Once upon a time, a fully realised person was something one became. Entailing education, observation, experimentation, and sometimes humiliation, “coming of age” was hard work. When the project succeeded, we developed a gradually richer understanding of what it means to be human and what constitutes a fruitful life. This ongoing project was halted only by death. Maturity was the result of accumulated experience (some of it dire) and much trial and error (both comical and tragic), helping explain why wisdom, as opposed to intelligence, was mostly the preserve of the old. We admired the “self-made man”, because character was a creation — one constructed often at great cost. Many a “character-building” adventure, such as joining the Army, was a trial by fire.

These days, discussion of “character” is largely relegated to fiction workshops and film reviews. Instead, we relentlessly address “identity”, a hollowed-out concept now reduced to membership of the groups into which we were involuntarily born — thereby removing all choice about who we are. Rejecting the passé “character building” paradigm, we now inform children that their selves emerge from the womb fully formed. Their sole mission is to tell us what those selves already are. Self is a prefabricated house to which only its owner has a key.

This is not an essay about transgenderism per se. Nevertheless, our foundational text is excerpted from Christopher Rufo’s September 2022 comment, “Concealing Radicalism”, which quotes adolescents from a TikTok video on gender assembled by Michigan’s education department:

“I am a triple threat: I’m depressed, anxious, and gay.”

“Last night at about 2am, I put in my bio that I identify as ‘agender’, which is different than non-binary because non-binary is like neither gender, right? Agender is like the grey area between genders.”

“Hi, my name is Elise. I’ve used she/her pronouns all my life. But recently, and for a while, I’ve been struggling with gender issues as well as a whole lot of other identity things. So, I finally gave in and ordered a [breast] binder for myself and it just came in today.”

“A rational observer might suspect,” Rufo notes, “that these youths are in a state of confusion or distress, but rather than explore this line of reasoning, the education department.,, promote a policy of immediate and unconditional affirmation.” He quotes Kim Phillips-Knope, leader of the LBGTQ+ Students Project: “Kids have a sense of their gender identity between the ages of three and five, so about the time that kids have language, they can start to share with us whether they’re a boy or a girl — usually those are the only things that they will identify as, because those are the only options we’ve given them.” He adds: “In response to a teacher who asked how to respond to a student in her classroom who claims to have ‘she/he/they/them’ pronouns, Amorie [a staff trainer] responded adamantly: ‘Go with what the kid says. They’re the best experts on their lives. They’re the best experts on their own identities and their own bodies.’”

I further submit: throwing kids who just got here on their own investigative devices — refusing to be of any assistance aside from “affirming” whatever they whimsically claim to be; folding our arms and charging, “So who are you? Only you know” — is child abuse.

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The kids aren't alright

By Hadley Freeman

The idea that your psyche is set from birth is intrinsically deterministic and therefore grim. The vision it conjures is fatalistic and mechanical: all these traits are hardwired, and life involves winding up the clockwork toy and watching it totter across the floor until it runs into the wainscotting. If a newly emerged self already exists in its entirety, there’s nothing to do. In contrast to becoming, being is an inert affair.

We haven’t given these young people a job. Contemporary education strenuously seeks to assure students they’re already wonderful. Teachers are increasingly terrified of imposing any standards that all their wards will not readily meet, so everyone gets a gold star. The Virginia school district of the once-renowned Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology now aims for “equal outcomes for every student, without exception”. A pedagogical emphasis on student “self-esteem” became dislocated from “esteem for doing something” decades ago. Why should any of these kids get out of bed? No wonder they’re depressed.

Minors don’t know anything, which is not their fault. We didn’t know anything at their age, either (and may not still), though we thought we did — and being disabused of callow, hastily conceived views and coming to appreciate the extent of our ignorance is a prerequisite for proper education. Yet we now encourage young people to look inward for their answers and to trust that their marvellous natures will extemporaneously reveal themselves. With no experience to speak of and no guidance from adults, all that many kids will find when gawking at their navels is pyjama fluff. Where is this mysterious entity to whose nature I alone am privy?

