If you spent 10 years trying to write a satire that encapsulates our present moment in American Democratic politics, you could do no better than this story. It is practically art. It is divinely ridiculous. But it’s also an incident from which certain conclusions can be drawn — about where the Left stands politically, and what the future holds, here at the almost-halfway point to our next presidential election.

The LatinX IncluXion Luncheon took place on Monday, in the Texas city of San Antonio, and Biden was attempting to compliment civil rights activist Raul Yzaguirre. “Raul helped build this organisation with the understanding that the diversity of this community, as distinct as the bodegas of the Bronx, as beautiful as the blossoms of Miami, and as unique as the breakfast tacos here in San Antonio, is your strength,” she said — mispronouncing “bodegas” as “BO-guh-duhs”. For the uninitiated, that is basically the closest thing we have in New York City to the crime of lese-majesty.

The backlash came swiftly from the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, which released a statement that read, in part, “NAHJ encourages Dr. Biden and her speech writing team to take the time in the future to better understand the complexities of our people and communities. We are not tacos.”

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The First Lady, of course, did not write this speech herself — as evidenced by the fact that it included a word she didn’t know and couldn’t pronounce. And the “tacos” line, of course, is not something she — or any normal person — would ever come up with organically. It’s pure political strategy, a too-earnest pandering to various identity groups that has dominated the liberal discourse for the past six years. It’s just unfortunate for Jill Biden that her speechwriters and political aides failed to realise that this type of rhetoric has not only reached the limits of its usefulness, but has lately become akin to walking around with a sign on your back that says “cancel me”.

This happened quite fast. It is only two years since the racial reckoning of 2020, a year when you couldn’t open your email without combing through half a dozen new corporate diversity declarations from every organisation you’d ever had contact with in your life. Your newspaper, your cable company, your dermatologist, the company that mails pineapples to your in-laws every year as a holiday gift: all of them wanted you to know that they stood in support of social justice. This was the year when the diversity industry climbed to a $7.6 billion valuation (and counting), and expensive DEI consultants flooded en masse into corporate life. It’s when Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility was a bestseller in its (approximately) 53rd millionth printing; when Democratic politicians took the knee wearing kente cloth; when celebrities purged their white guilt in self-produced confessional videos.

The momentum of the diversity movement was unstoppable, partly because Americans were united in genuine horror over the murder of George Floyd, but also because the country had been in pandemic lockdown for months, and everyone was bored and stir crazy and absolutely desperate to do something. Here was something to believe in and an excuse to flout the stay-at-home order, and by God, we were going to take it.

But as the landscape of daily life became littered with solidarity statements and BLACK LIVES MATTER signs, the significance of these expressions began to subtly shift. What started as legitimate outrage and demand for change was evolving into a sort of status signal, a code by which good liberals could recognise others of their kind. And as the summer wore on, the signs started taking on a subtext: not just I’m one of you, but also please don’t hurt me. Store owners plastered social justice slogans in their windows in the hope that their businesses would be spared if a riot broke out. Diners at sidewalk cafes were confronted by mobs of angry protesters who refused to let them eat until or unless they raised a fist for black lives. Silence, of course, was violence — and power was coalescing in new and different places.

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The desperation to demonstrate that you were down with the cause was palpable, and not unfounded. In one viral video, released at the moment when cancelling so-called “Karens” had become America’s new favorite spectator sport, a sobbing woman tries frantically to shield both her face and her licence plate from view. The unseen videographer accuses her of calling him the n-word; she protests that she’s done no such thing. “I have a black husband!” she shrieks, terrified.

To some people, the sight of that sobbing, desperate woman was deeply distasteful: a sign of things gone too far. But to others, it was a lightbulb moment: here was an opportunity. You could see it in the way that allegations of racism began to run rampant — not on the political Right, but through the most diversity-conscious, progressive spaces. The industries rocked hardest by the reckoning, and where most cancellations occur today, were not hotbeds of white supremacy but Left-liberal havens, populated by highly educated white people who prided themselves on their progressive bona fides and lived in terror of causing offence.

Media, fashion, publishing, television, the non-profit industrial complex: somehow, it was always the people doing the most who were next on the chopping block. The yoga studio owner who hosted free classes for students of colour. The novelist who diligently sought sensitivity reads in hopes of avoiding offence. The café owners who set out to create a welcoming LGBT community space. The summer camp with not one but two separate diversity committees to address issues of racial equity. The greater your dedication to diversity, the less likely your business was to survive a callout for even the most minor offences against it. Suddenly, nothing made you a target quite like being an ally (except apologising, of course).

And those statements that used to signal solidarity, even status — that used to be a tool for self-advancement in a world where caring about diversity was the best thing you could do for your brand — have taken on a new shade of meaning. Now, to say you care is to advertise your susceptibility to allegations of not-caring. You’re telling people that you can be squeezed, for apologies, or for money, or for whatever shred of publicity or attention or advantage might be gained by humiliating you.

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Jill Biden is being squeezed. Not because she actually did anything wrong, but because she cares about being seen to do right, and that makes her vulnerable. Let’s be clear about this: nobody actually believes that the First Lady of the United States, a 71-year-old professional with a doctoral degree, needs to be instructed as to the difference between people and tacos. Even the group of people who just issued a public statement declaring themselves not to be tacos do not believe it. Biden’s speech was many things — cringy, pandering, clearly unrehearsed — but it was not racist, not by any stretch of the imagination.

And yet, as long as someone can benefit from claiming they believe otherwise, they will — and the rest of us have to go along with it.

This might be the worst part: that everyone, from the First Lady to the NAHJ to the media covering this ridiculous story have to keep pretending that it’s a real thing, that it really matters. Journalists have to dutifully publish the interviews with the offended parties, who in turn dutifully manage to keep saying “We are not tacos” with a straight face. Jill Biden has to dutifully apologise and thank her interlocutors for the opportunity to listen, learn, and do better. And ordinary liberals who want to remain such, in good standing, have to dutifully nod along as if the party weren’t on the verge of collapsing under the weight of its own ridiculousness.

Meanwhile, the economy is imploding, no laws are being passed, our president’s approval rating is hovering around 30%, and those Latino voters who we claim to care about so much are fleeing in droves to the Republican party — where a candidate need not bother with endless racial sensitivity charades that cater solely to the sensibilities of an elite class of progressive activists. Donald Trump not only refused to celebrate diversity, unless you count tweeting a picture of himself on Cinco de Mayo — eating, of all things, a taco bowl — alongside the caption, I LOVE HISPANICS! He also vowed to build a wall to keep Mexicans  — who, he suggested, were mostly rapists — out of the country, a comment for which he refused to apologise. And yet, for a growing number of voters, even that is better than the cringe coming out of the Left.

And if things continue this way, that tweeting, taco-bowl eating orange ex-President will be re-elected in 2024 by a multi-racial coalition who care far more about the price of gas than they do about the culture wars. Melania Trump, who not only makes no apologies for her husband’s coarseness but really doesn’t care about immigrants will resume her position as the least-enthusiastic, and least seen, First Lady ever to set foot in the White House. But sure, let’s keep holding our politicians hostage to increasingly tortured purity tests. Let’s nitpick and police and snipe over etiquette until every last normal person in our orbit has fled. Let’s keep schooling the First Lady on the difference between a taco and a person. This will definitely end well.

As fitness goes, then, yoga has always been among the most accessible forms of exercise. Yet the community surrounding the practice is paradoxically plagued by anxiety about access, led by critics who are less interested in doing yoga than in obsessing about everything that yoga does wrong.

The online communities where yoga instructors gather are some of the messiest and most judgmental environments on the internet, marked by high tension and fierce infighting — even before the pandemic forced studios to close their doors. Battles raged over the proper way to Om, the acceptability of Sanskrit-based puns like “namaslay”, and whether the white women who make up the majority of American yoga instructors were guilty of colonising a spiritual practice to which they had no legitimate claim.

Those who eschewed those aspects and approached yoga primarily as a form of exercise, however, were treated with no less contempt — especially the yoga-influencers of Instagram, whose ability to stand on their hands or twist themselves into pretzels inspires envy and awe even among seasoned practitioners. Just like the culturally-appropriating woman Om-ing in a “namastay in bed” tank top, the Instagram yogis were guilty of crimes against inclusivity — in this case, making less-svelte practitioners feel inadequate by comparison. The last time I posted a video of my own practice, standing on my forearms in a pose called charging scorpion, another yoga instructor huffily scolded me that “yoga is not for showing off”.

All this scolding isn’t very zen, nor is it particularly in keeping with the fifth-century ethical code that yoga practitioners are supposed to abide by. On the other hand, it hews closely to a dynamic that seems to invariably emerge in spaces where liberal white women tend to gather, where whatever shared hobby or interest becomes subsumed by infighting over social justice issues. As with similar meltdowns in the YA fiction or knitting communities, the problem with yoga isn’t the practice itself but the audience it attracts. If privileged white women like it, it’s inherently suspicious for that reason alone — a conviction that nobody feels more keenly than the women themselves.

This predates the 2020 diversity reckoning that took particular aim at stuff white women liked — and that toppled the girlbosses in charge of brands like Refinery29, Man Repeller, or Reformation. The “whiteness of yoga” was a topic of critical discussion as early as 2014, but as in so many similar communities, the pressure to explicitly declare one’s allegiance to progressive politics ramped up to a fever pitch in the wake of Donald Trump’s election.

The first time I saw one of those now-ubiquitous “In this house we believe” signs was in 2019, hung on the wall of a local yoga studio where most of the clientele had mink eyelash extensions and shopped regularly at Lululemon. In early 2020, shortly before Covid threw us all into a state of emergency, the Yoga Alliance (a sort of unofficial governing body for certified yoga instructors) announced that it was overhauling its certification guidelines: registered yoga teachers would now be required to complete additional coursework in social justice and to sign an ethical commitment to “equity in yoga”. A statement on the website read:

“[We] recognise the inequities in the systems that surround yoga and through which yoga is practiced. These inequities have led to the marginalisation of many communities within the practice. In the spirit of “ahimsa” (non-violence), we acknowledge the harm that has resulted from this.”

