Just over a century later, Labour — as it is still quaintly known — has begun to rediscover the concept of social class that was once the foremost reason for its existence. Earlier this week, Bridget Phillipson, Minister for Women and Equalities, announced the creation of a new “class unit” within the Office for Equality and Opportunity. “We have been squeamish about class for too long,” said Phillipson. Reporters were quick to identify the unit’s purpose as “improving outcomes for white working-class people”. The government clarified, bashfully, that the class unit would examine disparities across all ethnic groups.

Things do seem to be changing from the era when identity, rather than class, seemed to rule the Left’s moral calculus. In August, the American Democratic politician Alexandria-Ocasio Cortez admitted on ABC’s This Week that perhaps some of the new socially radical politicking that had overtaken the institutions of the Left for a generation hadn’t landed quite as intended. “Woke One was crazy!”, she said.

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In truth, it was never really clear what so-called wokeness had to offer a majority of working-class people in Britain. As Woke 1.0 spread from the USA to our shores, it brought with it a moral diagnosis that resonated in America, where some states had struggled to move on from the Reconstruction era, but bore a smaller relevance to the malaise in much of the post-industrial Britain of the modern era. Prosperity and opportunity had begun to centralize in cities and vanish from Britain’s much less diverse towns and coastal regions. Social attitudes had seen huge progress. Race wasn’t the immovable roadblock in life that it once was.

My generation came to political maturity riding a wave that crested alongside Woke 1.0. We began walking into institutions equipped with a politics shaped by the 2008 banking crisis, the expansion of the EU’s migration covenant and the introduction of the Equality Act in 2010. It was an era where the moral leadership of the Left, once the de facto voice of working-class people, became dominated by people for whom “the white working class” were a distant species.

The former industrial communities of Britain’s regions were something modern politicians left behind en-route to a career in London after Oxbridge — and why wouldn’t the aspirational leave? Margaret Thatcher’s decade long war on local council democracy had left millions with little power at the ballot box. Everything meaningful was now decided in the capital.

Otherwise, the white working class were a group many of the Left had never actually met. They were to be spoken on behalf of in student meetings — the way a primatologist might talk about what was best for the gorillas in their charge at a zoo. Rather than considering the diminishing life chances and outcomes of millions of people on lower incomes as a central part of their politics, my generation were encouraged to adopt a series of niche causes under the doctrine of “intersectionality”. It was as though working-class life was a solved problem and not something collapsing around us.

For this more bourgeois iteration of the Left, the emotional pull of Woke 1.0, and maybe, dare I say it, a bit of traditional liberal guilt atonement, held an appeal that was easy to ratify just by looking out of the front door. We lived in big cities and in Britain’s most metropolitan boroughs, there really are still notable gaps between people’s prosperity that can be predicted based on their skin color. Those who might object to making these concerns the most prominent pillar of our politics could easily be presumed to only do so because of prejudice. In reality, the gaps on the doorstep weren’t nearly as wide as those between metropolitan Britain and everywhere else.

The country we maligned for its supposed backward social attitudes was quietly becoming the most regionally unequal major economy in the developed world. Large swaths of Britain had been torn to shreds by austerity not with a bang but a whimper. Traditional Labour politicians like Ellen Wilkinson or even Ramsay MacDonald would have marched the breadth of the country to do battle on issues like unemployment and closing factories. By the mid-2010s, this was an unsexy, even faintly embarrassing cause — largely forgotten, maybe a bit nostalgic. The odd episode of Benefits Street would present the collapse of working-class communities as something with a cosmic justice to it: they were always lazy, weren’t they? John Harris would conduct a Guardian-sponsored safari around the shuttered high streets of provincial England, furrowing his brow in befuddlement as people told him they were planning to vote to leave the EU, but couldn’t say exactly why.

Working-class institutions, like trade unions, had been collapsing for years. Deindustrialization, something the Left had largely given up trying to stop, had robbed unions of anyone to represent and deprived millions of working-class people of a decent job to go to after school. Culturally, the white working class were becoming unmentionable. They had been absorbed into the wider and varied “white” group by the Equality Act, their life outcomes masked by this sleight of hand.

Those who did mention the white working class — the last few political figures that had lived similar lives, like Angela Rayner, who left school, pregnant, aged 16 to become a care worker — were shushed. As education secretary Rayner spoke about the needs of white working-class boys being “pushed down the food chain” due to the focus on ethnic minorities and women, but was pilloried for her trespass. Even to mention the group seemed to risk resurrecting the ghost of Enoch Powell, like a monster from an Eighties horror movie coming back to life. It was a faux pas to mention the white working class. It could only be assumed that the speaker didn’t realize that working-class people now came in all colors.

None of this handwringing stopped the least well off white working class kids’ educational attainment utterly collapsing. White British kids on free school meals have the lowest higher education participation rate in Britain. They are less likely to spend age 19 in further education than Roma Gypsies.

As rolling the dice on higher education has become the only accepted way of creating social mobility in Britain, it isn’t hard to understand why people in these communities feel a profound loss of hope. The Social Mobility Commission — which will apparently become surplus to requirements following the creation of the Class Unit — places the least diverse former industrial and mining areas, such as the North East of England, Yorkshire and the Humber, and the West Midlands as the places least likely to allow someone to make generational progress. The Sutton Trust’s Opportunity Index shows a yawning gap in educational attainment between London and places like the North East and Cornwall.

Swaths of Britain being completely left behind has been a quietly accepted part of our national story for more than a decade. The story briefly came to a head during Brexit, only to be quickly dismissed by the political Left. The fact that the old Labour heartlands voted for Brexit in spite of what sensible people in London were telling them to do was seen simply as an inconvenience that their betters would need to muddle through. It was the spasm of a palliative patient whose bedside vigil often gave them cause to yawn and glance at their watch — a victory for the far-Right that any right-thinking person would reject.

Nevertheless, the broader political re-alignment that Brexit represented refuses to go away. In the recent Saxony-Anhalt election in Germany, the Alternative Für Deutschland [AfD] party dominated the votes of a community that looks like a facsimile of left-behind Britain: shuttered industries, a low rate of higher education, too disillusioned to bother much with politics. The AfD’s platform hoovered up and sent to the polls exactly the kind of working-class voters that have fallen off Britain’s electoral rolls over a generation of hopeless disengagement. Saxony-Anhalt was an election infused with a sense of the injustice of regional inequality too: 73% of voters there believed that East Germans are second-class citizens. The result is that Neo-Nazis, Holocaust deniers, ex-Stasi officers and Putin apologists are now more trusted to run a swath of Germany than the old parties of the working class.

Labour’s answer to the British version of this disengagement suggests that some within the party are at last waking up to the anger present in swathes of working-class Britain. However, the tools it has unveiled look much like those that have already produced unremarkable results.

For many years the moral component of modern social justice has amounted to a kind of human flower arranging. How many protected characteristics can you gather and display in your vase to prove that Britain is a caring society?

The creed of modern social justice was that Britain’s growing prosperity would be accompanied by the assurance that more of the beneficiaries would have a certain color skin, or a certain preference for other’s genitalia, or a certain bodily or mental difficulty. Now the working class will be included in this bouquet of virtue.

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It isn’t yet clear exactly how big a change this could be. Perhaps new positive discrimination access schemes of the kind that have become common (and commonly gamed by middle-class climbers) will be developed. Now Britain’s social justice engineers will be encouraged to say: “Look, we have a black person, a disabled person, a gay person AND a poor person.” Where previously an applicant being white and poor only gained one virtue point, now perhaps it could gain two.

The expanding prosperity that undergirded the politics of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion is evaporating. It hasn’t existed in parts of Britain for a long, long time. DEI politics has shown that it can take the ever-more centralized wealth of Britain and divvy it up among a more diverse fortunate few. It hasn’t shown any ability to provide for the parts of Britain clinging on by their fingertips.

In 2024, the Institute for Public Policy Research published its report, “State of the North”, detailing for the umpteenth time how the Britain that was remade by industry closure during the neoliberal turn was full of sicker people with shorter lives. It showed that wealth inequality was set to grow in spite of a Labour government: there will be an average gap of £228,800 per head between the wealth of those in the South-East and the North by 2030. The authors proposed  “Germany-style levels” of investment — nearly £8 billion a year for 15 years — to start closing the gap, referencing Germany’s history of “solidarity taxes” between West and East since reunification. IPPR proposed that this would be achieved by wealth taxes that mostly land on the South. But then, even that level of investment hasn’t worked to keep faith in the political system of Germany, as downward mobility leaves people hyper-vigilant, hoarding, worried about losing or being forced to share what little is theirs.

Andy Burnham came into No. 10 promising to be a prime minister for “The North”. But his previous economic advisor and Goldman Sachs chief economist Lord Jim O’Neill has already come out strongly against taxing the wealthy regions. His argument: London will need even more investment if any growth is to reach the rest of Britain. The money markets seem to agree that borrowing to restore prosperity to the once proud working-class areas of Britain should come at a punishing cost. A cost it isn’t clear anyone is willing to pay.

Will working-class voters buy into the idea that “social class” can be solved by being granted a protected diversity status? It’s not hard to wonder what someone like Ramsay MacDonald might think of such a measure; “class” was once the entire reason a Labour politician got out of bed in the morning.

But it speaks also to the mindset of the modern political class: that more unity can be created if more people can be given permission to be recognized as “in need” by their betters. The Labour of old knew that working-class people didn’t want this politics of pity: they wanted a politics of dignity. They built institutions, friendly societies, social insurance schemes, working men’s clubs and trade unions as a living demonstration of their ability to stand on their own feet, not reliant on other people to decide whether they can be given a leg up for the sake of meeting a quota.

Clearly, the working class of deindustrialized Britain will need to wait for anything that would mimic the gigantic leaps of change that Labour once provided: homes where there were once slums, work where there was once unemployment, an NHS where there was once sickness, a welfare state where there was once desperation. A New Jerusalem. In the meantime, the white working class can celebrate their induction into the world of DEI. One more flower in the bouquet.

Six months later, she was sacked. “I’m now on the barred list alongside Wayne Couzens and multiple rapist David Carrick,” she tells me.

Her crimes, though, were of a rather different order: remarks deemed sexist and transphobic. Colleagues alleged that she repeatedly referred to men in derogatory terms, regularly stating “I hate men”, “fucking men”, and on one occasion, “all men are rapists”. She also faced complaints for comments about transgender people. The allegations were upheld, and the career of a detective who spent 24 years investigating violence against women and children was summarily terminated.

Critics will characterize Fletcher’s remarks as straightforward misandry, and she herself accepts that some of what she said might be seen as offensive and inappropriate. Her defense, though, is not that the remarks were acceptable, but that they were made in the context of investigating repeated male violence against women, and that they have been judged by a disciplinary standard not consistently applied elsewhere.

The vast majority of male perpetrators of domestic violence and stalking are never arrested — let alone convicted. Just as shockingly, the Government’s early-release scheme will apply to those few who were jailed; soon, these dangerous men will be let loose to continue their war of attrition against their victims. In the meantime, a police officer who put heart and soul into protecting victims of the most heinous crimes has been sacked for hurting the feelings of male colleagues.

Why, then, was Fletcher deemed to be such a significant disciplinary problem?

Partly, this was because she was an outlier in the force — a woman of low rank who nevertheless spoke out against self-ID and what she saw as dangerous practices within the police (including the controversial ruling on strip searches for transgender individuals). She was chair of Northumbria Police SEEN, an independent body set up by women in the force in order to challenge sex discrimination and uphold the rights and protections that relate to sex, as set out in the Equality Act 2010. Her forthright approach to these matters, she believes, set her at odds with the DEI squad.

“From the beginning of this process,” she tells me, “it has felt like they wanted rid of me. And mainly because I do not hold the views of the force about gender ideology. I have been very clear that I believe self-ID is a disaster, and that gender ideology in general is anti-women.”

Context is everything, though, and Fletcher’s determination to speak out was all taking place as the entire police force embraced Diversity, Equality and Inclusion (EDI) policies and training. As Dominic Adler stated in his investigation for UnHerd: “Fantasies of inclusion are colliding with the brick wall of reality”. Indeed, Northumbria Police, in particular, has been criticized for taking its trans rights ethos too far, being seen to take a side in a highly politicized, deeply contested social issue, while internally admonishing those who refuse to toe the accepted line.

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Fletcher’s first “crime” was to express her views about how prevalent woman-hating is across society following Sarah Everard’s murder in November 2021. Some male colleagues, we subsequently learned, became “upset and offended” when she said that the only way to stop night-time rape is to put a nine-o’clock curfew on all men.

“I am upset that Sarah Everard was raped and murdered by a police officer,” she tells me in response. “It happened because of misogyny, and that’s the problem that they should be looking at, not me talking about it.” It’s worth recalling that police did suggest a curfew at the time — just one for women.

The next time she ran into trouble was in March 2023, when she complained about online training materials that had been issued as part of the EDI force strategy. One was a TED talk by Sophie Cook, a trans activist and TV newsreader. “He was talking about how he transitioned and how when he was feeling suicidal, he went and bought some make-up, and everything was better after that.”

Fletcher sent emails complaining about the Sophie Cook material. In the emails, she stated that it was offensive and misogynistic for men to claim they know what it’s like to be a woman. She explained in her complaint that she feared the force would “sleepwalk into self-ID, which would be a disaster”. Of particular concern to her was trans-identified men arrested for rape being recorded as female. “How would this work,” she points out, “with our research policy, and our crime recording?” It would completely skew the data about male violence if these were deemed to be female crimes.

Fletcher also complained about a presentation on “The power of pronouns”, delivered by a trans man and another member of the DEI team. Attendees were warned that refusal to use preferred pronouns would cause harm. Again, these were sent by email. And each time, Fletcher says she received an acknowledgment promising to review her complaints and come back to her. “But they never did, they just reported me to Professional Standards.”

When she was finally told by her sergeant that there had been complaints made against her, which would be investigated, she said out loud, “God, this is ridiculous. I’m getting done by the fucking rainbow unit!”

One complainant in the case who was in the room when she made that comment is PC Kevin Thompson, who is gay, and a passionate ally of trans people. In his statement for the tribunal he claimed that: “As a man working in that environment, I felt quite intimidated by her radical views.” It is probably noteworthy that, at the time, he insisted he wasn’t offended, and, indeed, continued to say as much until the gross misconduct disciplinary was being constructed. At that point Thompson, along with various others who had not felt moved to complain when offense was caused, suddenly decided to go on the record.

Given that the police service is now recognized as one of the most institutionally misogynistic institutions in the land, it is ironic that a woman with previous exemplary service has been sacked for making off-the-cuff remarks about male violence and women’s rights. As Fletcher puts it: “Without doubt, these trumped-up allegations came about because the entire force has been captured by gender ideology,” says Fletcher. “They went on a massive fishing expedition to gather as much dirt on me as possible so they could get rid of the big-mouthed feminist.”

The issue, then, is not whether Fletcher’s remarks and complaints were appropriate, but whether they justified dismissal when allegations of far more serious misconduct by male officers have often been dealt with less severely. Of the almost 1,000 officers facing formal internal proceedings for police perpetrated abuse, over half had their cases addressed in standard misconduct meetings — rather than gross misconduct tribunals — and so were protected from dismissal. Indeed, Northumbria police seems to be a textbook study of misogyny in the force. We learned, in 2024, that 64 Northumbria Police officers had been accused of sexual or domestic abuse in the previous four years. And, back in 2015, the chief constable, after also being accused of “rudeness”, claimed that she was treated differently because she was a woman.

It was the same story with Fletcher. “I was sacked because I challenged their unlawful conduct and their discriminatory conduct,” she claims. And she goes on to describe how not one colleague reported her at the time. They were all spoken to later on by a senior officer who was collecting “dirt”, mindful of the fact that Fletcher was repeatedly raising the fact that Northumbria Police has a huge problem with women.

If Fletcher sees her case as a witch-hunt, her fight is not over. She is preparing for an employment tribunal against Northumbria Police on the grounds of belief discrimination, and she will rely on the Forstater ruling, which held that gender-critical views deserve legal protection.

It’s hardly a ringing endorsement for any women considering joining the force. As Fletcher puts it in characteristically robust fashion: “I feel like I’ve been in an abusive relationship with my employer for about the last five years.” What woman would willingly sign up for that?

It seems likely to be an incredible read. In various interviews, Arday has claimed to have completed his PhD with a brain tumor; to have run 30 marathons in 35 days, and 600 miles in six days; to have raised millions for charity; to have played both snooker and football at professional levels. And now there is a new chapter in this gripping life story: outright allegations of plagiarism in his academic writing and muttered suspicions of fraud. There are magical-sounding transformations here, arduous journeys, and noble heroes battling it out with dastardly villains. But who exactly are we supposed to root for, and what is the moral of the story?

For some, the obvious baddie is Arday’s recent accuser, Nathan Cofnas, who has alleged several instances of plagiarism on his Substack. Cofnas, a philosopher at the University of Ghent, is best known for his controversial research on racially based IQ differences, and for taking a Cambridge college to court, claiming it had discriminated against him on the grounds of his “anti-woke” beliefs. It is as if the most stereotypically problematic of academics had escaped from a university HR manager’s cheese dream and taken fleshly shape. Predictably, then, commentators who have based their careers on divining institutional racism have been quick to take advantage of the caricatural optics. Cambridge itself says that Arday has been cleared of “allegations of plagiarism regarding his thesis and journal publications”, and is a “victim of a vile campaign to undermine his credibility”.

But serious concerns about Arday’s work have been circulating for at least three years, voiced by scholars who have no interest in hereditarianism; and it is hard to see how Cambridge could have dismissed them so lightly. In 2023, Professor Dave Harris, an emeritus sociologist, started documenting concerns about Arday’s doctoral thesis and some other journal articles on his own website. Along with another sociologist, Professor Martyn Hammersley, Harris also tried doggedly to raise the matter with journal editors, university authorities, and Arday himself.

Harris sent me his correspondence. To his polite inquiries, Arday insisted he would consider future contact from Harris as bullying and harassment. Cambridge’s Head of Policy told Harris that, since the alleged issues preceded Arday’s time at Cambridge, it was not within the university’s remit to investigate — a bizarrely relaxed attitude to the possibility that a star academic had committed research malpractice. Last year, Times Higher staff reporter Jack Grove looked into the case in great depth, drawing in part upon evidence from Harris and Hammersley, but his editors spiked the piece after legal letters from Carter-Ruck.

It is clear, then, that more reputations are at stake here than Arday’s own. When he was first appointed as a Professorial Chair, Cambridge made huge capital out of the moment, stressing the significance not just of their new hire’s ethnicity but his “neurodiversity” too. The well-known theory of intersectionality has it that a black or brown ethnicity, plus a disability, equals the likelihood of exponential discrimination. Alongside this dogma runs a shadow logic for progressive employers, whispering that two protected characteristics in a prominent employee are even better than one; three, if you count Arday’s origins on a deprived council estate. Or as the University press release put it at the time: “parts of [Arday’s] story… epitomize the significant barriers that neurodivergent individuals, those from lower socio-economic backgrounds, and Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic people face when trying to build careers in the sector”. But not at Cambridge, they might as well have smugly added.

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Throughout his career, Arday himself has highlighted his disabilities just as much as his race. He has said he only learned to eat for himself aged seven, and that he spent “thousands of hours in speech therapy… six days a week” from the age of three. He has claimed that the aforementioned brain tumor was surgically removed only two weeks before his PhD viva. Last year, he co-authored a book with Dr Chantelle Jessica Lewis entitled We See Things They’ll Never See: Love, Hope, and Neurodiversity, published by the elite Princeton University Press. Its subject is how “neurotypical hegemony reproduces a culture of exclusion”. The authors wax lyrical to their presumed neurodiverse readers: “Not only do you still deserve love, you deserve for your creativity to flourish and be nurtured. You still deserve ordinariness, even if you struggle to communicate your passions.”

As this suggests, the book is an extremely weird mix of academic jargon and chatty informality. Each chapter starts with a song lyric. Chapter Seven, for instance, begins with the Blur lyric “hold on for tomorrow”, then explains: “For neurodivergent people, who are often holding on to the coattails of neurotypicals, there is a need for the neuromajority population to be more accommodating and understanding in this process… and hold on for tomorrow.” There is also a lot of breathless metacommentary, as if the authors were fascinated with their own creative process — a feature often found in student essays, but not so much in work by senior academics. In Chapter Three, for instance, you get: “it will come as no surprise to many of our sociologist peers that this third chapter was one of the last we put together”; and “[a]s we returned to Durkheim’s analysis when writing this book, a sense of sadness and frustration often entered our conversations about neurotypical hegemony”. In Chapter Seven: “As we began to round up our reflections and the rationale of the book, we spoke a lot about the concept of time and our general sense of getting through the day.”

Irrespective of the outcome of the plagiarism allegations, it seems to me there is an even more fundamental problem here. Having waded through some of Arday’s books, articles, and talks, it is my strong impression his published outputs would be judged unambiguously mediocre, bordering on comically terrible, were it not for the heroic DEI-friendly backstory. As Cofnas has pointed out, his journal articles are full of typos and solecisms, and there is even a rogue apostrophe in his PhD title. His 2019 monograph, Cool Britannia and Multi-Ethnic Britain: Uncorking the Champagne Supernova, is also strikingly garbled, as he uses autoethnography about Britpop in order to pursue “an uncomfortable discourse for melancholic Britain to digest”: that the cool Britannia of the Nineties was actually cruel, racist Britannia instead.

Here, Arday relates how he fell in love with bands like Oasis at a young age, “or at least so it seemed until the veil of innocence and naivete was stripped away through the most pernicious and insidious of discriminatory instruments… racism”. The dramatic pause is his. Other phrases tend to collapse under their own weight: “Significant periods in most individuals’ lives prove to be a point of discovery which can often lead to a sense of belonging that is hard to quantify”; “There are periods historically which capture the mood of a generation and become the soundtrack to a particular type of lived experience”. The book was nominated for a British Sociological Association prize in 2020.

Arday’s academic talks, meanwhile, are rambling and banal, in no way consonant with his elevated rank. In his 2024 British Academy lecture at the University of Bristol, for instance — about “cultural appropriation” in Paul Simon’s album Graceland — he sounds like an enthusiastic sixth-former regurgitating talking points from a rockumentary. At one point he suggests that part of Simon’s “insecurity” and “arrogance” stems from the fact Simon is physically shorter than Art Garfunkel. At another point, he digresses and starts talking about the lack of indigenous actors in Neighbours and Home and Away, observing that “you become a sociologist and start looking at it through a different lens; you start thinking ‘well Australia had an indigenous population… how come none of them are present in the utopia of Summer Bay?’”. And his interest in these two TV soap operas is not merely in passing; in a podcast interview last year, the Professor said he sleeps “probably two hours a night… then in that two hours in between, I fill it with Home and Away and Neighbours”.

There is currently some bafflement on social media about why Cambridge authorities are disclaiming the accusations about Arday with such aggressive, self-satisfied certainty. I have a possible explanation that is only secondarily connected to skin color. Namely: at some point, the university sector decided that intellectual disability was something that should be mitigated, rather than treated as disqualifying one from scholarly life. Conditions such as dyslexia and dyspraxia, autism, ADHD, speech delay (and so on) were now to be treated as unfair obstacles to a person’s dreams of pursuing an academic career, rather than constituting evidence they were unsuited. And since over-diagnosis of mental health conditions is rife in the sector, and everyone is frightened of being called discriminatory, the predictable upshot was that — at least in some cases — straightforward midwittery came to be treated like an excusable intellectual disability as well.

Lecturers are now routinely expected to make adjustments to their ordinary critical approach as soon as someone has a diagnosis: to ignore spelling mistakes; mentally rearrange sentences without critical comment; try not to mind paragraphs that go on for days, or seem utterly arbitrary in their shape. I speak from experience. As a marker, you are supposed to look beneath the jumble of words and find the true scholar lurking shyly within. Most often, this nonsensical strategy is applied at the level of students; but once the principle was conceded, it was only a matter of time before such accommodations were extended to staff too.

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Primed by his amazing personal history, Cambridge bosses seem to have taken this patronizing approach to the quality of Arday’s outputs, just as other august bodies presumably did before them: Glasgow University, where Arday was also a Professor; the British Sociological Association, where he is a trustee; Routledge and Princeton University Press, the publishers of his books. According to the unspoken norms of these institutions, it doesn’t matter how silly Arday sounds in interviews, or how bad his writing is. It is already priced in. To point out the fact wouldn’t just be rude, it would also be positively discriminatory in a vague sort of way; whereas to ignore the issue is virtuous and noble. Many people have noticed marked inadequacies in Arday’s work over the years, I assume, but very few have said anything. And I also assume that the pressure to stay silent has increased, the higher he has climbed. What’s this? You are pointing out Professor Jason Arday of Cambridge University — a man who has been through so much to get where he is — can’t write coherent sentences, or stay on-topic in his talks? Are you some kind of Nazi?

Cambridge’s stubborn defense of its employee in the light of the plagiarism accusations looks to me like just more of the same. Managers there don’t seem to see the deliberate repetition of other people’s phrases as any kind of vice, in his particular case — it can only be inadvertent and excusable, given his known disabilities, and so perhaps doesn’t count as plagiarism at all. And it seems his race might be being treated as an additional mitigating factor, based on the assumption he routinely undergoes racist treatment which causes him psychological distress.

For instance, in correspondence between Harris and Head of the Cambridge Faculty of Education, Dr Hilary Cremin, Cremin said that when she had asked Arday about Harris’s plagiarism allegations, the former had “spoke movingly about his ongoing experiences of direct and indirect racism, and the conditions that he was living in whilst the… article was being prepared”. She also stressed that her faculty remained “immensely proud of Prof Arday’s achievements and scholarship”.

You’d be forgiven for thinking here that Cremin was trying to offer mitigating circumstances for a troubled but promising undergraduate — except that she was talking about someone holding a Professorial Chair. Once a narrative of mental disability is firmly in place, it seems that a presumed experience of racism can just be added to the list, as yet another unfair impediment to intellectual achievement. Minority ethnicity plus disability now equals the suspension of critical judgment.

Ultimately, there are likely to be many losers in this embarrassing debacle: deserving young scholars who were overlooked as Arday was appointed, now lost to the profession; fee-paying students who came to Cambridge or Glasgow to bask in the intellectual glow of world-class academics, and got some waffle about Australian soap operas instead; accomplished black or brown researchers smeared by association, now facing abuse online from hereditarian idiots who assume that Arday’s case is the norm. And ultimately, Cambridge University will be a massive loser, deservedly so. It is a necessary condition of the place’s continuing glamour and prestige that it enforces rigorous academic standards. To be shown not to care about this, in such a public way, is an act of catastrophic institutional self-harm.

