The Washington Post’s Will Lewis said the paper was returning to its ‘roots’ by not endorsing a presidential candidate. There was more to it than that
Postmortems continue for who lost Kamala Harris the US election, and these will be consequential for the left in the UK. However many times the US flags that the “special relationship” is really not a thing for them any more, their politics bears down on ours, whether it’s rightwing narratives travelling from the Heritage Foundation to the thinktanks at Tufton Street, via [checks notes], oh yes, money, or the centre left here praying they can sail past the Democrats’ shipwrecks.
If consensus is reached that the problem was “go woke; go broke” – that Harris was too inclusive, too pro-trans, too pro-diversity, generally speaking, not horrible enough – that would be multiple kinds of erroneous, the greatest of which is moral. It lacks backbone to diagnose the problem as “too strong on the values of humanity and universalism”, and solve it by abandoning those values. Amusingly, the message Labour has taken, so far, isn’t even that the Dems were too woke – rather, that they were just too hopeful, a reading which is a little like avoiding the shipwreck by drowning yourself.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian journalist
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