Truss currently has a 34-point lead on Sunak. While she did make her views known on culture war issues more emphatically than Sunak, she has not appeared to be the most hawkish on immigration. (It was Sunak, not Truss, who proposed cracking down on illegal immigration by detaining Channel migrants on cruise ships.)

And yet, as my new survey of 445 2019 Tory voters reveals, she has still emerged as the frontrunner among national populist voters.[1. Polls carried out on the Prolific platform, though weighted 50-50 on gender, are not representative samples, and this data leans towards somewhat better educated, younger, and more liberal/Remain voters than Tory supporters as a whole. However, the sample allows us to robustly look at how support for candidates differs between demographic and attitudinal groups.] Figure 1, below, shows how support for the leading contenders varies by respondents’ views on immigration. The pattern is clear and highly statistically significant: immigration sceptics back Truss, while those who are content with current numbers lean slightly towards Sunak.

It appears to be one of the principal issues differentiating between the two candidates’ support bases. Table 1, below, shows there is little to distinguish between them on race, gender, age, support for Boris Johnson and even education level. Instead, the most significant differences appear over issues rooted in the national populist attitudes underpinning support for Brexit: immigration and the belief that things in Britain were better in the past.

I also asked people to choose their top three issues. When these characteristics are placed in a statistical model, restrictionist immigration attitudes come out as by far the most important predictor of Truss support. Ranking culture wars a top issue is also significantly associated with Truss support, as is being retired/at home. Warmth for Boris is next in importance, though just shy of statistical significance, with greater Boris support predicting a Sunak vote. That is, when you screen out national populist attitudes, those drawn to Boris for other reasons — perhaps his personality or economic liberalism — lean towards Sunak. Sunak, not Truss, is the Boris continuity candidate.

My next aim was to test which factors could yet influence the leadership race. The sample was randomly divided into three equal parts and people were shown separate paragraphs. Group A saw a paragraph constructed from a BBC story about the Bank of England warning of a deterioration in the UK’s economic outlook. Group B read an excerpt drawn from a report about how Truss tried to scrap hundreds of “woke” civil service posts. Group C read part of an article about Sunak wanting to stop the “woke nonsense” he claims is “permeating public life”.

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Among those who read the gloomy economic news, Truss barely led Sunak, 52-48. But those reading about Truss’s battle with wokeness backed her 65-35. Meanwhile, people who read about Sunak’s criticism of wokeness still backed Truss by a 60-40 margin. The only statistically-significant effect was for the bad economic news story, which benefited Sunak even if he still fell 4 points shy of Truss. This would suggest some version of “Project Fear”, or bad economic news more generally, could help Rishi.

However, not every voter was swayed by economic bad news. Figure 2, below, shows that economic gloom only affected individuals who did not list immigration as a top three concern (blue line). As shown at the left of the chart, reading about the Bank of England’s economic worries significantly shifted them towards Sunak and away from Truss. Indeed, notice the gap between the red (populist) and blue (economic conservative) lines for the leftmost points in the chart is 30 points (.75 vs .45 chance of backing Truss).

Figure 2 also reveals how national populist voters are more resistant to economic appeals: reading about economic headwinds made little impression on them. Nearly 8 in 10 of those concerned about immigration (red line) who read the bad economic news story still supported Truss, compared with little more than 4 in 10 of those not highly concerned about immigration (blue line) — a statistically significant difference. As in the EU referendum, cultural considerations trump economic worries for national populist voters, who typically backed Brexit out of a desire for reduced immigration. They are, as a result, more resistant to economic appeals.

What about the culture war? This is becoming a signature issue for Truss, and Figure 3, below, reveals why.

Comparing the one in four Tory voters who place the culture war in their top three (red line) with the three in four who do not (blue line) shows that reading about Truss’s efforts to tackle wokeness in the civil service significantly boosted her fortunes with the former group: from seven in 10 of them to nine in 10, a significant increase. Sunak’s speech railing against wokeness, by contrast, drew relatively little support from those concerned with the culture wars. At best, doing so may have helped him by a few points. It may be that cultural conservatives do not see him as credible on these issues in the same way as Truss or Badenoch.

This means that if Sunak is to stand a chance, he must consolidate support among fiscal and liberal Tories. This means he needs to foreground the economy and his role as the person who can steward the UK through the difficult headwinds to come. Truss, meanwhile, should burnish her culture war and immigration credentials to solidify her support among the national populist half of the Tory base. Indeed, the last thing she should be doing is issuing more U-turns on cultural questions, levelling up and immigration.

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Of course, issues aren’t everything. Roughly 45% of pro-immigration Tories back Truss and a third of anti-immigration Tories back Sunak. Personality and vision, as well as a perception of who is likely to win, still matter hugely.

But there are other factors, too. If Truss is chosen as the party’s next leader, and if she follows through on her cultural policy agenda, this is likely to play extremely well with the national populist voters who have disproportionately left the Tories. Regaining their support is key for future Conservative success. On the other hand, if she loses focus or fails to maintain a coherent policy agenda, she will pay a substantial price at the ballot box — whether in this leadership contest or, more likely, in the general election that follows.

The Great Replacement theory argues that an elite cabal, often Jewish, sometimes Leftist, seeks to “replace” Western whites with minority immigrants. Like any conspiracy theory, it has is a kernel of truth upon which the fantastic elements are grafted. Many mainstream and liberal writers have drawn attention to the ethnic transformation of the West. The term “replacement population” has a long history of use by demographers and geographers. In Western countries, whites are a smaller share of the population than they were in 1960, and I suspect this is why many French or Americans think replacement is real.

On the other hand, there is no evidence that Jews have had much influence over such changes, and while the Left has sometimes celebrated demographic change or sought to capitalise on it electorally, the claim that Leftists orchestrated this change is not credible. Immigration policy in the US has long been driven by short-termist rather than long-termist considerations. Indeed, the Democratic architects of the transformational Hart-Celler Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 claimed it would not alter the ethnic composition of the United States. There is no evidence they believed otherwise.

Do Tucker and Trump bear responsibility for Buffalo? From a social scientific standpoint, this account is plausible, but so are several others. Vivid images and emotions often lead us to snap judgments that are highly prone to confirmation bias. In order to surmount such biases, the scientific method asks us to step back from emotive data points, entertain competing theories, and open our own explanations up to falsification.

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Consider the following hypotheses on how media and political narratives might influence mass shootings like the one in Buffalo:

1. Tucker Carlson, Donald Trump and the Republicans are to blame.

Trump spoke of “fine people” among the Charlottesville rioters, and Carlson has said that “the Democratic Party is trying to replace the current electorate, the voters now casting ballots, with new people, more obedient voters from the Third World”. A number of others, including Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, have endorsed the theory that lax border enforcement is a deliberate Democratic policy to improve its electoral fortunes. These comments could have created the narrative mood music within which the shooter operated.

2. Michael Moore and other progressive pundits are guilty.

The 2020 US census showed that the absolute number of white people had declined for the first time in American history, a result that came mostly from a change in the census question. But mainstream papers failed to highlight this, Instead running sensationalist headlines such as: “Number of White people falls for first time”; “America’s White Population Shrank for the First Time”; or “Vast Stretches of America Are Shrinking. Almost All of Them Voted for Trump”.

The documentarian Michael Moore called the announcement of these census results “the best day ever in US history”, marking the end of “white supremacy”. “This is fabulous news”, added Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin. In a recent column for National Review, Rich Lowry cites a number of mainstream Left-wing voices arguing that liberal immigration policies would help the Democrats gain and hold power. Given that numerous psychological studies show that telling white Americans that they are going to become a minority makes them more conservative and populist, this progressive messaging could have created a cultural climate conducive to white anxiety.

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3. Progressive commentators who have talked up the threat of white supremacy and division indirectly motivated Gendron.

The shooter apparently scrawled the name Virginia Sorensen on his weapon, referring to a woman killed in a racially-motivated attack by a black man on a parade in Waukesha, Wisconsin. There has been a sharp rise in the use of terms such as “white supremacy” and “racism” in the American media since 2014-15, despite growing interracial marriage, decreasing prejudice, and a marked decline in police killings of African-Americans since the Sixties. Like white liberals, most black Americans believe a young black man is more likely to be killed by police than in a car accident, even though the latter is six- to ten-times more likely. Could progressive media outlets have heightened the racial threat perceptions of the Waukesha killer, sparking Gendron’s tit-for-tat terrorism?

4. Trump, Carlson, and GOP populists are reducing the level of white nationalist terrorism by providing an outlet for ethnocultural fears.

Though I haven’t seen this thesis mentioned anywhere, it has a solid basis in the expert literature. On this view, political and cultural outlets for grievances, if blocked, can force sentiment into highly insulated extremist bubbles, increasing the risk of violence. Conversely, when terrorists participate in politics, they tend to moderate, as happened with the IRA and Sinn Fein.

Jacob Ravndal, a leading terrorism scholar, has shown that far-Right terrorism is lower where support for national populist parties is higher, and vice-versa. As Ravndal notes, “a predominantly pro-immigration elite perceived as hostile towards people with anti-immigration concerns might be exploited by the extreme Right to mobilize new followers and… motivate terrorism and violence”. Gendron’s manifesto referenced far-Right underworld figures like Tarrant, but never cited mainstream Republican populists like Trump or pundits like Carlson. Gendron’s behaviour could have stemmed from an inability to openly discuss his anxieties, pushing him toward radicalisation.

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5. Progressive politicians and media are reducing the level of white nationalist violence that would otherwise occur.

According to this theory, by enforcing taboos on racism and white supremacy, and spotlighting the threat of white nationalism, progressives reduce the appeal and respectability of racist beliefs, shrinking the potential pool of recruits from which extremists can draw. Likewise, white nationalist ideas, if rendered taboo, will have a harder time reaching a wider audience. If we think of white nationalist terrorism as an interaction between mental illness and ideology, a smaller universe of ideologically-sympathetic people makes it less likely that any one of them will carry the fatal combination of psychological instability and ideological motivation.

6. All the ideological stuff is beside the point.

Nearly 2,000 people were killed in mass shootings in the US between 1999 and 2020: around 100 per year. Many of these shootings were carried out by mentally unstable individuals like Gendron, who threatened to kill himself and his classmates before settling on a racist attack. Tighter gun laws or better tracking of potentially dangerous mentally ill people could ultimately ensure that events like these become less frequent.

***

All these hypotheses are falsifiable. One way to do so would be to design a study in which half a survey sample read a statement by a conservative or progressive pundit and half see innocuous text. Then those taking the survey answer a set of questions pertaining to their views of minorities and attitudes toward violence. If the group which read the offending passage expresses more hostile attitudes, this is evidence for a real effect. Alternatively, we could collect large-scale data on measures of each thesis and see which best correlates with terrorist outcomes. What is pointless is for partisans to cherry pick examples and ride their favoured horses.

Even more inexcusable is the tendency to use one’s cherished theory to censor opposing political views. On the Left, this typically involves smearing those who advocate reducing immigration or having more open conversations about white identity by accusing them of being complicit in white nationalist violence. On the Right, this can entail unsubstantiated claims about the danger of conservative Islam or criticising Israel.

I’m not a free speech absolutist. There is a point at which a proven risk of serious violence is a legitimate reason to restrict speech. However, the onus is on the censor to provide rigorous and overwhelming evidence. Hot takes from political opponents should be dismissed until serious analysis is produced. As with Covid-19 or speeding restrictions, liberal societies must accept some loss of safety to enjoy their freedom.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But the blocs aren’t monolithic. Hairline cracks at the margin of each coalition foreshadow the defections that often decide elections.

That, at least, is the implication of a new report from the Pew Research Center. According to its findings, the Democrats are divided by cultural issues such as critical race theory — look at how many of them flocked to Glenn Youngkin in Virginia — while the GOP are split over economic questions. Indeed, it’s all too easy to forget that an important minority of Democratic voters is patriotic, worried about cancel culture, and wants border control and strong policing. Likewise, a significant bloc of Republican voters is sceptical of banks and large corporations and wants them to pay higher taxes.

These observations echo the analyses of David Shor, Michael Lind, Lee Drutman and others: that the median voter leans Left on the economy and Right on culture. The serious challenge for both parties, then, is whether they can resist influential factions in their respective parties: for the Democrats, that’s the AOC-Elizabeth Warren progressive caucus; for the Republicans, the Paul Ryan-Mitch McConnell corporate tax-cut wing.

Drawing on a large representative sample of Americans, Pew has developed a nine-cluster typology of voters, including four Republican and four Democratic categories, in addition to one in the middle. Clusters group people’s answers to a large number of questions by the degree to which their responses correlate. For example, if people who support Black Lives Matter tend to support higher immigration and higher taxes, then those three questions can be reduced to one measure. If, however, there is a group of people who support the first two but not the third policy, that becomes a separate cluster.

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Ignoring the less distinctive middle three clusters of the Pew report yields six groupings: three for each of the two main parties. For Republicans, ‘Faith and Flag Conservatives’ are on the Right of pretty much every question. ‘Committed Conservatives’ are more moderate, with a final category, ‘Populist Right’, who are conservative on immigration, progressivism and race, but moderate on economics and somewhat centrist on religion. ‘Faith and Flag Conservatives’ tend to be older, while ‘Populist Right’ voters are distinguished by lower levels of education and religiosity.

Among Democrats, the ‘Progressive Left’ are very Left-wing on essentially all issues, while the ‘Establishment Liberals’ are a more moderate group. ‘Democratic Mainstays’ are Left-wing on economics, but centrist on cultural issues such as immigration or cancel culture. The ‘Outsider Left’, meanwhile, is largely made up of voters who opted for Biden but are frustrated with the party and its leaders. Of these, the ‘Progressive Left’ make up just 12% of Democratic voters and are the whitest Democratic cluster, at 68%. They are also younger: the share of Progressive Leftists among Democrats under 30 is 18% compared to just 8% among the over 50s.

On the face of it, splitting the two parties into these groupings reveals where the two parties are most strongly united. Across the four Democratic clusters, for example, 75% or more generally support higher taxes for high earners and say big business earns too much profit, while 85% support Black Lives Matter. On the other hand, more than 80% of Republicans oppose BLM; a similar proportion believe that government assistance to the poor does more harm than good, creating welfare dependency. These are the issues which unify each party’s coalition.

More interesting, however, are the fissures that divide them, presenting opportunities for the other party to poach supporters and win the tight contests that mark the current electoral era. This is most clear with the ‘Populist Right’ Republicans and ‘Democratic Mainstay’ Democrats.

Figure 1, above, adapted from Pew’s report, illustrates the responses to two statements. The first highlights threats to free speech: “People being too easily offended by things others say is a major problem in the country today.” The second concerns hate speech: “People saying things that are very offensive to others is a major problem in the country today.”

Notice that all four Republican groups lie inside the red circle in the top left quadrant. This means that most Republicans, more than three-quarters of most GOP clusters, think there is a problem with free speech while only a minority think there is too much offensive speech.

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On the other hand, the blue circle includes clusters in both right-hand quadrants; they are less closely aligned. Indeed, despite what a number of progressive politicians would have you think, some 81% of the ‘Democratic Mainstay’ cluster believe people are too easily offended, aligning them with Republican opinion. Nor is this a small minority: this group makes up 28% of the Democratic coalition — and is older, less educated and relatively Black and Hispanic. It voted heavily for Biden in the primaries, but is much cooler toward candidates like Sanders or Warren.

It represents, therefore, an important target group for the Republicans. As Glenn Youngkin’s victory in Virginia revealed, culture war issues can act as an important wedge issue for the GOP, making it imperative for the Democrats to put distance between themselves and unpopular progressive causes. And the ‘Democratic Mainstay’ group diverges from the small ‘Progressive Left’ wing in more ways than one. On increasing legal immigration, 63% of Progressive Leftists agree, but only 28% of Democratic Mainstays do; 71% of the first group think American institutions are systematically biased and must be rebuilt, but only 38% of the latter agree.

Meanwhile, the Right is also riven with its own divisions. The biggest outlier is the ‘Populist Right’ cluster which makes up a sizeable 23% of Republican voters. Its members were more likely to say Trump was the best president in recent times rather than Reagan, whereas other Republican clusters either split or favoured Reagan. 87% of this relatively less educated and less religious group say “the economic system in this country unfairly favours powerful interests”, and more than half want higher taxes on people earning over $400,000 a year.

Crucially, this puts them at odds with most Republican voters — and in the company of most Democrats. Here, then, lies an opportunity for the Democrats: if they can peel away populist Right-wing voters turned off by country-club Republicanism, they can split the GOP and flip some Trump voters while uniting their own ranks.

Similarly, the relatively old and evangelical ‘Faith and Flag Conservatives’ cluster is also distinct in its religious Americanism. Among its members, 75% say the “Government should support religious values and beliefs”, whereas fewer than 30% of Republicans outside this cluster agree. On same-sex marriage and abortion this group is more than 20 points more socially conservative than other Republican groups.

