America has a black-youth gun-violence problem. It’s long been with us, but the latest iteration is different, and it is getting worse in ways that the country’s establishment liberals and urban leaders seem either unwilling or unable to confront.

You won’t find much about this crime surge in the national mainstream news. Since the wave picked up speed during the pandemic, establishment liberals have remained largely uncomfortable talking about it. The press coverage of teen takeovers illustrates this tendency. Local police departments have been documenting and responding to these gatherings since at least 2023, yet it took The New York Times and CNN nearly three years to cover the phenomenon in meaningful depth. They finally did so only last week, as takeovers and shootings continue to grow across major cities this spring. Even then, CNN’s piece ran nearly 1,000 words on the violence without mentioning race once. And in typical fashion, the Times mentioned race only to suggest that concern about the gatherings was itself a form of racial bias.

To get a real picture of what is happening, you have to piece it together yourself, poring over local news coverage, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention records, and state-level data. What emerges is a crisis defined by two characteristics: a younger perpetrator profile and crimes more brazen and senseless in nature. 

The shooters are younger than before, many of them school-age black male youth between 12 and 19 who obtain firearms illegally through social media, which have made acquiring a gun easier than ever. The disputes that trigger the violence increasingly begin as interpersonal conflicts with other black male teens, escalating through online exchanges before erupting in person. In March, for example, a 15-year-old approached 16-year-old Jaylen Bailey at a mall in Champaign, Ill., over an existing dispute, before he shot Bailey in the parking lot, near his mother and siblings. 

Others erupt more wantonly, with many occurring during the alcohol-and-marijuana-fueled teen takeovers, whose young male participants often arrive armed. What begins as a fun gathering can turn violent quickly. An accidental bump or shouted insult can be enough to escalate into drawn firearms and open fire. In the majority of such events broken up by police across the country in recent months, officers have recovered multiple firearms among those arrested.

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This gun violence is also no longer contained to low-income residential neighborhoods. Increasingly, it’s spilling into the few remaining malls, commercial districts, and public parks that Americans of all walks of life share. And in doing so, it is injuring and killing a growing number of bystanders who had no part in the dispute. 

On April 23, at the Mall of Louisiana in Baton Rouge, the largest shopping center in the Bayou State, 17-year-old Markel Lee drew a semiautomatic weapon during a dispute with another young black teen in a crowded food court and opened fire, killing Martha Odom, a high-school honors student from Ascension Episcopal School, and seriously injuring five other bystanders. In a state that ranks third in the nation in overall gun homicides and first in child gun deaths, the Mall of Louisiana shooting drew a swift and unusually sharp response from lawmakers. Gov. Jeff Landry held a news conference the following day alongside more than a dozen visibly frustrated state law-enforcement officials, using the word “spillover” to describe how the violence had reached one of the state’s most popular commercial destinations, and took the opportunity to criticize the Democratic-run city of Baton Rouge for its failure to stem it.

 The numbers behind this crisis are stark. According to CDC mortality data, firearm homicide deaths among black youth 19 and under spiked to 1,553 in 2024, up from 1,125 six years earlier. The 1,553 deaths represented 65% of all youth firearm homicide deaths nationally, despite black youth comprising roughly 14% of the youth population. 

In Florida, homicide arrest intakes of black youth 18 and under rose 52% between fiscal years 2018-19 and 2024-25. Felony firearm arrests in the Sunshine State among black youth rose 31% over the same period, from 656 to 859. This surge is almost entirely isolated to black youth. Over that same period, felony firearm arrests among white youth in Florida fell 27% and homicide arrest intakes were flat. 

In Texas, homicide referrals to the state’s juvenile justice system doubled by fiscal 2024 compared to 2018, and firearm offenses rose 58%. By 2024, nearly 1 in 12 youth admitted to the Texas Juvenile Justice Department had committed murder, up from 1 in 100 in 2018. In Washington, DC, the share of homicides and nonfatal shootings committed by perpetrators aged 15 to 20 rose to more than 21% of all such cases by mid-2024, up from roughly 11% in 2021.

The data tell a more nuanced story than a general surge in black youth crime. Data from the Florida Department of Juvenile Justice shows misdemeanor offenses among black youth have declined since 2018, and felony property crimes have returned to pre-pandemic levels, a pattern that has been observed by other local law enforcement agencies across the country. It’s not that more black youth are getting into trouble with the law — but the nature of that trouble has changed. The lethal presence of firearms in adolescent interpersonal disputes that once ended in a fistfight and a juvenile-court hearing is turning mistakes into felony assault and even murder charges that prosecutors are compelled to bring in adult court. Taken together, the data point to a troubling reality: the first post-Obama, post-Black Lives Matter generation of black teens are more likely to die by firearm homicide than at any point in at least a quarter century or serve lengthy sentences in adult prison than any earlier generation.

All the more troubling: the surge wasn’t inevitable. It is, in large part, the consequence of progressive groups and establishment liberals abandoning effective crime-reduction strategies in favor of activist narratives. To understand how this unfolded, we have to go back to 2013.

On July 11 of that year, the CDC released a public-health report with a remarkable finding: the nation’s youth homicide rate had fallen to a 30-year low. After holding relatively steady through the early aughts at around 9.3 per 100,000, the rate had fallen to 7.5 per 100,000, the lowest recorded since 1981, and remained on a downward trajectory. 

The report should have been a moment of national celebration. Buried within it was data indicating real progress was being made to stem the staggeringly high murder rates for black youth. That figure had plunged to 25.9 per 100,000 in 2013, down from 32.8 per 100,000 in 2006 — a 21% decline.

But there would be no celebratory announcement from the Obama administration, nor would the findings receive significant national attention. That’s because a debate about race and policing that had been building for years in the country’s most liberal universities and law schools, catalyzed by works like Michelle Alexander’s influential 2010 book, The New Jim Crow, was about to spill into the broader culture.

On July 13, two days after the CDC study was published, a Florida jury acquitted George Zimmerman in the killing of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, a legal outcome that would ignite a national debate and dominate American political life for the next decade. Hours after the verdict, the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag was created, and it would serve as the rhetorical basis of a new social movement asserting that law enforcement and other public institutions systematically mistreated black Americans, particularly black male youth; fixing this, in the BLM telling, required fundamentally dismantling or restructuring policing itself.

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In the ensuing years, the movement proved remarkably successful at influencing mainstream media, the Democratic Party, and academic and corporate institutions. That institutional legitimacy would eventually be converted into a powerful political force, as philanthropy organizations, including the Open Society Foundations and the Ford Foundation, poured well more than $1 billion into a growing network of racial-justice nonprofits, advocacy groups, and the campaigns of office-seekers who adopted the movement’s worldview. 

The policy reforms that followed were sweeping, including reducing patrols in high-crime communities, ending cash bail for most misdemeanor offenses, reducing or outright eliminating punishment for property crimes, and cutting local police budgets in favor of alternative programs like social workers and “violence disruptors.” Democratic-run cities across the country began uncritically implementing these changes, driven by a new class of well-funded, ideologically driven nonprofits that had rapidly proliferated across major American cities.

The movement reached its peak in the summer of 2020, when the death of George Floyd following his arrest by Minneapolis police ignited protests and riots across major American cities. In the months that followed, multiple Democratic-run cities, energized by the political moment and the broader anti-Trump coalition, moved to slash police budgets and roll back law-enforcement practices that had brought about the successes of the previous decade. But instead of delivering racial justice, the concrete result was the single largest surge in youth violence in a generation. A CDC analysis found the youth homicide rate for Americans aged 10 to 24 jumped 37% between 2019 and 2020, to nearly 11 in 100,000, up from 7.8. For black youth, the picture was even more grim. Their homicide rate jumped 39% in that same single year, to nearly 46 per 100,000, up from 33, and continued climbing to a peak of 47.3 in 2021, nearly double the rate recorded at the low point of 25.6 in 2014.

Over the course of a decade, the movement carved a swath of destruction across American cities, defunding and demoralizing local police departments, stripping prosecutors and the criminal justice system of their most effective deterrence tools, and convincing a generation of young black Americans that the institutions around them were illegitimate instruments of oppression. It is the ultimate indictment of Black Lives Matter that the movement wiped out the very progress in reducing homicides that had been underway when it first launched.

The current black-youth gun-violence surge is a problem worth solving. Failing to address it means condemning still more members of this generation and future ones to death or lengthy incarceration, two outcomes that should be unacceptable, especially since American policymakers have shown before that it is possible to break crime waves, most recently in the mid-2010s. 

Any meaningful solution requires major reform, including the return of many of the hard-on-crime approaches used to stem previous crime waves, as well as more funding of the criminal- and juvenile-justice system, particularly at the local level. Republican-led states are better positioned to pressure Democratic-run cities into making the policy corrections they have grown increasingly reluctant to make on their own. But in Democratic strongholds like California, Illinois, and New York, meaningful change is unlikely so long as establishment liberals retain their outsized influence over state and local policy, while refusing to acknowledge that a decade of uncritically embracing radical progressive ideas dismantled what was working and set the conditions for this surge. Until they reckon with that, the crisis will only worsen.

The coming summer will make that reckoning harder to avoid. More shootings and more teen takeovers will likely mean more confrontations between GOP-led states and Democratic-run cities, which will keep the issue in the public eye. The Trump administration, which has shown little hesitation in pursuing federal intervention on crime, will likely raise the pressure further. Establishment liberal institutions will find it increasingly difficult to ignore the crisis — or their role in creating it.

This shift is the result of deep, and perhaps inexorable, changes that contemporary Western leaders celebrated in the name of “diversity.”  Western societies have indeed become more diverse, but the process hasn’t been the product purely of Western openness, but also of structural forces. To wit, modern communications and mass immigration have shrunken distances, making Western countries less like their past as exclusionary metropolises of racially based sea empires, and more like the multiethnic Eurasian land empires like Rome, Russia, Iran, and China. 

Thus, the history of those empires has important lessons — and warnings — for us. Above all, the Eurasian empires were civilizational states, dependent for their success upon the strength of their inherited civilizations, and on respect for these civilizations by their multiethnic populations. By these standards, Western countries today are in increasingly poor shape. 

Civilizational decline is not so dangerous in ethnically homogenous societies. Like many formerly great peoples before them, the ethnic English of the future could squat contentedly on the steps of the half-ruined monuments of their ancestors, scratching for fleas while telling themselves stories of their great past victories, great past works of literature that they no longer read, and great buildings that they no longer have the craftsmanship to build. This is, however, unlikely to impress new residents of their island. 

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In a world in which new residents are a given, the historical distinction between oceanic empires and land empires becomes crucial. Western-European colonists traveled thousands of miles across the sea and encountered completely different cultures with whom they had had no previous contact, and which were generally at a markedly lower level of technological development. In the Americas, on top of this came the immense new commercial opportunities of plantation crops and industrialized slavery based on race. The result was institutionalized racist systems for social management. There were of course beliefs in imperial “missions civilisatrices”, but accompanied by an implicit or explicit assumption that the process of civilizing the natives would take a very long time and probably always remain incomplete.

The great land empires — Roman, Chinese, Muslim, and Russian, among others — couldn’t be like this. They had lived next to the peoples they conquered for hundreds or thousands of years. They had similar levels of technological development. Sometimes, the subjects were tacitly recognized by the conquerors to have in certain respects a higher level of “civilization” than themselves: Greeks over Romans, Iranians over Arabs, Baltic Germans over Russians. For long periods, moreover, the subject peoples had been the former rulers: several of the great Chinese dynasties were from “barbarian” peoples; several of the great Iranian dynasties were Turkic; the Russian principalities lived for almost 300 years under the “Tatar yoke.” 

In these circumstances, hierarchies based on racial origin and proportion were hard to sustain — certainly if the empires wished to expand and survive. Dynastic intermarriage was a regular thing. To secure imperial rule over conquered territories required the successful co-opting of large parts of their elites. These elites then merged into the existing imperial elites. Hence the Tatar surnames of some of the greatest Russian noble families, like the Sheremetievs and Kochubeys.  

The test was not race, but readiness to adopt the civilization, language, and, in the case of the Muslim and Russian empires, religion of the empire. The originally “alien” ethnic origins of writers like Ivan Turgenev (with his Tatar roots) in Russia have never affected their status as great national cultural icons. Given time — and the Iranians and Chinese had millennia — whole populations could merge into the imperial people. Thus a large majority of “Han Chinese” south of the Yangtse River are, in fact, of non-Chinese “tribal” origin. 

Or as a Russian friend exclaimed when I first explained America’s racial “one-drop” rule to her, “That’s ridiculous! By that standard, every Russian is actually a Mongolian!” Indeed, the quasi-racist charge that Russians are racially and culturally mixed with Asiatics and therefore “not really European” has always helped to fuel Western prejudice against Russia. British visitors to Russian-ruled Central Asia in the later 19th century were appalled by the levels of corruption — and also by the ease of intercourse between Russians and “natives”.

What are the lessons — positive and negative — of these imperial traditions for our increasingly multiracial societies today? The first is that equality of racial origin in the elites has never said anything at all about the social and economic position of the mass of the population, whatever their race or ethnicity. The second is that social stability depends upon the integration of new populations by providing them with tolerable lives and equal rights before the law; and this process depends, in turn, on there being rights and a rule of law to start with. 

Caracalla, who reigned AD 211-217. was one of the nastier Roman emperors. Even so, he was responsible for extending Roman citizenship to all free-born men in the empire. A great sign of progress in a brief moment of liberalism? Not exactly. His chief motive, according to the historical consensus, was to increase the tax base. It may have been the right direction, but it did nothing to slow growing tax evasion by the elites, and the intensifying slide of the mass of the empire’s population into immiseration and exploitation. 

By the fifth century, this had reached a point at which many preferred to be ruled by the “barbarians.” Equally importantly, the “Antonine Constitution” granting universal citizenship was part of the process whereby the last vestiges of the Roman republican tradition and its legal rights were extinguished and replaced by the absolutist, quasi-sacred monarchy of the later empire: “equality in misery” as the old Russian saying has it. A multiracial elite is very nice, but it is even nicer when it is not ruling over a population of impoverished multiracial serfs. 

Above all, the history of the great Eurasian land empires raises the question of whether our societies can maintain the combination of material success, elite ethics, and civilizational attraction that made the “barbarians” respect the empires and enabled those empires to assimilate not only their subjects, but even in some cases their conquerors. This is in large part a question of maintaining — or rather, restoring — widely spread economic opportunities and prosperity for citizens of all races; but it is much more than that besides. 

The success of ancient Rome also depended upon the ethics and values known as Romanita, emphasizing such virtues as loyalty, discipline and fortitude. Chinese states repeatedly failed and were repeatedly put back together by ruling elites united and strengthened by the values imparted by the different strands of Chinese cultural tradition. Core to both was a deep sense of loyalty to the inherited idea of the state, leading to duty to the actually existing state. When contemporary critics say — rightly — that present Western cultures think too much about rights at the expense of duties, they should remember what happened to ancient Rome when the elites lost their sense of duty. How can immigrants develop a sense of loyalty to Britain or America, if those countries’ elites themselves have lost it? 

When it comes to assimilating immigrants, Western civilization is being undermined from several directions at once. Capitalist demand for wage arbitrage and a “reserve army of labor,” legitimized politically by a fanatically utopian and historically illiterate Left, is producing a nativist reaction in much of the older ethnic population. Some of President Trump’s restrictions on immigration are thus a necessary corrective. 

But by abandoning the universalist values of American “credal nationalism” in favor of a chauvinist version of US identity, Trump threatens to wreck America’s version of Romanita, and destroy the cultural and ideological elements that made the successful assimilation of immigrants possible. In Europe, the populist Right’s growing insistence on the Christian basis of national identity worked well for the great universalist religious empires of the past but is unlikely to do so in an irreligious contemporary Europe, where the strongest religious allegiances are found among Muslim immigrant communities.

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Finally, and perhaps most fundamentally, there is the need for a “great tradition,” a cultural core capable of assimilating other cultures. It has been said that “a language is a dialect with an army,” but it would be more accurate to say that a language is a dialect with a literature. Languages with a strong literary core have played a key role in preserving national identities and the idea of the state, for centuries or even millennia during which the state itself has vanished. This role has been most powerful when the literature is integral to a codified religion, as in the Jewish diaspora, or bound up with philosophies of state, as in China.

In the Middle Ages, the legends of King Arthur and his knights were called “The Matter of Britain,” as the legends of Charlemagne were called “The Matter of France.” In Persian-speaking lands, the Shah-Nameh (and the miniature art it generated) helped to preserve an idea of Iranian identity during long periods in which Iran was fragmented. The same was true of the “Knight in the Panther’s Skin” in the Georgian lands. 

The frantic attempts of late 19th century nationalist writers to “rediscover” and write down “national” myths — like Lacplesis in Latvia, transformed from a mythical half-bear into a “historical” national hero fighting the German medieval crusaders — has attracted a good deal of justified mockery. But these revisionists were onto something: national pride can bring us together. 

These are, however, specifically national and ethnic (or pseudo-ethnic) myths, rather than a literary corpus that can attract other peoples. Modern Russia has possessed, rather than one national myth, the corpus of great 19th-century Russian novelists and poets, whose work has been central to Russian civilizational identity. Being secular in form (if religiously-influenced), this core body of work has attracted many people of non-Russian ethnic origin to the Russian tradition.

Britain and France — and the United States, in a more complex and diffuse way — also possess such immensely prestigious inherited modern literatures, that exercised a powerful effect on colonial subjects who were educated in English and French.

For Britain and France to maintain the influence of their literary traditions within their domestic societies, however, requires a sufficiently large literate class interested in preserving them and reworking them for present and future generations. Quite apart from the apparent desire of much of Western academia to destroy this tradition, can such classes survive the era of AI and an atomized mass media? And when they do try to rework the classics, can institutions like the Royal Shakespeare Company in its present debased form carry a great tradition forward? All too often, the RSC’s “adaptation” looks more like woke Procrustean torture, and by the time they have finished stretching Shakespeare and cutting bits off there is not enough left to see him at all, let alone sense his part in a great tradition. Or can the Smithsonian in America, with its present insistence on curatorial self-flagellation over the misdeeds of the past, now transmit an American tradition?

I hope that the picture I have drawn is too gloomy, and that our sea-faring societies will find the cultural and political strength to adjust successfully to new populations in the way that the Eurasian land empires did. Should we fail, we can derive some thin comfort from the fact that all states come to an end, and that in the end, perhaps the best they can hope for is to leave a good-looking cultural corpse to help fertilize the civilizations of the future.

The Hamilton buzz came with distasteful notes of official propriety, the same dead respectability carried by such names as “Barack Obama” and “The New York Times” and “NPR”. Indeed, in my own California neighborhood, a continent away from Broadway, I was beginning to see grey-haired liberal ladies carrying Hamilton tote bags. That the play was supposedly a mashup of the American Founding and hip-hop threatened to spoil both the American Founding and hip-hop for me.

And then, one morning late in 2016, I woke to find songs from Hamilton coming from my own stereo — the official cast recording of Hamilton had become urgently popular among American 10-year-olds, and my oldest child was 10 at the time. The final barrier between me and musical theater had been breached. But I couldn’t disdain those songs as I may have wanted to, since my daughter loved them so much, and since she and her friends were singing and rapping along to them with such charming exuberance. And since, well, some of those songs, some of that Broadway hip-hop, I had to admit I kind of liked. They were like… songs, pretty good songs. There was, for example, the winning Beatles bounce of “Washington on Your Side”, and the ingenious, absurdly infectious rhythms of “Wait for It”.

What really broke my resistance, though, was Hamilton’s hip-hop side. Now, a musical about America’s first secretary of the treasury is obviously miles away, in sensibility and setting and street cred, from what is generally considered hip-hop, which was fine because so am I. What of hip-hop Hamilton does have — rapid-fire rhymes and expert word-play — it has in abundance. I can only imagine how much fun it would be to deliver such lines from a stage. What I do know is it’s consistently a kick to hear them.

It wasn’t until the summer of 2020, though, when Disney Plus released a filmed version of a 2016 stage production of Hamilton, that I saw the play as a single work of musical theater, start to finish. And my official critical assessment of Hamilton would be that, dramatically or narratively, it is somewhat less than the sum of its parts. Still, those parts are pretty great. And the individual scenes built from the dozens of fun songs, the countless witty lines and clever couplets, create their own cumulative pleasure that more than compensates for the narrative flimsiness. (This may be how musical theater works in general. I wouldn’t know.)

By then the play’s public reputation, which had been in flux for several years, was in something like a crisis. Initially, back in 2015 and 2016, it had been an object of fervent public adulation among people with real power, including Obama. Its standing was so exalted that the play’s cast felt entitled to direct a pointed, critical plea at the Vice President-elect of the United States, Mike Pence, when he and his wife attended a Hamilton performance shortly after Donald Trump’s 2016 election victory. Speaking for the entire cast after the show, one actor addressed Pence directly, expressing anxiety that “your new administration will not protect us” — the “diverse America” the mostly black cast took itself to represent — “or defend us and uphold our inalienable rights”. He went on to express “hope” that Pence would be “inspired” by Hamilton “to uphold our American values”. In its melding of patriotic boilerplate and the language of Obama liberalism, this was a very Hamilton sort of message. (In retrospect, Trump’s whining response — saying the cast had “harassed” Pence and violated the “safe place” of the theater — reads as a weirdly literal omen of how New Right Machiavels like Chris Rufo and Stephen Miller would take up the campus Left’s weepy pretexts for punishing wrong-think when the chance arose.)

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But by the time I finally watched Hamilton on Disney Plus, not quite four years later, America was two months into the “racial reckoning” incited by the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer. An unprecedented moral pageantry of protest and public kneeling and rote apologies had just been underwritten by the strange but effective teamwork of multinational corporations and urban rioters. The play’s affirming take on the American Founding, with its multicultural casting and its fond portrayal of Alexander Hamilton and George Washington, had been a perfect sendoff for the Obama years, but it didn’t fit so well with this puritanical moment. Openly conjuring the Founding Fathers so as to adulate the nation they wrought was the sort of thing that could get you cancelled — and indeed, the hashtag #cancelhamilton was briefly a thing on Twitter. Miranda was accordingly scolded by Harvard students and lectured by Columbia lecturers. The 2020 backlash was not huge, but it was big enough that Miranda embarked on a minor apology tour that summer, in which he absorbed without complaint every bit of criticism that came his way and, of course, promised to do better.

In fact, a small number of people had been finding Hamilton problematic more or less from the beginning, and for reasons of simple historical fact that are pretty sound. For example, shortly after the show began its massive run at the Richard Rodgers Theatre on Broadway, in August 2015, the black novelist Ishmael Reed wrote a long and (characteristically) angry essay pointing out the historical errors and evasions that enable both Miranda and Ron Chernow, author of the bestselling Alexander Hamilton biography on which the play is based, to portray Hamilton as an early abolitionist. Hamilton does indeed seem to have disliked slavery and looked forward to its dissolution, and he was close friends with abolitionist dreamer John Laurens, and he was a founding member of the New York Manumission Society, which advocated the voluntary freeing of slaves by slaveowners. But, as Reed and others have pointed out, he married into a slave-owning family, seems to have owned slaves himself, brokered the sale of other slaves, and represented slave-owners in his capacity as a lawyer. Hamilton disliked slavery, but not enough to take a stand against it in his personal and professional life.

In his biography, Chernow deals with these inconvenient facts by laboring to discover a sort of heroic ambivalence in Hamilton’s heart for which, in the documentary record, evidence is scarce. Miranda deals with them by briefly, glancingly, playing up Hamilton’s anti-slavery side and otherwise rushing past the whole topic. In a cabinet debate over government debt, Hamilton mocks the Virginia planter Thomas Jefferson: “A civics lesson from a slaver. Hey neighbor/Your debts are paid cuz you don’t pay for labor.” And earlier, in the rousing anthem “My Shot”, Hamilton identifies himself and his fellow rebellious New Yorkers, and Laurens, as “A bunch of revolutionary manumission abolitionists”. The couplet’s second line — which clinches a killer bit of wordplay — is heading elsewhere in a hurry: “Give me a position, show me where the ammunition is.”

For Hamilton’s harshest critics, though, invoking the play’s historical evasions and exaggerations is merely a way of prosecuting a deeper case against it. Miranda’s undergrad critic from Harvard accuses him of “blindly ask[ing] BIPOC performers to act in a piece detailing historical events benefiting their oppressors”. (That “blindly” is a very undergrad touch. The notion that contemporary actors are being oppressed by men from the 18th century nicely illustrates the collapsed version of historical time that operates in the minds of certain progressive commentators on race in America.) For Ishmael Reed, Hamilton’s historical characters are so fundamentally defined by their involvement in slavery that it should blot out all other ways of talking about these men.

In other words, it’s the implicit optimism of the play that is unacceptable to these critics. Historical details about Hamilton merely confirm this prior conviction. In the event that someone like Miranda stirs up a hopeful mood about America, a battalion of academic historians stands on call to provide these details, with angry writers ready to send them through their megaphones. Cornily, Miranda grants American Founder Alexander Hamilton the liberal honor of being an “immigrant”, because he came from a different part of the British Empire, and he lets the word “abolitionist” hang in the air like a sort of Kantian cologne for Hamilton and his revolutionary friends to pass through and bear the smell of for the rest of the play. And then the historians and professional pessimists step in to say: Wrong! Racism! Slavery!

But many of Hamilton’s admirers already knew it was wrong, or at least a happy distortion of a darker history. The play’s most famous and powerful admirer, Obama, was surely not duped into beliefs contrary to the historical record after seeing it, formed as he was by the more radical traditions of black thought and black struggle. But I imagine that, as president of the country whose founding was being portrayed in that delightful and hugely successful musical, Obama welcomed the opportunity to indulge the happy distortion for as long as the inertial forces of public discourse would allow. I imagine him thinking, “It’s healthy and useful to think about it this way for a while. No doubt we’ll have to go back to thinking about it the other way at some point.”

That is, the warm reception given to Hamilton by influential and historically savvy people like Obama, and indeed the writing of the play by the Puerto Rican phenom Miranda, are examples of what Benedict Anderson calls “memory and forgetting” in Imagined Communities, his great book on the origins and moral logic of nationalism. Since nation states were typically put together and solidified through enormous violence, often fueled by ethnic or racial hostility, they bear these injuries and outrages as undeniable facts of their national histories. But — unlike the multinational agglomerations known as empires — the nation state carries a civic and communal promise, in its very form, to all those contained within its borders, including those who were gathered in and politically domesticated through conquest and violence: “You are members of this national community, brothers in nationhood.” Because this promise and this history are radically at odds with each other, those who generate the legitimating stories of these nations are forced into an almost comically impossible task. They can’t simply engage in perpetual remembering of the formative outrages, since this contradicts the unifying conceit of nationhood and threatens to undo this work of unifying and legitimating. But they can’t simply forget these outrages since they’re too well-remembered, especially by the groups whose ancestors bore this formative violence, and they remain communally important for those groups. And so the nation’s legitimating stories, and everyone who imbibes them in moments of national affirmation, do both. They forget and remember at the same time, or they forget and then later they remember, or vice versa.

Anderson’s great example comes from his own people, the English, whose founding hero arrived from a different country and indeed bears this alienness in his name: William the Conqueror. But the name is rendered blurry in national myth, so that one can imagine William, touched with some primordial Englishness back in France, conquering not England but someone else on England’s behalf. As Anderson writes, the sobriquet “‘the Conqueror’ operates as [a] kind of ellipses… to remind one of something which it is immediately obligatory to forget”.

“The American national myth,” I wrote in that earlier article, “reflects an even more vigorous effort of memory and forgetting, in which… the enslavement of Africans serves as mere prelude to their emancipation into civic brotherhood.” Yes, the enslavement of hundreds of thousands of black people was a founding fact of American history, but so was their eventual, inevitable emancipation into membership in this great nation, thanks to the elevated sentiment and noble political philosophy of founding Americans like Hamilton. Yes, our greatest Founding Father George Washington owned slaves at Mount Vernon, but, in an almost perfect working-out of this mythic logic of founding and emancipation, he also freed those slaves when he died. It feels almost Christ-like in the national telling, as if Washington died in order to free his slaves. This is how it works.

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Critics accused Miranda of ignoring or downplaying slavery in Hamilton, of forgetting it if you will. This was true, sort of. He definitely didn’t dwell on it — except that, in the small matter of casting his play almost entirely with descendants of its victims, and having them perform in a musical style invented by other such descendants, he was very much remembering American slavery. The play wasn’t about slavery in its text, but in the subtext or metatext of its casting and music, it was about slavery quite powerfully, and quite obviously. In this way, Hamilton is one of America’s most pointed and elegant and self-aware achievements in memory and forgetting.

Of course, this is what its critics dislike about it. The funny practice of memory and forgetting, even if it contains ample portions of regret and self-critique, generally sustains the national myth and thus serves the national project. Otherwise, it would just be memory, bitter remembering as perpetual critique, cynical rebuke to the claim of belonging. (You might say that America’s racial pessimists are “all memory”, in which case Trump, who recently complained that America’s national museums focus too much on “how bad slavery was”, would accurately be described as “all forgetting”.)

And, of course, this balance of symbolic influences, along with those songs and that quasi-hip-hop wordplay, was another reason why I liked that corny musical when my daughter started playing it on my stereo. It felt like a healthy antidote to the dominant way of thinking about race in America at the time — the post-Ferguson years when activists had turned their flamboyant pessimism into an ongoing business, latching onto ambiguous individual tragedies as iron confirmation of a sort of paranoid metaphysics of racist oppression. It’s a convenient and profitable circularity, in which murky events, interpreted according to those invidious assumptions, are pointed to as proving those assumptions. In casting the American Founders in his hip-hop musical with black actors, Hamilton conveyed that adopting such blanket convictions about America’s “structural” and “systematic” — and thus permanent, unchanging, and inexpugnable — racial guilt was a political choice, and that other choices were available. There were other ways for black Americans to look at and inhabit their country.

And these ways are better. It’s not that the stance of pessimism and stubborn aggrievement has nothing behind it. This attitude must be especially hard to shake for a satirical writer like Reed. The satirist’s state of inflamed skepticism has an easy foil in America, with its vanity and vaulting ideals, on one hand, and its much less ideal history and sometimes ridiculous present, on the other. The satirical novelist looks upon such a nation and sees nothing redeemable, only a rich cast of targets — everyone appearing a clownish agent of racist evil or patriotic delusion or both. This harsh outlook serves the satirist, as it serves the activist with her hands out for the philanthropy of racial guilt, but it’s hard to imagine that it serves the material interests of everyday black people.

I’ll give an example of what I mean. At a middle school I’ve visited for my children’s football matches, a school in the poor and violent “Deep East” of my town Oakland, an exterior wall is adorned with a quotation. The quotation — an official message or motto of the school itself, though it’s spray-painted in a graffiti-style script — is from Huey P. Newton, co-founder of the Black Panthers, who said: “Youths are passed through schools that don’t teach, then forced to search for jobs that don’t exist and finally left stranded in the street to stare at the glamorous lies advertised around them.” This is the perverse endpoint of racial cynicism, a middle school’s leadership sending a hopeless message about school itself to their impressionable students — many of them restless boys who, like me at that age, are already looking for reasons to shed the burdens of school and to avoid caring about anything but themselves.

The pedagogical and political wisdom of Hamilton lay in rejecting this dispiriting attitude while allowing the history behind it to function as musical suggestion and visible specter. It took the material Reed turns into bitter satire and made something much less bitter of it. In doing so it revealed that, despite the cynicism dominant in commentary about America by high-status black figures, most black Americans would prefer to inhabit their country uncynically, at least some of the time. They loved Hamilton as much as everyone else. The black Harvard historian Annette Gordon-Reed was one of the scholars who felt compelled to remind everyone that Hamilton was less of an abolitionist than Miranda implied, and yet she also loved Hamilton. “Evidently,” she wrote in 2016, “many of us enjoy feeling good about America.” “It makes perfect sense,” she went on, that people would want “to celebrate” as well as “to complicate” their national story. It makes perfect sense that black Americans — like everyone else who seeks a citizen’s spiritual home in a flawed nation — would find it worthwhile to forget sometimes, even as they remember.

Nor is Rolling Fork, with its 1,800 residents, really alone: when it comes to national dysfunction, Mississippi is America’s champion. “First in everything bad, and last in everything good,” says Danyelle Holmes, an organizer for the Poor People’s Campaign. If you’re familiar with the numbers, it’s hard to disagree, with the Magnolia State beating its 49 peers in infant mortality and mass incarceration — and coming dead last in healthcare.

It doesn’t have to be like this. Raised in a shack on the edge of Rolling Fork, Ty Pinkins is convinced he can remake politics in his native state. A Georgetown Law grad, and a war hero who won a Bronze Star in Iraq, he’s already performed admirably in two statewide races for the Democrats. Especially with an unpopular GOP incumbent in the Senate, Pinkins feels the time is ripe to turn red Mississippi blue. “Voters are on the edge of their seats,” he tells me, arguing that all he’d need to win is a paltry $500,000 from Democratic bosses in Washington.

Good luck with that. Both national and state Democrats have aligned against Pinkins in favor of a 43-year-old district attorney named Scott Colom. Unlike his rival, Colom lacks name recognition, or indeed ties to the Mississippi Delta, a bulwark of Democratic support in this, America’s poorest state. What Scott Colom does have, however, is the right surname. Scott, after all, is the son of Will Colom, a major Democratic Party donor.

Now, finally, Pinkins has had enough, forsaking the Democrats and announcing plans to run for the Senate as an independent. Yet if he’s abandoned the party his family has backed since black Mississippians gained the right to vote, back in 1965, his tale is anything but done.

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By Jeff Bloodworth

Whoever you ask in Mississippi, they’ll tell you that the Republicans are vulnerable. In 2020, Cindy Hyde-Smith earned the GOP’s narrowest Senate victory in Mississippi in almost four decades. And, five years later, she isn’t doing much better, saddled with dreary poll ratings after a somnolent tenure. Yes, Republicans hold all eight statewide offices, and huge majorities in the statehouse and senate. But Democrats have a path forward in a state that is 39% African American: strong black turnout, alongside just 22% of the white vote, could make a liberal competitive.

In 2023, Brandon Presley used that very formula to come within 26,600 votes of defeating his Republican opponent for governor — with Pinkins hot on his heels. Certainly, his Delta roots are an electoral boon. A vast alluvial floodplain, home to 13 of Mississippi’s 82 counties, the region’s swamps and cotton fields host a third of Mississippi’s black residents. And if that’s significant from an electoral perspective, Pinkins can also use his upbringing to understand voter fears.

“Ty came from the bottom of the bottom,” says Lenora Wynn, his cousin. We met at “Pinkinville”, the plot of land outside Rolling Rock where the extended family once lived. “There’s only so much you can see from the cottonfield,” Wynn adds. “We had a simple beginning.” In this, Pinkins shared much with his neighbors: around 40% of all Deltans are poor.

But if that shared background helps Pinkins secure his black base, his horizon spans far beyond the Delta. An 21-year army veteran, he left Mississippi for tours in Germany, Okinawa, Iraq, as well as a stint in the White House as a military aide. Unlike many southern politicians, that makes him equally comfortable in black and white spaces. At a rally in Jackson, the state capital, Pinkins thrilled his white audience with bits of his grandmother’s wisdom. “‘Baby,’” he cried, “‘when the storm comes don’t cuss the wind, gather the neighbors and sing louder than the thunder.’” Afterwards, a white lesbian in a rainbow t-shirt wrapped him in a bear hug. As one relative puts it, “Ty can code switch.”

