His campaign focused primarily on housing, rent control, and the cost-of-living crisis facing New Yorkers across every demographic rather than on the symbolic-recognition politics that dominated the prior cycle. This is, by the standards of recent left politics, a genuine improvement.^[18]

The critical warning, however, is embedded in the electoral data. Mamdani won the Democratic primary convincingly and went on to win the general election in November 2025. But the electoral data embedded in that victory is more instructive than the headline result. He lost the vote of blue collar workers, and the votes of people without college degrees in general. According to CNN exit polling, Mamdani won 57% of voters with a college degree, compared to 47% of voters without one.^[19] His geographic base was concentrated in gentrified professional-class neighborhoods like Park Slope, Greenpoint, and parts of northern Manhattan, while Cuomo held stronger support in parts of the outer boroughs. In the Democratic primary, Cuomo outperformed Mamdani decisively in the Bronx, and exit polling showed that Cuomo outperformed Mamdani among voters at both extremes of the income distribution, including those earning under $30,000 a year.^[20] I do not bring up the class gap in Mamdani’s coalition to dismiss him or his ideas, but as a demographic signal worth taking seriously. Peter Turchin recently analyzed Mamdani’s victory in even greater empirical detail. The fact tthat a democratic socialist running a cost-of-living platform whose actual electoral base skews toward the college-educated and newly arrived, rather than toward the lifelong working-class New Yorkers his program is ostensibly designed to serve, is a clear indication that the left’s problem with being unable to sufficiently reach the working class is far from resolved. This is significant given that Mamdani’s entire campaign was premised on uplifting the working class, yet even he could not win over the working-class vote against a highly unpopular, scandal-plagued candidate. The most plausible explanation has less to do with Mamdani himself than with the people who campaign on his behalf, who tend overwhelmingly to come from university-educated, PMC, symbolic-capitalist backgrounds, and whose cultural register is precisely what prevents the message from penetrating the communities it is ostensibly designed to reach.

Part of that structural obstacle is the nature of Mamdani’s own coalition. His campaign was driven overwhelmingly by the New York DSA, an organization composed mainly of college students, adjunct professors, and social outcasts that still has a tendency to practice the kind of “woke” tendencies that make working-class people cringe. This is the organizational culture highlighted in years’ worth of satirical memes about socialist conference dysfunction, the “point of privilege” interruptions, the mask mandate debates, the pronoun fights and procedural chaos that became shorthand for everything ordinary working people find alienating about the contemporary left.^[21] The people who built Mamdani’s campaign are, organizationally, the same people who built the woke politics this essay has diagnosed throughout. That they channeled their energy into something more materially serious in this instance is encouraging. That the underlying sociology has not changed is the caveat that any serious assessment must hold onto.

Mamdani’s own background is worth dwelling on, because it is instructive about what the next wave of progressive politics might look like and why the essay has given him as much attention as it has. His profile is, in many respects, a textbook case of the symbolic-capitalist aspirant this trilogy has described throughout: a child of the global cultural elite, raised across multiple countries, multilingual, carrying the accents of a cosmopolitan formation that most working-class New Yorkers will never experience. His mother is a filmmaker embedded in the cultural world. His father is a Marxist postcolonial professor at Columbia University. His public record from the BLM era reflects the standard symbolic-maximalist package of that moment: abolitionist public-safety politics, aggressive sanctuary politics, and maximal support for gender-affirming-care access. Anyone can find this record. None of it is hidden. In many ways, prior to his mayoral campaign and his calculated shift toward material politics, Mamdani embodied many of the features of the “race communism” critiqued in my earlier essay, Anti-Social Socialists.^[22]

The point of raising it, however, is not to invoke it as hypocrisy or as disqualification. The structural problem with the PMC left is not that it comes from privileged or elite backgrounds, which is difficult to avoid in a society that routes political engagement through credentialed institutions. What makes Mamdani a more interesting case is that he appears, by the evidence of his campaign, to have achieved something that most of his organizational base has not: a genuine, if partial, attunement to the conditions facing ordinary New Yorkers. His ability to campaign on rent freezes and free buses, to build a coalition that reached across boroughs rather than concentrating entirely in the brownstone professional enclaves, represents a real departure from the prior cycle’s politics, however incomplete.

He is, in this sense, evidence for an argument the essay has made theoretically but needed a concrete case to illustrate: that the same credentialed-class energy that drove the Fourth Awokening can, under the right conditions, be redirected into a politics that prioritizes material class issues without the consciousness-first machinery. The people who drove woke politics can transition into something better. Mamdani himself is proof that the background does not determine the destination. What he does with that background is what distinguishes him from the typical PMC left politician, even if the movement built around him has not made the same transition. By 2025, his political priorities had shifted substantially toward housing and cost-of-living politics. The direction of movement is correct. The destination remains incomplete. And the organizational base remains the same.

The problem is never Mamdani himself so much as the movement built around him. Even if Zohran himself no longer acts in a stereotypically woke way when campaigning as a politician trying to win votes, many of the people who work for him very much do act woke. There is always a structural danger in having a movement backed primarily by elite aspirants and symbolic capitalists without a countervailing force from the working class and non-symbolic sectors to impose a different set of priorities.

The biggest problem with having a movement still controlled by college-educated urban progressives and elite aspirants is that even if they strategically pivot away from the most excessive aspects of woke language, they will still impose symbolic-capitalist priorities on the politician and his movement. If a broader political movement, which many people in the leftist media-industrial complex want to pretend Mamdani represents, is incapable of attracting working-class people toward it, especially people without college degrees who work with their hands, then the politics and character of that movement will be heavily shaped by PMC college-educated progressives. This is obviously part of why the left has trouble appealing to the working class, but what makes things worse is that many neo-left progressives have implicitly accepted that the working class is no longer their primary voting bloc, so they do not even try.