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So if Republicans shift too far toward religious conservatism, they will open an opportunity for Democrats. But while Pew’s findings reveal that the Republicans are more fragmented than many would expect, it is still the case that the Democrats should be more concerned. For ultimately, Pew’s research reinforces the conclusions of More in Common’s recent Hidden Tribes report. Using data from 2018, Hidden Tribes identified a heavily white 8% ‘Progressive Activist’ segment of the population that was Left-wing on identity issues, unconcerned with free speech and highly active on social media. Pew’s report finds a similar segment: the 6% ‘Progressive Left’ group, who share the same elite, young and white social profile that David Shor and James Carville warn is too dominant among Democratic staffers.

In both surveys, a much larger group of moderate Left-wing voters — often non-white, older and less educated — reject the activists’ progressive politics. And since cultural issues in recent western elections appear to be more important in motivating voters to switch than economic questions, the activist Left could prove a distinct electoral liability. This was the story told by recent elections in Virginia, New Jersey, Wisconsin and Seattle. And as long as the Democrats fail to realise this, it’s only a matter of time before more of its support base is lured across the political aisle.

In complexity theory, the term ‘emergence’ is used to describe a complex, higher order that arises out of the seemingly uncoordinated behaviour of individuals. The principal threat to liberalism today is an emergent authoritarianism, not a top-down form of the kind we find in China or Turkey.

Consider the case of Kathleen Stock, a philosopher and feminist who defends the right of women to restrict access to some women-only spaces to those who are biologically female. Stock was last week forced to resign her position at the University of Sussex after being subjected to a campaign of harassment from trans activists and their fellow travellers. Her decision to quit was not preceded by a demand by her bosses to step aside. Instead, a number of her colleagues at Sussex, as well as students and administrators at the university, created the toxic environment that forced her out.

Having experienced a milder form of the same treatment for criticising the excesses of ‘anti-racist’ activism, I completely understand why she left. Even though the university belatedly stood up for Stock’s right to free speech, pressure from her peers — especially when combined with an activist-led disciplinary process — creates a repressive climate for those who dare to dissent.

This is, of course, not confined to the UK. Across the Anglosphere, cancellation campaigns are soaring: the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE)’s ‘Scholars under Fire’ database records a fivefold increase in attempts to terminate American academics between 2015 and 2020, with students often leading the charge. But what makes the news is just the tip of a vast iceberg when it comes to hostility and self-censorship.

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My own work shows that in North America and Britain, around three quarters of academics in the social sciences and humanities (SSH) are on the Left. Three-quarters of SSH faculty in Britain endorse political correctness because it protects minorities, while just a fifth oppose it for stifling free speech. In the struggle between what Teresa Bejan calls ‘equal speech’ and free speech, many come down in favour of the former.

Even though it’s likely that most academics have been horrified by Dr Stock’s treatment, they still have an instinctive sympathy for disadvantaged identity groups — including those she is alleged to have hurt. So when activists smear Dr Stock as a transphobe, they make her radioactive to an important share of colleagues and students, who pull away out of a combination of moral disapproval and fear of guilt-by-association. Even in anonymous surveys, I have found that barely 1 in 3 North American and British academics are comfortable sitting down to lunch with a female academic who supports banning trans women from women’s shelters.

Cass Sunstein writes that the more one’s workplace doubles as a social community, the stronger its ability to force dissenters to conform to sacred values. And it is this which partly explains why Dr Stock was so vulnerable in the first place. Collegiate interaction and collaboration are a staple of academia. ‘Being a good colleague’ is not just an informal norm; it is often part of an academic’s formal appraisal. Peers review our presentations and papers, as well as the applications for grants and promotion that can make or break our career. Fellow academics also populate most levels of university governance, from a departmental teaching coordinator to the faculty Senate.

It’s hardly surprising, then, that biases and taboos pervade the system. Since over 40% of American academics wouldn’t hire a Trump supporter and a third of their British counterparts wouldn’t hire someone who voted to leave the European Union, the unorthodox keep their views to themselves. 70% of American conservative SSH academics say they self-censor, as do a third of British academics overall. The situation is similar in other ideologically-slanted industries such as journalism or the arts  — if anything, academics, once you control for their ideology, are more pro-free speech than others.

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That, however, is not saying much. There can be little doubt the campuses remain ruled by what Sunstein terms ‘outrage entrepreneurs’, the secular preachers of today’s cultural socialism — an ideology which holds that cultural narratives and signifiers reproduce group inequality. These outrage entrepreneurs compete to spot signs of the devil (i.e. racism, transphobia, sexism) all around them. Often this takes the form of redefining innocuous words, such as ‘master bedroom’ or ‘spooky’, as racist, while competing to erase the memory of ‘problematic’ historical figures.

In this sense, it is far from a new phenomenon. Just like the fundamentalist preachers who drove the Great Awakenings of American Protestantism or the Azusa Street Revival in the early 20^th century, a new priesthood is powering cultural socialism’s Third Great Awokening.

And they are succeeding beyond the wildest imagination of illiberal leftists such as Herbert Marcuse or the censorious student radicals of the Sixties. FIRE’s huge survey of 37,000 American university students shows that 75% of those in Liberal Arts colleges believe that shouting down a speaker with whom they disagree is sometimes acceptable; 70% of all students think a professor who says something that offends them should be reported to the administration.

Given censorious attitudes like these are so pervasive, it seems unlikely that they will grow out of their illiberalism. Indeed, this seems almost certain given the findings of a recent academic paper on white liberal Americans and their approach to toleration. The General Social Survey has been asking the same questions since 1972 about who should have the right to publicly speak. While American ‘liberals’ remain more tolerant than conservatives overall, the trend toward rising toleration — in relation to platforming racist speakers — began to go into reverse around 2000. Since the turn of the millennium, toleration has been steadily dropping. As Sean Stevens notes, Smith College students in 2000 and 2016, filling out the same survey, became 20-30% less favourable to free speech.

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It is somewhat baffling, then, that classical liberals are optimistic about the future; they have taken to congratulating themselves lately because much of the mainstream media is largely onside, while new organisations such as the Academic Freedom Alliance or Free Speech Union are doing excellent work defending victims of cancel culture.

But these are more a palliative than a cure. The demographic momentum of decades of cultural socialist control over education shows no sign of waning. The treatment of Dr Stock surely demonstrates that things will get worse before they get better.

In order to turn the tide of emergent authoritarianism, the Government must step in when institutions violate the laws and values forged during the West’s period of expanding liberty. Legislation such as the UK’s Academic Freedom Bill is required to proactively uphold civil liberties and guard against political discrimination. Beyond this, governments must restructure school curricula to ensure that students learn as much about the struggle for liberty and the evils of utopianism as they do about the fight against prejudice.

But even this is not sufficient. Ultimately, emergent authoritarianism will continue to spawn new outgrowths until we recalibrate the taboos around race, sexuality and gender that have been widening for decades. Taboos activate our disgust reflex, leading to a black-and-white approach that is anti-intellectual, and must give way to a more nuanced and proportional form of social sanction of the kind we apply to those who mistreat people on the basis of other characteristics.

This means applying the principle of charity in interpreting people’s intentions, allowing for second chances before doling out the maximum penalty, and creating space for forgiveness. Until we achieve this, there will be plenty more Kathleen Stocks in the coming years.

The article stated that the results of last year’s census marked “the first time the absolute number of people who identify as White alone has shrunk since a census started being taken in 1790”. Similar refrains rang out across numerous other news outlets: “America’s white population set to shrink”; “America’s White Population Shrank for the First Time”; “Vast Stretches of America Are Shrinking. Almost All of Them Voted for Trump”.

There was jubilation among the Left. Michael Moore called the announcement “the best day ever in US history”. For cultural radicals such as he, the census marked the end of “white supremacy” and the start of a millennium of progressive dominance and racial equity. Similarly, Neocon-turned-Never-Trumper Jennifer Rubin gushed that “this is fabulous news — now we need to prevent minority White rule”.

Meanwhile, on the Right, Tucker Carlson, while condemning the Left’s gloating, went on to claim, without evidence, that the opioid crisis in white communities explained the decline. Likewise, the news will only confirm views held by the far-Right, whereby white nationalists have warned that white decline is being orchestrated by globalist elites and minorities, and which will lead to dire consequences for white people and their children.

However, despite the charged rhetoric doing the rounds, the number of people American society considers to be white has almost certainly increased since 2010. White America is not shrinking, and whites are not being racially supplanted. It’s a false narrative with serious political repercussions: study after study has found that reminding white Americans about their impending minority status shifts their policy attitudes in a conservative direction and increases support for Right-wing populism. So while this announcement may make the cultural Left feel good, it largely benefits the Trumpist Right.

But what do the actual findings indicate? Isn’t the census reporting the facts as they stand, that the number of white people in the country is declining? Well, it’s certainly true 5.1 million fewer non-Hispanic Americans ticked their race as “white alone” in 2020 compared to 2010. But to take this number out of context is to paint a misleading picture of social reality.

Any quantitative social science student knows that when you change the wording of a survey question, you can alter — often substantially — the pattern of responses. The 2010 census questionnaire offered single tick boxes for “white” and “black”. The 2020 version was changed so that people were not only asked to tick a box but also prompted to write their ethnic group in a text box below. Research from Pew shows that around 15% of black and white respondents did not write anything in the text box, or they wrote something that doesn’t make sense. Hispanic Americans were also told, for the first time, that Hispanic is not a race[1.  For this survey, Hispanic origins are not races”, was the wording alongside the What is your race? question.] when asked to define theirs. It is likely this prompted people to question their choice of which box to mark, opting for a multiple race or “other race” category instead. This would depress the number ticking the “white alone” box.

In addition to the change in census wording, the politicisation of white identity in the Trump era may also have led liberals to distance themselves from the category. The 2010s bore witness to a sharp rise in cultural progressivism. During this decade, the share of liberal Democratic white citizens, saying they felt “cold” towards white people increased by roughly 10%.

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There’s also the fact that many WASP Americans, such as Elizabeth Warren, have some Native American ancestry and some, such as Brad Pitt, believe they do even when such claims cannot be substantiated. Similarly, since 8 in 10 black Americans have white or other racial backgrounds in their family history, and 1 in 10 white southerners has African ancestry, the scope for expansion in the mixed or other race categories is potentially enormous.

So did these changes affect what people wrote on the 2020 census? Much of this depends on three things: whether their answers reflect a) their own identity, b) how they think others see them, or c) some judgement about the preponderance of pan-ethnic origins in their background.

Figure 1 (below) shows that the number of Americans ticking “white alone” as their race dropped by 19.3 million between 2010 and 2020, while the number ticking “white” alongside some other category increased by 23.6 million. Much of this shifting took place within the Hispanic population, but even among non-Hispanics, “white alone” declined by 5.1 million.

At the same time, the census recorded a rise of 24.8 million in the “two or more races” group and a jump of 28.1 million in “some other race”. The increase of 3.6 million in the population of those with mixed “American Indian and Alaska Native” and other racial background is also noteworthy given that this group numbered just 2.3 million in the 2010 census. Hardly any of this shift can be explained by aboriginal birth or death rates.

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Indeed, it's striking that most biracial white and Native Indian Americans are effectively considered white and view themselves as such. Meanwhile, the assimilation process means that with each generation, fewer descendants of Hispanic and Asian immigrants, especially those of mixed background, identify with their origins. It is, therefore, difficult to conceive that the number of Americans considered white is in decline.

Yet none of this means there is nothing happening with the nation’s ethnic demography. The balance between white births and deaths, taking into account the small flow of some 200,000 white immigrants a year, is nearly equal. The non-Hispanic white population, using the old question, was essentially flatlining between 2010 and 2019. White Americans have maintained a North European fertility pattern, with a total fertility rate between 1.5 and 2, since the Seventies.

Though relatively high for the developed world, this is still below the magic 2.1 replacement level. The “unmixed” white American population, along with white ethnic majorities in the rest of the developed world, will start to gradually decline in the decades ahead. But the big demographic story of the 2010s wasn’t about White Americans, but the big drop in Hispanic fertility, which is rapidly converging with the more stable white rate. So even while the share of “unmixed” whites will probably dip below 50% by 2050, the share who are considered socially white is likely to be a majority into the foreseeable future.

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Either way, to be more informative, the US census needs an update. Social scientists and pundits are interested in people’s subjective racial identity, but we also want to know about the balance of “objective” racial categories. The latter shapes people’s decisions about where to live, who to marry, who to vote for and can affect their life chances. One option might be to ask people how others perceive their race. In Northern Ireland, people’s growing tendency to state their religion as “none” or “not stated” led census takers in 2011 to add a question asking about the religion people were brought up in.

Ultimately, though, until the results of such a question show a real decline in those considered to be "white", the zeal to foreground the Great Replacement tells us more about ideological hopes and fears than any emerging social reality. One of the few seeking to dispel such illusions is leading American sociologist of ethnicity, Richard Alba. However, his important book The Great Demographic Illusion failed to garner reviews because it doesn’t fit the prevailing narrative. Instead, the media are attracted to demographic stories which heighten white threat perceptions, gratifying progressives while increasing support for Trumpism.

So while the definition of white may be blurring at the edges, the white American majority isn’t going anywhere.

But are its findings really evidence of widespread racism in the US? Hardly. In fact, you need only look at the behaviour of Americans — at the number of interracial marriages or police shootings of minorities, for example — to see that racism has almost never been so absent.

Take interracial marriages. In 1958, 94% of whites opposed it — yet just 10% do today. Similarly, the long-running General Social Survey found that in the 1970s nearly 60% of white Americans agreed with the statement that blacks shouldn’t “push themselves where they’re not wanted”. In 2002, that figure fell to 20% — and the question was discontinued.

It’s much the same story with police shootings of African-Americans. Despite the charged rhetoric of the past year, which culminated in calls for entire police forces to be disbanded, such shootings are 60-80% lower than they were in the 1960s.

So why is there such a misunderstanding between the American public and the reality of US race relations? The answer, I suspect, reflects a media-driven moral panic — one that is rooted in the racialisation of identity-obsessed progressive politics.

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Indeed, the “rise” of racism in America since 2014 is a social construct that reflects perception rather than daily life. This is largely a result of what Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman described in 1973 as the “availability heuristic” — the idea that vivid images rather than statistical reality tends to shape people’s perceptions. For instance, people routinely overestimate vivid phenomena, from crime to the share of Muslims in their country, because these stories make the news. Crime in America may have fallen every year before 2019 — but when asked about it by Gallup, most people in all but two years said crime had risen over the past year.

So too with race. In some ways, this is to be expected. Whenever events such as the 1992 Los Angeles riots or the killing of George Floyd make the news, people — shocked by what they are seeing — inevitably perceive race relations to be worse than they are. What is distinctive today, however, is the sustained determination of major progressive news outlets like the New York Times or CNN to centre racism as a dominant theme in American society.

As UnHerd has previously noted, citing ground-breaking research by Zach Goldberg of Georgia State University, the use of the term “racism” and similar terms in mainstream news outlets took off around 2015, (which can be seen here).

What caused this spike? Goldberg cites social media and the new partisan clickbait business model in online journalism as the catalysts. Then, during the campaign for the 2016 US election, Donald Trump energised the enterprise. As the New York Times‘ Ben Smith recounted last year: “Heated Twitter criticism helped to retire euphemisms like “racially charged. The big outlets have gradually, awkwardly, given ground, using “racist” and “lie” more freely, especially when describing Mr. Trump’s behaviour.” Certainly, many of these outlets swiftly retired all objectivity and standards in favour of this new partisan model.

One reason for this was the media’s desire to tap into a mythic script of a white officer killing a black suspect. Indeed, Goldberg’s study of the 2015-20 Washington Post police killings database reveals that black police shooting victims received nine times the media coverage of white victims. As Coleman Hughes has observed, when footage emerged in 2016 showing Tony Timpa, a white suspect, being suffocated as a Dallas officer placed his knee on his neck, the media looked the other way while the officers walked free.

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This media fixation on identity politics, alongside pre-existing misperceptions, ultimately skews the public’s sense of reality. The number of unarmed black men killed by police in the Washington Post’s own database in 2019 was between 13 and, using a very broad definition of “unarmed”, 27. Yet nearly half of “very liberal” Americans think the number is between 1,000 and 10,000. There were over twice as many unarmed whites killed by police as blacks but, as John McWhorter, author of the new book Woke Racism notes, this never makes the news because it doesn’t fit the narrative of white racial violence against African-Americans.

The narrative of police racism is exacerbated by party politics. A young black man is around ten times as likely to die in a car accident than from a police bullet, but only 10% of African-American Democrats and 20% white liberals get this question right — while more than 70% white Trump voters do. While there are some who are undecided, Figure 2 (below) shows that 95% of blacks and 70% of whites who believe “all white Republicans are racist” agree with the statement.

The impact of such warped perceptions cannot be overstated. But rather than trying to correct untruths, the American Left has leaned into these corrosive myths. Witness Elizabeth Warren tweeting that Michael Brown was murdered by police in Ferguson, despite the fact that the officer had been cleared by a federal grand jury of wrongdoing. Or, in the wake of the Chauvin verdict, Joe Biden reinforcing the irresponsible fiction that black people in America live in fear of their lives from police bullets:

We must do more on police violence, so they don’t have to wake up knowing that they can lose their very life in the course of just living their life. They don’t have to worry about whether their sons or daughters will come home after a grocery store run or just walking down the street or driving their car or playing in the park or just sleeping at home.