But I can’t help thinking another loser is Arday himself, wandering like a modern-day Forrest Gump through various prestigious institutions, treated like a sage for every strange or incomprehensible thing he says. To be radically unsuited to an Oxbridge professorship is scarcely something to be ashamed of. Indeed, these days, in my book, it is practically a badge of honor. There are plenty of decent jobs Arday might have found earlier on, more suited to his skill set, which would not have set him up for such public humiliation later. Yet — whatever pieties university managers spouted at the time of his appointments — ultimately, the real reason for his elevation was that they saw the symbolic benefit of his protected characteristics for themselves. Irrespective of the truth about his research techniques, it is obvious Arday is already being treated by Cambridge and other places as — quite literally — a useful idiot. His fairy tale is not yet over; but I think we can already identify some clear villains.

In the end, the trainee resigned, but Andrew’s problems are hardly over. For if modern British policing resembles a moth-eaten tapestry made up of many tawdry threads, one thread is surely the cohort of officers that joined after 2010. Old police hands have a tendency to unfairly decry new recruits. Yet recent blunders, from muddled reporting over Ann Widdecombe’s death to the anti-racism row over the Henry Nowak case, expose just how broken British law enforcement now is — not least when it comes to recruitment and training.

Interviewing insiders from forces across Britain, I unearthed a story of bad policy, craven leadership and chronic underinvestment. Yes, DEI can harm policing, but not necessarily in the way critics imagine. Because while the strictures of the Equality Act cause doubtless harm on the streets, it also means forces often spend as much time wet-nursing vulnerable recruits as they do catching criminals. Combined with a raft of other problems, from a shrinking talent pool to the continued scourge of discrimination, and the future of British law enforcement looks grim.

***

To understand how Andrew’s trainee could avoid over 95% of her duties, you must first understand the Equality Act. Passed in early 2010, as New Labour stumbled towards defeat that May, it bundled existing anti-discrimination law into a single piece of overarching, rocket-assisted legislation. By creating nine “protected characteristics” — from age to sex to disability — lawmakers dumped employers into a legal and procedural minefield. Forcing managers to constantly balance rights and responsibilities, the Act is riven by ambiguities, making it easy to exploit or misinterpret. Crucially, the police have no blanket exemption to any of this: every officer’s duties must be considered on a case-by-case basis. 

This creates maddening issues for police forces, especially given a seemingly insatiable appetite for what the Equality Act calls “reasonable adjustments”. Paul*, a recruiter for one Northern force, heard of a young officer who suffered from “hypersexuality” requesting an extra 30 minutes in the work day to “sort herself out”. She was refused. Most adjustments are more mundane, typically involving working from home or avoiding certain duties. 

Much of this dysfunction comes from the top. As one former staff officer puts it: “Senior officers? All they seem to talk about and care about, really, is DEI.” This is borne out if you tour the upper echelons of forces nationwide. During one specialist policing course, a visiting chief superintendent spoke of nothing but opening up opportunities for minorities. On the actual subject matter? Not a word. Initially, this enthusiasm was probably a function of ambition, with promotion linked to pushing DEI. Then came a cultural and generational shift as a more activist cohort of officers entered the top tier. 

It doesn’t help that police line managers complain of having decisions challenged by staff networks — representing ethnicity, religion and neurodiversity, among others — established to protect minority rights under the Equality Act. One instructor complains how “the prestige of being able to say we’ve recruited officers from this or that underrepresented group” trumps operational efficacy. This is exacerbated by endless excoriating reviews, contributing to a culture of tale-telling. Stations increasingly resemble schoolyards, bubbling with rights-based resentments. Officers allege discrimination to distract from poor performance. And managers find themselves engulfed in office feuds, when really their focus should be on fighting crime.

Beyond the vagaries of the Equality Act, Gen Z recruits do also seem more vulnerable. Andrew recalls one officer who had to leave a tape-recorded interview after a suspect began swearing at her. “I found her hiding in a cupboard with a blanket over her head.” By 2024, officers reportedly took 774,000 man-days off for mental health reasons. No wonder many sergeants and inspectors complain of becoming little more than HR officers with truncheons, occupational health advisors and therapists to Gen Z rookies. 

Before any of this, though, new coppers need training. Until the Equality Act, many would have been precluded from joining. Now, though, forces must now find a way of adapting to recruits with a range of physical and mental health issues — even as courses themselves are less rigorous than ever. 

***

Hendon Police College, stranded in an unglamorous corner of northwest London, was always ugly. When I trained there in the early Nineties, before going on to serve at the Met for a quarter of a century, it felt like a Soviet housing project. Now, with its rows of modern, yellow-topped classrooms, it resembles an Amazon fulfillment center. The old Hendon site was demolished in 2015, after doubling as the Eastern European country of “Sokovia” in an Avengers superhero movie. 

Back then, officers joked the real supervillain was Theresa May. As home secretary, May oversaw reforms responsible for today’s desiccated police service, not least in terms of cuts. Officers no longer attend costly residential training courses, instead commuting to training centers or universities. What was once a quasi-paramilitary model, complete with square-bashing and long hours, became a more congenial, “civilized” experience. 

Veteran officers believe the old model was better: it developed a sense of camaraderie and focus. More than that, it gave instructors far more insight into their charges. My own time at Hendon involved daily role-playing exercises involving negotiation, confrontation and exercising practical legal knowledge. On the “training roads” around the campus, knots of novice coppers acted out arrests, stopping cars, searching people, adjudicating disputes and taking statements. Our performance was dissected by the instructors, our failings explained firmly but fairly. It mattered, too, that until the residential training centers were closed in the early 2000s, trainers were all sergeants.

Now, though, this robust in-person training is increasingly replaced by distance learning. In practice, this means fewer practical demonstrations and more learning how to stop and search from an online questionnaire. This, Paul argues, creates “officers with little life experience, a superficial knowledge of the law, precious little knowledge of how to put a prosecution case file together, and [who] have to fill in their lack of knowledge with enthusiasm”. For their part, sergeants have been replaced by more junior PCs, cheaper to employ but who seem to be more “professional trainers” than practical officers. Paul adds that he’s heard training increasingly involves short days and “directed self-study”: a euphemism for unsupervised homework.

Instructors are themselves under pressure to keep costs down. Now retired, Alex* taught “student constables” in the South West of England. “Recruiting’s driven by accountancy mindsets,” he says. “This leads to corner cutting, kit shortages and no investment in training amenities.” This typically means swapping out resource-intensive roleplays for abstract lectures.

Given all this, officers are reluctant to attack the newbies too harshly. “The current set-up’s broken,” admits Liam*, who before his retirement trained direct-entry detectives for a Northern force. “I’m not blaming the recruits, it’s just the initial recruitment process is flawed. During Covid, the whole thing was done over Teams! How can anyone be accurately assessed over Teams?” 

Nor are recruits responsible for the way senior staff indulge the worst Whitehall predilections. Alex describes how health-and-safety legislation has led to “a regime terrified of any risk, leading to sterile and false training scenarios”. Officers are now unlikely to receive proper training to deal with aggressive suspects, let alone undergo scenarios where their partners deliberately lie. One only needs to glance at the Henry Nowak video to see the potential problems of this approach. 

***

My Hendon class, in 1992, consisted of 14 trainee constables. Two were from ethnic minorities and two were women. Aged between 22 and 46, our number included three graduates, a former bus driver, an insurance salesman and a retired army warrant officer. One colleague had memorably been a male model. If we weren’t wholly representative of Londoners, we were at least reasonably educated, in good health and level-headed. 

If initial training was doubtless better then, my interviewees also agree that the talent pool has shrunk. In part, that’s down to broad societal changes. Alex, the former instructor, cites the smaller armed forces, so fewer take that “well-trodden path” to the police. Alternative careers, from digital nomadism to IT apprenticeships, are also more available than in the early Nineties, offering better pay for less anti-social hours. 

This coincides with sea-changes in recruitment. Hoping to “professionalize” policing, policymakers encouraged would-be officers to pursue degree training alongside a nursing-style license to practice. Significant pay cuts arrived too, meaning new recruits are generally younger and less experienced. Like Andrew’s ex-colleague, people can also now join as “direct-entry” detectives, missing out on the two years of beat experience older officers insist is key to becoming an investigator. This route is particularly popular among middle-class recruits, whole are less suited to dealing with the ugly realities of Britain’s criminal class. 

But perhaps most significant is the 2020 change which allows 17-and-a-half-year-olds to sign up. Some of these younger officers, I’m told, come from challenging backgrounds. Their life experience and education is significantly different from officers of my generation: and generally for the worse. Their relative youth, Alex explains, also means “they’re learning so much, so quickly, and are so unprepared, that they struggle”. 

Yet it’s hard, here, not to return to the Equality Act. Paul tells me about one new officer with cerebral palsy, who secured reasonable adjustments despite being unable to pass the personal-safety training where recruits learn to use handcuffs and CS spray. Another newbie, a direct-entry DC, failed the same course because of dyspraxia so severe he kept dropping his baton. Apart from tolerating candidates physically unable to perform basic duties, forces are also required to cater to pre-existing psychological issues. Despite holding generally “progressive views” — and suggesting the emphasis on the racial aspect of DEI training was over-egged — Paul nonetheless despairs at the consequences. “What victim cares that the new PC is anxious or has debilitating dyslexia?” 

As in policing at large, attempts to challenge the status quo are given short shrift, with managers keen not to rock the DEI boat. Alex, the former recruit instructor, says “the tone set is one that says ‘we’ll support your decision, just as long as it’s not contentious or difficult.’ The fear culture arises out of a combination of factors, ranging from the diversity industry; a promotion system that’s all about group think; and selfish ambition.” 

Alex’s experiences chime with my own service. By the time I retired, in 2018, the Met felt like North Korea — run by David Brent. I remember enduring computer-based DEI training claiming that telling sexist jokes was only a few steps from genocide. No wonder supervisors struggle to manage new recruits. “There’s a fear of doing anything informally at any level,” Alex says. “Now it’s just ‘pass the buck’ straight to [professional standards] for any level of allegation regardless of how minor or frankly daft it may be.” 

The new police training regime is supposedly built of good intentions. The irony, though, is that if it allows nice if unsuited candidates too much leeway, this system also does little to stem the flow of genuinely malicious recruits. There are plenty of examples here, from David Carrick to Cliff Mitchell, with the usual blend of cuts and remote work partly to blame. Wayne Couzens, too, dodged recruitment vetting before going on to murder Sarah Everard, while cuts to training meant he was enthusiastically received into the Met on account of the firearms skills he’d acquired in the Civil Nuclear Constabulary. 

***

After marching off Hendon’s parade square, I was posted to a West London police station. There, along with three others, I went through the final stage of my training — being “puppy-walked” for 12 weeks by a sweaty old sergeant and three tutor constables. It was made clear that, should I be found wanting, I’d be dismissed from the Met. The tutors were patient, but happily issued bollockings where appropriate. There were fines — 50p here, a pound there — for stupid mistakes, the proceeds going towards an end-of-course drink. Meanwhile, my first arrest was closely supervised and mentored until the arrestee was bailed. I felt confident and supported throughout. 

These days, though, quality control is infinitely harder — and the Equality Act is again partly to blame. “You can’t get rid of people unless they use hurty words,” says Andrew, the Met DS. “There was one uniformed officer playing the diversity game like a pro; she’s got every protected characteristic and a portfolio of reasonable adjustments. She’s bagged an office job and hasn’t been on the street for years. I mean, she can’t even meet the public or leave the building unless she’s working from home. As far as I can see, she does very little.” Not just her: thousands of Met officers aren’t “fully deployable” because of their health or performance. All the while, officers are stoutly defended by the ever-present support networks; for the feckless and shameless, it’s a license to take liberties. “Nobody ever challenged this officer,” Andrew adds of her colleague. “Then she boasted about the PIP payments she was claiming. Talking about it makes my blood boil.”

These problems are compounded by questionable mentoring practices, especially when rookies are now led by colleagues who faced similar training. More than a few crack under pressure. Over the past five years, forces reported up to a 19% attrition rate from new-officer resignations, unsurprising when policing was recently described as “one of the most complex frontline positions in the public sector”. It’s hard to disagree, particularly when any error is soon plastered on social media. Forces, keen to atone for previous scandals, adopted zero-tolerance professional standards policies. Yet in another irony, this means that officers most prepared to get involved in operational policing are also those most likely to be disciplined. Many fear being “chucked under buses” for making mistakes, even in good faith. At a time when we desperately need more mature, experienced officers, we appear to be traveling in the opposite direction.

Nor is any of this theoretical. The recruitment, training and mentoring regime I’ve laid out here was responsible for producing the officers involved in the Nowak case. Hampshire and Isle of Wight Constabulary, the force in question, ceased residential training in 2006. After watching footage of the incident, I fully agreed with Jonathan Hinder, a former police inspector and now a Labour MP, who said the decision to handcuff the dying Nowak was “unfathomable”. But frankly, was it really, given how officers are now recruited and trained? 

***

Amid these horrors, and polls showing less than half the public trust the police to deal fairly with complaints, can forces really change? There are some tentative signs that they can — at least beyond London. As Paul puts it of his Northern force, “the current regime does produce officers who are smartly turned-out and have a healthy respect for rank.” More than that, Paul says his colleagues would balk at the more absurd consequences of the Equality Act. “We wouldn’t dispute such a diagnosis,” he says when I ask him about that “hypersexual” young officer, “but wouldn’t support 30 minutes wanking time either.” This pragmatism is borne out elsewhere, with Sir Stephen Watson, the head of Greater Manchester Police, coming out strongly against rainbow lanyards and dancing with protesters. 

The reasons for these regional differences remain relatively unexplored. Yet Sir Stephen’s trenchant attitude — and my conversations with officers — suggest that the mood music from police headquarters percolates downwards. This only works, though, if chief constables feel supported by their bosses. It seems unlikely that Sadiq Khan will champion a campaign of common sense in the Met anytime soon.

All the same, it’s striking that even London’s famously progressive force is shifting. The service recently introduced a scorched-earth policy for “adjusted duties” officers. It’s a sign, perhaps, that managers are waking up to the disasters they’ve wrought. Yet even here, Andrew believes that the belated fightback is partly because the Met still doesn’t have the courage to back its managers. “The Met’s terrified of being sued for discrimination,” she explains, “so it decided to treat everyone equally badly.” The upshot? Well-performing staff with genuine health problems face six-monthly moves to other departments, a process one officer describes as “a stealthy form of constructive dismissal”. 

I asked the Met to comment on this and other issues raised in my story. It declined. All the while, British policing seems happy pursuing policies that are meat and drink to its critics. For example, the Telegraph recently reported that trainees are instructed to write essays “reflecting on antiracism”. Hopefully the investigation into Henry Nowak’s death will delve into the reasoning behind this ideological focus, as important as managing fractious crime scenes doubtless is too. 

Fail and the public will only keep suffering, as fantasies of inclusion collide with the brick wall of reality. Andrew, now nearing retirement, shakes his head. “It’s the Met all over. They lowered standards for diversity reasons and to hell with the consequences — until it bit them on the arse.” Of course, that doesn’t stop chief officers from insisting they’ve built inclusive forces, staffed by properly selected, well-trained constables. Politicians offer specious announcements around funding and officer numbers, claiming to support forces in keeping the streets safe. As Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood said in January, “I’m putting police back where they belong — on the beat and fighting criminals.” To which the public is presumably entitled to reply, like the officer who handcuffed Henry Nowak, “I don’t think you have, mate”.

***

*Names have been changed.

Citing her proven record of “fighting against identity politics on the Left” during the madness of the George Floyd era, the Conservative leader vowed that her party would do the same again against racialized messages from Farage, or those to the Right of him. “The answer to Black Lives Matter is not a White Lives Matter born of the same racial grievance,” she argued. “We will not defeat identity politics by building a mirror-image of it.”

Even as she said this, news was starting to circulate about the attempted beheading of Stephen Ogilvie in Belfast, by Sudanese migrant Hadi Alodid, with a wave of anti-immigrant violence quickly following. The unfolding of this awful situation has only made Badenoch’s proposed Hegelian maneuver — from “Black Lives Matter”  to “White Lives Matter” to the comfortingly non-specific synthesis “Everyone Matters” — look more attractive, and especially to those of us keen to avoid a civil war in the near future.

Meanwhile, her suggested method for rooting out identity politics from the public sphere is a further example of a channel run — in the Old Trafford sense, rather than the Calais one. The colorless legalese of the 2010 Equality Act remains, for Keir Starmer, a sacred text, offering the closest thing to a positive articulation of British values he is willing to provide. Reform has said it would get rid of the Act altogether, claiming it causes unfair discrimination against white people. No doubt anticipating voter unease at wholesale destruction of anti-discrimination law without a clear sense of what would replace it, Badenoch says she wants to ditch only a single part: the Public Sector Equality Duty (PSED). She therefore gets to look impressively decisive relative to Starmer, and reassuringly humane relative to Farage.

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In overview, the PSED forces public bodies to have proactive, anticipatory “due regard” to three areas: ending unlawful discrimination, advancing equal opportunities for those with protected characteristics, and fostering good relations between protected and non-protected groups. As was drily pointed out in the legal opinion accompanying Badenoch’s speech, there is a tension between these last two objectives that perhaps should have been anticipated at the time of drafting. Artificially boosting the chances of some groups over others, it turns out, tends not to be conducive to close social harmony, and perhaps especially not when it is done in the name of equality.

But according to Badenoch, the biggest problem with the duty is that it distracts public bodies from their core functions, sometimes with deadly results. With the horrific image of Henry Nowak’s dying moments in handcuffs weighing heavily on many minds, she reminded her audience of other high-profile cases where the threat of perceived racism had probably or definitely got in the way of effective action. These included the Manchester arena bombing; the Stockport and Nottingham murders; and rape-gang activity up and down the country. Whether or not the PSED was a direct causal factor in these failures is difficult to establish, but Badenoch is surely right that that its presence on the scene didn’t help.

Though, in theory, the duty doesn’t mandate any particular outcome, in practice it has allowed DEI professionals and external bodies to run amok in the public sector, feeding managers legally illiterate lines while making it punitive for wiser employees to dissent. When the National Police Chief’s Council offers a training session which confidently announces that an anti-racist stance “does not mean treating everyone ‘the same’ or being ‘color blind’”, you can be sure that serving officers didn’t come up with that stuff on their own. The result of the embedding of such context-free platitudes seems to be enhanced opportunities for minority stabbers, rapers, and bombers, and an end to all opportunities for their unfortunate victims.

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Something has obviously gone very wrong. Badenoch, writing in The Sunday Times, has lamented the loss of “common sense” from institutions, replaced by “box-ticking” and “bad frameworks” from outside, adding that “you can’t write common sense down in a policy manual, it is about judgment”. Assuming she is talking about specialist skills, honed on the job through repeated experience, she is absolutely right, echoing a venerable philosophical distinction between “knowing-how” (which can’t be got through book learning alone) and “knowing-that” (which can). Incredibly, a lot of DEI professionals these days appear to lack both. Still, it is interesting to note that in the early days of the Equality Act, various optimists imagined that the PSED would be a boon to good judgment and common sense at the local level, rather than an obstacle.

When first introduced, the duty was framed by some academics as an example of an admirably “reflexive” law, contrasted with heavy-handed regulatory approaches that specify certain outcomes as mandatory. With its vague requirement that bodies show “due regard” to equality considerations, but not that actions be determined in a particular direction, the PSED was supposed — as one commentator put it in 2012 — to defer “to the expertise and local knowledge of the decision-maker rather than imposing prescribed solutions”. Roughly, the idea was that, in making an important decision, a public body would first have to gather a lot of information about how something called “equality” might be affected — detailed data, predictions about possible outcomes, views of stakeholders, and so on — and then seriously consider all of this material in deciding how to proceed. The consideration process would also have to be documented.

If this is the most the PSED had ever amounted to, then though it would have been cumbersome, it would also have been quite useful, encouraging organizations to notice the consequences of their choices for certain local groups. But since cold, hard facts don’t determine values or actions, it seems that those in charge could not leave matters there. Additionally, a top-down layer of pressure was introduced, to prioritize certain progressive values wherever possible. While it remained true that no particular outcomes were mandated at a fine-grained level, it was clear that bodies were supposed to favor a certain kind of decision. And quite bizarrely, the kind of decision in question was defined by being directed at social injustices writ large.

This is evident from the EHRC’s description of the purpose of the PSED as “to make sure that public authorities and organizations… think about how they can improve society and promote equality in every aspect of their day-to-day business”. Improving society is obviously quite a big task. It is even more obvious from the Conservative government’s 2023 guidance, including its advice about how organizations might formulate their equality objectives; namely, to “try not to rely on basic, internal goals like diversity training instead of ambitious, customer-facing goals like closing the educational disadvantage gap in schools or fixing big imbalances in participation in technical industries”.

In other words: alongside the usual, already highly demanding day jobs, managers in the NHS, social services, police, judiciary, and education (etc) now had to work out what that elusive philosophical value, “equality”, looked like — not just nearby, but also at a national level — and then pursue that too, wherever practicable. Suddenly faced with the sort of intellectual problem that frequently makes its way onto philosophy exam papers at university, it is scarcely surprising most organizations felt the need to bring in some kind of outside help.

And nor is it surprising that so many public servants ended up treating evidence of different outcomes as evidence of disadvantage, presumed to be the result of background discrimination. For it is an extremely complicated matter to reconstruct the causal routes that explain differences in outcome between sexes, races, or sexual orientations, for instance — not to mention reputationally dangerous to discuss in polite society. It is so much easier to assume prejudice as the uniform cause, then make some clumsy adjustment, supposedly in the name of a fairer society overall.

So Badenoch is correct that the PSED has resulted in distraction from core institutional functions, despite — or perhaps even because of — its non-committal and vague wording. Thanks to the implied demand to think about addressing society-wide problems, spelled out in various bits of guidance, the traditional direction of focus for crucial public services has been altered, moving away from the present and the local toward the absent and the abstract. Instead of just concentrating on what is best for the people in front of you here and now, applying the specialist expertise you have gained as a professional, you are simultaneously supposed to treat these people as units in a much bigger national calculation. Quite apart from the ludicrously hubristic idea that — for instance — failing to section this particular black man in Nottingham will do something meaningful to shift country-wide patterns — the extra mental effort and attentional split is bound to result in misjudgments and blindspots. And that’s presumably how you get a police officer chummily saying, “I don’t think you have, mate”, in response to a young white man dying in front of him, describing how he’s just been stabbed by a Sikh.

That philosophy has a marginal role, even in the academy, is undoubtedly true in the West. But After Virtue doesn’t just examine what MacIntyre saw as the exhausted political traditions and moral confusions of liberal individualist Western societies. It also tries to offer an alternative, grounded in an idea of human essence and purpose, of the good life, inherited from the philosophy of Aristotle and largely, as MacIntyre saw it, abandoned.

In other words, in this book, MacIntyre is trying to change the world. He does so in a way that has particular resonance today, even a year after his death. His endeavor, in After Virtue, is to push humanity in a different direction — sometimes referred to as a “post-liberal” one — and, in a sense, to go backwards, to recover something lost through the turn to Protestantism and Jansenist Catholicism. You don’t find much that even vaguely resembles this in modern philosophy, characterized as it is largely by pedantic quibbling and unreadable obscurantism.

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The critique that MacIntyre presents also informs his alternative. He argues that Western mankind became morally homeless by abandoning the foundations of Aristotelian morality in community and arete — excellence in one’s work. This Aristotelian morality does still live on, but only as a sort of remnant, being found for example in distaste for “dysfunctional” individuals or institutions which fail to serve any useful purpose. But it rarely carries the day.

Its abandonment exposes us to the claims of untutored human nature, for which there are no ethics, no enduring standards and little conception of  excellence in and of itself. In this context, other types of moral assertion tend to prevail, generally based around ideas of equality and equity which tend to be suspicious of achievement. But these moral assertions often seem inappropriate — rewarding dysfunctional and even illegal behaviors.

One example would be the current arguments surrounding illegal migration in Britain. Our moral discussions on such topics typically go around in circles of assertion and counter-assertion. The state and other conforming institutions try to enforce a consensus, invoking Christian-style moral sentiments  like “kindness” and “compassion”. But these attempts don’t convince — and indeed, often appear to be attacks on other kinds of moral sentiment, say, based on ideas of deserving versus not-deserving. Meanwhile we find the “harm” of John Stuart Mill’s “harm principle” — that individuals should be free to act just as long as they don’t harm others —  expanded and exploited. Anything disliked is asserted to be harmful, thereby turning the harm principle into a rationale for preventing freedom when in fact, it was meant to facilitate it.

There is an unreality to a lot of this cod-Christian, equity-centered moral assertion and its opposition. Both appear disconnected: sometimes futile; sometimes open to exploitation by the powerful. Moral statements about right and wrong still project moral passion. But the aims and ambitions those passions embody die on contact with the real world. Immigration activists preach compassion to refugees, but the migrants they seek to help hardly meet a compassionate world, trapped as they are between bureaucracy on the one hand and criminal gangs on the other. Those who wish to “Stop the Boats” meanwhile find themselves talking into a void. MacIntyre says: “We possess indeed simulacra of morality, we continue to use many of the key expressions. But we have — very largely, if not entirely — lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, of morality.” Nothing works, nothing improves — and our divisions embed themselves more and more over time.

MacIntyre suggests that the government’s inability to express a moral consensus makes patriotism, which he sees as a virtue, no longer possible like it once was. Western governments appear merely as means to impose “a bureaucratized unity on society”. As a result, they struggle to mobilize collective commitment. The nature of political obligation itself “becomes systematically unclear.”

Our customary way out of this state of confusion is to fall into a pervading cynicism, MacIntyre tells us, reflexively dismissing moral statements from others as mere projections of self-interest. This cynicism gathers itself into a theoretical approach that he called “emotivism” and which sees self-serving, arbitrary motives behind others’ moral utterances, exposing the very idea of morality to routine denunciations of hypocrisy.

MacIntyre saw emotivism in everyone from Evangelicals to the Bloomsbury Group, Sartre and Nietzsche, and the liberal rights theorist John Rawls. Freud’s “superego” is another example. This conceptualizes an arbitrary, irrational eye of society that controls our actions via conscience, preventing us from being free. Emotivism coheres into a reflexive refutation of inherited morality, treating existing social bonds as oppressive. But the alternative it presents, of self-realization — the individual creating their own values — only leads us into more confusion as individual examples are unmasked in turn and rejected. And so we go around again, propelling ourselves into a brighter future only to refute it.

As MacIntyre presents it in After Virtue, emotivism is the dominant philosophical standpoint of our times. As with previous moral worldviews, it finds itself embodied through characters who morally legitimize certain forms of behavior. While in past times the public school schoolmaster, explorer and engineer furnished such ideals, MacIntyre says, nowadays the function of emotivism is fulfilled by the archetypes of the rich aesthete, the bureaucratic expert, the therapist and the protestor.

We might think of DEI as a sort of culmination of the emotivist spirit. For it is demonstrative and assertive, placing all wrongness outside itself and the groups it sponsors. It operates very much in the moral register. And it brings at least three of those archetypes together: wielding expert authority via the law-like generalizations of critical social science; protesting against the oppressive existing reality decreed by this science; and prescribing the overturning of existing functional society in order to fix it.

