Latest news with #MinorityRule:AdventuresintheCultureWar
New European
04-03-2025
- Politics
- New European
How woke went broke
But there is a growing consensus that the worst vagaries of that era may be over. Leftist commentator Ash Sarkar argues in her new book Minority Rule: Adventures in the Culture War that the left (including herself) may have gone too far on identity politics and culture war issues. Piers Morgan has a book due in October making a similar argument from a different perspective: Woke Is Dead: How Common Sense Triumphed in an Age of Total Madness . And in the USA, where these issues took up far more time and oxygen than they ever did here, Donald Trump's administration could not be making it clearer that a certain version of wokeness is not just dead, but being buried at a crossroads with a stake in its heart. The reality, though, is that the most puritanical and extreme phase of wokeness/cancel culture burned brightly, but peaked years ago – if it were not well past its peak now, no one remotely adjacent to the left, let alone Sarkar herself, would dare to say so. It should not now be difficult to say that, for a time, the political left and mainstream, in response to deep and serious issues such as US police violence and structural racism in that country, reacted in extremely silly and puritanical ways. As tempting as it is to recast such movements as a plea to have a conversation about racism, to be a little kinder and more understanding and to challenge ourselves, at their peak these movements were not about that. The admission is necessary, if for no other reason than to notice how brief that period really was, and how the right wing 'backlash' to it is larger, more dangerous, and more sweeping than peak woke itself ever was. In theory, wokeness is distinct from the Black Lives Matter movement, which in turn is distinct from cancel culture, from the gender debate, and so on. Each has roots in different academic traditions, different inciting incidents. But for most people, the everyday experience of these movements simply melded into one. The peak coincided with a string of high-profile cancellations, some of them long overdue and much deserved and some simply bizarre. In February 2021, The New York Times made the questionable but defensible decision to get rid of Donald McNeil Jr after 45 years at the paper, because he had used America's vilest (and most charged) racial epithet during a discussion on whether it was ever permissible to use the word. Slate then in turn parted company with its podcast host Mike Pesca for simply questioning the firing during a Slack discussion, during which at no point did he use the slur (or even directly refer to it). His colleagues argued that the simple fact of him saying it should not necessarily be an automatic firing offence. Meanwhile, Slate had used the word in articles nine times in 2020 and three times in 2021 – not all written by black writers. For a time, significant airtime was given to the idea that only writers from particular ethnic groups should write about those groups, with some even challenging whether any interracial relationship (or even friendship) could be unproblematic. It seemed that the search for social justice was leading people towards voluntary segregation. 'Defund the police' was adopted as a slogan, with some in the movement condemning critics for taking the term literally, even as others insisted the slogan was very much literal. There are books covering the excesses of the time, and they do not need to be relitigated here, other than to note the chancers who jumped on the issue with solutions that conveniently boosted their own incomes. For a time Robin DiAngelo's egregious White Fragility book was an international bestseller – a nice earner for a white woman after a race relations crisis, while bizarre 'Race To Dinner' experiences, offered by the activists Saira Rao and Regina Jackson, played on the guilt of white women in bizarre ways. All of these examples, notably, are American: most of the inciting incidents of the great awakening were American, and most of its excesses stayed there. The most famous UK incident sparked by Black Lives Matter is probably when Edward Colston's statue was thrown into Bristol harbour. Given that the city's authorities were paralysed for years over the question of what to do with the statue of the notorious slaver, and that the statue didn't go back up but was instead displayed as part of an exhibition on protest in a nearby museum, this act has aged pretty well. But, for a while, the mood in the UK was strange. Keir Starmer might get occasional flak in 2025 for taking the knee in a photo with Angela Rayner in his office, but he attracted significant flak at the time for referring to BLM as a 'moment' rather than a 'movement' – a simple and true statement that has since been vindicated. He eventually had to apologise. All of these examples are from 2020 or 2021, for the simple reason that all of these social justice issues peaked back then. There was a time when everyone was either enthusiastically jumping on to