Sometime around the end of the second Obama term, people started to discover that Dr. Seuss — Theodor Seuss Geisel — had drawn crude images of Asian, black, and Jewish people. Those images had been there all along, sitting uneasily with his famous books, which consistently champion liberal and environmentalist values. Only now, the “problematic” drawings started to overshadow the good doctor’s achievements.

When First Lady Melania Trump sent a collection of 10 Dr. Seuss books to a Massachusetts library in 2017, she received a furious response. “You may not be aware of this, but Dr. Seuss is a bit of a cliché, a tired and worn ambassador for children’s literature”, the recipient of the books, librarian Liz Phipps-Soeiro, lectured in a blog post. “Another fact that many people are unaware of is that Dr. Seuss’s illustrations are steeped in racist propaganda, caricatures, and harmful stereotypes.”

That was hardly the end of it. The NAACP called for “censorship” of all Dr. Seuss books (yes, the organization unabashedly used the “c” word). Dr. Seuss Enterprises, which publishes his works, pledged to remove six of the author’s most offensive titles from future publication.

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But the real scandal came when, a little more than a month into his first term, President Joe Biden failed to mention Dr. Seuss in his announcement for Read Across America Day, which customarily involves a president and/or first lady reading a Dr. Seuss book to schoolchildren. The outrage was instant: “Dr. Seuss Is Canceled”, went one headline at the libertarian Reason magazine. 

Spoiler alert: Dr. Seuss wasn’t canceled. His books have spent so much time on the Amazon bestseller list, the Atomic Habits guy is jealous. But Biden’s opponents saw it as an attempt to move the culture to the Left, the first of many. They seethed as he invited transgender influencers to the White House, showered accolades on progressive icons like Bruce Springsteen and George Soros. They vowed to restore sanctity to American culture once they had a chance.

Well, how’s that working out?

We now have the Gulf of America, while the US taxpayer has clawed back the $47,000 that United States Agency for International Development splurged on a Colombian “trans opera”. Inveterate Twitter troll-cum-diplomat Ric Grenell has been appointed the president of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, a position for which he is as suited as I am to translate Dr. Seuss into Bulgarian.

I am not saying that the supposed cancellation of Dr. Seuss is why we have a second Trump term. Nor is that controversy congruent to the consequences of four more years of MAGA. But minor as that affair may seem, it is a neat microcosm of our ineffective, herky-jerky politics, the main goal of which is increasingly only to undo whatever the other side has been doing.

Constant whiplash between political and cultural extremes isn’t what people signed up for. You could certainly argue that the Biden administration went too far in some of its diversity initiatives, but the branding of every black person in any position of institutional power as a “DEI hire” is a MAGA tic most people don’t endorse, as River Page pointed out in The Free Press.

People wanted normal, which shouldn’t be surprising, since Americans have for centuries been a pragmatic people. Even today, we are actually far less polarized then news reports would have you believe. It’s rather that the activists at the poles have megaphones the size of Kansas, which they buy with the cash raised from ideologically motivated billionaires (Soros, the Koch Brothers, Bill Gates, Elon Musk — take your pick). Those groups can then boost candidates who need both publicity and cash. The rest of us are like the archetypal guard in a bank-heist movie, bound and gagged with masking tape, helplessly watching the scene unfold.

When he was attorney general of the United States under George W. Bush, the dour John Ashcroft covered up the Spirit of Justice statue because its naked breast offended his evangelical sensibilities. In which case, he should have quit. We don’t elect censors or moralizers. To their credit, the new Trump people don’t share Ashcroft’s moralizing spirit. Their supposed enemy is wokeness, a term that could mean anything from cringeworthy shows of political posturing to worthwhile efforts to acknowledge past injustices.

The Trumpians seem to genuinely believe that the country is in the grip of a Leftist cultural revolution. In their fervor, they forget that at least half of Americans — the ones who vote for Democrats — flatly reject that view. And that, wide-eyed activists excepted, most liberals simply seek after a decent life: a measure of financial stability, happy and healthy kids, and, yes, the fundamental American right to worship as they please (or not at all) and to speak their minds.

Trump’s counterreaction has itself been immoderate, as evidenced by the harsh language of the new administration’s executive orders targeting transgender protections. Just as most Americans were never going to burn their Dr. Seuss books, most also are perfectly capable of living and working alongside people who hold different beliefs and espouse different values. We’ve never wanted anything but normal, but normal seems to be increasingly elusive in American politics.

So far, Trump 2.0 has shown himself to be just as obsessed with race and gender as the wokest junior staffer in the Biden administration. “Like its antithesis on the Left, the woke Right places identity grievance, ethnic consciousness, and tribal striving at the center of its behavior and thought,” Thomas Chatterton Williams wrote in an insightful essay for The Atlantic. Fort Liberty is Fort Bragg again, though its namesake this time around is World War II hero Roland L. Bragg, not the Confederate general Braxton Bragg. The move will cost several million dollars and will do absolutely nothing to help ordinary Americans with egg prices or medical bills.

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You don’t have to be a genius to see how all this turns out. After four more years of Trump, people will be exhausted, as Trump is an exhausting character. They will want something entirely different (sorry, Vice President Vance). The answer will probably come in the form of a moderate Democrat who shuns the language of the academic and activist Left: someone like Josh Shapiro or Wes Moore or Jared Polis.

Of course, that nominee will still need support from the Left, possibly in the primary, definitely in the general election. Promises and assurances will be made. Once in office, the new Democratic president will placate those liberal groups by reversing many of the policies that Trump is implementing today: pronouns back in email signatures, DEI trainings restored across the federal bureaucracy, no more country music at the Kennedy Center, no more Dr. Seuss. All of which will make the Right seethe once more, preparing us for the next cycle of our reaction-counterreaction politics.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Moderate politics is not only attractive because it accurately describes where most Americans stand on most issues. The more a politician tacks away from the extremes, the less likely he or she is to engender a strong political opposition.

Trolling takes a toll. At first, it seemed like Trump might begin his second term with a measure of popular support, but his early moves have been so sweeping, so striking, that people are protesting again, as they did in 2017. To be sure, many people do support cutting the federal government and making merit the basis of hiring, but unaccountably blaming a plane crash on “DEI” and humiliating the hundreds of thousands of men and women who have chosen to work for the federal government was bound to have major blowback. Already, according to The Bulwark, “Trump’s approval rating is falling fast.” And his second term is barely a month old.

Who will have the courage to change this state of affairs, the courage to be moderate? To borrow from the poor fish in The Cat in the Hat, “this is no fun at all”.

Even with my love of melodrama, I cannot sustain such histrionics. While it’s enjoyable to momentarily inhabit the caricature of the Andrew Doyle that exists in the minds of my detractors, the truth is far less exciting. On a recent appearance on the Jordan B. Peterson podcast, I let it be known that I am leaving the United Kingdom to work with the actor and comedian Rob Schneider on a new production company called No Apologies Media. Some of my friends have assumed that I am flouncing away out of a desperate conviction that all is lost. The reality is a little more nuanced.

While I do not believe that we live under tyranny, there are serious threats to liberty that ought to be addressed. Many members of the ruling class have scant regard for freedom of speech, as evidenced by the existence of hate speech laws, the recording of “non-crime hate incidents”, draconian jail terms meted out for offensive social media posts and continued calls for online censorship. These are not the hallmarks of an authentically free country, but one in which the authoritarian instinct has not been successfully tamed. As for the artistic industries, they are now similarly beholden to an ideology that demands self-censorship and punishes nonconformity. For creatives, this means finding ways to work within a system that is antagonistic to genuine free expression.

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We often hear practitioners in the arts claiming that “cancel culture is a myth” and that “nobody is being censored”. This is an easy claim to make if your views are naturally in lockstep with the prevailing orthodoxies of the time, but it does suggest a degree of solipsism. The energy it must take to studiously ignore the continual stream of reported cases of artists being cancelled would be sufficient to keep the Large Hadron Collider running indefinitely.

Like many of those with unfashionable views, I have been dragged unexpectedly into the culture war. Whereas I once made my living solely from writing plays, musicals and performing stand-up comedy, in recent years I have found myself drawn to punditry. I have hosted a weekly show called Free Speech Nation on GB News for the last three years, written numerous articles and two books in defence of liberal values, and satirised the worst excesses of culture warriors through my satirical character Titania McGrath.

But while I feel a compulsion to address the ongoing threats to free speech in our culture, and recognise the importance of challenging a journalistic monoculture, I do miss working in the creative field. It is my hope that relocating to Arizona to work with Rob will bring greater opportunities to focus on writing and producing comedy and drama. Rob’s commitment to freedom of speech is absolute and uncompromising. Under the aegis of his new company, I’ve already begun writing a sitcom with Graham Linehan and Martin Gourlay which we hope to be filming early next year. In addition, we have plans for other television projects with a focus on political and social commentary. This culture war isn’t over yet.

It’s quite the team. And it goes without saying that Graham is one of the foremost comedy writers of our times. If you ever find yourself in a conversation with someone who claims that cancel culture doesn’t exist, it might be worth asking how it is that the creator of hit sitcoms such as Father Ted and The IT Crowd has been unable to work in the UK television industry for six years simply for airing his opinions. You won’t get a coherent answer, but it’ll be entertaining to watch the attempt.

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For myself, I’ve never been cancelled. One could even accuse me of finding a way to capitalise on my heterodox perspectives, given that much of my career has depended upon me expressing my views openly and satirising the intolerance of those who would rather I shut up. Yet isn’t it strange that a commitment to freedom of speech, individual autonomy, and equal rights to all irrespective of immutable characteristics, should be considered “heterodox” at all?

Rather than facing cancellation, I have experienced what Helen Dale has described as the “silo effect”. Although most of my political views would traditionally be described as “Left-wing”, my stance on the culture war has meant that I have been pigeonholed as being on the Right. So while I do not hold allegiance to any ideology, the insistence that I must be classified with one particular “side” means that my employment prospects will always be limited. The digital crèche of social media, with its insistence on political tribalism, binary thinking and purity spirals, has infected the mainstream. For many commentators, it’s now a matter of “you’re either with us or against us”.

The first time I became aware of an opportunity missed due to ideological factors was when a senior member of staff at the Soho Theatre in London told me candidly that I had been taken off the shortlist for a new playwriting scheme because I was white and male. Years later, when I taught stand-up courses at the Soho Theatre for up-and-coming comedians, I was informed that my contract could not be renewed because one of the members of the group felt “unsafe” after reading a joke I had tweeted. This impact for me was negligible — I didn’t rely on the work financially and was only continuing out of a sense of loyalty — but it did concern me that a leading theatre had such a casual disregard for the importance of artistic freedom.

A career in the creative arts should not be contingent on toeing any specific ideological line, but such incidents are now, unfortunately, the norm. The groupthink that currently predominates in theatre, film, television, comedy, publishing and all other branches of the arts has catalysed some promising pushback. The choreographer Rosie Kay and arts producer Denise Fahmy have established “Freedom in the Arts”, a project specifically aimed at tackling these restrictive conditions. One of their mission statements is “to protect freedom of expression and make sure that the arts are the place where difficult ideas can be addressed, explored and discussed”. What should be a prerequisite is now an ideal that we must struggle to reclaim.

In the current climate, artists are expected to be activists, to ensure that their work promotes the approved message. In other words, conformity is being demanded of those whose vocation ought to make them the most freethinking. When art is expected to be didactic and propagandistic, very little of interest will be produced. Rather than tailor their output to the whims of prissy moralists, artists should be aspiring to William Blake’s precept: “Create a System, or be enslav’d by another Man’s”.

That is not to say that creatives cannot fall in line with intersectional dogma if they so choose, but we have seen how the arts quickly become enervated when this is the default expectation. Widespread self-censorship is inevitable when commissions are conditional on whether they reinforce voguish political trends. This does not mean that there are not exceptionally talented artists currently producing good work, but it does mean that their output is often sanitised.

Of course, the true artistic geniuses — those who emerge once or twice in a generation — can always find a way to play the game. There’s a very good reason why Shakespeare’s masterful narrative poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece are preceded by dull and dispensable panegyrics to his patron Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton. Michelangelo’s talents were so unquestionable that he was given licence to create explicitly erotic imagery for his frescoes in the Sistine Chapel. When the Papal Master of Ceremonies, Biagio da Cesena, complained that his nudes were more fitting for a bathhouse, Michelangelo painted the naked figure of Minos in the underworld with Biagio’s face, and for good measure added donkey’s ears and a snake biting his genitals.

We can’t all be Michelangelo. For us lesser mortals, we have to find a way to muddle along as best we can in an industry that expects us to be sheep to the establishment shepherds. I have no idea what my move to America will bring, but it is my hope to find a creative climate in which all this tribalistic nonsense is considered irrelevant. If nothing else, it’ll be an adventure.

Over the subsequent decade, the basic outline of this story has become all too familiar. But contrary to the widespread notion that cancellation is a Left-wing phenomenon, those who successfully demanded al-Gharbi’s dismissal were conservatives. They had taken umbrage at his argument that the United States bore heavy responsibility for destabilising the Middle East, and thereby enabling the rise of ISIS. The main impetus for his firing came from Fox News, which pilloried him as an anti-American jihadist. 

Some who’ve fallen victim to similar campaigns have built careers on denouncing their cancelers’ intolerance. Al-Gharbi took a different and arguably more interesting path: he sought to engage more extensively with right-of-centre audiences, writing a number of articles for conservative publications. As he explained later: “If I’m trying to convince people not to bomb Syria, then I should be writing to people who do want to bomb Syria.” 

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In the intervening years, al-Gharbi has gone on to become an advocate of viewpoint diversity in universities, as well as an outspoken critic of the liberal media’s ideological monoculture. His new book, We Have Never Been Woke, is a culmination of these efforts: a systematic critique of the dogmas that took hold in progressive culture over the past decade, and an examination of the institutional contexts in which they arose. Not, of course, that he’s alone here. Books scrutinising identity politics and Left-wing ideological intolerance have proliferated in recent years. But al-Gharbi avoids denunciation in favour of sober, rigorous analysis. For this and other reasons, I suspect it is the only book on the subject that will still be worth reading in a decade.   

Al-Gharbi’s cancellation squeezed him out of further work and study at Arizona, but he was later accepted into the doctoral programme in sociology at Columbia University, then as now a hotbed of social-justice activism. (As much ink was spilled on the performance art project of Columbia student Emma Sulkowicz in 2014 as on the university’s “tentifada” earlier this year.) His arrival there, in 2016, afforded him a front-row seat for the “Great Awokening” — which kicked off in the final years of the Obama administration and crescendoed after Donald Trump’s election.  

An older student, who hailed from a small-town Arizona military family, al-Gharbi sold shoes at a department store in between losing his job at Arizona and making it to the Ivy League. He arrived at Columbia as an outsider suddenly confronted the customs, taboos, and beliefs of an unfamiliar culture. What he discovered was a tribe that treated social — especially racial — justice as sacred, yet one that remained oddly blind to the apparent injustices in its own immediate surroundings. 

What al-Gharbi called a “racialized caste system” operated in plain sight. That is: “[y]ou have disposable servants who will clean your house, watch your kids, walk your dogs, deliver prepared meals to you,” and these servants are “mostly minorities from particular racial and ethnic backgrounds… while people from other racial and ethnic backgrounds are the ones being served.” 

The “Democratic-voting professionals” who are the beneficiaries of this arrangement “conspicuously lament inequality” at every opportunity — while never really doing anything to remedy it. 

Likewise, when Donald Trump won the election soon after al-Gharbi’s arrival in New York, he noticed that well-off students ostentatiously presented themselves as “somehow uniquely vulnerable to Trump and his regime”. They demanded accommodations to deal with their trauma and terror that fascism had arrived in America. But they didn’t demand any special treatment for, say, the immigrant labourers who served them their meals, who had a far more plausible case that they were at risk from the new president, what with his threats to ramp up deportation.   

Al-Gharbi saw the callow racial-justice concerns of affluent New Yorkers crest after George Floyd’s murder, even as the massive protests that flooded the streets in 2020 did nothing to address any of the inequalities they denounced. The author describes Black Lives Matter demonstrators crowding the medians of Manhattan thoroughfares, holding up signs to elicit honks from passing drivers. All the while, they were “literally right in front of” homeless black men without shoes.

The question animating al-Gharbi’s book, then, is this. If most elite social-justice activism isn’t doing what it claims to be doing — creating a more just and equal society — what is it, in fact, doing? This has long been of interest to sociologists. Consider Max Weber’s famous thesis that John Calvin’s theological argument for predestination served as a way for early capitalists to legitimise their own accumulation of wealth. As a-Gharbi puts it: “the practical ways that ideas function ‘in the world’ are often very different than what their creators may have anticipated.” 

This is why the most common recent approach to understanding “wokeness” — tracing it to the ideas of particular thinkers — ultimately offers limited insights. In al-Gharbi’s telling, wokeness doesn’t spawn from people reading dense philosophical tracts. Rather, it’s less important that students at elite understand the ideas of Foucault or Kimberlé Crenshaw than that they “interpret and mobilize these social justice discourses in ways that serve their interests” by “creating highly novel forms of competition and legitimation”. 

To explain his point, al-Gharbi borrows a phrase from Pierre Bourdieu. What the sociologist called “symbolic capitalists” are “professionals who traffic in symbols and rhetoric, images and narratives, data and analysis, ideas and abstraction”. To put it more simply, professions from journalism and education to social work and public health have always justified their existence on the basis that they served the public interest. From the Progressive Period onwards, al-Gharbi argues, they’ve purported to battle “capitalism run amok” and defend the masses from the greed of robber barons. In practice, of course, the exact ideological content has varied over time, but the basic self-serving purpose has not.

Taking a longer historical view than most critics of wokeness, al-Gharbi argues the “awokening” that peaked around 2020 was a symptom of the latest periodic crisis afflicting the symbolic professions. Along the way, he identifies four “awokenings” in the past century. The first, he says, happened from the late Twenties to mid-Thirties, when educated young Americans flocked to the Communist Party and other radical groups. The next happened in the Sixties, with the rise of the New Left. The third came in the Eighties and early Nineties: the era of political correctness. Our own awokening kicked off around 2015, peaked in 2020, and in al-Gharbi’s telling is now on the wane.

These cyclical moral ferments occur, the author argues, in periods “when symbolic capitalists find their own status or socioeconomic position threatened or highly precarious”. During such periods, a radicalisation of social-justice demands, a competitive striving for doctrinal correctness, a tendency to excommunicate heretics (“cancel culture”) all come to the fore. And certainly, these tendencies were present in prior awokenings: social media has simply made them more visible. 

The rational core of these seemingly irrational behaviours is simple to identify in the terms al-Gharbi proposes. Collectively, he writes, symbolic capitalists loudly advertise their own value, enabling them to extract concessions from the powers-that-be. One example might be the massive outlays of corporate and foundation funding through 2020. On an individual level, symbolic capitalists compete for status with each other through ostentatious displays of doctrinal purity. Not, to be clear, that this means their avowed beliefs are merely cynical ruses. As Weber understood of the Puritans, sincerely held beliefs can simply serve a different purpose than the true believers realise. 

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If periods of elite social-justice ferment have occurred cyclically, that means they have certain predictable effects. For one, not only do they fail to achieve purported social-justice aims, they actually “correspond with a perpetuation or exacerbation of inequalities”. By securing new sinecures for symbolic capitalists, al-Gharbi suggests, they augment the dominant role white-collar workers already play in society. Those outside this privileged caste, it hardly needs adding, are marginalised. Another predictable result is that public trust in elite institutions declines — which could ironically prove counterproductive to symbolic capitalists in the long run, even if it allows them to reassert their status in a more limited sphere.  

A further result is a backlash, which in turn generates new counter-institutions to accommodate those squeezed out of increasingly intolerant elite spaces. This is how al-Gharbi explains the emergence of conservative think tanks in the Seventies, a moment when the New Left seemed to have squeezed conservatives from academia. He says something similar of Fox News, with the Nineties a moment when the liberal bias of mainstream outlets had become intolerable. Perhaps unsurprisingly, al-Gharbi sees the recent proliferation of “anti-woke” media spaces through a similar lens. Interestingly, the author adds, these counter-institutions are often the most lasting legacy of awokenings. But as al-Gharbi says, to the extent these are also organisations run by symbolic capitalists, they end up reproducing many of the same tendencies, including proneness to ideological mania and cancel culture — as his own run-in with Fox suggests.  

Al-Gharbi declines to offer concrete recommendations. His conclusion that ideological ferment follows predictable cycles seems to suggest we’re doomed to suffer some other madness in a decade or two. Yet his personal behaviour — especially engaging in dialogue with a wide range of audiences — suggests a certain optimism that it’s possible to be a better symbolic capitalist, and perhaps also forge a healthier symbolic capitalist culture. His book’s diagnosis of that culture’s deep pathologies also serves that end.

“Critics,” al-Gharbi writes, “are united in the erroneous perception that there is something special about ‘woke’ ideology.” If woke beliefs serve to obscure the class interests of those who espouse them, anti-woke critiques often reinforce the confusion. To depict elite identity politics as a vehicle for the establishment of communism, or as a fundamental threat to Western civilisation, is merely to flatter the radical pretensions of its adherents. What We Have Never Been Woke offers, in contrast, is demystification. In eschewing the self-aggrandisement and moralism typical of woke and anti-woke literature alike, al-Gharbi offers a model for others to follow. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Whether Roosevelt’s Republic properly ended with the social chaos of the late Sixties or with America’s victory in the Cold War, and whether we are therefore currently living in the Fifth, Sixth or arguably even the Seventh American Republic, is the type of question that future history students in Beijing or Singapore are bound to contemplate on their final exams. The more immediate point is that another American Republic is collapsing, and also that we’ve been here before. In recent years, as in the Sixties, we’ve seen the take-over of large sections of American cities by armies of drug-addicted zombies, riots in Washington, dirty political tricks by the FBI and the CIA, the capture of universities by militants obsessed with race and gender, dire warnings about the fate of the planet, and the wholesale abandonment of American military allies. The difference between now and the Sixties is that today the people with Angela Davis posters on their walls are living in gated communities, rather than communes.

More troublesome, however, than the sight of America once again shedding its skin, is the shape of the American Republic to come — and the question of whether it will be a republic at all. Since the end of the Cold War, America has transformed itself from a country in which most citizens proudly imagined themselves to be “middle class” into a bi-coastal oligarchy. The hallmarks of this new republic’s politics are the sorts of pathologies that used to be associated with the countries to America’s south: a wildly unequal distribution of wealth, choking bureaucracy, paranoid mass politics, the weaponisation of the security apparatus, and the merger of monopoly capital and invasive state bureaucracies.

The beginning of the current crisis can be dated to the election of 2016, in which a large majority of voters expressed their rejection of the American socio-political order by voting for either Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump over the neoliberal establishment candidate, Hillary Clinton. Trump’s election was followed by coordinated attacks on his flailing presidency by large sections of the American power structure, including the national press, corporate monopoly internet platforms, and a security apparatus that used the press as a megaphone for a series of conspiracy theories and lies that were often spread under cover of anonymity. The media’s already-tattered credibility with the public was plunged into the toilet.

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This toxic combination of widening political polarisation and institutional failures was contaminated further by the country’s disastrous response to Covid-19, which crushed small and medium-sized businesses while padding the profits of large investors and internet-based monopolists. The result was the largest single transfer of wealth in American history since the Civil War, and the disenfranchisement of a significant portion of the American middle class — accompanied by a steady drum-beat of “woke” discourse that gleefully demonised the losers as “white supremacists” and “insurrectionists”.

