One of the founders of Extinction Rebellion boasts that he wouldn’t let an ambulance through if he was blocking the road, even at the cost of a patient’s life.

A biological male with criminal convictions for kidnap and attempted murder says at a Trans Pride rally: “If you see a Terf, punch them in the fucking face.” The crowd, holding placards about love, kindness and human rights, cheer and applaud.

Students at California State University glorify a Hamas terrorist paragliding into Israel to slaughter the innocent, while Harvard students write an open letter blaming Jews for their own execution. They grieve the “slow and sudden” deaths of Palestinians.

Acts of kindness bear witness to our shared suffering. But when kindness becomes pathological, it is cruel and divisive — as with these examples. And it is on the rise. In the West today, there are people whose suffering is deemed to be non-existent or of little value, and so judgement takes the place of understanding, punishment that of mercy. The result is a purity spiral whereby extreme kindness towards an in-group gives unlimited licence to act with cruelty towards an out-group. It’s this licence that gives progressive activists permission to clothe antisemitism as anti-colonialism.

Following the Hamas massacre, a lecturer at Stanford University used “identity-based targeting” to force three Jewish students to stand in a corner so they could feel “what Israel does to Palestinians”. He asked them how many Jews died in the Holocaust. One of the students said “six million” and the lecturer replied that “colonizers killed more than 6 million. Israel is a colonizer”. In New York, activists tore down posters pleading for the safe release of Jewish hostages, many of them women and children, while London saw a 1,353% increase in antisemitic attacks.

In the intersectional narrative inhaled by activists, kindness for the “oppressed” legitimises unspeakable cruelty against the “oppressor”. For normal people, whose instincts are not numbed by ideology, the dissonance of cruelty clothed in kindness is disorientating. In 2021, Milli Hill, founder of the Positive Birth Movement, challenged use of the phrase “birthing person” to describe a pregnant woman. Fellow birthing professionals denounced her — in the name of kindness. As the attacks intensified and the language became increasingly violent, Milli lost her sense of reality, telling an interviewer: “Am I the person I think I am? Do I have this dark side that’s violent and hateful and toxic and all the things they say I am?”

Polish psychiatrist Andrew Lobaczewski, who spent his early life under Nazi occupation, analysed the political and psychological processes that generate this loss of reality. He called it ponerology, or the “the study of the origin of evil”. Collaborating, in secret, with a number of dissidents in post-war communist Poland, he sought to explain the “pathological inversion of a normal social hierarchy” in which “psychological deviants” take power and create a “pathocracy…wherein a small pathological minority takes control over a society of normal people”.

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This minority is the “pathological underbelly” present in every society, about 6% of the population, of which a tenth are psychopathic — characterised by grandiosity, narcissism, personal charisma, impaired moral and psychological reasoning, a systemic incapacity for self-criticism and the sadistic pursuit of pleasure. Under communist rule, Lobaczewski witnessed such people, riven with mediocrity and oblivious to their incompetence, become leading members of the party. As their grip on power tightened, one malignancy bred another, until academics, scientists and psychologists succumbed to communist ideology. They acted as if in possession “of some secret knowledge; in their eyes we became their former colleagues, still believing what the ‘professors of old’ had taught us”.

From Mao’s attack on the Four Olds — old ideas, old customs, old habits and old culture — to the assault by critical race theorists on the universalism of the civil rights movement and the sublimation of antisemitism into support for Hamas atrocities, a defining factor of pathocracies is historical amnesia and psychological naievety. This allows for the separation of the “Old” from the “New”, and the metastatic transformation of what Lobaczewski called the “pathological underbelly” of society into the ruling elite.

In the West, progressive activists are denying their cultural dominance, despite using this dominance to shame, de-bank and destroy their enemies. They compete for status by aligning themselves with intersectional destitution to manufacture a world in which discrimination, inequality and climate deaths are increasing, when the evidence shows the opposite is true. Ultimately, elite pathocrats become totally isolated from the world of normal people. Their language becomes esoteric and they speak only to each other. The Polish philosopher Angnieszka Kolakowska described this descent into unintelligibility among Communist Party members as a defence mechanism: when they “feel cornered, they automatically lapse into textbook communist jargon”, she wrote. “Their words simply fail to refer and the result is gibberish.”

Gibberish, in the mouths of elite pathocrats, becomes wisdom, creating a utopia of nonsense, detectable in sentences like this, from the activist Rosa Lee: “By remembering the metaphorical character of any scientific model, we can draw out the insights of the theory of performativity while putting it into conversation with our other Marxist metaphors.” The end point is “communisation, the transition to new communist selves”. The mystique of this language cements the separation of ideology from reality and pathological elites from the “normal man”. Faced with struggle sessions, shaming, bullying and violence — and fearing for their sanity — normal people lapse into silence, unable to comprehend the pathocratic trauma unleashed upon them. When an individual is compelled to violate what she knows to be true, to substitute an ideological fantasy for reality, the result is psychological disintegration.

When an individual is compelled to violate what she knows to be true, to substitute an ideological fantasy for reality, the result is psychological disintegration. Such a spectacle is a source of pleasure to the dominant elites for whom “forcing others…to feel and think like themselves becomes an internal necessity, a ruling concept”. This “necessity” can never be satiated. No level of deindustrialisation can cleanse the West of its “abuse” of Mother Earth, no ritualistic recitation of pronouns can redeem the “sins of the cis” and no atonement can ever be sufficient to repay the debt owed by the Jews for their “crimes”.

This impossibility of salvation makes sadism eternal.

This process is viscerally described in Juliette, a novel written by the Marquis de Sade. In it, the eponymous heroine meets Pope Pius VI and demands that he offer up a dissertation on murder. The Pope obliges, arguing that to commit murder is in accordance with Nature:

“from time immemorial, man has taken pleasure in shedding the blood of his fellow man and to content himself he has sometimes disguised this passion under a cloak of justice, sometimes under one of religion. But, and of this let there be no doubt, his purpose, his aim has always been the astonishing pleasure killing procures him.”

Ideology, in other words, is used to conceal the sadistic desires of the libertines, to legitimise the raw exercise of power. Normal, virtuous people are imprisoned, tortured, brutalised and killed by aristocrats, priests and popes — purely for the pleasure of it.

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Pathocrats who seek the collapse of open societies do everything they can to conceal the “astonishing pleasure” they get from having the power to punish. They do so by redefining concepts like “justice”, “safety” and “kindness” in a language accessible only to the elite. Like contemporary identitarian progressives, Sade’s libertines speak only to each other. This enables them to hide the sadistic psychology that drives them.

And because it is impossible to prove that people are thinking “correctly”, the elite’s desire can never be satisfied. Pathocrats and libertines cannot be appeased. In a futile attempt to appease her attackers, Milli Hill offered her online platform to a Bame birthing expert. For this, her accusers amplified her guilt by adding racism to the accusation of transphobia. They shamed her for not paying the Bame woman for her work, and accused her of being a “white saviour”. The simple fact of Hill’s continued existence was an irresistible invitation to degrade her further. But still, they cloaked their cruelty in the language of kindness. Lacking the courage of the Sadean libertine, her tormentors clung to their progressive ideology, for fear, as Lobaczewski observed, that without it “nothing would remain except psychological and moral pathology, naked and unattractive”.

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It’s that nakedness we see when a mob is implored to “punch a fucking Terf” or a Hamas terrorist decapitates a dying Jew with a garden hoe. Yet those who raise their fists in support are, without doubt, on “the right side of history” — that is, the winning side. Pathocrats almost always win, the few silencing the many, because it’s easier to be kind than to love.

If we are to survive this cruelty in the name of kindness, we need to separate what’s benign and beautiful in progressive ideologies from the pathological underbelly that’s overwhelmed them. We need to salvage tolerance and inclusion for all trans people from the attack on science and single-sex spaces undertaken in their name. We need to rescue the universalism of the civil rights movement from an anti-racism that reverses the terms of a malevolent racial hierarchy in the name of justice. We need to protect present and future generations from the consequences of environmental degradation without sacrificing the poor to gratify an apocalyptic vanity. And we need to seek justice for Palestinians without glorifying unspeakable violence.

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Lobaczewski concluded that normal people protest against pathocrats “from the depths of their own souls and their human nature”. They protest against the evisceration of their language, the denigration of their values and the unjustified status of the elites who govern them. If we allow pathocrats to control our institutions and corporations, the future will #BeKind.

We must remember that it’s their weakness, not their strength, that compels the pathocrats to silence dissent. As the anti-apartheid campaigner Nadine Gordimer wrote: “No social system in which a tiny minority must govern without consent over a vast majority can afford to submit any part of control of communication.” To break their power means isolating the minority within the minority from the decent people who have become cruel out of fear, contagion and opportunism. In this struggle, we’ll find unexpected allies.

Having been one of the last prisoners in the Bastille when it was stormed in July 1789, the Marquis de Sade later found himself in the improbable position of a revolutionary judge. When the family of his estranged wife, responsible for his long years of incarceration, were brought before him for judgement, he chose mercy and spared them from the guillotine, saying: “Such is the revenge I take upon them.”

Critical theory was born in Germany between the two world wars. It was founded by a clique of Marxist academics in Frankfurt who were horrified that the grand march toward the communist utopia predicted by Marx wasn’t happening on schedule. On the one hand, communism in the Soviet Union had devolved into a totalitarian nightmare with a reliable habit of mass murder. On the other, the working people of one of the most educated and cultured nations of Europe, who according to Marxist theory should have been flocking to the banners of proletarian revolution, were instead rallying around a weird little man with a toothbrush moustache and an unhealthy obsession with an archaic, bloodthirsty mysticism of race and soil.

Obviously, something had gone wrong, not just with Marxism but with the entire enterprise of Western rationality summed up in the phrase “the Enlightenment”. Consider what that phrase means for a moment. One of the basic credos of the cultural mainstream in Western countries is the rather odd notion that, at a certain point not that many centuries ago, for the very first time in human history, intellectuals in Western Europe saw the universe as it actually is. Before then, despite fumbling attempts in the right direction by ancient Greek philosophers, humanity was hopelessly mired in superstitious ignorance; afterwards, Western intellectuals led a rapid ascent towards true knowledge of humanity and the universe. People still speak of that period using such far-from-neutral terms as “the Age of Reason” and “the Enlightenment”; in Germany, the term is die Aufklärung, literally “the Clearing-Off”.

It is to the credit of the founders of critical theory — Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Erich Fromm, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse — that they didn’t just go on believing in the secular mythology of progress. They grasped that the Enlightenment had failed to accomplish what everyone expected of it, and they set out to understand what had gone wrong. Since they were Marxists, of course, they still framed things in terms of the march toward a utopian society of the future, and critical theory thus set out not just to understand society but to change it. It sought, in Horkheimer’s words, “to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them” — but it tried to do that by understanding the entire panoply of reasons why those circumstances happen to exist at a given place and time.

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This is what makes critical theory useful. Treat a belief as though it’s timeless and context-free and all you can do is accept or reject it; recognise that every belief has a history and a cultural context and you can understand it instead. Critical theory attempts to do this with the core beliefs of Western society. The first major book to come out of the movement, Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, sought to make sense of the way that Enlightenment rationalism had led to the twin tyrannies of Stalin and Hitler. It’s still worth reading today, even though much of what passes for critical theory now is little more than empty propaganda.

In the opening lines of his Guide to Kulchur, Ezra Pound wrote: “In attacking a doctrine, a doxy, or a form of stupidity, it might be remembered that one isn’t of necessity attacking the man, or say ‘founder,’ to whom the doctrine is attributed or on whom is it blamed.” Similarly today, in circles unsympathetic to what critical theory has become, it is common to assail Adorno, Benjamin, et al., because of the current antics of their followers. This is unfair. The founders of critical theory did in fact make a massive mistake, but it’s one that pretty much everyone made in those days and too many people still make today.

That mistake? The failure to recognise that the academic circles to which Adorno and Benjamin belonged — and to which their followers by and large belong today — form a privileged class with an interest in furthering its own influence and grabbing more than its share of wealth and privilege. Critical theory by and large avoids talking about this. A genuine critical race theory would interrogate the discourses concerning race used by Left-wing activists in today’s society, and show how those discourses are used as instruments of hegemony by those activists and the people who pay them. A genuine critical theory would also interrogate the implications of “liberating human beings from the circumstances that enslave them”, and talk about how that rhetoric of liberation is used to replace one set of enslaving circumstances with another. You can read a whole lot of critical theory and never catch the least whisper of this sort of thinking.

This is what makes Jason Josephson-Storm’s work so fascinating. He tiptoes very close to the edge of that forbidden territory, by suggesting that one of the most fundamental assumptions of modern thought — the notion that we modern people are disenchanted, freed from the superstitious burdens of the past and venturing heroically forward into a new world free of myth and magic — is simply another myth. He has applied the tools of critical theory to one of the basic assumptions underlying critical theory, and showed that belief in disenchantment is just another narrative employed to advantage certain people over others. It is an impressive project.

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One of Josephson-Storm’s greatest influences, a scholar he frequently cites, did much the same thing on a bigger scale and to an even more vulnerable set of narratives. This is Bruno Latour, one of the first scholars to study “the social construction of scientific facts”. What does this mean? Well, it’s part of the mythology of science that claims that scientists in their research are simply following where nature leads. In practice, it’s very nearly the other way around.

Consider the steps you’d need to take if you wanted to do some research into any branch of science: reading the relevant literature, crafting a hypothesis, considering the available equipment, designing an experiment, and, of course, finding funding for it. It’s common for such steps to be dismissed as mere details, but in fact they are more significant than that.

For instance, the literature you’ve read is the product of peer review and the evolution of scientific opinion, which has at least as much to do with academic politics as with nature. The hypothesis is a product of your education, and also of current fashions in academia (anyone who thinks that scientists are immune to the blandishments of intellectual fashion has never met a scientist). The equipment available depends on who has invested money into developing certain kinds of experimental gear, and also on what gear is popular and readily available. The experimental design is just as subject to fashion, and it also has to appeal to funding sources. And finally, the decision to grant or withhold funding for an experiment depends entirely on the behaviour of human beings.

On top of this, after conducting an experiment, you’d have to interpret the results, write a paper, get a prestigious co-author or two to sign on, submit it to a journal, wait nervously while it goes through the peer-review process, and revise the paper at least once in response to comments by the anonymous peer reviewers. Then, once the paper is finally published, other researchers will respond to it and potentially adapt their own research projects in light of what you’ve found. All these, again, are social processes.

The end result of such a research project — a half sentence and footnote, say, in some future textbook — is thus almost entirely a product of social interactions among human beings. At the centre of those interactions, the flake of grit at the heart of the pearl, is the fact that you asked nature a specific question and got an equally specific answer. That process of question and answer is the thing that makes science as effective a way of making sense of the world as it is, but it does not erase the effect of social processes on the result — it just means that the result has to have some contact somewhere with nature.

Now take that and multiply it by four centuries or so of scientific effort, and the result is a vast social process built atop a relatively narrow foundation of natural facts. Those facts are carefully selected, curated, and assembled by the social process into a model of the world. Ask different questions, use different equipment, give the results a different theoretical spin, and you can quite easily end up with a completely different model of the world. That’s not something most people want to talk about in the scientific community, because it would weaken their claims to influence, wealth and privilege. That’s why so many scientists were shouting “Believe the science!” at the tops of their lungs not so long ago: maintaining the cultural prestige of science, and thus their own social status and its perks, took precedence over nearly everything else.

If you want another glimpse at just how far the social enterprise of science veers from its imagined ideal, look up the phrase “replication crisis”. One of the essential principles of science is that any scientifically valid finding has to be replicable; it can’t be some kind of fluke. These days, for an astounding number of studies in a very wide range of sciences, that’s no longer true. Very few people in the sciences want to talk about how much of this is caused by experimental and statistical fraud, both of which are pervasive in those branches of science where corporate profits are involved and far from rare even in less lucrative fields of research.

If science were really a matter of following nature wherever it leads, the emergence of the replication crisis would have caused a sudden, frantic search for the causes. We’re talking, after all, about something that challenges the act of faith at the centre of the scientific enterprise. By and large, though, that search hasn’t happened. Instead, scientists have chosen either to ignore the problem or to denounce anyone who dares to draw attention to it — typical behaviour of any elite group faced with a challenge to their legitimacy.

This is the kind of thing Bruno Latour wrote about. In We Have Never Been Modern, he proposed that most people are convinced, or at least act as though they’re convinced, that the modern world is something new and unique in human history because, unlike all others, our sciences really do tell us the objective truth about nature. These people also appear to be convinced that the same thing is true of everything else in our culture.

This is the heart of modernity — the conviction that keeps people today from making use of any of the hard-won lessons of past civilisations, or even learning from our own civilisation’s catastrophic mistakes. It is a fond, false, foolish belief — and Latour and Josephson-Storm have both shown that it can’t be justified except by the most absurd sorts of special pleading and circular logic.

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What does it mean if we give up the myth of modernity, the conviction that we — alone of all the human beings who have ever lived — see the world truly? Surprisingly enough, we don’t have to give up science. That our scientific worldview is not given by nature, but assembled out of data points drawn from nature, does not make science meaningless or false. It simply makes the work of the scientist a product of human society and culture, rather than a revelation handed down from on high.

In a very real sense, science stripped of the myth of modernity takes on the same shape as the study of history. It is absurd to think that history is simply an account of what happened; “what happened” in a month in any small town would fill entire libraries. The historian’s task is to craft a narrative which illuminates some part of the past, using actual incidents as building blocks. A scientist without modernist pretensions, similarly, crafts a narrative that illuminates some part of nature, using replicable experimental results as building blocks. Theories along these lines are useful rather than true; they start by accepting the reality that the human mind is not complex enough to understand the infinite sweep of the cosmos, and then goes on to say, “but as far as we are capable of making sense of things, this story seems to reflect what happens”.

