The Left's Self-Diagnosis Problem
In a live conversation recorded at Earth in London, Novara Media's Aaron Bastani and Ash Sarkar attempt something ambitious: a public reckoning with why the political right continues to dominate electorally across the anglophone world, even as it loses ground culturally. The conversation, anchored by the paperback release of Sarkar's book Minority Rule, ranges across identity politics, dating apps, dogs as class signifiers, and the implosion of Britain's new left-wing parties. It is at once sprawling and revealing, a snapshot of a left-wing media class trying to think its way out of a crisis it helped create.
Winning the Super Bowl, Losing the Election
Sarkar's central distinction is worth taking seriously. The right, she argues, is winning on policy and elections but losing on culture. The Super Bowl headliners are Kendrick Lamar and Bad Bunny, not Kid Rock. Pop culture remains overwhelmingly progressive in its sensibilities.
If you're looking at the terrain of pop culture, the right are not winning. They're still losing and losing bigly.
But Sarkar immediately undermines her own comfort by invoking David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest and its thesis about the entertainment-industrial complex as a deadening, atomizing force. If culture is just spectacle, then dominating it is hardly a victory. It is closer to being handed the keys to a very large distraction machine.
The counterpoint Bastani raises is sharper than either of them fully explores: is the left's cultural dominance actually by design? Are progressives permitted to own the Super Bowl halftime show precisely because it does not threaten the economic arrangements that concentrate wealth among a shrinking global elite? This is the classic bread-and-circuses argument, and it deserves more sustained attention than the conversational format allows. If Kendrick Lamar headlining the Super Bowl coexists comfortably with twelve people owning more than half the planet, cultural dominance may be less a consolation prize and more a containment strategy.
Identity Politics and Its Discontents
The most provocative thread in the conversation concerns Sarkar's critique of identity politics from within the left. Her book, she explains, was written for a specific reader: someone who is "little bit lib" and "highly online," with strong feelings about representation but weak political economy. The goal was to smuggle Marxist materialism past their defenses.
I thought, how do I get you guys towards a Marxist materialist analysis of the world?
Sarkar reports, with visible amusement, that readers who praised the book for demolishing identity politics would immediately make identity-inflected arguments in the next breath. The irony cuts deep. If even sympathetic readers cannot absorb the critique, the problem may be more structural than any single book can address.
There is, however, a tension in Sarkar's position that neither speaker fully confronts. She criticizes liberal identity politics as "anti-solidaristic" and rooted in competitive grievance, yet her own public profile was built substantially within the identity-saturated media ecosystem she now critiques. The right-wing caricature of her as "the queen of woke" is a misrepresentation, as she notes, but it is not an entirely baseless one. Sarkar's ability to critique identity politics from a position of credibility is itself a form of identity capital, one earned precisely because of the system she wants to dismantle.
The Crisis of Male Purpose
On masculinity, Bastani reframes the standard "crisis of masculinity" discourse into something more structural: a crisis of male purpose linked to deindustrialization and the end of compulsory heterosexuality. His argument is that blue-collar work once provided dignity, community, and meaning, and that the institution of marriage was propped up by systematic coercion of women.
Sarkar's response is characteristically vivid. She would ban dating apps outright, arguing that they create a prisoner's dilemma of mutual rejection and toxify relations between the sexes.
What dating apps have done is they've made the experience of romance and finding a partner, whether it's for a good time or a long time, made it a lot worse.
The dating app critique is not wrong in its particulars. Research does suggest that app-based dating correlates with lower satisfaction and higher anxiety. But Sarkar's proposed solution, an outright ban, sits oddly alongside her broader politics. A self-described communist calling for state prohibition of a consumer technology is at least intellectually consistent, but it glosses over the question of what would replace the social infrastructure that apps, however inadequately, now provide. The decline of churches, unions, community organizations, and third places preceded dating apps and created the vacuum they filled.
The Party That Failed
The most uncomfortable segment concerns the implosion of Sarkar's own political party. She is bracingly honest about its failures, describing a cycle of factional infighting inherited from Labour Party culture, combined with identity-politics fractures that made trust impossible to sustain.
What if, just bear with me, we made every child who was raised in a broken home feel like they're 5 years old again and mommy and daddy can't stop fighting.
Sarkar diagnoses the party leadership as caught in an "avoidant-anxious dynamic," with Jeremy Corbyn retreating from conflict while Zara Sultana lurched between radical positions without strategic coherence. As a national political project, she declares it dead.
This is admirably candid, but it raises a question that neither speaker addresses: if the left's own institutional experiments collapse under the weight of the very pathologies Sarkar diagnoses in her book, what grounds are there for optimism about building anything better? The "sedimentary networks" concept, the idea that useful relationships and local capacities survive the death of the parent organization, is a reasonable consolation, but it is a consolation, not a strategy.
Solidarity Without Proximity
The conversation's most compelling historical reference is to the Lancashire cotton famine during the American Civil War, when mill workers refused to process cotton produced by enslaved people, even at the cost of their own livelihoods.
Here's an example of white and working-class people not only standing in solidarity with black enslaved people in America who they have never ever met but doing so against their immediate material interests.
This is a powerful counterpoint to the prevailing cynicism about cross-racial, cross-class solidarity. But it also complicates Sarkar's own framework. The Lancashire workers were motivated substantially by religious abolitionism, channeled through church networks. Faith-based organizing of this kind is precisely the sort of institution-building Sarkar advocates in the abstract, but the contemporary left has almost no relationship with organized religion. The historical example she reaches for is rooted in a social infrastructure her own political tradition largely abandoned.
Bottom Line
Bastani and Sarkar are sharper diagnosticians than they are strategists. Their analysis of why the right wins, monopolized media, hollowed-out center-left parties, the structural irrelevance of cultural dominance, is largely persuasive. Their prescriptions, build institutions, meet real people, ban dating apps, are either too vague to be actionable or too narrow to match the scale of the problem. The conversation's most revealing moment is Sarkar's admission that she does not practice what she preaches. When asked whether she engages in the real-life, cross-difference political organizing she recommends, the answer is a cheerful "No." For a movement that diagnoses its opponents as cynical performers who do not believe in what they say, this is an uncomfortable place to land.