> Ganesh was active in Labour Students, the student wing of the Labour Party, having been inspired to join when he was 17 by Tony Blair's 1999 annual Labour Party Conference speech. In a 2001 interview with The Guardian, Ganesh described himself as "essentially a Portillista", indicating views the newspaper described as "liberal on social affairs, centre-right on economics". Ganesh opted not to attend his local constituency Labour Party meetings as they were "too dominated by Trots"
> For two years, Ganesh was a researcher at Policy Exchange, a Westminster-based think tank on the political right set up by Conservative MPs Nick Boles, Michael Gove and Francis Maude.
I'm... er, not sure, were I a socialist, that I'd be taking this guy's advice.
A question I won't be able to read about because the FTs boundary defeats my usual archive.is wall jumping.
The tl;dr here would be "it's blindingly obvious they don't have to be", and many aren't especially older ones like me who have different ties to an older world feminism, and anti racism world view which clashes with the current ones.
Hitchens (Chris, not Peter) said things in a very unwoke manner, which despite his clear non socialist world view, many on the left agree with. Of Peter his brother, the less said the better.
Author is basically very scared of DSA, because he knows that it's ready for power politics on their own terms.
When you are socially conservative but economically left wing, you are going to spend your debates arguing with a right wing / center guy who has 60 "non-partisan" studies about why liberal economics are good.
When you are in the DSA, you evacuate the question by mentioning Gaza at will. DSA is basically an American version of the french LFI, and they are constantly able to stonewall or turn any debate by going to moral issues.
Can't read the article, but I hate the title framing. Like, what do you mean by woke? If I'm against misogyny, racism, homophobia, etc, is that woke? Or does it require something special I don't know about?
I know it wasn't originally so, but nowadays it seems to be just thrown around as a generic insult.
> Like, what do you mean by woke? If I'm against misogyny, racism, homophobia, etc, is that woke?
That's the usual go-to, isn't it? Forcing your opponent to define the word woke to make them look dumb/hateful.
If we want to play semantics checkers, why don't we stick with the original meaning of the word, in which case being against only one of those things would be considered woke.
There are two parts - one which most of us would support (being against misogyny, racism, homophobia, etc) and one which most of us would oppose (defund the police, abolish ICE, trans women in sports, DEI quotas and promoting people because of their race or gender, etc).
Woke 1.0 lumped both of those buckets together and faced an appropriate backlash which resulted in Trump's reelection.
Having watched the past years unfold from outside the US and reading papers across the media spectrum I would assert that most of the work of smearing the meaning of Woke to include supposedly advocating for litter boxes in classrooms for furries, etc was work gleefully carried out by the US conservative right wing media.
> and faced an appropriate backlash
which was the entire purpose of relentless 24/7 Woke strawmanning.
"From the beginning, it was possible to be a socialist, the socialist, and culturally middle-of-the-road. It was possible to believe in seizing the means of production without being avant-garde on matters of sex, race, crime or war. That point has got lost over time, to the left’s immense cost
...
[a] political entrepreneur will notice the unmet demand for a culturally moderate-to-conservative socialism
...
A century or so after Das Kapital, some British dockers marched in defence of Enoch Powell, a Tory minister who had been fired for a speech against non-white immigration. The march wasn’t, and isn’t, peculiar. The conservatism of even the organised working class should not be news. Unable to come to terms with it, the modern left retreats into a sort of Ken Loach or Mike Leigh fantasy world, in which Christian and Muslim, native and migrant, blue-haired teenager and laid-off steelworker, are forever teaming up to fight the real Other, which is neoliberalism."
It's something worth thinking about, because it's trivially true one could be a socialist and socially conservative, the same way someone can be "socially liberal and fiscally conservative," and so on. More precisely, it's trivally true one can believe anything.
What the author is leaving out (and this is what makes it just a complaint, rather than analysis) is why the coalition formed. Instead, he just says "The mystery is why," and hand-waves it as "whatever the reason..." But it's the reason that's central to the issue. This didn't happen out of nowhere.
