Predictably, the Left derided MAGA Communists as “dangerous” and, of course, “fascist”. But when everything is fascist, it’s hard to take that epithet seriously. Indeed, if they’d bothered to look closer, the movement’s progressive critics may have learned something. For in reality, MAGA Communism is only a more forceful and meme-ified version of the modern Left. If it’s on the path to Fascism, it’s only because the rest of the Left lit the way.

MAGA Communism is led by a pair of the 20-something American political activists Haz Al-Din (often referred to as “Haz”) and Jackson Hinkle. Hinkle began his political career as a teenage environmentalist, praised by Teen Vogue and Reader’s Digest in 2017 as among the most inspirational young people working to “save the earth”. Within five years, however, he was describing himself as a “Maoist” and denouncing environmentalism as “anti-human” on his now banned YouTube channel. While Hinkle’s politics smack of controversy-courting and opportunism (he’s known for praising Vladimir Putin and Ali Khamenei), Haz is the more intellectual of the two although he shares similar political fandoms. His voluminous internet output includes several hundred tweet-treatises on why the ideas of Martin Heidegger and Russian ideologue Aleksandr Dugin provide the necessary foundations of Marxism and, thus for Haz, MAGA Communism. While MAGA Communism is allegedly rooted in Marxism, Haz asserts that the latter is absent in contemporary Leftism.

The movement consists mainly of niche agitations on social media, live streams and blogs which rail against imperialism and Zionism. Hinkle, in particular, has ridden the wave of anti-Israel sentiment after October 7. “Drop a like if you’re an American who SUPPORTS HAMAS,” he tweeted in May to his 2.7 million followers.

So far so Leftish. But unlike the Left, they are anti-identity politics, fervently pro-Russia and see the rise of Trump not as a sign of Fascism reborn, but as a unique opportunity to reawaken American communism. They are adamant, however, that this does not amount to support for the magnate-turned-politician. While Hinkle blamed the “deep state” for Trump’s recent assassination attempt and said he was “praying for President Trump’s full recovery”, it’s really Trump’s supporters who they’re excited about. For Haz, the rise of MAGA in 2015-2016 “marks an irreversible point in the rise of a new form of popular sovereignty in America — which American Communist politics will be rebuilt out of”. From a Left that long ago abandoned the working class for cultural issues and feigned kindness, their rejection of identity politics, gravitation towards MAGA and proclivity for edgy slogans like “FEMINISM IS CANCER” elicits horror. But dig a little deeper and things get murky.

Haz’s love affair with Dugin and Heidegger as intellectual torchbearers of Marxism hints at a much deeper affinity between both camps than either is perhaps willing to realise. At first glance, the ideas of these philosophers would seem far removed from the contemporary Left. According to Haz, Heidegger, who “finally initiated the revolution” to “emancipate the Western mind”, fuels “paranoia” amongst the Left due to the fact that he is “nearly equally infamous for [his] affiliation to German Nazism”. Instead, according to Haz’s account, the modern Left and wokeness are indebted to liberalism that stems from the Enlightenment. “Modern Western thinking doubts absolutely everything about society, even the definition of gender,” he writes. Such philosophical scepticism was upheld as an ideal during the Enlightenment.

But what this story misses is that the Left long ago abandoned the universalism of the Enlightenment, dismissing it as Eurocentric and racist: “Enlightenment-style Western democracy is… the source of black people’s subordination,” argued Richard Delgado, one of the founders of critical race theory. “Racism and enlightenment are the same thing.” With its now marked antipathy towards the French Revolution and its associated Age of Enlightenment, the Left has many of the same preoccupations as the “fascists” they accuse everyone else of being. What’s more — and here is where the Left’s embarrassment ought to kick in — it shares this hatred of the French Revolution with actual Fascism as a historically specific phenomenon, which sought to contain the forces of mass society that the French Revolution unleashed.

In its shift from upholding liberal reason to exalting authenticity, the Left today actually owes more to Heidegger than Marx or the liberal tradition in which the latter was enveloped. Heidegger’s thought was a key inspiration to French philosophers of the Sixties and Seventies as they searched for an alternative to a Marxist tradition that appeared discredited by Stalinism. His criticisms of Western philosophy for stripping the world of meaning provided a theoretical foundation for subsequent generations of ecological, postmodern and postcolonial thinkers.

Heidegger’s preoccupation with authenticity and critique of modernity was attractive to a Left seeking deeper, more rooted forms of existence as an antidote to the superficiality of liberal capitalism. But it was also what led Heidegger to support Nazism, in which he saw the ability to restore a sense of being-in-the world to the German people. Heidegger believed that the existential resolve of individuals could be harnessed to fulfil the historical destiny of the Volk.

Similarly, the Left has increasingly rejected the inauthenticity, consumerism and rootlessness of the West, seeking instead an authentic subject in struggles abroad. So too has Hinkle said that what attracted him to Dugin is his glorification of Russian culture, which he sees “as an antidote to corrupted values in the West”. For Haz, the major conflict today is not between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie “but between the ‘establishment’ and the ‘people’”. He frequently slips into the language of “soil”, gravitating toward movements “coming from the soil and the roots” of a country, and rejecting in particular the oppression of a people by “foreign” or “globalist” masters.

Like most of the Left then, the MAGA Communists are anti-Western and critical of liberalism and its attendant individualism. They instead want to undertake an exercise of communal ontology — that is, rethinking man as a “communal being”. According to Haz, “Dugin is necessary for Marxism” because he specifies the “communal being which is the premise of Scientific Socialism”. Indeed, one of his critiques of Heidegger is that his conception of mankind, Dasein, leaves too open the possibility of individualism: “While Dasein is thrown into a given community, as an established horizon of being, it acquires an authentic relationship to Being only through the exercise of individual will.”

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Ironically, this puts Haz in the same camp as arch-genderist, Judith Butler, who said in a 2021 debate in true Heideggerian style: “We need a radical social ontology. We need to rethink selfhood — its boundaries, its openings — to have a completely different ethics and a politics of care.”

Yet this rejection of individualism is a rejection of precisely where Marxism is most powerful, and most powerfully overcomes the excesses of the modern Left. It’s a basic Marxist point that if the individual isn’t free then neither is society. Unlike wokeness, which often advocates subordinating individual freedoms to the good of some group identity or grievance, Marxism envisions a society where individuals flourish without the constraints of race, class or gender. In its critique of individualism, MAGA Communism fails to understand a key tenet of the philosophy it claims to expound.