For the emotivist, MacIntyre says, moral agency is located “in the self and not in social roles or practices.” That individual self can pass judgment on the world — and can freely reject it. The emotivist perspective is universal and abstract and protected from criticism. It is apart from the world — at least until it starts to shape the world itself, at which point it finds itself assailed variously for cynicism and hypocrisy. And so we go around again.

MacIntyre’s alternative, Aristotelian, version of morality seems strange and counter-intuitive to the Western individualist mind. Bound up in social roles and the work we do, it does not exist in a walled-off individual self. It is not purely our own. MacIntyre uses the example of a sea-captain to justify it, showing that, in his role, the sea-captain should do whatever good sea-captains do. At least some moral agency is to be found in him being functionally effective in his work rather than in some sort of inner essence of goodness.

MacIntyre uses the idea of the “practice” to articulate this perspective further, explaining it as a “coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized”. In this sense, kicking a football isn’t a practice, but the game of football is. Planting turnips isn’t, but farming is. Bricklaying isn’t, but architecture or housebuilding is. To enter into a practice is “to subject my own attitudes, choices, preferences and tastes to the standards which currently and partially define the practice” — standards which change over time through a continuous process of critique and improvement. Painting and music qualify, since they are long-term traditions with standards that evolve over time; so does academic work like physics, chemistry and the study and teaching of history.

There is contrast here with our conventional utilitarian way of seeing things, for which the point of work is to achieve external goods — that is, work as a means for achieving separate ends. MacIntyre doesn’t dismiss such things, but focuses also on the “internal” goods of the practice, on maintaining and extending standards, which in turn requires the presence of virtues like justice, courage and honesty. For this perspective, your moral essence is to be found not in statement-making nor in abstract ideas about who you are, but rather attached to what you do — and whether this reflects the virtues of the practice. In this view, a sea-captain is no more virtuous for striving to ensure his crew is diverse.

The virtues help protect the integrity of practices against the acquisitiveness of institutions. But practices require institutions to protect and nurture them. When we consider the decline of institutions like the Civil Service and BBC, we might see it in MacIntyre’s framing, as reflecting a discarding of the virtues in favor of a sort of moralistic self-promotion.

Is there a possible political philosophy in all of this?

John Gray, perhaps our greatest current political philosopher, dismissed After Virtue in a New Statesman article soon after MacIntyre’s death a year ago, suggesting that, as “an avowed critique of the modern world”, it offered little useful guidance for modern urban-industrial societies. “Reading the book when it first appeared in 1981, I was struck by its political thinness,” he said.

This seems unfair. MacIntyre’s account of virtues and practices applies to modern industrial societies as much as any other society, embracing as it does science and improvement as part of a continual process of criticism and critique. Gray’s account, accusing MacIntyre of “pursuing an imaginary prelapsarian idyll”, appears to be at least partly influenced by a torrid four-hour exchange they once had in an Oxford college garden.

I, at least, found the book to be original and refreshing. It also offers a contrast to the reflexive pessimism that Gray falls into. It taps into our confusion about morality. But it also offers an alternative, and strangely practical vision, based on a deeper, more meaningful conception of work. Under MacIntyre’s idea of practices, work is essential to human flourishing, giving us meaning and purpose, a role and status in our community, something we can be expert in and work to improve. This emerges as a different way of looking at morality, assigning moral value away from judgment-making and towards making a contribution through our actions.

There is plenty to question about this vision. Applying such an idea to the low-paid drudgery of much work is not straightforward. But giving extra substance and recognition to work that is “socially useful”, in Mervyn King’s phrase, like street cleaning and caring for the elderly, is surely well within the bounds of our imagination.

It is also easy to imagine “practices” being employed to prop up unjust and oppressive regimes. But on the other side, you could argue that the integration of practices into the workplace could be transformative in a good way, infusing both capitalism and the state with a new spirit, infused with the virtues. There is hope here, possibility, surely a sine qua non for any democratic politics.

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Alasdair MacIntyre: virtuous outsider

By Terry Eagleton

In a postscript included in a later edition of After Virtue, MacIntyre admitted that the book’s argument is underpowered in certain aspects. Its confrontation with modern moral confusions is certainly limited, having little to say about sexual morality for example.

The book’s value can be found precisely in application. MacIntyre’s analysis offers both critique of what has gone wrong and a route back to what may be made right again. Under his framing, such things as media production, academia, housebuilding and architecture, town planning, war-fighting, crime-fighting, public cleanliness and sport might all be thought of as practices to which standards of excellence apply over and above the assertion of moral supremacy. Certainly, the idea of practices runs counter to the promotion of self that we find so widespread in institutional life nowadays, which divert attention and resources away from delivery.

Indeed, far from being politically thin, After Virtue appears to open up a deep and rich seam of applications. As an account of work, it applies equally to public and private sectors. And, encompassing these two sometimes antagonistic sectors, it might just confer on us a practical theory of state and society: a political philosophy, requiring collective political action to implement in all areas where work matters. It ought to be an ideal prompt for the think-tank world.

Voters in favor of such changes have been supportive as politicians in red states give speeches against local universities, legislators circulate viral clips denouncing campus ideology, and college presidents suffer ritual humiliation when called to explain what, exactly, happens in an Office of Inclusive Excellence. These voters imagine their representatives are putting an end to biased hiring practices, shutting down alienating classroom polemics, and making campuses safe for conservative speech. 

The reality, however, is much more complex. The opponents of DEI have weaponized regulation and are creating a Pandora’s box of tools that can be used and reused by successive administrations — all to the detriment of higher education. 

A look at new state-level bills being enacted — the certification language, the reporting dates, the audit authority, the clauses decreeing that money may be withheld and not later restored — reveals much more than the substitution of one ideology for another. Instead, we are seeing the establishment of a new system of governance. It is much bigger than DEI and the current political moment. 

Ohio is the clearest place to witness the shift, because the state has already moved beyond messaging into the mechanics of enforcement. Gov. Mike DeWine signed Senate Bill 1, the “Advance Ohio Higher Education Act,” into law on March 28, 2025. The statute bars public institutions from establishing or continuing DEI offices; prohibits DEI training and orientation except in narrow circumstances; forbids institutions from recreating the same functions under another label; restricts universities from stating official positions on “controversial belief or policy”; and requires a three-credit course in American civic literacy. The law took effect last June.

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One issue is the law’s vagueness, which masks matters of fundamental importance. What is a “controversial belief or policy,” and what is the curriculum of the new required course in “American Civic Liberty,” and who gets to decide? In the usual functioning of universities, faculty would, for better or for worse. But under Ohio’s law, politicians — with few if any qualifications — will be empowered to reject curriculum. 

Universities will have no metrics by which to judge their own compliance and will operate under constant surveillance. Any student could report any faculty member to the state at any time: an enlargement and statewide codification of a DEI measure in place at some universities, except now in the opposite ideological direction. It is nigh impossible for any teacher to uphold a requirement to stay within unknown bounds on any “controversial belief or policy” as judged by any student. The rule is bound to severely impact teaching.

Moreover, under existing arrangements, faculty have already been rigorously reviewed by their peers; their courses are also peer-reviewed; and universities receive extensive and serious peer-review through national and state accreditors, plus discipline-specific reviews. It isn’t a perfect system, but it is a system nonetheless, and could help address student concerns, if that is the desire. Instead, in order to correct one perceived problem, the state has instituted a new system that will destroy student-faculty relations and drain the coursework of meaningful content: essentially, each student will be dragooned as a potential informant on professors, who will have a strong incentive to steer clear of any controversial topic (Proust and homosexuality? Foucault’s diagnosis of power-knowledge? Aristotle on natural slavery?).

And this system will have teeth. Consider the Ohio bill now following behind Bill SB1. House Bill 698, introduced in February, would require each public institution to annually certify that it is complying with the statutory obligations created by SB 1. Beginning in fiscal year 2028, if an institution fails to submit that certification, the state university chancellor “shall withhold” the university’s share of a designated set-aside of funds that pay for classes. If a certification is found to be “recklessly false or fraudulent,” the chancellor may withhold the entire share. More striking still, the bill says withheld funds might not later be released even if the institution comes into compliance. Meaning, even if the errors are minor and corrected quickly, the instructional funds withheld might be lost forever. The state has built a lever and attached it to an essential revenue stream.

HB 698 is invasive in another way, too. The bill would require institutions to produce a public inventory of employees who, on Jan. 1, 2025, had DEI-related duties and were reassigned by Sept. 25, 2025. Universities would have to identify those employees by name, list their former and new titles, describe old and new duties, detail compensation changes, and provide a justification report explaining why the reassignment complied with the law. The president and board chair would have to certify that report. The bill aims to prevent universities from renaming, relocating, and redistributing functions, and it is designed to catch them doing so. This is understandable from the perspective of lawmakers but represents an unprecedented penetration of the state into granular aspects of university life — where it will have new abilities to impose political ideology. 

Such changes on local campuses are the first consequences of the new administrative order. At the University of Cincinnati, the implementation page simply states that “all four” identity centers have closed. Another university page says the central equity and inclusion office has also closed. At Ohio State, cultural and awareness observances — such as Black History Month, Women’s History Month, Pride Month, Juneteenth — may continue, the university says, but administrative support is permitted only under certain conditions, and funding can only be sourced from donations or gifts to the university. The university also says that it has paused communications that move beyond recognizing such occasions while it reviews the law’s restrictions on institutional statements.

This represents a transfer of authority inside the institution: the center of gravity is moving away from the administrator, the faculty committee, the dean’s meeting, and the campus debate, and toward general counsel, compliance staff, HR, and whichever office must eventually certify to the state that the university has obeyed. Lawyers become the curators of permissible language. Budget officials become interpreters of ideological risk. These laws do not simply ban. They reorganize decision rights. The change will also require the hiring of another layer of administrators to ensure institutional compliance, which will further constrain university budgets and siphon money away from student instruction.

The money matters because Ohio’s State Share of Instruction fund, which underwrites teaching, is not a decorative line in the budget — it is the core public subsidy for public higher education. SSI was funded at about $2.16 billion in fiscal year 2026 and $2.18 billion in fiscal year 2027. The Ohio Legislative Service Commission’s analysis of HB 698 says the state budget has already set aside $75 million of SSI funds (intended to support student instruction) for fiscal year 2027 to be distributed under the bill’s compliance framework (meaning the funds will go toward compliance mechanisms). One does not need to know the precise exposure of every campus to see the point. We can only expect the share of funds diverted toward compliance to grow. 

In Iowa, this logic has moved beyond public universities. There, House File 2488, passed by the state house on Feb. 24, 2026, but not yet law, would apply not just to state institutions but to private colleges, as well, if they participate in the Iowa Tuition Grant program — which is to say, almost all of them. The bill would prohibit participating private institutions from establishing, sustaining, supporting, or staffing DEI offices or doing DEI work, with some carve outs.

Similar to the design in other states, under the Iowa bill, any person may report a suspected violation on any college campus to the attorney general. The attorney general must notify the institution and the state department of education within 15 days. The institution then gets 30 days either to  prove it has fixed the matter or persuade the attorney general that no violation occurred. If it fails, it becomes ineligible for the Iowa Tuition Grant program beginning with the next academic year. 

Texas offers a preview of where such initiatives tend to end up. The Texas State Auditor’s Office issued the first required higher-education audit under that state’s DEI restrictions in February 2025. The auditor reviewed the Texas A&M University System’s 20 components and five community colleges. Most entities were found compliant, but the audit still flagged Texas A&M University-Central Texas over contract language and McLennan Community College over an employee training video. The findings themselves were small. The institutional meaning was not. Once the state creates auditable categories, someone eventually begins checking contracts, websites, trainings, handbooks, and organizational charts against them. To combat this, universities will need to hire their own internal policing and compliance staff.

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By Jacob Siegel

That is why the present moment can’t be understood simply as a dispute over whether DEI offices had become too large, too jargon-heavy, or too detached from the core educational mission — though they plainly had. They expanded carelessly. They confused student support with progressive catechism. They made themselves vulnerable through mandatory trainings whose claims outran their evidence and whose language alienated even sympathetic audiences. When anti-DEI clips go viral and red-state politicians grandstand, most audiences (though too few academics) can see exactly what the problem is. 

To admit all this, however, is not to concede the larger point. The danger, which is being hidden by the cultural unpopularity of DEI on the Right and the adoption of new, more pressing causes on the Left, is that state governments are building a reusable apparatus for directing universities through appropriations, attestations, complaint systems, public reporting, and audit authority.

Today, the target is DEI. It will not stay there. Once the mechanism exists, it can be turned toward rules governing anything. The state need not relitigate the culture war each time. It need only redefine the category, set the reporting date, and threaten the funding. For some states, this would require revision of the law; in others, the laws are vague enough that any administrative interpretation could set a yo-yo in motion. 

Universities still tell stories about themselves that belong to an older age. They imagine governance as a matter of argument: faculty debate, committee process, a report circulated for comment, a meeting running long in a room with bad carpeting and weak coffee. That world has not vanished, but it is no longer where power most decisively sits. Under this new dispensation, power lies with the office that certifies compliance, the official who can trigger an inquiry, the auditor who can define a violation, and the budget language that quietly waits for someone to miss a deadline.

The new university leash is not a slogan. It is not even, in the end, an idea. It is a system of control to be yanked by anyone who holds the leash. And it tugs whether anyone is persuaded or not. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That moment, captured on video and shared with the world, changed the country. Whatever debates linger about the precise medical cause of Floyd’s death, we all saw what happened: a man’s life ebbing away beneath the knee of an officer sworn to protect and serve. The immediate reaction focused on the alleged racial dynamics at work: white cop, black victim. 

But was this a racial incident? Or were we just making it one? And what happens when the world ceases to recognize the difference?  

The outrage was instant, visceral, and — to a point — understandable. But what struck me then, and still troubles me now, was the totalizing confidence with which commentators, politicians, and activists announced their verdict: George Floyd was murdered because he was black. The phrase “racist cop” became redundant. The nation’s moral diagnosis was rendered before the autopsy had even commenced. 

The moral panic that followed Floyd’s death imposed a set of demands on the country at large, but specifically on white Americans: acknowledge the nation’s past and ongoing crimes against African Americans; either submit to “antiracist” reeducation or admit to complicity with America’s ubiquitous white supremacy; accept that whiteness itself confers ineradicable social privilege (regardless of one’s actual social position); acquiesce to biased policies that compromise meritocratic selection processes; and, above all, do not voice any objections. 

I worried that white Americans who resented the imposition of these unworkable demands would revolt against them. I worried that a backlash would ensue, and that black Americans, and blackness itself, would bear the brunt of it. And now, five years later, racial politics in the United States have reached an inflection point, and the future of black America hangs in the balance.

The summer of 2020 witnessed the largest protest movement in US history. Millions of people — young and old, white and black, urban and rural — flooded the streets to proclaim that Black Lives Matter. Their anger was not limited to Floyd’s death. They invoked a roll call of tragedies: Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Freddie Gray, Ahmaud Arbery, Walter Scott. The litany of the dead took on a universal symbolic meaning that outstripped the evidence: this is what happens to black men in America, because of their race. 

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By Glenn Loury

However, there was something else animating those demonstrations. After months of confinement during the pandemic, Americans were restless and afraid. Many had lost jobs, loved ones, or simply faith in the institutions that governed their lives. The protests became, in part, a national exorcism — a chance to affirm one’s moral standing in a world turned upside down.

The protests were not entirely baseless. The research of economist Roland Fryer had shown that police use of non-lethal force was indeed more frequent against black suspects than white ones. Yet the movement’s rhetoric quickly escalated to the metaphysical. Protesters called for abolition: of the police, of prisons, of “whiteness” itself. What had begun as a demand for reform metastasized into a crusade against a civilization. Reminders of the great achievements of that civilization — the enshrinement of the rights of free expression and protest, the abolition of slavery, the expansion of full citizenship to all Americans regardless of color, and so on — fell on deaf ears.

This escalation did not come out of thin air. For years, the intellectual soil had been fertilized by theories — not least, Critical Race Theory — that framed America as a systemically racist project whose every structure was implicated in white supremacy. By 2020, these ideas had migrated from the academy into the bloodstream of our public life. Politicians mouthed the movement’s slogans, often without understanding their implications. 

Whiteness came to animate even seemingly innocuous institutions and cultural practices, inhabit our speech and thoughts, and possess our history. “Systemic racism” became a liturgical phrase that purported to explain every racial disparity. Corporate executives and elected officials at every level knelt in performative penitence. Schools rewrote curricula to emphasize racial oppression as the organizing principle of the republic.

Many of those who embraced this rhetoric did so cynically — seeking votes, donations, or absolution. Others were simply afraid. Either way, the effect was the same: moral panic masquerading as social criticism. That era’s stunts — the BLM signs in storefront windows, the black avatars on social-media accounts, the demands to “take a knee” at public events, the untold millions spent on struggle sessions at corporate retreats — look in retrospect like embarrassing, panicked attempts to preempt accusations of racism, that did nothing about inequality in the end.  

The irony is that the people most harmed were the black Americans in whose name this theater was performed. Calls to “defund the police” produced predictable results: officers pulled back from proactive policing. Fryer’s later research documented what followed — rising homicide rates that disproportionately victimized black residents. To those proclaiming that Black Lives Matter, the black lives themselves were apparently beside the point. Meanwhile, resentment grew in those who disagreed with these self-conscious displays of faux-solidarity, but feared the consequences of saying so.

I feared this outcome from the start. What worried me most was not that the Black Lives Matter movement would succeed in “abolishing” anything, but that it would provoke a furious reaction. And so it has. 

When people are compelled to mouth pieties they do not believe — when they must sit through hours of racial-sensitivity trainings, nodding along to theories that brand them as beneficiaries of invisible systems of guilt — resentment festers. Such “spirals of silence,” to borrow a phrase from political scientist Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, are unstable. They end abruptly, when someone decides to call the bluff. That moment arrived, in part, with Donald Trump.

Trump’s 2020 campaign drew strength from the backlash against progressive overreach. He presented himself as the tribune of the silenced, the man who would say aloud what others only whispered. His supporters were not, for the most part, the caricatured racists of media imagination. They were, in the main, ordinary Americans who felt unjustly accused — white citizens born long after Jim Crow, bewildered at being told that their country and their color made them complicit in murder, and angry at the institutions that, they felt, abetted their exclusion from respectability and honor.

The reactionary energies unleashed by that resentment have not yet subsided. We see them today in the rollback of affirmative action, the shuttering of diversity offices, and the rise of aggressive “anti-woke” politics. Granted, some of these developments were overdue; many of those programs had outlived their usefulness. But this backlash comes with a creeping repudiation not only of racial politics, but of blackness itself. 

By this I mean not a wholesale excision of blackness from public discourse, but a constellation of phenomena that view blackness as a cause for skepticism. Black public employees regularly face, without evidence, charges of being “DEI hires” — a code phrase meant to imply incompetence. Videos of black teens acting out circulate with comments suggesting that we should expect nothing better. The Trump administration has scrubbed mention of historic black figures — like Harriet Tubman and the Tuskegee Airmen — from government websites. After the chaos of 2020, an increasingly vocal segment of the country seems eager to wash its hand of what it regards as an unassimilable minority.

We might ask why such elisions would be wrong, given the excesses of 2020. For in this moment of retrenchment, it is tempting to retreat to a comforting slogan: colorblindness. Indeed, conservatives have, with varying degrees of sincerity, championed colorblindness as an antidote to the lingering effects of societal bias, and as an alternative to post-Civil Rights Movement entitlements. This sounds plausible. Indeed, I have long argued that colorblindness is a necessary condition of social justice. But it is not sufficient.

True justice in matters of race requires more than the refusal to see color; it demands the cultivation of conditions under which color ceases to determine opportunity. A just society would not be indifferent to this concern. To allow blindness to justify indifference is to betray the very ideals of the Civil Rights Movement. One needn’t be a critical race theorist to appreciate this point.

We can acknowledge racial disparities without invoking the language of white supremacy. And we can pursue equality without promoting guilt or resentment. The work of the great reformers of the 20th century remains incomplete — not because they failed, but because their victories created new, more subtle challenges. To complete their work, we must balance two imperatives: to transcend race as a moral category; and to honor the historical particularity of the black experience.

Implicit in those aims is an underlying claim about identity: blackness has content that is relevant to American politics. It is not, as some would have it, a matter of genetics or phenotype. It is the inheritance of a history: of slavery and emancipation, of migration and struggle, of spiritual creativity and cultural innovation. It is a social and moral formation — an evolving conversation among those whose forebears endured a particular ordeal and made of it something enduring. To be black in America is to inhabit an existential predicament shaped by that past. It is to grapple with the meaning of freedom in a country that once denied your ancestors their humanity. It is to claim a stake in the American story not as perpetual victim or permanent outsider, but as co-author.

That past is plural. There is no single “black experience.” The son of Nigerian immigrants in Houston does not share the same historical consciousness as the descendant of slaves in Mississippi. Yet both participate, however differently, in the ongoing project of defining what blackness means in the 21st century.

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To imagine that the end of racial politics will mean the end of race itself is to mistake the symptom for the substance. We may aspire to a future in which racial identity no longer structures opportunity or moral worth. But we should not yearn for a future in which the memory of blackness — its music, its language, its ironies, and insights — has been erased. And that is what the anti-race backlash threatens to do. 

Preserving that memory entails acknowledging that the racial question in America is changing. The old binary of black and white, which structured the politics of the 20th century, is giving way to a mosaic. Immigration has diversified the country. Hispanic, Asian, and multiracial Americans are reshaping the demographic and cultural landscape.

In this new dispensation, the claims once made in the name of “the Negro” or “the black community” may carry less political weight. The vocabulary of guilt and redress that dominated midcentury liberalism is losing its purchase. The very category of “race,” as a political identity, is being transformed apace with the nation’s demographics.

That is not necessarily a bad thing. But where does it leave blackness?

It could wither into irrelevance — reduced to a museum exhibit, a set of grievances recited on anniversaries, a dead limb on the political body. Or it could evolve into something richer: a cultural inheritance accessible to all Americans, a moral resource for understanding suffering, resilience, and renewal.

The choice is ours.

The task before us is not to erase race from public life, but to reimagine its meaning. The formal remedies that remain — equal access to quality education, fair enforcement of the law, investment in families and communities — should aim not to privilege, but to prepare. We must attend to the formation of our citizens in addition to the fairness of our procedures. But while we rightly prize meritocracy, it loses its moral force under conditions where individuals experience sometimes vastly unequal opportunity to acquire skills, knowledge, and experience. Rightly understood, meritocracy is not the cold calculus of test scores, but the cultivation of human potential across lines of class and color. This is a thick meritocracy, grounded in opportunity and responsibility alike.

In the face of persistent racial disparities, the alternative is grim: a society divided between those who weaponize grievance and those who hide behind denial; a politics oscillating between sentimental guilt and punitive backlash. We already have an inkling of what such a society could look like: hobbled democratic institutions, ethnic tensions, loose talk of civil war, and increasing social and geographical segregation between those with conflicting beliefs. 

It was not inevitable that the summer of George Floyd would lead us this close to the brink. But I fear it has. The lesson to draw from that moment is neither that America is irredeemably racist, nor that race shouldn’t matter. Rather, we must distinguish between seeing race and being ruled by it. 

Many years ago, when I began writing about race for a public audience, I declared that the Civil Rights Movement was over — that the strategies, programs, and policies of the past were unfit for the present. But the spirit of that movement — in its ambitions for true equality to reign as the guiding principle of the nation as a whole — is still alive. Its work remains unfinished, and we must complete it.

Well, so much for that.

“If you’re passing legislation that is effectively giving huge tax cuts to the rich and stripping away Medicaid, that speaks for itself,” Khan tells me in an interview Thursday, referring to President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill. “It’s difficult to paint that in any type of populist brush…. It’s very much a continuation of the kind of Reagan-Bush-type philosophy: ‘Let’s concentrate wealth upwards, and maybe it’ll trickle down.’”

She worries that the same corporations that used “woke” and “ESG” (environmental, social, and governance) tropes to legitimate their market power over the last decade are now deploying anti-woke rhetoric to do the same thing. And the Trumpians are letting them get away with it.

As chairwoman of the Federal Trade Commission under Joe Biden, Khan went further than perhaps any one official in giving teeth to post-neoliberalism. She reawakened the FTC, which for decades had lain dormant, enchanted by Reagan-era lullabies about how corporations can do no wrong. She went after firms that slapped false “Made in USA” labels on foreign-made goods; sued Facebook over its monopolistic practices; attacked fee-skimming middlemen in the drug industry; banned non-compete clauses used by employers to prevent workers from seeking better opportunities elsewhere; and much else of the kind.

Her crusades garnered praise from JD Vance, who, during the 2024 campaign, suggested she could stay in her job in a second Trump administration; young GOP staffers took to calling themselves “Khan-servatives.” And while she didn’t, in fact, get to keep her job once President Trump took over a second time, Khan saw early promise.

“In the first few months, and with some of their appointments, and certainly with their rhetoric, it did seem like there was going to be much more continuity” with the Biden approach, recalls Khan. As secretary of labor, Trump tapped Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer of Oregon, one of only three GOP lawmakers to cosponsor the PRO Act, the top legislative priority of the labor movement, which would reverse the decade-long hollowing out of collective bargaining.

On antitrust, Trump nominated Gail Slater, a former Vance Senate aide, to lead the Department of Justice’s antitrust unit. Antitrust types on both sides of the aisle viewed Slater as someone who gets it, an impression reinforced at her Senate confirmation hearing, in which she warned about the possibilities of market-based coercion and “private tyranny.” Trump’s antitrust team, moreover, retained the merger guidelines put forth by their Biden predecessors — standard practice, but enough to enrage the US Chamber of Commerce and the neoliberal Wall Street Journal comment pages (where, full disclosure, I used to work).

But then, as the honeymoon phase passed, says Khan, “we saw, just going back to this era of greenlighting really problematic mergers [and] accepting really flimsy promises for merging companies that create a huge risk of failure.” There were also “very troubling allegations about lobbyists kind of now taking over the process … and antitrust decisions being made not based on the facts and the laws, but based on what Trump lobbyist companies could get.”

She’s alluding to the DOJ’s controversial settlement in the merger between Hewlett-Packard Enterprise and Juniper, the second and third largest providers, respectively, of networking solutions for large institutions (universities, hospitals, sports stadiums, and the like). Early on, the Trump II DOJ sued to block the merger before putting the case on a settlement path.

But as contentions arose over the terms, HPE retained a pair of MAGA lobbyists to petition higher-ups in the department, circumventing Slater’s team. The final deal, as UnHerd first reported, was hashed out in a literal clubby backroom over cocktails, and two of Slater’s deputies who raised objections were fired. As one of the fired deputies, Roger Alford, wrote in an essay for UnHerd: “MAGA-in-name-only lobbyists and the DOJ officials enabling them are … determined to exert and expand their influence and enrich themselves.”

Reflecting on all this, Khan asks, “I think ultimately, a real realignment and a real commitment to economic populism require a willingness to make rich and powerful people upset, right?”

