There’s a brilliant piece in Spiked magazine that I’ve seen today by Frank Furedi. In his piece Professor Furedi examines the US Presidential Election and it’s aftermath and said that just as after Brexit, the American cultural Establishment feels that the people have abandoned them, that the ignorant masses have rejected and betrayed those who know better than them. Professor Furedi said: ‘Given the scale of Trump’s comeback this time around, the elite’s sense that they’ve been betrayed by the people will likely only intensify.’ Professor Furedi is in my view correct in that assessment. I very much doubt that those in the Establishment who are oh so sure that their views are correct will engage in any of the sort of introspection that might allow them to see that it is the application of their views as government policy that the public have rejected at not just the American ballot box but at others in France, the Netherlands, Germany and elsewhere.

Professor Furedi writes eloquently about the shock that the news of the Trump win had on mainstream media newsrooms and how the realisation that their continual shilling for Kamala Harris had zero effect on voters. Professor Furedi said that there was ‘hysteria’ amongst mainstream media personalities over the Trump win and all that it implied for them.

However, one of the key points that is of interest in Professor Furedi’s article is the section on the racially and communally diverse cohort of voters who have done a great deal to propel Mr Trump to the White House again.

Professor Furedi said:

Where ‘white’ Americans have long been blamed for the rise of populism, this time the elites feel especially betrayed by those millions of ethnic-minority voters who opted for Trump. In doing so, they showed they were unwilling to worship at the altar of identity politics. America’s oligarchy expects the automatic loyalty of Hispanic and black voters, in particular. The refusal of significant sections of these groups to vote for the Democratic Party has called into question the tactic of using minorities as election fodder.

The huge support that Trump gained from Hispanic voters is arguably the most serious setback ever suffered by woke identity politics. The importance of this cannot be exaggerated. In recent decades, identity politics has become an integral component of elite ideology and a means for the managerial class to retain control over society. Until this election, the politics of identity has rarely been so seriously challenged.

Professor Furedi is bang on correct there and what he’s said fits with what I’ve observed on this US Presidential election cycle. The Left and especially the now ascendant Left in the Democratic Party have treated American minorities as a captive vote bank. The Democrats played the identity politics cards to each different minority group to get them to give their votes to the Democrats. The trouble is that these policies often didn’t make the lives of minority Americans any better and identity politics has in my view gone a very large way to enhancing the divisions that are in American society as they are in all societies. The leftist Democrats treated minority Americans as separate groups rather than as individual Americans with their own individual hopes, fears and ambitions. Whether the Democrats will be able to abandon the identity politics and wokery that has clearly been rejected by American voters remains to be seen. Americans have expressed their disgust at what the Left has done to their country at how it has divided people, damaged the US economy and the country’s standing in the world and the Left need to take that new reality on board.

Is the US Presidential Election the death of woke? Not yet but woke does at least, after so much damage to our societies, to finally be getting ready for its death throes.