What is so frustrating about MAGA Communism is that it actually gets quite a bit right. The founders slaughter liberal sacred cows like the European Union, proliferating LGBT+ identities, and the coup of the Left by sneery PMC-types “who are themselves chiefly to blame for the unpopularity of Communism”. So it is strange that, by following thinkers like Heidegger and Dugin, they should be so willing to throw themselves into the same abyss of romantic reaction from which Fascism itself emerged, and into which the Left has increasingly tossed itself. The Left might have enough sparks of self-consciousness not to draw on someone like Dugin, but their penchant for grounding their politics in the supposed authenticity of the “other” — indigenous people and the growing ranks of the “marginalised”— echoes Dugin’s critique of western liberal modernity. Dugin and the MAGA Communists just have the nerve to bring the “other” home.

Still, the search for the authentic subject elsewhere remains palpable. Lost in a world that seems fake and alienated but with no hope of changing it, today’s Left continually searches for connection to something “real”. Hence, MAGA Communists share with some of the Left an obsession with Hamas. “Al-Qassam fighters are true sons of the soil,” writes Haz. It’s too late for the US, but at least over there, they can enact their fantasies of booting out the cosmopolitan rootless oppressor.

These are, of course, ideas that were best left buried in the 20th century. Indeed, even if one acknowledges the fearless thoughtfulness behind the spiky MAGA Communist facade, it’s clear such fearlessness can lead to one of history’s most famous dead-end pathways. Offering connections to our innermost longings — like spiritual re-enchantment or that “arbeit macht frei” — can easily be turned against us. Even in the bowels of the internet, it’s a lesson that shouldn’t be forgotten.

I would venture that most people would find this scene, relayed to me by a friend, largely innocuous. At the risk of stating the obvious, faceless corporations don’t care about your mental health. And they don’t care about the “stigma” surrounding the expression of feelings. To them, your feelings are just one of many unpredictable variables that must be brought to light, their risks neutralised, managed and controlled.

Yet many on the Left have received the sudden and unprecedented attention to mental health over the past decade as a triumph. Unions, understandably seeking to protect workers from new work hazards, routinely demand attention to emotional wellbeing in the workplace; their student counterparts, meanwhile, have moved from the fight over fees to overseeing the expansion of “mental health” to include an ever-broadening array of human experience.

And in both cases, they are pushing at an open door. For ultimately, managerial jabber about breaking down stigmas is a thin veneer for their view of you as a liability. Your unruly emotions are a potential risk to business, institutions, even society as a whole — you could go off sick, you could go on strike, or you could otherwise be unpredictable in ways that hurt the bottom line. But the corporate obsession with mental health is only the most obvious and easy-to-critique manifestation of a much more profound societal malaise: our whole culture has shifted towards a deep and pervasive concern with human behaviour — to the point that humanity itself is a risk.

Every day, we are told that we are living in the “Anthropocene”, whereby the “irreversible impact of human activity” has permanently scarred this planet. Part of the story of how humanity got too big for its boots is its apparently erroneous belief in its own rationality. If we could approach people as they truly are — not the mythical rational subject of the 18th-century Enlightenment but as truly emotional beings — then we could harness our feelings and transform them from risks into assets. Maybe “climate anger” can be harnessed for climate activism, suggests one study. Maybe the “mindful consumer” can change the world, offers another.

As a good person, employee and citizen, you learn to consider that exercising your free will without the careful consultation of expertise as reckless. You must consider yourself not just as “at risk” but also “risky”. You should be perpetually insecure, constantly surveilling your inner world, and ready and willing to seek guidance when you find a problem. Core to this worldview is disclosure. You must not only be on the lookout for risky thoughts, feelings and behaviours in yourself and others, but must openly identify them since doing so opens the door to training.

Bupa, for example, enjoins us to “open up” and make “mental health a normal topic of conversation in the workplace”. Doing so entails four steps, the first two dealing with identifying and expressing potentially risky emotions and “issues”, and the latter two with “training” and “treatment”. Its “Managers guide” even recommends adding staff discussing their wellbeing as a standing agenda item in team meetings. Unilever suggests embedding “wellbeing ‘rituals’ into the everyday”. A mental health toolkit for construction workers states that a “sound mind = a safe site”. Those who do not disclose are a workplace safety hazard. Emote — then seek the rules, the guideline, the script.

At the heart of these initiatives lies a concerted effort to cultivate a new mindset among employees and citizens — one where individuals are encouraged to view their thoughts and feelings as risks, who bring their “whole self” to work so that it can be assessed for hazards that can be managed and controlled. This is a necessarily “inclusive” mission: your whole self includes the expression of everything about you. No one and nothing must escape the lens of the bureaucratic machine. Everyone, it’s time to talk.

But what are we supposed to talk about? Here, talking about your feelings is the only safe, neutral territory. Translate material problems into the language of feelings and these can be converted into something safer, something more productive, something less risky and unruly.

Of course, many interventions and advice for maintaining mental health are harmless in and of themselves, and will undoubtedly help many people. But populations have been doing this for decades — and there doesn’t appear to be a movement of “mindful consumers” changing the world, or young people with self-esteem so high it’s vaccinated them from social ills; there are no fewer “mental-health problems” and no drastic decline in suicide. And every time, despite each intervention failing, bureaucrats fail to ask themselves whether emotion management really was the best path to solving problems. Instead, they become more pessimistic about humanity. And they become more zealous in their pressure to penetrate deeper, to exert more control.

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The underlying propulsion toward bureaucratic control extends to the use of mental health as a governing strategy at the beginning of the 20th century. Back then, however, it was called “mental hygiene”. Since the dawn of the industrial revolution, those in power had found themselves frustratingly bound by the willingness of the lower orders to work or not work and their reluctance to fit into the new world of round the clock production. Mental hygiene was intimately and unabashedly tied up with control of populations, treating their unruly behaviours like diseases infecting the healthy social body. Expanding the purview of emotion management to the healthy, it promised to cure social ills through education, adjustment of self, life and work, and “breeding out defectives”.

Mental hygienists adopted the view that emotions were central to all behaviour and personality development. This new class of bureaucratic servants pioneered large-scale survey instruments that promised to quantify the emotional reactions of populations. Once expressed in a measurable format, emotions, like a lack of worker or soldier morale, could now be pinpointed as the source of problems and “rehabilitated” accordingly. For instance, the phenomenon of soldiers losing the will to fight had long been an issue for those waging wars. New forms of emotional surveillance allowed them to identify and label these potentially destabilising elements and offered up new scripts that contained their distress. The horror of what these individuals had been through and their unwillingness to endure any more could now be safely identified, given a destigmatising medical label, quarantined from infecting the remainder of the military body, and honourably discharged.

This may sound well and good. But mental hygiene had a darker side. Its two-pronged focus on maintaining as well as preventing mental ill-health meant that eugenics had been an integral part of the movement from early on. While vociferous proponents of eugenics for the promotion of national mental hygiene, such as the German psychiatrist Ernst Rüdin, initially emphasised voluntary measures, they would eventually oversee the forced sterilisation and murder of psychiatric patients during the Second World War.