Not, it turns out, if the rich and powerful are willing to mouth the culture-war pieties du jour. During the “peak-woke” era, a firm like Amazon would march at the forefront of the Black Lives Matter column — even as it brutally suppressed the nascent Amazon Labor Union and called its African-American founder, Christian Smalls, “not smart or articulate.” Likewise in 2025, the Federal Communications Commission clears mergers between Paramount and Skydance Media based on the firms’ commitment not to pursue diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Khan is critical of both mirroring tendencies: the power of big business to adapt itself to prevailing cultural conditions, depending on who’s in power. “I’ve long been a skeptic of ESG-type initiatives,” she tells me, and when she took office as FTC chair, “I made very clear that there’s no ESG exemption to the antitrust laws. If companies come to me and say, ‘Hey, let our illegal merger through, but don’t worry, we’ll make some nice, full commitments,’ I tell them that was not what the FTC did.”

Put another way: You can’t act monopolistically and get away with it just because you hire a trans disabled CEO or donate to climate-change initiatives.

But are Republicans equally alert to how business uses anti-woke as a shield against regulatory scrutiny? Says Khan, “It is interesting and quite perverse, candidly, that we are now seeing [how] companies will make certain commitments to shut down their DEI projects…. And suddenly, you know, potentially troubling mergers” win approval.

Fair enough. But given the post-neoliberal thrust of much Biden economic policy, why did Trump and the GOP end up walloping Democrats in last year’s election, especially among working-class voters? Khan’s answer, in short, is that the Bidenites didn’t have enough time.

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“There’s no secret that people were very concerned about cost of living,” Khan says, by way of explaining Kamala Harris’s failure. “Initially, there was a surge in pricing during the pandemic, because there were legitimate supply-chain issues. As those supply-chain issues got resolved, prices didn’t come down as quickly. We have seen companies be quite open about how, be it the supply chain issues, be it tariffs, these can be very useful covers for inflating prices.”

Neoliberalism, she says, was too entrenched for post-neoliberalism to overcome in short order: “Big picture, the [Biden] administration in a whole bunch of economic domains really did break with the 40-year Reagan-Bush-Clinton neoliberal playbook…. But at the end of the day, you’re going to need more than four years to fully undo the destruction of that 40-year regime.”

Not all Democrats agree. The so-called Abundance movement — a cohort of pundits and intellectuals led by the likes of Ezra Klein, Matt Yglesias, and the newly founded Argument magazine — traces the party’s troubles to too much populism and not enough deregulation, especially when it comes to building up housing and transportation in blue cities and states. They’ve courted, and received, the backing of some major donors in Silicon Valley and elsewhere.

What does Khan make of Abundance? “I haven’t seen any credible analysis that suggested why Democrats lost was we didn’t have enough donors on our side,” she says. “I just haven’t seen that presented in a convincing way.” Indeed, Harris had the backing of one tech heavyweight, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, who called for Khan’s head as the price of ongoing support. “There’s some prominent tech donors who are opposed to the antitrust and competition work that we were doing.” Some of those donors are now throwing their weight behind Abundance.

Still, Khan grants part of the Abundance argument. Says Khan, “To the extent that there are arguments about making government more effective, more efficient, absolutely, let’s do that.” But even that, she goes on, depends on taking on oligarchic power and monopoly, since it’s often the largest firms that benefit most from byzantine bureaucracy and from deliberately gumming up economic governance as means to discredit it.

Asked which active politicians today she finds most congenial to her agenda, Khan doesn’t hesitate: Dan Osborn, the independent union organizer running to unseat a Republican senator in Nebraska; Abdul El-Sayed, the Bernie protégé running for Senate in Michigan; Nathan Sage, a progressive running for Senate in Iowa; and Zohran Mamdani, the socialist New York mayoral hopeful (and likely shoo-in).

The upshot of her analysis: given that the Trumpians are drifting away from robust antitrust, protection of entitlements, and friendship with organized labor, the future of post-neoliberalism turns on battles within the Democratic Party.

That random element inevitably results in controversy. Nearly every year, a large segment of the fan base walks away convinced that the lottery is fixed by the league brass in advance. Like so much in America, the NBA draft and its unique system of talent allocation is on the verge of losing its legitimacy.

Here’s how it’s supposed to work. Each spring, the NBA holds a lottery to determine the order of the first 14 picks — those are awarded to teams that failed to make the playoffs. The four worst are given the best odds at a top four pick, but it’s not guaranteed. Ping-pong balls, weighted according to regular-season record, are drawn behind closed doors and the results revealed on national television. A month or so afterwards, the actual draft proceeds in order, team by team, each selecting the player they believe can change their fortunes.

This year, though, the results are even more shocking. Despite very long odds, all three top picks in the lottery landed with middling teams which already have All-NBA-caliber players (as well as previous championship banners). Each of the teams rewarded with a coveted top-three pick comes with a host of reasons that make a fix plausible. The most notable — and oft-repeated — being that the Dallas Mavericks were given the top draft spot in return for selling one of their best players, Luka Doncic, back to the Los Angeles Lakers for a dubiously low price.

Former top picks LeBron James and Shaquille O’Neal have shared their suspicions (and relevant anecdotes) around the lottery delivering their talents to what seemed, to them, like the league’s preferred destinations. Dwyane Wade, the Hall of Fame guard and now part owner of a small-market team, added further fuel to the fire. In a recent interview, Wade danced very close to admitting the lottery results are in fact predetermined. “When you’re in the NBA, it’s a business,” he said. “Sometimes they have to do what’s best for the business.”

On some level, though, whether the draft is rigged is beside the point. A perception of backroom dealing threatens any sport’s most sacred commodity — the idea of fair play. All the same, there’s something essential that the conspiracy-mongers miss. The draft, and its lottery, has always existed to shield American fans from a reality which, owners believe, American national culture can’t psychologically handle.

Unlike football clubs in Europe — where the richest teams can just buy the best players — American sports owners let their fans cling to an illusion of competitive parity. Drafts are the foundation of that illusion. A performative ritual meant to uphold the fiction that every team has a shot, no matter how small their market or feckless their owner. At its core, a draft, as a system of resource allocation, mirrors a deep contradiction at the heart of American thinking. Like the nation itself, US sport insists on a democratic mythology centered around the country’s unique take on the Protestant work ethic — fairness for all, success through effort, and a staunch belief that underdogs can reach the top of the mountain even when faced with the worst possible odds.

This “overcome — no matter what” mentality permeates all aspects of US decision-making. In the founding era, Americans needed to think this way. The entire nation was barren frontier. Civilization had to be built from scratch. Immigrant settlers without a belief in their ability to overcome perished or, at minimum, became a burden on communities that had few extra resources to offer. While this overcome-the-odds mentality served the early stages of the country well, in the 21st century, it has ossified into a hyper-individualist “society does not exist” mentality. Something that encourages citizens to avoid acknowledging that equal opportunity is now less a reality and more a manipulative mythos (if not a farce).

For instance, Gen Z faces a less affordable existence — and worse employment prospects — than possibly any generation in US history. However, nearly 70% of college-age Americans still believe that they will someday be rich. Predictably, they attribute that prospect’s likelihood to their personal work ethic and guile. As a national culture, Americans believe — with near religious conviction — that the system will eventually reward them and “everything will even out in the end” if they just “work hard enough”. Sports drafts consciously play into this mentality. However, recent progressive reforms to the NBA’s lottery distort it in destabilizing ways.

The NBA is by far the most technocratic — and the most overtly progressive — of America’s Big Four sports leagues. This applies both to the league’s public-facing politics and its constant tinkering with the structure of the game itself. From shortening the time allowed to cross half court, to eliminating defensive hand-checking, to legalizing zone defenses, nearly every recent rule change has been designed to boost scoring and dampen the sport’s physicality — an aesthetic the league’s front office increasingly finds distasteful, for corporate-related reasons. As a result, the NBA is without a doubt the most manicured of all American sports leagues.

In the summer of 2020, amid the post-George Floyd reckoning, the NBA allowed players to replace the surnames on their jerseys with social justice slogans like “Black Lives Matter”, “I Can’t Breathe” and even “Education Reform”. It has also operated the WNBA at a significant financial loss for nearly three decades — a loss that has actually grown in the wake of Indiana Fever guard Caitlin Clark’s meteoric rise to stardom and the accompanying spike in attention women’s basketball has received. The NBA’s paternal support of their sister league isn’t driven by profit but by ideological principle: it sees the WNBA as an essential public service campaign. Given the league’s consistent commitment to social engineering, it should come as no surprise that fans increasingly suspect this ethos might bleed into its system of talent distribution — i.e., the draft.

Unlike NFL helmet-ball, which lets the worst team draft first (fittingly brutish and old-fashioned), the NBA’s leadership habitually re-engineers the rules of its draft lottery system in an attempt to discourage what it considers bad behavior — in this case, “tanking”. In other words, teams intentionally losing to secure better draft picks. The NBA’s current lottery system was specifically designed to discourage this by providing far less favorable odds for the worst teams than before. However, in a manner typical of progressive policy, the recent lottery reforms have in fact produced the opposite result while somehow still hurting those most deserving of assistance. Paired with other changes in team payroll structure, also meant to promote fairness, it’s only made it harder for well-run franchises to sustain their competitiveness long-term. Team salary caps are now also so rigid that clubs can’t retain role players around their stars without sacrificing the depth needed for playoff competition. As a result, teams are now more dependent than ever on the draft and the cheap, young players it provides.

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Small-market teams — and league integrity overall — would most probably be better off if the NBA scrapped the draft, and its lottery, altogether. Instead, eligible young talent could enter a structured free-agent pool under union-negotiated salary tiers. Teams would still operate under a strict salary cap, but the power dynamic would shift. Instead of team managers gambling on lottery ping-pong balls, they’d compete to convince young prospects that their system offers the best path to success — as happens throughout European football academies (not to mention National Collegiate Athletic Association recruiting).

Top talent, especially in a small-roster sport such as basketball, always gravitates toward the best opportunity. No high-powered agent would put a potential super-star behind a successful veteran in their prime on a lengthy guaranteed contract. Nor would they send them to a franchise with a reputation for mismanaging top-player development. In the system I propose, small-market success stories — teams like the Indiana Pacers, Utah Jazz, and Oklahoma City Thunder — might actually dominate the world’s top professional basketball league. They’d at least avoid the indignity of having to lose on purpose for years on end simply to improve their meager odds of securing top players. Under a more European arrangement, they’d win by being competent — not by luck or the privileges of wealth or location.

Ironically, this year’s Finals were the first in the NBA’s modern era to feature two small-market teams. Indiana and Oklahoma City got there the old-fashioned way too — patience, development and savvy financial management. The recent implementation of something akin to a hard salary cap has, in some ways, greatly helped the small-market teams compete, resulting in six different champions in the last six years — a level of parity unheard of in previous eras.

However, despite some of the most hard-fought and exciting Finals play in recent memory, the TV ratings for this year’s Finals (minus game seven) have been some of the worst on record. A major disappointment for the television providers, which almost guarantees the introduction of future structural “reforms” seeking to bring the league back in line with domination of wealthy, large-market teams like the Los Angeles Lakers, who just got one of the league’s best players for practically nothing. Hence the conspiracy theories surrounding how their trading partner, only a few months later, got the number one pick despite — literally — the worst odds possible.

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The NBA is nothing if not conscious of its own image, not to mention its massive profit margins, much of which comes from mammoth television and merchandise contracts. Given those priors, fans are hardly paranoid to ask if the league’s constant tinkering carries over into its draft lottery results. And so perceptions of the NBA draft lottery have become a microcosm of Americans’ declining faith in their institutions. These days, you don’t need a tinfoil hat to broadcast your suspicions of foul play. According to Gallup, public trust in every major American institution has cratered, from Congress (a laughable 7%) to higher ed (just 36%) to the presidency itself (26%). What Gallup does not say is that Americans increasingly believe their institutions are not just broken, but that they’re being run exactly as intended — for insiders only. Fans’ perception of the NBA’s draft lottery slots into this broader national disillusionment: it performs legitimacy while running its most consequential decisions behind velvet ropes.

The NBA’s need to constantly adjust its lottery structure shares ideological DNA with increasingly unpopular DEI favoritism practices — a deliberate show of randomness that conceals centralized control. However, what it really delivers is a platform for institutional preferences cloaked in algorithmic mysticism. And when fairness becomes understood as a social engineering project — unaccountable technocrats construct the illusion of chaos, carefully manage outcomes behind the curtain, and gaslight anyone who implies they’ve put a thumb on the scale.

Naturally, the NBA’s yearly lottery ritual happens in a private room. No personal cameras. No smartphones. Only hand-picked VIPs and pre-approved media are allowed. This isn’t transparency; it’s security theatre — lottery as high-church liturgy. Faith replaces evidence and the congregation is expected to clap politely from the pews.

Of course, the NBA’s draft lottery doesn’t need to be rigged for that perception to become a system-ending problem. What matters is it feels rigged or, at least, unfair and dishonest. That perception, at some point, will become inseparable from fans’ view of the basketball league as a whole. And, in this way, the NBA draft and its lottery has achieved something characteristic of late-stage America. It offers fans a spectacle they can still believe in — if only they ignore their own instincts and trust authorities with the most to gain.

It is also a case study in the weaknesses of the Trump movement’s simplistic approach to punishing enemies, and how instincts that can be healthy in one situation can be disastrous in another.

Partly, the delay in disbursing funds has been caused by a combination of incompetence and the time it’s taken to scrutinize research projects for “DEI” and other politically disfavored themes. Nonetheless, as if to leave no doubt of its ultimate intentions, the White House is proposing a budget that would cut funding for the NSF by 57%, and for the National Institutes of Health by 40%. Cancelling grants to Harvard while making impossible demands is another sign that the administration doesn’t think that support for science is worthwhile, as is its crusade against foreign students.

This is a bizarre set of priorities in light of what the empirical research says about American science, and even the nature of the forces that supported Trump’s 2024 campaign: above all, the Tech Right. Of the 210 drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration from 2010 to 2016, every single one was connected in some way to NIH funding. Qualitative estimates tend to find massive returns on investment.

The benefits of American innovation go well beyond pharmaceuticals. Seminal advances in artificial intelligence, from deep-learning algorithms to foundational natural language processing models, often trace back to basic research funded by the NSF and the Department of Defense. mRNA vaccine technology — which enabled the rapid response to Covid despite its current poor reputation on the Right — drew on decades of NIH-backed research into RNA biology and lipid nanoparticle delivery systems.

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The Human Genome Project not only transformed biomedical science, but catalyzed entire new industries in genomics and precision medicine. The Global Positioning System, initially developed by the Department of Defense, underpins modern navigation, logistics, agriculture, and ride-sharing platforms. Even touchscreens and voice assistants depend on publicly supported breakthroughs in materials science and speech recognition. Far from being wasteful, these investments are the root infrastructure for entire sectors of the 21st-century economy.

Moreover, a major political theme of the last few years has been the rise of the Tech Right, which preaches a positive attitude toward science and innovation. Marc Andreessen’s “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” is perhaps the most famous document reflecting this outlook. Many believed that the involvement of successful Silicon Valley entrepreneurs would make Trump a more pro-science president. While the Tech Right has always been more interested in deregulation than government support for innovation, many of the individuals involved, particularly Elon Musk, have greatly benefited from subsidies and built their companies on work in the public sector. There was reason, then, to hope that they would guide the administration in the right direction.

What, then, is behind the current delays and cuts, along with the proposals for massively reduced budgets?

First of all, there is a kind of zombie fiscal conservatism, which has been seen most clearly in the DOGE project. A rational fiscal conservatism would make use of cost-benefit analysis and think about where the most useful cuts can be made. Scientific funding is a minuscule part of the federal budget. Funds going to the NSF and NIH combined are less than a 10th of what the Pentagon receives. If you count all science funding across the federal government, including in the Department of Defense, you end up with only 3% of the budget. DOGE failed in its attempts to make major spending cuts, and Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill, despite some reductions, will increase the deficit.

Unable to claim major victories on the spending front, therefore — and for political reasons unwilling to touch entitlements or the Pentagon — fiscal hawks have fallen back on attacking the NIH and NSF to at least feel like they are doing something. This will have negative downstream consequences for the country. But it wouldn’t be the first time that the administration has shown that it prioritizes short-term political wins over the long-term future.

The other factor here seems to be the degree to which the culture war dominates thinking on the Right. Like Leftist radicals who want to burn down the entire system, MAGA World doesn’t see US institutions, even the best-functioning ones, as shared inheritances that Americans have an obligation to cultivate and defend. Most scientists vote Democratic, and work in universities and research labs that Trump supporters accurately perceive as hostile to their values. To the Trumpians, it is irrelevant that the average scientist devotes a lot more time to thinking about cellular development or the latest innovations in quantum computing than to destroying the nuclear family. Among the intellectually inclined Trumpians, enthusiasm for the work of Carl Schmitt — the Nazi jurist who defined politics as enmity — gives rise to an all-encompassing and zero-sum approach to our common life.

There has always been one MAGA movement in theory, and another in practice. Since Trump rode down the escalator in summer 2015, he has been a grassroots-driven political phenomenon that actors have tried to shape for their own purposes. Some, like immigration restrictionists and anti-woke activists, have succeeded in getting much of what they wanted out of Trump. Others, like the Tech Right, have found themselves out in the cold when their priorities have conflicted with the views of the president and his most fervent supporters. For those who have a vision of American greatness, the results have been mixed.

The assault on American science has unfortunately been a case of the Trumpian id triumphing over any kind of rational policymaking. Musk’s role in the administration prior to his falling out with the president has only reinforced its natural inclinations. A healthier vision of nationalism would appreciate the successes of American science, take the things that are working, and try to build upon them, while surgically targeting shortcomings. There is certainly room for improvement, through initiatives such as cutting DEI funding and reducing bureaucratic red tape.

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In some cases, the Trump administration has in fact moved the nation in the right direction. It appears that many if not most of the grants that have been outright cancelled had a DEI component, including education programs aimed at women and minorities that get classified under the category of STEM funding. An executive order ended a half-century ban on overland supersonic flights within US airspace. The Department of Health and Human Services under RFK, despite embracing anti-vaccine positions and other forms of quackery, has taken some positive steps in terms of deregulating the ability to manufacture and bring new drugs to market.

Then, too, the Trumpian urge to spite bureaucrats and those seen as political enemies has done a bit of good. During Covid, it was public-health and bureaucratic elites who insisted normal precautions be taken while expressing doubts about the feasibility of delivering a vaccine quickly, despite all forms of reasonable cost-benefit analysis suggesting at the time that the government needed to move as fast as possible. There are certain jobs in the government-scientific establishment that harm rather than promote innovation. This includes not only enforcers of DEI orthodoxy, but also much of the field of ethics, which is overly cautious in seeking to prevent harms regardless of how much doing so restricts individual choice and makes it more difficult to provide new drugs and treatments that can help people and save lives.

The two sides of Trump administration policy towards science are a microcosm of the strengths and weaknesses of the populist movement writ large. Elites have regularly failed in their duties, and often made themselves ridiculous to the point that they’ve discredited the entirety of American science in the eyes of much of the public. At the same time, we cannot lose sight of the fact that the United States remains the innovative engine of the world, particularly in the field of biomedicine. As conservatives used to preach to liberals, change should always come with a clear-sighted appreciation of what is currently working well and may not easily be rebuilt once it is destroyed. The slash-and-burn approach can’t but wreak havoc on American scientific and industrial capacity.

The DEI bureaucrat does not represent every American scientist. And every individual who votes against you is not an implacable enemy who must be defunded, if not destroyed, regardless of whatever merits they may have. Many scholars and academic leaders are all too aware of the blind spots of their institutions. This means that, by working with greater precision and sophistication, the administration could potentially find support for reform within the academy. If something good is going to come of the Trump movement going forward, it will need to keep these nuances and tensions in mind.

I’m referring to the Trump administration’s shock-and-awe campaign against the hard-to-define strata of college-educated Americans who perform “knowledge work”. They are often dubbed the professional managerial class, or PMC for short. This month, scribes at The Atlantic and New York published essays lamenting the Trumpian war on the professionals. PMCs are “being targeted for political, cultural, and perhaps economic extinction” by the White House, wrote Ed Kilgore. He’s got a point. Now that we’re entering the fourth month of Trump II, it’s clear that when the President repeatedly uttered, “I am your retribution” with comic-book-villain bravado on the campaign trail, he wasn’t bluffing.

Trump has mounted a multi-pronged assault on the PMC by eagerly siccing a rabid Department of Government Efficiency on vast swathes of the civil service, the scientific establishment, non-Trump media, the university system, and NGOs, while wielding executive orders like Thor’s hammer to smite these workers and their institutions.

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The story that liberal commentators tell is that the New Right hates the PMC due to their disloyalty or perceived treachery, or bloodthirsty hatred of the cognitive elite. They just hate the pencil-pushers who won the meritocracy game after American deindustrialization. Now the jocks have returned to power to stuff the nerds back in their lockers. But while this “they hate us because they ain’t us” analysis has a kernel of truth, it doesn’t tell the whole story, and I can’t help but think about how the Democratic elite were warned for years — decades even — that the establishment was rotting from the inside and was vulnerable to a sacking.

Ironically, critiquing the PMC was once the province of the Left. The conservatives say they hate globalists now, but in the second half of the 20th century, Reagan Republicans openly embraced neoliberalism and a strategy of globalization, free trade, and deindustrialization. The fortunes of blue-collar workers declined as those of the professionals climbed.

As far back as the early Forties, Trotskyite philosopher John Burnham identified the power of the PMC and predicted that the capitalist class would lose to them in what he called “the managerial revolution”. More than three decades later, in the late Seventies, the socialist intellectuals Barbara and John Ehrenreich first coined a more specific term for these ruling class managers: the “professional managerial class”. It originally described “salaried mental workers” — doctors, lawyers, academics, social workers, PR consultants, nonprofit administrators, and corporate middle managers — the knowledge workers and culture shapers who managed people, systems, and information and socially reproduced capitalism, even if they didn’t quite own it.

Admittedly, PMC is a clumsy moniker, but it’s better than “white collar” so as not to confuse professors and DEI executives with, say, nuclear technicians, radiation therapists, or civil engineers. (I also appreciate the term MANGOs, as in Media, Academia, and Non-Governmental Organizations, coined by writer Alex Hochuli). This third class, as the Ehrenreichs noted, caught between capital and labor, often expressed solidarity with the working class in theory, while undermining it in practice by opposing unions and imposing neoliberal reforms in health and education.

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Social critic Christopher Lasch’s book The Revolt of the Elites, published in 1995, argued that the PMC worshipped credentials and proceduralism, and like all priesthoods, believed itself immune from corruption by virtue of its own enlightenment. Ultimately, he said, they were responsible for dismantling the old society and civic life while preaching inclusion from behind the safe havens of tony suburbs and tenure-track appointments (or, we might add in our time, password-protected Zoom calls).

Their power only grew over the last three decades, as the Democratic Party evolved from the party of farmers and workers to the Party of the PMC. Its financial and philosophical bedrock became Hollywood, the tenured thinkers of academia, the mainstream media, and the itinerant members of what Richard Florida once breathlessly called the “creative class” (Silicon Valley used to be on this list but has been partially won over by MAGA).

In his 1998 book, Achieving Our Country, Richard Rorty explicitly predicted that working-class Americans would rebel against this arrangement. They’d eventually realize their government, including both parties, had abandoned them by allowing wages to fall and jobs to vanish without a fight. They would see that timid PMCs weren’t about to sacrifice their own comfort to help anyone else. When that moment came, Rorty warned, something would snap, and disillusioned voters from outside the suburbs would rally behind a strongman who promised revenge on the elites. Decades later, Rorty’s grim prophecy found its avatar in Donald Trump.

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That didn’t prompt the Democrats to change their tune and return to working-class politics. They went harder for the PMC. For a decade, starting roughly in Barack Obama’s second term, identity-politics-obsessed liberals led a top-down shift in culture that ranged from the stifling of speech (cancelling comedians, the overreach of #MeToo) to the forced symbolic diversity of entertainment, plus the pressure to put pronouns in email signatures. What we now call “woke”, a soft totalitarian ideology of cosmopolitanism and the elevation of identity over class, was prophesied about by Lasch. He described how the liberal elite were waging class war on the working class by creating “parallel or alternative institutions in which it will no longer be necessary to confront the unenlightened at all”.

The PMC label returned with a vengeance during this period of parallel institution-building, this time as a half-ironic slur from the old class-based Left critiquing the Democrats’ version of neoliberalism. Wokeness was anathema to many of the classic Marxists, like Adolph Reed, but when they pushed back against woke, they were lambasted by the PMC-heavy millennial Left. In 2020, the Democratic Socialists of America’s Afro-socialists and Socialists of Color Caucus called Reed “reactionary, class reductionist, and, at best, tone deaf”. Likewise, UnHerd contributor Catherine Liu’s 2021 polemic, Virtue Hoarders, whose subtitle was The Case Against the Professional Managerial Class, was pilloried or ignored.

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By Catherine Liu

The MAGA Right meanwhile, homed in on the crises generated by free-for-all of globalized free markets. It was just then, at the dawn of the MAGA era, that the PMC’s power in the Democratic Party solidified and the atomized working class began voting for Trump. This political realignment meant that when Left-wing essayist Amber A’Lee Frost wrote that the PMC “can — and should — be brought to commit to its own abolition”, it wasn’t in the pages of a Left-wing publication, but the vaguely New Right intellectual journal American Affairs.

The problem is that while the New Right has adopted and tweaked the Left-wing critique of the PMC, its support for the working class has been largely rhetorical. Taken together, Trump II’s domestic policies surely represent a class war of sorts, but not one you’d easily recognize in a textbook. This fight isn’t the proletariat pitted against the capitalists or vice versa. Instead, Trump versus PMC is an asymmetrical clash involving a billionaire president and conservative PMCs and techno-capital attempting to excommunicate a subset of the liberal bourgeoisie, all in the name of the “War on Woke”. It’s less Marx and more like a mirror world version of Mao’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China, with the purge of Left-leaning meritocrats. The philosophy is A Great Leap Back — to restore nationalism and capitalism as the nation’s civic religion.

As for the working class? They’re just collateral damage in this intra-elite class war.

All of the occupations the president mentioned typically require college degrees, as well as advanced professional degrees for doctors and lawyers. But no college diploma is required for the three occupations in the United States with the greatest number of workers — home-health and personal-care aides, retail salespeople, and fast-food workers. In discussing economic opportunity, both Republicans and Democrats often overlook the 62% of Americans who lack a bachelor’s degree or higher.

This oversight is no accident. The debate about meritocracy in both parties is dominated by people who are college-credentialed meritocrats themselves. In promoting “equity” or equality of result, progressives focus obsessively on the racial and gender compositions of university admissions and university faculties. For their part, conservatives typically reject equality of results, in favor of equality of opportunity — which they tend to equate with the successes of highly educated professionals or entrepreneurs.

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Test article

By Michael Lind

But fewer than 15% of Americans have a professional or other advanced degree, and only 7% own and run their own businesses. Equality of opportunity, with its promise of delivering exceptional success to individuals with exceptional abilities, is not enough. Broader social progress involves raising the economic level of those with mediocre abilities, because, outside of Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon, it is mathematically impossible for all children to be above average.