All the same, politics in Mississippi is about more than bear hugs. In his 2024 Senate campaign, Pinkins recruited team leaders across every Mississippi county — what Matt Barron, a political strategist, calls “cutting turf”. But when the general election came around, Pinkins lost by 25%. Why? Because by leaping into the race, Pinkins upset what many insiders here call the “gatekeepers” of the Democratic Party. A case in point here in Bennie Thompson. He may have made a name for himself nationally, chairing a Capitol Hill committee into the January 6 violence, but Mississippi’s lone Democratic congressman apparently continues to pull strings back home. According to Pinkins, Thompson withheld vital campaign funds and endorsements after he dared run without official backing, allegedly refusing to even acknowledge the upstart former soldier at campaign events. Neither Thompson nor his media representatives replied to a request for comment.

Yet despite going bankrupt bankrolling his 2024 Senate run without party help, Pinkins promptly announced his candidacy for the 2026 race, before breaking with the Democrats altogether. Leon Brown, another cousin, isn’t surprised. “He’s one that don’t quit.” And, truth be told, gatekeepers have defined Pinkins’ whole life. Back in 1986, it was a racist seventh-grade math teacher, who failed him out of spite. At the time, it seemed like Pinkins was destined to a lifetime chopping cotton — just like his parents, and his grandparents before them. When he read his grade that humid afternoon, Pinkins fell to his knees and cried. Even 39 years later, the incident still stings. “I was ready to give up,” he says.

But racism wasn’t Pinkins’ only obstacle — and here we arguably get closer to understanding the seeming elevation of people like Scott Colom. “There is a class structure in Rolling Fork,” says Shawonder Harris, yet another Pinkins’ cousin. “And our parents chopped cotton.” In the Delta, the region’s tiny black professional class connives with whites to keep poor blacks at the bottom of the socioeconomic pile. That’s hardly new: W.E.B. DuBois was infamous for making his peace with the racist white establishment, accepting that a “talented tenth” of African Americans might eventually achieve racial uplift.

Desperate to escape places like Pinkinville, these attitudes die hard, with DuBois’s teachers and grocers replaced by elected politicians. With hard-won sinecures vanishingly rare, self-service in Mississippi too often trumps the public good. “You have to navigate agendas to amass power and influence,” says Eva Posner, a liberal political tactician. “Over time, you do that enough, the person in the mirror changes. That line in the sand moves. In an industry powered by power, it is very easy to be corrupted.”

Taken together, it’s little wonder that the Pinkins clan characterizes these gatekeepers as the “Black Boulé”. Officially, the Boulé is an invitation-only organization of prominent African Americans. In practice, says Harris, it symbolizes the “intersection of classism and racism” that so exemplifies Mississippi’s Democratic gatekeepers. Never mind that Thompson and Will Colom, a lawyer and car dealer, sharpened their political teeth under civil rights icons like John Lewis. By the Nineties, they’d morphed into complacent members of the Black Boulé, more than happy to cut thrusting newcomers down to size. As Posner vividly puts it, it all speaks to a political class willing to “get dementia on national television” rather than simply retire.

In this, of course, Mississippi is far from unusual. How else to explain Joe Biden’s doddering attempts at re-election last year? But, as so often in the Deep South, the price of gatekeeping feels especially stark. “Mississippi is a crime scene,” says Holmes, “and the gatekeepers are the accomplices” — even suggesting that the state’s African American establishment is built on the exploitation of poor blacks. In Holmes’ telling, that goes far beyond dolling out campaign contributions. Rather, she claims, as does Delta whistleblower Fred Chambliss, that Thompson heads up a thoroughgoing political machine, one greased by thick wedges of cash.

“For the gatekeepers to let you in,” Pinkins agrees, “you better be like Santa Claus, with a sack of money to give to the national party and Bennie Thompson’s friends.” Will Colom, to be sure, has plenty of sacks. Since 2016, he has given many thousands to both state and national Democrats. There’s no evidence of any illegality here, but Colom’s generosity appears well-timed: around the same time that he made a substantial donation to the DNC, President Biden nominated his son for a Mississippi federal judgeship, a bid ultimately blocked by none other than Cindy Hyde-Smith. Three years on, it’s hard not to get the sense that other sacks of money are boosting Scott’s Senate bid.

Colom rejects any such links. “I am not one of the largest contributors to the Mississippi Democratic Party,” he tells me. “I stepped down as member Democratic National Committee representing Mississippi,” adding that he’s not yet sure if his son is even running for the Senate.

Thompson himself is at the center of other allegations. According to staffers, he once used his chairmanship of Congress’s Homeland Security Committee to threaten credit card companies with regulation in return for campaign donations. Current and former Thompson staffers have also operated a party-planning side hustle, in which they earned $20,000 from lobbyists for events they staged in their boss’s honour. As for the man himself, Thompson is one of the richest DC politicians in Mississippi, with an estimated net worth of $3.25 million. “This is a normal pattern and practice,” says Holmes, suggesting that if Thompson, or his close associates, can’t gain from a municipality, he simply has no interest. John Walker exemplifies these cozy arrangements. Thompson’s personal attorney and campaign advisor — as well as godfather to his daughter — Walker headed the firm that has represented both the state’s biggest airports and Thompson’s hometown.

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America's destiny lies in the New South

By Joel Kotkin

Whatever the truth, and as so often in Mississippi, this is a persistent problem. Local Republicans are hardly free of scandal themselves, with the local GOP implicated in a $77 million welfare scandal, one allegedly promoted by football hall-of-famer Brett Favre. Little wonder experts say it’s a coin toss between the Magnolia State and neighboring Louisiana for the most corrupt in the union. Either way, this explains why the arrival of a clean-slate candidate like Pinkins is such a threat to the Democratic establishment — especially when he can woo blacks and whites both, thereby breaking the Thompson machine’s hold over the Delta and the state’s Democratic Party.

That still leaves one more question: why would the Democratic establishment in DC indulge such behavior? The answer comes with a strange kind of logic. Long used to being short of funds, compared to plutocrat-friendly Republicans anyway, establishment Democrats still believe every candidate failing can be fixed by campaign cash. “It is donor relations, not a campaign strategy,” says Posner, arguing that though party poohbahs know Scott Colom is bound to lose his Senate race in Mississippi, that doesn’t matter as long as his father stumps up the funds for more winnable races in other states.

Not that Mississippi is necessarily destined to remain in hoc to dubious candidates forever. As insurgents like Donald Trump so vividly prove, peppering voters with pricey TV ads is no longer a guarantee of success, while the walking disaster that was Kamala Harris shows that funding isn’t everything. To be sure, money remains a vital ingredient in the American political stew: but cash without the grassroots won’t win campaigns. Besides, Democrats these days generally have enough funds to be competitive. The problem, Posner says, is that they never invest in the necessary political infrastructure, instead relying on the tried-and-tested Boulé.

For the moment, then, money and power remain the language of Mississippi’s political class. In mid-June, Will Colom is meant to have phoned Pinkins with a promise of future campaign funds — apparently wrapped in a warning. “Ty,” Colom allegedly said, “you know I have accumulated a lot of resources over the years. They are available to you. If you and Scott go against each other, I don’t want it to get dirty.” As far as Pinkins himself is concerned, the threatening subtext is clear: “‘If you don’t drop-out, it will get dirty.’” Colom denies making any threat, implied or otherwise. “I never said anything to Pinkins about running against Scott Colom for Senate,” he tells me. “Not a word.”

Either way, such allegations don’t surprise Holmes. “Nothing,” she says, “will go to the Mississippi Delta if you aren’t part of the in-crowd.” As for Ty Pinkins himself, he doesn’t seem willing to sell his integrity cheap. The night before he announced his independent bid, I spoke to him from his Vicksburg home. On that muggy Mississippi night, he sounded buoyant for tomorrow — even as he offers a warning to his former party’s gatekeepers. “If Tyrone from the Mississippi Delta says, ‘I’m no longer a Democrat,’ there’s a problem.” That’s surely true from a moral perspective. But depending on how the next few months go, it could soon pose vast electoral issues for the likes of Bennie Thompson too.

Floyd’s criminal past does not mitigate the tragedy of his death; it is always lamentable when human life is prematurely and needlessly cut short. Yet the fact that he was so rapidly canonized tells us a great deal about the religiosity of the woke movement. A piece for The Guardian in 2020 surveyed the various depictions of Floyd by street artists, from his bewinged and behaloed image on a wall in Houston, Texas to a mural in Naples which portrayed him as weeping blood “like a saint pictured in a southern Italian church”.

Some of the viral footage from this period was even more explicitly ecclesiastical in nature. In one video, white people were seen kneeling to their black neighbors to beg forgiveness on behalf of all their race. In another, white crowds had raised their arms in supplication, repeating the chant: “I will use my voice in the most uplifting way possible and do everything in my power to educate my community.” We had already seen Greta Thunberg fulfilling a role similar to the child saints of medieval Christendom, and were later to witness the astonishing spectacle of a protestant congregation at a church in Dallas being led in a liturgical prayer before a muster of drag queens to “celebrate this divine diversity”.

All of which is to say that the rapid ascendency of woke can be partly explained as a kind of pseudo-religious hysteria. The killing of Floyd had galvanized the movement, but its decline was swift and inevitable. A poll by The Economist has found that support for woke causes began to grow in 2015, peaked in 2021, and has been steadily falling ever since. With vaguely utopian goals in mind, activists had taken a wrecking ball to society, and it is only now that the dust is settling that we find ourselves struggling with the question of how so much sound and fury could end up signifying so little.

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By Andrew Doyle

The Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests and riots of 2020, and the subsequent mainstreaming of nebulous notions of “systemic racism”, had the unintended effect of heightening racial tensions rather than weakening them. Children in America were suddenly being taught that “all white people play a part in perpetuating systemic racism”, and parents were being encouraged to become “white traitors” and support “white abolition”. Mountebanks such as Robin DiAngelo — a supposed expert in “Whiteness Studies” — were being paid thousands of dollars by major corporations to berate their employees and instruct them to “try to be less white”. In hindsight, it is remarkable that so many were gulled into believing that any of this was progressive.

Worse still, Critical Race Theory (CRT) was being imported into the UK, in spite of the fact that its analytical framework made little sense when applied to any historical context other than the US. Protesters in London were crying “Hands up, don’t shoot” at police officers with imaginary firearms. The American School in London — the most expensive day school in the UK – organised after-school activities in which children were separated by race. Brighton Council introduced an “anti-racist schools strategy” informed by the tenets of American CRT.

Above all, the years of racial identity politics that followed Floyd’s death have served to nourish what was once a dying white identitarian movement. It should surprise precisely no one that when those in power continually insist that human beings should be perceived first and foremost through their group identity, this might provide succour to race essentialists who have always thought in such terms. The phrase “woke right” might be hotly contested, but there can be little doubt that identity-obsessed authoritarians exist across the political spectrum, and that the excesses of the woke movement have rehabilitated racialized thinking to the benefit of some very sinister groups.

In particular, we are seeing the rise of Right-wing conspiratorial thinking that wallows in victimhood and perceives white people to be an oppressed class. The tactics of the woke are being replicated explicitly on the Right. In the midst of the BLM protests of 2020, the Associated Press stated that its style guide would be amended so that “black” was capitalized and “white” was not, a convention that was quickly followed by other outlets. Now, the identical strategy is being embraced by figures on the Right. “Different identity groups will always strive to protect and promote their own interests,” writes Andrew Torba, CEO of Right-wing social media platform Gab. “This is common sense and White people are starting to wake up to this reality and realize that if they don’t advocate for themselves no one else will.”

Similarly, the view that Western society is unregenerable was once the cornerstone of woke thinking, but has now taken hold among what some call the “Very Online Right”. The “degeneracy” of contemporary western culture is taken by some as evidence that it might have been preferable had the allies lost the Second World War. Neo-Nazi discourse is flourishing in the online space, particularly on X, and memes that praise Hitler are becoming more frequent. Kanye West recently posted an image of Hitler along with a goat emoji (“GOAT” means “Greatest of All Time”).

This narrative has been nourished by academics on both sides of the culture war debate, “problematising” the history of the Second World War, and specifically taking aim at Winston Churchill. Many will recall the academic event at the University of Cambridge in 2021 in which a panel of Left-wing activist academics sought to frame Churchill as an irredeemable racist. One panellist, Kehinde Andrews, branded him the “perfect embodiment of white supremacy” who helmed an empire that was “far worse than the Nazis”. Over the past year, many Right-wing culture warriors have made identical or similar claims. Most notoriously, podcaster Darryl Cooper appeared on Tucker Carlson’s show to denounce Churchill as the “chief villain” of the Second World War.

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I was the target of Guardian misinformation

By Andrew Doyle

That one form of authoritarian grievance-rooted identity politics might birth another, albeit from an opposing political tribe, should not have been all that tricky to anticipate. The notion of color-blindness advocated by the likes of Martin Luther King was once widely agreed to be the ideal, meaning that identitarians from the Left and the Right found it difficult to gain traction. The culture war has destabilized this consensus. For many on both sides of the political spectrum, racial identity is now their lodestar.

As for BLM, many of its key figures failed spectacularly in their self-appointed roles as champions of their communities. Having raised approximately $90 million in the aftermath of Floyd’s death, only a third actually went to charitable bodies. By May 2023, the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation was facing bankruptcy. One of its co-founders, Patrisse Cullors, was found to have spent $3.2 million on luxury homes, although she claimed these were private funds. Its tax filing of May 2022 revealed expenditure on luxury properties to the tune of $12 million, with significant sums paid to Cullors’s relatives for security services.

Moreover, the legacy of BLM has been anything but positive for people it purported to represent. The defunding of police has meant that crime in black areas has soared, black businesses were looted and destroyed, and black victims of murder were mourned only when the perpetrators were white. As the Equiano Project — a forum for debate about race and politics — has pointed out, radical politics was prioritized over the material challenges facing black communities: “Instead of focusing on crime, education, or work, BLM UK pushed anti-capitalism and identity-based ideology.”

In short, the BLM movement has been a disaster for race relations. Quite apart from the myriad failings of the movement, the push for social justice through authoritarian means — censorship, intimidation and public shaming — was always guaranteed to generate resentment from those who would eventually learn to mimic their tactics. We may quibble with the term “woke right”, but the phenomenon it describes is becoming impossible to ignore, particularly when one considers the new emboldened form of white nationalism and pro-fascist messaging on social media. It is regrettable those who sought to redress racism in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd might have created the conditions within which it can flourish.

No, in fact, it’s complicated. In conflating race and nation, white nationalists on the Right like Carlson make the same mistake as Left-wing multiculturalists who use “culture” as a synonym for “race.” But race, however defined, is a biological concept, while nationality is a matter of culture. Everyone is born with a particular combination of DNA, but nobody is born speaking Japanese or Slovenian and preprogrammed with a particular nation’s culture and customs and tastes in cuisine.

As more countries become melting pots, thanks to the combination of immigration with assimilation, more nations like the United States will be made up of people who share a common culture, but not common ancestors or a common resemblance.

“Nation” and “state” are sometimes used interchangeably. But they must be different things, otherwise the term “nation-state” would be redundant, like nation-nation or state-state. “State” refers to an organized, independent territorial political community. “Nation” refers to a social community, defined by nonpolitical markers of some kind.

In nation-states, the national community and the political citizenry overlap, though not completely. But in addition to nation-states, there are multinational states with two or more nationalities — Anglophones and Francophones in Canada, Flemings and Walloons in Belgium. And there are stateless nations, like the Kurds and the Palestinians.

Whether you belong to a particular state’s citizenry or a particular national community is an objective question. It is sometimes said that to be an American is to believe in liberal democracy. No “American-ness” (extra-political cultural identity) exists, we are told, only “Americanism” (devotion to a particular political creed). But this gets both the American state and the American nation wrong.

There are three ways to become a citizen of the American state: to be born to one or more parents who are citizens; to become a naturalized citizen after a lengthy process of legal immigration; or to be born on US territory (according to a contested Supreme Court decision). A foreign national who tells a US custom agent, “I believe in the principles of the Declaration of Independence” isn’t immediately granted citizenship.

Nor is there any ideological or credal test in the oath that immigrants must swear to become US citizens; it is a loyalty oath to the government, the state half of the nation-state compound, not a confession of a secular creed: “I hereby declare, on oath, that I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty, of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen; that I will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic…”

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Can Trump make McKinley great again?

By Michael Lind

Is there an American “nationality”, a cultural majority, distinct from the US citizenry? For all of the talk about “American exceptionalism”, the relationship between state and nation in the United States isn’t different in kind from that in other modern countries.

Contemporary countries are shaped by what might be called the Three D’s: decolonization, disestablishment, and desegregation. Most of the countries represented in the United Nations today, including the United States, were created from the partition of a few multinational empires — overseas colonial empires, like the British and French empires, and overland dynastic empires, like those ruled by the Hohenzollerns, the Hapsburgs, and the Romanovs, whose domains were held together under new communist management until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.

The newly independent fragments usually have been more ethnically homogeneous than the multinational empire from which they were carved. In most post-imperial states, the numerically largest community — European settlers in the Americas and Australia and New Zealand, the largest tribe in the former dynastic empire — has lent its language to the successor state, and sometimes its name. Poland is the land of the ethnic Poles.

All contemporary nation-states have ethnic minorities as well as ethnic majorities. Not all citizens of Poland are ethnic Poles. The disestablishment and privatization of religion and the abolition of formal racial or ethnic segregation guarantee national minorities civil and political rights equal to those of members of the national cultural majority — in theory, if not always in practice.

The result in modern nation-states is the replacement of a “thick” conception of national identity — uniting language, culture, religion, and biological race — with a thinner but genuine national identity defined chiefly by a shared language and a few customs and cultural references that are shared by most citizens, notwithstanding their religious beliefs and ancestry.

This emphasis on language and customs in defining national identity is a return to the historic norm. For most of human history, settled populations were similar in appearance and ancestry to their nearest neighbors, who were sometimes their greatest enemies. You couldn’t tell which tribe people belonged to merely by looking at them. But whether they spoke your language, and whether they spoke it with an accent or not, could tell you whether they belonged to your community or were outsiders.

In the biblical Book of Judges, the Gileadites identified their enemies, the Ephraimites, by forcing suspects to pronounce the word “shibboleth” (an ear of wheat or rye), which the Ephraimites mispronounced as “siboleth”. Hence, the term “shibboleth” for a marker of group identity.

Membership in the cultural nation is defined not only by the language you speak, but also by the language in which you think, the Muttersprache (mother tongue), acquired in most cases in childhood.  Most citizens in a nation-state are members of the linguistic and cultural majority, but belonging to it isn’t and shouldn’t be a condition of citizenship. It is no insult to say that the immigrants Francis Lieber, Carl Schurz, and Albert Einstein became great US citizens while remaining cultural Germans.

Of course, outsiders who look no different from insiders can learn to talk like insiders as well. For this reason, in the past, ethnic boundaries among tribes of similar appearance were sometimes reinforced by physical alterations like circumcision, in the case of Jewish men and boys, or by distinctive clothing, ornaments, or hairstyles.

In many premodern Muslim and Christian societies, Jews were forced to wear yellow stars or other badges, turbans or conical hats, or other distinguishing apparel. The Manchu conquerors of Qing China forced men who belonged to the subjugated Han Chinese majority to identify themselves by wearing “queues” or pigtails, on penalty of being beheaded if they refused. Among other things, the end of invidious religious and ethnic discrimination in modern nation-states means that all citizens are free to dress alike and wear the same hairstyles, if they choose.

The lands of European settlement, from the time of Columbus onward, have been exceptions to the historic rule that the cultural nations in a particular region tend to be similar in appearance and ancestry. The Americas from the beginning have been radically diverse, with European colonists living alongside Native Americans, African slaves and their descendants, and, in some places, Chinese, Indian, Japanese, and other non-European contract laborers.

The independence of former European colonies in the Western Hemisphere — beginning with the secession of the United States from the British empire in 1776, and followed by the independence of Latin-American countries from Spain and Portugal — initially produced Herrenvolk (master-race) regimes, majoritarian or authoritarian. The descendants of European settlers lorded it over Native Americans, people of African and Asian descent, and mixed-race populations.

In the New World, racial classifications have reflected ruling-class strategies, not anthropological realities. For example, where European settler populations were outnumbered, as in some Caribbean islands, settler elites sometimes pursued a divide-and-rule strategy in which non-European populations were split up into multiple categories, like “mulatto,” “octaroon,” and “quadroon,” which distinguished varying degrees of mixed European and African ancestry.

In the Old South, however, all states, save for South Carolina and Mississippi, had white majorities. For strategic reasons, the Southern planter class adopted a strict binary black-white binary based on the “one-drop” rule: anyone with any African ancestry, no matter how minor, was defined as “negro” or “black.”

This definition benefited the planter elite in two ways. First, the one-drop rule maximized the number of unfree workers defined as slaves and, later, as blacks under segregation, by including many people who wouldn’t otherwise have been considered black, and might even have been considered white, in other Western Hemisphere countries like Brazil. At the same time, the fear on the part of poor Southern whites of being defined as black, losing their status and even their freedom, gave them a vested interest in the maintenance of white supremacy, which the Southern ruling class invoked to avert populist uprisings and democratic agitation by non-elite whites.

To be consistent, the US government should have stopped classifying Americans using the arbitrary categories of 19th-century racists at the same time in the 1960s that racial discrimination was outlawed. Tragically, most though not all black American leaders since the 1960s have rejected the idea of colorblind law in favor of a system of “affirmative action” or racial preferences, which can’t work unless all Americans were assigned to one of a few arbitrary “races”: black, non-Hispanic white, Hispanic or Latino, Asian and Pacific Islander, Native American (the precise list has varied with each census since the 1970s).

Since the 1970s, the proponents of “race-conscious remedies” to the legacies of historic American racism have found allies among American corporations, which can use racial tokenism to divert attention from their mistreatment of all workers, and American universities, which similarly have used racial quotas to divert attention from favoritism in admission for “legacies” (children of alumni, particularly big donors).

The premise of the existing system of racial classifications in the United States is that the races, or pseudo-races, are permanent. But in reality, the white-only “melting pot” that blended Anglo-American Protestant settlers with later waves of European “white ethnics” into a single generic white population has become a transracial melting pot, creating a mixed-race American majority with a common language and culture.

Today, 94% of Americans approve of interracial marriage, up from 4% in 1958, and attitudes are now the same in the South as in the rest of the nation. Interracial marriage rose to 11% in 2020, from 3% five decades earlier, when the US Supreme Court struck down laws against it; among cohabiting (as opposed to married) couples, the figure is 1 in 5.

Among younger Americans, the ratio is greater. Nearly 1 in 3 “Asian” and “Hispanic” newlyweds, and 1 in 5 “black” newlyweds, has married someone of another “race.” The number is lowest among so-called non-Hispanic whites, around 15%, simply because this group remains the largest. One in 10 children born in the United States has parents of different officially defined “races.” Old-fashioned “race” thinkers like Ibram Kendi may insist that the “colorblind” ideal is itself a form of white supremacy. But for growing numbers of Americans, both native and immigrant, love is colorblind.

Progress, right? The problem is that the United States, like all other contemporary democratic nation-states, has below-replacement fertility, meaning its population will shrink without immigration. The combination of large-scale immigration with low native fertility means that in the United States, as in Europe, the share of the population made up of recent immigrants and their first- and second-generation descendants balloons rapidly.

This wouldn’t necessarily seem to threaten the cultural majority, if immigrants assimilated quickly and painlessly to the language and culture of their new country. But it is a problem if large numbers of immigrants choose not to assimilate, or if they are discouraged from doing so. Assimilation does take time. And as the 1990s US Commission on Immigration Reform led by civil-rights pioneer Barbara Jordan noted, America’s engine of assimilation begins to break down when newcomers are piled on too rapidly.

At the same time, too many on the American Right underestimate the power of assimilation. From the 18^th century to the 21^st, anxieties that immigrant groups would never assimilate to the mainstream in America have been overblown. Irish-Catholic immigrants didn’t overthrow American democracy on behalf of the Bishop of Rome and his Jesuits. Today’s Mexican-American immigrants are assimilating to the mainstream at the same rate over several generations as did the European immigrants of the past, making a mockery of fears that they will turn the American Southwest into a Spanish-speaking Quebec.

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The only ethnic diasporas that have maintained their identities over time in the United States have been self-segregating sectarian communities, like the Amish and the Hasidim. Their numbers are so small that their self-segregation hasn’t caused significant problems, of the kind that would arise if a large share of the US citizenry formed a separatist religious enclave.

Then there are legal obstacles to assimilation. For most of American history, immigrants were assigned a race on coming to the United States. Scandinavian immigrants were assigned to white America; Haitian immigrants were assigned to black America. The combination of racial classifications with state laws against interracial marriage meant that “white” Italian Americans could marry “white” Polish Americans, but not black Americans.

The pan-racial categories of the US Census continue to be used to classify immigrants as well as natives. The results are frequently absurd. On arrival in the United States, immigrants from Denmark and Greece are assigned to the “non-Hispanic white” category, while immigrants from India, China, and the Philippines find themselves assigned to a fictitious “Asian and Pacific Islander” pseudo-race. Arab-Americans are treated as “non-Hispanic whites”, but some support the creation of a new, equally nonsensical category: Middle Eastern and North African, a fake official nationality that would include Arabs, Persians, and (to be consistent) Jews.

Proponents of affirmative action or “equity” or “DEI” want it to be legal to discriminate in college admissions and hiring against non-Hispanic whites, no matter how poor, in favor of “blacks” and “Hispanics”, no matter how rich. The beneficiaries of racial quotas, in addition to elite black and Hispanic Americans, include wealthy and well-educated immigrants — affluent professionals from West Africa, for example, or upper-class South Americans.

Unfortunately, the toxic interaction of America’s legacy racial categories with mass immigration promotes the idea that the important divide is not between Americans (of all races) and foreign nationals (of all races), but between so-called whites, blacks, so-called Hispanics, and so-called Asians. Like pan-Aryanism and pan-Africanism, these spurious racial categories never corresponded to any actual communities in the United States or anywhere else. Now that the American melting pot is creating a post-racial, post-ethnic cultural majority in the United States, it is time to abolish official racial classifications altogether.

The equation of race and nation by Right-wing racists and Left-wing multiculturalists is increasingly at odds with social reality. National identity in the future for the most part will be like national identity in the past — but with a post-racial twist. In the past, the members of a tribe usually sounded the same and looked alike. In today’s melting-pot nations, modified by waves of immigration, the members of the majority tribe will sound the same, even if they look different.

What we have seen since the Southport attack is the precise opposite response: uncontrolled spontaneity, which government policy is expressly designed to prevent. When Keir Starmer attended the scene to lay flowers, he was heckled by locals demanding “change” and accusing him of failure to keep the British people safe. Self-evidently, Starmer, who in August had been in power for less than a month, bears no personal responsibility for the attack: instead, he was derided as a representative of Britain’s political class, and of a British state that cannot maintain a basic level of security for its subjects.

In the same way, rioters in Southport — fuelled by false claims the killer was a Muslim refugee — cheered when they injured police during the violent disorder that followed the initial vigil, which included attempts to burn down the town mosque in what can only be termed a pogrom. Like the riot that followed in Hartlepool, violence against emissaries of the state — the police — was coupled with objectively racist and Islamophobic actual and attempted violence against migrants.

There are strong parallels with the ongoing disorder in Ireland, which is an explicit reaction to mass migration: last year’s Dublin riots, sparked by the attempted murder of schoolchildren by an Algerian migrant, were in some ways a foreshadowing for the current mass disturbances in Britain. In Southport, the spark for the rioting — the attack itself — was swiftly absorbed into a wider sense of hostility towards mass migration: protestors carried signs demanding the state “Deport them” and “Stop the Boats” to “Protect our kids at any cost”. As in Ireland, presumably local women were prominent, hectoring police and silencing wavering voices with appeals to group solidarity. While this is a very different dynamic to previous football casuals-dominated street mobilisation organised around Tommy Robinson — as represented by Wednesday’s desultory clashes in Whitehall — liberal commentators in Britain, as in Ireland, have nevertheless chosen to portray the violence as orchestrated by Robinson, rather than him piggybacking on it, as is also the case in Ireland.

Shocked by the jolt to their worldview, British liberals, for whom the depoliticisation of the political choice of mass migration is a central moral cause, have also blamed Nigel Farage, the media, the Conservative Party, the Labour Party and Vladimir Putin for the rioting, rather than the explicitly articulated motivations of the rioters themselves. But there is a matter-of-fact social-scientific term for the ongoing disorder: ethnic conflict, a usage studiously avoided by the British state for fear of its political implications. As the academic Elaine Thomas observed in in her 1998 essay “Muting Interethnic Conflict in Post-Imperial Britain”, the British state is unusual in Europe for being “exceptionally liberal in granting political rights to new arrivals” while dampening interethnic conflict by simply refusing to talk about the issue at all, and placing social sanctions on those who do. When it works, it works: “Interethnic conflict has never been as severe, prolonged, or violent in Britain as it has been in many other countries” — for which we should be thankful.

But as Thomas notes, sometimes it doesn’t work, as in Enoch Powell’s famous intervention, supported by 74% of British respondents polled at the time, when, “once the silence was broken and public debate was opened, the liberals found themselves in a weak position. Having focused on silencing the issue, they had not developed a discourse to address it,” and found themselves discomfited by demonstrations in support of Powell. The Labour government of the day dealt with the rising tensions surrounding immigration by rushing through emergency legislation that imposed an effective moratorium on extra-European immigration via the 1968 Commonwealth Immigrants Act, with the aim of assimilating migrants already here and dampening nascent violence by preventing others arriving.

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Under New Labour, however, this mostly successful policy was torn up, with the conscious intention of transforming Britain into a specifically multi-ethnic — rather than multiracial — society, largely derived from the era’s brief enthusiasm for globalisation. Downstream of then-fashionable social-scientific theories on the simultaneous inevitability and desirability of such a transformation, policy papers like the Runnymede Trust’s influential report “The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain” pushed to reshape Britain as “a community of communities”, a genuinely multicultural state that rejected the “narrow English-dominated, backward-looking definition of the nation”. Ethnic identities — of which the British one was framed as one among many — were to be embraced, within the parameters of the newly multicultural state, and immigration restrictions lifted to achieve this goal.

Yet Labour’s shift towards an explicitly ethnic understanding of community relations would not last long. Following the 2001 ethnic riots in Bradford, Oldham and Burnley, the Labour government performed a dramatic about-turn. As the Tunisian academic Hassen Zriba observed: “All of a sudden, multiculturalism became the disease that needed urgent solution.” Blair’s government commissioned five separate reports, all of which declared “that excessive cultural diversity is a hindrance to inter-racial harmony, and that community cohesion is the best solution”.

This emphasis on community cohesion was heightened by the mass casualty jihadist attacks of the 2000s and 2010s, leading inexorably — along with the Prevent programme, widened state powers of coercion and surveillance, and the accelerated construction of a civic conception of Britishness — to the “controlled spontaneity” project, the terminus of which we witnessed in Southport. While the other northwest European states which adopted a multicultural ethos, notably Sweden and the Netherlands, have since abandoned it, rhetorically the British state is still committed to multiculturalism.

In practice, however, the British state has quietly adopted a revived version of assimilationism. Over the past two decades, a capacious version of Britishness has been constructed around little more than superficial national symbolism and the desire to avoid ethnic conflict, euphemised as “British values”. Interestingly, Blair himself, who now rejects multiculturalism, has recently become an advocate of Lee Kuan Yew, in whose political philosophy Singapore’s ethnic diversity is, rather than a strength, an undesirable hindrance derived from well-meaning British colonial intentions.

But latent authoritarianism aside, Starmer is no Lee Kuan Yew. His faltering attempt to steer the discourse following the Southport attack towards tackling “knife crime” — itself a British state euphemism — highlights the state’s ideological inability to address ethnic tensions frankly, and so manage them effectively. If it were happening in another country, British journalists and politicians would discuss such dynamics matter-of-factly. This is, after all, simply the nature of human societies. Indeed, it is one of the primary reasons refugees flee their countries for Britain in the first place.

Yet when they occur in our own country, such dynamics are too dangerous to even name. Instead, ethnic groups are euphemistically termed “communities”, and the state-managed avoidance of ethnic conflict is termed “community relations”. When Balkan Roma rioted in Leeds recently, it was as an ethnic group responding to what it saw as the British state’s interference in its lives: the British state, in return, addressed its response to the nebulous “Harehills community”. When Hindus and Muslims engaged in violent intercommunal clashes in Leicester two years ago, it was as rival ethnoreligious groups, and was again responded to by the British state as an issue to be dealt with by “community leaders” — the state euphemism for its chosen intermediaries, in a form of indirect rule carried over from colonial governance.

But when the rioting is carried out by ethnic British participants, as is now the case, the limitations of this strategy reveal itself: the perception of an ethnic, rather than civic British or English, identity is actively guarded against as state policy, just as is the emergence of ethnic British “community leaders”. As such, political advocates of a British ethnic identity are isolated from mainstream discourse, as has been state policy since the Powell affair: any expression of such feeling is what Starmer means by “the far-Right”, rather than any traditionally defined desire to conduct genocides or conquer neighbouring countries. This mainland state of affairs, incidentally, is in strong contrast to Northern Ireland, where the existence of rival Irish and British ethnic groups is the basis of the political system, reified by the British state through the ethnic power-sharing apparatus of the Stormont parliament. In Northern Ireland, Britishness is an ethnic identity: across the Irish Sea, it is a firmly civic one: that these constructions differ is a function of political expediency rather than logical consistency.

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This ambivalence over referring to Britain’s various ethnic groups is contrasted by the British state’s deep engagement with identity groups based on race, a cultural quirk that academics have long highlighted, and which distinguishes Britain from its European neighbours. Even today, political discourse in Britain evades ethnicity for a focus on race in a way unusual outside America, where it stems from an almost uniquely stratified slave economy, overlaid on a settler colonial society deriving from genocide. Yet British liberals squeamish at ethnic identities — especially their own — instead obsess over the politics of race. Ethnic conflict is taboo to even discuss in the abstract: but minority racial rioting, even over imported grievances, is viewed sympathetically.

Perhaps well-intentioned, the assimilationist aim of this dynamic was counteracted by the British state’s parallel promotion of the new “BAME” identity, assembling various geographically unconnected ethnic groups together in one political whole solely by virtue of their non-European origin. Instead of reflecting our lived reality of a country now composed of multiple ethnicities, among which are the majority native British, an entirely artificial racialised binary was constructed for ideological purposes, in which the ethnic British, along with other Europeans, were merely white, while non-white Britons were encouraged to self-identify as a counterbalancing force. I am legally, but not ethnically British — like most descendants of migrants, I am perfectly happy with my own inherited ethnic identity — but in pursuit of its own convoluted logic, the British state instead chooses to define me as white, an identity of no interest to me. The long-term contribution to social harmony of this explicitly racialised innovation was, as both the ethnic conflict literature and common sense suggest, doubtful in the extreme, and the government dropped the BAME label in 2022: its mooted replacement, “global majority” is, if anything, more problematic.

The British state’s differing strategies to ethnic-minority rioting, on the one hand, and British ethnic-majority rioting on the other, are, as conservative commentators observe, markedly disproportionate. This may not be “fair”, but it is not intended to be. The function of British policing such tensions is increasingly not to prevent crime — as anyone living in Britain can see — but simply to dampen interethnic violence, in which the shrinking ethnic majority population is, as the literature is clear, analytically the most obvious and potentially volatile actor. In the words of the sociologist John Rex, whose advocacy for a new multicultural Britain was highly influential during the Nineties, the fundamental task of multi-ethnic governance is the twofold desire to “ensure that those who will come are peacefully integrated and that their coming does not lead to the collapse of the post-1945 political order”.