Increasingly, the Neo-Left has implicitly relied on a shaky alliance of educated PMCs, particularly younger female PMC aspirants, lumpen-proletarian outcasts, and politicized ethnic minorities as a voting bloc. This is the rainbow coalition minus the working class, which earlier proponents of the rainbow coalition, like Jesse Jackson, at least wanted to reach. The electoral strategies of the left reflect its tacit acceptance that it is not worth appealing to workers without college degrees, old people, and increasingly young men, and that the left is better off targeting voters based on how socially liberal they are and which identity is treated as “the most marginalized.” This is why in our current era most leftist politicians and leftist media figures often compete for support more with liberals than they do with conservatives, even though in the populist era Republicans tend to get more working-class support.

When a movement is captured by symbolic-capitalist PMC aspirants who have similar social backgrounds as their liberal competitors, those people will exert enormous pressure to adopt positions that reflect their cultural priorities rather than the material interests of the working class being courted. That is why the Democrats and the “leftist” influencers who tried to get them elected in 2024 relied so heavily on abortion and Project 2025 as the great moral scare against Republicans, even though voters consistently ranked cost of living, inflation, immigration, and the economy higher. The talking points of the liberal-left alliance reflected the anxieties of its PMC constituency, which forgot that everyone else was living in a different world. In some cases, this pressure pushes liberal-left figures into positions that do not even reflect their own constituency, much less the people outside of it whom they would need to win over. Defund the police, abolish ICE, maximalist gender politics, and similar slogans became moral badges inside one milieu and liabilities almost everywhere else.

This is also why the most revealing moments are usually the ones that sound absurd to normal people but perfectly intelligible to the activist audience in the room. Kamala Harris later pivoted rightward in the general election by courting the neoconservative right, campaigning with Liz Cheney, and presenting herself as the respectable anti-Trump establishment candidate rather than a populist alternative. But she could not easily disown her 2019 ACLU questionnaire answer supporting taxpayer-funded gender-transition care for prisoners and detained migrants, which is why Trump’s “Kamala is for they/them” ad landed as more than a random culture-war cheap shot. Biden performed the same dance in 2019 when, asked how many genders there were, he answered “at least three.” These moments reveal the power of the woke crowd as a disciplinary force: not because it represents all LGBT people, who are themselves a diverse group with different beliefs, voting patterns, and class positions, but because its most activist and symbolic-capitalist fraction is concentrated in media, academia, art, entertainment, nonprofits, and online discourse, where backlash can become career-threatening even when the underlying constituency is far less unified.^[23]

In some cases, liberal-left politicians can get away with this when they are competing with other liberals, as in primary elections between Democrats in overwhelmingly blue districts. Mamdani provides a concrete example of the dynamic. During his campaign, he pledged $65 million to expand gender-affirming care for minors and adults through New York City’s public hospitals, vowing to penalize any hospital that declined to provide it and to make New York an “LGBTQIA+ Sanctuary City.” The policy is coded in the language of protecting trans kids and sounds egalitarian on its surface. But it amounts to the mass medicalization of a condition whose prevalence among young people has risen at historically unprecedented rates, rather than addressing what might be driving that rise. It encourages life-altering decisions, which adults have every right to make, for children who are reporting alarming rates of gender dysphoria, under the assumption that the appropriate response is puberty blockers and an early transition pipeline rather than letting children go through puberty and deciding as adults. It is, regardless of one’s moral assessment of the policy itself, as politically suicidal a position as one could adopt for running anywhere outside a super-blue district.^[24]

Why Mamdani Won

The obvious question is why Mamdani was able to win anyway. The answer is not that these positions are secretly popular. It is that his opponents largely failed to attack him on the terrain where he was most vulnerable. The attacks that did dominate the race centered on Israel, Palestine, and his Muslim identity, and those attacks did not land. On Israel, they may even have helped him. In the debate moment when other candidates were pressed about Israel while Mamdani emphasized staying in New York, he signaled to many voters that he would put the city first rather than perform the usual ritual of deference. With Israel becoming more unpopular because of Gaza, and with Mamdani doing a good job of making it clear that his criticism of Israel was not based in antisemitism, the attack did not land the way his opponents expected.^[25]

This does not mean Mamdani escaped every pressure coming from the professional-class left. He still had to reassure the liberal-Zionist PMC world on antisemitism and Jewish safety, especially after the Palestine-protest wave made left politics legible to many liberals as a security threat. The point is not that he necessarily believed every sentence of this performance. The point is that politicians conform to the audiences that can destroy them. In New York, that means not only the woke activist crowd but also the liberal-Zionist professional class that controls much of the city’s symbolic terrain.

The Muslim panic also failed. Right-wing media tried to paint Mamdani as a radical Muslim, jihadist, or Islamist, but the attack was not believable to anyone. I doubt even Fox News boomers truly believed it. Mamdani is obviously a cosmopolitan New Yorker, socially liberal, comfortable with the LGBT coalition, and not plausibly an Islamist. The attack resembled the old “Obama is a secret Muslim” routine: useful for exciting the people who already hate the candidate, but useless for persuading anyone who is not already living inside the fever dream.

The more important point is strategic. Cuomo was competing with Mamdani for voters in a Democratic, liberal New York context. In this context, trans youth medicalization is not exactly the first issue that comes to mind when you are thinking of strategies to peel liberal voters away from Mamdani. When American politicians are competing against a “socialist,” their first instinct is to invoke red scare tactics because they assume that socialism is still the taboo word it once was. But clearly things have changed. Even in the presidential elections, the right-wing media’s attacks on Kamala Harris for her culturally left-wing positions and her character did far more damage to her campaign than trying to frame her as a “communist” did, which they tried and failed with Obama. Furthermore, Curtis Sliwa, meanwhile, split the anti-Mamdani field and spent much of the campaign attacking Cuomo as the status quo candidate rather than concentrating fire on Mamdani. The result was a strange game-theory situation in which Mamdani’s most nationally toxic positions were never made central to the race.^[26]

New York City is also not America. It is a global capital of symbolic capital: young professionals, immigrants, cosmopolitans, media workers, nonprofit people, academics, and PMC aspirants packed into one city. In that setting, the trans issue does not carry the same political weight it would carry in a family-centered suburb, small city, or red/purple state. Many childless symbolic-capitalist voters dismiss these issues as trivial compared to housing or affordability. Parents usually do not, especially when the question concerns minors, schools, puberty blockers, and parental authority. That is why the issue can seem fake or marginal inside progressive urban bubbles while remaining politically explosive almost everywhere else.