There’s nothing shameful about being an empty vessel when you haven’t done anything and nothing much has happened to you yet. Telling children, “Of course you don’t know who you are! Growing up is hard, full of false starts, and all about making something of yourself. Don’t worry, we’ll give you lots of help” is a great deal more consoling than the model of the ready-meal self. We demand toddlers determine whether they’re “girls or boys or something in-between” before they have fully registered what a girl or boy is, much less “something in-between”. Placing the total onus for figuring out how to negotiate being alive on people who haven’t been given the user’s manual is a form of abandonment.

Adults have an obligation to advise, comfort, and inform — to provide the social context that children have none of the resources to infer and to help form expectations of what comes next.  Instead, we’re throwing kids helplessly on their primitive imaginations. The first time I remember being asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I clearly remember answering, “a bear”. I wasn’t trying to be a wiseass. I just wasn’t up to speed on the ambitions to which I was expected to aspire. Little wonder that kids are now “identifying” as cats. Next, they will be identifying as electric lawnmowers, and we will have asked for it.

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By Lionel Shriver

This notion of the pre-made self is asocial, if not anti-social. It separates personhood from lineage, heritage, culture, history, and even family. You are already everything you were ever meant to be, never mind where, what and whom you come from. But seeing selfhood as floating in a vacuum is a recipe for loneliness, vagueness, insecurity and anxiety.

By contrast, a self constructed brick by brick over a lifetime has everything to do with other people. The undertaking involves the assembly of tastes and enthusiasms, the formation of friendships and institutional affiliations, participation in joint projects, and the development of perceptions not simply of one’s interior nature but of the outside world. Character that is rooted in ties to other people is likely to be more solid and enduring. The elderly are most in danger of desolation when they’ve outlived their friends and relatives. Who I am partially comprises decades-long friendships, my colleagues, my fierce devotion to my younger brother, a complex allegiance to two different Anglophone countries, and a rich cultural inheritance from my predecessors.

In my teens, we employed the word “identity” quite differently. We thought having an “identity” meant not only being at home in our own skins, but also having at least a hazy notion of what we wanted to do with our lives. It meant connecting with the likeminded (I found kindred spirits in my junior-high Debate Club). An “identity” was fashioned less from race or sexual orientation than from the discovery of which albums we loved, which novels we ritually reread because they spoke to us, which causes we supported, which subjects interested us, and which didn’t. It meant figuring out what we were good at (I was good at maths, but in second-year calculus I hit a wall) and what we couldn’t stand (me, team sports). Identity was fused with purpose: I knew I was drawn to writing, the visual arts, and political activism (the latter making me rather tiresome).

We were as self-involved in our determination to be individuals as Gen Z, but that particularity was commonly assembled from the cultural smorgasbord of other people and what they’d thought and made: Kurt Vonnegut or William Faulkner, Catch-22 or The Winds of War, Simon and Garfunkel or Iron Butterfly, hostile or gung-ho positions on Vietnam. Naturally this is a version of identity subject to change. That’s the point. It’s supposed to change. I no longer listen to Emerson, Lake, and Palmer.

The self is not found but made, because meaning is made. Rather than be unearthed like buried treasure, meaning is laboriously created, often by doing hard things. I cringe a bit recalling the person I was in my twenties, because she represented an early stage of an ongoing project that I have modified much in the years since. My twenties were an early draft of a manuscript whose sentences I have revised, pruned, and qualified. Ideally, if I keep forcing myself to do hard things — take on the premise of a novel that at first I have no idea how to execute, move to still another country, cultivate new friendships — the later drafts of my eternally incomplete manuscript will be more captivating. I would arguably be a fuller person had I done the very hardest thing — having children — but as a not-half-bad second best, I have committed to a marriage of 20 years and counting and thus to a man who moors me. Only death will part us.