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That is, after all, the logic of “controlled spontaneity”: to prevent a backlash to sudden atrocities or a generalised sense of insecurity that would detach the ethnic majority from Britain’s post-Blair settlement and potentially lead to the formation of ethnic parties. Indeed, the formation of explicitly ethnic parties is the deciding factor in what academics term the shift from a pluralist society — in which ethnic conflict is managed within the existing political order, as in mainland Britain — to a plural one, where the political system revolves around ethnic rivalries, as in Northern Ireland. We are not there yet, though the formation of notionally Muslim (but de facto Pakistani and Bangladeshi) political groupings is a step in that direction, as is Reform’s entry to Parliament, understood by Farage’s voters and opponents alike as a tacit ethnic British party, though one with a strong post-war assimilationist rather than ethnic exclusionist bent.

The government’s alarm aside, the potential for serious ethnic violence seems limited, as few of the precipitating factors listed by academic specialists exist: the British state retains vast coercive power, sympathetic elites aspiring to lead majority ethnic mobilisation do not exist, and, in any case, the most heated divisions on the validity of the British ethnic group remain within the British ethnic group itself.

Instead, like the daily drumbeat of violent disorder so new to British life, but now accepted as the norm, occasional outbursts of ethnic violence, whether currently by the British or by other ethnic groups acting in their perceived communal interests, will become commonplace, as in other diverse societies. To manage such conflicts, the state will become more coercive, as Starmer now promises his supporters. But modern Britain isn’t hell: for the most part it works, better than most places in the world, even if it is far less orderly or safe than the country we grew up in. There will be no violent rupture, no radical new dispensation: things will continue as they are, only more so. This is the nature of most post-colonial societies, and now it is the nature of our own.

***

This article was first published on 3 August. It was updated on 5 August to clarify the chronology of the 1968 Commonwealth Immigrants Act.

You’d think this professor would feel an even greater need to ground his claim in real evidence this election year, given that Trump did better with black and Latino and other non-white voters than any Republican presidential candidate in recent memory. But apparently not. When another panelist suggested that inflation better explained why Trump was elected, Professor Glaude was both derisive and adamant. The idea that Trump won because of inflation — historically a cause of trouble for incumbent parties — was nuts. The scientifically obvious answer was whiteness, threatened as it is these days by racially ambiguous children on Cheerios boxes.

Glaude’s claim seemed both obviously wrong and symptomatic of the extreme insularity of progressive elites, who talk in abstractions like “whiteness” as they consult each other, even as those abstractions look like delusions to the less sophisticated people who merely consult things in the real world. He aired his apparent delusion for these regular people, who mocked and scorned him on social media.

This is the second election in a row where a professor at an elite American university provoked scorn and mockery by using “whiteness” to explain things that non-white people had done. Writing in The Washington Post after the 2020 election, New York University professor Cristina Beltrán characterised increasing pro-Trump sentiment among blacks and especially Latinos as expressing “multiracial whiteness”. This apparently self-contradictory phrase was widely mocked by readers, who turned “multiracial whiteness” into a meme that still circulates on social media today.

Through three elections I have refrained from becoming a Donald Trump supporter, but I have to admit that his massive presence in American politics has had some positive effects. For example, he seems to have inspired this healthy reshuffling in ethnic voting patterns that some are calling “racial depolarisation”. And this is giving academics like Glaude and Beltrán the opportunity to beclown themselves before the general public by looking at things that non-white people are doing and ascribing them, somehow, to “whiteness”. And, in doing this, they are helping to discredit the increasingly empty and useless concept of “whiteness”.

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“Whiteness” wasn’t always an empty and useless concept. The text that probably did more to push “Whiteness Studies” toward the academic mainstream was Noel Ignatiev’s 1995 book How the Irish Became White. But Ignatiev’s study was very different from the work that came to characterise the academic preoccupation with whiteness, and it was infused with a very different set of political concerns. Ignatiev wasn’t a diversity bureaucrat or a professor of racial studies. He was a historian. But he didn’t get his PhD until he was in his forties. Before that he was a Pennsylvania steelworker and labour organiser.

For him, “whiteness” wasn’t an infinitely bendable abstraction that could be applied to anything a professor disapproves of. It referred to a specific historical process that Ignatiev illustrated with reference to a specific population. Ignatiev describes how, in the northern states of early 19th-century America, newly arrived Irish struggled to enter menial jobs and labour organisations. Over time, they succeeded, pushing free black workers out of many sectors, as native workers came to view the Irish as “white”. Through a complex process of assimilation and exclusion, native white workers’ hostility to free blacks intensified as they slowly embraced the Irish as fellow whites. The result for blacks in the supposedly free states was both economic and physical insecurity, as white workers refused to work with them and white mobs sometimes attacked them.

Whiteness in Ignatiev’s treatment is a historical, contingent phenomenon. It emerges in its importance over a particular span of time, as an effect of particular forces. It is subject, in other words, to the usual tides of historical change. The same general phenomenon Ignatiev describes certainly replicated itself later. Surely it has appeared at different times, with different populations, driven by different concrete interests, and these instances can be assembled into broader tendencies that one might identify as “whiteness”. For example, the assimilation and loyalty of immigrants who came to the US in large numbers from southern and eastern Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was pursued by employers and civic leaders, and the immigrants themselves, through the assurance that they were not black. They were “white”. And this fact of “race” gave them a preferred claim to communal membership in their new nation, preferred, that is, over the black people already here. But these instances exist in historical time. The force of whiteness they illustrate is a historical thing.

Something happens to this “whiteness”, though, in the hands of politicised academics like Glaude and Beltrán, and influential writers such as Ta-Nehisi Coates. It gets transformed from a contingent historical entity — a political force that emerges in time and changes with time, grows and weakens like the other contingent things of history — into a different sort of entity. It becomes metaphysical, a superordinate force that exists outside of history. Historical change is understood in terms of it. Historical change, especially in America, happens within, not to, the metaphysical contours of whiteness, in this understanding.

In other words, whiteness is transformed into a constant, like energy in the first law of thermodynamics. Its form can change — so that the behaviour of black people and Latino people can be labelled “whiteness” if one finds it discreditable enough — but its magnitude or quantity must stay the same. To say that whiteness is on the wane, that it exerts less influence now than it used to, is an anathema. Things might appear to change, but — deeper down, in their true essence — they don’t. They can’t. The iron law of the preservation of whiteness says they can’t. A political coalition adds an unprecedented number of black and Latino voters. Then the academic appears on the scene to characterise this new development with the same conceptual tool they applied to an earlier, very different set of facts, and the determination is: whiteness. It’s multiracial, but it’s whiteness. Whatever it is, if it’s distasteful enough to us in the “whiteness” business, it’s whiteness.

The writer Ta-Nehisi Coates is probably the most famous, and the most rhetorically powerful and effective, purveyor of this understanding of whiteness. In his bestselling book, Between the World and Me, he quotes John C. Calhoun, the notorious pro-slavery ideologist and senator from South Carolina, who declared that the main division in society was not between rich and poor but between “white and black”. This fact, Calhoun wrote, assures a pleasing equality among whites, from the saddest vagrant and the poorest dirt farmer to the wealthiest planter. By virtue of their superiority as white people over black people, they “all belong to the upper class, and are respected and treated as equal”. This is indeed a ghoulish formulation of a diabolical arrangement, but it’s also pro-slavery ideologist John C. Calhoun propounding it, and it’s also, like, 1848. Can it be that this construction of white belonging upon black oppression has not somehow weakened or slackened in the intervening 176 years? No, it cannot be. That this arrangement defines America, Coates writes, “was true in 1776. It is true today.”

This understanding of whiteness as unabating but unspoken, omnipresent but hidden, is a boon to many race-studies academics, and to writers like Coates, who conduct social analysis via the methods of literary criticism. They look onto the visible surface of Americans’ speech and behaviour and magically discover that this roiled mess of ambiguous signs is transparently legible, and that, surprise, it confirms the Theory of Everything that has lodged itself in their heads. You might find the deeper meaning of a cranky woman yelling at Coates’s young son on a New York City escalator to be fairly elusive, suggestive of many possible readings including, it being New York City, that the woman was insane — because what mentally composed person yells at a five-year-old boy? But for Coates, as he relates it in his book, the meaning of this maddening event reveals itself clearly and simply in the fact that it happened in America, and that it’s maddening to him as a black man, and it involved a black boy and a white woman. It was, ergo those things, another predictable instance of white presumption as to “black bodies”.

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The whiteness paradigm is also a boon to diversity consultants who help businesses and organisations cow and train their employees by forcing them into mandatory struggle sessions, in which those employees are forced to confess the inescapable whiteness that turns them into half-thinking agents of racial domination. For these consultants, the idea that whiteness is unchangingly ubiquitous and always suppressed offers a delectable setup for their operational model. The conceit of suppression justifies their invasive procedures, and the conceit of ubiquitousness assures that the procedures will always uncover what they’re looking for.

It’s also a boon for people trained in schools of education, whom it empowers to discredit the difficult subjects they may not understand or be able to teach, because these subjects are produced by or infected with whiteness. And it justifies pedagogical methods that resemble those of the diversity consultants, in which the whiteness hidden inside children is brought to light and exorcised. For institutions, in other words, real power, power over the docile “bodies” of workers and children, flows out of the “whiteness” paradigm.

One urgent and interesting question is how devotees of this paradigm — smart writers and well-trained professors — can treat its central concept so dogmatically. How can they understand a phenomenon, bad and historically prominent as it’s been, as if it’s not just empirically persistent but metaphysically permanent? How can they treat something that is obviously historical as if it exists outside of history, a condition rather than an effect of historical change? How can things that Latinos and black people do be understood as new forms of whiteness?

The answer to these questions is “America”. The theorists and analysts of whiteness define America by, and identify it with, whiteness. Now it’s true, as I note above, that whiteness has been used by both industrial bosses and American politicians to build political communion upon racial difference. But, for these thinkers, understanding whiteness in these banal terms of empirical history fails to get at its centrality for the American project. Rather, for them, whiteness is “structurally necessary”. America would not exist, they believe, were it not for whiteness.

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Maybe it wouldn’t. Maybe it would. I can’t say for sure. But I get why you might want to think of it in these terms. I understand the philosophical appeal of treating certain interpretive frameworks that come from your brain as real structures in the world, and then treating those structures as having a higher reality, as existing in a different sort of historical time, than the everyday things they supposedly comprehend. I went to grad school. I understand how pleasing it is to walk around with a paradigm that explains everything, a theory of society that’s not meant to be tested, much less falsified, but merely confirmed. Something usually happens that will do this confirming for you, not because America is infected with this one bad thing in particular but because America is a huge and unruly country. It’s infected with everything. And I imagine this appeal is even greater for people with a personal axe to grind against this country, supposedly their country, which has treated them and theirs pretty badly over the last four centuries or so. But I also get why people believe in conspiracy theories, which aren’t much different. In other words, the whiteness paradigm represents a failure of scepticism, and a triumph of gullible pessimism.

I’m not saying the remedy is optimism. I’m not saying that America is necessarily, inevitably improving, that the ideal of the equality of all men enshrined in the Declaration of Independence is being better realised all the time thanks to its essential truth, or to America’s essential goodness. I’m saying that things change, in whatever moral direction. Things fall apart. Over time they’re replaced by new things. That a political arrangement described by John C. Calhoun 176 years ago has succumbed to historical entropy is almost certain, not necessarily because America is “better than that” now, though it probably is, but because it was 176 years ago.

Regular people seem more willing to acknowledge this than their supposed representatives in the intelligentsia. The writers and professors remain attached to certain prescribed ideas of political identification, and for obvious reasons. They’re the ones who prescribe those ideas. When Cristina Beltrán writes, “Multiracial whiteness promises Latino Trump supporters freedom from the politics of diversity and recognition,” she assumes there’s something perverse in this promise. This inclination can only be explained by a desire to “lay claim to the politics of aggression, exclusion and domination”. Professor Beltrán seems alarmingly ready to believe terrible things about her fellow Latinos, as long as Trump is in the picture. But maybe Trump’s importance is that, even with his crudeness and scapegoating, he treats them as something other than objects of symbolic pandering.

That is, a simpler, less invidious, less conspiratorial explanation than “whiteness”, or “multiracial whiteness”, might be that people in America’s minority and immigrant populations find it kind of depressing and taxing to be addressed as separate communities as a rule. Maybe they don’t want to have intellectuals telling them that a “politics of identity and recognition” is the only proper way for them to be citizens, that they must be treated as precious ethnic others, delicate and vulnerable. Maybe what they want to be, finally, is Americans, just Americans, not because America is so great, necessarily, but because America is where they live, and American is what they are.

Nor is Franzese — who went to prison, found God, and is now a motivational speaker — alone. Over the past few years, YouTube has become a kind of Sing Sing for retired crooks. With names such as Joey Merlino and Jimmy Calandra and Dominick Cicale, they explain the mafia code and review classic movies. All the while, with their high-res cameras and sparkling production values, they hawk. Shamelessly. Quite aside from his book, which compares his country’s rulers to erstwhile mobsters like him, Franzese also sells Armenian wine and autographed posters. Buyers, for their part, are encouraged to “join the family”. 

To put it differently, then, that hidden world of Cosa Nostra, of omertà and hits, is gone, replaced by the kind of tawdry consumerism you could get from MrBeast. Given the influence the American mob enjoyed for much of the last century — at its peak, it boasted some 5,000 made men and held billions in assets — that’s remarkable enough. And just as the gangsters are shrugging off their pasts and strolling amiably into the republic’s mainstream, millions of ordinary Italian-Americans are losing their cultural uniqueness too. Together with the grandkids of other European migrants, rather, they’re shedding their hyphenated identities and becoming mere Americans, a process with immense consequences from food to music to politics. 

The American mob has been failing for years. In 1970, Congress passed the RICO Act, which for the first time allowed prosecutors to target anyone belonging to an “enterprise” involved in racketeering — even if the robbery or fraud was done by someone else. That meant bosses became vulnerable: in the mid-Eighties, several New York dons were indicted under RICO and condemned to 100-year jail terms. The prospect of such awesome sentences soon encouraged mobsters to snitch. One example is Sammy “The Bull” Gravano, now a YouTube regular but who became infamous for testifying against his colleagues in 1992. 

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By Gordon Marino

Beyond the rise in guilty verdicts, the mob’s decline can be traced through American culture. When it appeared in 1972, The Godfather mirrored a phenomenon that broadly still existed. Weeks after the movie premiered, “Crazy Joe” Gallo, like Franzese a member of New York’s Colombo family, was gunned down while celebrating his birthday at Umberto’s Clam House in Little Italy. A few decades later, this bloody way of life was already sliding into caricature. In the second episode of The Sopranos, broadcast in 1999, Tony and his friends sit about quoting The Godfather, drowning in nostalgia from their South Jersey strip joint. 

Visit Little Italy now, and Gallo’s killing feels like it could have happened in the Bronze Age. In truth, little but the name remains: the pastries are stodgy, the delis are closed, and the souvenir shops sell t-shirts emblazoned with “Faghedda Bout It”. Across the East River, my old Queens neighbourhood tells the same story. In 1982, two gangsters were executed at Licata’s, a bar the brothers ran in Ridgewood. In some ways, the area hasn’t changed: the yellow brick rowhouses, with their bay windows and Victorian plaster details, look as smart as ever in the sun. These days, though, the mafiosi have disappeared, replaced by $19 cocktail bars. Tellingly, the bar at Licata’s old address remained an underworld stalwart — it’s just that Albanian toughs hung out there instead. 

This hints at a broader trend: while RICO surely ravaged the mafia, the social foundations that gave it strength have crumbled too. That’s obvious enough demographically. Around 1900, that warren of tenements where Gallo was killed hosted some 10,000 paisans, even as substantial Italian-American enclaves arose from Providence to St Louis. Yet you’re now more likely to hear Cantonese than Calabrian on the streets of New York, with only 5% of Little Italy’s population boasting heritage from Il Bel Paese. And if that makes organised crime harder — thugs no longer have a captive audience to extort — the flight to the suburbs is revealing in other ways. 

When it first emerged, at the dawn of the last century, the mafia could recruit from pools of poor young men, just arrived from Neapolitan slums or Sicilian hilltop towns. Illiterate in Italian and ignorant of English, membership helped migrants navigate the treacherous paths of American capitalism, especially when discrimination from Anglo society remained a pervasive (if exaggerated) threat. Through the 1890s, more than 20 Italians were lynched for real or alleged crimes, including 11 on a single day in New Orleans. As late as 1969, sophisticates at Yale could chortle that if “Italians aren’t actually an inferior race, they do the best imitation of one I’ve seen”. Cynically or not, mobsters justified their actions on ethnic grounds too. “Friendship, connections, family ties, trust, loyalty, obedience,” said Joseph Bonanno, one of America’s youngest ever dons. “This was the glue that held us together.”

Nowadays, Italian-Americans face little worse than lazy jokes. More to the point, they’ve brushed off their outsider status and are fully at home in the American mainstream, earning comfortably more than the national average. There are Italian-American congressmen, and Italian-American asset managers, and an Italian-American judge on the Supreme Court. There’s even an Italian-American first lady: though she was born a Jacobs, Jill Biden’s grandfather was a Giacoppo. The need for Bonanno’s glue, in short, has gone, whacked by Michael Franzese and his $15 dog tags. And if even the remnants of the Cosa Nostra now succumb to America’s contemporary manias — the biggest mob hit in years only happened because the killer was made mad by QAnon — millions of honest Italian-Americans are shedding their identities too. 

The US Census makes this plain. In Philadelphia, for instance, the number of self-identifying “Italians” slumped by a quarter in a decade. And though some 16 million Americans still consider themselves Italian, either in full or in part, that’s down 7% too. The linguistic data is also telling. Between 2001 and 2017, the number of people who spoke Italian at home fell by 38%, a decline that’s particularly marked among youngsters. No wonder it’s one of the fastest-dying tongues in America. Religion, that other bulwark of Italian-American identity, is moving the same way. In 1972, 89% affiliated with the Catholic Church. Four decades on, that figure had dropped to just 56%. All that’s marinated by marriage: as early as 1985, more than two-thirds of Italian-Americans under 30 were tying the knot outside the community. 

Beyond the raw figures, you sense the passing of a world elsewhere. For the first time in years, Italian is no longer America’s favourite cuisine, with cannoli and ziti replaced by Mexican tacos. And then there’s the music. Between 1947 and 1954, some 25 Italian-Americans topped the nation’s pop charts. From Frankie Valli to Perry Como, they seduced audiences with their light tunes and dark looks, playfully embracing their italianità. In a 1959 duet with Dean Martin, appropriately called We’re Glad that We’re Italian, Frank Sinatra crooned for Chianti, and explained that linguini “sends me reeling”. It goes without saying that, in an age when Latino artists make all the running, any attempt to sing about puntarelle and anchovies today would be mocked to a shallow grave. 

There’s an irony here. By wearing their heritage on their sleeves, icons like Sinatra first made it sexy, then acceptable, then routine — then nothing much at all. Not, of course, that Italian-American society will vanish overnight. For one thing, identity is about more than language or God. For another, we shouldn’t overgeneralise. This Christmas, and for many more to come, families will celebrate the Feast of the Seven Fishes, a distinctly Italian-American take on the festive meal. No less important, there remain places where the old customs retain some power. Dodge the rats, and take the D Train uptown from Little Italy, and you’ll soon reach another ethnic enclave. This time, though, the Italian community in the Bronx preserves more that makes it special, from mozzarella makers and fresh pasta stores to Our Lady of Mount Carmel, a neo-Romanesque doorstop that still offers mass in Italian. 

Yet the broad trends, I think, are indisputable — just consider that Americans loved cricket until the Civil War. What I mean is that where the English have been, Italians are going; that sooner or later, every immigrant community is destined to be conquered by that mangled mongrel army called the United States. Certainly, this is happening far beyond people whose surnames end in vowels. In 2010, around 35 million Americans claimed Irish ancestry, down from 40 million in 1980. Two years ago, self-declared German-Americans accounted for about 12% of the population, a 4% drop in a decade. Other groups, from Belgians to Czechs, are assimilating too. And though the results are sometimes muddled, with Irish-American identity enjoying a late resurgence, this decline is again visible on the streets and in the suburbs. In Upper Michigan, viewers can no longer watch Finland Calling, a bilingual television show that ran for 53 years to 2015. Across the Great Lakes, the Ohio town of Lorain lately witnessed the demolition of the United Polish Club. It had first welcomed patrons back in 1913.

Quite apart from the flattening power of the American Dream, these identities are doubly vulnerable now. In 1960, when the US was almost 90% white, the countless fissures of Old World ethnicity unsurprisingly mattered more. There’s a reason “Polack” jokes were once so common, and why Martin and Sinatra started their song with “apologies to the Irish and the Jews”. But in 2024, when it’s race not ethnicity that counts, how can Welsh- or Dutch- or Swedish-Americans retain their idiosyncrasies in a culture, in politics and in media, that sees them merely as white? When even prime-time comedy decries Tim Walz for “white nonsense” — the answer must be that they can’t. Nor are things likely to change, especially when “majority-minority” status arrives in a few decades, and when Trump and his discontents have prodded two-in-five white Americans towards racial identitarianism. 

But integration is an old American pastime. And where the English have gone, and the Italians are going, more recent arrivals will someday travel too. In time, Cantonese will fade from the tenement courtyards. There’ll come a day when those Albanians bury their shotguns and shuffle off to Westchester, the proud dads of asset managers and congressmen. 

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The most important immigration story of all

By Peter Heather

This isn’t, however, simply an elegiac tale of loss. Rather, the passing of the clubs, and the cooking, and the identities that underpin them, has birthed a political storm. As late as the Vietnam War, so-called “white ethnics” were habitually assumed to vote Democratic, showing collective loyalty to the traditional party of migrants, Catholics and blue-collar workers. And so it proved: 78% of Polish-Americans voted for Kennedy in 1960, with the same percentage of Irish-Americans backing Johnson four years later. Even Italian-Americans, somewhat faster to go Right than their hyphenated peers, overwhelmingly championed LBJ. After half a century of wealth and assimilation — leavened by demographic shifts and the racially tinged mantras of people like Richard Nixon — the DNC surely would leap at such numbers today. In 2020, barely half of Polish-Americans gave Joe Biden the nod. In New Jersey, 57% of Italian-American men now say they’re Republican, comfortably more than other white males in the state. 

These trends are affecting practical politics. Boasting a large Italian-American population, Staten Island, alone in New York’s boroughs, went red in 2020. That’s dovetailed by GOP gains in other suburbs, in the Bronx and Long Island, where two recent Republican winners were suggestively called Anthony D’Esposito and Kristy Marmorato. Clearly, the Empire State has some way to go before it becomes competitive at the national level, but Donald Trump could nonetheless win more votes here than any Republican since 1988. It’s the same in the battlegrounds. For Poles in Milwaukee (Wisconsin), or Hungarians in Pittsburgh (Pennsylvania), razor-thin electoral margins mean the conservative turn matters. And recall once more that where they’re going, newer migrants will finally follow. Small wonder some Asians and Latinos are now moving Rightward themselves.

While the numbers are doubtless useful, the most interesting shift is cultural. And here, again, we return to the mob, with Italian-Americans using the last dregs of gangsterism to proclaim their politics. Trawl community Facebook pages, and many posts favourably compare Donald Trump to a mafia boss, praising his thuggish charm and disdain for social convention. It presumably helps that even his name is Don. He may be a born-again Christian, but Michael Franzese is much the same. Between waxing sentimental for the Cosa Nostra, he also shares more polemical videos, for instance reminding viewers that Trump “lowered your taxes” and that “we had no wars” during his time in office. Sometimes, he’s even more explicit. In a February interview with Piers Morgan, the presenter suggested the former president acted like a mob boss. “What’s wrong with that?” Franzese retorted. “You know how many people tell me, ‘I wish the mob was running the country right now’?” As a policy prescription, it sounds dubious. But as a mark of integration, I can think of nothing better. 

Yet dig a little deeper and things become a tad more nuanced. For all the caustic characterisations thrown the rioters’ way, their motives were far more complex and varied.

Thus far, police have made more than 1,000 arrests connected to the riots. More than 40 people have already been sentenced and that number is likely to rise markedly in the coming weeks. Already, however, what is striking about this group is their heterogeneity. Among the not so usual suspects: a 43-year-old woman who pushed a wheelie bin at police; a 34-year-old homeless mother-of-five who contrived to do the same, but instead ended up face-planting at the feet of her intended target; a 25-year-old homeless man; an 18-year-old with ADHD, a 15-year-old girl and a 15-year-old boy; a bingo-playing gay couple; and a 69-year-old retired welder.

The nature and seriousness of the violence of the rioters seems to vary greatly too, ranging from vandalism on cars to punching a police officer in the face. While the worst of the violence was very grave indeed — a library was torched and sacked in Liverpool, and there were attempts to set fire to hotels housing asylum seekers — some was more ridiculous than properly lethal: one teenager, aged 19, lobbed an egg at the police while chanting in support of Tommy Robinson.

Yet while there doesn’t seem to be a single profile of a rioter, three profiles have emerged — profiles that, ultimately, we need to distinguish if we’re to understand why these riots took place. Based on trial information and extensive online footage of the riots, they are: Combatants, Geezers and Scallies, and Losers.

The first group — Combatants — refers to the kind of rioter that many have in mind when invoking the image of the far-Right thug: namely, inveterate racists alongside self-proclaimed patriots motivated by fears about white replacement and hostility to the British state and police for their perceived collusion in this. Combatants are almost exclusively men who see themselves as defenders not only of English culture, but as the protectors of English women and girls — from, in their eyes, the rapacious sexual desires of non-white, and especially Muslim, immigrant men.

Despite this relatively strict categorisation, what remains unclear is how many Combatants were involved in the riots, how much of the violence they were responsible for, and whether that violence had been planned in advance. Nor do we know whether they were members or affiliates of organised far-Right groups or looser networks of ex-EDL activists and hooligans, like 28-year-old Liam Ryan who assaulted a black man during unrest in Manchester city centre and was already subject to a football banning order.

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The second group — Geezers and Scallies — refers to older and younger men respectively with criminal backgrounds whose participation in the riots was motivated not by any considered ideological grievances, but an abiding interest in manufacturing mayhem and the drama of violent contention. Historically, riots have always attracted this kind of dissolute stress-seeker, because they present ripe opportunities for a tremendous tear-up, including hand-to-hand combat with reviled authorities and the ritualised looting of goods that are later invariably discarded or destroyed.

Unlike the violence of Combatants, there is no instrumental logic to the violence of Geezers and Scallies: it is done and enjoyed for its own sake, because it’s thrilling and existentially satisfying. At the same time, this doesn’t mean that the violence is senseless; indeed, during much of the past fortnight’s disorder, it’s hard to miss the blatant defiance, spite and mockery on show towards the police. One rioter, for example, prior to having a brick thrown at his groin, danced effeminately in front of riot police, an act of mockery that was captured in camera-phone footage that swiftly went viral.

The final group — Losers — refers to that type of rioter, both male and female, whose participation in the riots was spontaneous and situational. Many of these accidental rioters were drunk when they entered the fray, either because they’re alcoholics or had been out on a bender or both; one 30-year-old rioter who hurled metal sheeting at police in Hartlepool had reportedly drank 30 cans of larger and had no memory of his involvement in the disorder. For some, it was the first time they had been in serious trouble with the police before, unlike the other two categories of rioters, many of whom have extensive rap-sheets.

It isn’t fully clear why the roughly dozen Losers sentenced so far participated in the violence, and none can coherently explain it, other than that something in the spectacle of violence beckoned them to enter it and join in the communal revelry of semi-authorised transgression. This is something most now deeply regret and not a few have sought to distance themselves from the ideological convictions of the Combatants they were rioting alongside. For example, Kieron Gatenby, whose sentence of 16 months in prison for lobbing an egg at police in Hartlepool seems especially harsh, did not harbour any racist views, according to a probation report. “He says he is disgusted at being involved with people who were chanting racist slurs,” Gatenby’s solicitor told Teesside Crown Court at his sentencing hearing. Similarly, it transpired at the hearing of Stacey Vint that her involvement in the riots in Middlesbrough was animated more by alcohol than ideology.

Of course, the overall picture may yet change. But it does seem to suggest that the narrative that the riots were wholly the handiwork of far-Right thugs is oversimplistic. Many of the rioters didn’t see themselves as part of some political resistance; they were bored and some were angry.

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By Terry Eagleton

The other salutary effect of looking at the profiles of the rioters is that it humanises them: in those pallid and lived-in faces in the police mugshots, we see a cross section of English working-class people from mostly northern towns. We read reports of teenage boys and girls who were involved in the disturbances and perhaps wonder about their turbulent lives and “lived experience” of white privilege. We read about someone like Stacey Vint, who is homeless because she fled an abusive relationship, and perhaps feel a stab of sympathy for her — or at least some sense of injustice that she was given such a punitive sentence (20 months in prison).

By contrast, you don’t find much humane empathy towards the rioters on social media or in the liberal press, but instead contempt and loathing. This expresses itself in different ways, one of which is a blatantly classist revulsion that sees the rioters as an odious and atavistic skidmark on multicultural society. The other is a kind of elite disdain that hides its moral revulsion under the cover of alarmist concern over the “radicalisation” of white working-class people; here, ordinary aspects of white working-class culture such as piss-taking are interpreted as signs of extremism in precisely the same way that ordinary aspects of conservative Islam were once red-flagged by Right-leaning terrorism experts like Sebastian Gorka.

None of this is to say that we should be sentimental or lenient towards the rioters. But it is imperative that we avoid painting them all with the same brush — and that means doing the more painstaking work of looking closely at their profiles and motives. Those who do otherwise — whether they are the Prime Minister, a think-tanker or a grifter angling for the Government’s attention — can call the rioters far-Right thugs or even terrorists if they like. But they shouldn’t kid themselves that they’re doing anything other than playing the grubby game of politics, much less providing any understanding of why the riots unfolded, and how they could unfold again.

Admittedly, tensions had been rising for over a month as politicians and fascists politicised a murder at a wedding to sow hatred and division. But nobody expected it to come to this. How could a European city so rich in culture and on the road to development be torn apart by such brutal violence? Overnight, Sarajevo had become a byword for the dangers of ethnic division, ultra-nationalistic fervour, tribalism and wanton extremism.

The events of the past few days in the United Kingdom reveal a number of familiar traces. Southport has become synonymous with Sarajevo, in the sense that, once again, under the watchful sun a small extremist minority is seeking to politicise a brutal tragedy and turn it into something whose consequences reach across the country. This is not protest; it’s about violence, terror and a naked appeal to intimidation.

The idea of a civil war has traditionally referred to an internal conflict where one armed group seeks to wrestle power from the state. While some may brush this aside by suggesting a civil war is not something that the British do, we should not be so complacent. Remember, after all, that alongside the American version, the English civil war between 1642-51 remains one of the most instructive. As a result of this very British version of civic slaughter, the modern theory of sovereignty appeared in Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan. Not only did it put forward the now-familiar mantra that there is no politics without security and no security without the state, it also set in place the fundamental understanding — later picked up by Max Weber — that only the state can engage in legitimate violence.

What marks a civil war from this perspective is a contesting of that very monopoly and the state’s right to use force for the preservation of order. That the police forces who appear on the front lines often become the first targets is not then incidental. But where is the line that needs to be crossed so that civil tensions become a war? Since the Seventies, critical thinkers such as Michel Foucault sought to invert the logic of civil war to explain how states are always waging a kind of silent battle upon minority groups. Through this, notions such as structural violence emerged. Presenting a civil war as a process — one that is not always about widespread slaughter but can also be measured in terms of a broader account of violence and social tensions — does have some merit. The danger with such reasoning, however, is that if everything is a civil war, nothing is.

If Sarajevo made explicit how the new emerging contours of civil war would be written in ethnic terms, it had already been shown in Somalia, Mexico and later Rwanda how the very idea of a civil war was no longer bound to single movements whose sole aim was the capture of the state. Such unbounded violence went global with 9/11, which revealed the utter nihilism of certain ethnic doctrines. It also showed how the lines between race, religion and political beliefs are far from homogenised.

Political violence has since been very much driven by ethnic division, which speaks to a problem that is far more expansive than reductive explanations that focus on race. Of course, there are some overlaps between race and ethnicity, but they are not mutually exclusive. A failure to recognise this means we fail to properly understand the causes and the solutions.

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How Britain ignored its ethnic conflict

By Aris Roussinos

Three decades on from the violence in Yugoslavia, the world is undeniably a different place. The UK political landscape is notably a world away from how it looked in the early Nineties, divided as we have become by all the social media tensions that, as recent days have shown, actually makes violence easier to provoke by non-uniformed and misinforming online generals. This has been matched by the Americanisation of our political system, where performativity — including the performativity of violence and outrage — has replaced substance and where the complex lines of identity and ethnicity have been reduced to crass caricatures based on neat categories of race, sex, gender and whatever other category we care to impose.

The category of race, for example, in itself tells us little about a person’s privileges or political and religious beliefs. That is why counter-narratives around “whiteness” are also unhelpful here; just as they are useless in explaining why many black and Asian people in the US support Donald Trump, or why Enrique Tarrio ,who is of Afro-Cuban descent, became the chairman of the neo-fascist organisation Proud Boys. We should not forget their cos-play riot on Capitol Hill, for what that pantomime showed was such movements today really don’t expect to be able to take on the state. Instead, their enemy are other Americans who have a different vision of what being American actually looks like.

Unlike in Britain, the idea of a possible civil war there has been part of mainstream discussion in America for some time now. Indeed, what marked out Alex Garland’s compelling film Civil War was precisely its plausibility. Garland revealed one of the truisms of a civil war, where its experience is never universally shared. A civil war has never meant that every street is a battlefield. The violence is always concentrated. Witnessing the streets ablaze in Belfast at the weekend should remind us of this. That city, which for many impartial observers looked on the precipice of a civil war for a number of decades, was also liveable even as the ethnic divisions required the physical construction of walls. Belfast also shows how the lines of ethnic divisions are never static but take on new forms.

How should we respond to it? Many have dismissed those engaging in the weekend’s violence by emphasising its thuggery and blaming the likes of Tommy Robinson or Nigel Farage. While I sympathise with this instinct — the criminality was parasitic and abhorrent — it shouldn’t come at the expense of understanding that it was also carried out in the name of a certain ethno-nationalistic vision. So, just as we asked “why do they hate us?” in the aftermath of 9/11, so we must now ask “why is there so much hatred in Britain?”.

A staple explanation in studies of global conflicts since the mid-Nineties has been the idea that poverty is the greatest single cause for violence. Indeed, the edict that underdevelopment was dangerous has been advanced by every single international organisation and humanitarian group tasked with mitigating conflict and violence. Certainly, areas of Britain are desperately poor at the moment. And they have been suffering from the fallouts of years of austerity, the impact of Brexit and the costs of the Covid lockdown. That the anger is spilling out from those areas is cause enough for deeper reflection. But we should not fall into the trap of reducing everything to a question of economy.

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Port Talbot and the suicide of Wales

By Brad Evans

One of the best books written on the rise of extremism and how a small minority can change the course of history is Wilhelm Reich’s The Mass Psychology of Fascism, which was published as Hitler was coming to power in 1933. Reich encouraged us to move beyond simplistic explanations for fascism’s rise. Instead, he asked us to question the fascist that exists within each of us. We can all learn to desire power and violence, and seek to belittle, shame and intimidate others. Fascism as such doesn’t solely reside on the Right or the Left of the political spectrum. Any identity or ethnicity can become fascistic, just as any identity or ethnicity can become peaceful and welcoming.

Despite the protestations of radical moral puritans, then, there is nothing inherently fascistic about Englishness, the flag of St George, or any other symbolic accoutrements. It is instead about how they are mobilised and whether they are appropriated in the service of violent means.

