Thus, ironically, policies rooted in the belief that all human peoples are equally capable of harmonious coexistence has helped to impel the West’s transformation into a real-life multicultural society, which is to say one increasingly governed by the politics of ethnic in-group preference. As this has accelerated, so too the American empire has begun to pivot institutionally from official colour-blindness to its inverse. And today, as evident in recent disputes over antisemitism and race-first ideologies in Ivy League universities, this worldview is so mainstream that one January 2024 Hollywood release is big-budget fantasy about African-American magicians tasked with keeping the dangerous, violent white majority quiescent, by making them feel comfortable.
At the geopolitical level, too, the shift from universalist race neutrality to race-consciousness is echoed in the fracturing of America’s large-scale universalist project: the “rules-based international order”. Since Iraq and Afghanistan took the shine off this order qua moral project, it has become markedly more contested, not least in recent outbreaks of territorial war and ethnic cleansing even at the edges of Europe. But where the new American domestic racism has elite support on the Left, the retrenchment of American internationalism finds its advocates on the new American Right. There, figures including J.D. Vance argue that the US should wind down internationalist commitments such as the war in Ukraine, and refocus on ending illegal migration via the southern border. More broadly, those jockeying to shape a putative future Republican foreign policy lean toward international restraint rather than internationalism, including arguing for an end to US defence spending in Europe.
None of this is to say that America is finished as imperial hegemon. On the contrary: the scale of its influence is evident in the seamless transition America’s satrapies have made in turn to re-align with the new American race-first ideology. This has been eagerly adopted in the peripheries’ increasingly multicultural populations, with the vehemence and volume of Left-wing pro-Palestinian support in the UK since 7 October being a case in point.
UnHerd reporting from one such march showed an emerging coalition of racially and religiously inflected minority in-group identities, that skews very young and often frames Jews in virulently racist terms as the outgroup. There is considerable overlap with a broader, youth-inflected Left-wing politics of race: one young interviewee told UnHerd (also in a Jafaican accent) that the last protest he attended was during the 2020 BLM disturbances.
Mirroring this coming to racial consciousness of a young and multicultural cross-section of Britain’s Left, race discourse is also re-emerging on the youthful Right. But this isn’t the stereotypical British racism of centrist demonology, coded white working-class and headed by demotic figures such as English Defence League founder Tommy Robinson. Britain’s emerging racist Right is more likely to be young, middle-class, and anonymous, reflecting their lives as students, or as recent graduates employed in sectors where only Left-wing forms of racism are socially acceptable.
The central material grievance for this group is the tension between mass immigration and the lifestyles, earning capacities, and home-owning aspirations of young graduates. In line with this more knowledge-class demographic, they produce well-researched newsletters, and display knowledge-economy communication skills such as a polemical use of statistics comparatively lacking among the Tommy Robinson set. And their converging economic and ethnic disaffection is discernible in the young commentators who point to the preponderance of foreign-headed occupants in inner London social housing, or the memes that frame every Western “social contract” as an extractive one, that tax-farms young professionals and redistributes their earnings to foreigners.
More provocatively still, the race-conscious Gen Z Left and Right now evince a shared belief that ethnic in-group advocacy is a central dimension of mainstream politics. But where on the Left this is granted mainstream form in support for policies such as reparations, or top-down imposition of racial equity, the Right extends this to the one demographic for which this remains taboo: white Europeans. From the perspective of a young Gen Z graduate educated to foreground race, working in a multicultural environment where his own demographic does not predominate, and regularly confronted with evidence of routine discrimination against people like him, it is perhaps difficult to see why doing so should be off-limits.
And so race-based advocacy for Europeans is re-emerging. The recent announcement by Bradford University of a scholarship for white working-class males indicates the direction of travel, while a rising number of public-facing Gen Z exemplars gesture at related ethnic talking-points already commonplace on the more explicitly race-first anonymous Right. These include the fresh-faced anti-immigration activist Jack Anderton, and the 21-year-old student Felix Gilroy, who made waves when he explained to far-Left activist Owen Jones outside the 2023 Tory conference why he believed that Enoch Powell’s much-maligned “Rivers of Blood” speech was prophetic.
Does this mean that every Gen Z is a rabid racist? No. One swallow does not make a summer; there are plenty of young men and women still indifferent to or disgusted by the new race politics. But the influence of America is overwhelming, whether geopolitically or via the media, and the message from the hegemon is now that race must be front and centre. It’s also a good rule of thumb that politics will tilt toward whichever group cares the most, and as things stand, the race-conscious Gen Zs across both Left and Right exhibit an ideological vigour that leads me to suspect they will be influential.
It may come, then, via the Left-wing attack on equality under the law. It may come via the Right-wing attack on liberal internationalism, egalitarianism, and human rights. It may be a mix of the two — but it’s coming. Having grown up amid the 20th-century intra-ethnic ceasefire, reporting this gives me no pleasure. But my prediction for 2024 is that as we see Gen Z maturing to political agency, its radicals will bring the politics of ethnic in-group advocacy definitively back, to unpredictable but potentially seismic effect. Older generations may pine for Hands Around the World, and the long 20th-century peace. But we must all brace ourselves for the coming to political consciousness of a generation that no longer believes peace is in their interests.
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SubscribeThanks Mary, for formulating thoughts I’ve held my whole adult life but never expressed in such detail.
The progressive Left has mistakenly believed only they can (and are morally entitled to) play race cards, there’s every reason for Right Identitarians to join in.
I also think a. it’s not a coincidence that democracies formed and have been maintained long-term in relatively small, homogenous (high trust) societies and b. multi-cultural (and probably multi-ethnic) states are primed for civil conflict/war (especially when things start going badly, which for a few reasons hasn’t happened to the US yet).
I agree. There have been many examples of very diverse societies in history, many accompanied by flourishing arts and culture (16th century Holland ‘ de gouden eeuw’), but these all without exception reverted to monoculturalism.
This was often, but not always, at the same time as economic influence declined. As far as I can see, that’s what’s happening across Europe, the US, Canada etc at the moment.
Its so tantalizing. Before the unintended Cultural Revolution/War triggered by the Progressives via their botched State Equality laws, one might argue that the UK was on gradual course for a fairly successful multiculturalism. But two radical groups emerged since the 90s to toxify and shatter that hope. The first and worst are the entitled corrupt largely white entitled property rich political and legal metro Establishment. It is they who have – out of guilt and fear -weaponized communal politics by bowing the knee to the likes of BLM and propogating insulting tokenistic DEI extremism. The second smaller group are the Muslims who have failed to find strong moderate leaders to face down and quell the minority of hardline radical supremacists and anti assimilation instincts within. But setting them and the poverty prisons of South London which harm so many young black men aside, it is not right to downplay the incredible organic success of our Jewish, Hong Kong, Chinese, African & Carib and huge Indian and Polish immigrant groups. They have no need of the insulting patronizing insincere coercive racial politicking of the ruling Progressives. The fall of this 20 year identitarian New Order and its twisted equalitarian credo would remove the poison of damaging race politics from the UK. How tragic that both Labour and the Fake Tories are too cowardly to make this true defence of positive multiculturalism, too weak to bring about this vital change.
People tend to assume that class war is invariably a struggle between rich and poor. In fact it’s most often a conflict between the rich and the very poor on one hand, and the striving class on the other. Whenever there was a shortage of bread in the later days of Rome the patricians would employ agitators to fire up mobs against the shopkeepers.
The George Floyd riots are possibly the best modern example of this, but we’re seeing the same dynamic emerge everywhere in the West – most ominously as the children of the rich join forces with militant Islamists to attack the Jews.
A crazy confluence of forces for sure. For me, the newly entitled Establisment/Blob is the bigger worry. In its cold detachment from the people and naked pursuit of class self interest (propetocracy/golden pensions/wfh/Big State First), it is horribly familiar to the grey armies of the Kremlin and the ruling CCP in the Soviet Union. Unelected. Permanent. Bound in fearful groupthink to pursue coercive policies that punish ordinary disempowered people and now the separate enterprise sector operating outside the Party State.They are growing immune to any form of political pressure or mandate and drunk on their regulatory controlling mania. The cold eyed student BLM/Gaza protestors (and immoral Young Doctors) look very like the deranged Red Guards of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Troubling – but will it burn out as they grow up?? It the political Clerisy – the Nomenklatura of the Blob – & their collaborators in State Media and the Law who have secured a 20 year grip on power and the State Machine that should worry us. No election can banish them. Thats the whole point of the Blair/EU New Order we still live under.
So true!
I’m not sure I’d say 16th-century Holland was really that diverse. Wasn’t it overwhelmingly made up of Dutchmen, at least after the French-speaking southern provinces reverted back to Spanish control?
Of course, there have been other examples of diverse societies — although, significantly, the ones which managed to be successful long-term were usually autocracies of some kind, not democracies.
Yes that’s my point. Diverse (low trust/cohesion) societies (such as Empires) have historically been held together with autocratic power. I think it’s the way the USA is going (alternatively split up – in a more or less violent manner).