Mamdani’s victory, then, is not a national blueprint. It is an exception produced by New York’s electorate, New York’s density of symbolic capitalists, the peculiar opponent he faced, the three-way dynamics of the race, and the failure of his opponents to attack him on his most vulnerable issues. The danger is that leftists will treat his victory as proof that they can ignore cultural moderation everywhere. Winning in New York City is not the same as winning in Kentucky, Ohio, Michigan, rural Pennsylvania, or even many working-class urban districts. A blue-district strategy can masquerade as a movement for a while, but it is not a national working-class politics.

It’s Not Just Optics. It’s About Truth

It is not just a question about optics either. On some of these issues, the progressive-maximalist position is just wrong, and the left is wrong to go along with it. There is no significant evidence that defunding the police is a good policy for helping the issues faced by black people and poor people in general.^[27] It is not clear whatsoever that decriminalizing, let alone legalizing, all drugs and prostitution carries more positives than negatives that outweigh the risks. It is also far from clear that promoting LGBTQ lifestyles to children and then outsourcing their gender dysphoria to the pharmaceutical industry is a great way to deal with gender troubles and mental health. Yet many woke leftists take these neo-left progressive positions to be self-evident staples of leftist morality, principles that they will accuse of abandoning if you critique them, even if this was never the “leftism” you signed up for in the first place.

The issue is not just about trying to strategically police optics so the left gets better at PR. It’s about political seriousness, not just about having the left “win” against the right, but about what is right and wrong at the level of policy. The Danish example matters because Denmark did not primarily treat youth gender medicine as a culture-war identity test. It treated it as a public health policy question: what does the evidence actually show, what risks attach to medicalizing minors, and what should clinicians do when the patient population changes rapidly? In Denmark and other Nordic countries, clinicians and policymakers have shifted toward greater caution, prioritizing psychosocial support and counseling-first protocols over routine puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones for minors. That shift was not a right-wing moral panic. It followed European evidence reviews and clinical reassessments that found the evidence base weaker and more uncertain than the confident claims often made by the American medical-pharmaceutical and activist ecosystem. In other words, the science coming out of Europe complicated, and in some cases contradicted, the “settled science” posture of the American affirmation model. North American leftists love to praise Denmark and the Nordic Model in general for its highly progressive positions on most issues (including women’s rights), yet they turn a blind eye to when these countries realize that not all progress is progressive. That Mamdani has gone ahead with this policy illustrates the structural point precisely: he ultimately has to acquiesce to the people who helped bring him to power, who are overwhelmingly symbolic-capitalist types. If your power base lacks blue collar workers, small business owners, and people without college degrees, you will get captured by the managerial class. Mamdani is, in this respect, George McGovern if McGovern had never run for president and had instead remained stuck in a very blue district.^[28]

Anti-left propaganda works because leftists ARE the propaganda.

The “loony left” narrative works for the right, not just because right-wing media is good at propaganda sorcery. It works because there are, in fact, a lot of loony leftists with loony ideas whom the gatekeepers of left-wing discourse allow to represent the left, even if those people do not represent the left as a whole in raw numbers. The fact that so many people trying to build careers in and around leftist politics choose to go along with, or at least not challenge, the loony-left ideas of a loud overrepresented minority is why the left appears like an unserious freakshow to many people outside of it, despite all the good ideas and intentions that many class-first leftists actually would have public support on. Leftists love to selectively highlight polling data showing the issues they are popular on, healthcare, jobs, housing, wealth inequality, social programs, anti-war stances, but they turn a blind eye to all the things they are unpopular on, like mass immigration, identity politics, and the excesses of social liberalism.

The PMC capture of the left and its capitulation to niche PMC liberal-left priorities is precisely the trap the agnostic approach to wokeism cannot avoid. The problem is not “elite capture” of a woke politics that was otherwise perfectly fine before. Woke politics is already elite-captured from the start, by the PMC and PMC aspirants, who prioritize first-world concerns and cultural revolution.

Many class-first leftists put up with woke extremism because they simply “don’t care” about culture war issues. Even if they find these topics annoying, they shrug them off, believing they are not major problems worth addressing. I too used to hold this opinion. However, the result of “not caring” about wokeness is that these class-first leftists allow those who do care about unwinnable culture wars to dominate left-wing discourse. Consequently, the woke faction of the left determines the “official” left-wing position on various cultural topics. In some cases, older leftists who prioritize class accommodate wokeness because they are too old to understand how extreme social progressivism has become, leaving them unsure of whether it is right or wrong. These older leftists assume that the progressives speaking on behalf of marginalized groups know what they are talking about. As a result, they keep their mouths shut, or they simply lack the energy to die on such a trivial hill this late in the game.

This dynamic between old and new leftists is evident among millennial and young Generation X professors. When entering academia, they prioritized woke topics while competing for status in a highly saturated academic job market. Eventually, these subjects became very safe avenues for gaining social currency. Nobody dared challenge that dogma at its height unless they had tenure, and even then, most remained silent. There are a lot of old leftist boomer professors who are not woke but are too removed to understand or challenge the new orthodoxy taking over.

This old-young leftist dynamic exists in leftist politics generally, explaining the political alliances between figures like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, or Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana. The older boomer leftist remains rooted in the 1970s, viewing their movement as a class-first project that works with marginalized groups and champions minority civil rights. Meanwhile, for the younger neo-leftist, class is a secondary and highly racialized category. Their cultural politics function as a top-down professional-managerial class (PMC) cultural revolution intended to re-engineer the common sense of the majority, completely diverging from a traditional battle for basic equal rights for the minority.