This sort of thinking is doubtless a bitter pill to swallow for those who have founded their own identities on the notion that humanity is or should be the conqueror of nature. Here again, though, the failure of those notions to create a world fit for human habitation is increasingly clear to many of us. And the sooner we accept that the stories told by today’s industrial societies are just another set of mythologies, and that the technologies they’ve created to manipulate the world are just another set of clever gimmicks — why, the sooner we can get to work discarding those aspects of modernity that have failed abjectly, and picking up those older habits and stories and technologies that are better suited to the world we find ourselves facing. Only then, can we begin to do something less inept and foredoomed with our time on Earth.

I was reminded of this curious ritual when I read recently of the “flame purification” ceremony conducted by the board in charge of elementary and secondary schools in southwestern Ontario. Almost 5,000 books judged to contain outdated racial stereotypes were removed from school libraries to be burnt or recycled. Some of the incinerated remains were used as a fertiliser to plant a tree — an uplifting, progressive and environmentally conscious gesture, if one ignores the overtones of Fahrenheit 451.

Yet perhaps it is unsurprising that activists who are convinced that language causes real-world “harm” should be troubled by the reading habits of children. After all, it’s hardly a fringe view: the Centre for Teaching and Learning at the University of Cambridge this month suggested that Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie series ought to come with “content notes” (a substitute phrase for “trigger warnings” given that the word “trigger” connotes violence and might therefore induce trauma).

This fear that children might be morally corrupted by “problematic” literature might explain the sudden deluge of progressive children’s books on the market: just as children are deemed so malleable that they might transform into bigots if they read outdated work, it is assumed that they can be indoctrinated in the “correct” way if their reading materials are layered with messaging that reinforces the creed of social justice. As Schopenhauer put it, “there is no absurdity so palpable but that it may be firmly planted in the human head if you only begin to inculcate it before the age of five”.

The rise of progressive children’s books arguably began in 2016, with Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls by Elena Favilli and Francesca Cavallo. The idea was a charming one; it contained profiles of exceptional women throughout history offered up as role models for young readers. Examples included Michelle Obama, Maya Angelou, Yoko Ono, and even Coco Chanel, whose collaboration with the Nazis was tactfully omitted.

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Thereafter, the tone of such books became more strident. There was Feminist Baby by Loryn Brantz, Antiracist Baby by Ibram X Kendi, and The Little Girl Who Gave Zero Fucks by Amy Kean. All of a sudden, highly dubious ideological positions were being represented as uncontested truth to very young children. Nor was this confined to America. Last summer, the National Education Union — the largest teaching union in the United Kingdom — claimed there was an “urgent” need to decolonise every subject and every stage of the school curricula and called for “activist training for teachers”.

But it’s not simply a matter of race; books aimed at toddlers which advance the idea that they each have a gendered soul are also being promoted by activist teachers and authors. For instance, Who Are You? The Kid’s Guide To Gender Identity by Brook Pessin-Whedbee is marketed for children as young as three, and introduces them to identity categories well beyond the comprehension of most adults, including “genderqueer, non-binary, bigender and two-spirit”.

Or consider the following claim from It Feels Good To Be Yourself: A Book About Gender Identity by Theresa Thorn, next to an illustration of a newborn baby: “See, when you were born, you couldn’t tell people who you were or how you felt. They looked at you and made a guess. Maybe they got it right, maybe they got it wrong.” Thorn, it seems, wants children to believe that for years midwives and obstetricians have simply been flipping a coin and randomly assigning male or female on birth certificates.

That is, of course, palpably absurd. And yet it would be wrongheaded to call for such books to be censored or banned. The vast majority of educators understand how ridiculous it is to teach infants that they have a gendered soul, or that they are guilty of white privilege. Last year, the Arizona Department of Education released an “equity” toolkit which claimed that even babies as young as three-months old are capable of racial prejudice. I remain unconvinced that any of this has much of an effect. As one teacher recently said to me: “Teachers are more prone to fashionable nonsense than pupils. Trust the kids. They know bullshit when they see it.”

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But what of the younger ones, those who tend to to accept and repeat the mantras of their elders? It is unlikely to be a coincidence that the emergence of such activism in the classroom has brought with it a sudden rise of young people identifying as non-binary or transgender. Some of these children will doubtless be suffering from a form of gender dysphoria, but most will find such confusions resolved through the natural process of puberty. When children as young as three and four are “coming out” as trans, are we not right to be suspicious that adult influence has played a role? As trans YouTuber Blaire White said: “A transgender three-year-old is like a vegan cat.  We all know who’s making the lifestyle choices.”

Few parents have grasped the significance of these developments, largely because these attempts at indoctrination have been couched in progressive terminology. One exception is in Wales, where the government is currently being sued by more than 5,000 parents and grandparents over their decision to make compulsory the teaching of gender identity and sexual attraction to children as young as three. The government has apparently adopted Stonewall’s misinterpretation of the Equality Act, and have accordingly substituted “gender identity” for “gender reassignment” in its Equality and Diversity Policy.

It may be that the Welsh government is breaking the law. Section 406 of the Education Act 1996 prohibits “the promotion of partisan political views in the teaching of any subject”. This applies not only to political belief systems such as Marxism, but also ideological frameworks such as Critical Race Theory. In October 2020, the equalities minister Kemi Badenoch addressed Parliament to clarify the Government’s position. “We do not want to see teachers teaching their white pupils about white privilege and inherited racial guilt,” she said. “And let me be clear, any school which teaches these elements of Critical Race Theory as fact, or which promotes partisan political views such as defunding the police without offering a balanced treatment of opposing views, is breaking the law.” If she is right, it is difficult to see how the teaching of gender identity ideology as undisputed truth could be exempt from these legal requirements.

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It remains to be seen whether current and future legal challenges make any difference. In the meantime, criticism and mockery are by far our best defence. Take the recent controversy surrounding the success of Matt Walsh’s new book Johnny the Walrus. It tells the story of Johnny, a boy who enjoys pretending to be a walrus by using spoons as tusks. The online community mobilises and tells him that he must either choose between being a walrus or being a human, and that he cannot be both. In response, hysterical staff at Amazon held a meeting to discuss the “trauma” the book had caused. Executives are even heard strategising about how to demote the title on their website to limit potential sales.

No books were burnt, but the underlying rationale was the same: namely, that indoctrination of the young is always a temptation for those whose ideas would not withstand adult scrutiny. But as Walsh’s book proves, the idea that small children are in any way interested in intersectional activism is inherently funny, and mockery is always the best way to expose the falsehoods of powerful elites. If there’s one thing that the high priests of this new religion cannot bear, it’s the sound of laughter.

The first two orders were aimed at the classroom. One promised “to ensure excellence” in schools by taking steps to “end the use of inherently divisive concepts, including Critical Race Theory, and to raise academic standards”. The other affirmed that whether or not a child should wear a mask to school was up to parents, not schools. Youngkin knows what was clear to anyone watching the Virginia gubernatorial race: that his focus on the question of who is in control of the state’s classrooms — whether they are open or not, and what is being taught when they are — was what delivered a Republican win in a state that voted for Joe Biden by 10 percentage points just a year earlier.

While many Virginians with school-age children were angered by long-term school closures during the pandemic, the promotion of a divisive “antiracist” pedagogy and the abandonment of the meritocratic pursuit of academic excellence, Youngkin’s opponent, Terry McAuliffe, sided with the teachers’ unions. Youngkin called his campaign events “parents matter” rallies, while McAuliffe chose Randi Weingarten — the union head honcho and public enemy number one for parents of children who, in many cases, missed more than a year’s worth of in-person schooling — as a headline speaker for his election-eve rally. In one debate, he uttered a self-incriminating mantra: “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” He never recovered.

Much of the debate that followed the Virginia result centered on whether it was school closures or the pedagogy for which Critical Race Theory has become a shorthand were the bigger factor. Some on the Left leapt on the fact that the anti-CRT campaigner Christopher Rufo is explicit about his intent to weaponise CRT against Democrats. An analysis of the Virginia results by Michael Hartney, a political scientist at Boston College, found that Youngkin did better in areas where school closures had been more extensive.

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But this post-mortem fails to understand just how tangled the issues are. The anti-CRT backlash was a product of remote learning: parents saw what their children were learning and, in many cases, were not impressed. Anger at a progressive reckoning was understandably intensified by the timing: renaming schools, paying thousands of dollars for a Zoom lecture from Ibram X. Kendi and abolishing standardised testing at a time when classrooms were closed, grades were slipping and the poorest students with the least support were being hit the hardest. Taken together, these questions boil down to control: who decides what happens in America’s schools?

Needless to say, classroom issues are not limited to Virginia. And for many Republicans, Youngkin struck on a winning issue ahead of the midterms later this year. Party strategists hope they can win back a cohort of college-educated suburban voters they lost during the Trump years. Some panicked Democrats also appear to realize this: since November, parts of the party have dropped their previous passivity towards the teachers’ unions. But whether or not Democrats learn the right lessons from 2021, parents of school-age children have been identified as a crucial slice of the electorate. They are worried and frustrated. And they have mobilised. They have joined campaign groups, attended school-board meetings and run for office. And they are set to decide races across America.

Writing in The Atlantic recently, one parent explained how a broader disillusion with the Democratic Party was triggered by pandemic schooling: “until recently… [I was] a loyal, Left-leaning Democrat, and I had been my entire adult life. I was the kind of partisan who registered voters before midterm elections and went to protests. I hated Donald Trump so much that I struggled to be civil to relatives on the other side of the aisle. But because of what my family has gone through during the pandemic, I can’t muster the same enthusiasm. I feel adrift from my tribe and, to a certain degree, disgusted with both parties.”

Another parent, a progressive who lives in Northern Virginia, an affluent, heavily Democratic part of the country, explained to me his disgust at the support for closures from his political allies. “I’m a Left-winger and the people who were the most pro-closure were all on the Left,” he said. “Everything they were pushing for was antithetical to liberalism. School closures were hurting the most at-risk kids: people whose parents aren’t a lawyer like me… The hypocrisy of these people was incredible. They claimed to care so much about underprivileged people and yet were ready to throw them under the bus.”

He says he knows many lifetime Democrats who voted for Youngkin because they wanted schools to return to normal for their children.

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Is this the end of progressive America?

By Joel Kotkin

If candidates and political consultants are plotting ways to win over the parent vote, education activists hope that the pandemic will prove to be a decisive moment for American schooling. “Covid didn’t break the public school system. It was already broken,” says Corey DeAngelis, the national director of research at School Choice Now. “But, for almost two years now, it has shone a spotlight on the main problem with K-12 education across America, which is a massive, long-existing power imbalance between the public school teachers’ union monopoly and families.”

Parents are voting with their feet. Enrolment in New York City’s public school system has dropped by 5% since the start of the pandemic. Homeschooling increased by 50% in Virginia in the 2020-21 school year. Nationwide, more than half a million American children have left public education since the start of the pandemic. The school-choice movement is flourishing. Public support is at an all-time high while 18 states have expanded school-choice measures. The number of states with an education saving account programme, which DeAngelis calls the “gold standard” for school choice and which allows parents to receive public funds for education if they withdraw their children from the public system, doubled from five to ten last year.

The question is whether anger over education at the moment will trigger a long-lasting change in education politics in America, or whether business as usual returns once anger over school closures subsides. I suspect it will do the former, just as the effects of the pandemic school closures will likely do lasting damage to the mental health and educational outcomes of America’s children.

Organisations started by parents to pressure their school systems offer a counterweight to teachers’ unions now have an institutional momentum of their own. Choice-enhancing policy changes will not be repealed overnight. Parents stuck dealing with at-home learning for more than a year will not easily forget who was revealed to have a veto power over their children’s education.

Perhaps above all else, the spread of anti-racist dogma in public education — and the prioritisation of progressive genuflecting over academic excellence — will mobilise all but the most progressive of parents.

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Of the many hasty symbolic changes made during the racial reckoning of 2020, the one I keep returning to is the decision by KIPP, the country’s largest network of charter schools, to retire their national slogan, which, until the summer of 2020, was “Work hard. Be nice.” It isn’t just impossibly inoffensive, but it strikes me as a pretty good motto: who wouldn’t want their kids to live by those words? But according to KIPP, the four-word mantra needed to go because it “supports the illusion of meritocracy”  and because “working hard and being nice is not going to dismantle systemic racism”.

After the pandemic passes, that toxic ideology will remain. It seems so anathema to human nature that a counter-revolution feels inevitable. In fact — as Virginia is demonstrating — it is already underway. And it is parents who are its foot-soldiers.

But what do they have to show for it? Not as much as they might have expected. Rather than a Bolshevik-style assumption of power, there’s every chance this institutional triumph will not produce an enduring political victory, let alone substantially change public opinion.

Even before Biden’s botched Build Back Better initiative, American progressives faced opposition to their wildly impractical claims about achieving “zero Covid” and “zero emissions”, confronting “systemic racism” by defunding the police, regulating speech, and redefining two biological sexes into a multiplicity.

Increasingly, the “march” has started to falter. Like the French generals in 1940 who thought they could defeat the Germans by perfecting World War One tactics, the progressive establishment has built its own impressive Maginot Line which may be difficult to breach, but can still be flanked.

That is not to deny the progressives’ limited successes. It has certainly developed a remarkable ability to besmirch even the most respected institutions, including the US military. But that is where its achievements stop.

While the Pentagon’s top brass focused on “domestic terrorists” and a progressive social agenda, it calamitously bungled its withdrawal from Afghanistan and appears utterly unprepared for Chinese or Russian competitors. And the effect of this progressive march is plain to see: the percentage of Americans who feel “a great deal of trust and confidence in the military” has dropped in just three years to 45% from 70%.

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This decline in trust in major institutions, so evident in America, is also rife across Europe and Australia. In Europe, for example, young people express less pride in their cultural and religious heritage, and are almost three times as likely as their elders to believe that democracy is failing.

The great paradox of progressivism is that nowhere are its shortcomings more evident than in its geographic heartland: the dense urban centre. Conventional wisdom has dictated that America’s high-tech economic future will be shaped in dense urban areas, where superstar companies stand the best chance of recruiting superstar employees.

But while the upper crust of the labour force continue to head to the dense urban cores, on the ground people are moving in the other direction. Across the high-income world, not only in America but Europe as well, the vast preponderance of growth has taken place in suburbs and exurbs. In the last decade over 90% of all US metropolitan population growth and 80% of job growth took place on the periphery. On the ground, then, the progressive dream is withering.

The pandemic has greatly enhanced these trends, with downtown neighbourhoods recovering far less quickly than suburban, exurban, and small towns. But even if these changes are not permanent, at least not entirely, city residents will still have to contend with another pitfall of the progressive agenda: rising crime. Twelve American cities have experienced record homicides this year; all are ruled by Democratic, often progressive, leaders, many of whom explain away crime and excused, even praised, the looting and mayhem caused by protestors in the summer of 2020.

Yet despite this visceral impact on urban neighbourhoods, it is in education that our new hegemony could have its most long-lasting impact. The West’s new educational mandarins, increasingly strident and increasingly influential, have no use for our liberal inheritance, which they consider little more than a screen for racists and misogynists.

In Canada, we have seen an instance of “flame purification” for everything from old encyclopaedias and maps to Depression-era cartoons. In America, the disconnect between the professoriate and the people also keeps growing, as conservatives head towards extinction on many campuses: on some well-regarded campuses such as Williams, Swarthmore and Bryn Mawr, the ratio of Democrats to Republicans reaches between 70 and 132 to 1.

These trends have long been evident in the fading humanities and social sciences, but now even the sciences are becoming politicised. Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that universities are losing credibility even among some traditional Leftists, who marvel at how they burnish their progressive credentials while making huge profits off their endowments and seriously underpaying most of their employees.

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And just as with the growing disaffection for the military, teachers, students and parents are starting to push back. A number of teachers who have been “cancelled” or otherwise threatened for dissenting are now fighting back in the courts. There’s also considerable criticism from parents and alumni, some of whom are now pledging not to contribute to their schools, and instead support well-publicised and well-funded efforts to start new initiatives, such as the recently announced University of Austin. Even more importantly, would-be students are also voting with their feet: after decades of rapid expansion, the number of college students enrolments fell by 5% last decade, and dropped an additional 6.5% since 2019.

Likewise, only one in three Americans have confidence in their public schools, where the education establishment’s goal seems to be to obliterate merit. In my adopted home state of California, this “post-colonial” approach includes deemphasising the importance of tests, excusing bad behaviour, and imposing ideology on often ill-educated students. The San Diego Unified School District, meanwhile, is busily getting rid of mandates for such things as knowing course material, taking tests, handing in work on time, or even showing up; all these, the district insists, are inherently “racist”. This in a state that ranked 49th in the performance of poor, largely minority students. (Still, the situation could be worse: neighbouring Oregon no longer requires any demonstrable proof of competence to graduate.)

In the past year, this blindness has incited considerable public outrage. Criticism of Critical Race Theory buoyed the Republican win in Virginia in November, and has become a rallying principle for parents around the country, including a recall drive against San Francisco school board members.

Other parents are trying to opt out of the public system altogether. The pandemic saw the departure of more one million American students from public schools, while 1.2 million families switched to home-schooling last academic year, bringing the total number of home-schooled students to 3.1 million, roughly 11% of the total. According to the Census Bureau, Black and Hispanic families now have the highest estimated rates of home-schooling, at 16% and 12%, respectively.

