The American Right increasingly answers in the negative. In doing so, conservatives are staging their own version of the critical-theory doctrine deployed by progressives until recently to restrict speech.

The triumph of the Free Speech Movement appeared to accord students full rights to participate in the era’s public debate, which fit in with the broader dismantling of the in loco parentis paradigm, under which university administrators acted as parental authorities for students. Where the in loco parentis regime had consigned college students to a status of quasi-adulthood, the Berkeley protesters’ demands successfully redefined the campus as a space in which the full exercise of citizenship could occur; not coincidentally, the voting age was also lowered to 18 in many states during this period.

In more recent years, the campus Left became widely associated with an anti-free-speech stance, while the Right has often laid claim to the ideals of the 1964 Berkeley students. Hence in 2017, it was the Right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopolous who attempted to hold a “free-speech week” on the Berkeley campus, after an earlier talk he attempted to give there was shut down amid violent opposition from progressive activists.

It might seem, therefore, that Trump’s crackdown has returned us to the pre-1964 status quo, with progressives once again defending speech rights on campus and conservatives trying to limit them. But this isn’t the full story. In reality, the approach taken by the Trump administration has far more in common with the progressive speech regime than its enthusiasts would have you think.

More from this author

Your awokening isn't special

By Geoff Shullenberger

The Left’s turn against free-speech maximalism is often traced to a text that appeared soon after the Berkeley protesters’ apparent triumph, under the byline of one of the protesters’ heroes, the philosopher and New Left guru Herbert Marcuse. I refer to the essay “Repressive Tolerance”, in which Marcuse expanded on the central argument of his hugely influential 1964 book, One-Dimensional Man: that the ostensible freedoms of advanced industrial society masked its fundamental unfreedom.

Revisiting the foundational 18th– and 19th-century struggles for freedom of speech, Marcuse argued that their aim was not simply to establish a neutral public sphere. Rather, “the tolerance which enlarged the range and content of freedom was always partisan — intolerant toward the protagonists of the repressive status quo”. In other words, advocacy for unlimited freedom of speech was a tactic of opposition to dominant forces — a tactic that, according to Marcuse, had become obsolete. This is because unlike the ancien régime, the “repressive status quo” of advanced industrial society in fact benefits from a regime of “pure tolerance”.

This was because, as Marcuse’s Frankfurt School colleagues Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer had first argued decades earlier, the 20th-century culture industry had become a regime of propagandistic mass deception that manufactured consent for what they called the “totally administered society”. Accordingly, arguments for free expression and other liberal rights now amounted, as Marcuse put it, to accepting “the toleration of the systematic moronisation of children and adults alike by publicity and propaganda”.

In contrast to authoritarian societies, “totalitarian democracy” bestows formal freedoms on its subjects, but these freedoms are negated by the overwhelming force of technological mass communication that tip the scales in favor of dominant social forces. By this account, demands for free speech like those made in Berkeley might ultimately serve to reinforce this broader unfreedom.

Marcuse’s paradoxical response to this impasse was to replace the value of “pure tolerance” of all views implicit in free-speech protections with what he called “liberating tolerance”, which, as he stated explicitly, “would mean intolerance against movements from the Right, and toleration of movements from the Left”. He characterized this proposal as “utopian”, since “no authority, no government exists which would translate [it] into practice”.

However, there was a way in which the approach he proposed was eventually put into practice. By gaining power and leverage within consensus-making institutions, especially universities and the media, the Left managed to tip the scales of tolerance against the Right, somewhat as Marcuse had counseled. The shift from an ostensibly neutral public sphere to one in which certain views coded as reactionary were subject to aggressive “intolerance” seemed to follow his prescriptions. Hence, Marcuse’s text has sometimes been read as a sort of ur-manifesto of cancel culture; the Left’s centrist and conservative critics have tended to fight back by reasserting “pure tolerance”.

More from this author

How Joe Biden wasted his presidency

By Geoff Shullenberger

In the wake of the October 7 Hamas terror attack against southern Israel, however, conservatives dramatically shifted their criticisms of the progressive campus speech regime. From the Nineties battles over political correctness to the early 2020s wars over wokeness, their main concern was with universities’ censoriousness towards conservative-coded views. But their new focus is on the same institutions’ permissiveness towards extreme speech by Leftists — most notoriously, celebration of terrorist violence against Israeli civilians.

