Saul Alinsky writing in the 1970s famously prescribed a set of rules to be followed by leftist radicals to maximise the effectiveness of their protests and mobilizations. At the heart of his strategy was a focus on problems rather than solutions:
The organizer’s first job is to create the issues or problems, and organizations must be based on many issues. The organizer must first rub raw the resentments of the people of the community; fan the latent hostilities of many of the people to the point of overt expression. He must search out controversy and issues, rather than avoid them, for unless there is controversy people are not concerned enough to act. . . . An organizer must stir up dissatisfaction and discontent.
S. Alinsky, Rules for Radicals (Random House, 1971)
Clearly his words have been taken to heart and appear no less relevant in characterizing the strategies pursued by radicals (arguably on both the left and the right) today, more than half a century later. Of course we tend these days to refer to such radicals looking to stir up or exploit discontent at a grass-roots level as “populists”. But their songs remain the same.
For Alinsky, an important element in maintaining strategic focus while tactically switching among the “many issues” that present themselves as opportunities for stirring up dissent is in identifying an enemy, then persistently attacking them:
The thirteenth rule of radical tactics: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.
ibid.
This rule resonates if anything more strongly in the present day, since it could be claimed it reflects the approach taken not only by radicals/populists but increasingly in mainstream political narratives. For example, the UK Labour Party’s main strategy in winning power from the ruling Conservative Party was neither to criticise its policies nor to spell out alternatives, but to point to perceived shortcomings in the character and conduct of Conservative leaders: Theresa May was incompetent and callous in her handling of immigration; Boris Johnson was a liar and a buffoon; Liz Truss was economically illiterate and crashed the economy in less than two months in office; Rishi Sunak was a billionaire clueless about life outside his bubble; and they were all enriching themselves and their cronies at the expense of ordinary “working people.”
The discrepancy between the election-winning credibility the Labour Party garnered through this strategy and the competence manifested in practice was clearly demonstrated by the fact it took Keir Starmer a mere three months from taking office to suffer the same level of collapse in favourability it took Johnson, amid sustained campaigns by the media establishment and ethics committees, three years to achieve. Yet, rather than changing tack and attempting to criticise the policy proposals of Reform UK who are currently outstripping them by up to ten percentage points in polling, they persist with Alinsky’s prescribed strategy and push back by characterising its leaders and policies as racist, immoral and promoting division.
Superficially, it would thus appear that there is a continuous thread connecting the modern-day Labour Party (and other leftist political parties) with the radical left of fifty years ago. But to leave the matter there would be to give inadequate attention to the equally important differences between the leftist political agendas then and now.
Previously the leftist movement was characterized by its identifying business owners and managers as the enemy and sought to vilify them as oppressors, while siding with the “exploited” working classes as their victims. The inherent notion of “social justice” was Marxist in origin, with an agenda which was fundamentally economic in nature: what was advocated was a redistribution of economic power and wealth away from the haves to the have-nots.
The story of how the left in the Anglosphere, and more widely, have over recent years drifted away from this economics-driven concept of social justice is a many-faceted one we shall not seek to address in any detail here. Suffice it to say that the failure of any society adopting Marxist economics to generate the prosperity needed to improve significantly the lot of the poor was a major factor and the collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of the ’80s a seminal event.
This period of Marxist analyses falling out of favour coincided with a rise in popularity within academia of postmodern notions of social justice with an emphasis on a purported systemic bias in developed societies against disadvantaged and/or historically marginalised minorities. These minorities were identified by what came to be termed protected characteristics, such as race, ethnicity, sex, sexual orientation, transgender status or religious belief.
As argued by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay in their best-selling work on this subject:
Therefore, in Social Justice scholarship, we continually read that patriarchy, white supremacy, imperialism, cisnormativity, heteronormativity, ableism, and fatphobia are literally structuring society and infecting everything. They exist in a state of immanence—present always and everywhere, just beneath a nicer-seeming surface that can’t quite contain them…This ‘reality’ is viewed as profoundly problematic and thus needs to be constantly identified, condemned, and dismantled so that things might be rectified.
H. Pluckrose and J. Lindsay, Cynical Theories (Swift Press, 2021), p. 182
But, unlike with human rights, the protections afforded based on protected characteristics are not bestowed equally. Rather, narratives of oppression and victimhood have been developed in the Anglosphere around certain groups, almost always minorities (with the notable exception of women), whose claims and concerns take precedence over those of the majority population. Thus was born the new “woke” agenda of the left. So, for example, when policies are introduced in corporations and public institutions to promote diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), it is invariably those who are members of such minority groups who are to be afforded greater representation and more opportunities and whose interests and concerns are prioritised at the expense of everyone else’s.
A number of problems arise out of this postmodern conception of social justice. First, the policies advocated disadvantage by design the majority in the mainstream of society in favour of minorities. Indeed the very fact one is in the minority enhances one’s claim to be entitled to special consideration and for one’s grievances to be taken more seriously. This is different from the traditional leftist argument that a privileged minority were gaining advantage at the expense of the exploited majority of the population.
