I’m a white man in my 30s. Thanks to preferences formed in my youth, I’ve been sleeping almost exclusively with black guys for the past 15 years. And though I had a pretty good guess what the term meant, I’d never heard it before. Given its taboo nature, I wanted to be very certain I knew what it meant for him specifically. Did he want me to call him the N-word? Hard “r” or the softer “a” ending? Was roleplay involved? A master/slave narrative, or perhaps a hood-thug/white-savior storyline? 

For Jacob, the answer was all the above. This was my first encounter with a fetish that seems to have appeared out of nowhere and has now become common among black gay men. I’d say that half of my hookups now request it. Proponents believe race play is a form of liberation. Or, they say, it’s an insouciant response to the political pieties of Black Lives Matter and DEI. For the white counterpart, it has its own unique complications. 

I’m not judgmental of anyone’s kink, and I’ve come across a litany of fetishes over the years, so I was willing to entertain Jacob’s request. At the time, I thought it was a one-off. I also believe that the bedroom is probably the best place to experiment with breaking social norms and defying societal expectations. Moreover, the past half decade’s media overload on race has had a chilling effect on black-white relations. BLM and DEI produce a cold dynamic of bureaucracy and activism. But in bed, relations are ineluctably individual and even spiritual, not political. If Jacob wanted it, it made sense to me to give this a try.  

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When Jacob finally came over, I did the best I could with his request, but I felt a ringing disassociation when the words started coming out of my mouth. Nothing is really off-limits in the sex-positive world, but this felt taboo. I was a vile character out of To Kill a Mockingbird, and yet when I looked at Jacob, he was turned on and elated. It was disorienting. It also did nothing for me, sexually, and I let the attempt slowly dissolve, moving Jacob and I back into our normal routine.

It wasn’t a one-off, though. Jacob started demanding this vituperation every time. And I went along with it. It made me feel less like myself in bed, but my belief in the transformative power of kink suggested to me that I should push my own boundaries, too.  

Almost immediately after Jacob made the request, I found more and more men wanting it. I recognize the pattern by this point. Guys I converse with on Sniffies, a gay-hookup site, usually start by telling me they’re very kinky and asking if I am, too. Then they mention race play and assure me that I can call them, you know, whatever I want. 

If I were truly a racist, none of these men would be sleeping with me. So on one level, we both know that the suggestion that I want to racially degrade them is a fantasy — they want it. On a deeper level, what we’re both doing is not degradation, but exploration of a dangerous part of the human psyche, in an environment of mutual openness and generosity. 

Other black men I spoke with — friends, co-workers, and lovers or former lovers — mentioned an array of reasons for the trend, from sex positivity and the increasing acceptability of fetishes, to the influence of porn, with its tendency to become more extreme in order to elicit the same sexual response. People find whatever is forbidden to be a turn-on. According to the progressive script, women aren’t supposed to want to be dominated by men (but sometimes they do). Likewise, according to more traditional scripts, men aren’t supposed to want to be dominated by women (but, again, many do). Blacks aren’t supposed to want to be called racist slurs by whites in 2026. But they do. And while everyone may performatively police their thoughts in public, in the privacy of the bedroom, the thought-policing gives way to desire. 

There was the dancer I met on a Princess cruise who kept referring to my whiteness. I got the hint. After the ship was all in bed, we’d find a corner to have sexual banter, with race integrated, at his request. He wanted me to call him my little N-word (hard r). Next, an artist in my neighborhood also asked for it. We’d been hooking up for a while before he dared to tell me. We were at his place, and when I moaned, “Damn boy,” he told me that he liked the slight Southern flare in my voice. Go further, he told me. 

In one sense, playing the abusive cracker is downright creepy, and not something I ever wanted to do. I’m attracted to black men because I find them masculine and beautiful, but also because I feel safe with them. As a gay kid in the South, I got bullied for being effeminate, and it was often blacks who stuck up for me when my white peers were being cruel. Also, maybe because blacks saw my race first, they seemed to see the gayness less and treated me more like everyone else. Now, decades later, I disliked pretending to be the kind of white person I’d always despised. 

But since it was hot for my partners, I tried to play along. Also, I realized that black guys have enjoyed a milder form of race play for years, considering the many cases of those who self-brand on fetish and dating apps as a “BBC,” a controversial reframing of the lore of the well-endowed black man. Race play has even made it into the mainstream, notably in the Broadway production Slave Play, by Jeremy O. Harris, a gay black man. 

In Slave Play, three multiracial couples engage in race play as therapy for lack of sexual desire caused by racial trauma in the black partner. Harris has said his intention was metaphorical, and in an interview with the comedian Ziwe, he explained that the kind of sexual race fetish he was satirizing wasn’t something he’d personally done or considered particularly realistic. He thought it was “part of our imaginaries via Tumblr and Twitter more so than it was ever a part of anyone’s actual sexual lived experience.” Once the play came out, though, Harris encountered “a lot of black people who do race play and kink intersecting with race.” He found it “exhilarating” to have represented their stories, even if accidentally. 

I talked to some current and former sexual partners to try to understand more. 

Eric (also not his real name), a 38-year-old actor who was once a sexual partner of mine but is now a friend, tells me that he has also noticed race play becoming more prominent, especially on the internet. He believes that the liberal ideal, previously pushed for by all races, is to transform race into a kind of politically correct equality, a process that was turbo-charged in recent years by BLM and DEI. This, he thinks, can feel coercive in its own right. “I think people are moving away from a rigid sense of that identity,” he says, “and have become more like, You cannot police my blackness. I can do what I want, especially with my blackness.” 

Eric told me he’d been tempted to try it himself but hadn’t, because of concerns about how it might impact him afterward. His preference is for nerdy white guys, but he’s not sure he wants to know what imagined racial features make him their preference. “Am I black enough, or am I the kind of black guy they seek?” It’s his relationship to his own blackness that he’s trying to protect, he says. 

When I asked Jacob what he thought about the trend, he got angry. He hadn’t known that his fetish was common, and at first tried to convince me that other guys were “copying” him. Upon deeper reflection, he thought that perhaps the fetish is popping up now because blacks and whites are mingling more. Born and raised in the Bed-Stuy neighborhood of Brooklyn, Jacob had until recently experienced New York as a very segregated city. As the neighborhood has integrated, there has been more opportunity for him — and everyone else — to meet and explore race through sexual encounters. Jacob questioned his own desires, however, when he learned how common they were. “I think gay black boys have a higher chance of having low self-esteem, racially,” he said. “Is this who I want to be or be validated by?” 

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He wasn’t the only person who took this view. Brian, a 28-year-old black chef, told me, “We’ve all grown up with the same white-savior public heartthrobs.” His implication was that if you see white men as the saviors, it would make sense why you would want them, and you might want to reject your own blackness, too. My friend Ashley, a straight black woman in her 30s, said something similar. When I told her I was hooking up with a guy who insisted on race play, she viscerally responded that “he definitely has some problems.” She went on to say that she could understand why a white man would only be into black men, “because they’re beautiful,” but if a black man was only into white men, it would be “suspect.”

My thinking on the matter clarified thanks to some experiences online. The internet has also in some ways decreased segregation. If race is what gets you going, all you need is a keyboard. X (formerly Twitter) is flooded with porn accounts linking to OnlyFans, where blacks and whites who otherwise wouldn’t meet in person can form parasocial dynamics. One day, I came across a video of a black OnlyFans creator I followed, in which a white boy was calling him the N-word.

It shocked me to be honest — and I hated seeing it. 

I value race play as a terrain where whiteness collides with blackness offline, between people and free of ideology. But once it starts being reproduced and witnessed, the fantasy enters the real world and feels uncontrollable, dangerous, and possibly formative of realities I wouldn’t want to be a part of. 

Brian and I had a tryst with Jacob last summer, and when Jacob tried to integrate race into our play, I disengaged. I didn’t want friends involved. “I didn’t really care,” Brian said afterwards. “That has everything to do with him.” 

I agreed, but it had to do with me, too. I’m not moralizing about anyone’s desires, and I haven’t come to any permanent conclusions, but I don’t engage in race play any more with guys from the past, and I have no plans for the future. I might try it again if I met the right person, but I don’t like feeling like I have to do it, and I don’t want to be tethered to that disassociation. While reporting this story, I asked a prominent gay, black male artist who sometimes shares sexual exploits on social media what he thought of race play. His reply: “Is this your sly way of asking me for race play? be honest [heart emoji].” No, I told him, it was merely an honest inquiry. I’m done for now. 

Yet recent years have shown the commitment to be only on paper. And as the institution’s conflict with the Trump administration deepens this year, it appears that it likely can’t fulfill its important national function if current leadership is allowed to stay in charge.

“There is no definition of a national museum,” per the Library of Congress, but it is generally accepted that they act as repositories of a nation’s collective inheritance. The National Gallery of Art, for example, when it was conceived by the financier and philanthropist Andrew Mellon in 1937, announced a mission “to serve the United States of America in a national role by preserving, collecting, exhibiting, and fostering the understanding of works of art.” 

The National Palace Museum in Taiwan provides another example. It displays a permanent collection of some 700,000 imperial artifacts and artworks, most of them collected by Chinese emperors of different dynasties throughout the millennia. The fleeing nationalist movement, which settled in Taiwan after losing the civil war on mainland China in 1949, saved these treasures from Mao’s communists for Chinese posterity.

In post-colonial Africa, national museums, according to a 2013 scholarly paper, “became symbols of national unity, where the diversity and dynamism of new independent nations could be displayed and celebrated.” Likewise, the National Museum of the Prado in Madrid, replete with Velazquezes and Goyas, instructs Spaniards and foreign visitors on Spain’s rich inheritance. The Louvre fulfills the equivalent function in France.

The Smithsonian Institution no longer does so in America. It may get almost two-thirds of its funding from the US taxpayer, but it has joined forces with those engaged in the national tear-down. And the Trump administration’s war against the institution — which flared up again in late December, and now is headed to a showdown early in the new year — is a clash between defenders of American continuity, on one hand, and those who seek to change foundational aspects of national life and transmit a sense of shame, on the other. 

Recent outrages at the Smithsonian include deliberate use of the institution to “legitimize” the 1619 Project, wall texts that push ideologies on “settler colonialism” and “systemic racism,” and the collection of trash and paraphernalia from the BLM riots as art. 

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It’s in the face of such curatorial policies that the Trump administration has decided that the Smithsonian urgently needs an about-face, especially considering the 250th anniversary of America’s founding in July, and has argued that American continuity depends on this reversal. It has warned it in its National Security Strategy that Europe is facing “civilizational erasure,” and is acting to prevent such erasure at home, too.

Though drawing less attention than tariffs, ICE operations, and the takeover of Venezuela, the Trump administration’s approach to the Smithsonian has been one of its flagship policies. As early as last March, Trump demanded in an executive order that the Smithsonian stop “replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth.” In August the administration sent a letter to museum leadership demanding documentation on content from current and future exhibitions, 250th-anniversary planning, educational materials, and indexing of permanent collections from its top-eight museums. But the Smithsonian has been stalling for time, and when it has sent materials, they have fallen far short of what was requested. 

On Dec. 19, the White House posted a letter it had sent the day before to the head of the Smithsonian, Secretary Lonnie Bunch III, informing him that it was running out of patience, and giving him a deadline of Jan. 13, 2026, to comply with the order. The letter’s authors, Domestic Policy Director Vince Haley and Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought, said they wrote “with particular urgency and concern that the museums of the Smithsonian Institution be well positioned” for the national celebrations. 

The institution’s positioning to date can easily be gleaned from an opinion column that ran in August in The New York Times. Former Times editorial board member David Firestone, wrote, approvingly, of a visit to the National Museum of African American History and Culture, that “it’s impossible to leave its magnificent building on the National Mall without feeling shamed and haunted.” Much of the museum’s collection, he added, “is a rebuke to the notion of American exceptionalism, explaining that the United States became a global economic power by enslaving Africans.” Other Smithsonian museums performed the same function, he said. “The Portrait Gallery now has labels on many of its paintings of prominent early Americans that show how many people they enslaved…. And there is no harm in accepting that shame.” 

There is a lot of harm. For starters, it isn’t true. Slavery did not play a key role in the making of the American economic juggernaut; this is one of the many lies propagated by the 1619 Project, which the Smithsonian has closely tied itself to. The museum claims, for example, in wall texts and didactics, that the “the race-based system of slavery was fundamental to the founding of the United States,” that “the national economy relied upon slavery,” and that “profits from the sale of enslaved humans and their labor laid the economic foundation for Western Europe, the Caribbean and the Americas.” 

These are misconceptions propagated by the 1619 Project’s gross overestimation of the value of cotton to the US economy in the first half of the 19th century. As historians, including Leftist and liberal ones, have explained, the 1619 Project relied on the work of the Cornell academic Edward Baptist, who wrongly miscounted, and “with a wave of his wand” multiplied by a factor of 10 cotton’s share of the economy in 1836, from 5% to “almost half of the economic activity of the United States.” Historian Phillip Magness, who has also analyzed the numbers, has argued that the exaggeration of cotton’s impact has been intended to serve the political purpose of anti-capitalism. 

The Smithsonian’s swing to insurgent mode has dovetailed with the tenure of Secretary Bunch, who was the founding director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture from 2005 to 2019, and has since been head of the entire institution. This evolution kicked into high gear in 2020, the year of George Floyd and Black Lives Matter. And other museums have followed suit, especially the Smithsonian’s neighbors on the National Mall.

The National Gallery of Art’s mission statement was an early casualty. In October 2020, at the height of the woke revolution, an anonymous letter, which claimed the signatures of current and previous employees, began to circulate, calling the gallery “the last plantation on the national mall.” “White supremacy,” fumed the letter writers, “is written into the gallery’s mission statement, which calls for the literal preservation of US history.” (The “literal” preservation of history — imagine a national museum doing that?). The writers demanded action: “We call for the NGA to rewrite its mission in understanding the foundation of the nation and its art collection in racial capitalism.” The letter further demanded an apology from the Gallery “to all BIPOC, LGBTQ, and womyn-identifying former and current employees.”

The National Gallery of Art folded like a lawn chair. In May 2021, it ditched the old Mellon-isms in favor of “inclusive” language that transformed the gallery from “national” to “international.” A new mission statement affirmed that “the National Gallery of Art serves the nation by welcoming all people to explore and experience art, creativity, and our shared humanity.” 

As early as 2014, two years before the new African American museum first opened, Bunch started acting in symphony with BLM, ordering his staff to collect debris left behind by the thousands who rioted in Ferguson, Mo., after police shot Michael Brown. According to an article in Smithsonian Magazine, Bunch “charged the museum’s curators and specialists with the task of documenting the Black Lives Matter movement. They needed to collect artifacts and ephemera of the campaign.” He did the same in Baltimore a year later, after Freddie Gray died there while in police custody, and riots again engulfed Charm City. 

In 2020, when the disturbances spread nationwide, Bunch sent a team of no fewer than nine curators from three different museums — he was by then at the helm of the whole Smithsonian — to Lafayette Square in front of the White House, where protesters had set fire to the basement of St. John’s Episcopal Church the day before. There, the specialists were to “collect mementos from the historic protests over George Floyd’s death,” so Bunch could store it in his museums’ vaults, as The Washington Post put it.

The Smithsonian explained that it had sent curators “to collect and preserve the expressions of protest and hope” because “the tragic killing of George Floyd has spurred a transformative time in U.S. history.” Thus, “the Smithsonian Institution is collecting today so that the world, in the present and future, can understand.” Smithsonian curators then fanned out across America digging for the new museum gold — or what people could reasonably call, well, trash. “Staffers will hunt down buttons, banners, hats and T-shirts, from the streets of Washington and from other cities where the protests have upended daily life and forced an unprecedented reckoning with the role of police,” explained the Post.

Everywhere BLM rioted, Bunch sent his specialists to collect the paraphernalia the rioters had declined to put in garbage bins and left behind to litter our streets. Or, to put it another way, the head of our main national museums embarked on a mission to record the trashing of America, both literally and figuratively, so he could transmit it to future generations.

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Bunch was essentially forcing a national institution to join an insurrection against that nation. BLM’s founders sought the transformation of America, not reforms that improved race relations. “Our laws, economy, education institutions and legal systems are infected by institutionalized racism. It is going to take complete transformation — at all branches of government — to change the fate of this country,” wrote BLM founder Patrisse Cullors and activist Darnell Moore in The Guardian, while Ferguson burned. BLM activist Alicia Garza told Maine progressives five years later that “we’re talking about changing how we’ve organized this country…. We all have work to do to keep dismantling the organizing principle of this society.” 

If pressed to put a definitive stamp on the moment when the Smithsonian switched roles from nation-preserver to nation-wrecker, one would have to pick 2019, when Bunch threw the Smithsonian behind the 1619 Project. He ordered his scholars to start curating and contributing materials for the scheme to rewrite American history, and to even co-author parts of it. He was explicit that he intended to use the Smithsonian to legitimize the 1619 Project, and celebrated that “everybody … saw that the Smithsonian had fingerprints on it.”

The 1619 Project sought to shift America’s birthday from 1776, the signing of the Declaration of Independence, to 1619, when a Portuguese ship arrived in today’s Virginia with a group of Angolans, the first slaves according to the project’s architects. This new birthday put a curse on America, making it appear irredeemably tainted by slavery from the start. The New York Times Magazine, originators of the project, have been explicit that its goal was, “to reframe the country’s history.” They were, subsequently and under enormous pressure from mainstream liberal historiography, forced to retract some of the project’s core claims. But that didn’t put an end to the Smithsonian’s devotion to the revisionist, ahistorical experiment.

All the Smithsonian institutions have succumbed to the woke virus under Bunch. Many exhibits at the National Museum of American History seem intended also to make Americans feel ashamed — of ill treatment of immigrants, of the unequal rewards of capitalism, of westward expansion, take your pick — and none makes you feel proud of an American story that the historian Paul Johnson described as “one of human achievement without parallel.” 

The National Museum of Natural History has recast its exhibits from the perspective of climate change, a perspective that targets capitalism. The National Museum of the American Indian has a classroom-resources website for grades four through 11 that discusses the ways that Indian tribes were pillaged and robbed, starting with the actions of George Washington.

Even museums that the Smithsonian hasn’t built yet, like the planned Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum and the National Museum of the American Latino, show every sign that they will be outposts of national wreckage. 

Bunch is a canny political operator. But he is now on a collision course with Trump. Haley and Vought wrote in their letter last month that “the American people will have no patience for any museum that is diffident about America’s founding or otherwise uncomfortable conveying a positive view of American history, one which is justifiably proud of our country’s accomplishments and record.” According to the Times, Bunch wrote to staff that it would be impossible to turn over the documents in the specified time frame.

To return to the National Palace Museum in Taiwan, the Smithsonian officials are not like the Chinese nationalists, collecting treasures to preserve for posterity, but more like the rampaging communist partisans. Our version of the Red Guards may not be vandalizing the works of Gilbert Stuart, John Singleton Copley, John Singer Sargent, Henry Ossawa Tanner, Mary Cassatt, Edward Hopper, or Andrew Wyeth, but they are preventing Americans’ ability to learn about the nation by interacting with them. Visitors are accosted by wall didactics with sneering lessons on “settler colonialism” and “systemic racism,” meant to discourage pride in the United States. 

National shrines should not be in the business of inspiring shame, even as they might prompt thoughtful, balanced self-criticism. The transmission of heritage across the generations is what a national museum is for, and America needs museums to take up this mission. Otherwise, American culture will not long survive.

What started out as a platform where users posted slightly rubbish pictures they thought were funny, sexy or cool, ended up introducing a new aesthetic pressure to the lives of Millennials. It made each user a public diarist, the director of a gallery entirely about themselves; it changed, perhaps forever, the amount of narcissism deemed acceptable in public forums. It birthed an entirely new category of bullshit job (“influencing”) and spewed the consumer junk they promoted — plastic phone charms, teas that paralyzed digestion, stacks of crappy eyeshadow palettes — into landfills via the bedrooms of young women. It gave that generation a reputation for vanity and trend-obsession which, millions of images of avocado toast later, it has yet to shake off.

Instagram also sped up young people’s deracination from political realities, becoming a forum for nonsense identity creeds and compulsive virtue signaling. In this, it doubled as a tool for shaming apostates: Instagram stories, launched in 2016, became peak-woke’s Place de la Concorde, swapping the guillotine for condemning posts. No celebrity cancellation scandal was complete until a heartfelt apology was coughed up here.

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When George Floyd was killed, everybody posted black squares on to their grids and vowed to host reading circles to unlearn unconscious biases (five years later, these initiatives have all, obviously, vanished). Many Gen Zs’ understanding of the gender debate is based entirely on the content of infographics — snippets from Judith Butler, misreadings of Simone de Beauvoir — and glib slogans which knowingly trampled nuance (“trans rights are human rights”). More recently, the Israel-Palestine conflict has undergone this cartoonifying treatment: in the weeks after October 7, a woman I followed shared an infographic daydreaming about “queers” in the Gaza Strip, and the experiences Israel, in launching its offensive there, was denying them. Little matter that gay sex is punishable by up to 10 years in prison in the territory. Conducted through the Instagram grid, politics became flattened and hopelessly factional. And for the first time, people incapable of defending their arguments at the pub were able to broadcast their ignorance without justification or debate: put simply, we heard so much more from those who knew so very much less. Given a platform, dullard perspectives flourished and political posers thrived.

These blights were prophesied by the French essayist Charles Baudelaire. In 1859 he wrote that if mechanical cameras were even slightly permitted into the category of traditional artworks they would defile creativity itself. The culprit was “the stupidity of the multitude which is its [photography’s] natural ally”; the spiritual purpose of art would dissolve on contact with a medium so inherently prolific, realistic and (shudder) democratic. Although his argument was limited to the scope of art, Baudelaire’s fears echo through the Instagram feed. The amateur photographers of his imagination were what he called “sun-worshippers”; hysterical yobbos dazzled by new tech instead of being, like he, chin-strokingly detached. Looking at the quality of what we see on social media, how right he was. The issue isn’t tech: it’s the immodesty of believing every one of us deserves to be a “creator”. The implication is horrifically snobbish (helpfully, this has never stopped me): not everyone should be an artist — nor a political pundit nor a poet, for that matter. Any technology that convinces us to broadcast as though we are is not to be trusted.

Later, Walter Benjamin would take the case against photography further by fretting that it endangered the “aura” of art — its singularity, its mythos. I feel that, grand though it is, his argument holds water as a template for our degraded social world. Instagram has made us know far too much about one another; what we know, moreover, is banal, bragging and useless in fostering intimacy. Closeness, friendship, true knowledge of another person; these are not what social media is for. At best, we are swapping avatars. The stupidity of the multitude has won out.

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In 1888, Kodak sold the first handheld camera. In the 1890s, amateur street photographers seemed to spring from every grubby corner: the “Kodak fiend” became a figure of anxiety among the middle classes, who feared being caught in private, undignified moments by a snap-happy rogue. So irritating was the possibility of being ambushed that in 1890 two attorneys wrote a furious article entitled “The Right to Privacy” in the Harvard Law Review. It said that “instantaneous photographs… have invaded the sacred precincts of private and domestic life; numerous mechanical devices threaten to make good the prediction that ‘what is whispered in the closet shall be proclaimed from the house-tops’”. This technology, in the hands of the unscrupulous, could destroy private life itself. It was also, as the essayist Oliver Wendell Holmes insisted, simply not decent. He believed that photography had introduced an unnatural self-consciousness in the lives of ordinary people: “In a moment the sitter becomes aware that the camera is merciless… the unconscious asymmetry of his features are laid bare… the world will see him as he is, or as the lens insists he is.” Of course, today blemishes can just be edited out, or be lost when one flattering image is posted out of 100 options. Social media gets us no closer to seeing ourselves “as we are”.

What a bunch of Luddites, you might think. But self-consciousness about cameras is something Wendell Holmes was right to bristle against. The presence of lenses attached to smartphones in almost every pocket has fundamentally changed how we move through the world. When anything and everything can be recorded in a moment, it’s not just personal vanity at stake; it’s privacy itself. Accustomed as we are to the fact that, in public life, everything we do might end up online, it seems quaint to think of a 19th-century office clerk suddenly feeling mortified about the way his eyes crinkle when he smiles. It seems crushingly naive to imagine anything about us being hidden from ourselves; a world that doesn’t continually show us our wonky teeth is prehistoric.

But 15 years after its inception, Instagram’s biggest crime is flattering us into inanity. Not only has it taught us that we must be our own personal archivists, but that these archives are interesting and important to both those who know us and, for the class of influencers, society at large. Instagram’s visual grammar has evolved over the years, from single, filtered images to carousels of images, videos, stories and the rest of it. All of this encourages us to agonize over how we present ourselves: what would “work” on a feed, what might accrue likes and shock and attention, and, increasingly, what makes us seem like we care about politics? And yet it’s worth remembering that most of us are, at times, boring, ugly and more concerned with the contents of our lunchboxes than the vagaries of far-away wars; though Instagram has supposedly encouraged us to be more “real” than ever, admitting these fundamental things remains too great a taboo.

The Gap video went viral, albeit not quite to the extent that Sweeney’s did. “This is actually a cultural takeover,” said Gap’s CEO, claiming that it had garnered 400 million views across its various social media platforms. “Now This Is A Great Denim Ad,” read a Glamour magazine headline. Indian-American influencer Megha Rao took a photo of the campaign, posted it to Instagram, and recited the same self-aggrandizing phrases about corporate “representation” that we have heard for the past ten years: “that little girl who always wondered why a face like hers was never in magazines gets to raise a daughter who takes it for granted.”

Together, the women in the video are called Katseye. Steadily becoming the world’s biggest girl group, they’re backed by two music industry giants: Geffen Records (owned by Universal Music Group) and Hybe, who are responsible for some of the biggest K-pop artists in the world. The women in Katseye are between 17 and 23, and come from the US (via China, Cuba, and India), Switzerland (via Ghana), the Philippines, and South Korea. Their hits are typically sung in English: there’s the TikTok-primed “Touch” and the controversial, acerbic “Gnarly” which has lyrics like “Oh my God, this song’s so lit, congratulations”. They are the product of a music business more cynical and exploitative than most Western listeners could ever imagine.

Emerging in 2024, Katseye were the first successful “international” girl group to come out of South Korea’s now $10-billion pop industry, otherwise known as K-pop. The industry’s characteristic all-singing, all-dancing “idol” groups first became a thing in the mid-Nineties and had accrued a large, global audience by 2012, when PSY’s “Gangnam Style” became a global hit. Now, K-pop’s fanbase is global and Gen-Z: last month, gargantuan girl group Blackpink managed to gather 70,000 fans in Wembley Stadium, while America’s three-day fan convention, KCON, welcomed 125,000 people.

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K-pop has no “signature sound”. A random sample of EPs will expose you to a dizzying range of electronic tics and textures, most of which have been collaged together from 50 years of extant pop history in the West and Japan. Sometimes this factory-made oeuvre ends up looking and sounding more experimental and interesting than its Western counterpart. While Anglosphere pop artists are allowed long hiatuses, most working K-pop artists are expected to release at least an EP every six months. The resultant oversaturation puts pressure on producers and video directors to stay ahead of the curve. So old genres come together with surprising originality.

The industry is exiting a love affair with Nineties-style drum-’n’-bass; it has also seen periods of Tokyo “city pop”, Ibizan house, and Eighties synthwave, all produced and mastered with a precision and cleanliness scarcely seen in the original source material. It is not unusual to hear several of these flashback genres on a single EP, and a seasoned listener may not be surprised to encounter them all on one track. This level of supercharged pastiche is K-pop’s real trademark. It applies to its visual side too: music videos tend to be expensive affairs, cutting quickly between synchronized choreography and glossy, highly-conceived sets.

Corporate strategists conspire to shape the perfect image for future acts. A tiny minority of working idols have any involvement in their own lyrics, choreography or visual identity. “Trainee” pop idols are taught singing, dancing and deportment in-house, often incurring sizable debts they’ll have to deduct from their later wages. The wealthiest K-pop companies edge towards the peak period of Metro Goldwyn-Mayer, with creative directors, stylists and choreographers on permanent payroll.

Corporate prestige is a big thing in K-pop. Even casual fans know who funds and produces their favorite act; labelmates are meant to act like members of a real-life family. Under the name Bighit Entertainment, Hybe was responsible for the massive success of the notionally intellectual seven-piece boy group BTS, an endeavor that shot them to the top tier of K-pop’s corporate world. For a long time the company only dealt in male artists. As if to prove the naysayers wrong, Hybe has spent the past three years building up a slate of female acts. Katseye, who live in Los Angeles, are their first “international” one.