The word “meritocracy” was originally coined as a term of abuse. In his 1958 book, The Rise of the Meritocracy, Michael Young, a Left-wing policy expert in Britain’s Labour party, treated the idea of a society of successful test-takers as a dystopian nightmare. In 2001, Young complained that under Tony Blair, Labour had adopted meritocracy as an ideal. He warned: “If meritocrats believe … that their advancement comes from their own merits, they can feel they deserve whatever they get.” In our time, a similar point has been made by the British thinker David Goodhart, with his distinction between college-educated “Anywheres” and working-class “Somewheres”.

Debates over meritocracy often focus on college admissions. For many centrist Democrats and Republicans, the golden age of the American university was between the Second World War and the Seventies. In that era, quotas limiting the number of nonwhite, Jews, and Catholics fell away, and new quotas to help black and Hispanic students and faculty were not yet widely adopted.

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Test article

By Michael Lind

For those who define merit in terms of academic ability the structures of the university and the workplace in the United States are essentially sound. What is needed is rejection of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI), the progressive doctrine that rejects equality of opportunity for equality of outcome, defined as policies to make the demography of every social institution mirror the racial and gender breakdown of the most recent US Census by means of reverse racism, of the kind called for by Ibram X. Kendi: “The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.”

But the crusade to end DEI in higher education is more important to conservative activists and donors than to the working-class Americans of all races who put Donald Trump in the White House a second time. Most of those voters did not graduate from college, and they are more concerned about grocery and gasoline prices than about the roster of authors in the literary canon.

Some want the rethink the assumption that an elite college degree is the standard pathway to success. The high-tech libertarians of Silicon Valley include many who are skeptical about traditional liberal-arts education and professional schools. They believe that ambitious young entrepreneurs and innovators should not have to compile diploma after diploma on campus before beginning their working lives until their late 20s or 30s. Peter Thiel has endowed a two-year Thiel Fellowship, described thus on its website: “The Thiel Fellowship gives $100,000 to young people who want to build new things instead of sitting in a classroom.”

“Move fast and break things”, in the words of Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg. Indeed, in the natural sciences, mathematics, and technology, the greatest geniuses often do their best work when young. But entrepreneurial meritocracy is as irrelevant to most people as academic meritocracy. Most Americans neither go to college nor found successful startups. For the majority of people of middling ability, both equality of result and equality of opportunity may be less beneficial than a third option: equality of condition.

Equality of condition means that you don’t have to be a high achiever in order to have access to the things that define a decent life. In 19th-century agrarian America, the promotion of equality of condition took the form of policies that helped people to become farm owners. Widespread ownership of family farms was encouraged by the federal land laws of 1796, 1800, and 1820, which provided for the partition of federal lands into small and inexpensive plots, as well as by the Homestead Act of 1862, which allowed Americans to own 160 acres of free public land after cultivating it for five years.

In the urban and industrial America of the 20th century, equality of condition meant well-paid factory and office jobs that permitted mostly male breadwinners to buy homes and cars and enjoy some economic security along with their families. Leisure is also important, because, unlike hard-driving professionals and business tycoons, most working-class Americans are not married to their jobs.

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The rise of the slacker aristocracy

By Joseph W. Sullivan

A growing number of thinkers and policymakers in both the Republican and Democratic parties are interested in creating pathways to success that do not require graduation from a four-year college or graduate or professional school. These alternatives include apprenticeship programs, community colleges, and skills certificates.

But these alternatives to conventional higher education can only succeed if employers are willing to hire workers without traditional academic degrees. Some corporations have removed degree requirements from their online job listings or announced programs to hire and train more workers without college degrees. But according to Burning Glass, a labor-market analytics firm, this has not led to a significant increase in the share of workers without college diplomas in many of those firms.

It is not enough for employers to be willing to hire more people without college diplomas. Skills certificates and apprenticeship programs may be avoided by young people if those alternatives do not lead to jobs with pay and benefits comparable to those of many jobs that require undergraduate degrees. Indeed, the multiplication of worthless skills credentials would be no improvement over the multiplication of worthless college degrees.

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The Millennial virtue economy is dead

By Matthew Gasda

Dismantling race and gender preferences in higher education and hiring is a necessary and long-overdue reform. So is the creation of alternatives to college. But politicians of Left, Right, and center should complement these reforms with initiatives that foster a rough equality of condition, allowing more Americans to achieve a middle-class lifestyle by 21st-century standards. What it means to be middle class in contemporary America and similar societies is somewhat subjective, but most people would agree that it includes adequate wages and benefits, access to affordable health care, quality education for children, and access to home ownership for those who seek it.

How to achieve these goals can be debated. But there can be a consensus in favor of equality of condition, to ensure that the rich, the poor, and the middle class do not live so differently that they might as well belong to different societies.

In the past few years, such tests have become unavoidable for any aspiring professional. As of 2017, 75 of The Times’s Top 100 UK companies used psychometric assessments as part of their recruitment strategies, and the year before last, the global industry that designs, administers and coaches these tests was valued at over nine billion dollars. No one can escape, if they want to get on in the white-collar world. University students regularly shell out sums greater than the average termly maintenance loan on slick preparatory courses, and adult career-switchers often have to take multiple days off work to participate in whatever “assessment suite” has been dreamed up by their prospective new employer.

The purveyors of these tests certainly seem sure of their efficacy. Pearson, the multi-billion-pound market-leader, informs prospective buyers that such tests are “seen as a successful tool for predicting job success”, and that “research shows that organizations can predict over 70% of performance [sic] by using the right tools”. Those professionals who have done well by them are equally optimistic: “It’s basically all about being logical,” a corporate lawyer tells me. “It suits me, because I have a very logical brain.”

Yet despite such convincing testimonies, it remains remarkably difficult to extract from these tests any kind of philosophically robust procedure. One study of one of the most popular “critical thinking” formats found that candidates with formal training in logic and the philosophy of language might actually be at a disadvantage compared to their more ignorant counterparts. What, we might reasonably ask, is going on?

Though there are, these days, nearly as many test formats as there are HR departments, a few clear market-leaders have emerged. The most widely assessed capacity seems to be “critical thinking” — a largely undefined term that seems to have something to do with reading chunks of text and sorting valid inferences from invalid ones. In the UK, at least, the most popular rubric is the notorious “Watson-Glaser” format, which forms the major criterion for entry into professions like law, but also underpins many of the verbal reasoning tests used in the educational system, such as TSA tests employed by Oxford and Cambridge and the UKCAT test that guards the gates of medical school. It is also comparatively ancient, originating in America’s Progressive Era, the high point of race realism, eugenics, degeneracy theory, and a host of other now-unfashionable beliefs in man’s capacity to measure and taxonomize his fellow man.

Here is a paradigmatic Watson-Glaser test question, which I have adapted from Pearson’s own website:

Statement: Two hundred school students in their early teens voluntarily attended a recent weekend student conference in Leeds. At this conference, the topics of race relations and means of achieving lasting world peace were discussed, since these were problems that the students selected as being most vital in today’s world.

Based on the statement above, evaluate the following inference: “As a group, the students who attended this conference showed a keener interest in broad social problems than do most other people in their early teens.”

A) True
B) Probably true
C) Insufficient data
D) Probably false
E) False

According to Pearson’s own marks scheme, this statement is “probably true” — “because, as is common knowledge, most people in their early teens do not show so much serious concern with broad social problems.”

But is this common knowledge? Having worked in a school myself, I am struck by the fact that, if anything, young people in this country are more attentive to broad social problems than their jaded elders, often saturated in online political talking-points to the point of downright unteachability. In fact, a plausible case can be made that the best answer is C) Insufficient data, on the basis that there is nothing about students’ interest in the prompt.

Such issues may seem trivial, but they stem from a deep philosophical incoherency in all the major critical thinking formats. Tests claim to be assessing analytic ability — that is, the ability to draw conclusions from logical premises, according to the ancient form of the syllogism: A is B; All Bs are C; therefore, A is C. But there is no “probably” in a syllogism. What ends up happening, then, is that applicants are invited to bring outside judgments about semantics and the probabilistic relations of natural facts on their answer.

This raises the question of what criteria the test-takers are meant to use to make such judgments. The preparatory course-providers set up complicated rubrics that they claim will help their students sort everything out: “Understanding the difference, between common knowledge (allowed in the inference section)” reads one handy guide on a popular site called JobTestPrep, “and other types of knowledge (not allowed) is what ultimately allows you to find the correct answers to questions”. Thus, from the fact “Dan is standing at the bus stop” we can make the “common knowledge” inference that “he is probably waiting for the bus” (other possibilities, such as “he is sheltering from the rain” are here deemed to be wild and unreasonable). We cannot infer, however, from the fact that “She is driving a BMW” that “she is probably rich”. This is not “common knowledge”, but “general knowledge” — which, apparently, is a totally different thing. Even if we wrap our heads around these distinctions, not one marks scheme I have consulted acknowledges that the word “probably” could just as easily denote a semantic uncertainty as an epistemological one. Candidates with a background in philosophy of language, for example, would likely perceive that words like “rich” are relative and depend on context; they would thus be more likely to include hedging words like “probably”, and thus fall afoul of the marks scheme in a different way.

In other critical thinking formats, this blindness to the way in which logic is underpinned by semantics yields even sillier results. Consider this question, from the “evaluation of arguments” section of the JobTestPrep website:

Evaluate the answer to the following question as STRONG or WEAK:

Q: Should a company grant its employees some free time to spend in any manner they choose?

A: No — employees are likely to use the free time to clean their homes, run errands, and meet with friends, and thus bring no benefit to the company whatsoever.

According to JobTestPrep, this is a strong argument. “It is important, as it refers to the benefit the company might (or might not) get from this policy.” Here, the “common knowledge” required is nothing less than a total and unquestioning identification, on the part of the test-taker, with the mercenary ethos of the shareholder corporation. The idea the word “should” might denote any other type of obligation — moral, perhaps — is totally impermissible.

The procedures underpinning the test-setters’ categorizations are not just difficult to divine: they are completely arbitrary. The poor test-takers end up desperately trying to channel the spirit of the test, spending vast amounts of time (and, conveniently, money) on test-prep programs in the hope of acquiring an instinctive sense of what the test-setting mandarins do and don’t think is self-evident. Needless to say, such arbitrariness encodes into the tests an immense cultural bias. If you come from a background similar to that of the test-setters, then you’ll likely do well. If you were raised in a different environment where, say, people are taught to believe themselves to have moral duties that extend into the limited-liability corporation, you will likely fail.

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By Kathleen Stock

Even more tellingly, the shiniest, newest professional aptitude tests increasingly do away with logical deduction altogether, and instead simply measure the test-taker’s spontaneous identification with official rubrics. This procedure is the core of the “Situational Judgment Test”, or “SJT”, that dominates hiring in healthcare and human resources, and even forms a major part of the UK Civil Service’s Fast Stream exam. In the SJT, it is the candidate’s “character” that is assessed, via an online widget that dreams up hypothetical workplace conflicts and asks candidates how they would respond. Test-takers are exhorted to “research company values” in advance — and, essentially, parrot the company’s own HR policies back at it.

Clearly, what this really amounts to is a perfect recipe for workplace conservatism: the company hires graduates who do exactly the kind of thing the procedures tell them to do, always. This would be one thing if the Civil Service was a paragon of leanness, efficiency and innovation. But does anyone in the UK really think this is the case? Incidentally, several civil servants inform me that almost no one in the Civil Service believes in the Fast Stream exam: most of these hiring practices were dreamed up by private outside consultancy firms with an obvious financial interest in the Civil Service’s stultification.

This institutionalized skull-measuring has the potential to wreak catastrophic effects. It is no secret that the UK is facing a slump in productivity, its vast firms with their swollen internal bureaucracies rapidly being overtaken by competition abroad. Thomas Piketty and Katharina Pistor have argued convincingly that most of what counts for growth these days is really sterile manipulation by the administrative class: changing the legal rules surrounding one’s assets to increase their value, lobbying for new schemes to siphon public money into one’s latest quixotic startup. Brett Christophers, meanwhile, has shown how the biggest, most profitable companies these days are more interested in extracting rents than making profits, precisely because no one is doing or making anything new or exciting enough to sell. Few, however, have noted that these are exactly the pathologies we would expect to find downstream of a selection procedure that prizes ploddingly interchangeable candidates and systematically overlooks those who think differently. How many of the UK’s sclerotic institutions could be rescued by taking in people who are able to think critically, rather than people who are good at “critical thinking”?

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By William Deresiewicz

When I put these objections to defenders of such tests, the response is uniform. Even if their methodologies aren’t fully understood, the Pearson website assures its doubters, the fact remains that such tests predict success; they are highly correlated to something called “outcomes”. Yet, when I look, there don’t seem to be robust studies proving anything of the sort — not least because the supplest and most interesting thinkers probably don’t score well enough to be given jobs in the first place. In any case, this fêted correlation could be attributed to the simple fact that “critical thinking” tests reliably weed out a few illiterate candidates. The results of a spelling test would correlate to professional success, too.

Arguably, given the well documented racial and social disparities in the UK’s professional services sector, so too would outright prejudice. One of the most astonishing facts about the literature defending the Watson-Glaser test is that it actually acknowledges that this is the case: different cultural and ethnic groups tend to achieve vastly different results. Of course, this is entirely to be expected if most of what is being measured is the test taker’s cultural proximity to the test-setter; the high priests of psychometry, however, remain determined to find a way to make their discipline seem compatible with the egalitarian ethos of the average HR department. One report by Imperial College London admits that “Pearson Vue’s own literature on the Watson Glaser Critical Thinking Assessment reports… ethnicity ha[s] been previously associated with differential group performance on the test,” only to observe that “there was no difference between groups when predicting [career] progression”. Thus, the report concludes, the playing field can be leveled via various baroque DEI initiatives. In other words: yes, the tests seem to be racially biased, but you needn’t worry because the tests don’t actually work, so you can impose whatever quotas you like in the name of compliance without feeling too guilty. Conveniently, most of the companies that sell professional assessment suites seem to be hawking “equality and diversity” services too.

Ultimately, professional assessors are guilty of making not one, but two of the great philosophical errors of our time. First, they mistake the fact that tests give quantifiable results for the idea that such results are somehow objective. Second, they assume that facts about the world can be derived from pure logic, without any theory of semantics intervening. These assumptions run rampant in the culture these days, animating everyone from online IQ fetishists to drab technocrats who think that everything can be solved with a nice, healing dose of economics. Anyone with a shred of philosophical training knows enough to question them — indeed, if one traces back the genealogy of “critical” thought far enough, one arrives at the work of Immanuel Kant, whose entire philosophical project aimed to show how “pure” or “logical” reasoning is always infected by a priori structures that it cannot itself justify.

Sadly, however, academic humanities like philosophy seem to be the one type of discipline that employers are determined not to take into consideration in their hiring procedures. This is a shame: to an unparalleled extent among branches of human knowledge, the humanities involve a questioning of abstract categories and measurement systems by which we parse and understand the world, and a consideration of whether the questions we are asking in our more mundane, technical pursuits are even the right questions. They are thus the perfect antidote to the inane proceduralism, the waterlogged bureaucracy, the creeping sense of stagnation, that haunt the contemporary workplace. If people really want to galvanize an organization, they should start trying to rediscover some of this critical, humanistic spirit, and do away with whatever crude new solution the latest smarmy consultant has sold them. Ditch Watson and Glaser; hire a few Kant scholars instead. Maybe then, one day, the students in college cafés like mine will be able to close their test-prep software and get back in the libraries where they belong.

So it was gross, but it was also symptomatic of something bigger, something real. One thing Trump understands is people’s dislikes. He has an expert nose for the simmering resentment, the latent energies of discontent suppressed by polite opinion. And a lot of people really don’t like DEI — which stands for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion and refers to the regime that manages relations among the various identities of ethnicity, sexuality, and gender, and prescribes proper attitudes and behaviors regarding those relations and identities, in organizations, businesses, universities, and schools.

When Trump uses the term, though, he’s usually, implicitly, talking about race, and media outlets and progressive commentators have been quick to characterize popular discontent with DEI as some mix of delusions and aversions grounded in racism. This reflects an important failure of simple political perception. To respectable figures, the idea that one might oppose diversity initiatives is something like a category error. Affirmation of diversity is merely a given, a necessary assumption — not needing to be argued one way or another — of respectable living in modern society. DEI people often say that “whiteness” is systematically normalized and depoliticized, legitimized by being removed from discussion. You might say the same thing about DEI. In its way of moving through bureaucratic channels where authority is effectively irresistible, the diversity regime has both depoliticized and radicalized racial discourse in many areas of American life. That is, it has removed several core racial issues from public contestation while imposing a decidedly Left-wing understanding of those issues on everyone it rules. This is a recipe for populist reaction.

Strange as it may sound now, there was a time when people talked and argued about race and racial preferences in America without saying or even thinking the word “diversity,” much less the initials “DEI”. Before the dull, bureaucratically depoliticized trope of “diversity” took over, that is, America had the openly, virtuously public and political concept of “civil rights”. For the 25 or 30 years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, people argued about whether racial preferences — “affirmative action”, racial quotas in hiring, racial set-asides in government contracts, and so on — were a legitimate application of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, or if they were a violation of it. The idea that they were a legitimate application of the Act was articulated most famously by the man who signed that Act, Lyndon Johnson. Johnson worried that, given the historical disadvantages black people faced, merely removing the overt legal obstacles before them would not be enough. In a 1965 graduation speech at Howard University, Johnson said, “You do not take a man who for years has been hobbled by chains, liberate him, bring him to the starting line of a race, saying, ‘You are free to compete with all the others.’” According to Johnson, something more than just removing barriers — something “affirmative” — had to be done.

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Donald Trump and the myth of whiteness

By Matt Feeney

There was a live debate here. On one hand, the dilemma that President Johnson dwelt on was real. Merely making overt discrimination illegal would not correct the many historic wrongs against black Americans, and it would not remedy their deeply unequal material status. On the other hand, openly discriminating in favor of black people was still discriminating based on race, and it was thus a violation of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and of the Constitution’s 14th Amendment, in the most literal and obvious readings of those documents.

There were other ways of addressing the issue as well. The black conservative economist Thomas Sowell, for example, wrote several books arguing that racial discrimination was not the main problem black Americans faced, and so civil rights remedies such as affirmative action were misplaced (as well as illegal and unconstitutional). He argued that other American ethnic groups — most notably Jews, Chinese-Americans, and Japanese-Americans — had also faced serious discrimination in America and yet outperformed the white Christian majority by substantial margins in education and income. Sowell’s critics argued back that what the black descendants of the victims of chattel slavery had experienced was far crueler and more hobbling than what other ethnic groups had experienced. And so on, back and forth.

My point is: it was a debate. The debate was largely contested in the terms of public law and public policy. Were racial preferences a legal and legitimate extension of civil rights legislation? Were they needed? Were they effective? Were they fair?

But as this debate went on, something else was happening that, by the Nineties, would make that debate largely obsolete and irrelevant. An increasing number of powerful institutions were aggressively employing racial preferences, but these racial preferences weren’t really an extension of civil rights law, as Lyndon Johnson imagined they might be. In the view of the U.S. Supreme Court, they were a strange exception to civil rights law, operating directly in tension with it. This exception arose from the 1978 case California vs. Bakke, in which a white medical school applicant named Allan Bakke sued the University of California for rejecting him while admitting several black applicants with inferior academic records. In its ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court sided with Bakke, finding that the sort of racial preferences that resulted in his rejection are illegal because they amounted to a race-specific “qualification” or quota, and these violate both the text of the Civil Rights Act and the 14th Amendment of the Constitution.

But — and this is one of the most consequential buts in American history — the court said universities could consider race in admissions, to some small degree, if it served some “compelling interest”. The admissions department at Harvard, for example, considered race as one part of its broader quest to compose diverse incoming classes — on the belief that human diversity of background and geography and, yes, race might contribute to a richer educational experience for its students. (A core element of this approach to diversity at Harvard, at the time, was the quaint practice of striving to admit at least one student from every U.S. state.) As New York Times writer Nicholas Confessore wrote in an explosive 2024 article on DEI programs at the University of Michigan, “the Supreme Court outlawed racial quotas in college admissions, while allowing a narrower form of racial preferences.”

But bureaucrats at American colleges and universities resisted this narrowness. They did this not by seeking other justifications besides diversity for enacting racial preferences, but by convincing themselves that diversity was more fundamentally important for education than anyone had ever imagined it to be, before 1978. The result was a thematic reordering of campus priorities, so that diversity — a minor consideration before Bakke — became a sort of institutional fetish, rising to number one on official lists of campus “values”. These days, someone from an alien civilization visiting the administrative offices of an American university might assume it’s a religious institution, and the object of its solemn devotions is this word, this holy concept, Diversity, whose earthly incarnation is the small collection of different-colored young people pictured on the pamphlet they handed out.

In other words, not only did administrators keep the deeply unpopular and legally suspect practice of racial preferences alive at American colleges and universities, they redefined the very purpose of their institutions so that this pedagogical novelty — diversity? the most important thing? since when? — was now at its very center. Not coincidentally, this brash and peremptory centering of diversity in their institutional missions also resulted in a pleasing centering of them, the administrators of diversity, in the power structures and institutional goings-on of their schools.

The diversity story is a thus lesson in the self-empowering ingenuity of bureaucrats. Remember, the Bakke case had ended in a ruling against the racial preference at issue. But one Supreme Court justice felt bad about telling a medical school its well-intentioned racial quotas were illegal, and then he remembered Harvard liking those different kinds of diversity, and so he threw in some stuff about diversity — and those college functionaries ran with it. The rest is history.

Racial politics on campus was now a bureaucratic project. The operational appeal of the diversity framework to campus bureaucrats should be obvious. Within this framework, students were understood as belonging to specific types. When students of different types came into conflict, that conflict would be understood not as a conflict of individual students, something regular that’s going to happen on any campus, but as a conflict of types, two categories within the administrative rubric of diversity. For those administrators such a conflict was always a sort of wonderful crisis. It was right in their wheelhouse. They were administrators, and here was something they could administrate the hell out of. And every such administrative occasion was a chance for the bureaucrats of diversity to enlarge their claims of importance over campus life in general. In other words, they had an incentive to make a big deal about it.

The legal origins of diversity power were different in employment settings, but the institutional dynamics have been somewhat similar, especially in large corporations. The origin of much diversity oversight in workplaces was the “hostile work environment” framework laid out by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) in the wake of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. By making the amorphous network of human interactions that constitute a “work environment” a possible site and source of legal trouble, the EEOC gave employers a strong incentive to set up an apparatus of monitoring and training that would control the risk of such trouble.

I’m more favorably disposed toward the hostile work environment framework than I am to the campus diversity framework, for a couple of reasons. First, it emerged out of good-faith efforts to enforce duly passed legislation, specifically Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act — as opposed to the uncanny power-grab by campus administrators that founded the diversity empire in higher education. And, second, the Civil Rights Act did in fact outlaw employment and workplace discrimination, and an environment of persistent, low-level racial torment is both all too easy to imagine as a fact of life in a workplace and clearly valid as an enforcement target under that Act.

It’s probably the case that the urgent diversity propaganda on college campuses informed the self-understanding of people in other institutions, such as Human Resources professionals charged with managing corporate work environments. The term itself carries such pleasant connotations — human variety and everyone being nice about this variety, not just tolerating it but celebrating it. The happy nomenclature spread easily, everywhere, into marketing and NGO-speak and all levels of education. And, for Human Resources departments, the diversity framework was a natural, deeply administrative way to visualize the human field of the workplace. The administrator of people begins her task in search of ordering categories, and the diversity framework hands her an array of categories, ready-made.

But in both university and workplace settings, the administration of diversity took on a disciplinary edge that people seriously resented. Where the civil rights framework drew on older liberal models of rights as the possession of individuals against government and other institutions, the diversity framework empowered institutions over individuals, rendered individuals prone to the disciplinary whims of those institutions. This is obvious and notorious in the case of universities, whose diversity bureaucracies often double as star chambers, secretive judicial bodies that punish students and professors for violating both imperiously written and mysteriously unwritten codes of speech and conduct.

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By Ryan Zickgraf

It’s a little different in the workplace. There you can still imagine an individual seeking to vindicate a legal claim against real racial harassment by his boss or his colleagues, and this does happen from time to time, such as in the recent case of a Tesla factory in California. But, in the hands of corporations, with their governing interests in risk-management, the threat of such complaints about hostile work environments tends to result in an extension of employers’ surveillance over their employees, rather than an expansion of employees’ rights against unlawful discrimination. Indeed, the sorts of corporate diversity initiatives inspired by the hostile work environment framework are likely to be aimed not at enabling but at preempting civil rights claims by employees: “We can’t be guilty of maintaining a hostile work environment! We do diversity training! We brought in Robin DiAngelo last year! We paid her thirty grand!”

And then there’s that diversity training. The most notorious versions of diversity training take the form of searing interrogations from which the white employee can’t escape without admitting unearned racial privilege and indelible racial guilt. But corporate diversity training doesn’t always come from fanatics like DiAngelo, author of the now-notorious tract White Fragility. It doesn’t always resemble a suffer session from China’s Cultural Revolution, with workers set upon to confess their despicable privilege, and told their dubious attitudes toward the DiAngelo paradigm only prove their guilt, and humiliated for crying “white tears” in the face of the interrogation and accusation. But even the more innocuous forms of diversity training can feel like another of those spiritual burdens that today’s employers force their employees to bear, like “team-building” retreats that are meant to convince workers to invest not just their efforts but their inner selves in the make-believe community of their job.

That is, the average person experiences institutional DEI efforts mainly as the expression of institutional power. It’s not something done in public by a righteous movement for racial justice. It’s just something done to her, in private, on her boss’s orders, on the assumption that there’s something wrong with her soul that needs to be fixed by a consultant. And it can only embitter the resentful employee even further to learn that there’s no practical point to the soul-sucking hassle and/or humiliation of her diversity training sessions, that they don’t even work. But it’s now widely known that this is the case, that most diversity training programs don’t reduce internal bias or improve external behavior. Sometimes these programs increase bias. Sometimes they make people more racist in their behavior. About this there’s now a sort of reckoning, so to speak, everyone realizing that businesses and organizations are paying millions of dollars to diversity consultants who don’t appear to know what they’re doing.

One other area in which people encounter diversity and DEI as blandly depoliticized in their form — borne to them by functionaries, a fait accompli of institutional practice — and yet politically very radical in their content is their children’s schools. This is not surprising. America’s education establishment — public schools, teachers’ unions, schools of education — has been on a Deweyan quest for over a century. That is, it is constantly trying to extend its portfolio from training students in academic subjects to using schools’ daily possession of those students as a way to influence the nation’s handling of its larger social problems. The stubborn problem of race is both useful as an object in this broader quest and an ongoing dilemma that schools themselves have to deal with. Racial differences in academic performance present themselves to educators every day. They’re a festering legitimation problem for the entire education establishment, but also a rich opportunity for the many activists within that establishment. No one knows quite how to close those differences, and so the default approach for educators is a righteous busyness of themes and symbols, an official belief in racial oppression as the main problem, and an official embrace of anti-racism as the remedy.

