But what makes America an old country is not just institutional continuity, but a politics shaped by a fixation with its own evermore distant moment of creation. For all the rhetoric of being a “new nation”, a tiny number of bewigged, silk-stockinged, well-fed gentlemen — many of them slaveholders and all of them dead — still have a powerful political voice. In America, we are so used to every political issue becoming a constitutional question, and to the sterile self-referential debates about the “original construction” of 18th-century documents, that we can easily forget how weird it all is. In Britain, debates about gun control or abortion never, so far as I know, centre on the views of the Second Marquess of Rockingham or William Pitt the Younger. To appropriate a famous metaphor, US political history sometimes seems like a boat beating against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

For the sons and grandsons of the founding generation, the defining fact of public life was the precious burden they had inherited. An example was Abraham Lincoln, who was born on the frontier of European settlement in 1809 and grew up with the stories of old men who had fought in the Revolutionary War, or who claimed to have done. In one of his first public lectures, given in 1838 at a “young men’s lyceum” in Springfield, Illinois, the future president laid out the intimidatingly high stakes for his generation. “We find ourselves,” he told the young men, “under the government of a system of political institutions, conducing more essentially to the ends of civil and religious liberty, than any of which the history of former times tells us.” They could take no credit for this; it was no more than good fortune. “We toiled not in the acquirement or establishment” of these blessings, he pointed out, “they are a legacy bequeathed us, by a once hardy, brave, and patriotic, but now lamented and departed race of ancestors.” Americans — of course, he meant white, male Americans — had inherited the earth and therefore it was theirs to lose.

Very few people in American history have done anything other than venerate the constitutional settlement of 1787. And the few dissenters — such as the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, who branded the constitution a “covenant with death and an agreement with hell” because of its protection of slaveholders — have been regarded as shocking iconoclasts.

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This underlying conservatism, the pose of moving forward while looking back, is characteristic of nations founded in revolution. You see similar traits in the political culture of Cuba or the old Soviet Union. After all, if you believe your revolution inaugurated a new order in which despotism had been banished by the bright light of freedom, then any further revolution would be revanchism of the most insidious kind. As the novelist James Fenimore Cooper explained in the early 19th century: “Here [in America], the democrat is the conservative, and thank God he has something worth preserving.”

Yet, at key moments in its history, the fixation on its founding moment has paradoxically enabled creative transformation. This was even true of the nation’s only true existential crisis to date, the slaveholders’ rebellion of the 1860s, which subsequently became known as the Civil War.

William Lloyd Garrison rejected the constitutional settlement, but Lincoln, who also hated slavery, saw the matter differently. Even as a young man in 1838, when he urged his generation to let “support of the Constitution and Laws” become the “political religion of the nation”, Lincoln had understood the danger to the revolutionary settlement as coming more from enslavers than from radical abolitionists. The example uppermost in his mind was the recent murder in Alton, Illinois, of an abolitionist newspaper editor, Elijah P. Lovejoy, by a mob backed by the city’s mayor. A quarter of a century later, President Lincoln led an administration that raised mass armies, waged industrial-scale war, and emancipated four million enslaved people, all in the name of preserving the founders’ legacy.

The outcome of the Civil War, with the breaking of the power of the slaveholding class, the formal commitment to equal rights, and the strengthening of the potential power of the federal government, is sometimes referred to as America’s “Second Founding”. This is a helpful formulation in many ways, and yet at the time what seemed more important was not the replacement but the preservation of the founders’ legacy. The 13th, 14th and 15th amendments, passed in the wake of the Civil War, fundamentally re-cast the relationship between the national government and its citizens. The 14th amendment defined citizenship for the first time — in a way that included black people — and other subsequent transformations in American government such as the growth of the welfare state and the enforcement of civil rights in the 20th century depended upon it.

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Had America been more like France, the post-Civil War constitutional settlement might have been called the “Second American Republic”. But America is not France, as Americans never ceased to point out — fear of swivel-eyed, guillotine-wielding Jacobinism was the 19th-century equivalent of 20th-century America’s obsession with communists. No one of any significance in the post-Civil War United States called for an entirely new constitution. Having just waged an unimaginably bloody war to preserve the constitution, the last thing they were going to do was discard it. And so, the constitutional innovations of the post-Civil War years were achieved not in spite of the fundamentally conservative nature of American political culture, but because of it. Only by presenting transformation as a validation of the founding could real change happen.