I live in Minneapolis, MN, USA. The US is roiled on the surface, and people can say some pretty terrible things to each other, but we are far more united than you think. I went to a Christmas light display last night, just as many Muslim people talking selfies as anyone else. I was in Los Angeles in early December. Way more diverse than the Midwest, and I just never get the feeling anywhere close to a tipping point that Americans will disintegrate for politics. Weekends are too fun. There is so much to do. Room for family, opportunity to create, there is just so damn much of everything here. And always the next hurricane or tornado to pick up after, help people, and the MAGA guys are usually the ones with the trucks. I just don’t see it.
I’m thinking long-term, centuries. I’m not really that interested in day to day ‘politics’, see it as downstream of social psychology, philosophy etc. You (in your post) seem a very upbeat person, perhaps that influences your views (or not). In its short life the US has been privileged to have been resource-rich, expanding, not threatened by powerful hostile neighbours, confident, founded on the basis of widely-agreed Enlightenment ideals etc. However things will change and that’s when we’ll see how well intellectual ideals (rather than instinctive loyalty) bind ppl together.
Muslims taking selfies is a sign of what?
One would hope they’re merely preserving the memory of a happy outing in the city, rather than conducting reconnaissance.
Whew, good to know everything is just dandy based on your insightful observations.
America now lacks a defining ideal that would hold us together.
We flourished under the inherited English ideals of fair play, the rule of law, the Protestant work ethic, and the primacy of the responsible individual, from our beginnings as an English colony. This ethos reached its zenith some years ago, and is now in noticable decline, but this is why American and British societies are still so similar.
We also to a great extent inherited the English naivete towards radically different societies and cultures, who don’t believe in those things at all. Like colonists striving to make all the world England, we didn’t understand that much of the world is clannish, dogmatic, hypocritical, and seemingly uninterested in equality before the law.
We therefore blithely allowed, for example, a huge community of Somalis to settle in Minnesota, which resulted in an avowed socialist and antisemite (Rep Ilhan Omar) sitting in our national legislature, with a militant Palestinian and a ditzy former bartender as her closest comrades. Many of their colleagues have similar views, which aren’t dissimilar from those of Carlos the Jackal. They attract high levels of media attention, are often endorsed by leading figures in the media and academia, and to a great extent direct the policies and priorities of the Democratic Party.
We also extended not merely legal equality, which is consistent with our values, but also considerable financial resources, which was foolish, to race hustlers, activists, and straight-up Marxists, who repaid us by “fundamentally transforming” our society. We are paying a heavy price for that, now.
And by dint of our enormous economy, we are a global hegemon, so we are now perhaps leading the world to a place of tribalism and strife.
But with luck, very hard work, and perhaps a bit more clear eyed awareness, we can possibly return to our founding ideals.
We will have to win back hearts and minds, somehow, from large groups of people who often seem to wish us ill. We will need to return to free market capitalism, and away from crony corporatism, so that our young people have the opportunities Americans traditionally had. Academia, education, and above all the core beliefs of our elites will have to change.
Perhaps the gruesome atrocities of October 7th may change some opinions, as well as the dismal state of our post-Covid consumer economy. The obvious bungling of our current presidential administration, and the appallingly incompetent governance of our largest cities, may do the same.
Maybe in the countryside. I was really thinking of Amsterdam which attracted people from all over. But eventually the population couldn’t tolerate that level of churn and it all reversed again.
In 2022 GDP per head in China with 1.4 billion people was – US$ 12,720. And they seem to be quite relaxed about that situation. I’ve lived in one of the poorer parts of the country for many years.
(But maybe there’s some worry about the property market).
So let’s look at the comparisons:
In 2022 the UK’s GDP per head was in US$45,544,
The USA figure was $76,399,
But while the UK and US people seem to be up in arms about how they have been deprived of their incomes, those in the developing world (of which China is one),seem to be quite content with their progress. (my observation)
Is anyone here proposing anything other than in the very best of circumstances, a global policy of increasing the per head increase in GBT, and of personal income.for those who, given the above discrepancies, feel they’ve somewhat missed out, but are looking for a better future?
The difference is that the median US/UK wage has stagnated for the last 40 years, while the median wage in China has increased ten-fold in that period.
Globalization massively benefited workers in poor countries and capital owners in rich countries, at the expense of workers in rich countries. It’s exactly what economic theory would predict.
If people in developing countries are so content with the slow pace of their economic growth, then why does it seem the whole developing world is storming the Southern US border and the prosperous European countries and GB?
Jon Barrow, you write:
“multi-cultural (and probably multi-ethnic) states are primed for civil conflict/war (especially when things start going badly, which for a few reasons hasn’t happened to the US yet)”.
So what are you proposing, a global apartheid system that so miserably failed in South Africa, in order to ‘avoid civil conflict /war?
Other than a few isolated cases, maybe 10 in the USA since 1965, where there’s access to lethal fire arms, and a few in Europe, including the UK, the world has progressed in amazing racial harmony.
And from the 2021, most recent UK census:
‘White and Black Caribbean’ people remained the largest ‘Mixed’ population group – 513,042 people identified as such, up 20% from the 2011 Census. But other Mixed groups saw faster growth. The number of people identifying as ‘White and Asian’ rose 43% to 488,225; ‘White and Black African’ rose 50% to 249,596. ‘Other Mixed or Multiple Ethnic Groups’ showed the fastest growth: up 61% to 467,113. This underlines that England and Wales’ mixed population is becoming increasingly diverse.
Mixed or Multiple ethnic groups population breakdown, 2011 and 2021, England and Wales.
Agree that as we Americans used to consider the US to be a ‘melting pot’ where, after initially living in separate neighborhoods and establishing separate churches, Germans, Irish, Hungarians, etc. soon found themselves speaking the same language and rooting for the same sports teams. Moreover they strongly desired to adopt an American lifestyle. Koreans, Chinese, and Vietnamese have followed the same pattern.
Recent immigrants have behaved somewhat differently. Most importantly, they have come in very large numbers, largely illegally, and live in homogeneous ghettos. The illegality makes the separateness a survival necessity. That is one very good reason to severely limit illegal immigration.
Making it all legal would merely invite so many immigrants – as we have seen since 2021 – to overwhelm all support services. Even very large, self-righteous, virtue-signalling sanctuary cities like NYC, Chicago, Denver, San Francisco, etc are straining under the torrent of people to digest. It cannot be done at the scale it is happening now.
Yes.
The joke is that all this new racial consciousness will disappear into irrelevance within a generation. There’s so much more inter-marriage every year and so many more people who simply don’t care. I can’t imagine anyone I know objecting to the ethnicity of their children’s mates, which was a common worry when I was a kid.
It’s wonderful to watch; the fruition of a dream we almost gave up on. How cool is that?!
I don’t think the disappearance of thousand year old nationalities/ethnic groups is something to celebrate. If one actually values real diversity (as opposed to just variations in skin color) one would want the English to stay English, the French to stay French, and the Indians to stay Indian, to preserve those distinct cultures. A homogenized, globalized world sounds like a hellish dystopia to me.
Racial and cultural suicide is progress. You must know only leftists that don’t care about anything. You’ll be hunted by Muslims in your old age and kicked out of your own country if you are lucky enough to live.
You mean the eventual goal of a new homogeneity?
I mean I’m not in the habit of telling people who they should or shouldn’t have children with. “…a new homogeneity” is also none of my business since I won’t be around to see it. We each have very little effect on our own worlds; the world(s) of the future are beyond our reach.
‘IT’S WONDERFUL TO WATCH’…so pardon me if I think your nonchalance is…untruthful.
I’m not proposing anything and honestly am not very interested in that kind of pontification – what I (or you) think should or shouldn’t happen means buzz all. More interested in likely outcomes, eg if humanity jettisons Western-led Enlightenment ideals and reverts to historical norms.
What point are you trying to make?
South Africa was the only functioning African country under Apatheid.
Definitely better working than now.
Try to apply world map of IQ to political and economic map and you will see why some countries work and others fail.
This theory works until it doesn’t. It works when you selectively pick your countries and periods, ignore egregious crime committed. It’s lazy thinking. Also I think it can function as a good litmus test to distinguish the old school racists from the new ones before the word started mean anyone who’s not leftist.
What I posted is not a theory and not lazy thinking, it is well proven fact.
Based on decades of tests and actual performance of various countries and cultures.
Just because woke left doesn’t want to even allow the discussion of real reasons for various problems in society does not change the facts.
Ah my bad, I was only assuming they must’ve found a statistically significant correlation based on certain (lazy) assumptions – didn’t realise this was an indisputable fact.
SA’s current government is wildly corrupt and incompetent. Unemployment is now over 50%, and murder rates are approaching those of Honduras or Afghanistan. Jobs in even very technical and essential sectors like civil engineering are withheld from whites. SA’s agricultural sector, and therefore their food supply, may soon be obliterated by “land reform.”
As unjust as apartheid was, it’s readily apparent that competence matters far more than skin color, and that political tribalism often leads to very poor outcomes.
You have the situation where the equality hire at Aviva boasts about the fact that any hire of a white male for a senior position has to be approved by her.
In effect this means few or none white males like me will be hired by Aviva for a senor role.