History needs heeding. As Reich showed, once fascistic desires are liberated, that is when politics tends to get reduced to questions of survival. We saw this repeatedly played out over the weekend as narratives of survival, from the protection of our children to the preservation of a way of life, resulted in the open assault upon police officers and burning of libraries and advice centres. Such calls to violence thrive in febrile moments when questions of sovereignty are translated into everyday concerns. And more dangerous still, the freeing of that violence creates the very conditions in which rigid positions have to be chosen.

Thankfully, Britain is not an armed society, and its violence is mostly contained. But that shouldn’t mean that can’t change. Across the world, civil wars have been raging in the name of revitalised ethnic divisions, which have only required a single spark to set entire societies and nations ablaze. Britain is contending with these forces, and they could become much worse. It would be foolish to believe that we are too civilised to ever let that happen. The potential for civil war is written into the DNA of all ethnic conflicts — and, like a sleeping demon, once its fires are lit there’s no knowing where it will spread.

What we have seen since the Southport attack is the precise opposite response: uncontrolled spontaneity, which government policy is expressly designed to prevent. When Keir Starmer attended the scene to lay flowers, he was heckled by locals demanding “change” and accusing him of failure to keep the British people safe. Self-evidently, Starmer, who has been in power for less than a month, bears no personal responsibility for the attack: instead, he was derided as a representative of Britain’s political class, and of a British state that cannot maintain a basic level of security for its subjects.

In the same way, rioters in Southport — fuelled by false claims the killer was a Muslim refugee — cheered when they injured police during the violent disorder that followed the initial vigil, which included attempts to burn down the town mosque in what can only be termed a pogrom. Like the riot that followed in Hartlepool, violence against emissaries of the state — the police — was coupled with objectively racist and Islamophobic actual and attempted violence against migrants.

There are strong parallels with the ongoing disorder in Ireland, which is an explicit reaction to mass migration: last year’s Dublin riots, sparked by the attempted murder of schoolchildren by an Algerian migrant, were in some ways a foreshadowing for the current mass disturbances in Britain. In Southport, the spark for the rioting — the attack itself — was swiftly absorbed into a wider sense of hostility towards mass migration: protestors carried signs demanding the state “Deport them” and “Stop the Boats” to “Protect our kids at any cost”. As in Ireland, presumably local women were prominent, hectoring police and silencing wavering voices with appeals to group solidarity. While this is a very different dynamic to previous football casuals-dominated street mobilisation organised around Tommy Robinson — as represented by Wednesday’s desultory clashes in Whitehall — liberal commentators in Britain, as in Ireland, have nevertheless chosen to portray the violence as orchestrated by Robinson, rather than him piggybacking on it, as is also the case in Ireland.

Shocked by the jolt to their worldview, British liberals, for whom the depoliticisation of the political choice of mass migration is a central moral cause, have also blamed Nigel Farage, the media, the Conservative Party, the Labour Party and Vladimir Putin for the rioting, rather than the explicitly articulated motivations of the rioters themselves. But there is a matter-of-fact social-scientific term for the ongoing disorder: ethnic conflict, a usage studiously avoided by the British state for fear of its political implications. As the academic Elaine Thomas observed in in her 1998 essay “Muting Interethnic Conflict in Post-Imperial Britain”, the British state is unusual in Europe for being “exceptionally liberal in granting political rights to new arrivals” while dampening interethnic conflict by simply refusing to talk about the issue at all, and placing social sanctions on those who do. When it works, it works: “Interethnic conflict has never been as severe, prolonged, or violent in Britain as it has been in many other countries” — for which we should be thankful.

But as Thomas notes, sometimes it doesn’t work, as in Enoch Powell’s famous intervention, supported by 74% of British respondents polled at the time, when, “once the silence was broken and public debate was opened, the liberals found themselves in a weak position. Having focused on silencing the issue, they had not developed a discourse to address it,” and found themselves discomfited by demonstrations in support of Powell. The Labour government of the day dealt with with the rising tensions surrounding immigration by rushing through emergency legislation that imposed an effective moratorium on extra-European immigration via the 1968 Commonwealth Immigrants Act, with the aim of assimilating migrants already here and dampening nascent violence by preventing others arriving.

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By Simon Cottee

Under New Labour, however, this mostly successful policy was torn up, with the conscious intention of transforming Britain into a specifically multi-ethnic — rather than multiracial — society, largely derived from the era’s brief enthusiasm for globalisation. Downstream of then-fashionable social-scientific theories on the simultaneous inevitability and desirability of such a transformation, policy papers like the Runnymede Trust’s influential report “The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain” pushed to reshape Britain as “a community of communities”, a genuinely multicultural state that rejected the “narrow English-dominated, backward-looking definition of the nation”. Ethnic identities — of which the British one was framed as one among many — were to be embraced, within the parameters of the newly multicultural state, and immigration restrictions lifted to achieve this goal.

Yet Labour’s shift towards an explicitly ethnic understanding of community relations would not last long. Following the 2001 ethnic riots in Bradford, Oldham and Burnley, the Labour government performed a dramatic about-turn. As the Tunisian academic Hassen Zriba observed: “All of a sudden, multiculturalism became the disease that needed urgent solution.” Blair’s government commissioned five separate reports, all of which declared “that excessive cultural diversity is a hindrance to inter-racial harmony, and that community cohesion is the best solution.”

This emphasis on community cohesion was heightened by the mass casualty jihadist attacks of the 2000s and 2010s, leading inexorably — along with the Prevent programme, widened state powers of coercion and surveillance, and the accelerated construction of a civic conception of Britishness — to the “controlled spontaneity” project, the terminus of which we witnessed in Southport. While the other northwest European states which adopted a multicultural ethos, notably Sweden and the Netherlands, have since abandoned it, rhetorically the British state is still committed to multiculturalism.

In practice, however, the British state has quietly adopted a revived version of assimilationism. Over the past two decades, a capacious version of Britishness has been constructed around little more than superficial national symbolism and the desire to avoid ethnic conflict, euphemised as “British values”. Interestingly, Blair himself, who now rejects multiculturalism, has recently become an advocate of Lee Kuan Yew, in whose political philosophy Singapore’s ethnic diversity is, rather than a strength, an undesirable hindrance derived from well-meaning British colonial intentions.

But latent authoritarianism aside, Starmer is no Lee Kuan Yew. His faltering attempt to steer the discourse following the Southport attack towards tackling “knife crime” — itself a British state euphemism — highlights the state’s ideological inability to address ethnic tensions frankly, and so manage them effectively. If it were happening in another country, British journalists and politicians would discuss such dynamics matter-of-factly. This is, after all, simply the nature of human societies. Indeed, it is one of the primary reasons refugees flee their countries for Britain in the first place.

Yet when they occur in our own country, such dynamics are too dangerous to even name. Instead, ethnic groups are euphemistically termed “communities”, and the state-managed avoidance of ethnic conflict is termed “community relations”. When Balkan Roma rioted in Leeds recently, it was as an ethnic group responding to what it saw as the British state’s interference in its lives: the British state, in return, addressed its response to the nebulous “Harehills community”. When Hindus and Muslims engaged in violent intercommunal clashes in Leicester two years ago, it was as rival ethnoreligious groups, and was again responded to by the British state as an issue to be dealt with by “community leaders” — the state euphemism for its chosen intermediaries, in a form of indirect rule carried over from colonial governance.

But when the rioting is carried out by ethnic British participants, as is now the case, the limitations of this strategy reveal itself: the perception of an ethnic, rather than civic British or English, identity is actively guarded against as state policy, just as is the emergence of ethnic British “community leaders”. As such, political advocates of a British ethnic identity are isolated from mainstream discourse, as has been state policy since the Powell affair: any expression of such feeling is what Starmer means by “the far-Right”, rather than any traditionally defined desire to conduct genocides or conquer neighbouring countries. This mainland state of affairs, incidentally, is in strong contrast to Northern Ireland, where the existence of rival Irish and British ethnic groups is the basis of the political system, reified by the British state through the ethnic power-sharing apparatus of the Stormont parliament. In Northern Ireland, Britishness is an ethnic identity: across the Irish Sea, it is a firmly civic one: that these constructions differ is a function of political expediency rather than logical consistency.

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Tribal Britain won't be governed

By Aris Roussinos

This ambivalence over referring to Britain’s various ethnic groups is contrasted by the British state’s deep engagement with identity groups based on race, a cultural quirk that academics have long highlighted, and which distinguishes Britain from its European neighbours. Even today, political discourse in Britain evades ethnicity for a focus on race in a way unusual outside America, where it stems from an almost uniquely stratified slave economy, overlaid on a settler colonial society deriving from genocide. Yet British liberals squeamish at ethnic identities — especially their own — instead obsess over the politics of race. Ethnic conflict is taboo to even discuss in the abstract: but minority racial rioting, even over imported grievances, is viewed sympathetically.

Perhaps well-intentioned, the assimilationist aim of this dynamic was counteracted by the British state’s parallel promotion of the new “BAME” identity, assembling various geographically unconnected ethnic groups together in one political whole solely by virtue of their non-European origin. Instead of reflecting our lived reality of a country now composed of multiple ethnicities, among which are the majority native British, an entirely artificial racialised binary was constructed for ideological purposes, in which the ethnic British, along with other Europeans, were merely white, while non-white Britons were encouraged to self-identify as a counterbalancing force. I am legally, but not ethnically British — like most descendants of migrants, I am perfectly happy with my own inherited ethnic identity — but in pursuit of its own convoluted logic, the British state instead chooses to define me as white, an identity of no interest to me. The long-term contribution to social harmony of this explicitly racialised innovation was, as both the ethnic conflict literature and common sense suggest, doubtful in the extreme, and the government dropped the BAME label in 2022: its mooted replacement, “global majority” is, if anything, more problematic.

The British state’s differing strategies to ethnic-minority rioting, on the one hand, and British ethnic-majority rioting on the other, are, as conservative commentators observe, markedly disproportionate. This may not be “fair”, but it is not intended to be. The function of British policing such tensions is increasingly not to prevent crime — as anyone living in Britain can see — but simply to dampen interethnic violence, in which the shrinking ethnic majority population is, as the literature is clear, analytically the most obvious and potentially volatile actor. In the words of the sociologist John Rex, whose advocacy for a new multicultural Britain was highly influential during the Nineties, the fundamental task of multi-ethnic governance is the twofold desire to “ensure that those who will come are peacefully integrated and that their coming does not lead to the collapse of the post-1945 political order”.

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By Aris Roussinos

That is, after all, the logic of “controlled spontaneity”: to prevent a backlash to sudden atrocities or a generalised sense of insecurity that would detach the ethnic majority from Britain’s post-Blair settlement and potentially lead to the formation of ethnic parties. Indeed, the formation of explicitly ethnic parties is the deciding factor in what academics term the shift from a pluralist society — in which ethnic conflict is managed within the existing political order, as in mainland Britain — to a plural one, where the political system revolves around ethnic rivalries, as in Northern Ireland. We are not there yet, though the formation of notionally Muslim (but de facto Pakistani and Bangladeshi) political groupings is a step in that direction, as is Reform’s entry to Parliament, understood by Farage’s voters and opponents alike as a tacit ethnic British party, though one with a strong post-war assimilationist rather than ethnic exclusionist bent.

The government’s alarm aside, the potential for serious ethnic violence seems limited, as few of the precipitating factors listed by academic specialists exist: the British state retains vast coercive power, sympathetic elites aspiring to lead majority ethnic mobilisation do not exist, and, in any case, the most heated divisions on the validity of the British ethnic group remain within the British ethnic group itself.

Instead, like the daily drumbeat of violent disorder so new to British life, but now accepted as the norm, occasional outbursts of ethnic violence, whether currently by the British or by other ethnic groups acting in their perceived communal interests, will become commonplace, as in other diverse societies. To manage such conflicts, the state will become more coercive, as Starmer now promises his supporters. But modern Britain isn’t hell: for the most part it works, better than most places in the world, even if it is far less orderly or safe than the country we grew up in. There will be no violent rupture, no radical new dispensation: things will continue as they are, only more so. This is the nature of most post-colonial societies, and now it is the nature of our own.

***

This article was updated on 5 August to clarify the chronology of the 1968 Commonwealth Immigrants Act.

Disillusioned ANC supporters stayed home everywhere. The party lost its majority in Gauteng, the country’s economic heartland, and the populous and tumultuous KwaZulu Natal Province. An avenging five-month old radical party, Umkhonto we Sizwe, headed by disgraced and deposed former President Jacob Zuma, swept the polls in the Zulu heartland and emerged the third largest party nationally.

The liberal opposition Democratic Alliance (DA) held the Western Cape and a clutch of small ethnic and regional parties also made incremental progress. Another Zulu-based movement, Inkatha Freedom Front (IFP), increased its share and held its fastnesses north of the Tugela River. The big loser was the urban radical and nativist Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) which bled copiously to the even more extreme and anarchic MKP. Socialist and redistributive voters trumped free market ones two-to-one.

The architect of the ANC’s decline is its own President, Cyril Ramaphosa, who was elected with the highest hopes in 2019 that he would be a reformer and an energiser after the eight years of plunder and decay of his predecessor, Jacob Zuma. He was neither, the country deteriorating by virtually every metric possible compared with the country’s halcyon days under former ANC presidents Nelson Mandela and, to a lesser extent, Thabo Mbeki. His weakness in failing to promptly extirpate the Zuma saboteurs from within his ranks years ago, and to lead a reformist national alliance, opened the gap for the extremists such as the EFF and MKP and disheartened even his most ardent supporters. He too has seen his gat.

Few will feel sorry for Ramaphosa. Perhaps fewer still for voters who seem wholly indifferent to either the competence or honesty of their public representatives and routinely vote for their own dispossession by marauding political elites. Such is the allure of tribalism and race.

All this has brought the country to a decisive moment. Initial hopes by the ANC that it could cobble together a majority from pliant smaller parties are dashed. Will the viviparous ANC, still kingmaker after 30 years despite everything, cast towards its offshoots like the EFF (sprung from the ANC Youth League) or the MKP (the former ANC Zulu diehards) to keep power? Or towards the DA and its liberal-reformist Multi Party Charter? If the former, it brings either 51% or 55% of the electorate and what analyst Dr Frans Cronje calls the Chernobyl Option, keeping power in the short term but sowing the seeds of its own destruction. If the latter, it brings 76% of the electorate and possible economic redemption.

A pre-poll survey by the authoritative Brenthurst Foundation found that South Africans rated weak leadership as a bigger threat than crime, more than three quarters were happy with a coalition Government, and 54% were in favour of a coalition which included liberal parties or ANC and liberal parties. This public expression should guide the ANC but probably will not, which is why it is in the position it is.

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South Africa's stagnant election

By Brian Pottinger

The ANC has declared itself winning to form a Government of national unity but, as always, the devil is in the detail.

The positive is that despite all past and looming threats, South African democracy is alive and functioning. There was little pre-election violence and a relatively stable, albeit sporadically dysfunctional, electoral process. There are numerous challenges but none that yet appears systemically threatening. The Judiciary intervened when called to defend the process and the media and independent observers were omnipresent and unfettered.

Vital indicators emerge from these elections. The first is the salience of identitarian or, in its South African context, tribal and ethnic mobilisation, its reality long denied or ignored by white liberals and the black elites. Black South Africans voted overwhelmingly for black parties; whites mostly voted for the DA and the Afrikaner dominated Freedom Front Plus (FF+); mixed-race people deserted the traditional parties to support “brown” and “first nation” parties, the most wildly popular headed by a convicted ex-bank robber who demands the return of the death sentence, and many Asian descended people, when not voting for the DA, voted for tiny local, religious, family and regional parties. With 54 registered parties contesting, there was an embarrassment of choice.

Zuma’s party did best in its Zulu heartland and Zulu-speaking regions in the eastern parts of the country. The ANC triumphed in the Xhosas-speaking Transkei region, its place of historic origin, and the northern parts. The DA benefitted from the huge counter-migration of whites back from the hinterland to the coast and abroad (74% of expatriates voted DA), fleeing the collapse of the northern metropolises. Ramaphosa’s indecisiveness and cowardice has thus decisively slain Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s Rainbow Nation, if it ever existed. A catastrophically failed ANC leadership through decades has ensured that South Africa is demographically and politically reconfiguring itself back into the 19th century.

Underlying these election results has also been a significant generational aspect. More than two-fifths of the voters were between the age of 18-34. Initial surveys show significant numbers voted for either EFF or MK. To these young voters, the mystique of the ANC holds little allure: the prospects of jobs and a better life do, although, tragically, their political choices last week will certainly defeat their personal hopes. More, the advent of the young disconnected radical, no different from counterparts across the developed world, diminishes the power of the trade unions, historically one of the ANC’s key support pillars but now widely regarded by many unemployed young blacks as anachronistic as the ANC itself. The real face of the ANC thus emerges. It is old, raddled and utterly bereft of ideas.

These elections have consolidated another theme of recent politics in South Africa: localism at both the regional and metropolitan level, a trend which will be hastened by the next round of municipal elections. This process has been underway for some time. As the central State withers, private initiatives move to fill the gaps in education, security, health and most recently in utilities like electricity and water. At the core of this cantonal impulse at municipal level, graced by the name of co-governance, has been the DA and some smaller parties, modest gainers in the elections. The process may promise a sunshine option to the numerous wealthy quasi cantons stretched along the Indian and Atlantic shorelines, but it presages even greater disparities in income and lifestyle chances nationally.

So too at provincial level where two powerful secessionist streams are running, one in the Western Cape, where polls suggest between 46% and 70% of the people wish to break away, and the other in the ever-volatile KwaZulu Natal where a vociferous lobby, the Abantu Batho Congress (ABC), is calling for an autonomous Zulu Kingdom. The extent to which these movements flourish depends on whether the ANC goes into alliance with one of its offspring movements (spurring Western Cape independence) or whether it does not (driving KwaZulu Natal’s simmering revolt).

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South Africa is on the brink

By Brian Pottinger

KwaZulu Natal, a fiercely contested arena, faces a fraught and unpredictable future. The upstart Zulu-based MKP, patroned by the indestructible 82-year-old Jacob Zuma who is bizarrely still allowed to hold ANC membership, has made huge inroads, stripped the EFF of support (cruel, as the EFF galvanised the young who now vote against them), and annihilated the ANC in both its urban and rural strongholds, emerging with 45% of the provincial vote. The DA’s premier candidate, a presentable young, white gay man able to speak fluent isiZulu, had no chance against the flood.

Reasons for the MKP’s success is a volatile mix of blood, disillusionment and rage: Zulu chauvinism, attraction to the MKP’s policies of radical economic “transformation” (translation: expropriation of private wealth in favour of an avaricious and unproductive new black elite), a traditional Zulu respect for age, a sense Zuma has been wronged by Ramaphosa, but mostly because of an utter public weariness with the ANC’s violently factional and failed rule in the province. In the wake of the abortive insurrection of July 2021 in which the State went AWOL and left local communities to fend for themselves, a revolt inspired by some now sitting in the MKP, I wrote that this province would never forgive Cyril Ramaphosa for allowing it to happen. It did not, but incredibly, many now seek salvation from the very quarters that caused the tumult.

It is uncertain who will rule in KwaZulu Natal. An ANC-IFP-liberal alliance is still possible. If it fails we should expect an unappealing mélange of medieval kingdom (the recently anointed King Misizulu Zulu is severely miffed at the ANC for challenging his sole directorship of 2.8 million ha of communal land), a radicalised tribal party, and a shadow despot who was arguably the most corrupt President in South African history.

Zuma is prevented by law from holding public office for five years due to a recent conviction for contempt of court and this is likely to be the first violent bone of contention between the State and a party which in its short life, like its leader, trails a succession of criminal and civil litigation and has brought chaos everywhere it has gone. A second bone would be if MKP is denied power in the province by an alliance of opposition parties: the balance is knife-edge. Today, police and military reinforcements are deploying into a wary but uncertain calm. KwaZulu Natal, historically the most fought over patch of South Africa, home to my family for five generations, deserves better than this. The nation does.

But the joke, as it turns out, is on Monk: a major publisher wants to buy the novel for almost a million dollars. When he takes the call, he nearly blows the entire deal.

“This is he,” he says, crisply — and the publisher, a white woman named Paula, flinches at the sound of his voice.

“Really?” she says, incredulous.

Monk reluctantly, hilariously, gets into character. “Yeah,” he growls, putting on an exaggerated blaccent, and then adds: “God damn it! Motherfucker!”

Monk Ellison is the protagonist of American Fiction (one of the nominees for Best Picture at this year’s Oscars); when I saw the movie, this was the moment when the people around me started to laugh — not just because of the swearing, but because of Paula’s reaction to it. Her whole body relaxes as she laughs and nods: “I was a little confused at first,” she says. Now, she’s relieved: expectation and reality are back in perfect alignment, and all is right with the world.

The audience, meanwhile, is experiencing a different kind of relief: finally, someone has admitted that the emperor has no clothes.

If 2020 was the peak of culture’s great awokening, 2024 may be remembered as the year the dam finally broke. Within the past year, satirising the identitarian obsessions of the publishing world has almost become a genre of its own. It’s not just American Fiction — adapted by Cord Jefferson from the 2001 novel Erasure amid Hollywood’s sudden circa-2020 surge of enthusiasm for stories by and about people of colour. There was also R.F. Kuang’s Yellowface, in which a white writer passes off the manuscript of her deceased Chinese-American friend as her own. And this week brings us Andrew Boryga’s Victim, a novel that pokes similar fun at the pieties of an industry that runs on equal parts white guilt and black trauma.

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Victim tells the story of Javi, a young, bookish man from the Bronx who slowly awakens — with the encouragement of various well-meaning white authority figures — to the power of being powerless. Much like American Fiction‘s Monk, Javi’s greatest asset is his ability to tell privileged liberals the feel-bad stories they yearn to hear. The events of his childhood, from the death of his drug dealer father at the hands of a disgruntled associate to his best friend’s arrest, secure his admittance to a prestigious college — a ripped-from-the-headlines plot development based on the real phenomenon of a college admissions process that heavily incentivises applicants to produce narratives of minoritised suffering.

On campus, Javi hones his skills. “I peeped game and realized I happened to be uniquely equipped to thrive in it,” he says. He embellishes, obfuscates, appropriates, and reaps the rewards — even as part of him marvels at the absolute grift of it all. But he didn’t create the game, or write the rules; he’s just playing to win.

If stories like this centre on the marginalised people who manage to medal in the oppression Olympics, they are also implicitly about the game makers: people like Paula, whose self-proclaimed interest in black voices applies only if those voices are singing the right songs, parroting the prescribed lines, playing the assigned role. Both Victim and American Fiction zero in on this dynamic, exploring the precise moment when a white person’s unspeakable thought becomes sayable — if expressed by someone of another identity. “I know you want me to write about being poor and stuff,” Javi tells his high school guidance counsellor, who hastily and nervously corrects him: “I didn’t say that.” When Monk trolls his publisher by insisting on changing the book’s title from My Pafology to FUCK, an obsequious marketing executive enthuses that the new title is very, um…

“Black?” Monk says, dryly.

“That’s it, yes, that’s it!” the other man giggles. “I’m happy you said it, and not me!”

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But unlike Monk, who watches in horror as his practical joke takes on a highly remunerative life of its own, Javi is more than happy to master the art of wielding power through the pretence that he has none. “I felt like a dominatrix,” he observes, after he skewers a white editor — who has just offered him a coveted staff writer job on the diversity beat at a Brooklyn magazine — as a gentrifier. It’s a moment that reveals the astonishing cynicism of the entire enterprise: the suffering, the degradation, the stories, are all part of a sadomasochistic farce in which everyone, including the self-consciously woke white editor with all his grovelling assurances that he intends to do the work, is just playing a role. Like the purveyor of trauma porn, the dominatrix takes your money and puts on a show of making you lick her boots — but as long as she stays in character, what do you care who she is when the costume comes off?

In the past 10 years, as American centres of culture have become increasingly politicised, publishing has become increasingly convinced of its own importance as a driver of political and social progress. In the meantime, some critics (including myself) have observed that the initiatives meant to elevate writers from marginalised backgrounds have a funny way, in practice, of pigeonholing them. Instead of simply opening their doors to good stories told by a diverse variety of authors, publishers built a rarefied ghetto and got busy filling it with token writers telling token tales of trauma, oppression, injustice.

The result is not just a homogenised literary landscape, but a reading public that increasingly cannot grok that “diverse” writers do not, in fact, all look or act or think alike. This has long been a point of frustration for black writers whose interests lie outside the narrow realm of “Black stories” (an early scene in American Fiction finds Monk ranting over the discovery that his books are shelved in the “African-American fiction” section of a store, shouting: “The blackest thing about this one is the ink!”) But it has also ironically fuelled the phenomenon of racial hoaxsters in places like academia, where minority scholars who eschew minstrelsy find themselves passed over in favour of pretenders who play to stereotype. In a world obsessed with identity as aesthetic, a white woman in feathers and beads inevitably reads as more “authentic” than a Native professor in a three-piece suit.

The success of writers such as Jefferson and Boryga lies in the way they step outside the paradigm that demands stories of black suffering, choosing instead to turn a mirror on the guilty white liberals who yearn to be One of the Good Ones. The whole thing puts me in mind of the court jester, privileged with permission to mock the nobles — but only by the grace of the nobles themselves. Publishing has painted itself into this corner, has made itself ridiculous, but nobody in charge can admit this; instead, they carefully appoint writers of the proper identity to point out the absurdity. I’m happy you said it and not me.

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For this reason, much of the praise for these works makes me somewhat uneasy. It’s in the tone and terms alike, at once fawning and familiar: American Fiction, for instance, is “scathing“, “a searing indictment of biased norms“, and “perhaps the most vital film currently in theaters“. Victim is similarly congratulated for pulling no punches; a glowing blurb on the book’s cover describes it as “brave”. That these works deserve accolades is not in question — they’re both brilliant, irreverent, and funny as hell — but it’s hard not to notice that the critical apparatus talks about them using the same language it once bestowed on the same personalities, the same grift, which these satirists so gleefully and effectively eviscerate. How is it that even now, the highest compliment we can think to pay a minority writer is not to praise the beauty of his language, or the quality of his storytelling, but rather to congratulate him on making the right people — which is to say, white people — uncomfortable?

That a book like Victim even exists is no doubt a step in the right direction — and a welcome relief, too, after however many years in which anyone who dared to question the effectiveness of the DEI-industrial complex would be instantly smeared as a racist. It would be nice, though, to someday move past the mockery, into a world where gifted writers could simply write good books without identity ever entering into it. Lampooning the pieties of publishing’s self-styled white saviours is a good start; seeing them discarded entirely would be even better.

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Perhaps we will. Given the length of time it takes for a manuscript or screenplay to become a cultural product, the most optimistic take on works like American Fiction and Victim is that they represent the seeds of a saner, slow-growing consciousness that is finally bearing fruit. Indeed, the extreme salience of these stories to our present moment is only possible because their creators had the audacity and prescience to anticipate this moment, and to speak to it, back when it was still professionally risky to do so.

And of course, our satirists are often harbingers of imminent cultural change: permission to laugh at the thing is, in many cases, the first step to dismantling it. Self Care, a satire of the wellness industry and the powerful women within, was released in 2020, just as girlbosses began toppling en masse from their millennial pink pedestals. The movie Saved! offered a send-up of American evangelical Christianity at precisely the same moment when it lost its cultural power. American Psycho, released in 1991, was a blood-spattered, cackling adieu to the archetypal Eighties yuppie.

And yet, for the moment, the future remains unclear. Not long after finishing the last page of Victim, I stumbled across a deal announcement for another book called THE OVERSEER CLASS: REPRESENTATION AS REPRESSION. Written by a black academic, the book argues that there exists a cabal of power-hungry Uncle Toms — people of gay, black, or otherwise minority backgrounds “who amass power by cracking the skulls of their own”. The announcement describes a “good” deal, which is publishing code for a six-figure advance. In other words: even as some people, like Boryga, are subverting the thing, others are clearly continuing to do the thing, or to pay other people good money to do it. And if woke literature is on its way out, at this moment, rumours of its death are still greatly exaggerated. “Representation as repression?” If Boryga’s fictional protagonist had been a real boy, he could not have done better.

One TikTok account doth not a trend make. But, really: no one is ready for race relations Gen Z style. Wince-making discussion of the relative sexual merits of “Chinese tings” and “Punjabi tings” is, in truth, the least politically virulent version of an emerging race-first mindset, already discernible in far more aggressive forms across the youth on both Left and Right.

The bipartisan rise in the salience of race reflects the changing priorities of an empire whose attitude to ethnic politics has always been ambivalent: the United States. And the demographic at the bleeding edge of the new racism is Gen Z, the group born 1997-2012.

In 2024, more of Gen Z will be eligible to vote than not, as several of the Anglosphere’s major democracies contest general elections, including the imperial centre in Washington. Much will depend on who secures the top seat at the heart of the world’s only hegemon. But whoever wins the US presidential election, the youngest voting bloc will be at the forefront of driving ethnic in-group politics to dominance, supplanting the now-faltering ideology of race neutrality.

Even leaving aside the history of slavery, modern America’s foreign policy has tacitly accorded an important role to race — especially in the weaponisation of ethnic fractures as a means of undermining geopolitical rivals. From Woodrow Wilson to (roughly) the Civil Rights Act, 20th-century America called for, and supported, global “national self-determination” — which, in practice, meant the formation of states along the lines defined by a self-identifying (and usually implicitly ethnic) in-group.

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This policy had the convenient side-effect of providing an ideological justification for dismantling the European empires that were then America’s chief geopolitical rivals. But under the Pax Americana that supplanted imperial competition, these freshly-decolonised ethno-states were then to be stabilised under an America-led infrastructure of international rules and institutions. Bodies such as the UN sought to minimise, or ideally avoid, conflict between nation-states in favour of the relative peace that is a precondition for global trade. In effect, then, a kind of diet ethno-nationalism, in which states were initially delineated along approximate ethnic lines, then encouraged not to compete along these fractures but instead to commingle in the solvent global community of commerce. This system, again as a happy side-effect, has also tended to enrich America.

For some decades now, this arrangement served as the ideological framework for the European ruling class. This is unsurprising: perhaps the most essential trait for survival in any upper bourgeoisie is an exquisite sensitivity to where sovereignty lies. And perhaps especially for Britain, as Aris Roussinos recently argued, this has for some time lain not in European capital cities or electorates, but ultimately in New York and Washington, plus its ideological correlates in Hollywood and the Ivy League.

Perhaps the most distinctive popular trope of the imperial vision in the latter half of the 20th century was that of American  children in national costume, holding hands around the world. This was the aspirational version of “multiculturalism” that I grew up with: one in which a plurality of peoples is envisaged as coexisting happily, while embracing and enjoying one another’s differences.

Until recently, the injunction emanating from these imperial hubs was that America-aligned states should join Hands Around The World. But over time, this ideal has begun gradually to invert itself, via the justification it offers for the mass movement of people. After all, if we’re all alike, why shouldn’t people move in search of a better life? The existence of modern America is inextricable from this impulse.

In line with this, the post-Cold War era has seen one European elite after another gradually retrofit their own countries with a version of modern America’s “nation of immigrants” origin story. In the Wasp-dominated America of the 20th century, this vision was at least somewhat believable, and powered a great many commendable political aspirations. And as the periphery will always tend to lag the centre, even in the Britain of the Eighties and Nineties, Hands Around The World still seemed plausible.

But as first America, then Europe, has set out to practise what America preached, the resulting diversification has shrunk the proportion of Western populations that believe in Western-style egalitarian universalism. And in the wake of this, it’s growing ever clearer that, wherever the culture that espouses race-neutrality loses its numerical super-majority, that ideology will begin giving ground to ethnic or religious in-group preference.

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For it is increasingly clear that minority ethnic groups tend not, on the whole, to dissolve their political consciousness entirely into the larger body politic. Rather, as has been evident in the United States, expat groups tend to retain an interest in the politics of their countries of origin. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong or surprising about this. But inevitably it introduces new potential fault-lines in the national conversation. So as America has diversified, one side-effect has been opening space for a broader spectrum of ethnic in-group lobbies within the corridors of power, all while undermining the Wasp doctrine of universalism.

Thus, ironically, policies rooted in the belief that all human peoples are equally capable of harmonious coexistence has helped to impel the West’s transformation into a real-life multicultural society, which is to say one increasingly governed by the politics of ethnic in-group preference. As this has accelerated, so too the American empire has begun to pivot institutionally from official colour-blindness to its inverse. And today, as evident in recent disputes over antisemitism and race-first ideologies in Ivy League universities, this worldview is so mainstream that one January 2024 Hollywood release is big-budget fantasy about African-American magicians tasked with keeping the dangerous, violent white majority quiescent, by making them feel comfortable.

At the geopolitical level, too, the shift from universalist race neutrality to race-consciousness is echoed in the fracturing of America’s large-scale universalist project: the “rules-based international order”. Since Iraq and Afghanistan took the shine off this order qua moral project, it has become markedly more contested, not least in recent outbreaks of territorial war and ethnic cleansing even at the edges of Europe. But where the new American domestic racism has elite support on the Left, the retrenchment of American internationalism finds its advocates on the new American Right. There, figures including J.D. Vance argue that the US should wind down internationalist commitments such as the war in Ukraine, and refocus on ending illegal migration via the southern border. More broadly, those jockeying to shape a putative future Republican foreign policy lean toward international restraint rather than internationalism, including arguing for an end to US defence spending in Europe.

None of this is to say that America is finished as imperial hegemon. On the contrary: the scale of its influence is evident in the seamless transition America’s satrapies have made in turn to re-align with the new American race-first ideology. This has been eagerly adopted in the peripheries’ increasingly multicultural populations, with the vehemence and volume of Left-wing pro-Palestinian support in the UK since 7 October being a case in point.

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UnHerd reporting from one such march showed an emerging coalition of racially and religiously inflected minority in-group identities, that skews very young and often frames Jews in virulently racist terms as the outgroup. There is considerable overlap with a broader, youth-inflected Left-wing politics of race: one young interviewee told UnHerd (also in a Jafaican accent) that the last protest he attended was during the 2020 BLM disturbances.

Mirroring this coming to racial consciousness of a young and multicultural cross-section of Britain’s Left, race discourse is also re-emerging on the youthful Right. But this isn’t the stereotypical British racism of centrist demonology, coded white working-class and headed by demotic figures such as English Defence League founder Tommy Robinson. Britain’s emerging racist Right is more likely to be young, middle-class, and anonymous, reflecting their lives as students, or as recent graduates employed in sectors where only Left-wing forms of racism are socially acceptable.

The central material grievance for this group is the tension between mass immigration and the lifestyles, earning capacities, and home-owning aspirations of young graduates. In line with this more knowledge-class demographic, they produce well-researched newsletters, and display knowledge-economy communication skills such as a polemical use of statistics comparatively lacking among the Tommy Robinson set. And their converging economic and ethnic disaffection is discernible in the young commentators who point to the preponderance of foreign-headed occupants in inner London social housing, or the memes that frame every Western “social contract” as an extractive one, that tax-farms young professionals and redistributes their earnings to foreigners.

More provocatively still, the race-conscious Gen Z Left and Right now evince a shared belief that ethnic in-group advocacy is a central dimension of mainstream politics. But where on the Left this is granted mainstream form in support for policies such as reparations, or top-down imposition of racial equity, the Right extends this to the one demographic for which this remains taboo: white Europeans. From the perspective of a young Gen Z graduate educated to foreground race, working in a multicultural environment where his own demographic does not predominate, and regularly confronted with evidence of routine discrimination against people like him, it is perhaps difficult to see why doing so should be off-limits.

