But that alliance is now faltering, and the search is on for a new one between young radical intellectuals and the wider masses. And whatever form it takes, it’s far from clear that it will follow the progressive lines that have characterised youth politics for the last two centuries.

The politics of students, and of that ambiguous class of 20-somethings whose lifestyle remains studenty even after graduation, has been a meaningful force for change ever since young people began flocking to higher education. For a new wave of higher-education institutions was, as historian Sheldon Rothblatt argues, inseparable from the class politics that emerged with that era.

In France, for example, the grandes écoles were founded after the French Revolution, and sought to shape a post-revolutionary elite to govern the country according to Enlightenment principles. These were the youth whose presence on the streets in 1848 was so conspicuous. In Prussia, meanwhile, a newly-powerful industrial bourgeoisie saw education as a key means of constructing a widespread national identity, which would serve their interests against the entrenched Prussian aristocracy.

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Such institutions served as crucibles of national identity, finishing schools for the bourgeoisie — and also as a stretch of time in which young, idealistic, middle-class youth absorb high-minded ideas while remaining relatively free of economic and political obligations. It should come as no surprise, then, that such young people have often used that time to develop utopian visions, which they then seek to realise in the wider world.

Such youthful radicalism was, in the 19th century, a fertile breeding-ground for nationalism, liberalism and revolutionary fervour alike. Half a century later and somewhat further east, too, students and young elite radicals played a key role in the revolutions that brought down the Tsar, and brought the Soviet Union into being (and some of their number into power).

But today’s utopians appear actively hostile to more place-bound constituencies, whose causes they championed in earlier ages. Most now prefer a borderless and often identity-driven form of youth activism that came of age with the internet, in the dominant mass student-activist cause of my youth in the late Nineties: the Jubilee 2000 campaign. This sought to persuade Western nations and international institutions to forgive the unpayable debts owed by the world’s poorest countries. Forget helping the poor in your own country, in other words: the proper scale for idealism is now planetary.

In aid of this planetary scope, too, all intellectual traces of a link between centres of power and feelings of national solidarity have become increasingly deprecated. This consensus is now well-entrenched in higher education, with institutions and youthful activists in lockstep: just this week, the Quality Assurance Agency, which monitors academic standards, recommended “decolonisation” across the board — even in science and maths.

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And supporters argue that this change is driven by students themselves. But it’s less universally well-supported by ordinary Britons outside rarefied social and political circles. When, last week, Streatham MP Bell Ribeiro-Addy loudly applauded a Cambridge Union vote in favour of Britain paying reparations for past imperial depredations, the response from the general public was cynical. At the more polite end were accusations that “a prominent subset of the elite want to take money away from working Britons and give it to governments who openly hate us”. At the less polite end, responses were more along the lines of “Fuck off, you fucking grifters”.

Is this simply the latest front in what the historian and political theorist Peter Turchin calls, “the problem of an excess of educated men”? With too many would-be rulers, and not enough positions for them all to fill, Turchin argues, the result is invariably a large number of disgruntled also-rans who combine intellectual firepower with strong senses of entitlement and grievance. In Turchin’s view, this “over-production of elites” helped precipitate the uprisings of 1848, as well as the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917. Young scions of an emerging bourgeoisie, without obligation to land-holding aristocrats and eager for a slice of political power, joined forces with the new urban poor and industrial proletariat to demand political reforms.

While the 1848 uprisings were swiftly put down, they had long-term consequences including much that we take for granted in the modern political settlement. (Arguably the long-term consequences of Soviet Russia also include a great deal we take for granted in the modern student-activist outlook.) Most remaining systems of serfdom were swept away, while (significantly from the perspective of bourgeois youth interest) governments crafted a series of political compromises with the emerging middle class and their working-class allies.

In Paris, the legacy of 1848 for workers included a shorter working day, a minimum wage and a guaranteed right to work; in Germany, the revolts spurred the move toward freedom of the press, jury trials, and expanded suffrage. Over the longer term, the same political changes also solidified Europe’s nation-states into more or less the political forms we have today, as the romantic idea of national fellow-feeling spread outward from the new graduate intellectual class to the masses.

In the process, many young activists also did well for themselves. And the cynical response to calls for “reparations” suggest others see in this campaign something like the same professed desire to help others while also accruing personal power and influence. Someone, after all, must be tasked with purging those libraries of reactionary classics such as Shakespeare, and administering funds designated for “reparations”. Who better than those who campaigned for the change?

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If such efforts no longer command much support from the masses, the hinge moment for this slow coming-apart of the radical coalition was another uprising in Paris. In May 1968, the stones were once again torn up by students fired by something like the liberalising energy of their 1848 predecessors. Or intra-elite competition, perhaps: after all, this was a baby-boom generation reaching adulthood in far greater numbers than their elders. The result was, once again, social upheaval — followed by accession of many revolutionaries to the elite, where many of the 1968 revolutionaries ended up as politicians and other establishment figures.