Many acts come through “survival shows”, and Katseye was no exception. Hybe and Geffen started out with a pool of 20 young women and let external voters cull it during a webseries they called Dream Academy. This came closer to a South Korean sifting-and-sorting exercise than a typical Western singing show; contestants wore truncated schoolgirl uniforms, went through tightly choreographed “challenges,” and sat through routine rankings and eliminations, this time conducted by an AI-generated robot voice. Personal narratives, “sob stories,” and celebrations of individuality had no part in the contest; all fans had to rely on were photos, short introductory videos, and footage of the contestants singing and dancing, generally to a comparable standard. Voters at home went off a mixture of looks and nationality. A Filipina contestant shot to first place with the help of her country’s enormous K-pop fanbase; a girl from indifferent Slovakia was promptly voted off.

Here, America’s post-BLM racial politics found a bedfellow in South Korea’s corporate cynicism. All conventional K-pop idols are of East Asian extraction; while historical atrocities have marred the relationship between the two countries, market logic dictates that a limited number of singers are allowed to be from Japan. Japan’s music fans are big spenders, and are more likely to drop the cash on a given K-pop act if they can relate to one of the singers. A token Japanese national only benefits the group as a whole.

Katseye replicates this shallow effect on a massive scale. The ideology behind the group is about as progressive as a Miss World final; you’ll max out your earnings if you can attract fans from every music market on Earth. Dream Academy’s end goal of catch-all racial representation meant that, if women were both black, or both Indian, they would find themselves competing against each other.

An in-depth Netflix documentary, Popstar Academy: Katseye, told something closer to the real story. The contestants thought they had simply joined a training bootcamp for a K-pop-style girl group, and had no idea they would ever be subject to public voting. As with every other “survival show”, the point of Dream Academy was twofold: it stressed the power and totality of the K-pop training system, and it lied about the meritocracy involved. There’s space for everyone in the idol machine, the message went. We can train you to be a star. But only if you devote your entire life to it.

An earlier cautionary tale came from JYP Entertainment, an enormous institution founded by the veteran singer and producer Jin-young Park. Park had always wanted his groups to take off in the West. This generally meant rewriting their songs in English and taking them onto American morning talk shows. But mainstream fame in the Anglosphere never followed.

In a 2023 webseries, America 2 Korea, Park patrolled the US to find a pool of girls who could sing and dance to acceptable idol standards. After a rigorous bootcamp and a few eliminations they became LA-based six-piece girl group VCHA, aged from 13 to 19. Their debut EP in early 2024 failed to land with the English-speaking market. The group disappeared from the public eye.

Then one of their mothers filed a lawsuit. During her time in VCHA, Tracey Madder’s 15-year-old daughter Kiera had allegedly amassed a debt of over $500,000, most of which went towards a $2.5 million group home chosen by the company and fitted out with secret surveillance cameras. Kiera, Madder claimed, was pressured into working 11-hour days, made below the California minimum wage, received inadequate treatment for performance-induced injuries, and faced verbal and emotional abuse from JYP staff.

“I feel like I don’t even hv a personality anymore,” the teenager wrote in a text message to another member of VCHA. One girl, Madder testified, developed an eating disorder and later attempted suicide during her time in the group. The introduction to the lawsuit quoted a passage from Nicholas Nickelby about “traders in… the helplessness of children”; some of the anecdotes sound as if they came straight out of Judy Garland’s life as a child star at Metro Goldwyn-Mayer, where she was abused, manipulated and overworked.

The case ended in a private settlement. There has been no industry reckoning. Kiera and another girl have left VCHA; last week, the remaining four released their first single under a new name. “Thank you for staying focused, hungry, resilient and most of all TOGETHER!” wrote Park in a celebratory Instagram post.

A recent spate of positive news coverage about Katseye looks only dodgier in light of this controversy. Interviewers often fail to acknowledge that they are an idol group at all, tailor-made for their market and operating under the auspices and whims of the K-pop system. A recent fawning profile in Flaunt magazine talked about “artistry”, with Katseye comparing themselves to Lady Gaga and Madonna, singers with near-total creative control.

“I see a lot of evolution… we’re gonna try a lot of different things,” said member Lara to NME in June, with no further clarification about who would make them. Teen Vogue says Katseye’s critics simply bear “typical qualms about women with success”, and that the group “knows their magic lies in their authenticity”. A short Rolling Stone article — perhaps the worst offender yet — contains no less than seven further glowing references to the girls’ “authenticity” and “individuality.” It all falls apart at the end, when the writer finally touches on the “creative” process. The latest EP, it turns out, “started with the girls being played songs and offered pre-selected verses and parts to try out”.

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Katseye’s fans want the group to be successful at all costs. Western listeners, primed by headlines about industry predators, may switch off if they think the singers are being exploited. So their fans remind us repeatedly that Katseye are allowed privileges their Korean label-mates do not share. K-pop diets are often extreme, with solo singer IU famously subsisting on an apple for breakfast, a sweet potato for lunch, and a protein shake for dinner; but Katseye can eat properly. They have enough time off to rest between performances. They are unusually candid during regular public livestreams. As the Rolling Stone journalist takes pains to remind us, they have a “group therapist, who offers them a ‘safe space’ to work through any issues”. They are allowed boyfriends; this would cause tabloid alarm in South Korea, where idols are expected to refrain from relationships out of dedication to their fans. Two Katseye members have even come out as bisexual, a declaration that wouldn’t make a ripple in the Western pop scene but is unheard of in K-pop.

But this new emphasis on diversity and authenticity is just another part of Hybe’s corporate strategy. Journalists are falling for it when they should really be concerned. Katseye, whose personal narratives are now tied up in the K-pop model, make convenient “kind faces” for the industry behind them. The industry proper is built around the premise that its stars must have as little power as possible; once cash-strapped companies manage to muscle in on the American scene, it will flip back to its logical extreme. We can learn from K-pop’s visual brilliance and its postmodern musical risks. We must leave the idol model on another continent.

That night and its aftermath, I now believe, were the biggest factor behind the backlash rippling through US culture today. That was when a Covid-era tension finally snapped; and many millions resolved that every claim issuing from reputable authorities must be a lie. The beneficiaries: YouTube crackpots, semi-literate weightlifting bros, amateur Holocaust revisionists, manosphere goons, spittle-flecked “X” racists commanding huge audiences.

The political consequences: allowing the Trumpian Right and its new tech allies to justify a raft of self-interested, pro-oligarchic measures by simply gesturing at the very real bogeys of that era: woke, DEI, debanking, censorship. This, even as many of these same moves will only deepen the power imbalances — between corporations and consumers, individuals and institutions — cast into stark relief in the plague-and-pandemic year 2020.

Watching the looting on Lex that night, I told myself they wouldn’t bother with our block, bereft of any cool shops. I was wrong. By the time I returned to our building’s lobby, I spotted those roving packs moving down the street. Over the next four hours or so, I joined our two doormen as they kept vigil, unarmed, while more and more looters came, some clearly pausing to size up our lobby. We were spared, but a restaurant and a salon downstairs were smashed.

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In the Bronx, a car deliberately slammed into a black NYPD sergeant, sending his body flying like a ragdoll. Another officer was run over by an SUV in the Village. I’d never felt so unsafe, and I’d filed datelines from northern Iraq during the ISIS takeover. In a place like Iraq, you know you’re dealing with war and terror, and as a reporter, you typically move with the security forces. This, by contrast, was our home, and the police were overwhelmed and seemingly ordered to stand down.

As unnerving as these events were, the mainstream-media coverage was somehow more so. By about 3am, when things seemed to calm down, one of the doormen tuned into a newscast on his iPhone: “Protests continue tonight throughout New York,” the anchor began. We both burst out laughing. Protests — mere protests — was how the local affiliate of a major network was describing what looked more like a scene of war.

But the coup de grâce came on 4 June, when public-health experts at the University of Washington published a letter encouraging mass gatherings in the name of BLM. “We do not condemn these gatherings as risky,” they wrote. “We support them as vital to the national public health.” Some 1,200 health experts and practitioners worldwide would sign the letter. The same authorities had pushed for restricting Catholic masses, Jewish funerals, kids playing in the park.

I remember feeling at the time: This one might fucking break my mind. Up to that point, I’d spent my entire career at mainstream publications (albeit on Right-of-center comment pages). Yet I could see why many Americans would come to react to any assertion by mainstream outlets, even the Right-coded ones, with a skulk: What kind of ideological bullshit are you trying to pull on me now?  

Strengthening this hermeneutic of permanent and total suspicion was the social-media censorship that accompanied dishonest coverage. The New York Post, where I served as the op-ed editor at the time, faced the business end of this censorship more than once. In February 2020, Facebook banned a Post opinion essay for raising the possibility that the novel coronavirus had leaked from a lab. The piece didn’t assert definitively that the virus had leaked, mind you. It merely noted that it might have, given that the epicenter, Wuhan, was home to a major Chinese virology lab.

Today, the CIA assesses that a lab leak was the “more likely” cause. By banning even the Post’s reasonable speculation about the possibility in 2020, and numerous other steps of the kind, Big Tech and its media allies helped stoke public mistrust. They thus lent a powerful mystique to opportunistic nutters offering a kind of gnostic progression: They banned lab leak. Justified looting. Called women “bodies with vaginas” in their medical journals. In which case why not: They lied about 9/11. Are you sure Hitler was the bad guy in the Second World War?

I don’t know how mainstream institutions — do they even deserve that label anymore? — can repair what broke over the past decade or so, and especially in the pandemic. What I do know is that our society is in desperate need of repair. Because there is still no substitute for the truth procedures of rigorous institutional journalism, reasonable public deliberation, and scientific inquiry free from progressive or RFK-style Lysenkoism.

As it is, the so-called Tech Right led by Elon Musk (and increasingly joined by the likes of Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos) are weaponizing the — well-earned — public mistrust against the professional classes who were supposed to uphold these ideals. And they are doing so for their own profiteering and power-grabbing ends.

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Consider social-media censorship. After 2020’s banning spree — and especially in the wake of the Hunter Biden laptop censorship that also targeted the Post — the populist Right began to take up serious reforms aimed at altering the power balance between individual users and platforms wielding Tolstoy-length “Terms of Service” written entirely in their own favor.

There was talk of abolishing Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a Clinton-era law that allows bulletin-board style platforms like X and Facebook to act like publishers — that is, to censor and editorialize — without carrying any of the libel liabilities of a traditional publisher. The Right also invoked the so-called common-carrier rule — the ancient Anglo doctrine according to which private operators of public services like toll roads may not unreasonably discriminate against customers. A social-media platform shouldn’t be able to boot you for your views, the argument goes, any more than your landline provider could remove you based on what you said on the phone.

Then came Musk with his purchase of Twitter (renamed X). Immediately, he began giving ideological succor to the embittered Right, including the very-hard Right, agreeing with a white-nationalist user who claimed that Jews are behind multiculturalism: “You have said the actual truth.” Talk of Big Tech reform all but dissipated on the Right. Nothing has changed in the fundamental power imbalance between user and platform, and the latter’s arbitrary ability to shape how billions of people perceive and think about the world.

Instead of offering a genuinely free and productive digital public square, the new X (and Facebook, too) algorithmically de-emphasize news links, meaning that if you embed a news story in your post, other users are less likely to see it, regardless of the ideological bent of the story or opinion in question.

The content that thrives, especially on X, is monetized slop: “What do you notice?” asks a post depicting a tourist site — say, Niagara Falls — visited by Asian tourists: Get it? Foreign tourists are overrunning our … tourist sites. These posts typically garner thousands, and sometimes tens of thousands, of reposts and “likes”. The platform and the slop-monger profit; the user is rewarded with irrational anger and dead brain cells.

Or consider the problem of debanking. Beginning in 2021, financial institutions began to arbitrarily remove customers based on their political views. Most of the early victims belonged to the populist Right. Yet in one of his last acts as the Biden administration’s outgoing director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Rohit Chopra promulgated a rule that would have barred banks from engaging in such practices.

Upon taking power, however, Trump II all but collapsed the CFPB. The new administration put the agency under the acting directorship of a hard-core pro-business libertarian, accepted a GOP proposal renouncing federal oversight of online payment processors, withdrew the Chopra anti-debanking rule, and iced an agency lawsuit against the banking association over the very issue of debanking.

“RIP CFPB,” Musk gloated. The Tesla and SpaceX boss has made no secret of his desire to turn X into a money app, meaning that by attacking CFPB, he preemptively defanged a potential regulator. At the same time, the Trump administration continues to raise the specter of “debanking” — to justify loosening regulations against the scammy crypto industry.

Or consider campus free speech and inquiry. In 2021, I was asked to join the advisory board of the University of Austin, a new institution that was to champion the old-fashioned academic values abandoned by elite institutions in the name of woke. Yet more recently, UA parted ways with an administrator, she claims, after she made a mild post defending the idea of diversity — even as she criticized institutional DEI. Her post — “We can have criticism of DEI without wanting to tear down the whole concept of diversity” — enraged a Right-wing donor.

The university told advisers that this was a long-term programmatic decision. Yet in its on-record statement to the outlet that published her story, it only highlighted a ferocious opposition to diversity, thus seemingly confirming the ex-admin’s account: “UATX is unapologetically opposed to DEI.” Moreover, one of the university’s most powerful donors publicly rails about the need to root out “Communism” on campus — which, to his mind, seemingly means anything to the Left of Attila the Hun. (I resigned from the advisory board.)

There are many other examples. The point is this: there is a clear effort by a subset of the oligarchy to use the epistemic madness that peaked in 2020 and 2021 to bring about a regime that is even more corrosive to authentic freedom, sanity, and the common good; that doesn’t even pretend to keep to the guardrails that have guided the West for centuries, ensuring its success.

Can the institutions and the “responsible people” make a comeback? I’m really not sure. But any revival will have to involve a much deeper reckoning with the failures of that mad, mad year — 2020. Maybe start by calling riots and lawlessness what they were. Make peace with the biological reality of two sexes — man and woman. Retract the ahistorical claptrap of the 1619 Project, which still enjoys the imprimatur of The New York Times. When ideology corrodes public trust, there’s only one path to winning it back: intellectual humility.

All of this activism has propelled him from just another Democrat megadonor and lockdown enthusiast to the latest hero of the political Right. But while you can understand conservatives’ excitement at sticking it to overpromoted DEI hires at elite universities, there has been a distinct lack of questioning over his methods. Putting the plagiarism to one side, surely conservatives should deplore these tactics on principle: publishing lists of people guilty of political wrong-think on university campuses, abandoning the much-vaunted value of free speech, orchestrating pile-ons and demanding resignations on social media. This is what they have been campaigning against for years.

This won’t be popular among my many conservative friends, but since the terror attacks in Israel on October 7 and the divisive war that followed, the tenor, emotion and heavy-handed tactics employed to control the current debate across campuses and throughout our institutions reminds me of how the BLM narrative was ferociously politicised during the summer of 2020. Back then, in the wake of George Floyd’s death, the people who lost jobs for incorrect political positions were almost entirely those who were critical of BLM or leftist identity politics. Since October 7, while the circumstances of each termination vary, the firings have all been of people holding pro-Palestinian views.

The departure of Gay, along with Liz Magill, the president of the University of Pennsylvania, has given conservatives much to celebrate. Activist Christopher Rufo sees the whole event as a “successful strategy for the political Right”, while politicians such as J.D. Vance regard Gay’s defenestration as a decisive victory against DEI hegemony. But their original crime — the event that made them a target — was the refusal to crack down on pro-Palestinian activists in the wake of October 7, followed by their congressional testimony on the subject of anti-semitism on campus. The video clip of each leader apparently failing to condemn alleged calls for the genocide of Jews has gone viral worldwide, and on the face of it seems impossible to defend.

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But if you watch the full hearing, instead of just the clips, it is very clear what took place. Republican attack dog Elise Stefanik spends her entire questioning slot trying to trap the university heads in specific logical sequence: first, do they agree that calling for “intifada” and chanting “from the river to the sea” are direct calls for genocide? They refuse to concede this point, insisting (I think reasonably) that both terms are context-dependent, and that students must be allowed to express political opinions even if they are personally abhorrent to university administrators. At the end of the hearing, in her final round of questions, Stefanik returns to the theme, asking in summary whether calling for genocide of Jews constitutes bullying and harassment and is against their colleges’ code of conduct? If they were to answer a simple yes, then every student calling for “Intifada” or chanting “from the river to the sea” would have to face disciplinary proceedings, so naturally each university head refuses to bow to that logic and continues to insist that each incident would be a “context-dependent decision”. Hence the now-infamous smirks: everyone in the room could see what the congresswoman was trying to get them to say.

In the event, Stefanik won the day, because their prevaricating clip looked just as bad out of context. She went on to point out the hypocrisy of university administrators spending the past decade training students that “fatphobia” and “using the wrong pronouns” constituted violent and dangerous speech and yet couldn’t condemn actual calls for genocide. The argument landed. But consider the principles that have been conceded in the process of deploying it: not only should the most hateful and extreme interpretations of every word or phrase be used when judging them, but speech is, after all, violence. These are far-Left ideas that conservatives were supposed to be against.

During the height of BLM furore, the far-Left pursued and cancelled high profile targets by inflating the risks posed by conservative speech. In 2020, James Bennet, editor of the opinion desk at The New York Times, was forced into early retirement after running a column by Republican Sen. Tom Cotton. In it, he called for the military to disperse violent BLM riots sweeping the country. Such was the political tenor at the time that the Times’s labor union claimed the article was a call to “invoke state violence” against racial minorities — the mere publication of the piece, the union claimed, placed “Black staff members in danger”. Bennet issued an apology and promptly resigned. And yet the column contained no demand for violence against Black Americans. When the National Guard was indeed called in to restore order by a variety of mayors and governors, just as Cotton had requested, there weren’t any instances of soldiers harming minorities. Was this so different from the current campaign against the university presidents?

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The new mood in the political Right goes far beyond Claudine Gay. Gov. Ron DeSantis, who launched his presidential bid promising a war on “woke censorship”, is now demanding the removal of Students for Justice in Palestine, a group his administration claims provides material support for terrorism. This may well be a radical organisation with, at times, poorly informed views. And its toolkit did appear to glorify Hamas’s paragliders. But rather than ban the organisation outright, would it not be more prudent for conservatives to address its insensitive shortcomings in the cold light of day? The Left has long attempted to cancel conservative leaders on campus who were accused of legitimising torture and advocating for pro-American death squads — policies that one might find odious but which should be debated, not deplatformed.

Where direct violence isn’t being threatened, shouldn’t we trust students and readers to digest and assess for themselves? Is it not the duty of a university to allow students to grapple with contentious beliefs and slogans in the marketplace of ideas? Authoritarian states such as Russia and China stigmatise and remove dissenting views on foreign policy on university campuses, broadly categorising any protest as dangerous to national security — Western democracies should be wary of following this path.

Even supposedly neutral academic studies are beginning to show some of the same motivated reasoning that has infuriated conservatives in the other direction in recent years. Exaggerated claims of racism have abounded since 2020, when a widely cited University of Michigan study claimed to have found surging hate incidents against Asian Americans. A closer look at its methodology, however, showed that the researchers counted every major public figure who raised the lab-leak hypothesis to explain the origin of Covid-19 as an example of “anti-Asian” racism. Hardly an example of overt bigotry.

Today, the highly influential Anti-Defamation League has reported a nearly 400% increase in antisemitic attacks across the country. There is every indication that antisemitism is on the rise worldwide, and that Jews are uncomfortable and unsettled with the rising heat of the argument. But the presentation of evidence must be rigorous if it is not to be dismissed as propaganda. In fact, the ADL study counted rallies and protests among its list of hate incidents, including a recent rally by Jewish Voices for Peace and other pro-Jewish groups opposed to Israel’s occupation and military assault on Gaza. This is only one example, but it is a prominent one that cheapens the charge — and by conflating all criticism of Israel’s government with antisemitism it ignores precisely the distinction that some pro-Palestine activists need to be reminded of.

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As usual, politicians are the worst offenders and the quickest to jump on a new division for partisan advantage. Democrats have long leaned on fear of fringe white supremacists and minor hate groups to galvanise voters: President Joe Biden even launched his campaign with images of neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, Virginia, to draw a comparison with President Donald Trump. Now, Republicans are capitalising on fears of terrorism and anti-Jewish discrimination. Republican groups are flooding competitive districts with messages denouncing opponents for failing to condemn campus protest rhetoric. In a sad twist, the Republican House committee overseeing academic issues went from hosting hearings just months ago that proclaimed the “ability to speak freely to build one’s knowledge is a cornerstone of the American system and postsecondary education” to demanding speech rules.

No group better embodies this shift than Ackman’s conservative supporters. Gone are the days when appeals to “free speech” were a useful defence for them in the culture wars on race and gender. Instead, its virtues have been abandoned amid a climate of fear and outrage. Ultimately, this calls into question whether these conservatives really believed in free speech in the first place. And this, I fear, could end up being their undoing. For perhaps more than anything, in America, the past months have revealed how swiftly the tables can turn when it comes to censorship. Whatever happens in the coming weeks, however many more academics are defenestrated, the Right should be careful what it wishes for.

“People are thoughtless all the time,” writes Alexandra Hudson in her new book, The Soul of Civility, while arguing that the best way to depolarise our society is to recognise that good people can have bad ideas. This idea is classically Christian, but also fundamentally American: even after the Civil War, a central tenet of Reconstruction was that those who fought for the Confederacy should be given grace for having chosen the wrong side. But that’s a principle it’s easier to hold to in the wake of victory than in the fog of war — or, as this past week’s events have reminded us, War Discourse.

The response from certain corners of the progressive Left to the stories coming out of Israel has been extraordinary. The silhouette of a paragliding Hamas militant has been adopted by groups ranging from Black Lives Matter to the Democratic Socialists of America — a graphic successor to that Che Guevara block print that used to hang on every dorm room wall. A crowd on the steps of the Sydney Opera House in Australia chanted “gas the Jews”. A cheer went up in Times Square at the news that 700 Israelis had been killed. And among the academic and media classes, a series of statements ran the gamut from half-hearted condemnations of the terrorist attacks to triumphant and bloodthirsty snarling.

“What did y’all think decolonization meant? vibes? papers? essays? losers,” wrote Najma Sharif, a writer for Soho House magazine and Teen Vogue. “Today should be a day of celebration for supporters of democracy and human rights worldwide,” tweeted Rivkah Brown of Novara Media. The language varied, but the sentiment was the same: this is good, actually, and seeing it should fill you with the same cathartic glee as any underdog story. Don’t you see? This isn’t terrorism; it is justice.

Who has time to care about civility when the world is burning down? Three nights ago, I was part of an audience on East 46th Street listening to Hudson explain the relationship between civility and “the norms of the practice of war” — norms which, of course, Hamas has explicitly chosen to subvert in its targeting and killing of civilians. The next day, on the phone, I asked her what civility looks like in an age of extreme polarisation.

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“Human nature hasn’t changed,” she said. (Her references include many ancient texts.) “But the ubiquity of our interconnectedness… that is different, that is new, and it presents new challenges to civility. It can coarsen us and desensitise us to the suffering of others when we’re imbibing it all the time.”

The war in Israel, and the one in Ukraine: it’s not hard to see how our distance from these events, combined with the immediacy of so much coverage and conversation about them, lends itself to the most grotesque kind of rubbernecking. It’s war as spectator sport; people haggle over the reports of Hamas beheading babies with the same energy as a group of armchair referees debating an off-side call.

Some people, anyway. The term “luxury beliefs” was coined to describe how privileged progressives like to traffic in this sort of unhinged extremist rhetoric. Partly, it’s a hazard of their utter insulation from ever having to experience the practical impact of the policies they advocate. Violence and chaos have a way of breaking through the barriers that separate the ivory tower-dwellers from the masses they condescend; one imagines the occupants of Versailles looked out their windows at the guillotine being constructed in the public square and, not understanding what lay in store, pronouncing the structure adorable.

But it’s also what happens when you succumb to the Manichean worldview that every conflict, every issue, boils down to a simple question of who is the more oppressed party. Whichever guy has more privilege, more power: this is your villain. In trying to topple him from his unearned position of influence, his victim can do no wrong. Hamas, composed as it is of Muslim people of colour, is merely punching (and raping, and kidnapping) up.

While the attacks on Israel have given rise to a particularly stomach-turning iteration of this rhetoric, we have seen it before. In 2020, as the US protests against police violence spiralled out of control, members of the laptop class could reliably be found posting that Martin Luther King Jr quote about riots being “the voice of the unheard” — always from the safety of their homes, in nice neighbourhoods, in coastal cities, where things were conspicuously not on fire. The people looting, rioting, and wreaking havoc were members of an oppressed class, and hence above reproach.

But the most absurd example of how true-life horrors become grist for the mill of perverse progressive fantasy popped up downstream of the “decolonisation” discourse. Every now and then, someone announces on the internet that they would begrudgingly allow themselves to be murdered if Native Americans decided to violently re-exert ownership over their ancestral lands. The authenticity of such sentiments is obviously belied by the fact that these same people could, if they wanted to, voluntarily renounce their power instead of waiting for some noble savage to take it by force. If you truly believed yourself to be a colonist, illegitimately squatting on someone else’s property, why would you waste time tweeting about it? Wouldn’t you just leave?

But surely it’s hardly worth pointing this out. The offensiveness of such a line of speculation is exceeded only by its impossibility; we could just leave its proponents alone to play in their ghoulish little sandbox, with their terrible little toys. And yet this, too, would be uncivil.

“Civility doesn’t require forgetting, it doesn’t require sweeping grievances under the rug,” says Hudson. “It requires confronting people with their mistakes, misjudgements, misdeeds. To do anything else is to see them as a child, as lesser.”

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If civility demands that we hold people to account for the hatred they spew, it also rejects the notion that a person of an “oppressed” identity category should get a free pass to spew hatred. The bar for human decency, surely, does not shift depending on the colour of your skin or the arrangement of your genitals — and to insist on this, on one standard for all people, creates a clear path forward, which may be the best thing about civility as an ethos. It works on the assumption that, as bleak as things are now, there will be an “after” in which we forgive, even if we don’t forget.

A day after her “celebration” post, Rivkah Brown deleted it, and wrote the following: “I responded too quickly and in a moment of heightened emotion. Witnessing Palestinians defy decades of oppression hardened me to the suffering of Israeli civilians, including my friends and family, and I regret that. I’m sorry.”

Of course the human instinct, as demonstrated in the replies to her post, is to not accept the apology. The hazard of finding oneself on the moral high ground is that it becomes difficult not to revel in being up there, and not to kick at least a little dirt down onto the person grovelling below you. “Self-sacrifice is not our natural way of thinking or taking action,” Hudson writes in The Soul of Civility. “The Book of Proverbs from the Hebrew Bible goes so far as to charge us to ‘bind [these teachings] around our neck,’ as we are prone to forget them.”

As I left Hudson’s event on Tuesday night, I found the street closed off. Instead of cars, the pavement was occupied by hundreds of people holding signs and banners and flags: the remnants of what had been a massive rally in support of Israel. I would later learn that some people present were captured on camera wishing for the annihilation of Palestine; no one side, as it turns out, has a monopoly on hatred.

As I weaved through the crowd, Leonard Cohen’s “You Want it Darker” was playing through my headphones, a fitting meditation on war, death, and the cruelty we inflict on each other in the name of a just cause.

They’re lining up the prisoners
And the guards are taking aim
I struggle with some demons
They were middle-class and tame
I didn’t know I had permission
To murder and to maim

The chorus to this song is a Hebrew word, a line from the Torah. It’s what Abraham says, in response to God’s request that he sacrifice his son; it is also what we might say to each other, eventually, when civility or decency or whatever deity you believe in asks us to confront and forgive each other’s failings in this moment, the better to thrive in the moments we have left.

Hineni, hineni. I’m ready, I’m ready.