Some of the reasons are just arbitrary. It is just coalition arithmetic. There's an argument that it was racial politics that flipped the parties (cf. Carmine and Stimson, Issue Evolution (1989)). It's disputed, but it's less ideological than it is political calculus (at least in America). People want to win elections. Kennedy moved cautiously on civil rights. And then eventually, Nixon looked at a map in 1972 and turned it into strategy. Nobody sat down and reasoned from Marxism to racial equality, it's the side-effect of a two party system. You can say the same for why there are a lot of conservatives who are both fiscally and socially conservative, so much that being "fiscally conservative and socially liberal" became a meme and clarification.
The other reason is de-industrialization. In the 50s, if you were young and left-wing, you go to your union hall. The labor movement was a huge part of the ground operations for the Democratic Party. Fast forward to today. The same person would probably be going to college, in large part because manufacturing employemnt has been dropping for decades. The factory is not culturally liberal. That's the professional culture. The campus is culturally liberal. That's the professional culture. At the end of the day, we work, and these are real social forces that move people in certain directions.
That said, it's not entirely arbitrary. Robin Kelley wrote this book, Hammer and Hoe, and in it he talks about black communist organizing during the Depression. The gist is that the Communist Party thought it was just going to educate industrial workers on straightforward class politics, but what they got instead was black workers taking over and bringing their own institutions with them: the black church, spirituals as organizing songs, people reading Lenin and scripture in the same evening, and so on. The author of the FT article is being pretty narrowminded or is just simply ignorant, to talk about "moderate socialism" and ignore the history of black communism, which is as significant as it gets, at least in the United States.
So the fusion -- even if it's not necessary nor sufficient for left-wing politics -- makes sense, and extends beyond race. We're looking at a social phenomenon where groups of people are left out, either by not having money or being the wrong kind of person. And I think when we're talking about a "culturally moderate socialism", it's inevitably going to invite the question "Who gets to count?" I don't have any theories on whether this is 'good' or bad for socialism, and I'm not interested in debating pros and cons of leftist versus neoliberal theories, but that's where it comes from, and I think the author should at least bother to think about it before dismissing it as a "mystery".
These terms are effectively dogwhistles, with whatever meaning du jour the propaganda machine decides.
A large number of people simply use words as weapons, for effect. Expletives detached from meaning.
If you asked one of them for a meaning, you might get a real word salad, concealing the unspoken meaning basically: "someone who supports Foreigners, Minorities, Women, Socialists, Gays and Liberals" [0]
Since the Lee Atwater "Southern Strategy" days the poor have been conned into supporting the very oligarchs who take away their health care, education, jobs and opportunity.
What an odd view of your fellow citizen. To simplify their aspirations as simple fear rather than a complex, human, genuine need. My only question if this: is this tactic working for your side? Given your historic loses to horrible people (Trump) and the general public rejecting your policies (open borders, identity politics, etc), do you think it's the right approach?
> Weird, given how more non-whites voted for the GOP last time around.
Looking at people like Clarence Thomas, who even voted to eliminate voting rights protection in states with a history of racial voter discrimination, that doesn't sound surprising.
Without reading the article (also paywall), it's helpful to be woke because that's basically now just "caring about others in general, not just selfish" but not required. You could be a selfish racist socialist, for example socialist with respect to white straight christians but at war with muslims and gays.
> Ganesh was active in Labour Students, the student wing of the Labour Party, having been inspired to join when he was 17 by Tony Blair's 1999 annual Labour Party Conference speech. In a 2001 interview with The Guardian, Ganesh described himself as "essentially a Portillista", indicating views the newspaper described as "liberal on social affairs, centre-right on economics". Ganesh opted not to attend his local constituency Labour Party meetings as they were "too dominated by Trots"
> For two years, Ganesh was a researcher at Policy Exchange, a Westminster-based think tank on the political right set up by Conservative MPs Nick Boles, Michael Gove and Francis Maude.
