The problem is that even with all the Googling, no one has a definitive answer on what the hell mutual aid actually means. In activist circles, it’s often tacked onto the stock list of self-descriptions, recited as part of their Leftist CVs: I do art, activism, political organizing, and mutual aid, which is like renaming the same job four times on a resume to sound busier. These days, mutual aid is usually a synonym for organized do-goodery or small-scale politics, but not always. 

It’s invoked to describe anything from “craftivism” projects like distributing “Melt the ICE” knitted hats, swapping casseroles, and borrowing a power drill, to running abortion access networks and organizing rapid-response teams for immigration raids. It can apparently include running a homeless shelter in Philadelphia, handing out free condoms and fentanyl test strips in San Francisco, or distributing Indigenous Justice fact sheets for the “Land Back” movement in the Twin Cities. Also, don’t forget mutual-aid GoFundMe campaigns for sex workers or the Bruce Springsteen and Bon Iver benefit concert to raise money for the families of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, which, of course, was named the Mutual Aid Benefit Concert.

What all of these disparate acts have in common is Left-of-center framing. Mutual aid is a woke rebrand of two very old human impulses: charity and neighborliness. Those terms sound too much like conformist bourgeois values, and to Left-libs, the act of helping can’t simply be helpful; it must be subversive. Everything has to be seen as a radical act of resistance against, well, what ya got? Federal overreach. MAGA. Capitalism. White supremacy. Check. Check. Check.

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What’s most grating about mutual-aid discourse isn’t the helping itself — which is mostly good — but the historical amnesia around it. The way activists talk, you’d think Americans only discovered the concept of neighbors helping neighbors sometime around 2020, thanks to, say, the Instagram reels of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. In reality, America was built on dense webs of voluntary association and community aid long before anyone sewed “Abolish ICE” on a tote bag. Just ask Alexis de Tocqueville, who — nearly 200 years ago in his book Democracy in America — marveled at the way Americans built their own associations and institutions as a bulwark against elite greed. “In democratic peoples, associations must take the place of the powerful particular persons whom equality of conditions has made disappear,” De Tocqueville wrote. He observed a society where, if a road needed fixing or a barn needed raising, men didn’t wait for a grant or a website; they simply came together and took action.

In the 19th and 20th centuries, union halls, fraternal orders, churches, ethnic societies, volunteer fire companies, and informal neighborhood networks once did much of what today’s organizers claim as a radical innovation and often went way further: they pooled money, fed the hungry, cared for the sick, buried the dead, and kept communities afloat when the state was distant or indifferent. Contemporary activists like to cite the Black Panthers’ Free School Lunch program in Chicago in the 1960s as their intellectual lodestar, but a better comparison might be the infrastructure of mutualism built by European immigrant communities in the same place decades earlier.

When the Czechs, for instance, turned Chicago into the third biggest Czech community in the world behind Prague and Vienna, they constructed hulking structures called sokols where you could attend educational classes, listen to lectures, visit libraries, see choral groups, theater, and other entertainment — all in the same building — for free, if you could speak the native tongue. These pre-welfare-state communities also looked after the poor and provided informal banking and insurance, all without state intervention. There was no “Solidarity, not Charity” slogan plastered on the walls because the distinction was self-evident: you weren’t “serving” a client; you were sustaining your own people. Even as these tight-knit immigrant cultures assimilated, a strong sense of neighborliness and charity remained throughout the 20th century. 

This instinct has dulled in the 21st century; what’s been deemed the “anti-social century,” due to hyperindividualism, the death of in-person community, and the NGOing of America that turned charity into Charity. But that doesn’t mean it’s dead — far from it. If we strip away the radical chic and the academic jargon, the biggest mutual aid project of this year didn’t happen at a protest or a community meeting; it happened on just about every street and city block during this winter’s historic snowstorms. People shoveled each other’s driveways, dug out or jump-started cars in sub-zero temperatures, and checked on the elderly. On my street, a 30-something man named Joe was outside all day after 14 inches of snow fell, shoveling his entire block. Another elderly man took turns heave-ho-ing cars stuck in snowbanks. Shoveling ice, not protesting ICE, was “mutual aid” in its truest and most effective form — neighbors, family, and friends looking out for one another without needing to call it resistance (unless that meant resisting the bad weather). You don’t need to “center the voices” of the cold; just grab a shovel, and suddenly three other people grab their shovels too. That’s how social norms work. 