these causes, or else keeping their heads down to avoid being called out or cancelled – but it didn't last long. The Democratic primary of 2020 happened at peak woke – and stances taken at that time plagued Kamala Harris through 2024's presidential race. But the party selected the least woke candidate in the race, Joe Biden, and the country elected him at the general election, over Trump, a rival much more engaged in culture warring. America's great corporations made great promises on 'diversity, equity and inclusion' (DEI), wokeness, and made a show of reshaping their businesses after the reckoning. But they did not even come close to reshaping capitalism. They wore the cause as a fashion, and discarded it as the seasons changed. The social justice side of the culture wars won at best tepid and reluctant endorsement from institutional power – the Democrats half-heartedly embraced the movement, and Labour just as gingerly showed some solidarity over here. Corporations sounded receptive to the movements because it was good for business. But wokeness never got the institutional backing that movements need to become real institutional forces in business. The same cannot be said of the reactionary side of the culture wars, which have not so much been embraced by the Republican Party as they have engulfed it. The party of big business and small government that believes in the USA as the leader of the free world, has been replaced with a party obsessed with 'owning the libs'. Donald Trump's war on wokeness is totalitarian in its obsession. He is willing to cut vital medical research if it uses the wrong word, and to cut lifesaving aid programmes across the world if a 20-year-old idiot who impressed Elon Musk thinks it might look woke. Trump was willing to fire the eminently qualified chair of the joint chiefs of staff – the most senior general in the US military, and a former fighter pilot – because he once talked about being a black man in the military. He was replaced with a less qualified white man. All of this is vile, and much of it is dangerous. But it is also deeply self-defeating. They have misunderstood the reason BLM/wokeness/cancel culture was rejected by large parts of mainstream America. It was not because most Americans love overt racism, or hate gay or trans people. It was because when they saw theories like those of Ibram X Kendi, that everything must be either anti-racist or racist with nothing in between, they were (for good or ill) repelled. Most people want most of their lives to be apolitical, insofar as that is possible. Wokeness became totalitarian, and said every act must be political and any attempt to reject or deny this was itself political. From the moment it did this, it was on to a loser. Trump's reactionary movement is making the exact same mistake, and using the same totalitarian impulse to engage in much more blatant cruelty from a position of much more obvious power. When people see their friends being fired from government jobs because of a misguided war on woke, most will not cheer it on. The audience for deliberate cruelty against minorities is still, hopefully, far smaller than Trump's coterie imagine. The reactionary side of the culture war is in the ascendancy, and is more powerful than the social justice faction ever was, even at its peak. But fundamentally, the MAGA-ites fail to grasp that most people want to Make America Normal Again and that they don't want to worry endlessly about these culture war issues. In their excesses, they sow the seeds of their own destruction. But such downfalls do not always come quickly, let alone easily. The harm that may be inflicted in the meantime is almost incalculable. A focus on that is far more important than relitigating the worst excesses of the social justice movement.
The Independent
02-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
Ash Sarkar: ‘I no longer care about microaggressions – pronounce my name however you want'
Ash Sarkar is the face of woke. Up against the Goliaths of the right wing, the 32-year-old journalist from north London counts tech billionaires like Elon Musk and US president Donald Trump among her adversaries – of which she has many. Another to cross her path was Piers Morgan before his unceremonious exit from Good Morning Britain in 2021, when during a heated TV debate about Trump and Obama, she quipped: 'I'm literally a communist, you idiot.' A video of the moment has since clocked up nearly eight million views on YouTube. In 2023, Sarkar was ranked No 45 on the New Statesman 's Left Power List, and through appearances on shows like Question Time and in her role as senior editor of Novara Media, she has become one of the left's most ubiquitous commentators. Thus it will come as a surprise to many that Sarkar is now sounding the death knell for the culture wars on which she made her name, declaring: 'Woke is dead.' By that, she means all this uproar about unisex bathrooms and the debate over whether there should be a Black James Bond or a gay James Bond is simply not the priority. Such a statement might seem counterintuitive to everything Sarkar stands for, but 'diversity, equity, and inclusion', she says, is a distraction from the real issues. And so goes Sarkar's argument in her debut book Minority Rule: Adventures in the Culture War. 'Identity has become the dominant preoccupation for both the left and the right,' she tells me in The Independent offices. 'I no longer care about microaggressions – pronounce my name however the f*** you want.' Sarkar knows that this view is controversial, and as ever, she's prepared for the backlash. 'People are gonna be like, she's moved to the right,' she jokes, drily. She's correct. A quick scan of recent comments on Novara Media, the platform she helped get off the ground over the last decade, reveals a rift in the left-wing ranks over her apparent conversion. 'Pathetic,' writes one person. 'A fundamentalist identity politician slating an ideology she built an entire career around as the Western public massively rejected it.' One headline in The Daily Telegraph reads: 'The Queen of Woke just exposed the hypocrisy of the virtue-signalling Left.' Still, online jibes are nothing compared to the death threats she's received in the past. 'I'm not worried about anyone from the left killing me,' she laughs. 'They've all got iron deficiencies anyway.' Sarkar is self-assured when it comes to politics, offering analysis with the certainty of scientific fact. And for someone who is about as famous as a journalist can get, she doesn't find talking about herself all that interesting. Unlike other media personas who make a meal of just about any X post – ahem, Piers Morgan – she shrugs off any insults, attacks, and controversies, often with a smirk or a funny remark. Sometimes a literal shrug. She has not once thought about quitting her job ('I made my bed') and tells me she doesn't feel any sense of pressure despite her still-rising profile. Sarkar doesn't get upset or angry about the vitriol she faces and credits a lack of media training for her ability to speak with wit and candour compared to the fusty politicians she often shares mics with. A testament to that candour, she calls such MPs 'degraded, atrophied figures'. Sarkar attributes her penchant for insults to her time at an all-girls school. 'It was an Olympic sport,' she says of the name-calling. 'And everyone else was much better [at it than me].' Perhaps most surprising of all, Sarkar doesn't enjoy fighting. 'I hate conflict in my personal life,' she says. 'I'm a scared little dog. If my husband is like, 'Look, let's have this difficult conversation, tell me what you really think.' I cannot do it. Whereas, if you put me in a news studio and say, 'Talk to this pro-privatisation lobbyist, they're going to take your head off and you've got to stop him from doing that,' I'm like, 'Great. Fine, light work.'' She's since come to the realisation that compartmentalising like this isn't exactly healthy. The death of her stepfather last year heralded the end of what Sarkar calls her 'avoidance and 'inshallah' strategy'. At the age of 31, she entered therapy for the first time where she learnt that being unmoved and removed is a survival technique. 'But you can't just freeze things out,' she says. 'Being frozen is not the same thing as being resilient.' Sarkar has been trying to tap more into her emotions. 'You have to accept that your brain is the dumbest part of you,' she says. 'You have to drop down into this intuition and work out what it is that it's telling you.' So far, it's a technique that has served her well, guiding her through some of the biggest decisions in her life, like getting married in 2023. For Vogue, she wrote a piece on how marriage and Marxism can, in fact, co-exist. Outside of TV and radio, you can find Sarkar hungover on the sofa with her husband (also an activist) and their cat Mousa Dembélé (named after the PSG footballer) watching Sharpe, the Nineties series about the Napoleonic Wars, starring Sean Bean. She falls asleep to woodworking videos. Her social media algorithm is wholesome, made up of 'cats, comedy, and recipes'. She's also an Aries. All this to say, she does, in fact, lead a very normal life. As Sarkar gets up to help me fix the faulty light in our meeting room for a third time, she reminds me of so many other Muslim women I know – charming, politically engaged, hospitable, and more cutting than Regina George when it comes to terrible politicians. In many ways, her entry into politics was inevitable. Her great-great-aunt Pritilata Waddedar was a fighter in the armed struggles against the British Empire in the 1930s; her mother, a single parent, was an anti-racist activist, trade unionist and child protection social worker, who helped mobilise marches following the racially motivated murder of Altab Ali in east London. Sarkar was 12 when she first read The Communist Manifesto. There is no doubt that her financial background also had an impact. 'I remember what it was like when my mum was worried about money,' she says. 