I'm... er, not sure, were I a socialist, that I'd be taking this guy's advice.
A question I won't be able to read about because the FTs boundary defeats my usual archive.is wall jumping.
The tl;dr here would be "it's blindingly obvious they don't have to be", and many aren't especially older ones like me who have different ties to an older world feminism, and anti racism world view which clashes with the current ones.
Hitchens (Chris, not Peter) said things in a very unwoke manner, which despite his clear non socialist world view, many on the left agree with. Of Peter his brother, the less said the better.
Freedium now supports FT: https://freedium-mirror.cfd/https://www.ft.com/content/1b0a8...
> the FTs boundary defeats my usual archive.is wall jumping
Works for me - https://archive.is/BLOgt
Author is basically very scared of DSA, because he knows that it's ready for power politics on their own terms.
When you are socially conservative but economically left wing, you are going to spend your debates arguing with a right wing / center guy who has 60 "non-partisan" studies about why liberal economics are good.
When you are in the DSA, you evacuate the question by mentioning Gaza at will. DSA is basically an American version of the french LFI, and they are constantly able to stonewall or turn any debate by going to moral issues.
Can't read the article, but I hate the title framing. Like, what do you mean by woke? If I'm against misogyny, racism, homophobia, etc, is that woke? Or does it require something special I don't know about?
I know it wasn't originally so, but nowadays it seems to be just thrown around as a generic insult.
> Like, what do you mean by woke? If I'm against misogyny, racism, homophobia, etc, is that woke?
That's the usual go-to, isn't it? Forcing your opponent to define the word woke to make them look dumb/hateful.
If we want to play semantics checkers, why don't we stick with the original meaning of the word, in which case being against only one of those things would be considered woke.
Like AOC has said (and Mamdani apparently supported), "Woke 1.0 was crazy".
https://www.axios.com/2026/08/12/aoc-democratic-socialists-2...
> what do you mean by woke?
There are two parts - one which most of us would support (being against misogyny, racism, homophobia, etc) and one which most of us would oppose (defund the police, abolish ICE, trans women in sports, DEI quotas and promoting people because of their race or gender, etc).
Woke 1.0 lumped both of those buckets together and faced an appropriate backlash which resulted in Trump's reelection.
> Woke 1.0 lumped both of those buckets together
Having watched the past years unfold from outside the US and reading papers across the media spectrum I would assert that most of the work of smearing the meaning of Woke to include supposedly advocating for litter boxes in classrooms for furries, etc was work gleefully carried out by the US conservative right wing media.
> and faced an appropriate backlash
which was the entire purpose of relentless 24/7 Woke strawmanning.
> Can't read the article
https://archive.is/BLOgt
> Like, what do you mean by woke
The author is positing that:
"From the beginning, it was possible to be a socialist, the socialist, and culturally middle-of-the-road. It was possible to believe in seizing the means of production without being avant-garde on matters of sex, race, crime or war. That point has got lost over time, to the left’s immense cost
...
[a] political entrepreneur will notice the unmet demand for a culturally moderate-to-conservative socialism
...
A century or so after Das Kapital, some British dockers marched in defence of Enoch Powell, a Tory minister who had been fired for a speech against non-white immigration. The march wasn’t, and isn’t, peculiar. The conservatism of even the organised working class should not be news. Unable to come to terms with it, the modern left retreats into a sort of Ken Loach or Mike Leigh fantasy world, in which Christian and Muslim, native and migrant, blue-haired teenager and laid-off steelworker, are forever teaming up to fight the real Other, which is neoliberalism."
It's something worth thinking about, because it's trivially true one could be a socialist and socially conservative, the same way someone can be "socially liberal and fiscally conservative," and so on. More precisely, it's trivally true one can believe anything.