Meanwhile, the mass media, particularly its legacy outlets, constitute another progressive bastion losing credibility. One recent survey found that barely one in three Americans trusts the media, including a majority of Democrats, while only 15% of Americans have confidence in newspapers. Part of this surely stems from their bias: although there remain some powerful conservative voices, notably on talk radio and Newscorp properties, the vast majority of journalistic power lies with the Left. It’s the same story with social media, which increasingly dominates news access and is also widely distrusted.

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But the media’s Maginot Line may prove more vulnerable than expected, and this breach is certainly a far better prospect than those that came with the German flanking. There is a definite challenge not just from the traditional Right but a plethora of new publications which offer intelligent analysis outside the establishmentarian party line, as well as from Substack. Unless the media oligarchs find ways to repress these elements, a resurgence of free thinking may rescue journalism from progressive editors and journalism schools.

The shift in the media parallels that in mass culture. As late as the Fifties, mass culture was seen as largely neutral. But in recent decades, it shifted towards a more monochromatic look — one which a significant portion of the public are fed up with. Gender flipping may excite progressive creatives, but politically correct remakes of household favourites have proved box offices disasters. Indeed, it’s striking that openly conservative presenters, such as Fox’s Greg Gutfeld, now do better in ratings than their more established network rivals like Jimmy Kimmel and Jimmy Fallon.

Yet perhaps nothing is more ironic, and potentially dangerous, than the takeover of the corporate suite by progressive ideology. Traditionally, the dispersion of ownership and the conflicting views of entrepreneurs and inheritors fuelled the dynamism of democracy: you had far-Left businessmen like George Soros and doctrinaire Right-wingers like the Kochs in competition. They fought it out, and sometimes even aligned. But they came from diverse viewpoints.

Today this diversity of viewpoints is being obliterated by design, with corporate behaviour now married closely to the notion of the “great reset” and “de-growth”: an economy where improving conditions for the masses is replaced with lowering carbon emissions and diversity tokenism. Such standards, of course, do not apply to snotty private schools attended by their offspring, or areas that are home to their mansions.

The oligarchs may feel they deserve dispensation from the masses by their “good deeds”, but people are not as stupid or malleable as the ruling elites believe. Trust in major corporations, never too robust, is below 20%, less than one third that for small businesses. It is slowly becoming apparent that ‘woke capitalism’ will never solve divisions which are essentially economic. The key, notes Richard Parsons, former President of Citigroup, lies not with racial quotas or hiring transgender workers but the economic growth and opportunity. There will never be “unity”, he suggests, until people “feel it in their pockets”.

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The question now is whether there will be sufficient pushback to turn the tide. Unlike local school boards, online magazines, and even alternative colleges, it’s difficult to replace or challenge an Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Google, or Morgan Stanley. Yet fortunately these institutions do not yet control all wealth. Big companies may have shamed themselves out of oil and gas, but investors are ramping up due to the soaring price of these assets.

So, here’s the good news. On what sometimes seems the inexorable course towards progressive capture, we can see multiple fronts of resistance, and the early congealing of independent-minded forces, from the rational Right to the traditional liberal-left. Our society may never regain the feistiness of previous eras, and our new elites might continue marching through our institutions. But as they become increasingly discredited, they would be unwise to forget that all long marches one day come to an end.

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.

There’s something uniquely fascinating about the persona of the journalist who betrays his or her professional ethics. There is no medical malpractitioner of historic notoriety, no lawyer so inept or corrupt that their infamy elicits international derision a century later. In fact, it might be only in the field of espionage that we find a parallel. The reason is that, like a nation’s spies, a citizenry loans journalists its most precious asset: trust. This is even more true in secular societies where social institutions take on the characteristics of religious bodies, guiding belief and shaping public perception of reality.

In this context, no American journalist has endured the same level of historical contempt as Hannah-Jones’s most notorious New York Times predecessor, Walter Duranty. One of the reasons Duranty’s name still echoes in the halls of ignominy is because his betrayal was of such an epic nature. He was not only the Times’s top Russia correspondent during the most important period of Russian-American relations in a century (namely, the very early days of the Soviet regime) but a celebrity intellectual.

Duranty’s star had risen so high that when the United States government officially recognised the Soviet Union in 1934, he was chosen to accompany its soon-to-be ambassador to the US — and escorted the newly minted American ambassador from DC back to Moscow. Indeed, it was Duranty himself who had advised Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt, then at the end of his presidential campaign, that US recognition of the new Soviet regime was the correct course of action.

But that was no shock. Three years earlier, around the time that international headlines were beginning to report on a famine unfolding in the Ukraine, Duranty had reported the very opposite. It wasn’t simply that he downplayed the famine, which Robert Conquest estimated killed upward of five million people in two years; he actively denied it.

What’s often missed when discussing Duranty, however, is the intentional nature of his malfeasance. When the Times came under pressure from the Ukrainian-American community in the early Noughties to return the “Duranty Pulitzer”, the paper’s publisher, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., went against the recommendation of a historian hired by the Times to assess the matter. The historian recommended (unsurprisingly) that the Times should return the prize. Sulzberger refused, chalking Duranty’s cover-up to nothing more than “slovenly” reporting.

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But Duranty, an Oxford-educated polyglot, was anything but slovenly. The truth of the matter could be far more disturbing, and can be found in a statement Duranty had made years earlier. In June 1931, while visiting the US embassy in Berlin to renew his passport, Duranty made a remark to a State Department official so significant that the official recorded it verbatim and entered it into the State Department record: “In agreement with the New York Times and the Soviet authorities,” Duranty told the American diplomat, “[Duranty’s] official dispatches always reflect the official opinion of the Soviet government and not his own.”

We might be tempted to think that a correspondent of a previous century would have little to do with the most celebrated journalist of the present day. Certainly, it is inconceivable that anything can compare with Duranty’s attempts to deny the Ukraine famine — and the deaths that followed. But the parallels between Duranty and Nikole Hannah-Jones seem hard to ignore. Like Duranty, Hannah-Jones has become the New York Times’s marquee reporter, her public profile taking on celebrity proportions. Hannah-Jones, like Duranty, is as often the subject of headlines as the creator of them. And, of course, there’s the Pulitzer Prize both she and Duranty won relatively early in their respective careers. But perhaps more than any of these factors, the tone and tenor of the subject matter each reporter covered set the stage for a spectacular rise and, at least in Duranty’s case (for now), an equally precipitous fall.

In her first major piece for the New York Times Magazine, where she was a staff writer, Hannah-Jones focused on school segregation — and did so through the lens of her own experience as a mother of a school-aged child. The 2016 article, “Choosing a School for My Daughter in a Segregated City”, placed Hannah-Jones herself squarely at the centre of the all-encompassing topic of race relations in America.

The 10,000-word piece launched Hannah-Jones into that rare elite which consists of reporters who become the focus of a larger reportorial arc. Just a week after it was published, the Times covered Hannah-Jones in an article that was part of a “Times Insider” series. Called “‘Surreal’: A Reporter Is in the Center of a Story She Covered”, the piece was written in the first person by Hannah-Jones and offered a look into the sausage factory of producing a culturally resonant piece for the New York Times. By October 2017, the Times was trumpeting Hannah-Jones in rockstar-like terms, running pieces about her with headlines such as “The Best of Nikole Hannah-Jones”.

And then came 1619, which made her as close to a household name as a journalist can in America. From an Oprah-backed film and TV production deal to appearances on NPR’s Fresh Air and The Daily Show, a talk with Moonlight creator Barry Jenkins to a 1619 book and accompanying children’s book, Hannah-Jones experienced the dazzling embrace of America’s corporate culture machine.

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Crucially, like that of Walter Duranty, Hannah-Jones’s celebrity has had the effect of coating her journalism with a lacquer which shields it from the buffeting forces of criticism. What unites that criticism, from both sides of the political aisle, is something fundamental to any work of journalism: accuracy. While some conservative outlets have attacked the 1619 Project on ideological grounds, the dozens of academics and many journalists who joined the debate intoned with a simple and hard-to-dislodge idea: the 1619 Project was not simply factually flawed, but deliberately, as Phillip Magness, one of the Project’s most vocal critics, put it, it amounts to “the sacrifice of scholarly standards in the service of the ideological objective”.

In the New York Times Magazine issue dedicated to the 1619 Project, there are the subtle but significant problems, such as the mischaracterisation of America’s early economy, which the Project emphasises was built on slavery, when, according to scholars who participated in the debate, slavery played a relatively minor role compared to the Northern industrial and commercial economy. Then there are the arguments that, when taken at face value, are simply absurd, such as the causal connection the Project draws between slavery and modern-day traffic jams in Atlanta or America’s love of sugary treats.

It’s the deeper claims of the Project, however, and specifically those made by Hannah-Jones herself, which are the most problematic — and which most closely tie Hannah-Jones to Duranty. The publication of a piece by Politico by Leslie Harris, a professor of African American history at Northwestern University, months after the 1619 Project was launched, identified the rot at the heart of the Project: “On August 19 of last year I listened in stunned silence as Nikole Hannah-Jones, a reporter for the New York Times, repeated an idea that I had vigorously argued against with her fact-checker: that the patriots fought the American Revolution in large part to preserve slavery in North America.”

This claim, that the American Revolution was fought to preserve slavery, is the fulcrum on which Hannah-Jones’s argument swings. The reason is that the 1619 Project was not simply predicated on the idea that slavery was of consequence to American history; that is a claim most (if not all) of the Project’s most vociferous critics would not have objected to. Instead, the thesis of the 1619 Project is that America is rooted in slavery. In pursuing this mission, what Hannah-Jones attempted to do is not simply “reframe” American history (as one of the introductions to the 1619 Project claimed) but rework reality.

It’s this attempt to edit history that most closely unites Hannah-Jones’s project with that of Walter Duranty. In both cases, historical realities were tarred over in order to make way for a new narrative. But beyond the personal failings of Duranty and Hannah-Jones, there is a larger and more significant connection between the two journalists. And that, of course, is the New York Times.

It is no coincidence that two largely successful attempts to alter history and edit reality have been carried out under the aegis of the New York Times. While Duranty and Hannah-Jones took centre stage, the platform essential to each was provided by America’s self-described paper of record.

As with any corporate-backed endeavour, a costly investment such as 1619 is undertaken only when there is a likely outcome of commensurately rich rewards. This is what we so often miss about major corporate news organisations such as the Times, which is far less significantly a newsroom built on a system of editorial practices than it is a reputation, a social construct, that produces trust — as well as a business mechanism that monetises that trust and processes it into power.

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This model applies equally to the denial of the Ukraine Famine and the creation of the 1619 Project. The case of the former is explained by the drive to be positioned at the very centre of the swirl of power, influence and profit presented by the nascent, rapidly industrialising economic power of the Soviet Union that was quickly modernising the agrarian economy of tsarist Russia. The USSR was a massive market of 150 million people that for nearly two decades since the revolution had been restricted to US corporate interests.

With the 1619 Project, the New York Times’s business interests are just as decisive a factor. The Times’s management is well aware that it has to replace its audience of ageing liberals with young adherents of progressive ideologies impassioned enough to pay for the digital subscriptions that are at the heart of its business model. For the Times, this is a matter of existential significance. As a New York Times Company vice president has explained, one of the aims of 1619 is, according to NiemanLab, to “convince more of its 150 million monthly readers to pay for a subscription”.

This makes good sense considering that over a third of the Times‘s revenue now comes from digital subscriptions — and nearly two-thirds of the Times’s American audience is made up of millennial and Gen Z readers. Print subscriptions, meanwhile, are in “steady decline”; advertising is falling by close to (and sometimes more than) double digits each year.

Like all dynasties, the Sulzbergers, the billionaire family that controls the New York Times, are, in part, motivated by financial self-interest. But in the current cultural environment, where a movement of ideological upheaval is at work, it is power as much as money that lies behind what is the most significant journalistic endeavour of the past decade. The Times’s progressive turn (like that of so many American brands) is more top-down than bottom-up; it is a quest for influence rather than principle. The Times knows which way the wind is blowing and in a raging storm why not sail downwind?

The only problem with this approach — in business as much as in life — is that it doesn’t work. As Captain MacWhir in Joseph Conrad’s novella The Typhoon shouts through the raging storm to the story’s young protagonist: “They may say what they like, but the heaviest seas run with the wind.” In its cynical embrace of progressive politics, the Times runs the risk of capsizing in storm waters it mistakenly believes it can control.

The same may well be true about Nikole Hannah-Jones. To her credit, unlike Walter Duranty, Nikole Hannah-Jones does not appear to be a passenger enjoying the cushy ride of celebrity. From all appearances, she is a true believer who is not just willing but eager to make the necessary sacrifices to bring about her vision of justice in the world. Whether that makes her more or less problematic than Duranty, only time will tell.

Two things. As these are not philosophies but tricks, they are less likely to affront; one can always say of a trick (and what are techniques but elaborated tricks?), “I just learned this last week…”

First: when the baby gets you up in the middle of the night, do not look at the clock. Anyone who’s had children will nod in understanding — you’re up anyway, why pay twice?

The second trick is The Designated Criminal.

My notion of hell is the cross-country road trip with the whole damn family. Here everything, of course, is always going wrong. Some kid is complaining, spouses are feuding about directions, and all is misery. Now this traveler and now that offends against reason and good order and everyone ends up blaming Father, who, as the sole voice of reason, will now turn belligerent. Hot, tired, weary, angry, thirsty and lost, the car rolls on.

How to get from Coast to Coast? Appeals for calm (from Mother), obedience (that’s right), fellow-feeling, and so on will not avail. But a technique (trick) may. It is The Designated Criminal.

On setting out the family must establish a rotation. Each car member, then, on his appointed day, will be The Designated Criminal. On his lucky day, everything that goes wrong in the car is his fault. The affronted family are happily then leagued against the diabolical offender in their midst.

It works like a charm.

But The Designated Criminal may also be practised as oppression. For there are families and other organisms which employ the technique not as a means of maintaining esprit-de-corps, but of exercising control. Here the criminal is designated once and for all time, and will live and die in his chains.

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The narcissistic fall of France

By Michel Houellebecq

In the co-dependant family one child or parent is always in the wrong. We have all seen it and some have been taxed with participating in the loathsome farce: that Dad is a fool, Mom is a dunderhead, Little Bob is a lazy good-for-nothing, Little Suzy is a pre-pubescent whore and if she doesn’t wear more modest clothes she will end on the street, and so on.

And we know of the continual indictment of The Jews, the Witch Trials of Salem and McCarthy, the chattel slavery of Black Americans, and the continuation of that vile racism as the indictment of Whites.

The mechanism of the Designated Criminal can be used both for social equilibrium, in the car, or, politically, for disruption of the body politic. The first case, The Orderly Rotation of Blame, is the essential engine of democracy. The Game’s Rules (The Constitution) are designed to ensure the periodic exchange of power. The Ins and the Outs, and their adherents and dupes, may not understand the transfer of power as a game; but they are involved in one as much as the folks in the station wagon.

The motorists enjoy a process which elevates family unity over individual discomfort; the voters, the self-importance of saving the world from mindless fools. But it’s the same game.

If played according to the rules the rotation of power promotes the health and longevity of the organism. The Ins are allowed to tax the limits of legitimate incumbency, the Outs to misuse the permitted latitudes of opposition. And then, as in a football game, offense and defence shift.

But what if the game is not played according to Hoyle?

What if a player or contingent takes advantage of the rules themselves to achieve a goal other than balance? What if put-upon Dad, for example, says, “I know which Young Traveller is today’s Designated Criminal, but Samantha has just done something so egregious that I am going to suspend the rules and humiliate her”.

Readers will feel the affront of the interjection. As will not only young Samantha, but the whole family. For they had agreed to suspend their individual feelings in favour of group unity. And Dad has just proclaimed that they were fools to do so — that they had made a bargain which, it seems, the car’s driver reserved the right to abrogate, and, thus, that anyone may be the next-accused.

Now, the once-happy car, all occupants free to enjoy not only the trip but the game, are forced into co-dependence. The game is over, and the Ref (of whose existence the car was previously unaware) has ruled that actual indictment of the other is now the order of the day and those not supporting the new rule will suffer. The enjoyment of Free Speech has been superseded by the necessity of obedience to power. The car has just experienced Terror.

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We need to talk about 9/11

By Lionel Shriver

The occupants, now, do not know what the new rules are, but only that they, having been changed once, may continue to be changed at will, by those possessing or bidding for power. Now, rather than the joy of improvisation (of the communal comedy), the rule of silence, obedience and denunciation is in force.

This is the state of the sick, co-dependant family. Here it is not that some things may be false, but that all things must be false. For if the subordinate members do not know what is and what is not permitted, they must devote themselves, in preference to any productive activity, to protection from power.

Far worse than the frowns of the car which does not know The Designated Criminal we now have the false smiles and the sad head shakings of the sick family, which is to say, of the Left.

When we know that it’s our turn on the electoral ducking stool tomorrow, we, when in power, may moderate our behaviour. In a crumbling Democracy, the power-mad, like Dad taking the reins, have come to the Dictator’s realisation. That is, “Wait a second. All I have to do is rig it so I can hold my seat indefinitely”. This, of course, is the aperçu of most every politician from dogcatcher to President, down through time. (George III said of Washington that if he chose to relinquish the Presidency he would be the greatest man who ever lived.)

***

One cannot credit the Politicians of the Left with even the delusion that they are Doing Good. And, if they do, then what? They did not take an oath to do good, but to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution.