The election of Joe Biden in 2020 was supposed to restore the legitimacy of the American political system and bring a measure of social peace. Instead, President Biden went in the opposite direction, attacking his opponents as “white supremacists” and “fascists”, setting the FBI on domestic foes, and endorsing a banana republic-style raid on Trump’s home.

Yet to blame America’s woes on either the 79-year old Biden, who strikes even sympathetic domestic observers as senile, or Trump, who continues to be a font of ugly and delusional politics, is to dangerously mistake the nature of the crisis. America’s toxic partisan politics are a symptom of deep changes in the American socio-economic structure that date back to the early Nineties, in the aftermath of America’s victory in the Cold War — when President Bill Clinton set out to take Reaganomics global with a series of trade deals that included NAFTA and GATT, and destroyed the American middle class that Roosevelt and his successors created.

From the standpoint of the Democratic Party of the Nineties, Clinton’s trade deals were a huge success, bringing major sectors of Wall Street and large American corporations into the party camp. For traditional Democratic constituencies such as industrial labour unions and their members, they were a disaster, permanently depriving millions of Americans of their jobs and turning large swaths of the country’s industrial base into rubble-strewn reservations for zombified meth-heads.

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Among the writers, thinkers, and reporters who tried to analyse the travails of the American working and middle classes during Bill Clinton’s presidency, perhaps the most acute was the Pentagon-linked geo-strategist Edward Luttwak. For Luttwak, the problem with America wasn’t market capitalism or the failure of American workers to compete with their peers in Mexico and China. Rather, it was the unholy conjunction of Right-wing libertarian Reaganomics with selfish Left-wing baby boomer mantras about free trade, technology, and open borders.

What both the Left and the Right shared, in Luttwak’s analysis, was their disdain for the kinds of Bismarckian social bargains that keep states strong. Luttwak called the unholy alliance of the libertarian Left and Right “Turbo-Capitalism”, and he warned of its disintegrating effects on the American middle class, which he saw as the foundation-stone of American stability, prosperity, and geo-political dominance.

In his concern for the disintegrating American middle class of the Nineties, Luttwak was hardly alone. The troubles of middle-and-working-class Americans were a common theme during that era among a cohort of perceptive American thinkers including Robert Bellah, Barbara Ehrenreich, Michael Lind, Robert Putnam, and Robert Reich. What made Luttwak a rarity among his peers, Lind excepted, was his embrace of European-style welfare state capitalism in the context of an overtly nationalist politics — ie the American status quo before the Reaganites and the Clintonites set out from different directions to destroy it.

The America of the Obama-Trump-Biden years now looks a lot worse than the America that alarmed Luttwak and Lind in the Nineties. At the top of the narrowing social pyramid is a tiny class of mega-billionaires who personally own and control a staggering percentage of the country’s wealth, resources, and power, and make their money from the globalised economy. Then comes the professional class that services the billionaires, ranging from highly paid lawyers and investment bankers to chefs and fashion designers and real estate salesmen. Below them is the servant class of bureaucrats, teachers and other lower-status employees whose salaries are paid by the state or non-governmental organisations and foundations, who funnel money back to their political patrons in the Democratic Party in the form of free campaign labour and contributions.

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Finally, there are the working poor, many of whom formerly considered themselves “working class” or “middle class”, but who are now forced to rely on government programs and subsidies covering everything from rent, to school tuition, to health care, to food. The glue that holds this power vertical together is the Democratic Party, which now regularly outspends the Republican Party — an incoherent mix of Trumpists, Christians, and other socio-economic losers — by margins of three or four to one.

In addition to being an oligarchy, the new American social pyramid is also a gerontocracy, in which both political power and wealth are wildly skewed in favour of people above the age of 60. Biden (79) and Nancy Pelosi (82) lead the Democrats, while Trump (76) and Mitch McConnell (80) lead the Republicans. Where the average American over the age of 55 has a net worth of somewhere between $1.2 and $1.5 million, the average American adult under the age of 35 is worth approximately $75,000, with the vast majority having no significant assets at all.

Understanding the new America as a decaying oligarchy run by old people is essential to understanding the increasingly bizarre mutations of Left and Right in American politics. The “Left”, in the United States, now represents the new oligarchy and its dependents. The resulting “Left-wing” preferences for free trade and open borders in turn make it impossible for American workers to earn a living wage. The fact that the new American Left is funded by billionaires such as George Soros (92) and Warren Buffet (91) ensures that Left politics is focused not on decent pay for workers but on the ever-mutating math of woke identity politics.

In place of tangible goods, such as a living wage and the chance to buy a home, groups of dispossessed Americans are offered official “recognition” of an ever-expanding set of “identities” rooted in race, gender and sexual preference, which pits them against other groups of Americans who suffer from much the same woes. Wokeness, as an ideology, can be seen as a function of the ascendent Turbo-Capitalist order — a means for controlling the working and middle classes to ensure that they can’t unite against their increasingly all-powerful masters.

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The digital technologies on which the new American mega-fortunes are based offer historically unprecedented opportunities for surveillance, censorship, and social control — and have allowed the oligarchs who own them to merge with the state. Jeff Bezos of Amazon, for example, owns the Washington Post, which the security apparatus used as a megaphone to spread the Russiagate conspiracy theory to undermine Trump. Amazon also holds a lucrative cloud computing contract to manage all the CIA’s data, which it administers from a centre in Northern Virginia where over 20,000 people work, many of whom were formerly employed by the government. While tech giants such as Oracle and Palantir have large contracts with the US security apparatus, public-facing companies such as Facebook, Google, and Twitter regularly censor news and opinions at the behest of the White House while funneling private user data to the security services for free.

If techno-monopolists have merged with the security bureaucracies in Washington, the human instrument of elite control is the “professional-managerial class”, which forms the backbone of the lay Democratic Party. But how did this relatively narrow group of lawyers, professors, teachers, nonprofit workers, bureaucrats, and lower-level editors gain the power to anathemise, exclude, condemn, and generally lord it over much larger sectors of the population?

One answer is its ability to leverage digital tools, particularly social media — a medium in which small numbers of activists can wreak havoc on hundred-billion-dollar corporations or prestige institutions. By this logic, the Woke is a vanguard movement that seized control of a new technology and used it as a force multiplier to discipline and terrorise the larger institutional landscape.

A more subtle version of this answer is that woke-ists use the threat of reputational damage to impose uniformity of opinion on the class of people like themselves, whose careers exist only insofar as they are backed by sufficient reputational capital. Unlike previously dominant forms of capital (like, say, land and cows), the reputational capital that is the professional class’s stock in trade — the ticket to the next job or fellowship — can be vaporised by a single tweet. In turn, the uniformity of opinion that the woke imposes within its own cohorts allows it to control those cohorts, and use them to bend powerful institutions to its will.

This explanation of wokeness, though, is to imagine that the tail is wagging the dog. But, media companies have stockholders, just as universities have wealthy and powerful trustees to answer to. These stockholders and trustees should be more powerful than broke 20-somethings with Twitter accounts. Surely, at some point, market forces should begin to punish institutions that chose to ignore reality. If Princeton University, say, were to embark on a programme of persecuting faculty who dissent from faddish doctrines, then those faculty members — and the donors who support them — could migrate to Harvard, which would accumulate money and prestige at Princeton’s expense. But that never happens. Not just institutions of higher education, the entire professional layer of society — from the professions, to corporate management, to non-profits, to media and publishing — moves in lock-step.

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So who does control the new American system? The answer isn’t broke woke-ists. It’s the monopolists who own the platforms where the woke-ists live. Elon Musk and Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos and Warren Buffett and Sergei Brin and Larry Page and Lorraine Jobs don’t care about mean tweets. They care about the hundreds of billions of dollars in their bank accounts, their lavish mansions and private jets, and pursuing rich person hobbies like colonising Mars. Their primary political goal, as a class, is to prevent the state from ever getting strong enough to tax their fortunes, break up their monopolies, or interfere with the supplies of cheap immigrant and offshore labour from which they profit. The more fractured, dejected, and heavily surveilled the America public is, the less likely a strong state is to emerge.

In the contest between the oligarchs and the fading Rooseveltian state, the woke are a useful tool— not an independent power. They are the foot soldiers of the Democratic Party, whose job it is to organise the dispossessed into groups that are narrow, factional, and divided enough that they can’t come together into a force that threatens oligarchical control. Discontent with the Turbo-Capitalist order can be usefully turned against anyone who refuses to follow the ever-changing party line — beginning with the “deplorables” who are now regularly portrayed as murderous, undemocratic racists and fascists, and extending to JK Rowling and Margaret Atwood. The result is a closed circuit in which Turbo-Capitalist oligarchs and Woke activists make common cause against formerly independent institutions like universities, professional associations, and the press. All of these institutions rely on guarantees of individual and collective rights by the state, which the Turbo-Capitalists and the Woke seek to capture and use as an instrument to enforce their own privatised social bargain: everything within the Party, nothing outside the Party, nothing against the Party.

The unprecedented reach of the technologies that the new oligarchy commands has already destroyed the press and replaced it with a government-corporate censorship regime that has no parallel in peacetime America. Combined with what appears to be a healthy appetite for humiliating others, this power does not bode well for the future of social peace in America, or for the health of the next American Republic.

The theatre, and tragedy particularly, offers a median between outright confession and conscious, rational (which is to say flawed or at least untrustworthy) understanding.

The tragedy is like the story around the campfire and, just like the joke, frees us from rational consideration. In listening, we are transported into another world. “Once upon a time”, just like “there were these two guys”, not only reassures but instantly bypasses our, necessary, quotidian concerns with our own position, well-being, and self-image.

In hearing these mystic incantations, we relax, because we know the story is not going to be about ourselves. Should we suspect, in our unprotected state, that we are actually listening to a cautionary tale (that is to say, to an advertisement), the spell is broken, and we must bring our self-protective capacities to bear.

Here we are like the radio listener, as the host describes the humiliation of some public figure, when he segues, unannounced, into a commercial for internet-image protection and we realise we were hearing an ad.

When we thought we were getting a bedtime story.

The bedtime story exists to address the child’s fear of the night and his understanding of his own frailty. He is not called upon to face it and to deal with it through reason (“There are no such things as monsters”), but he is soothed by a mechanism bypassing his frail consciousness, and his equally frail capacity to be soothed by the same. Which frailty the child shares with us all.

To address his fears by saying, “So remember, never be changed into a wolf”, is to make the same error as putting on plays with a “message”. These are a terrible misuse of the theatrical moment. As are the “talk-backs”, transforming an evening at the theatre into an English class.

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As free speech disappears like Jimmy Hoffa, producers and theatregoers are left with fear. Not only has a mechanism for relief been suppressed; the art form has been pressed into service of the repressive mechanism.

The theatre has long been turning and now, on its (potential) revival, will be found to have turned into the arena for the proclamation of right-thinking. The proclamation, that is, of the reign of the goddess Reason, that is, of mob rule.

We have seen, on Broadway, the usual forms of comedy, drama, and tragedy supplanted by the pageant. A pageant is a celebration of human accomplishment, intelligence, grace, or luck — finally of human power over nature or circumstance. It exists to celebrate a person (the birth of Galileo), a place (the founding of Des Moines), or an idea (National Farm Week, the Munich Rally).

It is a perfectly reasonable excuse for a performance and addresses our need for togetherness. But it is the opposite of the drama. Finally, it’s just, for good or ill, “the high school play”. We attend to applaud the notion presented in the pageant’s title. We will not and cannot experience those emotions nor, then, that catharsis for which the theatre has always existed. We will not leave the pageant cleansed, calmed, surprised, laughing, weeping, thoughtful, or disturbed. And we will not leave having had the burden of our consciousness momentarily laid aside.

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We know that he who rises refreshed from his prayers has had his prayers answered. Our prayers have, similarly, been answered in leaving the magnificent ballet, concert, or indeed football game: our burden had been lifted for a time. The pageant, however, answers not our prayers but the prayers of others. They, for good or ill, for whatever reason, civic pride, the hope of gain, the quest for adherents, have staged what is, finally, a demonstration.

The pageant has long supplanted the drama on Broadway, for the reasons following. Seventy-five percent of the Broadway audience are tourists. They come, legitimately, seeking an experience. They come to Broadway exactly as they come to Disneyland. As in that happiest place, they do not come to risk their hard-earned cash on a problematic event. (They might not like the play nor appreciate being “challenged”; they might just want a break after a day of shopping.) But no one need doubt that the teacup ride will function as advertised.

The knowledgeable Broadway audience, in the days of Odets, Miller, Williams, et cetera, is long in their graves, and their grandchildren basking in Scottsdale.

The middle-class New Yorkers (and the working class) supported the growth of the American drama. The tourist is not paying to do so, any more than he would pay to go to an amusement park with thought-provoking roller coasters.

Most plays are no damned good. The only way to write a play is to write a lot of plays. One learns through putting it on in the garage, in the storefront, off-Broadway, et cetera, trying and failing in front of a paying audience. There is no other way to learn how to write a play.

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Off Broadway, off-off-Broadway, are no more. The regional theatres have long devoted themselves to developing a subscriber-ship, “outreach”, “social consciousness”, and other means of destroying the possibility of attracting actual, ardent audiences.

No one says to his or her spouse, “Look online and see if there are any plays supporting the notion that (FILL INTHE BLANK) are people, too.” Or, “Get dressed, because, though you wanted to stay home and have a beer, it is the third Tuesday in the month, and we have to go use our subscription tickets to see some play.”

(By the way, what greater pleasure than recognising, of whatever event, that one is, at the moment, happier at home, and the tickets, whatever they cost, can go hang?)

Finally, to write a good play requires talent. There is not a lot of it around.

It was, I believe, Milton Friedman who, stunningly, said that the free market must exist to entice the able to reveal their abilities. If one has no possibility, in the theatre, of doing anything but staging platitudes, the talentless will (and do) step up, but the inspired have no reason to do so. The reward of the talented is unfettered creation.

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The painter or composer may work in solitude. The creation of the dramatist is complete only with the addition of an audience. He is writing for them. To create, in them, a transformative experience (the laugh, the gasp, dead intent silence, or tears) is the greatest of thrills.

The hack is unaware of the existence of talent. He may happily take his pointless facility to producers happy to put on a show of no more actual worth than the monochrome canvases beloved of museum curators.

The New York Times, our newspaper of record, and the liberal media, in conjunction with the schools and colleges, insist that nothing shall be said or staged which does not express “right thinking”, that is, statism.

Outreach, education, diversity, and so on are tools of indoctrination. So, for example, are marine boot camp and the Bar Mitzvah. But art is the connection between inspiration and the soul of the observer. This insistence on art as indoctrination is obscenity, denying and indicting the possibility of human connection to truths superior to human understanding, that is, to the divine.

This is an extract from Recessional: The Death of Free Speech and the Cost of A Free Lunch by David Mamet. 

© David Mamet 2022

That all changed last month, when a series of high-profile stories swept trans issues into the national spotlight, starting with the victory of transgender swimmer Lia Thomas at the NCAA women’s swimming championship. Although Thomas was, for the most part, lauded by the press, the victory was accompanied by protests, complaints from the parents of other competitors, and a string of anonymous tabloid leaks from Thomas’s teammates — at least some of whom seemed opposed to her presence on the team.

The pictures of the broad-shouldered, 6’1” Thomas towering over her competitors, were striking. Long-winded explanations about the role of testosterone in athletic performance aside, it was hard for the average person to conclude she hadn’t had a competitive advantage.

Then, later the same month, Florida governor Ron DeSantis signed the Parental Rights in Education Act into law. The “Don’t Say Gay” bill was vociferously opposed by the White House, much of the media, and major corporations such as Disney and Apple; it prohibits classroom instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity from preschool to third grade — roughly ages four to nine — and requires that parents be notified about any medical or mental-health issues with their children. Prominent liberals were scathing, with Biden denouncing the law as “hateful”, Pete Buttigieg’s husband warning that it will “kill kids”, and the hosts of the Oscars chanting the word “gay” in protest. The Right, meanwhile, has launched itself into a frenzy, accusing Democrats of wanting to “groom” children and insinuating that opponents of the law are pedophiles.

It is no coincidence that both pillars of the current trans controversies relate to education. A leitmotif of the post-pandemic world has been parental rebellion against progressive excesses in schools and instruction on issues such as race and gender. Remote schooling allowed parents to peek into their children’s classrooms, where they saw elementary schoolers being instructed to rank themselves on an intersectional privilege hierarchy and to celebrate the “black communism” of Angela Davis.

Republicans, sensing opportunity, have embraced the parental crusade with anti-CRT bills, curriculum transparency bills, and, in some states, new restrictions on trans athletes and “gender-affirming” medical procedures. They are responding to the fact that the woke extremism popular with professional educators is deeply unpopular with voters. Indeed, wokeness in general is unpopular, and “educators”, as a class, are something like the Salafists of social justice. This is a specific instance of a general problem for the Democrats: its professional and leadership class is fond of social positions that strike a lot of ordinary people as wacky or perverse.

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Democrats, however, have fallen into what Ruy Teixeira calls the “Fox News fallacy” — the idea that if Republicans are complaining about something, it must be made up. On CRT, for instance, they have used the unconvincing defence that CRT is only taught in law schools and dismissed parental concerns as a product of “disinformation.”

Similarly, they have cast the Parental Rights in Education Act as a homophobic attempt to “force kids back into the closet” and prevent gay teachers from discussing their home life in the classroom — when, in fact the main concern of the bill is gender identity. The strategy, as Leor Sapir has argued, has been to make the debate over the law a debate over gay rights — which are supported by the vast majority of Americans — while dodging the much more contentious issue of whether, and how, schools should be teaching about gender.

This is no idle concern. What evidence we do have suggests that paediatric gender dysphoria is rising at a rate that would be almost impossible to explain purely as a result of greater acceptance or diagnostic sophistication. One clinic in Northern California reported an 500% increase in paediatric referrals for gender dysphoria between 2015 and 2018, while in Sweden, gender dysphoria diagnoses among teenage girls rose by over 1,500% between 2008 and 2018.

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Some researchers, such as Brown University’s Lisa Littman, have argued that this rapid increase is consistent with other social contagions such as anorexia or cutting. This suggests that many children are adopting these identities due to peer influences and social media consumption rather than a stable and deeply felt sense of dysphoria. But if these messages are reinforced at school, they may be more likely to stick.  This is a particularly explosive issue given that schools have encouraged children to socially transition without notifying their parents, and some states, such as California, consider failure to affirm a child’s gender identity as grounds for stripping a parent of custody rights.

Although Littman’s work has been denounced as “misinformation”, it has received support from a number of “detransitioners” who have gone public with their stories. Their stories, on the whole, follow a pattern: a girl who is struggling with an unrelated mental health issue such as anxiety or depression falls down an Internet rabbit-hole, where she learns she is unhappy because she was born in the “wrong body”. She visits a psychiatrist who, instead of interrogating her feelings, “affirms” that she is actually a boy and sets them on the road to medical transition.

Only later, sometimes after painful surgeries, do the girls realise that whatever was bothering them was not gender dysphoria but another unresolved psychological issue. They are left wondering why the adults in their lives allowed them to damage their bodies in the name of what they later come to believe was a delusion. Due in part to stories like these — and to the lack of solid evidence in favour of “gender-affirming” care — a number of European countries have begun to discourage medical interventions for youth gender dysphoria in favour of psychotherapy.

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The Biden administration’s great strength so far has been its ability to recognise when the preferences of the Twitter class are deeply out of step with those of the public and then side with the public. Here, it has done the opposite. Last week, in response to the Florida and two recent Arizona laws (one banning biological males from girls’ sports, the other banning medical transitions for minors), the administration announced that it would be expanding its interpretation of Title IX — a federal law prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sex in education — to include protections for gender identity.

The full implications of the move are unclear, but they could include denying federal education funds to states that bar trans athletes from girls’ sports. Separately, the Justice Department warned states that any attempt to limit access to “gender-affirming” care for children could be in violation of the Constitution and federal civil rights law.

Biden may be miscalculating. Americans are by and large tolerant of differences and tend to take a laissez-faire attitude when it comes to how individuals choose to live their own lives. But they also have a basic sense of fair play and proportion. Majorities oppose laws, such as Arizona’s, prohibiting “gender-transition related medical care for minors”, presumably because they seem to legislate individual medical decisions. But a solid majority believe that trans athletes should compete on teams that match their birth sex, and polling suggests that even a majority of Florida Democrats supports the language of the Parental Rights in Education Act.

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In short, Americans tend to support trans rights when they are analogous to gay rights, meaning when they are seen as a simple matter of accepting those who are different. But they are more sceptical of the maximalist positions pushed by elite progressives — that the Lia Thomases of the world should be permitted to compete as women, or that schools should be allowed to facilitate major medical decisions for children without parental notification or consent.

By picking a national fight over these issues, the Biden administration risks stepping into a trap it has so far avoided: siding with the common sense of college-educated progressives against the common sense of the electorate as a whole. For a GOP attempting to rebrand itself as the party of ordinary people, this could be a blessing in disguise.

What bothered me was the extent to which several high-profile populist conservatives were seeming to reflexively side with the cruel Russian autocrat. I watched as Tucker Carlson and J.D. Vance defended Putin, or adopted the Kremlin’s critique of Ukraine. The country was a “pure client state of the United States State Department” said Carlson. “Spare me the performative affection for the Ukraine” said Vance on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast.

These interventions, made as Russia began an invasion that looks set to result in the deaths of thousands of Ukrainian civilians, look high risk and low reward. These commentators are undermining the credibility they have accrued for taking bold stances on the “security and identity” issues their base really cares about. Namely: wokeness, the border, crime and defending national heritage.

This is a real shame for populist conservatism in the United States. During the height of progressive moral panics such as the Covington Boys, George Floyd protests or Rittenhouse trial, Tucker’s show was an oasis of sanity. It was, too, on exposing campus craziness and anti-white rhetoric in institutions, or the scale of illegal immigration. He defended the legitimacy of Americans who wanted to regulate the pace of ethno-cultural change and protect social cohesion, taking immense flak from the great and the good. Others, such as Glenn Greenwald, highlighted the blind spots and biases of progressive organisations and tech firms. Most American politicians and legacy media outlets failed to cover these issues objectively.

And yet, when it comes to a suite of other problems, the incisive logic of the sceptics and their marshalling of evidence yielded to sweeping neo-Marxist conspiracy theories about a manipulative power elite. This became evident during the pandemic, a tricky new challenge in which experts and politicians had to optimise between death rates and freedom. While governments and public health bodies may have got the balance wrong, and overreached with mask mandates, such a complex issue does not lend itself to maximalist claims.

Instead, the difficulties of policymaking during the pandemic demanded building a patient case with data and arguing for the dial to be turned a bit towards greater personal autonomy. Indeed, the politics of anti-lockdown libertarianism has not paid off for those, such as Nigel Farage, who have attempted to campaign on it. It was never a populist position.

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Another tricky issue which is largely tangential to populist voters’ concerns is foreign policy, where, even with Putin issuing marching orders to unprepared conscripts, populist elites continued to carry water for this killer. Donald Trump, Marine Le Pen, Eric Zemmour, and Viktor Orbán all, at various moments, spoke warmly of him. While it is legitimate to make a realist case — as John Mearsheimer has done — for tempering Ukrainian demands and accommodating reasonable Russian security concerns, the inability of some to reject the moral equivalence of Ukraine and Russia was glaring.

What lies behind this bizarre empathy toward Putin’s thuggish regime?

