Ash Sarkar admits she wrote her book to slowly turn young, online progressives into Marxists.
Ash Sarkar appears at a live event to discuss the paperback release of her book Minority Rule, which examines why the political right is winning in elections and policy across the anglophone world. She describes writing the book for a specific reader: someone young, socially progressive, highly online, and without a deeply developed sense of political economy, with the explicit goal of guiding them toward a Marxist materialist analysis.
Sarkar distinguishes between domains where the right is winning and where it is not. In elections and policy, the right dominates. In culture, particularly music and entertainment, the right still has little to show. She cites the Super Bowl headliners Kendrick Lamar and Bad Bunny as examples of pop culture remaining outside right-wing control, but argues this cultural presence functions more as an opiate than as political power, referencing David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest and its theme that constant entertainment deadens political subjecthood.
On why the right wins electorally, Sarkar identifies several structural factors: sections of capital backing right-wing projects, the post-2008 death of the center-left economic model with no replacement, and the monopolization of the media environment. She traces this from Murdoch's newspaper acquisitions through Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter, algorithm changes on Facebook and YouTube, and the TikTok buyout in the United States. She discusses Bari Weiss's trajectory from New York Times opinion writer to founding The Free Press, which she says was vastly overvalued at $150 million because it serves a needed political archetype rather than generating proportional revenue.
The conversation explores the gap between public and private beliefs among media and political figures. Sarkar describes right-wing pundits who argue for benefit sanctions on air and then treat it as sport in the green room, distinguishing between true believers like Melanie Phillips and strategic performers like Daniel Hannan. She notes that many people on the right privately express horror about Gaza but stay silent to protect their careers.
On British identity, Sarkar argues the left tells a relentlessly negative story about Britain focused on slavery, colonialism, and rail replacement buses, while ignoring radical working-class history. She recounts the Lancashire cotton famine during the American Civil War, when mill workers refused to process cotton picked by enslaved people despite facing starvation, as an example of white working-class solidarity that gets left out of left-wing narratives.
The discussion turns to class, using dogs as an example of how objects become class-coded in British life, with a story about her brother-in-law's mixed-breed dog receiving polarized reactions from middle-class and working-class people. She connects this to the XL bully ban debate.
On masculinity, Sarkar frames the crisis not as one of masculinity itself but of male purpose, tied to the decline of manual work and the weakening of compulsory heterosexuality through the institution of marriage.
For her practical prescription, Sarkar offers two tests for useful political activity: does it bring you into real-life contact with people who are profoundly different from you, and does it help build an organization or institution that aspires to outlast you and the current media cycle? She acknowledges she does not fully practice this herself but points to Novara Media as her attempt at institution-building.