'I remember how arbitrary and unfair it seemed that someone who worked really hard and had two kids was still stressing about having a place to live sometimes.' Her stepdad entered the scene when she was 11, meaning the family could afford to relocate to the more upmarket neighbourhood of Palmers Green. 'It was like the Jeffersons moving on up to the east side. I was like, 'These kids go skiing, what the f**k?'' she recalls. 'It was a different planet, where there was all this ease everywhere. People were worried about different things. I thought, 'Oh, so this is money. This is what money does.'' All her new friends lived in 'houses full of books' and would participate in extracurriculars like singing, theatre, and sports. 'Were they any more deserving than the kids I grew up around?' she says now, her accent a mix of posh clipped and more colloquial. Class is the predominant issue for Sarkar, above and beyond the overblown spats of identity politics. 'Everyone could use the right language when they talk to me and it still wouldn't change the fact that you have racialised wealth gaps, discrimination in the employment market, racialised incarceration rates and sentencing,' she says. The problem is the left is weaker than the right, so it's currently getting its head kicked in with the very same tactics that it itself developed What Sarkar is pushing for is a more complex perspective on politics, beyond the soundbites that made her famous. 'It's about looking at things through a materialist lens,' she says. It's about what things cost, who owns what, and where the real power resides – as opposed to feelings. Her formidable online presence (Sarkar boasts over half a million followers across her social media) has no doubt been built on feelings – often the prickly ones that arise as a result of the irreverent boxing-style punditry that's now a mainstay of contemporary media. A punchy jab here, a viral refrain there, Sarkar has it down to an art. So withering are her put-downs that she once put them on T-shirts to raise funds for Novara. If Sarkar is a heavyweight in verbal sparring, then Piers Morgan is the world champion – for better or worse. Speaking to Sarkar for her book, the Talk TV star confessed that his show has a 'confected' nature. Of course, Sarkar says, Morgan couldn't fess up to the whole shtick being fake. 'He was as honest as he could be, because he's got an interest in people consuming this kind of media. So, if he was to say 'This is all bulls***, everything I do is designed to generate outrage', he would be taking food out of his own mouth,' she says. 'But the fact that he was able to accept that there was some 'confected' outrage, that was an important admission for me.' It's part of the reason why she's learning to be more selective when it comes to media appearances. 'The left had to take every single opportunity that came its way, and I was scared of being perceived as difficult or unavailable,' she says. 'But I want this project of contesting media terrain for the left to exist even if me and Owen Jones [perhaps the only left-wing commentator more recognisable than Sarkar] die in the same tragic bus crash.' As we speak, it becomes clear that something else has shifted within her since she was a spunky twentysomething doing vox pops on the streets of London. 'In hindsight, I was self-deluding and hubristic,' she writes in her book, discussing the personal toll that Jeremy Corbyn's defeat in the 2019 election took on her. 'I got swept up in the fantasy of what a socialist government could be like. There were far more people in the country who weren't like me than those who were.' Her U-turn on identity politics comes from this meteoric, unforeseen rise of the right. 'They're actually organising,' she says with a sense of urgency. 'The problem is the left is weaker than the right, so it's currently getting its head kicked in with the very same tactics that it itself developed.' While the left has 'absorbed' liberal priorities such as workplace cultures and tokenist representation, in effect tearing identity politics from its Marxist roots, 'the right has taken the position of challenger to the status quo. That is the biggest immediate political threat to the left'. Sarkar refuses to give any answers or solutions in her book or anywhere else for that matter, inspired by the ambiguity of Amia Srinivasan's 2021 collection of essays The Right to Sex: 'She opens up a contradiction, and then she opens up another one and another one, and people ask, 'When are you gonna give me the answer?' And she's like, 'I'm not, life is complicated.'' 'I never feel like an authority on anything,' Sarkar says. 'I think doubt is so powerful, doubting your own assumptions, putting them under pressure, putting them under scrutiny.' Her goal is radical: to get people across the political divide to unite against a common adversary – minorities, yes, but not the ones splashed across red-top front pages. The minorities Sarkar is talking about are the minorities who own everything and control it all. 'Why are we actively seeking out reasons to throw each other away?' she asks in her book. For someone portrayed as divisive, it's a remarkably earnest call for changing the world.