First, there is an important disconnect between Right-wing populist elites and their audience. Populist elites compete with mainstream intellectual elites, yearning for an overarching meta-theory to rival progressive liberalism or libertarianism. Many also desire a modicum of politically-correct respectability and thus try to pretend they are motivated by a desire to speak for the downtrodden. This typically results in a neo-Marxist mélange focused on globalist power elites and their manipulation of the masses. All of which pushes populist intellectuals toward grand theories of global economic and political order that bear little relationship to what national populist voters and audiences actually care about.

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Steve Bannon talks endlessly about the perils of free trade, Davos and the working class, despite the fact the data shows very clearly that cultural attitudes and views on immigration, not material deprivation, are what predict support for Trump. Likewise, Brexit elites such as Boris Johnson or Douglas Carswell, with their libertarian dreams of a sovereign free-trading Britain, are strangely disconnected from actual Brexit voters, who were — like Trump voters — mainly motivated by a desire for less immigration and slower cultural change. The more Brexit voters glimpse the real Johnson, who cares nothing for these things, the less connected they feel to him.

Populist elites have developed a fixation on global elites and institutions as self-interested scheming actors, and have become obsessed with mobilising opposition to the globalist juggernaut. Rather than viewing the problem as a western cultural-Left worldview which repudiates national tradition and elevates a cult of victimhood, we are treated to conspiratorial musings about the “Great Reset” and elites in Davos, Geneva or Brussels. My limited experience, having given talks at some of these institutions, is that the more international the organisation, the less woke it is. Yes, western high culture permeates global institutions, but these are nodes rather than the epicentre of the problem.

Once convinced of their neo-Marxist grand theory, some populist elites, fired by hostility to the rules-based liberal world order, feel compelled to develop an anti-western foreign policy. “Enemy of my enemy is my friend” logic carries them toward Putin’s Russia and quasi-illiberal democracies such as Hungary. An isolationism which originally sprang from the valid concern — after protracted wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — that American nationhood not be defined by missionary democracy promotion has mutated into support for autocracy.

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By William Deresiewicz

The perception that Russia is a masculine, white, Christian country unafraid to stand up for its traditions forms part of its appeal to conservative populist thinkers. “Putin ain’t woke,” Steve Bannon said last month. “He’s anti-woke.” The Russian President’s 2019 interview with the Financial Times, when he declared that liberalism has “become obsolete” clearly impressed many Western conservative populists. Against Drag Queen Story Hour and self-flagellation about the sins of the past could be set Putin’s macho, Christian, nationalist Russia. Clearly, some populist elites took the bait.

Yet any honest appraisal of Putin’s Russia would reveal that its religiosity is weak, immigration substantial, and the Eurasianism of Putin and Alexandr Dugin would readily trade cultural homogeneity for more territory. Moreover, as the Russianist Edwin Bacon observes: “Eurasianists embracing Orthodoxy identify themselves as having far more in common with what they would call other traditional faiths — notably Islam, and principally Shi’a Islam — than with other Christian churches.” Putin’s Russia is a ramshackle, corrupt, aggressive despotism. It is not “really hot stuff” as Donald Trump put it once. It is not a post-woke paradise.

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Populist elites also appear to like Russia because it has spurned liberalism, failing to appreciate that wokeness, whose sacralisation of minorities is used to restrict liberty, is best resisted by liberal arguments. They confuse procedural liberalism, which has been vital for the West’s success, with Left-modernist values such as celebrating diversity and change, which developed much later and are not central to liberalism.

As a ‘rational populist’ and liberal nationalist, I maintain that the values of the median voter should be reflected in policy, but that those tasked with carrying out such policies should be guided by science, analytic logic, and expertise. The problem with many Western elites is not their technical skills, but their post-national woke values, which spring from religious rather than rational wellsprings. While populist commentators correctly skewer the progressive pieties of the elite media and political class, the anti-globalist conspiracy theorising of many needs an urgent reality check. Populist pundits and politicians should resist the urge to stake out contrarian positions on every news item, tacking instead to the centre ground on side issues to avoid losing support for core issues.

Hopefully the Ukraine crisis can serve as a wake-up call, drawing them back toward the cultural problems their base actually cares about.

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.

Many people, like Oliver Dowden, the chairman of the Conservative Party, think that the culture wars in Britain are between the woke Left and the conservative Right. This is only partially correct. They are also between the liberal-Left and the woke Left; they are also civil wars.

Dowden made a speech a couple of weeks ago at an American think-tank called the Heritage Foundation. It wasn’t exactly Churchill in Fulton, Missouri, but it made a splash. Dowden denounced woke ideology as a terrifying force: “a social media mob,” he said, “can cancel you merely because you have dared to challenge one of the Left’s fashionable nostrums.”

Dowden’s analysis of woke politics is slightly misplaced; and so too is the criticism of the speech made by the former MP and government minister David Gauke in the New Statesman. Gauke is wrong because, though he admits cancel culture is a problem, he sees it as a minor nuisance.

I can understand how: if you think it’s simply a battle between academics and conservative journalists, it can seem like a minor conflict. One that is only played out in the hyperactive transient world of social media and radio talk-in shows. But it is not just a clash between Scylla and Charybdis. It is also a family fight. And this is why the word ‘woke’ should be used.

It is now fashionable among a certain type of Left-liberal or centrist to say ‘woke’ is a meaningless term. It is certainly true that it is much abused. Some newspaper columnists relish going after ‘woke snowflakes’ with the zeal of indiscriminate big-game hunters. I can see why one would want to remove themselves from that. It’s all so vulgar, and disavowing the term ‘woke’ thus seems like a cleaner choice.

But there is no point denying that there are conflicts around the issues of gender, free speech, race and culture. And that these conflicts are not only waged by the Right-wing press, but are in fact found within many institutions largely staffed by liberal-Left people. The culture wars, which are often derided as fake and drummed up by the Right, are real. They are an extension of politics — and politics is by its very nature oppositional.

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Woke also has a sharp Anglo-Saxon sting; it’s a name that sticks. “Social Justice Warriors” is too long and its acronymic version SJW is dull. Progressive is too loose and airy. Woke gets straight to the point, and is useful in conveying, in its aggressive consonantal force, the internecine nature of this conflict.

The transgender debate, for instance, is not a conflict between reactionaries and progressives. It is a battle between older liberal-Left women and younger progressive women; between older gay and lesbian radicals and younger ones. Mumsnet and the Observer have done more than conservative think tanks to highlight the tension between biological sex and gender identity. It is not lavishly funded conservative institutions but grassroots feminist organisations such as Woman’s Place UK which are at the forefront of the fight against gender-identity politics in Britain.

It may seem like an intergenerational conflict because older women care less about what people think of them than younger women. But there are many younger people who are privately sceptical about elements of the politics of social justice. The key word here is privately.

We tend to think this conflict is made up of Right-wing cranks and irate historians (and a group of inexplicable feminists!) against an online-savvy Left. But ask many people in the publishing industry about what they really think of J.K. Rowling, Kate Clanchy and sensitivity readers — and the obscuring effect of self-censorship becomes clear. Some of them will be happy to chat to you, over the phone or in a pub, and express their views. But it has to be off-the record.

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These people are Guardian readers. They hate the Tories. They support Black Lives Matter, and are gravely worried about climate change. But they are scared stiff about saying the treatment of J.K. Rowling was terrible, that Clanchy made a mistake in responding to a Goodreads comment on Twitter but her detractors have behaved terribly, and that the use of sensitivity readers is crude and patronising. This is what they believe, but they don’t want to lose their jobs.

People who say woke is meaningless are evasive about this intra-Left conflict. They point to people such as Robert Tombs and David Abulafia, who will gladly write columns for the Telegraph excoriating the woke Left. Tombs will (falsely) claim in the Times that Churchill was not a racist. But where are the academics who will argue that Churchill was a racist but also a great man? When is the Guardian going to publish that?

Such people do exist, but if they think any criticism of woke politics will put them in the same camp as people like Tombs, they’ll prefer to stew away quietly. Many of the same people who bemoan the divisive nature of the culture wars are doing absolutely nothing to make it more nuanced. Claiming that certain figures from the past who were racist were not in fact racist is an extreme view; but so is denying that some of these racist people should not be considered heroic or virtuous or praiseworthy in other respects.

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In English departments, many academics do not want to be labelled as racists, so they publicly acquiesce to calls to decolonise the curriculum, but many of them are, again, quietly sceptical. They value the principle of diversity; they also subscribe to a humanist approach to literature that affirms great books can’t be wholly reduced to politics. They love equality. But they also love pluralism and honest intellectual discussion.

They know these things should not conflict with each other — we can consider the politics of a text without viewing that text entirely through the lens of politics; we can value both diversity and frank intellectual debate. But they live in an atmosphere in which they are in conflict. And so they do nothing about it because they don’t want to face a backlash.

This is why saying and using ‘woke’ is important. It brings what is obscure into the open. It allows the debate to be had within the liberal-Left, where it needs to be had. It is clarifying.

But many (here, here, here, here, here, and here) argue that cancel culture doesn’t really exist. It’s just a Right-wing talking point. To which I would respond: how do you know? There is so much self-censorship going on that people are not being honest about what they believe about certain sensitive issues. They don’t have the wealth or power of J.K. Rowling; they are scared of losing their jobs. That is cancel culture.

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In another liberal-Left organisation, the Labour Party, the tensions are revealed by a poll last year which found that only 25% of Labour Party voters support defunding the police — one key policy of woke ideology. Even among 18-24 year olds, the wokest demographic, it is only 44%. When asked whether we should view society’s problems through the lens of white privilege, the poll also found that only 29% of Labour voters agreed. More than half think “woke practices” have gone too far.

Of course, people have complex views. One might support taking the knee, believe statues of certain slave traders like Edward Colston should be taken down, and believe that we should learn more about slavery and colonialism at school, but such people might still be critical of other aspects of woke ideology. This is why they would be reluctant to describe themselves as anti-woke. To do so might imply opposition to all those things. But they could also describe themselves as non-woke or woke-sceptical; the fact that wokeness can be ambiguous does not mean it is a meaningless term. It just means it can be ambiguous.

Wokeness has a family resemblance to other progressive ideologies — but it is also distinct. Many socialists are non-woke; their analysis is rooted in class politics rather than identity. I also think it’s lazy to simply describe wokeness as liberalism. It is often profoundly illiberal. If woke-deniers think the Right is often misusing the term, they should take ownership of it. Simply saying ‘woke’ is a meaningless term, without offering a more attractive alternative, is a form of evasion.

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One reason why this matters on the liberal-Left is because the vast majority of 18-24 year olds now back liberal-Left parties. There is an old adage that people become more conservative as they get older. But if the changes in people’s lives which lead them to become conservative, such as owning property and having kids, are becoming increasingly rare, then that transition to conservatism might not come to pass for many young people. This is why the battle between the woke Left and the non-woke or woke-sceptical Left is especially salient. It has repercussions for all of us.

Questions such as: what is a woman, how should we examine our past, how we should think about race in an increasingly diverse society, and how we should think about free speech and tolerance are all absolutely key for trying to make sense of the nature of public discourse today and in the future. They ultimately boil down to the question of who we are, and what we should do about it.

The training began with a corny short film, featuring a number of justly forgotten D-list actors. The central action revolved around a middle-aged white guy with a moustache struggling to come to terms with diversity. At work and in his neighbourhood, vexing new identity-based demands confronted him. He figured it sufficed to treat everyone fairly and without prejudice. He didn’t hate anyone, but neither did he think he owed anything on account of his own identity.

The middle-age white guy just didn’t get it. Luckily, his United Colors of Benetton cast of colleagues were prepared to gently guide him to the truth: that behind his “colourblind” assumptions lurked his enormous “privilege”; and that fairness and old-fashioned decency just weren’t enough, not with all the racial abuses marring Western history and still racking society.

At first, he resisted, spluttering angrily about “affirmative action” and “reverse racism”. But gradually, our protagonist came to recognise how much hurt his words inflicted on his minority (and female) colleagues. He resolved to do better, starting by acknowledging his privileges and consciously checking them. In short, he learned a new ethic for a new America.

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This was the first time I ran into the tangle of ideas now known as “woke”. And back then, I dismissed them as a silly sort of therapy-cum-spirituality for young adults, much as the Columbia University linguist John McWhorter does in his best-selling and hotly debated new book, Woke Racism. I was wrong then — as McWhorter is now.

All the elements of wokeness McWhorter identifies were present, in embryonic form, in that Houston auditorium 17 years ago: the grievance-mongering; the reduction of complex problems to an obsession with language; the denial of agency to victim groups; the corollary duty of whites to pursue social change, mainly by seeking individual self-improvement; the thrill of a higher gnosis.

It was useful for elite, mostly white grads to give some thought to how their backgrounds might help or hinder them in “majority-minority” school districts, such as the Rio Grande Valley region of Texas, where I was headed. But the sessions went far beyond that, staging by-now-familiar confessional routines (“for each privilege point the chart gives you, please take one step forward from the line….”) and ultimately seeking to mould a new type of person.

I found the whole thing contemptible, partly because I saw in the proto-woke worldview a bowdlerised version of the critical theories I had studied — indeed, adored — in college. And partly because I fell into the interstices of the official oppressor-oppressed categories. I could have brought home an Intersectional Olympics medal, as a Muslim-born immigrant in post-9/11 America. But I wasn’t, in fact, besieged by prejudice, and it would have been risible for a son of Iran — literally, “land of the Aryans” — to claim “POC” victimhood.

Others were enthusiastic. There were transports of tears, ecstatic hugs after heated exchanges, tedious self-criticisms. It all seemed to give them solace, of a kind that I, then a proud atheist, didn’t think I needed. Today, judging by social media, more than a few of my fellow Teach for America alumni are zealots who force everyone around them “to spend endless amounts of time listening to nonsense presented as wisdom, and pretend to like it”, to quote McWhorter.

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They’re everywhere, of course, not just in Teach for America. In a very few years, public life in the Anglosphere has devolved into one giant diversity session. McWhorter, who is black, is justly alarmed by this. He doesn’t want his daughter to grow up thinking of herself as a permanent victim, nor to believe that she carries some immutable racial essence that defines who she is more than anything else about her.

More immediately, McWhorter has had it with progressive inanities, which he dissects with great wit and gusto. A table supplied early in the book shows how the woke — whom McWhorter labels “the Elect”; more on that shortly — demand that white people simultaneously believe pairs of diametrically opposed propositions. “Silence about racism is violence,” we are told, but also: “Elevate the voices of the oppressed over your own.” Heads they win, tails we lose.

McWhorter addresses persuadable New York Times readers, who sense that such rhetoric is sinister but are cowed by progressive bullying, which is often backed by corporate power. The hope is that such sceptical liberals will finally “stop being afraid of these people” and “stand up” to them. Amen. But such calls to courage have been issuing from anti-woke liberals like McWhorter (and Bari Weiss, Douglas Murray, Bill Maher and James Lindsay) for some time. Why isn’t it working?

For McWhorter, “the Elect” win by duping well-intentioned modern people into adopting a malignant worldview. Wokeness, in this telling, is just a set of bad ideas. Bad religious ideas, to be precise, which assail the rational, individualistic pillars of the “post-Enlightenment society we hold dear”. If that’s the case, the “solution” is for the rest of us to double down on secular individualism. We, the non-Elect, should simply recognise that we’re dealing with faith-based fanatics, people who can’t be reasoned with, and “work around them”.

The author is less than clear on what this might mean in practice, other than answering progressive claims with a resounding “No”: No, we won’t apologise. No, we won’t recant. No, we won’t mouth your inanities.

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There is much that is sensible here. It’s especially commendable for a black, liberal intellectual, for example, to warn that the quest to extirpate all racist thoughts, once for all, is quixotic and dangerous.

But I’m afraid his diagnosis, and the treatment that follows from it, are woefully lacking. For one thing, the anti-woke liberals, who trend heavily toward Christopher Hitchens-style New Atheism, badly misunderstand religion, McWhorter especially so.

In fact, he admits early on that the book is likely to get pilloried for “disrespect[ing] religion.” But the problem isn’t so much his mean caricatures of traditional faiths as his sloppy definitions and the unaccountably sharp divisions he draws between religious and “secular” reason. These lead him to lose sight of the liturgical character of all political society, even the ardently godless.

Certainly, it’s hard to deny the religious characteristics of wokeness. The woke have their own liturgies (like the ones I witnessed in Houston). They believe in original sin (slavery, colonialism) and exalt themselves as a sort of secular Elect and excommunicate heretics (cancel culture). They’ve built a hieratic structure, composed of high priests (the UCLA critical theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw, say), popular preachers (Ibram X. Kendi, Robin DiAngelo) and ordinary pastors (your workplace diversity consultants). And because theirs is a messianic faith, they are hellbent on imposing it on the rest of us.

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So far, so familiar. After all, it isn’t exactly ground-breaking to notice the religious dimensions of secular ideologies. The classic of the genre remains Raymond Aron’s Opium of the Intellectuals (1955), which exposed the messianic dimensions of Communist ideology. But where Aron was nuanced and sophisticated, and obviously learned when it came to a Christian faith that wasn’t his own, McWhorter is too often downright crude. Straight-faced references to The Da Vinci Code as a guide to understanding how believers think? Check. Blanket assertions that the Bible “makes no sense”? Check. Constant evocations of “the medieval” as shorthand for superstition and barbarism? Check.

Three millennia of Jewish, Christian and Muslim theology and philosophy? Poof! — all demolished by McWhorter’s equation of “reason” with Enlightenment empiricism.

Through it all, McWhorter never pauses to define precisely what a religion is. It’s a shocking lapse for a professional linguist. We owe “religion” to the Latin religio — “to bind”. And who was bound to whom, thanks to religion’s marriage of ritual and belief? In the classical world, religion didn’t just involve binding the human creature to God or the gods — but also the political subject to his earthly rulers. Politics and piety, in other words, were bound together, a fact made especially manifest in the Roman worship of the god-emperor.

As a matter of substance, religious experience could and did vary; some religious beliefs are more reasonable than others. But as a matter of form, religion was about orienting the community, rulers as well as the ruled, toward the highest goods of human life. And in that sense religion was — and remains — unavoidable. Hence, ancient writers’ insistence that man is among other things a religious animal, always seeking to erect his altars in public squares.

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Today, our altar looks unquestionably progressive. Anti-woke liberals see themselves as the brave few who refuse to genuflect — rather like Roman elites who, following Constantine’s conversion, griped that worship of a would-be Jewish king had ruined the empire. Only, unlike the Roman religious dissidents, who were proud pagans, the anti-woke liberals refuse to recognise the religious character of their own beliefs.

They insist that their ideology is merely a gossamer framework for upholding pluralistic societies. Yet liberalism, too, offers a definite account of what should bind the individual to society, with its own pieties and liturgical practices. From French revolutionaries’ shrines to the goddesses of Reason and Liberty to today’s pantheon of civic saints, liberals render worship. And from the arch-liberal philosopher John Rawls’s infamous footnote excluding from the realm of “public reason” any “comprehensive doctrine that denied this right [abortion],” to the anti-woke liberals’ increasingly unvarnished hostility to those further to their Right, liberals excommunicate.

Meanwhile, their shoddy account of religion leads anti-woke liberals to separate the woke religio from material reality. McWhorter & Co. rightly mock and denounce the bad religio of the woke, but they give little thought to how the ideology might be legitimating a class structure.

McWhorter’s book is replete with hints, but he never connects the dots. Nearly all of the persecutors he profiles, and many of their victims, belong to the professional classes. He writes of teachers, professors, columnists, pollsters, corporate executives — people who, in one way or another, service the dominant classes under his cherished liberal order.

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I’ve argued, in these pages and elsewhere, that wokeness might be the latest legitimating ideology for neoliberal capitalism: a way to bind its subjects, to motivate them and to discipline the wayward. If it were otherwise, if wokeness truly undermined the material interests of today’s corporate ruling class, it would be extinguished this very day. And the Walton family and every other mega-foundation wouldn’t be lining up to fund woke outfits, not least Teach for America.

Teach for America (and Teach First) are premised on the idea that the achievement gap between poor kids and their affluent peers could be closed if only a committed corps of teachers mounted heroic, McKinsey-consultant-style hard work. Now, it’s absolutely true that we could use higher expectations and more diligent teachers in low-income classrooms. But these organisations would deny larger, structural causes for the achievement gap: the white teacher, for instance, mustn’t dare judge illegitimacy rates and absentee black fathers. A ferocious focus on race, sexuality and gender, meanwhile, helps to suppress the question of class.

Rolling back wokeness, then, requires paying attention to the intersection of ideology and class conflict in liberal society. Anti-woke liberals aren’t prepared to do so, because finally they’re loyal to our current material order, however annoying or discomfiting they might find its cultural symptoms. Their critique doesn’t give rise to any political response. You rarely find them at the forefront of legislative efforts to limit race-and-gender theory in classrooms. Indeed, they often oppose such efforts, lest they threaten higher liberal idols, such as the “marketplace of ideas”.

A deeper critique would call into question the anti-woke liberals’ own deepest commitments, their own religio.

Take Roberto Bolaño. When he first appeared on the American scene in 2003 with the English translation of By Night in Chile, he was hailed by Susan Sontag as a major voice of Latin American literature. But it wasn’t until the posthumous publication of The Savage Detectives in 2007 that he became a household name among the smart set. That novel, a towering work of literary virtuosity, would go on to be a national bestseller. Bolaño, who’d died in 2004 at the age of 50 from complications due to a liver condition, became that rarest of breeds — the writer who goes by a single name.

In 2008, his short stories began to appear in The New Yorker, and the same year saw the English translation of Bolaño’s masterpiece, the 900-page 2666, completing the cycle of his major works. But the publishing world was hungry for new Bolaño, whether he was around to write it or not. More than fifteen books have been published since 2666, the most recent in February 2021. Just when you think the last novella or half-finished short story collection has been unearthed from his hard drive, another one is announced. Like Charles Bukowski, Bolaño has found a fame in death he would’ve scoffed at during his life, which he spent as a struggling poet in Chile, Mexico and Spain.

Bolaño is worthy of his place in the canon, but he would’ve had a harder time earning it had he been an American. For the US literary establishment, Bolaño’s foreignness was central to his appeal. At a time when the literary Jonathans — Franzen and Safran Foer — and what remained of the old white males reigned supreme, here was a dead Chilean poet whose seedy, often macho stories of Latin American depravity offered white liberal readers a chance to wallow in grit and grime.

Wokeness wasn’t yet a factor then, but the winds were blowing in that direction. Bolaño offered an outlet for New Yorker readers who wanted some of the “toxic masculinity” — sex, violence, and machismo — that they’d previously gotten from the likes of Roth and Mailer. Bolaño, a foreign noble savage, was the perfect guy for the role.

Bolaño’s stature has only grown over the past 20 years, even as the literary world became increasingly feminised; both readers and editors are now mostly women. It’s a trend that’s been picked up on, and even lamented, by the Times, the TLS, and the Observer. It’s almost impossible to find debut novels by American men, and especially white men, about the plight of heterosexual males.

With foreign writers, it’s a different story. Like Bolaño, the French novelist Michel Houellebecq and his Norwegian contemporary Karl Ove Knausgård, have epitomised the rise of the literary noble savage. These two have built careers on “problematic” subject matter that would get an American-born writer cancelled. Why are imports allowed to thrive?

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A European like Knausgård, perhaps the whitest man in existence, can still be embraced by the publishing industry. His autobiographical My Struggle novels, which chronicle his everyday life in tedious and often brilliant detail, are almost pathologically self-indulgent. They are also, to put it lightly, controversial. The narrator, a Knausgård stand-in named Karl Ove Knausgård, rants against political correctness and feminist parenting, describes his attraction to his students while teaching at a high school, relates his anger at being falsely accused of rape, and, in general, details his sexual proclivities and hang-ups in all their quotidian repulsiveness.