In other words, the criticism directed at universities shifted away from the “intolerant towards the Right” side of Marcuse’s equation, and toward the “tolerant towards the Left” side. Meanwhile, the Left correspondingly pivoted from demanding “intolerance towards the Right” — keeping Milo off-campus — to “tolerance towards the Left” — letting pro-Palestinian protesters protest, even if their speech may offend some.

However, this reversal of positions was possible in part because it’s not only the Right/Left polarity that came to determine the range of permissible speech on campus in the post-Sixties era. Indeed, the unofficial campus speech regime didn’t so much legitimize itself in Right/Left terms as in terms of victimhood and oppression. A programmatic statement of this rationale can be found in the pioneering critical race theorist Mari Matsuda’s article “Public Response to Racist Speech”, published in 1989. In Matsuda’s account, it is speech by members of or on behalf of “historically dominant groups” and against “subordinated communities” that should be subject to “intolerance”, while speech going in the opposite direction, even if hateful or violent, should be subject to “tolerance”.

Matsuda offered, in effect, an update on Marcuse’s “liberating tolerance”, processed through the classifications of civil-rights law. Instead of “the Left” being granted extra leeway, as Marcuse had demanded, it was members of oppressed groups who were to enjoy what Matsuda calls the “victim’s privilege”. In practice, this meant that when any speech generated controversy, the task was to identify oppressor and oppressed, then ensure that the latter is granted “the tolerance of hateful speech that comes from an experience of oppression”, whereas the former is subject to maximum intolerance.

This is how the attempts to shut down controversial speakers at the height of last decade’s Great Awokening were justified. For instance, in 2017, New York University provost Ulrich Baer argued in The New York Times that efforts to prevent figures like Yiannopolous and Charles Murray from speaking on campus “should be understood as an attempt to ensure the conditions of free speech for a greater group of people, rather than censorship”. Intolerance toward oppressors, that is, equals tolerance toward the oppressed.

Matsuda defined universities as a “special case” because college students are “at a vulnerable stage of psychological development”. Accordingly, “tolerance of racist speech in this setting is more harmful than generalized tolerance in the community-at-large”. Gesturing back at Berkeley and other Sixties protest, Matsuda reaffirmed support for the protesters’ speech rights, but not on grounds of “pure tolerance”. Rather, she appealed to the “power imbalance” between students and “university administrators, multinational corporations, the US military, and established governments”. In other words, insofar as students can be construed as victims, their speech must be protected — but once they can be construed as victimizers, they can no longer lay claim to that privilege.

The broader implication of the original Free Speech Movement’s demand was, again, that intramural speech be protected by the First Amendment in the same manner as extramural speech. The effect of this demand — like the other factors that eroded in loco parentis — was to merge the university with the broader space of rights-granted citizenship. But a further implication of this move, not necessarily evident to the student protesters when they made their demands, was to weaken the specificity of the university’s function within society: to form young adults.

It was perhaps an inevitable reaction to this drift and evacuation of institutional purpose that new forms of paternalism reemerged to substitute for in loco parentis, not least the differentiated speech regime outlined by Matsuda. This helped define a new moral, values-imparting mission for universities, which over decades became ever more explicitly oriented around social justice.

Suggested reading

How universities teach students to shame

By Kathleen Stock

Conservative and centrist critics of campus politics have documented the divisive and intellectually stultifying effects of this regime. Now that the Trump administration is attempting to force top-down change on the system, many who opposed it are celebrating.

Yet it should be clear from the administration’s single-minded focus on reining in pro-Palestinian protest — justified on the grounds of protecting Jewish students from harassment — that what it is offering is not at all a fundamental change from the status quo ante. On the contrary, Matsuda’s basic idea that speech must be regulated on the basis of whether it causes harm to a “subordinated community” remains fully in force; it is simply that a different minority group is now asserted to be in need of special protection. In other words, Trump is merely adjusting the dials of the prior campus speech regime, applying greater tolerance here and greater intolerance there.

The real problem with this shift isn’t the apparent inconsistency with conservative opposition to cancel culture, but that the administration is leaving the deeper assumptions of the prior system for regulating speech intact. Universities need to be reformed, and reimagined, on a much more fundamental level. The post-in loco parentis integration of campuses into the broader realm of citizenship has failed to facilitate the responsible exercise of the citizenship. Rather, it has only succeeded at evacuating institutional purpose in favor of an incoherent mix of anything-goes consumerism and tendentious moralism.