What the author is leaving out (and this is what makes it just a complaint, rather than analysis) is why the coalition formed. Instead, he just says "The mystery is why," and hand-waves it as "whatever the reason..." But it's the reason that's central to the issue. This didn't happen out of nowhere.
Some of the reasons are just arbitrary. It is just coalition arithmetic. There's an argument that it was racial politics that flipped the parties (cf. Carmine and Stimson, Issue Evolution (1989)). It's disputed, but it's less ideological than it is political calculus (at least in America). People want to win elections. Kennedy moved cautiously on civil rights. And then eventually, Nixon looked at a map in 1972 and turned it into strategy. Nobody sat down and reasoned from Marxism to racial equality, it's the side-effect of a two party system. You can say the same for why there are a lot of conservatives who are both fiscally and socially conservative, so much that being "fiscally conservative and socially liberal" became a meme and clarification.
The other reason is de-industrialization. In the 50s, if you were young and left-wing, you go to your union hall. The labor movement was a huge part of the ground operations for the Democratic Party. Fast forward to today. The same person would probably be going to college, in large part because manufacturing employemnt has been dropping for decades. The factory is not culturally liberal. That's the professional culture. The campus is culturally liberal. That's the professional culture. At the end of the day, we work, and these are real social forces that move people in certain directions.
That said, it's not entirely arbitrary. Robin Kelley wrote this book, Hammer and Hoe, and in it he talks about black communist organizing during the Depression. The gist is that the Communist Party thought it was just going to educate industrial workers on straightforward class politics, but what they got instead was black workers taking over and bringing their own institutions with them: the black church, spirituals as organizing songs, people reading Lenin and scripture in the same evening, and so on. The author of the FT article is being pretty narrowminded or is just simply ignorant, to talk about "moderate socialism" and ignore the history of black communism, which is as significant as it gets, at least in the United States.
So the fusion -- even if it's not necessary nor sufficient for left-wing politics -- makes sense, and extends beyond race. We're looking at a social phenomenon where groups of people are left out, either by not having money or being the wrong kind of person. And I think when we're talking about a "culturally moderate socialism", it's inevitably going to invite the question "Who gets to count?" I don't have any theories on whether this is 'good' or bad for socialism, and I'm not interested in debating pros and cons of leftist versus neoliberal theories, but that's where it comes from, and I think the author should at least bother to think about it before dismissing it as a "mystery".
[dead]
These terms are effectively dogwhistles, with whatever meaning du jour the propaganda machine decides.
A large number of people simply use words as weapons, for effect. Expletives detached from meaning.
If you asked one of them for a meaning, you might get a real word salad, concealing the unspoken meaning basically: "someone who supports Foreigners, Minorities, Women, Socialists, Gays and Liberals" [0]
Since the Lee Atwater "Southern Strategy" days the poor have been conned into supporting the very oligarchs who take away their health care, education, jobs and opportunity.
[0] https://i.ibb.co/JtSWj63/Voterep-1.jpg
Weird, given how more non-whites voted for the GOP last time around. It's almost as if things are not as simple as you are hoping them to be.
Misogyny, machismo, braggadocio.
Many people sadly vote for someone who expresses their fears rather than their hopes.
I've been to a lot of these rodeos.
What an odd view of your fellow citizen. To simplify their aspirations as simple fear rather than a complex, human, genuine need. My only question if this: is this tactic working for your side? Given your historic loses to horrible people (Trump) and the general public rejecting your policies (open borders, identity politics, etc), do you think it's the right approach?
>open borders
I see you're not a serious person.
No its even simpler, they voted to be white.
> Weird, given how more non-whites voted for the GOP last time around.
Looking at people like Clarence Thomas, who even voted to eliminate voting rights protection in states with a history of racial voter discrimination, that doesn't sound surprising.
Without reading the article (also paywall), it's helpful to be woke because that's basically now just "caring about others in general, not just selfish" but not required. You could be a selfish racist socialist, for example socialist with respect to white straight christians but at war with muslims and gays.