Must they come to bend and break the rules in favour of 1) their good ideas, 2) the necessity of staying in office, 3) theft? Of course. That’s why we have elections. To roll the dice. The co-dependant, terrified society comes to think that, having achieved the perfection of leadership, it’s a grand idea to call it quits, abolish the electoral college, mail ballots to everyone on earth, require no voter identification, import new voters, and so on.

Just as the inspired politicians see that perpetual hegemony might be had by mere suspension of their Oath; their dupes, the electorate, learn to suspend their reason, and substitute hatred of the indicted for their new-found fear of power — a fear so powerful it must be relegated to the unconscious.

Just like the children in the car.

When Dad trashes the rules he changes the whole point of the exercise. The building of family happiness and unity (which, we assume, was, after all, the whole purpose of the trip) becomes an indoctrination; and, the child sees, safety must now be his primary concern. He may keep silent, or join in the condemnation of Little Trevor, but should he object, “what about the Game?” he is, most certainly, now the new Criminal.

Our electorate is split into the affronted Right and the supine Left. Those who wish to preserve our Constitutional Republic, its rules, and the culture from which they spring, are indicted by those in momentary power (both political and asserted) ad-lib.

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Will magic defeat America's elites?

By John Michael Greer

There is no merit in supporting various contemporary blasphemies (“Birthing Parent”, and so on). Unless they are untrue. The merit comes from the affiant’s vocal sacrifice of his reason, and, so, of his self-respect, in support of The Cause.

This is the contemporary terror. Not that we’re faced with the enormities, the crimes, delusions, and lies of a Politician (when were we not?), but that we are now frightened of whomever was screaming last.

From “New Business Item 39” posted on the National Education Association’s website on July 5, 2021: “The N.E.A. will provide an already-created, in-depth study that criticises empire, white supremacy, anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeniety, racism, patriarchy, cisheteropatriarcy, capitalism, ableism, anthropocentrism, and other forms of oppression at the intersections of society.”

This is the country’s largest Teachers Union. What do these words mean? That the teachers will be put in charge of criticising. Whom? Whomever the N.E.A. designates.

And how might one, however convinced, ensure that he will not transgress the rules? There are no rules, for the categories are infinitely expansible. (Larry Elder, an African American running for Governor of California, and a lifelong champion of America and of his race, was called “the Black Face of White Supremacy,” L.A. Times, August 20, 2021.) And what in the world are “the intersections of society”?

In Woody Allen’s film Sleeper (1973) he is transported to the future. There he learns that the world he knew came to grief in 1989. He asks how and is told: “A man called Albert Shanker got his hands on a nuclear warhead.” Albert Shanker was the head of the United Foundation of Teachers, and then the American Federation of Teachers.

This may be the rock on which the Left comes to grief: the insistence on infecting one’s children with hatred. Young parents four generations away from The New Deal are insisting that they will not abandon their children to the blasphemies of the N.E.A. and its servitors, the Democratic Party. They are finding that there is a mechanism created to protect them from a despotic government, and that it is The Constitution and the organisations derived therefrom.

It is not incumbent on us Jews to prove we do not drink the blood of Christian Children, nor of white American citizens to apologise, nor of citizens to assert their loyalty to various confederations of thugs, and shriek heresies and treason or risk blacklisting as “of insufficient zeal”.

What does it mean to be “cancelled”?

It seems to mean that some group asserting power has mobilised its forces in social media and that their indictments have, in turn, been echoed and endorsed by multitudes. But we all know, or should know, that the controllers of the algorithms are constantly aware of and manipulate our prejudices through their presentation of that called information.

Fear of the heretic is spread through social media, but who knows, and how could one know, that the numbers and the tweets are real? One cannot. They are pixels on a screen which stampede the fearful into actual action against the indicted.

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How Satanism conquered America

By Mary Harrington

Would the controllers of the blogosphere stoop to such subterfuge as cooking the numbers? They limit access to their outlets ad lib, banning any person or idea they do not endorse. Why would they not also warp the number or content of the blogs to suit or, indeed, confect them? (I worked, for a year, as a Contributing Editor (utility man) at a very prominent national publication. One of my duties was Letters to the Editor. This involved not only answering but writing them. I assume the practice was universal and that it continues in the new media.)

I live in a liberal neighbourhood outside of Los Angeles. The residents here are miserable. Traditionally it was Not Done to acknowledge each other’s presence on the streets. A “good morning” uttered to a fellow dogwalker was considered as if one had exposed oneself. (This latter, in fact, now accepted as a permitted practice of the Homeless.)

Since Covid, the masked or the unmasked cross the street to avoid each other, glaring.  Signs on the homes proclaim that Love Is Love, but the residents hate and fear each other. Nancy Mitford wrote of the Liberals, “they are all so unhappy, and all of their plans fail so miserably.”

I was elected a non-person by the Left many years ago. It’s uncomfortable, and it’s costly and sad to see the happy fields in which I played all those decades — Broadway, book publishing, TV and film — fold up and Hail Caesar, but there it is.

The question for the young is: what kind of country do you want for your children? The question for the aged (myself) is: “what did you do in the War, Daddy?”

I’ve been involved for near 50 years in dealing with folks in the mass. It was not a social experiment for me, but a game: The Theatre. I learned very young that the correct study of the dramatist was neither his own feelings, nor those of the actors, but the attention of the audience. I understood that it was not my job to teach them anything, nor to induce a feeling in them, but to perform a sort of magic trick — to understand their behaviour in order to control their concentration. Why? In order to give them a treat. Just like a magician.

I sat with them night by night and year by year, and it was a joy to feel their conjoined attention, and to learn from it and its absence how to improve the play. As Billy Wilder said, “individually, they’re idiots, but together they’re a genius”.

The horror of the last year’s slide into despotism has showed me the reverse of the medal.

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Britain needs a cigarette

By David Hockney

Watching the good play, the audience suspends its reason in order to be entertained — at Hamlet, as much and identically with watching a woman be sawed in half. The audience enjoys the trick while knowing, and because they know she is not going to be harmed. Just as they know Hamlet’s Dad is not coming back from the dead.

But just as the techniques of stage magic are identical with those of the confidence game, the understanding of the dramatist — that the mass can be suggested, and, so controlled —is the same as that of the Dictator. Here fear replaces happy anticipation; and, as we see, outrage at the indicted masks an unavowable fear.

The children in the car must immediately come to support the new regime or risk abandonment. The protection it offers is illusory (as who knows who will be next), but the illusion, to them, is preferable to knowledge of their powerlessness.

In the mass the alternative to submission is blacklisting, poverty, censure, et cetera. Finally, this is the same alternative offered to the children. They may court protection from fear only by remaining submissive. Just like the Electorate.

© David Mamet 2021

After a bit of encouragement from my usual critics, the Council of Islamic Relations, followed by a petition from a motley array of faculty members, Brandeis rescinded their offer. Frederick Lawrence, who was then the university’s president, rang me just hours before the university issued a public statement.

At the time, I dismissed it as a one-off incident; an anomaly that could simply be brushed off. How wrong I was. That same year, a group of Muslim students tried to cancel my study group on the political theory of Islam at Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, part of the Kennedy School. First, they complained to the university’s administration. When that didn’t work, they sent a letter to the funders of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Middle East Initiative. Then they suggested that I should install an imam in my class to counter my arguments. Unlike at Brandeis, the university authorities didn’t capitulate.

In both incidents, the challenge to academic freedom and free speech was posed by Islamists. But that didn’t disturb me: as an apostate who has spent many years criticising them, and received death threats in return, I was used to their antipathy.

Fast forward to 2021, however, and it seems I was wrong to dismiss this censorious attitude as an Islamist impulse. Hardly a week goes by without reports of a professor being protested, disciplined, and sometimes fired for violating the new and stringent norms of academic discourse. We read of scholars such as Kathleen Stock being driven to resign from their positions after constant hounding and threats. We read of a lecturer being no-platformed for daring to suggest that evaluations should be based on academic merit. We read of a Native American student being forced to apologise by a Yale University diversity tsar for making a harmless joke in an email.

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Critical Race Theory's new disguise

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

And that’s just in the past month. We have reached a point where grace and forgiveness are near extinct on American campuses; where reputations built over decades can be destroyed in a week. Some people still describe the phenomenon as “political correctness”. But this is much more like a religious movement. It’s hardly surprising that the Islamists’ opportunity to piggyback on existing illiberal and intolerant forces is now even greater.

Social justice, critical race theory, diversity, equality and inclusion — such terms are difficult to object to when taken at face value. And as a consequence, they have grown and spread like weeds in almost every institution. By the time we recognised the deeply illiberal notions that lurked behind these bland phrases, it was too late; they had already taken over whole departments, embedding their extensive roots into the fabric of academic institutions.

I didn’t see this coming. Seven years ago, I considered those who sounded the alarm to be engaged in histrionics. But today it is impossible to deny that the alarmists were right.

After the Brandeis cancellation, I published my intended remarks, stating that “we need to make our universities temples not of dogmatic orthodoxy, but of truly critical thinking, where all ideas are welcome and where civil debate is encouraged”. At the time, I was hopeful. Yet every passing year, free discourse increasingly became the exception in academic settings.

And while countless academics have been crucified for daring to speak out, it is ultimately their students who have suffered most in this tragedy. Our education system is failing them: rather than being a place of learning, universities have transformed into a place of fear. They demand safe spaces and a life free from all forms of aggressions: micro and macro. They graduate ill-prepared for the future, no longer equipped with the critical skills needed to thrive in a society where safe spaces, trigger warnings and preferred pronouns are not the norm. Their lives as students have been stripped of opportunities to overcome challenges and adversity, to develop inner-strength and confidence.

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Did critical race theory lose Virginia?

By Joel Kotkin

Faced with such a toxic climate, riddled with the weeds of intolerance, one might think the solution is to simply give up. But to do so is not only cowardly; it ignores the fact that there is cause for optimism in the future. There are seedlings sprouting that point to renewal.

This is partly because America’s markets remain strong and reactive, bringing supply to wherever there is demand. The American market is hungry for a new approach to education. Demand is high for a university that delivers on academic freedom, merit-based recruitment of students, and is a safe space for people to learn and exchange ideas, not imagined injuries. And the supply is coming.

This week, I joined an intellectually diverse and curious group of professors and scholars in launching the University of Austin (UATX). It is an institution that stands, above all, for the pursuit of truth. It will offer a rigorous, liberal education from leading experts in their fields; a place that will teach students how to think, not what to think; a place where they will be intellectually challenged and, at times, made to feel uncomfortable.

Professors will be able to explore ideas and topics that are taboo elsewhere, without threats to their reputation, livelihoods or well-being. Unlike nearly a fifth of universities, we will not require statements of commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion. All we are looking for is a commitment to learning. And that doesn’t seem to be in short supply: within 12 hours of announcing the University of Austin, more than 900 academics submitted inquiries seeking a position.

Their students, once applications open, will be accepted on the basis of merit, based on an admissions exam. The university states: “UATX will not arbitrarily factor in race, gender, class or any other form of identity into its decisions. UATX stands firmly against that sort of discrimination in admissions.” Of course, none of this matters if spaces are only reserved for a wealthy elite. So we are working on a financial model that will help lower tuition costs and provide scholarships or bursaries, providing an equal opportunity for students, regardless of their financial background.

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Kathleen Stock: I won't be silenced

By Julie Bindel

Starting a new university will no doubt be challenging, but the truth is that this is only the beginning — the first of many new educational institutions. American parents all over the country are in revolt against the increasingly divisive educational opportunities available to their children (witness the results of the Virginian gubernatorial elections). In the coming decade, it is not inconceivable that the market will deliver new grade-school opportunities for students, as well as other new institutions of higher education.

There are those who fear that the political extremes of the Left and Right may one day destroy the republic. But the only way to destroy America is to destroy our market system. As long as individuals have choice and the market self-corrects, we will continue to thrive. Where there is demand — and the result in Virginia prove there is demand — the supply will follow.

This is what the University of Austin symbolises: a new choice for all those disillusioned with the established institutions. For too long we have looked on as universities have been disfigured, blissfully unaware that all we needed to do was create our own. Let’s hope this is the beginning of a new Renaissance.

Appealing to what James Carville, Bill Clinton’s campaign manager, has dubbed “faculty lounge politics” — with its emphasis on Critical Race Theory, racial quotas, transgenderism and defunding the police — has become an obvious flaw in their political strategy. These positions might prove popular in certain sections of the media, but not so much among the public.

The Virginia results made evident these failures, particularly on radical education and transgender policies. A state that was on the verge of becoming a deep blue bastion, largely based on the affluent Washington suburbs, moved to the Right in part due to resistance among parents to a new progressive education agenda that prioritised issues such as race, slavery and gender. State-wide polls taken just before the election showed Governor-elect Gregg Youngkin beat Democrat Terry McCauliffe by 15 points among parents.

Yet educational excess was not the only policy area that hurt the Democrats. Overall, the election was won in the Northern Virginia suburbs where the GOP reduced the large Trump deficit in half from 2020. Here, as across the state, the sagging economy and rampaging inflation will have dominated this election; exit polls show that taxes and economic worries were even larger factors than education, pushing voters towards Youngkin.

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How the Republicans can steal Virginia

By Oliver Wiseman

Not surprisingly the egomaniacal Trump and his minions will claim credit for the GOP gains — Republicans also won Virginia’s Lieutenant Governor race, the state Legislature and possibly the Attorney General — as their own. This is true in part, the Republican base in the state’s rural hinterlands overwhelmingly opted for Youngkin.

Some on the Right will no doubt view the elections an expression of “buyer remorse”, paving the way for a Trump restoration. Yet Trump, according to the national  polls, remains barely more popular than the hapless Joe Biden, and would still likely lose Virginia. He would probably lose many of the affluent suburbs and, unlike Terry McCauliffe, would stimulate progressive voters and minorities to the polls.

In some sense Youngkin may have found the secret sauce for post-Trump Republicans — genuflect to Dr Demento, but don’t have him over for dinner, or brunch, or even in your state. While the Democrats focused on Trump — Biden cited Trump’s name 24 times during a campaign appearance on McAuliffe’s behalf last week — Youngkin sensibly zeroed in on the issues that matter most to your regular suburban family: public safety, schools and taxes. He realised that even moderate, liberal parents do not want racialism brought back into the schools, even if it’s introduced not by neo-Confederates, but impassioned social justice warriors.

His message helped him raise GOP shares, particularly among younger and middle aged voters, where Trump had been trounced in 2020, by double digits. He made a less impressive showing with minorities, who account for roughly a third of the state’s population, although he did win 30% more African-American votes — a key constituency in the former Confederate capital of Richmond in particular — than Trump. The GOP also was wise to nominate a former Marine and Jamaican immigrant, Winsome Sears, for Lieutenant Governor, who may have out-performed Youngkin in the race. Nominating and even electing racial minorities may be dismissed as “tokenism” by many, but ignores the fact that many minorities, and particularly immigrants, are more culturally conservative than the average American.

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Jim Crow returns to California

By Joel Kotkin

Yet Youngkin’s challenges, and those of the national GOP, remain enormous, including a national media which will follow and magnify every Gubernatorial misstep. His path to success could easily be thrown off-course by the extreme agenda of the Right, which too often matches in many ways the authoritarianism of the progressive Left. Texas, where the Right seeks to undermine local powers and is focused on issues such as abortion, could be a negative model in more centrist places like Virginia, and other bellwether states.

But these challenges are chopped liver compared to what the Democrats now face. Clearly    the far-Left agenda is not popular even in safely blue areas. In a sharp reversal from early in the pandemic, the desire for more government has fallen to barely 40%, while support for the huge Green New Deal remains tepid at best. On Tuesday, Minneapolis overwhelmingly rejected a police defunding initiative and Eric Adams, a former cop and centrist-sounding Democrat, became Mayor, succeeding the unpopular Leftist Bill de Blasio while defeating his ideological heirs.

The problem the Democrats face is that the progressive agenda now increasingly dominates the party, with even the redoubtable Nancy Pelosi seeming to be led around by boisterously socialist members of the caucus. Along with their powerful allies in the public employee unions, they have tied Biden to a radical programme that would embrace CRT, undermine America’s still-large energy industry, support steps to densify the suburbs and turn against Israel. Suffice it to say that these are not winning positions in much of the country.

Increasingly, the progressives and Biden are increasingly desperate. They seem desperate to impose a radical agenda now, in part because they fear the country, which rejects many of their priorities, will destroy their tiny majority, itself a gift from Trump’s idiotic post-election behaviour, next year. Meanwhile, Biden’s assumed successor, Kamala Harris, has polled badly or worse than her boss.

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Critical Race Theory ignores anti-Semitism

By Joel Kotkin

Successful parties intuit when to shift Right or Left and focus on issues with wide appeal. But Biden seems intent on stumbling through his Presidency as he carries the agenda of those, like Senator Bernie Sanders, who opposed his nomination. McAuliffe may have run a bad campaign, but he also was a victim of the remarkable incompetence, and poor communications, coming from the White House.

If the Democrats are to succeed, what they need is an answer to GOP populism that does not focus on cultural issues. Rather than pin Donald Trump on his tail, they should have gone after Youngkin’s background as co-CEO of the ultra-connected private equity fund Carlyle group. Fundamentally, non-racial social democratic programs of expanding health care, an infrastructure programme focused on roads and bridges, a clear strategy to deal with China all could work to expand, not shrink, the party base.

But this is not the path they have chosen. They still hope that by reviving the Trumpian ghost, enough centrists will go their way. But this will never work: you can’t win the centre while clinging on to the least popular parts of the progressive agenda.

And yet somehow — despite all the vigils, all the pledges, all the policy announcements — Islamism remains as potent as ever.