Trump’s heavy-handed actions will succeed in suppressing some of the campus radicalism to which conservatives object. But they will leave intact the divisive and infantilizing speech regime.

It looks, sounds, and smells like 1968. And this is no coincidence — many of the protesters see themselves as revivalists, resurrecting the pose and the politics of a more heroic era. But a closer examination of the trajectory of the 1968 generation reveals the Columbia crop to be little more than a patchy historical shadow. Because while the 2024 generation are ultimately the grandchildren of 1968, they are also its epigones, and placing the two political movements side by side is an object lesson in the difference between the authentic and ersatz.

Mark Rudd, who led the 1968 Columbia University protests, was a typical New Leftist. He entered college from the mid-Sixties middle class — apolitical, yet vaguely jaundiced. He longed for an “intellectual avant-garde”. He had tired of watching the Civil Rights Movement unfold from the side-lines. He drifted in such frustrations until discovering Malcolm X who taught him that “the division in the world is between the oppressed—who are mainly people of color—and the oppressors—who are mainly white”. In a phrase, this is how Rudd and the New Leftists could link their domestic situation to Vietnam and American foreign policy.

This was key to turning the Civil Rights movement into a larger New Left. The batons, German shepherds, and firehoses that the racist South used as its weapons had already permanently changed how Rudd, and many in his generation, viewed their country. John Lewis, Diane Nash, and the student wing of the civil rights movement served as their activist model. Their villain was George Wallace, the segregationist Alabama governor, who was taken to define America at home. Once Vietnam was thrown into the mix, New Leftists could think of their nation as George Wallace home and abroad — racist, fascist, and irredeemably imperialist.

Suggested reading

In defence of our new student radicals

By Terry Eagleton

This 21st-century movement opts for a similar synthesis, tying their Gaza activism to their anti-racist background. Like the original New Left, the culture war over American society in the last decade has led them on a journey from racial optimism to remorseless antagonism. It began with Barack Obama, the Zoomer John Kennedy. Charismatic and cool, Obama symbolised an ascendant “post-racial” America when the nation could still believe in change through traditional political channels. But Trayvon Martin’s 2012 murder, Michael Brown’s 2014 shooting, and the Ferguson Riots began to punch holes in this fantasy before, like the Civil Rights movement in the Sixties, Donald Trump’s election and George Floyd, radicalised a generation.

Once at college, the institutional pressures were there to bake these ingredients into a very 1968 mould: the 2024 student protesters sound and act like the New Left because they are trained by an institutionalised New Left at elite universities. This is why the intone the very same language and misapply identical principles. In 1968, Rudd founded his protest upon Columbia’s “racism and support for imperialism”. Now, 56 years later, Jawuanna McAllister a Cornell University student protester defines her philosophy: “we’re antiracist, anti-imperialist, anti-colonialist… none of us can be free… unless all of us are free”. It’s Freaky Friday — the student protest edition, except this time there is no generation gap on campus.

But though they imbibe and spout the same ideas, the modern protest movement dwells in a completely different context to its grandparent. In the Sixties, elite colleges and universities were institutionally conservative: the University of California even prohibited all political activity on campus. It was that total (and unreasonable) prohibition which prompted the original free-speech movement. At Columbia meanwhile, Mark Rudd sipped sherry with “tame and bloodless” professors in dreary afternoon seminars on Aristotle. At Swarthmore, future Weather Underground leaders Cathy Wilkerson and Kathy Boudin endured curfews, dined on white tablecloths, and organised formal dinners.

Suggested reading

PEN America has surrendered over Israel

By Lionel Shriver

Today, these very same campuses actively market themselves as Left-wing activist finishing schools. Cornell’s student union features a plaque commemorating armed takeover of the building in 1969. At Atlanta’s Emory University, Arts and Social Justice Fellows help students translate their learning into “creative activism in the name of social justice”. And Columbia, which is euphemistically called “Protest Ivy”, brings activist alumni to campus to woo potential students, while its two-semester core “Contemporary Civilization” is effectively a reading list for the 2024 activists. On the list are as many texts on the Haitian Constitution (three) as there are on the American, while the post-1945 readings are devoted exclusively to anticolonialism, race, sex and gender, and climate change. Unlike the Boomers who lived in a conservative social milieu amid establishment liberal ideas, the Zoomers scarcely encounter any contemporary notion to the Right of the Combahee River Collective or Frantz Fanon.

