Greens reflecting on culture war backlash their woke activists helped generate

Greens go face-to-face against the outrage-generating machine

As the Greens ready for another election year, co-leaders Marama Davidson and Chlöe Swarbrick say they’re looking to make an in-person impact during a campaign they know will be fought online. 

The duo plans to meet voters not just in city centres, where their ideas find more common ground, but in rural regions: places where the average voter’s exposure to the Green Party is when Government ministers mock them online. 

Swarbrick credits social media with her entry into big-time politics, and says it will have to be a part of any campaign they run. But she and Davidson agree the internet is no longer just a neutral rallying tool: the rise of engagement-driven algorithms has created a digital space where reach and reality can be manipulated, and where their opponents have proven just as successful.

With young MPs and a firm digital footprint, the Green Party is no stranger to social media. But for Swarbrick and Davidson, it’s time to get back to basics. 

“If we could all just get out and touch grass, we’d all be a lot more chill – we could come back down to Earth and have some real conversations with people face-to-face,” Swarbrick says. 

It’s a readjustment for Swarbrick, who tells Newsroom she credits the internet with much of her 2017 election success: a feat she doesn’t think she could replicate today. 

Chlöe and Marama are right, we’ve all been shadow banned on social media, but what they refuse to acknowledge is the role woke middle class Green activists themselves played in helping the reactionary right win.

Since 2016 I have argued that Identity Politics is a deeply flawed strategy for the Political Left.

I have argued that Identity Politics locked into place ‘feelings’ and ‘lived experiences’ that replaced logic, rational debate and reason because logic, rational debate and reason are heteronormative white cis male privileges that we all hate now.

MeToo, Black Lives Matter and the Trans debate – all issues we were prepared to burn every bridge for have come back to bite us all.

I warned that if you spent all this time screaming white men were the problem, they would become the problem.

The greatest danger of Identity Politics for the Left is that the millisecond white poor men see themselves through the same identity lens of victimhood that the Woke do, we were collectively fucked.

The moment men stop seeing themselves as part of a class or as citizens, the millisecond they replace solidarity with victimhood – we were in collective danger.

The Woke believed their ‘feelings’ were more important than anything else, unfortunately angry and frightened right wing people have ‘feelings’ too and their ‘feelings’ are way more demented than ours.

That is what has happened in the American Election and what we witnessed in 2024 was the most consequential election in modern political history – it is the beginning of America’s decline and the first true step towards a dystopian nightmare.

Trump’s United States of Wounded Masculinity beat Kamala’s Nation of Childless Cat Women.

Look.

If you are a Left organisation, you gotta cloak that woke.

You will all have some radioactive toxic Outrage Olympics Wokie in your movement and you gotta cloak that woke.

You gotta get that wokie onto Bluesky where they can scream into a padded cell that no one cares about.

You gotta create cool new Wellington Consultancies where the names of your wokies are hidden behind cool logos and nameless websites.

You gotta hide that Tiso, that Mok, that Lal, that Ngata, that Emily Writes, that Emmy – you gotta, because their message is so alienating and self serving it’s killing the Left’s ability to ever win again.

We hate on the Right for passing terrible social policy yet never look at how our own middle class activists have poisoned our well and handed the Right culture war ammunition we can’t win!

I’m not interested in the hashtag minefield of Social Justice which alienates with pure temple politics, I’m interested in the Broadchurch solidarity of class and Economic Justice.

Less ‘all men are rapists’, less ‘patriarchy decolonisation’, less ‘Trans Uber Allas’ and way more free public transport, Nationalisation of ECE, new state backed supermarket chain and way more rent freezes.

As the Political Right gear up to run romper stomper on us and wokeness, ‘praps we should ask how the Right managed to gain so much ammunition in the first place?

Can the woke please go back to sleep?

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