Are Green activists the Greens own worst enemy?

As the 2026 election tightens, the Greens face a challenge that has nothing to do with policy and everything to do with perception. While the party’s platform remains popular with younger and progressive voters, online activist culture risks alienating the very people the Greens need to win back — turning solidarity into spectacle and persuasion into backlash.

The problem isn’t Green policy — it’s activist perception

The following comment challenging the Greens are woke crazed is reasonable and deserves exploration because it’s true…

…the issue isn’t the Green Party, the problem is the activists whose activism online becomes an advert for not liking the Party.

Chlöe Swarbrick on tokenism and material change

Chlöe touched on this once…

Greens must reject ‘tokenism’ to connect with marginalised communities – Chlöe Swarbrick

Swarbrick also addressed claims both from political opponents and parts of the left that “progressive” identity politics have contributed to a global backlash enabling the rise of right-leaning populist figures like Donald Trump.

Former Labour finance minister David Parker recently criticised the political left’s “obsession” with identity issues to the detriment of meaningful progress during his valedictory speech. In response, Swarbrick argued that representation initiatives and material outcomes for society are not mutually exclusive.

But she also noted the missteps of superficial diversity efforts that fail to shift power. “Anything other than material redistribution is tokenism.”

“People are right to be frustrated,” she said. “But some of these self-styled strongmen are punching down, scapegoating minority groups instead of confronting the systems that caused inequality in the first place.”

She pointed the finger instead at other political leaders inflaming culture wars. “If we’re going to talk about who’s inviting this inflammatory culture war, it’s the deputy prime minister deciding to bicker about what bathrooms people can use.”

…the Greens themselves have been burnt by this tokenism.

How activist culture helped sink the Democrats

If you watch a lot of the Democratic adverts in the last election, you could clearly see Democratic strategists and tacticians frantically leaning into the right on gun ownership, closing the border and ‘common sense’ approaches to gender.

And yet Trump won biggest and deepest with his ‘Kamal is in it for they/thems, Trump is in it for you’ advert.

It wasn’t the Democrats leading woke cancel culture anymore, it was the woke activist base themselves.

Cancel culture, social media power, and political backlash

I’ve written a lot about ‘proxification’, the political cultural response many felt during the 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2020 woke Social Media lynch-mob season.

For many of the wokeIdentity Politics activists, having 10,000 social media followers gave a power infect before, and like any disenfranchised group who seizes immediate cultural power, they went on an ideological purge.

The backlash to that cancel culture woke purge is Trump and the rise of incel manosphere kulture.

Demographics, emigration, and invisible Green voters

The extra struggle for the Greens this year won’t just be the alienation their wokest voices will generate on social media, it is that the unique features of their support will be invisible.

We lost 140,000 people in two years, many of whom were the very age bracket that the Greens do best in.

The non vote who have been turned off by the culture war negativity won’t appear in Polling and the Government’s gerrymandering of the special votes which always lean heavily to the Greens will also hammer them.

Organising, enrolment, and the Australian factor

They will have to lobby hard in Australia to pick up those votes and work incredibly hard in the community to get early enrolment now.

In fact the Party needs to be hosting socials endlessly now in an attempt to enrol and be appearing in Australia regularly.

Solidarity builds movements — recrimination destroys them

These are all complex problems for the Greens to solve and it requires effort to support them because if the Greens slip from 3rd Party to 4th Party because NZ First leapfrogs them, then they will be forced to bend the knee and suck the Boot of Winston.

Green activists need to be recruiting voters with solidarity, not recriminating them with Identity Politics.