But one gets the sense that the books are popular among elites not in spite, but because of the way they muck around in male sexuality. Take one look at the grizzled and handsome Knausgård and it’s obvious that there is a psychosexual element at play here. Wokeness requires a degree of repression, which in turn necessitates an outlet for release. The sexual itch must be scratched in a non-problematic manner, and since the noble savages are foreign curiosities who can’t be expected to internalise the progressive ways of America, they get a free pass. The elite reader can be titillated by Knausgård’s grubby masculinity while keeping his or her conscience clean.

The American male novelist, by contrast, is despised not for his toxic masculinity but because he ought to know better. Unlike the noble savage, the American male is expected to understand what is and isn’t problematic — he went to college, after all. For him, masculinity is something to be condemned and renounced. The embodiment of this emasculated ideal is Ben Lerner, a master of self-flagellation whose 2019 novel The Topeka School “decodes white male rage”. Pull up any picture of Lerner and he looks just about ready to weep.

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American men who deviate from the Lerner school are treated like Callan Wink, whose debut, August, a coming-of-age novel set in Montana and Michigan was panned in the New York Times in no small part due to its flirtations with masculine bravado. “Despite his abundance of literary talent,” the reviewer teases, “we’ll be sure not to mistake [Wink] for some effete literary type.” The reviewer’s problem, of course, is that Wink, who lives in Montana and writes about Western men, is far too close to the American savages of old. Wink graduated from an MFA program and has published stories in The New Yorker. That means he got the memo, which makes his defiance unforgivable.

The case of Pulitzer Prize-winner Junot Diaz is another cautionary tale: this time about what happens to writers who make the leap from noble savage to upstanding member of the American literati. Diaz, who was born in the Dominican Republic, became a celebrity in 1996 with the publication of Drown, a short story collection documenting the gritty island life of his homeland. But as his fame grew, and especially after he won the Pulitzer for The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, something funny happened: he was civilised. He landed a teaching gig at MIT, and even if he still spat out his patented Dominican slang at readings, it was clear that he’d been domesticated. Diaz was an American writer.

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But with Americanisation comes cancellation. In 2018, Diaz became the subject of a #MeToo campaign, led by former students and writers whom he had mentored. He was accused of overstepping boundaries, pushing himself on female writers and getting handsy. Blinded by the awards and the fawning press, Diaz failed to realise that the sort of behaviour that was indulged in a Dominican was off-limits for a Yank.

Bolaño is still pumping out books nearly two decades after his death, but many a noble savage has joined him in recent years, including his countryman Alejandro Zambra and the Argentinian César Aira. And they just keep coming. The latest in the genre, The Women I Love, by the Italian Francesco Pacifico, came out in December, and is described by the publisher as “a provocative and bracing send-up of modern masculinity”. That’s publicity speak for: a noble savage Italian dude fucks around for 300 pages, magnificently unafraid of committing a microaggression.

For American novelists, the news is bleak but not hopeless. You may need to neuter your writing. You may need to show exquisite sensitivity to the ever-shifting rules around race and gender. You may need to conduct your personal life with the utmost progressive decorum. But if you change your name and flee the country, you can write whatever you want.

Does Britain deserve obloquy for profiting so hugely from the Transatlantic slave trade, or credit for having abolished it? Statues of imperialists and slavers have been toppled and daubed and tossed into rivers. The Right, more rampant and paranoid than at any time since the war, denounces the ‘woke’ movement as a new and noxious threat to Western civilisation. Yet as far back as 1938, the great Lead Belly was already warning travellers to Alabama, “I advise everybody. Be a little careful when they go along through there — best stay woke, keep their eyes open.” But Belly’s warning was a long time ago.

Why has it all come alive again, and with such unappeased ferocity on both sides? The book that caught the zeitgeist in the midriff this year was Sathnam Sanghera’s Empireland. It is never simplistic, always thoughtful, wry, and rueful as well as angry.

Sanghera comes from a family of Punjabi Sikhs and was brought up in Wolverhampton. He describes that upbringing in in his touching memoir The Boy with the Topknot. When he first went to school, he was unable to speak English, but he finished up at the great Wolverhampton Grammar School and then got a first in English at Christ’s College, Cambridge. He thus has the most intense imperial legacy, from Enoch Powell’s Rivers of Blood speech all the way back to the massacre of hundreds of Sikhs at Amritsar by the psychopathic temporary Brigadier Dyer.

In Empireland, he patiently explores that legacy: the loot in British museums (‘Loot’ is the Hindi word for the spoils of war, jocularly adopted by the British — a Pekingese dog found during the looting of the Summer Palace in Peking was christened Looty and sent home as a gift to Queen Victoria); the millions of post-war immigrants from the Commonwealth who have transformed England’s inner cities; above all, the abiding sense of the superiority and exceptionalism of the British race; and always in the background, the dark shadow of slavery, as abiding an embarrassment as it was profitable, best not spoken of in company — witness the silence of the Bertrams in Mansfield Park when their estates in Antigua come up in conversation.

Personally, Sanghera is grateful for everything that Britain has given him, and he acknowledges the formidable achievements of the British in India, up to and including the famous railways, one of the only vestiges of empire that ever make it on to TV, usually omitting the reality that the prime purpose in building them was to ferry troops quicker to suppress native disturbances and to carry British goods to the furthest corners of India at the cruel expense of native producers.

Sanghera refuses to tolerate the vainglorious, barely qualified praise of Empire from Right-wing historians and politicians, or their deliberate bleaching of our Island Story. Take David Starkey’s assertion, made in 2011, that “Britain is a white monoculture and schools should focus on our own history”. Sanghera’s deep-lying target is what he calls “imperial amnesia”, the pretence that the experience of the greatest empire ever known left no serious mark on the British psyche; a fifth of the world painted Peppa Pig pink, the English language the globe’s lingua franca — all this was a passing episode in our long history, which we shrugged off with a gracious smile.

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Outside the specialist literature, in the public sphere the whole experience has been muffled in a tactful silence as profound as the silence of the Bertrams. Now the argument has resurfaced with a vengeance — all the more toxic and unsettling for having been so long suppressed. At the many previous hauling downs of the Union Jack, would any royal personage have spoken as bluntly about the horrors of slavery as Prince Charles has just done on declaring Barbados a republic?

Nowhere can the extraordinary fluctuations in the British view of Empire be traced more vividly than in the rhetoric of Enoch Powell, Sanghera’s fellow-Wulfrunian whose shadow loomed so grimly over his childhood. Powell was devastated by the loss of India, but nevertheless wrote in his 1951 election address to the voters of Wolverhampton: “I BELIEVE IN THE BRITISH EMPIRE. Without the empire, Britain would be like a head without a body.” But by the mid-1960s, he was claiming that the British Empire had been “a myth”, “a deception” and “an invention, all along”. That people had ever believed in it was “one of the most extraordinary paradoxes in political history”. He insisted that “England underwent no organic change as the mistress of a world empire”.

His response to Dean Acheson’s wounding taunt that “Great Britain has lost an empire but has not yet found a role” was to sign up wholeheartedly to Macmillan’s application to join the EEC: “It is as a European power… that we shall work out a Britain in the 1970s which does not need make-believe to bolster its self-respect… This is Britain’s world-wide role, no less than that of France or Germany.”

Powell’s recoil from this new enthusiasm was even more violent. By the time of the first referendum in 1975, he had become apocalyptic about the dangers of staying in the EU: “Belonging to the Common Market… spells living death, the abandonment of all prospect of national rebirth.”

You might think that such an erratic record would disqualify Powell from being taken seriously as a sage. Far from it. It is because he publicly charted his zigzags with such melodramatic passion that he attracted and still retains such undiminished veneration; witness the volume published in 2012 to celebrate what would have been his hundredth birthday with contributions from Roger Scruton, Simon Heffer, Andrew Roberts, Iain Duncan Smith et al. For his wanderings were their wanderings too, his disillusion their disillusion. He taught them to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

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For Brexiteers, the suppression of imperial memory becomes almost as important for the future of the nation as the promotion of the project was in its heyday. Imperialist hankerings have to be explicitly denied. In This Sovereign Isle, one of the few attempts by a serious historian to justify Brexit, Robert Tombs, who in 1975 voted to stay in, argues that the Empire never did us much good: “Having an Empire had not been the source of Britain’s power and wealth… Empire had been in many ways a political, strategic and economic liability.” He insists that Brexit is in no sense a furtive effort to recreate it.

On the contrary, it is in fact a crucial trope in the Brexiteers argument that it was the European Union that was underpinned by “imperial nostalgia”. For historians like Toombs, and his fellow Cambridge historian Richard Tuck, the EU is indistinguishable — or very soon will be — from the great empires of the past. The idea of voluntarily sharing a range of powers with other nations is unimaginable to them. The simplest shared code of practice is seen as a vile infringement of sovereignty.

For Brexit Minister, David Frost, who is fast becoming the last hero of the cause, divergence is king. If as Lord Frost and Fraser Nelson, editor of the Spectator, have both admitted, the results so far seem less than satisfactory, that is because Brexit has not been properly tried, an argument familiar from old Communists disillusioned with an earlier god that failed.

This view of the nation sees Britain’s borders as an impermeable, indispensable protection of our national integrity. Up until the Fifties, Powell believed that “we must reduce or remove the barriers to free movement within the Empire of goods, of money, and above all, of human beings”. Now of course the free movement of human beings must be resisted without remorse: send them back, dump them on hulks in the Thames Estuary, send them to Albania, let them drown. Anything rather accept any obligation of humanity, let alone of empire.

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This was not how the dream of disentanglement was presented. Once ‘out of Europe’, we would be free, nimble, our bounds would be boundless. What was not said, perhaps not even thought, was that the Brexit dream brought with it harsher implications, of wilful exclusion of others, of hostile vigilance.

Only Nigel Farage and the ultras were prepared to deploy that harsher language, which was why they had to be kept out of sight not to frighten decent folk. With all their faults, the old empires — the Roman, the Ottoman, the British — had a certain openness, a sloppiness about ground rules. Which is partly why half the ministers in the present government are the descendants of recent immigrants, many of them fleeing persecution as well as poverty. Palmerston defended to the hilt the somewhat sleazy character of Don Pacifico, a Portuguese Jew, who happened to be a British citizen by virtue of being born in Gibraltar. These days Pacifico would be lucky to get past immigration control.

It is because Brexiteer rhetoric depends on peddling a sanitised version of the national past that we must redouble our efforts to recover every scrap of that past — the years of Empire, yes, but the years in the EEC/EU too — and not brush over any of the peculiar institutions that have adorned or polluted those pasts, including the most peculiar institution of all, the mass transportation and enslavement of millions of our fellow human beings. With all its attendant sillinesses and petty intolerance, this is a struggle that needs to be played out to the end, until we understand better exactly where we have come from and who we are. Better woke than dead to the world.

We spend so much time raking over this kind of tattle because the broader culture war tends to play out through small news cycle flash points. But also because we don’t have to talk about Jim Crow. It is a sign of precisely how well we’re doing.

By that yardstick, nothing should refute First World Problems more than Third World conditions. In the Third World, the obvious answer to the problematising of haircare regimes is: “Look out your bloody window”. Who needs micro aggressions when you have macro? Consider the woman begging for scraps at the traffic lights and vomit up your rainbow of intersectional identities.

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Why South Africa shrugs at the mutant strain

By Gavin Haynes

But as in the West, in South Africa it’s university campuses — and particularly the importation of Critical Theory sub-genres like Critical Race Theory and Queer Theory — that have provided the initial incubator to wokeness. In 2015, the University of Cape Town held an early dry run, with the Rhodes Must Fall protests. Initially focused on a prominent statue of the man who built the campus, soon the protests’ literature began to include phrases like: “the fall of ‘Rhodes’ is symbolic for the inevitable fall of white supremacy and privilege at our campus”. Before long, Critical Theory had usurped the entire movement, to the point where the university hosted a “Science Must Fall” meeting that rejected the white devilry of Newtonian physics, in favour of a suitably decolonised alternative: essentially an African witchcraft theory of causality.

Most developing countries are Bosnia to some degree: where there are ethnicities, there are tensions, and where there is fledgling democracy, there is only ever fragile order. The key question is whether identity then becomes the fault line on which all politics is built. For an opportunist as cunning as the South African politician Julius Malema — whose Chavista party is known as the Economic Freedom Fighters — the coming of Woke serves as a rhetorical cloak that speaks to some of his followers’ most base instincts: the belief that The White Man is evil, and ought to be pushed back into the sea. Malema’s lot might not be high theorists, but they instinctively grasp the rhetorical power of problematising. In 2018, while the “H&M Monkey” controversy raged across Europe, Julius and his freedom fighters deployed to suburban shopping malls from Cavendish to Sandton, knocking over rails of H&M clothes in protest — which later had to be picked up by low wage, mostly black workers.

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More than most places, this feels like a lost piece of England, divorced from modernity. And yet, if I am right, this view, this building, this part of East Anglia, with its peculiar and traumatic history, has something important to tell us about the future of our society. Specifically, the future of Wokeness and Cancel Culture.

The link is the man who once owned Mistley Thorn, and shared this prospect: Matthew Hopkins, the notorious “Witchfinder General”. But to understand how and why Hopkins’ career, especially its sudden end, is so relevant to us now, we need to go back in time. To the origin of his craft — witch-finding.

For many decades, England was largely immune to the witch-hunts of mainland Europe, which began around the late 14^th century, in southern France. For a long while these burnings and lynchings, even on the Continent, remained quite sporadic. Popes disapproved; sceptics scoffed; monarchs disliked the mayhem. Then things changed.

In 1484, at the request of the Dominican inquisitor, Jacob Sprenger, Pope Innocent VIII issued the bull Summis Desiderantes, encouraging the punishment of sorcery. A few years later, in the German city of Speyer, the same Jacob Sprenger published his infamous Malleus Maleficarum.

Known in English as “The Hammer of Witches”, the book is a detailed guide for would-be witch-slayers. It is also drenched with misogyny, and utterly obsessed with the bizarre behaviour of alleged witches: it describes women coupling with demons, feasting on babies, or even lying with Satan himself. The Devil, apparently, is cold, dark, and heavy, and possessed of a long and icy penis.

Crucially, for the future of witch-finding, the Malleus also recommends the use of torture to extract confession, especially the strappado. In the strappado the victim’s hands are, firstly, tied behind the back. Then the body is lifted off the ground, by the cuffed hands; sometimes weights are hung from the legs. The result is extreme pain, dislocated shoulders, and, after a few hours, probable death. Despite or because of its maniacal cruelty, the Malleus was an early modern bestseller — it was reprinted 12 times by 1520. It was, also, eagerly taken up by courts and prosecutors.

And thus, the powder was lit. By the mid-16^th century witch hunts, and witch trials, were a common spectacle. In 1562 in Wiesensteig, in Baden-Württemberg, 67 witches were torched at the stake. Over in Fulda, 250 died. In Wurtzburg, maybe 900. And in Trier, in 1581, up to 1,000 — perhaps the biggest mass execution in peacetime Europe.

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If the Holy Roman Empire remained the epicentre of the witch craze, it was not alone. Like a terrible pestilence, the mania spread south, to the Basque Country and Italy, and also hopped over the Rhine, reinfecting France. It went east into Russia, and drove north into Finland, Sweden and Norway. Via Denmark it reached Scotland, with the North Berwick Witch Trials of 1590, which were notable for the use of elaborate torture, such as the “pilliwinks” — enormous thumbscrews for crushing hands and feet.

Yet still, England remained largely immune, apart from a few stray examples, like the Pendle witch trials in Lancashire, which killed nine in 1612. But then came Matthew Hopkins.

Born in 1620 in Suffolk, the son of a Puritan clergyman, by his early 20s Hopkins had moved to Manningtree, on the Stour. With a small inheritance he bought the nearby Mistley Inn (now the Thorn), and there, in slightly obscure circumstances, he began his witch-hunting. Accompanied by another hunter, John Stearne, Hopkins’ technique was simple enough. Starting in his own neighbourhood, he sought out rumours of sorcery, usually (but not always) directed at old, eccentric, unpopular women.

After that came the “discovery”, i.e. the torture. The accused could be kept awake — walked around a room — for days on end, until she confessed. She (and 90% were “she”) might be stripped naked and closely examined, in the search for odd moles or vaginal polyps, seen as signs of demonic suckling, or devilish sex. Hopkins had surely read the Malleus; he was pruriently obsessed with the idea that women were bedded by Lucifer.

Alternatively, the witch could be “swum” — tied to a chair and thrown into water. If she floated she was a witch, and she was sent to the assizes. If she sank (and sometimes drowned) she was innocent. The surreal theory underlying the torment was that witches were resistant to water, because it was used in baptism.

Emboldened by his success at revealing all this sorcery, and enjoying the fame and money, Hopkins expanded activities, hiring help along the way. He rode to Aldeburgh, Ipswich, Stowmarket and Bury St Edmunds, rooting out witches everywhere — sometimes dragging them out of taverns by the hair. The truly unlucky ended up thrust into a barrel of pitch, to be burned alive.

By 1646, the 26-year-old Hopkins was at the peak of his powers: feared, revered, wealthy. Yet, in 1647, he abruptly “retired”, and a few months later he was dead, of tuberculosis. Stearne lamely tried to continue the witch-finding work, but without much luck. The craze was over.

So what happened — how did it all begin and end so suddenly? To understand this, we have to know what was occurring in England at the time, and how it echoes our own troubled times of Wokeness and “Cancellation”.

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As now, England was then horribly divided: not by Brexit, or culture wars, but by actual Civil War. As now, England back then was menaced, everywhere, by a tenacious and nasty plague (many of Hopkins’ victims died of the disease, before they got to trial). In the midst of this violence, and turbulence, England had somehow tipped into a fearful psychosis, a brief, hallucinatory age when people could be denounced, tormented, and often executed — i.e. totally cancelled — for the most minor things. For muttering. For owning cats. For having a rival farmer with a grudge.

In a further echo of the madder aspects of modern Cancellation, some people — including judges — joined in the denunciations, even when they clearly disbelieved them, simply for fear of being accused of witchcraft themselves, if they stayed silent. Compare this with the mobs on Twitter, or the more extreme BLM protests, where, if you don’t join in, or express support, you must be suspect.

But what does this tell us of the future of our own witch-hunts? Here there is an unexpected but provocative new perspective.

It is generally assumed that the Hopkins witch-craze fizzled out because common sense prevailed. But modern historians, such as Malcolm Gaskill (author of Witchfinders), believe this is only partly true. A more immediate cause was that witch-hunting was simply too damn expensive.

For example, when Hopkins went to King’s Lynn, to prick the witches, he got £16 for his work — an enormous sum at the time. Moreover, all his many helpers had to be housed, fed and paid. Likewise, when Hopkins sent the witches for trial, assizes had to be held, judges summoned: these huge trials could nearly bankrupt a town. And, as for a barrel of pitch, to burn a witch, that might cost a man’s annual salary.

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At a time of plague, war and enormous debt, these costs could not be sustained. So they weren’t. And my sense is that the same will likely happen to the similar extremes of wokeness. Pretty soon the UK will be trillions in debt. Can we afford tens of thousands of diversity officers and various related posts? Possibly not. Likewise, when plague is ravaging a country, sacking and cancelling useful people for saying a wrong word on social media might seem needlessly wasteful.

When I wake the next morning, in Mistley, it is cold but sunny, so I take a short stroll by the Stour, to a Georgian folly: the Mistley Towers. It is widely believed that Hopkins is buried here, under these riverside pillars.

Standing on the frosty grass, I listen again to the endless, rolling calls of the waterbirds. Local folklore claims they are the voices of the women Hopkins sent to the gallows, forever decrying the man who lies beneath my feet. And maybe he hears them. Maybe he turns in his unmarked grave, even now, as he sees history so strangely repeated.

The first approach has been heavily linked to Symonds, who is seen as a social liberal in the Cameronite mould, and who wants to emphasise environmental issues: evidenced by past campaigning activities and a close relationship with Zac Goldsmith. It also advocates a change in political approach, too. Symonds, along with Allegra Stratton, the PM’s new spokesman, is seen to want a less confrontational approach with “the Establishment”, an end to artificial “culture wars”, and to bring more backbench MPs into the fold. This camp hopes to see Johnson return to his policy platform as Mayor of London – “greener, kinder, gentler and more female pitch to a more familiar Tory audience”, as Paul Goodman described it.

In the rival corner, quick to the stump was Jake Berry, the former Northern Powerhouse (remember that?) minister and head of the new Northern Research Group, a lobby group of around 55 Conservative MPs who want a post-Covid recovery roadmap for the North of England. Members of the NRG “voiced concerns that overtures from the prime minister to socially liberal voters on green and cultural issues risked jeopardising their seats.”

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Tory voters say: spend, spend, spend

By David Jeffery

Who’s right? Well, let’s look at the data.

I’ve taken as my source the British Election Study — a large scale survey of voters across Great Britain. I’ll be using waves 17, 18 and 19 — conducted between November and December 2019 — to explore the views of four distinct group of voters:

1. Those who voted Conservative in 2019 in a Red Wall seat
2. Those who voted Conservative in 2019 outside the Red Wall.
3. Those who switched to the Conservative Party in 2019 in a Red Wall seat
4. Those who switched to the Conservative Party in 2019 not in a Red Wall seat.

The first area of interest is environmental protection. When asked whether they think environmental protection has gone too far, Red Wall Tories are more likely to think it has gone too far compared to non-Red Wall Tories, and the result is statistically significant. However, it’s important to note that both groups still lean towards “not gone far enough” (2.6 vs 2.7, with 1 = not gone nearly far enough and 5 = gone much too far). The same is the case for those voters who switched to the Tories.

OK, green sceptics might say, that’s fair enough — but when we’re recovering from Covid-19 we can’t sacrifice the economy or economic growth at the altar of green policies.

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Well, when asked which should have priority — economic growth or protecting the environment — all groups of Tory voters lean towards protecting the environment. On a scale of 0 to 10, with 5 being the middle option, the average Red Wall Tory position is 5.1, compared with 5.2 for non-Red Wall Tories. For switchers, the gap is bigger: non-Red Wall switchers place at 5.5 compared to 5.0 for Red Wall switchers. Yes, it’s a relatively large gap between the two groups, but it still places the Red Wall switchers slap-bang between economic growth and environmental protection in terms of their priorities. Damian Green was not far off the mark when he said “to assume that no one in the North cares about the future of the planet is patronising nonsense”.

Finally, even when it comes to the more emotionally-charged phrase “climate change”, 63% of Red Wall Tories and 67% of non-Red Wall Tories agree that the world’s climate is changing due to human activity, while among switchers the figures are 68% and 65% respectively.

So, the data shows there is significant scope for Johnson to push for a bold environmental agenda — ideally combining economic growth with “green jobs” — as argued for by the assuredly non-woke, pro-Brexit Ben Houchen.

What about the woke agenda?

Unfortunately, the BES doesn’t ask much about trans rights or the role of the BBC — two hot button issues on Twitter — but it does ask about views steps towards ethnic minority, female and gay equality, and whether attempts to secure it have gone too far. This can give us a flavour of how these voters see issues of equality and whether there’s much mileage in Theresa May’s burning injustices agenda.

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In all three cases, Tory voters and switchers, within and without the Red Wall, hover between “about right” and “gone too far”, although they are less hostile to measures for female equality than for ethnic minorities and gays and lesbians.