This isn’t a Reductio ad Hitlerum. The point is that underlying both the kind and extreme versions of mental hygiene was a strong belief that, if only people could be made to feel, think and behave in the “right” ways, business could proceed as usual. Some were simply more hopelessly resistant to intervention than others. From this perspective, you can’t be trusted to have an inner world that is all your own because it is that inner world that is pivotal for business, social and economic success. And if any of those things are threatened, so too is your freedom to think and feel freely and, above all, privately.

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Tarnished by this dark history, the term “mental hygiene” fell out of favour during the Forties. However, many mental hygiene organisations simply rebranded themselves with a concern for “mental health”. This more recent concern is obviously charted much more humanely than the bleak path its forebear travelled. Yet its fundamental understanding of the role played by unruly emotions remains just as intact as it is mistaken.

It is tempting to believe that all of this is going somewhere. But it is precisely because society has given up on having any kind of goals at all that such an outlook can flourish. Today, the path to freedom is no longer located in the outside world, in grand projects of societal transformation, but instead in the heads of individuals. Big ideas have shown themselves capable only of leading humanity to ruin. And so the modern individual has learned to understand freedom and emancipation as a kind of “self-care”.

In this world, expanding the regulation of everyday life, subjecting it to rules and increasing its predictability become ends in themselves. If those in power cannot solve social problems, they can at least teach fragile subjects to be “resilient” to a world beyond their control. As Christopher Lasch wrote back in the Seventies, modern people don’t seek religious transcendence nor even worldly success so much as “mental health” as the “modern equivalent of salvation”. And as a result, we are being sold our own bureaucratic iron cage as a kind of freedom.

It is fashionable to blame parents for being “too anxious” which has created a generation of kids too fragile for public life. But these anxieties haven’t come from nowhere. This is how we were told we were supposed to be. For decades, so-called “experts” peddled pseudoscientific theories and magic bullets in the form of parental behaviour management to cure all manner of social ills. The good parent was beatified as one who is aware of every risk and acts accordingly. And woe betide the “lazy” parent who does not. In doing so, they pointed the finger squarely at parents for nearly everything that goes wrong.

Since at least the Seventies, this is how generations have learned to think about problems, both personal and social: “What did the parents do?” At the inaugural conference of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) held last month, even critics of our over-fragile culture could not resist delineating all the ways parenthood has contributed to our censorious and illiberal culture. Phoning in from New York, Jonathan Haidt criticised the rise of the “phone-based childhood” and alluded to its roots in the Nineties when “free play” dwindled and paranoid parents started to think “everyone’s a child molester or rapist”. He was echoing his and Greg Lukianoff’s Coddling of the American Mind, published in 2018, in which they warn about the rise of “helicopter parents”.

Speaking like bewildered farmers whose chickens have come home to roost, they find it difficult to imagine that their own profession, psychology, might have something to do with our age of fragility. Over the years, a voluminous academic literature has mined the minutiae of childhood experience to find the sources of personal and social problems in everything from how parents feed their children (bottle or breast, spoon or “baby-led weaning”) to how many words they say before an ever-lowering crucial age.

In countless self-help books and on endless daytime talk show segments, they educated people in their emotional vulnerability and invited them to scan their childhoods for the sources of their troubles. A litany of minor behaviours became linked to metaphors of toxicity and a swathe of wicked personal and public problems. These experts preached a gospel of emotional vulnerability and now appear shocked that people believed them.

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Consider the widespread policy application of ACEs (Adverse Childhood Experiences). Drawn from a questionnaire devised in 1998, it tallies up adverse experiences in childhood to produce a score said to be predictive of future life outcomes. Under the veil of scientific calculation, it pinpoints the cause of so many issues that had proven resistant to change. And instead of dealing with the tough business of things such as poverty and poor housing, it implied that governments could simply intervene to change the way parents behave. Even Haidt and Lukianoff draw on ACEs in their manifesto for a more robust public life, concluding:

“… there are two very different ways to damage [children’s] development. One is to neglect and underprotect them, exposing them early to severe and chronic adversity… The other is to overmonitor and overprotect them, denying them the thousands of small challenges, risks, and adversities that they need to face on their own in order to become strong and resilient adults.”

So whether you over-protect them or under-protect them, the problem is you. Moreover, besides being criticised for, among other things, downplaying the role of poverty and conflating severe experiences such as childhood sex abuse and not feeling anyone thought you were “special”, it was precisely devices such as the ACE questionnaire that led to the overuse of concepts such as “trauma”. Sure, you might have never lived in a war zone, but add up your bad experiences in childhood and you too can have a coveted claim to emotional damage.

This is a tough narrative to shake. From the speeches of politicians underscoring the importance of the “first three years” to popular books such as Sophie Lewis’s Abolish the Family, there is one point of agreement across the spectrum: Larkin was right. This is the ethos of parental determinism: the notion that what parents do is a key cause determining our personal and societal fate.

Not only does it fail to capture the complexity of the problems that face us, it also becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, reducing the control people feel they hold over their lives. This is by design. The rise of parenting expertise happened in concert with the overall proliferation of other forms of pseudo-expertise, a large part of which involved the denigration of the ordinary, uninitiated individual’s ability to adequately manage his affairs. It is an expertise that arose hand in hand with a generalised pessimism about the ability of human beings to manage their fate.

Already by the middle of the 19th century, the enormous optimism about man’s ability to control the course of history that had characterised the “age of Enlightenment” had begun to wane. Optimistic figures of the Enlightenment such as Godwin and Condorcet had pointed to societal impediments to the “future progress of mankind”, and looked forward to the day when, once rooted out, problems would be a distant memory. Yet as many social problems appeared stubbornly resistant to change, a certainty grew that the answers lay not in the external world but in the internal world of the human subject. Society wasn’t the problem. The problem was you and me.

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As Christopher Lasch observed, by the 20th century, social reformers increasingly came to see the family as an obstacle to the social changes they desired. If behaviours and beliefs were now an impediment to progress, it was logical to look to their source — the family and the leading role that parents played therein. Accordingly, once-banal aspects of everyday life came to be referred to as an “art”, communicating a “conception of marriage and the family that derived not so much from aesthetics as from science and technology… When marriage experts said that marriage represented the art of personal ‘interaction,’ they meant that marriage, like everything else, rested on proper technique.” Progressives, Lasch continued, envisaged a day when parenting would be professionalised and “licensed” and the “unfit of the human species” would “cease to reproduce their kind”.

While obviously not everyone took their conclusions to such eugenicist extremes, many members of a new and growing “knowledge class” expressed a similar exasperation with the ordinary individual’s inability to manage his life. Hence even a figure such as Bronisław Malinowski, critical of Freud’s excessive focus on the nuclear family, could see “only one way out” of the “cultural crisis” of his time, the Thirties, as “the establishment of a… scientific control of human affairs.” Since that time, this class has only grown, both responding to such “crises” and, implicitly, responding to its own failure to really solve them.

