Sarkar, A. (2025) - Minority Rule
Introduction
Some key extracts:
Media and politics work on cues and misdirection. Like a magician pointing the way they want us to look while the rabbit disappears, we have been encouraged to focus our anger on a new set of villains. Who are these villains? Just open a newspaper to find out. Our villains are asylum seekers (note: don’t call them refugees, that makes them sound too human), coming to these shores on unsafe dinghies purely for the hell of it. They’re the ‘lefty lawyers’ wielding human rights law to stop deportations. They’re Just Stop Oil, Insulate Britain or Extinction Rebellion – inconveniencing the public, winding everybody up by reminding us of climate devastation. Transgender people, who want nothing more than to lurk in toilets and cause distress. In fact, they’re the woke more generally: 'wokies’, ‘tofu-eating wokerati’, ‘woke students’, ‘woke warriors’ and the ‘out of touch metropolitan elite’. These nebulously defined individuals range from diversity and inclusion managers to anyone who pipes up and makes you feel like a bit of a bigot. You can throw in Black Lives Matter too. Not black people, you understand, that would be racist: just those who protest when black people are killed by police. pp. 17-18
Minority Rule is the paranoid fear that identity minorities and progressives are conniving to oppress majority populations. It’s a #meta-narrative, a big story told through countless speeches, TV segments, articles, videos, books, policy papers and social media posts. It articulates the idea that the power of ordinary people has been curtailed, stolen or attacked by an elite minority. But instead of that elite minority being defined in material terms (as in, the real ruling minority of hedge-fund managers, press barons, landlords, corporations and oligarchs), they’re defined as a mishmash coalition of ethnic minorities, graduates, sexual and gender minorities, environmental activists and people who live in cities and regularly drink frothy coffees. This isn’t because anyone really thinks that these types of people are actually the driving force behind wealth inequality, but because these minorities are opposed to the cultural values and interests of those who’ve been dubbed ‘the white working class’. This is the thesis of Douglas Murray (The Madness of Crowds), Matthew Goodwin (The New Elite) and pretty much anybody who writes for The Spectator. They’re telling a story about institutional capture – you, the decent and silenced majority, have been oppressed by identity and political minorities who’ve seized control of the levers of culture. You are being ruled by minorities.
pp. 18-19
Over the next seven chapters, I’m going to show you how the paranoid fantasy of Minority Rule upholds a real minority rule, by keeping us divided and competing against one another for attention. By examining media, politics and finally the economy, I’m going to explain how our perception of reality is manipulated to sustain a deeply unequal status quo. I’m going to examine how the weaknesses in progressive arguments about identity politics helped set up the traps created by the right in their mobilisation of the Minority Game. I’ll look at how news and current affairs media has pumped bullshit into the public conversation, and what that’s done to our political leadership. I’ll break down how class and race have been presented as mutually exclusive categories, and how a misleading portrayal of the ‘white working-class’ has been weaponised against leftwing political projects. You’ll see how scaremongering about Minority Rule has created the conditions for an authoritarian power-grab in the UK and America. And lastly, I’m going to show you what all of this paranoia, confusion, violence and victim-blaming upholds – a global system of extraction that robs us all of health, happiness and our fair share.
pp. 27-28
Thinking about this introduction in relation to a few different texts: