The return of the loony Left Jason Arday has triggered a collapse of reason

Every so often, social groups fall prey to mass hysteria. The “choreomania” of 1518 saw several hundred Strasbourg peasants dance themselves to death. It lasted weeks, with victims convulsing rhythmically until they collapsed from exhaustion. The “dancing plague’s” real cause still divides historians — some posit stress as the catalyst, a superstitious populace ravaged by disease and privation, while others contend it was a reaction to mass poisoning. But, at the time, it was largely put down to demonic possession.

We like to think of ourselves as more rational today, immune to such disturbing outbreaks. But they still rear their heads — just in more subtle ways. And the Left — nominally the home of Enlightenment rationality and clear-headed secularism — is still just as susceptible to them. “Woke 1 was crazy”, we were lately told by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, perhaps once the very embodiment of “Woke 1”, at least in the realm of elected officialdom. It was an admission that a cultural-political tendency which had reached its apogee after the Covid lockdowns had perhaps gone too far. It turns out that attributing collective guilt to large groups of people actually wasn’t great; nor the neo-Catholic demand for confession and penance, albeit without absolution at the end.

But the implication that woke had gone away was always suspect. We now know it was merely hibernating, biding its time, as the Left’s reaction to the death of Jason Arday has shown. Rather than introspection, it’s instead doubled down — the universities made no mistakes, there was no malpractice, no sharp-elbowed self-promotion based on a cascade of absurd claims. Instead, we’re told, while the Cambridge hierarchy are unimpeachable, the attentions of accusers, black or white, can only be attributed to racism.

Jolyon Maughan, a former “tax-efficiency” specialist who has managed to furnish himself with unimpeachable Left-wing credentials as the founder of the Good Law Project, has launched accusatory broadsides against that infamous white-supremacist rag: The Guardian. His attack was based principally on a piece of detailed investigative work undertaken by a black journalist, and which found clear untruths in many of Arday’s claims. Jolyon attended a vigil in Trafalgar Square, in which he told a thousands-strong crowd that it was a day for white people “not to speak” — before speaking at length. The vigil was also attended by Labour and Green politicians, and Lord Woolley, a Cambridge don, who announced that Arday’s death was a “lynching” and a “public assassination”.

Prominent activists have posted hit-lists of journalists who have had the temerity to report or comment on the Arday case. And Left-wing commentators, who apparently indulged too readily in an onslaught that can be responsibly compared to Jim Crow violence, have been roundly harangued by followers until they film awkward mea culpas — all for describing a case of high-profile deception as a case of high-profile deception.

There is a mass delusionary kernel to all of this, this dubious post-mortem elevation of Arday to the status of a modern-day martyr. It is a troubling character arc being articulated, one of beatification and redemption through suicide, accompanied with either an explicit or implicit denial of the facts of the case. The professor had run marathons, his supporters insist, and Liverpool John Moores University had cleared him of plagiarism. This statement itself reveals that there is a sizeable number of performative liberals for whom the self-interested conclusions of a self-appointed committee gathered by Merseyside’s second-ranked university can supersede what they can see with their own eyes.

The historian Tom Holland has posited how socialism and Marxism were ideological descendents of the Christian faith, their mores grounded in New Testament teaching for the post-Darwinian age. For some, the rituals of Left politics no doubt serve the same human need for narrative and group identity as the Church once did. But if the old Left inherited a more ecumenical appeal and a genuine Christian teleology — with its new unionism; the building and co-operative societies; the mutualism and reciprocity extolling the brotherhood of man and an inexorable progress towards Heaven on Earth — then contemporary progressivism, in contrast, embodies the tradition of the Catholic Inquisition, or else the Puritan Witchfinder General.

In practice, this fatal intolerance appears from several strands. First is the New Left, all post-structural liberation politics, and incubated principally within the academy. This tendency doesn’t have much deep organic connection to practical struggles, though it does retain an old-guard Stalinist taste for excommunication. Indeed, while it celebrates “deconstruction” and the particular, and treats race, gender and cultural-discursive politics as primary sites of struggle, it is nevertheless marked by a predilection for ideological homogeneity. It is a politics which, when it finds everyday expression, is putatively based on “kindness”, with a commitment to two or possibly three types of “diversity” and “tolerance” — but blended with the revolutionary ferocity of Thirties Bolshevism. Treachery is to be found everywhere, expressed through the incorrect combination of words, or insufficient loyalty to the cause. Reasonable people cannot disagree. And, if you dare diverge from the gospel, your motives are automatically assumed nefarious.