Many class-first leftists who wouldn’t otherwise be perceived as woke are often complicit in the suicide of the left because they let all of this woke nonsense slide, as they don’t have the energy or the will to challenge it, and want to be diplomatic with other self-described “leftists” in order to maintain a coalition of allies. However, as Ruy Teixera has pointed out in many great articles of his, this approach of relying on economic populism alone without taking a stance on any cultural issues can only go so far. The “no war but class war” indifferent approach of keeping one’s head in the sand on all cultural matters can’t conceal the deep contradictions within leftist viewpoints that many leftists still feel they have to capitulate to in 2026.. A politician who genuinely does not hold woke positions can answer these questions in these matters directly and without apology. A politician who simply does not lead with them, but has never worked through a different framework, will revert to the woke frame the moment the question arrives. If one cannot offer a coherent and commonsense position regarding children, it signals to most parents that they have no place in the politics being offered.

Why the Left Is Slow to Learn

Why is the left so slow to learn from its mistakes? Why does it keep repeating the mistakes of New-Left McGovernism? The people who narrate the left’s failures are often the same symbolic capitalists who helped produce those failures. The voices that define, interpret, and publicly represent “the left” are disproportionately media workers, academics, nonprofit professionals, podcasters, writers, artists, graduate students, activists, influencers, and leftist content creators. They control the symbolic production of trademark leftism, determining the public perception of what “the left” is. They are the interlocutors, ideologists, translators, interpreters, commentators, narrators, and gatekeepers of what the left supposedly is.

That creates a built-in problem of self-criticism. The symbolic capitalists write the postmortems, but they are themselves part of what went wrong. They are not likely to say, “we were the problem,” because they often cannot see the problem from inside the same social world that produced it. In other cases, they have no interest in seeing it, because their careers depend on keeping alive the idea that there is a movement, that their media work is movement work, and that the audience is participating in history by subscribing, donating, sharing, or joining.

This is how the leftist industrial complex keeps manufacturing false hope. After Bernie Sanders was defeated, the Squad was treated as proof that the left was back, even though those victories were heavily dependent on district-specific conditions. Mamdani is now being treated the same way. The moment he won, some people began saying that “woke is back” or that he had provided the blueprint for the future left. When I criticized the Mamdani mania, including alongside Benjamin Studebaker, the first people to dismiss the critique as pessimism were often the very people with a material and symbolic interest in selling the idea that this is a movement.

The Canadian version of the same fantasy is already visible in the attempt to frame Avi Lewis, the new leader of the NDP, as a kind of “Canadian Zohran Mamdani.” Whether Lewis deserves that comparison is not the point. The point is how quickly symbolic-capitalist left discourse turns a context-specific victory into a universal formula. A charismatic democratic socialist wins in New York City by foregrounding affordability while avoiding direct scrutiny on his most unpopular cultural positions, and suddenly the lesson becomes: no compromise is necessary, no cultural reckoning is needed, the left was right all along.^[29]

That is precisely the wrong lesson. Mamdani proves something much narrower: a talented politician can win in a very specific city, under very specific conditions, by foregrounding material issues and avoiding the most damaging cultural fights. He does not prove that those cultural positions are nationally viable. Even some class-first, anti-woke, Bernie-left critics of identity politics have been tempted by the easier conclusion: if the left simply talks about bread-and-butter issues, it does not need to confront wokeism directly. But a strategy that works in New York is not a strategy that works everywhere. A country as large and politically diverse as the United States requires different cultural and political strategies in different places.

This is where the argument of my left-conservatism essay becomes unavoidable. A serious class politics must be broad enough to tolerate a socially conservative or culturally moderate wing, just as the right contains both libertarian and conservative tendencies. Whether we call it left politics, socialist politics, class politics, or something else, the movement needs a wider horizon of what can be debated and tolerated. The goal is not the personal exile of every woke person from political life. The goal is the defeat of woke capture, the woke stranglehold over the left’s imagination and discourse. If woke people are a minority, the real question is why the left continues to capitulate to them. The answer is that they are overrepresented in the symbolic-capitalist institutions that define the left’s public image.

A related and increasingly common claim is that woke is resurging because the right is unpopular. This confuses dissatisfaction with right-wing governments with pro-woke sentiment. They are not the same thing. The Democrats have remained as unpopular as ever (Especially on issues like immigration and social/cultural issues) despite Trump’s falling approval rating and the implosion of MAGA into deep factional infighting. Where left-wing candidates have had the chance to compete directly against right-wing candidates, they have not fared well. Jeremy Corbyn, running on precisely the kind of economic populism that should theoretically capture the anti-establishment vote, lost dramatically to Boris Johnson. Reform UK is now leading or highly competitive in UK voting-intention polling, not any socialist alternative. In France, the left could barely win despite forming a tactical alliance with centrist liberals. Die Linke won in Berlin but lost East Germany to the AfD. In Italy, Giorgia Meloni captured traditionally working-class socialist strongholds. In Canada, the reaction to right-wing populism swung voters toward the liberal centrist party rather than the NDP, which actually lost seats. Across the board, the candidates who have defeated right-wing populists have been moderate, centrist liberals who distanced themselves from wokeism. The left has fared best where it has more openly moderated or shifted rightward on contentious cultural positions. The working class is not turning to the left; it is turning away from it, not because economic populism lacks appeal, but because the left has coupled it with cultural positions that alienate the very working-class voters it claims to represent. The claim that woke is coming back because the right is faltering does not survive contact with the actual electoral results.^[30]

Israel and Palestine

The post-October 7 shift of substantial symbolic-capitalist left energy toward Palestine represents a parallel, if similarly ambiguous, development. On structural grounds, Palestine is a more serious cause than the cultural politics that dominated the prior cycle: it involves genuine material stakes, crosses left-right partisan lines in ways that racial and gender identity politics never managed, and has produced growing cross-ideological skepticism of American foreign policy commitments. Journalists, academics, and entertainers who spent the prior decade cycling through BLM, indigenous solidarity, and LGBTQ advocacy have, in many cases, redirected their political energy toward Palestine since 2023. In principle, a cause that involves higher stakes and reaches further across political lines is an improvement over the inward-facing consciousness politics of the prior cycle.^[31]

