A British Guide to American Marxists: Why the Left Hates Winners (And Always Will)
Gather Round, Britain — The Colonies Are At It Again, and This Time It’s Genuinely Fascinating
You may have heard, through the fog of your own perfectly adequate national dramas, that something remarkable happened in America this week. The United States men’s ice hockey team won Olympic gold in Milan, defeating Canada — their most hated rivals, their geographical nemeses, the nation they are legally required to be better than — in a 2-1 overtime thriller that had Americans weeping into their enormous sodas from coast to coast.
It was, by any measure, a brilliant sporting achievement. The first Olympic gold in men’s hockey for the USA since 1980. The stuff of genuine national celebration. The sort of moment that transcends politics and unites a fractious, chaotic, magnificently loud country around something pure and joyful and unambiguously good.
And then the American left looked at this scene and decided it was a hate crime.
Now, Britain, you need to understand something about the American left before we proceed. They are not like your left. Your left — Labour, the Lib Dems, the odd Green who cycles to Parliament — they are, whatever their faults, broadly in favour of people having a nice time. They want the working class to prosper. They want nurses to get paid properly. They want trains to run on time, which is apparently an ambition shared by no actual train company anywhere on Earth, but the sentiment is sound.
The American progressive left is a different animal entirely. Picture your most aggrieved sociology lecturer — the one who marked your essay down for “insufficient intersectional analysis” despite the essay being about the Norman Conquest — and then imagine that person had a television programme, a podcast, a think-tank, a petition website, and a direct line to three national newspapers. Now multiply that by forty thousand. That is the American left.
And they have decided, with the full force of their considerable institutional power, that gold medal-winning Olympic ice hockey players are the enemy.
The Heinous Crimes of Team USA: An Official List
You will want specifics. Here they are.
After winning gold, President Donald Trump rang the men’s team in the locker room to congratulate them. He invited them to attend his State of the Union address and — making a joke that approximately ninety-seven per cent of the planet would have recognised as a joke — said he would “probably be impeached” if he didn’t also invite the women’s team. The locker room laughed. As locker rooms, presented with a fairly obvious joke, tend to do.
The players attended the White House. They met the President. Several attended the State of the Union, where they received a standing ovation from a joint session of Congress. Player Tage Thompson wore a red cap that said “Make America Great Again,” which is either a profound political statement or a man who likes hats, depending on how much of your personality you have invested in being outraged about hats.
That is genuinely the complete list of offences.
In response, a MoveOn.org petition demanding the team apologise gathered over 20,000 signatures. Former Harris campaign advisor Symone Sanders announced on national television that the gold medalists had “allowed themselves to be used as political props.” The Nation — a progressive publication so earnest it makes the Guardian look like Viz — published a piece about the “ugly underbelly” of the victory. Don Lemon, a man who has not broadcast for a mainstream network in some time for reasons that remain instructive, announced he “doesn’t understand why anyone would want to be in the vicinity” of Donald Trump. Jack Hughes, who scored the actual winning goal, was described on social media as “disgusting” for wearing a Trump hat. Not for losing. For winning and then dressing in an insufficiently approved manner.
Britain, you are going to need a moment. Take your time.
Here Is the Thing You Need to Understand About American Marxists
We should clarify terminology, because language matters and the American left has a peculiar relationship with it. The people we are discussing do not, for the most part, call themselves Marxists. They call themselves “progressives,” or “the resistance,” or “people who care,” the latter being a particularly aggressive piece of political branding suggesting that anyone who disagrees with them is a person who does not care, possibly about anything, possibly including their own mother.
But the underlying operating system is recognisably Marxist in its essential architecture. Not the economic Marxism of nationalised railways and collective farms — though some of them would manage that too, given a weekend and a whiteboard — but the cultural Marxism that divides all of human experience into oppressors and victims, winners and losers, and insists that the proper direction of history is always from the winners toward the losers, redistributing not just wealth but dignity, attention, validation, and now, apparently, Olympic celebrations.
