On the voters – Costica Bradatan in TLS:

‘The election of Donald Trump as president of the United States in 2016, then again in 2024, has been seen as one of the greatest, most humiliating political failures in recent American history. And rightly so. For all the enormous resources at their disposal, as well as the enthusiastic, almost unconditional support they enjoyed across influential swathes of American society (mainstream media, academia, the entertainment world, much of the business and tech communities), the Democrats failed to gain enough support from those who truly matter in an election: voters.’

(…)

‘In We Have Never Been Woke, Musa al-Gharbi proposes an answer. For him, those involved in “knowledge production” in the US today are a key component of an elite whom he calls “symbolic capitalists”, and whose behaviour is the subject of his book. He defines “symbolic capitalists” as those professionals who “traffic in symbols and rhetoric, images and narratives, data and analysis, ideas and abstraction”, as opposed to those who do manual labour for a living. They are typically employed in education, science, tech, finance and media, but also in law, consulting, administration and public policy. Since intellectual work tends to be valued more highly than other forms of work, symbolic capitalists occupy a superior social position. Their dominance over “knowledge production, cultural curation, institutional bureaucracies, and (through these) the political sphere often affords [them] more sway over society than most other Americans”. They are the elites.’

(…)

‘The author’s biggest problem with today’s American liberal elites is that they make a mockery of the cause they purportedly serve. The trouble, he writes, “is not that symbolic capitalists are too woke, but that they’ve never been woke” – not that “causes like feminism, antiracism, or LGBTQ rights are ‘bad’”, but that, under the excuse of serving such noble causes, “symbolic capitalists regularly engage in behaviors that exploit, perpetuate, exacerbate, reinforce, and mystify inequalities – often to the detriment of the very people we purport to champion”.’

(…)

‘”Many who spent 2011 shouting ‘We are the 99 percent’ spent 2013 proudly declaring that ‘Black Lives Matter,’ identified as part of the #Resistance under Trump, began telling #MeToo stories in 2017, and became ‘trust the science’ stans from 2018 through the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s all been part of the same wave of activism among mainstream symbolic capitalists.
As the author admits, We Have Never Been Woke is “tightly focused on the United States”. He addresses possible parallels to situations in the UK, Canada, France and Australia, but only in the briefest of manners in his conclusion. This exclusive US focus is a frustrating limitation of an otherwise excellent work.’ (…)
‘Much of the anti-EU push in many of its member states, for instance, is driven by a growing perception that Brussels is becoming “too woke”. Defenders of “traditional values” across the continent are mounting a sustained attack on what they regard not necessarily as a European development, but as a dangerous American import.’

Read the article here.

Well, just listen to JD Vance’s speech at the Munich Security Conference, see here.
Europa, Western-Europe is according to the Trump administration comparable to Stalin. Woke is yesteryear’s discussion. Which doesn’t take away that the negative influence of the discourse on American universities and shortly after that can hardly be overestimated.
Yes, Black Pete is not accepted anymore in the Netherlands.

But the right won most of the important the cultural wars, except for a few battles, not the left.

The symbolic capitalists, I love this term, will be left to their own devices. If they still have a job in 2029.