Malcom Kyeyune is a writer, podcaster, and member of the steering council of the Swedish think tank Oikos. He recently spoke with City Journal associate editor Daniel Kennelly about the origins of woke politics and its manifestations in U.S. and Swedish politics.
There’s an effort underway in conservative circles in the U.S. to delve into the origins of woke politics. Some find them in the incentive structures in our laws and regulations; others point to ideologies incubated in the universities. You’ve argued that conservatives too often are blind to “material interests and class” as drivers of our politics. How is wokeness a class phenomenon?
It’s not necessarily the case that everything can be explained through some sort of primitive application of class analysis, but it’s also not something you should be blind to, especially when discrepancies are staring you in the face. In the case of woke politics, it’s probably meaningful that you rarely find an example of, say, a woke electrician or plumber or truck driver. Those people might exist—and we might find proof of the Loch Ness monster at some point, too—but this is not an ideology that infects people at random. It’s clearly a class phenomenon in what we can observe, in the sense that certain people, from certain classes—essentially people in the big cities, people working what some have called “email jobs”—tend to be woke, and people who work as part of the real economy tend to be not woke. To try to deny that these discrepancies exist, or that they’re not in need of investigation, is just a form of political self-harm at this point.
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