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Of course, in constantly reforming and refining who we are, we can lose aspects of ourselves from earlier drafts that we should have kept. I no longer dance alone for hours in the sitting room, and I miss that abandon. For years I crafted ceramic figure sculpture, and I’m not sure that substituting journalism as my primary side-line to fiction writing constituted an improvement. Towards the very end of our lives, many of us will drop pretty much every paragraph we ever added, and we’ll go from novel to pamphlet.

Nevertheless, given the choice I’d prefer to spend time with me in the present than with me at 35. I know more (although what I learn now has trouble keeping up with what I forget), my sense of humour is sharper, and rather to my surprise I’m humbler. I’ve more perspective; while that perspective is often bleak, that very bleakness — a gleeful bleakness — can be entertaining. I’m not as neurotic about what I weigh, and I am more generous, both in relation to contemporaries and younger aspirants. I’m less concerned with my professional status, and I think much more about death (which is torturous but intelligent). Some of this profitable evolution was effortlessly organic, but much has issued from a challenging career, the fruit of taking a big risk in my youth that’s paid off.

Clearly, some aspects of character, of self, are determined from the off. I’d never have become a nuclear physicist no matter how hard I tried. But the conventional “nature versus nurture” opposition still eliminates agency: you act mindlessly as whatever you were born as, or you are submissively acted upon. Where on this nature-nurture continuum does the object of all this theorising have a say in the outcome? I’m leery of venturing into the prickly no-go of sexual orientation. Yet while I’m open to the idea that some people are born gay, choices can affect what gets you off. We hear repeatedly from big consumers of online pornography that their tastes begin to change, and it takes more and more extreme videos to become aroused, until actual humans in real life will no longer do the trick. Watching porn is a choice. Even sexual proclivities exhibit some plasticity.

Following the modern script, 14-year-olds have learned never to say, “I’ve decided to be trans”, because all my friends are trans and I feel left out, but always, “I’ve discovered that I am trans”. This passive, powerless version of self has implications. We’re telling young people that what they see is what they get — that they already are what they will ever be. How disheartening. What a bore. Whatever is there to look forward to? Many victims of this formulation of existence, which apparently requires little of them besides all that being, must reach inside themselves and come up empty-handed. At the direction of the sort of educational authority Chris Rufo quoted above, they’ve undertaken a psychic archaeological dig, only to be left with a pit. So they feel cheated. Or inadequate. Convinced that they alone among their peers exhumed nothing but a disposable cigarette lighter.

By withholding the assurance, “Don’t worry about not knowing who you are; you’re just not grown up yet, and neither are we, because growing up isn’t over at 18 or 21 but is something you do your whole life through”, we are cultivating self-hatred, disillusionment, bewilderment, frustration, and fury. Young women often turn their despair inward — hence the high rates of depression, anxiety, eating disorders, and cutting. Young men are more apt to project the barrenness of their interior lives onto the rest of the world and take their disappointment out on everyone else.

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In a trenchant essay last autumn, “Mass Shootings and the World Liberalism Made”, Katherine Dee seeks a deeper explanation for the mass murders committed by disaffected young men, whose blind rage and misanthropy now express themselves in the US at a rate of twice per day.  Gun proliferation, Dee claims, is not the core driver. Rather, “we have a nihilism problem”. The videos left behind by the Sandy Hook child killer Adam Lanza suggest a belief that “even if we could free our ‘feral selves’ from the shackles of modern norms, there would be nothing underneath. Just blackness. A great gaping hole. For many mass shooters, the only reasonable response to this hole is death — the complete extermination of life. Not just theirs.”

According to Dee, all these atrocities have hailed from “a world where everything revolved around the individual”. The result is narcissism, which “is expressed through our perpetual identity crises, where chasing an imaginary ‘true self’ keeps us busy and distracted. We see it in the people who use their phones and computers like they’re prosthetic selves, who are always there, but never present, gazing endlessly at their own reflection in the pond.”