But if the student activists of 1968 were still demanding liberalisation, like their predecessors in 1848, the world had changed around them. The grievance that triggered the riots captures just how far. The precipitating factor wasn’t poverty, or even political idealism, but individual desire: specifically, a ban on students spending the night in each others’ dorms.

The riots triggered a general strike that nearly brought down the French government. But at root, 1968 was a sexual revolution, that only took on the cause of the industrial proletariat as a kind of afterthought.

Since 1968, student idealism has continued on that rarefied trajectory. As the West has de-industrialised, so youth politics has lost interest in the industrial working class, and instead turned either to pursuing the individualistic politics of identity, or expanded beyond the “national” polities first forged in the student politics of the 19th century toward global issues such as poverty or climate.

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In my own youth, I wholeheartedly embraced this planetary vision. The Jubilee 2000 campaign made a tremendous impression on me at the time, fuelling my youthful idealism about the power of the internet to network people worldwide for the good of humanity. Looking back, though, I’ve come to wonder if it doesn’t serve more to illustrate how the digital age has changed the dynamic of intra-elite competition that’s characterised student activism since universities emerged as formative institutions for the industrial bourgeoisie.

Drop the Debt campaigners of my acquaintance now sport OBEs and comfortable berths in the 21st-century NGOcracy, much as many soixante-huitards before them ended up at the heart of the liberal French establishment. The organisations themselves are still going, not to mention paying the salaries of activists, researchers, fundraisers and so on.

Meanwhile, it’s far from clear whether the campaign achieved much to ease the burden of debt in the long term. Tens of millions signed the petition. There were concerts. Bono got involved. And over $100bn of debt was forgiven. In the early 2010s, David Golding of Debt Justice made a celebratory video showing how ordinary people in Zambia had benefited from this forgiveness. But last year, The Economist reported that in 2020 Zambia, a key beneficiary of Jubilee 2000, was once again as indebted as ever. The only difference is that this time Zambia’s creditors aren’t the IMF, but an opaque web of international lenders including China and Saudi Arabia, largely immune to moral pressure from well-meaning Western campaigners.

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None of this is to say that activists were wrong exactly, in calling for debt cancellation. It’s more to suggest that political idealism meshes at best uncomfortably with the fallen nature of humankind. And with that in mind, where a utopian scheme seems likely to run aground on the disappointing complexities of reality, the principal beneficiaries of such utopianism — however well-intentioned — may end up being those who appoint themselves to realise that utopia in the world. And as this grows starker, without delivering any obvious benefits to the masses whose lives may be up-ended by another bout of student radicalism, it’s hard to see the time-honoured coalition between progressive radicals and the working class holding up.

The great unanswered question for today’s students, then, is this: where is the mass support today for the rarefied post-1968 brand of idealism that’s come to dominate youth politics? Even the soixante-huitards acted in a coalition of sorts with France’s industrial proletariat; but the post-national orientation of student activism today feels more like a revolution against what’s left of that proletariat, than anything calculated to serve working-class interests.

The counterpoint might be: well, the industrial age is behind us now, so who cares? It’s not like the masses have disappeared, but who knows what the new political poles are. And today’s students are making a big gamble, when they assume that even a post-industrial working class will rally behind the middle-class activist call for more post-nationalism, more identity politics, and more skimming of funds from the real economy for redistribution on moral grounds such as “reparations”.

It’s long been taken for granted that youth politics only ever gets more liberal. But when post-nationalism, globalism and so on is now an overtly elitist project, a truly radical youthful counter-elite would be one that mobilised mass revolutionary support by swinging back in the other direction. In this uncertain moment, perhaps the only subversive move would be to draw a line under the liberalising project begun in 1848, and seek mass support for a politics of limits.

“We’re collectively mourning right now and in grief, and a lot of old wounds have been dug up and reopened because of this,” said David Pratt, of the Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Nations. In response, the capital city of British Columbia, Victoria, cancelled its celebrations, encouraging people to consider “what it means to be Canadian in light of recent events”.

A co-chair of the Canada Day committee in Fredericton said, “a quiet day of reflection may be the best way for our community to spend the holiday.” And cancelled their celebration. Sol Mamakwa, a Member of Provincial Parliament in Ontario, called on people to “reflect on the dark roots of Canada”. The Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, whose father was PM during the time the residential schools operated, suggested the country think of “those for whom it’s not yet a day of celebration.”

Of course, celebration and consideration are not mutually exclusive. And despite the fact that the majority of Canadians wanted to celebrate on July 1, #CancelCanadaDay trending on Twitter was enough for these politicians.

But it seems the activists calling to cancel Canada were not interested in quiet reflection. A number of churches across the nation were vandalised and burned to the ground, in protest of the past. One wooden church named St. Ann’s near Hedley, British Columbia — where members of the Upper Similkameen Indian Band had been gathering for over a century — was reduced to ash. Not far away, The Sacred Heart — which has served the Penticon Indian Band since 1911 — was also razed.

