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This episode is an ElevenLabs voice-over of my essay “The Culture War IS the Class War: A Theory of the Two Lefts,” the fourth and final essay in my Genealogy of Wokeism series, originally published on my Substack.
The essay challenges the familiar claim that the culture war is merely a distraction from the class war. Instead, I argue that the culture war is one arena of class conflict, driven by elite overproduction and an internal division between two increasingly incompatible lefts: a class-first left committed to universal economic transformation and a woke cultural left rooted in the professional-managerial class.
Using the Bernie Sanders campaigns of 2016 and 2020—including the defining confrontation at his 2015 Seattle rally—as case studies, I examine the left-unity trap, pseudo-radicalism, institutional capture, K–12 education, gender politics, and the tendency of post-woke leftists to dismiss live cultural conflicts as fringe distractions. The essay argues that a serious working-class politics cannot succeed by ignoring these conflicts or indefinitely accommodating the faction that dominates the left’s institutional terrain.
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Timestamps:
0:00 The Culture War IS the Class War: A Theory of the Two Lefts
2:12 Memory-Holing Wokeism
7:44 Culture War Is Class War
13:54 The Lesson of Bernie Sanders, 2016–2020
16:17 The Day Sanders Stood Still
34:19 The Left’s Civil War
41:26 A Theory of the Two Lefts
51:37 The Left Unity Trap
53:24 The Hard Truth Most Old Leftists Don’t Want to Admit
56:26 How Pseudo-Radicalism Masks the Divide Between the Two Lefts
1:05:37 If Wokeism Is So Fringe, Then Why Doesn’t the Left Reject It?
1:09:29 Wokeism as a Paper Tiger
1:12:28 Why Accommodating Woke Fails
1:15:39 What Is to Be Done?
1:18:23 The Correct Answer to “Throwing Minorities Under the Bus”
1:28:49 Nothing to See Here, Folks. Turning a Blind Eye.
1:29:56 K–12 Radicalism and Gender/Race Education Revolution
1:31:40 The Gender Wars Were Waged by the Wokes and Rejected by the Right
1:36:47 Why Ignoring Culture War Enables Wokeism
1:38:16 “No War but Class War” Is a Lazy Cop-Out
1:41:30 What Discourse Is For
1:45:42 Conclusion: The Class War Is Inseparable from the Culture War
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