And this gets at the heart of the crucial difference between 2024 and 1968. Rudd, and his contemporaries, rebelled. Their movement, and its excesses, were born amid social upheaval and intellectual ferment. This certainly resulted in some misjudged actions and overheated rhetoric: when I interviewed Rudd, he freely admitted this. But one can understand, if not always defend, the New Left’s actions because of the scale of the political context. They imagined themselves battling racist oppression at home and imperialism abroad — because they were. In 1963, George Wallace had vowed to preserve segregation forever. Selma’s Bloody Sunday was a current event. Western imperialism was a present-day fact. What LBJ saw as the domino theory in Vietnam was instead a final act in Vietnam’s decades-long quest for independence, which America was denying through its war.

This iteration of the Left, by contrast, takes their canned philosophies from their elders and applies them by rote. And what they lack in originality they compensate with intellectual sloppiness. The Israel-Gaza War is not even America’s conflict. Israel is a sovereign nation governed by a prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who freely ignores Joe Biden. Protesters fundamentally misunderstand the very injustices they protest. And, trained by the old-New Left, they see American racism as frozen in 1968 amber, even though the material basis for racial inequality has fundamentally shifted. In 1968, to be black was to be in the American underclass: in 1960, only 10% of African Americans held a middle-class job. But the very victories of Civil Rights have changed that equation.

William Julius Wilson, the preeminent urban sociologist of his era, finds that class has become stickier than race in determining life chances. For the half of all black families that are now middle-class as a result, this is good news. And though they still suffer the worst, working-class African Americans are the victims of the same globalised economy as their white and brown brethren. There has not been a complete revolution: drive along any of America’s 955 Martin Luther King Boulevards and you will see reasons for pessimism. African-American men are still disproportionately victims of police violence. But this no longer a product of racialised legislation, but of the fact that poor Americans, of all races, are the disproportionate victims of a militarised police state.

And in several ways this is worse than 1968. Because this time it is the underclass, the Palestinians, who pay the price for elite hyperbole. Benjamin Netanyahu can more easily ignore shrill exaggerations: the war grinds on; Palestinians suffer. The Zoomer Left hasn’t responded to this reality — it doesn’t even try. Instead, it sets about exemplifying Rob Henderson’s luxury belief motif, where anti-war activism confers social prestige on the educated elite. The cultural geography of the current protests is equally telling in this regard. These protests are stationed at elite campuses, the “Ivy plus” institutions where children of elites predominate. The New Left admittedly started with upper-middle-class kids at elite schools. But hundreds of middle-class state colleges eventually erupted in protest. In 1970, normie Kent State University in Ohio became the symbol of a mass youth rebellion.

Anti-racism at home and Zionism-as-imperialism abroad is a nifty way to redirect focus from this reality. And just as Tom Barson, a veteran of the 1968 Columbia uprising, has written, the roots of the tumult are not so much social anomie as it is “deflection”. Otherwise, the student elites might observe their professional middle class has gobbled up 83% of the America’s wealth since 1989. Or that the income gap between college and non-college was a mere 10% in the Seventies (today it is 70%). They could notice that the just over 500, mostly urban, coastal counties where they reside is home to 70% of all wealth, and that an epidemic of “deaths of despair” tears through the thousands of counties left behind. They might even notice that today it is college that separates the underclass from everyone else — and that it should be the cause of social protest, not its incubator.

The Columbia protesters are too coiled up in political introversion to notice these historical ironies. And that is why they will only end up repeating the greatest Sixties irony of them all. After all the fury of that decade, its greatest political achievement was to pave Richard Nixon’s route to the presidency, shattering the coalition that had carried LBJ to a landslide in 1964. By broadcasting the worst of the modern Left to America and its “silent majority”, these students can do the same, sabotaging the current government and boosting a crook to the White House.

And yet fresh wrong will be done. It just won’t be between the Greeks and Trojans, but among the cohorts of the victors. As she pictures the sacking of Troy, Clytemnestra is already plotting to murder her husband.