The same was true in the US’s other revolutionary decade, the Thirties, when, in the face of terrifying levels of mass unemployment, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration massively expanded the federal government’s role in national life in order, once again, to keep the revolutionary settlement intact. The imagined approval of the bewigged gentlemen of the founding era was as important to Roosevelt as it had been to Lincoln, but, lo and behold, they turned out to be surprisingly sympathetic to change, so long as it was in the interests of preservation.

Today, however, such flexibility seems hard to imagine. The Declaration of Independence was signed 12 score and seven years ago. That’s at least eight generations of political leaders. But curiously, the more the founding moment recedes in time, the greater its ossifying grip on American politics seems to be. If America is an old country, it is showing its age: it’s crotchety, stuck in its ways, telling endless stories about the past. Institutional arthritis prevents the natural flexing that’s needed to deal with a rapidly changing society.

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It is now more than half a century since a significant constitutional amendment was passed (the 26th amendment allowing the reduction of the voting age to 18 was ratified in 1971, although there was also an uncontroversial amendment ratified in 1992 which delayed raises in congressional salaries until after the next election). With politics so polarised, and the parties so evenly balanced, any fundamental institutional reform now seems impossible.

In the Nineties, no one could imagine it being acceptable in the modern age for a president to be elected with only a minority of the popular vote because of the workings of the Electoral College. But then it happened in 2000, and again in 2016, and, after each, calls for an amendment to abolish the Electoral College went nowhere. The Senate ensures that voters in rural, sparsely populated states such as Wyoming are vastly more powerful in Washington than the voters of, say, California. And whatever the defence of this constitutional curiosity might be, the point is that it is practically impossible to change. With a majority on the Supreme Court now committed to the eccentric doctrine of judicial originalism, the ghostly chaps in silk stockings seem more than ever the pale-faced opponents of institutional innovation.

Obviously, the US is, despite its growing inequality, a remarkably successful, wealthy society. It is still capable of policy innovation, and even (contrary to what you might think if you don’t have a sense of historical and comparative perspective) one of the more successful multi-racial societies in human history. But at the same time, it is, to put it mildly, difficult to address issues of structural inequality when meaningful reform of the institutional structure is effectively off the table. How many presidents can be elected with fewer votes than their opponents before the system cracks? For how long can the Supreme Court retain authority if the perception continues that it makes hugely consequential decisions while being unrepresentative and unaccountable?

But the founding fathers have been flexible fellows in the past, and with their imagined blessing huge changes have been wrought. Perhaps even the oldest and crankiest country can rediscover its youthful capacity for reform, especially if it does so while insisting that it is doing so in order that the important things remain the same.

The Embrace, a new statue unveiled in Boston to honour Martin Luther King, brought exactly this to mind.

The 20-foot bronze is intended to depict the moment King learned he had won the Nobel Peace Prize. It’s inspired by a photograph of him embracing his wife, Coretta Scott King. But it doesn’t depict the pair enjoying a hug. It’s just the arms, joined by immense, amorphous, organic-looking tubes that evoke tentacles, raw sausage, or perhaps a length of colon. Even, as many suggested (including one of Coretta Scott King’s descendants), a giant penis.

Nor was the derision solely from conservative quarters, for all that it was louder there. Even Karen Attiah of the Washington Post fretted at these two important figures in the civil rights movement “reduced to body parts”, denouncing it as a “dismembered” and “de-racialised” symbol of anodyne “love”, shorn of King’s true radicalism. But this is, in fact, precisely the point. The Embrace captures a peculiar dilemma of the emerging post-human political order. How do you wield the power of public art as a way of signalling shared meanings, when your claim to rightful rule is based on the idea that all shared meaning is by definition oppressive?

It has always been the prerogative of ruling elites to determine the nature, placement and aesthetic of public monuments. From ancient Rome to the British Empire, or indeed the Soviet Union and beyond, one may infer a great deal about ruling moral and political priors from what gets a big statue. In 2020, for example, the president of Turkmenistan unveiled a surreal 19ft gilded statue of an Asian shepherd dog, symbolising the country’s heritage. Other monumental works of the last half-century or so may be religious, such as Japan’s 120m Ushiku Daibutsu Buddha statue, completed in 1993. Or, often, they are nationalistic, such as Russia’s 85m The Motherland Calls, completed in 1967, or the 182m statue of Vallabhbhai Patel unveiled in 2018 in Gujarat, as a symbol of Indian unity and independence.

And as one power falls and another rises, so too the older monuments will be at risk: images of Saddam’s giant statue toppling in 2003 are an iconic part of the Iraq war, while (on a smaller scale) the fall of Edward Colston into Bristol Harbour was a similarly iconic moment in the modern statue wars.