Leaving aside more often than not you will not be hiring the best person for the job, why should a white male like me keep his pension and insurance with a company that would not employ him.
I am moving my pension and insurance from Aviva at the earliest opportunity and I urge other white men to do likewise
I didn’t know that about Avia, thanks for informing me. My pension savings need a new home!!!
‘would not employ’, right?
I think I’m due about 15 pounds/month pension from Aviva, I’ll cash it in as soon as I can. Seen quotas at work in my previous employment, yes it’s a disaster. Makes everyone suspect why X person was hired/promoted then super-sensitive to X’s failings, also if it’s something complex/cerebral even say a 10 percent loss of competency can really stuff things up.
“why should a white male like me keep his pension and insurance with a company that would employ him”
I think you mean “wouldn’t”.
“I am moving my pension and insurance from Aviva at the earliest opportunity and I urge other white men to do likewise”
Quite right. And tell Aviva exactly why.
Isn’t that illegal in the UK?
It is only illegal if you discriminate against woman and ethnic minorities.
It is not illegal to discriminate against while men. Equality is a weasel word and code for the preferential treatment of some groups in relation to others
Loo at the decision of the Government to restrict the HPV vaccine to girls notwithstanding the risk to boys https://www.chrisnutting-oncology.co.uk/blog/hpv-vaccine-campaign-latest/
At this point, why would anyone take a vaccine the Gov’t recommends? Tell your sons and daughters not to sleep around instead.
And they would listen?!
Good for you! The more people who take positive action like you in protest against such egregious practices the better. These businesses (like Gilette, Budweiser, NatWest bank, etc.) need to fail and will only do so when mass action by disgusted customers hurts their share values and bottom lines.
I was appalled to read about the white female CEO of Aviva who’s policy it is not to hire white makes, and then only when she personally signs off such rare appointments. In the UK if a male CEO of a big (or any) enterprise had a policy (say) not to hire women (worse still, black women), he would be fired summarily, arraigned in court very swiftly on criminal charges and sued for massive costs and punitive damages in the civil courts. How can this female get away with such egregious actions, and why do we as a society tolerate such behaviour?
This may be true in a microcosm, but small homogeneous states however prosperous they may be, will be pray to large multiethnic empires in some guise. USA would be similar to Canada in population and influence today were it not for non-Anglo multiethnic immigration.
“ Can you cite one speck of hard evidence of the benefits of “diversity” that we have heard gushed about for years? Evidence of its harm can be seen — written in blood — from Iraq to India, from Serbia to Sudan, from Fiji to the Philippines. It is scary how easily so many people can be brainwashed by sheer repetition of a word.” – Thomas Sowell
How much stamina does the international left actually have? I’m guessing they’re starting to run out of virtue signaling fuel. We’re now onto the fourth year of Performance Theatre. Activists turning every crisis into self-righteous intersectional outrage will eventually lead to their their own identity group being targeted by the same Rebellion. Intersectional Post-Colonial Leftism sows the seeds of its own destruction.
People that understand Freedom will eventually beat these guys in the long term battle of ideas. Stay Strong ya’ll. Happy New Year everybody!
“People that understand Freedom will eventually beat these guys in the long term battle of ideas.”
Agreed. The question is how long is long term? My guess is the virtue signalers still have plenty of steam in the kettle.
Happy New Year to you too.
Do enough people still understand freedom? Moreover, are they willing to act on that understanding? In the US, we have a generation that is hostile to free speech, which is the underpinning of a free society. This month, many will pause and proclaim fealty to King’s life and words, conveniently ignoring the most salient part of his Dream speech.
The Soviet Union managed 69 years, so I think it’s a bit soon to be predicting the end of the current movement.
Fair…but after the Bolsheviks fully established control the Politburo was split between the Nationalist Vanguard like Stalin and the International perpetual revolutionaries like Trotsky.
We’re dealing with the latter strain which isn’t nearly as good at holding power. Perpetual revolutionaries are never content with power gains and are guaranteed to overstep. If “progressive transformation” stops it just becomes entrenched power…IE the Status Quo. There’s nothing Leftists hate more than being the Status Quo.
I don’t claim to know the timespan, I just don’t think the current ideology is sustainable. It will either get completely reversed or infiltrated and watered down by a more stable center.
I do worry that the left has so corrupted our education systems that the young don’t even have the tools they need to detect what utter bullcrap they’re being served.
You cannot discuss the philosophical underpinnings of our society with a generation that can’t comprehend the world outside their narrow race prism. A generation that can tear down a centuries old statue but can’t enforce its own immigration laws without being labeled racist, while those who want to resist this haven’t been taught how by the ideological education system Ms Harrington describes.
But…the economic reality may hit them in the face instead. Hopefully they don’t revert to that idiots refuge of blaming the Jews for their problems.
It’s a problem. But at the end of the day, the movement relies on the redistribution of public and private funds. A redistributionary movement will run into a wall if it can’t seize the moral high ground in terms of public opinion. They’re losing credibility rapidly which means funds start to dry up.
Superb Mary! I think your identification of a silent cohort of aware young white people deeply troubled by the extremist race theologies of the Progressive Party and ready to resist is very important. They are dealing most with the dreadful suffocating consequences of the reverse racist identitarian Progressive British state of the last 20 years. Want to get on social housing in London white couple? No. Over 50% are occupied by newly arrived immigrants (a fact the State has covered up for decades). Fed up of being branded a greater (Nazi) terrorist threat than Islamists by the State Militia? You are right to be. Aware of how the Muslim grooming gangs got away with sick crimes against poor white girls for decades because the local councils, State Militia and the BBC all turned their back for fear of being raycist? Yes you are. Appalled by the crude indoctrination of toxic CRT theology by dumb groupthunk academics and being branded unconsciously biased against your non white friends by the mendacious Harry & Megs? Yes you sure are. Sick of the virtue signalling Elect (State/BBC) telling you that the economic migrant young men collaborating with and funding people smuggling mafia at Dover are all Syrian mothers fleeing Assad?? Yes. For the last 10 years you have kept all this to yourself, rightly fearful of the Red Guard zealots who police social media, just becoming ever more astonished at the utter moral cowardice of our corrupt knee bending Establishment. But this Progressive mania is I think hitting a wall – they cannot keep a lid on such toxic hateful right think. 2024 will hopefully see the overdue payback as voters across Europe punish the EU and the enforced unmandated mass influx Pepsi multiculturalism our ghastly illberal Elites have constructed. Then perhaps the feeling of oppression may lift, kindling a desire for true freedom and liberty of thought. Resistance. Tragically the UK may fall behind this trend if it falls for a Red Guard 68 Labour Party who still believe devoutly in this demented ideological poison. It is their one and only real credo. Beware.
First essay of a new year, and what a blockbuster it is: yet punchier for being relatively concise. A blockbuster then, in terms of bringing together several deep strands of geopolitical cultural history and enticing an emergent theme from them.
I suspect MH (and Unherd) have been formulating this theme for some time (note the references to recent Unherd content) and the shift from ethnic integration to ethnic agency will likely have consequences which are both unpredictable and yet obvious.
So a dambuster too, and we’d all do well to learn to swim in the ensuing floodwaters.
Rooting for you Steve. Keep asking questions and learning. It’s cool watching people adapt their opinions when faced with new information. I know we don’t see eye to eye but I respect your approach. Have a good new years.
Thanks T, and that’s exactly how it should be.
All the best for 2024.
TB and SM exemplifying what I like most about Unherd comments. Hard to believe “agreeing to disagree”.was the default mode as recently as 15 years ago.
A cogent and well written essay.
However over the next 15 to 20 years the English will be a minority, the Money Tree will rot and wither, the justice system will collapse.
The comng storm, may be a more of a whimper than a tornado but the new landscape will be bleak for those with longer memories.
For a long time I puzzled over the ending of the film ‘If…’ Now I realise that even the most rabid of left-wingers actually longs for the adults to come back and restore order.
The English will be a minority, says you. Where? In England? And do you mean “white”?
40% of London residents are foreign born. Many immigrants live in insular ethnic ghettos. The rate of immigration far exceeds the rate at which assimilation into a larger monoculture operates. The English, yes, the Anglo-Saxons, the “white people,” are being replaced. The country has become unrecognizable. This squeamishness about talking frankly about race, demographics, history and culture has enabled this.
You probably don’t know what a woman is, either.
Just watched “If” again last week. I used to think Malcolm MacDowell’s character was justified in his rooftop shooting rampage: all those snotty upperclassmen and their oppressive rules, that humiliating caning, the clueless faculty – yeah, man, take ‘em all down.
Welp, here we are, 55 years later, and Gen Z can’t tell you what sex they are without tortured qualifiers, let alone identify Malcolm MacDowell.
Frankly, the adults in “If” should have been the ones wielding the guns.
Indeed, at the end it is the adults and the prefects wielding the guns and revelling in it. This was rather counter intuitive at the time.
“IF”…..What a splendid evocation of the ‘good old days’, the crack of the finest bamboo canes on unprotected buttocks, the muddy brutality of the games field, the incessant cold, the endless Latin chanting and worst of all compulsory Chapel every day, albeit in a magnificent Gothic edifice.