Something of the same uneasy mood of post-conflict hostility, and lurking internecine violence, pervades a bracing new polemic from America’s leading conservative activist: Chris Rufo. America’s Cultural Revolution is an unapologetically uncharitable and partisan but comprehensive explanation of how we got to today’s bitter culture war. It describes the modern history of Left-wing radicalism, from the Sixties to Black Lives Matter, and the ongoing institutionalisation of this ideology via education and DEI bureaucracy.

On the face of it, it is an accessible introduction, for conservative lay readers, to key figures and ideas on the radical Left. Everyone has an opinion on this movement’s culture war and perhaps Rufo’s most impressive achievement is economy in tackling the topic.

More from this author

How the NHS conquered Britain

By Mary Harrington

We learn about Black Power activist Angela Davis’s suspected complicity in a violent jailbreak, alongside her advocacy of violent revolution and later of a subtler institutional kind. The Brazilian Marxist Paulo Freire is presented as a bearded sage who inflicted untold ignorance on post-revolutionary Angola, before finally entrenching his “pedagogy of the oppressed” in American schools, only harming the disadvantaged children he sought to liberate. And Derrick Bell, the father of critical race theory, is presented as a mediocre, insecure man who sank ever deeper into racialised paranoia following his early, affirmative-action-driven promotion to undeserved prominence at Harvard — and in doing so, birthed a new field of legal theory that now threatens to demolish the principle of equality before the law.

In other words: this story begins after the fall of Troy. The invaders are inside the walls, burning and looting, and the book is a retrospective account of the siege. Rufo states that he wants to expand beyond the polemical register of activism, to offer a more expansive account of the political challenge as he sees it: ideological and institutional capture by Left-wing radicalism. The word “coup” recurs frequently. The arc of the book describes how the hated victors smuggled themselves into America’s institutions, hidden in the wooden horse of civil rights, only to erupt and attempt to destroy the founding ideals that granted them entrance.

Rufo denounces the resulting university-driven “revolution from above” as one of “relentless negation” that has “gnawed, chewed, smashed, and disintegrated the entire system of values that came before it”. And all for nothing, as Rufo sees it: the utopians have “failed to deliver the world beyond”. Nor have they even succeeded in abolishing class rule, but “simply replaced the management” even as they extended “state-social bureaucracy”.

More from this author

Why the nation state failed

By Mary Harrington

Worse still, a political programme based on “negation” can offer no positive programme that won’t swiftly fall victim to its own politics of critique. The result, Rufo argues, has not been utopia but a harvest of “failure, exhaustion, resentment, and despair”: a proliferating class of peevish bureaucrats bickering about symbols and ephemera, whose relationship to the institutions they have captured is “purely parasitical”. For such ideologues, even temporarily effective alliances regularly dissolve into “internal purges, leadership struggles, and conflict with ostensible allies”.

As a denunciation of the New Left’s moral turpitude and nihilistic moral vacuum, conservative readers will love it. The book shot to Amazon’s number one slot upon publication, suggesting there’s no shortage of appetite for such polemic. But the treatment of New Left theories of power and knowledge is much more interestingly ambivalent than the outrage-quotes would suggest.

We see our first glimpse of this early on, as Rufo explicitly situates himself in the story. A few pages in, he describes the harassment of his family by Left-wing activists in Seattle, saying: “It radicalised me.” It’s a strikingly postmodern acknowledgement of authorial positionality, placed upfront in text that’s ostensibly a critique of postmodern ideologies. Likewise, Rufo’s prognosis for where we go from here owes more than a little to the material analysis typical of classical Marxists. The “revolution from above” is so far incapable of governing for the common good, he argues, that eventually deteriorating material conditions will become impossible to ignore, however hard the bureaucrats work to suppress wrongthink. The average citizen “will be able to feel the truth intuitively”. With a confidence in historical inevitability that might have come straight from Lenin, he declares: “This realisation cannot be stopped.”