But while the motives of dozens of journalists or millions of members of the chattering public can’t reasonably be impugned, wholesale, as sudden outbursts of bigotry, there’s also a perfectly legitimate discussion to be had about the nature of some of the coverage of Arday. Certainly, the feting of the self-described “hereditarian” Nathan Cofnas on the more oddball hard-Right fringes leaves a bitter taste. Yet there can be no debate over the reporting of facts based on investigation, nor on people commenting and passing fair judgement on them. This, in the end, was a classic tale of ivory-tower eccentricity gone badly wrong, high-minded intellectualism found hollow once more.

But if much of the British academy has imported a strident postmodernism from Europe — and, by extension, critical race theory and social-justice campus culture from across the Atlantic — then it has only done so under pressure from large sections of its own student body: itself raised on a diet of Anglophone wokeism. The UK, to put it differently, may be experiencing a homegrown George Floyd moment, which began with a black man being killed by police in Minneapolis, and ended with deadly riots and a vast, globalised racial reckoning that set the boundaries of the contemporary culture wars across America and beyond. In the US, the institutions were subject to ritual purge, their practices “deconstructed”, “decolonised”, the online activists’ audit becoming the new arbiter of public standards.

Meanwhile, the once-ascendant radical millennial Left committed something like political self-immolation via slogans like “defund the police”. The manic reaction to Floyd’s death in Britain, which often played out as if US race relations could be transposed neatly to Nuneaton, revealed a graduate Left that nominally rejected American cultural imperialism, but was, in fact, trapped by the language of the campus and online activism. Today, of course, that special relationship is manifested in the comments of someone like Lord Woolley. Just as absurd is the bizarre spectacle of aging modernist authors publishing rambling tracts on X, accusing journalists like some pound-shop Zola.

It goes without saying that this is to misunderstand what’s happening here. There is obviously no equivalence between extrajudicial killing on the one hand, and exposing fraud on the other. What’s actually happening is a very typical Leftist meltdown, with breathless digital denunciation replacing actual praxis; an endless moral purification exercised as if from a position of strength. Locked from the corridors of power, the revolution turns inward, devouring its own children.

This swings against what, for a moment, seemed like a great moderation. While it felt as if post-woke might be a sort of new normal, that ship has now well and truly sailed. In the US, as ever Britain’s upstream cultural-political lodestar, Trump 2.0 had apparently started a “vibe shift” — with the Left, for its time, finally enjoying a moment for introspection on why its brand of unpopular populism had so utterly failed. That, in turn, was shadowed by a new wave of socialist Democrats, finding political success by renouncing their former views and pivoting towards humdrum cost-of-living issues. In Britain, too, sturdy Left critiques of the most egregious excesses of hyper-liberal identity politics were hitting the bestseller lists. The new prime minister’s brand of normie populism meanwhile attempts to chart a middle course between the opposed extremities of progressive overreach and reactionary ethnonationalism, potentially reconstructing a bifurcated Labour coalition.

But the Arday affair has shown that none of the Left’s neuroses have really gone away, and that there would, in the end, be no compromise. The graduate, activist radicals will not return to some prelapsarian past with a grounding in universalism, empiricism, or the practical representation of the labour interest. Instead, they will wallow and descend into a kind of collective madness, defined by petty internecine feud and driven by culture war ephemera.

While consensus reality, and majoritarian politics fragments, this Left seems compelled to push itself ever more forcefully into civil war. It’s apparently unable to comprehend that there is no viable political coalition to be built that doesn’t include people with views congruent or slightly to the Right of Aaron Bastani. The new social blocs that have coalesced are each defined by irrational hatred of the Other — less the “two great classes” of Marx’s Manifesto, divided by their economic interrelation — but rather a myriad of bewildering cultural-political formations: each living in their own ethical universes, and whipping themselves into separate forms of mass hysteria. Like the Strasbourg peasants of 1518, the Left will yield to its delusions and dance itself to death, or at least to political irrelevance.

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