Arguably the most important tradition is Tradition 10: “Alcoholics Anonymous has no opinion on outside issues; hence the AA name ought never be drawn into public controversy.” The Washingtonians, a group of recovering alcoholics that preceded AA by about a century, disbanded due to infighting over its involvement in social reforms like prohibition, religion and slavery abolition. AA’s founders, William Wilson and Dr Robert Smith (Bill and Dr Bob), didn’t want AA to suffer the same fate. Best their organisation remain neutral, they thought, so as to be welcoming for alcoholics from every walk of life. For nearly 88 years, AA has never weighed in on foreign or domestic policies, nor has it endorsed political candidates or legislative proposals. And so desperate drunks of every race, colour and creed have kept on coming and — together — got sober.

It is up to every individual AA meeting to uphold the programme principles. (Tradition 4: “Each group should be autonomous except in matters affecting other groups or AA as a whole”). But where many struggle, I’ve found, over the 20 years I’ve been going to meetings, is with Tradition 10. In AA, alcoholics are free to share about anything they like, so long as it pertains to alcoholism; politics and the culture wars, they can leave at the door. And yet, a lot of recovering alcoholics can’t resist hot takes when they’ve been handed a mic. I noticed this particularly after Donald Trump was elected, and especially in New York City. Members started sharing about a fight they’d had that day with their idiotic, MAGA-hat-wearing uncle on Facebook — apparently unaware of newcomers, desperate to get sober, who might now feel unwelcome because they had voted for the wrong guy.

In 2020, violations of Tradition 10 reached a fever pitch. After George Floyd’s murder, institutions across the nation absorbed progressive ideals into their mission statements. I was finishing my last year of study at Columbia University. Having entered the university in 2017 as a self-described radical progressive planning a career in LGBT activism, I was graduating an exile. I had become disillusioned with, and spoken out against, my fellow progressives’ tactics: suppressing free speech, purity policing and reducing every individual to his or her skin colour, gender and sexual orientation. During my last semester, which was moved online due to the pandemic, I’d sign on to virtual AA meetings after class, and immediately be struck by how similar the two spaces had become. Pronouns lit up the screen. Whereas opening readings once consisted of the AA preamble, the 12 Steps and 12 traditions, and details about the meeting, now some groups chose to add a thinly veiled threat: “We will not tolerate racist, homophobic, sexist or transphobic rhetoric in this space.”

From my experience of post-Trump academia, I knew these proclamations wouldn’t so much prevent inappropriate speech as put everyone on high alert, encouraging an atmosphere of self-censorship. Recovering alcoholics carry a lot of guilt about the harm their drinking has caused others; they are often irrationally fearful of causing any more. If they feel like they’re traversing a mine field of potential triggers that could set off listeners in the room, they may be reluctant to admit shameful details about the past, which they want and need to get off their chests. Recovering alcoholics’ lives depend on their ability to share honestly, and to feel like they will be accepted by AA no matter their histories or their personal views. Increasingly, certain opinions — although you could never be totally sure which ones — were no longer worthy of respect in a democratic society. Meetings were not unlike my university classes, where the silence during discussions would extend for what felt like an eternity, as so many students stayed quiet rather than risk transgressing.

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Why would you demonise Alcoholics Anonymous?

By Tanya Gold

But even silence could get alcoholics in trouble. In June 2020, Toby N. had been in the programme in New York for six years. He was raised in the Mormon church, but left it when he was 24 and came out as gay a couple of years later. On #BlackoutTuesday, when white people committed to posting nothing but a black square on Instagram for a full 24 hours, Toby decided not to partake. “I didn’t feel like it was going to do anything,” he said. Then he got a direct message from a friend — another gay man in AA — who asked: why hadn’t Toby posted anything about racial justice on social media? He accused Toby of inadequate allyship. (Toby had donated to Black Lives Matter.) In meetings, he would hear people whispering about other members’ “white privilege”.

Toby was generally in alignment with them about social justice issues, but he found the manner in which they spoke about them exceedingly “toxic”. But a line had been drawn in the sand, he told me: “You’re either with us, or you’re against us.” Exclusively attending meetings for gay alcoholics, Toby had previously found acceptance in AA, but now he felt like a stranger in the programme that had for years been like a second home. He decided to leave. The 12 steps worked for him, but the dogma and the groupthink, he felt he could do without. “It feels like I’m a man without a country,” he said. “I don’t have the gay community that I thought I did.”

For many years, I also attended affinity AA groups for gay and lesbian alcoholics. In these meetings, we felt no need to use coded language when sharing: we could say “my boyfriend” or “girlfriend”, rather than “my other half” or “significant other”. We could be honest about our difficulties with various spiritual aspects of the programme (Step Three: A decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him): the only God many of us had ever understood was one who despised us. It may seem like affinity groups violate Tradition 10, since some of the topics discussed in these meetings are technically “outside issues”. However, they are always spoken about as they pertain to alcoholism. And because these meetings are clearly labelled in the directory, straight members who attend are aware that some of the issues discussed might not pertain to them.

Sometime over the past decade, gay and lesbian meetings became “LGBTQ” meetings. After “intersectionality” leapt from university campuses into the mainstream, these meetings became the most ideological of them all. Suddenly, a whole range of difficulties had to be acknowledged. “If you suffer from chronic fatigue and don’t feel like you can make it until the end of the meeting to share, please alert me and I will call on your early,” the host of one LGBTQ meeting in New York I attended read aloud. Then: “If you want to share but you have difficulty speaking, please write what you would like to share in the chat and I will read it aloud for you.” I still can’t fathom how any member in attendance could have interpreted these announcements as anything other than disturbingly infantilising: one of the key ingredients for sobriety is personal responsibility.

Perhaps most disconcertingly, the language of one of AA’s best-known readings changed. The preamble has always read: “Alcoholics Anonymous is a fellowship of men and women who share their experience, strength and hope with each other.” On the last day of the 71st General Service Conference for the US and Canada, held virtually in April 2021, a vote was held on whether to change the wording of the Preamble from “a fellowship of men and women” to “a fellowship of people”. The motion passed. Many members were shocked. Alcoholics Anonymous is famous for its stubborn resistance to change: the first 164 pages of the Big Book have barely been amended since they were written nearly a century ago. The literature has saved thousands, maybe millions, of lives. “Don’t fix what isn’t broken” is one of AA’s unofficial mottos. Why risk changing something that works?

Another member, Justin D., says that another reason changes should rarely occur is that they are hard to reverse. At an LGBTQ meeting he attends in Baltimore, which began as a meeting for gays and lesbians, a young woman joined the group and began demanding changes to the opening literature because people were being misgendered. She called for a directive stating that only gender-neutral language should be used when calling on members to share. Group members reluctantly acquiesced to the woman’s demands. Not long afterwards, she stopped attending. Now, if members wanted to return the readings to their original form, they would have to propose it to the group and initiate a vote — which could result in accusations that they are trying to reintroduce trans-exclusionary language.

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By Park Macdougald

Elizabeth S. said that at a “queer-identified” meeting she attended, all of the opening readings were amended to include only gender-neutral language. However, she told me, one gender-specific pronoun had apparently managed to slip through the editing process. When the woman who read that particular announcement aloud arrived at the pronoun, Elizabeth said, she began to trip over her words and look nervously about the room, as if she was uncertain how to proceed.

Another member I spoke to, Bernadette R., remarked that for decades women have bristled at the male pronouns used in AA’s literature to describe God, or a Higher Power. “The female demographic is much bigger than the non-binary demographic. So why are they getting a space faster than women are?” She also mentioned her frustration with the new gender-neutral restrooms at the meeting she attends every week, which make many women feel uncomfortable. “Women deserve to feel safe,” she said.

And yet it has long been a principle in AA that it doesn’t matter who you are, what you believe, or what wrongs you’ve committed — AA says “You belong here.” The only requirement for membership is “a desire to stop drinking” (Tradition Three). Critical social justice ideology, which scoffs at the idea of redemption for those who may have transgressed, is inimical to AA’s core mission. If the programme doesn’t recommit to upholding Tradition 10, it could go the same way as the Washingtonians. In the meantime, many alcoholics with the “wrong politics” might choose not to join a group that could shun them for their problematic views. And, as it is said in AA, for a real alcoholic, “to drink is to die”.

Names have been changed to respect AA members’ anonymity. All agreed to participate in this article. 

Unfortunately, it’s a correction that many people are probably never going to see — or if they do, they won’t believe it.

Like many stories of its oeuvre, this one began on Twitter, when Richardson’s godmother Lesa Pamplin claimed in a series of since-deleted posts that the young volleyball player had been subject to racist abuse throughout the game: “My Goddaughter is the only black starter for Dukes [sic] volleyball team,” she wrote. “While playing yesterday, she was called a [n-word] every time she served. She was threatened by a white male that told her to watch her back going to the team bus. A police officer had to be put by their bench.”

Pamplin hadn’t been at the game herself, but the claim was incendiary. The story was soon picked up by mainstream outlets, which treated the alleged harassment — and discovery of its perpetrator — as verified fact. From USA Today: “Brigham Young fan banned after directing racial slurs toward Duke volleyball player.” The Washington Post: “BYU bans fan, relocates volleyball match after racist slurs, threats.” The New York Times: “Racial Slur During College Volleyball Game Leads to Fan Suspension.”

Additionally, readers were warned that failing to believe this story, or even asking questions about it, was simply not an option. An op-ed from USA Today columnist Mike Freeman declared any doubts about Richardson’s veracity to be a “Right-wing conspiracy theory”, like QAnon or Pizzagate or 9/11 trutherism. Ditto the suggestion that she might have made a mistake: “The other conspiracy theory is that she misheard the word. That is a word you don’t mishear. You certainly don’t mishear it more than once.”

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And yet, despite Freeman’s insistence to the contrary, not only is this a word that people do mishear, it has been only a year since the last high-profile incident in which someone misheard it in a similar context: in a raucous crowd at a sporting event, and, yes, more than once. In this case, the culprit was a man trying to get the attention of the Rockies mascot, whose name is “Dinger.”

That Richardson mistook another word for that word seems more likely than the alternative: that she fabricated the whole thing. But either way, it didn’t happen — and a responsible media class should never have reported otherwise so confidently, so soon. At the time, nobody present at the game had corroborated Richardson’s allegations, despite pleas from BYU’s athletic director for anyone who’d witnessed the incident to come forward. BYU and Duke athletic officials moved into the stands after the first alleged shout, but neither saw nor heard anything amiss. A review of video and audio footage also turned up nothing, and while the fan who was originally identified and permanently banned from BYU games was found in the footage, he wasn’t shouting slurs; he was sitting and playing with his phone. (BYU has unbanned him and apologised for the error.)

One potential solution to this problem, perhaps, would be a moratorium on teams with names or mascots ending in “-ger” (the BYU team is called The Cougars). Another would be to assume that in the year 2022, a person screaming something indecipherable in front of a crowd of thousands is in all likelihood not shouting a racial slur.

That is not to say that racism in American society has ceased to exist; on a systemic level, disparities continue, and the country still has work to do to level the playing field. But on an interpersonal one, America has never been less racist than it is today. A good proxy for how Americans feel about diversity on this front is the approval rating for interracial marriage, which was just 4% when the question was first polled in 1958. Last year, that number was 94%.

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And the brand of racism that involves using the n-word, let alone in public, let alone in front of thousands of people, is simply (and happily) not an accepted part of our social landscape — as evidenced by the immediate mass condemnation and punishment of anyone even alleged to have indulged in it. Not only can we safely assume that most people feel no yearning to shout racial slurs at sporting events, we might also assume that the handful of troglodytes who do will nevertheless have the good sense to to avoid indulging that urge, given the consequences.

It’s a riff on the old medical wisdom: when you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras. And when you hear a word with a hard “-ger” sound being shouted in the BYU stands, think cougars, not, well, you know.

But in our present moment, thinking “zebras” is what everyone does, and it’s not hard to understand why. Within the past few years, it seems like the folks who drive the national discourse — the cable news hosts, the talking heads, the journalists on every beat — have all coalesced around the narrative that when it comes to race in America, things are worse than ever.

The story goes like this: underneath the veneer of polite American society lies a deep and roiling river of racial resentment, barely contained at the best of times and always on the verge of spilling over. According to this narrative, that resentment is the only logical cause of every toxic, awkward, or otherwise negative interaction between a white person and a non-white person. Asking where someone is from? Racist. Working-class economic anxiety? Racist. Being unfriendly? Racist, obviously, but then again, so is being too friendly.

The idea that American race relations are bad and getting worse has been fuelled in many cases by legitimate tragedies: the killing of 18-year-old Michael Brown by police in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014; the murder of George Floyd in 2020. But rather than seeing something like Floyd’s death as a problem of police abuse, and one that might be solved by police reform, we were told that it was representative of the country’s true character. When Derek Chauvin put his knee on Floyd’s neck, he was only making manifest the racist hatred that simmers inside all of us.

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And if you assume the ubiquitous presence of that kind of hate, then no alleged hate crime, no matter how over-the-top, is too outlandish to be believed — even if the allegations themselves are unsubstantiated or ambiguous. The hoofbeats you hear? Zebras, not horses. When Jussie Smollett claimed to have been assaulted on the street at 3am, in one of the most liberal cities in the country, on one of the coldest nights of the year, by two Trump voters who just happened to be carrying a noose in their back pockets, it was interpreted as a sign how bad things really were. When a sixth grader alleged that she’d been pinned down and had her dreadlocks forcibly cut by three white classmates, it was the same. When a journalist accidentally said “Nakers” (a spoonerism of “Knicks” and “Lakers”) while reporting on the death of Kobe Bryant, the internet went wild: obviously this was a pathetic attempt to get away with saying the n-word, as we had been reliably assured all white Americans are constantly yearning to do. When a 15 year-old in a MAGA hat smiled awkwardly at the guy chanting and banging a drum in his face, we knew we were witnessing an act of racial aggression. And when a looped string appeared — in a public park, or in a NASCAR garage — we knew, without a doubt, that it was a noose.

This is what happens to a society that has been primed to assume the worst — and then, when the worst turns out not to be the case, to simply point to the assumption itself as evidence that things are dire. When the “noose” hung in NASCAR driver Bubba Wallace’s garage turned out to be just a pull rope, the Washington Post scolded readers that this was no reason to feel relieved: being glad that this wasn’t a hate crime just indicated a state of “denial about the dreary state of the nation”. Don’t you dare imagine that things are getting better. Don’t you dare imagine progress has been made. Maybe this cry of “wolf!” turned out to be baloney, but the fact that you believed there was a wolf tells you everything you need to know.

Needless to say, it is not good for a society to exist in a state of such constant catastrophising vigilance for signs of racial resentment. Amid our obsessive fear of fake news, this is a particularly insidious sort of misinformation; it is the reason why, for instance, liberal Americans grossly overestimate the number of unarmed black men killed every year by police. The actual number in 2019 was somewhere between 10 and 30, but fully 53% of surveyed liberals assumed it was over 1,000, while 22% estimated the number at 10,000 or more. It is also why, even as Americans across the board report feeling good about diversity and warmth for their black countrymen, we nevertheless believe that other people’s racism is bad and getting worse.

But the worst harm is something more basic: it is bad for black Americans to be unreasonably terrified that they’ll be hate-crimed every time they leave the house. It is wrong to instil fear and pessimism and panic for the sake of clicks. And telling people that many of their fellow Americans secretly hate them and wish them harm, when this is not in fact the case, is morally reprehensible.

If you spent 10 years trying to write a satire that encapsulates our present moment in American Democratic politics, you could do no better than this story. It is practically art. It is divinely ridiculous. But it’s also an incident from which certain conclusions can be drawn — about where the Left stands politically, and what the future holds, here at the almost-halfway point to our next presidential election.

The LatinX IncluXion Luncheon took place on Monday, in the Texas city of San Antonio, and Biden was attempting to compliment civil rights activist Raul Yzaguirre. “Raul helped build this organisation with the understanding that the diversity of this community, as distinct as the bodegas of the Bronx, as beautiful as the blossoms of Miami, and as unique as the breakfast tacos here in San Antonio, is your strength,” she said — mispronouncing “bodegas” as “BO-guh-duhs”. For the uninitiated, that is basically the closest thing we have in New York City to the crime of lese-majesty.

The backlash came swiftly from the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, which released a statement that read, in part, “NAHJ encourages Dr. Biden and her speech writing team to take the time in the future to better understand the complexities of our people and communities. We are not tacos.”

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The First Lady, of course, did not write this speech herself — as evidenced by the fact that it included a word she didn’t know and couldn’t pronounce. And the “tacos” line, of course, is not something she — or any normal person — would ever come up with organically. It’s pure political strategy, a too-earnest pandering to various identity groups that has dominated the liberal discourse for the past six years. It’s just unfortunate for Jill Biden that her speechwriters and political aides failed to realise that this type of rhetoric has not only reached the limits of its usefulness, but has lately become akin to walking around with a sign on your back that says “cancel me”.

This happened quite fast. It is only two years since the racial reckoning of 2020, a year when you couldn’t open your email without combing through half a dozen new corporate diversity declarations from every organisation you’d ever had contact with in your life. Your newspaper, your cable company, your dermatologist, the company that mails pineapples to your in-laws every year as a holiday gift: all of them wanted you to know that they stood in support of social justice. This was the year when the diversity industry climbed to a $7.6 billion valuation (and counting), and expensive DEI consultants flooded en masse into corporate life. It’s when Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility was a bestseller in its (approximately) 53rd millionth printing; when Democratic politicians took the knee wearing kente cloth; when celebrities purged their white guilt in self-produced confessional videos.

The momentum of the diversity movement was unstoppable, partly because Americans were united in genuine horror over the murder of George Floyd, but also because the country had been in pandemic lockdown for months, and everyone was bored and stir crazy and absolutely desperate to do something. Here was something to believe in and an excuse to flout the stay-at-home order, and by God, we were going to take it.

But as the landscape of daily life became littered with solidarity statements and BLACK LIVES MATTER signs, the significance of these expressions began to subtly shift. What started as legitimate outrage and demand for change was evolving into a sort of status signal, a code by which good liberals could recognise others of their kind. And as the summer wore on, the signs started taking on a subtext: not just I’m one of you, but also please don’t hurt me. Store owners plastered social justice slogans in their windows in the hope that their businesses would be spared if a riot broke out. Diners at sidewalk cafes were confronted by mobs of angry protesters who refused to let them eat until or unless they raised a fist for black lives. Silence, of course, was violence — and power was coalescing in new and different places.

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The desperation to demonstrate that you were down with the cause was palpable, and not unfounded. In one viral video, released at the moment when cancelling so-called “Karens” had become America’s new favorite spectator sport, a sobbing woman tries frantically to shield both her face and her licence plate from view. The unseen videographer accuses her of calling him the n-word; she protests that she’s done no such thing. “I have a black husband!” she shrieks, terrified.

To some people, the sight of that sobbing, desperate woman was deeply distasteful: a sign of things gone too far. But to others, it was a lightbulb moment: here was an opportunity. You could see it in the way that allegations of racism began to run rampant — not on the political Right, but through the most diversity-conscious, progressive spaces. The industries rocked hardest by the reckoning, and where most cancellations occur today, were not hotbeds of white supremacy but Left-liberal havens, populated by highly educated white people who prided themselves on their progressive bona fides and lived in terror of causing offence.

Media, fashion, publishing, television, the non-profit industrial complex: somehow, it was always the people doing the most who were next on the chopping block. The yoga studio owner who hosted free classes for students of colour. The novelist who diligently sought sensitivity reads in hopes of avoiding offence. The café owners who set out to create a welcoming LGBT community space. The summer camp with not one but two separate diversity committees to address issues of racial equity. The greater your dedication to diversity, the less likely your business was to survive a callout for even the most minor offences against it. Suddenly, nothing made you a target quite like being an ally (except apologising, of course).

And those statements that used to signal solidarity, even status — that used to be a tool for self-advancement in a world where caring about diversity was the best thing you could do for your brand — have taken on a new shade of meaning. Now, to say you care is to advertise your susceptibility to allegations of not-caring. You’re telling people that you can be squeezed, for apologies, or for money, or for whatever shred of publicity or attention or advantage might be gained by humiliating you.

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Jill Biden is being squeezed. Not because she actually did anything wrong, but because she cares about being seen to do right, and that makes her vulnerable. Let’s be clear about this: nobody actually believes that the First Lady of the United States, a 71-year-old professional with a doctoral degree, needs to be instructed as to the difference between people and tacos. Even the group of people who just issued a public statement declaring themselves not to be tacos do not believe it. Biden’s speech was many things — cringy, pandering, clearly unrehearsed — but it was not racist, not by any stretch of the imagination.

And yet, as long as someone can benefit from claiming they believe otherwise, they will — and the rest of us have to go along with it.

This might be the worst part: that everyone, from the First Lady to the NAHJ to the media covering this ridiculous story have to keep pretending that it’s a real thing, that it really matters. Journalists have to dutifully publish the interviews with the offended parties, who in turn dutifully manage to keep saying “We are not tacos” with a straight face. Jill Biden has to dutifully apologise and thank her interlocutors for the opportunity to listen, learn, and do better. And ordinary liberals who want to remain such, in good standing, have to dutifully nod along as if the party weren’t on the verge of collapsing under the weight of its own ridiculousness.

Meanwhile, the economy is imploding, no laws are being passed, our president’s approval rating is hovering around 30%, and those Latino voters who we claim to care about so much are fleeing in droves to the Republican party — where a candidate need not bother with endless racial sensitivity charades that cater solely to the sensibilities of an elite class of progressive activists. Donald Trump not only refused to celebrate diversity, unless you count tweeting a picture of himself on Cinco de Mayo — eating, of all things, a taco bowl — alongside the caption, I LOVE HISPANICS! He also vowed to build a wall to keep Mexicans  — who, he suggested, were mostly rapists — out of the country, a comment for which he refused to apologise. And yet, for a growing number of voters, even that is better than the cringe coming out of the Left.

And if things continue this way, that tweeting, taco-bowl eating orange ex-President will be re-elected in 2024 by a multi-racial coalition who care far more about the price of gas than they do about the culture wars. Melania Trump, who not only makes no apologies for her husband’s coarseness but really doesn’t care about immigrants will resume her position as the least-enthusiastic, and least seen, First Lady ever to set foot in the White House. But sure, let’s keep holding our politicians hostage to increasingly tortured purity tests. Let’s nitpick and police and snipe over etiquette until every last normal person in our orbit has fled. Let’s keep schooling the First Lady on the difference between a taco and a person. This will definitely end well.

As DEFUND BPD graffiti took over a prominent billboard on North Avenue, Scott was one of the few candidates who seemed in sync with the activist moment. He questioned the authorities’ over-reliance on police presence as they attempted to curb the violence plaguing the city. What Baltimore needed, he argued, was an expanded social safety net. But the darling of the activist Left would soon find himself at odds with his earliest supporters, as the reality of running a city with a spiking homicide rate became clear.

These tensions between activists and politicians were happening all across the country. Activists had been campaigning to end police violence for years when the death of George Floyd caught the world’s attention: finally, and abruptly, the words “defund the police” and “prison abolition” were appearing on the front page of the New York Times. Local politicians started running on issues such as bail reform. A handful of cities, from Philadelphia to Chicago to Seattle, all announced they were reallocating funds from bloated police budgets to other city services. Approximately $870 million was slashed from police departments nationwide. The idea was that with fewer police there would be more money to spend on the other services people want, which are typically underfunded. This in turn would boost the sense of community and stability — which should create a higher quality of life and theoretically bring down crime rates.

And then the homicide rate started to climb in cities across America. Many other crime statistics remained flat, but opponents to police reforms now had a frame for the backlash. Enthusiasm for slashing police budgets has faded — as has the idea that other services, such as housing, health, and drug rehabilitation programs, should be prioritised.

The debate is now absurdly binary: either you care about police violence, or you care about the homicide rate. Both these issues disproportionately affect the same demographics: economically vulnerable people living in under-serviced neighbourhoods are more likely to experience violence at the hands of both police and non-police. But anyone hoping to be an accepted member of either the Left or the Right must exaggerate one issue and erase the other.

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Baltimore, a city plagued by poverty and violence, is a microcosm of what the defund debate has become. Brandon Scott’s main rival in the hotly contested 2020 mayoral race was former mayor Sheila Dixon. She started in the lead, despite the fact that she’d had to resign after being accused of stealing and using gift cards that had been donated to the city for distribution to needy families. One reason for her popularity, despite her alleged crimes, was her previous ability to bring the homicide rate to its lowest level in decades. Her success was mostly credited to “focused deterrence”, a strategy that includes police presence in high-risk communities and police intervention in the lives of high-risk individuals. Despite being effective and popular, this approach was mostly abandoned in the wake of Freddie Gray’s death, after anti-police sentiment had swept the city (the six officers involved were charged and their trials resulted in a mix of a mistrial, acquittals, and dropped charges; all officers returned to duty).

Still, it was Scott, who was city council president, who won out in the end. For years, he has approached gun violence as a public health crisis — one that requires sustained engagement from services beyond law enforcement. He has discussed the reallocation of resources to give other forms of intervention priority; activists interpreted this as support for the idea of defunding the police. And yet when he released his first city budget for approval, and the police budget remained around the same level as his predecessor’s, he was roundly condemned by critics on social media.

In response, Scott gave an interview in the Baltimore Sun, in which he criticised the “defund the police” slogan and its activists for focusing on the means rather than the ends. “We have to do a better job of explaining to folks what we’re talking about.” The goal should be a city in which every citizen is given the opportunity to flourish, and defunding the police doesn’t in itself achieve this. Moving numbers around on a budget is not policy; it is a symbolic gesture. And it’s a gesture that will only satisfy a small number of activists; a large percentage of residents would prefer the same or more police presence in their neighbourhoods. The majority support police reform over abolition.

Scott still believes in reallocating resources and ending the dependence the city has on police, but, he said in an interview with The Trace, “I need time.” He continued, “I have been consistent that reimagining public safety and the budget would not be overnight work.” But time is not something many activists have been willing to grant him. He has been in office for a year and a half, and has already become a target for those on the far-Left, who often point to this one budgetary marker as a sign of his failings rather than fairly assessing his policies. Scott’s first municipal budget increased funding for police to cover rising healthcare and pension costs. During the Taxpayers’ Night — an open forum for citizens to give feedback about how the city’s funds are being spent — multiple activists waited in line to express their anger and frustration with him. Many said they regretted voting for the young mayor.

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When I moved from Baltimore to Philadelphia last year, I found a similar dynamic, with complicated realities obscured by the binaries, opportunism and bitter rivalries of local politics. Since the summer when 66,000 people marched in support of Black Lives Matter here, Philadelphia has been moving up the list of metropolises with the highest homicide rates in America. In 2019, it was fourteenth; now, it is twelfth. Last year, there were more murders here than in New York and Los Angeles.

Meanwhile, police shootings here have not made national headlines. Earlier this month police officer Edsual Mendoza was charged with murder. He shot 12-year-old Thomas Siderio in March. Between 2013 and 2021, 39 people, 26 of them black, were killed by the police.

Still, only a very small percentage of Philly’s population actually wants a decrease of police presence — including in neighbourhoods where police have killed or brutalised residents. They want services, such as affordable housing and free health clinics and public transportation and better schools, but they also say public safety is a top priority, and see police presence as a part of solving that problem.

Only 44% of Philadelphia residents feel “safe” in their neighbourhoods at night, and the largest percentage of residents who do are white. There is some truth to the criticism that the liberals who support defunding the police often don’t live in the neighbourhoods most afflicted by gun violence and homicides. And it doesn’t help that the most prominent professional activists in this arena, whether part of Black Lives Matter or the Women’s March, make headlines for lucrative book deals and expensive real estate purchases. The people on social media who most frequently and loudly talk about defunding the police often have extensive media bylines in their bios.

The city’s District Attorney, Larry Krasner, is adjacent to this demographic: a white civil rights attorney whose  education from University of Chicago and Stanford has been brought up in a few of the conversations against him I’ve overheard. Krasner was elected in 2017, following widespread protests in Philadelphia against police violence — and the arrest of the previous DA Seth Williams on federal corruption charges. Krasner ran on a platform of ambitious reform, and he has delivered: his office has declined to prosecute low level prostitution or marijuana possession, and it is also implementing the controversial bail reform measures. Requiring cash for bail has for a long time left the poorest people in jail for weeks, months, and, in at least one high profile case, years, awaiting trial for nonviolent crimes. Krasner and other reformist DAs like him have pledged to put an end to this possibility, letting low-level offenders go home to wait for trial.