Suggested reading

The Puritan spirit of America's civil war

By David Samuels

What happens then? Here, again, the book tips its hat to the revolutionaries. Rufo calls for a “counter-revolution” — and a glance at his activist track record suggests an approach to movement-building that owes much to the Marxist-Leninist theory of vanguardism. According to this doctrine, the most politically “advanced” revolutionaries should form elite organisations to advance their cause, as this will help galvanise the masses. Such vanguardism is both effective and increasingly popular among conservatives, as seen in the growing corpus of aggrieved progressive articles, criticising Rufo-affiliated activism for employing the classic Left-wing mix of grassroots volunteers and centralised, professional activists.

Throughout, the book evinces this double relationship to the political playbooks and epistemological judo of classical leftism, and of its postmodern progeny: the politics of language and power. Even as the story presents these strategies as evidence of his enemies’ wickedness, he is also reminding readers that conservatives must challenge New Left entryism on its own ground: “Revolution against revolution, institution against institution, negation against negation.”

This isn’t a criticism. Based on Rufo’s track record, there’s a strong case for counter-revolutionary vanguardism. And America’s Cultural Revolution rejects any suggestion that this means everyone is as bad as each other. Rather, Rufo draws a sharp contrast between the “politics of negation” and his movement’s underlying values. The counter-revolution, he argues, “must work as a positive force”.

To this end, he proposes smashing progressive bureaucracies and revolting against utopias in the name of “natural right, the Constitution, and the dignity of the individual”. The aim should be restoring “the revolution of 1776” over that of 1968, and reinstating the ideals of the common man, such as “family, faith, work, community, country”, along with “excellence over diversity, equality over equity, dignity over inclusion, order over chaos”.

To achieve this, Rufo implies, conservatives should not renounce but embrace the politics of power, and of knowledge, that have proven so effective in the hands of the New Left. This means adopting “a new political vocabulary” that can cut through propagandistic formulations skewed to the enemy’s priors, along with policies that will “permanently sever the connection between the critical ideologies and administrative power”. Consider the New College of Florida, where Rufo’s appointment as trustee by Republican Governor Ron DeSantis has prompted loud progressive lamentations, as he’s presided over a purge of DEI bureaucracies and policies, gutting a central New Left power-base and means of exerting institutional control.

But if this is the means, what will the end look like? While Rufo’s project is conservative-coded, it’s hard to avoid the inference that, by the time the counter-revolution happens, if it happens at all, the old world where everyone at least sort-of believed in neutral institutions and equality before the law will be long forgotten.

Suggested reading

The battle to control America's mind

By David Samuels

Regardless, America’s Cultural Revolution reads like a pivot point in American political discourse. I would have liked a glimmer or two of reflection on why leftist ideas gained such traction; Rufo’s facility for material analysis would surely stretch to this, and the findings need not be in his opponents’ favour. Ultimately, though, reflection is not what the book is for. Rather, it’s a multifaceted political intervention. For while those who enjoy culture war content may enjoy it simply as partisan red meat, its accessibility means those on the Right still bewildered by how they came to be so dispossessed no longer have an excuse for ignorance. And those conservatives with a serious interest in how knowledge and power operate in post-liberal politics can read it as an instruction manual.

Members of the Old Left, meanwhile, can mourn the theft of their movement by bourgeois nihilists, who commandeered the institutions of power in their name and are now retooling them into a shamelessly partisan bureaucracy of weaponised prejudice. As for those nihilists, should any take the time to read it, America’s Cultural Revolution is a shot across the bows. It declares, first and centrally, that the politics of negation will devour itself through negation. Troy may be sacked, but Clytemnestra waits at home, with a smile on her face and a dagger in her belt.

And it declares, further, that conservatives (or some of them, anyway) have belatedly grasped the new rules of engagement and are mobilising in turn. The citadel may have fallen, the temples looted. But in America’s Cultural Revolution, Rufo declares to the victorious New Left: we are the besiegers now. It’s your turn to try to hold the walls.

The message is simple: My side is allowed to have double standards. My opponents are not.

This level of political and intellectual contortion may be entertaining to watch, but it has serious implications. Slowly and steadily the party activists and ministers who peddle this line are contorting the very concept of political independence out of existence. Alex Allan, who wrote the report into Priti Patel’s behaviour, was known as the Prime Minister’s Independent Adviser on Ministerial Standards. His departure suggests there is no place for independence in this Number 10.