The Guardian
15-02-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Ash Sarkar: ‘I never learned much of value from TV'
Ash Sarkar, 32, is a journalist and political commentator. She grew up in north London and is a contributing editor at the leftwing website Novara Media. A regular pundit on TV and radio, she made waves with a viral 2018 appearance on ITV's Good Morning Britain, where she clashed with Piers Morgan, telling him: 'I'm literally a communist, you idiot.' Her first book, Minority Rule: Adventures in the Culture War (Bloomsbury), is a lively analysis of how the ruling classes purposefully misdirect political blame by stoking the fear that minorities are working to oppress the majority. What does 'minority rule' mean to you?I realised that every moral panic – whether it was trans rights, BLM [Black Lives Matter], Extinction Rebellion – was 1,000 doors opening on to the same place. The story was: here are these minorities who want to tell you how to live. But at the same time, I believe society is governed by minority rule – oligarchic power, corporate power, the way in which electoral systems devalue the votes of people who live in densely populated areas. So minority rule describes both this moral panic and the true state of affairs. Who is the book's ideal reader?Somebody who shares political content on Instagram, but doesn't have a job in politics; someone who consumes a bit of news media, but isn't an obsessive. They could think of themselves as anywhere from very left wing to in the middle. My hope is that I meet them where they're at, and give them the tools to perform their own analysis. And what should readers expect to learn from it?It starts by looking at how identity became the dominant preoccupation among progressives, then it goes on to examine media, lobby journalism, electoral politics and the insurgent far right – and how all of these forces contribute to breaking down unity among the majority of people who aren't part of the super-wealthy. What I hope readers will learn is that a big part of formal democracy is about making sure that ordinary people don't identify their shared interests with one another. So how do we break free of minority rule, especially in light of gen Z, whom recent research found are disillusioned with democracy?I wish I had a simple answer! Obviously young people are growing disillusioned with democracy – all they've ever known is democratic representatives and institutions telling them: 'No, sorry, things can't get better and you're an idiot for thinking anything different.' I think the starting point is thinking, working and organising with building majority coalitions in mind. That doesn't mean abandoning causes like anti-racism or trans rights, but understanding that you're going to have to speak to the issues that the majority of people are contending with if you want to get anywhere. Where do your politics come from?I grew up in a family where women talked about politics all the time. My grandma was an anti-racist activist. My mum was an anti-racist activist and trade unionist. But the family business was social work, which is like growing up in the mafia except everyone's an active listener. The fact that my mum, my auntie, my grandma would be talking about things they observed at work – like the way in which for children who have been in care, there's a pipeline that can end in prison because of state failings – was massively impactful for shaping my thinking. What has been your experience of X since Elon Musk took over?I interact a lot less than I used to because I know underneath is going to be a hailstorm of racism. It's got continually worse since Musk's takeover. You can report it. Nothing will get done. The other day I saw someone tweet: 'Ash Sarkar would be so easy to rape.' I worry that something really bad is going to happen [to me] in the real world, and it will cause my mum and husband so much pain – just because of the job I choose to do. Has that changed the way you live?I'm very careful. I don't share [online] where I am when I'm there – ever. I prefer facing doors when I'm sitting down. I'm a lot jumpier than I used to be. What made you want to write a book, given that you'd get wider reach on TV or radio?McDonald's sells more food than Ottolenghi, but one is better for you. I think broadcast is really important, and the success of Joe Rogan and Theo Von demonstrates the appetite for long-form interviews. But conventional broadcast is way behind social media for meeting the desires of its audience. And I never learned much of value from TV. The things that made me feel like I had the ability to marshal the chaos of the world into some kind of comprehensible shape were books. What were those books?Black Skin, White Masks by Frantz Fanon. The Communist Manifesto, obviously. Stuart Hall's essays The Neo-Liberal Revolution, The Great Moving Right Show, New Ethnicities – banger after banger after banger. What about fiction?I love Hilary Mantel's work. I'm a Mantel stan. In A Place of Greater Safety and the Wolf Hall trilogy you see that moment-to-moment decision-making of people who want to hold power, and you see those moments where it just slips out of their grasp. I also love Jane Austen. I love that her books are just people going over to each other's houses. What book would you give to a young person?I think any person who is interested in writing should look at the facsimile edition of The Waste Land, where you've got the original TS Eliot draft and then you see where Ezra Pound drew straight lines through, like 'no, no, no'. It tells you how important an editor is, and how shape comes from being willing to take things away. Are you hopeful that you'll see political change during your lifetime?Antonio Gramsci spoke of 'pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will'. I don't think it's likely, but if you're not hopeful, what are you doing? Minority Rule: Adventures in the Culture War by Ash Sarkar is published by Bloomsbury (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at Delivery charges may apply