Sadly as the film was being made the sun was rapidly setting on that astonishing phenomenon, the British Empire. ‘Sic Gloria Transit Mundi’.*
(* So passes the glory of the World.)
Passes, “transit” is present tense. You need a bit more Latin chanting.
Well spotted! Thanks.
My slovenly mistake, which I shall now correct!
I haven’t thought about that movie in years. Saw it in a theater when it came out. That it was questionable than. Now I am tempted to agree with you.
An outstanding essay to start the New Year.
As an aside, while the US may still be the global hegemon as noted by the author, I do believe its days in that role are numbered. Even in 2023 the limits of its influence were clear when many countries quietly declined to follow its demand to economically isolate Russia. Indeed, the US’s attempt to railroad the rest of the world into sanctioning Russia have, in many ways, catalyzed the appearance of new alliances and what may be the emergence of a multipolar world.
So you support the dictator Putin’s invasion of the Ukraine democracy?
I don’t think that’s what he’s saying, but I also don’t think anyone is exchanging dollars for rubles anytime soon.
Democracy. Ha ha ha. Big Joke.
Yes democracy. How much does Putin pay you?
My goodness Liakoura! You really are uninformed. The people of Crimea and the Donbass voted democratically to leave the vile neo-n*zi regime in Kiev in 2014 and 2022 respectively. They voted to leave because of systematic discrimination and the banning of their native language and culture – not to mention the murder of over 10,000 of their civilians by the indiscriminate shelling of cities by Ukron*zi thugs between 2014 and 2022.
Check out the BBC archive for the period from 2014 to 2021 on the bands of neo-n*zi thugs in Ukraine. These same neo-n*zi thugs were then installed in power in Kiev by the US funded Maidan coup in 2014.
Funny how they all suddenly reappeared as freedom loving ‘democrats’ from February 2022.
That was fake referendums , as legitimate as the fake elections were Putin always wins.
The extreme right got less than 4% of the votes in the Ukrainian elections of 2014, after the maidan revolution that supposedly installed them. And then in 2019 Zelenskyy won over the incumbent running for reelection. You know, democratic transfer of power, the kind that russias system doesn’t allow. And no, Zelensky was not a neonazi either.
The shelling of cities in the Donbas didn’t begin until Russia occupied them in 2014.
But I guess you know that, there is no excuse not knowing this. You are just insincere.
“It’s the economy, stupid.”
There is no need to over complicate this topic. At the root of much noisy radicalism of all varieties is quiet economic desperation. In the UK perhaps 30% of the overall population – and over 50% of those under 30 – have seen stagnating or declining and increasingly insecure incomes since 2008. The causes include globalisation, automation and immigration. The result is excess supply of low skilled labour in the face of insufficient demand and thereby much misery.
In the US, the figures are even more extreme and the problem emerged earlier in the 1990s. The political consequences are obvious. The UK should aim to avoid them.
In the US, the main response so far has been protectionism i.e. partially reversing globalisation at the expense of China. This option is unattractive for the UK. Luddism is equally impractical. Consequently, the main response available is to limit immigration. A few regulatory initiatives might help at the margin.
The post war social contract was based on the overwhelming majority of the population enjoying average real income growth of 1-2% p.a. Life got steadily better if not every year at least every decade and generation. Restoring this basic precondition for political stability is essential and justifies slaughtering any sacred cows that get in the way.
The rest is largely irrelevant rhetoric.
What particular “sacred cows” do you have in mind, besides obviously the SNP, may I ask?
one sacred cow to go should be unrestricted immigration, which, given the numbers allowed in by the Tories, is essentially what the UK (and Canada under the Liberals) has allowed. There has to be a more practical way of growing the GDP.
It is partly a general proposition. People should accept that it is essential that real incomes need to start growing again and then accept whatever policies are logically required even if they seem startling. More specifically – in the UK context – since the1970s a desire to reduce immigration has been seen an indication of racism and therefore unacceptable in those who wish to be seen as liberal minded individuals of good standing. This taboo is fraying and needs to disappear. Likewise, if European or British judges get in the way then they need to overriden. But, as I said, the important point is to focus on the objective – rising real incomes for the bottom third of society. Whatever his other faults, Boris got it but the other Tories not so much.
Surely there are just TOO many of us, both old and young?
Besides with AI looming do we really need the ‘toiling masses’ of old?
I have also heard it rumoured that the Dole* or whatever it is now called is FAR to generous and just encourages the idle and the feckless. Then there are those many thousands of graduates with high expectations yet worthless degrees. Coupled to all this is the astonishingly high rate of almost punitive taxation.
Finally to be slightly brutal most of ‘angry and defrauded young’ still hanker for a life in the great cities, as dictated by their social media gurus! Thus life in say far off Oban is not perceived as that attractive by many of them.
(*Is it that wonderful Orwellian gobbledygook UC or Universal Credit perhaps?)
POSTED @1541. GMT and immediately despatched to the SIN BIN.
Reply posted 30 minutes ago, but in the interests of free speech immediately despatched to the SIN BIN.
So a 2hr Penalty! Then off to the SIN BIN again in 5 minutes! Whatever next?
references please
Excessive immigration is having an impact on black men’s wages in the USA which is why they are increasingly supporting Trump. Biden is deaf to this problem as to so many other issues as well. Even legal immigrants want illegal migration shut down because it’s affecting their job opportunities as well. My Ecuadorian-American housekeeper voted for Trump in both 2016 and 2020. Biden will not do well this year unless leftist-billionaires intervene in swing states and finance ‘ballot harvesting’ which they did in 2020.
Biden will WIN – even if no one votes for him!
And he’s in the freezer.
Fire her!
I’ll believe it when I see it. Hopeful predictions that never come to pass…
In the USA there is an UNDER supply of low skill labor. Good luck finding a nurse’s aid to take care of you in your old age, or someone to help clean the gutters.
Or help clean your house.
There isn’t.
À masterful essay to start the year. The way the problems are neatly blamed on America was clever.
Have had cause to ponder the issue of peace over Christmas (and not in the festive “peace on earth and mercy mild” kind of way) and have come to the conclusion that Gen Z’s seeming lust for conflict stems partly from their remove from wartime generations. Unlike Boomers and millennials, they didn’t grow up with fathers and grandfathers who had fought in the world war(s) and therefore maybe don’t feel the impetus to maintain peace like older generations do.
For how else can you “lose faith in peace” if you’ve got no feeling for or connection to the horror of war?
Maybe a mark of my own advancing age, but I look at these young people and shake my head. Let’s hope they grow up and calm down, as we have.
Moreover, the stance of “lose faith in peace” is only maintainable in situations of messy, dirty, human-on-human, low-cost, conflict. As in, when it’s still people fighting people. But not all conflicts are going to be like that, and a purely high-tech war doesn’t have this type of outcome. This type of high-tech war machinery is only available primarily the US, and to a much lesser extent to a small number of nations like China, France, UK, Israel. I would have said Russia as well, before the Russian reality became starkly apparent in Ukraine. But countries who have this type weaponry won’t expose it in proxy wars, because it’s meant for the situation where the nation in question comes under direct attack itself.
Leaving aside nuclear weapons (where the victims wouldn’t even be aware enough to experience fear that something is coming for them, they would exist one moment and the next moment they would be gone), things like unmanned bombers so high in the sky that victims wouldn’t even see what’s attacking them, or drones etc, means that against high-tech weapons, the opposite of peace is not war with honourable person to person fighting, but anonymous annihilation. The “Gen Z’s seeming lust for conflict” is because (a) they are young and don’t know very much, and (b) they have blurred the boundaries between reality and gaming fantasy in their heads because they spend so much of their lives online.
Years ago William Woollard on Tomorrow’s World told us about the USA spy satellites that were so all-seeing and sophisticated they could read the headlines of the newspaper you were reading at your table on the cafe terrace. But we know now that nice clean hands off computer game war isn’t effective ,it doesn’t work,not on it’s own. People HAVE to get involved. People have to be killed. There must be blood. But in USA those heroic fearsome wonderful American Moms have so far put a stop to vampire Biden even thinking about it – sending their sons. Would our UK lot dare try it? I reckon Boris might have the gall to try. Your country needs You – to die in some foreign field – for we don’t know what. Anymore than my Dads lot did in 1940,or my grandad in 1914.
Neither died in war I add,but my grandads brother,my great -uncle,his name is carved on the Theipval Memorial. There was a time about the early 1980s when,and I remember this being a subject of media discussion,when the very last WW1 people had died it would vanish from peoples memory but Ive noticed that,maybe due to the popularity of family history lots of people have rediscovered all those great uncles and now take their small children to remembrance day ceremonies to honour them. I expect they’ll ban family history now.
“Race consciousness” has no doubt been useful to the ruling classes within a crude “divide and conquer” framework and so they let it have its head. Even they can probably see, especially in light of recent events, that things might have got out of hand. Perhaps they really would like to rein things in and turn the clock back to the “colourblind” ethos that prevailed in the late 20th century. Whether that it even possible now remains to be seen.