And even if fallen statues are preserved, it matters a great deal where. A giant gilded dog on an important thoroughfare in Ashgabat is infinitely more honoured than the likenesses of Stalin that now dot Grūtas Park in Lithuania, informally known as Stalin World. Here, tourists may view a huge collection of toppled Soviet-era monuments, the lack of reverence in their placement underlined by juxtaposition with a children’s playground and mini-zoo.

But what the statue defenders perhaps don’t realise is that we all already live in Grūtas Park: a semi-ironic display of relics from a civilisation and political order that died in the 20th century. For it is not a coincidence that every instance of large, figurative monumental art of the kind described above is located in a non-Western country. In Western Europe, that style was largely abandoned after 1945: too many blamed the high culture of the 19^th century, including its Christian faith, for the horrors that killed millions. In response, tastemakers turned away from figurative works – and as for heroic idealisations of the human form, forget it: just a bit too Nazi.

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Instead, postwar art mavens embraced abstraction, clean lines and planes, exemplified by the “modern, forward-looking and contemporary” Festival of Britain. Sculptors such as Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth reflect that commitment to a world stripped bare of anything too heroic, figurative, or ideological: one that had shed its dangerous fixation with the past, and pointed only toward a clean, innovative, universalist tomorrow. Public art was best when it didn’t really say anything. Traces of the older order, meanwhile, were for the most part politely ignored, or (increasingly) treated as relics.

But that intermezzo is over. As the End of History has come to an end, public art has once again become a site of explicit moral statement: not spaces filled with abstractions where no one mentions the war, but increasingly the battlefield itself. Gone are the carefully neutral, antiseptic abstracts. Now, public art must have a message.

But what should it say? The old order knew what it drew on: broadly speaking, in the contest over what we memorialise, one side stands for the long, messy history of the West – including the Christian humanist vision of human nature and dignity, and the common good, that Martin Luther King, a preacher, drew upon for his civil rights activism. But as far as the West’s cultural elites are concerned, that order died and was buried by 1945, along with that vision of what humans are, and the idea of nations as such.

And yet what’s replacing it is also, in a sense, dead. The old regime is denounced for being inadequately concerned with the suffering of victims – such as in Afua Hirsch’s call for Nelson’s Column to be pulled down, on the grounds that Nelson “was what you would now call, without hesitation, a white supremacist”. But when the time comes to fill those plinths with positive representations of its own sacred values, a new regime whose only sacred value is individual autonomy finds that representation runs the risk of excluding someone.

So any sculptor tempted to make something beautiful is on shaky ground. As the Nazis knew all too well, an idealised human form implies a hierarchy of values. This is dangerously exclusionary. Thus, inasmuch as heroic figurative works are still permitted, these are almost always what the sociologist Philip Rieff called “deathworks”: anti-monuments whose aim is principally not to uphold but negate sacred values. The prewar figurative register for public art still exists – but only in subjects that invert or negate a trope from the old order: Medusa holding the severed head of Perseus, for example, or a dreadlocked man in a hoodie astride a prancing horse.

In other words: it’s not that we no longer have skilled artists making beautiful, proportionate, figurative work. It’s just that, the class with its hands on the purse-strings doesn’t care. For what this class seeks to represent — the class that dominates media, NGOs, universities and the like — is its own form of power: one which I have elsewhere called swarmism.

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Swarmism is power without a head, which is to say without accountability. It operates instead via “overlapping partnerships and networks”, as the foundation which funded The Embrace describes itself. And it is power without a heart: in place of fallible, capricious human feeling, including human mercy or relationships, it offers bureaucratic compassion via algorithmic taxonomies of “intersecting” victimhood.

For the swarmist vision of human flourishing has no shared meanings. Instead, all we really have in common is individual freedom, our technologies, and our physical bodies. And if this is true, and if it is also true that all hierarchies of values are exclusionary, there is nothing to aspire to beyond this life. There is nothing admirable about humans. The best we can aspire to is probably to re-engineer ourselves into something superior.

This bleak vision, combined with the most vigorous possible negation of Christian humanism, overlaid with anxious posturing about “marginalised groups”, forms the backbone of the swarmist aesthetic — and nothing could be more swarmist than the unaccountable committees who now commission public art. The Embrace, for example, was commissioned by a nonprofit (one swarm) with support from a foundation (another swarm). It is indeed fitting that Martin Luther King, a man fired by a Christian belief in universal human dignity, should have his legacy reworked for the headless, heartless, swarmist order, by representing his moment of triumph in an embrace without either a head, or a heart.