As is often the case, evidence of the aforementioned harm is relatively thin on the ground. Critics of yoga’s “exclusivity” will point to things like the prevalence of thin, white models on the cover of magazines such as Yoga Journal, or one-off anecdotes such as this one — in which a non-incident, wherein the author accidentally stepped on a white woman’s yoga mat, spawns an increasingly far-fetched series of imaginary harms including the murder of the mat-stepping woman by racist police.

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It’s not hard to see how yoga’s politics are fuelled by this particular brand of liberal guilt, the same one that made Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility an instant bestseller among the suburban wine moms of the world. It’s the sense that one must always apologise, not just for being privileged, but for being basic: to be the type of woman who has a yoga studio membership, who goes to book club, who wears Reformation dresses, is in itself a sinful state for which you must atone. Your leisure time is not for having fun; it’s for doing better.

Of course, the exceptional levels of privilege-awareness and equity-commitment in yoga offer little protection from cancellation. Indeed, in some instances, it appears to have only made it that much easier to identify vulnerable targets, the ones least able to defend themselves. Take the case of Kindness Yoga, a chain of studios in Denver, Colorado whose owner Patrick Harrington was so committed to inclusivity that he regularly held classes just for people of colour. But when the studio posted in support of the Black Lives Matter movement in June 2020, it was immediately denounced by its own employees for “performative activism” and “tokenisation of black and brown bodies”.

The owner of Kindness made the requisite apologies, promising to listen and learn, but critics were not placated — and all nine studios, already in financially precarious circumstances from having been unable to operate during Covid, were forced to shut down. (The last news report on the Kindness Yoga cancellation noted that Harrington and his wife were frantically trying to sell their home to cover the costs of their lost livelihood. The ringleader of the campaign to kill Kindness, meanwhile, was planning to open her own studio, although it doesn’t look like she ever actually got around to it.)

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Meanwhile, the alleged exclusivity of the yoga community becomes laughable in contrast to the genuinely exclusive fitness trends that attract a similarly elite but less guilt-ridden clientele — and also, it must be said, to men, who can be found performing exactly zero hand-wringing over the whiteness of pursuits like alpine skiing, ice hockey, or the Tour de France. Compare the yoga folks meditating unhappily on their privilege to the Peloton junkies of the world, blithely spinning away on $3,000 exercise bikes — or to the $650 per hour pilates instructor Liana Levi, whose entire brand is to be explicitly, even hilariously, inaccessible. “I don’t cater to the masses, I cater to a demographic,” Levi told the New York Times in a recent profile. (When pressed on which demographic that might be, Levi’s amazing reply was: “Not masses.”)

And yet, perhaps Levi has the right idea. Cynically, what happened to Kindness Yoga can be seen as a cautionary tale, the living embodiment of the axiom, “Go woke, go broke”. But what’s more striking is how it reveals the cruelty that lurks within a community that prides itself on caring, and how the quest to repair harm invariably seems to perpetrate it in worse and different ways.

In this case, a few venal and self-interested actors were able to destroy reputations, torpedo livelihoods, and rob a community of nine wonderful spaces where people once joyfully gathered — all in the name of diversity, equity, and inclusion. The yogis who commit the hardest to this new ethos are only putting blood in the water: the more you do, the more you’ll be accused of not doing enough.

In Stage Three of this process as seen during the Black Lives Matter protests, you’ll remember, right-wing media were filled with hair-raising scare stories about what BLM really wanted. “Revealed:” burbled the Daily Mail. “The British arm of Black Lives Matter’s full agenda – abolish the police, smash capitalism and close all prisons”. No reference to this loose and decentralised racial justice movement went unaccompanied by mention that three of the prominent figures in it had described themselves as “trained Marxists”. You feel on stronger ground, I suppose, resisting a movement that you’ve decided wants to tear capitalist society and its institutions to bits than one that asks us to give people of colour an equitable stake in society and the hope of walking the streets without being harassed by the cops.

Yet, capitalism being miraculously forgiving, we have now entered Stage Four. Robin DiAngelo, of White Fragility fame, makes her main living as a “diversity consultant”, and is reported to charge north of £10,000 for a speech. She lectured Coca-Cola last year on “Confronting Racism”. And a brace of new books in her tradition indicates that far from wanting to smash for-profit workplaces, the diversity-industrial complex now wants to make capitalism safe for diversity. We have reached the stage, in other words, that trained Marxists would call co-optation.

Two books — one by Y-Vonne Hutchinson, How To Talk To Your Boss About Race: Speaking Up Without Getting Shut Down, and the other, A Judgement-Free Guide To Diversity and Inclusion for Straight White Men by Felicity Hassan and Suki Sandhu — are similar in scope and approach, though Hutchinson’s primary focus is race, while Hassan and Sandhu cover racism, sexism, ageism and homo/bi/transphobia too. They’re both aiming squarely at the business how-to market, most shamelessly in the case of the latter, which again and again mentions the “business case” for diversity and inclusion and barely makes the moral case at all.

In genre terms, we’re seeing the collision of two well established discourses: the boilerplate of antiracist discourse folded into the numbing cliches of the business self-help manual. This has the unfortunate effect, at least stylistically and in publishing terms, of making the case for antiracism or workplace diversity read like another vogue in management style — the new “mindfulness”, say — rather than an urgent moral imperative.

The books adhere to the same, by now familiar, theoretical framework — with leading anti-racists DiAngelo, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Ibram X Kendi liberally and respectfully cited, and microaggressions and privilege given the traditional working over. They both address the reader in a buttonholing, folksy way. “If you feel concerned that you may now be labeled ‘cisgender’ for the first time in your life, hold onto that thought”, say Hassan and Sandhu. “It’s all part of the learning curve”. Hutchinson opens with the words: “Let’s cut the bullshit”. If you resist any of this, in other words, it’s just another sign that you need to do “the work”.

That doesn’t mean, I should say, that the ideas they’re selling are in broad strokes wrong. We can agree that people from historically marginalised minorities continue to be disadvantaged even when they achieve de jure equality. To take one of the most obvious examples, racial disadvantage in the US is generationally baked in in all sorts of ways, and prejudice survives and adapts to legal remedies. This is why it makes sense to talk about “structural racism”.

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There is much evidence — cited generously in both these books — for the notion that not only are black and brown people disproportionately under-represented in agreeable and well-paid jobs, but that more black and brown people in those jobs would make everyone, not just the black and brown people, richer and happier. And that what goes for black and brown people goes, in the broadest sense possible, for other minorities. It’s also true to say, as both these books do, that privileged people – white, cis-male, straight, able-bodied etc – can get a bit defensive when confronted with their complicity in such a system. Hassan and Sandhu address themselves, primarily, to the notional white dude standing in the way of reform; Hutchinson, primarily, to the person of colour seeking to start a Difficult Conversation with that white dude.

They both offer, in styles apt to the genre (Hassan and Sandhu: Venn diagrams, bullet-points, away-day exercises and wince-making tint-panels in which the likes of Richard Branson puff themselves by spouting abstract bromides about how much they value diversity), explanations of the jargon of the territory for bewildered newcomers, and hand-holding step-by-steps on how to help to centre marginal voices, be a good ally, and be the change in the world that you want to see. Most of the practical advice is not unobvious. Hutchinson, that said, has useful points to make about the way in which the task of changing workplace culture can all too easily fall on the unpaid labour of minority employees, and warns all too plausibly of how corporate HR departments are generally more interested in shielding the company from legal and financial risk than treating individual employees fairly.

But there’s little sense in either book that the received ideas or the received vocabulary of antiracism or gender politics needs any interrogation. This is, perhaps in keeping with the turn in identity politics where an individual’s own sense of themselves (in the case of the argument over aspects of queer and trans identity) or of their experience of oppression (in the case of much race discourse) holds an almost theological authority: that unless you have “lived experience” you don’t just have an inferior standing to consider the issues, but no standing at all.

Both books proceed from a position of epistemic confidence. “Is your workplace racist?” asks Hutchinson. “The short and simple answer is nearly certainly yes. The more nuanced answer is still nearly certainly yes”. What can the reader do? They can start, say Hassan and Sandhu, by “learning the language of diversity and inclusion”. A set of terms, rather than a set of ideas. “Set up a debate to debunk the philosophy that women compete more with each-other than their male counterparts”, they advise chirpily at one point. Foregone conclusions, regardless of the subject, isn’t what debates are traditionally about.

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Yet the vocabulary is contested; and the remedies, when it comes down to fine detail, are contested too. Hassan and Sandhu make a distinction, for instance, between “diversity” and “inclusion” (though they seem to muddle the two at other points) and between “equity” and “equality”. They disagree with Hutchinson, a little, on “unconscious bias”. The Judgment-Free Guide finds the notion useful; How To Talk thinks we should stop pussyfooting around and call it racism, so as not to centre white people, their intentions and their feelings in a conversation about the harms done to people of colour. Do you capitalise “Ally”, as Hassan and Sandhu do, but leave “white” lower-case; or do you capitalise “White”, as Hutchinson does, and leave “ally” lower-case? At this point, I should say, my fragility is perhaps causing me to indulge in what Hutchinson identifies as the racist-in-denial tactic of “sealioning”: “focusing on details and small points of argumentation rather than the larger themes of the discussion”.

What I can say, which I don’t think is my fragility talking, is that however we may endorse those larger themes, or humbly submit to be educated by the emotional labour of their authors, this subject’s established orthodoxies can make for wearyingly abstract and repetitive writing. “Power is not binary”, Hutchinson writes, “It’s multifaceted and fluid”. I lost count of the number of times Hutchinson uses the word “leverage”, or Hassan and Sandhu — the front of whose book promises “everything you need to lead positive change” — talk about “journeys” and “driving change” (though, be it said, these are more the failings of bollocksy business books than identity politics books per se). As a side-note, isn’t it careless when writing about diversity and tolerance to quote, as Judgement-Free Guide does, Henry Ford and Chairman Mao — one antisemite, one mass-murderer — with approval? That’s a bit more judgement-free than many of us will be comfortable with.