The caveat, however, is the same one that applies to Mamdani: the woke tendency has a consistent pattern of absorbing causes that have genuine popular potential and rendering them politically self-defeating through the same dynamics of status competition and performative extremism. Woke people, on average, tend to be embittered/temporarily embarrassed professional-managerial-class aspirants in fields such as art, entertainment, media, and academia. When they get involved in political causes, they tend to turn them into a consciousness-raising spectacle as they use virtue signaling as a form of social currency, and in many cases, they enter into activist spaces because it’s a social hierarchy that they can accumulate more power in. Put bluntly, the wokes burn every movement they go near to the ground. Nobody burns an American flag at a demonstration if their actual goal is to convince their fellow citizens to care about Palestinian civilian casualties. Nobody chants about settlers deserving their fate if the objective is to build a coalition broad enough to shift American foreign policy. The people who do these things are not making tactical errors born of political inexperience. They are doing exactly what the consciousness-first mode of politics produces when it infiltrates a cause: demonstrating their commitment in terms legible to their peer group, regardless of how those demonstrations register to any audience they would need to reach to actually advance the cause. Bad optics, in this framework, are not an accident. They are the point. The logic is similar to what drives the behavior of hipsters. It is a kind of hipster leftism, driven not by a genuine commitment to a political project with serious intentions of winning, but by a brand aesthetic that prides itself on being more radical than others. For these individuals, leftism is a way of distinguishing themselves from others rather than finding common ground with them. They are not trying to move toward a political project with crossover appeal, but rather to occupy a niche. The problem with working alongside these people within any serious political movement is that in most progressive leftist organizations, you encounter a mix of individuals with very different intentions and motives: those who are genuinely committed to the cause and want to advance it, and those who may believe they are committed but are actually driven by the competition to virtue-signal and differentiate themselves. These latter individuals will often be the first to champion the least popular positions, because doing so is precisely what signals their distinction. Someone who is primarily performing virtue for the already-converted has no incentive to moderate their presentation for outsiders. This is the difference between someone who wants to win and someone who wants to be seen wanting to win. Serious political actors, even those with genuinely dangerous ideas, understand this distinction and moderate their public presentation accordingly. The woke tendency often fails this basic test of political seriousness because political effectiveness is not its primary objective.

There are key implications within this essay that are important when thinking about the future of woke. The Fourth Awokening is exhausting itself, its cultural causes saturated or discredited, its institutional infrastructure contracting under corporate rollbacks and political backlash. AI displacement is producing the conditions for a potential Fifth Awokening by collapsing the credential hedge that once separated the symbolic-capitalist PMC from the precarity it administered to others. Class politics is returning across both left and right, with figures like Sanders demonstrating that material appeals reach voters the woke left has abandoned, and with early cases like Mamdani suggesting that the same credentialed-class energy that drove the prior cycle can, under the right conditions, be redirected toward something more materially serious.

But the return of class politics is not, by itself, sufficient. Mamdani’s coalition still skews toward the college-educated and the newly arrived rather than the lifelong working-class New Yorkers his platform was designed to serve. The organizational base behind him, the New York DSA and the activist infrastructure of the symbolic-capitalist left, is the same base that spent the prior decade alienating ordinary people through the very dynamics this trilogy has traced. The Palestine cause, for all its genuine material stakes, is already being absorbed by the consciousness-first mode of politics, its potential popular appeal narrowed by the same performative extremism that consumed BLM before it. The pattern is consistent: causes with real popular potential are captured by a symbolic-capitalist political style that transforms them into status competitions legible only to insiders, shedding their broad appeal in the process.

The question, then, is whether this return to material politics represents a genuine structural break from the consciousness-first template or merely its latest iteration under a different label. Will the next political opening be post-woke in substance, organized around shared material interests and willing to challenge the woke tendency directly, or will it reproduce the essential features of the cycle it claims to have transcended? That question cannot be answered by structural analysis alone. It requires confronting a strategic problem that the structural account has illuminated but cannot itself resolve: the relationship between class politics and the woke tendency that currently occupies the organizational terrain on which any serious working-class politics must be built. Recognizing the failures of woke politics is a necessary starting point. Whether it is a sufficient one, and what the alternative actually requires in practice, is the subject of the final installment of this series.

However, this is not to say that the culture war must be ignored entirely in favor of the class war. It is also a mistake to treat class and culture war issues as entirely separate. The relationship between the two, and the strategic question of how a serious left politics must navigate both simultaneously, is the subject of part 4, the final essay in this series: The Culture War is the Class War.

Bibliography/Footnotes

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^[1] On corporate DEI retreat and federal DEI rollback, see Executive Order 14151, “Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing,” Federal Register 90, no. 19 (January 29, 2025): 8339-8341, https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/01/29/2025-01953/ending-radical-and-wasteful-government-dei-programs-and-preferencing; Lauren Schenkman, “Major Companies Reframing, Not Abandoning, DEI: Report,” ESG Dive, August 12, 2025, https://www.esgdive.com/news/major-companies-reframing-not-abandoning-dei-2025-report-the-conference-board-trump/757419/; and Forbes, “Here Are All the Companies Rolling Back DEI Programs,” updated 2025.

^[2] On the Freedom Convoy, public-health-mandate opposition, and mixed public sympathy, see Public Safety Canada, “Parliamentary Committee Notes: Overview - Freedom Convoy 2022,” October 13, 2022, https://www.publicsafety.gc.ca/cnt/trnsprnc/brfng-mtrls/prlmntry-bndrs/20221013/03-en.aspx; Ipsos, “Nearly Half (46%) of Canadians Say They ‘May Not Agree with Everything’ Trucker Convoy Says or Does, But Their Frustration Is Legitimate and Worthy of Sympathy,” February 11, 2022, https://www.ipsos.com/en-ca/news-polls/nearly-half-say-they-may-not-agree-with-trucker-convoy; and Angus Reid Institute, “Trudeau, Convoy Protests and Vaccine Mandates in Canada,” February 2022, https://angusreid.org/trudeau-convoy-trucker-protest-vaccine-mandates-covid-19/.