There’s also a class story hiding in the mutual-aid discourse. Much of what now exists under the banner of mutual aid is, in practice, the middle or upper-middle classes assisting the working poor or what Marx once called the lumpenproletariat, often mediated through NGOs, activist collectives, or social media campaigns. This is presented as horizontal solidarity, but the structure remains vertical. The resource-rich help the resource-poor. Again, there’s nothing particularly wrong with that. But what’s odd is the insistence that this arrangement is fundamentally different from charity, as if renaming the relationship dissolves the underlying asymmetry. It doesn’t. It just changes the story we tell ourselves about it.

That story matters because language shapes expectations. When mutual aid is framed as resistance, ordinary acts of care risk being devalued unless they’re politicized. Helping your neighbor move a couch becomes morally thinner than helping a stranger as part of a branded campaign called something like Seat Your Community. Clearing snow becomes less meaningful than staffing a mutual-aid table with a logo. This is a perverse incentive structure. It nudges people away from the kinds of thick, local bonds that actually sustain communities and toward thin, performative gestures that travel well on social media.

And vibes, like snowdrifts, eventually melt. When the political moment passes, as the current ICE #Resistance will inevitably, so does the attention, and with it the care. Neighborliness, by contrast, is boringly durable. It doesn’t spike on Google Trends, but it persists across decades. Unless your local Food Not Bombs chapter is actually stopping bombs rather than just cooking meals for people in need, that’s not radical. That’s called becoming your grandmother. And thank God. The revolution can wait; the driveway cannot.

If 21st-century politics is shaping up as class war, the American midterm elections have concretised a troubling facet of this political landscape: this class war is also a sex war.

Writing about the dynamic as a feminist is uncomfortable in the extreme because it’s difficult to do so without being accused of misogyny. This is not least because among the very online Right, there really is more than a tinge of misogyny to the term most commonly used to denote progressive-leaning Virtual women: AWFLs.

Coined by Right-wing commentator Scott Greer, AWFL stands for “affluent white female liberals”, and generally connotes not just the demographic but its perceived characteristic worldview — a mixture of progressive moral piety, self-righteousness, hypocrisy and unexamined class snobbery.

Whether or not you agree with this hostile evaluation, the AWFL class has been growing in relative power and influence for some decades. This is for wholly non-conspiratorial reasons: very simply, technological advancements have delivered new opportunities for well-qualified knowledge workers of both sexes, even as the same changes have automated and de-industrialised away the physically more arduous work previously performed mostly by working-class men. This virtualisation of work has, overall, benefited women much more than men.

Accordingly, women have seized the opportunity. American colleges have been majority-female since the late Seventies, and today, women outnumber men at undergraduate level in most colleges, with the disparity as large as 60%-40% in some elite institutions. And this has turned out a steadily compounding supermajority of knowledge-class women, which forms an increasingly heavy-hitting part of the rising Virtual elite.

The gradual extension of ever more spheres of work to relatively equal participation is, to a great extent, an effect of the transition away from physical toward knowledge work — but is routinely framed as “progress” in an abstract sense. In suggesting a more material interpretation of this change, I’m not making the opposite argument, that this represents decline. More women in public life is not in itself a bad thing, unless you really are a misogynist. But as female graduates have embraced professional life across knowledge-economy and bureaucratic roles, and their influence has compounded over time, this shift has redrawn the political map in important ways — not least by tilting visible public discourse Left, in ways that only ambivalently reflect the electorate overall.

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At undergraduate level, women are especially heavily represented among arts and social sciences courses – topics so overwhelmingly progressive that only 9% of undergraduates vote Republican. These overwhelmingly Left-wing female graduates then cluster in the institutions that set and manage social and cultural norms, such as education, media, and HR. In American nonprofits, for example, 75% are female, while HR, the division of corporate life most concerned with managing the moral parameters of everyday working life, is two-thirds female.

And those progressive graduate women who aren’t busy shaping public morals via nonprofits and HR departments are busy doing so for the next generation in schools: 76% of American teachers are women. Inevitably, given that all US states require teachers to hold at least a bachelor’s degree, these are also uniformly drawn from the female demographic most likely to be very liberal.