The differences between Red Wall and non-Red Wall voters (and switchers) is marginal across all three topics though, suggesting “going woke” isn’t a unique threat to the party’s new electoral coalition any more than it is to their voter base in general.

Finally, public spending. When asked on a scale of 1 to 4 how necessary reducing the deficit over the next three years was (and bear in mind, this was pre-Covid), all groups were closest to “It is important but not absolutely necessary”. There were no statistically significant differences between the groups either. When we couple this the fact that all groups thought cuts to local authorities had gone too far, we can see an easy win for the government: end austerity for local authorities.

This finding is complemented by polling carried out by Survation on behalf of the Local Trust. They asked 1,003 voters in 250 “left behind” areas about the government’s spending priorities. When asked if they thought their area got more or less than its fair share of spending resources, 4% said more and 42% said less.

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Can the Tories cling on to the Red Wall?

By David Jeffery

But these voters gave mixed messages: 54% said they believed local people should lead decisions about how money should be spent in their area, but only 33% of the people said they would be interested in getting involved in making those decisions — they want to take back control but not use it!

From this analysis, it seems that Red Wall Tories – even the switchers — aren’t really that different from other Tories. Johnson should dismiss lazy stereotypes about what will and won’t wash in the party’s new heartland. These voters are not climate change deniers, they are not deficit hawks, and woke identity politics doesn’t get them fired up.

Instead, Johnson should follow Stratton’s advice and make his main priority building bridges (not only to Northern Ireland or across the Thames). He should reject Cummings’ abrasive, confrontational style of politics, and instead bring in a diverse range of Tory voices in the policy-making process. The appointment of Neil O’Brien as chair of No 10’s new policy board is promising. But Johnson also needs to work the Commons tea-rooms and bring in representatives from the different Tory factions — the Northern Research Group, the One Nation Caucus, the Covid Recovery Group and the Common Sense Group should all feel like they have a seat at table, even if they don’t win all the policy battles.

The Prime Minister is not a details man. He is a vision man. And he doesn’t necessarily need to keep fighting the same fight as during the referendum campaign. But nor should he be listening to voices who make out Red Wall Tories are something they’re not.

The short of it is that Cuban-Americans, staunch Republicans due to the GOP’s anti-communism rhetoric, were always going to break for Trump. But the massive gains signal the birth of a broader political realignment, which aims to transform the Republican Party from a white working class party to a multicultural working class party. The coming days will show that it wasn’t merely Cuban-Americans who strongly favored the President in Miami-Dade, but also Venezuelans and Nicaraguans and other Latinos previously considered unattainable by Republican think-tankers. To put it simply, the President, to the dismay of Democrats who’ve labelled him xenophobic and racist for years, built a formidable Latino coalition.

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Black America can't take it any more

By Christopher Rhodes

The driving force behind this realignment is the fact that the blue-collar sensibilities that drive the white working class also animate Cuban-Americans and other Latinos. Many Latinos, and especially Cuban-Americans, are ferociously patriotic and have a deep love for America, a country that grants them the ultimate immigrant dream: if you work hard, you get to play hard. The month leading up to the election has been one big party in Miami, with caravans, concerts, and massive boat parades. If you’ve been to one of these raucous events like I have, you realise that they have an all-American good-times NASCAR vibe to them. You might hear more Spanish than English and run into various salsa dancers, but there’s an unmistakable American energy to these get-togethers — it’s all freedom and fun and unironic Americanism.

Democrats, so often embarrassed by America’s more “uncouth” elements, are no doubt mystified by this jovial Latino Americanism, because they fail to see what is most obvious: Latinos see themselves not as Latinx, or even Latino, but as Americans.

Democrats increasingly miss the obvious due to their commitment to wokeness, an ideology that will never be popular with proud working-class Latinos. The elite media class and woke Democrats have somehow convinced themselves that in order to ingratiate themselves with Latinos they must talk down to them and act as white saviours to these poor “people of colour.” This is repellant to Latinos, but especially to Latino men, who are traditionally masculine and will never accept the victim label the woke love to thrust upon chosen minorities.

Post-election numbers will show that Latino men went for Trump in massive numbers — and not just in Miami-Dade — as the touchy feely, feminised wokeness of the Democratic Party is the antithesis of the machismo found in Latino male spaces. The Cuban-American UFC fighter and Miami resident Jorge Masvidal, who recently stumped for Trump, is a prime example of the type of guy drawn to the President’s bravado. There are many others out there like him. Masvidal, who is certainly rough around the edges and a certifiable badass, would make the Democrats cringe with his “problematic” tastes and beliefs; but he represents the young, urban Latino male — unlike the effete and focus-grouped Lin-Manuel Miranda, a Democratic Party favourite.

Which brings us to that lovely word so beloved amongst the young, hyper-woke consultants that so often set the tone for the Democratic Party: Latinx. I’m not saying that the usage of Latinx has led to the Latino realignment, but the commitment to a word that is incredibly unpopular to the group that it is supposed to signify, says it all and speaks to a greater Democratic failure: woke Democrats believe that merely assigning a group a label grants them dominion over said group.

Latinos, many of whom left countries that sought to impose their will on them, will resist this dominion at all costs. This should be common sense, but as the Democratic Party increasingly focuses on the fringe beliefs of woke elites, the failure to see the obvious will only increase. The “socialism is coming” angle of Trump’s Latino outreach, for instance, was considered fear-mongering by the Democrats, but it never occurred to them that this would be an extremely potent message to Cuban-Americans and other Latinos that had escaped repressive regimes and who actually fear socialism; instead of allaying the fears, they criticised the messaging.

It should go without saying but let me spell it out to the Democratic Party: Latinos come to America because they want to live in America, which means that they want to be Americans. They don’t want to be Latinx or “people of color” or token trinkets without agency. It’s right there in the name after all: Cuban-AMERICANAmerican. If you look, instead of label, you just might see it.

The comparison is always meant as a criticism. The people who wield it see the story of the West as one of Reason advancing inexorably against ignorance, superstition, repressive morality and hidebound tradition. In other words, against religion.

The secular rationalists who champion this view have been winning for some time. Church attendance is cratering; Christmas and Easter are mostly about shopping; Catholic-run healthcare providers in the US are dragged through the courts over the provision of contraception or transgender surgery. So ‘Wokeness is a religion’ is a secular rationalist’s ultimate dunk: from a perspective that’s been dominant for centuries, it amounts to saying woke beliefs belongs in the dustbin of history.

Wrong. Or at least, only half right. Wokeness is a religion, or at least a re-emergence of religious impulse. But this is not a bug, it’s a feature.

By the same author

Hate crime is the new blasphemy

By Mary Harrington

The Emperor Constantine is said to have embraced Christianity after a dream told him to adopt the chi-rho symbol as part of Roman military insignia. Constantine ordered this Christian symbol to be painted on his armies’ shields, and won the Battle of the Milvian Bridge the next day. That he did so under the sign of the chi-rho was the founding moment of the Holy Roman Empire, the hinge event that turned Christianity from a minority sect into a power both spiritual and political.

Today we’re watching something similar: the transition of wokeness from fringe cult to mainstream public morality. It’s happening both in our plague-racked and protest-riven urban public squares, and also in a digital public square whose rulemakers are largely already converts to the new faith.

Some might protest that Twitter isn’t the real world, and it doesn’t matter what people do in its bubble. But the story of Constantine shows how mass adoption of a new worldview can owe as much to elite champions as deep inner conviction. Plenty will embrace whatever seems to be the new status faith, because they don’t care much either way and don’t want to miss out on promotion.

Imagine you’re a centurion in the Roman army. Your legion has been commanded to paint over your shield insignia with the chi-rho symbol, thanks to an edict from your new woke emperor. You, a regular worshipper of household gods, Caesars and other deities, will most likely shrug your shoulders and do it, because it doesn’t much matter either way and orders are orders.

Similarly, where the celebrities, politicians, billionaires and tastemakers on Twitter go, the rest of the world follows. Because of this, Twitter arguments over what you can and can’t say in fact matter a great deal. But the defenders of Reason have already lost, because they’re arguing from sacred values that wokeness has long since abandoned.

Suggested reading

A cautionary tale for today's 'woke' movement

By John Gray

In our Roman legion, a few stubborn hold-outs might complain. How can you only have one god? Who’s supposed to guard your household? No one listens, though, because that sort of thing can get you in trouble, and besides, didn’t you know household gods aren’t even a thing nowadays?

There are analogous hold-outs against wokeness, including not just conservatives but sincere liberals too. The recent Harper’s letter decrying ‘cancel culture’ gathered just such worthies, to mount a defence of open debate and objective standards that should apply to everyone.

Then in the last week, the fact that it took Twitter nearly a week to permanently ban grime artist Wiley after a bilious anti-Semitic rant mobilised much the same constituency in a boycott of Twitter to protest the site’s seeming tolerance of racism against Jews. In the latter case, the defenders of the old faith eventually won – but such protests, while they may win the odd battle, are still likely to lose the war=

This is because from the vantage point of wokeness, being criticised for not treating all groups the same is like a monotheist being told off for not honouring the household gods. If you don’t hold something sacred, you won’t care if someone accuses you of sacrilege against it. And for the woke, objectivity and even-handedness are not just impossible, they’re stalking-horses for privilege. So the old-school liberals of both left and right can only stare with mounting outrage, as people carry on professing wokeness despite the fact that its doctrines aren’t reasonable, or fair, or even trying to be objective.

For secular rationalists, especially the conservative ones, this is prompting a fear that we’ve hit Peak Reason. And indeed, from this perspective it’s not nice to contemplate the possibility that we’re not advancing at all, but instead sliding down the other side of the arc of progress back into the mire of Belief. But really, these grumblers should get over themselves: it’s the secular rationalist worldview which is the flash in the pan.

It’s been barely half a millennium since we first started trying to dethrone God, and barely decades since we mostly succeeded. But if you take a longer view, morality and religious doctrine have been fused in human cultures for as long as humans have had cultures. Far from being a devastating own, the more religion-like wokeness is, the more seriously we should take it.

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Identity politics is Christianity without redemption

By Antonia Senior

This also means debates about what does and doesn’t get you banned on Twitter are not idle at all. Rather, they’re debates about an emerging and increasingly powerful faith’s moral orthodoxy, and what will get you excommunicated. In other words, debates about types and degrees of sin and blasphemy.I’m not saying wokeness is Christianity in disguise. As Antonia Senior argued in January, the new faith does lean heavily on Christianity – but it borrows as syncretically as the Romans did. Its vision of the good is far from clear, if it exists at all. But regardless, it should be obvious by now there’s no point trying to resist the apostles of wokeness with the tools of secular reason.

No one who saw the internet go bananas last week because ‘baby witches hexed the moon’ can agree that all we need to deliver a rational, moderate and tolerant world is to chuck religion in the bin. Christianity is on its last legs in the West today, but it’s not obvious that the world is becoming more objective, rational, moderate and tolerant as a result. Rather, these days it’s secular reason that’s looking a bit cringe.

The triumph of Reason over Faith proved short-lived. Like water that’s been dammed, the religious impulse found new channels. As Tara Isabella Burton argues in her book Strange Rites, religiosity is reappearing in strange places, such as gym culture, Wicca – and, with growing dominance, wokeness. Woke liturgy is disjointed and its doctrines still fluid, but my bet is that the woke struggle sessions Gavin Haynes calls ‘purity spirals’ are in truth theological debates, and will solidify to a proper catechism within a decade or so.

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How knitters got knotted in a purity spiral

By Gavin Haynes

To survive the transition back to a religious world, we should study the one that existed before Faith ebbed away under the sign of progress and enlightenment. We’ve already gone some way toward mob punishments for heresy, so we should also dust off the medieval era’s more sophisticated approach to theological debate: disputation. This scholarly art allowed sensitive theological issues to be discussed, even sometimes between faiths, with some protection against being too vigorously cancelled. If religious passions are back, we’ll need all the scholastic tools we can get.

We could do with some medieval pragmatism too. Consider, for example, King Canute, an 11^th-century monarch praised by sycophants for his absolute power, who responded by commanding the sycophants to watch as he ordered the ocean’s tide to stop coming in.

Henry of Huntingdon’s Historia Anglorum reports that when the tide, predictably, came in anyway, Canute then said: “Let all men know how empty and worthless is the power of kings, for there is none worthy of the name, but He whom heaven, earth, and sea obey by eternal laws.”

Canute was clear-sighted about what was or wasn’t in his control. Those secular rationalists protesting the returning wave of Faith might take a leaf from his book. Instead of ordering the tide to withdraw, it’s time to learn to swim — which means, in practice, that none of us will have the option to be unbelievers for much longer. Instead we’ll all need to embrace one faith or another.

My suggestion is: pick a good one. If you refuse, you’ll end up having to profess wokeness anyway.

This is not to say that there aren’t many on the Left who consider themselves to be feminists and are happy with the party’s direction of the previous half-decade. It’s even true that in that time, Labour politicians have achieved a few feminist victories (although largely these have been accomplished by Stella Creasy in relation to abortion law, and without significant support from the front bench). But the kind of feminism permissible on the Left has been a narrow kind, with little room for discussion about its aims and underpinnings.

While Labour continued to offer its record in Government as proof that it was the natural home of women’s rights — the party of the Sex Discrimination Act (1975), the Equality Act (2010) and all-women shortlists — it was simultaneously going to war on its own record by endorsing gender self-identification, which would render all those measures incoherent. And anyone who expressed doubts about gender identity as a solid basis for legislation would find out very fast that they had placed themselves firmly outside acceptable thought on the Left, despite the fact that self-identity was driven by the Conservative MP Maria Miller.

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The sly sexism of the OK Karen meme

By Sarah Ditum

Obviously, plenty of people on the Left still held these unacceptable thoughts. When Dawn Butler, then the shadow minister for women and equalities, uttered the absurdity that “a child is born without sex”, she was hardly voicing majority opinion on the Left. When Suzanne Moore wrote a Guardian column against the harassment and no-platforming of the historian Selina Todd for her gender-critical views, many outside the immediate blast zone of the issue were surprised that this could even be up for debate: of course women should be able to speak, especially when it comes to matters directly affecting their rights.

Nonetheless, it was Moore, not Butler, who was subject to bitter criticism from the Left. Saying you don’t believe in sex had become a safer Left-wing position than saying you do believe in women’s civil liberties. It doesn’t matter how solid your commitment to redistribution is, how fervent your anti-racism, how deep-rooted your ties to LGBT liberation, how committed you are to the trade union movement, how adamantly you support public services. A narrative was established that any criticism of trans activism could only come from the Right, with journalism in the paranoid style drawing feverish connections between British socialists and American evangelicals.

The perverse consequence of this is that many feminists have ended up closer to the Right than they ever imagined. Certainly I would not have predicted that a nice social democrat girl like me would end up writing defences of women’s toilets for the Spectator, or condemning rape threats against JK Rowling in the Telegraph — or rather, if you’d told me a decade ago that I couldn’t write these things for a Left-wing outlet, I would have been very shocked indeed. (Then again, I’d have been surprised to learn there would ever be an occasion to write them.)

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The truth about the female brain

By SALONI DATTANI

But politics has shifted drastically during my adulthood. Old boundaries and expectations do not apply. The best description I’ve read of this shift has come in a New York Times column by Ross Douthat (and the me of a decade ago would also have been surprised to find myself aligned with Douthat given that I’m a pro-choice feminist and he’s a firm opponent of abortion, but here we are).

Progressive movements, he argues, are no longer beholden to conventional liberal principles. Instead, they “contain within themselves both reformist and revolutionary tendencies, and progressives regularly move back and forth between the two”. This is, he points out, what Wesley Yang calls the “successor ideology” – successor, because it is primed to succeed liberalism, although it so far lacks an internal coherence of its own.

So a feminist might ask how self-identification would work in the prison system where vulnerable women need to be protected from predatory male offenders, and the successor ideology response would be that we should abolish the prison-industrial complex, at which point segregation would cease to be an issue. Or, if the issue is how to include trans women in refuges, the successor ideology could answer that the real aim should be ending all male violence rather than just ameliorating its effects — a laudable goal, but a remote one.

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Feminism's job is far from finished

By Julie Bindel

It’s a shift to utopianism that evades all responsibility for material conditions in the present, while justifying the removal of rights now as a trade-off against the glorious kingdom to come. Why do you need free speech to talk about sex when you have the post-gender future to look forward to? (Means of reaching the post-gender future remaining very much TBC.) For feminism, which has to be about directly improving women’s lives and prospects if it’s to be about anything at all, this is all deeply unsatisfying. If the Right is able to offer at least a common ground of norms, why not work there?

In any case, the idea that feminism inherently belongs to the Left is — if not false, at least a bit flaky. The suffragists and suffragettes covered a whole range of political opinion with outliers on Left and Right, united by their belief that they should be able to express those opinions at the ballot box. The second wave was galvanised by a split between the women’s movement and the anti-war Left.

Keir Starmer’s Labour has clearly signalled its intent to move beyond inchoate radicalism and get back to policy on women’s issues, and this is very positive, but feminism can no more be taken for granted by the Left than the “red wall” could. And if women stop shaping their demands to fit a political movement that has clearly signalled its complacency towards them, and start working in the interests of their sex regardless of affiliation, feminism could emerge from this bleak era with a force it hasn’t had since the last century.

The phrase is not original to Marx, nor is the idea exclusive to Marxism. Yet, with remarkable economy, it captures the essence of the idealised communist society.

Of course, the reality of communism was best summed-up in the old Soviet-era quip — “the bosses pretend to pay us and we pretend to work,” but let’s stick with the ideal — and what makes it so attractive.

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Are you ready for 'fully automated luxury communism'?

By Peter Franklin

The first half of the slogan suggests a society in which everyone does their bit; and the second half, that there’s always enough to go round. It all seems so fair, so reasonable — until, that is, you notice that what you put into the system (“from each…”) is unrelated to what you get out of it (“to each…”). That’s a problem because “ability” isn’t the only determinant of productivity. In fact, the real difference is made by effort, determination, creativity and risk-taking — all of which respond to reward. So if people don’t get rewarded for the all-important extras they put in, what happens to the economy? Nothing good.

In any case, who decides what each person’s needs are — or, for that matter, what their abilities are?

If you look at Marx’s use of the phrase in context, you’ll see that he was applying it to the “higher phase of communist society” — a socialist wonderland in which material wealth flows abundantly and labour has become “life’s prime want” (because it’s all such fun). So no need for some oppressive state to direct your efforts and distribute the product, you just do what you want and take what you need.

Unfortunately, the path to this “higher phase” has never been clear and the radical Left has struggled with it ever since.

At this point, I ought to say that capitalism, though evidently more successful than communism, has also fallen short. It may be less overtly utopian, but free market economics has its own unrealistic assumptions — rational actors, perfect information, level playing fields etc. All too often, the reality is one in which asymmetries of knowledge and power allow the few to exploit the many.

Hence the enduring appeal of “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need”: twelve words which describe a clear alternative to a deeply-flawed capitalist system. The interesting thing, though, is that they present as much of a challenge to the contemporary Left as they do to the free-market Right.

*

Leftwingery is not, and has never been, a monolith. In the 20th century, communism achieved a position of dominance on the far Left, but had to overcome rival ideologies, like anarchism. In the 21st century, it is just one of many strands of radical thought. It struggles to stand out from and is sometimes co-opted by its rivals.

The old primarily class-based analysis of society now has to contend with other kinds of identity and inequality. A non-exhaustive list includes sex, sexuality, gender, disability (problematic word), race (ditto), religion, language, culture, lifestyle, age, body shape, and all the intersections thereof. It’s all so multidimensional that it’s difficult to decant into neat ideological categories like ‘Leninism’, ‘Trotskyism’, etc. Thus, we have to rely on informalities like ‘Woke’. Yes, it’s a word that been sucked-dry by continual mockery, but it’s useful nonetheless.

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Why I've reported Douglas Murray to the police

By Titania McGrath

The Woke Left dominates today’s radical politics — yet it is also neutralising it. For a start, we’ve seen the culture wars alienate the Left’s traditional working-class support. I’ll say no more about that, because it’s been extensively documented and debated already. Less appreciated, though, is the failure of the radicals to mobilise mass support along other dimensions of identity.

Look at what happened to the Presidential campaigns of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Their failure to enthuse the kind of voters the Democrats need to win back from Trump was bad enough. Worse was the disconnect with black voters — who swung firmly behind Joe Biden, the candidate of the centrist establishment. Neither Warren, nor Sanders, were able to extend their appeal much beyond a fanbase of young, mostly white, college-educated activists. In fact, compared to his 2016 run, Sanders went backwards.

It’s the same story across the Western world. With capitalism in crisis, the radical Left gets a hearing, but the establishment stays in power.

In the 20th century, the Left was able to build history-changing movements because their class-based politics had a clear economic programme. The identity-based politics of the contemporary Left does not. Yes, there are promises of lavish state spending — on free broadband and the like. But it doesn’t add up to a transformation of the economic order.

The old Left had the advantage of having a much simpler and clearer model of the society it wanted to change — i.e. the class system. Furthermore, the components of that system can be concretely defined by their economic relationships to one another — workers and management, labour and capital, etc.

The Woke model of society provides no such clarity. There are many more components, most which are not defined by their economic relationships to one another. The Woke Left has plenty to say about inequality, of course — but it’s expressed in terms of concepts like ‘privilege’ and ‘voice’, instead of the solid language of wages and ownership. The proposal that everyone should be paid the same, though lunacy, is at least comprehensible — but what the heck does ‘check your privilege’ mean?

Further reading

Bernie's failure is a lesson for the Left

By James Bloodworth

Inequalities of whatever kind can have economic causes and/or consequences, but unlike orthodox Marxism, the Woke Left is not underpinned by a unifying economic theory. While Marxist economics is a major school of economic thought, there’s no such thing as Wokenomics.

Or is there?

*

While, as I say, there’s no defining economic platform — we have seen ideas emerge from various corners of the contemporary Left that would re-order economic relationships across society.

One example is the proposal that reparations should be paid to the descendants of slaves. It’s the subject of an ongoing debate that’s especially current in the United States. Those opposed say that requiring some Americans to compensate other Americans for something that was abolished in the 19th century is deeply unjust — and, indeed, racist. Those in favour argue that the injustice of slavery is not “all in the past”, but can be seen in racialised patterns of advantage and disadvantage that persist to the present day.

And yet it’s hard to think of anything in the modern world that hasn’t been influenced by some past injustice. The principle of reparations, if seriously and consistently implemented, would certainly reorder economic relationships in a pretty fundamental, if immensely complicated, way.

There’s another branch of Wokenomics that is also about compensating people — only not for some historical legacy, but for unpaid labour carried out in the present.

For instance, there’s the idea that mothers should be paid for the work of mothering. It’s a case made in the New York Times by Kim Brooks:

“…if garbage collectors and grocery store workers and hedge fund managers expect to be paid for their labor, why not those who create and sustain the human race? Why can’t we imagine some form of universal basic caretakers income to support the work mothers (or fathers or other extended kin) do at home?”

To be clear, Brooks is not merely asking for a more generous social security system — she’s demanding to be paid as a worker:

“This work, despite bringing joy and meaning to my life, shared many of the qualities of the menial jobs I’d done before… But there was one important difference: The work I’ve done as a mother I’ve done for free.”

Brooks is far from alone in seeing the world in this way. For instance, she mentions the Wages for Housework movement that dates back to the early 1970s. Then there’s the splash made by Sophie Lewis’s 2019 book, Full Surrogacy Now — which advocates a radically different view of family relationships. If I understand her correctly, all pregnancy in the capitalist system is ‘womb-work’ (though, for the most part, unpaid).