^[3] On the legal settlement of same-sex marriage in the United States, see Obergefell v. Hodges, 576 U.S. 644 (2015), and the Respect for Marriage Act, Public Law 117-228 (2022). On the rising controversy over youth gender medicine and European policy reversals, see Euronews, “The UK Is the Latest Country to Ban Puberty Blockers for Trans Kids. Why Is Europe Restricting Them?” December 13, 2024, https://www.euronews.com/health/2024/12/13/the-uk-is-the-latest-country-to-ban-puberty-blockers-for-trans-kids-why-is-europe-restrict.

^[4] On Harris campaigning with Liz Cheney, see Associated Press, “Harris Campaigns with Liz Cheney at the GOP’s Birthplace while Trump Rallies in Michigan,” October 3, 2024, https://apnews.com/article/89396853e5521c3870a3c88e04cbfd99. On 2024 voter issue salience, see the Pew, AP VoteCast, and Gallup sources already cited in this essay.

^[5] On Meta’s post-2024 free-speech/content-moderation pivot, see Meta, “More Speech and Fewer Mistakes,” January 7, 2025, https://about.fb.com/news/2025/01/meta-more-speech-fewer-mistakes/. On AOC’s disappearing pronouns and her explanation, see Washington Times, “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Says She Nixed Pronouns from X Bio for Space,” November 18, 2024. On Starmer and the UK gender ruling, see Reuters, “PM Starmer Welcomes UK Top Court Ruling on Biological Sex in Equality Laws,” April 22, 2025. On Canadian immigration target reductions under the post-Trudeau/Carney-era policy shift, see iPolitics, “Everything We Know about Budget 2025 — the New Immigration Plan,” October 31, 2025.

^[6] On the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes and their AI dimensions, see Associated Press, “In Hollywood writers’ battle against AI, humans win (for now),” September 2023, https://apnews.com/article/39ab72582c3a15f77510c9c30a45ffc8; and SAG-AFTRA, “A.I. Bargaining and Policy Work Timeline,” accessed May 2026, https://www.sagaftra.org/contracts-industry-resources/member-resources/artificial-intelligence/sag-aftra-ai-bargaining-and. On artists’ IP litigation, see Richard Whiddington, “Artists Land a Win in Class Action Lawsuit Against A.I. Companies,” Artnet News, August 15, 2024, https://news.artnet.com/art-world/artists-vs-stability-ai-lawsuit-moves-ahead-2524849; and Copyright Alliance, “Mid-Year Review: AI Lawsuit Developments in 2024,” July 25, 2024, https://copyrightalliance.org/ai-lawsuit-developments-2024/.

^[7] Federal Reserve Bank of New York, “The Labor Market for Recent College Graduates,” 2026:Q1 Quarterly Highlights, accessed May 2026, https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/college-labor-market.

^[8] On the Big Tech new-graduate hiring decline, see SignalFire, State of Tech Talent Report, 2025, and reporting summarizing the report’s finding that new graduates constitute under 7% of Big Tech hires, down more than 50% from pre-pandemic levels. On early-career employment decline in AI-exposed occupations, see Erik Brynjolfsson, Bharat Chandar, and Ruya Chen, “Canaries in the Coal Mine? Six Facts about the Recent Employment Effects of Artificial Intelligence,” Stanford Digital Economy Lab, November 13, 2025, https://digitaleconomy.stanford.edu/app/uploads/2025/11/CanariesintheCoalMine_Nov25.pdf.

^[9] Dario Amodei, quoted in “AI Could Make Half of All Entry-Level White-Collar Jobs Vanish, Anthropic CEO Warns,” Fortune, May 28, 2025, https://fortune.com/2025/05/28/anthropic-ceo-warning-ai-job-loss/.

^[10] Goldman Sachs Research, “How Will AI Affect the Global Workforce?” August 13, 2025, https://www.goldmansachs.com/insights/articles/how-will-ai-affect-the-global-workforce; and Goldman Sachs Research, “How Will AI Affect the US Labor Market?” March 18, 2026, https://www.goldmansachs.com/insights/articles/how-will-ai-affect-the-us-labor-market.

^[11] On McKinsey’s AI-linked restructuring, see Bloomberg, “McKinsey Cuts About 200 Tech Jobs, Shifts More Roles to AI,” November 26, 2025, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-11-26/mckinsey-cuts-about-200-tech-jobs-shifts-more-roles-to-ai; and Computing, “McKinsey Considers Thousands of Job Cuts as AI Reshapes Consultancy Work,” December 2025, https://www.computing.co.uk/news/2025/ai/mckinsey-considers-thousands-of-job-cuts-as-ai-reshapes-consultancy-work. Earlier McKinsey headcount reductions should be treated as consulting-sector restructuring rather than cleanly attributable to AI alone.

^[12] Brookings Institution, “Measuring US Workers’ Capacity to Adapt to AI-Driven Job Displacement,” January 21, 2026, https://www.brookings.edu/articles/measuring-us-workers-capacity-to-adapt-to-ai-driven-job-displacement; and Brookings Institution, “Generative AI, the American Worker, and the Future of Work,” October 2024, https://www.brookings.edu/articles/generative-ai-the-american-worker-and-the-future-of-work/.

^[13] For the recent-graduate labor-market deterioration and Big Tech new-graduate hiring decline, see the New York Fed, SignalFire, and Stanford Digital Economy Lab sources already cited above. For the broader graduate underemployment problem, see Federal Reserve Bank of New York, “The Labor Market for Recent College Graduates,” 2026:Q1 Quarterly Highlights.