No doubt Biden was well-meaning, but he was, in effect, propagating a conspiracy; it was similar to telling an anti-vaxxer that their fears are well-placed and it is up to pharmaceutical companies to eliminate every last side effect before we can expect them to trust a jab.

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Of course, Black Americans have had a historically uneasy relationship with the police, but that is no excuse for the blend of romanticism and virtue-signalling that seems to have gripped today's progressives.

While Democratic politicians and the media rightly held Trump to account for violating liberal democratic norms, such as claiming the election was stolen or encouraging the Capitol rioters, they were strangely silent when Biden said he was "praying for the right verdict" in the Chauvin trial and Democratic Congresswoman Maxine Waters told a crowd in front of the courthouse to "get more confrontational" and let the judge "know that we mean business", Meanwhile, media interest in the record-setting $2 billion in damage caused by the riots following George Floyd's death — which struck a disproportionate number of minority-owned businesses — was minimal.

It was a disturbing reflection of the distorted, racialised reality they now inhabit. Just don't expect them to take responsibility for it.

Israel-Palestine is a distinctive region because it combines low infant mortality and high female education with high birth rates. As Paul Morland has pointed out, Jews and Arabs in the region have much higher birth rates than their “co-ethnics” outside it. For instance, Arab women in Jordan bear 2.69 children, while those in Palestine have 3.49; Jewish women in Israel average 3.17 children each, compared to 1.5 in the US and Britain.

Why is this? One explanation seems to be that birth rates are higher in regions of religious conflict — a hypothesis that also seems to map on to areas inside Israel-Palestine. For example, Arab women in relatively conflict-prone Gaza average 3.64 kids compared to 3.07 in the more peaceful West Bank. Jewish women in tense, religious Jerusalem average 4.27 compared to a national average of 3.17.

What’s particularly concerning, though, is how these high fertility rates further increase the risk of violence, producing a dangerous, combustible spiral. How so?

First of all, political demographers have long identified a relationship between population composition, politics and violence. Young men, due in part to testosterone, commit a vastly disproportionate share of murders in all societies. Indeed, statistical models show that the higher the share of a nation’s population made up of 15-30 year olds, the greater the risk of a violent conflict.

In Sons and World Power, Gunnar Heinsohn analysed this trend throughout history, arguing that surplus males have always played an important part in spurring conquest and aggression. When only the eldest son inherited land, those with the bad luck to be his siblings had to fend for themselves. And so, he explained, during periods when population growth exceeded peaceful economic opportunities, war, banditry and risk-taking became more attractive.

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That’s why the ranks of invaders, from the Vikings to Conquistadors, have disproportionately featured men such as Pedro de Alvarado, a younger son from a lesser-noble background who had no inheritance and thus decided, in 1510, to seek his fortune in the New World.

By contrast, as the population of the rich world ages, nations such as China, Russia and the United States will become increasingly unwilling to sacrifice their only sons on the battlefield, producing what Mark Haas has called “geriatric peace”. Indeed, Heinsohn argued that a major reason Lebanon did not descend into full-scale war in 2006, but did so in 1975, was age structure: by 2006, its fertility rate had plummeted and its average age had matured considerably compared to 1975.

Back in Israel, the issue of population has always commanded a central role in the nation’s psyche. First, Zionists worked hard to entice and sponsor European Jews to settle in the Holy Land, with the number of Jews swelling from 60,000 in 1918 to 600,000 in 1948. After the creation of Israel in 1948, waves of immigrants arrived, first from Displaced Persons camps in Europe, then from Morocco and, after 1989, from the former Soviet Union. Without immigration, as Paul Morland notes, there would be 250,000 Jews in Israel instead of 6 million.

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And these ethno-demographic considerations are woven into national policy; they shaped Israel’s border wall and helped convince Ariel Sharon to withdraw from Gaza in 2005, which contains just 1% of the territory of Israel-Palestine but over one million Palestinians.

At one time, Israeli planners became concerned that Jews would be steadily outnumbered because of the Arabs’ fertility advantage — a prospect celebrated by Palestinian leaders. In the immortal words of the PLO’s Yasser Arafat, “the womb of the Arab woman is my strongest weapon”. For American political scientist Monica Toft, the two sides were engaged in “wombfare” for control of territory and power.

But while demographers once thought that Palestinian fertility would diverge from the Jewish fertility rate, Palestinian women have been affected by the worldwide slide in Arab birth rates of the past few decades. Meanwhile, Figure 1 (below) shows that while Jewish fertility was trending downward from the 1960s to the mid-1990s, it has since defied the supposedly iron laws of demography, going into reverse to the point that the Jewish fertility rate has now overtaken the falling Palestinian one.

Yet the rise in Jewish fertility has come at a price. Secular Jews and those from moderate branches have historically made up Israel’s elite, but are losing population share due to their relatively low fertility. Instead, the Jewish fertility rise is largely due to the growth in highly religious Jews, especially the Haredim, or ultra-Orthodox. The latter have doubled their share of the adult Jewish population in Israel since 2000, and are extremely young, forming a third of Jewish first-graders — up from a few percentage points in 1960. Though they currently only make up 10% of the American and British diaspora, they are expected to form a majority of observant American and British Jews by 2050.

Within Israel, this demographic shift is already starting to cause tensions. Ultra-Orthodox Jewish men generally avoid full-time jobs and the military, and are instead encouraged to study the Torah at Yeshivas to fulfil the ideal of a “scholar society”. The Israeli Central Bank, as a result, fears that their growth will ultimately bankrupt the Israeli state.

Modern Orthodox Jews are, by contrast, successful and serve enthusiastically in the Israeli Defence Force (IDF). While the ultra-Orthodox are reluctant or pragmatic Zionists, the modern Orthodox are often passionately so, making up an increasing share of IDF officers and serving as shock troops of the Religious Zionist and Settler movements.

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But while ultra-Orthodox Jews rear between 6 and 7 children, modern Orthodox women have 3 or 4 — higher than the secular Jews, who have 2.2. This dynamic is having a number of consequences. First, the relatively poor ultra-Orthodox population is spilling out from concentrated areas such as Meah Shearim, near Jerusalem. A relatively inexpensive option is to move across the Green Line into East Jerusalem or to the Settlements in the occupied territories.

There are political repercussions, too. With their increased vote-share, the Ultra-Orthodox have shifted Israel in a more Right-wing and religious direction, generating increased support for Haredi and pro-Settler parties. This, in turn, makes it more difficult for the Government to trade occupied land — and the settlements of religious Jews which now stand on it — for peace.

Meanwhile, the still-healthy Palestinian fertility rate has resulted in a young and fast-growing population in the West Bank, where the median age is 22, and Gaza, where it is just 18. Indeed, Gaza is the 13^th fastest growing political unit in the world, with a population density of over 5,000 people per square kilometre.

As Figure 2 (above) shows, this, together with Jewish fertility, has resulted in a soaring population in Israel-Palestine. While it is far too crude to describe the region as a ticking time bomb, it’s equally difficult to see how this population boom can continue without resulting in increased pressure on land, as well as producing a surplus of young men willing to join militant groups.

How will this all end? In the long run, it seems possible that the ultra-Orthodox could bankrupt Israel, while Palestine may have to send its excess population to work abroad if Arab countries in the Persian Gulf once again become willing to accept large numbers of Palestinians. The region’s demographic struggle for power is heating up — and, despite yesterday’s ceasefire, it doesn’t look like it will be brought to an end anytime soon.

For the pro-Trump rioters who ransacked the Capitol this month, the bogus claim that the election was stolen remains at the heart of their belief system. But surely this isn’t the majority view among the 76 million Trump voters? Actually, it appears it is. Republican voters really believe their man won. Take, for example, a recent Data for Progress poll which offered respondents three choices: “I trust the election results and believe Biden should be inaugurated”, “I have some doubts about the election results, but believe Biden should be inaugurated”, and “I don’t believe Biden should be inaugurated”.

Of the 463 Republicans sampled, only 16% said Biden won cleanly, while 29% claimed he won despite some irregularities. Meanwhile, 49% replied that Biden should not be inaugurated. If we screen out the 6% who said that they didn’t know, this means that over half of Republicans think the election was stolen.

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When I conducted my own poll of almost 400 Trump supporters two days after the Capitol was stormed – using Prolific, an online survey platform – the results were much the same. I asked “Which statement comes closest to your view of what happened in the 2020 election?”. The answers, with emphasis added, were as follows:

• Trump lost to Biden fair and square: [17%]
• Trump almost certainly lost to Biden, but it would have been closer without rule violations that helped Biden: [13%]
• Trump probably lost to Biden, but it would have been closer without rule violations that helped Biden: [19%]
• Trump would have got more votes than Biden without the rule violations that helped Biden: [51%]

Even with my attempts to tease out a nuanced response, a majority of Trump voters echoed Trump’s conspiracy theory that the election was fraudulent. And surely it is a conspiracy theory. While none of us was there to count each ballot, I trust the US legal system, electoral process and the social science of election fraud more than hearsay. The same, however, cannot be said for Trump’s supporters, whose trust in the electoral process appears to have frayed. It’s a result, I suspect, of the wider social disconnect between voters and elites that both Michael Lind and Robert Putnam link to the demise of mass-membership associations such as unions and churches. They used to give people a rooted social connection to national political institutions, a phenomenon which since the 1960s has faded.

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Does this mean that Trump supporters are putty in his hands, devoted to a cult figure? Not necessarily. If they were, they would enthusiastically support him running for president in 2024. It would be a chance for their stabbed-in-the-back leader to redeem himself. But when I asked my Trump-voting sample, “What is your preferred vision for the Republican Party’s future?”, they were decidedly cool on Trump when compared to a hypothetical Trumpist politician with more respect for liberal democracy:

• Donald Trump runs again in 2024: [29%]
• A candidate who is more presidential, respectful and gets things done, while adopting Trump’s views on controlling immigration, nationalism and being willing to challenge the mainstream media, political correctness and elites: [55%]
• A candidate who is more presidential, respectful and gets things done, and avoids Trump’s views to focus on older Republican arguments like limited government, free markets, the family and resisting tyranny in the world: [16%]

All of which suggests that there is certainly room for a Republican candidate who can articulate the so-called “left-conservative” populist views espoused by anti-Trump intellectuals such as Andrew Sullivan and David Frum. Meanwhile, support for a candidate espousing the post-Reagan “fusionist” Republicanism of tax cuts, family values and promoting democracy garnered a paltry 16%.

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And so the hope for a return to the ideological status quo in American politics appears a vain one. As the below table — which compares the results of my two questions — reveals, even among those who accept that Biden won fair and square, a respectable Trumpist candidate beats the fusionist conservative 53-35. On the other side, moreover, even the die-hards who say that Trump won narrowly prefer a Trumpist over the man himself. In fact, the Trumpist always comes out on top.

Source: Prolific, January 8, 2020. N=393.

What this shows is that while a cultish devotion to Trump’s charismatic authority is important, it is secondary to the mainly cultural grievances — such as the policing of speech — which provided his 2016 election with an impetus. A skillful politician who fights back intelligently but unapologetically on these issues, while respecting democracy and procedural liberalism, has a serious chance of emerging as the next Republican presidential candidate. And though Josh Hawley, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and Tom Cotton will no doubt be leading figures jockeying for that mantle, we shouldn’t neglect the possibility that an outsider may ride into town once again.

“So much of the experience of watching returns,” remarked frustrated MSNBC anchor Chris Hayes to two leading pollsters, “was anchored by the polling going into it. And it was a bad night for polling—an enormous polling miss.”

Far from learning from the mistakes of 2016, the polling industry seemed to have got things worse. Whether conducted by private or public firms, at the national or local, presidential or senatorial, levels, polls were off by wide margins. The Five Thirty-Eight final poll of polls put Biden ahead by 8.4 points, but the actual difference in popular vote is likely to be closer to 3-4 points. In some close state races, the error was even greater.

Why did they get it so wrong? Pollsters typically receive low response rates to calls, which leads them to undercount key demographics. To get around this, they typically weight for key categories like race, education or gender. If they get too few Latinos or whites without degrees, they adjust their numbers to match the actual electorate.

But most attitudes vary far more within a group like university graduates, than between graduates and non-graduates. So even if you have the correct share of graduates and non-graduates, you might be selecting the more liberal-minded among them. For example, in the 2019 American National Election Study pilot survey, education level predicts less than 1% of the variation in whether a white person voted for Trump in 2016. By contrast, their feelings towards illegal immigrants on a 0-100 thermometer predicts over 30% of the variation. Moreover, immigration views pick out Trump from Clinton voters better within the university-educated white population than among high school-educated whites. Unless pollsters weight for attitudes and psychology – which is tricky because these positions can be caused by candidate support – they miss much of the action.

Looking at this election’s errors — which seems to have been concentrated among white college graduates — I wonder if political correctness lies at the heart of the problem.

Political correctness refers to the policing of speech so that it conforms to cultural taboos, especially the ones concerning race, gender and sexuality. Those who wield taboos gain rhetorical power, encouraging them to stretch the meaning of concepts such as racism to encompass non-racist actions such as voting for Donald Trump.

Across all racial groups, 80% of Americans say “political correctness is a problem in our country”. Only the small “Progressive Activist” 8% of the US population largely thinks it’s not. In practice, the burden of political correctness arguably falls most heavily on university-educated Republican supporters. Data from a recent Cato Institute survey shows that 88% of Trump-voting graduates compared to just 44% of Clinton-supporting graduates agreed that “The political climate these days prevents me from saying things I believe because others might find them offensive.”

Republican supporters with degrees tend to work in graduate-dominated environments, where organisations and peers are more likely to enforce norms of political correctness. As a result, it is highly-educated Republican supporters who are most shy about revealing their beliefs at work.

As figure 1 illustrates, 45% of Republicans with degrees, compared to 23% of Democrats with degrees, said they feared that their careers could be at risk if their views became known.

How does this affect polling? Republican pollster Frank Luntz told Emily Maitlis that Trump voters were over twice as likely as Biden voters — by a 19 to 9 margin — to conceal their intended vote from others. I would expect this ratio to be considerably higher among university graduates, which would, accordingly, skew predictions the most among graduates.

Pollsters claim to have overcome this problem by comparing telephone and online surveys and finding no difference. Since online surveys are anonymous, they reason, a ‘shy Trump’ effect should reveal itself by comparing these two methods, and they find none.

However, we also know that people who internalise social norms often conceal their views in online surveys. The psychologist George Herbert Mead referred to people’s ‘generalized other’, a kind of mental peer group we carry around in our heads that sits in judgement upon us is even if no one is actually watching. For instance, in a recent survey of North American academics, I found that just 23% of academics were willing to state they would discriminate against a Trump voter for a job, but the actual share when using a concealed technique called a ‘list experiment’ was 42%. Likewise, a 2010 study found that the share of white Americans willing to endorse zero immigration jumped from 39% to 60% when the question was concealed in a list, rather than asked openly.

There is also a problem of blowback among elite Republicans. Frank Luntz has also said that feedback from Trump-supporting respondents revealed considerable resentment towards pollsters, who were perceived as part of a media establishment out to misrepresent them. Indeed, studies show that using words like ‘racist’ to describe Trump or his policies tends to increase support for them among conservative respondents by provoking what is termed a ‘reactance’ effect. Knowing you are perceived as racist by elites for supporting Trump may make you less likely to answer a call from a survey firm you associate with that chastising elite.

Again, this perception is likely to be stronger among Trump-supporting graduates than Trump voters with lower education levels, who are less likely to circulate in politically-correct social environments. Research confirms that highly-educated white liberals have the most skewed perceptions of the actual views of Trump supporters, in part because their social circles tend to be politically homogeneous. The problem is worst among those most attentive to politics.

This may explain why the polls didn’t do badly in predicting the white non-graduate vote but failed miserably among white graduates. According to a Pew survey on October 9, Trump was leading Biden by 21 points among white non-graduates but trailing him by 26 points among white graduates. Likewise, a Politico/ABC poll on October 11 found that ‘Trump leads by 26 points among white voters without four-year college degrees, but Biden holds a 31-point lead with white college graduates.’

The exit polls, however, show that Trump ran even among white college graduates 49-49, and even had an edge among white female graduates of 50-49! This puts pre-election surveys out by a whopping 26-31 points among white graduates. By contrast, among whites without degrees, the actual tilt in the election was 64-35, a 29-point gap, which the polls basically got right.

Even with reasonable caveats about the accuracy of exit polls, the size of the polling error among white graduates is the 800-pound gorilla in the room, and is arguably linked to problems of concealment and reactance which loom largest among white graduate Trump voters. That’s why, in order to fix polling, we first need to fix political correctness.

The most important effects of speech policing are often indirect, shutting down important conversations across value divides that could improve policies and reach greater consensus on hot-button issues such as immigration, education or policing.