It is two weeks to the day since Sir David Amess was stabbed to death — and already it seems like it’s old news, discarded from the national conversation. This is partly due to the reporting restrictions put in place after a suspect was charged; Ali Harbi Ali is not a murderer until proven as such.

But that should not prevent us from having a broader discussion, on a societal level, about the way we respond — or, more important, do not respond — to acts of terrorism. For it seems to me that there is an implicit message in our reluctance to dwell on Amess’s death: we are content to accept that, despite the horror that follows every attack, Islamist terrorism, if indeed that is what it is, is a fact of life.

We will grieve for individuals such as David Amess, and for other innocent victims whose names and faces we don’t know or remember. But terror is no longer seen as something that will go away; it is something we just need to get used to.

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The myth of lone-wolf terrorism

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Part of this defeatism has been dominant since I fled Somalia as a teenager. Islamism, in essence, is a political philosophy, one that is rooted in jihad but seeks to describe how society should be run. It is more than an irrational and violent ideology: it is an attack on liberalism itself.

But for the past three decades, the West’s response has been one of cowardice masked by arrogance. We needn’t fight back; it’s much better, we’re told, to stay quiet in the hope that, one day, those who hold competing ideologies will come through and see things from our side. Evidently, it is not working.

More concerning, though, is the rise of a new type of defeatism — this time disguised as a progressive form of self-flagellation. Imagine you are a young British Muslim. At school and university, you’re repeatedly warned about Britain’s colonial roots; that the country your parents fled to, in the hope of escaping persecution and anarchy, is the cause of it all. And then you’re told: don’t worry, it’s not your fault. You are merely a victim; evil white people are all to blame.

This dispiriting approach to education, which has taken hold on both sides of the Atlantic, is often justified using the rhetoric of “equality” and “diversity”. In practice, however, I suspect it is more helpful to view it in the context of something called “dawa”. In Arabic, the term simply denotes a centuries-old, non-violent call to Islam — though in practice, it has become a tool used by Islamists to encourage Muslims to embrace their extreme ideology and disavow the West. More often than not, this is achieved by branding Western society as ungodly and sinful, as something that needs to be either reformed or destroyed. In other words, you have two choices: either come and join us, or we’ll need to wage a holy war.

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The Left's shameful tribalism

By Paul Embery

Whether they realise it or not, progressives are saying something strikingly similar. In their eyes, too, the West is evil, home to foundational structures that serve only the white, heterosexual, male oppressor. So when the Islamists come along and say that Allah has given you a higher purpose, one that will culminate with ending the wickedness of the West, young British Muslims are already half-way there. Hatred for their country is all they know.

That’s how a 22-year-old man can be driven to carry out a suicide bomb attack at a concert largely attended by children. Or how two men in their twenties can become inspired to behead an off-duty British soldier in broad daylight. Or how three teenage girls from East London can be coaxed into joining Isis.

Of course, none of this to say that identity politics or other forms of progressivism are solely to blame for the rise of Islamism. The influence of dawa across Europe and America is deeply concerning. And, as I have written before for UnHerd, Muslim communities need to do more to stop their young from being drawn into extremism.

But the difference with our insistence on demonising the West is that it’s a problem of our own making — and it’s something that we can fix. The most obvious way to start would be by devising a curriculum that doesn’t seek to portray Britain and America as evil at every turn.

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The making of Essex Man

By Simon Heffer

More urgently, though, liberalism needs to shake off its defeatist malaise and learn to compete with those ideologies that would see it destroyed. To new immigrants, as well as to our own schoolchildren, we need to teach the incredible success story of our way of life. We need to remind our younger generations why it’s better to live in Britain than, say, Somalia. The answer isn’t mysterious. I certainly feel no shame in saying it: there, women are treated as second-class citizens, and barbarity seeps into every aspect of your life. There, you have no liberty or rule of law.

In the West, on the other hand, we have all this and more. Perhaps above all else, we have the opportunity to die peacefully in our bed, of old age, surrounded by our family. That isn’t something that should be taken for granted; I should know. And yet we seem to have forgotten this, distracted by waging a toxic forever war which prioritises division over community.

But this is not a fight we can afford to sit out. Until we decide that the West is worth defending, Islamism will not be defeated — and innocent people will continue to be killed.

These groups can’t influence policies at Amazon and the Pentagon, or other undemocratic bodies at America’s commanding heights. But locally they still have the power to refuse orders from the managerial janissaries who carry out the oligarchy’s bidding.

Pretensions of democracy aside, this is the real political landscape in the US, argued the American scholar of statecraft Angelo Codevilla. The oligarchy demands complete submission, the locals refuse, each party grants itself greater licence in what is permitted to defeat the other and the country spirals toward revolutionary violence. Codevilla, who last month died aged 78 near his vineyards in California, termed it a “cold civil war”.

For Codevilla, America’s founding tradition of republican self-government has been replaced by a ruling class of both Democrats and Republicans that is steeped in progressive ideology and hides its power in the operations of a vast administrative Leviathan. These views, as well as Codevilla’s affiliation with the Claremont Institute, considered the intellectual home of Trumpism, earned him a place in what one critic recently called “The Anti-American Right”.

According to America’s liberal intelligentsia, the open collaboration between corporations and state organs monopolised by the Democratic Party is unimportant compared to the fascist threat coming from “anti-American” conservatives. They believe that fear of demographic and cultural change has marginalised these anti-American jingoists, and led to their embrace of strongmen like Donald Trump who promise to restore their honour.

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By Jacob Siegel

But that critique, when applied to Codevilla, reduces an historical and structural analysis of power to mere reactionary resentment. It also misinterprets and seriously underplays the radicalism of his ideas. Far from being radicalised by the election of a black president in Barack Obama, or a white restorer in Trump, Codevilla was radicalised by seeing the inner workings of the US government in the 1970s.

It is Codevilla’s background as a classicist, not a culture warrior, that best explains his harsh criticisms of the “War on Terror” policies of a Republican president, George W. Bush. His counsel to Americans who fear the rise of an oligarchic ruling class was not to storm the Capitol or elect a Caesar, but to get out and start something new. He saw an answer to the revolutionary spiral not in violence but federalism achieved through exodus. “Were the deplorables to struggle for the partisan power to oppress the others, they would guarantee dysfunction at best, war at worst,” he wrote in March this year. “That is why it makes most sense for them to assert their own freedom.”

Codevilla was born in 1943 in Voghera, a Northern Italian town near Milan. His father died before his birth. In 1955, he moved to America with his mother, arriving in New Jersey. After a stint in the Foreign Service he made his formal introduction to the American power elite in 1977, when he joined the staff of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. In 1978, he helped draft the original foreign intelligence surveillance court law that, after 9/11, provided the pretence of legal authority — in the notorious FISA warrants — for carte blanche spying by the U.S. intelligence agencies. Finished with government work by the mid-1980s, he went on to take a number of university teaching positions and pursued a prolific writing career, over which he published 14 books and countless articles and essays, mostly for conservative publications.

When I had the chance to interview Codevilla in 2017, his generosity left an impression, as did his voice. For someone who came to America as an early adolescent, he had no discernible accent save a highly articulated diction and crisp, mid-Atlantic consonants. It was the voice of someone obviously learned, slightly mischievous, direct and lacking pretension.

It was the same voice in which he wrote, and reflected something of Codevilla’s character and unique background. He was a government insider who internalised the vision of America’s founders and an unsparing critic of the intelligence agencies who failed to make the country safer while hijacking its politics. You could disagree with his conclusions, as many did when he defended first the Tea Party and later the political movement around Donald Trump. But it was clear he was a man who lived partly outside his own time, translating Machiavelli into English and consulting Thucydides to diagnose the causes and effects of a growing administrative state.

Codevilla was best known for his writing on the American ruling class. Indeed, the idea that America is no longer ruled by a collection of individuals selected on their merits — and its popularity on the American Right — is largely Codevilla’s legacy. His 2010 essay on the subject for The American Spectator became a sensation after the conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh was moved to read aloud from it to his more than 15 million listeners. The essay became a book and elevated Codevilla’s reputation from respected authority on military and intelligence matters to a general Right-wing eminence of the American political scene.

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Codevilla interpreted what has often been described as “polarisation” as a conflict between two distinct classes, each with competing visions of America. There is a “court” or “ruling” class, made up of highly educated urbanites whose group identity was forged in the American Progressive movement founded over a century ago, and a “country class” of those excluded from the court, who preserve the older assumptions of America’s founders.

The US has always had an upper class. But for most of American history, it was regional and varied. Because these people came from different places with their own local customs and made money in different ways, they were “not predictably of one mind on any given matter”. The internal tensions and disputes that naturally arose among them served as a check on their consolidation of power.

But now those regional elites have been replaced by a monolith. “Today’s ruling class,” Codevilla wrote, “was formed by an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance, as well as tastes and habits”. From Washington to Silicon Valley, progressive elites share a “social canon of judgments about good and evil, complete with secular sacred history, sins (against minorities and the environment), and saints”. While the test for entry into this class is moral and aesthetic, it exercises power through offices of the administrative state, whose authority rests on secrecy.

Codevilla’s most original and striking contribution was to argue that secrecy, rather than expertise, is the foundation of ruling class power. As a strategy of rule, it provides the connective tissue between the ruling class’s domestic social engineering projects and the foreign wars it fights without clear goals or prospect of victory. As Codevilla wrote in his 2014 book, To Make and Keep Peace Among Ourselves and with All Nations:

“The bipartisan ruling class that grew in the Cold War, who imagined themselves and who managed to be regarded as entitled by expertise to conduct America’s business of war and peace, protected its status against a public from which it continued to diverge by translating the commonsense business of war and peace into a private, pseudo-technical language impenetrable to the uninitiated.”

As used by American spy agencies, “secrecy” can mean hiding information or obtaining it surreptitiously. But it might equally refer to the deployment of academic and scientific obscurantism to justify unpopular policies such as the forced masking of school children or the imposition of racial mysticism in school curricula and corporate boardrooms. The logic of such policies is never straightforwardly presented to the public, where it can be refuted on its own terms, because the logic of this or that policy is beside the point. In the end, the secular utopianism of early twentieth century progressive ideology combined with a secrecy-powered security state built to win the cold war and produced a strange offspring: our new America.

Socialised into the belief that they alone have the skill and moral sensitivity required to govern, America’s elites regard their countrymen not as fellow citizens to be reasoned with but as subjects to be ruled, no different in principle from the Afghans and Iraqis designated for liberation.

For Codevilla, such an outcome was always implicit in the premises of the War on Terror. Shortly after the attacks on September 11, at a time when many of his fellow conservatives regarded deference to the national security state as synonymous with patriotism, he offered this counsel in an essay for the Claremont Review of Books:

“Common sense says that victory means living without worry that some foreigners might kill us on behalf of their causes, but also without having to bow to domestic bureaucrats and cops, especially useless ones. It means not changing the tradition by which the government of the United States treats citizens as its masters rather than as potential enemies.”

No one in power took his advice, of course. Arguing that “some foreigners” might want to kill us, and that victory meant stopping this from happening rather than converting them to our way of life, could be easily written off as xenophobic and antiquated. For the next 15 years, the Bush and Obama administrations appealed to the nobility of Islam and dignity of Muslims as US wars killed hundreds of thousands of actual Muslims while achieving no lasting peace for Americans.

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Codevilla was not always right in his five decades of writing about America’s wars and political struggles at home, but he was often uncommonly wise and never lacking in common sense. He understood that while some people live above their means, the members of the American ruling class live above their mistakes.

No senior US military official faced any serious consequences over the war in Vietnam. Five decades later, the same is true of Afghanistan. The generals who oversaw the US defeat and lied to the public about the progress of the war have moved on to jobs in the White House and defence industry. President Biden, to his credit, manoeuvred around the machinations of the security establishment to finally end the war. But he did so in a shambolic way that was careless with allies and pushed America’s strategic adversaries into closer cooperation.

What’s more, Biden shows no interest at all in dismantling the massive and immensely powerful war on terror security apparatus that, left intact, will always find new enemies to justify its existence. In fact, part of Biden’s motivation to get out of Afghanistan was to rely more on “over-the-horizon” capabilities — meaning jets, missiles and drone attacks — to fight our enemies abroad so that he could refocus the surveillance and policing power of the national security state on political enemies at home.

The plan, outlined in June, deems white supremacist and anti-government militia groups the “most persistent and lethal threat” to the US out of all “domestic terrorist” ideologies. To combat this, the National Security Council strategy calls for increased government spying powers combined with efforts at reeducation. It is “the first document,” writes the Center for Strategic and International Studies, “to directly tie US counterterrorism efforts to broader social issues such as systemic racism, police reform and gun control”.

All of this is as Codevilla predicted. Many have criticised US military policy in Afghanistan and the opaque and divisive racial theories being imposed in American schools. Codevilla recognised that they are structurally indivisible, two sides of an American ruling-class ideology that defines itself in opposition to the values and preferences of most American citizens.

This ideology generates endless cycles of failure because it reflects not particular policies but the gross inadequacies of those who have a monopoly on institutional power. It “guarantees,” as Codevilla wrote in 2014, “unending conflict with all nations and strife among ourselves”.

But rather than convince anyone about the non-existence of CRT, his comments merely confirmed something else: namely, CRT’s remarkable ability to shape-shift into whatever form its advocates choose. For Northam, CRT might not exist — but that’s only because it has undergone a rebranding.

Indeed, while many on the Right have obsessed over the rise of CRT in the past year, a different abbreviation has quickly become entrenched in America’s schools and colleges: “diversity, equity and inclusion” (DEI).

Part of its purpose appears to be to sow confusion among opponents of CRT. It has certainly riled the conservative Heritage Foundation. In its recent guide on “How to identify Critical Race Theory”, it warns of a “new tactic” deployed by the movement’s defenders: they “now deny that the curricula and training programs in question form part of CRT, insisting that the ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI)’ programs of trainers such as Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo are distinct from the academic work of professors such as Derrick Bell, Kimberle Crenshaw, and other CRT architects”.

Certainly, regardless of which trendy three-letter term you prefer to describe the latest iteration of America’s obsession with race, the goal in each case is the same: to shift away from meritocracy in favour of an equality of outcome system.

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But implementing a grievance model into our youth education curriculum will not fix the problems it purports to solve. There is, after all, a dearth of evidence suggesting that DEI programmes advance diversity, equity or inclusion. In fact, if DEI programmes in schools have similar results as DEI corporate training, they might be not only ineffective, but potentially harmful.

This shift is due to the clear failure of affirmative action policies. First introduced more than 50 years ago, they were intended to create equal opportunities for a black community said to be held back by the legacies of slavery and Jim Crow laws. Suffice it to say that they failed. Today, only 26% of black American’s have a Bachelor’s degree, 10% lower than the national average. More than half of black households earn less than $50,000 annually, and the labour force participation rate for black men is 3.3% lower than for white men; it has actually shrunk by 11.6% since the early 1970’s. Only four CEOs from Fortune 500 companies are black.

Instead of providing opportunities for black students, affirmative action threw many students into the deep-end of schools where they lacked the educational foundation to succeed. Frequently, as Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor Jr have observed, they were mismatched: “Large racial preferences backfire[d] against many, and perhaps, most recipients, to the point that they learn less… usually get much lower grades, rank toward the bottom of the class, and far more often drop out.”

But rather than recognise the failure of this approach, its proponents have chosen to double down. Without analysing why affirmative action failed to produce equal opportunity for black students, and without trying to identify solutions that would be more impactful, those interested in CRT and DEI only wish to manipulate the system further.

Instead of focusing on ways to lift black students up as individuals with agency, ability and choice, they believe the system must reorient itself to produce the desired outcome, starting with kindergarten. It is dependent on the magnification of barriers and tension between racial groups — something which I suspect is psychologically damaging to both white and black students.

For white students, the blame of slavery and Jim Crow laws are laid at their feet. Bari Weiss recently revealed a number of shocking cases of how this manifests itself in schools, but one in particular caught my eye: “A Fieldston student says that students are often told ‘if you are white and male, you are second in line to speak.’ This is considered a normal and necessary redistribution of power.” But it is far from “normal” or “necessary”. Putting the atrocious sins of America’s past on the shoulders of children and teenagers is a form of child abuse.

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For black children, the situation is no better. Students are being taught that it is the system, not their own effort and abilities, that will determine their future in life. This discourages hard work, motivation, ambition and aspiration. It also breeds distrust and hostility towards white teachers, further truncating their abilities to learn and progress in school. As Ian Rowe points out, “the narrative that white people ‘hold the power’ conveys a wrongheaded notion of white superiority and creates an illusion of black dependency on white largesse”.

And in the schools themselves, this often leads to physical segregation. Paul Rossi, a former teacher at Grace Church High School in New York, recently described how “racially segregated sessions” were “commonplace” at his school. Down in Atlanta, meanwhile, last month a concerned mother filed a lawsuit alleging that black students at Mary Lin Elementary School were being assigned to only two of the six second-grade classes.

But “you can’t treat one group of students based on race differently than other groups”, as her attorney eloquently put it. After all, any ideology that separates people due to their immutable characteristics will not lift up minority students, but drag society down into neo-segregation. Indeed, it’s hardly surprising that students today seem more anxious, scared and lacking in confidence than any previous generation for which we have data.

Nevertheless, the grievance model methods are spreading through American schools like wildfire. Take Ralph Northam’s state of Virginia, which is implementing the “Road Map to Equity”, which suggests that making equity is more important to education than academics. Perhaps that’s why Virginia legislators passed a bill this year that requires all educators to “complete instruction or training in cultural competency and with an endorsement in history and social sciences to complete instruction in African American history”.