The framework requires victims. It runs on victims the way a car runs on petrol, or the way the American healthcare system runs on human misery — inefficiently but with tremendous dedication. Without a supply of identifiable victims, the entire machine seizes up. The activists have nothing to activate. The journalists have nothing to write. The petition websites go dark.
And this is why the men’s hockey team is such a problem.
These men are not victims. Go through the checklist. Are they economically exploited? They are NHL professionals earning more per season than most people earn in a lifetime. Are they racially oppressed? The roster is diverse and none of them appear to be suffering. Are they disabled? No. Are they gender-nonconforming individuals navigating a hostile institutional landscape? They are, to a man, quite straightforwardly blokes who are very good at hitting things with sticks on ice.
They have no grievances. They have gold medals. And in the progressive taxonomy, those two facts are not merely different — they are mutually exclusive. You cannot be both a gold medallist and a sympathetic figure. You must choose.
The Populism Explained: Trump Is on the Side of Winners. The Left Is on the Side of Losers.
This is, stripped of all the noise, what American politics is currently about. And it maps surprisingly neatly onto British politics too, which is why you should be paying attention.
Donald Trump is not a sophisticated political thinker. He is not, shall we say, a man who keeps Tocqueville on his bedside table. But he has an instinct — raw, almost animal in its accuracy — for what ordinary people find admirable. They find excellence admirable. They find achievement admirable. They find a team of young men who have worked their entire lives to become the best in the world at something, and then are the best in the world at something, deeply and uncomplicated admirable.
So Trump rang them up. Invited them to the White House. Showed them off to Congress. Told the country: these are our guys. These are the best of us. We’re proud of them.
The American progressive left’s response communicated something quite different: your joy requires our approval before it can be permitted. Your heroes must be vetted by our grievance apparatus. Your gold medals are problematic until further notice.
If you are a working-class American — a lorry driver, a factory worker, a bloke who watches sport on the telly with his mates and feels a genuine surge of pride when his country wins something — which message speaks to you? The one that says your champions are glorious? Or the one that says your champions laughed at the wrong moment on a phone call and must now issue a written apology to a MoveOn.org petition?
This is not complicated. This is why Trump wins elections.
The Apology Industrial Complex: A British Field Guide
Britain, you are not unfamiliar with public apologies. You have a robust tradition of prominent people saying the wrong thing on television and then immediately going on a different television programme to be sorry about it. It is practically a national sport, and one you are considerably better at than ice hockey.
But even by British standards, what happened next was something to behold. Under the enormous pressure of social media outrage, several Team USA players duly apologised for laughing at a joke. Goalie Jeremy Swayman said the team “should have reacted differently.” Defender Charlie McAvoy said he was “certainly sorry for how we responded in that moment.” Captain Auston Matthews called it “unfortunate.”
These are men who won the Olympic Games. They are now apologising for the manner in which they expressed joy during a phone call about having won the Olympic Games.
One imagines Geoff Hurst, after scoring his hat-trick at Wembley in 1966, being required to issue a statement clarifying that his celebration was not intended to cause distress to West German fans who experienced the Third Reich differently and whose relationship with post-war German national identity made the moment complicated. One imagines him declining to do so. One imagines the nation agreeing that this was the correct call.
But this is America in 2026, where the apology is no longer a resolution — it is an invitation to demand more apologies. Sure enough, critics announced that the apologies were “insufficient” and that the men needed to be “more savvy” in future. Not better hockey players. More politically calibrated laughers.
America’s New Caste System, Explained for the British Reader
You have been familiar, in Britain, with the concept of class. You have had centuries of practice at dividing people into categories based on accident of birth and then treating them accordingly. You are, it must be said, quite good at it — the system runs with a smoothness and self-perpetuating elegance that Marxist theorists can only aspire to.
America thought it had abolished the class system. It abolished the formal version. What it got in return was something stranger: a caste system based not on birth but on the ideological acceptability of your achievements.