^[14] On Amodei’s prediction that AI could soon write most code, see “Anthropic’s CEO Says That in 3 to 6 Months, AI Will Be Writing 90% of the Code Software Developers Were in Charge Of,” Business Insider, March 2025, https://www.businessinsider.com/anthropic-ceo-ai-90-percent-code-3-to-6-months-2025-3.

^[15] On relatively low AI exposure in built-environment and manual occupations, see Brookings Institution, “The AI Durability of Built Environment Careers,” March 12, 2026, https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-ai-durability-of-built-environment-careers/; Brookings Institution, “Generative AI, the American Worker, and the Future of Work,” October 2024, https://www.brookings.edu/articles/generative-ai-the-american-worker-and-the-future-of-work/; and Goldman Sachs Research, “The Jobs AI Is Likely to Boost—and Those It May Disrupt,” April 24, 2026, https://www.goldmansachs.com/insights/articles/the-jobs-ai-is-likely-to-boost-and-those-it-may-disrupt.

^[16] On Nordic union density and immigration-policy tightening, see Anders Kjellberg, “Changes in Union Density in the Nordic Countries,” Nordic Council of Ministers, 2025, https://pub.norden.org/nord2025-001/changes-in-union-density-in-the-nordic-countries.html; Nordic Welfare Centre, “Nordic Integration Policy Shifts towards Restriction and Selectivity,” January 28, 2025, https://nordicwelfare.org/en/nyheter/nordic-integration-policy-shifts-towards-restriction-and-selectivity/; and Socialeurope, “The Immigration Policy Turn: The Danish Social Democratic Case,” May 25, 2017, https://www.socialeurope.eu/immigration-policy-turn-danish-social-democratic-case.

^[17] On the salience of the economy and immigration in the 2024 election, see Pew Research Center, “Issues and the 2024 Election,” September 9, 2024, https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/09/09/issues-and-the-2024-election/; Associated Press, “AP VoteCast: Voters Who Focused on the Economy Broke Hard for Trump,” November 8, 2024, https://apnews.com/article/11db37c033328a7ef6af71fe0a104604; and Gallup, “Economy Most Important Issue to 2024 Presidential Vote,” October 9, 2024, https://news.gallup.com/poll/651719/economy-important-issue-2024-presidential-vote.aspx.

^[18] On Mamdani’s affordability-centered platform, primary win over Cuomo, and mayoral victory, see Associated Press, “Zohran Mamdani Wins New York City’s Democratic Mayoral Primary,” July 2025, https://apnews.com/article/c398b33fe7304287596d64582d326988; CBS News New York, “Zohran Mamdani Wins NYC Mayoral Election After Energizing Young Voters With Focus on Affordability,” November 5, 2025; and The Guardian, “Zohran Mamdani Elected Mayor of New York,” November 5, 2025, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/nov/04/zohran-mamdani-mayor-new-york-city.

^[19] On Mamdani’s primary and general-election victories and affordability-focused campaign, see Associated Press, “Zohran Mamdani Wins New York City’s Democratic Mayoral Primary, Defeating Ex-Gov. Andrew Cuomo,” July 2025, https://apnews.com/article/c398b33fe7304287596d64582d326988; and The Guardian, “Zohran Mamdani Elected Mayor of New York,” November 5, 2025, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/nov/04/zohran-mamdani-mayor-new-york-city. For turnout, geography, and exit-poll discussion, see Holly Pretsky and Tsehai Alfred, “5 Takeaways from the 2025 NYC Election Turnout,” City & State New York, November 7, 2025, https://www.cityandstateny.com/politics/2025/11/5-takeaways-2025-nyc-election-turnout/409413; and CUNY Center for Urban Research, “NYC 2025 Election Map,” 2025, https://www.urbanresearchmaps.org/electioncompare2025/. For the education and other subgroup exit-poll figures, see CNN Politics, “Exit Poll Results: New York City Mayor Election 2025,” November 2025.

^[20] For income, neighborhood, and coalition breakdowns in the 2025 New York City mayoral election, see Holly Pretsky and Tsehai Alfred, “5 Takeaways from the 2025 NYC Election Turnout,” City & State New York, November 7, 2025, https://www.cityandstateny.com/politics/2025/11/5-takeaways-2025-nyc-election-turnout/409413; and CUNY Center for Urban Research, “NYC 2025 Election Map,” 2025, https://www.urbanresearchmaps.org/electioncompare2025/. For the income and education subgroup exit-poll figures, see CNN Politics, “Exit Poll Results: New York City Mayor Election 2025,” November 2025.

^[21] “What a Democratic Socialist Convention Is Like,” YouTube, August 5, 2019,

^[22] On Mamdani’s family background and political biography, see TIME, “‘A Politics of No Translation.’ Zohran Mamdani on His Unlikely Rise,” 2025, https://time.com/7308924/zohran-mamdani-interview-time/; People, “All About Zohran Mamdani’s Parents, Dad Mahmood Mamdani and Mom Mira Nair,” 2025; and The Guardian, “How Mamdani Is Defying Immigrant Expectations by Embracing His Identity,” November 9, 2025. On abolitionist and public-safety debates surrounding Mamdani, see City Journal, “Mamdani Picks a Police Abolitionist to Guide His Public Safety Transition,” November 26, 2025, https://www.city-journal.org/article/mamdani-alex-vitale-defund-police; and Fox News, “Socialist NYC Mayoral Candidate Mamdani on Abolishing Prisons,” July 18, 2025, https://www.foxnews.com/politics/watch-socialist-nyc-mayoral-candidate-mamdani-abolishing-prisons-what-purpose-do-serve.

^[23] On Harris’s 2019 ACLU questionnaire and the Trump campaign ad, see ACLU, “Rights for All Candidate Questionnaire: Kamala Harris,” 2019, https://assets.aclu.org/live/uploads/2024/08/Harris-ACLU-Candidate-Questionnaire.pdf; FactCheck.org, “Harris’ Position on Health Care for Transgender Prisoners and Detainees,” October 4, 2024, https://www.factcheck.org/2024/10/harris-position-on-health-care-for-transgender-prisoners-and-detainees/; and CBS News, “Trump Campaign Has Spent Millions on Anti-Trans Ads,” October 16, 2024, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-anti-trans-ads-spending/. On Biden’s “at least three” answer, see Daniel Avery, “Joe Biden Says ‘There Are Least Three’ Genders in Iowa Campaign Stop,” Newsweek, August 11, 2019, https://www.newsweek.com/joe-biden-iowa-state-fair-gender-1453688.