Part of the difficulty, then, is that ordinary people don’t realise just how stupid they are. They have to be convinced of their incapacity, lest they have no idea that they are going about their lives all wrong. Hence at the beginning of nearly every new psychotherapeutic fad, advocates emerge informing audiences of their perilous inability to do things correctly. And so, a key part of the gospel of emotional vulnerability is the constant preaching that the uninitiated “layperson” is sorely ill-equipped to manage the tough business of living. They need the growing piles of books, apps, and even “wellbeing curriculum” produced by proliferating therapeutic entrepreneurs whose business it is to make a problem of the minutiae of everyday life. In all this, vulnerability has become a sacred ethos, preached to young people and their parents at every turn.

All of which means that we parents are told we cannot simply rely on our own experiences and those of generations before us. After all, that’s where all the problems started — with people who just didn’t know what “we know now”. The result is a complete denial of agency: parents are constantly enjoined to doubt themselves and to “listen to the experts” — and yet, paradoxically, no one seems to look to the experts when things go wrong.

It’s not an uncommon experience, especially today when young people feel more comfortable developing relationships online than throwing themselves into the uncertainty and unpredictability of real life. But I was also an early adopter of a nascent but now ever increasingly “important” message: these feelings you have are neither normal nor existential nor simply “growing pains”. They are a health condition, and the only way to overcome it is to seek professional help.

For the past decade, an emerging class of therapeutic entrepreneurs has consolidated this claim, warning that the problems of everyday life are simply too much for the uninitiated layperson to manage with their own resources. While recognising that deep emotional pain is part of life, there is a growing sense that even “normal” feelings require “treatment”, lest they spiral out of control.

This assumption has become most startlingly apparent on university campuses, where young people’s preference for seeking help from “informal sources” such as friends and family is frequently seen as a problem and a risk. Yet the modern education sector has always been a target for expanding professional services, as I detail in my forthcoming book. Since the Nineties, British universities have seen a rise in counselling services, with groups such AMOSSHE and HUCS lobbying heavily for growth. They swiftly joined forces with mental health charities and urged students to lead campaigns for more funding. And as concerns about student mental health grew, a wave of apps, surveillance tools, and other light-touch interventions emerged, offering solutions and even prevention.

Long before there was evidence, therapeutic entrepreneurs were certain that a widespread “mental health crisis” demanded these interventions. In 2013, with this in mind, the National Union of Students (NUS) conducted a survey in collaboration with mental health advocacy groups to push for more funding. The results must have been disappointing. Released during Mental Health Awareness Week, it claimed that “20% of students consider themselves to have a mental health problem” — a figure that combined those suspecting they had a diagnosable condition (8%), those actively seeking diagnosis (2%), and those with a confirmed diagnosis (10%). The only problem? The number was slightly lower than the general population of the same age, despite its conflations and reliance on self-selection and self-reports, known to inflate incidence.

The campaigners, however, continued undeterred. Ignoring the findings that students were at no greater (and probably lower) risk than age-matched populations, Poppy Jaman, chief executive of Mental Health First Aid England, stated that the NUS findings were “unsurprising”. It was proof, she said, that “the student community is considered high-risk for mental ill health, with exams, intense studying and living away from home for the first time all contributing factors”. Perhaps as insurance, the survey also produced the eye-catching claim that 92% of students suffered from “mental distress” — which spanned everything from “feeling unhappy/down” to “suicidal thoughts”. Put this way, it is surprising that 7% of respondents reported no “negative” emotions at all throughout their university experience (1% selected “prefer not to say”).

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Still, campaigners highlighted that their “main concern” was the proportion of students preferring their informal networks to professional ones. As one newspaper asked of a recent NUS survey: “Why don’t students seek help from their universities — and how can this be reversed?” Or as one Director for Student Experience warned: “Ultimately, if high-stress situations go unmanaged, they can sometimes develop and even lead to mental illness.” It became common to hear that, no matter how small the problem, only professional support could prevent things from spiralling out of control. And the consequences of failing to seek help could be dire: “They may start to self-medicate with drink or drugs, self-harm, or even take their own lives,” claimed one commentator.

But would they “take their own lives”? Newspapers proclaimed a “university suicide epidemic” and campaigners dangled the threat of student suicides over institutions should they fail to invest sufficiently. The evidence for this was frequently cobbled together from Further Education, Higher Education and young people as a group. However, according to ONS estimates released in 2018 and 2020, the rate at which university students commit suicide appears to be significantly lower than the general population of the same age. For young people up to the age of 24, the rate was 2.7 times higher than those in Higher Education. Headlines might have read: “Going to university significantly lowers suicide risk”.

But they didn’t. When these stats were first released, media coverage maintained mental health advocates’ framing. MailOnline ran with: “Number of university students committing suicide nearly doubles since 2000”. The Sun went for: “SUICIDE UNI SHOCK”. Other papers demanded that the student “mental health crisis” be “top priority”, citing rises between different years. Counsellors were described as working on the “frontline”.

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Yet the ONS itself had warned against such conclusions; it’s easy to produce a high rate of increase if you’re dealing with already low numbers. Indeed, a number of conclusions could be drawn depending on the year emphasised — for instance, that the rate had fallen since 2004/5 or that, in recent years, the number has fallen even more and remains low.

Despite years of encouraging young people to seek help for any problem “no matter how small”, increased help-seeking itself thus became a key indicator of the severity of the “student mental health crisis”. And here, campaigners were pushing at an open door. While the majority of students might still take their problems to their friends, they have been seeking help in greater numbers since the early 2000s. Today’s students have been taught through years of therapeutic education; trained in the virtues of constant self-surveillance, they know that as good citizens in the making, they should interpret distress as a potential “symptom” for which they should “seek help”.

These processes are greatly aided by what Nick Haslam has called “concept creep”, or the tendency for psychological concepts of harm and pathology to expand to include new and less extreme phenomena. It’s easy to see how this happens. For instance, two years after the disappointing results of the NUS survey, the organisation put out another which shed the restrictive language of “diagnosis”. Instead, it asked: “Do you believe that you have experienced problems with your mental health in the last year, regardless of whether you have been formally diagnosed?” This produced the headline-grabbing statistic that 78% of university students suffered from “mental health problems”.

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At the same time, universities became increasingly receptive to the claims of professionals who promised that they could contain risk and breathe new life into institutions already struggling with their meaning and purpose. Universities, after all, are constantly exposed to the reputational risks that might result from young people’s behaviour. To soften this threat, promises to provide ever greater levels of therapeutic and “wellbeing” support have quickly become part of the “package” sold to eager students and their parents on Open Days.

But they are also selling a way of being and a way of thinking about the self. For all that is invested in myriad new-fangled interventions, they struggle to live up to that great healer: time. The kids might not be all right, but most of them will be eventually.