Both these books default too often to a tissue of generalities and buzzphrases that tend to leave little or no impression on the mind. That isn’t sealioning. You can agree that the elimination of structural racism and all the other structural-isms is an urgent necessity, and still wish that writing on the subject were lively and original and precise; indeed, the more you recognise the urgency the more you’ll want some decent books on the subject. It’s a bit depressing to think that wine made from the vineyards of Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass and James Baldwin has found its way into bottles designed by Tom Peters.

By June, every title in the top ten of the New York Times’s bestselling nonfiction list was an anti-racist book. Magazines, newspapers, Instagram influencers, book clubs and bookshops all encouraged readers to educate themselves about racism by reading an approved list of books. The same titles kept reappearing.

A new canon was soon established. It included, among others, Reni Eddo-Lodge’s Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race, Ijeoma Uluo’s So You Want To Talk About Race, Akala’s Natives, Layla F. Saad’s Me and White Supremacy and Ibram X. Kendi’s How to be an Antiracist. Never mind that these books differ from each other in content, style and genre; they constituted an integral wish-list for any aspiring anti-racist. And DiAngelo’s was top of the pack.

DiAngelo’s latest book, Nice Racism: How Progressive White People Perpetuate Racial Harm, is released this week. The audience is, of course, progressive white people; she describes her intended “white progressive” readership as generally on the Left, but they can also be moderates, centrists and soft conservatives. They probably read The Root or the New York Times and “listen to NPR or the BBC as they commute to their job at a non-profit or tech company”.

Like so many of these recent books on race, Nice Racism is, quite explicitly, a self-help book rather than an anti-racist polemic.

Though she now has a very successful career, DiAngelo had a harrowing childhood. Her parents separated when she was young, and she moved apartments several times a year; her single mother couldn’t pay the rent. DiAngelo grew up without medical and dental care. She was called dirty at school and shunned by her peers. When she was ten, her mother died of cancer.

DiAngelo received her undergraduate degree in her mid-thirties at Seattle University, and her PhD, in the field of multicultural education, more than a decade later at the University of Washington. It was between the time of her degree and her doctorate that she became a diversity trainer, since when she has spent 20 years advising white-led businesses and organisations on how to positively interact with black and ethnic minority people. It was out of this work that she conceived the concept and title of her bestseller: white fragility.

White fragility is white people’s inability to discuss race and racism without being defensive and anxious. Whenever the vexed topic of race comes up, DiAngelo argues, white people bristle. This is because white people have been “socialized into a deeply internalized sense of superiority that we either are unaware of or can never admit to ourselves”. Everywhere you look you see white people in positions of political, economic, and cultural power; white standards of beauty are the norm; and black and ethnic minorities are presented throughout society as stupid, incompetent, and dangerous.

And all of this has been normalised to such an extent that, when such racial inequities are pointed out, “we become highly fragile in conversations about race”. Because the challenge to the “internalized superiority” of white people triggers a response of debilitating discomfort, anti-racist white people need to “build” their “racial stamina”— their ability to endure such conversations.

White fragility, however, is not benign: “it is a powerful means of white racial control and the protection of white advantage”. The genius of DiAngelo’s argument is that she can use any rejection of her thesis as evidence of its soundness. Condemn it out of hand and, well, you’re just suffering from white fragility.

What leads to white fragility, DiAngelo argues, is the belief that racism is individual actions committed by unkind people. This is an outdated view. Racism is instead deeply woven into the institutions of our society; every white person is socialised to be racist, and it is up to each individual white person to undo this socialisation.

This is why DiAngelo has no truck with individualism, meritocracy, and colour-blindness — they obscure the collective social fact of racism by suggesting we are unique individuals outside the matrix of race, or we can achieve social mobility without race, or that race doesn’t shape or influence how we perceive the world.

Even though DiAngelo explicitly disavows individualism, there is an essentially individualist mindset implicit in her argument: the individual who has to face up to her own socialisation in white supremacy. Individualism is bad because it suggests white people can escape from the forces of socialisation; but the only way to tackle white fragility, DiAngelo suggests, is by strengthening our individual capacity to sustain such conversations. White Fragility is not a utopian manifesto. It is not a Marxist polemic. It is a self-help book for white people who want to know how to confront racism.

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Yet while many self-help books are about making you feel good, or at least providing you with the tools to feel better, this isn’t quite the same with DiAngelo’s work. There is a Lutheran-like emphasis on the need to purge yourself of racism. And there is a distinctly pessimistic strain: “Racism is so deeply woven into the fabric of our society”, DiAngelo writes, “that I do not see myself escaping from that continuum in my lifetime”.

The two books often bought alongside White Fragility, Saad’s Me and White Supremacy and Kendi’s How to be an Antiracist, encourage the reader to use a journal when reading the text – a confessional volume itemising their list of racial sins. Becoming an anti-racist is not a walk in the park.

In her 2001 book, Race Experts, Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn analysed the intersection between race and the vogue for individual self-improvement in the wake of America’s civil rights movement. “The race experts”, she argues, “moved in to fill a void created by the collapse of the civil rights coalition and the loss of the clarity of the early movement, capitalizing on a long-term trend in American culture toward reliance on experts for guidance in all aspects of public and personal life”.

The civil rights movement was characterised by a commitment to egalitarianism and a universal standard of moral conduct: “It rested”, Lasch-Quinn writes, “on historical truths about America’s pluralism and its racial crimes. It rested on moral truths about harmony and justice”. The rhetoric of the new race experts, by contrast, is characterised by an emphasis on racial difference and individual self-expression:  “The therapeutic notion of identity called for unlimited self-expression as a goal”, Lasch-Quinn writes, “instead of a collective rehabilitation aimed at the formation of a morally viable community”.

Nevertheless, underneath the seeming chaos of individual self-expression lurks the strictures of ritual: “Despite its ostensible commitment to baring all emotion and thought”, Lasch-Quinn writes, “it has its own rituals and forms that actually constrain certain kinds of expression, perhaps the kinds we as a public need the most”. We are encouraged to educate ourselves about racism, and what is lost in our vain attempt to make full sense of the complexities of race is compensated for by the security of race experts telling us what to do and think.

DiAngelo’s tone is earnest and straightforward. There is a charm to how briskly she addresses contentious issues. The world is confusing and she encourages humility in her readers. She has the charisma of a prim no-nonsense teacher.

Saad possesses a similar quality, but she is more explicit. Her book Me and White Supremacy began as a 28-day Instagram challenge. It then became a PDF workbook that was downloaded by over 100,000 people around the world.

It is written as a companion guide for white readers to unpack their complicity in white supremacy. Saad is our Virgil: with characteristic humility, she describes her work in the introduction as a “one-of-a-kind personal antiracism tool structured to help people with white privilege understand and take ownership of their participation in the oppressive system of white supremacy”.

That Saad was born in Britain and grew up there and in Qatar — where she currently lives — does not stop her from using a term like BIPOC (black, indigenous, and people of colour) to refer to ethnic minority people. Like all successful self-help authors, she knows her own audience: they are either American or have internalised American culture to such an extent they can read about the marginalisation of “indigenous communities” without batting an eyelid.

At times Saad sounds like a boorish Italian-American boxing coach from the 1950s, or a barking Army general in a Stanley Kubrick epic: “There are no safety nets, no shortcuts, and no easier routes. You will want to close the book, run away, and pretend you never heard of me”, she instructs her reader: “You will want to blame me, rage at me, discredit me, and list all the reasons why you are a good person and why you don’t need to do this work. That is a normal, expected response. That is the response of the white fragility and anti-Blackness lying inside”.

But you can, of course, overcome this. She is more upbeat than DiAngelo. Like an old-fashioned textbook, there are questions at the end of each chapter to answer.

Kendi’s How to be Antiracist, by contrast, is distinct in one important way from many other contemporary anti-racist books: he believes black people can be racist to white people. As a college student, Kendi briefly thought white people were aliens. He no longer believes this. “Whenever someone classifies people of European descent as biologically, culturally, or behaviourally inferior”, he writes, “whenever someone says there is something wrong with White people as a group, someone is articulating a racist idea”.

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In How to be an Antiracist, definitions are absolutely critical for Kendi. He wants clear and consistent definitions on the terms racist and anti-racist. A racist is someone “who is supporting a racist policy through their actions or inaction or expressing a racist idea”. And an anti-racist is someone “who is supporting an anti-racist policy through their actions or expressing an anti-racist idea”.

How to be an Antiracist is the most unnuanced book I have ever read; he splits everything down the middle. There is no such thing as a race-neutral policy: every policy is either producing or challenging racial inequities. “The opposite of ‘racist’”, Kendi writes, “isn’t non-racist. It is ‘anti-racist’. One who ‘believes problems are rooted in groups of people’ is a racist”. By contrast, one who “locates the roots of problems in power and policies is an anti-racist.”

But for Kendi, being a racist is not the worst thing in the world. “It is not the worst word in the English language; it is not the equivalent of a slur”, he writes. “It is descriptive, and the only way to undo racism is to consistently identify and describe it — and then dismantle it”.

Kendi, like DiAngelo with her concept of white fragility, is effectively saying: get over yourselves. Stop being squeamish about being called racist. This aggressively dispassionate style of reasoning, however, is opposed to the true emotional character of people — something earlier anti-racist activists appealed to rather than denied. How, for example, can we be animated to fight racial injustice if we strip racism of its moral content and treat it as simply an analytical tool? isn’t the fact we are upset by being called racist a good thing because it implies we have intuitively accepted the moral case for fighting racism? Of course, many evidently racist people deny they are racist because of the social stigma attached to being called racist. But it’s still possible to identify their dishonesty without diluting the moral content of the term. To do so would be to undermine the legacy of those who proscribed racial prejudice in polite society.