Hate begets hate and there is plenty of blindness on the subject of race today. Blind to the fact that anti-racism is built on hate for white people, which will, in turn, fuel white peoples hate of black. There is nothing going to guarantee more, the return of abject racism, than anti-racism, no matter how righteous you think you are.
When you look around the world, though. To other cultures and countries, and see how they’re weary and untrusting of their neighbouring countries to the degree of blatant xenophobia, you come to realise that some hatred is probably earned from the learned history of man.
“Blind to the fact that anti-racism is built on hate for white people”
I don’t know how old you are, but the original, late 20th century “Boomer” wave of anti-racism really wasn’t like that. It really was about saying “hey, we look different but underneath we’re all just human” and trying to get along. Now maybe that was an unduly optimistic take on the human condition, and there was more to “racial essentialism” and other such dismal theories than we were prepared to admit. Nevertheless it was back by a broad consensus and there really was a time, say in the 90s, where that optimism seemed justified.
The irony is that the subsequent revival in racial essentialism came from the woke left, and not the right. As a result whites, having been tainted with the indelible original sin of whiteness, started to doubt the “hands around the world” narrative and started to revive essentialist ideas of their own, and the consensus started to crack.
As I said, this state of affairs may have suited the ruling elites for a while in a crude “divide and conquer” kind of way, However, even they noticed things were getting out of their control (Jews suddenly finding themselves on the wrong side of woke no doubt accelerated this) and will try to turn things back to the status quo ante. The only question is whether they will succeed or not.
When boomers had this attitude the white percentage was 85% I believe. As posted above even the 90’s had a 70+ rate. We are now at 60%.
There is a real reason for xenophobia.
I’m not disagreeing, but I doubt race per se will be the defining issue for Gen-Z for very long. At the moment, the tone of all the race-grift stuff is being set, not by zoomers, but by boomers, genx and millennials it seems to me. There are several issues all around the disfunctional zoomer generations, that severely limit the influence they can have, in 2024 or for many years yet.
The thing to note here is that the reason the zoomers are dysfunctional, is that they have been stiffed by their elders and (supposedly) betters. The boomer generations in their youth managed to wrench cultural control off of older generations exhausted from the aftermath of the War, because there was a background of rising prosperity, they had numbers and they were supremely confident – showing the middle finger to older generations and telling them to their face: “…Why don’t you all f-f-fade away… Don’t try to dig what we all s-s-s-say…”
The zoomers are simply smaller in numbers than previous generations (which matters), they are still very young and don’t (yet) know very much, are still poor and dependent, and significantly less social. The economic and cultural climate they are coming into is a hostile one.The mentality is also odd, and one I find difficult to understand – the urge to independence is muted, nor is there yet the rage I would expect from a generation thwarted from being able to strike out on their own – this bird is ambivalent about flying the coop. The boomers and genx, are still setting the tone, alongside increasing assertiveness from the millennials.
Against that, zoomers are definitely smart (although antisocial). I am hoping they will turn out to be original, especially in the arena of high arts. I don’t envy them, but they are the generation set to run the gauntlet of an AI driven world – if they manage to emerge onto the other side, I imagine their reward (or punishment) will be *literal* immortality.
I tell my 22yr old ‘zoomer’ that boomers like me were trying to do exactly what they are doing now, which is to exert what they think is their own control over (or ‘put their own stamp’ on) a society that is fundamentally reacting to influences that are out of their control. And that they will be on the receiving end of equally contemptuous disdain from their own kids (if they have any!) for their own mistakes and the outflow from those. Rampant immigration for one and perhaps more terrifyingly, the rise of AI?
There’s always DIGNITAS, it’s only about £5,000.
I suspect we’re close to getting our very own version of MAID soon. 8% of deaths in Quebec are now suicide …. and you can get it on the state. Who knew we would become this enlightened?
I’ve heard it’s offered you if you apply for a ramp for wheelchair access or suchlike. I wonder if you refuse it you get your state pension reduced or stopped or such. Maybe not yet.
Last year extended to include the mentally ill, and increasingly offered to the poor. Aged next I suspect…. one way of dealing with ageing demographics and doubtless supported by the “dispossessed” young in spirit of correcting intergenerational unfairness (even within families I have heard people expressing a wish for 85+ parents to shuffle off this mortal coil for the inheritance). Life appears increasingly cheap and transactional from my observations. Either that, or I am becoming a cynic
As my niece said to me”What do you need money for you’re going to die soon”.
The Canadian state now offers it for free.
Thank you. I shall bear that in mind when the time comes!
I have heard of a deathbed conversion to Catholicism, but a deathbed conversion to Canadianism, now that’s a new one on me.
Agreed, you’d have to be pretty desperate.
It’s not that easy. I wish it were.
Don’t include Gen X in that please. Everyone ignored us when policy was being made
“The progressive Left has mistakenly believed only they can (and are morally entitled to) play race cards”
Trouble is, they are mostly neither really progressive or Left. They are just selfishly pursuing their own interests and status, and / or afraid of being on the wrong side of the zeitgeist.
You certainly have a point, and I too believe that a lot of them are simply mindless followers engaging in virtue signalling for the purpose of being accepted, but many of them are indeed left of centre. It’s our mistake to conflate being progressive and being left, because they are not synonymous, although the Left wants us to believe that.
Birds of feather is an age-old truism for good reason. It’s not just racial and cultural. Go to a large gathering and people will naturally gravitate to their own sex and age cohort.
What the h*ll is wrong with that? Forcing people together who otherwise wouldn’t mingle of their own volition is the main cause of public strife.
But, of course, pretty much everything government does is deliberately toxic and harmful. 2024 is going to be a make or break year for the entire world.
What comes to mind is Obama’s policy to build low-income housing for blacks in white, upscale Westchester NY…it’s a policy that so stupid it boggles the mind. It’s like oil & water. Does he really think even the white liberal Jews of Scarsdale are going to invite black folks who would have formerly lived in inner city New York to their cocktail parties? Really? Do note that Obama himself lives in three multi-million dollar homes which are either isolated ( Martha’s Vineyard and Hawaii) or in an upscale neighborhood (Wash DC Kalorama area). Leaders like Obama are just charlatans.
“But we must all brace ourselves for the coming to political consciousness of a generation that no longer believes peace is in their interests.”
I think that’s wrong. I think they may see it as peace is not possible. But, it’s not necessarily about race. I thought the Owen Jones conversation with that young man was revealing. Jones, the old school multiculturalist imagining cool new restaurants and the young man who had a clearer understanding of the value of diversity for diversity’s sake. Left out of the conversation, as well as in Mary’s article, was the elephant in the room: Islam and more directly, Islamism. It cuts across racial lines (don’t tell a Bangladeshi she’s the same ‘race’ as a Saudi or tell a Syrian he’s the same ‘race’ as a Somalian, and on and on – it goes much deeper than skin color, obviously). If they happen to be Muslim, how they practice that religion and the cultural baggage that comes with it matters. I think Mary doesn’t give Gen Z enough credit, here. You don’t need to have more than one or two people beheaded or sent into hiding due to de-facto blasphemy laws to take notice, no matter your generation (or skin color). Not everyone is as messed up as we are, here in the US!
The 20th century was one of the most violent periods in human history. It began with both World Wars, continued with various bloody proxy wars across the third world and ended with the Chechen and Yugoslav wars in Europe. I don’t want to tempt fate by doubting that the 21st century can match it, but it isn’t exactly helpful to regard the past hundred years as some golden age of peace.
Most of the 20th century seems to have been an attempt to put Germany ‘back in its box’. It has obviously failed, so perhaps ‘third time lucky’?
If you study the occurrence of violent conflict throughout history, I don’t think one can really say the 20th century was any more violent than any other. The 20th century just happened to occur contemporaneously with significant technological advances in weaponry and our ability to inflict mass casualties, which necessarily amplified the violence.
Well that’s depressing. Sadly, I also think it’s correct.
“But as first America, then Europe, has set out to practise what America preached, the resulting diversification has shrunk the proportion of Western populations that believe in Western-style egalitarian universalism. And in the wake of this, it’s growing ever clearer that, wherever the culture that espouses race-neutrality loses its numerical super-majority, that ideology will begin giving ground to ethnic or religious in-group preference.”
This is one of those observations which, once you’ve read it, is exactly what you were trying to articulate but couldn’t quite frame. Another brilliant essay from Mary Harrington.
It’s hard to believe how completely ignored here is the old Soviet Union’s use of ethnic, nationalist, and racial division around the world to undermine US dominance. Its ongoing echoes in the once pro-Soviet or at least pro-socialism Left on campus and increasingly in NGO, non-profit, and even for-profit corporations is one reason this new racism is going strong. It’s poison fruit of a poison tree the USSR cultivated long ago.
When has race based ideology ever ended well? The new Jacobins are upon us.
Yes, they are, but let’s not forget how that ended: every revolution eventually eats its children. Unfortunately, we are caught in the midst of it.