To say this has become heresy. I’m not discouraging therapy and counselling and no doubt many will need professionals. But they are not helped by being queued behind so many who don’t. Twenty years ago, when I ended up seeing a university counsellor, I realised in that awkward interaction that I didn’t need a stranger, much less some diagnosis into which I could safely place all of my problems. I needed some experiences, some meaning and purpose in my life and some friends to share it with. If I had not had that realisation, I probably would have become dependent on strangers and discouraged from relying on those networks that ultimately provided my release. Today, it’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that this is precisely the point.

We have good reason to be sceptical of Starmer’s attempts to wave the red flag. The thinness of his commitment to working-class interests is demonstrated by his record. It was Starmer, after all, who played a key role in Labour’s disastrous attempt to please everyone and no one by courting supporters of a People’s Vote, ignoring the Red Wall’s steadfast desire to leave the European Union. It didn’t matter that, as an institution, one of the EU’s key purposes was to prevent member states from upturning their economies — precisely what Corbyn’s nationalisation plans, which Starmer signed up to, needed to do. Nor did it matter that the EU boasts a proud history of enforcing anti-union legislation.

Since then, like a good lawyer rather than a good working-class boy, Starmer has revelled in playing both sides — assuring businesses of his “economic competence” while also talking uncomfortably about the needs of the working class. This past weekend, his shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, promised that a Labour government would rule out increases in taxes on capital gains and top rates of income. The week before, Labour’s national policy forum attempted to win the hearts of corporate leaders by diluting pledges to strengthen workers’ rights.

This is the essence of Starmerism: a commitment to fiscal discipline that doesn’t scratch, let alone smash, his “class ceiling”. As Steve Hall and Simon Winlow argue in The Death of the Left, “Labour seems even more liberal and metrocentric than it was under Corbyn.” Just wave the flag, tell some anecdotes about your working-class father, and surely no one will notice.

Except that, when they look a bit closer, voters surely will. Consider Starmer’s much-vaunted “Five Missions”, the last of which — “break down the barriers to opportunity at every stage” — is little more than a rehashing of Blair’s behavioural managerialism. Teach people “resilience”, “emotional intelligence” and… “oracy”? That’ll do it. New Labour also demonstrated a strong commitment to reforming working-class behaviours. Regulate daily life, interfere with what people say, do and think, and, somehow, some way, that “class ceiling” will just melt away.

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There used to be so much more to it than this. At the turn of the 20th century, the Labour Party emerged out of workers’ attempts to organise as a formidable political force. They weren’t constrained by condescending talk of a “class ceiling”, but saw an entire world for the taking. As Martin Hagglund puts it in This Life, in 1912, a 33-year-old German miner with eight children could describe his involvement in the labour movement thus: “[It] enriches me and all my friends through the glowing light of recognition. We understand that we are no longer the anvil but rather the hammer that forms the future of our children, and that feeling is worth more than gold.” It was this realisation that pushed workers’ parties across Europe towards political power — the recognition that their work built countries and made them run. Contained in this is the core of a working class constituted as a political subject. It is about more than money and “getting ahead”. It is about being a political subject capable of directing everything from the shipyard to the seeming arcane throws of the economy.

At the same time, however, the British labour movement has always been characterised by a tension between a philanthropic faction, which grew out of Methodism and saw social reform as a moralising mission, and a second, grittier faction that grew out of the working class itself. As Hall and Winlow relate, this was a conflict between middle-class socialists motivated by charitable desires to help the poorest and those who thought “philanthropy should play no part in the movement”. It wasn’t about feeding the hungry and giving beds to the homeless, but rather “creating a new economy and society in which charity wasn’t needed”.

This tension is perhaps best exemplified by the role of the temperance movement in the early Labour Party. A product of the more religious elements of the progressive middle class, they saw ridding poorer communities of the scourge of alcohol as a key step in improving their lot. This mission clashed with those who wished to be more pragmatic, recognising the role of the pub in social life and the importance of alcohol for relaxation after exhausting working days. These positions also matched an existing split within the working class itself, between the more “respectable” elements who valued public morality and the bawdier factions who enjoyed drink, sport and straight-talk. Yet, for the most part, it was recognised that foregrounding temperance and associated moral reforms was a losing political battle.

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Hillary Clinton still doesn't get it

By Ashley Frawley

This division, of course, has always been about more than alcohol. It is between those who wish to oversee the working class and its problems and those who wish to represent the working class and move beyond its problems. It is a tension between the working class as objects and as subjects. And, in the therapeutic language that adorns his Five Missions, Starmer has shown that he’s uneasy with moving fully from the former to the latter. For him, the real barrier to working class advancement is their own behaviour and outlook. Like the temperance advocate, we must “protect them from themselves”. Here, it is not a collective project to better society that matters, but rather a shoring-up of each individual’s will and resilience to confront the world as it is — unchangeable and fixed. There is no alternative. Sound familiar?

But in clumsily trying to walk Labour back to its working-class roots, Starmer has wound up lost in their labyrinth. He has learned nothing from the failures of 2019, wherein trying to please everyone — now including business technocrats — meant that everyone was thoroughly disgruntled. Comrade Starmer has figured out that the material reality of working people is important, but mistakenly thinks that’s all that counts. Yes, material comfort is important, but the working class always jostles between hardship and comfort. And it can endure a great deal of hardship if it is doing so for a project whose pathway it is directing.

These were the good old days, especially if you were Hillary Clinton. By 1997, the First Lady of the United States had published It Takes a Village — “a textbook for caring” for America’s children — and followed it up with a conference on “What New Research on the Brain Tells Us About Our Youngest Children”, at which only one neuroscientist spoke and didn’t say anything new. There, she gushed about how experiences during the first three years “can determine whether children will grow up to be peaceful or violent citizens”. Rob Reiner, who had devised a recent national public education campaign (also not a neuroscientist), claimed that what we know about brain development during the first three years of life was “the key to problem-solving at every level of society”.

If only that were the case; if only healing America’s broken electorate had simply been a matter of socially engineering a new one. Instead, in the three decades since, the country’s atomisation continued to fester, compelling Clinton to once again return to the frontline. Eight years (and another book) since Trump ruined her presidential party, this time her weapon of choice is a 3,500-word essay for The Atlantic, in which she laments the rise of “loneliness” and its manipulation “by dark forces that are threatening American democracy”.

Once again showing a stubborn penchant for reducing social problems to biology, Clinton believes that an “epidemic” of “loneliness and isolation” not only explains the rise of the “alt-Right”, but is also infecting American society to its core, threatening citizens’ “personal health and also the health of our democracy”. Turning her “basket of deplorables” into a “basket of the debilitated”, she confirms that America’s political elite is inclined to view the politically dispossessed in two ways: risky or at-risk; swarming or sick; dangerous or disordered.