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The tyranny of diversity training

By Ed West

Ultimately, both Kendi and DiAngelo, despite themselves, fit established stereotypes about America. The individualism, the meritocracy (they are both now wealthy and distinguished public thinkers), the vigorous evangelical piety, and, perhaps the most American thing about them: the neurotic fascination with race.

In her latest book, Nice Racism, DiAngelo’s fixation with race reaches a new pitch of intensity. Among her practical solutions for confronting racism includes attending something called an affinity group. A white affinity group is white people meeting together to discuss their internalised superiority, implicit bias, confusion, and resentment — and doing this in a racially segregated space so as not to cause harm to “racialized people”.

Another thing she suggests is getting “accountability partners of colour”. This is a black person who has agreed to coach you, think with you, and challenge you on your inevitable racism. And you should pay them for this.

If you are inclined, you could also seek out white accountability partners. DiAngelo says she doesn’t offer to pay her white friends for this, but she generously informs us that “there are white people with strong analysis and deep experience who do offer professional aid coaching”.

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How we bend the knee to our HR overlords

By Aris Roussinos

Apart from the dangers of encouraging and retrenching racial segregation, there is something so intensely cringeworthy about all of this. An accountability partner? White affinity groups? DiAngelo’s prose, in this book, is deadening rather than enlivening, tedious rather than instructive. Her analysis and recommendations lack sophistication, original insights, sprightly sentences, and astute observations. It is like reading a HR manager’s attempt to write a bestseller.

How can we have constructive discussions about race when everything is so tightly scripted? How can we have genuine conversations when our emotions are disregarded rather than acknowledged?

DiAngelo evinces no curiosity about the lives of ethnic minority people: they come out of this book as shallow as a street puddle. There is no attempt to dig beneath the surface of oppression and marginalisation. How, exactly, can we build authentic cross-racial relationships on the basis of all of this?

But, as she reminds us in one passage, her book is not an attempt “to teach white people about Black people. I am seeking to teach white people about ourselves in relation to Black people and other people of color”. In the end, it is supposed to be about the individual white person overcoming a barrier to greater racial enlightenment. In truth, what is offered is not enlightenment but an emotionally and intellectually enervating form of narcissism.

Calvinism was an energetic and revolutionary creed which found its epicentre in Geneva. Here, as elsewhere, Calvinists showed themselves devoted to education, enthusiastic charity givers and generous to refugees.

They also proved to be violently intolerant, with Jean Calvin’s Geneva imposing extreme punishments for perceived sinners, including the death penalty for pregnancy out of wedlock. They also had a tendency to smash up statues and burn down abbeys, or anything else that was associated with the old religion. Perhaps most puzzling of all to religious conservatives, Calvinists saw the world being divided between the damned and the saved — and the doubt this caused in believers often led to extreme psychological stress, to the point of breakdown.

It wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea, and so just over 400 years ago, a group of English men and women with Calvinistic leanings, feeling that their homeland wasn’t Godly enough, set sail to start a new country. This they did, pretty successfully, and today the new religion spreading from America displays that country’s strong Calvinist roots, and with the zealot’s indifference to local customs.

Today the faith is spread not by preachers, or even teachers, but through the institutions that wield the most power in the 21st century; corporations, and their Human Resources departments. For the practitioners of what is generally known as “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” are teaching nothing less than a modern form of political Calvinism, one that paints a pessimistic picture of humanity destined to be damned. And their strength is growing.

Our economy may be in deep trouble following the pandemic, but one area which is already enjoying a roaring 20s is the diversity industry, which has significantly increased its presence in many companies since the protests that followed the death of George Floyd. All around, in hushed tones, people in a variety of careers, from academia to medicine to finance, grumble about the increasing encroachments on their workplace by newly empowered D.E.I teams. And the grumbling is always private; no one wants to go on record.

For some it’s a mere time-wasting exercise, with occasional Zoom conferences adding to the day’s workload. For others it goes much further, with HR-led diversity teams now even deciding who can be hired for what role. But almost everywhere there has been a significant ramping-up since last June.

The usual pattern is that a well-meaning manager, bombarded with images of BLM and racial justice from every corner of social media, will suggest that the organisation needs to alleviate concern about racism. The company or department, aware that racism is seen as the number one social evil and that anti-racist courses might also act as insurance against any discrimination lawsuit, will hire a professional anti-racist activist from outside.

It is rarely initiated by human resources, but HR embrace it because it gives them a role as priests of the new faith. There is also a whole outside industry that benefits too.

A middle manager at a medical professional body told me how, following the summer protests in the US, “it was [considered] a matter of urgency that we ran a series of mandatory diversity and inclusion training sessions for our staff”. There hadn’t been any problem at the company, which was pretty diverse and had good morale.

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Why we love to hate the French

By Ed West

The sessions were run by professional diversity consultants, and were “quite different from previous E&D training I had attended at past jobs. Whilst those ones tended to focus more on how to avoid breaking the law, these sessions felt a lot more like an induction into their ideology.” They said that equality meant “treating people differently and acknowledging their race” and afterwards participants were told to research “ally behaviour” and “to educate ourselves about the British Empire”.

As with many of these courses, some very questionable claims were made: “We were told that high levels of diversity were in all cases a great thing and can only lead to good outcomes,” when numerous studies point to the opposite. They were told the gender pay gap was in large part caused by people using the word “girl” instead of “woman”, a claim that fails to take into account the overwhelming influence of child-rearing on the gender pay gap.

There was a talk about unconscious bias testing, even though it’s been shown to be largely bogus, and as with so many of these sessions, almost all the examples and talking points came from the US, “and there didn’t seem to be any kind of recognition from the trainers that these are two very different countries with very different histories”.

Many diversity and equality sessions instruct employees to read Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility, a runaway bestseller that has become the Little Red Book of the diversity industry. White Fragility is mainly tasked with teaching white liberals that the polite ways they talk about race to avoid offence are actually proof of their deep-seated sin. Whites, says DiAngelo, are able to “infuse their racial prejudice into the laws, policies, practices, and norms of society in a way that people of color do not”, and being unconscious of this racism is merely proof of how insidious it is.

In this world, greater white average wealth in any area is a priori evidence of this racism, even though over a dozen or so ethnic minority groups in the United States are wealthier than the white average. This central inequality, according to the book, “represents power and control by a racial group that is in the position to disseminate and protect its own self-image, worldview, and interests across the entire society”.

It is an incredibly bleak worldview, and as Matt Talibi said, “sees the human being as locked into one of three categories: members of oppressed groups, allies, and white oppressors”.

And this is what is being taught at workplaces across Britain, a new American religion proclaiming that, whatever we do, we are damned. It goes largely unopposed partly because the British are so unused to politics intruding in these areas of life, but also because workers are scared for their jobs; the rise of woke capital has given large corporations more power over their precarious employees.

One of the things I find so alien about the new religion is the absence of humour. So much of what is called identity politics is funny in its absurdity, because fanatics are intrinsically ridiculous — but only when they can’t get at you. But most people feel that they can, they can get them sacked or publicly humiliated, and so all the humour is told in DM groups or Slack channels. True believers certainly can’t laugh at themselves, and are determined to take the public realm’s sacred space for themselves.

There is also the difference between the totalitarian mind and the liberal mind; for the former, everything is about politics. What you do in your spare time has political implications, and so no area of life is free of political discussion. The traditional English cultural taboo about not discussing religion or politics in the pub reflected a deep-seated aversion to fanaticism; the idea that workplaces might be settings for political instruction would once have struck people here as positively demented.

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Why monarchies are more tolerant

By Ed West

A friend who works for a Russell Group university in the north of England described how, since June last year, there have been “constant invitations to regular Race Equality sessions and Diversity and Inclusion sessions”. Even in department-level meetings on completely unrelated topics there are now talks “educating us about the slave trade” with videos and slides. She describes these as “just complete non-sequiturs since the majority of the meeting is about new research grants, new students in the department, recruitment for next year”. It’s not that it’s a great intrusion, it’s just that it’s…. weird.

They are also made to undergo unconscious bias training before being allowed on interview panels for new staff and students, and are told things which are either questionable or outright false. At one of the meetings a diversity and inclusion officer told faculty that “if you only have one woman on your job shortlist there’s statistically no likelihood you’ll recruit her”, and this went unchallenged, even though this is not only untrue, it’s obviously untrue. Strangest of all, they were also told to “start every lecture with a picture of a black scientist and say that they have a voice and that it’s being heard”. She finds it embarrassingly patronising.

Universities are particularly vulnerable to this sort of activism, because by nature they are political. Many privately despair, including academics who aren’t especially right-wing; whatever your politics, conformism can become intolerable in a workplace. Talking about politics all the time is tedious. And activists can be disagreeable people.

Another academic, working at a politics department, recalled that things ramped up after the death of George Floyd when a committee was set up to look at diversity and decolonisation. It ended with activists from outside the department hiring students to “review” their reading list and blaming the inclusion of John Locke and David Hume for the BAME attainment gap. The conclusion was the demand that they separate “colonial and non-colonial” political history courses, which meant in effect separate courses for white and non-white political philosophers.

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How to resist the new totalitarianism

By Niall Gooch

The strangest thing about all this expanded HR is that there is almost no evidence that diversity officers improve outcomes for underrepresented minorities. Indeed there is even evidence of the “pharisee effect”, that people made to recite a platitude about diversity and gender equality were less likely to hire a black or female candidate; it just made them feel like they’ve done their bit, a criticism that has been made against upper-class activism since Tom Wolfe’s day.

None of this stops it expanding. Even the royal family are on board, or as it was reported last week, “Queen to appoint diversity tsar”, one of those headlines that would truly baffle someone waking from a long coma. This will not improve the life of a single BAME person except for the actual tsar, or tsarina, who gets the job; everyone knows it, it’s just the royal family conforming to the state religion, just as their ancestor George I did.