An authentic sense of self commonly involves not thinking about who you are, because you’re too busy doing something else. It is inextricably linked to, if not synonymous with, a sense of meaning. Nihilism, an oxymoronic belief in the impossibility of believing anything, can prove literally lethal. Young men who feel no personal sense of purpose are inclined to perceive that nothing else has a purpose, either. They don’t just hate themselves; they hate everybody. In telling people who’ve been on the planet for about ten minutes that they already know who they are, and that they’re already wonderful, we’re inciting that malign, sometimes homicidal nihilism. Because they don’t feel wonderful. They’re not undertaking any project but, according to the adults, inertly embody a completed project, which means the status quo is as good as it gets — and the status quo isn’t, subjectively, very good.

Transgenderism may have grown so alluring to contemporary minors not only because it promises a new “identity”, but because it promises a process. Transforming from caterpillar to butterfly entails a complex sequence of social interventions and medical procedures that must be terribly engrossing. Transitioning is a project. Everyone needs a project. Embracing the trans label gifts the self with direction, with a task to accomplish. Ironically, the contagion expresses an inchoate yearning for the cast-off paradigm whereby character is built.

We should stop telling children that they’re the “experts on their own lives” and repudiate a static model of selfhood as a fait accompli at birth. Sure, some inborn essence is particular to every person, but it’s a spark; it’s not a fire. We could stand to return to the language of forming character and making a life for yourself, while urging teachers to exercise the guidance they’ve been encouraged to forsake.

As we age, we’re not only that unique essence in the cradle, but the consequence of what we’ve read, watched, and witnessed; whom we’ve loved and what losses we’ve suffered; what mistakes we’ve made and which we’ve corrected; where we’ve lived and travelled and what skills we’ve acquired; not only what we’ve made of ourselves but what we’ve made outside of ourselves; most of all, what we’ve done. That is an exciting, active version of “identity” whose work is never finished, full of choice, enlivened by agency, if admittedly freighted with responsibility and therefore a little frightening. But it at least provides young people something to do, other than mass murder or gruesome elective surgery.

This, increasingly, is what ex-presidents do: they trade on their brand, milking their fanbase for cash. Obama has his media company, his tedious podcast with Bruce Springsteen, his paid appearances. The Clintons had their consultancy and speaking fees. After all, how can they continue to hobnob with their billionaire friends unless they, too, get filthy rich? Trump, I figured, was a little different: already wealthy, it was adoration he sought.

Freedom Tour tickets ran from the thousands for a seat close to the stage all the way down to $45 for those at the back. (There was a still lower level that got you a seat watching a video screen in an overflow hall.) Intrigued, I purchased a ticket for the cheap seats, wondering how the disgraced prophet would try to shore up the faith among his followers. Biden and his media stenographers would have it that these followers are an extremist, angry force active in the land, still fulminating over a thwarted coup attempt. His opposition researchers have already coined a new insult: “ultra MAGA”. And I wanted to know: what is happening to Trumpists during their period in the wilderness?

*

The Austin Exhibition Center is a massive space that’s right downtown: it is easy to reach, so I expected to see some protestors, especially given the role of Trump-appointed justices in the recently leaked Roe v Wade ruling. But there were none, just a dude selling car air fresheners shaped like prominent Democrats (because “Liberals Smell”).

Trump fans, on the other hand, had turned up en masse, and early. It took over an hour to clear security, which provided me with ample time to check for signs of the “multiracial whiteness” that The Washington Post warned us about. And indeed, I saw that Trump had attracted Asians, Hispanics and a small number of black people in addition to white people, although within each of these very broad categories there was great diversity.

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Among the white people, for example, there were representatives of the big-beard-and-shaved-head cohort, older rural Republicans, preppy college kids and black T-shirt Infowars types. The gender split seemed close to 50/50. The vibe was good humoured despite the long line: people were expecting a good show. A Trump impersonator walked up and down, posing for pictures. The woman in front of me asked if she could touch his hair. “Go for it,” he said, adding: “It’s real, completely real.”