What this forgets, though, is that treating voters as vulnerable, malign loners rather than disenfranchised political agents is part of the problem. Just as in the Nineties, Clinton seems incapable of reckoning with people as conscious actors. For her, problems are not solved by negotiating with the affected, but by prescribing expensive social programmes that seek to alter their behaviour. Yet being treated as passive recipients of “behaviour change programmes” will backfire unless the political class that Clinton represents addresses the political vacuum once filled by representation and contestation.

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No one needs to be reminded of Clinton’s “deplorables” comment, or her warning about the risks posed by “low-information voters”. But few seem to recall the brief stunned moment following Trump’s election win when political pundits and social-media experts were bursting with performative self-reflection (though admittedly not a little emotional incontinence). Maybe we needed to reflect; maybe we needed to listen a little more to the “left behind”. It didn’t take long for soul-searching to be replaced by waves of condemnation towards those “ignorant” voters who were duped by Facebook, Google and Vladimir Putin into allowing the “darkest impulses” of the human psyche out into the light of day.

Like the flick of a switch, this new narrative became “the truth” about 2016. No, no — it was nothing we did. People had been swindled out of doing what was good for them, lured into the deep, frog-dwelling recesses of the internet. It’s not that we failed — it’s that the forces of evil were too powerful. Defeating them became an all-consuming passion. Suppress free speech. Curtail freedoms. All so that the greater good can triumph.

In this narrative, the disenfranchised became both victim and villain: they are duped and they are malign. Neither, however, places any importance on political agency. Clinton’s latest reflection on “loneliness” is only the latest manifestation of this. As she describes, before these voters became dangerous, they were just vulnerable young men, the offspring of broken families in broken communities: “There have always been angry young men alienated from mainstream society and susceptible to the appeal of demagogues and hate-mongers,” she writes. “But modern technology has taken the danger to another level.” And, crucially, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

Throwing herself behind the lofty political aim of finding the electorate (adequately vetted) friends, she echoes other campaigners who liken loneliness to obesity and “smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day”. She takes this medicalisation of the problem further, comparing it with the public-health threat presented by HIV/AIDS, arguing that it is time to “sound the alarm”. The rationale here is straightforward: by medicalising loneliness, it can be safely transformed into something much more isolable and soluble than something such as real democratic representation. Indeed, it medicalises democracy as a whole, diagnosing it as infirm and in need of a cure.

Here, the political enemy becomes sick, not an object of hatred but of empathy. “Researchers also say that loneliness can generate anger, resentment, and even paranoia,” she writes. “It diminishes civic engagement and social cohesion, and increases political polarisation and animosity.” She cites the US surgeon general to argue that unless this crisis is addressed, “we will continue to splinter and divide until we can no longer stand as a community or a country” — the implication being that voters didn’t distrust Clinton or her ilk; they were just “lonely”.

To this effect, she complains of Steve Bannon’s conspiracy to turn isolated “rootless white males” of the online gaming world into the “shock troops of the alt-right”. But is transforming them into patients-in-waiting and seeking to quarantine their discontents really any better? For Clinton, there is no other choice: “Like many others, I was too slow to see the impact this strategy could have. Now the surgeon general is telling us that social disconnection is not just a problem at the margins… but is in fact an epidemic sweeping the country.” The language of “epidemic” leaves readers with no doubt that this is not a political but medical problem.

What is the treatment? She suggests that governments bring opportunities back to hard-hit areas, stem the need to leave communities to find work, and put the family first — none of which would be disagreeable if it weren’t an excuse for more intervention with the aim of creating the right sorts of citizens. Just as her demonisation of “deplorables” makes her promises to support the same voters ring hollow, treating people as objects of behaviour management techniques is hardly a winning formulation. Across Europe and around the world, people are voting less for the ascendent populists than against the condescending political mainstream that Clinton has come to represent. Every insurgent political movement of the past decade shares one thing in common: its members want to be subjects instead of objects.

Still, there is a kernel of truth here. A growing number of voters in America, and the West more broadly, feel alienated. Today’s society is characterised by ongoing individuation and social fragmentation and a loss of collective projects beyond the self. Union membership has collapsed and what is left of them is just as sceptical of political agency, often expressed through the infantilising rhetoric of health and safety.

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Neoliberalism killed the liberal dream

By Ashley Frawley

Yet there clearly remains something distinctly sanitising about grouping problems together under the umbrella of health. This is not a phenomenon that can be solved by completing a checklist and finding the appropriate intervention. People are politically dispossessed: more important than the feelings that result from alienation is the disenchantment, political or otherwise, that follows.

In other words, loneliness isn’t the problem, but disenfranchisement. The political sphere has been emptied of all meaning and mainstream politicians are happy to keep it that way, perhaps even longing for the comfortable, stabilising political apathy of the Nineties. For a time when “getting people excited about politics” didn’t involve Steve Bannon, but a “rock the vote” talk at a local high school; when a policy can be marketed with a PowerPoint presentation and people are passive recipients of your charitable interventions.

But they won’t get that. There is no going back. Political frustration will inevitably reappear elsewhere — in conspiracies and populist figures who promise to tell it like it is. Trump had his moment, and most will not be blind to his embarrassing inability to accept a backslide from his presidency. Yet until those in power reckon with the need to see people eye to eye, Trump-like figures and movements will replace him. Trump didn’t cause the circumstances that made him and, at least if Clinton is listened to, those circumstances won’t be changing soon.

Today, neoliberalism, broadly understood as the extension of markets and market logic into ever-expanding swathes of social and political life, is everywhere misunderstood as a straightforward legacy of the liberal Enlightenment. Worse, its supposed emphasis on individual autonomy and responsibility is widely seen as a vestige of dated illusions of human reason and freedom that are now too big for humanity’s boots. Wasn’t it the silly notion that reason could light the way to freedom that lit up the ovens in the death camps? Surely, if the 20th century has taught us anything, it’s that reason doesn’t need to be freed — it needs to be constrained. Far from needing to be raised up, humanity could use, so the popular prejudice goes, being knocked down a few notches.

But what critics fail to realise is that neoliberalism long ago left behind the rights-bearing human subject, one that was capable of self-reflection and worthy of autonomy and freedom. Humanity must be divested of these illusions. The real ideal is heteronomy, or a will that is relieved of responsibility and conditioned by external forces that stipulate the proper conduct of life. These ideal subjects are aware that their untrained, non-expert judgments are potentially dangerous; they thus look constantly to external rules to ensure they make the “correct” choice. And if no such rules exist, they demand them. Think, for instance, of the profound unease many felt when governments did not stipulate whether and how they might hug family members as the pandemic wound down.