Krasner’s platform and unapologetic manner have brought him national attention, including an eight-part documentary series on PBS that gives an inside look at the work in his office and the controversies that have sprung from his tactics. Bail reform is an easy target for the Right: if someone with an extensive record commits a heinous act, a conservative will inevitably go on television to demand to know why that person was “on the streets” in the first place and not in prison. Locally, Krasner has been blamed for the increasing homicide rate, by both politicians and members of the police.

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But like Scott in Baltimore, the most serious criticism that Krasner faces comes from his own side, the Left. In the mind of his most prominent critic, Michael Nutter, Krasner is a white saviour, thinking he knows best how to order the world while underserving the black people in neighbourhoods hardest hit by violence. The former mayor, who is black, said in an interview with the Washington Post: “It all goes back to supremacy, paternalism. ‘I’m woke. I’m paying attention. I spend a lot of time with Black people. Some of my best friends…’ All that bullshit.”

Nutter has referred in speeches to young black men as an “endangered species”, threatened by imprisonment, poverty, and violent death. He has long been an advocate for public safety, both before and after his eight years as mayor, and his term saw a significant decline in the Philadelphia homicide rate. Although there is no consensus about why or how that drop happened, but Nutter’s work, like Sheila Dixon’s in Baltimore, has often included a close relationship with the police, including controversial measures such as stop and frisk. As soon as Nutter left office, the white progressive Jim Kenney was elected as mayor and Krasner was elected DA, and those tactics were discontinued. And the homicide rate once again started to rise.

The most recent city budget presented by mayor Kenney significantly increased the funding for “anti-violence” programs, including neighbourhood organisations, after-school and summer programs, and workforce development programs — the same types of programs Defund the Police advocates have argued should take priority over policing. Philadelphia has also been slowly implementing other police-related reforms, such as a citizen oversight committee and the deployment of mental health professionals alongside police for certain emergency calls. Krasner enjoys widespread support from black voters, and his reforms have been largely popular in the city, despite the fact that a small handful of crimes have involved people who had been released on charges awaiting trial. But the effects of his work are not yet visible. The homicide rate for 2022 is already above what had been recorded by the same time last year.

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The reality is that when crime rates go down, it’s hard to pinpoint a specific reason. Everything from neighbourhood development to the removal of lead paint from homes to robust police forces were credited with Philadelphia’s drop in violent crime in the Eighties. Similarly, when the homicide rate increased during the pandemic, many contradictory reasons were given. Gun sales had gone up — but was this cause, effect, or unrelated? Unemployment had gone up, but when it declined again it had no effect on the rate of violent crime. Were the police effectively on “strike”, refusing to engage in the prevention or intervention of dangerous situations because they were concerned about being blamed for bad results? Something similar had happened in Baltimore after the uprising that followed Freddie Gray’s death. But maybe other problems contributed too, such as rising rents or the difficulty of accessing health services during the pandemic.

The lack of clarity has allowed anyone, with any agenda, to speculate publicly about why homicide rates are climbing. For the head of the police union, it’s because the police force is underfunded and under-appreciated by the community. For conservatives, it’s because of broken families and lack of personal responsibility or because authorities are soft on criminals. For liberals, it’s the lack of gun control laws or poverty.

The truth lies somewhere in the middle, just as effective policy lies somewhere between anti-police activism and an unquestioningly pro-police stance. Crime rates aren’t predictable or easy to change, as local leaders across America are discovering. To pretend otherwise is to fail its victims.

Many of the protests in the summer after the death of George Floyd looked like festivals; people swayed as they sang. And at a time when actual festivals were banned, the events possessed an especially transgressive allure. We were breaking out of a recently organised old world of restrictions into a new one where the cause of racial justice transcended the obligations of social distancing.

The rules, the protestors affirmed, should not apply to them. In the first month after the murder, over 14,000 American protestors were arrested. In Washington DC, cars were burned down and bathroom stalls were spray painted with the “Amerikkka”. A fire was lit in the nursery of the parish house of a church called St John’s Episcopal Church, which is known as the “church of the presidents”, because every American president has attended it at least once since it was built in 1816.

But the nature of the protests constituted a break at a deeper level too, a new paradigm shift in racial thinking, both in America and across the rest of the world. There were protests in over 60 countries and all continents — including Antarctica. Now, racial justice is a matter of reflexive urgency; there’s no time to consider national or cultural context. Many expressions of anti-racism look like religious revivalism, any analysis of the complex realities of black people obscured by penance and sanctimony.

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The basic outline of what happened on the evening of May 25, 2020 was reported in every major newspaper on the planet. A middle-aged black man called George Floyd was choked to death in Minnesota by a police officer named Derek Chauvin, because Floyd was suspected of using fake money to buy cigarettes. His Name Is George Floyd, a new book by Washington Post journalists Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa, substantiates this outline with a glut of information. It is a detailed investigation into the life of Floyd, the nature and context of his murder, and the impact of his death on wider American society.

The authors conducted over 400 interviews for the book. They interviewed Floyd’s siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces, lovers and friends. We get a solid picture of the man. We also learn a lot about Floyd’s ancestors — who they were, what they did, and where they fit within the narrative of America’s vexed racial history.

But there is very little in the book on the global impact of Floyd’s death. The authors do not have a lot of interest in the wider world, nor do they seem to have a great understanding of it. In one historical passage, for instance, they write that Scotland was a country that was dominated by “the British”. Colonies always know more about the metropole than the metropole knows about the colonies; faced with such American ignorance, it’s easy to conclude that the former colony has become the coloniser.

Culture changed so rapidly in America in the wake of that summer of protests, and we in Britain soon followed suit. Many American publications, for instance, started to capitalise the b in black —  including the New York Times, Washington Post and the Associated Press. Many British publications swiftly did the same: the b in black is now capitalised in the London Review of Books, for example, and the Times Literary Supplement. It’s become de rigueur so rapidly in British publishing that, when I submitted a proposal for my book, about the way American race discourse influences Britain, in 2021, I had to explain why I didn’t capitalise the word black.

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Lori Tharps makes the case for capitalising black: “Black with a capital ‘B’”, she writes, “refers to a group of people whose ancestors were born in Africa, were brought to the United States against their will, spilled their blood, sweat and tears to build this nation into a world power and along the way managed to create glorious works of art, passionate music, scientific discoveries, a marvelous cuisine, and untold literary masterpieces. When a copyeditor deletes the capital “B”, they are in effect deleting the history and contributions of my people.” Unlike Tharps, though, I am not American.

My ancestors were not brought against their will to the country where I’m currently living. In fact, most black British people are now black Africans, which means recent immigrants, or the children of immigrants, from independent African nations. The particular historical relationship between the transatlantic slave trade and black Americans does not neatly apply to the contemporary black British population. Pretending that it does would be to deny the history of my people, to borrow the argot of Tharps. Black people in Britain are essentially immigrant communities — the average black American, by contrast, can trace his ancestry further back than the average white American.

But in the aftermath of Floyd’s death, the catch-all framework of “Black Lives Matter” was imported to every corner of the planet, even though race relations are not the same throughout the world. They are instead mediated by a country’s unique history and culture. Now as then, insufficient attention is paid to the different contexts of the black people who do not live in America; we are simply put in the mould of black Americans.

It was bizarre, watching the majority of liberal democracies use the example of America to make sense of race in their own countries. People on the streets of central London were screaming “hands up don’t shoot”. British university students were passionately denouncing discrimination against BIPOC people — black, indigenous people of colour — without recognising that speaking for the interests of indigenous people in Britain makes one sound more like Nick Griffin than 20-year-old Molly studying History at Bristol University.

Robin DiAngelo’s book White Fragility and Ibram X. Kendi’s How To Be an Anti-Racist monopolised the nonfiction bestseller’s charts in Europe for many months. And this trickled down to social media. Instagram listicles stipulated you needed to read those books if you wanted to understand the condition of black people. Not black American people (though these books are not even useful for that) but black people in toto.

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And, while the liberal democracies were committing penance, countries with distinctively worse human rights records swooped in like hungry vultures. The supreme leader of Iran, Ali Khamenei, said dark-skinned people face the prospect of being killed “within minutes” whenever they walk down the streets of America. The Russian Foreign Ministry condemned America’s human rights abuses.

Another patron saint of anti-racism, Layla Saad, was born and raised in Britain and now lives in Qatar. She has never lived in America in her life. Yet her book, Me and White Supremacy, is explicitly targeted at an American audience, and reached number five in the New York Times bestseller list in the summer of 2020. There is no mention in the book that she lives in a country that imports slave labour; there is a lot about the devastating toxicity of microaggressions. Although she doesn’t live in America, Saad lives on the internet (she has 650k followers on Instagram) and being on the anglophone internet is like inhabiting a terrain utterly dominated by America. The Atlantic writer Helen Lewis compared it to being in a room with a giant rhinoceros.

What is lost in all of this is the specific circumstance of Floyd’s death — aggressive policing, economic deprivation, the fraught relationship between black American communities and the police, drug dependency, and America’s war on drugs. And herein lies the value of His Name is George Floyd.

Samuels and Olorunnipa tell us that George Perry Floyd Jr — known simply as Perry to his family and friends — was born in October 1973 in Fayetteville, North Carolina, to George Floyd Sr and Cissy Floyd, two people who wanted to make it as singers. North Carolina was their native state, but Floyd Jr grew up in the Third Ward of Houston, Texas, a poor and largely black area. He attended schools that were racially segregated and underfunded. His high school, Jack Yates Senior High School, has a student population that is 90% black and 10% Hispanic. This kind of education and upbringing is inconceivable for a black British person.

As a kid and teenager, Floyd wanted to be a rap star, a pro football player, and a supreme court justice. His life turned out very differently. He was arrested more than 20 times in his life by the police, often for dealing drugs, and he spent almost a third of his adult life in jail. He suffered from high blood pressure, anxiety, depression and drug addiction.

He moved to Minneapolis from Texas in 2014. A year earlier, he had been released after serving four years in prison for aggravated robbery with a weapon, a charge he personally denied but nevertheless accepted as part of a plea bargain for a reduced sentence. In Minnesota, he wanted a reset in his life. He worked variously as a security guard at a nightclub and as a truck driver. But he lost those jobs during the 2020 Covid pandemic.

You cannot show genuine respect to a group of people if you do not acknowledge their context — their origins, their distinctive lives, the communities and cultures they inhabit, who they are rather than what they represent. Expressing solidarity to communities victimised by racism is a good thing. But the global conversation about race went past the expression of solidarity after the death of George Floyd. And this heightened pitch is reflected in Britain to the detriment of black people, as we lose sight of the fact that they are not all the same — which of course should be the very first insight of anti-racism.

This was especially true in elite liberal communities on America’s highly segregated coasts, including the part of Connecticut where I’ve lived for the past ten years. These towns are geographically diverse — from Scarsdale, New York, to Hillsborough, California, to Short Hills, New Jersey — but they have a unique collection of traits: a highly educated, Democrat-voting population; an astounding concentration of wealth; a median home price upwards of $1 million; and, most crucially, almost no black people at all.

Needless to say, these places aren’t usually big on racial awareness, save for the occasional self-conscious acknowledgment of their homogeneity. But as the Black Lives Matter movement swept the nation, the mounting social pressure to demonstrate one’s support forced a confrontation with what had long been undiscussed: how does one demonstrate a commitment to black lives when virtually none of them are being lived in your zip code?

The result was, to put it mildly, remarkable: a rash of extremely fancy white people performing near-hysterical levels of hyperawareness for an issue that had absolutely no material bearing on their lives. Black Lives Matter signs popped up like weeds in the front yards of multimillion dollar homes, in neighbourhoods where they would be seen by approximately zero black people save for the odd delivery man. Pricey boutiques hung Black Lives Matter signs in their windows. In Darien, Connecticut, a town with a black population of less than 1% and a median household income of $365,528 that regularly ranks it on lists of America’s wealthiest communities, a sea of white people in designer sunglasses marched down the leafy main street screaming, “No justice, no peace!” before gathering politely in a local park to listen to the main speaker: a black woman who had traveled up from Brooklyn just for the occasion.

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It’s hard to overstate the irony of a town like Darien, whose racial demographics are in part a direct result of the infamous “white flight” from nearby New York City in the Seventies, having to import people of colour from that same city in 2020 in order to demonstrate its commitment to social justice. It also speaks to the peculiar relationship that places like Darien have with more local communities of colour. The town where I live, Norwalk, is just five miles down the road from Darien and has a 15% black population — but not only did Darien not ask its black next-door neighbours to participate in its Black Lives Matter protest, they also recently rejected a plan to allow just over a dozen Norwalk kindergarteners into their top-ranked school district. And so the de facto segregation of these communities has always served to insulate them from ever truly feeling the impact of America’s racial reckonings — or from having to think about them once they’re over.

Two years after George Floyd’s murder, in some cities, ubiquitous murals, statues, and street art stand in commemoration of the moment; in others, the boarded-up remains of empty, smashed-out storefronts are a stark reminder of the revolution’s less-glorious moments. Many of the places where the movement found the most purchase are now struggling to realise its promise, with rising crime rates serving as a direct challenge to progressives’ dreams of defunding the police.

In Connecticut’s wealthy enclaves, some Black Lives Matter signs are still there — albeit faded by the sun and a bit tattered around the edges, in what seems like almost too perfect a metaphor for the legacy of BLM in elite liberal communities. But in 2020, those three words weren’t just a slogan, but a brand, as conspicuous a class signal as owning a Birkin bag and knowing which fork to use.

Long before the raised fist became an high-class accessory, writer Rob Henderson identified the rise of what he called “luxury beliefs” among privileged progressives — including the attention-seeking brand of anti-racism that became so ubiquitous that summer. “Affluent whites are the most enthusiastic about the idea of white privilege”, he wrote, “yet they are the least likely to incur any costs for promoting that belief. Rather, they raise their social standing by talking about their privilege. In other words, upper-class whites gain status by talking about their high status.”

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That a person can successfully preserve his power by flagellating himself for undeservedly having so much of it certainly goes a long way toward explaining the position that communities like Darien took vis-a-vis Black Lives Matter. (See also: the popularity of “defund the police” in communities that are safe and wealthy enough to be wholly unconcerned with crime.) One year after the peak of the protests, the New Yorker noted that all this shrill awareness-raising had been largely nothing but noise: people in positions of influence had “mastered the language of racial contrition, lamenting the conditions that nourish inequality, while doing the bare minimum to change them”.

The people who spent an afternoon parading around and shouting in their pretty town square before returning to business as usual in their comfortable, lily-white neighbourhoods may not have been consciously engaging in a cynical performance, but they nevertheless seemed to grasp the game intuitively: you can be the living, breathing embodiment of privilege, but nobody will ask you to give it up if you just make enough embarrassed noises about it — and, perhaps, if you make a generous enough donation to the cause, to the tune of the $90 million raised by BLM in 2020 alone.

Here, the mind boggles: not just at the sheer volume of both attention and money generated by this movement among people who have no skin in the game, but at their utter incuriosity about just where their money went. When stories surfaced earlier this year about the shady misappropriation of Black Lives Matter funds to, among other things, purchase a $6 million party house in Los Angeles, the response from donors was revealing in that there was hardly a response at all.

But of course, there was no outrage. Those donations were indulgences: a tax-deductible expense after which you, the giver, were free to keep living your privileged life. Whether the money did anything to help was immaterial. The point was to give, and to be able to say you gave.

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But then, the intersection of wealthy white Left-leaning lives with the black ones which they profess to value has always been thus. As genuinely progressive and avowedly anti-racist as these good white liberals may be, the only black people they encounter day to day are invariably paid to be there. The gardener. The maid. The personal trainer. An endlessly rotating series of cashiers and delivery people. In lieu of actual connection, transaction. In lieu of relationships, reparations.

And in lieu of using their influence to push for actual change, the most powerful people in America — the CEOs, the philanthropists, the hedge fund managers, the people who sit on boards — raise an empty fist. At home, they plant a Black Lives Matter lawn sign and write a check for the cause; at work, they sign a bigger check alongside a polished solidarity statement crafted by the in-house PR team for maximum engagement. It is all signal and no substance, designed to mask a deep and abiding investment in the status quo — as demonstrated by what happens when you ask the folks with the lawn signs how they’d feel about a low-income housing unit being built in their neighbourhood.

Which brings us to the question of what will happen now, when Black Lives Matter is no longer the hot new trend, the must-have status symbol. Already, the black-and-white BLM banner has been largely replaced in the progressive Twittersphere by the Ukrainian flag. And in a world dominated by performative activism, where causes are less about principles than they are about keeping current, this is all but inevitable. How long will it be before the conflict in Ukraine is eclipsed, too, by some shiny new tragedy?

And sometime soon, if it hasn’t happened already, the glue holding together the last Black Lives Matter sign in the front yard of someone’s multimillion dollar mansion will give way. The hedge fund manager who lives there will come home from work to find it face-down, covered in dirt, curling with damp at the corners. And maybe he’ll pause a moment before tossing it in the trash; maybe he’ll make a mental note to order a new one from wherever that was. But by the time the men who collect the garbage come to take the bin away, its contents will have been long since forgotten — as if it was never there at all.

After all, what else were they going to do?

The conflict in Eastern Europe has thrown the inherent tensions of digital culture into sharp relief. If the war itself is unfolding too slowly, a public hungry for content will get their fix in other ways, filling the void with viral videos and Ukrainian flag emojis, finger-wagging everyone else for being insufficiently engaged, or sombre, or whatever. We may not be on the ground in Ukraine, but we’re on the front lines of the accessory culture war, fighting our common enemy with the only weapon we’ve got: cancellation.

Russian films have been barred from festivals in Glasgow and Toronto, while Hollywood films from Disney, Sony, and Warner Bros are skipping their Russian release. London’s Royal Opera House has cancelled the Bolshoi Ballet. Russian athletes (and in some cases, those from neighbouring country and ally Belarus) have been suspended from competition by FIFA, the International Skating Union, and the Paralympics. In Milan, a course on Dostoevsky — which perhaps didn’t mention the fact that he spent multiple years in exile for defying the Russian state — was cancelled (albeit reinstated after backlash).

And then there’s the vodka, that famous export now the subject of performative destruction. In American liquor stores and supermarkets, Russian vodka has been removed from displays; in a viral Twitter post, a bartender at a ski resort in Vermont poured a bottle of Stoli down the drain.

Even as reasonable voices beg the general public to maintain a sense of perspective — and as countless articles seek to remind us, “the war is not about you” — the impulse is nevertheless easy to understand. No longer is politics a topic thought to be best avoided in public; these days, your good standing in polite society (not to mention the continued operation of your business) requires your vocal participation in the cause du jour. One is reminded of that moment in mid-2020 when every corporation suddenly felt compelled to announce its support of Black Lives Matter in the most strident possible terms. Neutrality was complicity; silence was violence. Somewhere along the way, we decided that we need to know who our neighbours vote for. We need to know if the local hardware store supports the LGBT community. We need to know Doritos’ deep thoughts about racism and police brutality. We need, we insist, to know how the International Cat Federation feels about Vladimir Putin.

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Because in spite of everything, we remain convinced that this is, somehow, all about us: our sense that we are owed complete political solidarity by the brands we consume, our histrionic sense of betrayal when we don’t get it. The ski resort bartender pouring his Stoli down the drain would probably like to think of himself as a resistance hero; really, he’s more akin to the angry Republicans who set their Nikes on fire when the company hired Colin Kaepernick as a spokesman.

Now, as in 2020, people generally mean well — even if what they’re doing ranges from empty gestures to gross absurdities. As those in charge strategise support for Ukraine and sanctions against Russia in the hopes of achieving submission through economic starvation, culture warriors hope that barring Russian athletes and artists from the global stage is an effective secondary strategy. One such argument in The Atlantic suggested that depriving ordinary Russian citizens of the pleasures of seeing their country compete in the Olympics or enjoying the latest MCU blockbuster might provoke them to turn on their leaders — not to mention how much it’ll piss Putin off. (“The decisions to strip him both of his titles as honorary president and ambassador of the International Judo Federation and of his honorary black belt in tae kwon do are particularly personal blows”.)

That’s the optimistic take, of course; the cynical one is to note how very, very reminiscent this argument is of that moment when Left-wing commentators thought they were really sticking it to Donald Trump by making fun of the size of his hands and referring to him as “Drumpf”. You know, right before he was elected the President of the United States.

And even if the symbolic resistance of cultural boycotts is an important piece of the puzzle, then those measures still need to make sense — and here one must note, setting aside the questionable impact of one man in Vermont trashing one bottle of spirits that was already bought and paid for, that Stoli vodka is not actually produced in Russia. The Stoli company is Latvian and owned by the Luxembourg-based SPI beverage group.

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This absurdity reveals the dark side of the current fever: adopting a hostile stance toward anything that sounds Russian is undergirded by a potent mix of ignorance and misdirected aggression that ought not to be indulged. It’s the sort of blunt impulse that led to the harassment of blameless, turban-wearing American Sikhs in the wake of 9/11, a spasm of bigotry against anything that seemed Muslim which we now look back at with shame and chagrin. Even as much remains uncertain, we know that this with-us-or-against-us line of thinking rarely leads anywhere good.

Well-intended or not, imposing guilt by association on ordinary Russians — the classical musicians, the cat owners, the athletes — in the hopes of inspiring mass resistance against Putin is absurd. Demanding that Russian expats denounce their homeland contains ugly shades of McCarthyism (not to mention that speaking out may put their families at risk). And in the case of Russians now trapped in their country, it’s not just morally questionable but unlikely to be effective, given the country’s merciless crackdown on dissenters against the war. It’s easy for westerners to forget that our willingness to protest our government goes hand in hand with the guaranteed freedom to do so; if speaking up came at serious personal risk, many of us would choose to keep quiet (and keep our skulls intact).

It’s also a betrayal of an important tradition, one in which art, sport, and culture are supposed to sustain our sense of shared humanity in times of tragedy, including war. There’s a reason why the famous Christmas ceasefire during World War I was marked by football matches and music — or why, when the Cold War between the then-USSR and the US finally ended, it was thanks in part to the effects of cultural exchange and engagement between the two nations. Of the many videos to emerge from Ukraine in the past week, some of the more hopeful ones show Russian prisoners being offered bread, tea, and a chance to call their parents.

Yes, these isolated feel-good stories pale in comparison to the wide-ranging and countless horrors of war, but the sentiment they contain is anything but cheap: embedded in each of these moments is a broader perspective, the understanding that we all still have to share a planet when the fighting is done. To isolate, alienate, and demonise those on the other side may satisfy one’s sense of purpose in the moment, but it also creates rifts with our neighbours that are not easily fixed.

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Meanwhile, Americans of all people should understand that the citizens of a country cannot be expected to shoulder the guilt of their president’s misdeeds. The character of an entire people is not defined by the worst whims of its most authoritarian lunatic. But here, too, our perspective is skewed: we are too used to being able to criticise, insult and openly rail against our political leaders. We are too used to the meaningless performative bluster of American politics. We are, in short, so used to culture wars that we’ve forgotten that real wars have different stakes and are not won by rhetoric — and that if the US decided to truly involve itself in this conflict, a victory would not be measured by how much we managed to hurt Putin’s feelings.

In the meantime, punishing a bunch of figure skaters, cats, filmmakers, and the corpse of Fyodor Dostoevsky for Vladimir Putin’s warmongering is the emptiest of endeavours, like painting half your face blue and booing your favourite football team’s rivals from the safety of your living room. But nobody will emerge at the end of this conflict to hand out awards for team spirit; nobody will congratulate you for all the vodka you didn’t drink. Nobody will ask you, “What did you do during the war?”, when the war had nothing to do with you. And when someone says, “We cannot just witness these atrocities and do nothing”, the truth is: yes, you can. Better a witness than a self-involved keyboard warrior. Better to watch than turn away.

Many people, like Oliver Dowden, the chairman of the Conservative Party, think that the culture wars in Britain are between the woke Left and the conservative Right. This is only partially correct. They are also between the liberal-Left and the woke Left; they are also civil wars.

Dowden made a speech a couple of weeks ago at an American think-tank called the Heritage Foundation. It wasn’t exactly Churchill in Fulton, Missouri, but it made a splash. Dowden denounced woke ideology as a terrifying force: “a social media mob,” he said, “can cancel you merely because you have dared to challenge one of the Left’s fashionable nostrums.”

Dowden’s analysis of woke politics is slightly misplaced; and so too is the criticism of the speech made by the former MP and government minister David Gauke in the New Statesman. Gauke is wrong because, though he admits cancel culture is a problem, he sees it as a minor nuisance.

I can understand how: if you think it’s simply a battle between academics and conservative journalists, it can seem like a minor conflict. One that is only played out in the hyperactive transient world of social media and radio talk-in shows. But it is not just a clash between Scylla and Charybdis. It is also a family fight. And this is why the word ‘woke’ should be used.

It is now fashionable among a certain type of Left-liberal or centrist to say ‘woke’ is a meaningless term. It is certainly true that it is much abused. Some newspaper columnists relish going after ‘woke snowflakes’ with the zeal of indiscriminate big-game hunters. I can see why one would want to remove themselves from that. It’s all so vulgar, and disavowing the term ‘woke’ thus seems like a cleaner choice.

But there is no point denying that there are conflicts around the issues of gender, free speech, race and culture. And that these conflicts are not only waged by the Right-wing press, but are in fact found within many institutions largely staffed by liberal-Left people. The culture wars, which are often derided as fake and drummed up by the Right, are real. They are an extension of politics — and politics is by its very nature oppositional.

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Woke also has a sharp Anglo-Saxon sting; it’s a name that sticks. “Social Justice Warriors” is too long and its acronymic version SJW is dull. Progressive is too loose and airy. Woke gets straight to the point, and is useful in conveying, in its aggressive consonantal force, the internecine nature of this conflict.

The transgender debate, for instance, is not a conflict between reactionaries and progressives. It is a battle between older liberal-Left women and younger progressive women; between older gay and lesbian radicals and younger ones. Mumsnet and the Observer have done more than conservative think tanks to highlight the tension between biological sex and gender identity. It is not lavishly funded conservative institutions but grassroots feminist organisations such as Woman’s Place UK which are at the forefront of the fight against gender-identity politics in Britain.

It may seem like an intergenerational conflict because older women care less about what people think of them than younger women. But there are many younger people who are privately sceptical about elements of the politics of social justice. The key word here is privately.

We tend to think this conflict is made up of Right-wing cranks and irate historians (and a group of inexplicable feminists!) against an online-savvy Left. But ask many people in the publishing industry about what they really think of J.K. Rowling, Kate Clanchy and sensitivity readers — and the obscuring effect of self-censorship becomes clear. Some of them will be happy to chat to you, over the phone or in a pub, and express their views. But it has to be off-the record.

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These people are Guardian readers. They hate the Tories. They support Black Lives Matter, and are gravely worried about climate change. But they are scared stiff about saying the treatment of J.K. Rowling was terrible, that Clanchy made a mistake in responding to a Goodreads comment on Twitter but her detractors have behaved terribly, and that the use of sensitivity readers is crude and patronising. This is what they believe, but they don’t want to lose their jobs.

People who say woke is meaningless are evasive about this intra-Left conflict. They point to people such as Robert Tombs and David Abulafia, who will gladly write columns for the Telegraph excoriating the woke Left. Tombs will (falsely) claim in the Times that Churchill was not a racist. But where are the academics who will argue that Churchill was a racist but also a great man? When is the Guardian going to publish that?

Such people do exist, but if they think any criticism of woke politics will put them in the same camp as people like Tombs, they’ll prefer to stew away quietly. Many of the same people who bemoan the divisive nature of the culture wars are doing absolutely nothing to make it more nuanced. Claiming that certain figures from the past who were racist were not in fact racist is an extreme view; but so is denying that some of these racist people should not be considered heroic or virtuous or praiseworthy in other respects.

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In English departments, many academics do not want to be labelled as racists, so they publicly acquiesce to calls to decolonise the curriculum, but many of them are, again, quietly sceptical. They value the principle of diversity; they also subscribe to a humanist approach to literature that affirms great books can’t be wholly reduced to politics. They love equality. But they also love pluralism and honest intellectual discussion.

They know these things should not conflict with each other — we can consider the politics of a text without viewing that text entirely through the lens of politics; we can value both diversity and frank intellectual debate. But they live in an atmosphere in which they are in conflict. And so they do nothing about it because they don’t want to face a backlash.

This is why saying and using ‘woke’ is important. It brings what is obscure into the open. It allows the debate to be had within the liberal-Left, where it needs to be had. It is clarifying.