Like a referee in a football game, we need to call penalties when real racist or sexist infractions have been committed, but must stand firm against cries to those based on false accusations grounded in hair-trigger suspicion and conceptual stretching. Failing to do so silences voices that need to be heard, such as college-educated Trump voters, while breeding anti-elite resentment that demagogues exploit. If America cannot reform its regime of speech discipline, it has no hope of overcoming its yawning cultural divide.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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David Lammy's double standards

By Eric Kaufmann

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Are young people turning to the Right?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How might this be explained? Are Zoomers just more irreverent, reacting against their politically-correct older siblings? Or is it that Britain’s newest voters are simply too young to have been shaped by the Brexit shock? Whatever the explanation, in the immediate post-Brexit years the youngest voters were 40 points more liberal than the oldest. Today they are only 20 points more to the Left.

The rise of Right-wing populism in the West from 2014 onwards led some to argue that the future heralded a nationalist revolt against the multiculturalism of the post-1960s era. The staggering demise of mainstream Left parties in recent years is attributed to their pivot away from economic issues toward an embrace of globalisation and a concern with the claims of disadvantaged racial and sexual minorities, and other identity politics issues.

Against this is the theory, found both in conservative analyses like Ed West’s recent book Small Men on the Wrong Side of History, and liberal ones like Pippa Norris and Ron Inglehart’s Cultural Backlash, that young people are trending ever more Left. Less attached to tradition and more physically secure, they are embracing empathy and liberalising social change, and each new generation is more liberal than the last. Those who vote for anti-immigration parties like Ukip in Britain or the AfD in Germany tend to be older, and, as they die off, western societies will begin electing the Left once again.

The former theory suggests that Left parties need to shelve their wokeness and liberal immigration policies to avoid repelling disadvantaged whites. The latter counsels patience: history is on the Left’s side, and, with generational turnover, demography will carry it to victory. On this score, Biden’s strong poll numbers might be a harbinger of Left-liberal resurgence.

This certainly seemed to be the case in Britain, where, at the December 2019 election, the Tories won just 21% of the 18-24 age group but 67% of those 70 or above, so that age seemed to have replaced class as the primary cleavage of British politics. What seems to have occurred, starting slowly in the early 2000s, and gathering pace after 2010, very much fits his argument that newer generations, moulded in a progressive mediascape and education system, are set to enact “the biggest cultural shift in half a millennium”.

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Figure 1, which I have compiled from waves of the British Election Study (BES) going back to 1964, shows little difference in the voting patterns of those under 25 and over 65 up until 2001. However, beginning with the 2005 vote, a six-point gap opened up between young and old, steadily widening until it reached 40 points in 2017 and again 2019. In the last election, according to the BES, nearly eight in ten young people voted for Labour, the Liberal Democrats, Greens or Left-inclined regional nationalists.

Young people really seem to inhabit a different world to the old, and it is about culture. Most of the age gap doesn’t concern economic redistribution, where Millennials tend, if anything to lean toward individualism and away from redistribution. Rather it revolves around “culture wars” questions, notably immigration, attitudes to race, gender and sexuality, as well as Brexit. Millennials are simply less attuned to British traditions of nationhood and more influenced by the liberal cosmopolitan ethos of film, vloggers, pop music, advertisers and the education system.

Figure 1.

The story of the never-ending march of each generation toward liberalism is difficult to square, however, with Gen-Z’s more conservative tilt. If the youngest voters are now moving in a conservative direction, much of the empirical ground under the West-Norris liberalisation claim collapses.

In the earliest stages of a new trend, it is often difficult to acquire sufficient data to rule out statistical blips — but the growing conservatism of the youngest British voters can no longer be readily dismissed. YouGov maintains what is arguably the largest panel of survey respondents in the western world, its Profiles dataset containing the views of over 200,000 people.

This means that for every single age (apart from the very old), there are some 3,000-4,500 people — a much larger sample than one finds for all age groups in most opinion surveys that make the news. So we can’t dismiss trends at the youngest edge of the age graph as a statistical aberration.

One YouGov question asks “Some people talk about ‘Left’, ‘Right’ and ‘centre’ to describe parties and politicians. With this in mind, where would you place yourself on this scale?” The scale is a 7-point question from “very Left-wing” through to “very Right-wing”. The share of those who don’t know where to place themselves is about 30-40 percent between age 18 and 40, with no clear relationship to age. If we remove those in the centre — where it is also difficult to discern an age pattern — and amalgamate all shades of left and right into two categories, this yields the graph in figure 2. (Coda for those sticklers out there: if we don’t remove centrists or those who don’t know, but instead compile everything into an index of all data, the results remain the same.)

What is striking is that the views of today’s 18-year-olds are basically aligned with those of 40-year-olds. If young people were trending consistently more liberal over time, the biggest gap between the two lines should be at age 18, but instead it is between 22 to 26, where there is a 40-point gap between Left and Right.

Figure 2.

These trends seem to be ongoing. Profiles data (at least that which I have been able to see) begin in July 2019, and Figure 3 compares data from a year ago with data from now. There is always some variability in a sample, but if you look at the same question a year ago, what you find is that the most liberal age was 20. Now it is 21 or 22. This is consistent with the pattern of a more Left-wing Millennial generation moving through the electorate as it ages while a more conservative Zoomer generation takes its place.

Figure 3.

Weren’t 21-year-olds always more Left-wing than 18-year-olds? After all, the younger group haven’t attended university. Actually, no. The British Election Study allows us to go further back to see how things have changed since Brexit. In 2015, the BES age-voting series showed the classic West-Norris cohort liberalisation pattern of Left-identification and voting rising monotonically with age. Eighteen-year-olds were most Left-leaning. That is no longer true.

Why is this? Could it be that today’s 18-year-olds have yet to go through the liberalising crucible of university education, and when they do, they will be as liberal as today’s 22-year-olds? In a word, no. For one thing, the evidence that university has much effect on the political attitudes of students is pretty thin. For another, whether we look at men or women, students or non-students, in YouGov Profiles, the 18-year-olds seem more conservative than the 22-year-olds.

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Further evidence comes from the BES. Unlike Profiles, whose data I can’t access for multivariate analysis (even the little I have shown is only permitted due to me purchasing an expensive survey), the BES allows me to screen out the effect of university attendance, gender and even attitudes to immigration and redistribution. Its latest wave asks people who they voted for in 2015 and 2019, so that assuming a 22-year-old in the 2019 data was 18 at the time of the 2015 election, this allows us to compare voters of the same age during both contests.

BES is a smaller sample than Profiles so the data are bumpier, but the basic trends are the same, and what the numbers reveal is twofold. First, in 2019, with the exception of a bump at age 20 which could well be noise coming from a smaller sample, support for the Left peaks at age 24, with 18-year-olds considerably less likely to vote for a socialist or liberal party. By contrast, in 2015, the line — with bumps for smaller sample size — slopes downward Left-to-Right: the younger the voter, the greater their chance of voting for a Left party.

Figure 4.

So what explains the Zoomers’ relative conservatism? While I can’t test this systematically because I don’t have the Profiles dataset, I have been able to look at patterns in the figures, and I believe there are two leading explanations. The first, which I consider more likely, is the fading of the Brexit shock. The second, revolving around Zoomers’ hostility to political correctness, receives weaker support.

After Brexit, Millennial voters shifted strongly against the Conservatives. The typical 23-year-old in 2019 had, controlling for gender and education level, an 80% chance of saying they voted Labour, Lib Dem, Green or for a regional nationalist party. But the same voters, aged 19 in 2015, reported just a 68% chance of having voted for a Left party. So young people moved against the Tories between the 2015 and 2019 elections. On the other hand, the 18- and 19-year-old voters of 2019, just 15 and 16 at the time of the Brexit result, hadn’t reached political maturity. Having missed the anti-Tory bump of Brexit, their voting patterns recall those of the pre-Brexit Millennials.

Is there any evidence for a “Jordan Peterson effect” of Zoomers rejecting the Left-liberalism of their older siblings? This would truly be the death-knell for the “coming left majority” thesis. One US survey finds Gen-Z to be more politically polarised, and, especially among men, less politically correct — influenced by countercultural voices on social media rather than the mainstream media and educational institutions. On the other hand, Pew finds American Zoomers to resemble Millennials. This said, firm conclusions are tricky because some of these surveys sample children as young as 13, before they have reached political maturity.

While the fading Brexit shock seems to explain Zoomer’s reduced leftism, this may not be the whole story. For example, in the BES data, which admittedly suffers from a smaller sample, a typical 18-year-old in 2015 — before the Brexit shock — had a 73% chance of voting for a Left party, whereas an 18 year-old in 2019 had only a 67% chance of doing so. This indicates a move to the Right despite Brexit, and that something else might be going on.

Attitudes to immigration or the economy in Profiles don’t appear to differ much between Zoomers and Millennials, so this is unlikely to explain the conservative drift among youth. On the other hand, support for political correctness (net of opposition to it) is 5-10 points lower among 18- and 19 year-olds compared to those aged 22-29. This seems to be especially marked among 18-19 year-old men, who are 10-15 points more opposed to PC than in favour of it — even as Zoomer women are 30-40 points more in favour of it than against it. This gender divide may become a critical one for the politics of Gen-Z.

Political correctness is generally a bigger issue for young people compared to the old. But even so, it’s noteworthy that in Profiles, 20% of 18 and 19-year-olds, the highest of any age, say political correctness is a top issue. This compares to around 13-14% of those aged 22-29 who say it is important. Despite this, there is bumpiness across age groups and results shift somewhat over time, so I am not convinced this relationship is as strong as the Brexit one, and the data seem to fit the story of a Brexit shock better than that of an anti-PC backlash.

West’s argument, like Norris and Inglehart’s, is that younger generations are becoming ever more liberal and will usher in a revolutionary change as the electorate ages. That story is yet to be written, but even though Zoomers appear more Right-leaning than Millennials, we’ll need to see evidence of further change before we can dismiss West’s thesis.

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The Tories are facing a new revolt on the Right

By Matthew Goodwin

In the 2019 election 18- and 19-year-olds were about 10 points more likely to vote Conservative than those aged 22-30. There is a similar pattern for party identification, with 18-year-olds about ten points more likely to identify with the Conservatives than 22 year-olds. Nevertheless, the distance the Tories still need to travel among Zoomers is great.

Figure 5.

James Tilley, using data that tracked voters over a 30-year period, showed that people become 20 points more likely to vote Tory between the ages of 20 and 80. If this holds, today’s Zoomers will still be only 50% Right-leaning when they reach their ninth decade, and long before this the hyper-liberal Millennials will have worked their way through the electorate, causing elections to swing far to the Left before moving back toward the centre.

All told, Zoomer conservatism is currently not strong enough to alter the broad picture West paints. Only time will tell if younger members of Gen-Z drift even further Right, but it’s probably safer to assume otherwise. The Conservatives are going to have to do a lot more to reverse the leftward drift of the culture if they hope to remain competitive in a generation’s time. As things currently stand, they do appear on the wrong side of history.

Rich in description, Tribes begins with a DNA test landing on his doorstep. Driven to find out more about his pre-slavery roots, Lammy discovers he is part-Tuareg and journeys to Niger in search of his origins where his newfound co-ethnics wrap him in a long white turban and robe. Initiated into the Tuareg in a ceremony accompanied by the “infectious beat” of singing, drums and ululating, he feels this “immense sense of belonging” which changes his world.

“This has been one of the most special moments of my life,” he tells his hosts, and when in Parliament, he would now “stand much taller”. In the local capital, he recognises himself in the physical features of those around him.

Lammy’s quest for origins is the most interesting part of the book. He transports us to his ancestral community of Hopetown, Guyana. Here he recounts that “everyone in the village seems to be related to me in some way… the Thomsons, the Johnsons, the Semples and the Grants…” He speaks warmly of the luxuriant fauna and the local village festival, as well as his ancestors who helped establish the village in 1841.

It’s a powerful story of identity, so I was interested in how the book drew a connection between these rich life stories and those of England. Unfortunately, my admittedly academic outlook was repeatedly frustrated as the narrative chopped and changed between topics, rarely pursuing an argument for more than a few pages.

Yet when Lammy considers the ethnic English, his attraction to communities of shared ancestry takes a sharp dive. “An ethnic Englishness,” Lammy writes, “tied to toxic assumptions about group supremacy, has put down deep roots in recent years.”

His connection to the white English runs through Peterborough, where he attended a state boarding school and made local friends. The parents of one friend, Clive and Kathy, are depicted as generous, but critical of the new East European migration. While claiming to understand the feelings of insecurity induced by rapid immigration in Peterborough, Lammy admonishes those who don’t embrace the transition.

Some of the local white working class are “anxious about the changes society is undergoing and end up retreating into smaller groups,” yet “others are bursting with hope and generosity”. All that is needed is more opportunities for Clive and Kathy to mix with the “dozen or so hard-working Eastern European migrants crammed into the small family home next door” and all will be well.

The term ‘tribalism’ is often reserved for expressions of group feeling Lammy dislikes, notably English ethnicity and, more broadly, ethnic majority sentiment across the West. Minorities tend instead to have the more positive-sounding ‘identity’. Yet, as I point out in my book Whiteshift, attachment to in-group is not correlated with disliking out-groups in peaceful societies. Does someone’s attachment to being black make them anti-white? No, say decades of studies. The same holds the other way around, even as the book seems unable to separate English ethnicity from the unfalsifiable charge of superiority and domination.

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This said, Lammy does own up to being a member of various tribes, including the Labour one, and the book makes an important argument that competitive individualism has eroded older communal structures, paving the way for a less cohesive society. The solution, he argues, is a new localism, promoting mixing across groups, giving local authorities more money and power, as well as the mandate to set their own immigration policies.

The book is at its best when discussing Lammy’s autobiography and the identity questions faced by Afro-Caribbean Britons. There is no doubt that differing from the majority – on the grounds of race, sexuality, language proficiency, height or disability – makes life more complicated, and can give rise to discrimination and inequality. There has been considerable injustice on these fronts in the past, and indeed some persists today. However, whereas a systematic approach to this problem would place it in world-historical context, Lammy tends to lose his sense of proportion when discussing race in Britain and America, favouring — dare I say it — an ideologically tribalist approach.

It seems the book has two settings. The first, corresponding to Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky’s deliberative “System 2″ is the macro discussion of individualism, loneliness and alienation, how these promote tribalism, and how to address it. This part of the book, though overdetermined and insufficiently alive to counterarguments, is based on academic studies and a clear thesis.

On occasion, however, Lammy toggles to a fast-thinking “System 1”, bypassing the prefrontal cortex to enter a totalising binary mode in which there are the good folk who embrace diversity and the bad ethnic nationalists/fascists/racists. While he acknowledges some difference between the “fears and anxieties” of the Mail-reading classes and “more sinister groups like…UKIP”, there is precious little in the way of nuance when it comes to understanding his tribe’s ‘other’. Perhaps aware that there might just be a tension between donning the mantle of Healer while demonising the outgroup, he claims that he has sacrificed his tribalism by calling out anti-Semitism in his Labour Party.

The problem, of course, is that Lammy’s ideological tribe is not just Labour, but the cultural Left, or, more specifically, adherents of what African-American linguist John McWhorter terms the “religion of antiracism”.

This secular religion holds that an identity group’s place on the oppressor-victim totem pole determines when it should speak or “just listen”, and that group experience endows a member of an oppressed group with both unique empirical knowledge and a moral authority, neither of which may be questioned with representative data or analytic logic. To attempt do so is to profane the sacred. To question whether a comment like “America is a colourblind society” is racist, or whether “white fragility” is an unfalsifiable trope based on circular reasoning, marks one out for excommunication.

Lammy is quite open about the fact that when the religion kicks in, tribalism is fine: “There are times for cool, dispassionate and objective politics, but there are other occasions when it is important for politics to be about who you are, where you come from and where you belong.” Cue System 1. Back in System 2, we hear the reasonable argument that social media is helping to fuel division, anger and loneliness. Yet we also hear that the author has more followers than the daily circulation of the Times or Telegraph, using this platform to “call out opponents when I think they are wrong”.

For Lammy, when his identity – be it black British or the identity Left – is triggered, he feels entitled to dispense with System 2. The Windrush scandal, in which administrative sloppiness led to people resident for decades in the country being told to leave, was rightly criticised. So too was the Grenfell Tower disaster, in which building control failures were compounded by inept fire evacuation instructions. Theresa May’s campaign to crack down on illegal immigration was likewise bedevilled by bureaucratic errors in the Home Office.

The fact that these measures fell disproportionately — but far from completely — on black people and ethnic minorities led proponents of the religion of antiracism like Lammy to stick the ‘racist’ label on them. The same holds for Oxbridge, which Lammy berates for their low black student intake, his first port of call being to blame discrimination and racism.

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It’s one thing to deliver a strongly-worded accusation of racism if one has compared the public response to analogous situations in which the victims are predominantly white (Hillsborough, for instance). An honest attempt to rule out competing explanations would provide the scientific foundation for a claim of injustice. But to presume that because one possesses the right identity credentials, one’s outrage should cause others to fall to their knees in supplication is to overestimate the size of the progressive religion’s congregation. In fact, the main result of this priestly strategy is to fuel the polarisation Lammy rightly laments.