And so race-based advocacy for Europeans is re-emerging. The recent announcement by Bradford University of a scholarship for white working-class males indicates the direction of travel, while a rising number of public-facing Gen Z exemplars gesture at related ethnic talking-points already commonplace on the more explicitly race-first anonymous Right. These include the fresh-faced anti-immigration activist Jack Anderton, and the 21-year-old student Felix Gilroy, who made waves when he explained to far-Left activist Owen Jones outside the 2023 Tory conference why he believed that Enoch Powell’s much-maligned “Rivers of Blood” speech was prophetic.

Does this mean that every Gen Z is a rabid racist? No. One swallow does not make a summer; there are plenty of young men and women still indifferent to or disgusted by the new race politics. But the influence of America is overwhelming, whether geopolitically or via the media, and the message from the hegemon is now that race must be front and centre. It’s also a good rule of thumb that politics will tilt toward whichever group cares the most, and as things stand, the race-conscious Gen Zs across both Left and Right exhibit an ideological vigour that leads me to suspect they will be influential.

It may come, then, via the Left-wing attack on equality under the law. It may come via the Right-wing attack on liberal internationalism, egalitarianism, and human rights. It may be a mix of the two — but it’s coming. Having grown up amid the 20th-century intra-ethnic ceasefire, reporting this gives me no pleasure. But my prediction for 2024 is that as we see Gen Z maturing to political agency, its radicals will bring the politics of ethnic in-group advocacy definitively back, to unpredictable but potentially seismic effect. Older generations may pine for Hands Around the World, and the long 20th-century peace. But we must all brace ourselves for the coming to political consciousness of a generation that no longer believes peace is in their interests.

Gun violence is booming in the US. In the past three days alone, there have been reports that residents of Washington DC are afraid to walk five blocks, because “I don’t want to get randomly shot”; that a New Mexico governor has issued an emergency ban on bearing arms in response to gun violence; and that 60 congressional Democrats have signed an open letter to President Biden demanding that he use “every tool at his disposal” to combat the wave of gun-related deaths.

Within this culture of fear, guns are rapidly ceasing to be the preserve of white men. Since 2020, according to the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF), there has been a 43% increase in Asian-American gun ownership, a 49% rise by Latinos, and a 58% increase among black people. And the diversification of gun ownership is intersectional: during the pandemic, Geneva Solomon, co-owner of Redstone Firearms in the Hollywood district of Los Angeles, said that she began noticing “an increasing number of black women, including single mothers and those living alone” coming to her shop to buy guns. “The desire to feel secure and empowered sparked a significant surge in interest,” she told me. Even before Covid, change was afoot, with the National African American Gun Association reporting that, since 2015, half of its new members are women.

Gun ownership increases when people feel threatened; it is well-documented that gun sales spike after mass shootings. Likewise, the increase in violence against people from non-white backgrounds during the pandemic has helped spark a national arms race. Attacks on people of Asian backgrounds in particular exploded, as political leaders began calling Covid the “kung-flu” and blaming China for unleashing it on the world. In liberal states such as California and New York, where large numbers of people from Chinese, Japanese and Korean origin have lived for generations, businesses came under attack and people were subjected to random assaults on the street.

The Latino population, who account for one fifth of new American gun owners, have some more complex, nebulous motivations for arming themselves. American Latinos, particularly those who speak Spanish at home, have traditionally been in favour of gun control. But that support has dropped precipitously. The desire to assimilate to their new lives as Americans has been cited as one factor, as has fear of hate crime. In Texas, where Latinos now outnumber white people, they are increasingly being targeted by white supremacist propaganda and are moving further to the Right — particularly along the Mexico border. There are signs that the same trend is taking place in New Mexico, where there are calls to impeach the Democrat governor trying to ban guns.

For African Americans, the question of gun ownership — something denied to them for long periods of American history — is thornier still. Black people remain the most targeted demographic for hate crimes in the country, while the number of black people killed by police has also increased in recent years. Civilian gun violence also takes a hugely disproportionate toll on black communities, particularly in disadvantaged areas. Between 2016 and 2020, more than 10 out of 100,000 black teens were murdered with guns; the equivalent figure for their white peers was 0.8, and for Latinos 1.9.

But if black people are arming themselves out of fear of violence, the inevitable result has been more violence. Josh Sugarmann, an anti-gun activist and founder of the Violence Policy Center, says that the real effects of a broadening gun ownership base is already having catastrophic consequences within the black community. “We’re starting to see the impact of putting more guns in homes,” he says, “especially as measured by suicide among black kids.” Last year, the gun suicide rate among black teens surpassed the rate of white teens for the first time on record. The most likely result of being armed, Sugarmann says, is that they will use their guns “against themselves, their friends or their family — and never to kill a criminal or stop a crime”.

While discrimination and violence are undoubtedly central to the changing demographics of American gun ownership, there is another factor at play. For the gun industry, expanding its ownership base has been an active project, and an existential one — bred of cold-blooded capitalism as much as radical ideology. Since the Nineties, the gun lobby has conducted an all-out assault to expand its market share, weaponising fear as part of a diversity push to expand its customer base.

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Watching the extinguishing of the tobacco industry, the powerful gun lobby realised that failure to move with the times would see guns, like cigarettes, becoming a fringe vice that was looked down on by the general public. To survive, the industry would have to persuade citizens that its product is a mainstream commodity. Limiting itself to only the “pale, male, and stale” demographic was not only bad for its image — it was bad for business.

Naturally, it turned to advertising. White men would no longer be the focus. Women, people of colour, and the gay and lesbian communities were targeted with slogans such as “Equality? Brought to you by Sam Colt”, “Gun control once kept freedmen defenseless against KKK”, and, “99.8% of rapists polled prefer you unarmed”.

The industry hit their target. One recent study found that videos geared towards protecting women were viewed two-and-a-half times more often than videos that only featured men. Whether these were directly appealing to women, or to men keen on protecting women, isn’t clear. But these ads were onto something. Women’s gun ownership has almost doubled since 2007, from 13% of the population, to 22% today.

In 2015, the NSSF, which has overtaken the NRA as the key industry voice, held a summit. The theme was: Diversity. Its marketing chief Chris Dolnack said that the industry was focused on making changes “to embrace a new consumer audience”.

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This increase wasn’t entirely down to the gun industry’s activities. Tragedies such as the Columbine High School massacre and 9/11 saw Americans of all stripes feel the need to be armed for self-protection. A woman firing off rounds in a bikini might look cute, but it’s fear and loathing that really sells — and wins votes. “Stand your ground” laws, where individuals have the right to use deadly force if necessary to protect against an intruder, have now been enacted in 38 states. People listened. Whereas in 2000, the majority of gun owners cited hunting as their primary reason for possessing a firearm, six years later, two-thirds said it was self-defence. By 2021, the proportion of people who said they purchased a gun for self-defence had risen to 88%.

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What effect this shift in gun-owning demographics will have at the polls next year remains to be seen. It won’t necessarily benefit the Democrats. Gun owners, a historically Republican base, can still be in favour of harsher weapons restrictions and background checks, the traditional domain of Democrats: rights for me and not for thee has never been an unpopular position. And attempts to take on the well-funded and highly aggressive gun lobby have fallen short time and time again.

Addressing the broader social issues that have led many to gun ownership could, in theory, persuade some new gun owners to put down their weapons. But, if the past decades are a guide, there’s only so much politics can achieve here. There’s no getting round the second amendment: it’s baked into American history.

Boba has a reputation for being a drink that’s all sugar and no substance. Likewise, a boba liberal is an Asian who uncritically subscribes to the Democrat party line that “diversity is our strength!”, while making shallow tributes to Asian-American identity, such as celebrating representation in Hollywood. While it is commonly used by conservatives, “boba liberalism” was actually named by the other sworn enemy of liberals: Leftists. It was coined by a socialist Twitter activist, who wrote that “Boba Liberalism is thinking t-shirts, products, and merchandise are the main way of affirming one’s racial identity”.

The term is also used to describe Asians who are deemed to have been “whitewashed” — to have abandoned their “authentic” Asian identity to assimilate into the middle class. But how do you decide what counts as “authentic”, when the whole concept of Asian-American identity is built on a shaky foundation? African Americans are mostly descended from individuals who crossed the Atlantic centuries ago as slaves, and are therefore disconnected from their ancestors: they had no choice but to create a new culture from scratch, which gives it a coherence. Asian Americans, by contrast, have only existed in significant numbers for the past few decades. They have stronger ties, as well as living relatives, with other hugely varying nations. Bureaucracy may still lump together East and South Asians, but the two groups are two distinct races in everyday life. Ironically, in an era when racial minorities are encouraged to think about themselves as categories on a census form, boba liberalism is pushing a pan-Asian identity that does not actually exist.

The recent New York Times article “What Does It Mean to Be an Asian American Brewer?” is a classic example of how that identity is pushed. The author emphasises how few Asians there are in the industry, and points how those breweries which have succeeded began using Asian motifs, such as Chinese Zodiac symbols, only once they became popular. The only real difference between an Asian and a non-Asian brewery, apparently, is that an Asian brewery engages in self-Orientalism so that the mostly non-Asian customers can get feel like they are getting an “exotic” experience, even though the beer tastes just like any classic American beer.

Over time, politically conservative Asian Americans have also come to enthusiastically adopt the term “boba liberal” — mainly because it gave them a chance to “own the libs”. Like Asian Leftists, conservative Asians view boba liberals as not possessing an authentic Asian-American identity, but for the Right, disparaging boba liberalism is not a way to critique capitalism. It is a way of taking aim at a small but influential group of progressive Asian-American activists who are supposedly selling out other Asians, especially working-class Asians, in order to win brownie points from elite, generally white liberals.

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After all, Boba liberalism is, essentially, an Asian version of white liberalism — or wokeness. The core of this identity is self-flagellation, the sacred mission to “do the work” of atoning for being born white, the original sin. As Tom Holland has suggested, wokeness is a direct by-product of European Christian morality. And modern-day white liberalism has largely abandoned Christianity, but persistent is the desire to make up for the offences of one’s ancestors, and to see that the last shall be first and that the first shall be last.

As the most educated in society have adopted the tenets of this new religion, people who want access to elite spaces feel immense pressure to convert. Asian Americans from middle- to upper-class families are typically from majority-white neighbourhoods, and the urge to join the club is immense. (This demographic has the highest rates of getting into elite colleges.) Since white guilt is in vogue among their white liberal peers, they have created their own version.

Boba liberals cleave to the idea that that “anti-blackness” is endemic in Asian-American communities. In Liquor Store Dreams, for example, the Korean American filmmaker So Yun Um turns her parents’ experience of running a shop in a majority-black neighbourhood into a critique of this supposed anti-black racism. Her parents were working-class immigrants who toiled for decades to give her a better life, but she has risen above them socially, becoming a filmmaker — and is now castigating them to gain acceptance in her new class.

In an interview to promote the film, she tells the story of a Korean American friend who was accosted and robbed on the street by a black person. Her friend felt conflicted because he didn’t want to bring race into how he viewed the incident. The rest of the interview focuses on the myriad ways Korean Americans are said to perpetuate anti-blackness. When discussing attacks on Asians, for instance, she says: “If you’re in a predominantly black and brown neighbourhood, if an accident were happening, who else would be the assailant? It wouldn’t be a white person because a white person doesn’t live there.” Note her use of the word “accident”, rather than, say, “attack”. By doing so she is unintentionally perpetuating the obviously racist idea that a black person can’t help being an “assailant”; it denies black Americans agency. There is no similar call for black Americans to “unlearn anti-Asianness”, because in a boba liberal’s mind, how can they possibly take responsibility for their actions?

While boba liberals may experience anti-Asian racism themselves, they know there is little social capital to be gained from discussing it. The common assumption is that Asians are mostly well-off and do not need liberal saviours, unlike black Americans. The latter are often portrayed in popular culture as living tough lives in “the hood”. But working-class Asians tend to cluster in ethnic enclaves that receive very little media attention. The dominant Asian stereotype is of the “crazy rich Asian”. Boba liberals will intentionally distance themselves from these working-class Asians. Anyone who doesn’t toe the progressive party line on every issue is actually an ally of white supremacists.

Unsurprisingly, then, boba liberals often support affirmative action over merit-based admissions policies. In other words, they support a process based not on a clear set of consistently applied rules, but on more nebulous, unspoken criteria set by elite ideology. This benefits them, because they understand the “right” things to do and say to gain access to institutions such as Harvard. Working-class Asian Americans have little-to-no social capital and have the “wrong ideas”, however, and thus prefer merit-based admissions policies that don’t require intricate knowledge of elite codes.

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But being against affirmative action is considered “wrong” by affluent progressives; for them, the policy is an accessory they can tout to signal that they believe in the value of having a superficially multiracial ruling class. And just as affluent white liberals feel ashamed about white MAGA voters or Brexiteers, boba liberals are embarrassed by working-class Asians and their “incorrect” views.

As Rob Henderson has pointed out, Asian Americans are adopting “luxury beliefs, which are ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class while often inflicting costs on the lower classes” — which he sees as “an indicator of assimilation” into upper-middle class America. A similar phenomenon is happening among Latinos: the college-educated now use the term “Latinx” as a class signifier, a term that is deeply unpopular with the vast majority of Latinos. It seems, then, that racial solidarity is not as powerful as class solidarity. America’s liberal elite have all converged on one value system that sets them apart, while pretending to be “diverse” through shallow imitations of identity.

Since the Sixties, the answer on campuses from Harvard down has been race-based affirmative action — a policy dedicated to increasing racial diversity on campuses. Until today, that is, when the Supreme Court rejected the practice as unconstitutional.

In the coming days, you will no doubt be treated to a cacophony of views either celebrating the decision as a victory for meritocracy or abhorring it as a racist verdict that exposes the white supremacy inherent in our institutions. What you won’t hear, however, is much discussion about whether affirmative action has realised its intended outcome of raising black Americans, the descendants of slaves and victims of segregation, out of poverty. It is all too easy for a university to boast about having a certain number of black kids on campus. It is much harder to reflect on whether the policy that put them there has succeeded more generally.

While the birth of affirmative action can be traced back to the end of the Civil War, its role in college admissions was only secured by a Supreme Court ruling in 1978. Since then, all affirmative-action policies have articulated the same goal: to make the second-class socio-economic status of black Americans a thing of the past.

In part, this was to be celebrated. In the US, access to college is seen as a prerequisite for success; indeed, those with bachelor’s degrees tend to earn significantly more than those with only a high school diploma: 75% more, according to one recent study. In other words, despite recent cynicism, affirmative action comes from a genuine desire to improve the lives of black Americans.

But have these attempts worked? Although the formal and objective legal and social barriers to black prosperity have been eliminated, and despite the fact that all sorts of other government welfare and criminal justice policies have been adopted since the Sixties, disparities between white and black Americans remain entrenched in wealth, education, housing and crime. One recent study by the Federal Reserves notes, for instance, that black households earn on average about half as much as white households. In fact, black Americans do less well than any other minority groups in America, including other black immigrants from the Caribbean and Africa.

As for those black Americans who do get into college, only 42% graduate within six years — well below the national average  of 63%. Forgive me for spelling this out, but it bears emphasising: if you are a black college student in America, you are more likely to drop out than graduate.

From a humanitarian point of view, then, one of the key problems with the debate around affirmative action is that it focuses on admissions, and not on the trajectories of students after they are admitted. For a university to enrol a student is, in some ways, easy — in the sense that all it consists of is sending out a formal letter. By contrast, putting the admitted student on the path to graduation and a successful future is more challenging. All of which raises an uncomfortable question: just how fair is it to admit students without considering their ultimate chance of degree completion and the debt load they will be saddled with regardless of whether they graduate? Or, to frame it more constructively: if affirmative action is not the answer to the plight of black America, what is?

To answer this, it pays to compare successful black Americans with those who lag behind. In May 2022, I attended a conference of distinguished black thinkers, including Clarence Thomas, Glenn Loury and Ian Rowe. During the gathering, I identified three main groups of black Americans. The first consists of those who are quietly successful and rarely make the news. Even during segregation, they somehow prospered, and with the abolition of formal racism in America, they thrived.

The second faction is embodied in the Black Lives Matter movement. These people loudly argue that recent racial progress is irrelevant and seek to exploit the history of American racism to further their own radical agenda. They mostly come from affluent families, which is perhaps why they prefer to focus on skin colour rather than economic class as an explanation for why black America remains disadvantaged. This is the group which benefits most from affirmative action policies.

The third grouping is made up of a vast number of poor black Americans. They tend to be wards of the state, in prison, involved in or affected by crime, unemployed or employed in low-paying jobs that are threatened by mass immigration and growing automation. The second group claims to speak for this group’s interests, but in fact exploits their genuine grievances for their own political ends, encouraging poor black Americans to think of themselves as forever doomed to be victims. This inspires a mindset of permanent resentment and does nothing at all to actually inspire them, let alone improve their economic circumstances in an enduring manner.

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The other obvious difference is that those in group one tend to come from stable, monogamous families. They largely complete their education before marrying and having children. They cultivate a strong work ethic and are members of strong communities.

The problem is that poor black Americans (group three) live in an environment in which these values are difficult to nourish. They often face an intergenerational cycle of poverty involving fractured families, dysfunctional school systems and financial strain. Young men are forced to look to all the wrong role models to survive, embracing norms that are not compatible with durable socio-economic stability.

When one looks at other demographics, however, one finds that this pattern is not solely racial. The factors outlined above can lock any group of people into poverty, forcing them to live in neighbourhoods where violence is common and education is poor. In such cases, the cycle continues. Think, for example, of the poor white Americans discussed in J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, who have ended up in distinct but not entirely dissimilar circumstances.

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Besides strong families that nurture habits associated with stability and success in life — literacy, inquisitiveness, a hard work ethic — access to good schools at an early age is essential for remedying the economic disparities. And this is where affirmative action stepped in, no doubt because other factors — such as stable families — were beyond the power of legislators to address.

Seen in this light, affirmative action on its own could never solve the problems of black Americans born into terrible environments, because its operation came too late. It worked in the latter half of the 20th century for those black Americans who came from environments that encouraged high educational attainment, because the only obstacle facing them was formal discrimination based on skin colour. But it could not work for those who came from less auspicious backgrounds. If you were poor, it was never going to be enough.

So, what comes next? Of course, nobody is to blame for the environment into which they are born. But, equally, we have to recognise that there are good and bad environments — and whichever one you are born into does affect your life outcome. Accepting this is the first step to solving the disparities faced not just by black Americans but also by other disadvantaged groups in the US. This was affirmative action’s fundamental flaw: the plight of poor black Americans has little to do with race. It was a policy inspired by good intentions, born into a world that no longer exists.

This is where things got hairy: with each selection, the rejected partners would exit past the person doing the picking, who would see their faces for the first time. The point was torment, obviously: behold the sea of beautiful people you just canned for totally arbitrary reasons. The potential for regret in this moment was so powerful that the show eventually introduced a new gimmick, whereby the featured contestant had one “golden lifesaver” that could be used to save a passing reject.

In the era of dating apps, users are of course spared the anguish of a physical confrontation with all the people they’ve categorically rejected; the algorithm is the man behind the curtain, mercilessly dismissing everyone who doesn’t fit your preferences, out of sight, out of mind. We tell ourselves it is more efficient this way, ordering a human being via the same box-checking exercise we use to build a burrito bowl at Chipotle. We tell ourselves, more importantly, that not doing this is a risky proposition, maybe even a dangerous one. Without the algorithm, who knows what you might end up with? He could be short. Or a Nickelback fan. Or, gulp, a Republican.

Everything’s Fine, a new novel by Cecilia Rabess, seems like a cautionary tale about the dangers of too-indiscriminate, non-algorithmic dating. The relationship in this story is between two people who would never have matched on Tinder: Jess, a progressive and professionally ambitious black woman who works as a Wall Street trader, and Josh, a pragmatic fellow trader who describes himself as a moderate, but who Jess insists (sometimes to his face) is the personification of conservative cishet white male privilege. As a complicating factor, clues littered throughout the book suggest Josh might actually be Jewish — or rather, this would complicate things, if Jess had an iota of curiosity about it, but she doesn’t. Her obliviousness seems to be shared by Rabess herself: the only definitely Jewish character in this book, the main antagonist, happens to be a grasping, greedy, tax-dodging hedge fund manager.

Where other people see humans, Jess sees stereotypes. She is obsessed with voting habits as a proxy for character. If she had a dating app profile, she would emblazon it with one of those “Republicans swipe left” warnings. In this, of course, she would only be doing what the media has lately identified as the sole sensible strategy for selecting a romantic partner: in our obsession with “red flags”, political beliefs have become the ultimate dating dealbreaker. Everything’s Fine has already been cancelled on Goodreads by people arguing that a progressive black character dating a conservative white one is a way to “excuse racists”.

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A recent piece in the Atlantic reads out the writing on the wall, straightforwardly advising that politically heterogamous partnerships are a bad idea — “because research suggests that marriages across political or religious lines (when those things matter significantly to each partner) can be less happy, more conflicted, and more likely to end in divorce than marriages where spouses agree on religion and politics”. Note that the caveat appears only parenthetically, as if the eventuality that these things might not matter significantly to each partner is barely worth mentioning.

Indeed, to believe that politics is a mere drop in the bucket of multitudes that each human being contains is not only outré in elite circles, but often cited, contemptuously, as evidence in and of itself of a certain political affiliation. Jill Filipovic, in an essay responding to the Atlantic article, writes:

“There’s an impulse, especially among those on the moderate right, to talk about politics as simply a set of preferences, like what kind of shows you might select on Netflix. But politics, especially in the post-Trump era … reflect entirely different goals and certainly different values, as well as very different ideas about what our country and our world should be, and — perhaps most crucially for a marriage — very different ideas about the rights, rules, and opportunities for women, men, and children.”

It’s a bit of a Kafka trap: push back against the defining importance of politics, and ugh, that’s just what a Right-winger would say. Among progressives, it is increasingly an article of faith that the personal is, and always will be, political; if you don’t think so, well, you’re not one of us.

I suspect, though, that this extremism is less Trump’s fault than Tinder’s. Algorithmic dating is all about finding reasons to write off entire categories of people as undateable — and to be savage about it. If a certain type of human being doesn’t spark joy, then into the bin they go. For women, particularly, to be as discriminating as possible in one’s romantic life is positioned as an act of self-care: you are holding out for what you deserve, and what you deserve is a person who checks every box, meets every criteria. To give an unqualified man a chance represents a failure to respect yourself.

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And yet, I’m not sure that intentionally ensconcing oneself in a silo of perfect-on-paper people — and, by extension, seeing the values of everyone who thinks differently as an existential threat — is the best thing for any of us. Filipovic’s essay unwittingly demonstrates the hazards of entrenching oneself in this mindset: how intolerance gives rise to caricature, how stereotypes creep in to fill the empty spaces left by ignorance. Conservative men, in this view, are not just unsuitable partners but actual monsters: “With the demise of Roe v. Wade,” she writes, “a vote for a Republican politician is a vote to criminalise abortion, which is a vote to force women to risk their lives in pregnancy … If a man is willing to vote for that, why would you trust him with your body and your medical decisions? … Is he the man you want making medical decisions for your daughter, or teaching your son what masculinity looks like?

As visions of romance go, this one is absurdly catastrophic, not to mention dehumanising to everyone involved — the conservative men, obviously, but also the women who are depicted as brainwashed traitors to the sisterhood for even considering marrying one. (What of the fact that many of the most fervently pro-life voters are, themselves, women?) Its proponents might want to imagine how they’d feel if the tables were turned — if liberal women were being similarly caricatured and dismissed as amoral, unmarriageable ogres based on their voting patterns alone. In fact, this has happened within living memory: in 1992, the recently-deceased Pat Robertson decreed that feminism was “a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians”. This was news to the happily married non-witchcraft-practising feminists of the world, who rightly roasted Robertson for his ridiculous pronouncement. Had the man ever even met a feminist?

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At the risk of stating the obvious, even couples who vote the same way still have differences, political or otherwise; they still disagree, fight, and get divorced. The Atlantic article frets that “fewer than half (47%) of politically mixed married couples report they are ‘completely satisfied with their family life,’ compared with ‘61% of couples in which both spouses are Republicans and 55% where both are Democrats’.” That’s one way to put it; the other way, of course, would be to note that your chances of marital satisfaction are roughly 50/50 whether you pair off within your own political tribe or not, making it a pretty impractical criterion for deciding who to marry.

Of course, this is the type of pragmatic take that Josh is always offering in Everything’s Fine, which inevitably infuriates Jess. “It’s just a hat,” he says, when she discovers a red MAGA baseball cap, a gag gift from a fishing trip, stuffed in a storage bin in the home they share. “It can’t hurt you.”

“But it’s not just a hat,” the book sombrely intones. “It makes Jess think of racism and hatred and systemic inequality, and the Ku Klux Klan, and plantation wedding Pinterest boards, and lynchings … and decades of propaganda and Fox News and conservative radio, and rabid evangelicals, and rape and pillage and plunder and plutocracy and money in politics and the dumbing down of civil discourse and domestic terrorism and white nationalists and school shootings—”

That paragraph continues for practically a full page — there is apparently no malady in the world for which the hat is not an avatar — but you get the idea. It’s all about going to extremes: your Republican vote is literally killing women, your feminist book club is full of lesbian witches, your little red hat might as well be a KKK hood. Josh, of course, is the bad guy for thinking that none of this makes any sense: he’s the oblivious toxic white male who not only brought the hat into the house, but is so blinded by his own privilege that he cannot sense its evil.

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Because this is how Jess sees Josh, she treats him terribly, not that she treats herself much better. Her perpetual sense of victimhood, her certainty that she is at a permanent disadvantage owing to her race and sex and middle-class background, leads her to both take advantage of others and to sabotage herself. And while the book ends on an ambiguous note, her relationship with Josh is almost certainly doomed — not because she’s black and he’s white, or because she’s a liberal and he’s a conservative, but because he views her as a person while she views him as a collection of labels. Jess sometimes says she loves Josh, but she doesn’t. She doesn’t even see him.

That inability to look past someone’s labels has always been with us, embodied by the concept of the dating dealbreaker. Sometimes it’s political (“I could never be with someone who votes Republican”), sometimes it’s practical (“I could never be with someone who hates dogs”), sometimes it’s utterly arbitrary (“I could never love a man who wears pants tighter than I do.”) But really, we have no idea who we could or couldn’t love. For all our attempts to plan and predict and control our romantic destinies, human beings have never been good at knowing what — or who — will make them happy. And god, isn’t that terrifying?

In a world where love makes fools of us all, red flags, political or otherwise, operate as a sort of fantasy: a story you tell yourself about what kind of person you are, or perhaps what kind of person you’d like to be, dressed up as a declaration about what kind of person you could never be with. The dealbreaker is a way of imposing order: I know where the line is. I’m in charge. These stories can be comforting. They can be exciting. But that doesn’t make them true.

Schreiner’s words would strike her countryfolk today with stark resonance. The white middle classes, confined to their urban or coastal bubble communities, have largely given up — those who can leave often do. The black middle class are hardly different: revolutionaries have become businessmen and sometimes not very honest ones. “I did not join the struggle to die poor,” proclaimed one senior ruling African National Congress (ANC) politician endlessly mired in sleaze allegations. The unions, meanwhile, are corrupted by greed and the “democratic movements” — a few courageous exceptions allowed — are knee-deep in self-enrichment.

It is now clear that whatever force drives public policy within the opaque and factional halls of the ruling party — which is certainly not the impressionable President Cyril Ramaphosa, who drifts like kelp in the coastal currents of the Western Cape seas — has come to three dreadful conclusions. Firstly, the ANC will stick to its catastrophic redistributive economic policies rather than pursuing growth. Secondly, knowing that its economic plan will cause chaos, the government will batten the hatches against capital flight and pre-emptively seek to chill free speech. And thirdly, it has accepted that what is left of developed world investment interest will dry up and a flailing South African state will have to find succor elsewhere. Enter the Russians and the Chinese.

Let’s start with the ANC’s disastrous economic policy. The recently passed National Health Insurance Act seeks to impose a complex and unaffordable R256 billion (£11 billion) national health insurance system on a state which has utterly failed in key governance functions for nearly 30 years due to epic corruption and maladministration. This has been most prominent in healthcare, where criminal cartels have operated with impunity for decades in securing tenders and, in one recent case, assassinated a whistleblower. The new measures, meanwhile, threaten to displace the extensive and highly successful private healthcare system on which the middle classes and many formally employed workers depend, black and white.

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Other draft regulations, this time by the Department of Labour, allow the government to set employment targets for every business to reflect the precise demographic profile of the country, both an absurdity and an impossibility given the uneven spread of skills and demography. On top of this, draft regulations by the Department of Water and Sanitation require businesses and farmers applying for water rights permits to prove that between 25% and 75% of their businesses are black-owned: the equivalent of asking multi-generational Devon farming families to cede chunks of the value of their farms to Tory cronies for the future right to draw water from the Tamar.

And this comes on the back of a failed land restitution programme, which has seen a catastrophic decline in productivity and employment in the millions of hectares handed to new crony or communal ownership. Millions of other hectares, 2.8 million in KwaZulu Natal province alone, remain under communal tenure systems dating to Victorian times. The ANC is too afraid of a rural insurgency to touch the power of the traditional leaders who have the right to rule over this land: the whites are an easier target.

All of these measures will certainly be fought tooth-and-nail up to the Constitutional Court, and may well be defeated: the Court, some brave opposition politicians, and a small band of intrepid and independent investigative journalists remain the only deterrents to South Africa becoming a badge-bearing failed African state. But in the interim, the proposals are creating enormous uncertainty.

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This explains why, on the eve of Easter this year, the South African Revenue Services quietly published amendments to its capital export rules. Whereas once individuals could export R10 million (£431,000) a year as offshore investments, now the transfers are classified under the same terms as those dealing with formal emigration: a vastly more complicated and expensive process. The authorities insist the measure is simply to tighten up on cross-border movement of securities after the country was grey-listed by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) for laxity when billions of rands of embezzled state money flowed out of the country in the freebooting days of former president Jacob Zuma.

Yet it forms part of a trend. Regulatory changes in 2021 prevented emigrating pensioners from having their pensions paid abroad for three years after leaving South Africa. This effectively kept them hostage, denying them the opportunity to fund the waiting periods to get foreign residency rights. If the young are fleeing, grab the old folks. The government, meanwhile, is pushing ahead with amendments to the Prevention and Combatting of The Crime of Hate Speech Act, which free-speech advocates argue could be used to suppress genuine dissident opinions. Given that the ANC routinely dismisses as racist all criticism of its actions — no matter how valid — this is not an unjustified concern.

The effect of all this will be to hasten the already terrifying skills exodus from South Africa. Nearly a fifth of white South Africans have emigrated since the political transition in 1994; the white proportion of the population is now almost half what it was then. With them went a significant slice of current and future high-level skills. Emigration rates among the talented and hugely entrepreneurial Indian-descended community is reaching similar proportions, limited only by their sense of family duty. This exodus is comparable to the rates of migration from Ireland in the mid-19th century, Italy in the early 20th-century and Syria during the civil war.

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Collapsed state educational and training institutions cannot feed demand quickly enough with young black replacements. The coy phrase “capacity crisis” runs through all state justifications for its universal institutional failures, yet it is a self-induced crisis caused by the systemic discrimination against whites and latterly Indians — many of whom were not even born during apartheid — in access to state jobs, tenders and bursaries, and in the preferential employment policies forced on the private sector. In the place of the departing whites have come an estimated 3 million migrants and economic refugees from the rest of Africa, sparking xenophobic outbreaks from black South Africans and the recent panicky withdrawal by the government of 834,000 temporary work permits for Zimbabweans, who have traditionally done the menial and artisan work black South Africans prefer not to do.

The impact on the tax base is visible. Only 12.3% of South Africans pay income tax, and this figure is diminishing. Meanwhile 47% of all South Africans draw state grants, rising to 62% of the black population, and this is growing. Unemployment is at an all-time high of 32.9%. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) predicts a growth rate of 0.1% for this year, far below that of African peers. We don’t need Yeats to grasp that the centre cannot hold.

That reality was abruptly reinforced last week by the IMF’s annual Article IV Report on South Africa, which warned that the country urgently needed to get its financial house in order lest its current “moderate” risk of sovereign distress deteriorates. The warning coincided with historically low rates for the rand and the first signs that the government may not be able to find enough local buyers for the bonds, which foreign holders spooked by the ANC’s inexplicable policies have been dumping since 2019. Retailers speak openly of bread riots. The Arab Spring is invoked.

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The response of President Cyril Ramaphosa has been typical: an emergency meeting last week with South Africa’s captains of industry to hammer out a new contract of mutual support. This time, the ANC ostensibly accepted the long-standing offers of the private sector to provide high-level administrators for state functions: perhaps an admission by the government of its abject inability to govern; perhaps just a ploy with an eye to next year’s elections.

Few here have any confidence it will make a difference: the last man drafted from the corporate world, in this case to head up the national power utility, gave his notice in December last year after a failed poisoning attempt on his life. He was then summarily dismissed when he publicly alleged high-level collusion between senior ANC figures and criminal cartels leeching the entity. Many ask why Big Business has not demanded an end to the government’s reckless economic redistributive policies as a price for cooperation, but then since the Act of Union in 1910, it has always rolled over for its tummy to be rubbed by the politicians. The cash registers must ring.

The situation is now dire. South Africa’s postal services, rated worse than Nigeria’s by the Universal Postal Union, is about to file for bankruptcy. The ports are rated in the bottom 10 out of the 370 facilities listed on the Container Port Performance Index. The national electricity supplier is technically bankrupt after years of plundering, racial preferment in jobs and tenders, and sabotage. Power outages of 12 hours a day are common. This week it was confirmed that impoverished Mozambique, languishing towards the bottom of the UN Human Development Index (HDI), would be asked to supply power to South Africa, once the most successful economy in Africa.

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Every financial metric has weakened under Ramaphosa’s tenure, which is ironic when one considers it was the business community that bankrolled his presidential ambitions in 2017 on the promise he would cleanse the ruling party, create a reformist alliance, and put the country back onto the path of modernity. Pity his backers did not insist on money-back guarantees. The betrayal of the promise of the democratic transition in 1994 is complete, the humiliation absolute.

It is not surprising, then, that the ANC government, bust, broke and bereft of old allies, has turned to new friends who can be relied on not to raise inconvenient questions about governance or human rights or competitiveness: Russia and China. South Africa has refused to condemn Russia for its invasion of Ukraine. Indeed, its navy took part in joint operations with China and Russia in February this year. More intriguingly, in December last year, an embargoed Russian ship, the Lady R, secretly loaded a consignment of munitions from the Simonstown naval shipyard, according to a public accusation made on 12 May by Reuben Brigety, US Ambassador to South Africa. Subsequent reports suggest the cargo may have been bound not for Russia, but for the Russian-Wagner-supported Rapid Support Forces fighting a civil war in Sudan for the reinstatement of their old boss and the ANC’s friend, Omar al Bashir. The deposed president, now imprisoned for corruption, is wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for alleged human rights violations in Darfur Province during his tenure. Typically, President Ramaphosa, nicknamed here “Cyril The Silent”, smartly shuffled the issue into a secret Commission of Inquiry whose findings, he assures, will not be made public.

What is not in dispute, however, is that Russian oligarchs close to President Vladimir Putin, some on the US embargo list, are now the main financial backers of the perennially bankrupt ANC. Nor is it contested that a mysterious cache of dollar notes stolen from a sofa inside Ramaphosa’s private game lodge two years ago originated from a Sudanese businessman, Hazim Mustafa, identified by Sudanese media in 2017 as once being close to, yes, Omar al Bashir.