Rather than push race to the foreground of education, anti-racists would do better to cultivate a learning environment for students where the focus is on being kind and respectful. Real diversity and inclusion are more likely to flourish when students are taught to help their fellow classmates — rather than view them through a crudely racialised prism.

Last week, I spoke to Katharine Birbalsingh, the Headmistress of the remarkable Michaela Community School, which serves families from disadvantaged backgrounds and achieves incredible results. When I asked Katharine what their secret was, she told me: “We’re very traditional. We believe in things like belonging. We believe in personal responsibility in a sense of duty to your family, to your community.”

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And that is what it comes down to. All children and students want to belong. But demonising white students and re-segregating black students does the very opposite: it divides far more than it unites.

A focus on personal responsibility also goes a long way, both for students and for those looking to help. When watching some of the Virginia Department of Education webinars on equity earlier this week, I heard no mention of empowering or helping individual black children. The conversations revolved around “personal reflection” and “doing the work”, with little explanation of what this means in real life. There was no mention of tutoring, mentoring or guiding struggling students.

If we are going to have an honest conversation about elevating black students, we must throw out buzzwords such as “equity” and start talking about practical solutions. There is, after all, a genuine appetite for this: a recent Pew report found that 76% of Americans said that “racial and ethnic diversity is good for the country”.

And that will only be achieved by encouraging community service and involvement, and requiring teachers to focus on respect and academic rigour within their classrooms. What we must not do, however, is outsource education to a three-letter abbreviation, be it CRT or DEI. They are shallow, short-sighted and performative — and, most importantly, will do nothing to improve the futures of our children

They’s most renowned sentence, which won the 1998 Bad Writing competition in the journal Philosophy & Literature, runs as follows:

“The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.”

It is a glorious racket, and you can’t help admiring it. I like to picture Judith as a snake-oil purveyor on a travelling show in the days of the pioneering Wild West, sat in the wagon after the sell, in a box-coat and a tall hat, lighting a cigar with a ten-dollar bill and having a good chuckle with the missus at the dumb rubes in the crowd. “Honey pie, those bozos sucked it up!” There’s something very funny about seeing bourgeois idiots being taken for schmucks and grandly fleeced. “Good for you gal!” you want to shout. 

If this were only a few bottles of liniment sold to a few stooges it would have a roguish charm. But with the explosion of higher education and of social media, these laughable ideas are increasingly seeping out into wider society. 

Judith is the undisputed master of the form, but such specious claptrap is a game anyone can play. 

Let’s have a go. You take a social phenomenon or a piece of art (high or low, that doesn’t matter) and subject it to theory. To pluck a random, recent example let’s take current hit BBC drama Vigil. We might say that in its depiction of a female detective investigating a murder mystery on a submarine that it posits interiority citationally as a partial détournement of the ideological power structures of the late-capitalist ideations of guilt and innocence. 

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Thanks to my university days — thirty long years ago now, but already riddled with this stuff, which goes back a lot longer than people think — I can spew this out. Once you’ve grasped the basics, it’s easy. 

The difference is that back in 1992, when I’d completed my dissertation on gender norms in Carry On Loving (1970) and got my 2:1, I emerged into the real world with real people in it, and didn’t have to think about this trash again apart from as an amusing memory shared with fellow sufferers. 

No such luck for the graduate of 2021, who will find the mainstream media and the arts awash with theory jargon such as “lived experience”, “intersectionality” and “equity”. 

Theory stems from the deconstruction popularised, if that’s the word, in European academia in the middle of the last century — taking social conventions and art to bits to see how they work (which is something Aristotle was doing two thousand years ago, to be fair). It can be very interesting to see how ideas operate, particularly in the then under-examined and comparatively new mass popular culture. The differences in taboos and hierarchies across cultures are fascinating. And abstract, unfamiliar concepts can obviously be hard to convey and to understand. 

But critical theory tips buckets of nonsense over these reasonable, even banal foundations. It has no truck with the obvious reality of humans as evolved animals like any other. All of its observations stem from the false premise of the human being as a wholly nurtured blank slate, so everything that follows on is just plain wrong. It is like a series of whodunnits where the murderer is “the capitalist hegemony” every time. It gulps down for its inspiration art, beauty and humanity — and vomits them back up as pabulum. 

The observations of early pioneers in linguistics — Ferdinand de Saussure in particular, with his painstaking deliberations over the meanings of words across human languages and the way humans frame the world through language — became the baloney of saying that words actually physically change reality, so all you have to do is change words to change reality. Judith’s new Guardian interview is a shining example. Hocus pocus, alakazam — woman as a category is redefined to include blokes. The cabinet is thrown open, and the lady has disappeared. 

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So now we have queer theory, gender theory, critical race theory, out in the open. And this stuff is dangerous when it metastasises. 

Because it’s not merely an irritant. It weakens and debilitates us. It amplifies neurosis and further damages already damaged people — the shouty unicorn-avatar children of Twitter have been driven out of their tiny minds by it, to their and our detriment. It has had a terrible, deadening effect on the arts, reducing a lot of drama to nothing much more than grievance and resentment.

The irony of this situation is that loopy ideas so obviously contrary to sanity and reality as Open Borders, Defund The Police or every human interaction being racist could only have sprouted from the soil of liberal, western capitalist consumer societies. Theory is the most western belief system imaginable. Picture an intellectual movement posturing against the central tenets of Chinese or Saudi Arabian society, embedded at the heart of the academic establishment in those countries, being funded by their peoples, disinterested governments nodding it through. You can’t, because its exponents would be lucky to last the week. 

Deconstruction never deconstructs itself. If it ever looked in the mirror, it would see that it is old establishment down to its toenails, a ruling class ‘progressive’ pose that belongs more to the eleventh century than the twenty-first (it’s surely no accident that the younger royalty is keen.) It’s as much a product of capitalism, and about as left-wing, as a packet of salt and vinegar crisps. It is — oh, irony of ironies! — all about strengthening existing class structures and power relations, its arcane lexicon an etiquette system. Objecting to it, or breaking a taboo by saying for example that one tries not to see race, or that there are two immutable sexes, marks a person as low-status. It is a mechanism for preserving inequalities, keeping people in their place and making racial strife worse to enhance position and keep the cash rolling in. 

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Its opponents, on both the Left and Right, are far too squeamish. Detractors suggest that these bad ideas can be argued against and rejected — the excellent Cynical Theories by the estimable Helen Pluckrose et al makes this case immaculately. But you cannot argue with these fallacies and their perpetrators, as they grant no space to their opponents, who are by their definition oppressors, i.e. heretics. Theory cannot brook enlightened debate, because it is pre-enlightenment, a feudal power grab.

The only way to deal with it is to defund the academic institutions and courses that expound it. It must go. 

Or perhaps, as Judith might say, this whole article has been an attempt to reify hegemonic power structures, resisting praxis by codifying reified systems of meaning as normative. Who can possibly tell?

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.

The contrast is even sharper if you consider the “equity” that various social justice movements seek to achieve, in which every sub-segment of society — at least those we fixate on — must be proportionally represented at every echelon of society. Or really, only in the elite reaches of the social firmament; nobody bothers with the racial diversity of lumberjacks, fruit workers or commercial fishermen. 

Nowhere is the paradox between Darwinian competition for success and the progressive pursuit for equality more apparent than in Silicon Valley. Titans like Facebook or Apple — where, until recently, I worked — relentlessly race to recruit the best talent and put them through an absolute wringer of an interview process designed to filter for The Perfect Software Engineer or The Perfect Product Manager. I’ve been through it myself many times — sometimes successfully, often not. The hiring rates, a handful among hundreds of candidates reviewed, resemble the acceptance rates at the universities that typically grace the CVs in question.

Once our lucky candidate is given the job, the measurement doesn’t stop. Every tech company has an involved performance review process, aligned with whatever management gospel they believe. Employees, having spent long hours both working in Zoom meetings and bonding in “offsites” — imagine a school trip combined with group therapy — are then asked to submit “360-degree feedback”. Similar to East Germans writing Stasi reports on their neighbours, employees rank all their colleagues according to whatever rubric is deemed most important.

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The calculus is even harsher among Silicon Valley’s high-growth startups. Here, returns on techno-capital can be stratospheric, way beyond even other capitalism-soaked boom times of the past. A single well-timed investment can make good on a venture capitalist’s entire fund, and a few choice years at the right company can set up an engineer for life.

But herein lies the problem: if venture-capital-fuelled technology is one of the most brutal, though effective, amplifiers of human talent, then the outcomes will be spectacularly unequal. Which is why the diversity agenda — the thought that all groups must enjoy equal representation everywhere we choose to measure — reaches such a crusading fervour inside the tech industry. The economic peaks and valleys that must be pummelled smooth are Grand Canyon-esque in their proportions. But in the current American zeitgeist, that enormous discrepancy in outcome is instantly projected along a single obsessive dimension: race and ethnicity.

The diversity reports from large public tech companies — they’re all required to publish them nowadays — reflect this one-dimensional focus. Consider a table from Google’s 2021 US diversity report below. Asians constitute over 40% of all of Google; that’s a seven-times overrepresentation versus their population percentage. Whites form barely 50% of Google, which is less than their percentage of the population as a whole.

More amusing in Google’s report is the crude racial categorisation which perfectly captures the progressive agenda’s simplistic approach to “diversity”. Here you can toggle the region to any part of the globe, and all of humanity in its spectacular diversity reduces to essentially the same five buckets: Asian+, Black+, Latinx+, White+ and Native American+. In true American style, it takes all the world’s real-life cultural diversity, puts it through the meat grinder of American racial politics and pops out five flavours.

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A closer look at the “diversity data” reveals just how unhelpful this approach is; Silicon Valley is one of the most open and diverse industries in the United States.

According to data from the American Community Survey, something like 39% of software engineers in 2015 were foreign-born, many times higher than the baseline 17% of foreign-born in the US workforce. More anecdotally, in my thirteen or so years working in numerous companies, I was routinely the only American-born citizen and the only native English speaker. (Put to one side the irony that as Mr. García-Martínez, I’m actually an utterly basic Cuban-American exile type from Miami.)

The same people who highlight the supposedly glaring deficiencies in Silicon Valley “diversity” are often the first to point out how roughly half of Silicon Valley “unicorn” companies are founded by immigrants, or how two-fifths of the FAANG quintumvirate are led by immigrants. Such figures are counterintuitively cited as proof that increasing diversity is good and we should have more of it. But is Silicon Valley a den of white privilege, or is it an avenue of enormous success for non-American, foreign-born minorities? It can’t be both.

Indeed, today “white” doesn’t really refer to a skin tone: it’s the set of people not offered any sanctioned sympathy in the otherwise ruthless battle for talent and resources. Arguably, “white” has always been something more metaphysical than biological: the Italians, Irish, and Jews and various flavours of non-WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants) were not “white” in decades past, and only slowly acceded to “Whiteness” as social mobility climbed and prejudice receded. In a sense, how quickly a group “gets to white” is a measure of their success in the ever-churning American assimilation machine. What will “white” mean in twenty years’ time?

As with many other social trends, I suspect the answer will come from Silicon Valley. When discussing tech’s “dismal” diversity record, Asians are simply dropped from the picture. This is a form of functional “whitewashing” that will likely expand to include other successful minorities. Yet outside of this absurdly reductionist Diversity Inc. worldview, Silicon Valley continues to be just a roaring machine for recognising and rewarding — to often ludicrous extremes — any talent it can find by whatever means.

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Want to make American companies still more diverse than they already are? Forget “equity” targets and institute a points-based immigration system like Canada and New Zealand have, which streamlines global STEM graduates working at US companies. Let’s give the much-coveted US “green card” to every engineering graduate of an American research university, so that they don’t have negotiate bureaucratic black holes to stay in the country.

Those bosses desperate for corporate photos with lots of non-WASP faces in them — beaming, hoodie-clad, from inside the shiny gleaming interiors of Silicon Valley’s plush corporate campuses — could only be supportive of the idea. Let’s have accented English be (even more) the norm inside the country’s most successful companies. We might just be surprised at the result.

In some respects, as an approach to understanding history, CRT has a certain credibility. Ibram X. Kendi’s retelling of American history in Stamped from the Beginning is lucid, well-crafted and internally consistent in its description of racism as both a motivating force and by-product of the American tale. He uses it to rationalise and support his claim that African Americans have failed to attain the fruits of American life in the same way as whites — higher education, corporate leadership, home ownership and intergenerational wealth — but suggests this is due almost entirely to racist policies embedded in American institutions and law.

It certainly does not serve any country’s history to ignore such things; they are fundamental strands of the national tapestry. But CRT and its adherents present an all too one-sided view. Its founding father, legal scholar Derrick Bell, even claimed African Americans had not made progress since Abolition, obliterating the enormous contributions — in politics, arts, culture and elsewhere — made by African Americans in the face of widespread discrimination.

CRT takes an opposite approach to many black leaders — Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. DuBois — who sought not to lower standards, but to raise them. Indeed, Black Americans made significant progress in terms of incomes and skills in the 1940s to the 1960s, before many of the most heinous forms of racism were abolished. Relying on whites to achieve an anti-racist enlightenment has never been a good strategy, in any era.

But rather than draw inspiration from this, today’s racial activists decry the habits often associated with success as reflections of “whiteness”. Some even denounce habits such as punctuality, rationality and hard work as reflective of “racism” and “white privilege”. Mathematics and science have also been dismissed for being reflective of “racism” and “white privilege”. Yet as African American economist Glenn Loury has observed, CRT wipes out agency by downgrading “western” concepts and “impedes the acquisition of traits that are valued in the marketplace and are essential for human development.”

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CRT also gives short shrift to many other histories. Most working-class Americans, particularly outside the American South, had little contact with black workers. Their struggles were not against African Americans but against the white factory owners who controlled capital. Working-class Americans or Brits of the last century do not fit easily into the role of oppressors, nor have they enjoyed the economic benefits CRT imputes to them by dint of racial privilege.

Also cast into what Trotsky famously called “the dustbin of history” are the family stories of most Americans, Canadians and Australians — most of whom came to supply cheap labour. Engels writes about the Irish being “demoralised by dirt and poverty”, living in the worst slums of Victorian England.[1. Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England, translated by W.O. Henderson and W.H. Chaloner, (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press,1958), p.34] Whether in the United States or in Britain, Irish migrants were oppressed by their fellow whites. Although many Left-wing historians now downplay this repression, it was only in the middle of 20^th Century that being Irish Catholic disappeared as a disqualification for the highest office, through the election of John F. Kennedy.

Other newcomers, such as Italians, also faced discrimination and prejudice. But few faced more strenuous opposition than Asian immigrants, who were banned from immigrating or even owning land. During World War II, the US Government actually shipped Japanese Americans off to concentration camps, albeit not for extermination but to address the racist paranoia of their mostly white neighbours — a crime not perpetrated against white German Americans.

Today, Asian-Americans and groups like Hindus in the UK generally outperform whites in school and incomes — despite a history of discrimination against them, even after leaving harsher discrimination in East Africa. Instead of embracing this history, many advocates of CRT see this success as an affront. Although clearly “people of colour,” Asians have transcended “whiteness” by dint of hard work and educational achievement.

As a result, at Harvard, the birthplace of CRT, Asians now face official discrimination, much as Jews did in the last century. In the same vein, when violence is inflicted on Asians, advocates of CRT even suggest that it is somehow the product of white nationalism. Meanwhile, some racial theorists, like Robin DiAngelo, accuse Asians of being “white adjacent”, non-whites who succeed to copping Anglo attitudes.

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But perhaps no group has been more forgotten in the broad assault on “whiteness” than the Jews. CRT, notes David Suissa, publisher of the Los Angeles Jewish Journal, forces people of whatever background to allow themselves to be defined by their peculiar “systemic ethos”. This means that Jews are whites like any other, despite millennia of persecution in virtually every country where they have settled. Their right to a separate identity is denied; their unique history, obliterated.

However successful they may be today, it took centuries — including a 365-year exile — for Jews to become full citizens of the British Empire. In America, where their rights were guaranteed by the Constitution, they still struggled against fierce WASP opposition, seeking to block their ascent into the highest echelons of business, professions, media, culture and politics. Given their history, Jews often identified with black communities, and the oppressed in general, and were particularly early and disproportionate backers of African American equality.

It is strange, then, that while CRT advocates seek to obliterate three thousand years of unique history, much of the Jewish Establishment — including the Anti-Defamation League — has been slow to distance themselves from Black Lives Matter, even after riots led to desecrations of synagogues. They even embraced BLM allies like Al Sharpton, a Brooklyn preacher with a history of leading anti-Jewish protests.

In modern America, Jewish leaders would rather adopt the politically acceptable focus on white nationalists as their biggest threat. But that doesn’t change the fact that despite several bloody incidents perpetrated by individual white nationalists, a significant proportion of recent attacks on Jews came from African Americans, criminals, the mentally ill or by Palestinian activists. Neo-Nazis are not thick on the ground in Brooklyn or the Fairfax district of Los Angeles where recent acts of violence have occurred.

Meanwhile, CRT, as Rabbi Meir Y. Soloveichik has noted, represents an increasingly secular America: “a strange form of moral Puritanism without faith, and therefore without forgiveness.” Its functionaries on campuses and in the street often embrace their dogma like the sometimes hysterical Chinese Red Guards, who demonised their own country’s rich history to create a totally new one. Mao would certainly have understood such things as dismantling “the systems of hegemonic power” and introducing compulsory “anti-racism training” throughout education, business, and government.