After close to a century of careful, antiseptic abstraction, then, the swarmist monumental style has arrived. It memorialises its moral taxonomies in deliberately beautiful deathworks, and deliberately ugly, posthuman artworks. In sculptural form, it produces something akin to a deification of nihilism, that alternates between feasting on the carcass of the previous regime and creating swarm-approved monuments to a posthuman future. It is a queasy mix of genuflection to any visual tradition save the Western one, combined with a Cylon-laboratory celebration of distorted, protean flesh.

We get the high culture we deserve. Our journey to this point didn’t begin with the two world wars, but rather completed its trajectory there. Now, after a mid-century intermezzo of abstraction, we appear to have accepted that the Christian age is over, as too is industrial one, and our period of mourning for its demise. And as the WEF’s grandees meet in Davos to discuss how best to embrace the Fourth Industrial Revolution that will transform us into cyborgs, the culture swarm has settled on a style of monumental art to suit. Welcome to the flesh factories.

In premodern England, processions were mostly connected to the liturgical calendar: events often both celebratory and of deep moral significance, marking saints’ days and Holy Week, accompanied with chanting, song or enactment of Bible stories. Perhaps the first monarch to use public spectacle as a political tool was our reigning Queen’s namesake, Elizabeth I, whose annual Queen’s Progress would see her take the whole court on the road over the summer, passing slowly and in great splendour through every part of her kingdom, where her subjects would put on pageants and feasts in her honour. She embarked on 23 in her 44 years as Queen, extending the glamour of her reign well beyond the narrow circle of her immediate court.

But what does a procession mean in the 21st Century? And who is it for? If Elizabeth I used pageantry to project her image and soft political power across her kingdom, the time between her reign and the arrival of her namesake, Elizabeth II, has delivered technologies that — in theory at least — render such efforts obsolete.

What’s the point of taking your entire court on the road, at vast effort and expense, when you can broadcast images of yourself everywhere with little to no effort? Meanwhile, for participants, the idea that your procession is being watched by journalists or TV cameras gives it a whole different set of meanings and potentials. No longer something you do with the other participants, it becomes something you do for an imagined audience, and whose meaning is outside the event itself.

If that sounds abstract, think about the idea of “peaceful protest”. This has been extensively used by progressive movements throughout the 20th Century, to effect political change with minimal violence by inspiring public sympathy for a cause. The Indian independence campaigner Mahatma Gandhi was a trailblazer in the format: between March and April 1930, he led a 240-mile march across India to collect salt from the coast, in protest against the 1882 Salt Act, a British colonial law which prohibited Indians from gathering or selling salt.

Gandhi was joined by thousands of his fellow-countrymen, some 60,000 of whom were arrested for their involvment. The march helped tilt public sympathy in favour of independence both on the subcontinent and – via newspaper reports – elsewhere in the world, and contributed to the movement for independence that came to fruition in 1948, four years before our reigning Elizabeth was crowned. Barely over a decade after that coronation, in 1963, Martin Luther King led some 250,000 sympathisers in another historic political procession in Washington, this time for racial equality: the scene of his “I Have A Dream” speech.

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Both these peaceful mass protests changed the course of history. But their political force relied on the presence of journalists to report on them. Before the mass-media age – that is, well into the 18th Century – any crowd of people with a political grievance was less likely to be treated as a noble political protest than as an incipient riot, not least because in most cases that’s what it was. The 1381 Peasants’ Revolt didn’t sit about with placards waiting for the world to sympathise with their dislike of wage caps and the poll tax. They marched on London, where they massacred Flemish merchants and demolished John O’Gaunt’s palace.

By the same token, who cares about some people walking 240 miles to get salt, unless the world at large reads about it in the papers and understands the symbolic meaning? And as for 250,000 people gathering near the seat of government in a country of (then) 189 million people, unless the press is there to record the stirring speeches and report on its orderliness, that’s not a peaceful protest, it’s merely a public order problem. As it was, these events proved pivotal at a time when mass media was becoming increasingly important.

The digital age has changed the calculus again, though. On social media platforms such as Twitter and Instagram, you can get a sense of which ideas, causes or moods are swirling across the collective consciousness by seeing which hashtags are popular. Meanwhile, protests like those led by Gandhi and King have increasingly given way to something more nebulous and feel-good: the physical manifestation of a trending hashtag.

These such events may gesture at concrete political change but (like the clicktivism they mirror) often land instead on something far more nebulous: emotional gestures of “standing with” some oppressed group, or “raising awareness” of the most broad-brush issues, with very little in the way of concrete policy attached.

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In this view, political voice isn’t something individual; it’s weilded collectively, by a swarm. That is: if you want to be heard, you need to make sure the imagined observer can see that there are lots of you. And to achieve that, you have to ensure the hashtag trends, and add your body to the physical swarm of people all gathered in one place to support that cause.