This diplomatic shift has not been a considered strategic response. Like all ANC initiatives, it is a survivalist cringe in the face of a self-induced crisis: panicked, clumsy, shortsighted, self-serving, and harmful. Inevitably, it ends in farce or tragedy as has happened with South Africa’s turn to host Brazil, Russia, China, and India at the BRICS summit in August. The event, which Ramaphosa wanted to make a jamboree of for his new best friends, has turned into a Ruth Rendell-type nightmare in which the host might technically be expected to arrest a main guest, Putin, on a warrant issued by the ICC of which South Africa is a member (but not Russia or China).

South Africa faced the same dilemma in June 2015, when the ubiquitous al Bashir attended an African Union meeting in Durban as Sudanese President while confronted by an ICC arrest warrant. A South African court ordered that he be detained pending clarification as to whether he be handed over to the ICC, but the South African government let him walk away with no more than a tut-tut from the liberal press and opposition.

Now, however, the stakes are far higher, with a vastly displeased United States watching closely. In a typical piece of diversionary fandango, President Ramaphosa has rustled up four other African Heads of State for a lightening “peace mission” to Moscow and Kyiv next week. The summit may move to China or go virtual or be held in South Africa with an immune Putin in attendance, in which case the US will certainly exclude South Africa from the benefits of the Africa Growth Opportunity Act (AGOA), which gives South African exporters, primarily agricultural, a free ride into US markets. Indeed, a bipartisan group of Congressmen have asked Washington to boot South Arica now. One of the country’s top banks, meanwhile, has warned that the government is imperilling up to R32 billion in foreign trade because of its dalliance with Russia. Whatever the outcome, it will either lead to national humiliation or to further economic devastation.

Is there a way out of this nightmare of serially dashed hopes? General elections are to be held next year. The ANC’s share of registered voters has dropped from its high of 58% in 1999 to 37% in 2019. If no more than one in five ANC voters chooses to go to the shebeen rather than the polls next year, party support will drop 31%. Even in coalition with its natural ally, the nativist Economic Freedom Front (EFF), an organisation with, if possible, a more elevated sense of entitlement than even the ANC, it leaves a pool of between 55% and 59% of registered voters to build a possible winning reformist and modernist coalition from four of the main liberal and conservative opposition parties. That is if they too do not engage in what Schreiner diagnosed as a “lifeless striving for gain for themselves” and if, crucially, a defeated ANC complies with the last great rule of democracy: go when you are licked. The record is not encouraging.

This week, Blum spoke to me about his fight for legal justice, his enduring faith in colour-blindness, and the importance of family values and “tiger moms” in educational success. Below is an edited transcript of our conversation.

Freddie Sayers: When it comes to your lawsuits against racial affirmative action in education, is there one that is likely to dominate at the US Supreme Court in the coming months?  

Edward Blum: There are two cases pending. “Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard”, and a similar case, “Students for Fair Admissions v. the University of North Carolina”. Students for Fair Admissions is a membership organisation that I founded in 2014. We sued Harvard and the University of North Carolina, arguing that their admissions policies violate the current laws regarding race and ethnicity in college admissions. But more importantly, we argued before the court that allowing race and ethnicity to be a factor at all in college admissions violates the Supreme Court jurisprudence, going back years and year, as well as the US Constitution.

FS: Can you explain how affirmative action is affecting admissions to American universities?

EB: The United States law today, as interpreted about 20 years ago by the Supreme Court, allows colleges and universities to put a thumb on the scale — that is, to rig an outcome — based upon a student’s race or ethnicity. In the case of Harvard and other elite universities, that thumb on the scale is now diminishing the opportunity of Asian Americans to be admitted, while boosting that of African Americans, Hispanics and whites. This is not only going on at Harvard, but at Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and dozens of other competitive colleges.

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FS: So what you’re saying is that this form of affirmative action actually helps white people? 

EB: It does.

FS: How does that work?

EB: Let me give you an example that we presented in court. Take a typical Asian-American, male applicant to Harvard and assume his grades and test scores give him a 25% likelihood of being admitted. Now change the race of that applicant to white and the likelihood that that white student will be admitted goes up to 36%. If you change their race to Hispanic, the likelihood jumps to 75%. And if you change their race to African American, that student now has a 95% chance of being admitted to Harvard. This is not a light thumb on the scales. This is a dispositive policy that prohibits better-qualified Asian Americans from being admitted.

FS: Is it a sense of unfairness towards the Asian American community that drives you? Or is it a defence of meritocracy from first principles?

EB: There isn’t a simple answer. I think what drives me, and what drives this movement, is the belief that America was born with a terrible scar on its history. And that is the history of slavery that then evolved into a history of Jim Crow racism against African Americans. What came out of that, what was bitterly fought for on the battlefields and in the courthouses of America, is the belief that your race and ethnicity should not be used to help or to harm you in any of your life’s endeavours: whether you’re applying for a job, or to college or medical school. So that’s what drives me and that’s what drives, frankly, the vast majority of Americans, who — when polled about the use of race and ethnicity in college admissions, or employment, or in other areas — believe that race shouldn’t be a part of these decisions.

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FS: This reminds me of the famous Martin Luther King quote about being judged on the content of your character, not by the colour of your skin. And yet, the phrase “colourblind” has become controversial in recent years. Do you use it?

EB: I do, just as the founders of the modern Civil Rights Movement did. There are, I think, a small minority of Americans who, in good faith, see colour-blindness as a reversion to white supremacy. However, in poll after poll, going back 30 years, Americans celebrate the idea of colour-blindness. They don’t want their race to be used as an element in whether they’re hired or fired, or whether the police pull them over, or whether they’re selected for jury duty. Americans embrace colour-blindness — and it’s not just white Americans, it’s a vast majority of Hispanics, African Americans, and Asians.

FS: What would the future look like if the Supreme Court revokes affirmative action? The most recent Harvard diversity statistics say that African-American students make up 15.2% of the student population, Asian-American 27.9%, Hispanic or Latino 12.6%, Native American 2.9%, and Native Hawaiian 0.8%. Judging by these figures, I guess it means that roughly half would be white. How would that change if you win the ruling?

EB: We did a study for the courts back in 2018, and the premise was, if Harvard only uses grade point averages and standardised test scores as a metric for admissions, it’s likely that Asian Americans will make up about 50% of the incoming freshman class. The number of Hispanics will go up slightly, while the number of Whites and African Americans will go down slightly.

FS: How far down would they go?

EB: African Americans would drop to about 10% of the incoming freshman class, down from 15% now. And, if I’m not mistaken, I think whites came in at around 30%, with Hispanics about 10% — maybe a little bit more.

I believe Harvard will be compelled to change the entire framework of its admissions policy. Right now, there is a significant boost given to students whose parents also attended Harvard — the legacy status. That may change dramatically. The “tips” [leg up] given to certain athletes or those who play water polo or fencing, that may be changed. And more importantly, Harvard may start to lower the bar a little for students who have come from very modest, or even disadvantaged backgrounds, who are the first in their family to attend college, who are raised by a single parent, whose family income falls below a certain level.

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FS: Would you approve of that?

EB: We absolutely would. We’ve advocated for this at the Supreme Court. It is an important element of our argument.

FS: So you’re not entirely opposed to affirmative action? You’re only against it on racial grounds. If it gives preference to students based on social economic group or education, you’re all for it?

EB: That’s perfectly said. This organisation is against race-based affirmative action. However, we encourage Harvard and other universities to use socio-economic affirmative action. They should be trying to attract a truly diverse group of individuals, not just in terms of skin colour, but in terms of their backgrounds.

FS: My gut feeling would be that a lot of conservatives would make a libertarian objection — that these are private institutions, and that they should not be told by the state who they can and can’t admit. What do you say to those people?

EB: We have a solution to those objections, and that is that Harvard can forego receiving federal funds. There are a handful of colleges and universities in the United States that have done exactly that; Hillsdale College is probably the best known. If Harvard chooses to not accept federal funds, then they can shape the class in any way they would like.

FS: How would you respond to the Left-wing critique that, unless you force institutions to accept a certain quota of minority people, they will simply go back to prioritising their preferred groups?

EB: I think they’re wrong for two reasons. For one thing, it assumes that the academic gaps between African Americans, Hispanics, whites, and Asians are intractable; that there is no way, based upon the history of the United States, that they will ever narrow. That’s just not correct. It assumes that there is somehow a system in place that prevents this. Asian Americans are outperforming whites academically, despite having fewer resources, less family wealth, and lower income levels.

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FS: The cliché goes that Asian Americans have “tiger moms” who make them do their homework and take academics seriously — and that’s why they are so high-achieving. Is that a fair observation? 

EB: Well, coming from a Jewish background myself, I had a Jewish tiger mom who didn’t let me hang out at the basketball court with my buddies after school or drive around and see girls. We had to study and we had to achieve. The most important educational institution in the United States, and I think, perhaps in the UK as well, is the family. Learning begins at the cradle, and parents within the Asian community realise that. That’s something which can be replicated among whites, Hispanics and African Americans as well.

FS: So rather than implementing defeatist university quotas, society should be getting to the root of the issue by helping and encouraging parents to improve early life education? 

EB: That’s an incredibly important part of the argument, but there is something else that is deeply troubling about race-based affirmative action. That is, in universities that lower the bar for African Americans and Hispanics, we often see students either dropping out because their academic backgrounds are not sufficient to compete, or switching to less competitive courses. This means that students who hope to become doctors, engineers or computer scientists end up graduating with degrees in the humanities or social sciences, which wouldn’t have happened had they gone to a college where their qualifications were better matched. That’s another important element that I think will change.

FS: There’s a practical argument there, that students would reach a better place later in life if they weren’t artificially pushed into places that maybe didn’t suit them.

EB: That’s exactly right, and there’s data and studies to endorse that. Plus, there’s one other element here. We’ve heard it, and we can read it, and we’ve seen it a million times: minority kids on competitive campuses are told that the only reason that they are there is because they are a certain race, not because they were academically qualified. So those kids who truly were academically qualified feel like: “Because the bar is lowered for all African Americans, even though I scored as well as any Asian on this campus, people think I’m here because I’m black.” That’s a terrible burden, too.

FS: Now, I’m not going to try and do a “gotcha”, Mr. Blum, but I do feel like the last couple of arguments would equally apply to affirmative action for people who come from a more deprived background or have had fewer education opportunities — they too would arrive at the college without the necessary preparation and may have to drop out. How is that any different?

EB: That is very true. You may notice that I said “Lower the bar a little bit”. You cannot lower the bar dramatically for kids from disadvantaged backgrounds, just as you cannot lower the bar for kids from ethnic or racial backgrounds. Kids who come from disadvantaged backgrounds don’t walk around campus with signs saying “Family below poverty level”, or “I’m the first in my family to go to college”. You won’t know that just looking at kids from those backgrounds. They may have disclosed it to their friends and others, but you won’t know it.

FS: So there’s less stigma, but is it not similarly defeatist? It puts the onus on these institutions, while, actually, as a society, we need to do better in terms of helping families to look after — and not give up on — their kids. 

EB: Trillions of dollars in this country have been spent trying to narrow the gaps in educational attainment between African Americans and Hispanics on the one hand, and whites and Asians on the other. And it has been only modestly successful. We can spend more money, but I think the bulk of the solution is within the family.

And could resources be put there? Sure, but it’s really up to moms and dads to do this. I have been to the homes of Asian students — one-bedroom, very modest apartments in Queens, New York, where mom is a maid at a Midtown hotel and dad is a doorman at an apartment building on the Upper East Side. They have the bedroom, their two children sleep in the living room. Very modest backgrounds. How is it that these kids have done so well in school? Because mom and dad were there and encouraged them. They put their own limited resources into their education. So that’s what needs to be done more than just about anything else.

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FS: So there needs to be some uncomfortable home truths spoken to some of these other communities that are underperforming, saying: “Look, we need you to focus on family life and pay proper attention to education.” Do these communities need to take responsibility for the outcomes?

EB: That’s right.

FS: If your case is successful, do you think it will have ramifications beyond the sphere of higher education?

EB: My great hope is that the opinion that comes out of these two Supreme Court cases provides the US with a legal doctrine that can be applied with regards to employment, to fellowships and scholarships, to voting and contracting issues, and that this doctrine will be the beginning of the restoration of the great colourblind covenant that has held together this country through very difficult periods of history. That’s my hope: that the justices give us something that not only applies to higher education, but also to other, very important areas of American life.

According to liberal conventional wisdom, we are in a post-industrial, post-imperial society where shouty (white) men can no longer trumpet their entitled assumptions unchallenged, and perhaps even have to stand in line. Well, if that’s truly the case, thank fuck for it. After all, imperialism and the patriarchy cost a lot of lives, and gave us wars, bad politics and bad art. And nothing’s changed.

Ironically, however, most of those lives lost in Western society were male, white and working-class; basically, those citizens assumed by the paradigm of class-denying intersectionality to be the enemy of progress. White working-class males are now recast as the establishment’s salivating attack dogs; the overseers of imperialism, enforcing the bidding of their wealthier masters. Their role in securing most of our human rights — through workplace struggle in the trade unions, strikes, demonstrations, wars and riots — is to be erased from our collective consciousness.

Because some sections of the white working class bought into the reductive neoliberalism of unrestrained capitalism through the Thatcher-Reagan revolution, so the entire group was written off. In the “hierarchy of the oppressed” so beloved of intersectional theory, a (white) penis in the underpants is more important than the lack of an arse in the trousers in determining your place in the world.

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So, what excludes white working-class men from this LGBT intersectional paradigm? It can’t be race, as white women are permitted. It can’t be class, as working-class women and black men are allowed in. It can’t even be sex/gender, as gay or bisexual white working-class men and women are included. But perversely, white proletarian men are lumped in with their bourgeois “brethren”; outsiders in this rainbow-coloured festival of the oppressed.

In this bizarre schematic model, working-class football supporters in Liverpool are deemed on the same side as rabid establishment mouthpieces such as The Sun’s Kelvin McKenzie, who demonised, vilified and lied about them. Conversely, black teenagers in inner London estates, continually the victims of harassment by the Metropolitan Police and at the bottom of Britain’s opportunity pile, are ludicrously deigned to have common cause with the privately-educated colonial elites placed strategically in the media and commerce through “equal opportunity” positive discrimination schemes. There’s something about the bourgeois psyche that produces a visceral reaction to that deadly combination of working-class, white and straight — irrespective of the actual views and life experiences of someone in that grouping.

The decline of class politics and its replacement by the schisms of identity is an integral part of the neoliberal order. After all, one unites and the other divides. The class war was won by the elite in Britain, probably as far back as Orgreave in the 1984 miners’ strike, when organised labour was crushed. Today, capital rules supreme, steadfastly tightening its hold, aided by a rapacious individualism that has now tipped into a demented narcissism, and a technology concentrated in the hands of corporations and its co-opted governments.

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Therefore, in the realms of finance and economics, nothing is now contestable, unless it’s national elites using their power (and manipulating the populace) to try to gain more traction and influence at the expense of the interrelated global ones. What is presented to us as politics is a hollow civil war of the super wealthy, with the rest of us as pawns. Silver-spooned, daddy-issue Republicans, like Trump and his ilk, have long presented as comic-book versions of the most vulgar, dumbass versions of redneck USA. This is now Right-wing de rigueur, enabling exploiters to “connect” with a politically and socially displaced white America, which embraces grievance and victimhood as eagerly as any grouping that claims to be oppressed. This folksy affectation is only partly strategic: late capitalism has stupefied its winners as much as its losers. Hollywood has recycled the potty mouth of the ghetto into the boardroom, where the same tropes are now regurgitated in a decontextualised way, with defiant alienation replaced by entitled arrogance, under the depoliticised posturing of “attitude”.

Meanwhile, digital technology and its deployment solely for private profit through capital accumulation has fucked all our attention spans, and our sense of the past, as completely as George Orwell suggested. (Indeed, there’s little point in saying that: the ubiquity of Orwell as just another internet cliché has completely nullified the power of his message.)

In Britain, I believe that the traditional working man — of all colours — has had a bad rap. Recently, I was out with some old pals, and we were talking about how we’ve stayed close friends down the years, despite life, love and work taking us off in varying directions. One friend went on at length about how his partner and her friends were quite surprised at the continuing bond between us all. It’s a recurrent theme with women I know, who ask, perhaps not unjustly: how can you still be bothered with each other?

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Men, whose camaraderie can seem frivolous, built on drinking, football and laughing at each other’s embarrassments, paradoxically tend to stick together down the years more than women, who talk of weightier, more emotional subjects. Several years ago, following a relationship breakdown scenario, I went through a phase where I felt like I was done with male company. I decided I could do without the gung-ho nature of the archetypal male response to such events: “Forget her. They’re all the same. Get another round up. I’ve left a line out for you in the toilets.” As a result, I basically surrounded myself with my women friends. Not for the first time, they were the ones offering real support and genuine insight into my predicament.

Then you realise: it’s not about thesis and antithesis. There’s always got to be room for a synthesis of different ideas and values. Once more, I’m appreciating the narrow, lazy affirmation that belonging to a mob of men can offer. The best thing about being a man of my generation is that we’re allowed to get the fuck out of the house. Now I feel for youth who don’t do this so much — they really don’t know what they are missing. When they do, the experience is invariably packaged for them. The biggest indictment you can offer our current dystopia is that we’ve created a society where the old pity the young. That’s just not right.

Masculinity (as well as femininity) is tied to our lost sense of community. As pubs and clubs close down across the country, teenagers are more likely to spend their evenings on Instagram, TikTok, playing video games or on some dubious porn forums than getting drink from the offie and messing around in the park or on abandoned railway lines. A social vacuum has been created at the same time as a dumbed-down visceral communication system has emerged. This creates a place where someone as pathetic as Andrew Tate can gain a limited sphere of influence. The emergence of such characters would have been impossible in the Nineties. They would have been dismissed as ludicrous wankers in a truly contested, democratic street culture, as opposed to the top-down media one we now live in. Now a noncey, supermarket transgression has gained a foothold, appealing to an entire lost generation of anxious, isolated teenage bedroom wankers, brimming with the sleazy narratives of onscreen porn.

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The narcissistic fall of France

By Michel Houellebecq

While young people are being stripped of their right to be completely irresponsible — i.e. young — those of us who spent a whole chunk of our change in the last century are often unprepared to let go of our unruly youth, still investing in bad behaviour and the institutions believed to encourage it; the pub, the gig, the nightclub, the rave, the football ground and the traditional workplace. I personally thank the higher powers for those declining bastions.

In their growing absence, the neoliberal state has gutted everyone’s lives of meaning — to the extent that we have little to cling to other than a narcissistic, media-constructed sense of who we are and our supposed entitlement to avoid personal discomfort at all costs. Thus, through toxic social media platforms, proponents of various identities get to sling all sorts of mud at each other, devoid of any social setting and real human interaction. Generally, it’s an inconsequential battle, in which people are afforded the keyboard warrior’s licence — rewarded by the dopamine hits — to abuse each other with relative impunity. The objective of the game is to goad the other party into an overreach and a subsequent pile-on, with an attendant Twitter ban or, the great weapon of our times, “cancellation”. Generally, however, in those futile wars, no party claims a feasible victory. Nonetheless, the participants are rarely shy of pompously deploying tiresome, overdramatic dictums declaring their cause or viewpoint to be “on the right side of history”.

This nonsense benefits only the continuation of the current bankrupt system. The establishment’s economic, financial and social elites once starved people into compliance; now it lures them into pointless shouting matches, allowing them to stupefy themselves in the process.

So, white men aren’t the only ones rendered toxic by our culture. Every group and demographic, as evidenced by its social media extremists, are fundamentally unhappy with their lot and in existential crisis about who they are in this changing world. Part of this is the old science of consumer capitalism: keep us feeling bad about ourselves and then give us a product or service or procedure that will make us centred, complete or alive. Ignore the fact that we’re strutting around in a zoo we’ve made for ourselves. Whatever we consume or change or alter, we remain polar bears in the same concrete enclosure, pacing up and down.

The toxicity of white rich men is more consequential than that of the rest of us, which is largely an acting out, a cry for attention. After all, they are seen to have the power to change all this. Only they don’t. The consciousness-crushing machine they’ve helped create and service brings them no substantive life benefit anymore. Can a man with £400 million in the bank really be poorer than one with £500 million? How many lives do you need to live to spend that? It’s the accumulation of meaninglessness; the buying of some kind of dominance and largely imagined status over peers. Checking figures from the spreadsheets on their screens. Seeing how efficient a capitalism no longer tied to production is in taking the resources of communities, monetising it, and transferring it to their accounts. Basically, wasting their lives away in that most futile of pursuits: making non-spendable money, while the years tick by, and dreams of love and laughter are replaced by a rancid resentment and urge to satisfy the ego-driven need for “influence”.

The continuing war of capital upon consciousness, on what makes us human, continues apace. In an economy that can produce everything at zero cost, the wealthy are coming to the end of their ability to control us by paying wages. Now, this can only be done through the steady erosion of human consciousness. AI is a backstop here, just in case our spirits rebel in reaction to this, and we cut up too rough. After all, a robot or a computer doesn’t need food. And crucially, it’s not changed by anyone looking at it. It is not self-conscious. But if the system can’t make robots quickly enough to replace us, it’ll try to make us all into robots.

“We’re not allowed to say that” is the factory bleat that resonates throughout social media from all we older, toxic, white working-class males. How excited we get on our dopamine hits, when some papier-mâché faced ponce seems to stick it to the poker-arsed gatekeepers of neoliberal morality with a racist or sexist quip — while they (quietly) endorse an economic system of gross inequity that now almost literally defecates on us. Our participation in “politics” is reduced to watching a Frank Drebin from Police Squad/The Naked Gun look-and-soundalike clownishly annoy some uptight disapprover.

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Britain needs a cigarette

By David Hockney

What we certainly are allowed to do, is to be nostalgic. The system plays on our need to make sense of our existence by processing our past, but only in a way that all conflict is taken out of it. Thus, our need to validate our lives in a fake “golden age” haze becomes a de facto endorsement of a system that has limited the potential of those lives. It encourages us to sit around crying into our beer about how things ain’t what they used to be, reconstructing a collective rose-tinted past designed to sustain us in our dotage, while ensuring this state creeps ever closer as mindless aphorisms — ubiquitous, circular — rot our brains.

Fuck that. Pick up a book instead. Let’s get educated. The smarter we are, the less easy it is for the unenlightened greed junkies to fuck things up for us. The world is changing, let’s change with it, but in ways which make sense to us, not to the blueprint of white-collar fascist controllers or soulless tech nerds who need to get properly laid. (They are the ones who’ve swamped our brains and culture with the shabby dictates of their crass dating algorithms.) If I could make one solitary plea to white working-class men: do not be servile to the upper classes. They are not your amigos. They blithely dispatched your forefathers to the killing fields, and they haven’t gained any greater appreciation or respect for you since. In broader terms, Trump-Biden 2 or 3 or 4 will not do anything for the citizens of this world that the first one didn’t. Probably much less. Toxic masculinity is just that, because it exists within a toxic system.

I knew that the will to dominate did not exist only in whites: I saw Nigerians lording it over other Nigerians. So I understood why racial domination was practised — but not what made it possible. Or why, despite the grim facts of history, Africans (and the world in general) accorded white people more status than others.

For going on five centuries now, we’ve been living in a world that generally positions whites at the top, blacks at the bottom, and others somewhere in between. The story about how such an order came about is familiar, incorporating the transatlantic slave trade, colonialism and white supremacist ideas. But what is sustaining this order today, despite consensus that racial hierarchies are morally unacceptable? Any behavioural pattern that persists while being at odds with popular opinion must be driven by something very powerful indeed.

I believe that the chief shaper of racial group dynamics today is money. And it’s a case I make in my book It’s Not About Whiteness, It’s About Wealth. It is not the only thing that matters but it is the thing that matters most in a capitalist world. Thomas Piketty has traced how the distribution of wealth determines the distribution of power. It is not merely about the raw purchasing power of money; it is also about the meaning people attach to wealth and the qualities they attribute to those who have it and those who don’t. Money, and our understanding of it, shapes racial group dynamics in everything from immigration, technology and media to stereotypes, prestige and geopolitics.

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Antiracism is too middle-class

By Remi Adekoya

Single European states, including Britain and Germany, have larger economies than the entire continent of Africa, home to 1.4 billion people and roughly 90% of the world’s black population. And even the most diverse European countries still have large white majorities — Britain’s, for instance, is 82% — meaning there is a strong correlation between national and racial wealth. Sweden, a country of 10 million people, generates a larger GDP than Nigeria, the largest black nation, with over 200 million inhabitants. Tiny Ireland, with its five million citizens, has a GDP of $520 billion, compared with the $411 billion of South Africa, the most industrialised black-majority nation, which has a population of 60 million.

The economic gulf is not just between black and white-majority countries, of course. Norway’s five-million-strong economy boasts a GDP of $505 billion, compared with the $461 billion of Bangladesh, home to 170 million people.

Meanwhile, the “best” passports are those from rich nations, irrespective of their nationals’ skin colour. In 2022, for instance, a United Arab Emirates passport was ranked the most powerful in the world, enabling you visa-free or visa-on-arrival travel to 176 countries. However, as most rich nations are white-majority, we live in a world in which white people get to gate-keep the world’s best living situations, but can usually travel wherever they want at the drop of a hat. You can travel to 173 countries hassle-free if you have a German, French or South Korean passport, and 171 if you have a British or Japanese one. But if you hold a Nigerian passport, you must get a visa to travel to 145 countries; if you hold a Pakistani passport, you need one to enter 154 countries.

The correlation between race and wealth is also why Western academia, the world that I inhabit, dominates global academia. Harvard University has more in its endowment fund than the Nigerian state has in foreign reserves. The total education budget of Nigeria in 2021 amounted to the equivalent of £1.2 billion; the wealthiest British universities, such as Oxford and Cambridge, have annual budgets exceeding £2 billion. This cash funds world-class research and attracts the very best scholarly talent: how are poorer universities supposed to compete?

Because of their credibility and prestige, Western universities attract most of the over five million students who study abroad each year. There are over 600,000 foreign students in Britain — the most popular destination after America for international study — who usually pay at least £20,000 per year in tuition fees alone. This makes UK universities ever wealthier, ever more capable of financing world-class research and ever more attractive to global scholarly talent. It is hardly surprising, then, that Western academia is at the heart of global knowledge production today. “Decolonising” the curriculum by adding some more black and brown authors to reading lists won’t change that. In fact, it might just attract even more foreign students to the UK, and entrench the domination of Western academia. How does that further racial equality?

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The narcissism of America's race politics

By Tomiwa Owolade

Wealth brings entire countries prestige, not just universities. It means whites and successful East Asians (such as the Japanese) are often stereotyped as competent, while black and brown people, associated with unsuccessful nations, are stereotyped as less competent. Wealth gives mid-sized European nations more influence in the corridors of international institutions like the UN than black or brown nations with several times their population. It is why the Western media has global influence, while the media of black-majority nations crosses few borders.

The racial order is an international order. But the UK race debate is that it tends to ignore this reality in favour of a parochial Anglo-American lens, which arrogantly assumes the race issue can be resolved in Britain and America — where only 3% of the world’s black population resides. A proportion that will only shrink as Africa’s population is set to double to 2.5 billion by 2050. Demographic realities mean it is global-scale dynamics that will shape the future of race relations, not their manifestations in particular Western societies.

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Race was invented by liberals

By Sohrab Ahmari

I am hardly the first person to realise that money matters. Many Brits would readily acknowledge this, but most Westerners of all skin colours do not grasp just how important wealth is when it comes to racial inequality because of their attitude to money. Western nations are affluent societies with generous welfare systems; people can afford to be less aspirational. A 2021 survey of Americans, Brits, Germans, Swedes, Italians, Spaniards and the French showed an average 28% of people in these nations consider it “important” for them personally to become rich. Brits placed the lowest value on wealth with only 19% saying it was important to them. Contrary to pop-culture portrayals of Americans as uber-materialists, only 30% prioritise wealth.

The same survey conducted among the Japanese, Chinese, South Koreans and Vietnamese showed an average of 58% consider it important to become rich, making them twice as likely as Westerners to prioritise money. Even the Asian nations that have been wealthy for decades now are more money-focused than Westerners — in Japan, 43% say it is important for them to become rich, while in Vietnam, the figure is an enormous 76% — and the same pattern is evident in Africa, the Middle East and South America. The status hierarchies people establish in their heads are built around the dimensions they consider most important to their everyday lives. Most people around the world consider wealth to be the most relevant indicator of status. And the race conflict today is, at heart, a conflict over group status.

Too many on the Right today deny the persistence of a racial hierarchy. Too many on the Left believe it can be lectured out of existence. But debating the details of colonialism, slavery and Western imperialism won’t change the status quo and its consequences for the everyday lives of people of colour. Not if money remains on the margins of the race debate.

The interview went viral in 2012. And the final line, shortly after it was uttered, became culturally ubiquitous, particularly on social media where it proliferated as a reaction GIF — it was also, crucially, the subject of a fierce debate about whether its popularity was racist. Did we love Sweet Brown for her story and her screen presence, or was it because she was a walking, talking stereotype of the archetypal sassy black woman?

That debate has waxed, waned and evolved over the years, but the one thing it stubbornly refuses to do is die. Five years after Sweet Brown’s original interview, it was given new weight with the coining of a phrase. In a Teen Vogue essay, Lauren Michele Jackson described the act of non-black people using reaction GIFs featuring black Americans as “digital blackface”. And so, a trend was born: The New York Times weighed in, followed by The Guardian, followed by the mommy bloggers and the service journalists. Just when it seemed like the internet had squeezed the concept dry, it returned again, last weekend, in the form of a clickbaity banner on the front page of CNN: “What’s ‘digital blackface’? And why is it wrong when White people use it?”

For those who remember this argument in its original iteration, the immediate reaction is probably best encapsulated by a meme from the pre-social internet — not one of the ones that allegedly constitutes digital blackface, but the one from Mean Girls, in which an enraged Regina George hisses: “Stop trying to make ‘fetch’ happen! It’s not going to happen!” We do not need to do this again. This argument was transparent, racebaiting, outrage fodder even when it was new; now, it is all of that and tired.

If anything, the notion that, as CNN’s John Blake insists, employing reaction GIFs featuring black people represents “one of the most insidious forms of contemporary racism” is illustrative of just how badly the discourse is foundering in the wake of the massive racial reckoning sparked by the murder of George Floyd. All that momentum, all that money, all those marches and protests and pleas for real change end up being squandered again and again on luxury beliefs: galaxy-brained takes that circulate like wildfire among members of the coastal media class while being utterly bewildering to any normal person. The absurdity of Blake’s argument seems obvious even for those who think America is a long way from being a post-racial paradise. This is a country where black citizens remain underrepresented in key positions of power, and disproportionately suffer from poverty and violence. How terminally online must one be to think that the “most insidious” form of racism comes in the form of some 60-year-old Facebook grandma in Des Moines who feels that her emotions are best represented by a GIF of Stanley from The Office rolling his eyes?

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The narcissism of America's race politics

By Tomiwa Owolade

But then, one gets the sense that no one does think this. Not even the people who are earning a living — or at least, a few hundred freelance dollars a pop — by arguing as much. Every writer who tackles this topic has dutifully attempted to connect the mimetic phenomenon of reaction GIFs to the atrocious (and happily defunct) practice of minstrel shows featuring performers in actual blackface. But given the integrated state of contemporary society, and the substantive difference between posting a video of a black cultural icon and doing a mocking impression of one yourself, that’s a tough argument to sell.

Often, those recycling it don’t even seem to be trying. Women’s Health claims that using the wrong reaction GIFs isn’t just upstream from minstrelsy, but also from murder: “[As] it has been proven throughout U.S. history, a Black man can be killed for demonstrating aggression, confusion, or even indifference. Popular GIFs of Kanye West looking serious, Nick Young with question marks around his face, and others, show Black men expressing themselves which, while technically be harmless [sic], can oftentimes be fatal.”

This isn’t just unpersuasive; it’s practically incoherent. Does anyone believe this argument? Does anyone even believe that the writer believed it? The whole enterprise feels so convictionless, more like a simulation of an opinion than the real thing.

If anything, the concept of “digital blackface” reads like an attempt to meme more racism into existence by claiming that it’s already everywhere. Like the too-credulous coverage of outrageous hate crimes that turn out to be hoaxes, stories about the hidden racism of reaction GIFs suggest the need for constant vigilance, which in turn fuels perpetual mistrust. The overarching narrative, as I wrote last year, is one of a deep and roiling river of racial conflict running beneath the surface of American society. The moral of the story is that we can only ever relate to each other through the lens of power, privilege, resentment, and loathing — that, as Robin DiAngelo instructs, there can be no question of racism’s presence in any given interaction, only of how the racism manifests.

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Is it racist to like big butts?

By Kat Rosenfield

It’s a pessimistic and profoundly superstitious mode of thinking — racism, the devil lurking in every room — and one that has spawned a particularly fervent adherence among millennial white women, for whom self-help and self-hatred have always been inextricably intertwined. Blake’s essay quotes a young woman named Elizabeth Halford who narrates her use of reaction GIFs with the ecstasy of the confessing sinner: “I’ve appropriated Black trauma as punchlines and peeled their faces off to put on my own and say what I can’t say, to make you laugh, or just because it went viral.”

It’s hard to imagine who or what is served by this confession, apart from Halford’s masochism. It is also hard to imagine that any GIF could represent a greater affront to black people than the idea that selecting said GIF is akin to peeling their faces off.

But more discouraging than the pessimism (and bizarre Hannibal Lecter comparisons) inherent to this worldview is its racism — and not the insidious, subtle kind. The original Teen Vogue essay introducing the concept of digital blackface bemoaned that “black reaction GIFs have become so widespread that they’ve practically become synonymous with just reaction GIFs”, as if the ubiquitous presence of black people in American culture is a bad thing.

Blake’s CNN piece calls out specific, seminal memes: an outraged Tyra Banks on America’s Next Top Model shouting, “I was rooting for you! We were all rooting for you!”, or Michael Jordan crying at his induction into the Basketball Hall of Fame. Maybe these are “black reaction GIFs”, in that they are reaction GIFs featuring black people. But surely what they capture is something bigger. These are American celebrities. This is American culture.

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Race was invented by liberals

By Sohrab Ahmari

But lately, an impulse has found a regrettable level of validation in American media, academia, and cultural institutions — an impulse to fracture and resegregate society along racial lines. American colleges hold exclusive, separate graduation ceremonies that segregate students by racial background. Lizzo, a multiple Grammy winner and one of the most famous musicians in the country, is forced to defend herself against allegations that her music is too popular among white people. An influencer goes viral for urging white moviegoers to stay away from the new Black Panther movie. Media institutions fret over race-matching the authors of book, theatre, and film reviews to the content they’re critiquing.

All of this is great, of course, if you have an economic stake in keeping Americans at each other’s throats. But for the rest of us, it only fuels polarisation and mistrust. The most incisive response to the latest “digital blackface” article came from Wilfred Reilly, a professor of political science at the University of Kentucky, who tweeted: “This stupid article is important in only one way: it illustrates that, as actual racism continues to decline, new varieties will simply be invented/’promoted’ and used to make us fight one another.”

In a diverse, thriving, integrated society that includes people of multivariate backgrounds, of course non-black citizens are going to engage with, appreciate, and relate to cultural products created by their black countrymen — and vice versa. Not only could it not be otherwise — culture, in our highly mimetic species, has long proven itself impossible to contain — but isn’t it what we want? The popularity of these GIFs stems from the fact that they represent events, emotions, and cultural touch points that millions of people recognise and relate to; in many cases, they speak to something not just specifically American but deeply human. That something like the Crying Jordan meme has become a global visual shorthand for conveying our feelings — the fact that people of every age, shape, colour and creed feel represented by the raw emotion captured there — should be seen as a triumph of common humanity over identity category. It is, at the population level, exactly what an inclusive society should strive for.