The companies hiring diversity consultants probably aren’t improving people’s lives, and they aren’t encouraging tolerance, let alone “diversity”; quite the opposite. They’re doing what people in positions of power have done since the first states were formed, ensuring that their gods and saints are the ones being revered by the subjects they rule. As for the individuals who do not believe in the new faith, they do what people in totalitarian societies have always done – they keep quiet and retreat to an inner world where the intolerance and conformity of the powers-that-be cannot reach them.

But help is on the way, for we now have the cure for this problem: Critical Theory. The goal of “Theory” is to overthrow the Force, liberating the disadvantaged from their mental slavery to usher in an epoch of perfect equality, or even — dare we hope — turn the tables on the white cis-het male oppressor. If you fall into a hegemonic category, you must repent of your privilege and become an ally to the oppressed. If from a victim group, you must wake up and fight against lies about “objective truth”, “free speech” or universal standards, which are oppressing you and erasing your identity.

If you have the temerity to disagree with this conspiracy theory, or demand evidence for its sweeping claims, you’re part of the problem, helping to reproduce the Force and uphold the System. Time for your re-education, otherwise known as diversity training.

Critical Theory is the philosophy which underlies Wokeness. It consists of layers of assertions, built up over time, with each new generation of theories building on the inventions of previous theorists. Using moral self-righteousness and the leftist monoculture of the soft social sciences to shield them from scientific scrutiny, its practitioners have founded a series of fields such as queer theory, critical race theory, fat studies and critical gender theory.

Gradually, these have intersected and morphed into an all-encompassing Theory, which today’s identity politics activists use to justify a ratcheting programme of language policing, Twitter mobbing and re-education. When challenged, they wheel out Theory buzzwords like “white fragility”, “heteronormative” or “microaggression”.

Critical Race Theory, in particular, has become such a concern that last month the US president issued an executive order barring its use in federal institutions, while yesterday in Parliament Equalities Minister Kemi Badenoch condemned it as a “dangerous trend” in race relations.

Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay’s Cynical Theories is the most thorough attempt yet to unmask this Social Justice religion, or, to use postmodernist lingo, to “deconstruct” its “metanarrative”. It tracks the genealogy of critical race, gender, queer and fatness theory, painstakingly pointing out logical leaps and flaws. The two authors, along with a third figure, Peter Boghossian, came to well-earned prominence in October 2018 when they revealed the scandal that they were able to get seven hoax papers published in established gender studies, fat studies and queer studies journals.

These included a purported participant observation study of a dog park alleging that canines engage in rape culture and a paper on the penis as social construct. Though designed to be ridiculous, these studies passed peer review because they ticked the right ideological boxes and demonstrated proficiency in postmodernist jargon. One even won an award. Like Alan Sokal’s similar hoax in the 1990s, Pluckrose and company exposed the fact that these studies trafficked in ideology and faux-knowledge, and could thus be manipulated in a way no scientific journal dedicated to understanding the real world can be.

As a Masters student in Sociology at the London School of Economics in the early 1990s, I encountered the prelapsarian world in which high theory and activism were still separate. Coming from an economics background, I was stunned to find myself in a sociological theory seminar that felt like a séance, in which participants riffed off each other, tossing in morsels of jargon or fragments from canonical thinkers like Michel Foucault, Claude Levi-Strauss or Homi Bhabha, while shedding little to no light on the workings of the social world beyond our classroom.

The big thing was still postmodernism, the idea that modernisation and progress are a myth, along with its bigger sister, post-structuralism, which holds that language is just a bunch of words which gain meaning from each other and have no relationship to anything in the real world. Postmodernism was an art rather than a science, a play on words instead of a serious attempt to improve our knowledge of society.

Of course, there may be a grain of truth to Foucault’s untested idea that knowledge affects power relations, or to the post-structuralist claim that context has some effect on the meaning of words. Phrases like “astral world of signs” or “liquid modernity” really are a lot of fun. Yet, rather than make such claims measurable and modest, its contemporary practitioners have elevated the idea of knowledge as oppression onto the plane of sacred values, with reality and theory two non-overlapping magisteria that science cannot solve. Relativism insulates Theory from scientific scrutiny.

After the seminar, I noticed one especially humourless classmate dressed in proletarian gear flogging the Socialist Worker in the quad, having swapped his postmodernist theory for Marxist practice. Nowadays, his high theory and activism would be better coordinated, united in the form of a strident intersectional identity politics which manifests in the form of open letters to cancel professors, Robin D’Angelo’s White Fragility training or the New York Times’s 1619 Project. Indeed a key theme of Pluckrose and Lindsay’s book is that the political radicalism of the 1960s-80s has commandeered the pretend-expertise of postmodernism, invested it with seriousness and pressed it into action as Cancel Culture.

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David Lammy's double standards

By Eric Kaufmann

Just as Salafi Islam was a quietist form of fundamentalism that ignited when mixed with Marxist theories of action, Theory has now entered its activist phase. It has migrated off campus into government, the media and the corporate world. This is why the sane mainstream can no longer afford to ignore its abstruse nonsense and why, whatever we think of Trump, we should applaud his executive order banning Critical Race Theory in the US government.

The book’s intellectual history is vital, and I commend its plea for a return to what Jonathan Rauch terms “liberal science”. This said, the authors fail to grasp the liberal roots of Theory, and how Left-liberalism’s well-intentioned and sometimes protective attitude to minorities has overreached and helped make the problem worse.

They believe a sharp emotional line can be drawn between a nice “left-liberal” who “favour[s] the underdog” and a totalising victim-oppressor worldview. Unfortunately, it can’t. Once your default position is warmth toward supposedly helpless minorities and suspicion of majorities, you have stepped across an affective abyss which sacrifices your objectivity, and this makes it far harder to resist the leftist good guys just trying to protect the meek. After all, the hearts of activists fighting for the underdog are in the right place and you wouldn’t want to be associated with the dark side.

Theory is set up as a form of science but it rarely advances through logical argument, and it can only be countered if it rests on a pre-cognitive base of emotional neutrality.

While the principles of reason and liberalism are opposed to extreme egalitarianism, there is no appeal to the heart in contemporary liberalism to viscerally counter the powerful Woke metanarrative of “defending the weak against the tyranny of the majority”. Until such a thing happens, liberal science will continue to mock Theory the way Sokal did in 1996 — while wokeness barrels on, capturing the hearts of young, educated and “right-thinking” people.

John Ellis’s The Breakdown of Higher Education is a case study of what happened at the epicentre of Theory, the university. It provides a first-hand account of how the cultural revolution that institutionalised critical theory and Cancel Culture began and spread. As a British-born emeritus professor of English at the University of California Santa Cruz who has taught there since 1966, Ellis recalls an exciting time when staff and students learned the western canon, and used it as a jumping-off point to freely discuss ideas without fear of being shamed or disciplined. He recounts how Social Justice ideology has, over the course of his lifetime, driven the pursuit of truth and excellence out of the social sciences and humanities in American universities.

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Are young people turning to the Right?

By Eric Kaufmann

This cultural change began with demographic shifts and was consolidated through political discrimination. In 1969, the authoritative Carnegie faculty surveys found that 45% of the professoriate leaned left, 28% right and 27% in the middle. By 2004, a study of party registration data for Berkeley and Stanford university faculty showed an 8:1 left-to-right ratio, rising to 49:1 among junior faculty. Trend-setting California offered a clue as to what was happening. By 2016, another study found that the modest 2:1 left-to-right nationwide faculty ratio of 1969 had given way to a yawning 12:1 tilt. By 2018, Mitchell Langbert’s study of the party registrations of faculty in the top 50 US liberal arts colleges discovered that 39% had zero Republican registrations, with most of the rest in single digits.

Ellis remarks on the confluence of chance events that allowed this capture to take place. In effect, during the sixties, a combination of baby boom demographics and rising affluence resulted in the universities undergoing massive expansion. This occurred at precisely the moment that the Vietnam War and Civil Rights movement delegitimated the country’s traditional narrative, a conjunction that created an opening for radical students to enter the professoriate in large numbers, transforming it.

Once in post, the new generation deepened their ideological grip by controlling recruitment. Instead of being inculcated into the dominant truth-seeking culture of the university, the radicals now possessed the critical mass to escape Rauch’s “liberal science” and transform the entire mission of academia. Now truth-seekers would have to bend to orthodoxy instead of the other way round. Instead of their traditional motto of veritas, the university now stood for radical activism, with a focus on disadvantaged race, gender and sexuality groups.

Ellis draws on John Stuart Mill’s argument that “the opposition of the other… keeps each within the limits of reason and sanity” — bad ideas on the extremes are sidelined. Once academia becomes a monoculture, however, with conservative voices excluded or suppressed, there is no longer a battle of ideas at the centre, but rather a climate which empowers “the most extreme and exciting positions of the left”, in Ellis’s words, a group who come to exemplify the shared outlook of the campus. The result has been ever-more strident campus radicalism, culminating in disasters like the Evergreen State and Middlebury affrays, shoutdowns and no-platformings. Professors who fail to conform to campus orthodoxy face open letters, chanting students and Twitter mobs trying to end their livelihoods.

Meanwhile, says Ellis, the university is failing its students. A succession of studies show that graduateliteracy levels and general skills have slipped compared to past generations. In one study, 45% of students showed no skills development over their entire university course. Meanwhile, implicit racial quotas at leading universities have resulted in minority students with weaker results being improperly allocated to universities that don’t match their aptitude, producing high dropout rates or transfers to less rigorous courses — with their relative lack of success in prestige fields then blamed on a racist curriculum rather than a flawed admissions process.

Universities have stonewalled attempts to obtain data on graduation rates for preferentially-admitted students, Ellis writes, because “they don’t want anyone to know the damaging results of these policies…the harm they do to black students”.

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Is Critical Race Theory racist?

By Helen Pluckrose

The mushrooming of equity and diversity bureaucracies in recent decades has both increased the chilling effect on conservative and centrist scholars and replaced an ethos of excellence with one of “diversity”. Diversity training using Theory-inspired materials is now mandatory across most American universities, and some University of California departments are requiring job applicants to complete “diversity statements” outlining how they are advancing orthodoxy. Administrators, not scholars, weed the pile of applications, which is only then sent on to academic departments.