But the trouble with trending-hashtag approach to mass politics is that, much like hashtags themselves, such physical gatherings are markedly less connected with concrete political action than their 20th-Century forebears. Gandhi wanted an independent India; King wanted equal legal standing for all Americans regardless of skin colour. Both achieved their aim. But since the turn of the century and rise of the internet, this has steadily broken down: in 2003, a million Not In My Name marchers did nothing to deter Tony Blair from invading Iraq.

The 2017 Women’s March, meanwhile, took place across some 600 locations and 81 countries – itself impossible without social media – and had an estimated 3.2 million participants in the US alone, making it the largest single-day protest in US history. It was hailed as transformational; but it’s far less clear what the march as a whole was for, let alone what it achieved.

It swiftly became roiled by anti-semitism scandals, and saw participants falling away to more issue-specific campaigning. And if 3.2 million Americans in pink hats marched in outrage at the election of a pussy-grabber to the White House, it appears the weight of their numbers has had little impact on The Donald’s reported determination to have another crack at the US Presidency.

For what might such a swarm campaign do after its collective voice has been heard? This reflects, maybe, the parallel rise of an ecosystem one commentator has called the “NGOcracy”: a body of non-governmental agencies concerned with driving social change, in line with how they have chosen to interpret popular opinion as seen in trending-hashtags. That is: in the digital age the job of mass processions is simply to emote.

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Processing alongside my flag-waving daughter on Thursday evening, though, I found myself wondering: is that all it can be — an emotional pressure-valve for a politically defanged public square whose claim to agency has been colonised by professionalised NGOs? One of the most striking criticisms I saw of the Jubilee celebration seemed to me to map nationwide Jubilee events, large and small, onto this social-media-age paradigm of hashtag activism. Based on the turnout of supporters at the Mall, this commentator suggested, the Queen is not popular nationwide. And, furthermore, anyone who really cared about the monarchy could easily make the journey into London to add their body to this single swarm in the Queen’s honour.

Implicitly, in this view, none of the local processions was meaningful unless it added to the royalist body-count visible in drone footage of Central London. But does this make sense? I struggle to imagine another cause that could turn out a thousand small-town citizens of Bedfordshire, of all ages, after dinner on a Thursday night. I also know that other processions of a similar kind took place all over the country. I imagine very few of them were filmed by drone, so their body-count couldn’t be evaluated by media commentators for trending-hashtag status.

Does it follow that each of these events was meaningless? Only if you believe that the value of a gathering, event or procession lies in its ability to make a contribution to the trending-hashtag emotional life of the nation as a whole. But what I found hopeful and heart-warming about my modest local celebration was the reminder that great swathes of the country really don’t care much about what’s happening on the internet.

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For me this was salutary. Especially in the face of in-person interactions mostly banned or tightly constrained during lockdown, and ever more of our public life accordingly forced online, it can feel difficult to escape an increasingly noisy, divisive and overheated digital public discourse. And it’s this discourse that prefers to emote en masse, whether online or in the real world, via the kind of hashtag-protest we saw in the Women’s March. Last Thursday reminded me that away from all the shouting, plenty of communities still gather with and for one another, and with only the faintest of nods to the noisy and increasingly self-absorbed parallel universe of digital-era mass politics.

It’s too early to tell whether such events will persist once Her Majesty is gone, and with her, our last national tether to the 20th Century. As for those ritual moments of collective moral communion that are all we have left of the political protests of yore, perhaps we need to stop thinking of them as protests. Instead, we can call them what they are: liturgical events more akin to the medieval processions that pre-dated Elizabeth I than anything between her age and Tony Blair. Religious gatherings, in praise of new (or perhaps long-forgotten) gods whose outlines we’re only just starting to discern.

As furious crowds flooded on to streets across the country, Robert Kennedy landed in Indiana on the stump to win the Democrat’s presidential nomination. He was, of course, a man who had suffered personal loss in another terrible political murder. Police advised him to cancel his event but instead he spoke from the heart for a few minutes. “What we need in the United States is not division,” he said. “What we need in the United States is not hatred. What we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness; but love and wisdom and compassion toward one another. And a feeling of justice towards those who still suffer within our country whether they be white or they be black.”

Some listeners cried. Others stood still in shock. But elsewhere rioting broke out and cities burned. It was start of the country’s worst unrest since the Civil War, with dozens killed, hundreds of shops destroyed, thousands of citizens injured and tens of thousands arrested. Two months later, Kennedy himself was shot on the campaign trail in California. It felt as though American society were falling apart as cultural, political, social and racial fissures beneath the surface of the nation erupted. African-Americans, anti-war protesters, hippies and women were fighting for profound change. Yet that summer of fire and fury ended with election of Richard Nixon as president.

