It hasn’t even been published yet, but Ash Sarkar’s new book – Minority Rule: Adventures in the Culture War – is already generating controversy. As one of the most prominent left-wing journalists and broadcasters in Britain, what she has to say is afforded a particular weight, and a lot of people on all sides of the political spectrum (except, perhaps, the centre) aren’t happy. This is due in particular to her critique of a certain brand of liberal-left identity politics as “corrosive to solidarity”, which has been blowing up on Twitter over the last fortnight. Based on the breathless captions being used to promote her press tour – centrist podcast The News Agents titled her appearance “Ash Sarkar: How the left is DESTROYING ITSELF!” while Novara (the media company she co-founded in 2011) opted for “Woke is OVER” – you might reasonably conclude that Sarkar has gone full Red Scare and written a book exclusively about why the left are whiny, annoying cry-babies who need to get a grip.
Thankfully, this isn’t the case. Minority Rules features only one chapter on identity politics, and this chapter is as much about the right as the left. It’s really a book about the function which “the culture war” serves and why conservatives are winning it. Minority rule, Sarkar writes, is “the paranoid fear that identity minorities and progressives are conniving to oppress majority populations”, a meta-narrative which is used to obscure “the real ruling minority of hedge-fund managers, press barons, landlords, corporations and oligarchs” and to “fragment, weaken and inhibit working class power”. She devotes more space to analysing transphobia, anti-migrant sentiment, the resurgence of race science, and the media’s demonisation of young Black men – issues which she recognises as being both bound up with identity and of deep political significance – than she does to critiquing the left. It’s no surprise that the British media would rather focus on the latter.
Last week, I caught up with Sarkar at a Turkish cafe in North London to talk about Minority Rule, right-wing identity politics, whether young people are turning to the right, the appeal of Reform, what gives her hope and more.
How have identity politics been co-opted by conservatives?
Ash Sarkar: As I was researching the book, I realised that many of the tactics and rhetorical devices I was identifying on the right – like competitive victimhood and the weaponisation of grievance – first began on the left. That doesn’t mean that people are acting in good faith when they use the language of decolonial struggle to talk about ‘indigenous Brits’, but it does tell you that moral authority is seen to reside in being able to present yourself as an oppressed minority group. So I was forced to confront things about the left which I had tried to ignore or dismiss as unimportant.
Really, it was a culture which took good ideas and misapplied them, blew them out of proportion or weaponised them to create a culture of hostility and suspicion rather than one of engagement, connection and possibility. The left has absorbed the tenets and emotional affects of neoliberalism just like everybody else, and the way that’s played out for us is liberal identity politics.
What are some examples of the right weaponising victimhood?
Ash Sarkar: In the UK context, you have organisations like ‘UK Lawyers for Israel’ which clog up institutions with complaints, saying ‘this thing you’re doing, which in some way acknowledges the existence of Palestinian people, is causing Jewish people alarm, distress and harm.’ They did this to a hospital in London over a display of Palestinian children’s paintings, which were then removed – I think this shows how the meaning of ‘harm’ has been inflated to an absurd extent.
I don’t think going out to bat for an apartheid state carrying out a genocide is morally equivalent to writing an an overly sensitive article about being traumatised by an all-white yoga class, but it shows you the danger of not fishing out bad ideas from the political swimming pool. They’re going to be used against you.
The millennial socialist moment seems well and truly over now. Are you worried about today’s young people becoming more right-wing?
Ash Sarkar: I worry about that all the time and I think that there are lots of different components to it, one of which is the information landscape. The acceleration of atomisation, loneliness and disconnection due to social media is incredibly beneficial for the right. The left thrives when people are brought into contact with each other in person. Left-wingers on Twitter are not sane, well-adjusted people, and I include myself in that. If you experience more and more of your socialisation on the internet, it becomes harder not to bring that into your real life, and you just become jarring and weird. Social media is driving emotional maladaptation, which is beneficial to the right, just as it benefits from the hyper-personalisation of algorithmic feeds, which means that people are no longer occupying a shared information reality.
The right are also great at experiencing your anger with you and making you feel like, ‘well, Nigel Farage – or whoever – might be a bastard but he’s our bastard; he’s going to be a prick on my behalf.’ We are really bad at channelling that kind of affect, which I think might be a professional-managerial-class thing. It’s a way of conducting yourself which is trained out of you.
Mick Lynch is already hot – how dare you! But yes, you do need someone like that. I’m good at persuading people who are already like me, but the country is full of people who aren’t like me at all
So what do you think the left needs to do?
Ash Sarkar: I don’t actually prescribe in the book. During the Corbyn years, I did too much prescribing and not enough thinking. But I do have some ideas. I think we’re experiencing both a crisis of organisation and a crisis of leadership. Whether it’s Donald Trump or Zelensky, some of the most successful populist leaders have come from outside politics and have entered into it with their own clout and following, which seems to me quite important. There isn’t an obvious figure from the left who could do that, and it seems to me that there is a lack of willingness to think in that way. I think that there are loads of incentives which encourage people to think in terms of their individual brands and platforms, rather than building institutions.