The authoritarian nature of the movement is not hard to spot. Ibram X. Kendi has called for an Orwellian federal Department of Anti-racism with extra-constitutional power to abolish any law deemed insufficiently “anti-racist”, He identifies racism and capitalism as “conjoined twins”: both will have to collapse before racism can be eradicated. Of course, this is hard to reconcile with the lack of racial harmony in China and other socialist countries, much less the vast fortunes Kendi and BLM receive from the oligarchy.

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The good news is that CRT’s racialist agenda may not become a permanent fixture. The vast majority of Americans — including millennials and minorities — do not, for example, favour defunding the police. Most American voters — by wide margins — reject the notion of teaching Critical Race Theory in schools, even though the effort is adopted by the billionaire class as well as corporate HR departments, most Democratic politicians, the White House and the powerful teachers’ unions.

Equally promising is the growing alarm among liberals —including TV host Bill Maher and journalist Andrew Sullivan — whose devotion to the ideal of colour-blindness is dismissed by CRT adherents as a “fantasy”. Similarly, former Clinton advisor Bill Galston has pointed out that CRT is a “doctrine” that rejects the Enlightenment, “tacitly requires deconstructing the American order and rebuilding it on an entirely different foundation”. In other words, it is not a project likely to be enacted democratically.

Perhaps nothing more reflects the “on-the-street” reality, as opposed to Twitter, than the growing tendency towards intermarriage and interracial dating — not only in the US, but in Canada, Australia and the UK. Inter-racial dating in America is up 40% since 2003, according to the Census, while interracial marriage has soared from 3% in 1967 to roughly one in six now.

There is, of course, more work to be done. African-American incomes — as well as those of Pakistanis and West Indians in the UK — have not kept pace. And there are still racial imbalances in imprisonment, confrontations with law enforcement and worse health effects, particularly during the pandemic.

But whatever is needed to help African Americans will only gain political support if it focuses on alleviating the economic and health challenges of all races. The key to addressing our racial divides, notes Richard Parsons, former President of Citigroup, lies not with pushing racial distinctions but promoting economic growth and opportunity. There will never be “unity”, he suggests, until people “feel it in their pockets”. The goal should be to do whatever it takes to address poverty and distress, whether in the south Chicago ghetto, Appalachia or the British Midlands.

Whether they realise it or not, CRT and its backers appear to be undermining this goal. In the last decade, the percentage of Americans who consider relations between black and white communities as “poor” has almost doubled, to near 60%. Certainly, policies of “reverse discrimination” seem likely to stir resentment. People don’t like to be forced to beg forgiveness and make recompense for the sins of their fathers, especially when they have no reason to believe their fathers , most of whom immigrated well after the Civil War, have done nothing wrong. Indeed, it’s hardly surprising that the anti-Zionist and anti-Jewish far-Right — including the neo-Nazi National Socialist Club, Proud Boys and Aryan Nations Arizona — has targeted anti-CRT protests as a way build support.

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Despite the persistence of these racists, there’s still a reason that non-whites continue to move to Britain and its colonial offspring. After all, these places offer important legal protections not common in the developing world. China’s autocratic Xi Jinping may offer “the Chinese dream”, but the number of immigrants from China living in the United States more than doubled between 2000 and 2018, reaching nearly 2.5 million, with many others heading to Canada and Australia. There is little such movement to China — where the foreign population is barely one in a thousand —or most other Asian countries.[2. Carlos Echeverria-Estrada and Jeanne Batalova, “Chinese Immigrants in the United States,” Migration Policy Institute, January 15, 2020]

In the end, our shared historical legacy — so different than China — represents the essential basis upon which we can expand and improve our multi-national societies. It does little good to demolish the historical bonds we, as citizens, feel, even as we recognise that our greatest heroes — whether its America’s Founding Fathers, Lincoln, Churchill, Roosevelt or Martin Luther King — were in some ways flawed.

The solution to the racial crisis in the West requires not separating people by race but by finding common grounds upon which to create a successful, diverse and coherent society. Without “awareness” of our history, its differing tangents and permutations, we, as classicist Michael Grant once noted, will be “blindfolded in our efforts to grapple with our future”. Communities that don’t fit a certain label — whether they are Jewish or Asian — will continue to find their histories obscured. And more important, we will steal from ourselves and our children the common sense of past needed to forge more perfect unions.

Last month, the company proudly announced that its Nixon had been nominated for a South Bank Sky Arts Award. Yet less than 48 hours later, the company withdrew from the nomination and issued a grovelling apology for causing “offence”. It begged for “space” to learn from its errors.

What had changed between 2020 and 2021? The meltdown among global elites over systemic racism after the death of George Floyd in May 2020. In this fevered, racialised atmosphere, the hapless Scottish Opera committed an offence that heretofore no one had known existed.

The company’s transgression lay in casting white singers in the roles of Communist Party Chairman Mao Zedong and Chinese Premier Chou En-lai, consistent with over three decades of performance practice. The fact that a black baritone sang the role of President Nixon, a first for Nixon in China, earned the Scottish Opera no protection from accusations of racism.

“Yellowface in opera has to stop,” commented British baritone, Julian Chou-Lambert. “It’s like blackface, but applied to East and South-East Asian characters. It’s offensive and dehumanising for ESEA people. Opera folks, please learn about this and do better.” A Scottish MP from the Labour Party, Sarah Owen, lamented the paucity of Asians in the production and the “exaggerated winged eye make-up”. She wondered ominously if Nixon in China had received taxpayer funding.

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The company tried to defend itself by explaining that its production “intended to portray the character of Chairman Mao as old and in ill-health and in no way were we trying to change his ethnicity”. Not good enough. “There is clear photographic evidence,” an obscure advocacy group called BEATS (British East & Southeast Asians in Theatre and on Screen) shot back, “that the practice of yellowface was employed on dancers in the production.”

Apart from BEATS, Chou-Lambert, and MP Sarah Owen, there was no groundswell of outrage against the Scottish Opera and its arts nomination. Nevertheless, the company caved immediately to its detractors. It issued a statement of classic neo-Stalinist self-abnegation: “We are deeply sorry for the offence caused by the casting of our 2020 production of John Adam’s Nixon in China. We are also sorry for any misrepresentation caused by the stage make-up.” Though the company practices diversity in casting, “we accept there is a lot more work still to be done. . . . Once again, our heartfelt apologies to everyone, most especially our ESEA communities.”

If the Scottish Opera owes these “communities” an apology for “yellowface” and “whitewashing” (defined by BEATS as using non-Asian singers for Chinese roles), so do the creators of Nixon in China and nearly every director that has mounted the opera since its 1987 premiere in Houston.

It would be hard to come up with a more progressive team of collaborators than Nixon in China’s composer (Adams), inaugural director (Peter Sellars), librettist (Alice Goodman), and original choreographer (Mark Morris). Peter Sellars reigned for years as the enfant terrible of opera, updating operas to modern times and Left-wing politics, sometimes imaginatively, more often anachronistically. When Sellars ceased being an enfant, he continued being merely terrible. He opines regularly on social justice from the lectern and in his capacity as regisseur.

His Nixon in China staging, for example, was inspired by the Reagan White House, he said in a 1994 interview. Reagan and his cronies were “tearing the country apart”, “dividing profits among their close friends, slashing budgets, putting cities deeply in the hole,” while distracting the country with photo ops. In response, Sellars and librettist Goodman sprinkled elephant jokes throughout that first production.

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The elephant imagery did double duty, referring not just to the GOP but also to operatic imperialism. Verdi’s Aida was playing concurrently with Nixon in China at the Houston Grand Opera. According to Sellars, Aida raises questions about the “imperialist tradition” of grand opera. Since many in Nixon in China’s audience would also have seen Aida the night before or after, the Nixon collaborators were, he said, “quite consciously commenting” on what it means to move an opera plot into Egypt.

And yet, despite Sellars’ exquisite sensibilities about imperialism and cultural appropriation, it apparently never occurred to him or to his colleagues that they were committing a racial transgression by casting all white singers for the original Nixon in China production. Within a few years of its Houston premiere, Nixon in China had been performed in Brooklyn, Amsterdam, Edinburgh, Bielefeld, Germany, Los Angeles and Paris. Those casts, too, were virtually all white.

And when Adams, Sellars and Mark Morris got together again in 2011 for the opera’s premiere at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, the lead Chinese characters were once more all white. No one protested. Indeed, the New York Times’ lead classical music critic, Anthony Tommasini, singled out one of those white Nixon in China singers, Robert Brubaker, as capturing Chairman Mao’s “authoritarian defiance and rapacious self-indulgence.” Today, Tommasini is lambasting classical music for its racism (see “Classical Music’s Suicide Pact,” City Journal, Summer 2021); in 2011, he did not mention Brubaker’s race.

That blindness to whitewashing continued into 2020. In its review of the Scottish Opera’s Nixon in China, The Guardian, hardly a conservative mouthpiece, praised both Mark Le Brocq as Chairman Mao and Nicholas Lester as Zhou Enlai.

A norm against “whitewashing” would make Nixon in China almost impossible to stage in the West, an anonymous source told the Telegraph recently. Finding enough Asian singers of requisite quality to fill the large roster of Chinese characters “in a country the other side of the world from China” would be “just too difficult”.

Nixon in China’s creators would presumably have an interest in defending their work and its production history against a potentially fatal new casting restriction. They are keeping out of the fray, however. When I asked John Adams if he thinks that it is problematic to cast a white tenor as Mao Zedong, he declined to comment. Peter Sellers also refused comment.

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And so it is left to BEATS to explain the nuances of yellowface and whitewashing. Why is it acceptable for a black singer to sing Nixon but not acceptable for a white singer to sing Mao or Zhou Enlai? I asked. The answer turns on whether a singer’s skin color helps or hurts a political agenda.

“Casting a black singer (or other Artist of Colour – AoC) as a white historical personage can be progressive,” the group responded, “as it works to balance out the historical and current exclusion of AoCs on stage, and the discrimination they have experienced, and continue to experience”. But “casting a white actor in a specifically non-white role, such as a Chinese historical personage, is regressive, as it perpetuates the exclusion of ESEAs (East & South-East Asians) from the stage.”

But no singer is presently “excluded” from roles because of his race. Asians and blacks have sung leading white characters in Mozart, Rossini, Berlioz, Bizet, Verdi, Puccini, Wagner, and Offenbach, in the world’s major opera houses. If there are fewer Asian singers on opera stages than in the orchestra pit, that is because Asian involvement with Western classical music began with the string instruments. But training in Western opera techniques is catching up fast.

Staying current with “progressive” casting rules will require full-time study. Would it be acceptable for a black singer to play a Chinese character such as Mao, I asked BEATS. Not really. Here pan-Asian casting would be recommended. So artists of colour may bump whites from white roles but different categories of AoC’s should enjoy monopolies over their respective identity-defined characters.

For an organisation intent on policing identity boundaries in art, BEATS is remarkably lax in defining those boundaries. A Korean or Japanese singer may perform Mao or Zhou Enlai, the advocacy group said in response to a further question —notwithstanding the large differences in culture and history between the Chinese, Koreans, and the Japanese.

In fact, all the groups which BEATS regards as interchangeable for the purpose of casting are wildly heterogeneous. Individuals from the following countries may substitute for each other in roles written for any particular nationality: “Brunei, Burma, Cambodia, China, East Timor, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, Laos, Macau, Malaysia, Mongolia, North Korea, Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Vietnam and their diasporas.”

Never mind that many of these peoples spent millennia subjugating and colonising each other. Today, their most important characteristic is that they are not white, so someone from Brunei may sing a Chinese Communist leader even though Brunei had almost no connection with either Imperial or Communist China. Someone from Brunei could also sing Madama Butterfly, even though Japan invaded and occupied Brunei during World War II. This conflation of distinct identities under one “Asian” umbrella is little different from the “Orientalist” tropes decried by Edward Said and his epigones.

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Such ecumenicism is already behind the curve, however. To see the future of the diversity crusade in the arts, one must, as always, look to the United States, where casting directors henceforth will need a spectrometer to decide if a performer is sufficiently “coloured” to fill a role.

At the moment when the Scottish Opera was self-destructing, In the Heights, a screen adaptation of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Broadway musical, landed in American movie theatres. It, too, had an immaculately progressive creative team, with Miranda writing the screenplay and Jon Chu directing. The movie, about New York’s Dominican community, which is concentrated in Manhattan’s Washington Heights, received generally favourable press.

Miranda’s diversity credentials would seem unassailable, given his portrayal of the Founding Fathers as rap-emitting black and Hispanic citizens in the musical Hamilton. In the Heights used an all-Hispanic cast, thus obeying the rule that whites may not play person of colour roles. But the diversity racket has moved beyond such blunt categories. One critic complained that the actors in In the Heights were not dark-skinned enough, even though the proportion of dark-skinned actors among the lead characters — 16% —matches the racial demographics of Washington Heights.

A new offence was born, which may be dubbed “brownwashing.” Miranda fell on his sword immediately. “In trying to paint a mosaic of this community, we fell short,” he tweeted. “I’m truly sorry. I’m learning from the feedback, I thank you for raising it… I promise to do better in my future projects, and I’m dedicated to the learning and evolving we all have to do to make sure we are honouring our diverse and vibrant community.”

Every time arts leaders and institutions cave to racial pressure, they deal creativity another blow. The dumb literalism of today’s censors is a frontal assault on the human imagination, which frees us from the constraints of time, place, and the boundaries of our own subjectivity. One of drama’s most mesmerising set pieces is an onstage actor putting on his make-up and costume, effacing one identity and taking on another right before our eyes. Ovid’s Metamorphoses is a classic of erotic literature because transforming oneself into another being is an act of God-like power and seduction, whether of an amorous target or of an audience.

The next step in imaginative emasculation is obvious: Only elderly actors can play King Lear, only hunchbacks can sing Rigoletto or play Richard III, only fat people can play or sing Falstaff, since using stage make-up and body suits to transform non-old, non-handicapped, and non-fat actors into those roles represents ageism, fat-shaming, and ableism. Certainly no straight actor will ever be able to play a gay or “trans” character, as Sean Penn recently observed. But then again, maybe only Falstaff should be able to play Falstaff, since surely between a fat actor and Falstaff himself there are significant differences of identity. Jorge Luis Borges could have figured this puzzler out, but not the rest of us.

Ultimately, theatre itself may have to be segregated, since to claim that a white audience can identify with a black-themed work is a more subtle form of cultural appropriation. A recent play, lauded twice by the New York Times, asked white audience members to leave the theatre before the play’s conclusion so that black attendees could experience undisturbed racial solidarity.

Imaginative empathy—the ability to project oneself into someone else’s shoes–has been a key to expanding liberty and toleration. The arts have played a crucial role in widening human understanding. Now, however, they are leading the way back into a world of tribal barriers and stunted experience.

That the systems that held entire populations captive, and which enslaved and killed millions, and were run by little men who were worshipped as gods, are deemed too trivial to study is really quite remarkable.

Indeed, if you ask Google “do they teach about communism in schools?” the results on the first page will consist mainly of archival and scholarly papers about educational programmes during the 1950 and 60s. Well, those and some much more recent articles about Florida governor Ron DeSantis, who in late June signed a Bill mandating that all high school students must learn about “political ideologies such as communism and totalitarianism, that conflict with the principles of freedom and democracy essential to the founding principles of the United States.”

Why now? Speaking at a press conference in a middle school, DeSantis attacked teachers who praise Mao Zedong and denounced Che Guevara as a “total communist thug” before adding “We’re going to be pushing back on a lot of the whitewashing that’s been done.”

Lenin, of course, would instruct us to ask cui prodest? DeSantis is a Republican who has many Cuban immigrants in his state, not to mention voters who have escaped other Latin American leftist regimes, so attacking communism is certainly good politics in Florida. But at the press conference DeSantis was careful not to frame the study of communism in purely historical terms. He also gave space to Ana Bouza, who fled the Sandinistas in Nicaragua at age 16, escaping at first to Venezuela, before moving again to Florida — only to have her granddaughter inform her one day that socialism was “not… that bad.” DeSantis himself is only 42, and so was two years old when uber cold warrior Ronald Reagan was elected. It seems, therefore, that his concern is that ideas once thought confined to the dustbin of history might yet have some life in them and be at risk of spreading.

He is not necessarily wrong. A decade on from the Communist Party USA’s enthusiastic embrace of Occupy Wall Street, the acceptance of “socialism” in America as something non-radioactive continues to advance. A Gallup survey in 2019 found that socialism was as popular as capitalism among young adults, while Bernie Sanders, who did not shy away from the term, was the last of Biden’s challengers to drop out of the Democratic Party presidential primaries. DeSantis himself has young daughters, so perhaps he is worried that the day is coming when they read the glowing profile of Rosa Luxemburg in Teen Vogue, then run away to join the LARPing kombucha-drinking revolutionaries in America’s whitest big city.

Indeed, I sometimes wonder if some aspects of the so-called Great Awokening that caught so many observers off-guard might not have been so surprising had more people known something about radical left regimes of the 20^th century. Much has been made of the parallels between last year’s summer of statue-toppling iconoclasm and China’s Cultural Revolution, but that is only one example.

If you have even a cursory familiarity with the history of the USSR and its satellite regimes, you will not be shocked when self-proclaimed progressives turn out to be censorious prudes fearful of ideas, nor will you be amazed when liberals fail to defend their principles and go along with things that they don’t believe, “hiding, for [their] job’s sake, the rattle of bones”, to quote Aleksandr Blok. Nor would you be surprised to learn that Left-wing authoritarianism exists, contra the parochial studies seeking to prove otherwise.