Neither is it surprising that schools have been the focus of the most prominent and successful agitating against DEI. People don’t like their kids being politically programmed during their school days, and they really don’t like their kids being programmed in ideas that they themselves find obscure and obnoxious. And education is one area where the ideas that animate DEI regimes can’t be buried in administrative procedure, presented to people merely as obligatory workplace operations or unargued dictates of unseen university bureaucrats. In education, the animating ideas have to be stated outright sometimes, often in formulas simplified for children, which reveal just how radical they are. When your 10-year-old’s teacher says she joins Black Lives Matter activists in “disrupting the Western-prescribed nuclear family”, or tells you that she learned how to deconstruct her white privilege in school today, you might suspect that some aggressive politics is happening somewhere, that public issues are being decided via private channels. You might not like that the people involved have also involved your kids.

It’s easy and affirming for liberals and Leftists to ascribe this parental suspicion to a “desire…to protect whiteness”, in the words of one Slate writer. This familiar smugness betrays a failure to even think about what DEI is, in both its basic pragmatic details and its political nature and origins. In its pragmatic details DEI is a collection of disciplinary practices that institutions deploy on people in order to manage risk and enhance their own power. In America, it’s often lamented that courts are often used as a dubious end-run around democratic decision-making. The DEI regime does this one better. It originated in large part as an end-run around both democratic decision-making and courts. It is the creation of functionaries working under cover of bureaucratic darkness, who directly harry people and drizzle agitprop into their children’s education. It has the weak and hollow legitimacy you would expect in a bureaucratic creation that does those things. I’m sure some people don’t like it because they’re racists or afraid of change or whatever. But they have deeper reasons than that not to like it. They are citizens, and it insults their status and their prerogatives as citizens.

For my part, I find many of the background ideas that inform DEI — the academic arguments often described as Critical Race Theory — to be some mix of partially plausible and occasionally stimulating and eye-opening and, also, tendentious and wilfully pessimistic, readily challenged in both analytical and practical terms. They are far from a settled science of social relations. They have not earned the standing to be taught as unquestionable fact in schools, or to form the theoretical basis for peremptory regimes of behavior management and attitude adjustment and secret punishment in workplaces and universities. They are part of the intellectual mix, one interesting side of the vital debate that once happened about race and racism in America, before that debate was rendered moot by enterprising bureaucrats who don’t do debate, who just give orders.

Many of us have wondered the same thing about the tens of thousands of consultants and paper pushers embedded in America’s “diversity, equity, and inclusion” complex. According to data compiled by the research firm Coresignal, nearly 43,000 people were employed in DEI-related roles last year, up from 35,000 in 2022. That means America was on track to have more DEI specialists than commercial airline pilots (56,000) in the coming years.

But we know what pilots do. What exactly do DEI apparatchiks do all day in Anno Domini 2025? We may soon find out.

Last week, President Trump issued his own Severance of sorts. On 22 January, federal DEI employees were placed on paid administrative leave “effective immediately”. As a result, many are being flung back into the private economy at an inopportune time. DEI initiatives had already been hemorrhaging support in the C-Suite and among rank-and-file workers over the past two years; the private sector might soon be just as much of a DEI dead end as the government.

I don’t want to sound flippant about mass layoffs. Losing your job sucks, and extirpating DEI from the government is a mission Team Trump has taken up with McCarthyite zeal. It may cut too deeply. Trump’s decree also revoked the 1965 Lyndon B. Johnson order that created the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The EEOC was tasked with preventing unlawful job discrimination “without regard to race, color, religion, or national origin” in the private and public sectors; ending it could have plenty of negative consequences, intended or not.

Here’s the thing, though: the modern DEI state isn’t a righteous flowering of the decades-old civil-rights movement; it’s a four-year-old tumorous outgrowth of panicky progressive paranoia about identity politics. LBJ and MLK would probably snicker if they knew that the main mission of contemporary DEI departments isn’t economic redistribution, but fussily policing the language and manners of college-educated professionals.

DEI is a relatively novel bureaucratic form invented whole cloth by the enlightened liberals of the white-collar world in the summer of 2020 (who says America can’t invent anything new anymore?). After the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, there was a dizzying moment when everyone seemed to be asking, “What can I do to stop racism”? Or more precisely: “How can the Best Buy chain of electronics stores stop racism”?

The lanyard class in board rooms, college campuses, and nongovernmental organizations all over the country responded in the only way they knew how: by creating new bullshit jobs.

The anthropologist David Graeber in 2018 coined the pithy phrase “bullshit jobs” to describe the rebirth of medieval feudalism in the modern corporate world, with the same tendency to create endless hierarchies of lords, vassals, and retainers. Bullshit jobs are the polar opposite of “shit jobs” that are disproportionately blue-collar, paid by the hour, and performed by the serfs. Bullshit jobs tend to be held by the college-educated lords. They’re salaried, sometimes generously, but have little social utility. Graeber said that they are “a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence”.

The longer your job title is, and the harder it is to explain what you do to a stranger, the greater the chance that your job is superfluous. So it goes with DEI “experts” hired to enrich the workplace with diversity and equity — the latter is a fuzzy term that even Bernie Sanders threw up his hands when asked to define.

Exactly how full of shit are DEI jobs?

Graeber’s taxonomy places bullshit jobs into five categories: Flunkies, Goons, Duct Tapers, Box Tickers, and Taskmasters. DEI jobs could fit all five conceivably.

Consider Flunkies (workers whose purpose is to make their superiors feel important) and Goons (those who deceive others on behalf of their employers). Since the rise of DEI, executives grilled about their anti-racism initiatives by the media can simply gesture vaguely at their middle-management DEI Flunkies and walk away. The Goons are the ones mystifying what they do via the dark arts of public relations. Brands could wallpaper over bad behavior like union-busting by appearing to be Taking a Stand for social justice, even if they weren’t quite sure what that meant or what came next after all that standing.

I say this as a former Goon. In 2022, I did some contract work for a small ad agency hired to do DEI-related anti-racist campaigns. The company was helmed by a black woman, who outsourced much of the creative work to freelancers like myself. There was something bitterly ironic about being a straight white guy whose job was to design woke social-media posts — for Pfizer, among others — about the importance of celebrating Juneteenth. But that job was the kind of grift that helps disguise the fact that the whole DEI world is smoke and mirrors.

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Wildfires don't care about DEI

By David Mamet

The same goes for the people Graeber considered “Box tickers” — those who create the appearance that something useful is being done, when it emphatically isn’t. Will your company unionize or provide your employees with better health care? No, but how about promoting a Queer BIPOC Awareness Day? When I was a reporter covering Atlanta’s public-school system in 2023, I was puzzled by the fact that the district was spending $3.5 million a year on DEI. If your student population is 72% black, what does it mean to diversify it? Were white and Asian children “underrepresented”? No one could tell me. Additionally, three-quarters of Atlantic public-school students couldn’t even read at grade level. But why teach kids how to read when you can “uplift Indigenous voices” instead?

Likewise, “Taskmasters” are the bullshit-job artists who create extra work for those who don’t need it, and that’s what DEI seems to do best. For four years, white-collar office workers have endured the same self-serious seminars on pronouns and “unconscious bias”, and have had to pretend to care about self-congratulatory “awareness” days with social-justice-y slogans. It was all premised on the theory that the way to beat racism is to be hyper-aware of race at all times — the rough equivalent of being told to treat intrusive thoughts about the possibility of death by moving into a cemetery. So, it’s no surprise that a growing body of research shows that DEI undermines diversity, rather than strengthening it.

To make matters worse for out-of-work DEI professionals, corporate America has been cutting back on all bullshit jobs recently amid a surge of consolidation, the rise of artificial intelligence, and the growing realization that many remote workers and middle managers weren’t adding much value. So will there be sufficient demand in other fields for someone in a suit who can lead dour Robin DiAngelo “White Fragility” support groups or write passive-aggressive emails to those using the term “pregnant women” rather than “birthing people” on Slack? That’s anyone’s guess.

Back in the Obama days, those whose hard-hat jobs were outsourced or automated away were told to “learn to code” and join the information economy. But now that the blue-collar sector is hot, maybe it’s time to tell ex-DEI workers: learn to hammer.

“We couldn’t represent everyone we wanted to,” Shukla admitted, citing “a culture war or two” and “an industry that assumed itself to be doing the work” as relevant explanations for the company’s failure. But even leaving aside the growing backlash against DEI practices, his analysis seemed incomplete. For there was also the folly of calling a business “The Good Literary Agency” (TGLA), a strategy surely so hubristic that they were bound to come a cropper eventually.

But then again in 2017, the year the TGLA launched, we were also blessed with the pompously named The Good Law Project — a company also now ailing — so perhaps there was something in the air. After all, it was the early days of the first Trump presidency: many histrionic Guardian op-eds were being written and pussy hats knitted. It was easy to feel good about yourself in contrast to the evil orange one: to sail into work, your lunchbox stuffed with Innocent smoothies, Kind protein bars, and JUST water cartons, feeling you had moved one step closer to canonisation simply by turning up. And every day offered opportunities for new acts of righteousness: writing bits and pieces of moral cant for the company website; putting pronouns at the bottom of emails; signing various petitions to get your colleagues sacked, and so on.

But still, in retrospect, announcing your company as “Good” in its title does seem particularly daft when you work in the literary world; a place that tends to demand that writers “show, don’t tell”, traditionally holding lazy topline descriptions in some contempt. Equally, novelists have wrestled for centuries over what makes a man good, kind, innocent, or just, but rarely have they concluded that his self-identifying as these things is a reliable sign. That original ‘umblebragger Uriah Heep keeps telling us about his defining virtue, but Dickens knows it is all fake news. “I am not fond of professions of humility,” says wise David Copperfield, “or professions of anything else.”

To be fair to Shukla and Kingsford, in naming their agency they presumably were inspired by the success of Shukla’s 2016 edited collection The Good Immigrant. But whereas that title wore its sardonic irony on its sleeve, the later business name came across as painfully straight-faced. Perhaps they told themselves that the branding would hover playfully between “we are good at our job” and “we are good people”, but the accompanying piety seems to have eliminated useful ambiguity from the start.

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Clearly, they were not just saying they were good, in the way a baker, estate agent, or an arms dealer might be — namely, by performing their stated commercial function well. Rather, they were Good with a luminous capital “G”, putting the gospel of diversity and inclusion into practice. In her own Bookseller exit interview, Kingsford made this explicit, describing people like them as “hopeful change-makers” and saying: “So much good has been done across the industry since 2016, but for those of us at the coalface it feels like we are at a high risk moment where the danger of complacency, of a feeling that enough has been done, that we don’t need to keep pushing for more change, is beginning to creep back in.”

This fluently sanctimonious style has become emblematic of progressive ventures over the last decade, barely even noticeable in a field so crowded with proselytising. How anyone ever got taken in by the posturing is still a headscratcher, but it seems many did. Ascertaining someone’s morals is traditionally supposed to be a complicated business, requiring close and prolonged attention to the interaction of character traits, intentions, behaviour, and outcomes. Yet somehow, about a decade ago, we got to a point where explicit boasts about personal ethical achievements acted more like subliminal messages in adverts, inserting a conviction in the hearer that he must be in the presence of spiritual purity, though he wasn’t exactly sure how the thought had got in there.

The flipside of being so mesmerised with superficial markers of virtue is that you are also shallow and credulous about what counts as vice. And so we find adults who genuinely think it plausible that a tech billionaire, well known for his enthusiastically awkward gestures, would deliberately perform a Nazi salute at a post-inauguration Presidential rally, as the latest stunt of those subtle intellects at Led By Donkeys suggests they do. Or we get the sort of people who interpret “Jewish” as identical to “Zionist”, and “Zionist” as identical to “genocidal maniac” without noticing any moral variations under those first two headings — as a former Save The Children staffer did in a TikTok video this week, to her cost. And on the other side, we also get those who automatically equate “Pro-Palestinian protestors” with “hate marchers”. Obviously, there can be deliberate political strategy behind a particular decision to lump certain categories rather than split them, but equally, it sometimes seems that the art of fine moral discernment is just generally dying out.

Maybe part of the underlying problem is a mania for thinking of yourself and those in your tribe as belonging to the good people, a childish mental construction which both requires a contrast class (the bad people, over there) and some vaguely plausible-looking fellow travellers. There is a hint of this in Shukla’s plaintive “we did the best we could”: and it’s there every time someone falls back on the excuse of having had good intentions, ignoring well-known observations about pavement arrangements on the road to hell. It’s also there when you extend similar excuses to those with whom you feel some kinship, as if you know that whatever bad-looking things they do could only be the result of well-intentioned misreadings of the situation; as if there were no really bad people on your side of the fence at all, but only unfortunately foolish ones. Needless to say, such a concession is rarely made to opponents.

But in fact, just as there is no particular reason to trust myself on how good a person I am, there is equally little reason to trust me about the goodness of my intentions, or about those of people I like and presume to understand. It is true that there is a limited sense in which most or all intentions are “good” — meaning only that whatever action you chose, that action seemed to you to have some attractive aspect at the time. Philosophers sometimes describe this as acting sub specie boni; alternatively, acting “under the guise of the good”. In the same fairly trivial sense, Milton’s Satan in Paradise Lost said “Evil, be thou my Good” but it didn’t make him any less satanic.

For my intentions to be “good” in a more full-blooded sense, relevant to moral assessment, depends on whether they stem from attitudes like benevolence, love, courage, or kindness; or alternatively from self-interest, hate, cowardice, or cruelty. It’s hard to admit that it might be the latter, even to yourself. And such things are even harder to discern in others, based only on a superficial glance. In the case of the now defunct Good Literary Agency, the still active Good Law Project, and other Good enterprises, it should go without saying — but apparently doesn’t — that uninformed onlookers have no actual idea what sorts of intention motivate their founders, whatever the holier-than-thou branding. They might actually be good people, or they might not. Still, I’m with Davey Copperfield: the fact they keep saying so should make us highly suspicious.

Last week the Biden era’s devotion to reality-as-fiat climaxed not with a bang, but an internet whimper: an apparent effort to meme an amendment to the US Constitution into force, by posting about it online. This bizarre moment saw Joe Biden (or, more likely, someone else writing on his official account) announce that the Equal Rights Amendment is “the law of the land” — even though the National Archive declared in December that it was not.

It was the perfect finale to a regime characterized from its inception by eerie fakeness: what Nathan Pinkoski recently called “a simulacrum of a functioning progressive presidency”. This order treated as stage-managed and artificial even meetings normally understood as living, relational politics. Donors, for example, were given scripted questions to read out at supposedly private meet-and-greet events.

Between Biden’s increasingly obviously scripted appearances and the accumulating visual evidence for his frailty, conspiracies proliferated. He was characterized as fake, played by actors, or even computer-generated. Such claims were easy enough to “fact check”, but they conveyed a fundamentally true intuition: Biden was a cipher, and no one knew who was really in charge. Consensus just seemed to coalesce, as if by otherworldly telepathy, often followed by policies everyone was assumed to agree with, and which you’d then be ostracized for questioning.

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This sense of rule by a headless, faceless and monolithically ideologically aligned swarm was characterized by writer Curtis Yarvin as “the Cathedral”: an architecture of political coordination that comprises journalism plus academia, NGOs, foundations, the permanent bureaucracy and other institutional actors. In Britain we might just call this “the Establishment” and shrug; but as David Samuels showed recently, the digital revolution turbocharged a specifically modern, progressive American version of this “Cathedral” to such potency, that its partisans seemingly came to believe they really could re-write reality just by posting.

The phenomenon gained momentum through the early 20th century with the Obama-era discovery that digital communications could be wielded to transform public opinion in progressive directions, using an activist technique known as “permission structures”. This method of persuasion, developed by consultant David Axelrod, induces people to vote against their own prior convictions, by convincing them they’ll gain moral standing among their peers by adopting the approved viewpoint.

To those who grasped the method, social media provided a powerful new tool for engineering political permission structures. The resulting consensus-manufacture machine then swiftly ate the legacy press, reaching a peak of ideological dominance during the Covid years. At its ascendancy, the moral outlook that came bundled with this approach was perhaps best encapsulated by the famous “In This House, We Believe…” lawn sign: a utopian creed associated with the progressive knowledge class, mainly because it’s largely those rich enough to delegate the material side of life to underlings who cannot see its obvious shortcomings. Its moment of peak hubris (and, arguably, a crucial nemesis) was encapsulated in its adherents’ adoption of the belief that someone could become the opposite sex simply by verbal declaration: as though words really were magic spells.

And if there’s a lesson from the pitiful end of the Biden simulation, in a wholly ineffectual attempt to make lawn-sign type updates to the US Constitution via blog post, it’s that this mechanism always had hard limits. Around this time four years ago, I glimpsed a harbinger of these limits, in the strange story of Hilaria Baldwin. Hilaria, wife of the actor Alec Baldwin, was accused of having spent a decade pretending to be Spanish — even though she grew up in Massachusetts. Even four years ago, this read as a cautionary tale for the reality-engineers: no matter what you say, if the gap between “Hilarity” and reality is too large, eventually someone will point this out and the whole thing will implode.

And so it has transpired with the civilization-scale Hilarity that was the Biden simulation. The first and most significant crack in its architecture came the year after Hilaria-gate and the (simulated) Biden inauguration: the sale of Twitter to Elon Musk. Musk then promptly fired most of the website’s Trust and Safety team, released documents revealing the website’s routine government-requested censorship, and unbanned Right-wing accounts including Donald Trump himself. And this triggered a cascade which culminated in Trump‘s re-election.

It’s not quite right to say that the information-repression mechanism broke, and allowed reality to shine through. The alteration in tone and content since Twitter was rebranded as X has not been principally in the service of “facts”, as such. But Elon bought the Cathedral’s Rolls-Royce permission-structure machine, retuned the engine, and took the silencer off the exhaust. Now a vehicle meticulously assembled under Obama, and driven with reckless hubris by Biden’s carers, is full of tipsy anons and doing doughnuts in the public square.

What will reality look like, once the dust settles on their antics? There is reason to expect at least a correction toward pragmatic engagement with the world as it is and away from Hilarity’s progressive dream of the world as it should be. Signals include Trump’s skepticism toward Net Zero, already prompting a cascade of corporate indifference to its once sacrosanct green edicts. American foreign policy shows indications of an analogous turn away from liberal internationalism; a shift with uncertain geopolitical implications, but that would at least mean an end to the “peacekeeping” bellicosity characteristic of the “global policeman” stance.

And, importantly, from almost the moment he became President, Trump signaled an explicit re-orientation away from utopian gender politics, declaring in his inauguration speech itself that “as of today, it will henceforth be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders, male and female”. He also signed a Day One executive order legislating against the notion that sex is a matter of verbal fiat rather than physiological reality.

In this context, the effort to meme the ERA into the constitution is a powerfully symbolic damp squib. For while Trump surely owes his new mandate prosaically to reality — notably prices, Ukraine, and the southern US border — it was Hilarity’s gender politics that came to stand totemically for that regime’s faltering grip on the facts.

In this context the ERA was also totemic, as a longstanding flagship cause for the liberal-feminist Valkyries of progressivism — America’s “Affluent White Female Liberals” or AWFLs — since it was first proposed in 1923. And it stood for reality-as-fiat in that the ERA’s wording would have enshrined in the US constitution an assertion that the sexes are always interchangeable: the OG effort to re-engineer reality using language. Thus, as transgenderism followed logically from the ERA’s liberal-feminist claim that men and women are always interchangeable, AWFLs slid into their Hilarity-era position as the noisiest and most self-righteous caucus in its favor.

And now the whole thing is in ruins. Even the efforts to revive a Women’s March (now renamed, and I’m not making this up, the “People’s March” because the organizers refused to define “woman”) drew barely a tenth of the 2016 numbers. “Vibeshift” doesn’t really do justice to the seeming completeness of Hilarity’s rout. But it would be naïve to imagine we can escape unreality altogether — or that the incoming administration would want to. Handing a different group the keys to the Current Thing machine is not at all the same as dismantling it.

Consider: media titans who until recently operated in lockstep with progressive consensus are hurriedly updating their bylines in line with the new normal. The house journal of Yarvin’s “Cathedral”, the New York Times, signalled its change of stance recently by interviewing Yarvin himself; the Grey Lady has also parted company with several longstanding columnists and brought on board new voices such as James Pogue, long a well-connected observer of the New Right and its paradoxes.

Similarly, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has opted to PR-blitz himself a new backstory as — if not exactly Right-wing — at least Right-curious. More substantially, Facebook has replaced the erstwhile Lib Dem leader, Nick Clegg, as head of global affairs with the former Bush staffer Joel Kaplan. What we are witnessing is, in other words, less a dismantling of the reality-formation apparatus than an imperial-scale reshuffling of its moral sensibility. Likewise, the long-running TikTok saga is less about banning the platform, than ensuring American control of its propaganda power. We shouldn’t necessarily expect any of this to result in more reality.

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But we might, perhaps, benefit from a change of utopia. What scotched Hilarity was how disappointing its utopianism was in practice: a blend of idealism and leveling-down that grew increasingly unpalatable in the atmosphere of scarcity and suspicion that succeeded the Global Financial Crash. By contrast, the Trumpian caucus has no shortage of grandiose visions — at least off the record, after a few beers.

There’s a lot about those visions that trigger my skepticism. And the real reality of Trump 2.0 is likely to disappoint many of his true believers: expect ambivalent dealmaking on actually realist hard-policy questions such as NATO, mass migration, and how best to manage America’s oligarchs to be richly gilded with “real” Trumpian Ws on gender and DEI.

This aside, though, having a vision at all surely beats the pod and the bugs. And the incoming regime has one characteristic we should all welcome: personalism. When the progressives tried to save democracy and bring about their vision of utopia on earth, what we got was Hilarity: democracy-like simulacra as a skinsuit for managerial tyranny, all enforced by a distributed digital propaganda machine. Against this, the new Trumpian order may have many flaws but Trump is obviously and irreducibly real and human. That is the point of him.

So with his coronation, we leave behind Hilarity, hopefully for good, along with its dogma, its shrillness, and its glass-eyed Presidential golem. In its place I expect politics to remain mostly as technocratic, de-materialized, unequal, and fractious as ever, and perhaps in some ways just as unreal — but now, at least, with a chance of re-centering human thought and needs in human politics. There is a great deal of mopping up to do, but the 21st century is upon us. Bring it on.

The contest was more equal when police used impact weapons. A baton, nightstick, monadnock baton, Kubota, saps, and so on, allowed the officer to stun, control maneuver or incapacitate a recalcitrant suspect. A pistol displayed in the hands of an officer the felon understood was reluctant to use it, was probably less effective in affecting compliance, than a sharp blow to the wrist, elbow, knee, or shin. But impact weapons use has been banned by most jurisdictions as brutal, and control techniques like the knee-in-the-back, and the carotid choke have also been generally abolished – methods which enabled a trained smaller and lighter officer to subdue a larger opponent.

The female officer, thus found herself stripped of tools allowing her to protect herself and the public from larger male offenders. (Short of lethal force, the use of which would take her off the force and give her to the courts.)

Women were admitted into American police forces to correct discriminatory practices. But without the impact weapon, pain avoidance techniques, and the control of jiu-jitsu, the woman street cop is at a disadvantage. Most streetfights go to the ground, and, there, she is in danger. But government, which can never be seen as wrong, equaled the playing field. Under California Penal Code section 242: resisting arrest, is now generally charged only as a Class One Misdemeanor and prosecuted infrequently.

Then, in the 2020s California District Attorneys had shoplifting decriminalized. Any theft under $1,000 was allowed, and neither store employees nor the police intervened nor were allowed to do so — the cops, first hamstrung, were then ordered to “stand down”. Like the tactical evisceration, this move led to the (internally) logical suggesting that police be banned altogether. See: The Knock-on Effect: fairness in diversity hiring; fairness to suspects, then fairness to criminals, after which, there would be no need for police.

This adolescent confusion of fairness and justice has led our country to the last brink of dissolution. For the question is “who is being fair to whom?” Is fairness to female officers unfair to the now under-protected citizens who pay them? Is depriving them of adequate offensive and defensive weapons fair to police?

We’ve had a decade of shrieking about “fairness”, by those unfit to ponder Milton Friedman’s: “When some government program is proposed to ‘help’ a group, we need to ask, ‘Whom does it harm?’” The question, historically (if aspirationally), was addressed not through a debate about “fairness and equity,” but through the process of jurisprudence.

Justice means deciding between the conflicting claims of two petitioners by reference to previously determined laws. A mature citizen understands that every claimant (himself included) initiates his claim with some reference to “fairness”, but that this fairness can only mean “That result I prefer”. Every loser in a court of law knows he was treated unfairly. The universal (and moot) claim of “fairness” allows the protestor potential access to the news-cam, the podium, and a leg-up in a court system dedicated to “Social Justice”.

There is no such thing as social justice. It means “fairness”, a metaphysical concept defensible, finally, only by a reference to “feelings”. But its application is easier (as improvisational) than a dedication to the codified common sense of the community, that is, Law.

Further reading

LA's dreams went up in flames

By Joel Kotkin

Perhaps even more than that of the cops, the brotherhood of firefighters seems unlimited and inviolable. The police are always at risk, but much of that risk is potential, while the firefighter, every week in the career, will be working at on or in a burning building, at the end of the hose, or going up a ladder to save lives. Their mutual devotion, as Joe Wambaugh explained in Fire Lover (2002), grows, in shared, mortal danger, undertaken with the absolute assurance that his brothers will back him up and come for him unhesitatingly at the risk of their own lives. But, at some point, up the chain of command, that brotherhood was replaced by a commitment to “DEI”, a concept not recognized by fires.

Today, Los Angeles is still burning. My family was evacuated, and has just returned after two days to our house, which is still in the “warning” area. Many of our friends have lost their homes.

It has been known for decades that massive brushfires were fueled by debris and blowdown, which should have been regularly cleared. On August 31, 2023 Circling the News reported that Pacific Palisades Community Council President Maryam Zar contacted her Assemblyman about concerns regarding brush abutting her land. “She was put in touch with Richard Fink, California State Parks District Superintendent II. He attended the August 24 Community Council meeting and explained that the state does not do brush clearance of park land because ‘we’re here to protect the natural habitat’.”

In an email to Circling the News, it was explained, “The department works closely with the Newsom Administration and other State departments to improve and expand forest management on state owned land to reduce the risk of catastrophic wildlife fires and improve forest and wildlife health.” But where the state land ends, habitation begins, and what unutterable fools would suggest a wildfire would respect the boundary? Answer: the Newsom Administration.

Brushfires on uncleared State Land have been devastating California for years, and the ecosystem Newsom’s commission was protecting did not extend to human beings and their property in the Palisades, or Altadena, or Franklin. And, so, the largest and most catastrophic fire in Los Angeles history resulted from fairness. Newsom, Los Angeles Mayor Bass, and Fire Chief Cowley, though not on the hose, have been in the frontline of the Struggle for Fairness.

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Will Trump make me Poet Laureate?