Further reading

The unhappy truth about surrogacy

By Julie Bindel

The issue here is that if the activities undertaken by a paid surrogate, childminder or cleaner are defined as work, then why is what parents do for themselves considered to be something else?

An answer is provided by Oren Cass in a counterblast for American Compass:

“Suppose we grant the premise that child-rearing is work and that by definition work should be paid. The next question would be: paid by whom? Presumably, by the child’s parents. So if Ms. Brooks wishes to charge Ms. Brooks for Ms. Brooks’s work, she is welcome to do so. But she will find the credits and debits in her account cancel out.”

(Also, think of the paperwork — would one have to pay oneself for that too?)

I presume that Kim Brooks thinks that she should be paid by the state, not by herself — on the grounds that mothers “create and sustain the human race”, which indeed they do. But as Cass points out, the state, in taking responsibility for payment, would thereby take control. That, after all, is the thing about getting paid — your employer decides what you do and how you do it. They also get to own what you produce. Is this really an arrangement we want to apply to motherhood?

Even more than the reparations argument, what is being proposed here is a fundamentally different social and economic order. Firstly, there’s the expansion of the state into private life. Secondly, there’s the transformation of family relationships into transactional relationships. And thirdly, there’s the redefinition of voluntary action as work.

One has to ask, where will it end?

One of the tenets of the Woke Left is that “sex work is work” — and therefore must not be stigmatised or criminalised in any way, but rather regulated and unionised just like the older professions. But I wonder if they’re missing a trick. Why not also argue that “sex is sex work” — and, therefore, should be remunerated in all circumstances. If parents should be paid for looking after their own children, and mothers for gestating them, then shouldn’t we apply the same logic to the start of production line?

*

OK, leaving aside the reductio ad absurdum, the fact remains that eroding the distinctions between public and private life, and between work and voluntary action, gets you into all sorts of nonsense.

In a celebrated essay for Buzzfeed last year, Anne Helen Petersen writes about the causes of “Millennial burnout”. She repeatedly uses the word “labour” (or rather “labor”) to describe the never-ending demands made on young people trying to survive in a hyper-competitive economy. She makes a lot of powerful points — for instance, having to respond to out-of-hours work emails is indeed labour, not to mention an intrusion into home life. But she also uses the word inappropriately, for instance referring to self-promotion on Instagram as “the labor of performing the self for public consumption.”

Further reading

The bitter truth about Millennial burnout

By Peter Franklin

Except it very clearly isn’t labour, it’s posting on social media — and you don’t have to do it. I don’t think Petersen is demanding ‘wages for selfies’ or anything like that, but she does go on to ask what can be done “until or in lieu of a revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist system.” Deleting your apps would be a good start.

The concept of ‘emotional labour’ is another example of seeing everything as work. It was originally used to describe the undervalued emotional content of what a lot of employees (often in female-dominated occupations) do in the workplace — for instance the compassion of a nurse or the friendliness of a receptionist. However, it’s been extended to describe what happens in private life too — not only in caring for children and elderly relatives, but also things like consoling a friend or mediating between feuding flatmates.

Caring for others is not cost-free. Nor is the burden always equally shared — and certainly not between men and women. But there is something deeply dehumanising about applying the language of work to something that should be freely given. Moreover, if it is coerced then that should be treated as the domestic abuse that it is, not a breakdown in industrial relations.

*

What a volunteer does for a good cause is, by definition, freely given. But even here we see confusions between voluntary action and the world of work. For instance, well-meant schemes to provide incentives for volunteering — such as discount cards — introduce an element of payment. Other line-blurring elements include the dangled possibility of a paid job with the organisation one volunteers for — or merely the opportunity to embellish a CV. There’s not much difference between that and the exploitative practice of unpaid internships.

Further reading

Which is worse, work or no work?

By Peter Franklin

It may sound corny and clichéd, but the idea of virtue being its own reward is a life-enhancing one. The things in life that don’t get dragged into the transactional sphere of economics are literally and figuratively priceless.

But Wokenomics takes the opposite view, which is that if we do value something then we must value it economically.

In a recent article (also in the New York Times) the Australian economist Justin Wolfers argues that GDP figures should record “the immense value of the sacrifices being made by millions of people who have stayed at home to stop the spread of the coronavirus”. He says that the GDP figures include the “defense services” produced by soldiers going off to fight wars, so why not also put a direct value on the contribution made by those staying at home to fight Covid-19? Why do we include soldiers’ pay in GDP, but not the support payments made to those who can’t work because of the lockdown?

The answer is straightforward: soldiers are doing a job; people staying at home are not (indeed they are supported by the state precisely because they can’t work). They are, of course, doing the right thing — by not engaging in risky behaviours that would cause themselves and others harm. But if we were to consider that as part of economic production, then why not also include what people ‘do’ by not speeding on the roads, not getting addicted to crack cocaine or not eating junk food all day? There’d be no end to it.

*

This is the trouble with Wokenomics — it turns absolutely everything into a series of politicised, administrative value judgements. As such it goes even further in its ambitions than Marxist economics. Arbitrarily putting a price on a tonne of wheat or a tractor factory is economic insanity, but doing the same for motherhood, friendship, volunteering or personal responsibility is moral madness.

That people take care of their families, respect the law, show consideration for others — and do so without incentive or recognition — is what makes a society great. We should very much value it, but not within any kind of economic paradigm.

To resort to another clichéd but true sentiment, the best things in life really are free.

Liberals, eh? Dontcha just hate ‘em? Or should I say ‘so-called’ liberals, who aren’t really liberal at all because they want to silence their opponents. And whatever happened to John Stuart Mill? He’s been taken off the curriculum of course — because he’s a Dead White Male and the Cultural Marxists who control the universities don’t think their snowflake students will be able to read him without bursting into tears…Want to hear more? Sign up to my YouTube channel…

Of course, I don’t really have a YouTube channel, but a lot of people do. And this sort of Right-wing dissent from liberal orthodoxy proliferating on social media and video-sharing websites these days.

The raucous and antagonistic online culture has sprung up as traditional media’s gatekeeper role has diminished. And such are the financial incentives — rewarding controversy and gotchas rather than reasoned debate — that decent money can now be made from stoking the Right-wing id with jeremiads about millennial snowflakes and Cultural Marxism and post-modernist wreckers. It’s a problem.

The circuit of this alternative media is now pretty well established: mostly YouTube-based discussion programmes, broadly opposed to the progressive cultural consensus. There are different styles. For example, the Triggernometry podcast is presented by two very funny comedians and has a fairly informal approach, full of jokes and occasionally quite profane, whereas Conversations, hosted by former Deputy Prime Minister of Australia John Anderson, is more polished and old-fashioned. Nevertheless, the programmes have the same kind of guests, who tend to make the same kind of points, in the same kind of way. 

There are two topics that arise time and time again. First, cultural decline, i.e. the gradual loss of knowledge and understanding of the great art, the great literature, the great achievements of Western civilisation. This is usually ascribed to the dominance of the academy by highly politicised Left-wing academics with a bad case of what Sir Roger Scruton called “oikophobia”, that is a strong feeling of dislike and repugnance towards their own cultural and religious inheritance. 

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The second subject is the increasing censoriousness of culturally dominant progressives, who are keen to silence and delegitimise critics of the Current Year social consensus. A stern and humourless progressive piety reigns in the citadels of the British cultural establishment, empowered and encouraged by the dynamics of social media. 

These are important subjects. However, they cannot be the only topic of conversation. Clearly there’s a problem. What about the solutions? 

When I worked for a pro-life organisation, we used to grumble about media bias, how big broadcasters stacked the deck against pro-lifers in interviews and debates, and how the print media gave endless column inches to outright liars and propagandists. Such complaints were all rather futile. We should, instead, have been asking: “Given the media landscape, what are we actually going to do?” It’s hard to fight a battle on a field you didn’t choose, but you do still have to fight.

In his thoughtful piece for UnHerd after the death of Sir Roger Scruton, Ben Sixsmith noted, correctly, the lack of intellectual heft within British conservatism. The problem isn’t just in the academy; it’s in virtually every field of cultural endeavour. Where are the conservative painters and poets and sculptors and TV writers? Perhaps more importantly, where is the institutional infrastructure to support conservatives in the arts?  

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If conservatives genuinely want to challenge the progressive hegemony, they need to get serious and they need to get organised. They can’t afford to get bogged down in cultivating resentments. Resentment, as Scruton himself often noted, is a corrosive and dangerous dead end. 

Of course, tweaking the nose of the po-faced consensus, with its bizarre, ever-changing shibboleths and bureaucratic vindictiveness, is great fun. There is a glorious heritage in Britain of robust opposition to hectoring officialdom. People who stand at the back and hurl tomatoes at the stage will always be needed. But conservatism can’t be just about that. 

Sure, it might feel good to say the unsayable and to get hundreds of RTs for a devastating put-down of Polly Toynbee or some withering remarks about the suffocating piety of BBC drama. But, generally speaking, the juggernaut rolls on regardless. The task is not to make the drivers of the juggernaut feel embarrassed or angry, but to actually stop the juggernaut. This is one reason to be concerned by the preponderance of comedians among the heroes of the anti-woke counterculture; while comedy can advance dissident goals to some extent by breaking progressive taboos, it is ultimately a destructive force, not a constructive one.

Maybe conservatives should take a step back from the day-to-day combat of the culture war. Now, don’t get me wrong, I am not one of those conservatives who retires to the fainting couch with a glass of sherry when the culture war is mentioned. 

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In Western countries in the modern era, it is entirely natural and reasonable for there to be culture war, i.e. a rigorous, ongoing debate about the attitudes, expectations and moral imperatives that should govern public and private life — especially in areas such as education, entertainment and the media. The alternative is so-called Tory pragmatism, the school of thought whose main principle seems to be “whatever the Guardian editorial page says, but four years after the editorial appears rather than 18 months”.  

The point is not that the culture war shouldn’t be fought; rather, conservatives need to fight smart, and remember the culture bit as well as the war bit. This means thinking about strategy and not just tactics. One tendency in the world of Right-wing podcasters and YouTubers is to seek out the latest person to fall foul of the dreaded libs and thrust a microphone in front of them. 

The problem is that those people don’t always have anything very interesting to add, and that giving them more publicity simply feeds into a reactive and antagonistic atmosphere of snark and counter-snark. It also contributes to a climate where grifters can flourish; it is very easy to carve out a niche for yourself as The Person Who Says What They Don’t Want You To Say, without contributing much of value to conservative thought and action. 

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Which brings us to another difficulty. There are really (at least) two factions on the Right-wing side of the culture war: classical liberals or libertarians, and traditional conservatives. They have overlapping concerns and shared enemies, but fundamentally they have quite different aims and so want to fight different battles in different ways. 

Traditional conservatism, my own part of the political forest, is not simply concerned with removing restraints on speech and clearing obstructions from the public square. It has a vision of the true and the beautiful, a particular understanding of what a good and orderly society should look like. For adherents to this philosophy, the future cannot simply lie in joining forces with the libertarian loudmouths and provocateurs. 

Imagine a podcast or YouTube video series that wasn’t content to condemn the decline of Western civilisation or the absurd censorship attempted by academic liberals, but actually sought out conservative artists to interview them about their work. Imagine a new media show that was not a lament about how X university won’t teach Dante or Plato or Shakespeare, but instead gave a voice to a young poet seeking to write within the great tradition, or an up-and-coming architect seeking to build beautifully and creatively, or a painter rejecting the sterile conceptualism of establishment art.

It won’t be enough on its own — not without the impressive and enviable institutional support available for conservative artists in, say, the USA — but it would be a big step in the right direction.

I’ve become fascinated by the link between what we see in examples like these, and a dynamic we’ve seen play out through history.

In 1967, Mao’s Red Guards took to the streets determined to root out the ‘four olds’ of traditional Chinese culture, killing hundreds of thousands in the process. By 1968, they had fallen apart as factions fought each other to represent the truest version of Maoism. In 1794, Robespierre found himself on the same tumbrel he had prescribed for so many other problematic persons. In both cases, a bidding war for morality turned into a proxy war for power.

In my new BBC Radio 4 documentary I wanted to join the psychological dots between history’s pinnacle nightmares and what happens at the end of your road. I decided to call both the phenomenon and the documentary, “The Purity Spiral”. A purity spiral occurs when a community becomes fixated on implementing a single value that has no upper limit, and no single agreed interpretation. The result is a moral feeding frenzy.

But while a purity spiral often concerns morality, it is not about morality. It’s about purity — a very different concept. Morality doesn’t need to exist with reference to anything other than itself. Purity, on the other hand, is an inherently relative value — the game is always one of purer-than-thou.

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It’s not just another word for ‘woke culture’, or even ‘cancel culture’, or ‘virtue signalling’. Even though intersectional social justice is a pretty great breeding ground for purity spirals, it is one among many. Nor is it confined to the Left: neo-Nazi groups offer some of the clearest examples of purity spirals: the ongoing parsing of ethnic purity into ever-more Aryan sub-groups. Perhaps the most classic one of all hails from Salem, Massachusetts.

It is a social dynamic that plays out across that community — a process of moral outbidding, unchecked, which corrodes the group from within, rewarding those who put themselves at the extremes, and punishing nuance and divergence relentlessly.

A purity spiral propagates itself through the tipping points of preference falsification: through self-censorship, and through loyalty tests that weed out its detractors long before they can band together. In that sense, once one takes hold, its momentum can be very difficult to halt.

Our documentary analysed just two latter-day purity spirals — Instagram knitting culture and young adult novels. Both seemed perfectly-sized to be taken over — they were spaces big enough to have their own star system, yet small enough for the writ of a dominant group to hold.

In each, a vast tapestry of what were effectively small businesses competed for attention online by fluidly mixing personal and professional brand. On social media, opinion, diary and sales often existed within the same posts. Each individual small business was uniquely vulnerable to being un-personed, ‘cancelled’. But, simultaneously, each could benefit enormously from taking on the status of thought leader — from becoming a node that directed moral traffic.

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To take the example of Instagram knitting: the unravelling began with a man called Nathan Taylor. Gay, living with HIV, nice as pie, Taylor started a hashtag aimed at promoting diversity in knitting, Diversknitty, to get people from different backgrounds to talk. And he did: the hashtag was a runaway hit, spawning over 17,000 posts.

But over the following months, the conversation took on a more strident tone. The list of things considered problematic grew. The definition of racism began to take on the terms mandated by intersectional social justice ideology. Knitters who wished to be on the right side of history began to post pictures of the books they were reading. Two came up over and over again. White Fragility, by Robin DiAngelo, or the Me and White SupremacyWorkbook, by Layla Saad.

The term ‘racism’ had taken on its broad, all encompassing, ‘systemic’ meaning: the idea that “we live in a racist society”, and that this inbuilt, inescapable institutional racism is policed by a thousand and one daily micro-aggressions.

White Fragility in particular implied that all dissent from its tenets was itself a sign of racism. Like Stalin’s show trials or witch-ducking, the loop had been closed. In game theory terms, objecting to something was now always a dominant strategy, and rejecting an allegation of racism was always a losing strategy. Inevitably, a ratchet effect took hold in which those with the most strident vision of what ‘diversity’ meant were effectively handed the keys to the castle. That is — until someone with a more strident vision turned up behind them…

By January 2019, this narrative of white supremacy and racial privilege had saturated the knitting world. What happened next was not something very important. In fact, it was the opposite. Something very trivial happened; a tiny spark, that landed on bone dry tinder.

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In January, a popular knitter from Nashville, Karen Templer, wrote a blog about her upcoming first-ever trip to India, in which she suggested the experience would be like “being offered a seat on a flight to Mars”. Cue: outrage at her racial insensitivity. Hundreds of comments later, Templer issued a lengthy apology: turned out she loved Big Brother after all.

Seeing what had happened to Templer, in January last year a Seattle wool dyer called Maria Tusken decided she would take the smallest of stands. In passing, she announced on her vlog that she was taking a break from Instagram because of what she saw as ‘online bullying’ in the knitting world.

If she had any lingering doubt about whether or not the bullying was real, the tsunami of denunciation that ensued probably cleared that up.

Clearly, the spiral had entered its final phase: it was no longer enough to just stay out of it. Only positive affirmations of support — and only in the most-correct tone and timbre — could save you now.

Professor Timur Kuran is Professor of Economics and Political Science at Duke University, and the father of ‘preference falsification’. His theory relates to things like the fall of the Soviet Union, where almost no one saw the end coming, because they hadn’t realised that an entire population was falsifying their experience to each other. He sees a clear parallel.

“People who are trying to prevent members of society from speaking the truth will often punish minor criticisms,” he told me. “Simply to send the message to the rest of society that no dissent will be tolerated and no attempt to form an opposing group — even one that differs only slightly from the status quo — will be tolerated. If you allow minor differences, you allow people to coordinate around minor differences, and that can encourage even greater opposition. If people get that sense, then the whole process can unravel.”

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Finally, just as the guillotine had eventually come for Robespierre, Nathan Taylor, who had founded the #Diversknitty movement, found himself at its sharp end.

When Taylor tried to inject positivity back into Diversknitty, his moral authority burnt up inside minutes. A poem he’d written asking knitters to cool it (“With genuine SOLEM-KNITTY/I beg you, stop the enmity”) was in turn interpreted as a blatant act of white supremacy. When the mob finally came for him, he had a nervous breakdown. Yet even here, he was accused of malingering, his suicidal hospitalisation described online as a ‘white centring’ event.

Once it has gathered momentum, the dynamics of a purity spiral are those of a leaderless cult. You hold a viewpoint that privileges an abstraction of the world over the messy reality. You have a sense of mission which sets you apart from the world, and you derive social status from being holier than the next acolyte.

So when someone comes calling from “realityland” with a list of questions, the mere fact of having their viewpoint interrogated represents an existential threat to the sacred viewpoint. They circle the wagons.

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In making the programme, I approached more than 20 of the leading social justice knitters for comment. I assumed these strident anti-racists would be delighted to proclaim their gospel on the Beeb. Not one did.

Where does a purity spiral end? Results may vary. “I get lots of emails these days from people in all kinds of walks of life where this is happening,” said James Lindsay, one of the three grievance studies hoaxers, and a long-time foe of intersectional social justice ideology. “I get reached out to from Dungeons & Dragons societies, rock climbing, from religions.”

Lindsay pointed to the atheist movement of the mid-2000s, from which he’d come: a community that once had the wind in its sails, but had imploded into infighting by 2011, as half of its members jagged off in an social justice direction. Soon enough, the likes of the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins were being problematised as stale, male and pale. The rules on who could speak became more byzantine, and, eventually, half the audience stopped bothering. These days, there are effectively two communities bearing the New Atheism tag, each much weaker and less coherent.

For knitting, the situation had gone from bad to very bad, but there was no evidence it had bottomed out. As the summer dragged on, the Nordic wool bible Laine magazine was forced to apologise for having too many white faces on their pricey knitting retreat. The auto-cannibalisation doomsday clock had gone so far that now even the instigators were having their privilege severely checked. Ysolda Teague, a Scot who had been one of the leading social justice knitters, published a lengthy apology on Instagram which began with the immortal line:

“Earlier this week I conducted a live interview in which I failed to acknowledge the extent of the deeply painful, difficult labour BIPOC [Black and Indigenous Persons of Colour] have done in our community since January…”

But then, at the end of September, something twitched. Nathan Taylor published a vlog setting out his side of everything that had happened. The social justice knitters dismissed it in the usual. Many recommended that others not watch it — always a signal that something has struck a chord.

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After sharing his story, Nathan received well over a thousand messages of support. He also saw a huge spike in pattern sales — so much so that in two weeks he recovered all that he’d lost in cancelled work.

Having been an unhappy tourist inside a couple of purity spirals for many months, my sense is that the phenomenon isn’t going anywhere. These are deep psychological truths about humanity, carved into the cliff-face of how we construct our societies. The cudgels of morality will always be a convenient lever for hidden competition — you can pretend to be socialising the private realm, when in effect you’re privatising the social realm for your own status gain.

The problem is that we tend to see the dynamic for what it is only in its aftermath. In the moment, the mesmerism of ideology fills the screen entirely. What’s scary is that an individual alone can almost never win: you can’t define reality in the singular; it takes a much larger critical mass, hundreds, recognising the purity spiral’s signs and saying so.

The simplest solution is to notice earlier, to notice better, and to call it out as something that has nothing to do with morality, and everything to do with purity — and to say why that’s different.

If you call its name, it flinches. After all, the best defence against witch-finders is a population that doesn’t believe in witches.

The Purity Spiral airs on Sunday at 1.30pm, BBC Radio 4

Inevitably, the woke press have been quick to condemn the new series. Just as these commentators have mastered the ability to divine the secret motives of their political opponents, they have also developed a form of clairvoyance which enables them to pronounce judgement on creative endeavours in advance of their existence. The Guardian has produced two hit pieces in quick succession to bewail the return of this ‘problematic’ show. An article for Glamour claims that Little Britain’s brand of humour is ‘dangerous’ and that we should be “leaving behind an era we should all be ashamed of”. In a further twist, a source at the BBC has apparently said that a new series has been ‘ruled out’ because the show is too ‘offensive’. The claim has since been denied by friends of Lucas and Walliams but, if it turns out to be true, that means that the new series of Little Britain will have been announced, denounced and cancelled in the space of five days.

This tells us a great deal about the cultural climate we now occupy, one in which social media can catalyse a flurry of competing storms. Offence is a contemporary form of currency, and declarations of virtue are deemed an adequate substitute for virtuous acts. Little Britain was never to my taste, but there has never been a greater need for mainstream comedy that teases the limits of our tolerance. When the new series was mooted, the headline in The Sun posed the question: “Will it fall foul of PC killjoys?” The answer was never really in doubt.

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One of the many problems with the identitarian Left is an apparent inability to assess art or comedy by anything other than ideological standards. A film is judged successful if it is sufficiently diverse and sends a positive message about social justice. This is why Avengers: Endgame was lambasted for its ‘fat shaming’ by The Guardian, in spite of Marvel’s desperate efforts at woke posturing. Ideologues demand purity, and mistakes are not to be brooked.

It is difficult, therefore, to see how a Little Britain that even remotely resembles the original series could possibly be forgiven were it to be broadcast today. Perhaps the solution will be to modify the targets according to the prevailing intersectional creeds. For all their censuring of ‘bullying’ comedy that ‘punches down’, the woke are happy to indulge in the most vicious forms of bullying so long as the targets are approved. Ageism is fine, for example, because elderly people voted for Brexit and tend to subscribe to outlandish and outdated belief systems. Many, for instance, insist that there are only two genders, or that obesity can lead to health problems. Whatever you say, boomers.

Attacks on working class people are also acceptable, of course. This is a consequence of the social justice movement’s poisonous influence on the left. Not only has it rehabilitated racial thinking and abused the principle of diversity in a way guaranteed to foster division, it has failed to prioritise its traditional mission of redressing economic inequality. In the early days of Little Britain, commentators for The Guardian and The Independent would often cite the character of Vicky Pollard — the tracksuit-clad teenage mother who swapped her baby for a Westlife CD — as an example of how Lucas and Walliams were ‘punching down’ at the oppressed. Owen Jones devoted a substantial part of his book Chavs to criticising what he perceived to be Little Britain’s damaging stereotypes.