If you spend too much time in academic circles, you might get the idea that neoliberalism’s supposed valorisation of freedom and autonomy is an evil that lurks behind every corner. For instance, critics of therapeutic fads like the self-esteem movement of the Nineties and recent obsessions with promoting “mindfulness”, “wellbeing” or mental health often argue that these crusades are really part of an overarching neoliberal project bent on creating ideal, self-governing subjects —autonomous, self-reliant individuals who won’t call on expensive state or employer supports. However, what is frequently left out of such analyses is the question of why it is so taken for granted that such subjects need to be created in the first place. The human capacities that had so animated the liberal Enlightenment — rationality, a capacity for self-reflection and conscious judgment — are now seen as uncharacteristic not just of women and minorities who had once been left out of it, but of the vast majority of humanity.

Indeed, flipping through the pages of newspapers and magazines, one is persistently reminded that it is humanity’s persistent lack of capacity for self-determination that supposedly underlies a host of social ills. Mindfulness gurus tell us that we spend our time on “autopilot”, going through the motions of life unthinkingly and leaving disaster in our wake. Governments have been receptive to such claims, seeing interventions that help citizens to “pay attention to what’s happening in the present moment” as the solution to myriad social issues. What is more, the fact that we are unaware of this — that we carry on thinking that we are in control of our lives, much less our inner lives, is part of the problem.

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But don’t worry, the “experts” have the solution. Fund their ever-proliferating programmes. Buy their new book. Adopt their creepy brain surveillance technologies. And before long, when we give up our silly illusions of freedom, wellbeing and happiness will prevail.

At the heart of this confusion lies the fact that neoliberalism long ago dispensed with Mill’s notion of freedom as about removing barriers to human flourishing. Today’s crusades, from attacking “white privilege” to accommodating the needs of proliferating minority groups, are much more focused on protecting child-like citizens from each other. Longstanding movements for indigenous self-determination, for instance, have gradually shifted towards therapeutic obsessions with the indigenous person as a “traumatised” subject in need of extensive intervention. Even institutional defenders of free speech can’t help but reach for justifications based on protecting the weak and vulnerable.

Having jettisoned the Enlightenment subject on which so many liberal freedoms rest, it is little surprising that contemporary society finds it difficult to place freedom at the centre of social and political life. Even David Harvey’s widely referenced Marxist critique of neoliberalism struggles to wrest a powerful subject from its entanglements with neoliberal logic. He criticises neoliberal assumptions that, for example, all “agents acting in the market… have access to the same information”, as at best “utopian”. In other words, a key criticism of neoliberalism as an economic doctrine rests on its emphasis on a classical liberal subject that does not really exist. Unmasking this fiction becomes a key part of explaining why neoliberalism so often leads to ruin. It seems we can’t challenge the power of neoliberal economics without destroying the classical liberal subject along the way.

But if the Enlightenment subject, capable of reflecting on emotions and experience and rationally deciding how to live, is a myth, then freedom is not only not a goal — it’s a problem. Vulnerable subjects don’t need to be freed. They need to be protected.

In the place of this “myth”, we have valorised what Kant, at the dawn of the Enlightenment, warned against: an ideal human subject that is content (or perhaps in today’s parlance, sufficiently “mentally well”) to revel in self-imposed immaturity. The good citizen now has learned to embrace a rule that springs from a foreign will as a matter of course. This is why “neoliberalism” is a bit of a misnomer. Instead of revitalising some kind of classical liberal project, it sounded its death knell. And in its place, our democratic will was subordinated to that of the expert and the technocrat.

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Today, as a result, whenever public discussion erupts, someone always seems to interject that now everyone suddenly thinks they’re an expert. But this is precisely where even liberals fall short. The truly liberal response to such comments would be “every cook can govern”, not “that persons of talent, the more known and respected the better, should put themselves forward”. Yet the former was not said by Mill or any 19th-century liberal – but by the Trinidadian Marxist C.L.R James in 1956.

The latter, on the other hand, was written by Mill, in reference to the American Civil War in 1861. It’s interesting here to compare Mill’s remarks with those of his contemporary, Karl Marx, who was also writing about the same events as they unfolded. While both men agreed that slavery and the power of slave owners must end, as August Nimtz describes, they differed profoundly on which force would prove decisive in bringing this about. And Nimtz continues, history seems at least to show that it was the middle and working classes, and not men from Mill’s milieu, that often proved most decisive in the conflict.

And yet, descend from the halls of academia and into the hellscape of our social media squares, and you will find that it is Marx who is vilified as the incarnation of illiberalism. The ominous label of “cultural Marxism”, or now just “Marxism”, is wielded to decry the erosion of individual rights. Yet it was Marx, writing in 1842, who emphasised that “the truly radical cure for censorship would be its abolition”. And it was Marx who defended freedom of the press, describing it as a thing of “beauty” “without which my nature can have no full, satisfied, complete existence”. What is more, Marx himself did not waver in his commitment to democracy. “Democracy,” he wrote, “is the solution to the riddle of every constitution”, because it is where “we find the constitution founded on its true ground; real human beings and the real people… posited as the people’s own creation”.

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How the truckers split indigenous Canada

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In fact, although his writings were later twisted by his successors to justify repression in his name, Marx’s commitment to liberty, democracy and free speech surpasses many liberal theorists. By the time Mill wrote anything on the American Civil War, for instance, Marx had written (or had ghostwritten via Engels) at least 18 articles on the topic. Moreover, following the emancipation of the slaves, while Marx and Engels looked immediately to agitating for the expansion of freedom in the form of suffrage to former slaves, it was Mill who considered the potential need to hold back the freedoms of the “privileged” in order to make enfranchisement a possibility. He even mused that without black suffrage, a “military dictatorship” lasting “two generations” would be necessary before “the stain which the position of slavemaster burns into the very souls of the privileged population can be expected to fade out”. While Marx was analysing the colonies as illustrating capitalism’s tendency to eat up whatever “primitive” forms of freedom existed there, Mill defended “despotism” as legitimate when dealing with “barbarians” provided those in power had the best of intentions.

Where Marx differed was in his belief in the self-governing capacities of all human beings, not just the learned or the better or the higher or whatever is the going excuse of the time. Against the grain of conventional wisdom, Marx’s advocacy for individual freedom often surpasses the efforts of Mill and other liberal luminaries. Marx vested his faith in human reason and held that history could be shaped by the collective force of rational thought.

Where does this leave us today? Well, we clearly do need those copies of On Liberty, but to have a true commitment to liberty we could do with also recalling the liberal core of Marx’s writings. For while Marx and Mill agreed on more than history gives them credit for, it was Marx who surpassed Mill in the expansiveness of his vision of human freedom and in his refusal to accept external limits to its expression. Today, everywhere we see excuses, and sadly often in Marx’s name, for why freedom should be rolled back to “protect the vulnerable”. But in the 19th century, it was Marx, more than Mill, who looked down those pathways to freedom that thinkers of the liberal Enlightenment built, but that they often could not bring themselves to travel.

In many ways, these divisions are unique: they are not draped in the usual identitarian focus on race, gender and sexuality that has come to define the West. Rather, they are between those minority groups which embrace a sense of victimhood and those which reject it; between the strong, self-determining subject capable of rational judgement and between the vulnerable subject who demands protection. Nowhere is this clearer than in the contentious case of indigenous participation in the Freedom Convoy.