This gives rise in turn to a problem with democratic legitimacy insofar as the assent of the majority is in principle needed to justify the pursuit of policies which are not and do not profess to be in their interest. Hence an argument needs to be made in ideological terms that the attainment of social justice requires it. Likewise the victimhood narratives that back up the theory need to be endorsed even by those who are not part of the allegedly oppressed group. Indeed members of the majority group are deemed to be implicated in the “oppression” by virtue simply of the fact that they are the majority. For example, “whiteness” is regularly portrayed by woke social justice activists as problematic in white majority societies.
Two possible ways can be envisaged for securing acknowledgement of such guilt in relation to the purported social injustice. This can be achieved by persuading the alleged perpetrators to swallow the narrative of the woke activists and adopt their social justice perspective. In this regard, there has been a concerted effort to achieve institutional capture particularly in academia for this ideology or “Theory” as it is often referred to by its protagonists. According to Pluckrose and Lindsay (2021)
There is a problem that begins in our universities, and it comes down to Social Justice. The most immediate aspect of the problem is that Social Justice scholarship gets passed down to students, who then go out into the world. This effect is strongest within Social Justice fields, which teach students to be skeptical of science, reason, and evidence; to regard knowledge as tied to identity; to read oppressive power dynamics into every interaction; to politicize every facet of life; and to apply ethical principles unevenly, in accordance with identity.
ibid., p. 214.
In a similar vein, Eric Kaufmann observes (referring to woke activists as “cultural leftists”):
Leftist graduates flowed into meaning-making fields like journalism, education, charitable foundations, the motion picture and television industries, and the human resources and communications departments of large organizations. From these heights, cultural leftists spread the gospel. Idealistic young people, always on the hunt for new ideas to mark them out from their parents, increasingly came to share the view that historically marginalized groups were sacred, not to be offended. Equality came to be viewed in identity rather than class terms, the aim of ‘social justice’ being to weaken oppressor groups while strengthening the oppressed, thereby moving toward equality of resources, power, and self-esteem.
E. Kaufmann, Taboo: How Making Race Sacred Produced a Cultural Revolution (Forum, 2024).
Alternatively, those not subscribing to the creed of the woke social justice proponents, or who are insufficiently interested in their views to form an opinion, can be shamed into submission. Eric Kaufmann characterises this strategy as a radioactive glove which:
conceals its iron fist of compelled speech, unreason, and attacks on White, national, male, and female identity within an attractive velvet glove of ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion.’ This allows it to camouflage its illiberalism as liberalism, attracting support. Second, it immobilizes opponents with a toxin of cancel culture that renders critics radioactive, serving as a warning to others… Public morality is based on the threat of being shamed by the judgment of an external audience while private morality is driven by an internal guilt which arises from the judgment of our internal audience— the superego or ‘generalized other’—whose approval is necessary for a positive sense of self.
ibid.
According to Kaufmann, the majority of those who conform in their behaviour and moral judgements to the woke agenda fit this description. But a sizable minority if not a majority do not so conform and are subject to the retributive treatment Kaufmann alludes to. Examples abound of individuals whose lives have been turned upside down by witch hunts of this kind initiated by woke social justice warriors. For a UK perspective, the reader is referred to two recent books by Andrew Doyle, The New Puritans (Constable, 2022) and The End of Woke (Constable, 2025), and Douglas Murray’s The Madness of Crowds (Bloomsbury Continuum, 2019) and The War on the West (Harper Collins, 2022).
It is not surprising, therefore that there is a backlash from the many who are not persuaded of the merits of the woke agenda, nor by the moral judgements flowing from it. They naturally perceive an unfair narrative bias against their perspective and interests and an unjustified impugning of their moral character. This backlash one can argue has given rise to what is referred to as the culture wars. Although this phenomenon is often portrayed as a dispute occurring mainly between overzealous ideologues on both sides of the divide, I want to suggest here that this is something of a mischaracterisation. It is true that there is an increasingly vocal faction who criticise the woke left for their retributive ad hominem practices of denigration, shaming, cancel culture and censorship by attacking them in the same terms. Such are referred to as the “woke right.” However the majority of thoughtful critics of the woke left oppose mainly the retributive approach they are led to follow, which approach they see as counterproductive, whether used against the right or against the left.
In conclusion, although there has been some pushback in recent months against some of the more extreme practices of the woke left in the culture wars, the emergence of a woke right adopting similar practices means the conflicts are unlikely to de-escalate significantly in the near future. So it is important that we look to understand and expose how aspects of the ideology driving the new social justice agenda give rise to and justify the retributive ad hominem behaviour we continue to see manifest. In this way we may hopefully come to see a way to transcend the culture wars based on a mutually respectful social discourse, rather than prosecuting them based on retributive justice.