*

Dinesh D’Souza was wrapping up as I entered the hall. The Left had captured all the institutions, he said; nothing could be done. Conservatives needed to withdraw and create new ones, a culture within the culture. This got some applause, but the message struck me as defeatist and un-Trumpian.

D’Souza was followed by the author of a business book, who wanted to live in a world where you could still tell jokes without fretting about offending people. He then told a mild gag, about getting punched after “helpfully” fixing a lady’s skirt, which would have been suitable for broadcast pre-watershed any time in the past 50 years. The crowd laughed: this guy was definitely more entertaining than Dinesh D’Souza.

Next up came Kevin Sorbo. Democrats get Jay-Z and Beyonce, MAGA people get the star of Hercules: The Legendary Journeys. An outspoken Christian conservative with a penchant for trolling liberals (“If men can’t comment on abortion because they don’t have a uterus, why does the Left comment on gun control?”), Sorbo was dropped by his Hollywood agents and ejected from every social media platform bar Twitter. But he has fought back by forming his own production company and now makes successful films for the Christian market. I half-remembered a line from The Brothers Karamazov, describing Alyosha, the protagonist: “he had gone beyond the fear of appearing ridiculous.”

To me this has always sounded like the greatest of freedoms, although those who achieve it are not always likeable. Trump had done it; he could afford to. Sorbo had done it and paid a price, but he had survived. The audience, with fewer resources, were being encouraged to do the same, to own the MAGA-ness that earned them the contempt of the elites. “I’m not here to wake up the sheep,” said Sorbo. “I’m here to wake up the lions — and you guys are lions.”

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This would emerge as a major theme of the day. There were barely any references to policy, to Roe v Wade, to Ukraine, or even to the Republican Party. Very little organising was going on. The American Freedom Tour was not a rally; it was a revival meeting bringing believers together so they could strengthen each other in the faith and return renewed to the world to tell the truth.

Sorbo, at least, did not attempt to lead the audience in prayer, though the MC who came on between the “acts” did. The Bible instructed us to pray for our leaders, he said, and that included Joe Biden, even if he was not the audience’s favourite person. He pulled it off: heads were bowed, and everybody went silent to join him in a prayer for the president.

*

By lunchtime it was clear that Trump had drawn a huge crowd: the number “8000” kept coming up. Yet the success in Austin appeared to have caught the organisers off guard: there was hardly any merch for sale, just a whiny-voiced snake oil salesman pitching membership of the “inner circle” for $30,000 a pop, an online system for investors that was supposed to be foolproof, and copies of Trump’s latest book, Our Journey Together, which you could get signed by his son.

Trump had missed an opportunity, as his followers loved T-shirts and hats. The variety was spectacular: a grinning Trump sprinkling stars that formed the word “America”; Trump as Theseus holding up the severed head of the Gorgon Medusa; and “God, Guns and Trump”, to name but a few. “Ultra MAGA” was already a T-shirt. Trump’s fans are serious about their beliefs, but they are also in on the joke.

The tone, however, hardened in the afternoon. Introduced to us as “Donald Trump’s pastor”, Mark Burns, an ultra-energetic black preacher and Christian media entrepreneur, was the first speaker to really push evangelical conservative stances on abortion and gay marriage, but he also came out swinging against transgender athletes, Black Lives Matter and CRT.

And then he invoked the name of Rosa Parks. All American children are raised on the story of how she rejected an unjust law and refused to take her seat at the back of the bus. Burns offered a radical reinterpretation of the story: the second-class citizens of today are not black people but white Christian conservatives, and the time might come when they might have to follow Rosa Parks’ example and reject unjust laws.

*

“It seems from what the speakers are saying that Trump is thinking of running again,” said a middle-aged man, sitting behind me. “I thought he was going to hand over the baton. How old is he?”

His friend did a quick Google search. “It says here he’s 75. He’ll be 77 and a half at the next election.” There was a pause. “He’s still sharp, though.”