One of your best yet. Very astute. We sowed. Now we reap
I’m old enough to have grown up in a middle-class US environment where anti-minority racism was common and embarrassing for me, and then go through middle life where that racism disappeared from sight while coinciding with improved, possibly illusory, racial harmony, now only to see our society lapse back to tribalism.
It’s depressing. I can’t imagine a scenario where we get back towards toward the goal of a color blind society.
Historians love to debate the importance of single individuals in determining the arc of history – our current race relations dilemma is instructive to this debate. The 1st election of Barrack Obama was the high mark in the quest for a color blind society and racial harmony. He could have took pride at his inauguration of being the first mixed-race President and thereafter ignored the topic. Instead he took the opposite approach. He did so because his primary identification was as a black person and he could see that his “in group” could never achieve “equity” in the markers of social advancement in a racism-free, free-market society.
Obama’s legacy will go down as a ‘missed opportunity’ and he will be designated one of the USA’s worst Presidents ever.
I’m UK and to be honest Obama never struck me as particularly black,or black at all really. Actually even his skin wasnt that dark brown/black whatever polite word one is supposed to use. He came across to me,in his body language and mannerisms and unconscious “vibes” as,what term do i use,I’llsay white but i don’t mean skin tone,I mean general lifestyle and culture,and that has got to be because his upbringing was totally in his mother’s white family and ive read that he adored his maternal grandfather who must have been the true Father Figure in his life. Im not calling him a coconut,dreadful slang term. I’m just saying he was promoted as something he wasn’t.
My impression is the reverse.Obama angered radical black groups by bending over backwards in not playing the race card.
He left that part to his husband.
It’s a charming thought, that the Gen-Z right have potentially equal clout to influence politics as they mature. But it’s clear the Gen-Z prog left will climb into the seats of power built for them by older wokes, and will have at their disposal all levers of power throughout all the institutions. There isn’t any equivalence at all. No, the future is a long period of left totalitarianism and decay in Western countries as others, such as China and the Umma, take over the global space.
An excellent article and one somewhat more comprehensive than many I read here. I also found some of it somewhat difficult to read. Nevertheless, you write:
“The recent announcement by Bradford University of a scholarship for white working-class males indicates the direction of travel,”…
But does it?
The failure of white working class males to succeed in the UK’s world class education system, that’s judged second only to the USA in both of the two major higher education international surveys – QS World University Rankings and The Times Higher Education World University Rankings, has I suggest far less to do with their ethnicity, (white working class), than their parent’s failure to insist that their ‘males’, and to a lesser extent their ‘females’ buckle down to three hours home work and studying, each night and every night six days a week for their entire secondary education.
And for Asian parents, of whom I know something, this procedure begins at primary school. Those parents know what educational success means to their children, their future lives and that of their parents.
I profoundly disagree with your assertion that it’s necessary to “buckle down” to three hours homework six nights a week. That’s fine if you want to produce adult automatons, arriving at university unable to think for themselves, but isn’t that part of the problem that’s been identified in the production line of graduates whose education fits them for nothing other than compliance and indoctrination?
An hour or two, maybe three nights a week is more than sufficient for anyone with half a brain to pass the necessary exams; any more than that is child cruelty, and adult misfits. If my parents had tried to get me to “buckle down” as you suggest, i’d have told them where to get off.
3000 years of Chinese imperial exams for the bureaucracy gave nerds a harem. Asian women descend from harem girls. This changed the preferences of asian women and gave a nerd tendency to their male children. The other way to economic success was to become a enuch and guard the nerd’s harem. It was natural selection in action. In Europe nerds because celebate Catholic monks!
Cheery article for the New Year.
What happens when those young white men realize that they’re either indigenous, or the founders of these Western nations?
Either we double down on colourblindness fast and hard, or we reassess the Hands Around the World approach altogether.
“there are plenty of young men and women still indifferent to or disgusted by the new race politics.”
No. The young’uns believe what they have been carefully taught. ‘Twas ever thus.
Our educated rulers, after coming to power two hundred years ago, have ruled by advocating for victims. First they were all for the working class. Then for helpless blacks. Now it’s LGBT and the Palestinians. But not TERFs!
Our job is to send this vile, divisive ruling class to somewhere, anywhere where the sun don’t shine.
For most of that time those compassionate and caring people were the majority population and if not wealthy,at least affluent or merely comfortable but able to dispense goodness and kindness from above as it were. White Saviour. Now most of the very rich are so rich they don’t have to care or worry about us knowing they don’t care. The affluent and even comfortable are having one of those families they once patronised with generosity and kindness LIVING NEXT DOOR and even though they are a beautiful family and lovely neighbours. …..they’ve got as good a car as you,theyve just come back from the Maldives. Just before Christmas Mr Ahmed brought you round a Xmas hamper from his flourishing store in town and you suddenly realized he was giving YOU charity,in a nice way,and well it suddenly didn’t feel right……..
This passage seems to encapsulate the main proposition:
“Thus, ironically, policies rooted in the belief that all human peoples are equally capable of harmonious coexistence has helped to impel the West’s transformation into a real-life multicultural society, which is to say one increasingly governed by the politics of ethnic in-group preference.”
Hmm… Perhaps we are entering a 1924 moment: The United States had encouraged mass–and largely controlled–immigration for decades. There were exceptions such as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 that put a hold on immigration from China for ten years. But, in 1924, the United States shut down virtually all immigration. It didn’t open it up again until 1965. In between the United States implemented things like the bracero program (guest worker program) of 1943. With “Okies” being plucked from the fields and orchards of California and packed off to Europe and the South Pacific, there was demand to let more Mexicans in to work during the harvest seasons.
The shut down of immigration in 1924 followed the virtual takeover of the major cities by ethnic blocs comprised of Italians, Irish (especially in Boston), Poles (Detroit), etc. The Sacco-Vanzetti trial illuminated concerns about importing a combustible “anarchism” from a restive Europe in the immediate aftermath of the Great War. There had been a lot of (largely ethnic) sorting going on in Europe–especially in the Balkans–before the War as Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires continued to disintegrate. That sorting did not slacken in the immediate post-war period. Throw in the rise of Bolshevism–celebrated in some quarters (as in Ernest Toller’s account in I Was a German) and condemned elsewhere–and Europe proved to be a dangerous place. The toll on Russians of the Russian Civil War, for example, for exceeded the toll of the Great War. Tough business, that post-war.
So, was Wilson’s “self-determination” an important influence, or was it really just language dressing up larger processes that had been swirling around for some time?
My theory is that in response to very mature multiculturalism (which has still failed to overcome the challenges of full integration of religious-ethnic cultures into mainstream liberal democracies), the Left has become solely cultural and successfully; at least in the West, entrenched as it is now in a parallel media culture separate to the old neoliberal centrists.
To an extent, the Internet-based Right has mirrored them, backed up against civil movement against racialist education and gender ideology in schools, notably.
The upshot is that any watered down (post-)structuralist school of academic theory (CRT and gender being the prime examples again) can be disseminated in this media culture using a standard set of print, TV and internet news platforms with corresponding transmission by the political parties whose post-economic objectives align precisely.
The UK Labour Party may reveals itself to be a prime example of this phenomenon in the coming election year, lacking the capacity to wield political economic power of their trend-setting cousins, the US Democrats.
Identitarianism is a very real pyschological phenomenon and mania. It is a virus created by the State and State laws…the Wuhan Lab engineered it by accident with its Victim/Oppressor Equality Acts. From there, it has entered the cultural bloodstream and has captured the weak minds at the BBC, academia and the bent legal profession. It is a chaotic derangement, feeding more off the terror of social ostracism and London/public sector groupthink than any cold Leninist political programme. But it is a very real poison – we will struggle to recover from the Remainiacs Big 20 Year Lie – that free movement and open borders brought only armies of brilliant doctors and City lawyers to our shores. The incredible unplanned 8 million plus population surge has seen a majority destined rather to feed off the welfare state (from their priority social housing), crippling our poor broken unprepared public services. Such unavoidable hard truths will bring this ideological arm of the Progressive/EU legacy into utter disgrace over the next 10 years. Ditto their other magical/irrational mania and coercive diktat on energy and the climate. What painful days lie ahead. The payback for their madness will be so very hard, communally, socially not just economically.
There are now at least two generations of multi ethnic UK voters who have shared the same schools ( and every other public facility )
The race card is not that effective in the UK for that very reason ( much to the chagrin of some ).
Immigration is an entirely separate matter but with also entirely seperate ( and complicated) consequences .
The two should not be joined ( though of course attempts will be made )
Gen Z is also our smallest generation in quite some time, and it’s a big drop off in sheer numbers (in the US) from Millennials to Zoomers. In other countries there’s not nearly as big a Millennial generation so it’s not as big a drop, but it still makes you wonder how much the Zoomers will actually elect as compared to their wider influence.
The Boomer generation has never put anyone or any principle ahead of its own financial well being and I don’t think they’re going to start now during retirement where the loss of every penny hurts. If limiting housing supply coupled with mass immigration is what is needed to keep house values rising, that will be the policy adopted. It would be nice to have a figure who could overrule the entrenched class and put the nation first, such as a King. Oh well.