By David Mamet

Fire Chief, Kristen Crowley, wrote to the Board of Fire Commissioners on December 4, 2023, that budget cuts “have adversely affected the Department’s ability to maintain core operations”. Karen Bass had just cut 17.8 million dollars from the fire department’s budget. But according to CSB News, “When asked about the budget cuts at Thursday morning’s Press Conference (January 9, 2025), Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass said they did not impact the department’s ability to handle the ongoing fires.”

Yet many hydrants had been stolen for scrap and never replaced, as periodic inspections had been cancelled due to budget cuts; and hydrants ran dry in the Palisades and in Altadena, where firefighters were reduced to filling their tanks from homeowners’ garden hoses. County officials said this (shortage) was to be expected due to the constraints of the municipal water system, which LA County Public Works Director Mark Pestrella said, is “not designed to fight wildfires”. (LA1st) One must ask why it is not so-designed, and, as always, what happened to the taxes we pay to insure public safety?

So where did the 17.8 million go? According to the department’s website: “Creating, supporting, and promoting a culture that values diversity, inclusion, and equity while striving to meet and exceed the expectations of the communities are Chief Crowley’s priorities, and she is grateful for the opportunity to serve the City of Los Angeles.”

Mayor Karen Bass just returned from vacation in Ghana during the fires, was interviewed by Sky News last week. Asked if she had anything to say to the victims of the disaster, had she any apology to make, and where was the money cut from the fire department, she remained silent.

Universities urgently need reform. Henry Adams, who graduated from tiny Harvard College in 1858, wrote that his alma mater left the mind “open”, “supple”, and “ready to receive knowledge”. Few would say that today about any elite American university or liberal arts college. The top schools, and many lower-ranked ones as well, have become grim centres of cancellation, progressivist indoctrination, and self-censorship.

To understand how higher education reached this deplorable state, we must return to the 19th century.

Back in 1874, Nietzsche wrote that universities must be quiet enclosures where the young, protected from the noise of the day, can become “finished, ripe and harmonious personalities”. But he perceived that the primary objective of the modern research university — which was born in Germany, and came into its own in the US at the turn of the 20th century — was social utility, not individual growth and ripeness. The young, Nietzsche lamented in his On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, were “to be trained for the purpose of the age and to lend a hand as soon as possible”.

The world wars of the 20th century only exacerbated this narrow intellectual presentism. In 1946, George Orwell wrote that “there is no such thing as keeping out of politics”, and the university was no exception. In the aftermath of the Second World War, Europe was focused on repairing its ruined infrastructure and economy, and these tasks — to say nothing of the rapidly expanding US military-industrial complex — called for technical expertise. The result was what German philosopher Josef Pieper decried as an industrial model of education, in which teaching and learning were judged exclusively by the criterion of “social service”.

Pressed by an increasingly complex age’s demand for specialists, universities eventually lost whatever integral vision of education still animated their faculties. As Wendell Berry observed in his 1984 essay “The Loss of the University”, the faculty no longer understood that “the thing being made in a university is humanity”. Academics had ceased to speak or teach the “common tongue” that for millennia had formed “responsible heirs and members of culture”. For Berry, while liberal education resembled the trunk of a tree from which it is possible to branch out — a tree of life — the contemporary academy was “a loose collection of lopped branches waving about randomly in the air”.

By the mid-Eighties, something new — or rather, something as old and stale as a secret policeman’s office — was in the air. Universities had come to understand service to society not just in economic terms, but in ideological ones too. The activist seeds of the Sixties — in particular Herbert Marcuse’s call for “intolerance against movements from the Right” — had been blowing in the wind for decades, and were taking root well beyond campus walls.

Marcuse, who combined (and in the process deformed) the thought of Marx and Freud, fathered the so-called New Left. He inspired generations of radical activists and professors, including Angela Davis and Abbie Hoffman, and laid the foundations of what is today known as critical theory. Marcuse rejected the basic traditions of American political life, including free speech. Tolerance, he wrote in 1965, “cannot protect false words and wrong deeds which demonstrate that they contradict and counteract the possibilities of liberation”. Channeling the Sixties’ “Make Love, Not War” vibe, he aimed to liberate our erotic nature from social constraints, but ignored Freud’s warnings that the monsters in the basement of the psyche must be kept behind locked doors.

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How universities killed the academic

By Kathleen Stock

With the release of aggressive and nihilistic resentment, ever more ground had to be cleared in the university curriculum for new growths of political activism. In 1987, Jesse Jackson led 500 students at Stanford in chanting “Hey hey, ho ho, Western Civ has got to go”. In 1989, Stanford’s “Western Culture” humanities programme, mandatory for all undergraduates, was replaced by one that featured “more inclusive works on race, class, and gender”.

Some tried to fight back, but their attempts were futile. In 1991, Yale alumnus Lee Bass gave $20 million to his alma mater to fund a Western Civilisation curriculum. The curriculum was never implemented, and in 1995 Yale returned the money.

These developments were not limited to esteemed institutions such as Stanford and Yale: elite universities have a huge impact on the composition of the professoriate at every level, from community college to research university. One decade-long study published in 2022 showed that the most prestigious PhD-granting departments (those in the top 20%) train 80% of American professors in any given field. That includes schools and departments of education, which generally attract faculty and graduate teachers and future administrators who are steeped in identity politics.

Unsurprisingly, while liberals have significantly outnumbered conservatives and moderates in the professoriate since at least 1960, the percentage of those who identify as liberal and far-Left has skyrocketed in recent decades. A 2018 survey of 8,688 tenure track, PhD–holding professors from top liberal arts colleges in the United States found that the ratio of registered Democrats to registered Republicans in the field of history was 17.4 to 1, in philosophy 17.5 to 1, in English 48.3 to 1, and in religion 70 to 1. This imbalance — present in every one of the 24 academic subjects surveyed — is likely higher today, as professors have moved further Left along with the Democratic Party.

In 2024, little remains of the great hard oak of the West in university curricula — and what does is often pulped and strained through a steel mesh of criticism so as to extract object lessons in inequality and injustice. Universities still pay lip service to the goal of graduating well-formed human beings, but far too many punish independent thought and reward ideological conformity. Applicants to elite institutions, many coached by expensive consultants, have for decades been evaluated according to largely non-academic measures. This explains the decreasing percentage of Asian and Jewish students in the Ivy Leagues and other top-tier schools. If you want to be admitted to these universities, or for that matter to win a Rhodes Scholarship or any other highly prestigious award, it helps enormously to be a member of a favoured minority who can speak the language of DEI, critical race theory, intersectionality, and settler colonialism.

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By Jacob Howland

All of which raises Lenin’s favourite question: “What is to be done?” In Hope Against Hope, a memoir of life under Stalin, Nadezhda Mandelstam wrote of Soviet leaders who, “ensconced in their ivory towers”, thought that they could “build the present out of the bricks of the future”. Today we find ourselves in a similar predicament. We do not need social engineers. We need leaders and citizens who can think for themselves: who understand the conditions of human flourishing, see things whole, and exercise sound judgment.

The good news is that most Americans seem to agree. There were many reasons for Donald Trump’s landslide victory in the presidential election, including inflation, open borders, and a feckless foreign policy. But voters were also fed up with elites who use their power as platforms for ideological scolding and radical activism.

Trump has vowed to eliminate “Marxist diversity, equity and inclusion bureaucrats”. That includes dismissing the current national higher education accrediting agencies, only six of which are authorised to accredit four-year colleges and universities. One agency requires that “the institution defines and acts with intention to advance diversity, equity, and inclusion in all its activities”. Another explains that “an equity framework should permeate… all levels of institutions.” A third obliges institutions to “focus on equity”. New, non-ideological entrants into the accreditation space are sorely needed.

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By Terry Eagleton

Even with control of both house of Congress, how much Trump and McMahon can accomplish in the face of Democratic opposition and widespread hostility among federal employees remains to be seen. But if they want to Make Education Great Again, they need to make it easier to start new universities. Regulatory capture is the rule in higher education, even in red states. When the University of Austin (where I am provost) received state authorisation in 2023 to open its doors to students, it was the first new secular institution to do so in Texas in over 60 years. And although our first class of freshmen matriculated this September, these students can receive no federal financial aid until we are accredited, which cannot occur before they graduate. Nor can their parents use popular 529 education savings plans to pay their tuition.

Yet ours is a model whose time has come —as a CBS News feature makes clear. Like rowers, future builders, leaders, and founders need to look back to the past in order to move into the future. Our curriculum turns on the civilisationally productive tensions between tradition and innovation, reason and revelation, authority and freedom, the individual and society. We introduce students to the knowledge and wisdom of our ancestors, compel them to apply those lessons to today’s pressing challenges, and equip them with the 21st-century skills they need in order to do so — all in an atmosphere of open inquiry and civil discourse. For the next four years, at least, institutions that want to try similar pedagogical experiments will have fresh wind in their sails.

In the next few hours, the BBC focused on this aspect of her address — that anyone discussing these developments further was irresponsible — and notably disapproved of Conservative leadership candidates Robert Jenrick and Kemi Badenoch for expressing concern about a possible cover-up. During the News at Ten, the story was relegated to the end of the bulletin.

But the game was already up. At the press conference, Dr Renu Bindra of the UK Health Security Agency said that they were informed that ricin, a biological weapon, had been found in Rudakubana’s home “early in August”. In other words, leading agencies in the British state had had evidence to charge Rudakubana for producing ricin for nearly three months. They had also discovered that he had possessed a PDF file entitled “Military Studies in the Jihad Against the Tyrants: The Al-Qaeda Training Manual”.

The new information was quite a contrast to what we were told in the aftermath of the attack. Then, the police had said that the incident was “not believed to be terror-related”. Even during Monday’s press conference, Kennedy maintained that Counter Terrorism police were not classifying the Southport murders as a terror incident due to the lack of an established motive — even though they are now prosecuting their suspect under the Terrorism Act.

Then there’s the religious connection. Many of us immediately assumed that the attacker was inspired by radical Islam, connecting his rampage with actual and planned Islamist attacks on music events at Manchester Arena in 2017 and more recently in Austria. However this notion was stamped on hard after the killings, especially as far-Right riots spread around Britain in response, and Keir Starmer launched a blitz of prosecutions on those accused of “lies” and “disinformation” and for stirring up hatred against Muslims.

Something distinctly odd and unsatisfactory appears to be going on here. Certainly the timing of the police announcement gave off a bad smell, coming a day before the Budget. It was also notably delayed until a few days after a Tommy Robinson march in London, which would have been given fuel by the news.

The day the authorities released the news could hardly have been bettered from a media-management point of view, suggesting at least informal coordination between police, the Crime Prosecution Service (CPS) and the Labour government. But I think this is unlikely to take the form of any deliberate “cover-up” or conspiracy. Rather I suspect that any coordination will be wrapped in technical, legalistic language and of shared priorities like maintaining “community relations”: in the collective assumption that they were simply doing the right thing.

For, despite 14 years of Conservative rule, the British state shares broadly the same aims as the new Labour government. They speak the same language and have the same approach, especially to things such as diversity and equality. In the last and most domestically significant act of its previous time in government, Labour embedded identity politics in the state through the Equality Act of 2010. And this has now percolated fully through the system. The government and state, now largely aligned as shown in their common response to the Southport riots, give off the appearance of being a regime, one with a common sociology. Its mantra is “Diversity is Our Strength”: an unabashed assertion that diversity causes good things to happen, which also means not bad things.

We all now know what this messaging demands. We’ve seen it before, following outrages from 7/7 in London to Manchester Arena, Liverpool Remembrance Day, London Bridge, Waterloo Bridge, Reading, Parsons Green and Lee Rigby in Woolwich; as well as other largely unknown attacks happening at the fringes, such as in Hartlepool in 2023 and Burnley in 2020. Right-wing activists are familiar with the logic. Liberal-Left opinion managers know it like the back of their hands. So do the authorities, and they crank into gear whenever an attack occurs bearing the obvious hallmarks.

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We all know instinctively that the system must defend diversity. It must be revealed as a strength, otherwise the meaning of our society is revealed to be fake: at best naive and mistaken; at worst mendacious lies, open for exploitation by those who mean us deep harm. The bold statements we used to hear about how such attacks have “nothing to do with Islam” are no longer convincing. Other tactics must be employed. Some things must be revealed and others concealed. And so the regime and its supporters go to war over “reporting”, “commentary” and “sharing information”. They say that this is a matter of responsibility versus irresponsibility, that it is legally necessary in order to not prejudice a trial.

But we get the wider message. We shouldn’t talk about it. We shouldn’t be concerned about the same pattern repeating itself. And we shouldn’t get angry about this information being withheld from us for nearly three months while people were convicted for overreaching in their anger.

This is not to say that the police and the Criminal Prosecution Service; the commentators and opinion managers on Twitter; the Home Secretary Yvette Cooper and the Prime Minister Keir Starmer are all bad people, mendacious, cynical liars, determined to prevent people from knowing the truth. Rather, as Dominic Cummings keeps on telling us in between his relentless denunciations of these people: “The system is working as intended.”

This is the regime we live in. It is a regime of the Equality Act and associated Public Sector Equality Duty, of community leaders for some and not for others, of DEI commissars telling us to who must be favored and disfavored, of the Human Rights Act and European Convention of Human Rights protecting dangerous foreign criminals from being deported. It is the system of diversity: and it demands that certain things be promoted and others be suppressed. The regime has committed itself. Its functionaries are merely following the rules, following the logic of the system. Communities that qualify as “communities” must be protected from harm: and this means that we must all be protected from reality.

Fortunately for Javier, he doesn’t exist. He’s a figment, a spectre, a ghost in the machine of the diversity-industrial complex — and a character in the anti-harassment and discrimination training that I had to complete last month. This training, accessed remotely via an online portal, is an annual requirement of my part-time job as a yoga instructor. Designed by a third-party contractor, it covers all manner of workplace sins: sexual harassment, discrimination, plus various isms and phobias.

It also takes two hours — as in, 120 minutes — as required by state law. In 2019, Connecticut governor Ned Lamont put his signature on two pieces of legislation known, collectively, as the Time’s Up Act. Touted as a “proactive approach” to combating workplace sexual harassment, the law was inspired by the #MeToo movement (along with, presumably, the movement’s fancy Hollywood cousin, Time’s Up.) Among its accomplishments was a mandate that the employees of any company comprising three or more people must complete two hours of sexual harassment training, no exceptions.

The above information is contained in the training itself, for what I’ve concluded must be two reasons. The first is that the authors of the training want you to know exactly who is responsible for making you sit through an interminable lesson in why you shouldn’t refer to your co-workers using homophobic slurs. The second reason is that, man, two hours is a lot of time to fill.

To be fair to the creators of the training module, they have done their best to make it interesting (more on that later). But, having been employed at the same company since before the passage of the Time’s Up Act, I’ve noticed something intriguing: all this content is virtually unchanged from what it was several years ago, when the law required just one hour of DEI compliance training. It’s not just the same concepts, but the same actors, the same scripted scenarios. Is this a two-hour training? No: it’s a one-hour training in a two-hour bag padded out with a bunch of foam packing peanuts. Having noticed this DEI twist on shrinkflation, it’s impossible to unsee. The sheer volume of gimmicks, whereby the training designers manage to convey the same information in double the time, would be awe-inspiring if it weren’t so irritating.

Each hypothetical harassment scenario is described four times: in a short text essay, then in a first-person video, then as a word problem followed by a multiple-choice quiz, and then, finally, in a post-quiz recap that reiterates the same information all over again. A segment about the professional hazards of social media is similarly laborious, making you click through six panels of an alleged confession by “Sarah”, who wrote a social-media post with a “discriminatory tone” before boarding a long flight, only to find herself dogpiled when she landed. (It’s hard to know what’s worse: the time-consuming structure, or the blatant, uncompensated rip-off of the Justine Sacco story, as if that woman hasn’t suffered enough.) And in the section detailing the content of the Time’s Up Act, the legislation is broken into eight bullet points, each hidden behind an interactive drop-down menu that you have to physically click on three times — once to open it, once to close it, and once to advance to the next one.

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Have you ever been stuck in the supermarket checkout line with a cashier who insists on breaking a bunch of bananas into eight individual bananas and laboriously scanning them one at a time? It’s like that, but worse, because you can’t eat the sexual harassment training. But if the form of the training is categorically absurd, what it attempts to teach isn’t much better. At best, these concepts are common sense, a reiteration of the basic norms of human interaction that most of us learned in preschool. Don’t exclude, don’t name-call, don’t touch people who ask you not to touch them — and no, Javier, I do not think you should tell Raphael to “stop being such a drama queen” about his co-worker referring to him with a homophobic slur.

At worst, though, this training seems like it was designed in a lab to replace a functional, high-trust workplace with one in which employees are both in constant terror of giving offence and primed for any opportunity to take it: ratting each other out to HR for failing to use a co-worker’s preferred pronouns, hand-wringing about whether it’s harassment to invite a gluten-intolerant colleague out for a pint, asking formal consent to high-five. And I particularly have questions about the instructional video on gender identity, featuring a montage of daring gender nonconformists such as… a man holding a baby and a woman lifting weights. Should we really be telling people who literally work at a gym that every woman in the weight room is gender nonconforming? Isn’t this crude and sexist stereotyping the opposite of inclusive? Excuse me, sir, but don’t you know that holding your infant child is for sissy girls? A real man would drop-kick that baby through the goalposts at the Big House while shotgunning two beers at once!

It’s strange to realise that all of this has been done in the name of the #MeToo movement, whose original purpose was to raise awareness of how women continue to be held back in the workplace on the basis of sex. It wasn’t just harassment or assault; it was pregnancy discrimination, gendered workplace expectations, the way the inescapable presence of sexuality loomed in the background of our professional lives. A woman who is expected to sleep with her boss in order to advance professionally is in a terrible position, but so too is the woman at the same company whose boss doesn’t want to sleep with her, and whose prospects suffer as a result.

But insofar as this problem can be solved, it’s not by ensnaring would-be perpetrators in a web of red tape; it’s through the slow and deliberate work of effecting cultural change, and the immediate improvement of support for the victims of discrimination. On this front, I’ll grant that the Time’s Up Act isn’t entirely useless. Those who wish to file a workplace harassment complaint now have up to 300 days to do so (it used to be 180 days). And while employers were already prohibited from retaliating against complainants, it is now also illegal to change the terms of a person’s employment after they make a harassment complaint — by relocating that person, for instance — without their consent.

But mostly, this legislation is typical of the extreme do-somethingism that politicians become afflicted with whenever a lot of Americans — and particularly the subset of Americans who walk the red carpet at the Oscars wearing $85,000 gowns — are up in arms. From the War on Drugs to the Patriot Act, moral panics tend to make for bad policy. And in this case, the clarion call of “There oughta be a law!” becomes complicated by the fact that there already is one: the Civil Rights Act of 1964 established a nationwide edict against workplace discrimination and harassment on the basis of sex, one which has been consistently upheld by both the courts and a cultural consensus that women should be able to do their jobs unmolested.

The problem is, there’s a difference between making a thing illegal and writing that thing out of existence; much like thieves, murderers and fake Nigerian prince email scammers, sexual harassers are still out there, harassing people sexually. But rather than admitting the limits of their power to eradicate the world’s ills through bureaucracy, politicians instead conclude that the existing law making workplace harassment illegal doesn’t make it illegal enough. It needs more bells and whistles! More rules and regulations! We need a cursed matryoshka doll of policies within policies within policies, each more unwieldy and elaborate than the last.

This is where the mandatory training comes in — a training which I would estimate prevented exactly zero incidents of harassment, unless the would-be offender happened to be stuck completing it at precisely the day and time when he would have otherwise been harassing someone. The Weinstein-esque perpetrators at whom the #MeToo movement took aim are not going to be deterred by an extra hour of anti-harassment training, if they even have to take it (most, I would imagine, are getting an assistant to complete it for them). This is what makes the Time’s Up Act and its ilk so toothless, and frankly so offensive: it pretends to address the abuses of powerful men by condescending to and wasting the time of ordinary working people.

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It’s worth noting that employees like me are often not compensated for this training, and it goes without saying that we are not meant to model our actual behaviour on it. It’s not just that being maximally sensitive to microaggressions is incompatible with a job that requires you to stand at the front of a crowded room, in spandex, lunging and squatting while two dozen people stare at your body in order to mirror your movements. It’s that fitness is a service industry, one in which tolerating people’s idiosyncrasies, oddities and low-key improprieties is part of the job.

Of course, if I were sexually harassed at work, I’m sure my employer would protect me to whatever extent required by law — but only because it’s required by law, much like the two-hour harassment training, which I’m equally sure the company would point to as evidence that they ought not be held responsible for the bad acts that happen under their watch. We gave them the training! It’s not our fault! Ultimately, these measures are little more than exercises in box-checking compliance, a way for corporations to dodge lawsuits and displace the accountability for workplace harassment onto someone else’s shoulders.

This was never more apparent than in the moment after I finished the final quiz, when I was greeted with a pop-up and a countdown clock: “This course requires you to spend a certain amount of time on your learning experience,” it read. “Please go back and review the course material until you’ve reached the time limit.” In spite of everything, I had finished too quickly; I would need to stare aimlessly at the module for another 30 minutes to fulfil my compliance. Time’s Up, indeed.

Perhaps these developments merely represent the swinging of the culture war pendulum back from the “Great Awokening” of 2020. But it’s worth exploring another possibility: that something larger is happening, outside the culture wars, motivating shifts in attitudes beyond the usual conservative audiences. It should not be forgotten that the incident precipitating the latest round of campus controversies — Hamas’s October 7 attack against Israel — was a foreign policy issue. In the United States, Israel-Palestine tends to be treated almost entirely as a figment of the domestic culture war, as has been in this case. But the latest round of violence takes place in a context very different from that of the recent past: America no longer has unquestioned military supremacy, primarily because of its declining industrial base. The Russia-Ukraine war has now lasted for two years, and replenishing US ammunition stockpiles used in that theatre could take up to seven. Estimates suggest that, in a military conflict with China, the United States would be out of critical ammunition in just a week. China built 21 submarines last year; the United States struggles to build more than one. In sum, America is not prepared for a major conflict anywhere, and in the face of coordinated attacks from Russia, China, and Iran and its proxies, US and allied forces could quickly run out of materiel.

These statistics may seem far afield from campus politics. But it is worth recalling that foreign policy issues — the Cold War battle for technological supremacy against the Soviet Union — were critical in shaping American higher education as we know it today. Now that great power competition has re-emerged, academic culture wars may take on new dimensions. This historical perspective might also offer some insights on reforming educational institutions, a revolution extending well beyond culture war sniping on DEI, and into the entirety of the American political economy.

The Second World War and the Cold War shaped American education in profound ways, including in its most controversial and contradictory social valences — meritocracy and affirmative action. The need to educate the best and brightest from all backgrounds to ensure technological leadership featured prominently in Vannevar Bush’s Science, The Endless Frontier, the 1945 report which laid the foundations of the modern American research system, giving rise to institutions such as the National Science Foundation and similar bodies. Bush placed universities at the centre of national technology research, called for increasing their funding, and argued: “If ability, and not the circumstance of family fortune, is made to determine who shall receive higher education in science, then we shall be assured of constantly improving quality at every level of scientific activity.”

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Bush’s vision would be realised in the ensuing decades. The combination of the GI Bill of 1944 (which covered tuition for veterans), and the post-Sputnik National Defense Education Act of 1958 greatly expanded attendance at and funding for colleges and universities. And although the SAT originated in the Thirties under Harvard president James Conant, standardised testing became increasingly prevalent as higher education was “democratised” and “rationalised” during the Cold War. Thus, driven in large part by great power competition, university education went from a narrow, elitist pursuit — led by the Ivy League and “Saint Grottlesex” feeder schools, along with regional replications — to a national and meritocratic endeavour. In 1940, around 5% of the US population had college degrees; that number has increased in every decade since and approaches 40% today. Meanwhile, Cold War competition also played a role in the advent of affirmative action, which has since evolved into “diversity, equity, and inclusion” programmes and the broader phenomenon of “wokeness”. Although foreign policy was certainly not the primary motivation of civil rights legislation, national security arguments were frequently used to justify it. Conservatives tend to locate the origins of wokeness in the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, while progressives focus on centuries-old legacies of racism, as in the “1619 Project”. But perhaps neither side has given sufficient attention to the role of great power competition in the mid-20th century.

To summarise a well-known history, segregation quickly became an international problem in the Cold War context. Soviet propaganda exploited the persistence of Jim Crow among audiences in the Global South, which glaringly undermined America’s own efforts to present an image of freedom, opportunity for all, and human rights. For hawkish liberals, civil rights was very much a foreign policy issue. Furthermore, although the origins of affirmative action are controversial — there is still some debate over what President Lyndon Johnson meant by the phrase — administrations of both parties highlighted such policies for international audiences when responding to the Soviets.

To some extent, then, the modern American education system was built to defeat the Soviet Union, both in terms of science and technology leadership as well as moral authority. It is also not surprising that both meritocratic education and affirmative action would drift from their original intentions as the Cold War faded into the “end of history”.

In the decades since Vannevar Bush’s report, the idea of meritocratic universities, open to all, gradually metamorphosed into “college for all”, and even “Yale or jail”. In light of America’s deeply entrenched small-d democratic passions, it was perhaps inevitable that the notion of universities being open to anyone with ability would eventually come to mean that everyone should attend one. If college is open to anyone with ability, after all, then anyone who does not go to college must be lazy or an imbecile. So American primary and secondary education became explicitly oriented around “preparing students for college”, meaning a four-year liberal arts degree, which came to be seen as essential for simply entering the middle class. Vocational tracks were stigmatised as casting children into intellectual and professional oblivion — and, besides, why go to “trade school” when the trades were in decline?

The neoliberal turn further entrenched the “college for all” mentality. The Chicago school of economics notion of “human capital”, which conceptualised training as a form of input capital, gained prevalence as deindustrialisation progressed. In theory, human capital simply means that the knowledge, skills, and other attributes of workers have economic value. In practice, it promised that education could substitute for physical and investment capital, and conveniently rationalised the notion that “more education” would address the challenges related to deindustrialisation and the “fissuring” of the US economy (and seemingly just every other economic problem). For various reasons, politicians and business leaders on both Left and Right embraced the sectoral shift away from capital intensive “Fordist” production in the late-20th century. The story that they sold to voters — and told themselves — was that, although nothing could or would be done to “bring the factories back”, the government would support more education for “the jobs of the future”. Americans would do the brainwork in the new “information economy”, while “commodity production” was offshored. In this paradigm, of course, the apparent value of university education only increases.

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By Terry Eagleton

Unfortunately, many of these illusions have not survived contact with reality. The “information economy” jobs of the future never materialised at the levels promised. The tech industry, relative to its profits and market capitalisation, employs relatively few people — unless one counts driving an Uber — and has delivered notoriously underwhelming productivity gains. Perhaps simply by the logic of supply and demand, the value of college degrees appears to decline as they become more common. While still significant, the economic advantages of a college education have fallen over time, even as student loan debt has exploded. Furthermore, the record of universities — fundamentally medieval institutions — at preparing students for the workforce is questionable at best. Increasing university enrolment has not always meant that more students were meeting higher standards, but rather that academic rigor and quality were being sacrificed to accommodate more tuition-payers. At any rate, it would be hard to argue that the quality of American intellectual life has improved with the expansion of university education. Instead, the entire college apparatus has become a bloated system that seems to badly misallocate resources while heightening inequality. Meanwhile, the original objective for expanding the universities — competition with the Soviet Union — disappeared during the end of history.

