The Woke Left is Reaping the Whirlwind

Progressives like to talk about the ‘authoritarian Right’ as if it arrived from outer space in a red baseball cap. In reality, parties like AfD in Germany, Wilders’s PVV in the Netherlands, Le Pen’s National Rally in France, Meloni’s Brothers for Italy and Farage’s Reform in the UK are a delayed reaction to something that happened first.

They are what you get when a self-anointed elite decides to rewrite the moral software of Western civilisation, then calls anyone who objects a bigot.

Every civilisation runs on an operating system. In the West it is a messy yet effective fusion of Judeo-Christian ethics and Enlightenment rationalism. The first insisted that the individual soul mattered more than the tribe. The second insisted that truth must answer to evidence, not authority. Together they gave us equal treatment under law, free conscience, universal human rights and mutual responsibility.

History shows us that whenever a new priesthood decides that this inheritance is oppressive and must be ‘deconstructed’, the result is rarely liberation. The Jacobins’ ‘Cult of Reason’ gave way to Napoleon, Weimar decadence to Hitler, Lenin’s vanguard to a grim Soviet backlash, the Shah’s technocrats to Khomeini. Every time a new cabal of elites tears up the inherited moral order in the name of liberation, what follows is not harmony. It is backlash.

Our latest round began in the universities. Postmodern theorists taught that truth is a mask for power, that knowledge is ‘socially constructed’ by dominant groups. Their disciples in critical race and gender studies took that logic and weaponised it. Objective truth became suspect. ‘Lived experience’ and group identity were treated as superior to data. That jargon leaked from academia into HR departments, schools, charities, media and the civil service. The bureaucratic class learned to talk in a new language where equity trumped equality, speech was violence and ‘positionality’ mattered more than proof.

You can see the effect in public sentiment. In Britain and America majorities now tell pollsters they do not feel free to say what they think about politics or culture at work. Young adults are especially wary. Large shares in both countries no longer trust politicians, parties or the press. In some surveys a fifth of younger voters say they would prefer a strong unelected leader to messy democracy. That is not because they have all secretly become fascists. It is because they no longer believe the people at the top are listening or honest.

Look at the American story from Obama to Trump to Biden to Trump again. Obama ran on hope and change, then governed as custodian of the same globalised order that closed plants in Ohio while flattering editors in New York. By 2016 roughly 13% of Trump’s vote was made up of Obama voters – enough to flip the Rust Belt because the party that once spoke for welders and waitresses had started talking like a graduate seminar, not a union hall.

Biden arrived in 2020 with 81 million votes and a promise to unite the nation and restore normality. Yet within three years only about a third of Americans approved of his performance. The rest disapproved with persistent majorities saying the country was on the wrong track and the economy was failing them.

At the same time, survey after survey showed around 80% of Americans, including most young people, saying political correctness has gone too far. Yet the White House, media and HR class doubled down on pronouns and diversity pledges.

In other words, ordinary working men and women concluded that the people who ran America neither liked them nor listened to them. Both Obama and Biden share one thing in common. Their real legacy is MAGA and Trump: a man voters hired to drain the swamp who is now denounced as a fascistic authoritarian for doing (however chaotically) exactly what he promised to do.

Britain is further along the same road than Westminster likes to admit. In the 2024 election Reform UK took 14.3% of the vote, the third largest share in the country, yet only got five MPs, just 0.8% of the seats. The Liberal Democrats took 12.2% of the vote yet walked away with 72 MPs, about 11% of the Commons.

Labour formed a ‘landslide’ Government with only about one third of the vote, while turnout slumped below 60% and commentators talked openly of a crisis of electoral legitimacy.

No surprise then that trust has collapsed. The latest surveys find 87% of Britons have “not very much” or “no trust” in politicians. Three quarters say the system of governing Britain needs “major” or “great improvement”, levels back at the worst of the Brexit paralysis. At the same time a growing majority even before the latest Labour Budget think the welfare system is too generous or too lax – that benefits encourage dependency rather than self-reliance.

Into that mix walks Reform. Post election analysis suggests almost 80% of Reform’s 2024 voters previously backed the Conservatives in 2019, a quarter of the Tory electorate walking away in one cycle. Most recent polls now have Reform as the largest party nationally, on roughly 30% of the vote, with Labour and the Conservatives languishing in the high teens.

In other words Reform is not a weird fringe. It is the political expression of a country that thinks the main parties have stitched up safe seats for life, filled the landscape with quangos and regulators who police ‘disinformation’ rather than corruption and turned the post-war safety net into a feather duvet.

The professional classes who trade welfare and public sector jobs for votes find this very comfortable. The people who actually fund the system are now looking for someone, anyone, who will blow a whistle on the whole racket and start again.

Christopher Lasch saw this coming 30 years ago in The Revolt of the Elites. He warned that a new meritocratic class would cut itself loose from any loyalty to place or nation and come to view ordinary citizens with quiet contempt. David Betz and others now argue that, if this continues, the main security threat in Western states will not be foreign enemies but internal conflict between rulers and the ruled.

When elites warn that authoritarianism is rising on the Right, they are not wrong. What they never admit is that this new authoritarian Right is largely their own creation, born of progressive overreach, bureaucratic capture and a detached ruling class that stopped listening long ago.

The choice facing Western democracies is not between polite centrists and brutal authoritarians. Yet.

The public mood is no longer reformist, it is pre-revolutionary. You can feel it in every poll and every pub. People do not want a ‘national conversation’, they want a national clear-out.

They are sick of new inquiries and new budgets funding the same failed caste. Either we force a serious reset, with power dragged out of the ministries and quangos and back to the people, or we roll the dice on what happens when a nation that has stopped believing in ballots goes looking for other tools.

Clive Pinder is a recovering global executive, former elected ornament, accidental columnist and mildly repentant political provocateur. He writes about hypocrisy, hubris and the small matter of wresting power back from the bureaucrats on Substack.