I also must say I find the discussion on Enoch Powell fascinating. It used to be said his ideas were clearly mad. Now it’s said he was correct, but the effects he warned of should be welcomed instead. Ha!
Tommy Robinson is not even slightly a racist. He’s an islamophobe.
Is it a phobia to recognize when people tell you who they are? Is it a phobia to notice that one group is doing things no other segment of British society ever considered? These isms and phobias are hollow accusations designed to stop debate.
I don’t disagree. I should have put quote marks around the word.
Is it Islamaphobic to see, given Walter Marvell’s social housing figures, what’s happening in London and be angry enough to complain noisily about it?
As are most of the commentators on UnHerd, or so it would seem.
He’s not even an islamophobe. He’s an islamismophobe.
Islamophobia is a misnomer. A phobia is an irrational fear; fearing Islam and its adherents is not irrational.
EXACTLY!! Just ask Salmon Rushdie.
“Phobia” is defined as an irrational fear of something. Is concern about Islamist tendencies and actions in Europe/GB and the US really irrational?
No, it’s realistic.
Aren’t we all.
I’m happy to be Islamoprudent. Data suggests that a small minority of this group want to blow us up and knife us. As the daughter of 2 Irish immigrants to the UK, as a child I remember being fairly regularly stopped, or our plates checked, by the police. We understood why – sadly a minority’s terrorist intent made folk wary of the whole. Hard to spot individual malintent, but a pattern is more obvious. We all have different attitudes to rsik Iguess, but I’m not sure that labels one with a phobia. That just feels like left wing claptrap, much like transphobe. As a female I am extremely over that one too. Again, prudence suggests biological men in women’s spaces carries risk, and in female sport is simply unfair.
Unfortunately its not a small minority but a substantial one – possibly even a majority – if you count the ones who try to find historical or political justification (whataboutery). Or who simply fear the rage and wrath of the radicals in their “community”.
Its commonsense to fear political Islam – and all Islam is political – so not a phobia at all.
Cultural enrichment, innit? Get used to it. Migration and multiculturalism will dominate the political debate for the next century or until all our descendants are “multicultural.”
The population of Africa is set to continue to grow towards 2,500,000,000 by 2050 – as India’s approaches 1,700,000,000 – with half that population under 25 years old. Meanwhile Europe’s indigenous population ages and shrinks with all that implies.
The only way to “stem” this and create some sort of equilibrium is to: invest in Africa now, fund education, build infrastructure, create companies, generate jobs, and wealth – don’t leave this to the Chinese. They won’t do a good job.
All this, and much more, was done during the all-too-brief colonial period, which (for most) went from about 1890 to 1960.
It seems to have been conveniently forgotten but, by the early 1960’s, most African countries had higher GDP’s per capita than all but a few Asian countries, and certainly much higher than S.Korea.
Its all been squandered by incompetence, corruption and looting. No, lets leave it to China and let them take the blame for African failure.
While agreeing with Mary (as I usually do) I have to take exception with the description of my 20th century feelings on the matter as “Hands Around the World”. For me and many people I know, our ready acceptence of various cultures and ethnicities was always a more New York-style “So what! Who cares? What’s in it for me?!” The effect was the same, just minus the hand-holding.
Yes, indeed. The racialists that are so prevalent today were around in the 1990s, but no-one listened to them. They were a humorless bunch, so ready to take offense at everything that they were best avoided. I had no idea that their redundant views would become so popular twenty years later.
They have been around since at least the 1960’s, i.e. Malcom X, Louis Farrakhan, the Black Panthers, etc.
I don’t quite see what this has to do with my comment. “… ready acceptense of various cultures and ethnicities…” was our natural default attitude. We just weren’t going around hugging people.
Well that sounds f*#%ing horrible. If these pillocks are the best gen Z has to offer, I’m inclined to think the ageing population we’re supposed to get so ventilated about might be a blessing in disguise.
Is it impossible to congratulate Ms Harrington on this essay?
Thanks to Draconian censorship this is my THIRD attempt today.
This is perhaps because I think she may have scuppered her chances of a Damehood or even being ‘elevated’ to the House of Lords to join such illustrious Tory toadies as Charlotte Owen, Julian Fellowes or even wee Andrew Roberts.
I’ve recently been binging with great fascination on misery porn from MGTOW men showcasing sobbing lonely millennial women “hitting the wall” alongside 20 something men commenting proudly about (in)voluntarily adopting a single-life since they don’t think there are any women who’ll accept them the way they are, with an added topping of gen-Z girls boasting about their “alphabet dating” (mis-)adventures.
If the quoted numbers are to be trusted, we could be looking at up to 50% of women being involuntarily not-in-a-relationship or childless in the near future. It looks like many young men are already involuntarily celibate. If these are correct, then opening the chapter for gen-Z, this may be a pertinent topic to start talking about. I’ve not seen this on Unherd prominently at least. Culture is downstream of sexual politics after all.
The use of the term “Ethnic” is a grave error to understanding this issue. It is far too broad a term.
The most successful both economically and academically are Indians, Chinese and West African.
Whites come next.
Then other Asians , notably Pakistani,
Finally poor whites and Black folk of Caribbean origin. There is a huge attainment gap between Black Africans (top) and Black Caribbean extraction folk (near bottom). So the difference isnt due to race.
One notable difference is that Black African folk are better at stable families than Black Caribbean folk. Does that account for the attainment gap ?
Your quote “Innit “-the pseudo Jamaican patois isnt used by anyone other than Black Caribbeans.
Only those who are cherry-picked for immigration to the west, not in their own countries (except possibly Chinese), otherwise Nigeria, and West Africa generally, wouldn’t be the chaotic crime-ridden s***hole it is.
Not all West Africa. Countries like Senegal and Benin have, for example, lower homicide rates than UK.
As someone who has been to both countries I doubt it. Most African countries have no homicide data or very “incomplete” data.
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“one January 2024 Hollywood release is big-budget fantasy about African-American magicians tasked with keeping the dangerous, violent white majority quiescent, by making them feel comfortable.”
Irony or gaslighting as US crime statistics show that `African Americans’ make up a larger percentage of criminals (based on their percentage of the total population) than other races. They also make up a larger percentage of victims from the same group of criminals.
All societies are divided on some sort of lines however democracy seemed to thrive in the post war class system, as opposed to the bygone world of aristocratic privilege, where your class being largely determined by your birth. The post war class system, being far more fluid and socially mobile, allowed for shifting coalitions of political interests to be formed as individuals interests were no longer determined predominantly by communal interests, which in turn provides an environment for competing ideas to exist, the market place of ideas, which is required for a healthy democracy.
Once democratic coalitions become centred on immutable characteristics, such as race, this fluidity dries up and politics becomes a zero sum game of securing the biggest slice of the pie for your group. Whilst class based politics was far from as ideal as I’ve made out in this brief sketch and there is certainly an argument that the very fluidity that made it a success is also at the root of its down fall, undercutting the social stability that allowed it to emerge in the first place, it’s far preferable to the pseudo democratic racial settlements which can be found around the world, where votes or even representative quotas are divided on ethic lines.
This is the disturbing direction we are heading in. Could it be that case that functioning democracy was only a product the post war technological revolution, which drove the meritocratic social mobility which made democracy a viable system of government? As those conditions fade, swept away by their own market dynamics, society could easily regress to its more tribal instincts, to the detriment of democracy.
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So:
“It’s a dreary day in a provincial English town. A tracksuit-wearing teenage boy affecting an exaggerated version of the “Jafaican”, which has replaced Cockney as the capital’s working-class dialect.”
Really?
Well having been born in that part of East London where in my parent’s back garden I could hear the home crowd at Upton Park or to give it its correct name, the Boleyn ground, named after the long late Queen of England whose name graced the pub at the junction of the roads it was built on, cheer as the ‘Hammers’ scored their first goal.
Today at that junction is the statue of England’s greatest ever captain and leader of the players who won that world cup in 1966, Bobby Moore
And more importantly to the racists who inhabit this place, while there were no black players in the England World cup squad in 1966, by today, 2024, there are:
England men’s senior team squad members Bukayo Saka, Marcus Rashford, Raheem Sterling and coach Paul Nevin have been named on the Football Black List 2022, an initiative shining a light on the most influential Black people in British football.
Former England Women’s star Lianne Sanderson and FA Board members Deji Davies and Jobi McAnuff were also among those included.
The Football Black List was first founded back in 2008 by sports journalists Leon Mann and Rodney Hinds to highlight leaders working across all areas of the game from the Black community.
As America becomes less White, Whites will become more White.
It’s inevitable — and about time.
Why if I downvoted William Hickey did it not register, I wonder. It stayed at zero.
Isn’t this all down to our innate tribal instincts, which have hardly evolved since we were hunter-gatherers roaming the wide open spaces in small groups?
We still feel the need to identify with and (conform to the rules of) groups who look, sound and act exactly like us, whether they are ethnic, political religious groupings or even supporters of the same football team. The comfort of belonging to the tribe allows us to feel that we’re part of something bigger than our ‘self’ which often doesn’t amount to very much.