But many (here, here, here, here, here, and here) argue that cancel culture doesn’t really exist. It’s just a Right-wing talking point. To which I would respond: how do you know? There is so much self-censorship going on that people are not being honest about what they believe about certain sensitive issues. They don’t have the wealth or power of J.K. Rowling; they are scared of losing their jobs. That is cancel culture.

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In another liberal-Left organisation, the Labour Party, the tensions are revealed by a poll last year which found that only 25% of Labour Party voters support defunding the police — one key policy of woke ideology. Even among 18-24 year olds, the wokest demographic, it is only 44%. When asked whether we should view society’s problems through the lens of white privilege, the poll also found that only 29% of Labour voters agreed. More than half think “woke practices” have gone too far.

Of course, people have complex views. One might support taking the knee, believe statues of certain slave traders like Edward Colston should be taken down, and believe that we should learn more about slavery and colonialism at school, but such people might still be critical of other aspects of woke ideology. This is why they would be reluctant to describe themselves as anti-woke. To do so might imply opposition to all those things. But they could also describe themselves as non-woke or woke-sceptical; the fact that wokeness can be ambiguous does not mean it is a meaningless term. It just means it can be ambiguous.

Wokeness has a family resemblance to other progressive ideologies — but it is also distinct. Many socialists are non-woke; their analysis is rooted in class politics rather than identity. I also think it’s lazy to simply describe wokeness as liberalism. It is often profoundly illiberal. If woke-deniers think the Right is often misusing the term, they should take ownership of it. Simply saying ‘woke’ is a meaningless term, without offering a more attractive alternative, is a form of evasion.

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One reason why this matters on the liberal-Left is because the vast majority of 18-24 year olds now back liberal-Left parties. There is an old adage that people become more conservative as they get older. But if the changes in people’s lives which lead them to become conservative, such as owning property and having kids, are becoming increasingly rare, then that transition to conservatism might not come to pass for many young people. This is why the battle between the woke Left and the non-woke or woke-sceptical Left is especially salient. It has repercussions for all of us.

Questions such as: what is a woman, how should we examine our past, how we should think about race in an increasingly diverse society, and how we should think about free speech and tolerance are all absolutely key for trying to make sense of the nature of public discourse today and in the future. They ultimately boil down to the question of who we are, and what we should do about it.

At my son’s school, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (TJ), Asian children account for about 70% of the student body. Many have worked incredibly hard to get into the prestigious institute, supported by first generation immigrant parents who, like me, see education as the best route to security and success. But in the months when America was rocked by race riots, self-described “equity warriors” described the Asian, mostly immigrant families of TJ as “white-adjacent” and “resource hoarders”. The white principal, Ann Bonitatibus, told us to check our “privileges”, while one teacher called on her to push through a “Diversity Initiative” while “The Iron is hot!”

In the months that followed, the local school board — all 12 members endorsed by the Democratic Party — voted to remove the school’s merit-based, race-blind admissions process, and replace it with one that was race-based. Along with other parents I was horrified by the school’s readiness to use identity, rather than achievement, as the basis of admissions. But when we objected, the Virginia education secretary, a Democrat, told our families that preparing for tests was like using illegal “performance enhancement drugs”. A black father, Harry Jackson, who spoke up for our cause was called a “motherfucker” selling “segregationist bullshit” — by a white activist who uses the Twitter handle @Antiracist14. These “anti-racists” have worked day and night to try to silence us, using pressure and insults, instead of debating us.

And our story is far from unusual: racist admissions processes are being reintroduced across America. Take the case of San Francisco’s elite Lowell High School, which garnered national attention last week: the overwhelmingly progressive city — Republicans account for less than 7% of the electorate — voted to recall three Democratic members of the school board in a landslide. One of those fired was Alison Collins who, in a now infamous tweet, had called Asian Americans “house n****rs”, insinuating that Asian parents who disagreed with her plan to turn an outstanding school into an experiment in racialism are captive to white supremacist forces.

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Like at TJ, activists waged a war on merit at Lowell, in the name of “equity”. Asian Americans, through diligence and ambition, had earned an impressive number of slots — so they were disparaged as “privileged” by anti-racist activists, who called on the school to replace merit-based testing with a lottery. The result was striking. Asian freshmen admitted to Lowell in 2021 fell to 42% from 50% the year before. White enrolment also decreased, to 16% from 21%. Black students increased to 5% from 2% and Hispanic students rose to 25% from 14%.

This process doesn’t just harm Asian American students. Despite increasing the enrolment of black and Hispanic students, schools like TJ put little effort into preparing them for their advanced academic classes. In school district enrolment figures made public for the first time, eight freshmen students, admitted through the new race-based admissions process, dropped out of TJ over just five months, between September 2021 and January 2022 (in the entire school year before, just one student dropped out). Changing admissions processes of outstanding schools does nothing to address the systemic failure of the education system to ensure these students are ready for rigorous training in Maths and Science. It also insults and demeans the achievements of black and Hispanic students who get into schools like Lowell and TJ through sacrifice and achievement. The message is clear: stop trying so hard. (The school district claims its new admissions process is “race neutral.”)

The United States Constitution — and common sense — tell us that a just society requires equality of opportunity, regardless of race, ethnicity, gender or social status. “Equity” is a divisive, illiberal system fundamentally at odds with this ideal, because it preaches that there is a quota of opportunities for every group; individuals now find that their skin colour ends up being more important than their hard work.

One year ago, I waited in a virtual waiting room to express those views to the San Francisco school board. I wanted to explain that it had made me sick to my stomach to witness the disdain endured by parents who look like me, for immigrants from Asia with dreams like my family’s. I’ve written here before about how I moved to New Jersey from India, as a child who spoke no English. What I didn’t write was that we lived in poverty. While I was learning the alphabet, I received free breakfast, part of America’s social welfare program for the poor. Now, families like mine are being called “privileged” and “white adjacent” just because our children have achieved academic success, like I did.

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The board members never called on me in that meeting. Instead of sharing my story, I listened to Collins — whose tweet calling Asian families “house n****r” had just emerged — discussing her efforts to change admissions to Lowell High School.

Other parents watched in shock, too. Siva Raj, an immigrant from India and father to two sons, wanted something very simple, he told me in an interview: for his sons to be able to return to school. For almost a year, the board had been on a virtue-signalling crusade — scrubbing American icons such as Paul Revere and Abraham Lincoln out of school names — while utterly failing to address the elephant in the room. In cahoots with the powerful union, the California Teachers Association, and a far-Left wing of the Democratic Party, the Berniecrats, the board showed little concern as parents pleaded with them to come up with a plan to reopen schools closed during lockdown.

All children, but especially the most disadvantaged, were suffering terribly under remote learning. Even the uber-liberal mayor of San Francisco wanted schools reopened. But “the school board had a wall of indifference,” Raj told me. And so on Valentine’s Day 2021, he sat in his kitchen with his partner, Autumn Looijen, and cooked up a plan: a recall election.

Looijen readied the papers and that Friday, Raj posted a Priority Mail Express envelope, his hands trembling. At the time, he was only in the US on a work visa (now he is on the pathway to citizenship). Growing up in an apartment above a carton factory in Chennai, where his parents worked, Raj learned to never challenge authority. “This is what gets your throat slit”, he said. But he could see his sons withering under online learning.

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Last week, Raj stepped onto a small stage at Manny’s, a community space in San Francisco’s Mission District, and read the results of the recall election. Looking on were leaders of the Chinese American and Indian American communities, as well as other parents. “We had a cross-fertilisation of energy”, Raj told me later: parents of all races, backgrounds and political beliefs had united to oppose the corruption of our educational system.

Even the progressive New York Times declared, “The recall, which galvanized Asian-Americans, was a victory for parents angered by the district’s priorities during the pandemic”. This felt like a turning point: the mainstream media has been all too eager to perpetuate the idea that parents who object to the prioritisation of “anti-racism” over effective education are “Republican strategists”, “right wing activists”, “suburban white moms”, “conservative white parents whipped into a frenzy” and “white supremacists” engaged in “domestic terrorism”. And yet these parents prevailed in San Francisco, arguably America’s bluest city.

And the implications of this victory ricochet across the nation. Prior to the recall election, Allison Collins posted a video of me speaking to my school board, asking why someone in Northern Virginia would care about a school’s dust-up on the West Coast. What was I thinking, “penning” articles about the story in which she was embroiled?

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After the results were in, I answered Collins. I am “penning” articles about Lowell High School because it is one battleground of many where Asians have become the illiberal regressives’ scapegoat, punching bag, doormat — pick your metaphor. In the new hierarchy of human value put forward by “anti-racism,” Asians don’t count.

Indeed, Hannah Nikole Jones, the author of the controversial “1619 Project”, once posted a tweet arguing that it was “disingenuous” to say that New York’s specialised high schools have “majority people of color”, because the majority are Asian. In November 2020, North Thurston Public Schools in Washington state — which includes 22 schools and some 16,000 students — lumped Asian and white students together, excluding “Asians” as “Students of Color.”

And, in discriminating against Asians, Lowell mirrors not only my son’s school, but schools across the country. In August 2020, in Loudoun County, Virginia, the mostly-Democratic school board ignored the pleas of Asian families from India by suddenly eliminating the merit-based admissions test to its advanced academic science and technology high school programmes. The same year, Boston’s all-Democratic school board dismissed the protests of Asian parents, who said their children were being targeted in a plan to change admissions to the city’s most advanced schools, imposing postcode quotas and a lottery system. In both cases, just as in San Francisco and northern Virginia, new freshmen classes saw a decrease in the number of Asian students.

For a long while, the parents fighting against these measures were outliers. Many are understandably afraid of cancel culture; some are already marginalised in their communities, because of their race, their fear of challenging authority, immigrant status and the fact they speak English as a second language. But the case of Lowell High School shows what they can do when they find the moral courage to organise. This courage, for many, comes from the high stakes. For many immigrant families, education is a way out of poverty; for others, it is the path to becoming more settled: secure jobs, rewarding careers, a deciding role in America’s future. As one father said online, as parents celebrated at Manny’s, “They touched the third rail for Asians. Never mess with Asians and their education.”

Freddie Sayers spoke to Glenn about Joe Rogan and Whoopi Goldberg, Joe Biden’s new Supreme Court Justice, and how to fix America’s torturous racial politics.

Joe Biden has pre-announced that his nominee for the Supreme Court will be a black woman. What do you think about this? 

I think it is strange. I think no one needs to be apologetic about reacting to that announcement with a bemusement and kind of quizzical ‘what?’ This comes out of Joe Biden’s political ambition, and the character of American politics. During the South Carolina primary when Biden was uncertain of prevailing in the contest for the nomination of the Democratic Party, in 2020, he wanted to appeal to the black vote and so he made this announcement. He announced that his vice presidential selection would be a woman and that his first appointment to the Supreme Court, should he be fortunate enough to have one, would be a black woman.

You could call this craven pandering. I’m bemused by it because it unnecessarily raises questions about the fitness of whomever he might appoint, when he might have simply chosen a black woman as his nominee, and crowed about it after the fact. To avoid casting any doubt over the choice that he would have made, he could have said this is the best, most qualified person that I could find. But in any case, as he’s done it now, he’s limited his range of options to a very small percentage of the total population of people who might have been selected, and, you could say, has put an asterisk by the name of whomever it is that he might ultimately select.

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This is, by the way, the Supreme Court of the United States of America, this is the final stopping point for any legal dispute. There are nine justices serving there, the quality of an appointment is not a small matter. We’re not now admitting a marginal student to an elite college campus, we’re selecting the people who are going to govern the country. The President might have engaged in a kind of subtle and tacit preference, rather than crowing about it and making it overt and explicit. It sows a kind of contempt for the standards that we ought to be employing.

Is it right to aim for public bodies to be “representative” of the population? 

What do we mean by representativeness and who can represent whom? How many Catholics are there on the US Supreme Court? I’m pretty sure there are more Catholics on the court in proportion than there are Catholics in the population. Dare we ask the question: how many Jews, how about gays, how many openly gay people are on the Supreme Court? How dare we. That’s a rabbit hole that we don’t really want to go down.

And it’s kind of silly because it presupposes that something as superficial as racial identity or sexual orientation is of such fundamental significance that legal counsels must have members present who, when they act out in that context, are acting on behalf of, quote unquote, their group. Well, these individuals are not only women, or blacks, or gays, or Catholics. These are human beings whose humanity supersedes and reaches beyond the categories that we might impose on them.

You were the first African American to become a tenured professor at Harvard. Would you have felt differently about this achievement had the governors at Harvard pre-announced before selecting you that they were going to choose someone of African American heritage? 

My appointment as professor of economics at Harvard, which happened in 1982, was accompanied by an initiative at Harvard to enhance the quality of the Afro American Studies department there. I was jointly appointed: economics and Afro American Studies. I was 33 years old. It would have been entirely fair, for some outside observer looking at that to say: “Oh, well, fine. But if he hadn’t been black, they wouldn’t have appointed him.” That’s probably true. So such is the condition that we find ourselves in.

How do you think someone like Whoopi Goldberg can get to the point where said that the Holocaust was not about race? 

I assume it’s because she thinks Jews are white. I would chalk that up to ignorance and naïveté — just not being immersed in the long history of modern Europe and anti Semitism and the ideology of Nazism, in which the notion of race had a very particular meaning. I think Whoopi just didn’t appreciate the actual meaning of the word race, in the context in which the Holocaust arose, revealing her ignorance. She ought not to have put it that way. It is a misstatement or mischaracterisation to say that the Holocaust was not about race — it just wasn’t about ‘race’ in the way in which we in the United States might be talking about race.

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One finds anti-Semitism not only on the far-Right, with ‘Jews will not replace us’ kind of sentiments, but also in ethnic minority communities. Especially among African Americans, there’s quite a bit of anti-Semitism; there are attacks on Jewish interests. The Reverend Al Sharpton, a prominent civil rights leader, got his start in part by demagoguery over incidents in which there was conflict between blacks and Jews. He has a history in which I think anti-semitism would be a fair descriptor.

Why is there not more sympathy for the Asian community among progressive activists? 

The Asians are called a model minority — people say that sardonically. And of course, the subtle implication there is that you must be anti-black if you compare blacks to Asians, and you find the blacks wanting — or anti-Latino.

Some of the corruption and decadence of the legacy population here, black and white, in American society, is exposed by Asian success. They expose the lack of depth and seriousness of too many of our people by their assiduous self application, and their excellence in the mastery of the currency of the modern world. I’m talking about calculus, I’m talking about biochemistry.

Do you think this kind of thinking actually makes racial tensions worse? 

So George Floyd is killed — murdered, a jury has spoken — by Derek Chauvin in Minneapolis, in 2020. A policeman inappropriately applying force, he had his knee on the man’s neck, the man expires. Was that a racial incident? Now the police officer was white, the man was killed, George Floyd was black — it became a racial incident. A whole movement was launched or abetted by the racial characterisation of that incident. But why should we understand it as a racial incident?

There is very little evidence at all, if any, that Chauvin was motivated by racial animus when he acted. And on the victim side, George Floyd, the fact that a policeman might over use his power and harm a citizen — that’s something that happens to white people, too. There are cases parallel to the George Floyd case in which the victim has been white, which have not occasioned national attention. So that’s one thing.

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But the other thing that I would say is that by cultivating a practice of looking at such incidents in racial terms, invites a parallel practice of looking at criminal victimisation of citizens in racial terms. You want to count the number of white cops who have killed unarmed black men, somebody is going to start counting the number of black murderers who have abused, black carjackers who have robbed and threatened, black assaulters who have bludgeoned and beaten white people. There are an endless number of such cases.

There is enough racial blame to go around, and I’d hate to live in a country in which when a white person was victimised by a black criminal, the first words out of their mouth were “a black criminal victimised me”. That’s not good for black people, because there are many black criminals. And that’s not good for our country because the issue is a criminal victimising a person; the criminal’s blackness doesn’t stand in for his race. He doesn’t represent his race when he acts badly. The victim’s whiteness doesn’t stand in for her race.

What would happen if Affirmative Action is deemed unconstitutional by the Supreme Court? 

The Supreme Court has six conservative justices, the majority of whom have publicly stated that they have serious doubts about affirmative action. There’s a very good chance that racial affirmative action will be stricken by the Supreme Court.

If it happens, I assure you, there will be mobs in the streets of this country. No progressive activist is going to take the Supreme Court’s ruling as an opportunity to turn within and consider: “if we want to be at Harvard or the University of North Carolina in larger numbers, why don’t we get busy preparing our youngsters from the cradle to be competitive in this great country that we live in where competition is the coin of the realm?” No, they’re not going to do that. They’re going to interpret that as an anti-black move by a racist Supreme Court. I assure you that it is a disaster and I think we’re headed toward it.

In the past week there has been a big, powerful movement to get Joe Rogan removed from Spotify over historic cases of him using the N-word. What should we make of this?

I’m not going to say the N-word on your programme, but I should be able to say it, it’s just a word. I’m talking about a word — I’m not talking about a slur. And neither was Joe Rogan’s use of it a slur. He wasn’t pointing to a person and calling them one in a way of being a derogation, of an insult. He was speaking about speaking. That is to say he was saying that the word exists and then he was saying the word in the context of quoting someone else’s use of it or whatever.

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We have a genre here of music, it’s called hip hop or rap, in which the word is used regularly. And they are not using it as a slur either. It’s a part of the English language. Now, this thing that we’re doing here — where we’re making the utterance of certain sounds an indication of a person’s racism, and then seeking to cancel people for it being revealed that they uttered sounds, without any reference to their intent — is a bizarre phenomenon.

And I think that it’s actually not a sign of strength, by the people, black people, who insist that the sound of the word is so injurious to them. I think it’s a sign of their weakness. There’s something almost pathetic about requiring people to indulge you by not making certain sounds with their mouth because hearing it reminds you of lynching, of nightriders coming down on black people who are defenceless and are being set upon and whatnot.

It seems like a lot of the voices that were most upset about this were white. And it seems like more of an intra-elite power battle to do with the nature of the media, in which the race issue is used as a battering ram. What do you think?

Who are those people who listen to Joe Rogan? They are mostly not latte-sipping, National Public Radio-listening, coastal elites in New York City or Washington DC or San Francisco or whatever. They are mostly, or more often than not, male, more often than not, white. There’s some truck drivers among them. There’s some Trump voters among them.

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So this culture war that’s well-advanced here in the United States in which we are in effect, mutually contemptuous of one another based upon what camp we belong in — Joe Rogan is right at the centre of it and his audience substantially is on the ‘wrong side’ from a progressive’s point of view. A lot of this enmity directed toward Rogan is really directed toward his audience.

How do we make it better? 

I’d like to tone down the emphasis on race and be more concerned about the humanity of people. If we want to talk about disadvantage, poverty and the lack of wealth in America, there are more poor white people than there are black people. And anything worth doing, whether it be reform of education, or changes in the tax laws or extension of the welfare state programmes, anything worth doing to help black people is worth doing to help people who are in need of of help. I would have our arguments, that is our African American arguments, couched in broad, humanistic terms. And I think that less attention to racial identity and more attention to human common need is healthy for the country.

This transcript has been lightly edited.

The Smollett trial has been worth following for a few reasons. The first, if least important, is the pure entertainment value of the story that Smollett initially told police. For those who have forgotten, the former actor — famously dubbed “Juicy Smollé” by the comedian Dave Chappelle — originally said he was attacked by Trump supporters wearing ski-masks, in the integrated heart of Chicago, at 2am on the coldest day of the year.

The details were even more absurd than the big picture. Smollett claimed that after leaving his condo to buy a sandwich, he was approached by two white men who recognised him from the television show Empire, a hip-hop musical with a 61% black audience. The men assaulted him, tied a noose around his neck, and doused him with bleach, all while call him homophobic and racist slurs and shouting “This is MAGA country!” Per Smollett’s initial report, he heroically fought both off his attackers (“I hit his ass BACK!”), and escaped to his building with a noose around his neck and the hoagie still clasped tightly in one of his hands.

Of course, as was obvious from the beginning, none of this was true. The alleged “MAGA country” area of city-centre Chicago went 83% for Hillary Clinton in 2016. The real perpetrators of the “assault” turned out to be a pair of Smollett’s gym buddies from Nigeria, one of whom, we learned at trial, used to accompany Smollett on drug-fuelled excursions to gay bathhouses. The brothers testified that Smollett had paid them $3,500 to “fake beat him up,” call him slurs, and make a MAGA reference, allegedly so that the actor could garner public sympathy. The hoax took place early in the morning because Smollett’s flight to Chicago that evening had been delayed.

What is remarkable, in retrospect, is just how seriously Smollett’s story was taken. In a famous, widely circulated tweet, then-Senator Kamala Harris tweeted that the attack on Smollett was an “attempted modern day lynching”, a sentiment echoed by Senator Corey Booker. President Trump condemned the “horrible” attack. Even today, after Smollett’s story has definitively fallen apart, he has a handful of defenders. On Wednesday, Black Lives Matter released a statement in support of the actor, saying “We can never believe police… over a Black man who has been courageously present, visible, and vocal in the struggle for Black freedom”.

It is indisputable that Smollett’s allegations reflected what many mainstream Leftists believe about the United States. His claim was, very specifically, that “the attack” was an indictment of just how racist and homophobic America still is — he, a black gay man, had been assaulted in a liberal city just for existing. We hear this sort of thing often: that police violence is constant, that “systemic racism” and univariate “white privilege” plague the land, and that interracial crime is at near race-war levels. A famous and solidly-selling 2019 book was titled Open Season: The Legalized Genocide of Colored People.

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Content like this has an effect. The average “very liberal” American believes that between 1,000 and 10,000 unarmed black men are killed annually by police, when the actual number in 2020 was 17. However, beliefs like this are not based in reality. Only about 1,000 people of all races and sexes are killed by police in a typical year, and only around 250 of them are black. We may be overrepresented among those shot by police — 14% of the population vs. 25% of police shooting victims — but even this gap largely vanishes when one adjusts for black crime and police-encounter rates, which are about 2.5 times their white equivalents (no surprise, given that we are a younger and more urban population). And while violent interracial crimes involving blacks and whites are rare, accounting for only around three percent of serious crimes tracked by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, more than 80% of them are black-on-white.

While the incident Smollett claimed he survived would no longer be a metaphor for America, what actually happened arguably is. Many very high-profile incidents of ‘racial hate’ have unraveled similarly in recent years. The Covington Catholic affair, which was at first alleged to have involved a mob of white high school punks chanting “Build the Wall” at a Native American elder, turned out to have been a shouting match between the high-schoolers and a group of radical “Black Israelites,” which the Israelites started. Other incidents that turned out to be fake: Klansmen roaming the bucolic campus of Oberlin College, a white man harassing a black Georgia state representative in a grocery store, racists placing a “noose” in the garage of black NASCAR driver Bubba Wallace, Trump supporters tearing a hijab off of Yasmin Seweid on the New York subway, white bigots urinating on a young black girl in Grand Rapids, white men setting a biracial teenager on fire in Madison, and so on and so on. One could go back farther and add the Duke lacrosse case and the fabricated assault on Tawana Brawley.

Even these famous cases represent just a small sample from a larger data set. For my 2019 book Hate Crime Hoax, I spent several weeks conducting targeted searches of Internet research platforms for term sets like “hate crime hoax” and “hate crime: narrative collapse.” By the end of the research period, I had compiled a set of 409 cases, concentrated between 2014 and 2019, in which an undisputed claim (police report or story in national or reputable regional media outlet) was made about a serious incident involving racism or bias that was later utterly debunked.

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This data set, which is available to anyone who requests it, has now grown to include more than 1,000 incidents. Of course, no one claims that the majority of hate crime allegations, including allegations of lower-profile offences, turn out to be hoaxes. However, given that there are fewer than 7,000 hate crimes reported in the US in a typical year, and that only perhaps 10% of these receive the sort of coverage necessary to be included in my data set, the numbers just given are sizeable.

Although many modern allegations about the social effects of race are not true, Mr Smollett does possess one characteristic that is likely to protect him: he is rich. The power of the 1% has increased to a sometimes ridiculous extent within the United States in recent years. This real advantage has operated to Smollet’s benefit repeatedly throughout his legal ordeal. He has friends in high places too. CNN’s Don Lemon tipped Smollett off that the police were skeptical of his story. At one point, the Chicago DA’s office simply dropped all charges against him (they were later reinstated). Some friends and colleagues apparently still say that he is innocent; he may well work again one day. Smollett faces up to three years in jail, but he seems unlikely to ever go down into the bowels of CCJ as a convict. Expect instead the rich man’s sentence: probation or community service.

In one already-notorious image Carolyn Maloney, a Democratic representative for New York City, sports a gown that trailed multiple banners bearing the legend EQUAL RIGHTS FOR WOMEN. Maloney smiles, unmasked, at the camera. Behind her stand serried ranks of female serving staff, dressed in black and wearing identical black Covid masks.

In the earliest days of lockdown, this class-inflected freedom from hygiene theatre was the preserve only of the ultra-rich. While ordinary people were saying goodbye to dying relatives over Zoom, Kim Kardashian flew her entire feudal entourage to a private island for a birthday party.

A year on, those Met Gala images attest that hugging-as-privilege has now trickled down to the merely upper crust: regular celebrities, politicians, the founders of Black Lives Matter. But at the same time, those benefiting from the new elite right to in-person contact are pushing the opposite for everyone else: disembodiment as liberation.

This dream has been long in the making. We should greet it with all the enthusiasm we’d muster for a gift-wrapped bouquet of scorpions.

This is easier said than done. Pretty much everyone younger than I (born at the fag-end of the ‘70s) has grown up seeing themselves animate a CGI avatar on-screen, in any one of countless computer games — just as they’ve grown up conducting much of their social lives online.

If this is your normal, it’s not a big step to imagine a ‘self’ that has nothing to do with a physical body. This idea received big-budget cinematic treatment in the 2009 fantasy Avatar, featuring a crippled ex-soldier who gains a new life in a prosthetic body. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the movie was a smash hit, triggering such an outpouring of nerd emotion it spawned a new insult: ‘Avatards’.

But the dream of freeing human consciousness from the human body isn’t an internet-age invention. Back in the chaos of the first centuries AD, long before Christianity was codified into religious orthodoxy, esoteric sects and strange rites flourished. One such was the body of thought that came to be known as ‘Gnosticism’, from gnosis or ‘knowledge’. What survives of their thinking suggests that for Gnostics, the material world was intrinsically evil and the task of humanity was to escape it.

The early gnostics were scattered by heresy-hunters, but their dream of becoming beings of pure spirit lived on, famously via the Cathar sect in Southern Europe through the 12^th to 14^th centuries. The Catholic Church was not keen: in one notorious massacre at Béziers in 1209, the papal legate Arnaud Amaury is said to have told his men: “Kill them all — God will know his own.”

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Despite such persecution, the idea of liberating the human soul from squalid materiality persisted stubbornly underground. It survived in Rosicrucianism, which in turn made its way into strands of esoteric thinking that still flourish today in weird corners of the internet. But if esotericism is now largely the preserve of Very Online cranks, the Gnostic longing to become creatures of pure consciousness has gone supernova.

Early pioneers of the internet imagined ‘cyberspace’ as a place of liberation from all the pesky constraints of the material world. I remember thrilling at this ‘cyberpunk’ vision, as imagined by authors such as William Gibson in the 1990s. As Gibson depicted it, in ‘cyberspace’ a growing proportion of human life would be wholly unmoored from physical reality: an endlessly creative zone of gods, monsters and infinite possibility. In the recent words of cult sci-fi author Zero HP Lovecraft: “We imagined ourselves as samurai sword VR pirate pioneers”.

In this worldview, as for the crippled hero of Avatar, the imperfect nature of physical bodies is little more than a drag on self-actualisation. I’ve argued previously in these pages that this opinion helps power the increasingly radioactive debate about ‘gender identity’. But this is only one of the ways that what seemed in 2009 just a fantasy for nerds, is now mainstream politics and culture.

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Witness two new reality TV shows (or perhaps more accurately unreality TV shows) whose core premise is that selves can be separated from their bodies. Like The Voice, Fox’s new show Alter Ego showcases singing talent over physical hotness. But this comes with a twist: instead of singing from behind screens, Alter Ego performers will compete via CGI avatars.

This comes hot on the heels of Sexy Beasts, where contestants don elaborate prosthetic makeup before going on a blind date. The conceit is that by concealing their actual faces, their true selves will be better able to shine through.