Some of the book’s policy aims, such as more money for local government, spaces for mixing across social lines, and facilities for people to interact face-to-face on the basis of equal status, are sound. The plea to overcome tribal division is welcome. However, the idea that Britain should not have a limit on the number of immigrants because businesses need workers, or because “the world is far wealthier, connected, and more reliant on the free movement of labour than in previous centuries” shows that Lammy is deaf to those outside the bubble. Calls for a global identity, Canadian-style multiculturalism and re-educating people to celebrate immigration come straight out of the New Labour playbook.

Writing off the views of older generations as rooted in chauvinism, Lammy essentially rests his hope in demography: baby-boomers dying off will allow cosmopolitan youth to bring forth the millennium. Like much of the Left, he has learned nothing from the rise of populism and urges ideological purity.

Lammy repeats the claim that British people uncritically celebrate Empire. Yet there is no evidence presented that this is what is being taught, or that Britons are unaware of Britain’s part in the Slave Trade. Yes, there is pride in Empire, but — as with Pakistani celebration of the Mughal Empire — this is more a reflection of general national sentiment than a moral statement.

And those like Oxford’s Nigel Biggar who seek to adjudicate the positives and negatives of Empire are under immense pressure to bend the evidence toward the latter. For Lammy to dismiss the view that transatlantic slavery was not distinct in world-historical terms – a claim made by the recent “1776’ group of African-American intellectuals – as a “glib attempt to deny a real injustice” is not an argument, but just a system 1 reaction.

Banging on about national sins more than already occurs in elite institutions can only feed division. Better to permit those who wish to pay more attention to sins to do so, others to foreground the positives, but all to agree on basic facts, basing claims in representative historical samples.

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A vision of Britain's polarised future

By Daniel Kalder

At first I imagined that the book would engage in more self-reflection about tribalism rather than criticising it for opponents while indulging in it for one’s own, yet at bottom the book fails to see the log in its own eye.

It caricatures Leave voters and ethnic English people attached to their identity as fearful, backward-looking authoritarians, yet part of nationhood and local identity includes historic ethnic composition. It is possible for people — including minorities — to be attached to the distinctive ethnic composition of England without this implying that non-whites are less English. Seeking to conserve a critical mass of distinctive characteristics, or slow their erosion, is not the same as excluding from membership. To use the charge of ‘exclusion’ as a stick to beat those who want slower ethnic change or more time for ethnic assimilation is to stoke the politics of division.

A critical reflection might have asked how the African-Caribbean residents of Hopetown, or of Guyana, should react if their town or country were to transition to majority Indian. It might have mused about Afro-Creole cultural and political hegemony in Guyana and other diverse Caribbean societies.

It might even have reflected on Lammy’s Bantu ancestors, who enslaved pygmies and conquered the San the way agriculturalists in North America conquered the hunter-gatherers there. Not because Lammy’s co-ethnics are worse, but because they have acted the same as whites in analogous situations.

Ultimately the book fails because it sidesteps the role of progressive tribalism in stoking cultural conflict and polarisation. There is an accommodation to be had, but not on these terms. 

David Lammy’s Tribes: How Our Need to Belong Can Make or Break Society, is published by Little, Brown, priced £20

The habit of mind I term “asymmetrical multiculturalism”, which combines white intellectuals’ hostility to their own group with a romantic celebration of minorities, began not in the 2010s, but in the years following the First World War. Likewise what we call wokeness is a sensibility rooted in a set of ideas I term “Left-modernism”, a hybrid ideology of liberal cosmopolitanism and cultural egalitarianism. This blend crystallised before the War, but spread within US high culture in response to nativist populism in America and nationalism in Europe.

Then, as now, ethno-demographic change had been the catalyst for a populist cultural nationalism. The prohibition of the selling of alcohol, per the 1920 Volstead Act, was motivated by the animus of the country’s “dry” rural Protestant majority against the “wet” Catholic immigrant-descended populations — who formed a majority of most northern cities — and their “smart set” allies among the urban, often Episcopalian, elite.

Anglo-Protestant populism had helped curtail immigration from southern and eastern Europe through the Literacy Test of 1917, and National Origins (Johnson-Reed) Act of 1924 which established immigration quotas for countries based on their share of the 1890 immigration population. The year was deliberately chosen to skew the numbers in favour of north-west Europeans, although it was later adjusted to the 1920 share.

Concurrently, a revived Ku Klux Klan, focused this time in northern states, and anti-Catholic rather than anti-black in focus, enrolled six million members, and controlled several relatively Protestant northern cities such as Indianapolis. As in our time, the radical cultural Left had developed ideological innovations before the rise of Right-wing populism, but was energised by the populist surge.

Meanwhile, the genocidal excesses of Stalinism in the 1930s produced a breakaway anti-communist Left which influenced the post-1945 cultural order. In the 1960s, Left-modernism achieved mass penetration with the expansion of television and the universities, influencing the ambitious members of the new Baby Boom generation and steadily capturing society’s elite institutions in the 80s, 90s, 2000s and today.

The story begins in the 19th century, when nations were still considered an instrument of liberal progress. Cosmopolitanism prior to 1900 was typically yoked with admiration for the nation. Giuseppe Mazzini, for instance, founded both the nationalistic Young Italy and supranational Young Europe, seeing little in the way of contradiction.

American liberals like Ralph Waldo Emerson crowed, in 1846, about the US as “The asylum of all nations . . . the energy of Irish, Germans, Swedes, Poles and Cossacks, and all the European tribes, of the Africans and Polynesians, will construct a new race.” Yet Emerson was equally adamant about the Anglo-Saxon ethnic basis of America, suggesting that the free population of America was of British stock, and that the “foreign element, however considerable, is rapidly assimilated… [into] a population of English descent and language.”

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By Richard Overy

In the 1900s, the national-cosmopolitan intellectual synthesis of liberals like Emerson began to decay into its warring components: a universalist cosmopolitanism and a closed ethnic nationalism. In America the former steadily gained ground after 1905; the progressive movement, coalescing around liberal Protestant figures such as John Dewey, William James and Jane Addams, began to spurn the idea that immigrants should assimilate into the Anglo-Saxon Protestant matrix which had defined the melting pot to that point.

Universalist cosmopolitanism was adopted by the country’s liberal Protestant elites of the Federal Council of Churches (FCC) in the 1910s, with the ecumenist New Testament idea that “there is neither Jew nor Greek” in Christ replacing anti-Catholicism and temperance as the organisation’s guiding ethos.

Into this brew came a wholly secular new force in American life: bohemian modernism. Taking root among a small cadre of highly-educated radical WASPs in Greenwich Village, New York, the “Village Renaissance” gave birth to the first fully-formed Left-modernist cénacle, the so-called Young Intellectuals. Among the innovations pioneered by this group in the 1912-17 period were modern art and theatre, “slumming” tours of ethnic ghettoes like the Jewish Lower East Side, and, thanks to Carl Van Vechten, the habit of travelling to Harlem to hear black jazz.

Expressive and interesting ethnics were contrasted with the stale Anglo-Protestant majority. Randolph Bourne, a prominent Young Intellectual, distilled the new ethos into a powerful oikophobia in his seminal 1916 essay in the Atlantic Monthly, “Trans-National America”:

“It is not uncommon for the eager Anglo-Saxon who goes to a vivid American university to-day to find his true friends not among his own race but among the acclimatized German or Austrian, the acclimatized Jew, the acclimatized Scandinavian or Italian. In them he finds the cosmopolitan note. In these youths, foreign- born or the children of foreign- born parents, he is likely to find many of his old inbred morbid problems washed away. These friends are oblivious to the repressions of that tight little society in which he so provincially grew up. He has a pleasurable sense of liberation from the stale and familiar attitudes of those whose ingrowing culture has scarcely created anything vital for his America of to-day.”

Remarking upon New York Times writer Sarah Jeong’s tweets against white people, Reihan Salam wrote in the Atlantic in 2018:

“A lot of them [anti-white intellectuals] have been whites who pride themselves on their diverse social circles and their enlightened views, and who indulge in their own half-ironic white-bashing to underscore that it is their achieved identity as intelligent, worldly people that counts most, not their ascribed identity as being of recognizably European descent.”

Bourne, an old-stock New Englander like most New York writers of his day, established the template for angry Left-modernists of the 1920s, who watched helplessly as Anglo-Protestant populism won the day. Consider H.L. Mencken, who parroted Bourne’s oikophobia in more strident tones in 1923:

“The Anglo-Saxon American[‘s] is a history of… blind rage against peoples who have begun to worst him… The normal American of the ‘pure-blooded’ majority goes to rest every night with an uneasy feeling that there is a burglar [ethnic minorities] under the bed… His political ideas are crude and shallow. He is almost wholly devoid of esthetic feeling. The most elementary facts about the visible universe alarm him, and incite him to put them down. Educate him… and he still remains palpably third-rate. He fears ideas almost more cravenly than he fears men.”

The Anglo-American majority was dehumanised as an automaton subservient to authority. Mencken called them “serfs and goose-steppers” or the “booboisie”. Van Wyck Brooks dubbed them “the apotheosis of the average” while Matthew Josephson scorned the “well-fed, indifferent masses”.

In Sinclair Lewis’ Main Street, protagonist Carol is trapped in the monochrome confining world of Gopher Prairie, a town in Minnesota. Yearning for cosmopolitan New York, she appreciates the local Scandinavian immigrants for injecting a dose of culture into a town whose Anglo-Saxon element was of “standardized background… scornful of the living…. A savourless people, gulping tasteless food… and viewing themselves as the greatest race in the world.” The thought of the Scandinavians being assimilated filled Carol with horror.

In Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, the villain is Tom Buchanan, an old-stock New Yorker who is suspicious of Jay (Gatz) Gatsby’s ethnic provenance and approvingly cites tracts which are thinly disguised versions of the work of restrictionist intellectuals Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard. The sense that Prohibition-era America was a cultural wasteland helped produce the “Lost Generation” of American Left-liberal intellectuals, many of whom left for Europe in disgust.

The difference between the culture wars of the 1920s and now is that the Left is far stronger today. After the Second World War university education exploded, more than doubling between 1950 and 1970 and eventually reaching nearly half the US population. Television sets could be found in just 9% of American homes in 1950, but by 1965, 93% had one. This spread the sensibility of relatively liberal New York, Los Angeles and Washington across the entire nation.

In 1976, Daniel Bell wrote that “the life-style once practiced by a small cenacle . . . is now copied by many . . . [and] this change of scale gave the culture of the 1960s its special surge, coupled with the fact that a bohemian life-style once limited to a tiny elite is now acted out on the giant screen of the mass media.”

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In 1924, ecumenical Protestant clerics and liberal progressives had vigorously opposed immigration restriction but had almost no political clout: the Johnson-Reed Act passed 323-71 in the House and 62-6 in the Senate. Unions like Samuel Gompers’s American Federation of Labour led the battle to limit immigration. Today, by contrast, progressives are powerful in the media, Hollywood, unions, large corporations, government agencies and the universities. So much so that they are now in control of social norms and institutional sanctions.

Where communists, atheists and Elvis alike once felt the sting of conservative moral panic, today’s Inquisition is progressive, enforcing panics over racism and sexism, and concocting such faux-racist notions as cultural appropriation. Indeed, Left-modernists influence the direction of the Democrats to the extent that the party cannot speak of “illegal” immigration, deportation or assimilation, while most primary candidates feel compelled to endorse reparations for slavery.

The populism and polarisation of the 1920s faded in large part because the new immigration laws constricted the flow of newcomers, allowing for assimilation. First, Protestant immigrant groups like the Scandinavians and Germans married into the WASP majority, then, after the 1960s, Catholics and Jews began marrying Protestants, creating a new “white” majority. By that time, the rising influence of 60s liberalism reopened the country’s gates, which has produced a level of diversity that rivals that of the 1920s.

Trump is a response to the ethnic shifts which followed the liberalising 1965 Hart-Celler immigration Act, but will today’s culture war repeat the cycle? Will restriction and assimilation calm passions and heal divides? The power of today’s Left-modernism places that outcome in doubt.

Regardless of what happens in 2020, the Left may eventually prevail at the presidential level as Democratic-leaning Hispanic and Asian voters form an ever larger part of the electorate. These groups have not yet melted into the majority the way white Catholics did after Kennedy’s election, and until they do, they are unlikely to lean Republican.

The outcome in America may therefore be one in which a provincial populist minority bitterly resents a liberal urban majority, obstructing Democratic legislation in the Senate. In Europe, restrictionists are more likely to prevail, but a significant group of disgruntled “Anywheres” will continue to revolt, fomenting cultural division. History repeats itself, but never in quite the same way.

Yet Labour won just 47% of the Remain vote, while the Conservatives captured 73% of Leavers. The Tories retained two-thirds of their 2017 Remain voters while Labour kept only half their Leavers. This is the story of the 2019 election, and it speaks to Labour’s deep misalignment with the cultural mood of the country.

And a deep dive into British public opinion shows that Labour Remainers, the group which dominates among party activists, sit well to the Left of LibDem Remainers on economics and are far too Left-liberal on culture for Tory Remainers and ex-Labour Leavers. This means the party either has to shift to the Blairite Right on the economy or tack in a conservative direction to woo Labour Leavers — much like the Danish Social Democrats.

To understand why, let’s focus on the relatively understudied Remainers, who tend to be typecast as one-dimensional metropolitan liberals. Yet Remainers are not all liberals. In fact, Tory Remainers are more similar to Labour Leavers on cultural issues than Remainers who voted Labour or Lib Dem.

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Who cares about immigration?

By Eric Kaufmann

Using 2017 data (which won’t differ much from today), Figure 1 shows that when it comes to beliefs about black, gay and female equality, Tory Remainers are closer to Tory Leavers than Labour Remainers.

 Scale runs from 1 — not far enough — to 5 — gone too far

Figure 2 shows a similar story on immigration attitudes, with Tory Remainers twice as restrictionist as Labour Remainers (based on 2019 attitudes and 2017 vote). In a survey I conducted with Simon Hix and Thomas Leeper of the London School of Economics in 2017, we found that the average Tory Remainer was willing to admit 61,000 people from the EU per year compared with 78,000 for Labour Remainers. For Asian, African and Middle Eastern immigration, the numbers were just 47,000 for Tory Remainers versus 65,000 for Labour Remainers.

We find something similar on both English and British national identity in the 2017 British Election Study, with Tory Remainers considerably closer to the nationalistic Labour Leavers than the more cosmopolitan Labour Remainers. There is also an important difference between Tory and Labour Remainers in their affection toward the European institutions, as figure 3 reveals. In other words, for Conservative Remainers, a Remain vote was a pragmatic rather than expressive choice.

In effect, there are three groups of Remainers: conservative, liberal and Left. Whereas working-class Leavers are cross-pressured by economic factors, inclining some toward Labour, many Remainers are cross-pressured by both economic and social conservatism toward the Tories. This gives the Conservatives an advantage, which showed up in their 2019 result, where they won two-thirds of 2017 Tory Remainers.

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A good barometer of how well each party is doing against its pool of ideologically-aligned voters is to examine the share of the progressive vote won by Labour and compare it with the proportion of the Right-wing vote won by the Tories. Whereas the Tories consolidated the vast majority of Right votes, losing little to the Brexit Party, Labour bled a considerable share of progressive voters to the Lib Dems and Greens, often in battleground constituencies.

Figure 4 shows that in Leave seats (at top left of chart), Labour won most of the progressive vote. The problem is that Leave seats are slanted against Labour, making them difficult to win. In more Remain constituencies, the vote was bifurcated into a Left-Remain and liberal-Remain zones, dissipating Labour’s advantage.

Figure 4.

Essentially, Labour needs to appeal to voters in two or three of the zones. The comfort zone of the party is zone 1, populated by culturally and economically Left voters, concentrated in inner cities and university towns, with their young, highly-educated and ethnically diverse populations. I call this “Left Remania” in figure 5.

Figure 5.

In order to expand, the party first must make inroads into zone 3, Liberal Remania. This is depicted in figure 6: a Remain-voting region where the Labour share of the progressive vote is below 50%. On the British Election Study, 2015, Lib Dem voters were a full scale point to the right on economic redistribution from Labour voters. Labour averaged 2 out of 10, the Lib Dems 3 and Tories 4.5. Thus moving into zone 3 will require a softening of Corbyn-McDonell economic redistributionism and a corresponding effort to instil greater confidence in Labour’s stewardship of the economy. While this wouldn’t get Labour all the way to 325, it would be an important start.

Figure 6.

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By Graeme Archer

In order to move closer to 325, Labour also has to moderate on culture, stepping back from overreach on questions of immigration and the race-gender-sexuality agenda. They must find a way to either recapture the culturally-conservative working-class Leavers in figure 7 or appeal to successful suburban and provincial Tory Remainers in figure 8.

Figure 7.

Both present formidable obstacles. Working-class Leavers are further from Labour culturally, but, as we saw, Tory Remainers are both economically and culturally estranged from the median Labour Remainer.

Figure 8.

The notion that Labour can remain wedded to its Momentum agenda, combining a far-left economic and cultural progressivism, and simultaneously win a majority, is a pipe dream. Assuming Labour sticks to its economic programme due to its allergy to Blairism, it will need to take on its cultural radicals and rediscover national protection. As I note elsewhere, this is not going to change after Brexit. Post-Brexit, issues such as immigration, national identity and identity politics will, if anything, gain in salience.