That said, I am not sure that a pure focus on hardline totalitarian communism is necessarily the best way to educate people about the false promises of bogus utopias. As Czeslaw Milosz observed, people take the reality they live in as something “natural” and “cannot believe that one day a rider may appear on a street he knows well, where cats sleep and children play, and start catching passers-by with a lasso.”

Thus were I to design a curriculum, I would certainly teach about Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot, but I would also teach about the herbivorous phases of socialist regimes, when they were working as well as they ever did — and yet still there were shortages of the most mediocre goods, and people were still forbidden to travel abroad or listen to foreign radio stations, and religious believers were still subjected to crude propaganda, and there were still armies of snitches informing on their neighbours, and a cassette copy of Deep Purple’s In Rock that had been taped and retaped hundreds of times over was a precious commodity that could make you the envy of all your friends. (In fairness, I would also teach that in these conditions of bad government and permanent shortages, solidarity and kindness between individuals can flourish.)

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And none of this is to include, say, the successes and failures of post-war socialist parties in Western Europe. But even if DeSantis emphasises the excesses of communism at its worst, that is a great improvement on what we have had up to this moment, which is pretty much nothing. My main critique of this law is that it is required at all; but Florida also has a law mandating the study of the Holocaust, so this is not an innovation. The classroom is not the public square, and governments can and do decide what is taught in them. Indeed, DeSantis may have started a trend — hot on the heels of his press conference, the Arizona House voted in favor of a similar bill.

And yet, I wonder if this moment when some students in America start learning about communism might not also mark the moment when the subject jumps the shark. American elites have long treated anything that smacks of “anti-communism” as terribly déclassé, thanks to the legacy of McCarthy, and there is a strong whiff of that in the coverage of DeSantis’ bill on purported news site The Daily Beast, which ran a story with the headline Florida Guv’s School Crackdown is a Red Scare Throwback.

In addition, the fact that this type of bill was pioneered not just by any Republican governor, but by DeSantis, who is a staple of hate-click media content targeted at progressive audiences, means that it is all but guaranteed to be sucked into America’s uber-degraded culture war discourse. At the same press conference where DeSantis announced that young people in Florida were going to be learning about communism, he also spoke about two other bills — one related to civics education, and another which requires public universities to “annually assess intellectual freedom and viewpoint diversity” on campus. The first of these was not very controversial, but the second certainly was, and DeSantis also signed an early law banning “Critical Race Theory” or CRT in schools, which was even more so.

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Now you would think that reasonable people on both sides of the political aisle might be able to agree that teaching children to think of themselves as oppressor and oppressed on the basis of their skin colour, or to use curricular materials where “whiteness” is depicted as a pact with Satan (to pick just two examples), is more than slightly batshit, and likely to do more harm than good. But when other Republican-controlled legislatures followed DeSantis’ lead and banned CRT, the debate over the extent of extreme wokeism in education and whether simply banning it is the most effective response got sucked into the polarisation vortex and rapidly degenerated into the moronic inferno of culture war kayfabe.

Media workers at progressive corporate content mills argued that since little children were not literally studying the works of theorists such as Kimberlé Crenshaw, the parents railing against CRT across the country were all Fox News-hypnotised racists who in truth just wanted to ban all discussion of slavery and Jim Crow, etc. Even by the standards of today’s American media, with its epic 29% trust rating, it was quite the display of gaslighting. Some valiant souls attempted to study the laws on their merits, but they were few and far between.

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And so I fear that if bills requiring students to study the history of communism do catch on among Republican-held state legislatures, you can rest assured that the same media workers will rush to boost their detumescent ratings with hot takes denouncing DeSantis as the new McCarthy.

Meanwhile your more elite click chasers will commission solemn editorials from academics comparing Evil Conservatives to Putin, and Twitter will light up with long threads arguing for a more nuanced take on Stalin, who beat Hitler and was also “a great listener and collaborator during discussions.” And besides, isn’t America uniquely evil because racism and Trump? Meanwhile, Right-wingers will start arguing that socialised healthcare leads directly to the Gulag.

Of course, in communist regimes even this degraded level of debate would be inconceivable, so perhaps I should be grateful? Even so, I fear that the Culture War is rotting more brains than the Cold War ever did. What is to be done, indeed?

But when a word gets used so relentlessly, it begins to take on a certain legitimacy — and even begins to crop up in the minds of people who loathe it. Indeed, it even happened to me recently after I read a number of pieces in the American press claiming that “Critical Race Theory” (CRT) was a bogeyman of the Right. Now here, I thought, is something that is definitely gaslighting. Surely these people must be trying to drive readers mad by making assertions that are so clearly untrue; presenting one vision of the world and then denying that it even exists. If this is not “gaslighting”, then what is?

In the New York Times last week, Michelle Goldberg claimed that the current wave of concern across America about CRT had simply been whipped up by a clever propagandist — and that, as a consequence, CRT had become a maddening debate. In particular, she said, “the phrase itself had become unmoored from any fixed meaning”. Elsewhere she criticised people of being guilty of a “moral panic” and said that she was “highly sceptical” of the idea that CRT is being taught in schools, before going on to explain that “antiracist education” isn’t “radically leftist” but just “elementary”.

This slew of claims demonstrates the problem at hand. For in CRT we are not talking about some hidden theory; we are talking about a school of thought which was openly heralded within American academia and has now been forced upon the wider world. Yet just at the point that it has infiltrated the public sphere, Goldberg and others claim that our understanding of CRT has become confused — as if an ideology that is wilfully obscurantist ought, in fact, to be straightforward and agreed upon.

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In the Washington Post and elsewhere, this debate has come to define American politics in recent weeks. Most prominently, Joy Reid of MSNBC has taken to claiming that CRT is not being taught in schools, is not what its critics say that it is and is both too complex for people to understand and also an exceptionally obvious demand for social justice.

What prompted such a desperate defence? Well, American parents have finally woken up to what is being taught to their children. At one prestigious Manhattan school, the headmaster even resigned after a group of parents complained about a number of school initiatives, ranging from “racist cop” re-enactments in science lessons to classes about “decentering whiteness” and “white supremacy”.

But now, just at the moment that the American public are starting to push back, supporters of CRT are stepping away from their creation, pretending that concerned citizens have misunderstood it, or are railing at a mirage.

The aforementioned Reid, for instance, recently interviewed a leading CRT scholar — indeed the person who reportedly coined the term — Kimberlé Crenshaw, who has described the backlash against CRT as an effort “to reverse the racial reckoning unlike anything we’ve seen in our lifetime”.

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There is, to put it simply, a lot going on here; clearly, today’s discussions about CRT are unclear and disingenuous. But if there is a reason for this, it is that CRT’s decades-long advocates are no longer being honest. In their 2001 work Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic described CRT as a “movement” consisting of:

“A collection of activists and scholars interested in studying and transforming the relationship among race, racism and power… Unlike traditional civil rights, which embraces incrementalism and step-by-step progress, critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.”

So this is not a hidden campaign. Its thought leaders did not try to hide the revolutionary, activist nature of their “discipline”. They boasted about it; the activism was the point. The purpose of CRT was never simply to throw around ideas — it was to change America, and by extension the wider world, by applying these new racial rules in the widest possible way.

So why the sudden reversal? Why the sudden retreat into contradictory forms of self-defence? The reason, I suspect, is clear: the ugly little game that has been playing out in American academia is — like many a theory before it — not surviving its first encounters with the public.

In that sense, at least, it faces a similar problem to that experienced by Marxists. On paper, Marxist academics were able to make grand claims about how to make an equitable society. But try it out on the public and they soon learned that what worked on paper did not work in practice

A similar, if so far less bloody, discovery is being made with CRT. Yes, its advocates may believe that they have come up with a system to create universal justice. But applied in American schools, for instance, all they come up with is a system which causes untold pain and ugliness.

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Earlier this year when Grace Church School in Manhattan was in the headlines, people could see this for themselves. In private the headmaster conceded that there was a problem with the racial games he was forcing on all of his students. “Problematising whiteness” may seem fine in theory, but in practice it creates discord. As its headmaster reluctantly conceded, there are a lot of white children at his school; and if you “problematise” whiteness then you problematise them. Crenshaw, Reid and their fellow CRT supporters failed to account for that — and now this failing of theirs has plunged America into chaos.

In the meantime, their response has been to run for cover, camouflaging themselves with every technique possible. They say we don’t understand them. They say that CRT doesn’t really exist — or that it is all too complex to explain to ordinary people. But the simple fact is that CRT does exist, as a very large number of Americans have discovered. As for CRT’s bad reception, there is only one group to blame: its creators. It is their fault, not ours, that their ideology’s first mass encounter with the general public is proving such a failure.

In his debate with Joe Biden, Donald Trump claimed that critical race theory is racist and teaches people that America is a horrible place to which Biden responded weakly by claiming that Trump was the racist. Trump’s previous attacks on critical race theory produced a mass of conflicting claims about what critical race theory is, what precisely has been proscribed by the administration and what its motivations were for doing so.

The memo stated: “[A]ll agencies are directed to begin to identify all contracts or other agency spending related to any training on “critical race theory”, “white privilege” or any other training or propaganda effort that teaches or suggests either (1) that the United States is an inherently racist or evil country or (2) that any race or ethnicity is inherently racist or evil.”

The memo also says that “employees across the Executive Branch have been required to attend trainings where they are told that ‘virtually all White people contribute to racism’ or where they are required to say that they ‘benefit from racism'”. The memo describes critical race theory as “propaganda” five times, “divisive” five times, “unAmerican” twice, and “anti-American” once. Critical race theory is declared to be “contrary to all we stand for as Americans.”

This is an odd claim, since racial inequality and attempts to remedy it have been a constant in American history. Consequently, there have been two centuries of scholarship and activism by African-Americans and others in the realm of American race relations.

The president has also declared that he is raising funds to educate people as to the “real history of the country — the real history, not the fake”. This is concerning to those who are not convinced the president is a reliable judge of what is and isn’t fake news, historical or current. It was similarly alarming when Mr Trump said that he would sign an executive order to create “patriotic education” that will teach young people “to love America with all of their heart and all of their souls”. The implication is that Trump wants to promote an entirely prideworthy version of American history. If so, it is unclear how the enslavement of African Americans would be taught.

Prominent critical race theorists responded to the memo angrily. To Kimberlé Crenshaw, it was “McCarthyism 101” while to Ibram X Kendi  it amounted to a claim that to be American was to be racist. “There is danger here” said M.E Hart, provider of federal diversity trainings. “We have to see each other as human beings, and we have to do whatever it takes to, including whatever classes make that possible.”

So, what is critical race theory? Is it divisive propaganda that claims America and white people to be racist and evil? Or is it simply the recognition of all people as human beings?

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The theory traces its roots back to the writings and activism of freed slaves including Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth, who argued strongly for the recognition of African-Americans as full human beings. However, the theory as we know it today could best be understood to have its founding father in the sociologist, W.E.B Du Bois (1868-1963). Du Bois argued that the idea of race was created to provide a biological justification for the enslavement, mistreatment and exploitation of African-Americans. He was right.

Du Bois, however, was inclined to believe that African-Americans needed to raise themselves out of their subordinated position by showing white Americans how wrong they were to devalue black Americans in this way. During the Civil Rights Movement, a more activist stance developed which required white Americans to take more responsibility for their own racist assumptions and help to reorder society more fairly.

Following the legal success of the Civil Rights Movement the movement stalled. Legal victories had been won but racist attitudes remained. Thus, what was needed was a “critical” approach. The word “critical” refers to a practice of critiquing institutions and broader society with a view to revolutionary political change. This was in contradiction to the liberal approach of reforming existing structures so that everybody had equal access to them.

As Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic wrote in the introduction of Critical Race Theory: An Introduction: “Unlike traditional civil rights discourse, which stresses incrementalism and step-by-step progress, critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.”

The founding father of critical race theory was Derrick Bell, professor at Harvard Law School. Bell argued that racism has not improved and is, in fact permanent, and that whites simply find less obvious and legal ways to maintain their dominance. Bell developed his theory of “Interest convergence” which argued that whites only extend rights to blacks when it is in their own material interest. This cynical and pessimistic materialist approach tends to present empirical evidence of disparities and then claim racism as the sole cause of them, while ignoring progress.

Materialism held sway in critical race theory in the 1970s and 80s but gave way to postmodern ideas from the 1990s. In 1991, Kimberlé Crenshaw defined intersectionality as a “provisional concept linking contemporary politics with postmodern theory.”  She critiqued liberalism for its universalism which held that all people should have access to everything regardless of their identity and argued instead for an identity-based approach.

This critique marked a shift from liberalism to identity politics with added postmodernism. The postmodern approach to critical race theory focused less on material aspects of society and more on concepts of power, knowledge and language.

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This owes much to the thought of the French theorist Michel Foucault, who argued that oppressive systems of power are maintained by ways of talking about things — discourses. Powerful forces in society get to decide which ways of talking about things are legitimate and they do so to maintain their own privileged positions.

Having legitimised certain discourses, the general population then accepts them as common sense and speaks as though they are true, thus upholding power structures such as white supremacy without realising what they are doing. Critical theorists exist to explain these systems and how they work so people can see them and dismantle them.

This is how critical race theory developed within the academy. However, since around 2010, it has moved into the mainstream. The ideas we are most likely to hear are those of Ibram X Kendi and Robin DiAngelo. Kendi’s How to be an AntiRacist (2019) and DiAngelo’s White Fragility (2018) were New York Times bestsellers for months and sold out again following the death of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter protests.

The work of Ibram X Kendi seems to draw most of its spirit from the materialist approach, presenting us with two intertwined false dichotomies. Firstly, one can only be racist or anti-racist. Secondly, one can either support the existence of disparities between races as right and natural or one can attribute them to racist power structures and policies in society and oppose them.

That is, either one accepts that all disparities are the result of racist structures in society and devotes oneself to opposing these as such, or one is a racist. Kendi does not claim that all white people are racist but maintains that all people can behave in ways that are racist or anti-racist according to his definitions.

He writes: “One endorses either the idea of a racial hierarchy as a racist, or racial equality as an antiracist. One either believes problems are rooted in groups of people, as a racist, or locates the roots of problems in power and policies, as an anti-racist. One either allows racial inequities to persevere, as a racist, or confronts racial inequities, as an antiracist… . The claim of ‘not racist’ neutrality is a mask for racism… . The only way to undo racism is to consistently identify and describe it — and then dismantle it.”

Robin DiAngelo takes a thoroughly postmodern approach. Her belief is that white people are unavoidably racist because of the ways in which they have been socialised in white supremacist countries. DiAngelo identifies America as just such a country but also much of Europe, including the UK.

For DiAngelo, “whiteness” is a system that whites perpetuate with everything they do. In White Fragility, she describes whiteness as a “constellation of processes and practices” consisting of “basic rights, values, beliefs, perspectives and experiences purported to be commonly shared by all but which are actually only consistently afforded to white people”. For DiAngelo these processes are “dynamic, relational, and operating at all times and on myriad levels”.

Elsewhere, she sets out a tenet of anti-racism, stating that “The question is not ‘Did racism occur?’ but ‘How did racism manifest in that situation?'” There is no possibility of not being racist and DiAngelo’s training aims to get white people to accept that they are racist — as the Trump memo claims.

So, is the Trump administration right? Does critical race theory claim that America is racist? Yes. Does it claim that white people are racist? If the training is based on DiAngelo, yes. If it draws more on Kendi, a racist is anyone not entirely convinced that all disparities are due to racism. Interestingly, 43% of black Americans are not convinced of this and believe an unwillingness to work hard is a major cause compared to only 30% of whites who believe so. This doesn’t mean they are correct and the perception being higher in black Americans could well be better explained by a tendency to conservatism related to their greater, often Protestant, religiosity as a group.

Is Hart correct that critical race theory and anti-racism training simply want all people to be recognised as equally human? No, this universal humanist approach is explicitly criticised in critical race theory as the failed liberal approach. Critical race theory works by foregrounding identity, not our shared humanity. Is the Trump administration thus correct to call it “divisive”? Absolutely.

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Defenders of critical race theory training often miscategorise it as a standard form of essential workplace training, but training people in critical race theory is not like training them in protocols of data protection where compliance with the law can reasonably be required. It is more like training them in a belief system like Christianity and denying employees the right to be openly Muslim, Jewish, Hindu or atheist. Nobody should be required to pretend to believe themselves to be racist or to believe in invisible systems of whiteness if they don’t.

Critical race theory and particularly the anti-racism of Robin DiAngelo require people to reject individual agency and the individual’s knowledge of and control over their own mind, and to accept that they must believe precisely what one set of American theorists insist they do. While believers in critical race theory often insist that only white people reject its ideas, studies show that progressives who hold these kinds of views are much more likely to be white. Black Americans are even split in believing that race relations will improve by focusing on commonalities (liberal universalism) as on differences (identity politics).

By banning training rooted in critical race theory for federal employees, President Trump has defended freedom of belief and taken a stand against coerced speech. Yet there is cause to be concerned. The rhetoric about “patriotic education” and “anti-American propaganda” indicates that Trump could intend to replace one biased and ideological narrative with another and thus deny American children a rigorous education about the racial history of America.

Following the release of his memo, he tweeted, “This is a sickness that cannot be allowed to continue. Please report any sightings so we can quickly extinguish!”

And rather ominiously, at Tuesday’s debate the president also responded to requests to condemn white supremacy by telling the far-Right street fighters Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by. But I’ll tell you what: Somebody’s got to do something about antifa and the left.”

While American liberals might share the president’s wish for critical race theory to cease and desist, they must retain their principles of freedom of belief and be on their guard lest this language presages authoritarian censorship.

Cynical Theories: How Universities Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity — And Why this Harms Everybody by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay is published by Swift Press