The common factor behind both these shows is the idea that by working a human ‘self’ loose from its embodied presence in a physical body, provides ever greater freedom to be our ‘true selves’. In a promo video for Alter Ego, one of the singers explains his desire to perform via alter ego: “There’s something about how I look behind this alter ego,” he says, “that I feel like it’s held me back”.

In 2018, Aaron Bastani promised that automation would create a world of super-abundance for everyone, leading to a socialist horn of plenty and liberation from work via ‘fully automated luxury communism’. Today, that’s morphing into a dream of emancipation not just from work, but from our very bodies: fully automated luxury Gnosticism.

But this dream has a sting in the tail. For many adolescent girls now, what holds them back isn’t their bodies but the impossibility of living up to the image they project online. Reports are emerging of teenagers so dependent on tweaking their selfies with Instagram ‘filters’ they become unable to interact with people in person.

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Even Facebook’s own research now shows that life lived through too-perfect selfies is toxic for teenage girls. Meanwhile, for those whose jobs by definition can’t be unmoored from their bodies, the push for disembodied life has still more unsettling implications. Because no matter how loudly you promise that luxury Gnosticism will be fully automated, someone still has to take out the bins, stack the dishes and care for those who can’t care for themselves,

Their existence is a painful reminder that while Covid has accelerated the rise of the robots, even prompting the launch of a robot Covid nurse, we haven’t yet managed to automate blue-collar workers out of existence. Instead they’re increasingly downplayed: there’s a new presumption of mandatory, masked facelessness for the lowest-status people whose roles regrettably require them to show up to work in person. Lockdown’s abrupt reminder of how radically we depend on manual workers did not prompt a new appreciation of the working class.

Meanwhile, the middling strata — the so-called ‘Zoom classes’ — forms the key target audience for unreality TV shows that present virtual life as liberation. And for some, the shift to remote working has indeed been a net positive. For those with space for a home office, and families already formed, going virtual can be liberating — while there are still plenty of reasons to log off and focus on real life.

But for those who are single or less professionally established, the bleak reality of ‘remote work’ is less bucolic. This is the group for whom fully automated luxury Gnosticism offers the greatest temptation: when IRL life looks like sitting on your bed in a shared house, with an incipient case of laptop burn and one of the top 10 most popular girlfriend apps for companionship, why would you ever want to log off?

“I believe we are living in the cyberpunk dystopia,” writes Zero HP Lovecraft, “and it’s way less metal than everyone thought it would be.” It’s tempting to imagine that Britain’s thus far more moderate approach to Covid restrictions — it feels like everyone has unmasked for autumn — will save us from such baroque extremes as we saw at the Met Gala. But we shouldn’t be over-confident: whether it’s quinoa or statue-smashing, what starts among the American elite has a habit of percolating out to the American imperial province that the United Kingdom now indisputably is.

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This is how democracy dies

By Jamie Bartlett

At the start of the pandemic, we imagined embodied, in-person human life might grow more valued as a result of the disruption. And indeed it has: but not for everyone. That endlessly creative world Gibson imagined is now romanticised and sold back to us by the people commissioning unreality TV. The right to remodel our ‘meat avatars’ is politicised as the new front for civil rights. The danger of taint by other physical bodies is a key public-health message. But how you experience fully automated luxury Gnosticism depends on where you sit in the class hierarchy.

At the bottom stand masked, anonymised servants, clad in face coverings and uniforms until they can be automated out of existence. In the middle sit the Zoom classes, for whom virtual life can be a perk or a nightmare. For the lucky ones, it’s a chance at family life, but for others it’s more like an endless, lonely shift as (in Zero HP Lovecraft’s bitter phrasing), “pointless argument vegetables growing in walled gardens, harvested for the benefit of robots that serve us ads”.

And even as tech and media elites sing the praises of luxury Gnosticism for the rest of us, they’re reserving unconstrained, in-person human interaction as a privilege for themselves. Whether this emerging political order comes dressed as civil rights, TV entertainment or public health, we should see it for what it is: an assault on the humanity of all but the aristocracy.

Southgate is the sort of footballer who, in team photos from the early Seventies, would have been the last one to sport a short, back and sides when everyone else was looking like Charlie George. A haircut to set your watch to, as Grampa Simpson put it.

That someone like Southgate would support England players taking the knee, the gesture associated with Black Lives Matter, is telling, then, about how far social attitudes have changed in the last few decades. Although Southgate felt the need to write an elegant defence, it’s perhaps more surprising how little opposition taking the knee faced, and how even most critics proclaimed to support BLM’s aims, if not methods. Indeed, it’s arguable that there has never been so little doubt in public life about what is morally wrong and right, at least in our lifetimes.

The past 50 years or so have seen a cultural revolution in western society comparable in scope to the Reformation. Most of us have known only that period of transition, when morality and norms were up for debate, but perhaps it is now over. Perhaps we have returned to the sort of world we lived in when England last reached a final, in 1966 – a world of strictly enforced social mores.

The year 2020 marked a convenient end to the cultural revolution, because of the vastly different nature of the protests that took place that summer, compared with 1968. In the late Sixties, student radicals were protesting against the system. American academia itself was politically mixed; there were around three Democrat professors for every Republican — it’s now about 15 to 1 — but the higher echelons of the Ivy League were quite conservative. The Boston Brahmin elite were still pretty traditional, as was big business (although, not coincidentally, far more egalitarian than it is now). The Army was obviously very Right-wing, and one of the causes of student protests was the prospect of being drafted into a war to defend the honour of a conservative American establishment.

In 2020, almost all the major institutions in the US, aside from the actual President, were loudly vocal along with corporations, charities and NGOs in their support for the BLM protests. Parts of the media were sympathetic to the point of actively playing down some of the violence, the phrase “mostly peaceful protests” becoming an example of American journalism’s Pravda-like bias.

The protesters themselves tended to come from America’s upper-middle-class, displaying a feverous zeal that felt alarming. And there was no debate to be had about race and policing, opponents simply had to educate themselves.

During those decades of social change, the problem of Left-wing “moral relativism” was often a complaint of conservative commentators, but look today at the young protesters demanding that  “Rhodes must fall” or “black trans lives matters”. They certainly aren’t moral relativists.

Relativism is a position you employ when you’re weak, to be abandoned when you win. On a wide range of issues, including race and gender, the Right has been more relativist for some time. Before the 1968 revolution those outside of power (the Left) argued for moral relativism, those in power (the Right) argued for moral absolutism. Now it is the opposite. Even things like claims to absolute truths (“trust the science”) have changed. Likewise with censorship, which is by definition a tool of the powerful.

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Before the Sixties, book publishing was restricted on grounds of obscenity; I still have as a family heirloom, an early copy of Ulysses published in Paris because it was too obscene to be printed in London. It’s in fine condition, being unreadable.

But book censorship began to break down with the 1960 Lady Chatterley’s Lover trial; there were still a few obscenity cases afterwards, but this was seen as the end. Most famous of all in the public imagination were the prosecutor’s comments about this not being the sort of thing you’d want your servants to see, a comment so laughably out-of-touch that it made a mockery of the old ruling class – and no ruling class or moral order can survive being openly mocked in that way.

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Yet liberals demanding a permissive society in the Sixties were pushing at an open door, with an establishment that was often sympathetic. At the time of the case the Bishop of Woolwich had argued, in pure Thought for the Day-ese, that “what Lawrence is trying to do is to portray the sex relationship as something essentially sacred… in a real sense an act of holy communion”. It’s hard to see a leading voice of morality today defending a play or novel that was seen as obscenely close to racism or homophobia.

But the British and American establishments of the late 20^th century were historically quite unusual in allowing themselves to be mocked; from the mid-Sixties onwards, television regularly made fun of the habits and beliefs of the powers-that-be, with Monty Python — the most prominent product of the satire boom — pointing fun at the people who ran the country. Their 1979 film Life of Brian even mocked the beliefs of that old establishment. Two of the Pythons debated an Anglican bishop and Catholic writer Malcolm Muggeridge, but no one serious tried to stop the film.

Life of Brian couldn’t be made 20 years earlier, and neither could it be made now; its satire of Jesus, a prophet of Islam, would risk upsetting Muslim sensibilities, which it’s fair to say people have become slightly wary of doing. At the very least it would need to cut out the scene pointing fun at a man who, absurdly to the filmmakers and audiences, identifies as a woman; absurd in 1979, as it had been in 1879 and 1779 and in every year before that, but a sacred idea in 2021.

It’s sacred in the sense that its believers have captured the moral citadel where the most powerful ideas are protected by taboo, achieved either by emotional argument or intimidation (and both can be effective).

This is not some dark new age of cancel culture, however, it’s just a return to normality. Those who grew up in the late 20^th century were living in a highly unusual time, one that could never be sustained, a sexual and cultural revolution that began in 1963 or 1968. But it has ended and, as all revolutionaries must do after storming the Bastille, they have built Bastilles of their own. The new order has brought in numerous methods used by the old order to exert control — not just censorship, but word taboo and rituals which everyone is forced to go along with, or at least not openly criticise. You might call it the new intolerance, or woke extremism, but all societies need the policing of social norms.

No one would satirise the transgender movement today; no one would dare point fun at BLM, or Pride month; no one would dare joke about George Floyd, because like the publishers of Gay Times in 1977, they might face jail for blasphemy.  Instead leading satirist Sacha Baron Cohen makes a living making jokes at the expense of the little people. Indeed the only satire made now pokes fun at the old establishment, like punching the corpse of a once-ferocious zoo animal, or the people who still hold the old beliefs; the elderly, the less educated, the rural and provincial. The powerless.

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The Nineties and Noughties were a time of outstanding comedy partly because so much of public morality was up for grabs, and in transition; it was a period in between two quite rigid societies.

A sign of how the environment has changed can be seen in the changing tone of the word“controversial”. The term once had a neutral, or even positive, undertone, to denote cutting-edge artwork that challenged us. Now it is used entirely by the media to denote a policy or position they disapprove of, and which you are therefore supposed to disapprove of. It means something beyond the pale of acceptable opinion, a pale that has shrunk as the cultural revolution has ended, illustrated by neologisms like “problematic”.

The MeToo movement was to some extent an end-of-cultural-revolution moment. Janice Turner made the point that the Seventies and Eighties were the worst periods for abuse because sexual freedom had been achieved but not yet sexual equality. It was an ambiguous, revolutionary period, always fun times for abusive men, but that can’t last; someone has to police sexual behaviour in a species in which males have 40% more upper body strength than females. The stricter sexual atmosphere since then reflects that revolutionary period ending.

Revolutionaries who establish themselves in power inevitably start thinking about firming up that power. They have a vested interest in making the times before seems worse than they really were, which is why contemporary films or plays set before the Sixties must always show it as racially prejudiced or portray traditional marriages as unhappy. Revolutionaries also need to start thinking about public rituals that imitate faith, something the Soviets, Chinese Communists and Jacobins all imitated in various ways. Rituals in particular attract children and adolescents; just as young people across Europe once dressed up to celebrate Corpus Christi, run riot on Shrove Tuesday or flirt on St John’s Eve, now Pride month and the other new feasts of the calendar are increasingly popular with children, spread through TikTok and other social media.

The religious nature of the 2020 protest has been much commented on, with strange outpourings of hysteria and feet-washing, and with Floyd becoming an icon.

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Perhaps the most powerful, and obviously quasi-religious, symbol of the new order is taking the knee. Indeed, intelligent people have even argued that taking the knee before games or displaying the rainbow flag at stadiums are not “political” acts, when critics have pedantically pointed out that they clearly are; because when you doubt your politics so little it barely registers as politics anymore. And to believers, something like racism or homophobia is non-negotiable; there is no moral relativism allowed.

Before the cultural revolution, public morals were patrolled by volunteers, believers in the dominant religion (Christianity) and typically women, Mary Whitehouse being the archetype of the disapproving great-aunt. Now the revolution has ended, public morality is patrolled by volunteers, believers in the public religion (and typically women, although gender differences are one of the taboos of the new age).

The way in which the Left had taken the role of the Right was best summed up by Scott Alexander, who asked what happened to the stodgy old conservatives who used to enforce public morality in the Fifties. Where would they be now? Of the archetypal disapproving great aunt figure, he said, it’s hard to argue she is “not a proud leftist by now, still chattering about how scandalous it is that people read books with the wrong values, still giving her terminally uncool speeches to the school board about how they had better enforce her values on the children”.

The revolutionaries were always going to create new rituals, new speech codes and new forms of censorship. England has changed a huge deal since our great victory in 1966, but in many ways it has barely changed at all.

Portia Pollock was 60 years old when she was murdered outside her home. She was a physical therapist who loved working with elderly folk in care homes. She also loved drumming. So I learned about her life and brutal death when I walked into New Orleans’s Louis Armstrong Park five days later and heard the sound of music.

More than two dozen people were pounding djembes in rhythmic unison in the scorching heat, while one woman in a straw hat played a flute, another tapped a tambourine and a third danced in the drumming circle.

But she was just another fatality in a rising tide of violence plaguing not just this Louisiana city, but the entire United States; I arrived in New Orleans from Austin, Texas, where a late-night shooting just down the road from my hotel had left one dead and 13 injured. National statistics are not yet released but preliminary data shows homicides rose almost one third in major cities last year — the largest recorded rise in the nation’s history — and carried on surging this year, up another 18.5%, according to latest figures.

This rise in killings — seen in cities big and small, red and blue, north and south — threatens to unravel one of the most remarkable success stories of this century: the decline in violent crime. Several cities, including Chicago, suffered their highest homicide rates for nearly three decades. New York recorded a 45% murder increase last year and near-doubling of shooting incidents. As a result, crime is also rising up the political agenda. In the New York mayoral battle, Eric Adams, a former cop who campaigned on public safety, looks set to be the surprise winner of the Democratic primary.

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New Orleans, a city about the size of Coventry, has long suffered some of the highest murder rates in the US. After a dip in 2019, it experienced a 60% leap last year with 195 killings and have so far risen this year at higher rates than the national level. Carjackings, where victims tend to be random, more than doubled in 2020.

The city is still recovering from the traumas of the biggest residential disaster in US history. When the city’s levees failed during Hurricane Katrina in 2005, hundreds drowned and most households had to relocate, often for months. Today, the city has 100,000 fewer residents. The disaster also led to imposition of an educational experiment: its low-performing public schools were replaced by a charter system — similar to our free schools — based on choice. Test results have improved. But I was also told this policy lay at the heart of many problems, since kids from poor, black and troubled backgrounds were kicked out of classrooms rather than helped by local teachers from their own backgrounds.

“After Katrina large sums of money were spent on improving security in schools, since there was the thought young people would come back traumatised and unruly,” said Gina Womack, 59. “The schools were still in a horrible condition but there were police, more security, more suspensions. We prioritise policing and patrolling over support for struggling families. It shows how as a society we are quick to blame but we ignore the problems of our youth.”

Womack founded a group to keep kids out of prison in Louisiana: “I am a black single mum of three children and I did not want them to end up in an unjust system,” she tells me. And describes how, when the pandemic struck it exposed, with ruthless efficiency, inequalities in education, housing and income, especially in a city that relied for so many jobs on events and hospitality. “Life has been tougher and it’s been really hard for many families with everyone at home,” she says. “There have been many conversations around the loss of life, first through Covid and now homicide — which happens in impoverished communities under stress.”

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Flozell Daniels agrees. He’s head of the Foundation for Louisiana, which spent millions rebuilding communities after Katrina. He believes that many people, often still traumatised by the catastrophe, were subject to extreme pressure by the pandemic in a place which already had a profound lack of faith in government and deep distrust for the police. “Black people do not trust them to keep us safe,” he said. “George Floyd’s death may have been surprising for white people but we knew there was this culture of violence in a system failing black people.”

Others had different reactions. Denise Graves, Portia’s close friend, told me about one black boy from a prosperous family: “He said ‘I’d never understood police brutality, I’d always thought someone shot must have been doing something wrong so I tried to do everything right — but now I realise my skin colour makes me a target.” Graves, a community pastor in her mid-sixties, has raised five boys; she grew up in a tough part of Los Angeles, but said “every night one of them was out of my sight I was terrified”.

Such attitudes cannot be healthy for any society, let alone one as fissured and flooded with firearms as America. A Gallup survey last summer found confidence in police had plunged to its lowest level since the firm started tracking such data almost three decades ago. Yet it also exposed the nation’s divisions: trust actually rose among Republicans to 82% while falling to 28% among Democrats.

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Chabre Johnson, 36, works on the frontline. She’s a project manager with Youth Empowerment Project, a scheme that has helped many young people in New Orleans but has also seen some of its kids murdered or jailed. In the last month alone, a 12-year-old girl and 10-year-old boy have been slain in separate city shootings. So many of the children and teens she works with have seen bodies, heard gunshots and have relatives in prison. “They get tired of trying to do the right thing when everything is stacked against them.”

Johnson believes the dehumanising effect of technology — accelerated in the pandemic — has had a devastating impact. “I think the value of life and self-worth has declined.” The kids she works with are taking less interest in their appearance, and are more interested in the destruction of property and using drink or drugs to blot out problems. She worries too that schoolyard beefs are inflamed on social media and families have lost their ability to control children: “Kids tells parents that if they are not allowed out they will call the police and say they are being kidnapped. Young people do not fear anything.”

These children are growing up in a city with a history of violence, remarked upon even by the Times war reporter William Howard Russell when he visited  in 1861, and the causes are complex. But Flozell Daniels argues that his country does not care about young black men killing each other, becoming alarmed only when violence spills out to affect middle-class people such Pollock. As we drink coffee in a bookshop in a poorer part of town, he explains that these issues are deeply personal: his son was shot dead five years ago at the age of 20 in a murder that has never been solved.

His family thinks they know the killer, now in prison for another attempted murder. This exposes another corrosive issue in black and impoverished communities: low clear-up rates, currently at 36% in New Orleans for murder, despite evidence many proven killers are linked to other violent crimes. “We spent the first couple of years offering the police information, doing our own investigations, offering a reward. We kept calling the police but they never reacted. They were disrespectful — they said he must have been doing something bad to have been killed,” said Daniels. “I am sure that if it had been a 20-year-old white girl from upstate they would have found her killer quickly.”

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Jill Leovy wrote that this issue of impunity for killers of black men was her nation’s “great, though mostly invisible, race problem” in Ghettoside, her brilliant book on homicide. She pointed out that black men comprised about 6% of the population but 40% of homicide victims, arguing that efforts to combat this mostly black-on-black murder epidemic had a dark history of dismissal by authorities that remained “inept, fragmented, underfunded, contorted by a variety of ideological, political and racial sensitivities.” The Californian journalist concluded that when the criminal justice system failed to respond strongly to violent injury and death, such issues become endemic.

The New Orleans police, their union and the district attorney declined to discuss these issues —although as one youth worker said, who would want to be a cop in the current climate? Many commentators and police leaders, however, have jumped on the homicide figures to argue this is the inevitable consequence of demonising the police as “genocidal oppressors of minorities”, thereby reducing their confidence to tackle violent criminals. Such claims are undercut by data showing little difference in murder rates in cities regardless of which party is in charge, despite widely differing policies. The rise also started soaring in June last year, three months after the first lockdowns, so cannot simply be blamed on bored teenagers hanging around streets when schools closed.

Jeff Asher, a crime analyst based in New Orleans and former adviser to the city authorities, was among the first to highlight the alarming murder surge. He points out that police have been making fewer arrests for years as part of the trend to reduce incarceration and soften drug policies — down from about 60,000 a year in 2010 in his home city to some 17,000 the year before the pandemic. So the rise in killings is unlikely to be due to sudden police retrenchment. “De-policing could be a contributing factor but it has been going on for a decade,” he said.

The former CIA officer thinks “anyone giving a single answer to this complicated question is wrong”. He believes it may be part of a cycle of violence and mistrust that has seen cops pulling back, perhaps to more peaceful streets, which fed into existing mistrust of police in more troubled areas. This ends up with more people taking disputes into their own hands, a situation made worse amid the stresses and tensions of a pandemic. “People are not willing to depend on the criminal justice system when they do not see it as something neutral that treats them fairly.”

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Asher backs his argument with another alarming set of figures showing more guns being carried. We know sales boomed last year, with many first-time buyers. But he shows me that more firearms were found by police in early months of the pandemic last year, despite arrests and stops falling sharply, and then the figures rose again after Floyd’s murder and the protests at the end of May. In Chicago, for example, police stops fell two thirds between January and May 2020 — yet they found almost twice as many guns at the end of that period as at the beginning. Similar patterns can be detected in other cities, suggesting this was another legacy of deteriorating trust that coincided — or could have been fuelled — by the pandemic.

Asher points out that there was no rise in killings in Baltimore since trust of the authorities in this city wrecked by gang warfare was already shot to pieces. “George Floyd was the spark, not the cause. The poorest communities have been over-incarcerated, subjected to gun violence for generations and then hit hardest by pandemic. We have too many firearms and policing needs reform — but it’s hard to rebuild trust.”

Yet he also says it is simplistic for the Left to blame Donald Trump’s presidency for such deep societal problems. “One administration does not cause children shooting at police, everyone carrying guns, police becoming less willing to engage and communities historically underserved seeing enormous eruption in violence.” So is this, ultimately, a racial issue, I asked? “Everything in America goes back to our original sin,” he replied.

And now the whole glorious project of uniting the states might be entering its final stages. I hope, and think, they will pull back from the brink as they did in 1968, that sweaty year of assassinations and street fighting. But it’s possible the United States is heading for the rocks.

The end-times thinking goes like this. The Republican party — only partially committed now to free and fair elections — will probably take back the House of Representatives in the mid-term elections in 2022. It has a good chance of taking the Senate too. If Donald Trump were to run in 2024 and lose, he could do then what he failed to do last time: use raw power and congressional poodles to get statewide votes annulled or altered and even electoral college decisions over-ruled.

The army might object or might not. Either way it would not be pretty. There could be a coup. Worse in many ways than the civil war because neither side would win. It would be the end of Webster’s unifying project.

One of the tasks that Americans must set themselves in the (quite short) space of time there is to come to terms with all this is to focus anew on the things that draw them together — or at least to analyse and address the things that have carved them apart. The ever-brilliant writer George Packer sets an example with his new book, Last Best Hope (out 1st July). In it, he sets out the divisions in a manner that invites reconciliation — or an effort towards it, at least.

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One of Packer’s most telling points is simple but devastating. The people doing well in modern America have lost sight of the need for this task to be undertaken at all. They fail, in the modern age, to grasp the need for national myths and identities that can unite nations. “Smart Americans,” Packer says, “are uneasy with patriotism. It’s an unpleasant relic of a more primitive time, like cigarette smoke or dog racing.”

They are fiercely loyal to their families, and to “diversity and efficiency, heirloom tomatoes and self-driving cars.” But not patriotism. Nothing that binds them to their poorer (and increasingly distant) neighbours. “The winners in Smart America have lost the capacity and the need for a national identity, which is why they can’t grasp its importance for others.” But, always assuming they don’t want America to fall apart, they must re-grasp it.

Since these folks enjoy books as much as fancy tomatoes, here’s a suggestion. That they read another new one, Americanon, which brings together, well, the American canon. Not the classics. Not even the Constitution — a text that fewer than half of Americans read. The conceit of Americanon, written by the journalist Jess McHugh, is that it gathers thoughts on thirteen books that Americans have turned to, down the years, in huge numbers. They thus reflect, McHugh argues, the nation better than any other set of works. She includes cookbooks, self-help books. And in pride of place: Webster’s dictionary.

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The dictionary was a dramatically successful tool of nationalism, which, McHugh says, “started to establish the idea that American was something anyone could become — as long as they adhered to the rules. It cemented, she says, “the notion of American as an identity that could be both taught and learned.”

And the same goes for the rest of the canon: favourites like The Old Farmer’s Almanac and Betty Crocker’s Picture Cook Book are seen by McHugh not just as popular titles but as foundational texts that shaped a shared understanding of the American story. “These how-to books taught people certain skills, all while delivering messages about American beliefs, encoding everything from individualism and self-reliance to meritocracy and personal freedom.”

This was not bottom-up. It was top down. American values were created and shaped by an elite group of authors. That’s an important point, when you consider George Packer’s contention that the modern elites just don’t care about building anything anymore. If they don’t, who will?

Sometimes the books in Americanon were seen as dangerous, such was their power. One night in 1942, a German agent was arrested on a train in New York City’s Penn Station. Among his few possessions, he was carrying a copy of that year’s Old Farmer’s Almanac in his coat pocket. The US government worried that it might contain too much useful information, in particular about the expected weather, so they considered closing it down. The canon was a window into the soul of America — a risky thing in the hands of an enemy.

In an age when the project of unification seems, to so many, to be going into reverse — what is the modern equivalent of the Almanac or Betty Crocker’s Cook Book? The stress in literature now is on the harms done by America to its own people. Real harms, as McHugh acknowledges, to black people, to native Americans, to all manner of people who have never shared in the promise of the place.

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The trouble of course is that concentrating on those harms — and on the simple fact that positive stuff has often been tendentious or plain lying — disbars Americans from wallowing in the unifying features of the canon. And that could well mean that the healing these bestselling books could bring is unavailable, even in the event that any authors wanted to return to the project.

McHugh is sanguine, though. Myth-making, she says, is the amulet to ward off a national death. She thinks it can be revivified, and done so in a modern way: “The narrative is revised to incorporate new fears and fresh trauma, but the story never goes away. Culture, myth, and identity are fashioned over time; cobbled together in moments of doubt as a way of reassuring ourselves not just of who we were but of who we are.”

She suggests a broadening of the horizons of the myths, to tell a new, truer story, as she puts it: “one that does not respond to uncertainty with a rush to create meaning but instead embraces the ambiguity of an ever-changing nation.”

Good luck with that, as the Americans say.

The trouble is that writers who try to follow her advice — to write modern myths that balance the endless talk of distress and dysfunction with a little bit of 4th of July jollity — are either laughed at or edged out of the public space. Or both. The latest to be heading for the knackers yard is poor David Brooks at the New York Times, who has written some sweetly earnest books about the American Dream and still mentions in his columns the long littleness of American life, such as the vital issue of how to get the best sandwich in New York City.

“A deli sandwich was the main thing in his life that day,” said essayist Tressie McMillan Cottom in an interview last year. “I’m deathly terrified of that.” An incoming associate professor at a thing called the School of Information and Library Sciences at the University of North Carolina, Professor Cottom rebukes genial optimists: “We could laugh at David Brooks five years ago. What happened isn’t that David Brooks started being bad … It is that the problems became too real. And now we just can’t waste too much time on these writers.”

We are still united by sandwiches and the weather and apple pie. But in the age of Black Lives Matter, no one will write about them.

The outbreak of this second virus was confirmed earlier this month by the Center for Disease Control (CDC) and Prevention, which issued a statement declaring racism an “epidemic” that posed a “serious public health threat”. Citing a “growing body of research”, the CDC director called on her agency — and America at large — to “confront the impact of racism”.

This is, on the face of it, a peculiar focus for America’s leading public health agency; one might think it would be preoccupied with the other pandemic ravaging the country. And yet the CDC’s statement was all too typical of today’s medical establishment. The American Psychological Association recently announced that America was “living in a racism pandemic”; the American Medical Association has called racism an “urgent public health threat”; and The Lancet has declared it  a “public health crisis we can no longer ignore”.

It is easy to dismiss such rhetoric as “woke” nonsense, typical of “progressive” America’s obsession with race. But there is something striking — and troubling — about the way in which racism has evolved from a social problem into a medical one. For it is not simply a case of well-meaning medical practitioners parroting the language of social justice to “assuage their liberal guilt”, as a former member of President Biden’s Covid-19 advisory board put it. From a public health perspective, it has potentially fatal ramifications.

Take, for example, the “anti-racist agenda for medicine” recently published in The Boston Review by two Harvard doctors. In it, the pair argue that, because colour-blind solutions have failed to achieve racial equity in health care, they have had to introduce “race-explicit interventions” in their Boston hospital. These have culminated in a pilot programme of preferential care for black and “Latinx” heart failure patients, due to launch this spring; instead of triaging their patients according to the seriousness of their condition, race has become a mitigating — and deciding — factor.

In effect, it will mean that a black person with a less serious condition could be prioritised over a white patient on account of their skin colour. “Building on calls for reparations,” the two doctors explain, “we call this a vision for medical restitution.” Here, writ large at the heart of the medical establishment, was Critical Race Theory — the idea that the US is a fundamentally racist country and that race is a social construction designed to oppress and exploit people of colour.