Labour is on the wrong side of where it needs to be to win crucial voting blocs outside its comfort zone. In order to succeed, it must become more like the Danish Social Democrats, engaging in a cultural revolution akin to the economic one Tony Blair pioneered in the mid-90s.

Small-c conservative working-class voters have migrated to the Conservative Party because of immigration and Brexit. On the other side, successful educated cosmopolitans opt for Labour or the Lib Dems.

As a number of academics, including me, have pointed out, apart from attitudes to the EU, nothing predicts whether someone voted Leave better than their views on immigration. This shows up clearly in UnHerd’s data.

For instance, as figure 1 reveals, 55% of the variation in immigration attitudes across constituencies can be explained by Brexit vote share, a powerful association. The relationship is especially strong toward the top left, with the strongest Remain seats far more pro-immigration than elsewhere.

Figure 1

Sources: UnHerd Britain / Brexit data from: “Areal interpolation and the UK’s referendum on EU membership”, Chris Hanretty, Journal Of Elections, Public Opinion And Parties, Online Early Access, https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17457289.2017.1287081

This rising cultural cleavage made a powerful impact in the 2017 election despite the fact Corbyn’s far-Left image gave prosperous voters a strong incentive to vote against him. But what makes Hackney different from Boston on immigration attitudes? At the constituency level, this is about demographics, of which the key ones are, in order of importance: the proportion with degrees, the level of ethnic diversity and average age. The share with a degree varies from under 5% in Clacton to over 50% in Battersea. Immigration attitudes largely track this measure, as figure 1 shows. The reason higher education is so important is not because it boosts earnings, but because it is a measure of psychological openness and a liberal worldview, both of which incline curious minds toward the pursuit of higher education.

Figure 2

Sources: UnHerd Britain / Norris, ‘British General Election Constituency Results’

When it comes to explaining Brexit, Trump or any other western national populist vote, it’s breathtaking how resilient the narrative of the ‘left behind’ is. This suggests that those who feel they have lost out during the economic modernisation of the British economy are striking back at the elites. Yet, as I mentioned after the Brexit vote, economic factors do not tell us much about who voted Leave or Remain. As figure 3 clearly shows, unemployment level — as with other purely material factors — can’t explain immigration attitudes. The flat regression line and wide spread of constituencies around it tells us there just isn’t a story here.

Figure 3

Sources: UnHerd Britain / Norris, ‘British General Election Constituency Results’

Beyond education, what social indicators underpin immigration attitudes? An important — but not dominant — factor is ethnicity. Many are fond of pointing out that places with few immigrants seem to be the ones most concerned about immigration. Yet this statement completely sidesteps the fact that a high-immigrant area will have lots of immigrants in it! Since immigrants and those who are from minority communities tend, all else being equal, to be more pro-immigration than White Britons, highly diverse constituencies are also more open to immigration, something evident in figure 4.

Even so, there is considerable variation around the trend line. Constituencies with a more educated population tend to lie above the line, and those with fewer degrees below it. In addition, there is an important current of immigration restrictionism among ethnic minorities, especially those who are UK-born. This is more pronounced in constituencies with a higher Sikh and Hindu component to their minority population since these groups are more restrictionist than other minorities, and less so in places with a higher Afro-Caribbean share, as they are relatively liberal on immigration compared to other non-White British groups.

Figure 4

Sources: UnHerd Britain / Norris, ‘British General Election Constituency Results’. NB: excludes constituencies with less than 20% non-White British share (a majority of seats)

The share of the population aged 20-24 is also an important correlate of immigration attitudes, with younger constituencies more ‘open’ and older ones more ‘closed’ in immigration outlook. Yet this matters considerably less than education or ethnicity. The share of passport holders, however, is an indicator, even when we account for its relationship with education, age and ethnicity. Figure 5 shows the importance of this association.

Figure 5

Sources: UnHerd Britain / Norris, ‘British General Election Constituency Results’

Education, ethnicity, share without a passport and age account for nearly 80% of the variation in immigration opinion across constituencies. This means almost all of the differences in immigration attitudes over place have to do with these demographics. But is there any role here for the properties of place — whether local tradition, regional economy or cultural atmosphere?

The answer is a qualified yes. Even with controls for education, ethnicity, age and share without a passport, London emerges as somewhat more open, and the East of England and South East somewhat less so. We should bear in mind, however, that regional differences are small. Apart from London (at 46% agreement), the share agreeing with open immigration fluctuates in a tight band from 32% in Wales to 36% in Scotland. When you account for education, ethnicity and age composition, London remains only 3 points more pro-immigration than the supposedly restrictionist East of England. Moreover, some of this may be due to social indicators we haven’t included in the model, so the geographic effect may be weaker still.

Geography is important, but it’s also vital to appreciate its limits, which too many pundits fail to do after perusing an election map. A map of SNP vote by British region would suggest that living in Scotland explains 100% of the variation in SNP voting among people. It doesn’t. Mapping state income and the Democratic vote in America would show that richer states back the Democrats. Yet richer individuals aren’t more likely to vote Democratic than poorer people. In other words, you can’t simply read individual-level relationships off aggregate correlations. More than that, most of the variation (90% or more) in attitudes lies within constituencies, not between them.

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By tom shivers

Consider university education, the most important cross-constituency predictor of immigration attitudes in Britain. When we drill into the survey data on individuals (as distinct from constituencies) — using the British Election Study — we find that education is much less important. That is, once we take psychological factors such as the death penalty into account, having a degree makes only a modest difference to immigration attitudes.

Figure 6, based on a sample of around 20,000 individuals, shows that a person’s views on the death penalty matters vastly more than whether they have a degree in predicting whether they want less immigration. Almost 9 in 10 strong death penalty supporters back restriction against barely 3 in 10 strong opponents of capital punishment.

Next to this 60-point chasm, the roughly 5-point gap between those with and without degrees pales into insignificance. While graduates are less likely (41%) than non-grads (62%) to back the death penalty, this is beside the point. The massive difference between pro- and anti-death penalty supporters holds as strongly within the population of university graduates as it does among non-graduates.

Figure 6

Source: British Election Study Internet Panel Study wave 9, 2016

As I argue in my book Whiteshift, immigration attitudes are the fulcrum around which the politics of western societies are realigning. This is because those whose psychological make-up inclines them to see difference as disorder and change as loss are voting for parties that promise to slow immigration. This isn’t generally about competition for jobs or services, which is a safer narrative to voice, but instead mainly about majority-ethnic and what I term ‘ethno-traditional’ national identities. Conservative voters feel that these are being unsettled by the rapid ethnic shifts sweeping across western countries.

The Brexit vote was primarily driven by the immigration question, though the focus on the economic risks of Brexit is presently overshadowing the subterranean force of this issue. Should Johnson ink a deal while failing to reduce migration levels, we should expect this debate to return — intruding as sharply into British politics as it did in the runup to 23 June, 2016.

As candidate and President, Trump has gratuitously insulted minorities, retweeted extremist Twitter accounts, and displayed, at best, a morally ambivalent attitude towards violent white nationalists. All this, coupled with growing populism in Europe and signs of increasing political violence, has led some parts of the media to claim that America is entering its Fascist moment.

It has also raised questions about the extent to which the alt-Right feeds off the wider conservative movement, and whether the latter enables and normalises the former. This is the argument of the latest addition to the alt-Right canon, Alexandra Minna Stern’s Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate.

Stern’s work explores the pedigree of alt-Right ideas, showing their origins in a mixture of reactionary, green and even Hindu thought. Whereas progressives look to a future in which their beliefs and goals have triumphed, reactionary intellectuals reject the narrative of linear progress and instead favour a cyclical pattern of conflagration followed by revival. French radical Right author Guillaume Faye’s Archeofuturism, for instance, reaches back into the mists of ancestral time and forward into the high-tech future.

Hence the optimism of Faye and other alt-Right intellectuals about the role of genetic and reproductive technologies in rehabilitating whiteness. This cyclical conception of time, according to Stern, was partly inspired by Hinduism, via French-Greek Nazi intellectual and Hindu convert Savitri Devi, who in turn influenced post-war French New Right intellectuals such as Réné Guénon and Alain de Benoist.

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Then there are the multifaceted green influences. Before reading this book I had no idea that bioregionalism, the idea of an arcadian land separated from modernity in which the inhabitants coexist in harmony with nature, resonated with the separatist dream of a whites-only ethnostate. The pristine zone beloved of deep ecologists is usually imagined as my neck of the woods: the Pacific Northwest, including northern California and British Columbia.

This area, especially in the 1970s, was among the most racially homogeneous in North America, and ecologist Ernest Callenbach’s bestselling 1975 novel Ecotopia describes a utopian society set here; a throwaway aspect of which was the “few dark-skinned faces” evident in Ecotopian San Francisco and the existence of separate city-states for African-Americans and Chinese. From a different angle, American eugenicist Madison Grant in 1916 compared the “Passing of the Great Race” of North European whites with the extinction of the Redwoods and other native species.

Given the fact that barely six in 10 Americans are non-Hispanic whites, a segment of the alt-Right has already written off their country, preferring a racial breakup of the union and vesting their hopes in white separatism. The various proposed ‘whitopias’ in North America tend to focus on the most homogeneous contiguous territories, such as ‘Ozarkia’ in Arkansas and Missouri, ‘Cascadia’ in the Pacific Northwest, ‘New Albion’ in Maine, Vermont and New Hampshire, or ‘Gulflandia’ along the somewhat less homogeneous Gulf Coast.

Yet Stern’s book comes unstuck, as many similar works do, when it tries to link white nationalism to mainstream conservatism, and to hype up the threat. This is a wider problem with academic and journalistic assessments of a phenomenon many see in morally absolute, binary terms. The typical formula is to cite extreme Right approval of a racist Trump tweet or statement, yet Trump is hardly an ideologue with a steady compass. He lashes out indiscriminately at opponents, and yes, makes racist generalisations about entire groups such as undocumented immigrants, Mexicans, Haitians or Muslims.

But support for Trump is not confined to white Americans, and, as the book acknowledges, no more than 6% of Americans share white supremacist beliefs. In Washington Post/Kaiser 2018 survey data cited by the book, when white Americans are asked directly about their support for the “alt-right or white nationalist movement”, the number who answer in the affirmative is just 2%, compared with the 6.4% of African-Americans and 5.4% of Hispanics who identify as white nationalists!

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Sometimes these academic critiques of the alt-Right and the wider conservative movement say as much about the mindset of the contemporary cultural Left as anything. Stern, for example, insinuates that those who criticise feminists or sympathise with Trump are of a piece with white separatists; conservative pundits, such as Fox News’s Tucker Carlson or Laura Ingraham, who have expressed concern about the pace of ethnocultural change, apparently “parrot… Alt-right rhetoric”. Liberal-rationalists such as Jordan Peterson and Claire Lehmann, editor of Quillette, are thrown into the amorphous Right-wing miasma supposedly spreading alt-Right memes.

Many people see the Trump administration’s admittedly ham-fisted and poorly-planned attempt to get control of the very real crisis of Central American migration as evidence of white nationalist thinking, with migrant detention a harbinger of concentration camps and ethnic cleansing. In fact, the crisis has been largely caused by liberal court rulings that created loopholes attracting poor Central Americans to the border. Many are unaccompanied children because the migrants know that US law prohibits their deportation. Family separation was mandated by the 1997 Flores Agreement (and its 2015 reinterpretation by a California court) preventing minors from being detained for more than 20 days. It presumed the US would rather turn a blind eye to an influx of family migrants (few of whom are fleeing war, but most of whom will never be deported) than separate children from parents to allow more claimants to be heard and, therefore, deported.

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Trump deserves to be criticised for not securing a bipartisan waiver of the Flores Agreement before the surge, and failing to work with Democrats in Congress ahead of time to get the money to detain families humanely. His nasty, dehumanising words must be condemned, especially as these poor migrants are only doing what any rational person would in their situation. On top of this he has botched relations with Mexico, whose cooperation he needs to stem the flow. But he is not responsible for the border problem and didn’t invent child separation.

It is very tempting to lump in the extreme members of the nationalist Right, the danger of which was most recently illustrated by the El Paso shooting, with more broader conservatives or even classical liberals, since even quite distantly related ideologies share some concerns, goals and beliefs. It is a temptation especially associated with Left-modernism, a totalising “us-them” worldview in which those who criticise the progressive agenda on race and immigration are accused of marching us down the road toward the ethnostate. Progressives probably wouldn’t appreciate a conservative arguing that higher taxes are a slippery slope toward Communism – and rightfully so, precisely because the slippery slope charge cannot be refuted. If you tar a person with the alt-Right brush, you needn’t detain yourself with facts or arguments.

There is a broader problem with ‘scholar-activism’ in the study of nationalism and populism, an interpretive pick’n’mix approach over systematic empirical generalisation. As a consequence, purported links between the alt-Right and mainstream conservatism are asserted through anecdote or painted by the broad brush of guilt-by-association, rather than being substantiated through big data analytics or survey evidence. This activism has itself played a role in today’s white backlash. By weaponising the ‘racism’ charge and using political correctness to shut down the possibility of sensible discussion and compromise over the pace of ethnocultural change, academia and the media have opened up space for both the alt-Right and wider populist movement to emerge.

Eric Kaufmann’s Whiteshift: Immigration, Populism and the Future of White Majorities is out now in paperback. (Penguin/Abrams, 2019).

More from this author

Who will resist the great awokening?

By Eric Kaufmann

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

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

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

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

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

More from this series

The war against objectivity

By James Bloodworth

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

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

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

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

Suggested reading

Liberalism: the other God that failed

By John Gray

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

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

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

Suggested reading

How I was cancelled by Doctor Who

By Gareth Roberts

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

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

Suggested reading

Why Britain needs Christian politics

By Christopher Rhodes

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

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

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

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

Suggested reading

Could you spot a tyrant in the making?

By Douglas Murray

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

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

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

Right now, if academics dare to challenge orthodoxy in the hot-button areas of race, sexuality and gender, their job may be on the line. But each time opponents of reason and free enquiry win, our society loses a little more of its hard-won liberty. That’s why I applaud the young researcher, Noah Carl, and have donated to his campaign to raise the legal funds needed to challenge his wrongful dismissal by St Edmund’s College, Cambridge. 

More from this author

How the woke inquisition broke Cambridge

By Eric Kaufmann

Noah won his place at the university rightfully, in an extremely competitive process. But he didn’t reckon on the influence of the ‘social justice’ Left. They wield extraordinary power as they mobilise flash mobs and perform on camera to win plaudits from their international, social media, ‘social justice’ subculture. They targeted Noah and his so-called ‘racist pseudoscience’ and mustered 1500 to sign a letter calling for his dismissal. Cambridge bowed to their demands.

These activists, and people like them, justify themselves and their actions with a worldview constructed from two conceptual sleights-of-hand.

The first involves expanding the remit of words – what psychologist Nick Haslam terms ‘concept creep‘ or political scientist Giovanni Sartori would call ‘conceptual stretching’. The meaning of ‘harm’ is extended to encompass the psychological ‘harm’ of hearing uncomfortable ideas. Often the harm that such ideas pose may not be clear to their supposed victims, so activists must work hard to frame these ideas as ‘offensive’ to a protected group.

The second trick is to take ‘justice’ and apply it, not to equality of opportunity, but to equality of outcome. This means that they can take any group differences of outcome – i.e. white people earning more than black ones – as evidence of ‘systemic’ discrimination.

In this way, the shadowy notion of fighting ‘systemic’ or ‘structural’ racism becomes the end, which justifies the suspension of reason and the violation of the liberty of the ‘oppressor’ (read: white, male) who stands in the way of righting historic wrongs.

Suggested reading

Why aren't illiberal universities challenged?

By Nigel Biggar

In short, their perfectionist, no-holds-barred vision justifies their illiberalism and unreason – much as fascism once did, and as socialism continues to in North Korea and Venezuela. Though sometimes violent, more often they use the perceived wrongdoing to gun for people’s jobs, reputations and livelihoods. 

Failing this, they aim to make the purported offender’s life as uncomfortable as possible in the hope they will be forced out. One way of doing this – and something I’ve encountered on several occasions – is by bombarding a university’s social media account with complaints in order to force a (mandatory) investigation by administrators.

The net result is to purge the campus of wrongthink. And the activists have almost succeeded: cultural conservatives in the social sciences and humanities in the anglosphere are nearly extinct, and libertarians are scarce outside economics. 

Their struggle for ‘social justice’ is a sacred one, as are its sites of resistance. Noah Carl’s presence at Cambridge was held to profane the sacred, since it violated the role the social justice Left demands of the modern university: that it act as a progressive safe space from the unjust world beyond.

Hence the open letter signed by numerous academics and students – a tactic which Jonathan Haidt remarks is now a staple of progressive activism – in which Noah was attacked as a ‘race scientist’.

But scrub away the patina of guilt-by-association, conceptual stretching and innuendo, and the radicals’ case quickly evaporates. What emerges is a thoroughly dishonest smear campaign, in which ideologues created a superficial narrative and used political pressure to ruin an individual’s career. 