“I heard one of the speakers say he is the greatest president of our lifetimes,” said the first man. “Well maybe some of the young folk here don’t remember, but I was around for Reagan…”

The consensus was that Reagan was better than Trump. The conversation then switched to a discussion of Elon Musk’s tweets, the border situation and Disney’s declining stock price. These men were well-informed professionals who had arrived later in the day and were worried they had missed rock star Ted Nugent. Although he was never mentioned by name, Chris Rufo’s influence loomed large in their conversation — and at the Freedom Tour in general. Trumpian causes such as the border wall might get the occasional shout out, but Rufo’s, with his leaks and campaigns against woke institutions, were the driving force. But Rufo is aligned with Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, not Trump. Even at the ex-president’s own event, the centre of gravity seemed to have shifted: the agenda is no longer set by Trump.

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The men behind me had not missed Ted Nugent. The rock star landed, playing the Star-Spangled banner on electric guitar, telling the audience that although he loved us “madly”, he would love us even more if we “went berserk on the skulls of the Democrats and the Marxists and the Communists”. This soundbite would briefly light up Twitter the next day, juxtaposed with the news of the racially motivated mass shooting in Buffalo. He did not receive boos, but Don Jr’s girlfriend, Kimberly Guilfoyle, de-escalated the rhetoric when she arrived on stage: she settled for sneering at Joe Biden’s cognitive decline and reciting his many failures (high price of gas, debacle in Afghanistan, no baby formula) against Trump’s many victories (low price of gas, victory over Isis, record low unemployment) while repeating the mantra: Trump was right.

In the morning Sorbo had made fun of Obama’s golfing skills; now the attacks on Biden, Big Tech and other bête noirs of the MAGA movement became relentless. I expected things to deteriorate further when Donald Trump Jr took to the stage. This scion of privilege, like his father before him, presents himself as a defender of the working class — with the energy and delivery of a stand-up comedian. Clearly revelling in his heretic status, he was willing to go much further than any of the previous speakers in terms of his selection of targets.

There had been little mention of Ukraine until this point, but Trump Jr attacked the senate for rushing through $40 billion worth of spending on a regime he described as second only to Russia in its corruption. Then he attacked Big Pharma, Big War, defence contractors and the Biden administration for doing nothing to stop the flow of fentanyl over the border from Mexico. The self-proclaimed “prince of MAGA” was leading the audience into territory that until very recently would have been the preserve of the Left. They followed him willingly, cheering at his comments.

And then, finally, eight and a half hours after the show had begun, the man himself took to the stage. Following the energetic and radical performance of the son, the father was content to perform a greatest hits routine — the wall, “fake news”, his successful renegotiations of NAFTA and the bill for Air Force 1, his victory over Isis. Yes, the election was stolen, but he didn’t bang on about it, and he didn’t mention January 6th at all. He was coy about his intentions for 2024, only saying that the audience would be very pleased.

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And the audience was pleased, on the whole. Trump put on a show, and those who saw it were entertained, even if some people got up and left before he was finished (he was an hour late) and so missed the comedy dance moves at the end. Trump was the main draw, required to bring the show together, but he was no longer the main source of energy or ideas. He was, however, “still sharp” — a canny performer who knew how to keep his audience excited enough that they would tune in for the next episode.

I wondered if he has a twist in mind for us. Many a businessmen will pass the family corporation onto his son, and Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov, erstwhile dictator of Turkmenistan, recently passed on the presidency to his son Serdar. The order of the show kept it in the family: the top three headliners were Trump, his son, and his son’s girlfriend, whose main claim to fame otherwise is years spent as a second tier talking head on Fox News. Suddenly the thought of Don Jr signing his dad’s books no longer seemed absurd but rather one of the rituals through which a patriarch might anoint a successor.

As the Democrats complete their transformation into a party representing the interests and values of the professional-managerial class — and so prove themselves unable to learn from 2016 — it’s worth noting that Trump Jr’s appropriation of hitherto leftist critiques of power drew some of the loudest cheers from the audience. Despite his immense wealth, he has, like his father, the same ability to articulate the concerns of people infinitely poorer than himself. His isn’t “classical” Trumpism; it is a new, more radical mutation.