Ellis believes that universities have passed the point of no return and cannot be saved from within. The only hope is for outside intervention, from donors, trustees or the Government. However, time is short, for Social Justice is now taking root outside the campus, from K-12 schools to corporations. As new generations are raised to prioritise sensitivity to minorities (as interpreted by Theory) over truth, the common sense of the off-campus majority may no longer exist in sufficient strength to resist dogma.

Pluckrose and Lindsay, inhabiting the more intellectually plural world of commentary and journalism, believe good ideas will win out over bad. Ellis, who has seen the face of repression first-hand within the American university system, is, in my view, more realistic.

Conservatives and traditional liberals naively expected the political correctness and speech codes of the 1990s to fade away. They wasted their energy on economics and foreign policy, neglected the culture and are now in danger of losing it altogether. Only an active mobilisation, involving the intervention of elected governments, can hope to reverse Theory’s capture of elite institutions, the current slide toward collective unreason and the emergence of a truly Orwellian public culture.

In his debate with Joe Biden, Donald Trump claimed that critical race theory is racist and teaches people that America is a horrible place to which Biden responded weakly by claiming that Trump was the racist. Trump’s previous attacks on critical race theory produced a mass of conflicting claims about what critical race theory is, what precisely has been proscribed by the administration and what its motivations were for doing so.

The memo stated: “[A]ll agencies are directed to begin to identify all contracts or other agency spending related to any training on “critical race theory”, “white privilege” or any other training or propaganda effort that teaches or suggests either (1) that the United States is an inherently racist or evil country or (2) that any race or ethnicity is inherently racist or evil.”

The memo also says that “employees across the Executive Branch have been required to attend trainings where they are told that ‘virtually all White people contribute to racism’ or where they are required to say that they ‘benefit from racism'”. The memo describes critical race theory as “propaganda” five times, “divisive” five times, “unAmerican” twice, and “anti-American” once. Critical race theory is declared to be “contrary to all we stand for as Americans.”

This is an odd claim, since racial inequality and attempts to remedy it have been a constant in American history. Consequently, there have been two centuries of scholarship and activism by African-Americans and others in the realm of American race relations.

The president has also declared that he is raising funds to educate people as to the “real history of the country — the real history, not the fake”. This is concerning to those who are not convinced the president is a reliable judge of what is and isn’t fake news, historical or current. It was similarly alarming when Mr Trump said that he would sign an executive order to create “patriotic education” that will teach young people “to love America with all of their heart and all of their souls”. The implication is that Trump wants to promote an entirely prideworthy version of American history. If so, it is unclear how the enslavement of African Americans would be taught.

Prominent critical race theorists responded to the memo angrily. To Kimberlé Crenshaw, it was “McCarthyism 101” while to Ibram X Kendi  it amounted to a claim that to be American was to be racist. “There is danger here” said M.E Hart, provider of federal diversity trainings. “We have to see each other as human beings, and we have to do whatever it takes to, including whatever classes make that possible.”

So, what is critical race theory? Is it divisive propaganda that claims America and white people to be racist and evil? Or is it simply the recognition of all people as human beings?

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By Douglas Murray

The theory traces its roots back to the writings and activism of freed slaves including Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth, who argued strongly for the recognition of African-Americans as full human beings. However, the theory as we know it today could best be understood to have its founding father in the sociologist, W.E.B Du Bois (1868-1963). Du Bois argued that the idea of race was created to provide a biological justification for the enslavement, mistreatment and exploitation of African-Americans. He was right.

Du Bois, however, was inclined to believe that African-Americans needed to raise themselves out of their subordinated position by showing white Americans how wrong they were to devalue black Americans in this way. During the Civil Rights Movement, a more activist stance developed which required white Americans to take more responsibility for their own racist assumptions and help to reorder society more fairly.

Following the legal success of the Civil Rights Movement the movement stalled. Legal victories had been won but racist attitudes remained. Thus, what was needed was a “critical” approach. The word “critical” refers to a practice of critiquing institutions and broader society with a view to revolutionary political change. This was in contradiction to the liberal approach of reforming existing structures so that everybody had equal access to them.

As Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic wrote in the introduction of Critical Race Theory: An Introduction: “Unlike traditional civil rights discourse, which stresses incrementalism and step-by-step progress, critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.”

The founding father of critical race theory was Derrick Bell, professor at Harvard Law School. Bell argued that racism has not improved and is, in fact permanent, and that whites simply find less obvious and legal ways to maintain their dominance. Bell developed his theory of “Interest convergence” which argued that whites only extend rights to blacks when it is in their own material interest. This cynical and pessimistic materialist approach tends to present empirical evidence of disparities and then claim racism as the sole cause of them, while ignoring progress.

Materialism held sway in critical race theory in the 1970s and 80s but gave way to postmodern ideas from the 1990s. In 1991, Kimberlé Crenshaw defined intersectionality as a “provisional concept linking contemporary politics with postmodern theory.”  She critiqued liberalism for its universalism which held that all people should have access to everything regardless of their identity and argued instead for an identity-based approach.

This critique marked a shift from liberalism to identity politics with added postmodernism. The postmodern approach to critical race theory focused less on material aspects of society and more on concepts of power, knowledge and language.

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Racial categories are reactionary

By Ralph Leonard

This owes much to the thought of the French theorist Michel Foucault, who argued that oppressive systems of power are maintained by ways of talking about things — discourses. Powerful forces in society get to decide which ways of talking about things are legitimate and they do so to maintain their own privileged positions.

Having legitimised certain discourses, the general population then accepts them as common sense and speaks as though they are true, thus upholding power structures such as white supremacy without realising what they are doing. Critical theorists exist to explain these systems and how they work so people can see them and dismantle them.

This is how critical race theory developed within the academy. However, since around 2010, it has moved into the mainstream. The ideas we are most likely to hear are those of Ibram X Kendi and Robin DiAngelo. Kendi’s How to be an AntiRacist (2019) and DiAngelo’s White Fragility (2018) were New York Times bestsellers for months and sold out again following the death of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter protests.

The work of Ibram X Kendi seems to draw most of its spirit from the materialist approach, presenting us with two intertwined false dichotomies. Firstly, one can only be racist or anti-racist. Secondly, one can either support the existence of disparities between races as right and natural or one can attribute them to racist power structures and policies in society and oppose them.

That is, either one accepts that all disparities are the result of racist structures in society and devotes oneself to opposing these as such, or one is a racist. Kendi does not claim that all white people are racist but maintains that all people can behave in ways that are racist or anti-racist according to his definitions.

He writes: “One endorses either the idea of a racial hierarchy as a racist, or racial equality as an antiracist. One either believes problems are rooted in groups of people, as a racist, or locates the roots of problems in power and policies, as an anti-racist. One either allows racial inequities to persevere, as a racist, or confronts racial inequities, as an antiracist… . The claim of ‘not racist’ neutrality is a mask for racism… . The only way to undo racism is to consistently identify and describe it — and then dismantle it.”

Robin DiAngelo takes a thoroughly postmodern approach. Her belief is that white people are unavoidably racist because of the ways in which they have been socialised in white supremacist countries. DiAngelo identifies America as just such a country but also much of Europe, including the UK.

For DiAngelo, “whiteness” is a system that whites perpetuate with everything they do. In White Fragility, she describes whiteness as a “constellation of processes and practices” consisting of “basic rights, values, beliefs, perspectives and experiences purported to be commonly shared by all but which are actually only consistently afforded to white people”. For DiAngelo these processes are “dynamic, relational, and operating at all times and on myriad levels”.

Elsewhere, she sets out a tenet of anti-racism, stating that “The question is not ‘Did racism occur?’ but ‘How did racism manifest in that situation?'” There is no possibility of not being racist and DiAngelo’s training aims to get white people to accept that they are racist — as the Trump memo claims.

So, is the Trump administration right? Does critical race theory claim that America is racist? Yes. Does it claim that white people are racist? If the training is based on DiAngelo, yes. If it draws more on Kendi, a racist is anyone not entirely convinced that all disparities are due to racism. Interestingly, 43% of black Americans are not convinced of this and believe an unwillingness to work hard is a major cause compared to only 30% of whites who believe so. This doesn’t mean they are correct and the perception being higher in black Americans could well be better explained by a tendency to conservatism related to their greater, often Protestant, religiosity as a group.

Is Hart correct that critical race theory and anti-racism training simply want all people to be recognised as equally human? No, this universal humanist approach is explicitly criticised in critical race theory as the failed liberal approach. Critical race theory works by foregrounding identity, not our shared humanity. Is the Trump administration thus correct to call it “divisive”? Absolutely.

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Defenders of critical race theory training often miscategorise it as a standard form of essential workplace training, but training people in critical race theory is not like training them in protocols of data protection where compliance with the law can reasonably be required. It is more like training them in a belief system like Christianity and denying employees the right to be openly Muslim, Jewish, Hindu or atheist. Nobody should be required to pretend to believe themselves to be racist or to believe in invisible systems of whiteness if they don’t.

Critical race theory and particularly the anti-racism of Robin DiAngelo require people to reject individual agency and the individual’s knowledge of and control over their own mind, and to accept that they must believe precisely what one set of American theorists insist they do. While believers in critical race theory often insist that only white people reject its ideas, studies show that progressives who hold these kinds of views are much more likely to be white. Black Americans are even split in believing that race relations will improve by focusing on commonalities (liberal universalism) as on differences (identity politics).

By banning training rooted in critical race theory for federal employees, President Trump has defended freedom of belief and taken a stand against coerced speech. Yet there is cause to be concerned. The rhetoric about “patriotic education” and “anti-American propaganda” indicates that Trump could intend to replace one biased and ideological narrative with another and thus deny American children a rigorous education about the racial history of America.

Following the release of his memo, he tweeted, “This is a sickness that cannot be allowed to continue. Please report any sightings so we can quickly extinguish!”