Now look across the Atlantic. Once again, the US is horribly divided, its cities burn with rage and the curse of racism continues to corrode the world’s richest nation in an election year. Nixon, the former vice-president who had slunk away in 1962 after defeat in his previous presidential campaign, won through overt appeal to white anxiety as he promised to restore order and played into fears of his ‘silent majority’. Today we see Donald Trump pursuing the same strategy but in far less subtle style. “When the looting starts, the shooting starts,” he tweeted, reviving a phrase popularised by the segregationist George Wallace in 1968 as he sent troops on the streets.

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History never repeats itself exactly, even when it ricochets through time. Now there is rioting over the murder of another black man taking place against backdrop of a public health battle rather than bloody conflict in Asia. Yet there is one clear political continuum that links these two turbulent years half a century apart. For 1968 was the year in which the Right took firm control of the Republican Party, driving away the liberals in a strategy that has reached its dark apotheosis in Trump.

Nixon won as a populist, using the language of law and order to lure fearful white Southern, suburban and working class northern voters into the Republican fold to create his conservative majority. This was nasty party politics: brutal, divisive but effective. He repudiated a liberal consensus that had held sway for four decades, speaking directly to some citizens’ anxieties on crime, economic status and racial integration. The success of this strategy, four years after the crushing defeat of conservative champion Barry Goldwater, confounded many analysts.

Nixon’s coalition was solidified by Ronald Reagan as he seduced Southern Democrats with sunny optimism and cemented by the Bush dynasty, then the politics of fear revived by Trump to win narrowly in 2016. The narrative remained much the same: that government is bad, spraying around cash on anti-poverty programmes and threatening traditional values. There was a clear racial subtext. And this contempt for consensus and its ultimate embodiment through the state ended up with the fanaticism seen on the American right today, resisting controls on anything from firearms through to a new disease even as they cause carnage.

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It seems strange to recall when we look at today’s America that it was once — and within my lifetime — southern Democrats who defended segregation. Wallace, the repellent Alabama governor called “the most dangerous racist in America” by Martin Luther King but now quoted admiringly by a president, ran three times for the White House as a Democrat. Meanwhile there was a strain of liberal Republicanism that sought to use the state for progressive ends. Their last standard-bearer was Nelson Rockefeller, the governor of New York who sought to prevent developers such as Donald Trump’s father, Fred, from practising housing discrimination. King once said that inequality might have ended in months if the south had leaders like ‘Rocky’.

Instead these progressive Republicans were driven out to the delight of centrist Democrats. That seminal election of 1968, with defeat for Rockefeller’s belated bid for the Republican nomination, marked the extinguishing of liberalism in their party. It died when John Lindsay, the New York mayor and another prominent liberal, finished speaking at the convention with an appeal for unity — as noted by Lawrence O’Donnell in Playing With Fire, his fine book on the campaign. Some hoped Lindsay might have become Nixon’s pick for vice-president. Instead, he ended up running for the White House four years later as a Democrat.

This Republican strategy proved electorally successful, winning eight out of 13 presidential races since 1968. But it has ended up handing the party to Trump, backing someone obviously unfit for office while descending into the cesspit of his hate-fuelled populism. Bear in mind that Trump’s first political action in public was paying for full-page newspaper advertisements demanding the execution of five ethnic minority teenagers accused of rape who were later exonerated. Like father, like son. Typically, he has never apologised. Yet the Republican Party remains in thrall to him, even when he advocates the injection of disinfectant to beat a disease that has killed more Americans than the war in Vietnam.

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There is a straight line from Nixon in 1968 to Trump in 2020, a pair of rogues who ended up as president, and it runs straight through the heart of the Republican Party. Shortly before winning the party’s nomination four years ago, Trump even praised his predecessor, a disgraced crook yet a far more serious political player than the reality television star. “What Nixon understood is that when the world is falling apart, people want a strong leader whose highest priority is protecting America first.” His team embraced Nixon as a role model with his appeal to those citizens alarmed by conflict, disruption and racial unrest.

Nixon was a big admirer of Benjamin Disraeli — yet could the US have moved any further from the concept of One Nation politics? Trump has taken that populist appeal to the silent majority and, pushing it to the limits, infused it with Wallace’s bigotry and his own vanity to appeal to a shrinking demographic. Even the right to protest, hailed as a key part of America’s greatness in King’s last speech, seems in jeopardy. So a party that talks of faith and freedom is undermining democracy by colluding with a president who teargases peaceful protesters so he can pose for a publicity stunt with a bible. And a political force that wraps itself in the flag ends up assisting in destruction of America’s global leadership while China uses a pandemic that erupted within its borders to extend its influence.