On Mamdani’s $65 million pledge for gender-affirming care and LGBTQIA+ sanctuary-city platform, see Samantha Riedel, “Democratic NYC Mayoral Candidate Zohran Mamdani Is Pledging $65 Million for Trans Health Care,” Them, June 25, 2025, https://www.them.us/story/zohran-mamdani-nyc-major-trans-healthcare-65-million; and “Mamdani Pledged $65 Million to Protect Gender-Affirming Care. Will He Follow Through?” Prism Reports, March 18, 2026, https://prismreports.org/2026/03/18/mamdani-gender-affirming-care-budget/.

On the mayoral debates and Mamdani’s handling of Israel/Palestine, see Al Jazeera, “Five Key Takeaways from the New York City Mayoral Debate,” October 17, 2025, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/10/17/five-key-takeaways-from-the-new-york-city-mayoral-debate; and The Guardian, “Israel Is Playing an Outsized Role in New York City’s Mayoral Race. Will It Matter?” June 22, 2025, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jun/22/israel-new-york-mayoral-race.

^[26] On the three-way race dynamics and the argument that Sliwa’s candidacy split the anti-Mamdani field, see “Did Curtis Sliwa Cost Andrew Cuomo the Mayoral Election?” The Independent, November 5, 2025, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/curtis-sliwa-cuomo-mamdani-new-york-mayoral-election-b2858895.html. See also Quinnipiac University Poll, “NYC Mayor’s Race: Mamdani 43%, Cuomo 33%, Sliwa 14%,” October 29, 2025.

^[27] See Musa Al-Gharbi, “On Crime and Punishment,” Symbolic Capitalism, January 20, 2026, https://musaalgharbi.substack.com/p/on-crime-and-punishment.

^[28] On Denmark, Finland, Sweden, and other European shifts toward more restrictive or counseling-first youth gender-care protocols, see Euronews, “The UK Is the Latest Country to Ban Puberty Blockers for Trans Kids. Why Is Europe Restricting Them?” December 13, 2024, https://www.euronews.com/health/2024/12/13/the-uk-is-the-latest-country-to-ban-puberty-blockers-for-trans-kids-why-is-europe-restrict; S. C. J. Jørgensen, “Puberty Suppression for Pediatric Gender Dysphoria and the Child’s Right to an Open Future,” Archives of Sexual Behavior, 2024, https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11106199/; Karolinska Institutet, “Systematic Review on Outcomes of Hormonal Treatment in Youths with Gender Dysphoria,” April 19, 2023, https://news.ki.se/systematic-review-on-outcomes-of-hormonal-treatment-in-youths-with-gender-dysphoria; and European Academy of Paediatrics, “European Academy of Paediatrics Statement on the Clinical Management of Children and Adolescents with Gender Dysphoria,” Frontiers in Pediatrics, 2024, https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/pediatrics/articles/10.3389/fped.2024.1298884/full.

^[29] On Avi Lewis becoming leader of Canada’s NDP, see New Democratic Party of Canada, “Avi Lewis Elected Leader of NDP,” March 29, 2026, https://www.ndp.ca/news/avi-lewis-elected-leader-ndp; The Guardian, “Avi Lewis, Elected to Lead Canada’s New Democratic Party, Promises ‘NDP Comeback,’” March 30, 2026, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/mar/30/canada-avi-lewis-elected-new-democratic-party; and Jacobin, “Avi Lewis Is the New Leader of Canada’s NDP,” March 30, 2026, https://jacobin.com/2026/03/avi-lewis-canada-ndp-election.

^[30] On the cited electoral pattern, see Mark Wickham-Jones, “The 2019 UK General Election and Labour’s Worst Defeat Since 1935,” Oxford University Press, 2020; YouGov, “Voting Intention, 4-5 May 2026: Reform UK 25%, Labour 18%, Conservatives 17%,” May 6, 2026, https://yougov.com/en-gb/articles/54701-voting-intention-4-5-may-2026-ref-25-lab-18-con-17-grn-15-ld-14; Reuters, “French Left-Wing Alliance Wins Most Seats in Snap Election, No Party Wins Majority,” July 2024; Associated Press, “Conservative Opposition Wins German Election and the Far Right

-Is 2nd with Strongest Postwar Result,” February 23, 2025, https://apnews.com/article/ebf16ed38e0beaff7fed9a6d29b32a24; The Federal Returning Officer, “Bundestag Election 2025: Results,” 2025, https://www.bundeswahlleiterin.de/en/bundestagswahlen/2025/ergebnisse/bund-99.html; and Reuters, “Canada’s Liberals Win Minority Government,” April 29, 2025, https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/canadians-vote-election-dominated-by-concerns-about-trump-2025-04-28/. This paragraph is a high-level comparative claim and should be read as interpretive synthesis rather than a single-source empirical finding.

^[31] On the scale of post-October 7 Palestine/Israel protest activity and the shift in U.S. public opinion, see Harvard Kennedy School, Crowd Counting Consortium, “Protests in the United States on Palestine and Israel, 2023-2024,” October 18, 2024, https://www.hks.harvard.edu/publications/protests-united-states-palestine-and-israel-2023-2024; Pew Research Center, “In Views of the Israel-Hamas War, Younger Americans Stand Out,” April 2, 2024, https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/04/02/younger-americans-stand-out-in-their-views-of-the-israel-hamas-war/; and Benedict Vigers, “Israelis No Longer Ahead in Americans’ Middle East Sympathies,” Gallup, February 27, 2026, https://news.gallup.com/poll/702440/israelis-no-longer-ahead-americans-middle-east-sympathies.aspx.