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Yet many of the leftists who took umbrage at such characterisations at the time are the same who now routinely demonise the working class in the name of progress. In today’s context, Vicky Pollard could work well as a satire of the kind of attitudes held by prominent left-wing columnists who dismiss working class people as ‘gammons’. For all their pretence that the slur was aimed at affluent Little Englanders, in practice it was mostly reserved for white Brexit voters on the very lowest incomes.  In trendy metropolitan circles, it is now de rigueur to deride the working class as stupid and suggestible creatures, fuelled by race hatred, who can’t stop themselves from voting the wrong way.  If Vicky Pollard does return, we might well expect to see her gloating about Brexit to her gammony friends, or spending her dole money on a tattoo of Boris Johnson.

And what of the other characters? How might they be sanitised to avoid the ire of a new generation of intersectional Mary Whitehouses? The padded bodysuits of Bubbles and Desiree would be considered fat-shaming; the masculine ‘ladies’ Emily and Florence would be deemed transphobic; the mail order bride Ting Tong would be dismissed as legitimising racist stereotypes. Caricatures are always offensive to somebody.

But a new series of Little Britain also has the potential to take aim at the intolerance of the identitarian Left and ‘cancel culture’, should the creators be inclined to take the risk. The character of Daffyd, the “only gay in the village”, was based on the type of gay man who is obsessed with victimhood, determined to detect prejudice even where it doesn’t exist. In the intervening years, overt homophobia has become far less common, while sensitivity to homophobia has increased. This means that the joke actually works better in today’s context, because the victim-centred social justice movement has spawned innumerable Daffyds, all desperate to denounce the homophobes of their imagination. But this is also why in a 2020 reimagining of Little Britain, Daffyd would probably be the first for the chop.

“Humour normalises thoughts and behaviours,” writes the author of Glamour magazine’s pre-emptive critique, “and we definitely don’t need bigotry any more normalised then [sic] it already is.” No evidence for this assertion is forthcoming. Like so many woke mantras, the idea that there is a causal link between entertainment and public behaviour is simply taken on faith. Comedy can flourish in this kind of puritanical atmosphere if comedians are willing to subvert the new dogmas. It will be interesting to see whether or not Little Britain makes it back to our screens and, if so, whether it will resist or embrace the new oligarchy of social justice.

Andrew Doyle will be touring the UK with Douglas Murray later this year for a live political discussion show “Resisting Wokeness”. Details available at resistingwokeness.com.

The first is Bendor Grosvenor, who presents art history programmes on the BBC. He used to be included in the hit BBC1 series Fake or Fortune, as number two to the art dealer Philip Mould, but was regrettably dumped from it in the more recent version. He has since been moved to a more recherché programme on BBC4 called Britain’s Lost Masterpieces, correcting the misattribution of 17^th and 18^th century portraits languishing in public collections.

It’s lovely stuff. Bendor is inescapably patrician — he brings to mind the parson in a Jane Austen novel, missing only the britches — so the BBC has paired him with a lady called Emma Dabiri, a model turned visual sociology researcher at SOAS with a luscious Ulster accent and a vibrant wardrobe. Their genial non-chemistry only adds to the programme’s charms.

Bendor can walk past a portrait of an aristocrat, of the kind that lines every National Trust property in the land, and instead of seeing just another bloke with a big nose, he can identify the artist, the context, the whole long lost language of gesture and pose. To see his excitement as damaged paintings are restored to life, and his appreciation of every brushstroke, is an inspiration.

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Another hero is Jonathan Foyle, an expert on Tudor architecture and furniture. His is a less outlandishly period presence, but he more than compensates with deep knowledge and surprising superpowers including climbing buildings and stunning architectural drawing (to watch him recreate the lost Nonsuch Palace by hand in the recent Henry’s Lost Palaces was a particular joy). Mr Foyle’s contribution to the rediscovery of Henry VII’s marriage bed has earned him an unassailable halo in Tudor enthusiast circles.

Between them, Grosvenor and Foyle offer a tiny bat’s squeak of hope in the vast cultural void. Here is connoisseurship of the highest order, a lifeline connection to the past, and a rejoinder to today’s deadening relativism with a powerful reminder that some things really are better than others, and there are still people around who can appreciate them. Bravo BBC!

And then… you follow them on Twitter.

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Why oh why, throughout the long and painful Brexit years, did these two art experts take it upon themselves to be so loud and confident at the most aggravating end of Remainer obsession? How can it be that two such fine minds, one of whom (Grosvenor) actually has a PhD in History and even some work experience in politics, be so subtle and enlightening in the realm of art and so pat and incurious in a political context?

If I were their brand advisor I would have delicately pointed out that, in the niche fanbase of English renaissance art, there might well be as many Brexiteers as Remainers, so there’s an obvious career disadvantage in getting so ‘stuck in’.

But more than that I would try to persuade them that some of the same élan that they respond to so powerfully in Henry VIII’s palaces, or a perfect van Dyck portrait, was involved in the Brexit movement: cherishing the particular over the generic, a need for a more stirring purpose than only economic pragmatism and a pushback against the dullness of globalised modernity. (And this comes from a Remain voter, but one who has since been trying to understand rather than demonise.)

One of the things I was most looking forward to about the end of the main phase of the Brexit argument was that these important minds could go back to their illuminating expert subjects — but no! Bendor Grosvenor, who has moved to Scotland, has started campaigning for the SNP to fight the Tories’ “hard Brexit” deal, including campaign videos and a New Year’s Day column in The Times.

The SNP! Does he think a post-independence Scotland will be prioritising investment in museums? Or that the inconvenience of Brexit would even compare to the inconvenience and damage of a hard border between Scotland and England?

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As for Mr Foyle, on the day after the killing of Quasem Soleimani, when the Iranian streets were being flooded with protestors (with disastrous effects and more than fifty dead), he gave us this gem:

Just saying. pic.twitter.com/Q6nnpLRAWn

— Dr Jonathan Foyle  (@JonathanFoyle) January 5, 2020

What wisdom does this comparison, between Donald Trump’s apparently sparsely populated inauguration and the funeral of a known killer and sponsor of political instability across the Middle East, give to the world? Are we to conclude that Soleimani had more supporters, and was therefore the better guy? The crowds are even bigger for the Ayatollah himself — does that mean he wins this competition? Jonathan, I could watch you talk about Tudor buildings for the rest of eternity but, please, make this stop.

I suspect that for lifelong fans of Lewis, the sudden elevation of actor Laurence Fox to anti-PC badboy since his appearance on last week’s Question Time is equally distressing. Gone is the fresh face of Lewis’s loyal assistant Hathaway, and the cosy parochialism of Oxford; a few elections later, the new Laurence Fox has become very cross and transformed into someone you might feel a little uneasy about if stuck in a tube carriage with late at night.

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I share much of Fox’s frustration at the overreach of identity politics, but I also suspect that the angry man routine won’t convert anyone; it will only rouse the rabble who already agree with him, and put off more cautious listeners from the cause.

Fox’s now famous row with Shami Chakrabarti on Question Time was about the Labour leadership — that it shouldn’t matter what gender the candidates are, it should be about their policies and capabilities. So far so good, but his argument would have been rather stronger if he had mentioned a single one of Keir Starmer’s policies or capabilities as his reason for supporting him. Instead, as he told Brendan O’Neill the next day, he supports Keir Starmer “only because I think he is the one that can go up against Boris — I think they’re both a bit dick swinging and, you know, that’s how it works.”

Lozza. If you’re going to offer yourself as more high-minded than the gender-obsessed wokerati, it’s probably best not to offer “dick swinging” as the main attribute you look for in a potential leader. I know what you’re trying to say, and I probably agree with it, but you’re not making things better here.

Cultural figures are people too, and, in the virtuous parlance of modern celebrity, why should they not ‘use their platform to promote causes they care about’? Well, perhaps because, whether you agree with them or not, they tend only to make things worse.

Watching highbrow brains drop all nuance and get down with political Twitter is particularly painful, but even actors have something precious to protect. Earlier in the same interview, Laurence Fox asked, “What’s the point of an actor?” and answered his own question: “Essentially the only job of an actor is to take a writer’s words and give them life. That’s your only job.” Couldn’t have said it better myself.

As I read these condemnations on Twitter, I struggled to recall the despicable stance I had espoused. Had I advocated the random euthanising of toddlers? Suggested it was reasonable to inject sleeping pensioners with methamphetamine? Waged a campaign to kick kittens in the teeth?

No. What I had said to rouse this chorus of internet disgust, was that men aren’t women. I’d observed that men who claim to be women seem often to have a restricted view of what women are. I had said all this in a statement in response to being depublished from a collection of short stories about Doctor Who, a whimsical children’s television programme.

This is a story of how the selling of Doctor Who got taken over by the woke. It acts, I think, as a curious microcosm of the mania that’s infected the institutions of public and cultural life across the West.

For most of its life, Doctor Who has been the kind of thing you’d expect: cheerfully liberal, middlebrow mainstream. It has typical BBC values bubbling away at low level — the UN is always good, any kind of corporation is inherently evil, etc. It’s hardly ever been outspokenly political, though one script editor in the Eighties did try to bring down the Thatcher government with it.

As for the Doctor’s moral code — he doesn’t use guns or knives against his enemies. This is for the same reason that Mr Tumble and the Octonauts don’t; because children aren’t to be encouraged to shoot or stab people. But the Doctor has used other methods to see off his non-human enemies — gassing, bombing, shoving into liquid ice, etc. (Nobody ever points out this screaming hypocrisy because it’s all part of the fun.)

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By Mary Harrington

The revived series — the New Testament, if you will — has foregrounded the Doctor’s morality over and over again. This was perhaps inevitable, given the ‘punch the air’ Hollywoodisation of our popular culture. The Old Testament Doctor was never pious or mawkish, which cannot be said of the New. What was devised as a Saturday treat, a chance for adults to feel frivolous and for kids to feel grown up after a hard week, has become an arena for exploring ethical notions, in a flagship BBC show from top-drawer writers. This is a weight it was never designed to bear.

Some of the fans, though, are taking this seriously as a credo, and before anything else a new religion needs heretics. That what was particularly interesting about the tone of the denouncing I was on the receiving end of. It was all couched along the lines of the Doctor’s moral code.

“The Doctor would NEVER stand for this! This is the whole ethos of the show – fighting the good fight, being who you want to be. How could anyone who enjoys the show not feel the same?”

The dramatic device of the Doctor making people morally ‘better’, a major part of its return, with hindsight seems like a beacon for lost souls. In a fleeting TV drama this is stirring stuff. But in the real world it had been received in a way never intended, offering confirmation to neurotics and narcissists. In an existence that feels random and rudderless what they heard was ‘you are special, unquestionably good, and anyone who disagrees is a monster’.

What amplified this signal even more was the behaviour of the BBC’s commercial wing, BBC Studios (formerly BBC Worldwide).

In the early years of the revival, the must-have toys and kids’ ephemera of the nation were Doctor Who-related; the Cybermen voice-changer mask was a best seller at Christmas 2006, and action figures, comics and magazines were lapped up at a prodigious rate.

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Why the woke can't make jokes

By Gareth Roberts

The books I wrote at that time sold many, many thousands. Inevitably this couldn’t be sustained – children are notoriously fickle and reject the fads of their older siblings.

Floundering, the BBC looked not to recapture their mass child audience but turned instead to the people that were still responding – a small but very loud section of the woke internet. They reoriented their marketing to target this audience, adopting its slang on the official twitter account, plucking its YouTubers to front their product.

When I was working on Doctor Who around ten years ago, it was an unwritten law that the highly engaged, highly entitled, highly strung breed of fans were to be ignored as much as possible. Never feed a starving dog! But, then, BBC Studios made the classic embarrassing middle-aged error of assuming a loud, small group of young people are representative of all young people.

The trouble is, if you encourage the woke, then your enterprise will never be pure enough. It can only get more bizarre, more out of touch. And this is what happened to the Dr Who fan base: a band of happy hobbyists were taken over by what is now termed ‘the Doctor Who community’, which is policed vigorously. I see this sort of infiltration across our culture, to the extent that everybody from the Conservative Party to Budweiser Beer is in lockstep with frankly batty ideas, especially regarding gender and identity.

So we come to the sorry but, yes, funny tale of my defenestration, when Ebury Books, parent company to BBC Books, said my views “conflict with our values as a publisher“. What these weasel words actually mean is they are terrified of the vampire they admitted over their threshold.

It would seem only those who subscribe to these nebulous ‘values’ can be published. I assume the values of Ebury correlate perfectly with my fellow Doctor Who author, trans woman Juno Dawson, who said in Attitude Magazine that she “just wanted to be fucked like a woman, it’s not about what hole it goes in”. To say nothing of the frantic scramble by Penguin (Ebury’s parent company) to justify their recent publication of the ramblings of anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist Pedro Baños. My opinions on identity politics, though, are unacceptable.

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Has trans activism gone too far?

By Douglas Murray

As Trotsky so nearly said, I may not be interested in the culture war but the culture war is interested in me. How to fight it? How to win it? I haven’t the faintest clue where to even begin.

I used to wonder what happened to all the repressed, uptight people I remembered from my youth. The self-deniers, the quivering zealots, the senior prefects and hall monitors. The revellers in victimhood, moral certainty and sententiousness, who enjoy nothing better than a good old ban, where did they go? Turns out, they never left us. They went to Uni, got woke, and became our masters.

And even with all the resources of Gallifrey, the miracle of the Tardis and the wisdom of the Time Lords, the Doctor never saw that future coming.

I’d been invited to deliver the opening address of the Brisbane literary festival. The organisers had originally requested that I speak on the theme of “Community and belonging”; I told them for such a soft, sappy topic they had the wrong speaker. By all means, choose your own subject, they wrote back. I proposed to speak about identity politics in fiction, and received wholehearted approval.

I chose to focus on a concept I’d only recently encountered, which at the time had primarily been used to castigate adventurous musicians and fashion designers. ‘Cultural appropriation’ was a brand new taboo: ‘stealing’ from other people’s traditions for your own evil creative purposes without ‘permission’. Although it was baffling however one might go about securing such a licence.

In 2016, I was hard-pressed to come up with examples of this peculiar no-no being used to impugn works of fiction. But I did manage to dig up the fact that a white male British novelist had recently been chided in reviews and on social media for daring to employ a female Nigerian character. I worried that if this sort of rebuke spread, the new taboo could be catastrophic for my occupation, one wholly dependent on imagining what it’s like to be someone else.

Alas, only three years later, I’d have found copious examples of fiction writers who’ve had their knuckles rapped for helping themselves to what didn’t belong to them.

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Taking on the Social Justice Warriors

By Eric Kaufmann

Before delivering that lecture, I’d been solely concerned that my thesis was so self-evident that the speech would be boring. Afterwards, I was informed that one audience member, a 24-year-old from Southern Sudan, had flounced down the middle aisle and out of the venue – to be followed, after several minutes, by her concerned mother.

The young woman — who has dined out on her rude exit ever since — promptly posted an indignant screed online about how deeply hurt and offended she was by my talk (much of which she did not hear). Said screed was so over-written that it was actually funny. Nevertheless, the Guardian, which has an increasingly, shall we say, ambivalent relationship to my politics, picked up the blog and posted it on the paper’s website.

The rest is history.

Media across the world piled on. The story, such as there was one, was widely misreported. One woman walking out, followed five minutes later by her mother, transformed into a mass audience desertion. My final flourish of donning a sombrero – a droll reference to the speech’s intro, and worn only during the last three words of the speech – was mis-described in every account. According to news reports, I’d worn the sombrero belligerently during the entire 45-minute address. Now, that was slanderous. I have a far better sense of theatre.

To set the record straight, I had had my publicist post the keynote’s text online. Meanwhile, the festival administrators informed the press that I had spoken “beyond my brief”, and had no permission to address this topic. When my publisher sent the organisers a copy of the email thread demonstrating that they knew perfectly well what I would speak about and had given the topic their blessing, we got back sorrow about my “hurt” and “pain”. I wasn’t hurt or in pain. I was pissed off. Advertising that I go rogue at the podium impugned my reputation, and potentially curtailed future speaking invitations.

In private, I received a surprising quantity of supportive email, some from friends I didn’t know I had, but most of these defenders didn’t take a public stand. Oh, and that British writer, whose novel I stuck up for? He’s never spoken to me again.

*

It had been my intention to nip in the bud a poorly thought-out hard-Left injunction that had the capacity, if widely applied, to make my occupation untenable. Instead I fear that I helped spread the very concept that I’d hoped to discourage. For ‘cultural appropriation’ has in this last three years become widely regarded as forbidden in fiction.

I confess that I’m sick of the subject. Nevertheless, my opposition to this harebrained notion has grown only more implacable.

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By Gareth Roberts

It took me a while to figure out that the ‘appropriation’ foofaraw is, in part, about the commodification of identity. In those indignant 2016 comment pieces, I encountered outrage that pale-faced authors were making money from experience that wasn’t theirs to sell. Thus the idea must be to reduce supply of writing about ‘marginalised communities’, and thereby to increase demand. Presumably, if we white writers are prevented from using ‘stolen’ material – if we’re required, in the latest lingo, to ‘stay in our lane’ – then, clamouring for fiction about characters from Southern Sudan, the minority-starved reading public will turn the recent first novel of a certain huffy African-Australian activist into a bestseller. I fear this model displays a poor understanding of economics and publishing both.

In literature, too, ideological predation on established writers is intended to allow younger, woker folks to take their place. When I was coming of age, we younger writers were eager to find mentors whom we admired, and with whom we often tried to ingratiate ourselves in Master of Fine Arts programs. We inhaled the work of accomplished predecessors, the better to hone our own skills.

We now have a generation that simply ‘cancels’ the older generation, the better to clear the stage and clamber onto it. (None of these people read anymore, but mysteriously they all still want to be writers.) What I encountered in Brisbane hewed to an ugly behavioural model that has more in common with big game hunting than with art.

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I'm Lionel, I'm a news-aholic

By Lionel Shriver

More fundamentally, I challenge the propositions that any of us ‘own’ our own culture, that a culture is even subject to strict definition, and that a culture has any borders that can therefore be rigidly policed. Because we are all elements in other people’s landscapes, our experience – how we act, what we say, what traditions we observe – is also an ingredient in other people’s experience. Thus I would submit: we do not even own exclusive title to ourselves.

I reject this hoarding, hostile, selfish, and perplexingly commercial relationship to ‘identity’. Better that we all conduct our work and social lives in a spirit of sharing, generosity, exploration, curiosity, experimentation, and even willingness to fail in our sincere efforts to understand one another.

But apparently we white writers are now on notice that we don’t have “permission” to write non-white characters. There was actually a headline I tripped over online during the Brisbane hullabaloo, atop an article I didn’t choose to read: “Lionel Shriver Should not Write Minority Characters” – just in case I hadn’t got the message loudly and clearly enough. Ironically, this implies that authors like me are obliged to portray the Western world as if it’s still the 1950s. Off the page, our countries may grow ever more ‘diverse’, but between book covers we’re back to apartheid.

*

The strictures now constraining the imaginations of fiction writers are not limited to a ban on cultural kleptomania. All artists today are encouraged to be political, but only in the service of a narrow hard-Left orthodoxy. Any novel that challenges the trans movement or the 100% socially and economically beneficial character of today’s mass immigration to the West will attract a Twitter mob and scathing reviews. And that’s assuming you could get such books published in the first place.

Cutting-edge artists were once famously ‘transgressive’.  Now to be cutting edge is to be cookie-cutter. Despite the reputation of the artist as a maverick, I live in a world of conformity. I don’t personally know a single fiction writer in London who supports Brexit.

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By Paul Embery

You know, even having characters voice views or behave in a manner that runs contrary to progressive mores is now dangerous. At the 2016 Sewanee Writers Conference in Tennessee, fellow authors accused Allen Wier of a “microaggression” because three old men in a baseball park ogled a young woman in his short story.

It’s especially perilous for a novelist to express anything but officially approved progressive opinions in non-fiction – and as a prolific comment writer and columnist, I should know. I should have kept my noxious libertarian views about tax policy, the EU, and affirmative action to myself. I’ve made myself a target of animosity for virtually all the people who can influence my career – who commission the manuscripts, judge the literary prizes, award the writing residencies, and assign the reviews. For politically, my professional milieu is almost perfectly homogeneous. In outing myself in journalism, I’ve branded myself an outsider, if not an exile, among my own kind.

Hence I now get a brand of review I’ve come to recognise —whose author pre-hated me, and read my novel only with a view to locating unforgivable sins against social justice.

A friend of mine who teaches criticism at Columbia’s Master of Fine Arts program in New York confirmed that this recent inclination to judge literature in accordance with its adherence to a political catechism is not all in my head. Over a glass of white wine last summer, she despaired that all her criticism students think the job of a critic is to assess a given work in accordance with its implicit racial or sexual mores. Her students won’t even cut historical texts any slack if the content doesn’t line up perfectly with contemporary progressive values.

*

Writing fiction used to be a hoot. Now it’s fraught with anxiety. My colleagues and I have been made destructively self-conscious about any sentence that touches on race, ethnicity, disability, gender, sexual harassment or assault, Israel, colonialism, imperialism, diversity, class, or inequality – and that list keeps getting longer. As a consequence, too many of today’s artists are struggling to be ‘good’ rather than to do ‘well’. Perpetual nervousness that a foot wrong could get you banished from civilisation for life is not conducive to making art at all, much less outstanding art.

Publishers’ practice of employing “sensitivity readers” to vet and censure manuscripts is currently restricted largely to Young Adult fiction, but could soon be coming to a mainstream publisher near you. Self-appointed experts in the delicate feelings of a range of protected special-interest groups supposedly ensure that the text doesn’t offend anyone —although at this point if your book doesn’t offend anyone, it’s probably not worth reading.

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Who called the fun police?

By Richard Godwin

After #MeToo, we authors are also fearful about how we behave at parties, which could not only invite personal censure but get our books withdrawn from the shelves. Now that the presumption of innocence is out the window, we have to protect ourselves from both our real sexual lapses and mere accusations of such lapses. Ask Junot Diaz. It took months of ignominy to clear the author’s name after he was accused of planting an unwanted kiss, and meanwhile booksellers banned his work.

Remember when writers like Hemingway were expected to be licentious hell-raisers who drank too much? I’m perfectly capable of batting the odd hand from my knee, so please give me back the old days, when being a novelist was good fun.

*

What are we all to do?  Because this watch-your-step environment is not only a problem for artists. We’re all being coached to use dumb expressions, to edit what we say lest we violate a host of unwritten regulations, and to be increasingly avoidant of people different from ourselves not because we’re bigots but because we might say something wrong.

The hard Left’s code of conduct is drafted by people with no authority. A small group of self-nominated tyrants concocted ‘cultural appropriation’ as an unpardonable transgression, but that doesn’t mean we have to pay any attention to these bullies. The only thing that gives made-up rules any teeth is obeying them.

I’m an old-school rebel. Tell me I can’t do something and my immediate impulse is to do it. I write minority characters. You can only dispense with silly rules by breaking them, and any freedoms that you don’t exercise you’re bound to lose.

This means resisting the all-too-rational protective urge to self-censor. In 1969, Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint outraged American conservatives, and Roth meant the novel to be outrageous. He recognised that artists are supposed to push the confining cultural boundaries of their times. But these days, that means pushing back against the rigid rectitude of the Left.

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CLR James rejected the posturing of identity politics

By Ralph Leonard

We can also maintain our senses of humour. The best weapon against people who take themselves too seriously is not to denounce but to make fun of them. They deserve it, and we deserve a good belly laugh at their expense.

It’s also important to come to the defence, publicly and not only in private emails, of artists, academics, journalists, and thinkers who have stuck their necks out only to have their heads chopped off. The august, yet temporarily disgraced philosopher, Roger Scruton, who was crucified by an irresponsible journalist taking his quotes out of context, was only restored to respectability with the assistance of friends and allies who advocated on his behalf.

