Our fearful leaders are failing to stand up to a radical woke minority

The Left’s march through the institutions will continue until the majority organises its fight back

How have we allowed things to get this far? How is it that a minority of extreme activists can dictate to politicians, broadcasters, universities, firms and the wider world what can and cannot be said, and who can and cannot say it? Why do they get to determine the true meaning of words written or spoken by others?

As the mainstream grapples with these questions, several old thinkers keep coming up. Michel Foucault, a post-modernist, argued that all discourse is oppressive. Antonio Gramsci, a Marxist, said that cultural hegemony perpetuates political hegemony. Rudi Dutschke, another Marxist, advocated a “long march through the institutions of power”, in which the Left would transform society by seizing control of organisations within and beyond the state.

Each of these thinkers, and more recent academics, such as Kimberlé Crenshaw, an American theorist of intersectionality, help us to understand where we are today. But we also need to ask ourselves a more prosaic question: how are we allowing an aggressive minority to dictate a new moral code that is intellectually incoherent, ethically dubious and deeply divisive?

The answer comes from another old political thinker. “An organised minority,” Gaetano Mosca once said, “inevitably forces its will upon the disorganised majority.” And while Left-wingers organise, often hiding their radical agenda behind apparently reasonable slogans like “Stop the War”, “Extinction Rebellion” and “Black Lives Matter”, their opponents are fragmented and disorganised.

From illegal direct action – disrupting traffic, occupying private property and vandalising monuments – to violent disorder, conservatives hate this trend of radical activism. But what are they going to do?

To be fair, most conservatives are like most people, bewildered by what is going on. It is, after all, almost impossible to argue with this strange cultural liberalism on its own terms. Language deemed unacceptable and racist when used against other groups, for example, is now encouraged when referring to white people. Concepts such as “white fragility” – surely as racist as anything said about minorities – are not only tolerated but promoted, even by the BBC.

The idea of white fragility is especially pernicious because anybody who questions it is supposedly demonstrating their own fragility. But this modern-day witch trial has never been logical or fair. When minorities fail to conform and hold conservative beliefs, for example, they are attacked in violent, and even racist, terms. Just think of the Guardian’s depiction in a cartoon of Priti Patel, a Hindu, as a cow.

It is also why theories of intersectionality – the idea that black women, for example, have different experiences from black men and white women – are all the rage, yet nobody makes this argument about white working class boys, whose chances in life are at least as tough as those of any minority. In fact, in the doublethink of cultural liberalism, just referring to the white working class is a crime, because it “legitimises racist attitudes”. Predictably, those who make this argument were silent when a leading Black Lives Matter campaigner called white people “sub-human” and “recessive genetic defects”.

But confusion cannot be used as an excuse for fear and cowardice. For rather than taking a stand for common sense and free speech, people in positions of power often prefer to surrender to a noisy minority who bay for blood each time they identify so-called “micro-aggressions”. And so it was that, after criticising the Black Lives Matter campaign, Nick Buckley was sacked by the Manchester charity he founded. Baroness Nicholson was sacked as vice-president of the Booker Prize for her views on trans issues. After asserting her feminist beliefs, Suzanne Moore was denounced by Guardian colleagues as a “transphobe”. The list goes on.

Sometimes the problem is not cowardice but cynicism and complicity. It suited Sadiq Khan to play silly games with statues rather than address the thornier subject of making sure the police use their powers legally and respectfully, while still remaining tough enough to reduce crime. It is not only Labour. Ministers will this week rule out allowing people to change their legal gender without a medical diagnosis, but it was Tory ministers who, hoping to appear “progressive”, originally proposed the change.

Companies not known for their sense of social responsibility are also desperate to prove their woke credentials. HSBC, arguably complicit in Beijing’s assault on Hong Kong, lectures British customers that “we are not an island”. From footballers to bankers – representing two of the most rapacious industries going – many have rushed to “take the knee” in solidarity with a campaign that wants to “abolish capitalism”. On Twitter, tea firms explain that they are “educating themselves” about racism, while the Body Shop piled into the criticism of JK Rowling over her feminist critique of trans campaigners. Twitter itself promises to police language and warns its users to avoid gendered pronouns.

One can argue that none of this matters much. After all, ministers are contending with an unprecedented public health crisis and a deep recession; they are leading Britain out of the EU, and have ambitious plans to rebalance the country’s economy. But Gramsci was right. Cultural hegemony does bring political hegemony. Those who police our language police our moral code and our behaviour. Those who promote ideas like “white privilege” and “white fragility” undermine the cohesion of our country. Those who view everything through a prism of race or gender see complex problems in simplistic ways, and fail to see injustices of other kinds.

Thanks to confusion, cowardice and cynical complicity, our leaders are allowing the mainstream majority to be bossed around by highly organised ideological and unrepresentative radicals. But an organised minority can only force its will on the rest of us as long as we are disorganised. In government, on campus, in business and across society, it is time for conservatives to fight back.