We have reached a level of partisanship in our politics that makes it truly hard for many of our political leaders to even conceptualise what it might mean to be independent. It’s the politics of medieval warlords: unless you are on our side, you must be our sworn enemy. And while it is the Right putting this into practice, it is the Left which has created an entire intellectual architecture for this mode of thinking in the shape of critical theory. When deployed in the service of political movements, it means: you’re a trans ally or a transphobe, you’re an Anti Racist or you’re a racist, you believe in Modern Monetary Theory or you’re a neoliberal capitalist sellout.

Suggested reading

Who'd work in Downing Street?

By Polly Mackenzie

It is astonishing to me to see formerly serious, sensible Conservatives getting sucked into this vortex, and yet in defence of Priti Patel they have. She only shouted at civil servants in the first place because they refused to do her bidding as part of a deep state conspiracy against Brexit, apparently. Alex Allan’s report is not independent, it’s a continued effort in the war against Brexit: senior civil servants trying to take down a popular minister securing a popular agenda.

This is what these Priti-protectors want us to believe: there is a Deep State. It is against Brexit. Civil servants are strongly against doing popular policies because they want to be despised. Civil servants who work in the Home Office, dedicating their lives to policing and security, are firmly opposed to Priti Patel’s agenda to increase policing and tighten security law. The Deep State has decided, at the eleventh hour, to make a final attempt to sabotage Brexit by trying to remove a Minister (who has very little to do with Brexit), while leaving the Prime Minister (who led the Brexit campaign) well alone.

It reminds me of the old Sherlock Holmes adage: “Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however implausible, must be the truth.” Flip it around: to convince yourself that something implausible is true, you have to first convince yourself that the more plausible alternatives are, in fact, impossible. That’s the magic trick partisanship has pulled off.

It has made it feel literally impossible to believe that Alex Allan is a genuinely independent mind, giving an unbiased opinion. It is impossible to believe that a civil servant who messes up or gets confused or makes a mistake is just a bit useless. And even more impossible to believe that a civil servant who says a policy won’t work is giving accurate, independent advice, instead of pursuing a partisan agenda.

Suggested reading

Are special advisers just gossiping grifters?

By Polly Mackenzie

There are some civil servants who don’t particularly like this government: of course. But they don’t stay to sabotage. If they really care, but don’t want to lose the pension, they disappear from the centre and trot off to work on eggs policy or widget regulation for a few years. The vast majority just carry on, and they take their job as loyal servants to their minister extremely seriously. I know this because I worked in a government — the coalition — where there was a Deputy Prime Minister whose very job description included “stopping the Prime Minister and his Cabinet from doing stuff we disagree with”.

That coalition did many things that the Deep State is supposedly against, and for once it had a democratically legitimate ally right in the heart of Whitehall. If the Deep State existed, it would have leveraged us. And yet in five years, our overwhelming experience in engaging with departments was their utter loyalty to their minister, and their minister’s choices, however loopy. In five years there was literally one occasion when we received covert information from a department: from a very junior civil servant who happened to be friends with someone in the DPM’s office. It wasn’t even very useful.

Our civil service is not perfect, but it is independent of politics and loyal to the government of the day. But it isn’t enough for me to believe that. It needs to be believed by ministers, by Parliament, and by the public too. Independence that used to be held up as one of the great accomplishments of the British state but now it is viewed with scepticism by partisans who believe we must all take sides. Partisans who cannot comprehend how to not take sides, or believe failing to do so is collaborating with the enemy. Partisans who say they would never be friends with an MP on the Conservative benches, or believe going on a Pride march is equivalent to trying to overthrow the government.

Independence used to be an aspirational word: while it was never a roaring commercial success, the Independent newspaper captured the spirit of what it meant to be independent: free from fear or favour. The fortunes of the concept have been mirrored by the publication: now it only exists online and it no longer has an independent agenda but mostly parrots the platitudes of the new Left.

We need to fight back against the idea that independence is mindlessness. It is, in fact, the only way to be open minded. Partisans hate to be reminded of the evidence, chronicled in The Political Brain, that taking a political side alters your brain so that you respond emotionally, instead of logically, to facts. To remain independent is to remain flexible, to be free to respond to new evidence and new ideas.

The real danger to the good governance of the nation is not too many independent civil servants, or some imagined Deep State. It is those who have taken sides, closed their minds, and granted themselves the freedom to make, with impunity, the mistakes for which they want their enemies punished.