MAGA isn’t finished, but nor is it fixed, and though the American Freedom Tour wasn’t pointing towards a particular end point, it did prove that something else is being born. But there were still no protestors outside the stadium when I left.

Critical race theory is now widely accepted by the liberal-Left media and much of academia. It’s not just the bad laws of the Jim Crow south. And it’s not just a few racist people here and there. Racism is not some bad apples; it is as American as apple pie.

For Martin Luther King and, later, Barack Obama, American racism was the consequence of a liberal and egalitarian country failing to live up to its principles; for supporters of critical race theory, by contrast, these principles were predicated on the subjugation of black people. The American Dream is rotten to the core.

In critical race theory, then, the key historical moment is not the abolition of slavery — or the passing of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, which brought an end to segregation in public places — but the 1954 Supreme Court ruling that “separate but equal” public schooling was unconstitutional. It violated the fourteenth amendment — which, after former slaves were granted citizenship, had assured all citizens “equal protection of the laws”. If black Americans have separate schooling, they can’t realise that equality: so concluded the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case.

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This seems like a tremendous achievement. Indeed, in many standard textbooks on the history of the civil rights movement, Brown v. Board is seen as the first big crack in the edifice of Old Jim Crow. But the founding father of critical race theory was sceptical about its positive impact. In an article published in the Harvard Law Review in 1980, Bell argued that the decision was based on:

“value to whites, not simply those concerned about the immorality of racial inequality, but also those whites in policymaking positions able to see the economic and political advances at home and abroad that would follow abandonment of segregation.”

In other words, the decision was motivated not by principled idealism but cynical self-interest. Domestic legislation in the fifties was shadowed by the Cold War — and in the battle against communism, America wanted to be seen as a moral exemplar.

But Bell’s critique of Brown v. Board runs deeper than this. Bell considered himself a realist, and viewed those who celebrated Supreme Court victories with bemusement. A few laws don’t change 250 years of slavery followed by 100 years of segregation and terror. “My position”, he wrote in his 1992 Faces at the Bottom of the Well, “is that the legal rules regarding racial discrimination have become not only reified (that is, ascribing material existence and power to what are really just ideas) … but deified”. This is because “the worship of equality rules as having absolute power benefits whites by preserving a benevolent but fictional self-image, and such worship benefits blacks by preserving hope”.

Hope was the very emotion, however, that animated the politics of King and Obama. (The latter’s second book was entitled: The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream.) But Bell is having none of this.

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“I think,” he writes, “we’ve arrived at a place in history where the harms of such worship outweigh its benefit”. Those who persist in clinging on to the vision of the nation as a bastion of enlightened values are, according to him, at best naive.

This display of world-weariness, in contrast to doe-eyed idealism, is one shared by the most esteemed black American intellectual in the second term of Obama’s presidency: Ta-Nehisi Coates. No one writes much about Coates anymore. Perhaps because he left Twitter. The last memorable thing he did was base a villain in a comic book on Jordan Peterson. But six years ago, after the publication of his book Between the World and Me, which won the National Book Award for Nonfiction, he was anointed by Toni Morrison as James Baldwin’s successor — the nation’s intellectual and moral conscience on matters of race.

Coates isn’t a theoretician like Bell; he is a polemicist. In his writing, the realist attitude central to Bell’s critical race theory is expressed with piquant force. Racism is a constitutive part of America’s identity, Coates argues, and anyone who deviates from this fact is deluded, naive or malevolent. “There is nothing”, Coates writes about racists, “uniquely evil in these destroyers or even in this moment. The destroyers are merely men enforcing the whims of our country, correctly interpreting its heritage and legacy”.

