Zohran Mamdani smiles into the camera: “I’ll make buses fast and free,” he says. “I’ll make child care available to all New Yorkers, at no cost. And I’ll freeze the rent for every single rent-stabilized tenant.” The footage is clearly professional, yet overlaid with a warm, grainy tint. The resulting video feels both polished and personal, both inviting and gritty. Wearing a white kurta, Mamdani comfortably signals a postcolonial identity.
As the camera turns away from him, a five-point red star is visible on the back of his shirt. Banned in several countries for its association with far-left totalitarianism, the symbol also represents the Red Star caucus of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). An open DSA member, Mamdani received the group’s congratulations for his recent victory in New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary. The caucus’ stated aim? To “abolish capitalism, and ultimately, to achieve communism.”
The Shifting Cultural Landscape
Since mid-2024, figures such as Tyler Cowen, Lionel Shriver, and Niall Ferguson have argued that the Anglosphere is undergoing a “vibe shift.” Woke excesses are now being ignored, or even mocked, by the same corporations that once championed them. Support for diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives and other progressive cultural causes have dropped off a cliff. From blonde-haired, blue-eyed Sydney Sweeney quipping about her “great genes,” to a banker boasting to the Financial Times that he can “say ‘retard’ and ‘pussy’ without the fear of getting cancelled,” the shift has been hard to miss.
The sentiment has also been observed in books: British playwright and satirist Andrew Doyle refers to wokeness in the past tense in his May book, The End of Woke, and in June, Piers Morgan released Woke is Dead. Still, for those of us who have cast a critical eye on wokeness, it may be too early for optimism. As Mamdani’s ascent reminds us, hyper-progressivism is a shapeshifting force: When one cause loses steam, another emerges to take its place.
Understanding the Moral Grammar
Beneath the surface lies not a static list of political positions, meant to be taken literally, but a moral grammar that divides the world into good and evil. “We understand Marxism as a living, breathing theoretical framework, which is not and never can be a static set of dogmas,” notes the Red Star caucus. Rooted in critical theory, this framework is portable—and once internalized, it can be redeployed against any perceived system of power. After trying and failing to dismantle the apparent forces of patriarchy, white supremacy, and cisheteronormativity, its next target may also be its oldest: capitalism.
Earlier this summer, I traveled to the University of Buckingham for the inaugural conference of the Centre for Heterodox Social Science—a gathering that focused refreshingly on analysis as opposed to polemic. Speakers included American sociologist Musa al-Gharbi, Dispatch contributor and political scientist Yascha Mounk, theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss, and Harvard cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker—as well as many others—each examining hyper-progressivism from different angles.
Kaufmann’s Post-Progressive Thesis
Eric Kaufmann, who directs the center, argued that we have entered a “post-progressive” moment—a cultural turning point in which the high tide of left-liberal activism, peaking around 2020, has begun to recede. His data show falling public support for trans activism (particularly in the U.K.), growing skepticism toward DEI initiatives, and a new readiness among mainstream institutions such as the New York Times to push back against woke excesses. “The decline of woke,” he declared in the Wall Street Journal in May, “marks the end of the 60-year rise of left-liberalism in American culture.”
“The decline of woke marks the end of the 60-year rise of left-liberalism in American culture.” – Eric Kaufmann
Kaufmann’s thesis is compelling. Anecdotally, the extremes of trans activism—such as insisting that biological males compete in women’s sports or suppressing evidence about medical interventions in children—have created a kind of rubber-band snap. For many ordinary people, largely indifferent to politics or culture wars, the spectacle of children being used as vehicles for radical activism, and the bending of basic language to reshape reality, has been jolting.
Economic Underpinnings and Future Implications
But even with President Donald Trump’s return to office and the concurrent backlash against wokeness, declaring a clean break into a post-progressive age is premature. Certain identity-based causes may be losing steam, but others are only gaining intensity. In the United States, for example, polling shows that Gen Z is far more sympathetic to the Palestinian cause than older generations. Efforts to combat climate change, too, continue to command overwhelming support from young voters across the Anglosphere, with majorities backing aggressive policy action.
Such cultural energy persists because support for progressive causes among many young people has never been about individual policy positions. When young people back these causes, they are not merely ticking boxes they agree with as they might for a bill or a candidate; they are embracing an epistemology, a framework for understanding the world.