Suggested reading

The righteous anger of youth

By Gerard de Groot

Noah does a nice job of responding to his critics point-by-point, but for brevity’s sake, I’ll summarise their stitch-up. The signatories’ defining charge is that Noah is a ‘race scientist’. This is incredible given that Noah hasn’t worked on, or made any definitive claims about, the relationship between race and intelligence. What he has done is to make the libertarian and rationalist case that scholars should be free to seek the truth, however uncomfortable. 

We won’t know whether race really is connected to intelligence until the gene-level relationships that define the two are mapped at some point in the future. I suspect the data will show a mess of weak and contradictory correlations, which may be why current work has difficulty with anomalies such as why black Americans are so much more successful than (ostensibly more intelligent Asiatic) Inuit and Eskimo. In any event, inter-racial marriage and – who knows? – gene-editing mean race and IQ is unlikely to be much of a talking point a century from now. 

But this is beside the point. Noah’s argument is that university researchers need to have the freedom to conduct research on all manner of subjects – indeed, James Flynn, who argues that environment rather than genes is responsible for race-IQ differences, has decried the stigma attached to research in this area. How else could he prove his case? 

Indeed, there is nothing nefarious about this research. Even measuring skulls is not inherently sinister. The early 20th-century eugenicists who used this technique to argue that southern and eastern European immigrants to America were inferior to the ‘Nordic’ natives were hoist on their own petard by Franz Boas, who showed that the US-born children of non-Nordics had the same skull sizes as American-born Nordics.

And a properly functioning scientific culture would have just as swiftly debunked the ad hoc excuses used to explain away African-Americans’ lower criminality rate (than whites) in the early 20th century. 

More from this author

Taking on the Social Justice Warriors

By Eric Kaufmann

Noah also points out that the Nazis actually opposed the study of race and intelligence because the results favoured Jews. Instead they, like all ideologues, cherry-picked what they wanted from both religious and secular belief systems. The fact anti-minority eugenics won out wasn’t due to science, but to dominant ideologies which stood in the way of rigorous analysis.

Today’s social justice ideologues are much closer to the spirit of the Nazis than social scientists such as Noah whose methods are transparent and findings falsifiable.

If someone tries to broadcast the claims of race science, a case can be made that this harms the self-efficacy of black people and so should be discouraged. We know that when methods of suicide are widely publicised in the media, suicide goes up.

But this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t study suicide methods. As African-American linguist John McWhorter argues, the subject of race and intelligence can be quietly investigated without broadcasting the results. When progressives kick up a storm about this, they publicise the very findings they claim to be harmful. 

Of course, one may disagree with all this using data or logic. But disagreement is Noah’s point. He has not done work on race and intelligence; he has only defended the right of other academics to do so. He is a libertarian and contrarian, but – and I say this as one who has lost relatives in the Holocaust – he is certainly not a racist. His interest in academically taboo subjects stems from his contrarian curiosity and belief in the importance of academic freedom.

Suggested reading

The dangers of post-truth journalism

By Douglas Murray

He was also accused of attending a ‘secret’ conference on intelligence to discuss race science; but it turns out to have been an innocuous invitation-only event (common in academia) attended by a multiracial array of scholars studying numerous aspects of intelligence, few of which concern race. The supposedly ‘far Right’ journals he published in, also cited as evidence of his unsuitability, turn out to be publications with similarly global editorial boards and varied interests. 

Furthermore, the allegedly ‘shoddy’ methods used in some of his lower-tier publications are actually the standard methods used in thousands of academic papers that focus on country-level data. Finally, in contrast to the charge levelled by his critics, he didn’t hide any of his published work from the evaluation committee.

The links in the progressive activists’ join-the-dots story of ‘race scientist helping the far Right’ are spurious – based on guilt-by-association or outright ignorance. Like his Oxford doctoral supervisors, I’ve been fortunate enough to meet Noah, and to know that he is an honest, personable scholar. He has done nothing wrong and his struggle is vital if we are to restore reason and freedom in academia and beyond. 

Some years ago I opined that London was not really an English city any more

Since then, virtually all my friends from abroad have confirmed my observation

So there must be some truth in it…

I note also that London was the UK city that voted most strongly to remain in the EU

— John Cleese (@JohnCleese) May 29, 2019

Sadiq Khan, Mayor of London, amid the furore, tweeted his own view: “Londoners know that our diversity is our greatest strength. We are proudly the English capital, a European city and a global hub.”

So how English is London? Well that depends very much on what is meant by  ‘English’. A significant problem with the word is that its ethnic and national meanings are often confused or blurred.

Ethnic groups, for instance, are large-scale communities which consider themselves to be descended from common ancestors, are attached to a particular ‘homeland’ and are distinguished from other ethnic groups by cultural markers such as religion, language or appearance. Nations, on the other hand, are territorial-historical communities with a degree of political aspiration. They are different things, though the same word is used to describe them.

Suggested reading

Why the herd hates Cleese

By Douglas Murray

‘English’ is both an ethnic and national designation. The English, for example, are the largest ethnic group in most of the more populated parts of English-speaking Canada, in the American state of Utah and in northern New England (see light purple shades on the linked map). They are also an overwhelming majority – around 70% – of the population of England. In London, however, they make up no more than 45% of the total.

Cleese, then, was right – if he was talking about ethnicity.

Equally, those of English national identity are also a majority in England, but not in London. Of England’s residents, 60% said they were ‘English Only’ in the 2011 census. In London, this was only 37%. This is because more than any other groups, ethnically English people also claim their national identity to be ‘English’.

And while ethnically English people tend to claim Englishness as a nationality, minorities lean towards a British identity.

Even though, according to the ONS Longitudinal Study (ONS LS), minorities under 30 are increasingly identifying as ‘English’, it is still accurate to claim that London is not an English-majority city in either ethnic or national terms.

More from this author

The trial of Danny Baker

By Eric Kaufmann

But was it ever thus?

No. In fact, over the course of Cleese’s lifetime, there has been considerable change in London’s ethnic and national composition. While it’s true that London has always received immigration, this has typically been on a small scale. Jewish immigration, for example, was only about 5,000-10,000 per year at its height in the late 19th century.

And while no ethnicity question on White Britishness was asked until 2001, we can use the ONS LS to track 2001 and 2011 London residents back to the 1971 census. This method finds that London was around 86% White British in 1971: an ethnically-English city with a modest minority. By 2011, the ethnic English were in the minority. These dates track the period from Monty Python’s debut to Cleese’s retirement. Living through that transformation no doubt influences his perspective.

Source: ONS LS 1971-2011

So, in these strict terms, it seems Cleese is on pretty solid ground in making his claim that London “isn’t an English city any more”. It is only English in the sense that it is located in England. But if we were to follow that to its conclusion, then all accents heard in London must be English ones, which would be an absurd thing to say.

Suggested reading

Do we really have that much in common?

By Trevor Phillips

Can we, therefore, dismiss Cleese’s critics as overreacting? Well, not necessarily.

There is nuance to this story. There is a sense in which London is still English: the majority of its population is native-born. The UK-born (nearly all English-born) formed nearly 80% of the city into the 1980s, and while this had dipped to 60% by 2011, natives remain a majority.

Source: Hechter, M. (1976). UK County Data 1851-1966 (UKDA ref#430); Census of England and Wales 1971-2011.

Is being born in England enough to qualify as being English? Yes, say 85% of those asked in the BBC-YouGov 2018 Englishness survey. On this logic, London is still an English city, but if it passes the 50% foreign-born mark – like Miami, Dubai or (almost) Toronto – then it would cease to be so.

But even though London may still be (marginally) English by birth, if its inhabitants think of their ethnicity and nationhood in non-English terms, then Cleese’s point stands.

But what if there are people – notably ethnic minorities or white liberals who claim to be British rather than English – who have an English national identity but who don’t explicitly acknowledge it? As Daniel Kahneman writes, people “aren’t rational, they rationalise”. Their subconscious impulses drive them, but the deliberative part of their brain constructs a story about why they behave as they do – which often bears little relationship to the underlying motivations.

If this is the case, then a good test of what nationality ‘British not English’ Londoners hold deep down would be to see if they back the English football team, or feel defensive about the anti-English barbs levelled by relatives in Wales or Scotland, or care when they hear that Scotland gets more out of the Treasury than England. If they do, they quite possibly do have an English national identity. Though because they imagine a white, traditional Englishness, rather than the more modern version, they consciously reject it. On this measure there are only a few Londoners who aren’t English – unconsciously or otherwise.

It’s possible these Londoners also have English symbolic attachments. When people, regardless of whether they identify as English or not, were asked in the same Englishness survey how strongly England’s ‘diverse cultural life’ contributes to ‘your English identity’, for instance, 75% of non-white Londoners replied ‘very’ or ‘fairly’ strongly. This is also true for 73% of White British Remain-voting Londoners, though only 45% of Leave-voting White British Londoners concur.

When it comes to the English landscape, things veer the other way: this is important for 85% of White British Leavers in London, 73% of White British Remainers but just 54% of non-white Londoners. There is nearly as great a divide on the importance of English ‘history and heritage,’ with almost 90% of White British Leavers in London saying this is important for their English identity against 77% of White British Remainers and 63% for minority Londoners.

But while minorities are not quite as keen on landscape and history, a majority still consider these to be an important part of English identity. And on English sport, Christian traditions, poetry and dance, there are only small differences between white Londoners and non-white Londoners. If these people really didn’t identify as English, would they still reply that these symbols were important to ‘their English identity’? It seems that when you probe a little, many who claim not to be English are significantly attached to its key symbols.

Suggested reading

The truth about 'liberal' London

By Paul Embery

So where does this leave Cleese? For conservative whites, such as Cleese, English ethnicity blurs into their concept of nationhood. Being ethnically English makes it more likely that they will identify their nationhood as English which, in turn, shapes the symbols (landscape, history) that make up the image of England in their head. Ethnicity is the lens through which they view the nation; it seems inseparable from their national attachment.

When confronted by an ethnic minority person, therefore, who possesses English characteristics (attitudes to sport and Scotland, say) Cleese’s reflex may be to consider such a person not ‘truly’ English. Not because he wishes to exclude minorities from the nation, but because he has no vocabulary for distinguishing his ethnic identity from his national one.

I’m not convinced Cleese has a sinister desire to exclude minorities from national membership. I can’t know for sure, but, as an expat living in the Caribbean, he may simply wish to express his diaspora English ethnicity, as well as his attachment to an England in which his group forms a majority, but not the entirety of a nation in which minorities are equal members.

In my book Whiteshift, I call this ‘ethno-traditional’ nationalism, as distinct from exclusivist ethnic nationalism, which seeks to limit national membership to members of the ethnic majority while repatriating, or discriminating against, minorities.

Suggested reading

Is there a future for English nationalism?

By Paul Mason

Meanwhile, as John Denham argues, Englishness is becoming more inclusive. Ideally, English national identity would be what I call multivocalist, a kind of Englishness-as-menu which would permit some to attach to England through the nation’s landscape, ancestry and history, while others can relate to its ‘diverse cultural life’, sports, vibrant economy or popular music.

So Cleese should allow that the ethnic English no longer have a monopoly on English nationhood; native-born minorities are just as English, but imagine their nation differently. Equally, Sadiq should allow that Cleese has a right to identify with his English ethnicity, and to cherish his own conception of London – and England – as opposed to the cosmopolitan one promoted by the mayor’s office.

London has become less English since Monty Python premiered, and is no longer ethnically English. But a majority of its residents are English-born and most identify with some version of English national identity. So is London still an English city? Well that, of course, depends what you mean by English.

In my book Whiteshift, I argue that we need a moral jurisprudence that mirrors our legal body of rulings to decide whether individuals are ‘guilty’ of ethical transgressions and what the severity of punishment should be. At present, this is decided in a Hobbesian war between competing interests and ideologies, with the strongest faction getting its way. Punishment typically consists of a unitary sentence of sacking and excommunication.

Further reading

How Cambridge flunked the Peterson test

By Douglas Murray

Much better, surely, would be a rational approach, which seeks empirical evidence of harm, consistent precedent-based sentencing of individuals across time and place, and principles whose conclusions flow from their premises. After all, even if the law upholds rules such as innocent until proven guilty or freedom of expression, when institutions such as universities, government bodies or corporations shift from a ‘reasonable person’ to a ‘most sensitive person’ standard, and fail to calibrate their penalties to the severity of the offence, we collectively become less free, fair and rational. A virtual Supreme Court or online nonpartisan Task Force could act as the relevant body to which plaintiffs may appeal in the quest to clear their name or reduce their sentence.

I conducted a small survey on the recent case of Danny Baker as a trial run for how such a panel might work. The Radio 5 Live host was sacked a fortnight ago after posting a ‘joke’ on Twitter entitled ‘Royal Baby leaves hospital’ showing two well-dressed adults with a chimpanzee. He tweeted it on the same day Prince Harry and Duchess Meghan Markle presented their new baby Archie in public. The connection between the African-American ancestry of Meghan and the racist trope of a chimpanzee doesn’t need much explanation. Baker argues that he was lampooning press coverage of the royals, hadn’t clocked that the baby was mixed race and just clipped the nearest image to hand. When the connection was pointed out, he swiftly deleted the tweet and apologised profusely.

The BBC fired him. While the police do ‘not consider that a criminal threshold has been met’ and have dropped their investigation against him, there are still moral questions at stake. Should he have been fired? Should he ever be given a position in public life again? What are the free speech implications? Baker argues that the BBC threw him under a bus by firing him, and its bosses behaved in a cowardly way.

The Evidence

The survey was conducted through the online opt-in platform Prolific, which, like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, is heavily used by academic researchers. Those taking part were asked to read a news story about the incident, then respond to a series of questions. The sample size of 200, split equally between White British (excludes white Europeans) and Black British (both African and Caribbean) respondents, combined with its opt-in nature, means the data are not nationally representative, so claims about levels of sentiment must be treated with a grain of salt even as studies find that opt-in platforms don’t differ greatly from national samples.[1.   I would encourage any pollster who wishes to fund a (much more costly) representative survey to replicate the findings!]

Despite the limitations of the data, like other academics that use the platform, we can make inferences about the size of differences in opinion between groups, statistically controlling for age, education, Brexit vote and other factors.

The first finding is that, taken together, the overwhelming majority of respondents find the tweet to be both racist and offensive. Of our sample, 73% say it is offensive, 23% say that it isn’t, and only 4% say that they don’t know. Fully 75% describe the tweet as racist. On the other hand, only a minority of respondents think Baker should lose his job (41%), that he is a racist (31%), or that the tweet proves he is racist (27%).

Does this mean Baker should get his job back? Not so fast.

More from this author

How the woke inquisition broke Cambridge

By Eric Kaufmann

When a debate I co-organised with Matthew Goodwin on immigration in December was attacked because of its ostensibly ‘offensive’ title, we conducted a survey which showed that few people found it offensive and minorities were no more affronted than whites. So we were the victims of a phoney charge. The same conclusion would most likely be reached for many of the high-profile dismissals at the top of the piece.

Yet in the Baker case, we see something quite different. Ordinary black Britons overwhelmingly do find the Baker tweet offensive, and a majority, 59%, believe he should lose his job over it. This marks an important difference from other cases, and is a powerful argument in favour of the BBC’s actions.

Consider the range of responses in figure 1. On no question is there less than a 20-point opinion gap between white and black respondents, and on the question of whether Baker is a proven racist, or should lose his job, this increases to over 30 points.

Figure 1.

Source: Prolific survey, conducted 14th May 2019. N=95 Black British, 113 White British (no other groups sampled)

Not only that, but within the white sample, there are no statistically-significant differences in answers to these questions by age, education level, 2017 party vote or Brexit vote. Just 25% of white Remainers say Baker should lose his job, similar to 23% of white Leavers. Evidently, this is not a ‘culture wars’ question dividing white progressives from conservatives, but a purely racial one. It stems from the actual black experience, not white progressives’ mindreading of that experience, in contrast to many questions on race where white progressives are most likely to believe society is racist and white conservatives least, with minorities in the middle.

Further reading

Don't base policy on moral panic

By Joan Smith

Probing opinion in more detail in figure 2, we see that there is actually considerable inter-racial agreement on Baker’s tweet. While more black respondents feel the tweet is motivated by racism than whites (25% to 10%), about the same share (54-55%) say it’s ‘racist, regardless of motivation’ suggesting that even if Baker’s intent wasn’t racist, the tweet is.

Figure 2.

Source: Prolific survey, conducted 14 May 2019. N=95 black, 113 white (no other groups sampled).

The big difference is that among white Britons who say this, just a quarter say Baker should go, whereas for black respondents who say it the corresponding figure is 63%. Though both seem to incline toward seeing the tweet as negligent rather than deliberate, black respondents view the consequences more seriously than whites do.

Applying the evidence

In my view, the first test for a conviction of racism, sexism or other progressive offenses is that a clear majority of the protected group must view the act as offensive. The survey shows that this test has been met. It could be argued that some white Britons are aggrieved by Baker’s ouster, but it’s likely that black respondents care more about his tweet than whites do about his dismissal.