In this context, it seems not just absurd but grotesque for our national news media to argue that we should wall off these memes from the American mainstream, or make it so fraught for non-black people to engage with them that it becomes effectively taboo. The idea that black culture, whether it’s memes or music or slang or style, needs to be kept separate for its own protection is indistinguishable in practice from the racist ghettoisation that once sidelined black artists and athletes from the mainstream, lest they pollute the spaces where white people gathered. At its root is the notion that black culture is not American culture, that black people are somehow other. And, well, you know, there’s a word (and a GIF) for that.

Katie Law: Why don’t you start by telling us what sensitivity readers are — what are your views of them?

Lionel Shriver: For the few of you who aren’t familiar with the concept, sensitivity readers started out being hired mostly in young adult fiction — a genre that, for some reason, woked out earlier than anyone else. The idea is that these people are self-nominated experts on whatever category of humanity they happen to have been born into. So I’m a professional American and a professional white person. They’re supposed to go through, line by line, and find anything in this book that could possibly offend anyone, especially their hallowed group. And unsurprisingly, that results in a much more anodyne, boring manuscript. Basically, you can’t win, because if you have a character do something that most people in that category wouldn’t do, then it’s inauthentic; but if they do things that that category of people are renowned to do, then it’s a stereotype.

I should make it clear that no one at HarperCollins has yet had the nerve to subject me to these people. And I object to the whole idea of it. There’s nothing wrong with being professional, being accurate. If the book you’re writing requires you to write people who are credibly disabled or black or Muslim or what have you, and it’s a realistic piece of fiction, then you should probably do a little homework. But it shouldn’t be against the law not to do your homework. If you’ve made glaring errors, then it’s the part of criticism and a responsible reader to notice. But it’s a very different thing — deciding to do a few interviews or a little reading on your own account — from having your publisher sic these self-nominated experts on your manuscript to tell you everything that’s wrong with it and everything that has to go. I won’t mention her by name, but a very successful novelist who I talked to recently was subjected to multiple sensitivity readers and they reduced her to tears.

What few authors understand is that they don’t actually have to take the advice of these interfering little people. But most authors think they do and therefore make these moronic changes. What the publisher is really doing is protecting themselves, so that if this book gets it in the neck, on social media or in criticism, then they can say, “well, she didn’t do what she was told”.

KL: How have these edicts affected you personally? Have you had any pushback from an agent or your own editors in your fiction writing?

LS: I have been subjected to very little of that kind of interference, but it’s not foreign to me. One of the things that now makes people extremely nervous is the use of accents. Now, I don’t generally like heavy-handed transliteration of accents in fiction. I think you can sometimes convey an accent with a few little touches. And those little touches can be very useful in creating the character. But even expressing the way people actually talk when, for example, English is not their first language is now considered offensive. And there are whole books, therefore, that would be cancelled for this very reason.

In The Mandibles, there’s a short dialogue with African immigrants, and I had used those little touches, and I had my British editor say that it was “othering”. I find that word so repulsive. And rather than take her head on, because I wanted to keep things cool and she had restrained herself in relation to a lot of other things, I obliged, except that I did so in an underhanded way. There was a way of changing the dialogue so that you did get the accent, but I expressed it with whole, legitimate English words. So you couldn’t quite say that it was transliterating and “othering”, but I still got my way.

There was another instance where I got myself into trouble with objecting to the concept of cultural appropriation. I had written a short story in which there was a girlfriend of a white character who was black. She was a very appealing character. She’s smart and very well spoken. And she’s upper-middle class and her mother’s rich — so not a stereotype. The story takes place in Atlanta, where there is a huge upper-middle class black population. So this was credible. But my agent suggested that I changed this person to a white character, because if we submitted the story to the New Yorker — eye roll! — and they rejected it, we would never know whether or not it was rejected because I was culturally appropriating, or the story just sucked. I always allow for that possibility. Sure enough, it was rejected, and I do not know whether or not it was because I culturally appropriated or this story sucked.

KL: Authors seem to sometimes apologise too quickly if they’re accused of a particular misdemeanour.

LS: Oh, I have never apologised in public for anything as a matter of principle. Once you go down that road, you have lost the battle, you have finished yourself. And the irony is that apologies don’t even work. They’re never accepted. You never apologise enough.

But it’s worth pointing out that transparent cowardice is not so much on the authorial but on the publishing level. As I wrote in a Spectator column, one of the reasons that publishing has become so timid, and frightened, and compliant, and risk-averse, is because it’s been taken over by women. I do not say that with any pride in my sex, and there are many exceptions, but women err on the side of being fearful. They also have, as a group, a fatal desire to please. What’s needed in this circumstance is balls, and I don’t care whether they’re literal or figurative.

KL: You won a prize in 2005, The Orange Prize. It’s now been renamed as The Women’s Prize for Fiction. At the time, did you think there was a good reason to have a women-only prize? And today, do you think we still need women-only prizes for fiction?

LS: I think at the time there was some good reason for it. There was a real historical disparity in the award of prizes, especially the big prizes, to women. We just weren’t getting acknowledged. Now, I was quite forthright, even at the time, about the fact that if I had my druthers, I would prefer to have won a prize that was open to both sexes. I have no problem with going head-to-head with men and I do not feel that I need special protection. But it was at a rather low point in my career, and I would take what I could get.

I have made a habit of not doing down the Women’s Prize. For the most part, it doesn’t do any harm, it’s just one more prize. It means that there are more people out there who have a little more money and a little more profile. But if you look at the statistics of who’s being awarded what now, if anything we need a men’s prize. We now have a serious reverse discrimination situation, whereby authors, especially debut authors, simply cannot get into print if they are straight, white males. And you know what, I think even the gay white males are starting to struggle.

KL: Do you put that down to the number of women running publishing? Do you think that they are wanting to push their own interests?

LS: It’s partly a matter of fashion. Publishing is utterly obsessed with diversity. And that means that they are not choosing books strictly on the basis of whether they’re any good. This is a huge, society-wide problem and it’s not just publishing — we have ditched excellence and even competence, and all we care about is what category you belong to — but publishing is the worst of it. Women are slaves to fashion, including ideological fashion, and have this drive to please, and regard talking about diversity all the time as pleasing because that’s what you’re supposed to do now. However, I do not think the problem is female readers. I sense no demand, from the ground up. “Listen, stop foisting these male, white writers on us. We only want to read books by people from Zimbabwe.” I do a lot of events and I just don’t hear it. The readership wants good stories and good characters, and also something with a little edge, which is where I come in.

KL: A lot of the management in publishing houses are terrified of their very young staff, who are calling the shots, who are feeling offended, who are feeling uncomfortable about JK Rowling’s views. Is that something you’ve experienced?

LS: Yes, which is bizarre. It’s just a complete inversion of who has the power. I mean, we’re dealing with an entire administrative class that doesn’t realise that they’re wearing Dorothy’s shoes. They have the power; they can fire all these people. Look at what happened at Netflix. They did a trim after the Dave Chappelle brouhaha, and the first people in the firing line were the people who’d made a big stink about the Dave Chappelle comedy special.

But in publishing there’s just this complete failure to exert control. I’ll tell you an interesting story. I hope Douglas Murray is cool with this. Douglas recently changed publishing company from Bloomsbury to HarperCollins. And by the way, HarperCollins, in the big picture here, has acquitted itself quite well. They’re my publisher and they have not given me a hard time, much less fired me. And they have been a refuge for a number of other authors who have fallen out with their publishers. But this particular instance of leaving Bloomsbury was interesting to me because of a twist. They were wrangling over the contractual details — they didn’t actually want to lose Douglas — believe it or not but they threatened Douglas with their younger staff. They used their younger staff as a weapon and said, “you know, you’re lucky: our younger staff hasn’t gone for you. The younger staff of all the other publishing companies wouldn’t put up with you. So we’re the only people who would have you.” It’s really underhanded, really creepy. And of course, it was a lie. Douglas didn’t have any trouble finding someone else to publish him. He’s very profitable. It was using the current political situation to get what they wanted in a much more mercantile sense, not in an ideological sense.

The real problem is that, in the elevation of these ostensible values of diversity, equity and inclusion, whole organisations and corporations forget what they are for. I got myself into trouble in 2018, after Penguin Random House sent round a declaration to all the agents of their authors that, by 2025, they were going to have both their authors and their staff perfectly reflect the demographics of the United Kingdom — it’s hard to say this without laughing — in relation to sex, sexual preference, ethnicity, gender ID, of course, race, and even class. Now, that’s a hell of an algorithm. I thought it was hilarious and I wrote about it for The Spectator — about how the purpose of a publishing company is not to perfectly reflect the demography of whatever country it’s selling books in, but to sell books. And somehow that column got twisted so that, according to the Guardian — they’re so creative there! — I thought only white people wrote good books.

KL: I’ve actually got the sentence that you wrote here: “If an agent submits a manuscript by a gay, transgender Caribbean, who dropped out of school at seven and powers around town on a mobility scooter, it will be published whether or not it is incoherent, tedious, meandering and insensible.”

LS: That line was endlessly quoted back to me as somehow terribly prejudiced. If you examine each element on its own, there are no pejoratives. There is nothing insulting in that line at all. But it is, in its composite, funny — and that’s a crime.

KL: You talked on the Today programme about what you had meant when you wrote that and why you’d written it. I think you defended yourself and acquitted yourself brilliantly — but I wonder how these things affect you, and whether you come away from it feeling bolshier? Or whether you ever fear you’ve gone too far?

LS: Well, so far, I’ve got away with it. So I don’t live in fear all the time. I realise that the era we’re living in is dangerous to me — the irony being, however, that it’s also been very useful to me. I mean, you are probably here not just because you like my novels, but because I have stuck my neck out politically. And therefore I have benefitted from wokeness more than I have suffered from it. And that makes me rather gleeful.

KL: And do you feel that you can harness it for your next novel?

LS: I really broke the rules in The Motion of the Body through Space, which came out in 2020. One of the secondary characters is an incompetent diversity hire. You’re not supposed to do that. And, of course, it was widely criticised. And that made it really fun. But I don’t want to become just an ideologue and I don’t want to just write books that are shadowboxing with the enemy. I want to write books that would be interesting beyond this moronic era.

I don’t always want my novels to be focused on the culture wars, but I have used the culture wars and more broadly, I have found the whole experience of the last several years informative, not necessarily in a cheerful manner. It’s been very discouraging — in the same way that I found the whole Covid era incredibly discouraging — and I think less of humanity as a result. But I find this time period illuminating in relation to any number of other political movements that I have known about in theory, but have not known in practice. It illuminates the French Revolution and Year Zero in Cambodia and Maoism and Stalinism, the whole package of authoritarian movements which have not always been top-down but have sometimes been ground-up — instituting an orthodoxy, which if you do not hew to it, you lose your job, your livelihood. That is what’s happening. I sometimes worry that it’s petty and I shouldn’t get that concerned with it, but on reflection, I don’t think it’s petty. I think it’s real, I think it’s important. If it gets much worse, we’re really talking about total dysfunction. We’re talking about countries just not working anymore.

KL: Have we reached peak woke, or do you think it’s just going to get worse?

LS: Everyone I talk to wants to know whether or not it’s started to subside. The real problem is that it has a life of its own, because it has produced this entire class of people whose jobs rely on this DEI nonsense. And you know that theory of the overproduction of elites? If you haven’t encountered it, basically we’re sending too many people to university. There are not enough jobs. And this DEI crap, it creates lots of little useless sinecures — often very well paid — for these overproduced elites to fill, and they’re going to cling to those positions for dear life.

For the organisations involved, or the companies, they’re a terrible drain but what’s happening is that these whole layers of management are being maintained as a protection. It’s a little bit like the sensitivity readers. They don’t cost that much and it’s good PR: “look at us, we have a whole department of 30 people who do absolutely nothing”. And furthermore, the ideology, which began in the universities, is still being promoted in universities. At places like UnHerd, we may feel we’re winning the argument because the essays are so good but that doesn’t mean that they’re teaching UnHerd essays in university, as they should do. I’m afraid that none of the people who need to be persuaded are reading this stuff. It’s a very atomised media situation.

I think there is a role to be played in preaching to the choir: the choir needs sermons. And we need to reach out to each other and to feel that we’re not alone and that there are other people who are sane. It makes you feel, in the current parlance, “safe”, because everyone is not crazy. And it gives us a sense of community, a much-misused word, but this is a community. You are actually physically here, and we are of like minds, though we don’t agree on everything — that would be creepy.

KL: If the woke tide is a youthful one, and more young people are coming out of universities and going into the workplace, then what is going to stop it?

LS: The problem is not only young people. And I have to say, I feel a kind of funny mea culpa in relation to my own youth. I grew up at the tail end of the so-called Sixties, which in truth lasted well into the Seventies. And this is where a lot of this stuff was born — and by the way, as a kid, I bought into it hook line and sinker. I would still oppose the Vietnam War, if I could go back, and I still recycle. But this whole obsession with self-criticism, which has an almost communist touch and feel, started back then. And I was very proud of being critical of the United States and being ashamed of the United States and being obsessed with all the terrible things we’d done wrong. People these days act as if we only started talking about slavery yesterday. No, we were obsessed with it in the Sixties, slavery and the genocide against the Indians. A lot of the stuff that you hear harped on now, we harped on, and I’ve internalised this stuff, and I was very proud of how ashamed I was. When you’re ashamed, you’re superior, because you know how terrible you are and everyone else is dribbling around in their ignorance, and they don’t know what evil they hail from.

That lasted well into my young adulthood, until I became a permanent expat. Even for the first few years of my ex-patriotism, when I was living in Belfast, I was ashamed of being American. I was a little self-conscious about opening my mouth with my accent and giving away that I was from this terrible place. And honestly, I’m not quite sure what did it. Maybe it was just living in Belfast, where I realised there are other terrible places. I grew up politically and I grew up personally. I came to resign myself to being American.

I didn’t choose to be born American. There are worse places to be from and I was not responsible for slavery. I didn’t kill any Indians. Everyone has to be from somewhere and actually, that shame is perhaps the main thing that I should have felt ashamed for. Because it is a false pride in being so illumined and it’s an empty pride. And frankly, from the outside, it is unattractive. We don’t really like people who are ashamed of where they come from. It’s a kind of betrayal and it’s a lie. It’s as if you can repudiate that which cannot be repudiated. It’s also a denial of fact, of physical reality. I was born in the United States in a little town called Gastonia, North Carolina: that is a fact. A fact, and I can’t live it down, and for me to feel that I have to is, well, shame on me.

So, I came round — but this self-hatred stuff goes way back, this very Western-centred, “oh, haven’t we done terrible things”. And it starts with my generation. The Boomer generation brought this stuff to life. And those are the people who took over the universities. So, it is not just a bunch of young people who got some stupid notion in their head. They got it from us.

KL: On that note, shall we take some questions from the audience?

*

Do you think that books like Satanic Verses wouldn’t be published now? Or that series of books called The Number One Ladies’ Detective Agency, which was beautifully written by an elderly Scottish professor, Alexander McCall Smith, but from the perspective of a black woman?

LS: Funnily enough I had a conversation with somebody in the upper levels of HarperCollins — they publish Alexander McCall Smith — and he was bemoaning the fact that if one of those books came in today, they would not publish it. And that’s HarperCollins, the refuge. The truth is that HarperCollins’s CEO is a Brexit supporter. Very conservative. And that helps explain why HarperCollins is a bit of an island politically. But even they would probably turn down The Number One Ladies’ Detective Agency, because it’s an older Scottish white writer with a main character who is female, black and African — which is, from my perspective, admirable. It’s an extension of imagination, of empathy. I’m far more interested in reading that book than I would be if it’s about a barely disguised older, white Scottish male who happens to be the main character and writes novels for a living.

*

You said a while back that the best way to fight this war on language was to either ignore it or to laugh at it. Do you still think that?

LS: That’s a hard one because, yes, my tendency is to laugh at it. I find these lists of words we’re no longer supposed to use, which get longer and longer, hilarious. You can’t refer to a “field” of study anymore, because it’s going to remind people of slavery. I mean, it is beyond satire. These people are doing our work for us in making a mockery of themselves. The trouble is that it does start trickling down. The Associated Press guidelines set a standard that is largely observed across the journalism industry, but now they’ve said that you can’t use the word “the”. Now, obviously, it’s in certain contexts, but honestly, they are banning articles. You can’t say “the disabled” because it defines a person in terms of a particular aspect of themselves. They even said you couldn’t say “the French”. The French got really pissed off!

For this lunacy to have filtered down to even the AP Stylebook means that it’s a little more serious than I would like it to be. I would like us to be able to laugh it off. But honestly, they have successfully made it almost unpublishable in mainstream newspapers to say “slave”; you have to say “enslaved person”, because otherwise we idiots are not going to know that we’re actually talking about a human being. They’re starting to endanger whole classes of words that pertain to people. Pretty soon we’re not going to be able to talk about me as being “a writer”, because I’m also a person. So, I have to be a “writing person” or a “person who writes”. It’s dumber than dumb, but at the same time, it is starting to have an impact on what is considered acceptable use of language.

My biggest sense of upset about all of this stuff is that I just hate bad writing. I hate the mangling of language. I hate stupid use of words and that’s what they’re promoting. They honestly have people on the news saying, “people living with obesity”. And again, this is funny, but there’s another level on which it is more insidious. It is denial of reality. I gather there’s a series called Goosebumps — I haven’t read it; it is for children — which is removing the word “fat”. I mean, first off, no matter how many references to the word fat you eliminate, it doesn’t change the fact that being massively overweight is bad for you. It also doesn’t change the fact that most people do not find being massively overweight attractive. If you eliminate the word, you don’t eliminate the prejudice against that state. And by the way, that’s a healthy prejudice. We don’t want to encourage everyone to be massively fat. So I don’t think we should stop finding it funny but we do also have to take it seriously. I use the word “slave” at every opportunity.

*

I wonder whether there’s any way of engaging with a lost generation of people who are completely captured by weird, weird ideologies?

LS: Fortunately, I don’t have to confront people who have swallowed this ideology whole very often. One of the problems with the ideology is the way it seals itself off. So that part of the ideology is a refusal to have a conversation, that it causes you harm to talk to somebody or listen to somebody with whom you disagree. It’s anti-education, which is why I find it incredibly ironic that this stuff originates in universities. Because it’s the antithesis of what real education is.

I think parents may have a role to play. I’m not a parent, but I wouldn’t give up on trying to talk to your kids. One of the things that dismays me is that a lot of the parents believe the same stuff. And so the kids are not entirely against the parents. What dismays me about younger people these days is: they don’t rebel. This is what they’re being told. This is what a lot of their parents believe. It’s not rebellion, it’s anything but: it’s conformity, total conformity.

Now, what is wrong with young people who don’t tell the adults that they’re full of shit? That’s what we were like. I bought into my parents’ liberal ideology, but I grew up and I overthrew it and started thinking for myself. My first experience of asserting myself was overthrowing my parents’ Presbyterianism. Both my parents were professionally religious, and I instinctively didn’t buy it. Now it turns out everyone else is the same way, so it doesn’t seem especially interesting, but it was risky in my family, to say, “I’m sorry, I don’t want to go to church anymore. I don’t believe this.” And it gave me practice for later, when I realised that I didn’t entirely buy their political ideology. I became an independent intellectual being.

What is wrong with younger people that they don’t go through that process? It is empowering, as we used to say; it is exciting and it’s fundamentally Oedipal. It’s overthrowing the previous generation and asserting yourself and growing into yourself, and deciding that you are capable, and that you can think for yourself. Why is this generation — and even to some degree, the previous one — not going through that rebellion and that self-assertion? I’m afraid that a lot of the self-assertion we do see is an assertion of weakness, so-called vulnerability, mental illness, feeling unsafe? It’s all soft. I would like to see a little strength.

*

As a sensitivity reader, I advised somebody to remove something because he was calling able people “blessed”, implying that disabled people are not blessed. But I felt bad, because at what point does it become self-censorship?

LS: I don’t think there’s any formula. There is such a thing as being edited well, and my editor occasionally calls attention to something that’s going to alienate people. I don’t mind having that called to my attention. I’ve been a little careless, or I wrote something in such a way that it could be interpreted in a way that I don’t want it to be interpreted. So, if you’ve got a line that seems to be dissing anyone with a disability and that’s not what you’re trying to convey, then you should fix it and there’s nothing wrong with that. I don’t believe in gratuitous offence. I sometimes offend on purpose, but there’s nothing wrong with having another perspective, and I’m always willing to listen. If someone can make a good case that I should cut a line or change a word, or whatever, I’ll listen to it and I will entertain it. And sometimes I’ll reject it, but sometimes they’re right. There’s always a danger of becoming so dogmatic in the service of anti-dogmatism that you close yourself off to information that actually is very useful to you. I sometimes have to watch that myself.

*

I’m left with the feeling that this is an era of even greater polarisation than I had thought. And perhaps what we’re missing is more of a voice for the centre ground and the middle ground. And I wonder if, to get through the era, that voice might be better than the two polars fighting each other?

LS: That’s what got us here, the centre ground! I’m afraid that the centre ground is now interpreted as Right-wing. Nothing I’ve said, 30 years ago, would have been faintly controversial. And now it is. It’s funny, I was just speaking with another audience member who said that she’s from my same generation and she started out a liberal, and she hasn’t changed any of her opinions and now she’s regarded as Right-wing. And that’s what’s happened to me. The irony of the position I find myself in is that most of the positions that I advocate for are expressing the views of the majority of the population. And the views of the majority of the population are no longer acceptable. And that bothers me. It shouldn’t be brave to say most of the stuff I say, and unfortunately it has become so.

Within minutes, she’s been arrested. Within a day, her lifeless body is swinging alongside the others. And for the rest of the week, the townspeople find themselves at a loss to describe precisely what just happened. When a witch presents herself, admits her guilt, and all but throws herself on the pyre, can you even really call it a witch hunt?

As ridiculous a line of debate as this is, it has dominated the discourse about the recent cancellation (ah, or is it?) of Dilbert creator, Scott Adams, after he made comments during a YouTube livestream that were widely derided as a “racist rant”. Citing a recent Rasmussen Reports poll, which found that 47% of black Americans disagreed with the statement “It’s okay to be white”, Adams urged white viewers to “get the hell away” from black people, who he described as a “hate group”; within days, multiple newspaper syndicates announced that his long-running cartoon about the absurdities of corporate office life would no longer run in their pages. (According to Adams, the widespread shunning of Dilbert has cost him 80% of his income, although given his estimated $75 million net worth, one might surmise that this is not the financial catastrophe it would represent for a normal person.)

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Yet as salacious a topic as Adams’s apparent support for the re-segregation of American society is, some media figures have chosen not to examine it but to use it as a cudgel. Within days of this incident, a certain cohort of writers, artists and public intellectuals received the following, bizarre request for comment from a reporter at the newsletter Popular Information:

In July 2020, you were among a group of writers that signed a letter saying that “it is now all too common to hear calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought.” My questions are:

Do you object to Adams being dropped by major papers and his syndicate? If not, why not?

Is what happened to Scott an example of “cancel culture”? If not, how do you distinguish what happened to Scott from “cancel culture”?

I was among the recipients of this email, having been a signatory on the aforementioned Harper‘s letter in support of free speech more than two and a half years ago. I did not, for what I assume are obvious reasons, respond to it directly — and yet, I do think it is an interesting artefact in its own right. For as long as “cancel culture” (a term I really loathe, and which, notably, the Harper’s letter did not include) has been a topic of discussion, there are those who have fundamentally misunderstood what is being discussed. To focus on the particulars of individual cancellations — whether they’re reasonable or unreasonable, deserved or not — is to miss the broader point that each cancellation, whether objectionable or not, exists against the same backdrop of generalised intolerance.

As such, demanding to know if what happened to Adams represents an instance of “cancel culture” is as absurd as asking if our hypothetical, self-described sorceress, swinging from the gallows in Salem, was the victim of a witch hunt. Cancel culture is the context, the medium, the social marinade in which we are all soaking. The most interesting thing about Adams’s downfall, coming as it did amid a national game of hunt-the-racist that has been ongoing for the better part of a decade, is not whether it was deserved; it’s that it was entirely predictable, and Adams of all people surely knew this. What we have witnessed was less cancellation than self-immolation. Whatever the point he intended to make — about cancel culture, or free speech, or the alarming ubiquity of divisive racial narratives that seem to have propelled the entire country into a death spiral of fear and suspicion — there can be little doubt that he was making it on purpose.

The tragedy for Adams — in the literary rather than literal sense — is that there’s not much cachet in being a martyr, especially now the hangman’s gallows and pitchfork-wielding mob have moved out of the town square and into the virtual world. The list of contemporary figures who’ve gained positive attention by sacrificing themselves (which is to say, their careers) for a cause is not just short but subject to the polarising currents of our media landscape: for every person who deemed Colin Kaepernick a hero and an inspiration when he took the knee in protest of police violence during the national anthem, there is another who thinks he’s a showboating putz. For every gender-critical feminist who stands with JK Rowling, there’s a trans activist who would dearly love to mount her head on a pike.

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And even within the limited confines of this fractious category, Adams comes in low on the list of influential figures. His critics are not calling for his head so much as rolling their eyes. Even his supporters, of whom there are not many, seem to be in reluctant agreement with those in the former category that all he’s really managed to do is embarrass himself. Apart from a certain amount of earnest hand-wringing from the likes of New York Times columnist Charles Blow, the headlines about the incident largely lean into the notion that Adams is less evil than a bumbling idiot who just soiled himself in public while daring people to notice the smell. The Bulwark derides “The foolishness of Scott Adams”, while Slate exhorts readers: “Don’t miss the absolute dumbest part of this controversy.”

I, too, rolled my eyes at Adams’s comments when they first surfaced — because they were ridiculous, but also because buried ten feet deep in this inane controversy is a conversation which might actually have been worth having and now is less likely than ever to come to fruition: a conversation about the bizarre mainstreaming in rarefied academic and cultural spaces of explicit (and often self-loathing) anti-white rhetoric; about a media class that flogs false narratives of ubiquitous racial hatred for clicks; about the multi-billion-dollar DEI economy built on convincing ordinary Americans that they can neither understand nor trust each other. Personally, I’m less perturbed by the few dozen respondents to the Rasmussen poll who weren’t sure if it’s “okay to be white” than I am by the fact that people in a position to shape national discourse are going around asking this question in the first place.

I would also guess, based on Adams’s own commentary over the past week or so, that the point he wanted to make was something much closer to the points in the above paragraph than his original sputtering video would suggest — but it hardly matters. A poorly-articulated YouTube livestream has cost Adams not just his livelihood but his place of influence within the culture (which is kind of a shame, really: the Dilbert send-ups of corporate diversity training were often quite funny).

Of course, it is a good thing that old school martyrdom is no longer available to the morally and ideologically pure; nobody wants to return to a time when speaking your mind might cause the loss of your head instead of just your reputation, your career, or your comic strip. But the low-stakes, bloodless nature of taking a stand does seem to have the unintended side effect of rendering the whole enterprise somewhat meaningless, and sometimes ridiculous. As it turns out, self-immolation packs much less of a punch when, the smoke having cleared, the immolee remains not only standing but holding a flame-proof bag containing many millions of dollars.

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What has been the point of this, then? Adams still evidently believes that he’ll be vindicated, even celebrated, as the guy who broke the American conversation about race wide open; everything that’s happened to him proves his point, it’s all gone according to plan. “It’s important to know when to avoid a thing and when drill through the middle of it,” reads one of his recent tweets.

Certainly, it’s hard to argue that something’s middle is being drilled. The response of the media to Adams’s comments has been wall-to-wall coverage — none of it in favour of him, of course, but that hardly matters if one’s goal is simply to get people talking. What seems unlikely, however, is that all this drilling will lead to a deep well of meaning as opposed to a hollowing-out. On Adams’ Twitter page, a poll of his own asks, “Does canceling me make race relations in America better or worse?”

Thus far, more than 24,000 people have responded. Of those, fewer than 10% answered “better”. The rest believe that Adams’s self-inflicted cancellation is either making things worse, or making no difference whatsoever.

In November 2022, the Wellcome Collection, a museum dedicated to the history of medicine, announced the closure of Medicine Man, an exhibition of artefacts relating to the history of medicine collected by its founder Sir Henry Wellcome. The decision to close this exhibition was itself perfectly reasonable. As a collector, Sir Henry Wellcome was a bit of a magpie, and the exhibition, which was 15 years old, was rather fusty. However, what mainly attracted attention was the statement which the curators published on Twitter that they had closed it because it “perpetuates a version of medical history that is based on racist, sexist and ableist theories and language”. To understand this statement, it is necessary to go back two and a half years to an earlier announcement from the Wellcome Collection in June 2020 in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Under the heading “Anti-Blackness and Racism”, it declared that the Collection was built on “racist and patriarchal narratives” and that institutional racism was enmeshed within its fabric. It went on to suggest that not only the Wellcome Collection but museums generally were “built on a foundation of white supremacy” and had replicated “racist behaviours” for decades. The curators declared their intention of “continually ask[ing] questions about power, representation and the civic role of public museums” and focussing on the “lived experiences of those who have been silenced, erased and ignored”.

What does all that mean? It is palpably untrue that medical history, as presented in Medicine Man, was based on racist, sexist and ableist theories. Certainly, museums reflect the historical outlook of those who assembled their collections and their successors who curated them. In Britain, they were generally able-bodied white males. But museums do not, just by virtue of that fact, replicate racist behaviours. Nor does our culture silence or ignore non-European experience where it is relevant. I think that what the curators meant to say was that the exhibition treated medicine as a western science of which non-white groups were passive consumers with no worthwhile contribution of their own. This, they felt, implied a hierarchy of cultures in which the west was superior to the rest, a notion which was offensive to non-western racial groups.

The Wellcome Collection is not alone. The Museum Association, which represents museums generally, has called on them to “address colonial structures and approaches to all areas of museum work”. At about the same time as the curators of the Wellcome Collection published their June 2020 statement, the Director of the Royal Botanical Garden at Kew, probably the world’s leading institution dedicated to plant science, issued a similar statement on its behalf. He began with the usual cringing confession that its history “shamefully draws from a legacy that has deep roots in colonialism and racism”. The only fact cited to support this surprising assertion is that during the nineteenth century, the Royal Botanical Garden studied the movement of plants around the British Empire as part of its world-wide botanical mission. This is said to have made the Botanical Garden at Kew a “beacon of privilege and exploitation”. The director went on to declare that Kew would in future decolonise its collections and “tackle structural racism in plant and fungal science”, with a view to achieving “transformative and societal change” in modern Britain. The inference is that merely by having existed and collected information and specimens in the great age of imperialism Kew Gardens is in some way complicit in modern inequalities in Britain. Finally this. “There is no acceptable neutral position on this subject [racial injustice;]; to stay silent is to be complicit”. This is a particularly odd thing to say. It seems obvious that one can be an excellent plant scientist and an outstanding plant historian without taking any view at all on racial injustice.

These statements have certain points in common.

The first is that they are proposing a political program for the modern day, supported by a highly selective approach to the past which sees everything through the prism of race. Race becomes the supremely important phenomenon, masking every other aspect of a complex culture. Racial politics provide the framework of values by which every institution concerned with the past is to be judged. There are many important factors in the way that human societies develop. Race is only one of them and not necessarily the most important. Any serious commentator on the current state of historical studies ought to welcome attempts to present aspects of history which have previously been ignored or marginalised. That includes the story of ethnic minorities and non-European societies. But it does not mean that the whole of Britain’s modern history should be viewed through their eyes. It does not mean that the role of slavery or empire in Britain’s economic, cultural and social history should be exaggerated beyond recognition. And it does not mean that current political priorities should determine how we understand the past.

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The second thing these statements have in common, is that they lose sight of the broader evolution of human history. Benjamin Disraeli once observed in response to an antisemitic taunt in the House of Commons, that “while the ancestors of the right honourable gentleman were brutal savages in an unknown island, mine were priests in the temple of Solomon”. Victorian elites undoubtedly regarded their own civilisation as superior to others. This been a universal habit of humanity ever since the Greek city-states and the ancient dynasties of China dismissed the whole of the rest of the world as barbarians. If these prejudices are ever justified, it is only for short periods of time, two or three centuries at the most. Empires and cultures are transient. They have their periods of power and creativity, before fading away. Medicine is as good an example as any. White males have not always dominated medical science. There have been periods when major contributions came from non-European cultures: Chinese, Indian and Arab in particular. Historians have not ignored this. Great books have been written about it, almost all in European languages. The 26 volumes of the History of Science and Technology in China by the Cambridge scientist and historian Joseph Needham is one of the most remarkable works ever written on the multicultural origins of modern science. But this should not blind us to the fact that the three centuries before the Second World War were the European centuries, in medicine as in other sciences.

With very few exceptions, such as the use of some medicinal plants, indigenous non-Europeans contributed very little. If one looks across a broader chronological range, the picture is very different. But calls for the decolonisation of academic disciplines do not do that. They generally focus narrowly on the 18th and 19th century and seek to debunk one of the few indisputable facts about that period, namely that it was a period in which cultural and scientific developments fundamental to the modern world almost all emanated from Europe or from European settlements elsewhere.

Decolonisation has been demanded of many other disciplines which were never in any meaningful sense colonised: the visual arts, music, literature, philosophy and even the physical sciences and mathematics. The only connection between these fields of study and Europe’s imperial past is that the West achieved a dominant position in them during the imperial era. The decolonisation statement of the Mathematical, Physical and Life Sciences Division at Oxford reveals the same obsession with race and the same tendentious attempt to portray racism as a perennial theme of western thinking. It begins by seeking to discredit its own subject by referring to the scientific racism of the 19th century, which posited a racial hierarchy identified by physiological characteristics, a view which no serious scientist has entertained for many decades and which has no current relevance to the subject.

It goes on to identify science with empire by pointing to the Victorians’ collection of material samples and botanical specimens across the globe. Moving to the present day, it calls for a study of deep-rooted racial biases in digital technology, artificial intelligence and machine learning. One would not have thought that the subject was capable of racial bias. But as the statement proceeds, it becomes clear that the object is to redefine knowledge itself, in a way which artificially devalues western science. “As we work towards greater inclusion”, it declares, “we need to have a broader understanding of what constitutes ‘scientific knowledge’. Among other things, this is said to involve “challenging western-centric ideas of ‘objectivity’, ‘expertise’ and ‘merit’”, and “removing structural hierarchies that privilege certain knowledge and certain peoples over others”. It is clear that the authors of this document believe that the empirical scientific method as conceived in the west since the 17th century is just one of a number of equally valid approaches to the subject, and that it is racially biased to prefer this to any other.

There are two basic ideas behind statements like these. One is about the nature of historical truth. The other is about inherited collective guilt.

The repeated emphasis on challenging the structures of power is an echo of the teaching of postmodernist philosophers such as Michel Foucault. Foucault was the leading exponent of the idea that objective truth is unattainable, because truth is by nature subjective. In The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969), he taught that the structures of power within a society determine what is generally perceived to be true. Few people outside the discipline of philosophy have read Foucault’s opaque works. But many more have read Edward Said’s influential book Orientalism, published in 1978, which applied Foucault’s ideas to the legacy of the great European empires. Said argued that powerful groups control the intellectual framework within which ideas are discussed and determines what constitutes knowledge. Historical truth, he claimed, is not discovered. It is made by historians, in accordance with unconscious prejudices moulded by the power structures of society. The power structures which had enabled Europeans to dominate much of the world between the 18th and the 20th centuries had generated a view of the world based on a hierarchy of civilisations which patronised and marginalised non-European peoples. According to Said, this frame of mind persisted. It led modern scholars to construct a narrative of the past which treated non-western races as representing an earlier stage of human evolution, less valid than the more developed experience of the modern west. The task of the historian was therefore to deconstruct the hegemonist West and substitute a different power structure in which other people’s truth could be acknowledged.