Churches have been burned in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Nova Scotia. Almost all were on indigenous land, destroyed, apparently, in response to deaths of the children who were removed from their families sent to the schools in a policy of forced assimilation. But what do these acts really accomplish?

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It is true that Canada’s residential schools existed to destroy indigenous cultures and languages and were notorious for neglect and abuse. By the Seventies, most of these schools were run by the state. Nevertheless, the latest scandal has been widely misunderstood.

The “unmarked graves” that precipitated the cancellation of Canada Day and the church burnings were not the graves of murder victims — a fact many activists appear to misunderstand. Analysis of the remains shows that the children mostly died from the same causes as non-indigenous children at the time — things like influenza and tuberculosis.

Nor were the graves kept secret. A landmark 2015 report from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission had an entire volume entitled “Canada’s Residential Schools: Missing Children and Unmarked Burials”. The report describes how “the practice throughout the system’s history was to keep burial costs low, and to oppose sending the bodies of students who died at schools back to their home communities,” hence why there were cemeteries on the school grounds. Very few articles about the report pointed out these facts (besides Brian Lilley’s in the Toronto Sun.)

Moreover, the graves were not intentionally unmarked; rather, the markers decayed over the years and were simply not maintained. The “discovery” of these unmarked graves was not a discovery, then, but something activists could have read up on years ago. It’s perfectly reasonable to be upset and disgusted by these facts. But it is important to get the facts right.

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There’s always a temptation, when you’re an activist, to peddle the narrative that presents your adversary in the worst possible light (and you — the valiant saviour — in the best). In Canada, the Left gives into this temptation far too frequently — and I say this as someone who was a devout leftist for most of my life. Few spoke out against the arson of religious buildings. Those who did included indigenous leaders, who were left dealing with the fall-out.

The Abbotsford News reported that a residential school survivor and Indigenous elder was “devastated” after St. Ann’s was razed. Her ancestors had helped build the church. Upper Similkameen Indian Band Chief Bonnie Jacobsen also expressed dismay and disbelief at the burnings, which she called, “complete disregard for our elders and ancestors,” adding, “Putting our lands, wildlife, and members at risk is not the way.” Keith Crow, the Lower Similkameen Indian Band Chief, said “I don’t see any positive coming from this and it’s going to be tough.”

These church burnings are part of a recent trend on the Left to destroy symbols or statues that some feel are representative of a regressive time. Statues of Queen Victoria and Queen Elizabeth II were also casualties of Canada Day this year. When progressives tweet their support of extreme actions — which tend not to have any effect on them personally, or even their communities — they ignore the fact that destruction and violence do not tend to effect positive change for the communities they claim to be defending.

Both the Sixties race riots and the LA riots in 1992 destroyed working class communities populated by people of colour, which which never truly recovered, despite decades of working to rebuild. Many families were forced to leave the neighbourhood, and countless businesses were permanently erased. More recently, the result of Antifa-led Black Lives Matter riots in Portland and Seattle has been to sow even further division and repulsion towards those who claim to seek justice but advocate for and perpetrate violence against anyone who fails to toe the line.

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Who are these activists helping, when they burn down local businesses and religious buildings? These responses are too often about projecting toughness and holier-than-thou “commitment” to the cause. Often, they go too far. Last week, executive director of the BC Civil Liberties Association (BCCLA), Harsha Walia, resigned after responding to the church burnings by tweeting, “Burn it all down.”

Walia, a long-time Left-wing activist, has long projected extreme views — advocating for censoring and cancelling those she deems political opponents. Before becoming the director of a civil liberties organisation she was, for instance, a supporter of a petition to have me fired from my job as an editor at a Left-wing publication in 2015 on account of my criticisms of the sex trade and advocacy for the Nordic model of prostitution law; she worked to have a talk by journalist and author Chris Hedges cancelled that same year, for the same reason. As a proponent for the full legalisation of the sex trade, Walia felt entitled to silence those who viewed the trade as inherently exploitative and wanted the men responsible for that exploitation held to account.

Advocating for the destruction of Canadian churches is an entirely inappropriate thing for a person representing an organisation supposedly committed to protecting freedom of religion and assembly to do. But the rush of power and validation activists experience in making such extreme statements ensures many speak without consideration for facts or consequences. Walia is, alas, also a typical product of modern progressive activism, which has devalued truth, rationality, and practicality in favour of short-sighted hyperbole.

This is why activists rushed to spin the “unmarked graves” story into a shocking discovery, hidden by a media and liberal government that is always at their mercy. The result of this rhetoric was arson that devastated people whose lives most urban liberals can’t imagine. Activists put themselves centre-stage, to the detriment of communities; it’s disturbing, this knee-jerk response towards violence, destruction, and cancellation. Leftist leaders, in particular, must resist this urge, lest the entire Left burn all its bridges and go up in flames. Policy must be rooted in facts and rational thought. But perhaps that’s a little too dull for the burn-it-all-down crowd.