A second test is whether the offence can be justified by a higher public aim. Even if Muslims are offended by Salman Rushdie’s novels, or Jews by criticism of Israel, there is a compelling reason to override a minority group’s feeling of offense. In the Baker case, the tweet is arguably not of sufficient value in terms of intellectual debate or artistic expression to meet this public good test.

The final hurdle is to determine whether minorities are being sufficiently reasonable and resilient in terms of their sensitivities. Would a cartoon playing on an Irish stereotype (such as a leprechaun) provide justification for dismissal? Probably not.

Further reading

Why are publishers pandering to the mob?

By Sam Leith

However, given that simian imagery is still sometimes deployed in aggressively racist fashion against black Britons, on football terraces as well as on the streets, their sensitivity would seem justifiable. The general lack of discrimination towards the Irish could be deemed to make their depiction a less serious offence.

Discrimination against any group will never be zero, but even if discrimination against black people were to fall to the same level as the Irish, there is a question of how long a group should remain sensitive. A decay rate of one or two generations – approximately the case for the Irish in Britain – might be a reasonable rule to follow.

The point of these deliberations is to ground a verdict of social sanction in principle, precedent and evidence. Penalties should be calibrated to the severity of the offense. The survey data shows that the BBC was right to fire Baker. Yet the fact that a slim majority of the black respondents don’t consider him racist and only 25% say his tweet was racially-motivated suggests he shouldn’t be banished from public life permanently. Once his punishment has been served, Baker will be back.

St Edmund’s claimed that “Dr Carl had collaborated with a number of individuals who were known to hold extremist views. There was a serious risk that Dr Carl’s appointment could lead, directly or indirectly, to the College being used as a platform to promote views that could incite racial or religious hatred, and bring the College into disrepute.”

With these moves, and its recently announced inquiry into the University’s association with the slave trade, Cambridge seems determined to signal its fealty to Left-modernism, or what African-American linguist John McWhorter calls the “religion of anti-racism”, the reigning ideology of our high culture.

What are Noah’s crimes? First, daring to attend a conference on intelligence research at University College London that was invitation-only and where some who study the putative association between race and intelligence were, apparently, present. Carl himself doesn’t endorse the race-IQ link, but he does defend scholars’ right to research in this area in pursuit of truth. That’s a distinction, between liberalism and the science of group differences, that is lost on the guilt-by-association mob.

The need for the event to be private should be obvious, given the hysterical reaction to it from radical students and staff that would accompany any open conference on such matters. This was not some secret plot to sterilise the unfit, but a serious symposium that had to convene in secret to avoid a lynching by the progressives.

Peruse Noah’s research profile on Google Scholar, which his social justice critics no doubt have not, and you will see that he has collaborated with numerous leading academics and written mostly on, well, intelligence research. Much of this is in leading peer-reviewed journals such as Plos One, and its findings are eclectic.

He has a striking number of publications for someone at his stage of career, which just might explain him getting the fellowship in the first place. His most cited article is – wait for it – ‘Verbal intelligence is correlated with socially and economically liberal beliefs’. Maybe the ‘woke’ inquisition would like to put that in their pipe and smoke it.

Further reading

Who let the thought police invade our universities?

By Julie Bindel

He has also, however, been unafraid to do research on the leftward tilt in academia – work which has been replicated by liberal researchers using other datasets. He has worked on the established field of stereotype accuracy, suggesting a connection between ethnic group crime rates and public attitudes toward groups immigrating to a country.

Academics should be allowed to have these conversations in pursuit of truth and theory-building, free from the kind of orthodoxy that once prevented Galileo from propounding his heliocentric view of the universe or Darwin from speaking of our evolution from apes.

I am not a free speech absolutist, but rather a rule-utilitarian – I believe there are other goals in a good society besides free expression. I would be willing to entertain a restriction on speech provided: a) there is a significant, empirically-demonstrable harm derived from a proper study by the college or its committee attempting to get at representative opinion; and b) this is sufficient in weight to override the extremely valuable rule of free speech which should only be violated when there is a very strong countervailing imperative. I don’t believe either condition is met here, despite what the college may believe.

What has occurred is an orchestrated putsch by an organised group of progressive fundamentalists who wield enormous influence in academia and the creative professions.

Let’s be clear on the harm standard that is used by Left-modernism to quash free enquiry. First, there are totemic “protected groups”, with racial minorities at the top, followed by sexual minorities and women, with all other disadvantaged categories (ie class, disability) essentially marginalised.

Second, any action or words that offend the most sensitive member of a sacred group, or the most sensitive member imaginable by a mind-reading progressive, is prohibited. With this ‘most sensitive’ standard in mind, there is an enormous incentive for Left-modernists to go out of their way to be offended or, in the lingo of social science, to engage in the social construction of offence. Evidence – in the form of a representative survey of the minority population, or even the campus minority population – is not provided.

Further reading

Taking on the Social Justice Warriors

By Eric Kaufmann

Having been accosted by radicals in the past in the form of a Twitter mob and an open letter in December 2018, following the announcement of a debate with UnHerd, one of the things I undertook was to empirically test our assailants’ catastrophising claims. And when I surveyed minority opinion, I found what the large-scale data tells us: that minorities are more moderate than white liberals on racial issues and not easily offended. They simply don’t fit the fragile caricature painted by the social justice opportunists.

Whites are likewise unmoved by controversial debates: my data showed no change in their attitude toward protected groups when presented with the ‘offending’ title of our debate.

Students are also not as fragile as the Left-modernists like to claim. The Cambridge and Oxford Unions have both had Jordan Peterson to speak, with large crowds of interested students attending. I suspect most Cambridge students who care wish Peterson could reside at Cambridge for two months so they can hear and test his ideas.

When fundamentalists tried to no-platform me at the University of Bristol, students quietly urged the university not to do so because they are intellectually curious. Far from panicking in their beds, most students – whether from ‘protected’ groups or otherwise – are simply unaware of, or don’t care about, controversial speakers.

The battle for free enquiry won’t be won by converting progressive fundamentalists to reason. Those we need to focus on are the politically-correct herd of centre-Leftists and liberals in academia who dislike the radicals but believe, like the Emperor having new clothes, that their colleagues believe in the logic of no-platforming.

Like traders shorting a fundamentally-sound stock because they believe others will, the downward spiral of censorship will only end when academic authorities become convinced that the reputational cost of capitulation is higher than the momentary cost of annoying a few highly-networked activists.

Spearheaded by radical staff and students, and leveraging twitter to harass and intimidate opponents, SJW excesses provide fodder for the Right-wing media, and continue to raise the temperature of the culture wars. Are the SJWs a wholly new product, brought to life by social media and a coddled generation, as Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff argue? While I love their book, the headwaters of this movement lie further back in time.

Further reading

Can anything arrest the polarisation of the West?

By Eric Kaufmann

The 1960s brought many societal advancements, such as the extension of civil rights to blacks in the American South and a new push for gender equality. Protests helped draw attention to injustices and mobilise public support. However, in the heat of the moment it’s tricky to know how far to push things.

Legitimate protest tipped, at elite universities, into a frontal assault on intellectual merit and the norms of rules-based deliberation – the foundations of the university. Protest, occupation and emotional release came to be sanctified as equivalent or even superior to the Socratic or Popperian models. Moralistic poses could trump evidence and logic.

Sixties radicals cited their resistance to power and hierarchy, championing narratives of liberation and equality to justify a radical revolution in the curriculum. The first generation of writers to dissent from this cultural radicalism were largely New York Jewish, ex-socialist, figures like Daniel Bell and Nathan Glazer, who shifted Right in disgust at the anti-intellectualism of the students.

More Christmas Reading

Why you should read more history

By Tom Chivers

Bell’s The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976) is a classic of conservative cultural thinking. In the book, he traces the origins of what he termed the ‘antinomian’ strain in western culture. Originally contained within utopian socialism and anarchism, the expressive-individualist impulse to reject tradition and community became the dominant force in western art and high culture between 1880 and 1930.

This sensibility was contained within small circles of bohemian intellectuals before bursting forth in the 1960s onto the stage of mass culture due to the rapid expansion of universities and the television media. Capitalism co-opted bohemianism, leading to a working arrangement in which people were encouraged to work hard during the day like disciplined puritans, then switch masks to become indebted hedonistic bohemians by night and on the weekend. For Bell, this cultural contradiction defined the modern West but rendered society unstable, ripe for a ‘great instauration’ of tradition.

Where New York intellectuals like Bell reacted to the first wave of student revolts, the second upwelling of progressive unreason took place in the late 1980s and early 1990s. This period gave rise to speech codes and attacks on the western canon in philosophy and history. Some scholars favoured a new Afrocentric or multicultural curriculum, fingering Eurocentrism as the fount of all problems.

The use of the word ‘postmodernism’ in English-language books exploded. ‘Political correctness’, ‘racism’ and ‘sexism’ enjoyed similar takeoffs, as a Google Ngram Viewer makes clear. In this febrile atmosphere, Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind (1987) exposed the fatuousness of many of these trends while criticising my generation (‘Generation X’) for its superficiality, lack of intellectual curiosity and narcissism.

Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt take a similar approach in The Coddling of the American Mind, published earlier this year, remarking on the fragility of the social media generation (born after 1995) known as ‘Gen Z’ or ‘i-Gen’. Raised by helicopter parents and sheltered by protective teachers and counsellors, these youngsters have not developed the resilience to take risks and deal with uncomfortable ideas. According to the authors, many of the new generation seek protection and safety over freedom and exploration.

Meanwhile, the post-1980s saturation of the academic humanities and social sciences by the Left, and the rise of zealous diversity administrators, has emptied the academy of the intellectual diversity which acted as a check on the wilder impulses of New Left ideologues. Together, these twin forces have produced today’s lexicon of ‘safe spaces’, ‘trigger warnings’, ‘microaggressions’ and ‘bias response teams’.

Once speech is equated with violence, no quarter can be given to purveyors of dangerous ideas, while nothing must stand in the way of the noble mission of equity and diversity. The disturbances at Evergreen State College (where whites were effectively ordered off campus for a day) and Middlebury College (where Charles Murray was forcibly prevented from speaking) are examples of the new campus fundamentalism.

Suggested reading

Why I welcome the Economist's mea culpa

By David Goodhart

You know a non-academic has struck a chord when, at the last count, his book has accrued 562 academic citations, far more than anything I’ve managed as a longstanding professor. In 2017’s The Road to Somewhere, David Goodhart helps make sense of our post-UKIP, post-Brexit world. He nicely lays his finger on the key divide in modern western societies between ‘Anywheres’, whose identity is tied to their credentials and achievements, and the ‘Somewheres’, whose identity is rooted in place, ethnicity or nationhood.

In Britain, about a quarter of the population are Anywheres, many of whom attended residential universities and voted Remain. Somewheres, about half the population, tended to vote Leave. About half the UK population lives within 20 miles of where they were born, and this group exists a world away from the bubble of those who form opinions in the media and academia, or play a leading role in politics and finance.

Somewheres have stronger national identities than Anywheres, view change as loss and tend to want less immigration and economic change. Their interests are ill-served by an Anywhere elite, whose mobility and lack of connection to place renders them tone-deaf to the longings of those with a Somewhere worldview. Goodhart suggests the Leave vote in the Brexit referendum was a democratic expression of discontent from the Somewheres, whose cultural and economic interests have been repeatedly ignored by governments since Blair. He urges more Somewhere input into culture and politics – and a new accommodation between Somewheres and Anywheres that better balances the desires of each – in order reduce the pressures driving populism and polarisation.

More Christmas Reading

Understanding the 'gilets jaunes'

By John Lichfield

This new schism springs from several forces. First, the unprecedented post-1960s level of long-distance migration from the developing world to an aging West. Second, the Left-wing ideological shift from class populism to pro-minority cosmopolitanism. The latter has successfully made any meaningful discussion of immigration and national identity taboo, with mainstream parties until recently steering clear of such topics for fear of being branded ‘racist’.

When liquor isn’t supplied by the market, bootleggers move in. So, too, the expanding anti-racist ideology hemmed in the major parties on immigration, opening space for populist Right entrepreneurs such as the Sweden Democrats or Donald Trump. In Britain, where the debate was more open, it was the failure of first Labour, then the Tories, to control numbers that permitted the BNP and Ukip to flourish.

Suggested reading

Labour’s conspiracy of silence on immigration

By Paul Embery

Western countries’ ethnic majority share ranges from around 62% in America to over 80% in much of western Europe. However, this is steadily declining: the US non-Hispanic white portion will dip below 50% in 2050. Britain and other western European societies will follow suit around 2100. Cities will be transformed first: London is now minority White British and most major metropolitan areas in the US and Canada are majority non-white.

When conservative voters’ minds focus on this demographic shift, they are more likely to support Right-wing populism. US experiments which asked a set of white Americans to read about white decline found that it led them to lean towards the Republicans. I also find, using 2016 survey data during the primaries, that immigration rises up Americans’ list of priorities when reminded about this. In Britain, the share preferring lower immigration with lower average skill over higher numbers with higher skills jumps 25 points when people are asked to consider the long-term impact of sustained higher levels on the ethnic composition of Britain in 2060.

Actual increases in immigration have an effect similar to these experiments. As coverage of the increase grows, the public becomes more focused on the potential long-term loss of what I term the nation’s ‘ethno-tradition’, i.e. its characteristic ethnic composition of having a substantial ethnic majority alongside minorities. It also makes white majorities more aware that their group, with its collective memories, sense of common ancestry and cultural practices, is declining numerically in relation to other groups. Thus in the Bavarian elections where the AfD broke through, fully 100% of its voters agreed with the statement: “I worry that our culture is gradually getting lost”, compared with just 20% of Green voters.

Suggested reading

How should we respond to the rise of mixed-race Britain?

By Sunder Katwala

Migration expert James Dennison and colleagues have shown that populist Right support rose alongside immigration in nine of 10 West European countries between 2006 and 2016. And while the Migrant Crisis was a shot in the arm for many of these populist Right parties, the 2008 economic crisis had no discernible effect, revealing the limited impact of economic hardship on populist Right voting.

Not all people react the same way to diversity and change. As psychologist Karen Stenner has shown, some prefer stability over diversity – an orientation which is between a third and a half hereditary. Attempting to compel such people into appreciating diversity can backfire, making them even more resistant. When Republican partisans are shown passages in which Trump is criticised as racist, many become significantly more pro-Trump.

Others, of course, welcome change and diversity. These people are more likely to live in cities like London and be highly educated. Yet, nearly 40% of London voted Leave and most Leave districts outside London have at least 40% Remain support. In fact, around a quarter of two-person households were divided over Brexit. Psychological disposition, not class or location, is key to explaining today’s emerging culture war.

And just as rising immigration galvanises some people, the rise of populism galvanises others – those cosmopolitan voters that David Goodhart calls the ‘Anywheres’, who are bound together by a moral worldview, rather than ethnicity. In the elections in Bavaria and Hesse, for example, the Green party enjoyed a boost as cosmopolitan voters deserted the Social Democrats, who represent a more traditional conception of the Left based around economic issues.

Suggested reading

The economic rationalists don't get the immigration debate

By Ben Cobley

This can take on a quasi-religious quality – what African-American writer John McWhorter terms the “religion of anti-racism”, something especially visible on elite American university campuses. The outbreaks of political correctness since 2013 speak to a reaffirmation of what I would call Left-modernism, an ideology fusing cultural egalitarianism with anti-traditionalism that emerged in the 1920s but only achieved wide penetration from the 1960s.

This polarisation occurs three times over. First, people respond differently to ethnic change, with conservative voters resisting it while liberals welcome it. Second, individuals divide by values, with cosmopolitan voters viewing opposition to immigration as racist, while conservatives reject this characterisation as politically correct. In a 2016 survey I conducted, I found 80% of Remain voters who are content with current immigration levels say it is racist for a White British person to want less immigration to maintain their group’s share of the population. Among Leavers without a degree, the share is precisely zero. In the US, the gaps are even wider.

Third comes electoral arithmetic: cosmopolitan voters celebrate the fact minorities tend to vote for Left-liberal parties like Labour. They look forward to the day when a rainbow coalition of white liberals and minorities brings forth a millennium of equality and diversity. Conservatives are insecure about this prospect and dig in.

Suggested reading

The rise of post-truth liberalism

By John Gray

As society grows more diverse, these divisions will steadily widen. This self-reinforcing triple-lock will tighten its grip. The US is at a more advanced stage in the process, but as the German regional elections show, Europe is following suit: the centre is hollowing out.

The remedy lies in what I term Whiteshift, the voluntary assimilation of minorities into the majority though intermarriage – a process which will need active telegraphing as mixing won’t be strong enough on its own to make much difference to social cohesion until the end of the century.

The Left needs to back away from excessive accusations of racism and dreams of radical social transformation. Conservatives should worry less about Muslims, Hispanics or the behaviour of other minority groups and focus instead on defending the interests of those who seek slower cultural change. This is not just about immigration levels, but should involve ethnic majority citizens  inducting mixed-race children into myths of British ancestry.

If ethnic majorities come to see a secure future for their group in the rising mixed-race population, they may regain a sense of cultural security, allowing the West to overcome the growing forces of polarisation.