When Meghan McCain’s husband talked about how the Democrats will soon be dominated by “millennial girlboss energy” types and described the prospect as “crazytown”, progressive firebrand Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez was strictly correct to point out that women make up less than a third of the Senate, and millennials only 7%. But this is to miss the point.

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The AWFL demographic, relatively underrepresented in the Senate, is overrepresented across media, journalism, nonprofits, HR departments, academia, and school teachers. Their views can expect enthusiastic signal-boosting and institutional support from such bodies. They’re also the demographic most overwhelmingly likely to vote Democrat. No wonder their political priorities increasingly shape Democratic political platforms: their high visibility makes it easy to mistake them for the entirety of the Left.

Even the staunchly liberal New Yorker has worried recently that this constitutes a blind spot, while the far-Left Jacobin described the emphasis of New York’s Kathy Hochul on abortion rather than inflation as “girlboss politics”. Much was made of a WSJ poll last week, that suggested, albeit based on a small sample, that even white suburban women (an affluent demographic that overlaps with the derisive “AWFL” designation) were swinging against the Democrats based on economic concerns.

But results so far suggest that this swing, if it’s come at all, has been muted. And perhaps this makes sense. For the changing nature of work isn’t the only way this political bloc relies on technology for its ascendancy. For this group, it seems intuitively right to push for a world where sex differences are no longer politically important — to the extent of agreeing that a woman is anyone who identifies as such. It should come as no surprise that AWFLs are also the strongest supporters of trans rights: for this class, there are no obvious upsides to disturbing the idealist vision of men and women as interchangeable, or as a menu of body parts to be mixed and matched according to personal taste.

For knowledge-class progressive women, though, a still more central issue where tech and their interests converge is in the core material obstacle to workplace equality: the female reproductive role, including gestation, childbirth and breastfeeding. For the so-called “gender pay gap” is, in truth, a motherhood pay gap. Thus, for a chance to compete in the knowledge workplace on the same terms as men, women’s bodies also need tech support.

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So such women are structurally dependent on medical interventions to keep their bodies free from the rigours and long-term obligations of pregnancy, childbirth and dependent children. In other words: for AWFLs overall, abortion really is an existential issue. And making the midterms a referendum on that issue appears to have paid off. For suburban women, and indeed the electorate overall, it seems gas prices remain some way downstream of the tech-enabled reproductive “freedom”that knowledge-class Clinton feminists routinely frame as a precondition for personhood as such.

But it remains the case that material sex differences continue to matter a great deal among (for example) manual workers, mothers, athletes and incarcerated women — just as gas prices and other material pressures can often rank higher than abstract questions of “rights” — something that becomes more pressing the further you go down the socioeconomic hierarchy. We can guess at some of the emerging tensions in news that married men and women as well as unmarried men broke Republican – but unmarried women swung the other way by a whopping 37%. These fissures are not going to go away.

For now, the coalition between Clinton feminism, Virtual class interests, and the American electorate seems to be holding up, albeit with some creaking. But for how long? For “progress”, understood as the march of technology, has losers as well as winners. And when “progress” is routinely conflated with “feminism”, you can expect groups who aren’t doing so well under its auspices to take this at face value too – and blame feminists for their suffering. I can see no possible direction for this to take save a backlash that will likely spill far beyond the class at whom it’s really directed.

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A few days, ago, answering the question about women’s rights and gas prices, one young woman said: “Everything in the world has got significantly worse since we gave women the right to vote. So I honestly think we should just lower gas prices.”

Perhaps this is just one voice. But perhaps it isn’t. If, as I fear, we’re just barely into the foothills of a new class war, and with it a burgeoning sex war, we can expect a great deal more of this from those ranged against the progressives.

Plenty of us – including plenty of knowledge-class women – don’t feel much sympathy for the lawn-sign political programme. But save on the fringes, few of us have any great wish to live through a vicious misogynistic backlash either. Feminists in this uncomfortable position urgently need a new language to describe and defend women’s interests outside AWFL feminism. If we don’t find it, I worry that in due course, political polarisation really will make us choose between gas prices and women’s rights.