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In many ways, it was only a matter of time. As far back as 2010, the American Journal of Public Health published an article titled “Critical Race Theory, Race Equity, and Public Health: Toward Antiracism Praxis”, in which two Professors of Public Health argued that only a “race-conscious” approach to healthcare would be able to combat racial inequities. Based on “race equity and social justice principles”, they encouraged the development of solutions that “bridged gaps” in health, housing and employment.

In the years since, this medicalisation of Critical Race Theory remained purely academic, largely confined to Professors looking to rack up a few journal citations and bask in the warm glow of approval from fellow Left-wing academics. But after the death of George Floyd, that changed overnight.

As Black Lives Matter protests erupted across the country, politicians began likening the scourge of racism to a health emergency, calling it a “pandemic on a pandemic”. The mood was captured by Austin’s mayor, who cried out: “Racism is literally killing black and brown people. It’s a public health crisis, and it’s beyond time to treat it as such”.

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Public health officials agreed. “While everyone is concerned about the risk of Covid,” said one infectious disease expert, “there are risks with just being black in this country that almost outweigh that sometimes”. Meanwhile Anthony Fauci, the chief medical advisor to the President who had previously denounced anti-lockdown protests, was decidedly more equivocal about BLM: “It’s a delicate balance because the reasons for demonstrating are valid, but the demonstration puts one at additional risk.”

Soon after, America’s public health bodies began discussing racism in terms formerly only used to describe Covid-19. The American Medical Association, for example, recently announced that it wanted to increase funding into the “epidemiology of risks and damages related to racism”, while the CDC’s new Racism and Health Program seeks to “build a healthier America for all” by confronting racial and health disparities.

Yet the most striking feature of these statements is their similarity. Each one promises to “acknowledge” the damaging effects of structural and systemic racism and supports the “development” of policy to combat racism.

But what does this mean in practice? In New York, for instance, the City Department of Health, in an attempt to address low testing and high positivity rates among minority communities, launched a hyper-local testing programme. It proved a success and resulted in 8,730 tests across the two postcodes. So far, so sensible.

However, compare that to the approach of the Milwaukee Health Department, which, in order to “own the work of racism being a public health issue”, devised its own “health equity initiative”. Contained within a “three-step process”, it proposed the introduction of racial equity training, the development of “a racial equity framework” and the creation of safe spaces and a “welcoming, inclusive” organisation.

This latter approach is characteristic of Critical Race Theory, which disregards evidence-led specifics in favour of ideology-based generalities. But in the field of medicine, this is particularly dangerous. American medical insurance companies, for example, now attribute lower levels of depression among black people and Latinos to under-diagnosis, even though suicide rates among white people are three times higher. Yes, depression doesn’t always manifest itself through suicide, but it is strange, as Wesley Yang notes, that Blue Cross, which provides insurance to a third of Americans, “sees ‘not enough depressed black people’ as a problem that has to be fixed”.

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Elsewhere, certain states are adopting race-prioritised vaccine rollouts — a move first mooted by the CDC last year. These states, including Vermont and Montana, claim that, even after controlling for income, underlying health conditions and other variables that potentially affect the disease, there is still a racial disparity.

Put to one side the disturbing historical parallels of dividing Americans by their skin colour — it is not even clear that this racialised approach to vaccines makes sense from a public health perspective. After all, there are a number of other issues — such as education, access and outreach — that are also hindering the vaccine rollout to non-white communities. Moreover, as one former Biden official warned, it could even have the opposite effect and deter uptake if minorities fear that they are being treated like “guinea pigs”.

In reality, all that has resulted from this policy is a racially distorted vaccine rollout that is likely to fuel resentment in an already divided country. Today’s doctors are, of course, doubtlessly well-intentioned in their attempts to cure America’s societal ills. But shifting attitudes on race is a long and difficult process — and not something that can be remedied with a three-step public health initiative.

Every year American police kill about 40-50 unarmed civilians, of whom just under half are black, and while many have become well-known since the rise of Black Lives Matters in 2013, Floyd was the first to have become an icon. Murals were painted across the world and those who mocked him went on trial for blasphemy. His is one of the most recognisable faces of 2020.

The murder triggered a month of protests characterised not just by looting and violence but by strange and bizarre scenes such as the washing of black feet. As Niall Gooch put it at the time: “I am beginning to understand what it must have felt like to be alive in the Middle Ages when one of those hysterical outbreaks began and everyone in your village started quacking like a duck or refusing to wear clothes.”

At the same time, the trend among conservative and classical liberal commentators of comparing American progressivism to a religion accelerated. Certainly the influence of Christianity and, in particular, Calvinism has been well documented, by me included.

It is easy to compare social justice politics to religion because there are so many superficial similarities; it is also fun, because many of our opponents despise religion and prize rationalism. Yet it is also unfair to religious believers and the faiths that inspired them.

Right now, hundreds of millions of Muslims are fasting for the month of Ramadan, during which time they will raise huge amounts for charity — quietly, dutifully and without informing their Instagram followers. They do that because the Abrahamic faiths demand great self-sacrifice and selflessness.

In contrast, political ideology mostly offers only rewards — status, popularity and often jobs and money. While big corporations have been pressured to support social justice campaigns since last May, it’s questionable who will benefit the most; the campaigners certainly won’t be out of pocket.

Religions also inspire great art, while the Great Awokening won’t leave us with a Last Supper, Chartres Cathedral or Shrine of Fatimah Masumeh. We have some murals, yes, but there is nothing transcendental, nothing for future generations to marvel at and to cherish. Most significantly, though, there is no possibility of redemption or forgiveness with today’s political religion. What is often referred to as “cancel culture” is the absence of forgiveness in public life, even for things people said in their youth.

At the height of the Great Awokening last year, 14 of the 15 bestsellers on the New York Times list were about race, racism and the means by which white people could be better “allies”. Yes, there was Christian guilt there, but the phenomenally successful White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism offers no redemption or hope at all. There is really nothing that white liberals, Robin DiAngelo’s target audience, can ultimately do — except to recognise their privilege and feel guilty, because they benefit from the system.

Religions at their most anthropological offer people a means of rubbing along, through the ideas of justice and mercy. There is none of that in the political ideology of our time; it is far more a clash of wills and a battle for supremacy; there is certainly no sense of sacrifice.

The ultimate sacrifice, for Christians, was Jesus’s death on the cross, and Christ accepted his death to save mankind. George Floyd did not; he was not a martyr, he was a victim of murder. Of course, the veneration of Floyd is indisputably Christian in flavour; Jesus himself was a criminal, and the religion turned the moral hierarchy on its head by idolising the despised. Yet the religious fervour of our age is better described as cultish rather than religious — and the differences are important.

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The term “Political Religion” was coined by the German philosopher Eric Voegelin in his 1938 book of the same name, which made the point that totalitarian political movements strongly resemble faiths. He later called all modern political movements “ersatz religion” and argued that after the Enlightenment people began to see their own activities as sacred, including their politics.

Which seems prophetic, if that’s not the wrong word.

This was followed after the war by Norman Cohn’s The Pursuit of the Millennium, a book that was talked about a fair bit as last summer dragged on. Cohn looked at various millennial Christian movements that had sprung up during the late medieval era and following the Reformation, his historical account having one eye on the tragedy that had just hit Europe. Most of the movements Cohn described shared certain characteristics, including a veneration of the poor and hatred of the rich, a belief in the inevitability of a future earthy paradise — “the Third Age” — and a division of the world into good and evil.

“These people could be regarded as remote precursors of Bakunin and of Nietzsche” and the “armed bohemians of National Socialism”, he wrote of one such group, the Brethren of the Free Spirit.

The Brethren believed in “a quasi-mystical anarchism — an affirmation of freedom so reckless and unqualified that it amounted to a total denial of every kind of restraint and limitation”. In order to come closer to God, they first had to engage in group sex and surprisingly the group didn’t have much trouble attracting recruits, until the Church cracked down on them.

More disturbing were the Flagellants, large groups of people who would proceed from town to town and whip themselves into an agonised, bloody fury, accompanied by weeping crowds. The flagellation movement had started in Italy in the 1260s, during a period of great stress, with an epidemic and a civil war, but over the decades had been taken up by the Germans, who made it far more extreme and violent, and also adding uniforms.

When the Black Death struck in 1348, it led to huge Flagellant processions and hysterical scenes wherever they went. But on top of spreading the disease, the group soon turned violent, possessing an angry, quasi-revolutionary element and a hatred of clerics, the rich and, most of all, Jews. Horrific pogroms followed, despite the Pope’s condemnations.

The Flaggelants had spread all over Germany, France and the Low Countries although strangely it never took off in England; a group arrived in London where they set up shop outside St Paul’s, proceeded to whip themselves and cry… and were met with stony, embarrassed silence. They soon left. The Flaggelants were eventually suppressed by the Church — bizarrely, its leaders were taken to Rome and publicly beaten, which surely can’t have been a terrible punishment.

The period culminated in the most extreme event of all, the Münster rebellion of 1534-5, when a group of Anabaptists created their own proto-communist paradise. It ended — incredibly! — with mass murder. The Münster rebels believed in equality, a dream of many Christian cults and one which in Cohn’s lifetime had also led to millions of deaths. It is an unachievable goal, but it still inspires believers today, even if the focus has moved from the individual to the group.

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The leader of the Münster rebellion was an actor, a reliable force for evil throughout history. He had used the moral anarchy of the Reformation to charm, bully and sexually exploit — also a characteristic of cults throughout the ages, and one that distinguishes them from religions (a fuzzy difference at times). The political cults of today often have similar psychological dynamics.

Cult members are expected to give everything, body and soul, and this means keeping away from non-believing friends, and even denouncing family members who oppose the cult’s goals. One of the most disturbing trends of 2020 were videos of teenagers denouncing older family members for their racism or “white supremacy”. One teenager crowed on social media when her mother was punched at the Capitol for her opposition to BLM.

There were echoes of Soviet Russia and Mao’s China, both of which encouraged young people to denounce anti-communist family members. Many of the children who did so then suffered psychological traumas in later life as the enormity of what they had done dawned on them. But, then, the lure of peer popularity is incredibly strong with adolescents.

Cults enable bullying to flourish, endorsed by the ideology. Being a vehement believer in a cause, locked against powerful and malignant outside forces, is the perfect vehicle for anyone with sadistic or even violent tendencies; it has been seen throughout history, and it is quite obviously on display in many of the social justice causes of recent years.

We live in an age of changing social mores, and the speed of moral change was illustrated last year by the warnings Sky Cinema issued about old films reflecting the different social values of the year they were made in. One of the movies featuring this warning, a remake of Aladdin starring Will Smith, was made in…. 2019.

This kind of moral confusion is the perfect environment for bullies and sadists because it is far easier for people to be punished for using the wrong language, or having the wrong opinions, and for many it is a ruthless competition to reach the top. Most of the nastiness is mercifully online, but we had a taste of the medieval at one point when a latter-day mini-Münster — the CHOP — sprang up in Seattle.

The victims of that utopian experiment, not being part of the litany of the saints, have been largely forgotten, but the underlying violent energies of the social justice movement shouldn’t be. George Floyd the man is dead, and his family have received the justice they deserve, but George Floyd the icon will live on, a powerful symbol for the faithful as they strive to build a third age of racial equality.

But take a moment to read the sign on the shop’s window as you enter, and it soon becomes clear that Petunia’s has been drawn into a far darker chapter of the Portland story; one that tells of a city in free fall due to an almost accidental anarchist takeover, where residents have as much to fear staying home as going out and even the most harmless of shops is liable to have its windows smashed in.

The sign is Petunia’s special take on a Portlandian phenomenon that my wife Heather has come to call a “don’t-hurt-me wall” — a now-widespread attempt by local business owners to make anarchists think twice before vandalising their shop or café.

“We are a small, women and locally owned business,” Petunia’s sign pleads. “We are struggling like so many of us in this hard time, and love our community. Please don’t cause us any damage.” Welcome to Portland; the progressive dream that has turned into a nightmare.

When Heather and I moved to the city three years ago, after being spectacularly driven from our jobs at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, there was little to suggest that municipal embrace of anarchy was on the horizon. We considered moving to more than a dozen cities across the US, Canada and Europe — but in the end Portland won. With the city’s proximity to nature and world-class food culture, it seemed to provide the perfect balance. And then suddenly last summer, with the confluence of the George Floyd protests and the Presidential election, Portland came unmoored.

For what it’s worth, Petunia’s “don’t-hurt-me wall” is more explicit than your average Portland business. It has, for example, resisted the urge to simply and loudly proclaim that BLACK LIVES MATTER, presumably because its owners know that Portland is entirely composed of people who already agree with this obvious decree — including the police.

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But its attempt to reason with the anarchists — by highlighting how it is a struggling small business, locally owned and run entirely by women — speaks volumes about day-to-day life in my home city, where negotiating with vandals has become an essential skill. Indeed, Portland is full of signs in windows and on lawns pleading with anarchists to move on and hurt someone else. These residents know they cannot depend on the police to either prevent crimes or arrest those who commit them, and who can’t manage to come together and face down a small but violent mob of misanthropes.

The streets of downtown Portland, once a bustling home to independent boutiques, are now lined with boarded-over windows and closed businesses. No neighbourhood is secure from the current wave of terror; the breaking of shop fronts, arson and harassment of sleeping citizens in their homes are all commonplace.

Rioting has occurred like clockwork, and often anarchist “direct actions” are announced in advance, so the police are never taken by surprise. And yet the city’s officers, under the command of our cartoonishly liberal mayor (who is also our police-commissioner), have stood by and — night after night — allowed the city to descend into chaos. Last September, rioters even targeted the Mayor’s own apartment building, breaking in and setting a fire in the lobby. The Mayor’s response? To announce that he was moving out of the building to keep his neighbours safe, a move any competent parent would recognise invites more terror. The anarchists have gained a strange kind of control over the city in their fight against Nazis and white supremacists they appear to have conjured in a quest to give their anger meaning.

America may be being torn apart by the tension between Democrats and Republicans, but that is not what afflicts Portland. The problem in Portland, as in so many the cities along the West Coast, is that the progressives have fully defeated conservatives, and without any opposing political force, their liberalism has become unhinged.

Anarchism has deep roots in the Pacific Northwest, but until 2020 it largely persisted on the fringe — they would blockade the federal ICE facility, or take over an occasional intersection, harass drivers and direct traffic. This, of course, caused them to be regarded by most Portland citizens as an irritant.

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But that all changed last summer when, during the Black Lives Matter protests, the city’s anarchists discovered that, so long as they shouted certain slogans, citizens who once grudgingly tolerated them would now cheer them on with gusto. Suddenly, the absurd claim that “All Cops Are Bastards” became a mainstream belief, and “Abolish the Police” went from being a threat to a policy proposal.

Of course, all reasonable people understand that black people have faced oppression in North America since their ancestors were brutally imported as slaves. Liberals can be justly proud of our role in fighting this evil, from abolition to the civil rights movement and beyond. But as the current situation in Portland demonstrates, “the right side of history” has now been ceded by voices of reason on the Left to extremists who deliberately conflate a demand for racial justice with a desire to burn civilisation to the ground.

And this has put those of us who consider ourselves “of the Left” in a dangerous predicament. I am not a gun enthusiast. I never wanted to own guns, but I do — for the same reason I would if I lived in a war zone. The civil authority has abandoned the law-abiding citizens of Portland, and in so doing it has created a new Wild West in which we are each responsible for protecting ourselves from bands of roving bandits.

Sometimes, their threat is purely symbolic, as when they topple public monuments. In these situations, the city responds by helpfully removing the offending statue. But in other cases, these habitual rioters attempt to exert power, both directly and indirectly, over their fellow citizens. Graffiti in downtown Portland calls for the killing of local journalist, Andy Ngo, who continues to report on Antifa violence regardless. Having failed to intimidate Ngo, the rioters succeeded in shutting down Powell’s Books for several days when Ngo’s book went on sale.

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Knowing the store would not be protected by police, Powell’s had already decided the book would only be sold online. Yet the unsatisfied rioters forced Powell’s to suspend operation, and the city for its part offered no defence of free speech, or of a free press, or of Portland’s iconic bookstore or of Andy Ngo, a citizen of Portland being openly threatened with murder. The city has also allowed rioters to march freely through residential neighbourhoods, where they intimidate sleeping residents by chanting “wake up, motherfucker, wake up”, shine spotlights into people’s windows and harass anyone who comes out to face them.

So long as rioters claim to fight for the oppressed, they appear to have carte blanche. If they decide they don’t like this article, if they come to my house to menace my family as they have done to Andy Ngo, Mayor Wheeler and countless anonymous citizens of Portland, will the police intercede? I honestly don’t know.

The truth is, I rarely see any evidence of even basic law enforcement here in Portland. The police are extremely slow to respond to emergency calls. The citizens and businesses have, over the last year, been left to fend for themselves against criminals thinly cloaked in progressive slogans. And given the way the Mayor and City Council have undercut the police and allowed them to be demonised by the anarchists, it is easy to understand their reluctance — they are doing a difficult job, under a microscope, where only their mistakes count.

And this is the great tragedy of Portland. As people flee New York, San Francisco, Seattle and Los Angeles, Portland has everything it needs to pick up the slack and be the next booming metropolis — everything, that is, except the political will to resist following those once great cities into a self-inflicted, depressive spiral.

Instead of capitalising on those cities’s errors, Portland is making them too, and in even more spectacular form. The combination of runaway taxes and a municipal authority that sides with criminals, against working people, is sealing the city’s fate. And the needless, coming collapse will fall disproportionately on the most precariously positioned.

Portland, ultimately, is a great city headed in the wrong direction. As Heather and I watch it fall to pieces, we can’t help but feel we have seen this happen before. Portland’s meltdown is, after all, eerily similar to the collapse of Evergreen. A city’s hapless mayor hamstringing the police at the behest of a woke mob that claims to see racists around every corner; it’s uncannily similar to what we saw in 2017.

And the result will be the same, albeit at much greater scale, with much higher stakes. Once again we are left with the question: Can anything be done? And once again, I fear that the answer is no.

The Government knows who its enemies are: Housing Minister Robert Jenrick has attacked the “woke worthies and town hall militants” trying to remove statues, while Jacob Rees-Mogg has criticised the “woke brigade”.

But what do they mean by this very overused four-letter word? I imagine most people, when they hear the word “woke”, rather feel like King Théoden after a day of Wormtongue whispering in his ear. It’s a boring, overused, culture-war term used to denote people arguing over nothing. Even the Prime Minister doesn’t seem to know. When asked if there was “nothing wrong with being woke”, his spokesman said: “I’m not sure what you mean specifically.”

Some Tories certainly don’t see being woke as a problem. Lord Vaizey, once MP for Alfred the Great’s home of Wantage, has labelled the whole War on Woke “pathetic”, adding for good measure: “Maybe I’m not good enough or noble enough to be woke. I want to be woke.” Rather than getting excited by statues, Vaizey said, the Government should “lean in” to issues of social and racial justice, and be more like Joe Biden — “woke in the best way” — by celebrating both tradition and diversity.

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By Ed West

Because it isn’t clear what it means, woke has become synonymous with either “leftie”, “liberal” or just “nice”. And that is why it will win – just as happened with its ideological forerunner in the 1990s.

One of the reasons that “political correctness” eventually proved successful, or at least overcame the initial disdain and contempt it inspired, is that a less important aspect of it was more attention-grabbing than its central component. PC was, in one respect, a form of political politeness, the desire to use language that was more inclusive and forgiving. But it was also — more importantly — a way of enforcing political orthodoxy, a belief that certain ideas should and could be made unsayable, even unthinkable, with enough social pressure.

Theodore Dalrymple called PC “communism writ small”; it emerged out of radical left American academia in the 1960s, and had certain similarities with the stifling orthodoxy of Soviet Russia. But it might better have been described as a mutation of Christianity, another successful form of behavioural enforcement with a long history of intolerance towards unbelievers, especially heretics.

Woke is not “kindness”, nor is it even “political correctness” — although it is rooted in that ideology. To be woke is to believe particular things about human society and human biology, and with a zeal that is often described as religious. One of the most useful definitions was made by the brothers Bo and Ben Winegard, who identified some of the main credal points of the woke Left, including the idea that “bigotry is pervasive” in America (and the West), that “almost all disparities among demographic groups are caused by bigotry”, that “if we all work really hard, we can create a more just, multicultural society” and that “diversity is almost always a good thing.”

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Unlike political correctness, however, woke — originally an African-American term to mean “awake” to social justice — is primarily about race, although gender is a secondary issue. To be woke in particular means to believe in “equity” rather than equality, that is equality of outcomes rather than equality of opportunities between groups.

The term has been around since at least the 1970s but grew in use and salience during the “Great Awokening”, the name for the seismic, radical shift in American upper-middle-class opinion from around 2013. The link between the smartphone and the Great Awokening is as clear as that between printing and the Reformation – and, thanks to social media, this period saw a dramatic shift in attitude towards racial injustice, diversity and immigration.

Social media encourages conformism, which was most visible last summer when huge numbers of people around the world displayed black squares on their Instagram pages following the death of George Floyd. Yet most people know fairly little about US homicide rates and statistics; they imitate the belief systems of their friends, colleagues and people they look up to, and will adopt beliefs if they appear socially desirable or moral.

This can include some quite implausible beliefs that would not survive rigorous scientific analysis and, if the roles were reversed, would resemble conspiracy theories. It is now taken as given that “systemic racism” prevents some minorities from achieving equity in terms of education, income or imprisonment rates, while the fact that other minorities far exceed that average is left unspoken. Indeed, some of the most vocal supporters of the idea that the United States is overwhelmed by systemic and systematic racism come from groups who outperform white Americans on any metric.

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Diversity is a central part of the Creed, and while it clearly has some benefits, especially in restricted settings — such as science — there is also a vast literature on diversity’s negative impact on trust, political stability, corruption and various other social ills. But the mainstream conservative movement has largely given up on this issue, partly because the social cost of debating such a sacred idea is too high. A few narcissistic show-offs on the Right like to be hated; most of us don’t. And when conservatives are no longer willing to fight for their beliefs, they launch wars over symbols instead.

It seems bizarre for a government to flag up the issue of statues and street names while over 1,500 of its citizens are dying each day from a virus they failed to control. But statues and street names don’t actually matter. They are a proxy for the far more important issue of diversity and demography; perhaps people worry about statues of dead Englishmen disappearing from city centres because they worry about Englishmen disappearing from those cities.

America’s iconoclastic spasm is certainly related to the country’s transformation from an overwhelmingly European country to a multicultural liberal caliphate, a bold experiment which is yet to produce its end results. African-Americans, though small in number and in relative overall decline, are a totemic group for the multicultural “Blue Tribe”, and their all-American narrative of slavery and redemption echoes the country’s Christian ideals.

What we call “woke” has become the court religion of that Blue Tribe which, despite or because it is led by wealthy whites, has become obsessed with “whiteness” as a form of original sin. But this strange, apparently masochistic tendency also, perversely, acts as a form of elite justification, distracting from more material injustices and allowing the privileged to present themselves as part of the moral vanguard, protecting society from the bigoted masses. Beliefs can be genuinely held and at the same time be manifestations of class interests; it’s happened throughout history.

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When conservatives liken current Left-wing ideas to religion, they are not doing so to undermine faith, only to point out progressivism’s power to create a strong belief-community — religio means “to bind” — glued together by rituals and creeds and without the need for empirical facts. The mostly peaceful protests we saw last summer, with white protestors washing the feet of black protesters, contained a goldmine for anthropologists studying the binding power of religious ritual — well, they would, if there were any conservative anthropology professors left.

The most obvious religious echo is with Calvinism, which holds that humanity is divided between the saved and the damned. In the 17^th century, Calvinists would agonise over this issue, and in many cases it caused acute psychological distress, just as the desire for moral purity in the social media age does today.

Calvinists also believed that some people were more morally righteous than others, and that these Godly folk should make laws for the betterment of others. Overthrowing the natural hierarchy was an extremely alarming idea to more traditionally-minded Englishmen — and it was in response to this that the political philosophy of conservatism was born. As historian Jerry Z Muller put it:

“Conservatism arose in good part out of the need to defend existing institutions from the threat posed by ‘enthusiasm,’ that is, religious inspiration which seeks to overturn the social order. The critique of religious enthusiasm, which was central to [David] Hume’s conservatism, was later extended… into a critique of political radicalism.”

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It is this “enthusiasm” that makes woke politics dangerous, because to its adherents their opponents really are bad people and, because there will always be inequality, this is a forever war. Equality of outcomes, a doctrine now so all-encompassing that it even enters the vaccine debate, might be theoretically desirable, but by definition it is also a zero-sum game. One group’s success is another’s failure, or injustice, and so it inevitably sets some minorities up against the weakest, poorest and least educated members of the majority, who have nowhere to turn except to Right-wing populists.

This is not just about things like censorship or quasi-blasphemy laws, although these are concerning; the American homicide rate increased 20% after the George Floyd protests, and an additional 3,500 are now dead as a result. These are real-world consequences.

Nothing that spectacular will happen in England, but the underlying ideas behind the Great Awokening will lead to endless bitterness and division, often ostensibly about the pettiest of issues but, deep down, about everything. And conservatives will lose because our own thought-leaders will convince the world that this is about well-meaning kindness vs the performative toughness — vice-signalling — that characterises so much Right-wing politics.

I’m not “anti-Woke” because I care about statues of slave-profiteers, or because of people using their pronouns in emails. I object to it because I think its ideas are fundamentally untrue and dangerous, just as our forefathers believed that “enthusiasm” was untrue and dangerous, as they did of Jacobinism and all the utopian ideologies of the 20^th century, too. That is what conservatives believe — and if our own prime minister cannot even agree on that, then we really are damned.

Ed West’s Tory Boy: Memoirs of the Last Conservative is published by Constable

Andrews’s book The New Age of Empire is an extension of that argument. In it, he cautions sympathetic readers not to get too giddy over the embrace of “anti-racism” by officialdom. As he sees it, it will only lead to “meaningless change” and “token gestures”. A self-proclaimed “black radical”, Andrews wants to attack the root of the problem: the West itself and the “logic of empire” that organises it.

Unsurprisingly, ground zero for Andrews’ critique is the Enlightenment — the “sacred foundation of Western knowledge”, as he sardonically puts it. All our modern ideas of freedom and equality are traditionally traced back to this Age of Reason. Andrews argues against that narrative. Kant’s racist anthropology and Hume’s polygenism, he writes, “provided the universal and scientific framework of knowledge that maintained colonial logic”, which is the central organising principle of the current “political and economic system and therefore infects all interactions, institutions and ideas”.

Kant et al placed white people firmly at the top of the racial hierarchy. And that codification of black inferiority was used to justify Western imperialism, which has gone through several mutations — from the relentless expeditions into the New World and Atlantic slavery, to 19th century European colonialism, to the present, in which the United States inherits imperial responsibilities. In our allegedly “post-racial” age, institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank continue to exploit Africa through unfair “structural adjustment” programs that force austerity and privatisation upon poor African nations, further crippling their economies. No matter how “the logic of empire” mutates, the premise is still the same: “The West is rich because the rest is poor”.

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As an epigone of Malcolm X, Andrews is not interested in interracial allyship as a solution. “The white left”, as he calls them, are too in thrall to the “psychosis of whiteness” to recognise that racism and imperialism are baked into their own politics. Echoing Maoism-Third Worldism, he chastises the white Left for failing to see that the “true revolutionary class has always resided outside the West”. As far as he’s concerned: “If you have come this far and believe that White people offering a meaningful hand of friendship is the solution, then you have missed the point.”

His solution is revolutionary Pan-Africanism — and has been for some time. In a 2018 video he made for the BBC, Andrews outlined his African utopia, his own Wakanda, materially rich and technologically advanced, where the diaspora will eventually return to their “African promised land”. In his book, he states his purpose is to develop “the politics of black radicalism, which centres on uniting Africa and the African diaspora to create a true revolution … the only true solution to the problem of racism”.

Andrews’s tract is uncompromising. His re-telling of the history of Western violence and the chronically poor state of Africa is potent. Interestingly, he is also critical of China and other upstart powers for using Africa as a “stepping stone” for their own development, while continuing the systematic “looting” of the continent. But Andrews ignores a number of contradictions that might puncture this worldview.

