BY Charles Lane (in Things Worth Remembering, 4Jan2026)

Among my prized possessions is a first-edition copy of George Orwell’s nonfiction The Road to Wigan Pier, published in 1937 by Britain’s Left Book Club. It’s not much to look at. No illustration or artwork adorns its faded orange limp-cloth cover. The spine is split and stained black, as if with coal dust Orwell picked up while he researched the book, in mining regions of industrial northern England.

Still, I treasure this beat-up volume for its searing description of life among the ill-paid, socially marginalized workers upon whose backbreaking labor the entire British economy depended, and for whom Orwell expressed respect, bordering on awe.

“In a way it is even humiliating to watch coal-miners working,” Orwell wrote, after a harrowing visit deep underground. “It raises in you a momentary doubt about your own status as an ‘intellectual’ and a superior person generally. For it is brought home to you, at least while you are watching, that it is only because miners sweat their guts out that superior persons can remain superior.”

This humbling encounter with the actual working class, as opposed to the abstract one of socialist theory, inspired Orwell to reflect on the cultural gap between workers and the progressives who claim to speak for them. Though a committed socialist, he was compelled to train his formidable polemical powers on fellow leftists. This section of The Road to Wigan Piermakes the book unforgettable—and uncannily relevant to the era of Donald Trump and Zohran Mamdani:

We have reached a stage when the very word Socialism calls up, on the one hand, a picture of aeroplanes, tractors, and huge glittering factories of glass and concrete; on the other, a picture of vegetarians with wilting beards, of Bolshevik commissars (half gangster, half gramophone), of earnest ladies in sandals, shock-headed Marxists chewing polysyllables, escaped Quakers, birth-control fanatics, and Labour Party backstairs-crawlers. Socialism, at least in this island, does not smell any longer of revolution and the overthrow of tyrants; it smells of crankishness, machine-worship, and the stupid cult of Russia. Unless you can remove that smell, and very rapidly, Fascism may win.

There’s no precise analogy between the British socialists of Orwell’s day and contemporary U.S. woke progressives. Yet it’s close: If you substitute “electric cars” for “aeroplanes,” “trans kids” for “birth control,” and “Free Palestine” for “the stupid cult of Russia,” Orwell could be writing about academics in the Bay Area or Mamdani’s fan base in Brooklyn and Manhattan. Substitute “MAGA” for “fascism” and the parallels are even clearer.

Writing in the era of the Popular Front—the no-enemies-on-the-left anti-fascist alliance of Stalinists and Democratic Socialists—Orwell was that rare progressive intellectual willing to admit that his own side’s cultural cluelessness was driving workers into the far right’s arms.

He challenged the left’s habit of prescribing economic remedies—public housing, nationalized industries—while remaining oblivious, or even hostile, to the working class’s spiritual and emotional needs. If you repudiate traditional sources of collective meaning, he argued, don’t be surprised when demagogues of the right try to fill the void.

With their eyes glued to economic facts, [socialists] have proceeded on the assumption that man has no soul, and explicitly or implicitly they have set up the goal of a materialistic Utopia. As a result Fascism has been able to play upon every instinct that revolts against hedonism and a cheap conception of “progress.” It has been able to pose as the upholder of the European tradition, and to appeal to Christian belief, to patriotism, and to the military virtues.

For example: Slum clearance, a reformist cause in Britain (and the U.S.) at the time, did provide shiny new dwellings. But it also demolished many a corner pub, which, “for a working-class population. . . is a serious blow at communal life,” Orwell wrote. “It is a great achievement to get slum-dwellers into decent houses, but it is unfortunate that . . . it is also considered necessary to rob them of the last vestiges of their liberty.” To the extent it’s effective at all, Mamdani’s plan for a chain of city-owned and -operated grocery stores would similarly displace neighborhood bodegas.

Orwell suspected that the left’s policy prescriptions reflected not compassion for the poor, but a “hypertrophied sense of order,” related to an unacknowledged belief that “the lower classes smell.”

“The truth is,” he wrote, “that, to many people calling themselves Socialists, revolution does not mean a movement of the masses with which they hope to associate themselves; it means a set of reforms which ‘we,’ the clever ones, are going to impose upon ‘them,’ the Lower Orders.”

Orwell was that rare progressive intellectual willing to admit that his own side’s cultural cluelessness was driving workers into the far right’s arms.

Ideological gatekeepers responded to Orwell much as contemporary U.S. progressives sometimes do to apostates within their ranks: by trying to shut him up. Victor Gollancz, the Left Book Club’s publisher, asked Orwell to delete his critique of the left.

Orwell refused. But after Orwell departed for Spain to fight in the civil war for the leftist-led republic, Gollancz appended his own 14-page foreword to The Road to Wigan Pier, in which he assured readers that the Left Book Club did not endorse Orwell’s “provocative” assessment.

As Orwell explained in the book, he believed that socialists could still win working-class voters if they spoke to—and about—them in different terms. He urged the left to ditch Marxist jargon about “class consciousness,” or “expropriation of the expropriators,” and adopt intelligible language “compatible with common decency.”

“Justice and liberty!” he wrote. “Those are the words that have got to ring like a bugle across the world.”

In this, Orwell anticipated today’s moderate Democrats, who are desperately trying to get their party to cast off “woke” rhetoric. Not long ago, Third Way, the middle-of-the-road Democratic group, published a paper urging the party to stop alienating voters with words and phrases—“pregnant people,” “holding space,” “stakeholders”—that “no ordinary person would ever dream of saying,” as the group put it.

However, this was the least convincing part of Orwell’s essay, for the same reason that pleas like Third Way’s are necessary, but not sufficient, to salvaging the Democrats’ working-class appeal. The issue isn’t just that progressives and workers talk like two different kinds of people; they aretwo different kinds of people. That was the case in 1937, and it’s still true in 2026.

What workers really want, Orwell argued, is “present society with the worst abuses left out, and with interest centering round the same things as at present—family life, the pub, football, and local politics.” Meanwhile, a typical socialist is “a prim little man with a white-collar job, and, above all . . . a social position which he has no intention of forfeiting.”

It’s fair to say that George Orwell would have despised Zohran Mamdani. During the campaign, when he was not out stumping for a rent freeze, free bus rides, or decriminalizing “sex work,” New York’s new mayor could be found dining at Manhattan’s pricey Omen Azen. His 2025 wedding celebrations included a three-day bash at his family’s secure compound in Uganda. Yet today, many Democratic progressives have happily, eagerly anointed him as their new leader.

In hindsight, it seems, The Road to Wigan Pier’s plea for self-awareness on the left was destined to become a literary classic—but politically futile.