Otherwise, we just have to weather the storm. This Left-wing mania for dos and don’ts can’t last forever. I fear what may be required is some sort of catastrophe, one that makes ‘microaggressions’ suddenly seem as trivial as the expression suggests. This lunatic authoritarian obsession with an infinitely growing list of rules in relation to an infinitely growing list of specially protected categories of people? It’s an ailment born of prosperity. It’s the ultimate first-world problem. A plague of antibiotic-resistant flesh-eating bacteria across the planet might kill billions of people, but it would also wipe identity politics right off the map. In my desperation to restore sanity, playfulness, mischief, and abandon to our cultural landscape, I just hope I don’t have to resort to disseminating the bacteria myself.

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How identity politics drove the world mad

By Roger Scruton

Both artists and arts consumers need to return to first principles. That is, the purpose of art is not to do good. A given novelist may choose to promote the author’s version of virtue, but being good-as-in-virtuous is not what makes a book good-as-in-excellent.

It’s time to return to valuing not only nuance and complexity, but anarchy, wickedness, and heresy. It’s time to stop feeling obliged to be such good little campers, at least in our heads. Both writers and readers need to feel free to explore the unseemly underbelly of our imaginations. After all — aren’t books the ultimate ‘safe space’?

And sometimes we just have to talk about something else — something besides whatever group is socially disadvantaged this week, or what remark some public figure made about race or gender that’s supposedly beyond the pale. Sometimes we authors have to write about something else — so maybe I’m even apologising for the very topic I’m speaking of right now.

Because for me, the biggest trap of this whole identity politics lark has been getting lured into debating a proposition that’s unworthy of my address. I get drawn into fights from which I’d be better off just walking away. I’m genuinely embarrassed to have continually explained what I think is wrong with the concept of ‘cultural appropriation’ for three solid years. It’s a dumb idea, and it’s dumb terminology. Call it ‘cultural appreciation’ and the argument is over. For there’s a way in which, when you spend your precious time on this earth battling something dumb, even if at length you prevail, you’ve nevertheless thrown your pearls before swine, and the morons have still won.

This text is an abridged version of Shriver’s John Bonython Lecture for the Centre for Independent Studies, entitled ‘Creativity in the Age of Constraint’, which she gave in Sydney earlier this month. 

It’s essentially an Alt-right handbook, and I don’t think it’s too much to suggest that every copy ought to be incinerated. Preferably in a public square or something so that we can all see what happens when fascists try to spread their wicked ideology.

For the best part of 300 pages Murray spews his hateful bile – on white paper, no less – denouncing social justice, identity politics and intersectionality. Even the font has a certain heteronormative quality about it. He rails against “millennial snowflakes” who all “identify as attack helicopters” and how “you can’t say anything anymore” and that “you can go to prison for singing the national anthem these days”. I mean, he doesn’t actually write any of these words, but we all know that’s what he’s thinking.

The book is divided into four sections: “Gay”, “Women”, “Race” and “Trans”. These are all wonderful subjects – coincidentally, they also happen to be the names of my tropical fish – and so it is heart-breaking to see such noble ideas befouled in Murray’s grubby paws.

Needless to say, the last thing the world needs right now is yet another book by a straight white cis male. I’m told that Murray claims to be gay, but as journalist Jim Downs said of gay entrepreneur Peter Thiel after he appeared at the Republican National Convention, he “is an example of a man who has sex with other men, but not a gay man”. The idea that you can be gay and have conservative opinions is absurd. It was the same with Kanye West, who gave up being black once he’d put on that MAGA hat.

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How identity politics drove the world mad

By Roger Scruton

Murray seems to believe that, as a society, we have gone “through the crash barrier” (a typically male Top Gear-style analogy) and messed everything up through our supposedly divisive obsessions with race, gender and sexuality. “It is a curiosity of the age,” Murray writes, “that after the situation appears at the very least to be better than it ever was, it is presented as though it has never been worse”. What the hell would he know? As an ecosexual vegan intersectional feminist, I am surely better qualified than anyone to understand that ours is the most oppressive society on earth.

Murray’s ideas about gender and sexuality are so outdated that they are genuinely embarrassing to read. He relies on a whole range of pseudo-sciences such as “genetics”, “endocrinology” and “facts”. If he’d bothered to take even a basic course in Gender Studies he would realise that all of these superstitions have long been discredited. He completely fails to understand the fundamental point that gender is an arbitrary social construct and has absolutely nothing to do with “biology” (except in the case of trans people who have been born in the wrong body).

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Is woke culture totalitarian?

By Eric Kaufmann

Let’s consider Murray’s chapter on race. Speaking as an ethnic minority – literally nothing about me is white except for my skin colour – I find it pretty vile that a white author has even been allowed to address the subject in the first place. He scoffs at the brave work of academics in the field of Whiteness Studies, such as Barbara Applebaum and Robin DiAngelo, who have repeatedly pointed out that there is nothing more racist than treating black people the same as everyone else. Murray is a perfect example of the type of privileged white man who gets all defensive when you point out what an evil scumbag he is.

His internalised homophobia is perhaps the saddest thing of all. He kink-shames gay pride marchers who choose to wear S&M gear, claiming that it is “off-putting to whatever cause they are hoping to advance”, and that “if the black civil rights movement had included a fetish section it would have been considerably easier to ignore its moral force”. On the contrary, if Martin Luther King had regularly worn PVC harnesses and nipple clamps at his public speeches, I’m sure that people would have taken him far more seriously.

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Unplug the outrage machine

By Douglas Murray

The Madness of Crowds is the most offensive book to have been penned since The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, or The Enid Blyton Book of Fairies (which is probably about gays or something; I haven’t read it). I’ve already contacted the police to report Murray for hate speech, which strikes me as a perfectly legitimate approach to reviewing a book. The officer I spoke to told me that Murray is “entitled to his opinions”, which just goes to show the extent to which the fascist mentality has seeped into our law enforcement agencies.

But I shall persist. My daddy knows someone high up in the Crown Prosecution Service. With any luck, Murray will be arrested soon and we can all get back to the business of promoting tolerance.

Titania McGrath is a radical feminist slam poet and activist. She is the author of Woke: A Guide to Social Justice.

Why I've reported Douglas Murray to the police

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Who will resist the great awokening?

By Eric Kaufmann

The terms ‘reactionary’ and ‘progressive’ were staples of communist doctrine, Polish professor Ryszard Legutko reminds us in his edgy and thought-provoking new book. He should know. Growing up in Poland after the war, he took great risks to produce a dissident Samizdat anti-communist magazine, ‘Arka’. In The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies, Legutko points to the eerie similarity between 20th-century communist and contemporary liberal societies, providing western readers with an important new vantage point on problems of our current moment.

Having experienced the communist regime first-hand, he is well-placed to spot the symptoms of ideological tyranny today. Anything which stood in the way of the forward march of socialism was labelled by communists as ‘reactionary’, ‘bourgeois’ or ‘idealist’. Like today’s progressives, he says, they believed that familial, ethnic, national and religious traditions were obstacles to the revolution – atavisms to be overcome and ultimately dismantled.

Numerous artists and intellectuals jumped aboard the express, eagerly suppressing their rational faculties. Alongside the party apparatchiks, these ‘lumpen intellectuals’ constituted the shock troops of the socialist movement. Average citizens stepped into line to avoid harassment and intimidation.

Arguments no longer revolved around truth, but were judged by their fidelity to the tenets of the secular religion. You were either with the movement or against it – those who tried to straddle the middle ground were denounced by socialists as ‘bourgeois’. The dishonest ‘slippery slope’ charge was repeatedly laid by communists to indict moderate opponents seeking some form of compromise between competing positions. Those on the opposite side of the debate were deemed ‘dangerous’ rather than incorrect.

History, the socialists believed, was moving inexorably in the direction of ‘progress’, and the role of the vanguard was to vanquish those standing in its way. Sound familiar? Anyone exposed to the power of the cultural Left in today’s liberal institutions, where ‘because it’s 2019’ is a killer argument, will recognise this. In communist Poland, the millenarian vision was the worker’s paradise.

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The war against objectivity

By James Bloodworth

Today’s progressive ideology, what I term ‘Left-modernism’ in my book Whiteshift, is a fusion of cosmopolitan liberal-individualism and cultural egalitarianism. Its perfectionist dream is a society in which historically-disadvantaged groups based on race, sex and gender outperform their privileged oppressors, while diversity accelerates toward infinity. Those who oppose it are immediately branded ‘reactionary’ or ‘dangerous’ by progressives.

Legutko writes of being “more and more exposed to an overwhelming liberal-democratic omnipresence”, which “permeates public and private lives, emanates from the media, advertising, films, theatre and visual arts…through educational curricula from kindergartens to universities, and through works of art”.

It finds its ultimate political expression in the European Union, he says, with its manifold agencies and directives. For the author, the EU had laudable origins, but once the 68ers gained control, the institutions morphed into a project to create ‘European Man’ as if ‘two and a half thousand years’ of European history had come to an end with the codification of a final set of ‘European Values’.

Opposing the project is viewed by its champions and functionaries as a form of blasphemy, much like opposing Marxist doctrine was in communist Poland.

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Liberalism: the other God that failed

By John Gray

Legutko finds conservatives agreeing to play by the rules set by liberalism, to use its lexicon, and condemn the sins in its catechism: “racism, sexism, homophobia, discrimination….”.  He also makes an important observation about the artificiality of the communities favoured by liberalism’s ideologues. Marx and Lenin may have lauded the ‘workers’, but they disdained workers’ actual culture and communities. Rather than really-existing people, with their traditions, what the Marxists celebrated were politicised constructions, like the ‘proletariat’.

Today, we encounter similar politicised abstractions, such as ‘People of Colour’ or ‘LGBTQ’, which bear little resemblance to actual social groups. Those minorities who don’t play their assigned role may be accused of ‘internalised misogyny’ or ‘internalised racism’. The Marxist theory of false consciousness rides again.

Where the book goes off the rails, though, is in its failure to distinguish liberal democracy from Left-modernism. The first is a venerable set of political principles, the second a historically-specific fusion of cosmopolitan liberal-individualism and cultural egalitarianism, which emerged in the first decade of the 1900s, gained intellectual prominence in the 1920s and 30s, and exploded onto the scene in the 1960s. Since then, this creed has been steadily infiltrating elite institutions of society by hijacking and weaponising norms of politeness in organisations (‘political correctness’) to secure acquiescence through intimidation.

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By Gareth Roberts

Contemporary liberalism’s resemblance to communism stems from the fact that Left-modernism drew strength from waves of ex-communists entering the movement, beginning with the Stalinist purges of the 1930s and ending with the fall of communism in 1989. They brought their doctrinaire, Manichaean worldview with them, translating their object of devotion from the working class to disadvantaged biological groups. As they marched through western institutions, spreading political correctness, they reached a tipping point, acquiring enough power in certain sectors to become an establishment or even an Inquisition – a leaderless movement whose critical mass could rival the state-led communist juggernaut of old.

Legutko is right about the nature of contemporary progressivism and its resemblance to socialist tyranny. However, he writes from the perspective of a Catholic conservative (he is a Law and Justice Party MEP) with integralist, anti-democratic impulses. This is an important new strand of thought on the Right, encompassing American figures such as Sohrab Ahmari and, to a far lesser extent, Patrick Deneen. This religious stance, in my view, aims at too wide a target and mistakes surface usage of the term ‘liberalism’ with its essential character. Its prescriptions simply replace a secular form of political correctness with a religious version.

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Why Britain needs Christian politics

By Christopher Rhodes

In effect, Legutko fails to spot the important difference between what Isaiah Berlin terms ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ liberty. Negative liberty consists of the procedures and institutions which protect a sphere of freedom for individuals against the state and other institutions, as well as each other. Positive liberty involves the visions of the good life and good society that people can promote with their newfound liberties.

Political correctness is a form of positive liberalism which has nothing whatsoever to do with negative liberty – indeed it subverts it. The principle of individual rights must be defended, and it is disingenuous to argue, as he does, that enlarging the sphere of freedom somehow fuels progressivism.

Legutko adopts the classical critique of democracy – that it leads to a coarsening of taste, neglecting beauty and virtue in favour of entertainment – and favours an aristocratic sensibility which found favour among a wide range of thinkers from Plato to Catholic theologians to John Stuart Mill. What he fails to see is that this is also a form of positive liberalism.

Indeed, its elitism is one of the wellsprings of Left-modernism. One can passionately argue for the higher virtues and taste, but once this informs hierarchies, norms and institutions, it begins to censure vernacular culture. This renders it as oppressive as the contemporary compulsion to be ‘modern’ in one’s artistic taste. Negative liberalism does not automatically lead to positive liberalism. Japan, Korea, or the fledgling democratic movement in Hong Kong stand as clear-cut cases of liberal democracy without the virus of coercive progressivism.

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Could you spot a tyrant in the making?

By Douglas Murray

Legutko would argue that liberal democracy tends inexorably toward coercive Left-modernism. There is truth here, insofar as the symbolic and emotional apparatus needed to mobilise people to fight for equal opportunities and rights for citizens can take on a life of its own, overshooting to become a crusade for equal group outcomes and rights across borders. But there is nothing necessary about this development. The baby of liberal democracy should not be thrown out with the bathwater of Left-modernism. Many voices, notably in this publication, are fighting to reform the best system yet devised by pushing against the tyranny of Left-modernism.

One final point. Legutko’s book can be read as a psychiatric report into the damage Left-modernism is doing to the cause of liberal democracy outside the West. Every time an athlete who appears to be a man wins a women’s sporting competition, Hollywood overdoses on wokeness at an awards ceremony, or an activist stages a hate-crime hoax, the prestige of liberal democracy suffers. New weapons are handed to opponents of liberty in authoritarian societies. Those who champion the rational form of liberalism based on equality of treatment and procedural liberty can now be accused of trying to transform the culture and ethos of their society.

All of which places a responsibility on sensible western liberals to push back the ideologues who would sacrifice centuries of hard-won liberties on the altar of utopia.

As I read these condemnations on Twitter, I struggled to recall the despicable stance I had espoused. Had I advocated the random euthanising of toddlers? Suggested it was reasonable to inject sleeping pensioners with methamphetamine? Waged a campaign to kick kittens in the teeth?

No. What I had said to rouse this chorus of internet disgust, was that men aren’t women. I’d observed that men who claim to be women seem often to have a restricted view of what women are. I had said all this in a statement in response to being depublished from a collection of short stories about Doctor Who, a whimsical children’s television programme.

This is a story of how the selling of Doctor Who got taken over by the woke. It acts, I think, as a curious microcosm of the mania that’s infected the institutions of public and cultural life across the West.

For most of its life, Doctor Who has been the kind of thing you’d expect: cheerfully liberal, middlebrow mainstream. It has typical BBC values bubbling away at low level – the UN is always good, any kind of corporation is inherently evil, etc. It’s hardly ever been outspokenly political, though one script editor in the Eighties did try to bring down the Thatcher government with it.

As for the Doctor’s moral code – he doesn’t use guns or knives against his enemies. This is for the same reason that Mr Tumble and the Octonauts don’t; because children aren’t to be encouraged to shoot or stab people. But the Doctor has used other methods to see off his non-human enemies – gassing, bombing, shoving into liquid ice, etc. (Nobody ever points out this screaming hypocrisy because it’s all part of the fun.)

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You're reaping what you sowed, liberals

By John Gray

The revived series – the New Testament, if you will – has foregrounded the Doctor’s morality over and over again. This was perhaps inevitable, given the ‘punch the air’ Hollywoodisation of our popular culture. The Old Testament Doctor was never pious or mawkish, which cannot be said of the New. What was devised as a Saturday treat, a chance for adults to feel frivolous and for kids to feel grown up after a hard week, has become an arena for exploring ethical notions, in a flagship BBC show from top-drawer writers. This is a weight it was never designed to bear.

Some of the fans, though, are taking this seriously as a credo, and before anything else a new religion needs heretics. That what was particularly interesting about the tone of the denouncing I was on the receiving end of. It was all couched along the lines of the Doctor’s moral code.

“The Doctor would NEVER stand for this! This is the whole ethos of the show – fighting the good fight, being who you want to be. How could anyone who enjoys the show not feel the same?”

The dramatic device of the Doctor making people morally ‘better’, a major part of its return, with hindsight seems like a beacon for lost souls. In a fleeting TV drama this is stirring stuff. But in the real world it had been received in a way never intended, offering confirmation to neurotics and narcissists. In an existence that feels random and rudderless what they heard was ‘you are special, unquestionably good, and anyone who disagrees is a monster’.

What amplified this signal even more was the behaviour of the BBC’s commercial wing, BBC Studios (formerly BBC Worldwide).

In the early years of the revival, the must-have toys and kids’ ephemera of the nation were Doctor Who-related; the Cybermen voice-changer mask was a best seller at Christmas 2006, and action figures, comics and magazines were lapped up at a prodigious rate.

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The books I wrote at that time sold many, many thousands. Inevitably this couldn’t be sustained – children are notoriously fickle and reject the fads of their older siblings.

Floundering, the BBC looked not to recapture their mass child audience but turned instead to the people that were still responding – a small but very loud section of the woke internet. They reoriented their marketing to target this audience, adopting its slang on the official twitter account, plucking its YouTubers to front their product.

When I was working on Doctor Who around ten years ago, it was an unwritten law that the highly engaged, highly entitled, highly strung breed of fans were to be ignored as much as possible. Never feed a starving dog! But, then, BBC Studios made the classic embarrassing middle-aged error of assuming a loud, small group of young people are representative of all young people.

The trouble is, if you encourage the woke, then your enterprise will never be pure enough. It can only get more bizarre, more out of touch. And this is what happened to the Dr Who fan base: a band of happy hobbyists were taken over by what is now termed ‘the Doctor Who community’, which is policed vigorously. I see this sort of infiltration across our culture, to the extent that everybody from the Conservative Party to Budweiser Beer is in lockstep with frankly batty ideas, especially regarding gender and identity.

So we come to the sorry but, yes, funny tale of my defenestration, when Ebury Books, parent company to BBC Books, said my views “conflict with our values as a publisher“. What these weasel words actually mean is they are terrified of the vampire they admitted over their threshold.

It would seem only those who subscribe to these nebulous ‘values’ can be published. I assume the values of Ebury correlate perfectly with my fellow Doctor Who author, trans woman Juno Dawson, who said in Attitude Magazine that she “just wanted to be fucked like a woman, it’s not about what hole it goes in”. To say nothing of the frantic scramble by Penguin (Ebury’s parent company) to justify their recent publication of the ramblings of anti-semitic conspiracy theorist Pedro Baños. My opinions on identity politics, though, are unacceptable.

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What will the woke folk make of Notting Hill?

By Nick Tyrone

As Trotsky so nearly said, I may not be interested in the culture war but the culture war is interested in me. How to fight it? How to win it? I haven’t the faintest clue where to even begin.

I used to wonder what happened to all the repressed, uptight people I remembered from my youth. The self-deniers, the quivering zealots, the senior prefects and hall monitors. The revellers in victimhood, moral certainty and sententiousness, who enjoy nothing better than a good old ban, where did they go? Turns out, they never left us. They went to Uni, got woke, and became our masters.

And even with all the resources of Gallifrey, the miracle of the Tardis and the wisdom of the Time Lords, the Doctor never saw that future coming.

Indeed, one of those rulers, the villainous Queen Cersei, puts on a hypocritical show of piety – while empowering the Sparrows to move against her rivals at court. Too late, Cersei realises she has created a monster she can’t control and she too falls victim to its zealotry.

It’s a marvellous study in power politics, in particular the cluelessness of the high-and-mighty in the face of a grassroots revolution they didn’t see coming.

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How Corbynomics is winning over Britain

By Matthew Goodwin

First broadcast in the Spring of 2015, the storyline gained a special saliency in the UK – where the Corbynite takeover of the Labour Party was about to take place. It helped that the leader of the Sparrows, ‘the High Sparrow’, bore such a resemblance to Jeremy Corbyn. Jonathan Pryce was rightly praised for his portrayal of the role – a subtle but chilling combination of personal humility and swivel-eyed fanaticism.

The following year, it was America’s turn – with the Trumpian takeover of the Republican Party. On this occasion there was rather less in the way of personal humility, but once again a ruling establishment was overwhelmed by a radicalised rank-and-file.

The latest example of this phenomenon comes not from politics, but business – specifically the tech industry.

In an in-depth report for Fortune, Beth Kowitt documents the growing power of employee activism within Google and other big tech companies:

“As the so-called techlash has cast a pall over the entire sector, organized employee pushback is slowly becoming part of the landscape: Amazon workers are demanding more action from the company on battling climate change; at Microsoft, employees say they don’t want to build technology for warfare…

“But nowhere has the furor been as loud, as public, and as insistent as it has been at Google. That’s no surprise to Silicon Valley insiders, who say Google was purpose-built to amplify employee voices. With its ‘Don’t be evil’ mantra, Google was a central player in creating the rosy optimism of the tech boom.”

We’re not talking about conventional industrial action here. This is a highly skilled, well-paid workforce. In Silicon Valley, company employees are the cosseted insiders – with a lot less to personally complain about than the outsourced workforce.

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However, this is about a lot more than pay and conditions:

“…Silicon Valley [is] a place that has long worshipped at the altar of meritocracy and utopian techno-futurism. But in the past few years, the industry’s de facto mission statement—change the world (and make money doing it!)—has been called into question as examples of tech’s destructive power multiply, from election interference to toxicity on social media platforms to privacy breaches to tech addiction. No one is closer to tech’s growing might, as well as its ethical quandaries, than the employees who help create it. “

Rather like the characters in the Mitchell and Webb “Nazis” sketch, tech employees are taking a look at themselves and asking “are we the baddies?”.

For a long time, a rebellious, anti-establishment culture was not only tolerated but encouraged by the tech companies. If you’re in the business of disrupting entire industries by developing breakthrough products then what you need is an insurgent force of t-shirted mavericks, not an army of grey-suited corporate clones.

But the incentives are changing. The disruptors have become the new establishment – and thus want to keep a lid on their own tradition of dissent. However, this comes an awkward time. The fresh talent these companies need to recruit and retain is no longer drawn from the devil-may-care individualists of Generation X, but from the Millennial and Post-millennial generations. This lot seek meaning as well as money from their careers – and what they find meaningful is strongly influenced by the orthodoxies of the middle-class Left.

These may be the days of the ‘woke corporation’, when big companies seek to associate themselves with progressive causes, in the hope their own corporate sins go unnoticed. However, media-savvy Millennials aren’t so easily fooled. It doesn’t matter how many millions a big company spends on diversity training and other good works, its activist employees won’t be happy if it’s also chasing billions from defence contracts.

Unlike the more downtrodden kind of worker, it’s hard to threaten alpha-geeks with unemployment. The big tech companies are the kings of ‘clustering’ – i.e. the geographical concentration of an industry in a few high profile, urban centres. This gives employers access to the widest possible pool of talent, but it also maximises options for talented employees.

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Can Big Tech save its soul?

By Charles Arthur

Big tech, therefore, is in a tight spot – dependent on a footloose workforce (or should that be a wokeforce?) that can afford to move on should their employers not meet their exacting ethical standards.

On the other hand, it is quite funny. The tech lords, having exploited their own unconventional image, and pandered to political correctness, now find themselves on the receiving end of the radicalism they once used as a weapon. Indeed, the Sparrows of the tech industry might just prove to be the most effective means of keeping its power in check:

Knowledge workers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your troubled consciences!