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Ironically Pan-Africanism, the ideology Andrews pledges fidelity to, is a bastard child of the West. It was westernised blacks that imagined a global black community with a common destiny transcending all nations, as a response to racial oppression (an idea rather similar to Zionism, a comparison Andrews wouldn’t be pleased with). Many of the icons of Pan-Africanism — Henry Sylvester Williams, Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X — hailed from the Americas, not Africa. Even native-born African adherents like Kwame Nkrumah were Western educated and very much influenced by the modernist impulses of Marxism.

But Andrews exhibits a common vice of contemporary radicalism: the idea that to be radical is to be disenchanted with all that is Western. It is rather fashionable, as the shrill calls to “decolonise” suggest, to believe that authentic radicalism regards the Enlightenment not as a resource in challenging imperialism but an imperial project itself. That narrative omits the fact that, while mainstream Enlightenment thinkers like Kant were rabid racists, the Enlightenment also provided the best tools to date for universal human liberation.

As Jonathan Israel has documented in his voluminous scholarship, there were two sides to the Enlightenment: a moderate and a radical wing. Funnily enough, all the individuals Andrews names in his galère of “dead white men” — Kant, Hume, Locke, Voltaire and Jefferson — were part of the Moderate Enlightenment, which was more elitist and conciliatory towards the old order. A different set of dead white men, inspired by Baruch Spinoza, made up the Radical Enlightenment — Diderot, Condorcet, D’Holbach . They  applied reason consistently against old hierarchies and institutions, including slavery and colonialism, precisely because they were fetters on human freedom and equality.

For instance Condorcet, in 1795, observed that during the “Age of Discovery” a “stupid and brutal fanaticism governed the kings and robbers”, which meant the “unfortunate beings who inhabited these new countries were not treated as men, because they were not Christian”. He went on to argue that the advantages of the Age of Discovery meant nothing unless Europeans “acknowledge men of other climates, equals and brothers by the will of nature, have never been formed to nourish the pride and avarice of a few privileged nations”.

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Indeed, anti-imperialist radicals of the 20th century such as CLR James recognised that Western thought was the wellspring of all progressive, emancipatory politics — especially the historical gains that emerged out of the Enlightenment. Secularism, individual rights, the scientific method, democratic politics, universal values, philosophical humanism and materialism have superseded earlier concepts — not because of white supremacy, but because they are, patently, improvements on what came before. Out of the seismic upheavals that formed the modern world — the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Scientific revolution and the Enlightenment — flowed superior ideas: ideas that still form the basis of human liberation.

These so-called “western values” are not western in any essential sense. They aren’t the property of white people; they are the birth right of all humanity. Which is why previous anti-imperialist radicals made a distinction between the good that stemmed from the most revolutionary elements of Western culture and the scourge of Western imperialism, which was a major obstacle to the realisation of these ideals around the world.

“The science resulting from all human knowledge has no nationality,” observed Sekou Touré, who lead Guinea to independence: “The ridiculous disputes about the origin of such and such a discovery do not interest us since they add nothing to the value of the discovery.”

Patrice Lumumba, a Congolese nationalist and Pan-Africanist himself, was known to have been inspired by the French revolution in his anti-imperialism, and studied French Enlightenment thinkers such as Voltaire and Rousseau. Moreover, CLR James, while detesting European colonialism, felt no shame in acknowledging the “learning and profound discoveries of Western civilisation” and made it his mission to “master the literature, philosophy and ideas of Western civilisation”.

Radical Enlightenment values are still the best tools humanity has crafted to create a better world. The challenge then is not to negate them but to build upon them, expand them, and ultimately raise them to a higher level never before seen. This still remains Africa’s path to liberation from tyranny and want — as opposed to Andrews’ nihilistic vision, which sees no place for interracial solidarity and finds a “glimmer of hope for true transformation” only in total collapse of the system. Dare I suggest it: “western values” are the real path towards black freedom.

Last week he was arrested (then released) in Washington DC, after burning a BLM flag stolen from a black church, once again confounding white Americans with his supposedly distorted racial identity. I found it hard, as I do every time he pops up in the news, not to roll my eyes at the media’s portrayal of Tarrio as some great instigator of racial discord. Because, like me, he’s a Cuban-American from Miami, which is to say that I’ve seen plenty of Tarrio-types in my day.

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Tarrio is what I’ll call a petty Miami schemer — the kind known to anyone who lives in the city, which was built on schemes and grifts in its days as a swampland backwater. In Miami, guys like Tarrio, from the personal trainer who tries to sell you steroids after your first session to the sleazy foreign investors who buy up entire high-rises, are a dime a dozen. The Proud Boys leader was first convicted, of theft, at the age of 20; nine years later, in 2013, he was sentenced to 30 months in federal prison for rebranding and reselling stolen medical devices. Before that, he spent some time in North Florida and ran a poultry farm. And let us not forget Tarrio’s failed 2020 congressional run.

That Tarrio leads a white supremacist group can be explained not by national race relations, but by the fact that he grew up in Miami: a place where “whiteness”, as it’s defined by the woke media class, simply doesn’t exist – for the simple reason that there are basically no white people here. It’s the only American city where Hispanics completely dominate the political and cultural landscape, and the few white people who remain no longer feel themselves to be “culturally white”. Everything in Miami, including racial dynamics, is filtered through a Hispanic lens, not an American one. Miamians don’t even consider themselves Floridians, because the rest of the state resembles Miami as much as Zimbabwe does. Those who grew up here are unrestrained by traditional ideas of race.

As a Miami cliché, Tarrio isn’t remarkably interesting. He’s merely an opportunist with some street smarts, who, due to his urban look, cuts an imposing figure. What he represents to the media class — and how they frame him — is far more interesting. The conversation about race in America always revolves around the supposed animus between blacks and whites, with other POC automatically siding with African-Americans due to some assumed melanated kinship. The fact that Tarrio is even a member, not to mention the leader, of a white supremacist group is inconceivable to most liberals. Their paradigm, in which all POC are locked in an interminable struggle against their white oppressors, removes all possibility for the fluidity and nuance with which POC, and especially Hispanics, navigate ideas of race and colour.

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In Miami, the main animus Hispanics have is with other Hispanics. The Puerto Ricans and the Dominicans have beef with one another. The Chileans and the Argentinians despise each other for reasons beyond just soccer. Hell, my people, the Cubans, have issues not only with other Hispanics, but with each other! The Cubans who immigrated shortly after Castro took power view themselves as entrepreneurial hard workers; they look down on the “newer Cubans” as lazy dope dealers and Medicare fraudsters.

These disparate Hispanic demographics, in order not to have to deal with one another, have segregated themselves into neighbourhoods where they only associate with themselves. The idea that anyone in Miami is thinking about white supremacy is preposterous; to someone like Tarrio, the “spectre of whiteness” — or any other concept used by the Left to explain American race relations — is completely foreign. Herein lies the problem with a term like “people of colour”; something as surface level as pigmentation doesn’t bind distinct subgroups into some kind of coalition.

If liberals find the impossibility of Hispanic solidarity distasteful, it’s only because they believe that kinship between groups is only achievable if all animus ceases to exist. People who live in cities where cultures are constantly clashing, Miami being the greatest example, get that a utopia in which every single group loves each other isn’t necessary. It’s only those suffering from white guilt who advocate this communal POC lovefest, because they are convinced that “whiteness” — and not natural and historic differences between groups — is what’s keeping the utopia at bay. One of the only things Hispanics seem to agree on, though, is that merely tolerating one another is often all the tolerance that’s needed. Some may find this “division” disconcerting, and maybe even sad, but if there isn’t a deep affinity among disparate Hispanic groups, there is in Miami a begrudging camaraderie that permeates personal interactions and animates the culture, and the city.

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Steeped in this culture, a figure like Tarrio, despite all his petty idiocy, has a more acute understanding of American racial dynamics than any African-American Studies major from an elite institution. The race-obsessed commentariat — the same people who’ve pushed the word “Latinx” on Hispanics in the hope of inducing an inorganic solidarity — would be mystified by the Hispanic view of blackness, if they ever bothered to listen to it. To white liberals, if a person looks black, they must automatically identify as black, which isn’t necessarily the case. A Dominican friend of mine, who is very dark-skinned and would be considered “black” by an outside observer, bristles if you jokingly call him so, quickly saying, “I’m Dominican.” Like a lot of Caribbean islanders, he’s not invested in the African-American racial project as understood by those who dominate the race conversation.

Of course, some would argue that this is a result of internalised anti-blackness. Whether that’s true or not — I don’t buy it — the fact remains that in the Hispanic world, black isn’t always black. Which goes a long way in explaining why a guy like Tarrio, who personally identifies as an Afro-Cuban, seems to suffer no cognitive dissonance in leading a white supremacist group.

What his opponents fail to understand is that Tarrio, in a twisted way, is a post-racial man. If I had to guess — and as I said, I’ve known many like him — he truly isn’t concerned with thoughts of colour and race. The only colour that matters to him is the green of the American dollar. In his albeit disturbing quest for finding the ultimate grift, he would’ve fit in just as well with Black Lives Matter as he does with the Proud Boys. He just so happened to have fallen down one internet rabbit hole and not the other.

After the recent events at the Capitol, groups like the Proud Boys will certainly be monitored more closely — and possibly even be forcibly disbanded. But Tarrio, a nasty Miami grifter through and through, will just move on to his next scheme.

This scene was broadcast across the globe — and I imagine many people looked upon it with a certain kind of awe, as I have looked upon footage of the botched Gullenist coup in Turkey in 2016, or the live-streamed terrorist attacks around Paris in 2015. This is history, live. A state is being challenged. But this time the world got to see it happening in the most important country in the world, the United States. The added frisson must have been delectable. Not only “this is history”, but perhaps, this is a symbol of a changing world order. Or, maybe, this is a fate richly deserved, comeuppance for a puffed-up hegemon who arrogantly elected an obnoxious oaf as the leader of the free world.

Every which way it was gripping to watch; the whole ragtag look enjoyably daft. And the world learned: this is what the world’s superpower looks like right now. The most powerful country on earth can see its Senate dispersed, its election results delayed, and its Vice President fleeing for protection from a relatively small rabble that was entirely unarmed, save for their memes.

One could say that Q Shaman and his friends had been sent to the Senate by Donald Trump himself, to hunt out the Vice President. In the day before these events, Trump had taken his White House pressure campaign public. Having failed to uncover evidence of voter fraud, the Trump campaign had tried to disqualify votes or whole states from the 2020 presidential election with bizarre legal theories. Maybe the election violated American civil rights, or wasn’t scrutinising mail-in ballots differently at least? American courts, many of them staffed with judges Trump appointed, rejected these theories.

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The latest idea, one that had been circulating widely among conspiracy theory social media accounts associated with QAnon, focused on the Vice President. The Queueties held that Mike Pence had the power to keep Trump as president. The 12th Amendment specifies that the President of the Senate — the Vice President — counts the certified votes of the Electoral College. Pence, they believed, could simply refuse to count the votes from Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia and so on. Technically, the sitting Vice President could annul all 50 states and disenfranchise 150 million or more voters. Couldn’t he? Trump warmed to the theory.

It’s not even clear whether Constitutional interpretation interests QAnon. For those who don’t know the conspiracy theory, Q holds that Donald Trump is confronting the malevolent people — many of them paedophiles — who want to politically enslave us, and that he is succeeding. Most of the news is just a shadow of the real events: the pandemic, the death of a GOP Congressman from Covid-19, and the harassment of Senator Josh Hawley were all planned volleys in this ongoing shadow war between good and evil. In this black and white moral battle, Mike Pence was the only character whose ultimate loyalties were unknown. One could tally the evidence up either way. Stay tuned!

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Donald Trump spoke about Mike Pence exactly this way at the pre-riot rally, emphasising the forthcoming turn of the plot and heightening the drama. “If Mike Pence does the right thing, we win the election… ” Trump said: “All Vice President Pence has to do is send it back to the States to recertify, and we become president, and you are the happiest people.”

Pence released a letter confirming that he obviously did not have constitutional powers to overrule the people in an election. Within a few hours, he would be rushed out of the Senate chamber for his safety. And Trump tweeted:

The American public is in many ways inured to Trump, having long internalised his generally high level of bullshit. But in a day of many strange happenings, the president publicly accusing the Vice President of participating in the overthrow of the American form of government has to rank in history somewhere.

Most of the MAGA occupiers were not violent. They simply walked into the Capitol building after the initial violent wave caused the overmatched Capitol police to retreat.  Many were unlikely to know the stranger menagerie of second and third-tier internet rabble rousers who strolled into Congressional offices with them. Legislative staffers who remained in their offices boarded up their doors, waiting for an all-clear from the police. In an affray near the Senate Chamber, a young woman was shot and killed by Capitol police; Trumpers are now echoing their BLM counterparts with demands to “say her name”.

Her name was Ashli Elizabeth Babbitt. She was 35 years old and a veteran of the Air Force. Three others died of medical complications in the melee.

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Here I must admit that, like several other contrarians, I believed that the danger for America was likelier to come in the form of resistance to Trump, rather than from Trump himself. I read the many prestige publications fantasising about “toppling” Trump as child-like fantasies, the liberal inteligentsia’s vain hope for the villain to finally reveal the depth of his wickedness at the culmination of the story. By doing so, Trump would justify not just his removal, but discredit all his supporters forever.

And forgive me but I still believe it.

Had Trump narrowly prevailed in the Electoral College, I believe hundreds of thousands of the resistance would have gathered in Washington DC and a reprise of the summer’s unrest would have flamed out across the country. This demonstration would have sought to provoke the kind of precipitating events that led to a government losing “moral legitimacy”. The sentiments of this resistance would have had the backing of the powers and principalities in American life. As bad as the brief reign of Q Shaman was, I still think that this Wednesday’s ragtag farce of an insurrection was easier to put down than the alternative.

And yet, the bedlam in Washington D.C. cannot be unseen. A relatively small rabble quickly seized the Capitol from retreating law enforcement. They ran wild in the offices of our elected government. If any rival power was lucky enough to have a capable operative and a thumb drive in DC today, our Congress got pwned today. America’s friends, frenemies and rivals saw these events. You think Angela Merkel is having any second thoughts about the investment agreement with China after this? I don’t.

And then there is Q Shaman himself, and what he represents. Q types will simply present their followers little snippets and clips of the news in a slightly twisted context. The story of the congressman who died of Covid and the story of a protest — maybe an Antifa mob‚ at Senator Josh Hawley’s house are linked to events like the Electoral College certification. And the human mind, talented at pattern formation, will fill in the gaps, and construct for itself the impression that there is a shadowy war between the forces aligned with Trump and the forces that oppose him, with real drama and real casualties.

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What Q is doing is just intensifying and slightly re-shaping the common experience of social media, where snippets of outrage and fear are torn slightly out of context and linked together across the most addictive parts of the platforms like Instagram “stories”. Our pattern-making minds work on this constant stimulus, leading us to ever-more adamantine convictions, unshakable suspicions and disquieting fears.

Perhaps my own belief that a liberal insurrection would have been worse than this is one of these confected convictions, imprinted on me by the collision of my biases with the overstimulation of internet media. I can’t discount that possibility.

No one should forget the disgrace and danger that President Trump inflicted on America yesterday. But the thing that will keep me up at night is the knowledge that, in an instant, these confected beliefs and lurid fantasies can leap out of Facebook and Instagram and cause my countrymen to simulate the overthrow of my government. This is a psychological weapon, and somebody is going to learn to use it more effectively. Q Shaman reigned for an instant, and I’ll always wonder if he’s coming back.

Mark from Peep Show’s take on the 1960s is one I have some sympathy for. That most controversial of decades saw revolutionary cultural change and, depending on your worldview, it was either a period of liberation or the start of a free-for-all that undid the social fabric. It was the decade that created now, and how much you like the modern world will shape your view of it, of the civil rights marches, San Francisco hippies, love-ins and various other groovy happenings.

In Peep Show terms, Christopher Caldwell is certainly on the side of Mark rather than Jez, although he’s rather sceptical even of the “I have a dream” part. Caldwell’s brilliant and bleak history The Age of Entitlement charts the development of the United States from Kennedy to the rise of Trump, and in particular its division into two tribes with two worldviews, even two different constitutions and two realities. Caldwell’s history was published in the US in January, before the Covid epidemic would bitterly expose those divisions weeks later following the death of George Floyd.

The Harvard-educated Caldwell is a gifted writer and chronicler, and he articulates a conservative vision of a disappearing country without ever sounding inhumane or shrill. It is a vision that for most of this period would have been almost mundane in its normality, but as speech codes and legal campaigns have successfully narrowed the scope of what is permitted in polite society, this idea of America has grown “controversial”, as the country’s high-end media now labels any idea they want to signal as unacceptable. And that narrowing of acceptable thought is a central thread of the story.

Caldwell writes as a historian rather than a polemicist. In fact, he comes across like a historian in the year 2200, in the reign of the Emperor Bezos III, looking back to the downfall of the Old Republic. Do not expect Steven Pinker levels of cheeriness and optimism.

He charts a republic in flux — a once-European society now turned multicultural, a highly religious and sexually conservative country now obsessed with personal liberation and also one which, dressed up in soothing talk of diversity and inclusion, has created a brutal system of winners and losers. Indeed, “Winners” and “Losers” are two of the chapter titles.

For the winners, there is not just the wealth — though that is extreme — but the prestige and glory, and the role in the country’s narrative. This group comprises what the LA Times writer Ron Brownstein called the “coalition of the ascendent” — immigrants, African-Americans, gays and lesbians, single women but, perhaps the most important minority of all to modern America’s story: the rich.

For the losers, the new society “would make it far more difficult to take an interest in anything after one’s own death. It would make men less active and probably cause them to retire earlier from work. It would diminish their interest in history and their sense of the continuity of historical tradition.” It would lead to de-sexualisation and addiction.

Caldwell charts the decline of the uniquely American egalitarianism of the 1950s, when CEOs earned as little as four or five times that of the lowest paid of their workers, compared with the 4,000 or so ratio now sometimes found at tech firms.

It was a society devoted to the wellbeing of the average man, one where the classes had similar tastes and interests, as well as incomes. The decade of liberation unleased what Irving Kristol called “the Aristocratic Impulse” in US politics, an aristocracy made so much more unpopular by its lack of noblesse oblige. If the country has become increasingly haunted by Roman fantasies of collapse, it is because, as with Rome, overmighty subjects now threaten its ancient constitution.

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Why the rich are revolting

By Ed West

So while the American culture of the post-Sixties era has been defined by a search for equality, it has also seen declining faith in democracy; and those two things are not contradictory. Today’s American wealthy are not just richer than their predecessors, they are also more disconnected from those less fortunate, culturally, geographically and ideologically. The new moral order – with its ideals of tolerance, openness, diversity, freedom – has liberated them, while granting them a sense of moral worth previous elites did not enjoy, constrained as they were both by Christianity and the widespread knowledge that their good fortune was conferred by inheritance and luck.

The Sixties was not so much a revolution as a reformation, and the new faith was codified, as all dominant faiths come to be — in this case with civil rights laws. For most Americans, the civil rights movement was a sacred, holy mission, led by secular saints such as Martin Luther King; for Caldwell it was a cure in some ways worse than the disease, creating “not just a major new element of the Constitution” but “a rival constitution, with which the original one was frequently incompatible”.

What many Americans fear, an increasingly totalitarian streak in society, is to Caldwell not a perversion of civil rights, but its logical outcome. Illiberal progressives win not because they are popular or because of “the arc of history”, but because they have the law on their side. Companies remove employers for their Facebook posts because they know the authorities can sue them; universities go along with extreme political ideas, with real-world consequences, because it’s legally safer. Social changes are enacted by litigation, not laws, and public opinion follows.

At the start of the story, Americans mostly disliked the South’s backwards racial practices. In their minds “Americans were civilized, modern, gentlemanly. Segregation was sleazy, medieval, underhanded.” But when civil rights legislation began with the Supreme Court’s school desegregation ruling Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka in 1954, it would unleash a process that could not be stopped. “Brown granted the government the authority to put certain public bodies under surveillance for racism… And once the Civil Rights Act introduced into the private sector this assumption that all separation was prima facie evidence of inequality, desegregation implied a revocation of the old freedom of association altogether.”

For Caldwell and many great minds before him “freedom of association is the master freedom — it is the freedom without which political freedom cannot be effectively exercised”. He quotes philosopher Leo Strauss: “A liberal society stands or falls by the distinction between the political (or the state) and society, or by the distinction between the public and the private. In the liberal society there is necessarily a private sphere with which the state’s legislation must not interfere… liberal society necessarily makes possible, permits, and even fosters what is called by many people ‘discrimination’.”

But those older liberal arguments have been swept aside as race has become “invested with a religious significance… an ethical absolute. One could even say that the civil rights movement, inside and outside the government, became a doctrinal institution, analogous to established churches in pre-democratic Europe.”

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One of the first great civil rights controversies was the bussing in of black students into white schools. Conservative fears about this measure were laughed at in 1964; by the 1970s, bussing was nationwide (it was even tried at one school in north London, which subsequently closed).

When working-class neighbourhoods in Boston protested, they were put under military occupation with martial law. Those who enforced integration were entirely unaffected by it, and to a lesser extent by the huge explosion in urban crime. Homicide rates in New York and Chicago increased 200% and 300% over the decade; millions fled from violence and incivility. It made “liberal” a dirty word to many Americans.

The Sixties also brought sexual liberation, but then the Fifties were unusually conservative. “As surely as World War II had advanced the integration of blacks into the mainstream of American academic and work life, it had reversed the integration of women. The war done, women were shunted from the jobs they had filled, to make way for the returning heroes. Between 1920 and 1958, women went from a third of college students to a quarter.”

Yet even in the early 1970s, four in five American women felt that “being a woman has hardly ever prevented me from doing some of the things I had hoped to do in life”. Most had never heard of the major feminist authors and marriage status made no difference. “Fifty years later, married and unmarried women would disagree about almost everything.” Indeed it is the biggest values divide in American society. And sexual liberation was more complex than portrayed; men consistently were more in favour of changing women’s place in society; abortion was first legalised across the South, with the more liberal North dragged along by the courts.

Rich and poor were also diverging, with the collapse of working-class jobs; real income for Americans with advanced degrees rose by 21% between 1973 and 2000 and fell for everyone else, including 26% for those with only a high school diploma.

Liberalism became another form of class war after Vietnam, which was much more popular with the young than the old, with the exception of elite college students who clashed with working-class policemen.

In 1969 a member of the Maoist Progressive Labor group at Harvard lamented the drift towards elitism: “We imagined a great American desert, populated by millions of similar, crass, beer-drinking grains of sand, living in a waste of identical suburban no-places. What did this imagined ‘great pig-sty of TV watchers’ correspond to in real life? As ‘middle-class’ students we learned that this was the working class—the ‘racist, insensitive people.’”

The privileged were already starting “to look on ‘average’ Americans as the country’s problem”.

But then the “average” Americans were becoming sidelined in the country’s story as, post-1965 immigration reform, the country became multicultural, a process that would both accentuate class divisions and make the country more ideologically intolerant, out of necessity: “the more loudly a country professed its commitment to diversity, the less tolerance it would have for actual dissent.”

Immigration was one of those issues Ronald Reagan was elected to slow down but only accelerated, as with all the excesses of the 1960s. “Reagan changed the country’s political mood for a while, but left its structures untouched.” Worse still, Reaganism “began a process that by the early years of the following century would render American society unrecognizably inegalitarian, even oligarchic”.

Reagan enabled even more dangerous and egotistical radicals — businessmen who wanted to “cut the past away”, proving Irving Howe’s criticism that conservativism was “nothing but liberal economics and wounded nostalgia”.

A creed that “mixed untrammeled capitalism (deemed ‘conservative’) with untrammeled sexuality (deemed ‘liberal’) seemed self-contradictory” but “it was logical and powerful. It would come, a generation later, to seem invincible.”

Up went the national debt, as Ayn Rand-loving Republicans gave tax cuts to the rich while failing to cut back on Johnson’s Great Society or low-waged illegal immigration. This, also, was a form of borrowing that allowed pleasant lifestyles for the upper-middle-class, but would have to be paid for in the long term, “in the form of overburdened institutions, rapid cultural change, and diluted political power”. Reagan’s state of California, now a dystopian failure with Third World levels of inequality and outbreaks of medieval diseases among its homeless, become a trailblazer in this change.

“The Reagan era had in retrospect marked a consolidation, not a reversal, of the movements that began in the 1960s,” Caldwell writes.

American society took on a “Roman aspect” with the rise of a new super rich, seen as “cool (Steve Jobs), prophetic (George Soros), or saintly (Warren Buffett). Wealth has never been without its appeal and its power. But it was striking that, more than any generation for a century, and in sharp contrast to its own declared youthful values, the Baby Boom generation revered wealth.”

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For the poor, things grew steadily worse, and diverging cultural tastes between the classes grew alongside increased contempt. “Political engagement and economic stratification came together in an almost official attitude known as snark, a sort of snobbery about other opinions that dismissed them as low-class without going to the trouble of refuting them. Why offer an argument when an eye roll would do?” The target were the “Reagan electorate, minus the richest people in it”.

And so “a new social class was coming into being that had at its disposal both capitalism’s means and progressivism’s sense of righteousness”. Tech culture either “embodied the ideals of the 1960s or was the antithesis, or both”, more individualistic and cosmopolitan but also more hierarchical, with what we now call “woke capital” the product of the romance between radicalism and big business. Where once the Left was personified by the union representative, today it’s the head of human resources — a term that was five times as common in the 1980s as the 1960s. These HR departments became increasingly political, and “carried out functions that resembled those of twentieth-century commissars” checking there was sufficient “diversity”.

Big tech, led by men of awesome individual wealth, epitomised the contradictory progressive aristocracy of the age. ‘The marketing campaigns of the internet giants were sweet narratives of liberation. Their inner workings were bossy, shifty, and ruthless.”

Eventually “real political decisions” were being made by businessman who prided themselves on being “disrupters”, less angst-ridden by their good fortune because they were “self-evidently virtuous” in supporting the right causes.

From a deeply moral country with low-church Protestant origins, Americans would increasingly turn their Calvinist instincts to agonising over race. Racial shame became normalised but not all were damned: “certain whites, however, far from feeling the shame of racism, stood in a newfound moral effulgence as fighters against it, sharing a little bit of Martin Luther King’s glory. It seemed coincidence at first that they were generally society’s leaders. CEOs, lawyers, professors, and other rich and well-educated people… were now the custodians of America’s conscience, the priests of the nation’s repentance.”

This Calvinism extended to what would now be recognised as “cancel culture”, an early example being baseball legend Al Campanis, whose career was destroyed in 1987 for some comments on race, his employers disowning him. Invariably the victims were uneducated, or at least ineloquent; they weren’t bad or bigoted, they had just not learned to mask their opinions, as cultivated Americans had (the more truthful the inelegant remark, the more sinful).

By almost any measure life has got much worse for working-class whites in America since around 1970. By Obama’s reign, poor whites were dying younger and younger, the country coming under the grip of an opioid epidemic as people with no work and no real future medicated themselves out of existence.

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Almost no one cared at first. Compared to Aids or the war on drugs, it barely passed notice. “Unlike blacks in the decades after the Vietnam War, twenty-first-century suburban and rural whites were not protagonists of the nation’s official moral narrative. Indeed, they barely figured in it.”

Polarisation would ramp up during Obama’s second term, much of it driven by the invention of the smartphone. Black Lives Matter grew out of the issue of racial disparities in income and imprisonment, now officially explainable only by the unfalsifiable idea of systemic racism. The young and rich grew increasingly angry and radical. The poor died.

By now “the parties represented two different constitutions, two different eras of history, even two different technological platforms. And increasingly, two different racial groups.”

Caldwell is a pessimist, but it hard to see that 2020 has exactly given Americans or Americanophiles reasons to be cheerful. At one point in the summer a part of the United States was ruled by an actual warlord, controlling a statelet with the highest homicide rate of any polity since the bronze age. This happened while much of the country was engaged in scenes of violence and hysteria, some people literally getting down on their knees to seek racial redemption after the martyrdom of George Floyd.

Liberations bring new forms of tyranny. Those who tear down Bastilles build their own Bastilles in turn. Was the cultural revolution a good thing? It’s too early to tell, but all cant aside, it has left winners and losers, and the costs of losing can be catastrophic. But perhaps it just wasn’t possible to have all the optimism of the 1960s, the “I have a dream”, without the squalor, too.