Coates is known for his essays in The Atlantic, which are stylish, personal, historical and very long. The overall mood is one of disenchantment. The American Dream is not for black people. Between the World and Me is written as a letter to his son, and it contains no consoling words for the future: “I have no praise anthems, nor old Negro spirituals”. The view that the moral arc of history bends towards justice is an illusion. “America”, Coates writes, “understands itself as God’s handiwork, but the black body is the clearest evidence that America is the work of men”. He is an atheist.

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Bell was not; he was a Christian. And his detached pessimism was tempered by an aggressive moralism. In his book, Ethical Ambition, which mixes memoir and self-help, he emphasised that:

“humanity at its essence is both an ongoing readiness to recognize wrongs and try to make things better, and the desire to help those in need of assistance without expecting reward or public recognition”.

So there is a point in being human, and that point is to do good. The virtues that are most important to Bell are “passion, courage, faith, relationships, inspiration and humility”. He often reads less like a radical subversive than a hokey Grandpa, slipping you moral maxims rather than sweets. Which raises the question: how can someone with such piety end up conceiving an ideology characterised by doleful pessimism?

Bell is in truth an unlikely candidate for the godfather of critical race theory, an ideology sceptical about the positive impact of anti-racist legislation. When he was younger, he worked for the NAACP, the establishment anti-racism group that believed American society could be transformed through the legal system. He worked, in particular, as a civil rights lawyer in the fifties Deep South. But eventually the US Justice Department’s Civil Rights division asked him to stop being a member of the NAACP: they thought he couldn’t be objective. He quit his position in the department, but continued to work for the anti-racist organisation.

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One plausible way to reconcile these two sides of Bell — the moralist and the pessimist — is to emphasise his Christianity. He believed in the permanence of racism just like any Christian believes in the inevitability of sin — nevertheless, the inevitability of sin does not mean we shouldn’t try to be better.

But perhaps a better way to account for this tension — a way that explains the similarities between Bell and non-Christians like Coates — is to view his conception of critical race theory as a case of thwarted idealism in the American Dream. America did not become a post-racial utopia after the civil rights revolution; therefore racism is a permanent feature of American society. Just like every passionate atheist is in some sense an inverted believer, people like Bell who are so antagonistic to American idealism belie their underlying attachment to it. This is true of critical race theory in general.

Although he is not a Christian, Coates is as profoundly American as Bell. His criticism of the nation is animated by his acceptance of American exceptionalism. “One cannot”, he writes, “at once, claim to be superhuman and then plead mortal error”. His proposal is this: “to take our countrymen’s claims of American exceptionalism seriously, which is to say I propose subjecting our country to an exceptional moral standard”. In other words, he takes at face value the ideals of the American Dream (the very same American Dream that, he argues, is not for black people).

Meanwhile, the opponents of critical race theory see its ideas as hostile to — or at least inconsistent with — America (Fox News has mentioned it over 1,900 times in four months). In an exact inversion of critical race theory’s contention that racism is present in every aspect of American life, many on the Right — in this case, Christopher Rufo — now complain that critical race theory has “pervaded every aspect of the federal government” and poses “an existential threat to the United States”. Rufo and his ilk aren’t opposed to, say, teaching the history of slavery and segregation in American schools; what they oppose is schoolchildren acknowledging their whiteness. Rufo calls it state-sanctioned racism.

The irony is that critical race theory is not, as it sees itself, a realist’s ideology. And it is not, as its main opponents view it, fundamentally un-American. Like many on the conservative American Right, it espouses an idealised view of the nation’s self-professed values: if they truly believed these values were fundamentally corrupt, then what would be the point, as Bell and Coates do, of holding America to them? The truly realist position is one like Coleman Hughes’s: he has shown, with evidence and dispassionate argumentation, that black Americans have made material progress in recent decades.

Although Rufo may deny this of himself, many on the conservative Right do cling on to a form of American idealism that is insensitive to the existence of racism. But critical race theorists cling on to their own idealism by concluding that, because America is not yet a post-racial society, racism is an inexorable feature of the country. The vision of the shining city on a hill becomes the sole means by which to judge the nation — while the material realities of black people fade into the distance.

This piece was originally published in August.