There are still some liberal conservatives trying to resist the Republican descent into darkness, including prominent governors and members of Congress — although the loss of the combative and widely-respected John McCain leaves a big gap. There are groups such as Defending Democracy Together, founded to fight nativism infecting their party as “antithetical to what it means to be a Republican and what it means to be American”.

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The decision of the former president George W Bush to speak out this week on racism is signifiant on several levels, not least since he has been battling behind the scenes for the soul of his party. If the Democrats can travel from supporting segregationists to backing the first black president over four decades, there must some hope the party can pull back from its far-Right flirtation before it is too late.

Among the most prominent Republican voices against Trump has been David Frum, the former Bush speechwriter and author of Trumpocalypse, a savage indictment of his party’s current leadership. Frum wrote in 2018 about how class and racial divisions enable demagogues. “For two political generations, Republicans have proclaimed the purity of their conservatism. But in a democratic society, conservatism and liberalism are not really opposites. They are different facets of the common democratic creed. What conservatives are conserving, after all, is a liberal order. That truth has been easy to overlook in the friction of partisan politics. It must be reaffirmed now, in this hour of liberal peril.” His wise words ring even truer today.

Rather than celebrate it, an angry white mob descended upon the city and committed what in any other context would be remembered as ethnic cleansing. Entire city blocks were burned to the ground and at least 300 black residents murdered; the exact numbers may never be determined.

This weekend, 99 years later, angry mobs were on the streets again, as the United States rose up in protest against the killing of George Floyd, an unarmed black American, by Derek Chauvin, a police officer.

These two moments, nearly a century apart, demonstrate an enduring reality for black Americans. We are consistently told that we must stop our own oppression, and do so in a way that is acceptable and not too jarring for the rest of society. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Dress, talk and act properly. If you must protest, do so in the most peaceful, least disruptive way possible (which is not at all how protests work). And even then, after black Americans employ all these peaceful forms of protest and self-empowerment, they are still met with opposition from angry white Americans who oppose changes to the status quo.

Sometimes, this opposition has been blatant and direct, ranging from the mobs that descended upon Tulsa in 1921, to the white supremacists at Charlottesville in 2017 who were heralded as “very fine people” by President Trump — despite their killing an innocent anti-racism activist and injuring many more.

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At other times, the opposition to black equality has been faceless. I’m thinking of the Jim Crow laws of the American south which legalised discrimination for most of the 20^th century, as well as also official government policies such as redlining — which deny African Americans home mortgages in more affluent or white neighborhoods, as marked by literal red lines drawn on city maps. These latter policies ensured that wealthy black communities like the one in the Greenwood District would be much harder to create and that black wealth would be only a fraction of white wealth for the average American household.

Throughout American history, black America has had the deck stacked against it. Black Americans have, even so, attempted to effect change, or simply fit in with our white neighbours and colleagues, in ways that were deemed acceptable (polite, peaceful, not too disruptive or uncomfortable) by the wider society. But even when we do everything that would seem necessary to gain acceptance – talk softly and in “proper” English, obtain education and professional success, obey the rules to a fault – these are not defences against arbitrary oppression or violence.

Acceptability did not prevent noted Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., (a truly respectable gentleman for whom I once worked) from being suspected of “breaking in” to his own house in 2009 and then being arrested for “disorderly conduct” for complaining too loudly about the situation. Nor did achieving the highest office in the land protect the new black President of the United States, who called the arrest “stupid” and was accused of not speaking in a way that was “becoming” or “appropriate” for the president (a standard that somehow stopped being enforced once Obama left office). Fame and success did not protect football players such as Colin Kaepernick, who was blackballed and singled out for kneeling during the national anthem as a polite protest against police brutality; President Trump called on the NFL to say “get that son of a bitch [Reid] off the field right now” to any player choosing to kneel.

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On the same day that George Floyd was murdered, respectability did not protect Chris Cooper — a black, mild-mannered, Harvard-educated former comic book editor and current bird watching enthusiast out for a stroll in New York’s Central Park. After asking a white woman, Amy Cooper (no relation), to obey the park’s leash laws, she threatened to call the police and accused the “African American man” (as she emphasises) of threatening her. She not only makes the false accusation to the police while repeatedly pointing out Mr. Cooper’s race, but modulates her voice as if in a panic from some imagined assault. It’s all captured on video. Even when we’ve done everything right, threats, violence and arrest are only one moment away.