Rooted in critical theory, this worldview organizes reality into a binary of oppressors and the oppressed, assumes that social outcomes are driven by powerful structural forces, and assigns moral virtue to “dismantling” those forces. Gender theorist Judith Butler distilled this very logic while speaking in France last year about the October 7 attacks: “The uprising of October 7 was an act of armed resistance… It is not a terrorist attack, and it is not an antisemitic attack. It comes from a state of subjugation and is directed against a violent state apparatus.”
“The uprising of October 7 was an act of armed resistance… It is not a terrorist attack, and it is not an antisemitic attack.” – Judith Butler
It is a moral grammar so transferable that populists of both the left and right alike draw on it. When Alex Jones or Candace Owens cast “globalists” as oppressors of the people, they are using the same framework as the Ivy League intersectional academics they claim to be fighting. Increasingly, even the populist right echoes the left in rejecting free-market economics outright, with figures like Batya Ungar-Sargon railing against Wall Street elites.
The Economic and Social Context
Which brings us back to Mamdani. The son of a postcolonial academic and a filmmaker, he is, in every sense, the next generation of wokeness. He combines the cultural fluency of elite progressivism with the language of bottom-up economic grievance, bridging two worlds that rarely align. As al-Gharbi points out in his book, until now, wokeness has been largely an elite project, preoccupied with identity issues of race, sexuality, and gender, as opposed to economic inequality. But if this movement mobilizes the working class and the downwardly mobile middle classes, it will no longer be confined to the campus or cultural niches. On the contrary, it will ignite into a truly mass movement.
Even those born into privilege can be seduced by Marxism. While members of Gen Z are not impoverished in absolute terms—the average 25-year-old in the U.S. now earns more than $40,000 a year, outpacing Millennials at the same age—many feel deprived in relative terms, as social media has opened up avenues for social comparison hitherto unknown to humankind.
“The average 25-year-old in the U.S. now earns more than $40,000 a year, outpacing Millennials at the same age.”
And despite relatively high household incomes, homeownership for those under 35 has been in decline across the Anglosphere, adding to a sense of relative deprivation. The U.K. has been the hardest hit, with a nearly 20 percentage point drop in homeownership for young people over the past two decades, but homeownership among young people has been on the decline in Australia and Canada as well. In the U.S., according to the National Association of Home Builders, only 36 percent of adults under 35 currently own their own homes.
Kaufmann’s analysis zeroes in on the decline of progressive causes such as transgender activism, DEI mandates, and mass immigration, and reads this as the collapse of an underlying worldview. But his account leaves economics almost entirely out of the picture. In this sense, it is incomplete: It mistakes the retreat of identity-based movements for the exhaustion of the progressive project itself, overlooking how the same moral grammar can easily pivot toward class and capitalism.
This blindsiding is precisely what Danish essayist Uri Harris warned about six years ago, writing an essay for Quillette on the sudden unpopularity of “neoliberal centrists.” Harris argued that by teaching a generation to see the social world as a lattice of oppressive systems—patriarchy, white supremacy, cisheteronormativity—progressive elites were, in effect, preparing the ground for capitalism itself to be cast as the ultimate system of oppression.
Future Directions and Challenges
The fall of one wave of activism does not mean the tide is going out; it may only be pulling back before returning with greater force—this time aimed at the economic elites who helped usher it in. When that tide comes back, it will not look like the cultural skirmishes over pronouns, statues, or speech codes that dominated the last decade. It will be broader and more material, focused on wealth, property, and the architecture of capitalism itself.
Not all of this energy will take the form of violence. In figures like Mamdani, it is being channeled into a new kind of mass politics which emerges out of a synthesis: the cultural fluency of the elite fused with bottom-up economic appeal. Nowhere is this synthesis more apparent than in his soft kurta emblazoned with the hard symbolism of the red star. In him, the aesthetic of postcolonial identity is married to the language of rent freezes and class struggle. That combination—which is new to the United States but familiar to the Global South—signals the possibility of a mass politics capable of mobilizing the downwardly mobile middle class alongside the urban poor.
Mamdani is not a relic of a fading era but a herald of the next, proof that wokeness has not retreated—it has simply shapeshifted. And if Kaufmann is right that the tide of cultural progressivism has begun to ebb, then Mamdani is the sign that it has already mutated. What comes next may not be softer or weaker, but sharper, harder, and more dangerous—and aimed squarely at our economic order itself.