The affirmative action component of education, likewise, quickly evolved beyond its original justifications. Initially conceived as an understandable if somewhat ham-fisted attempt to rectify legacies of slavery and segregation, the intended beneficiaries were African American descendants of slaves. This group was essentially the entirety of the black population in the United States in the Sixties, which was then a little over 10% of the total US population. But around the time of major civil rights legislation, new immigration laws were also passed, dramatically expanding immigration. The non-Hispanic-white share of the population fell from about 85% in the Sixties to 58% today (among American children, the share is now less than half). The black population has also shifted, including many African immigrants who were never victims of slavery or segregation; today, Nigerian immigrants have above-median earnings. Nevertheless, affirmative action continued to expand along with the non-white population: from a relatively targeted programme aimed at about 10% of Americans, who had experienced state discrimination in the immediate past, it became an elaborate system for managing “diversity” in an increasingly “majority-minority” country. As globalisation gained momentum, foreign students could also benefit from simplistic racial categorisation, with the added benefit, for universities, that many paid full tuition.

Other emanations from civil rights had unexpected effects on education. The Supreme Court decision Griggs v. Duke Power Co., known mostly for establishing that seemingly neutral employment practices could be in violation of the Civil Rights Act if they resulted in a “disparate impact”, directly concerned employment testing. With the decline of such testing, employers increasingly turned to college degrees (and the relative ranking of universities) as indicators of graduate ability. This solidified the economic importance of the university system and its hierarchies. Meanwhile, other court decisions (and some state referenda) barred hard racial quotas and other forms of affirmative action. Universities did not abandon these programmes, however, but pursued them through ever-more opaque methods (applicants were credited for “overcoming adversity”, or universities were allowed to consider the effects of diversity on the student body). The result was that the substance of the “diversity” regime remained intact, but its logic appeared increasingly obscure and arbitrary.

Decades of mission drift have thus left universities in an impossible position. On the one hand, they function as the main sorting mechanisms for employers at the high end of the economy. On the other, they are supposed to be the main sources of “human capital” for all of society, saving the middle class through “more education”. They also retain, at least in theory, the goal of advancing science and technology, and have added functions around applied, corporate-funded research with the disappearance of the large corporate labs (e.g. Bell Labs). Some consider themselves start-up incubators as well. At the same time, they have appointed themselves to manage the diversity of an increasingly fractured populace, even though they cannot explicitly articulate or openly pursue that purpose. It is probably not a coincidence that wokeness erupted amid this confusion, and after the original rationale for meritocracy — great power competition — seemed to have vanished. To be charitable to academia, one could argue that society expects far too much from universities today, and it is little wonder that they seem to be performing worse and worse at each task.

In light of this history, the reform proposals of both anti-woke liberal and conservative critics seem inadequate. Even if this provisional anti-woke alliance can rein in progressive excesses, the deeper confusion surrounding the universities’ purpose cannot be resolved entirely on the culture war battlefield — or even by reforms limited to the universities themselves.

Harvard professor Steven Pinker, a prominent representative of the liberal camp, illustrates the limitations of the liberal perspective in a tweet proposing five reforms. Some of his recommendations, such as bolstering free speech policies by prohibiting forceful takeovers of buildings and interruptions of lectures, seem like basic common sense. Others, such as disempowering DEI bureaucrats, should be. But two of them are inherently in tension: discouraging the groupthink associated with intellectual “monocultures” will at least occasionally require abandoning his call for institutional political neutrality. Left to its own devices, the Harvard faculty will almost certainly remain a political monoculture, as it already is. To remedy this, Harvard’s administration would have to undertake some direct or indirect affirmative action for conservatives. The question of ideological diversity, then, seems to recapitulate the liberal dilemma over racial diversity. Is actively promoting diversity merely levelling the playing field, or benefiting the whole university community through exposure to under-represented viewpoints? Or is it just unfair discrimination, enforced by, in Pinker’s words, “bureaucrats responsible to no one”?

At the level of intellectual diversity, discouraging monocultures becomes even more complicated. There are no phrenologists at Harvard, for example, and few, if any, climate sceptics, creation scientists, or “human biodiversity” scholars, not to mention orthodox Freudian psychoanalysts or Marxist economists. Should the administration intervene to employ professors with these views? The faculty would doubtless say that the science is settled on these topics, and inviting dissident voices would only promote error over truth. But who gets to decide? How does one determine which monocultures are pernicious and which ones happily represent the triumph of truth over falsehood. Liberals do not really have an answer, which is one reason why their institutions have all deteriorated in recent decades. Ultimately, liberal value neutrality is always a fiction. It may be a salutary and desirable fiction, and probably would be a beneficial one for universities to recover. But such neutrality only functions within a horizon defined by a shared purpose — its own monoculture. Vannevar Bush and the Cold War liberals had such a purpose; today’s liberals do not, or at least have not been able to articulate one.

Anti-woke conservatives, on the other hand, have a clear goal: they seek to use the universities to inculcate conservative values, whether by refashioning red-state universities, starting new ones, or other means. The problem is that this vision is too narrow; it ignores the structural sources of universities’ power and the system’s underlying problems. Although Democrats are the party of education, conservatives often have far more romantic notions of the power of universities and professors. Look no further than the common conservative critiques of wokeness, which emphasise the role of academia. Not surprisingly, then, conservatives tend to imagine that hiring more conservative professors is the main thing required to reshape American culture.

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In reality, however, most evidence suggests that professors have relatively little influence on students’ ideologies, and there is little reason to think that more conservative faculty or academic institutions would make much of a difference beyond the campus. It is worth recalling that conservative colleges already exist, such as Hillsdale College, and there are more outside-funded conservative student organisations operating at, say, Harvard today than there were 20 years ago. Yet while Hillsdale is important to conservatives, and its students are well-represented among congressional staff, the brutal fact is that its influence on larger elite opinion is negligible. Likewise, while conservative campus organisations may be important nodes of personal networking, they obviously have not done much to change the trajectory of elite universities.

Conservatives’ inveterate idealism tends to blind them to the real functions and sources of the power of elite universities. The status of top institutions is not derived from their stellar humanities departments or pedagogical commitment, but rather from the signalling value of their credentials, the wealth of their alumni networks, and their relative importance to corporate and government research apparatuses. Everything else is marketing. Thus, changing university culture without changing any of the system’s underlying dynamics, which seems to be the current conservative approach, seems unlikely to succeed. Moreover, even if such an approach were to succeed, it would offer little to those who are not cultural conservatives: substituting identitarian progressivism with Straussian political theory or some other conservative hobbyhorse would do little to create a better prepared workforce or advance science and technology.

Instead of an exclusive focus on superficial culture war issues, educational reformers today should recall the last major, intentional reorganisation of the American university system that occurred during the Cold War. We must be cognisant of how that legacy has contributed to current problems, but should also recognise its value. Reforms that meet the needs of great-power competition are more likely to be far-reaching and enduring than endless battles over the universities’ symbolic orientation.

The primary difference between then and now involves the shifting demands of great-power competition. After the Second World War, US manufacturing dominated the world, but American primary research and basic science needed to be strengthened. The reforms of Vannevar Bush and the post-Sputnik legislation thus increased the funding for and importance of universities. Today, however, the situation is essentially the opposite. Basic research is still important, of course, but America’s main vulnerabilities lie in its supply chain and manufacturing dependencies on China. Its leadership in pure research is also most at risk in capital-intensive sectors that have been commercially abandoned due to foreign manufacturing subsidies, such as shipbuilding, nuclear reactor components, and perhaps even commercial aviation. Further strengthening universities will do little to address these problems; the focus should shift to other institutions.

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Americans in the mid-20th century probably could not have imagined the country’s loss of manufacturing dominance. They also underappreciated the importance of corporate labs, which Bush considered too focused on incremental improvements rather than fundamental breakthroughs. But institutions like Bell Labs — whose scientists won 10 Nobel Prizes — RCA Labs, Xerox PARC, and others made immense scientific contributions. These labs were lost in the late-20th century as a result of increasing foreign competition, the growing capital intensity of research, and shareholder demands for short-term financial returns. Universities, by default, picked up many of their functions, but university research productivity has been on a declining trajectory for decades. Instead of funnelling ever more money into dysfunctional universities, government and corporate funders should look to recreate, at some level, the major corporate labs. Such labs are better suited to work that combines innovation with production and manufacturing, and they could allow for better collaboration between multiple universities as well as researchers from corporations and start-ups. Insulating this research from faculty politics as well as undergraduate admissions and credentialing could also reduce pressures against meritocratic hiring.

The Bell Labs of 1950 is not coming back, of course, because Bell Telecom is not coming back. Large corporations are no longer incentivised to invest in quasi-independent research labs, and start-ups lack the capital for such projects. Nevertheless, government could work with the private sector to pioneer new labs and research facilities that could fill the holes left by the lost corporate labs. Another model is offered by the Broad Institute, a collaboration between Harvard and MIT, which was a leader in the development of CRISPR technology. Such institutions could be co-located with universities, and share personnel, but institutions with their own unified and coherent research missions, along with their own independent governance and funding structures — separated from undergraduate admissions and credentialing — would be an improvement over housing more programmes within already sclerotic universities.

At the same time, policymakers should continue existing efforts to reduce the importance of universities in employment credentialing. States such as Utah and Pennsylvania have already removed bachelor’s degree requirements for state government positions; hopefully other states will follow suit. Moreover, contra Griggs, direct employment testing should be encouraged to open up pathways to hiring at top-tier companies outside of elite college recruiting. Allowing five or 10 universities to be gatekeepers of the highest echelons of the U.S. economy has hardly improved “equity” and “inclusion”. If universities were less central to elite credentialing, the importance of micromanaging the “diversity” of their admissions would also decline.

Finally, instead of focusing on replacing the faculty of liberal arts institutions, or starting new ones, such as UATX, reformers should seek to build institutions that meet workforce or other practical education challenges. Elon Musk has floated the idea of starting new K-12 math and science schools, and this approach also seems more likely to succeed at the higher education level than churning out more underemployed liberal arts graduates, whether woke or anti-woke. To be sure, politicians have lavished praise and funding on community colleges and vocational training for decades, to little avail. The existing community college and apprenticeship tracks, even if some students can go on to do relatively well financially, do not offer access to prestigious professions. But a new set of applied science training institutes might have a better chance, especially if they solve an actual workforce challenge and are part of a larger ecosystem for training and credentialing outside of the universities.

On the whole, “college for all” has been a disaster economically, intellectually, and politically. Too many people, too much money, and too many research functions have been pushed into universities that have no business being there. It may have been reasonable, in the Forties and Fifties, to believe that strengthening universities was necessary to maintain America’s technological and economic leadership. But today, the opposite course is required. We need the universities to do less, not more. A common objection to this argument is that technology has become so much more complicated and specialised that more education is simply necessary. But the connection between “more education” and the “information economy” has always been overstated. One does not need a four-year degree, much less a postgraduate degree, to become skilled at “coding”. Two of America’s most successful computer technology entrepreneurs — Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg — famously dropped out of Harvard. Many successful recipients of the Thiel Fellowship intentionally avoided college.

Conservatives and liberals who remain devoted to more Romantic conceptions of the humanities will doubtless object to this ruthlessly instrumental approach to education. But breaking the university monopoly on credentialing and applied science has benefits for liberal arts purists as well. The “right-sizing” of universities would allow liberal arts colleges of various ideological orientations, whether Hillsdale or Oberlin, to compete with Harvard and Stanford on more equal footing. All of society would benefit if universities lost some of their exalted status. They are not the preservers of civilisation, guardians of truth, or reservoirs of moral purity. The more they are seen as practical institutions with practical functions, the less we need to worry about their ostensible values.

Although today’s crisis of higher education manifests primarily as another culture war battle, the issues go much deeper. Decades of institutional drift have left that system with multiple, contradictory purposes, none of which are being served effectively. If it is to be successfully reformed, American higher education must be reorganised to address the exigencies of great power competition that are emerging in the present.

Signs of revolt are everywhere. Last month, The New York Times led with a story headlined “Inside the Anti-DEI Crusade”, which reported that “more than 20 states considered or approved new laws taking aim at DEI” in 2023. BlackRock, a pioneer of ESG investing, just announced mass layoffs in its ESG division. It was recently discovered that assets under management in ESG had declined by $5 trillion over two years.

This string of victories might suggest that the swift “de-wokeification” of business is not far off. After all, the C-Suite represents the only locus of power in American life to have a documented Right-leaning bias. One study last year found that registered Republicans outnumbered Democrats among top-earning executives in S&P 500 companies by a margin of 69% to 31%. It seems logical enough, then, to attribute the relentless equity, gender and climate activism of American businesses over recent years to pressure from a shareholder base, media and society in the throes of a sociocultural maelstrom. It would seem equally logical to predict that as this maelstrom subsides, managers will return to their traditional role of maximising shareholder returns, while leaving the political realm to elected politicians.

But wishful thinking will only lead to disappointment. Such optimism depends on the tenuous assumption that business leaders, when left to their own devices, will lead their businesses the way they vote. In today’s America, that would require them to be willing to see their own elite position severely curtailed or taken away entirely. And to give up one’s status for one’s values is a bigger sacrifice than most people are willing to make.

To be sure, C-Suite positions accord their holders wealth and status within a company or an industry. But that most tantalising of emoluments — social status — is doled out by other institutions, most notably media, academia and government, all of which have a decidedly different political orientation from the C-suite. It is, therefore, no surprise that, even while Republican executives outnumber Democrats by more than 2-1, the CEOs whose wisdom is most regularly exalted in the mass media —  say, Warren Buffett of Berkshire Hathaway, Bob Iger of Disney, or Larry Page (formerly) of Google — are Democrats. Meanwhile, Right-leaning CEOs and founders too powerful for the media to ignore — say, Elon Musk or Peter Thiel — are cast as out-of-touch, if not a bit sinister.

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If this isn’t enough to remind a CEO which side his bread is buttered, he can consider the recipients of those most golden of post-retirement parachutes, Distinguished Professorships at Harvard or the Wharton School of Business. (As an ex-employee of the former, I can vouch that the ideology of its practice-based faculty mirrors Buffett’s far more closely than Musk’s.) Or he can observe which titans of finance are awarded honorary doctorates or deliver homilies at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, the Aspen Institute, and the Munich Security Conference.

Beyond the quest for status, there are more quotidian considerations that encourage business leaders to stay the course with DEI and ESG. Every year, as America’s regulatory state grows, so does American businesses’ dependency on the good will of regulators and government partners. And once one penetrates below the rank of presidential appointees — even if November brings a second Trump Administration — the political makeup of regulators is overwhelmingly Democratic. Many CEOs will conclude that running afoul of regulators to satisfy their personal values simply isn’t worth it.

For the first time in years, shareholders and investors are fighting back against the American C-suite. It’s too late, however, for their revolt to have a deep and durable impact on company behaviour. That is because the shareholder is no longer king in American business, and he hasn’t been for a long time. The “stakeholder” is.

In American business law, the cornerstone of fiduciary duty is the business judgment rule (BJR), which stipulates that managers are exempted from legal liability for violating their duty to the shareholder, provided that they act “in good faith”, in the company’s interest. Classically, “the company’s interest” has been defined narrowly as maximising shareholder returns. Over the past decade, however, the definition of a company’s “interest” has been quietly expanded — in sources ranging from the Harvard Law School Forum on Law and Governance to that consummate arbiter of business conventional wisdom, Investopedia — from shareholder benefit to “stakeholder” benefit.

What is a stakeholder? Pioneered by WEF Chairman Klaus Schwab decades ago, the term refers to any “party that has an interest in a company and can either affect or be affected by the business”. The term is wide enough to encompass not only shareholders, but employees, customers, government regulators, communities, entire nations, even the whole world. Under the stakeholder system, there is no hierarchy, no order in which the different stakeholders must be served. It is — critically — so slippery a concept that virtually any business decision can be justified on the grounds that it benefits one stakeholder or another. In this way, it accords unprecedented power to managers, who, by virtue of their positions, can claim an understanding of stakeholders’ needs shared by no one else.

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Stakeholderism enables managers to do two things that were far more difficult under the conventional shareholder model: first, to pursue ends other than profitability without running afoul of the BJR; and second, to avoid personal responsibility for unpopular business decisions by claiming that other “stakeholders” have demanded them. If they are to win the corporate battle against DEI and ESG, therefore, shareholders need to be ready to recognise and resist three common “stakeholder” dodges: employee activism, consumer activism and government regulations.

Let’s start with employee activism, which refers to pressure exerted on managers by company employees to adopt or reject a certain policy or position. Employee activism is a real concern for managers at many companies, particularly those in industries that attract politically engaged young people. But it is also easily exploited by managers for their own ends. This is due to a fundamental asymmetry in information: managers know what their employees are saying, but the public — and even shareholders — largely do not. Therefore, when a manager justifies a policy decision on the grounds that key employees threatened to leave the company if they decided differently, who is to say that they didn’t?

Take Disney, an expert in the use of employees as a corporate shield. In 2022, in response to a new set of education regulations related to sexuality in the company’s home state of Florida (monikered as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill), the company capitalised on employee activism to oppose the law. Following a series of walkouts by some employees, Disney’s various outlets issued statements condemning the law, such as this tweet by Disney+: “We strongly denounce all legislation that infringes on the basic human rights of people in the LGBTQIA+ community — especially legislation that targets and harms young people and their families.” Disney subsequently committed to ceasing all political donations within the state of Florida, donated to the Human Rights Campaign, and included a gay kiss scene in the upcoming movie Lightyear.

The narrative, as widely reported, was that Disney employees had acted en masse to persuade their bosses to take a stand against bigotry following an insufficiently indignant reaction from CEO Bob Chapek. But there was another side to the story which only received coverage in conservative media outlets. It turned out that a group of conservative-leaning employees at Disney had also written an open letter to management, urging Disney to remain “politically neutral” and arguing that the company “shouldn’t be a vehicle for one demographic’s political activism”. Disney, they added, had created an oppressive political culture within the company: “Employees who want [Disney] to make Left-wing political statements are encouraged, while those of us who want the company to remain neutral can say so only in a whisper out of fear of professional retaliation.”

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Here were two groups of Disney employees taking contradictory positions. But when Disney management sought to express “solidarity” with its employees, it did so by capitulating totally to the first group while ignoring the second. And yet, if a shareholder irate over Disney’s antagonism of its home state, its governor and legislature were to take management to court for violating their fiduciary duties, he would have faced a severe uphill climb. After all, Disney’s employed “creatives” mean the difference between industry leadership and falling behind. And when it comes to what those employees really want, or whether one group of dissenting employees poses a greater threat to the company than another, who is in a better position to decide than the managers? This was none other than a victory for managers over shareholders, using employee activism as a shield.

Indeed, as if to demonstrate just how fully he has internalised this principal, Iger, responding to a separate imbroglio over the restrictive 2019 abortion law in Georgia, speculated portentously: “I think many people who work for us will not want to work there, and we will have to heed their wishes in that regard.” Quartz, reporting on Iger’s comments at the time, asked: “Was this another victory of sorts for employee activism before employees even acted?” This was the wrong question. It was, rather, another victory for managers over shareholders, using employee activism as a shield.

The principle can also apply to customer activism. While customer feedback can be more public than employee sentiment, much of it is also proprietary — collected through meetings and correspondence with clients or customer surveys. The prerogative of packaging this information and determining how it should influence company behaviour falls to managers. The same goes for government regulations. When the task of interpreting the regulatory climate is left solely to managers, they can very easily end up passing off their own political aims as regulatory risks, or even lobbying behind the scenes for the very regulations that they present to their boards as regrettable faits accomplis.

The long-and-short of it is that shareholders are in a far weaker position compared with a decade ago. Their only avenues to influence company policy now are through questions brought to corporate boards, and through the hiring and firing of managers and board members. If they are to fight back, they must learn to use those avenues to maximum effect. Firstly, by demanding thorough proof from managers every time a decision is attributed to the needs of a “stakeholder”, to make sure it’s not another dodge. And then, by hiring and firing managers and board members based on who will prioritise benefit to shareholders, rather than their public image or personal political aims.

Managers will always feel the urge toward “mission creep” from the purely commercial to the political. When they succumb to it, the democratic process surrenders to what the sociologist C. Wright Mills once termed a “power elite” — an amalgamation of public and private sector that offers us a single orthodoxy rather than a marketplace of ideas or products. Shareholder capitalism is democracy’s vital firewall between the public and private sector, and it is under threat. It is nothing less than the patriotic duty of all American investors and board members to reinforce it for the protection of our republic.

The answer is straightforward: both Ali and Gay came unprepared onto a major public stage, failed spectacularly in their respective roles, and massively embarrassed their respective organisations.

In early August, Ali had dreams of winning the 100-metre sprint for Somalia at the International University Sports Federation (FISU) Summer World University Games in China. Her performance was a fiasco. She looked confused at the starting blocks. Once the race started, she was so slow the cameraman struggled to keep her in the frame. As for the remainder of the race, one Forbes reporter noted: “Ali completed the 100-metre dash in 21.81 seconds, an embarrassing finish that’s almost double the winning 11.58-second time run by Brazil’s Gabriela Silva Mourão and nearly nine 9 seconds behind the second slowest time of 13.15 seconds by Turkmenistan’s Alsu Habibulina — leading many to ask questions about how a runner, who has never competed in a major event and appears to be untrained, was able to compete on such a large international stage.”

When she finally made it to the finish line, she did a little skip and a hop of triumph. A video of her sloth-like performance went viral on social media, along with demands for an explanation.

In early December, Claudine Gay, the president of Harvard was called to testify in Congress and asked whether calling for the genocide of Jews on campus violated Harvard university’s code of conduct. Gay delivered prepared remarks, priding herself and her institution on protecting free expression and, after a pitiful exercise in evasion, settling on the answer that calling for the genocide of Jews on campus depended on the context. She did the equivalent of Ali’s hop and skip with her smiles and smirks. The video clip of her abysmal performance went viral along with demands for an explanation.

Back in Somalia, the most pertinent questions in Ali’s case were obvious. Where was her record? How did she qualify? Where were the gatekeepers? The Somali Minister of Sports ordered an investigation, which found that a relative of Ali had ignored or lowered the standards of athletic selection for Ali. He sacked the woman in question and apologised publicly. This may not be the end of corruption in the government of Somalia, but it ended the story there within about 48 hours.

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After Gay’s shambolic performance in Congress, similar questions were asked and answered by the public. The most obvious being: how did someone with a wafer-thin scholarly record of only 11 journal publications over a period of 26 years get to become the president of Harvard? Allegations and proof of nearly 50 instances of plagiarism followed. How on earth was this overlooked? Where were the gatekeepers?

The Harvard Corporation, the authority responsible for hiring the university’s president, chose a different path from the one taken by the Somali Minister of Sports. After a series of denials and statements of “unanimous support for the president”, threats against the New York Post and accusations of bigotry, they persuaded Gay to step down. Nevertheless, she continues to stay employed by Harvard as a tenured professor, retaining an annual salary of around $900,000. As for the university itself, the result is at least a billion dollars in withdrawn commitments from various donors, more congressional probing, a slump in applications from prospective students, and the trashing of its reputation.

All of which raises a peculiar question: if the Sports Ministry of a war-torn African country is able to show ethical clarity when objective standards of merit have been violated, what is holding back the leadership of America’s most renowned university? The answer, I suspect, lies in the three-letter acronym that has been menacing American and other Western institutions of higher education for the past decade: DEI, which supposedly stands for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.

DEI is the programmatic implementation of an intolerant progressive agenda that views the existing structures of government, education, media, and industry as deeply unjust. It presents these institutions in the light of a hierarchical “intersectional” model of the oppressors and the oppressed. The ultimate oppressor is white, male, and straight. Blacks, women, gays and others are defined as their victims. To redress these past wrongs, DEI is supposed to design new structures of “positive” discrimination, or “affirmative action”.

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This is how individuals such as Claudine Gay secured promotion to the commanding heights not just of the Ivy League, but of many other august institutions. Merit, qualifications, the ability to lead — all these criteria were cast aside as expressions of “systemic racism” and “white supremacy”.

The blame for this, of course, cannot be solely pinned on the individuals who have since benefited from DEI. As Gay ascended the ladder of academic preferment, her ambition was central but hardly sufficient. Rather, she did so with the complicity of a network of gatekeepers: the admissions offices of Princeton and Stanford; the peer reviewers who overlooked her plagiarism; the Harvard committees that promoted her through the various ranks of the professorship; and, finally, the members of the Harvard Corporation who deemed her the most suitable candidate for the position of president.

Thanks to their collaboration, and the fall-out following their exposure, the truth about DEI has been thrust into the mainstream. As an acronym, it still holds, but not in the way they intend. In reality, the D stands for the degradation of the standards once upheld at institutions such as Harvard; the E stands for their erasure; and the I stands not only for the indoctrination that follows, but also intimidation. Gay, after all, not only plagiarised the work of Carol Swain and other black academics. As dean and then as president, she set about destroying the careers of black scholars who choose to play by the rules of merit and academic integrity, notably Roland Fryer.

In a homogeneous society such as Somalia’s, identity politics is all about the bloodline. There, people in positions of authority try to give members of their extended family a leg up, whether or not they are qualified for the position in question. On rare occasions, the corruption might be caught on camera, as with the chubby girl who fancied she could win the 100-metre sprint. Normally, though, the favouring of family and friends continues until the resentment erupts into the next cycle of civil violence. There are no nice-sounding acronyms to cover up venality and, since everyone has the same skin colour and adheres to the same religion, immutable traits are irrelevant.

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In a more sophisticated society such as the United States of America, corruption takes a different form. Here, identity politics assumes the role of bloodlines. Preferment is given to “women” or “women of colour”, so long as they follow strictly the progressive party line. But the net result is essentially the same. People without talent are rewarded and promoted. Those who would fare better in a meritocracy are left seething with resentment.

In her graceless attempt to portray her downfall as something more than the result of her exposure as a fraud, Claudine Gay alleged that there was “a broader war to unravel public faith in pillars of American society… Trusted institutions of all types — from public health agencies to news organisations — will continue to fall victim to coordinated attempts to undermine their legitimacy and ruin their leaders’ credibility.”

The reality is very different. Harvard — like the New York Times, which published her screed — has done the work of unravelling public faith all by itself. It has made a mockery of itself as surely as the Somali Sports Ministry did when it fielded a manifestly unqualified runner. The difference is that Harvard humiliated itself for the sake of an ideology, as opposed to plain nepotism. Until that ideology is extirpated not just from one university but from American education as a whole, the mafia of mediocrity will continue to march on — and produce many more Claudine Gays along the way.