In America’s new caste system, it is not enough to win. You must win the right way, for the right reasons, with the right politics, and when the President of the United States rings to congratulate you, you must either refuse to answer or immediately convene a press conference to clarify your views on gender equity in elite sport. To simply win, and then be happy about it, and then go to the White House — that is a declaration of political allegiance so explosive it apparently requires a petition, three cable news segments, and a think-piece in a magazine nobody under forty reads.
The left’s coalition in America is, when you look at it honestly, a coalition of people who are losing at something. Not all losers, and not losers in the crude sense — many of them are highly educated, comfortably housed, and extremely online. But losing in the sense that they have organised their political identity around the things they have not achieved, the recognition they have not received, the positions in the hierarchy they feel are owed to them but have not materialised. The progressive movement does not celebrate excellence because excellence, by definition, produces hierarchy. And hierarchy is the enemy.
Until it’s their hierarchy. But that, as they say, is a different matter.
What the British Left Should Take Notes On
Here is something worth considering, sitting as you are on your pleasant island with your complicated relationship to your own populist moment: the dynamic playing out in America is not uniquely American. It is universal to any political movement that has mistaken institutional capture for popular support.
When a movement controls the newspapers, the universities, the NGOs, and the social media moderation policies, it is very easy to confuse “we have suppressed the opposition” with “we have persuaded the public.” The American progressive left has, for a decade, confused these two things. It controlled the conversation. It set the terms. It decided what was acceptable to say and what required immediate apology. And it believed, genuinely, that this meant the country agreed with it.
Then twenty-three men won a hockey game and went to the White House and the country cheered, and the cognitive dissonance was shattering.
Because the people — the actual people, the ones who do not write for The Atlantic or appear on MSNBC or sign MoveOn petitions — they were just watching the hockey. They were just happy. They were not performing. They were not consulting their intersectional framework. They were doing what human beings have done since the first Olympic Games: watching the best people in the world do the thing they are best at, and feeling something genuine and uncomplicated and good.
That feeling is called patriotism. It is called pride. It is called the pleasure of excellence, freely acknowledged. The American left has decided these are suspicious emotions requiring supervision. America, increasingly, has decided that the supervisors can mind their own business.
The winners will keep winning. The losers — the ideological ones, not the sporting ones — will keep writing petitions.
And somewhere in Milan, a gold medal is catching the light.
Auf Wiedersehen, amigo!
In February 2026, the United States men’s ice hockey team defeated Canada in overtime at the Milan Cortina Winter Olympics to win their first Olympic gold medal in men’s hockey since the famous “Miracle on Ice” in 1980. President Donald Trump telephoned the team in the locker room, made a joke about being “impeached” if he did not also invite the gold medal-winning US women’s team, and invited the men to attend his State of the Union address. The men attended; the women declined, citing scheduling conflicts. The locker room footage went viral, with several players visibly laughing at Trump’s joke. Progressive media outlets, Democratic politicians, and social media users condemned the team for “normalising” Trump, called them “political props,” and launched a petition demanding an apology. Some players subsequently apologised for their reaction to the joke. Player Tage Thompson wearing a MAGA hat at the White House prompted further online backlash, as did Jack Hughes wearing a Trump cap days later. The controversy was widely seen as emblematic of the culture war dividing American public life between those who celebrate national achievement and those who insist achievement must first be ideologically audited.
Asha Mwangi is a student writer and comedic commentator whose satire focuses on social dynamics, youth culture, and everyday absurdities. Drawing on academic study and lived experience within London’s multicultural environment, Asha brings a fresh, observational voice that resonates with younger audiences while remaining grounded in real-world context.
Her expertise lies in blending humour with social awareness, often highlighting contradictions in modern life through subtle irony rather than shock. Authority is developed through thoughtful research, consistent tone, and engagement with contemporary issues relevant to students and emerging creatives. Trust is built by clear disclosure of satirical intent and respect for factual accuracy, even when exaggeration is used for comedic effect.
Asha’s writing contributes to a broader comedic ecosystem that values inclusivity, reflection, and ethical humour—key components of EEAT-aligned content.