And rather ominiously, at Tuesday’s debate the president also responded to requests to condemn white supremacy by telling the far-Right street fighters Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by. But I’ll tell you what: Somebody’s got to do something about antifa and the left.”

While American liberals might share the president’s wish for critical race theory to cease and desist, they must retain their principles of freedom of belief and be on their guard lest this language presages authoritarian censorship.

Cynical Theories: How Universities Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity — And Why this Harms Everybody by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay is published by Swift Press

What does this all do to speed along policing reform, ask bewildered African-Americans, as they observe global corporations and white celebrities compete to beat their chests in ever-more elaborate and meaningless gestures of atonement? What kind of meaningful anti-systemic revolution can provoke such immediate and fulsome support from the Hollywood entertainment complex, from the richest oligarchs and plutocrats on earth, and from the media organs of the liberal state?

If we are to understand the successor ideology as an ideology, it may be useful here, counterintuitively, to return to the great but increasingly overlooked 1970 essay on the “Ideological State Apparatuses,” or ISAs, by the French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser. Once influential on the Western left, Althusser’s reputation has suffered somewhat since he killed his wife in a fit of madness 40 years ago. Of Alsatian Catholic origin, and a lifelong sufferer from mental illness, Althusser wrote his seminal essay in a manic period following the évènements of 1968, for whose duration he was committed to hospital. 

Composed with a feverish, hallucinatory clarity, Althusser’s essay aimed to elucidate the manner in which ideology functions as a means to prop up the political order, observing that “no class can hold state power over a long period without at the same time exercising its hegemony over and in the Ideological State Apparatuses”. 

What are these ISAs? Contrasted with the Repressive State Apparatuses — the police, the army, and so on — the ISAs are the means by which the system reproduces itself through ideology: Althusser lists the church, the media and the education system along with the family, and the legal and political system and the culture industry as the means through which the ideology of the governing system is enforced. Althusser here develops Gramsci’s thesis that the cultural sphere is the most productive arena of political struggle, and inverts it: instead of being the site of revolutionary victory, it is where the system reasserts itself, neutering the possibility of political change through its wielding of the most powerful weapon, ideology. 

It is through ideology, Althusser asserts, that the ruling system maintains itself in power: “the ideology of the ruling class does not become the ruling ideology by the grace of God, nor even by virtue of the seizure of state power alone,” he states, “it is by the installation of the ISAs in which this ideology is realised and real­ises itself that it becomes the ruling ideology.”

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How does this apply to the successor ideology? Almost anyone who works in a university or a large corporation will by now have been forced to attend the instruction sessions in the dogma of the new faith which have rapidly become mandatory. When we see a handful of MPs proclaim on Twitter that they refuse to attend the struggle sessions to which they have been ordered by the faceless bureaucracy, trying feebly to assert some degree of autonomy against the managerial state, we appreciate clearly the hierarchies of power which govern our system. 

Like the wave of statue-toppling earlier this summer, which immediately subsumed itself into the endless bureaucracy of commissions and panels, overseen by the quangos and opaquely-funded NGOs which actually run this country, we realise that true power in Britain rests neither in the streets nor at the ballot box, but in the hands of the professional managerial class. The spread of the successor ideology is not, despite the urban violence which occasionally attends its spread, a revolutionary moment, but the very opposite, a counterrevolution of HR managers, the means by which managerial liberalism reasserts its authority over the organs of the state. 

The sheer zeal with which middle managers and HR executives, as well as the students rioting in the streets aspiring to join their numbers, have latched onto the successor ideology reveals their grasp of the potential power it affords them. Like Althusser’s ISAs, the apparatuses of the new ideology are the education system, the mass media and the culture industry: go to university, read the newspaper, listen to Radio 4: there is no escape from the ideology of the administrative class. 

When we hear the righteous indignation of middle-class young women, lecturing soldiers for cleaning graffiti off the Cenotaph that they are furthering a system of structural racism or whatever, we hear the nasal tones of the future managerial class asserting itself, drunk with its own power. Imagine the sound of a passive-aggressive email from HR plinking into your inbox, forever: that is the sound of ideology taking the helm of the state.

How does ideology assert its control? For Althusser, it is in the moment of interpellation, or “calling out” (so resonant of the phenomenon of “calling out” on social media, when those addressed are forced to either submit themselves to the governing ideology, or accept their casting out into the wilderness). 

Althusser gives the example of a policeman calling out “Hey you!” to a passer-by. The passer-by turns round; Who, me? He asks. It is in that moment of interpellation that the person addressed recognises himself as a subject, and in doing so recognises his subjection to the authority which calls out to him, the greater Subject. 

He can deny he is the person the policeman is looking for, can profess his innocence, can meekly submit himself to authority: but in each and every case, the subject, by recognising himself as such, accepts the validity of the system to which he is subjected. In that split-second shock of self-recognition, for Althusser, ideology asserts itself.

How does this work in practice? Let’s take the example of Keir Starmer at the moment the successor ideology called out to him: will Keir kneel in the ritual BLM pose, and in doing so, recognise himself as subject to its moral authority? He has three options: he can kneel, and prove himself subject; he can refuse to kneel, and declare himself a rebel or heretic against the rightful authority, with all the social and political risk that brings; or he can ignore it entirely, refusing to either submit or to refuse to submit, thus stripping the ideology of all political power. 

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And yet the third option is denied him, by the media, functioning as what Althusser terms an Ideological State Apparatus. Journalists hound him asking whether or not he will kneel, his backbenchers and Labour’s media commentariat speculate over whether or not he will or he should; ignoring the question is no longer an option. He has been called out to, interpellated, and must respond, whether he wants to or not; in that moment, the system asserts its power and Starmer accepts his subjection to that power.

The great irony here, of course, is that in writing about the ideology of liberal capitalism, from the perspective of a Marxist-Leninist seeking to overthrow it, Althusser was foreseeing, dimly, the future failures of his own fellow ’68ers. They, the intellectual children of the French theorists, are now the wizened enforcers of the liberal capitalist order, wielding critical theory as the new establishment’s most powerful weapon. 

Railing against social democratic parties, Althusser dismisses them as “‘loyal managers of the capitalist regime’, which they have no desire really to ‘overthrow’, at least not in deeds, whatever their declarations,” observing that “the bourgeoisie makes very able use of them to counter the very troublesome ‘component part’ represented by a proletarian party or trade union.”

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Indeed, he argues, “the whole history of bourgeois politics for the last eighty years is based on this tactic of dividing the working-class forces, at the level of politics and trade union organisation alike. Thanks to this technique, the bourgeoisie effectively ‘annuls’ the presence of proletarian organisations in its ISAs.” Yet consider how much more true this is of the new managerial class, whose enforcers wield White Fragility and the critical theory as a means to assert their own power, and of the system which allows them to do so. 

Are we to believe that the entire oligarchical and corporate class which runs Western economies are submitting themselves to a moment of real revolutionary force, or instead that they recognise in it a powerful source of counter revolutionary power against the inchoate political uprisings of recent years? 

Althusser, the committed Marxist, states firmly that “it is not enough to destroy the repressive apparatus; it is also necessary to destroy and replace the Ideological State Apparatuses. New ones have to be put in place, urgently,” and many conservatives, faced with our new HR overlords flexing their power, now find themselves forced to agree.

Critics seized on this as evidence that the anti-racism narrative that has taken hold in institutional America is permeated by a bigotry of low expectations. The chart seemed to suggest that African Americans should not be expected to adhere to the basic tenets of modern civil society and intellectual life. Moreover, the notion that prudence, personal responsibility and rationality are inherently white echoes to an uncanny degree the racist claims that have historically been used to justify the oppression of people of African descent.

We could assume, in the interests of fairness, that the problem with the NMAAHC’s chart was a lack of context. Surely the various qualities it ascribes to “white culture” should be read as though followed by a phrase like “as commonly understood in the United States today?” The problem is that the original document which inspired the chart, and which bore the copyright of corporate consultant Judith H. Katz, provides no such caveats.

If we look at Katz’s own career, however, we do find some illuminating context — not just for this particular incident, but also regarding the origins of the current anti-racism movement more broadly. During the 1970s, Katz pioneered a distinctive approach to combatting racism, one that was above all therapeutic and managerial. This approach, as the NMAAHC chart suggests, took little interest in the opinions and experiences of ethnic and racial minorities, but focused on helping white Americans understand their identity.

Katz’s most obvious descendent today is Robin DiAngelo, author of the bestselling White Fragility — a book relating the experiences and methods of DiAngelo’s lucrative career in corporate anti-racism training. Katz too developed a re-education program, “White awareness training,” which, according to her 1978 book White Awareness, “strives to help Whites understand that racism in the United States is a White problem and that being White implies being racist.”

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Like DiAngelo, Katz rails against the pretense of individualism and colour blindness, which she regards as strategies for denying complicity in racism. And like DiAngelo, Katz emphasizes the need for exclusively white discussions (the “White-on-White training group”) to avoid turning minorities into teachers, which would be merely another form of exploitation.

Yet the most striking aspect of Katz’s ideas, by contrast to the puritanical DiAngelo, is her insistence that the real purpose of anti-racism training is to enable the psychological liberation and self-fulfillment of white Americans. She consistently discusses the problem of racism in the medicalizing language of sickness and trauma. It is, she says, “a form of schizophrenia,” “a pervasive form of mental illness,” a “disease,” and “a psychological disorder… deeply embedded in White people from a very early age on both a conscious and an unconscious level.” Thus the primary benefit offered by Katz is to save white people from this pathology, by allowing them to establish a coherent identity as whites.

Her program, she repeatedly emphasizes, is not meant to produce guilt. Rather, its premise is that in order to discover “our unique identities,” we must not overlook “[o]ur sexual and racial essences.” Her training allows its subjects to “become more fully human,” to “identify themselves as White and feel good about it.” Or as Katz writes in a journal article: “We must begin to remove the intellectual shackles and psychological chains that keep us in a mental and spiritual bondage. White people have been hurt for too long.”