As long as there is a clear, homogenous majority within the tribe, stability can be maintained and outsiders accommodated and accepted if they abide by the tribal rules. What we are now seeing as a result of the policies of the last quarter century is that stability being threatened by the relative newcomers, who are aware that they are in the process of demographically overturning the majority status of the dominant group. The dominant group is naturally going to react in the face of that ever more visible threat.
Jaifaican has replaced cockney? Did you really start your analysis with such drivel? Given how far what you seem to be describing is from actual anti racist theory the logic would lead one to conclude that the phenomena you are noting is more the failure of any radical politics to make any real success and what we are left with are just all the various ways that capitalist recuperation, to use Debords term, has shored up any radical anti-racist demands into a weird sort of race market. I lack your cynicism regarding the young generation (and detest this abhorrent ordering system people have adopted) and I doubt your source material since you start with a contradictory fable of a provincial English town that’s also in the capital? This apparent conversation you patronisingly overheard was it whilst you were commuting to London from your cottage in the Cotswolds, are you thinking about a conversation you heard whilst in Hoxton feeling trendy? Do you even think of the lives of the kids who live in the ends you’ve come to colonise? You can point out your condescending lack of knowledge about the continuously developing nature of London slang or you can start to really understand what black lives matters means.
You’re delusional. As a Londoner I have witnessed Cockney, my ancestral tongue, go virtually extinct while so-called ‘Multicultural London English’ has become ubiquitous among nearly the entire non-privately educated under-30 population, white and black. We can only hope that awful dialect gets gentrified out of existence. The rest of your post is anti-white race baiting drivel.
I told my fiancé back 20+ years that it’s easy to be liberal when you’re the majority populace. In the 90’s whites were still a substantial majority in America; now we are at 60% and going down. Once parity is reached the struggle for power will intensify. Anyone with common sense could see where it would go.
This article appears to ignore the obvious counter argument to race based and sub-culture based movements, which is to assert that our common humanity is more important than racial and cultural differences, what Paul Simon referred to as the “myth of fingerprints” in his Graceland album. This is perhaps a mono-culture in itself, but it is worth defending against more divisive subcultures.
I love Mary but I have no idea what the following statement means.
The bipartisan rise in the salience of race reflects the changing priorities of an empire whose attitude to ethnic politics has always been ambivalent: the United States.
Anyone? I think the meaning of the words “salience” and “ambivalent” in that context are unclear. I really dislike this kind of thing in the brainy writing of brainy writers.
I know what you mean. Seems a bit like intellectual arrogance.
Bradford University of a scholarship for white working-class males …
Absolutely despicable to include race in such a calculation just as it is despicable for any favoritism of any race of any kind… God help us as these stupid kids are hell bent on repeating the mistakes of the past…
“Rivers of blood” is a deliberate misquotation which the media have established over decades of falsehood.
The average hack is too low IQ to have read Virgil.
Not an heartening article. But truth matters, and truth it is.
It is OK to be a white European straight biological male.
A propos Jafaican (and I just had to go to YouTube to hear it): One of my most fascinating experiences was to watch a dialog on YT, from a UK broadcast, where one person was talking in mainstream British English and the other in some of those dialects. They apparently perfectly understood each other, conversing freely, but I could understand only one of them, what the other guy was saying remained a complete mystery to me!
In my experience generation Z do not like race politics and are strongly anti immigration. For them even Reform are too liberal .
Article is good but I don’t understand the first two paragraphs. Surely the production of mixed race individuals is to be applauded? (yes, young men are awful). Of course to the racist ‘left’ mixed race means ‘black’. To them ‘race’ is quantised and the actually binary sex is not. But then they are insane.
I have never known a mixed-race person (even when 75% white) to identify as anything other than “black”, the more to wallow in racial resentment. How can that sort of divisiveness be a good thing for society?
For some reason this doesn’t usually apply to Eurasians (esp. caucasian and oriental blends). In my experience they don’t bear or hold grudges against white society, but just get along with life and usually do very well. So if we really need a mixed-race society then we need more of those.
It was the white ruling class that decided if someone had even a small amount of black blood that they were to be categorized as black.
That was a very long time ago, thus irrelevant. I live in the here and now, how about you..?
The past isn’t irrelevant to them and what’s it to ‘ya?
nothing to do with ruling class, Anthony is correct, most mixed race people identify and associate with black people.
In the US the black population is still living with the scourge of slavery. Not sure this applies to all the other diverse populations and one that I do not think the US will be able to overcome in the short and medium term.
That does NOT excuse Black Capital Police Lieutenant Michael Byrd shooting* and killing at point blank range one White female agitator, a Ms Ashli Babbitt during the Capitol disturbances of nearly two years ago.
Nor does it excuse the rioting and mayhem that ensued after the accidental killing of the Black habitual criminal known as George Floyd. At 6’3” and 16 stone a veritable ‘King Kong’ of a man, and ‘out of his head on drugs’.
I am amazed the White policemen Lieutenant Derek Chauvin just didn’t shoot him immediately as he so richly deserved.
(* With a Glock-19.)
Thank you for letting us know what kind of a person you really are.
As I recall you ‘legged’ it from dear ‘old Blighty’ back in the 1970s
From your shrew like behaviour that was obviously a terrible mistake! You are rapidly turning into a ‘Mary Whitehouse’ character, whom I am sure you will remember?
I’m flattered that you remember some of my personal history. There will be a test on the rest of it.
Have you watched the video of George Floyd’s demise ? Have you read the two autopsy reports including the toxicology ? (all available online).
You shouldn’t believe anything that is spoon fed to you by the MSM Charles.
Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd with a particularly clean and efficient method that is known to all of us who have done a modicum of martial arts – by compressing the major vessels in the neck, on one side only, for about 30 seconds. Very clean. No blood.
So where did the 8/9 minutes come from?
Besides I did NOT say he died of an overdose, but rather that he was “as high as a kite “ when arrested, as the video clearly shows.
Still? After 160 years? Oh, the poor traumatised little dears.
How many more centuries must knee-benders like you make excuses for their troublemaking and criminality?
My down vote didn’t register.
Good, knee-benders are virtue-signalling useful idiots who are poison to western civilisation and shouldn’t allowed a vote..!
These things become so embedded in the group psychosis, that there is no way out.
A Brit complaining about American Imperialism is the pot calling the kettle black. Although I will admit the Brits were definitely less ambivalent about race, they starved and slaughtered people as well reaping billions in the slave trade.
Ms. Harrington, America’s determination to destroy the British empire was an evangelical quest to end British tyranny, and calling for democracy, what you disdainfully call “national self-determination” usually meant replacing a British ruling elite. India wasn’t better off being ruled by British occupiers.
To be sure American Imperialism favored American corporations, but it is a reach to blame the current state of woke culture on American foreign policy. Just because the dots can connect doesn’t mean you have correctly connected the dots. The world is still a better place now that the British have been forced back into their sceptered isle.
India WAS better off under Empire…unless you are as contemptous of the legacy principles you (grubby tax dodging/ slave owning) colonies have enjoyed and prospered by as you are ignorant of the history of Empire; silly things like the rule of law and democracy…boring incidentals like not shoving live wives onto burning funeral pyres.
Maybe you should watch Gandhi again, or once.
For God’s sake you simpleton you don’t really believe anything from films or Hollywood do you?
Please tell me you don’t?
Idiots have no sense of humor.
Takes one simpleton to know one, does it not.
So that’s where you get your facts from? What an imbecile..!
I don’t think Indians today would agree with you, and really that’s the opinion that matters in the end.
Why not ask Ms Sayantani Gupta our renowned Indian commentator?
Older generations who actually have living memories of the Raj would agree, but there are very few now left to counter the malicious lies of recent Indian govts, esp this Modi one. The young generation are indoctrinated with neo-fascist Hindu nationalism which falsely alleges the British did “nothing” for India and owes “Bharat”, as they call it, £trillions in reparations. No doubt you also believe – or want to believe – the same grotesque lies?
Coming from a citizen of the nation that probably participated the greatest genocide in history that is a bit rich, as we say.
To remind you, in a myriad of genocidal smash and grab raids which ‘you’ have the barefaced cheek to call ‘Indian Wars’ you damned nearly exterminated the native population of North America.
As to your nation’s recent disgraceful antics in Iraq and Syria need I say more?
You obviously haven’t studied enough of your own history, so don’t lecture me on mine.
Really?
What an ignorant little toad you are, a proper old ‘Soldier Blue’ I’ll bet.
To think that God in his infinite wisdom has produced such an ignorant cretin such as your good self is ALMOST beyond belief.
So, Brits really can’t stand any criticism of their empire. I must have really hit a nerve. Your empire is in the dustbin of history where it belongs and you can’t bear it, so who is the proper old soldier. I think thou protests too much!
Charles, you a quite the nasty little man. Being verbally abusive says more about you than those you attack.
Haha! You ridiculous old hypocrite Clare. Back to the kitchen sink with you, you’ll be much happier there, I trust.
You do know that the British empire was first in abolishing slavery, and that as much as a third of the Royal Navy was focused on fighting slavery and the slave trade during much of the 19th century. While the US was genociding Native Americans.