Would you ever run for office yourself?
Ash Sarkar: We need a white dude with a regional accent.
Like a younger, hotter Mick Lynch?
Ash Sarkar: Mick Lynch is already hot – how dare you! But yes, you do need someone like that. I’m good at persuading people who are already like me, but the country is full of people who aren’t like me at all. Gender, ethnicity, the way that class is encoded in accent and diction – these things do matter in terms of whether or not people think you are one of them.
Do you think Reform is going to win the next election?
Ash Sarkar: It’s hard to work out how polling advantages will play out because of First Past the Post, but I have a feeling they are going to take a significant number of seats off Labour. If you look at the places where they’re doing well, and you look at their on the ground game when it comes to organising, their membership is fast catching up with Labour, and that will make a big difference when it comes to seats like Barnsley or Redcar. Just anecdotally, there are people in my life who are looking at Reform and thinking ‘this is the only challenge to the status quo that exists and I want to vote for them.’ If I’m just wagging my fingers at them saying ‘well that makes you racist,’ what do you think they’re going to do?
He’s just the product of the Labour machine that wanted to reassert control of the party. If he fell out of a window tomorrow, there would be another Keir Starmer
What is it that attracts them to Reform?
Ash Sarkar: Nationalisation, reviving the high street, legalising weed – which might sound silly, but a lot of people want that to happen and Starmer is telling them ‘just say no’. I don’t want this to be interpreted as ‘Ash Sarkar’s Red-Brown moment’. As it stands, Nigel Farage is something of a civic nationalist, but the crème de la crème of the far-right is moving in a more ethno-nationalist direction, which is deeply frightening. So I do think Reform is a racist party, I just don’t think you can defeat them simply by calling them racist.
So how do you defeat them? It doesn’t seem like Labour is going to pull anything out of the bag.
Ash Sarkar: Labour had the chance to defeat the far-right, deal with inequality and elect a left-populist Prime Minister, but his name was Jeremy Corbyn and they all tried to fucking kill him. Maybe in another generation, Labour is capable of producing such a moment again, but the problem is so much bigger than Keir Starmer. He’s just the product of the Labour machine that wanted to reassert control of the party. If he fell out of a window tomorrow, there would be another Keir Starmer.
The book is mostly focused on the UK but it’s also about the rise of the right globally. Do you think what’s happening in America now can be described as ‘fascism’?
Ash Sarkar: It’s a complicated question, not least because there are so many different definitions of the word. With Trump there is an element of ‘palingenetic ultra-nationalism’, a definition of fascism proposed by Roger Griffiths which is about the rebirth of the nation through an authoritarian project. You’ve got the consolidation of state power on one hand and extreme privatisation on the other, which bears a resemblance to fascist projects of the past. But there are also some important differences: the party doesn’t have total control over the police force and MAGA is a lot more diffuse than something like Italian fascism.
I think it’s maybe more important to think about: how does the obnoxious cruelty which is an animating feature of MAGA combine with the control which tech oligarchs have over our information environment? In information-dominated economies, that’s a pretty big deal.
Studying history [gives me hope]. Do you think that the people involved in the Russian Revolution knew it was the Russian Revolution – that it would be this world-defining, epoch-shifting event – when it was happening?
Elon Musk is currently cutting the US government to the bone, which seemed to me very relevant to the last chapter, which is all about asset-stripping and privatisation. How does this development relate to the ideas of Minority Rule?
Ash Sarkar: The book opens by saying that everyone is blackpilled. Everyone agrees that there’s something fundamentally wrong with our society, and this transcends left and right, young and old, renters and homeowners. As I see it, this is because we have an entire system of political economy geared towards making money for a class of parasites and nothing more. I’m not saying that capitalists weren’t exploitative in the 19th century, but you could see some improvements in the standard of living. The technologies being developed today, on the other hand, just seem to make us lonelier, stupider and more hostile.
Then you look at the practices of corporations. What’s been happening with Thames Water is crazy: you can buy a public utility knowing the state won’t let it fail, load it with debt, pay out your shareholders and then fuck off. And then you wonder why everyone is really angry? Unless you have a populist left wing which organises around majoritarian class politics (which doesn’t mean giving up on anti-racism), the beneficiaries of that anger and disdain for the status quo are going to be the ethno-nationalist far-right. We’re seeing that now.
It’s all quite bleak! What, if anything, gives you hope?
Ash Sarkar: Studying history. Do you think that the people involved in the Russian Revolution knew it was the Russian Revolution – that it would be this world-defining, epoch-shifting event – when it was happening? Or were they people who had their theory of change, confronted their circumstances, had to make decisions minute by minute, and then it just fucking happened? I don’t know what the catalyst is going to be, whether it’s going to be a big externality or about finding the right leader. I just know that the history of the left is about winning even when the house is playing with a stacked deck.
Minority Rule: Adventures in the Culture War by Ash Sarkar is published by Bloomsbury, and is out on February 27.
