This is nothing new, though. That has always been a defining characteristic of the left, it has always been a coalition of vastly different groups of people with interests that don't necessarily overlap.
Take labor rights advocates, for example. They're generally in favour of economic growth and often in conflict with the environmentalists. Teachers and academics are often quite disconnected from blue collar workers. Liberal religious people who are in support of social programs may clash with feminists who prioritise reproductive freedom.
If you imagine society as a circular pie and divide it into "political Left" and "political Right", then you don't actually get a pie divided into left and right halves. Rather, "the Right" is located in the center of the pie that is occupied by the conservative establishment and its allies while "the Left" is distributed alongside the outer crust like an annulus.
That also explains the siege mentality of the conservative mindset, btw.
This, by Janan Ganesh, in the Financial Times (
hence Evernote link) makes some interesting points. I'm not sure that I agree with him, particularly because I distrust anyone who uses the term "woke" in a pejorative sense, but I do think there's an important distinction between socialism -- which, to my mind, is about changing the whole economic system to transfer economic and political power from capital to organised labour -- and liberalism, which is more about social and cultural attitudes.
Both the US left and right seem more interested in fighting about cultural issues than about economic ones, to the obvious benefit of the right, who can't really defend the current system, particularly in the US.
And here, by Robert Shrimsley in the same paper, is an article arguing the right have the same problem (
again, Evernote)