Reading all of this, it is difficult not to be reminded of the critic Christopher Lasch’s portrayal of 1970s America as a “culture of narcissism”. Lasch was referring to a bundle of tendencies that characterised the hangover from the radicalism of the 1960s: a catastrophising hypochondria that found in everything the signs of impending disaster or decay; a naval-gazing self-awareness which sought expression in various forms of spiritual liberation; and consequently, a therapeutic culture obsessed with self-improvement and personal renewal.

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The great prophet of this culture was surely Woody Allen, whose work routinely evoked crippling neuroses, fear of death, and psychiatry as the customary tool for managing the inner tensions of the liberated bourgeois. That Allen treated all of this with layer upon layer of self-deprecating irony points to another key part of Lasch’s analysis. The narcissist of this era retained enough idealism so as to be slightly ashamed of his self-absorption — unless, of course, some way could be found to justify it as a means towards wider social improvement.

And that is what Katz’s white awareness training offered: a way to resolve the tensions between a desire for personal liberation and a social conscience, or more particularly, a new synthesis of ’70s therapeutic culture with the collectivist political currents unleashed in the ’60s.

Moreover, in Katz’s work we catch a glimpse of what the vehicle for this synthesis would be: the managerial structures of the public or private institution, where a paternalistic attitude towards students, employees and the general public could provide the ideal setting for the tenets of “white awareness.” By way of promoting her program, Katz observed in the late ’70s a general trend towards “a more educational role for the psychotherapist… utilizing systemic training as the process by which to meet desired behavior change.” There was, she noted, a “growing demand” for such services.

Which brings us back to the NMAAHC’s controversial chart. It would be wrong to suggest that this single episode allows us to draw a straight line from the culture of narcissism in which Katz’s ideas emerged to the present anti-racism narrative. But the fact that there continues to be so much emphasis placed on the notion of “whiteness” today — the NMAAHC has an entire webpage under this heading, which prominently features Katz’s successor Robin DiAngelo — suggests that progressive politics has not entirely escaped the identity crises of the 1970s.

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Today that politics might be more comfortable assigning guilt than Katz was, but it still places a disproportionate emphasis on those it calls “white” to adopt a noble burden of self-transformation, while relegating minorities to the role of a helpless other.

Of course, it is precisely this simplistic dichotomy which allows the anti-racism narrative to jump across borders and even oceans, as we have seen happening recently, into any context where there are people who can be called “white” and an institutional framework for administering reeducation. Already in 1983, Katz was able to promote her “white awareness training” in the British journal Early Child Development and Care, simply swapping her standard American intro for a discussion of English racism.

Then as now, the implication is that from the perspective of “whiteness,” the experience of African-Americans and of ethnic minorities in a host of other places is somehow interchangeable. This, I think, can justifiably be called a kind of narcissism.

Or are we? They don’t teach the history of Mao’s China in schools — I mean, why would they? — but for those who have read a book or two, the surface similarities to the present moment can be unnerving. Yet while the rallies are a powerful phenomenon and Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi are certainly selling well on Amazon, I think our tendency to look for past precedents that confirm our present anxieties can blind us to the uniqueness of the now. Yes, a shift is taking place, but not only is it not 1968, it is not anything else either: this moment is its own thing.

Take the mass gatherings, for instance. In China these went on for months and were not so much protests as state-sponsored displays of loyalty towards a monstrous narcissist who would turn up to bask in the frenzied love of his adoring worshippers. Here the monstrous narcissist is so reviled by the crowds that he had to tear gas his way into a church so he could wave a Bible at a camera for a photo op that may well go down in history as the moment when even his most ardent apologists thought: oh hell no.

Unlike the Cultural Revolution, or the Iranian Revolution, or the Russian Revolution, this moment has no clear leader. It does have spokespeople, however, and the American media — being the sad, decadent, exhausting travesty that it is — has unerringly zeroed in on the most unreasonable and extreme voices, providing them with a platform upon which they can undermine their own cause.

Excusing looting that destroys the livelihoods of working-class people is fairly typical for bourgeois radicals and so lacks sufficient frisson; thus they quickly moved on to demand that the police be defunded or even abolished — though there is some disagreement as to what that actually means. Fortunately for them, Trump is now so damaged that even this generous attempt on their part to hand him back the political advantage may fall short.

The iconoclasm, too, is very different. In the UK a monument to a slave trader was tossed in the water, and activists have set their sights on everyone from Churchill to Gandhi to Baden-Powell. In the US it was Columbus who took a bath while a statue of Thomas Jefferson in Portland was pulled down, and the bitter debate over Confederate monuments has flared up again. During the Cultural Revolution, however, the destruction was so thoroughgoing that radicals didn’t just topple monuments; they smashed up the tomb of Confucius, dug up a dead emperor and denounced him and incinerated countless artistic treasures. Sadiq Khan’s review of London’s statuary is a feeble and unambitious affair in comparison.

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Then, too, there are the texts. There is no equivalent to Mao’s Little Red Book, and not just because White Fragility has a long way to go before one billion copies are in circulation. This is America and voices are many. The ideas of critical race theorists might be leaving campus and entering the mainstream, but its leading authors — unlike Mao — will have to compete with other writers on the same topic, with readerly indifference, with critical readings, and with the fact that most people will never read them.

It is striking, meanwhile, that they have so far aimed their texts exclusively at an affluent, well-educated audience, making no effort to sell their message to the masses, which all great revolutionaries know is essential. Lenin and Mao were experts at crafting memorable slogans, while Stalin took the dense body of Lenin’s works and produced the catechistic Foundations of Leninism. Meanwhile, despite the increasing conformism of elite American journalism, it remains a fact that the best critical review of both Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi was published in The New Yorker.

Which brings me to another point: the inestimable Ed West, seeking to illustrate the difference between now and a similarly radical moment in 1968, recently pointed to the “almost universal establishment approval” bestowed upon the 2020 protests and the ‘Great Awokening’ in contrast to 50 years ago, when the establishment was less united in its response to protests.

This is true, but isn’t the establishment looking kinda rotten? Trust in the media is low; newspapers and magazines rely on billionaire patrons to survive, new media can’t turn a profit, and while rebellious NYT staffers successfully defenestrated their opinion page editor so their 5 million subscribers could have a more soothing reading experience, Joe Rogan gets 100 million downloads a month and promotes the kinds of thinkers NYT staffers dislike intensely.

‘Woke’ corporations are only woke up to the point where it hurts their bottom line; Google was firing employees at the center of labour-organising efforts not long ago; and nearly half of the American workforce works for small businesses anyway. Meanwhile, America’s elite universities, founded by Puritans to instill purity of heart and thought in future preachers, have gone back to their roots, only students now have to pay a fortune for the privilege of having their minds narrowed.

These institutions are so rich they can do what they like, of course, but two-thirds of Americans do not have a college degree and, as Richard Hofstadter pointed out long ago, America has a strong anti-intellectual tradition. People here do not defer to their ‘betters’ and that seems unlikely to change any time soon, given that America’s elites are not exactly covering themselves with glory, hyper-polarisation having destroyed much of their capacity for anything remotely resembling intellectual honesty.

And that, in turn, brings me to another point: the fundamental unruliness of American culture. Puritans may have climbed off the Mayflower and founded the first colony, but it was tea-dumpers who kicked off the revolution and founded the Republic. Nobody in America ever gets it all their own way; at most, you get two years. The horror of George Floyd’s death, and the moral bankruptcy of the president created a moment of unity, regardless of the excesses of some asshats. Everybody could agree that this kind of thing had to stop.

But already I can feel the centrifugal forces kicking back in. The disappearance of what was left of the centre means that the dismal state of politics and journalism will likely get worse; the two sides will push each other further out to the extremes, the national discourse will grow more bitter, and the loudest voices in the country will resume the unhappy work of tearing things apart, while the many millions of reasonable people look on in dismay.

Even as I type this, Sean Hannity’s researchers are undoubtedly providing him with a cheat sheet on critical race theory so he can start rambling on about it much as he did about Saul Alinsky during the years Obama was president. I’m so old I can even remember Greta Thunberg: she promised us that we didn’t have a future. Well, she was wrong about that. When that cop killed George Floyd, time didn’t just start moving again, it accelerated.

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But even if I am mistaken, and this truly is a revolutionary moment, let us not forget that revolutions never turn out as planned. Let us return to the Cultural Revolution. How did it end? Well, after an awful lot of destruction, Mao grew tired of the excesses and imposed discipline, sending the youthful radicals away to live in the country with the peasantry. After he died, the surviving ringleaders were sent to prison, and Deng Xiaoping, whose son had been tossed out of a window during the madness, came to power and introduced the economic reforms that began the transformation of China into the not-terribly-communist place it is today.

In Russia in 1917, there was similar disappointment: the revolution that started in Moscow was supposed to sweep across the world, starting in Germany. Instead it got as far as Mongolia and then stopped. Stalin had to invent a new doctrine to justify the failure, and resort to massive violence to keep everyone in line.

And so on. Complex, messy reality has a way of reasserting itself over both the best (and worst) intentions. If I were Joe Biden, I’d be worried about what I was letting myself in for: should he come to power, he will inherit the highest unemployment rate since records began, an intensified culture war and possibly a new wave of coronavirus. Meanwhile the emboldened radical wing of his party will almost certainly overreach (as victorious parties always do), provoking a comeback from a Trump-free Right two years later.

There are reasons to study the history of communism other than to learn about what went wrong: you can also learn about what those who didn’t lurch to extremes got right. Radicals have long been frustrated by the fact that most people are not interested in revolution; that the workers, when given a choice, always chose reform over millennial dreams of transformation. The radicals will be disappointed again.

The pendulum will swing one way, then it will swing another way. And yet mysteriously, America will continue to move forward, and people of good will shall do what they can to try and prevent tragedies such as the death of George Floyd from happening again, despite all the histrionics and performative showboating. And things will get better.