Even in my own family, the truckers’ protest sparked an unprecedented sense of discord and division, both on and off reserve. In recent weeks, I have spoken with several relatives and their contacts who participated in and organised portions of the Convoy. What emerged was a sense of division that is a microcosm for a more fundamental rupture in mainstream Canada and beyond.

This is to be expected: no matter how hard policymakers and even indigenous leaders try to convince us otherwise, the issues faced by indigenous people are not so different from those faced by people around the world. Like so many groups, they are torn between the demand for freedom and the demand for safety. It is a conflict faced by governments and populations that predates Covid-19 — but which has become manifest with lockdown measures and the resistance to them.

While Trudeau dismissed the protests as sexist, racist outpourings of white supremacy, the indigenous participants I spoke to were keen to emphasise their diversity. Some indigenous people arrived in full regalia; a mother marched with a papoose on her back and two small children in traditional dress. “We met so many people from every background,” said an Ojibwa woman from a Northern Ontario reserve who helped organise protestors in her area. “Because we’re just like everyone else. We want the mandates to end. We want freedom of choice and autonomy over our own bodies. We want a good life and we want our children to have a good life. We want the same things.”

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She pointed to problems on reserves but linked these to broader issues in Canadian society. “Like the rest of the population, we have suffered from so many drug-related deaths and suicides. Covid just made that worse. We don’t want that anymore. We’re so sad seeing this and we’re just hoping for change. Just like everyone else.”

Yet many in the indigenous community disagreed. Leaders issued statements condemning the protests, and in particular the use of traditional ceremonies and objects by both indigenous and non-indigenous people without “permission from us in order to proceed”, dismissing them as “ignorant acts of cultural appropriation”. While there was some controversy about a kitsch “pipe ceremony” that was posted online, the broader message underscored that ceremonies and ceremonial objects only have a place in certain approved protests and in relation to certain approved issues. Indigeneity, it appears, is the sole province of those who toe a certain line. And that line is not about freedom, but safety and protection.

Indeed, all these pronouncements highlighted was the insularity of Canada’s indigenous movements. Grand Council Chief Reginald Niganobe said: “Once again, we ask that you please remain vigilant within your communities where you are continued to be needed.” In a statement shared on social media, he argued: “It is counter-intuitive to the progression of our communities to be caught up in anti-government sentiment which fails to address the complexities of Anishinabe realities.”

Others framed the protests as a clear indication of racist inequality in Canada, pointing out that an indigenous-led convoy would have been met with swift suppression. The author of one such piece reflected that while some indigenous people might be attracted to the movement’s anti-establishment rebelliousness, “this is not the cause that we need to get behind because they’re not here to help our issues”.

But as Kenan Malik recently observed, racial specialness has often been used as a means of dismantling cross-race “fusion” movements that threatened the existing order. Take the struggle that brought together poor black workers and poor white farmers in the American south during the early 20th century. Rather than organising together, white workers were persuaded that their interests lay not in their class position but rather in their racial uniqueness. Of course, certain groups undoubtedly suffer individualised issues. Historically, however, the distinctiveness of one’s struggle was preached precisely to destroy the power of solidarity movements to achieve change.

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And this is a danger that still runs deep today. Indigenous people are constantly invited to believe that their problems are distinct and rooted squarely in the past. When news broke last summer about the alleged existence of unmarked children’s graves at a Kamloops residential school, the media was awash with tales of suffering and horror. While many indigenous people did suffer greatly in these schools, it is important to note that not all children attended them. Nonetheless, a predictable narrative began to emerge: that, however indirectly, all indigenous people are essentially traumatised by this past. As one academic put it at the time, indigenous people have “ongoing issues in our communities that are a direct result of these schools”, and the failure to recognise this ensures “that new generations are continuing to suffer”.

Such claims about the colonial trauma experienced by all indigenous people have not been dampened by more recent evidence that the evidence of mass graves is shaky. It fits too well with the dominant ideal of the indigenous victim. As one young woman put it: “We’re still experiencing the effects of the residential school from our parents and grandparents. We’re all damaged, and we’ll pass it on to our children, so it will never end.”

With victimhood now all but regarded as an innate indigenous characteristic, it is hardly surprising that indigenous frauds have started to fabricate entire identities grounded in this trauma: Saskatchewan professor and public health expert Carrie Bourassa was revealed last year to have fabricated claims to indigenous heritage, appearing publicly in elaborate dress as ‘Morning Star Bear’ with attendant melodramatic theatrics. While organisers of the Freedom Convoy have similarly been outed for making shaky assertions about their mixed roots, it is interesting how long Bourassa’s claims went undetected.

Bourassa climbed the career ladder for years, steadily growing bolder with expanded claims to indigenous heritage and cultural roots. Why? Because Bourassa told a story that people wanted to hear. She talked of suffering, addiction and “endemic” sexual abuse — experiences that were likely a far cry from her comfortable middle class upbringing in Regina. “Everybody around me was either an alcoholic, drug addict or suffered from some sort of addiction,” she embellished. “There was a lot of violence in my family.”

True or not, here we had a story of a virtuous indigenous victim — the sort of victim that inspires a carefully positioned Justin Trudeau to be photographed with a single tear running down his cheek; the sort of victim that legitimises his decision to exclude indigenous citizens from obeying his draconian emergency laws without needing to explain why.

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And for the people I spoke to, this can have an unintended effect: it makes them feel like frauds because that narrative of trauma is not their experience. Even if it were, I am not convinced it would be capable of fulfilling their desires for more control and freedom to decide how to live their lives.

Quite the opposite. As indigenous scholar Dian Million has warned, this narrative of virtuous victimhood runs expressly against claims to self-determination, a long established goal of indigenous communities. This is because when we assume victimhood, we often relinquish power. Constantly invited to confess endless tales of suffering and damage, the call for “self-determination” fades into “self-management” and the therapeutic “empowerment” of outside agencies.

And this is echoed throughout Canada at large. In recent years, indigenous communities have started to groan under the weight of expanding bodies of surveillance. It’s striking, then, that during the recent protest, truckers spoke of the encroachment of endless managers into their work, subjecting them to increasing surveillance, such as fitting their trucks with cameras in their cabs. And like indigenous leaders’ disavowal of indigenous participants’ demands for freedom in favour of safety, so too did the truckers’ unions retreat into threats, seeing their main role as providing not self-determination but safety.

Indigenous experiences, then, are a microcosm of Canada. We are not so different. Like so many others, some of us reject the vision of virtuous victimhood. And it is testament to the power of this unity that our community leaders should respond with such horror. They’ve finally sussed out that we too are the “Average Joe” — and as one indigenous participant told me: “The average Joe has had enough.”