Has Woke won a permanent victory? Will our kids now be transed? Must we take the 2024 Golliwogs down and stop blacking up to our places of work on dress-down Fridays?
Rule nothing out, but to interpret the performance of the Republican in the Midterms as signalling that Woke is back in all of its early 2010s pomp and glory is absurd. As this article will demonstrate, without even a whiff of copium, the Democratic left is winning politically because it has surrendered its unwinnable fights (immigration and trans) whilst refocusing attention to where it has always done well (opposing unpopular wars and dem programs to keep minority blocs).
What we are witnessing, then, is not a rejection of the vibeshift away from woke, but a realignment of politics in the wake of it. The most fitting analogy in the United States would be in 1952, after decades in the political wilderness (8 marks) Eisenhower’s Republicans won a landslide when they finally stopped resisting the New Deal and mobilising opposition to the war in Korea. Hoover’s America, where most people never paid federal income tax and you could queue up to shake the President’s hand on New Year’s day was gone forever. So too, I believe, are the free the nipple marches and ‘hands up don’t shoot’ riots; we shall not see another doctor hounded out of his profession for refusing to acknowledge Healthy At Every Size in our lifetime.
The crucial graph for understanding what has happened is the below by Axios, which shows how the two parties ads changed between the primary stages for the Mid terms (March to September) in which members of each party vote, and ‘the general’ where everyone can – therefore providing a useful illustration of what both parties emphasise when they are trying to win over their ‘base’ and when they are trying to win a broader election.
Trump is right to point out that he was ‘not on the ballot’ for the General (from 1 to 35). But what is more interesting is the Democrat between the primaries and the General has been the Democrats completely abandoning the issue of ICE when they need to get the public on side. Remarkably, just as immigration has become less politically potent in Britain where the government is failing to resolve it, it has also become less politically potent in America despite foreigners being deported with gratuitous cruelty with polls showing it has become less of an issue to voters since 2024.
Contrary to the insistence by Will Stancil and his fellow travellers that the sight of ‘ordinary Americans’ being rounded up by ICE would inspire an anti-Trump caucaus, this has not happened, Democrats have concluded that they cannot campaign heavily on liberalising immigration if they want to win over the centre. This was even a prediction made by many imbeciles on Britain’s ‘far right’. Trump has successfully shifted the Overton window on the borders and if a far-left Democrat does decide to reopen the floodgates the Republicans will have the ready-made example of how the Asylum system can be effectively abolished with no real international consequences.
The progressive left is succeeding in the United States because of the Iran disaster, corruption and above all Israel. Contrary the insistence of Britain’s broadsheet columnists you cannot easily map ‘Woke’ and ‘Anti-Woke’ onto questions of Zionism. If being anti-Israel becomes a requisite for American politics it will be very easy for the American right to adapt to this change. The US Left has also benefited by not being tainted with the Iran War. Again, this is not a neat left-right issue. Farage, who has long been a foreign policy dove missed an opportunity to take a popular stance against the Iran war at the beginning of the conflict which would now be paying him dividends, I suspect because he has been browbeaten over Russia connections and thought that coming out hawkishly would help allay these concerns (as well as his honouring his personal relationship with Trump).
Britain’s Conservative Party has, over the last year, attempted to quieten the issue of immigration. Having made noise about leaving the ECHR and even reversing legal migration in 2025, their last party conference had only one immigration event (of hundreds) and the phrase ‘stronger borders’ has been dropped from their party slogan (to be replaced by ‘stronger country’).
We have no doubt that various bad actors will try to weaponise the floundering of the GOP to assert that a retreat on migration is now necessary to win the support of Gogglebox Britain. This is the wrong lesson to draw, just as it was wrong to think that Reform should ‘professionalise’ by blindly obeying the foreign policy establishment. The right lesson is that if a populist government gets into power is that they should remember who put them into power and focus relentlessly on serving those people’s interests instead of getting bogged down in corruption and military adventurism abroad.
"Very well said."
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Of course, all of this very good commentary will be entirely ignored