These ideas have been extremely influential among many people who know nothing of their origin and have never heard of Foucault or Said. In 2015, the organisers of the campaign to remove the statue of Cecil Rhodes from its niche outside Oriel College issued a pamphlet entitled Our Aims. Their purpose, it said, was to suppress the frame of mind which the statue symbolised. It was to “remedy the highly selective narrative of traditional academia—which frames the West as sole producers of universal knowledge—by integrating subjugated and local epistemologies…” When, three years ago, the Director of the Pitt-Rivers Museum decided to ask a Maasai shaman to divine which objects from the Maasai collections of the museum had been stolen from their original owners and to repatriate the items that he designated, she was giving practical effect to the idea that modern historical and archaeological methods are no more valid as a route to truth than mystical divination employed in other cultures. If truth is subjective, then every ethnic group may have its own truth, and the whole concept of objective knowledge disappears.

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As for inherited collective guilt, the argument is that if people once suffered what we now regard as injustice at the hands of our forebears, we owe it to their descendants to make that good. One thing that the study of history teaches us is that injustice as we conceive it has been the lot of much of humanity at most times. Much of the history of the world is a history of the brutal exercise of force: tyrannies, wars, massacres, persecutions. Historically, most people at most times have abhorred democracy, rejected political and religious tolerance and regarded the very idea of gender or racial equality as ridiculous. What should we do about this now that we think differently?

Logically, perhaps, humanity at large ought to atone for its own past. But at that level of generality, the gesture would be largely meaningless. After all, injustice is indiscriminately distributed across the centuries and continents. It would deprive what is really a political program of its political force. So the call for atonement for heritable guilt is directed against some specific sector of humanity, say, white people, the British or Oxford University. This is not only irrational. It is also morally repellent. Historically, the idea that particular groups bear an inherited responsibility for some past iniquity has been the basis of ugly prejudices and vicious persecutions.

The desire to visit moral responsibility for the past on some identifiable sector of mankind has generally focused selectively on Britain’s involvement with empire and slavery. No one would today defend the worst moments of the British Empire: the rapacity of the East India Company before its political and military operations were brought under government control at the end of the 18th century; the Opium wars; the Amritsar massacre, and so on. But it is a gross offence against historical honesty to take all the worst features of some historical phenomenon and then serve them up as if they were the whole.

Throughout history, empire and armed migration have been part of the dynamic of human development. The values which we regard as characteristic of western civilisation were born in the societies of ancient Greece and Rome both of which were founded on slavery and imperial conquest. The bloody conquests of the Arabs in the seventh and eights centuries gave rise to a remarkable middle eastern civilisation, far more impressive than anything to be found in Europe in the same period. The rise of modern Japan as a technical and industrial giant had its origin in the forcible opening up of the “hermit isle” in the 1850s by the American navy. The European colonial empires between the 16th and the 20th centuries had the same catalytic effect on the world.

The British Empire was created and sustained by force or the threat of it, as all empires, indeed all governments, ultimately are. It denied self-determination to its indigenous populations until its final years. Yet it was also a remarkable administrative and cultural phenomenon. Those who governed it were guided by a variety of motives, patriotic, economic, military, geopolitical, evangelical. But at least in the last century and a half of the empire’s existence they were also infused with a strong streak of humanitarianism and idealism. The empire suppressed a variety of barbarous practices which it would have been convenient to tolerate, including cannibalism, suttee, human sacrifice and slavery. It brought spectacular economic development, creating global networks of shipping, railways and telegraph and injecting capital and enterprise into local economies. It brought relative peace, honest administration and the rule of law to much of the world. It built great world cities: Mumbai, Hong Kong, Singapore, Sydney.

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Our forebears believed that good government was better than self-government, and that trade and economic development were better than cultural autarky. These are unfashionable views now, but there is nothing inherently disreputable about them. Would sub-Saharan Africa be better off today if Europeans had left its peoples to their own devices? Would modern India be better off if it had not inherited its subcontinental identity and economic infrastructure from Britain? Would the world as a whole be a better place if Europeans had never settled in the Americas or Australia? I do not think so.

Slavery was once among the most ancient and persistent institutions of mankind. The Arabs and the indigenous rulers of precolonial Africa were probably the greatest slavers who ever existed. The involvement of the Atlantic nations is, by comparison, relatively recent. It began with the Portuguese in the 15th century and the Spanish in the 16th. Britain was the last country to take to slave trading and the first country to reject it. In societies imbued by Christian moral teaching, slavery was only defensible on the footing that black people were not really human. In the late 18th and early 19th century, the rise of evangelical Christianity in Britain led to a major movement of moral revulsion against that idea. In 1772, the Court of King’s Bench declared that the English common law did not recognise property in another human being. The slave trade was criminalised throughout the British Empire in 1807, earlier than any other country except Denmark. Slavery itself was abolished by statute throughout the empire in 1834.

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For the remainder of the 19th century, Britain deployed its considerable diplomatic and naval power in suppressing the practice, initially on the Atlantic coasts of Africa, then in the African interior and the Indian ocean. The polemics surrounding Britain’s involvement in the slave trade concentrate on its participation in the 17th and 18th century slave trade while ignoring or belittling its involvement in the suppression of the trade. Yet historically the latter was very much more significant. The 17th and 18th century slave trade was in line with the conventional moral values of the age. But its suppression was revolutionary. It went against the tide of opinion elsewhere in Europe and against Britain’s economic interest. The global consequences were immense. The sheer size and global reach of Britain’s colonial empire was the biggest single factor in the suppression of a practice that had existed across the world from time immemorial.

To many people, all this is beside the point. Their real concern is with the present, and with those aspects of the past which serve their arguments about the present. Their anger against the past is provoked by a small number of totemic issues, of which race and empire are the most sensitive. These issues are totemic because the position which one takes on them is seen as a symbolic statement of which side one is on in the broader battle to shape the future. When an issue acquires totemic status, the actual facts disappear from view. The issue becomes a mere occasion for political self-expression. Hence the vandalism of statues and the campaigns to rename streets and buildings.

The statue of Edward Colston in Bristol was erected to honour his foundation of schools, hospitals and almshouses in Bristol. Tobias Rustat’s monument in Jesus College Cambridge was put there to mark his generous gifts to his college. All Souls College Library was once named after Christopher Codrington to mark his funding of one of Oxford’s great institutions of learning. All three individuals had some involvement in slavery, but none of these memorials and dedications commemorated that aspect of their lives. The objection to them suffers from the same partial vision of the past as the unbalanced historical accounts of Britain’s imperial record. Once a person or an institution is touched by slavery or empire, nothing else about them matters, however important or admirable. This marks the extreme point which tendentious selection can reach. David Hume is thought unworthy of commemoration by Edinburgh University because he shared the patronising indifference of his contemporaries to other races. Yet this is a fact about Hume which is of very little importance when measured against his stature as one of the intellectual giants of the 18th century Scottish enlightenment. In the eyes of a significant minority of the British population, mostly young, Winston Churchill has become a mere symbol of English imperialism and racism. Far more significant aspects of his life, such as his contribution to Britain’s survival in the Second World War and the destruction of Nazism, are swept aside.

Does this matter? I believe that it does.

The civilisation of mankind since the 17th century has been based on the notion that there is such a thing as objective truth. It may be more or less difficult to identify with confidence, but it exists. In history, the difficulty in discovering the truth is due to the uneven survival of sources and to the problems of interpreting those that we have, not to inherited prejudices or ideological mental blocks. We have traditionally built our intellectual world on the basis that we get closest to the truth by objective study of the available material, by abandoning immovable preconceptions, by logical reasoning and by willingness to engage with dissenting opinion. These are not just western constructs. They are universal principles, which are necessary if we are to discuss controversial issues in the same language. There is no alternative route to truth dependent on different racial identities or different hierarchies of power. Yet these basic principles of rational discourse are now under challenge.

The repudiation of Britain’s past in the name of a modern political agenda is currently a minority position. But there is a serious risk that it will become the orthodoxy of the next generation. It is strong in some important groups, notably the young and politically active, and a vocal contingent in the academic world. It may not be a passing phase. The habit of reinforcing one’s political instincts by adopting whatever facts suit them is too deeply ingrained in human nature. Today, it is intensified by the social media. They are a major source of information, especially for the young. But they are curated by algorithms which amplify views that already exist, suppressing nuance, balance or doubt and giving a misleading impression of a great tide of opinion when the material is often generated by a handful of fanatics.

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Those who believe that knowledge and truth are mere social constructs are almost bound to end up by suppressing competing views. If what we think we know is actually no more than an artificial consensus created by power structures invisibly controlling our schools, universities, publishers and museums, then there is no point in debate. You have to change the power structures, take control of those institutions and create a new consensus. This is what is now happening. It is happening with the enthusiastic support of many of the institutions themselves. They lack the self-confidence to stand up for a rational approach to empirical research and knowledge which alone justifies their existence. I am not going to suggest that modern academic scholars on the British Empire and slavery are all determinists in the mould of Foucault and Edward Said. However, their treatment of the past often shares the three main vices of postmodernist history: tendentious selection, exaggeration and intolerance of dissent.

Oxford’s 2017 “Ethics and Empire Project” was set up to explore the moral and factual basis of the conventional hostility to empire. It provoked vocal opposition from many academics. One opponent of the project, a professor of history at King’s College London, was quoted in The Guardian as saying that “any attempt to create a balance sheet of the good and evil of empire can’t be based on rigorous scholarship”. It is rare to find a serious scholar overtly rejecting the very idea of balance in the assessment of controversial evidence. But it is not as rare as it should be. The fact that his protest was supported by 170 academics in various open letters sends a depressing message about the current state of scholarship on this issue. It also explains why scholars who dissent from the current orthodoxy find it wise to keep quiet about it if they value their careers.

Every human society depends for its cohesion on a sense of collective identity. The French historian Ernest Renan, in his Sorbonne lecture of 1882 “What is a Nation?”, argued that the solidarities which created a nation were primarily historical. Renan’s target was the ethnic nationalism and social theories preached by overt racists such as Johann Herder and Arthur Gobineau. National identity, Renan declared, did not depend on ethnic or linguistic solidarities, but on a history of collective effort, collective sacrifice and collective devotion. It depended on a consciousness of having done great things together in the past, and wanting to do more of them in future. His definition is pithier in French: “avoir fait de grandes choses ensemble, vouloir en faire encore”.

There is a great irony to modern debates about the past. Those who claim to be the champions of ethnic minorities are seeking to undermine Britain’s past as a source of collective solidarity. They are reverting to morally questionable notions of conflicting ethnic identities which can only fragment our society, obstruct the integration of minorities and undermine any sense of community. The problem is aggravated in the case of race by a notion of hereditary moral responsibility, which requires one to recognise an entirely artificial class of modern victims defined by race. The result is to perpetuate grievances on account of past events that have no practical relevance to modern lives.

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Democratic institutions only work if people accept the legitimacy of their decisions even where they disagree with them. For that to happen, they have to identify themselves with the wider society to which they belong. The fragmentation of a society’s historic identity can only hinder that process. The problem is aggravated by the intolerant and polemical tone that characterises much of what is written and spoken about Britain’s past. The great apostle of Victorian liberalism John Stuart Mill foresaw that the main threat to its survival would come not from the authoritarian state but from the conformity imposed by public opinion. Current campaigns to vilify parts of our history are an attempt to create a new conformity, a situation in which people will not dare to express contrary opinions for fear of provoking outrage and abuse. These are symptoms of the narrowing of our intellectual world. Recently, publication of a book written by the director of the Oxford Ethics and Empire project was indefinitely “deferred” (in effect rejected) by Bloomsbury, the publisher which had commissioned it, on the ground that “public feeling” did not support its publication at the moment. This is the mentality which Mill and other apostles of liberal values dreaded.

We will never understand the past unless we recognise that human beings are light and shade and acknowledge both. Few individuals and no societies have ever been wholly good or wholly bad in any age. This mixture of darkness and light is a critical part of the process by which human societies develop. We can celebrate the achievements of our forebears as well as learning from their mistakes and iniquities. To reject what is wonderful and fascinating about humanity in favour of a monochrome view of the past, dictated by current priorities, is obsessive and fanatical. It is also very bad history

These New Roundheads,with their destructive campaigns against historical objectivity, share a deadly combination of dogmatic intolerance and sanctimonious philistinism with the original Roundheads. The earlier Roundheads ultimately failed in their attempt to produce a uniform culture in England according to their own narrow vision of virtue. A civilised society should wish the same fate upon their modern successors.

This is an edited version of the Pharos Lecture, which Jonathan Sumption delivered on February 27 in the Sheldonian Theatre at Oxford

Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that certain folks want to see her run for president — or are terrified that she will. One article by former GOP creative strategist Myra Adams called Mrs Obama the Democrats’ “break-glass-in-case-of-emergency-candidate”, noting that her “limitless” fundraising ability and “winner’s aura” would make her not just a frontrunner in the primary but an uncontested one whom no other Dem would dare challenge. Meanwhile, presented with the prospect of a 2024 Michelle Obama candidacy, one anonymous Right-wing activist gasps: “God help us.”

Luckily for Republicans, God need not be involved; Michelle Obama has been unequivocal about her total lack of desire to run for office, recently saying that it’s the one question she detests above all others.

But, then, the eagerness surrounding the idea has little to do with Obama herself and lots to do with an overall sense that the wives of presidents, at least the Democratic ones, are not just political spouses but political spouses. This is partly to do with Hillary Clinton being the first FLOTUS-turned-aspiring-POTUS, but perhaps more to do with the prevalent (and not necessarily incorrect) sense that women can and should be doing more in the world than standing behind a man, even if that man is the leader of the free world. Gone are your grandmother’s first ladies, baking cookies and hosting social events and carefully choosing their pet projects from a pre-selected list of distinctly feminine causes. Dissolved is the unofficial role of America’s Homemaker-in-Chief.

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Michelle Obama is, indeed, like no other First Lady before her — but this includes the ones who came right before her. Her new book, The Light We Carry, is less a political memoir, than an inspirational guide; certainly it could not be farther in tone or subject matter from Hillary Clinton’s What Happened, a grim post-mortem on her failed 2016 run for President. Over the course of 10 chapters, Obama emphasises communication, connection, and common humanity; she reflects on her role as a wife, a mother, a daughter, and a friend. The whole thing is unmistakably and unabashedly classy, to the point where if Obama recalls any of her predecessors, it’s more Jackie Kennedy than Hillary Clinton: a person without leadership aspirations who nevertheless ends up leading by example.

Michelle Obama’s values and principles are classically liberal, which is to say they’re out of style on the Left — dismissed as respectability politics by people whose preferred political setting is level-11 rage. Publicity seems to nod to current progressive pieties: the blurb promises a look at “issues of race, gender, and visibility”. In it, Obama does occasionally use language that feels borrowed from more polarising authors (the term “black bodies” appears here and there, as if it accidentally wandered into the text from an adjacent book by Ibram X. Kendi), but these elements are far less prominent than one might imagine — or than the media’s insatiable hunger for stories of racialised conflict might make it seem.

The most striking thing about the book is how consciously she veers away from the divisive framing that’s such a hallmark of Left-wing political discourse in 2022. “Most of my earliest memories of being different have nothing to do with being Black,” Obama writes early on in the chapter, “Am I Seen?” Being black did eventually make Obama different, and she does eventually get to this part. But as a child in a largely-black Chicago school, she stood out not for the colour of her skin but her height.

Obama was a tall child. It made her at once hyper-visible and easily dismissed — always in the back row or last in line, owing to the obsession among elementary school teachers with lining up students from shortest to tallest. She describes the moment of dismay she experienced as a high school student watching the cheerleaders tumble across the basketball court and realising that “some of those girls were approximately the size of one of my legs”. (Obama, like her husband, unlike her predecessor, can be very funny.) What’s remarkable here is the relatability. Who among us didn’t experience a moment like this in the throes of puberty: a self-consciousness so heightened that your very existence seemed like an embarrassment too awful to bear?

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It’s to Obama’s credit that she gives this credit to her audience: she knows they’ll nod along, recognising their own experiences in hers. This shouldn’t be a significant thing for the memoir of a high-profile Democrat to do — but it is. Operating in a sea of awareness-raising tomes, whose readership is meant to include many if not mostly white women, she is a rare thing: an author who treats those readers charitably rather than with scathing contempt. She gives them the benefit of the doubt, not just that they are capable of empathy, but also that her own experiences are universal enough to empathise with.

If not for the fact that the term has already been coopted to describe a very different sort of ideology, you might even say that Obama’s attitude is inclusivity made manifest: an insistence that humanity recognises humanity, across boundaries, in spite of our differences. “I think the most we can ever do, really, is to walk partway across the bridge toward another person and feel humbled that we get to be there at all,” she writes.

And so this book, against the backdrop of contemporary American politics, does begin to seem like a political legacy of sorts, in spite of itself. It’s impossible not to notice echoes in The Light We Carry of the same pragmatism — and sometimes exasperation — that Barack Obama has exhibited in recent years when critiquing the excesses of the progressive Left. In 2019, the former president made headlines for noting “a sense among certain young people on social media that the way of making change is to be as judgemental as possible about other people”, before telling them to cut it out.

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“This idea of purity and you’re never compromised and you’re politically woke, and all that stuff — you should get over that quickly,” he said. “The world is messy. There are ambiguities. People who do really good stuff have flaws.”

In her final chapter, titled “Going High”, Michelle Obama echoes these sentiments: “We’ve become adept at making noise and congratulating each other for it, but sometimes we forget to do the work,” she writes. “With a three-second investment, you may be creating an impression, but you are not creating change.” The subtext is clear, if unflattering to today’s keyboard warriors: You’re not helping. Calm down. Grow up.

The former president has come in for a not-insignificant amount of criticism over comments like these, denounced by one writer as “yet another needless prescription of acquiescence to a bloc of Americans on the wrong side of history”. It’s a fair bet that his wife, with this book, will invite a similar backlash from people who believe that going high, especially amid the looming threat of another Trump presidency, is a fool’s errand. Some people will even go so far as to create a new projection, a new ghost-self to join the others: Republicans will point to the book’s discussion of race, gender, and obnoxious Fox News commentators as evidence that the former first lady is far woker than she cares to admit, even as progressives who feel called out by the book accuse her of being a crypto-conservative.

But if Michelle Obama believed in going high even amid the outrage and agita of Donald Trump’s first bid for the White House, surely she won’t allow the more radical elements of her own side to drag her down into the mire now.

Yet it was only after the Second World War that Jews became white. A new book by Emily Tamkin tells the story of how the racial identity of American Jews evolved. Bad Jews: A History of American Jewish Politics and Identities reminds us, again and again, of something too often forgotten: Jewry isn’t homogenous, and its ethnic character hasn’t always been static.

The early Jewish community in America, from the time of the revolution, was largely Sephardic — that is, Southern European and North African. Paler-skinned Ashkenazim from Germany and Central Europe, who were more bourgeois and assimilationist, didn’t arrive in significant numbers until the mid-19th century. But it was the mass migration of poor, oppressed Jews from the Russian empire, which began a few decades later, that dramatically altered the composition and culture of American Jewry, making Ashkenazim overwhelmingly dominant. That’s not to say American Ashkenazim were a cohesive, mutually supportive ethnic group. The earlier settlers feared that the newcomers, with their markedly different cultures and Yiddish language, would give Jews a bad reputation.

When they first arrived in significant numbers, the pale skin of Ashkenazim Jews was not a privilege. Those who settled in America faced considerable social and cultural prejudice — and certainly weren’t viewed as white. After the First World War, the images of Jews in pop culture were quite often of gangsters or Bolshevik subversives. During the Second, the American state was not enthusiastic about accepting Jewish refugees from the Holocaust. One of the reasons behind the opposition to America intervening in “European entanglements” was suspicion that it would be doing so at the behest of Jewish power.

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Nevertheless, despite the discrimination they faced, the philosophy of the diaspora was assimilationist and remarkably successful. Over the course of the 20th century, Jews gradually transitioned away from living in the urban slums of the Lower East Side — with their radical socialist politics, Yiddish culture, and strong association with Jewish ethnic identity — and into the leafy middle-class suburbs of white bread America. Now, Jews are among the most socially integrated groups in America. Total assimilation is commonly accessible for those that want it. A Jew, in other words, can be Jewish by choice.

The title of Norman Podhoretz’s memoir, Making It, captures the post-war ethos of American Jewry. Loyalty should be pledged to America. Jews shouldn’t stress their particularity. They should become “white”. The GI Bill, which virtually excluded black people in practice, as Tamkin notes, “enshrined their status as white Americans”, enabling them to become “publicly, outwardly all-American and privately religiously all-Jewish”. Whiteness, for many American Jews, was a result of assimilation: it meant stability, material comfort, upward social mobility, and safety.

Jews have never been an oppressed minority in America. Even early migrants faced nothing like the systematic oppression of the Pale of Settlement, which they fled from. When David Ben-Gurion toured America in 1916, he noted the existence of a “Negro Pale of Settlement” in Nashville, which does put things in perspective. And it wasn’t just Jewish immigrants who were treated as outsiders. The Irish, Italians, Poles — most ethnically “white” arrivals in the 19th and 20th centuries were treated as “alien” by an America that unofficially defined itself as White, Anglo-Saxon and Protestant; most were accepted into the mainstream and ultimately seen as white, which entailed moving up the social hierarchy. All were regarded much more favourably than black Americans.

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And yet, there’s something fraught and imprecise about describing American Jews as “white” in the same way one would describe a Polish-American as white. It doesn’t completely fit. Considering how Jews have been among the most detested groups in history, it seems callous to casually claim we benefit from “white privilege”. As David Baddiel argued in Jews Don’t Count, contemporary anti-racism excludes Jews to the point of legitimising antisemitism, by regarding Jews as participating in racist structures against people of colour. It’s true that in Western countries, Jews don’t face the institutionalised oppression that other minorities may do and largely. Jews are included in national identities, while being free to preserve Jewish culture. None of this suggests antisemitism doesn’t exist.

Moreover, as Tamkin usefully points out, any association with Jews and “whiteness” has the problem of taking the Ashkenazim as the sole paradigm of Jewishness. Obviously, this isn’t the case. Judaism has had a historic presence in so many societies across the world; Jews come in different appearances and hues, imbued with different cultures. In Israel, at least half, possibly a slight majority, of the Jewish population is visibly “non-white” — the nation airlifted 14,000 Jews out of Ethiopia over two days in 1991. Far-Right parties draw much of their support from this demographic, puncturing many of the assumptions about Israel’s supposed “white supremacy”. But an overwhelming majority of American Jews are Ashkenazim, and because American culture dominates the world, Ashkenazim end up representing “authentic” Jewish identity worldwide. Ethiopian Jews are overlooked, despite being one of the most ancient Jewish communities, and much of the way we discuss Judaism is white-centric.

This mentality also affected Jews themselves. Within America, Jews have divided and demonised one another. Many Ashkenazim, as Tamkin reveals, regarded their Sephardic co-religionists as “bad Jews”, or not Jews at all, since they didn’t speak Yiddish, didn’t pray in the same way and looked different. In her history of Sephardic Jews in America, Aviva Ben-Ur recounts stories of Ashkenazic landlords in New York excluding Sephardic Jews from lodging, and petitioning Mayor William Jay Gaynor to “remove these Turks from our midst”.

Throughout American history, groups condemned to the lower rungs of the social ladder often disdain those even lower down the racial hierarchy than they are. Black people, being right at the bottom, bear the brunt of this retaliatory discrimination. There is a history, which Tamkin documents, of Jewish leaders arguing that Jews are white for immigration purposes, of Jewish leaders using the language of eugenics to abjure the connection between Jews and Africans commonly made by racial scientists, of bigoted Jewish shop owners discriminating against black customers. Tamkin also notes that, “Jewish support for civil rights was not unanimous”. Reactionaries such as Norman Podhoretz and Nathan Glazer saw the “Negro revolution” as a threat to Jewish security. Their case, as Tamkin describes, was based on the premise that Jews “belonged to white America and one need only look at Black America to see that that was true”.

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Their attitude was not universal, however. Many progressive Jews, such as Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, avidly supported equal rights — and indeed were overrepresented among the white people that joined the freedom marches in the South. And prominent black leaders also supported Jewish causes: Paul Robeson, Bayard Rustin and W. E. B. Du Bois were vocal about sympathising with Zionism, out a deep affinity and solidarity with the plight of European Jewry.

Indeed, some Jews were, to use Leonard Fein’s phrase, the “unintended beneficiaries” of the black-power style. Jewish leaders took inspiration from black-power activists: if blacks can advocate for blackness, then Jews can advocate for Jewishness. The zenith of black power coincided with Israel’s triumph in the Six-Day War of 1967, after which American Jews embraced Zionism more fully. “The perceived heroism of Israel,” Tamkin writes, “led some Jews to identify openly as Jews.” This embrace of Israel, ironically, was a function of American Jews finally “making it”: being fully integrated into the fabric of America. They could adopt a dual identity without being accused of “dual loyalty”. Israel becoming a key strategic ally of America helped in this regard. Supporting the state complimented American patriotism and fealty to liberal democratic values.

And of course, black people and Jews are not a mutually exclusive group. Tamkin estimates that there are as many as 1.2 million black American Jews, whose Jewishness is so often be ignored, including by Jews themselves, because they don’t “look” the part. They are mostly a product not of immigration but the erosion of the stigma directed at interracial marriage. Their Jewishness therefore tends to be Ashkenazic, whereas the only vague blueprint for black Jewishness rests on an indigenous African version of the religion. Ethiopian Jews, isolated from the rest of the Jewish universe, also face racism in Israel. The double consciousness of being both black and Jewish remains more vexed than that of being both American and Jewish. If becoming “white” is the only way for Jews to escape cultural prejudice, what are black Jews supposed to do?

By the time Sacco landed at her destination and regained access to the Internet, her life had been turned upside-down. She had been branded a certified Bad Person by almost the entire Anglo-Twittersphere, including a reality TV star named Donald Trump. She was ultimately dismissed from her job.

Looking back, Sacco’s tweet may be seen as a world-historical pivot, Ground Zero for the cultural developments that characterised the 2010s: the return of Nineties-style “political correctness”; the swift destruction of lives by online mobs; the instantaneous capitulation of employers ; above all, the obscuration of important sociopolitical and material crises by a pathological obsession with language and offence-taking. Sacco, in short, inadvertently called forth the Woke Moment.

Now, nearly a decade later, the Post-Woke Moment is here. It’s a tenuous achievement, to be sure, and the woke still wield enormous political, economic and cultural power. Still, there are unmistakable signs of “a vibe shift”. In Britain, gender ideologues have suffered major setbacks, as authorities crack down on the malpractices of gender clinics. In the United States, the teaching of ahistorical nonsense in schools has run up against a wall of parental outrage. Even Netflix has told its censorious culture-managers to shut up or find another job.

The question is where we go from here. The two most plausible paths are restorationism and radicalism. (Many of the potential “third ways” ultimately collapse back into one of the two.) By restorationism, I mean an effort to turn the cultural clock back to roughly where things stood before Sacco self-destructed her life and career in 52 carelessly typed characters. The fundamental instinct of this path is that the matrix of social, economic, and cultural policy and practice that prevailed roughly a decade ago was sound. Into that happy arcadia of free speech and free markets was suddenly and for no reason injected the virus of Left-identitarianism, which conjured as a reaction the even more dangerous virus of Right-wing populism. The battle, then, is between individualists and “collectivists” of various stripes. Now that wokeism is faltering, restorationists feel, individualism must reign again.

The restorationists are essentially cautious conservatives. They believe that the sex-liberationism and gender-nominalism that have characterised the last 20 years were fine — a healthy and organic development of classical-liberal doctrine — but then suddenly things went too far with the “gender stuff”. Likewise, the liberal censoriousness of that era was fine, but then the far-Left adopted the same methods and went too far with “cancel culture”.

The dividing line between the authentic fruits of modern society and its freakish excesses was always blurry, and remains so to this day. The bigger problem for the restorationists is that, to paraphrase Mitterrand on 1968, the pre-Woke Moment contained in it many of the elements that gave rise to the Woke Moment. Restoring 2013, even if it were possible, would mean restoring the same internal contradictions — not least an obscenely unequal society, in material terms, that desperately needed the fake egalitarianism of wokeness as a legitimating ideology.

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The second path is radicalism. By this, I don’t mean extremism, but a cold appreciation for the fact that the Woke Moment was rooted in, rather than a departure from, the class rivalries and material conditions of modern society. The contradictions that gave rise to wokeness, in other words, won’t be resolved unless we work for a decent and more materially equal society — a process that will require political confrontation and compromise between the three major classes: the asset-rich few, the managers who service their affairs, and the asset-less many.

Both of the post-woke camps — the restorationists and the far less numerous radicals — must contend with a powerful woke remnant. Even more so than the restorationists, the woke are fundamentally conservative. As I have argued before, by changing how we talk about society, and altering its managerial hierarchies, they seek to preserve the existing power structure. Only now, with a backlash brewing, they must change tack.

Anand Giridharadas’s new book, The Persuaders, is representative of this subtle shift in the woke camp. In it, he aims to “reinvigorate the idea of persuasion” at a time when too many Americans view each other as “alien, menacing, and, therefore, unchangeable”. He says he wants to reverse these trends — but mostly ends up replicating their logic, in page after interminable page of saccharine prose that recalls nothing so much as a piece of corporate diversity messaging. Giridharadas is a wokester trying to strike a restorationist-liberal pose.

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The book starts out promising enough, with a discussion of the Russian troll farms that many liberals to this day blame for catapulting Donald Trump to the Oval Office. For Western elites struggling to explain rising populism, it couldn’t be that Trumpers, Brexiteers, and Gilets Jaunes revolted over legitimate grievances with progressive rule. No, it must have been Kremlin mind-control that propelled them. Where once it was chiefly the politically uneducated prole on the street who unreasonably suspected elites of conniving with nefarious foreigners, today it’s as often elites who imagine the common people are foreign agents or automatons.

Observing the workings of the troll farms up-close, Giridharadas draws a different conclusion: that the Kremlin’s influence operations merely exploited existing social discord. “As tempting as it may be to view the Russian operatives as instigators,” he writes, “to witness these moves is to witness a mission of amplification.” Even in 2016, this should have been apparent to anyone with enough faith in Americans to question their susceptibility to St. Petersburg-hatched memes depicting the Lord Jesus hugging Trump. Still, that a former New York Times columnist is now prepared to voice the obvious signifies something.

That something is, in a word, weakness: the yawning sense that despite their conquest of major institutions, progressives are alienated from broad swaths of the public. Big Tech and Hollywood, the HR department and the Central Intelligence Agency — all now speak in their vernacular. Yet comedians have begun to mock their inanities with impunity, the GOP is making electoral hay of the 1619 Project, and suburban moms are mobilising to defend the right of their sons to become merely gay men, rather than eunuchs.

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That’s where Giridharadas comes in, bearing both a warning and a hopeful omen for progressives. The warning is that unless the Left changes rhetorical course, its language and purity-policing will leave it isolated from the masses, its political causes moribund. The good news is that the Left can overcome this obstacle by making accommodations for those less enlightened than themselves. “Persuasion,” in other words, is just a matter of cultural progressives being a little nicer to the benighted many.

That, supposedly, is the great achievement of Linda Sarsour, the Palestinian-American feminist who in the aftermath of Trump’s election helped organise the Women’s March. Viewed through the lens of social class, the Great Pussy-Hat Uprising of 2017 was a movement of gentry wokeism, by gentry wokesters, for gentry wokesters. I would venture to say that it “persuaded” not a single true-believing Trumpian. So why does Giridharadas single her out as an exemplary “persuader”? Well, you see, Sarsour and her Women’s March co-founder Tamika Mallory made “a bet that a lot of their fellow activists and movement allies might not have made”: namely, working with ignorant, all-too-privileged, liberal white women.

Sarsour & Co. had to contend with the fact that it’s “difficult to deal with these white women”. But they did it all the same — a great sacrifice. Trump’s rise had thrust “white supremacy” into the spotlight but, nevertheless, the magnanimous, committed Sarsour was prepared to work with white women. In doing so, says Giridharadas with unspeakable earnestness, she defied Audre Lorde, who had insisted that women of colour shouldn’t seek to “educate white women… as to our existence, our differences, our relative roles in our joint survival”. Doing so, the great intersectional sage taught, “is a diversion of our energies and a tragic repetition of racist, patriarchal thought”. Nevertheless, Sarsour & Co. persisted.

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Likewise, we are supposed to cheer Sarsour for mildly questioning her fellow activists’ ruthless enforcement of gender pronouns. She told them:

“Everyone’s pronouns should be respected. But [for some of the activists] who are here, English is not their first language, and this is a very new concept for them. So I would ask for forgiveness, and I would ask if that would be something that maybe we’ll do next time when we’re together as we get these women through this process.”

Note that the pronouns themselves aren’t up for debate — or even a matter of persuasion. Everyone should adhere to the linguistic demands of gender ideology. It’s just that some people are new to these norms, and Sarsour’s great persuasive act lies in asking “for forgiveness” as she helps the ignorant “through this process” of mastering them.

Everyone is on a “journey” — a word that appears so frequently in Giridharadas’s text, it made me never want to leave home again. The destination is the same for all, but the author and his cast of characters are generous enough to allow that, for some, the “journey” might take longer or more circuitous paths. Giridharadas’s great persuaders are those brave few prepared to guide lesser beings to the higher gnosis of current Left commitments. Yet the rightness of the gnosis itself is never up for questioning. Thus, we meet another Left-wing activist who declares that masks are about keeping “my neighbours safe” (Giridharadas implicitly agrees, since he never introduces the slightest critical distance from his subjects). The activist’s “persuasiveness”, we are made to understand, lies in trying to find common ground with even those who don’t share this (unscientific) view of masking.

Another activist, a proponent of police abolition, encounters a woman of colour who wants more policing in her neighbourhood. She is not unusual: wider polling data shows that very few black and brown Americans want less policing in their neighbourhoods. Our activist, however, is held up as a model of persuasion because, rather than writing off the woman, she badgers her relentlessly, until she comes around to the view that maybe policing is bad.

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Again, persuasiveness lies in “educating” the benighted, rather than genuinely listening to what they might have to say. Setting out to persuade progressives to be more persuasive, Giridharadas merely ends up ratifying the movement’s unbearable smugness. So much of what the author characterises as “persuasiveness” involves Left-liberals offering something like political-cum-psychological therapy to other Left-liberals. There is a camp, for instance — called Transracial Journeys, naturally — which offers guilt-ridden white parents a way to navigate their hang-ups over adopting black children (“I like to tell people that I’m a recovering racist,” confesses one mom).

Giridharadas’s account of persuasiveness reinforces the progressive tendency towards depoliticisation: contests over material conditions give way to therapeutic journeys for those at the top, with working-class people cast as the oafs and bigots in need of being coerced — if gently, as the author would have it — into enlightenment. It all ends up benefitting the culture-war Right and the restorationists, who are equally uninterested in improving the oiks’ material conditions, but at least don’t condescend to the many and call it persuasion.

This leaves it to the radicals to pursue a different politics, one that pays due attention to material reality and breaks through the culture-war deadlock. As one of the proponents of this approach, I admit that it is by far the more arduous alternative to merely restoring the status quo of 2013. Tech bros who think chief restorationist Bari Weiss talks good sense might be alienated and angry, but they’re not going to agitate against their own material interests. The suburban moms who are lacerating their woke school boards will never sign up for economic populism.

At best, the Post-Woke moment will be defined by a messy and unstable admixture of restorationism and radicalism, now countervailed by the regnant woke, now able to return the pressure with the help of pseudo-populist politicians — who would discipline Disney for pushing gender ideology, but not for underpaying its workers. As Justine Sacco no doubt did before her fateful flight, we would all be wise to buckle up.