Despite being opposed at every turn, black Americans continue trying to work peacefully towards change. And the immediate reaction to George Floyd’s death gave hope that this time would be different; everyone from President Trump to Joe Biden and virtually all major conservative pundits condemned Floyd’s murder and called for swift justice.

But when this did not come, and frustrated that Chauvin and his associates had not been arrested, Minneapolis protestors displayed their anger in a generally peaceful way — by all reports, one broken window and some spray paint inflicted at the precinct where the officers worked on the first night of protests. But, instead of working to de-escalate the situation (or, say, arresting the man who killed a detained civilian on video), police responded by “firing tear gas and flash grenades” into the crowd.

After that, the protests and clashes grew in intensity, spreading across an America where many citizens felt that they had exhausted other options and, well, just felt exhausted in general. Curfews had to be enforced, and by the time Chauvin was eventually arrested, the clashes had taken on a more destructive character.

Despite the way that the unrest is being portrayed by Trump, who has labeled the protestors “thugs” (long a racially-coded term in American discourse), the lion’s share of actual violence — not property damage, but injury and death of people — has been inflicted on the protestors, not caused by them. Multiple motorists have purposely driven into crowds of protestors. This includes New York City police officers who were caught on video accelerating into a group of protestors (NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio blamed protestors for being in the way). Police and National Guard troops opened fire into a crowd in Louisville killing a popular black restaurant owner who may not have even been protesting at the time (the police claim they were responding to gunfire, but their body cameras were turned off, prompting firings and an FBI investigation into the event). In all, several black protestors and bystanders have been killed.

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It is interesting to compare the authorities’ immediately aggressive response to the Floyd protests, even during the first few days of overwhelmingly peaceful demonstration, to the tolerance shown by police to armed, white anti-quarantine protestors when they invaded government buildings at the beginning of May. Echoing his Charlottesville remarks, the President encouraged and lauded those armed white protestors as “very good people”. These Floyd protests, by contrast, are “domestic acts of terror” with Trump threatening to implement martial law, even in defiance of local and state governments. Right-wing Fox News pundit Tucker Carlson, meanwhile, has argued that the rioting is worse than the offence and represents “oppression” and “tyranny” being committed by African Americans against society (the idea that African Americans are the true oppressors is a new, almost laughable, spin on a conservative strategy of painting themselves as the victims of progressive and minority agendas).

Unfortunately, as the protests endure and are met with sustained repression, the crowds are becoming more hostile. Outsiders — many of them white — have been responsible for much of that escalation in violence, although the identity of these individuals remains an open question — Right-wing extremists attempting to spark a “race war”; far-Left antifa activists, as President Trump has alleged, or whatever this mysterious and oddly dressed hammer-wielding man represents.

Lost, though, amid all the reports of looting and violence, is the reality that in instances where police officials and officers have shown recognition of the protestors’ grievances and solidarity with their struggles, the encounters have remained peaceful.

America declared its independence to protect “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” for its citizens. Most Americans take these rights for granted, and fiercely defend them at the slightest provocation. But while, the anti-lockdown protestors were literally allowed to take up arms to protest the temporary infringements upon their liberty and personal pursuits, black Americans have been attempting to just convince society to fully respect the “life” portion of that phrase. The intensifying uprisings currently gripping the country are the latest, desperate but calculated attempt to be included in the principles that have been granted to others but continue to be denied to some.

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In the face of racial injustices, non-violent resistance of the type employed by Martin Luther King, Jr. and other Civil Rights protestors has been idealised as the “right” way for black Americans to protest. Across social media, many people have reminded us that even King recognised that “a riot is the language of the unheard”.  It’s also worth remembering that King’s non-violence did not prevent him from being beaten, jailed and ultimately shot in the face at age 39.

As black America continues to be shot in the face for standing up to racism and oppression, perhaps we’re beginning to recognise the limits of passive protest, as did America’s founders. In the words of black labour leader A Philip Randolph, an architect of Dr King’s March on Washington, “Freedom is never granted: It is won. Justice is never given: It is exacted.”

And the protests are sparking pledges of change across the country — Democratic and Republican governors have promised to implement reforms, while corporations, sports franchises and wealthy individuals are pledging millions of dollars for social justice initiatives.

So while not “acceptable” to those currently in power, the current uprising is forcing America to confront the injustices it has continued to enforce, it is rejecting the idea that we must oppose these injustices in the “right” way and it is recognising that we must do what is effective. The ultimate outcome remains uncertain, but the protests are certainly creating an atmosphere in which America sticking to an unjust status quo is no longer “acceptable” to us.