It didn’t matter that the book was critical of the Border Patrol; as the protesters saw it, to treat that agency’s operations with literary nuance and moral complexity was as obscene as doing so with the Gestapo. They tried to shame attendees into leaving, then repeatedly shouted down the author, derailing the discussion until the store manager called the police. After loudly denouncing her, they left.

I don’t know whether any of these hecklers called themselves “Antifa”, but their disruption of a minor literary event was just one small indication of the extent to which the movement’s values and tactics went mainstream during the Trump era. For decades, Antifa activists had focused their attention on shutting down the activities of fringe far-Right groups with violence if necessary. But with Trump in the White House, many concluded the domain of the struggle needed to be extended. In their panicked state post-2016, many liberals and mainstream progressives who might have once eschewed Antifa’s rejection of free speech and advocacy of violence against ideological opponents came to regard them as a last line of defence against a surging Right.

In reaction, Antifa became a central element of conservative demonology in the Trump era, especially during the riots set off by George Floyd’s killing in 2020, in which masked “black bloc” agitators were often seen setting fires and causing mayhem. As Minneapolis burned, Trump claimed on Twitter that his administration would designate Antifa a terrorist organisation. This never happened — and since the United States lacks a domestic terrorism law, it is unlikely it will in the event of a second Trump term.

At the local level, however, conservatives are now testing out other ways of cracking down on the movement. This month, the District Attorney of San Diego, California, brought conspiracy charges against two Antifa activists who were involved in street brawls in early 2021, in effect trying to prosecute them using a legal toolkit created to fight organised crime.

Both the prosecution and the defence in the Antifa trial lay claim to free speech. In her opening statement, the Deputy District Attorney alleged that the defendants conspired “to shut down the speech and the assembly of a patriot group” (they were protesting a pro-Trump rally of the Proud Boys and other far-Right groups). In response, as well as arguing the prosecution is politically motivated — plausibly, given that the government opted not to prosecute any of the Right-wingers involved in the street fights in question — defence attorneys contend that the conspiracy charge threatens free political expression, because it will have a “chilling effect” on anyone protesting Right-wing gatherings.

The irony of the defence attorneys’ argument is that Antifa advocates are often explicit about doing what prosecutors allege — conspiring, or at least coordinating, to prevent those it defines as “fascist” from speaking and assembling. They are also open about the fact that they reject the liberal conception of free speech. In Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook, the historian and activist Mark Bray writes: “At the heart of the anti-fascist outlook is a rejection of the classical liberal phrase incorrectly ascribed to Voltaire that ‘I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it’.” Bray, whose book is at once a history of Antifa, an apologia for its approach, and a how-to guide for aspiring militants, writes that the movement is “committed… to fighting to the death the ability of organized Nazis to say anything”. (“To the death” here is literal: Bray approvingly cites historical instances of murders committed by anti-fascists.)

Like many Antifa sympathisers, Bray directs much of his ire at liberal free-speech advocates, whom he believes are naïve devotees of the “marketplace of ideas”. The reality, though, is that after Trump’s election, many liberals and liberal institutions embraced Bray’s position. Indeed, the popularity of his book — which garnered many positive reviews in the mainstream press and scored Bray multiple NPR interviews — was an indication of this shift. The most dramatic about-face occurred at the ACLU, long notorious for defending the right of a Nazi group to hold a rally in Skokie, Illinois, in 1977. The organisation took the same consistent free-speech stance prior to the 2017 Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally, but after the deadly events of that day, it began to waver, with many of its employees publicly disavowing its prior position.

In another sign of the patina of respectability Antifa acquired in the Trump era, in early 2018 Minnesota congressman Keith Ellison — then the deputy chair of the Democratic National Committee — promoted Bray’s book on Twitter, saying it would “strike fear in the heart of [Donald Trump]”. This was quite a reputational upgrade for a movement that, as Bray’s historical account details, existed for many decades mainly as a minor skinhead subculture devoted mainly to brawling with equally marginal groups of neo-Nazi skinheads.

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For much of its existence, however, Antifa had a more ambivalent relationship with the liberal mainstream than its frequent denunciations of liberal proceduralism would imply. The movement first emerged alongside and in response to the rise of fascism in interwar Europe; the first anti-fascist militants were communists, socialists and anarchists who took to the streets to confront fascist paramilitary groups such as the SA in Germany and the Blackshirts in Italy. At this time, their violent struggle was part of a broader revolutionary agenda. Defeating fascists, viewed as the shock troops of capital, was one piece of the larger radical social transformation they sought, often inspired by the recent Bolshevik triumph in Russia (the fascists, for their part, saw their violent activities as justified by the threat of Bolshevism). Yet in nearly every country, they failed not only to bring about a communist revolution but to block the rise of the far-Right.

It was only in the post-war era, with the West settled under liberal-democratic rule, that Antifa re-emerged in something like its current form. With the dream of universal communist revolution deferred, the movement focused largely on beating back the scattered far-Right groups that persisted. While still deploying the rhetoric of the revolutionary Left, these militants were for the most part resigned to policing the outer fringes of acceptable discourse, following terms set by the liberal mainstream they despised. To the extent their use of political violence was tolerated, it was in large part because their far-Right targets had already been pushed to the margins of society by other means, or because they unfolded in subcultural spaces of little broad political significance.

In making the case for the efficacy of Antifa tactics, Bray and other apologists often point to concrete successes at preventing some particular neo-Nazi group from gathering or speaker from speaking. But it was the subtler, more comprehensive methods of enforcing ideological consensus employed by the liberal mainstream that rendered these fringe groups vulnerable to the antics of a handful of activists in the first place. Conversely, Antifa has had less success lately at shutting down Right-populist leaders and parties it dubs fascist, from Trump to Marine Le Pen and Giorgia Meloni — for the simple reason that it is unable to muster sufficient numbers to physically confront their mass base of support. Even Bray concedes the movement’s tactics are inadequate to take on this new enemy.

Hence, Antifa faces the problem that its approach is more likely to rack up successes when the stakes are lowest; when those it dubs “fascist” manage to command a broad base of support, it seems unable to scale up its approach. An approach calibrated to shutting down a bar show by a neo-Nazi hardcore band is unlikely to have much effect on a Trump rally. The liberal establishment, it would seem, began to embrace Antifa just as its tactics were becoming irrelevant.

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And yet, the possibility of effective collaboration between the centre-left and Antifa activists was on view this week, in the briefly successful attempt to shut down the National Conservatism conference in Brussels. Belgian anti-fascists had repeatedly demanded the conference be prevented from happening, and the local mayor used the pretext of potential violence from counter-protesters to justify asking the police to break up the gathering on public safety grounds. Ultimately, a court forced the city government to allow the conference to go forward, but the affair revealed something novel: that Antifa’s willingness to use violence can furnish sympathetic authorities with a useful rationale for limiting the freedom of speech and assembly of their enemies.

If Antifa has contributed anything to public discourse other than shrill slogans, it is having forced the consideration of what the limits of tolerance and freedom are in a society that claims to revere these values. But this question also applies to them too, as the San Diego prosecution’s case makes clear. Can a liberal society tolerate the activities of a group that openly seeks to deny the speech and assembly rights of whomever its members deem “fascist”? (In the final chapter of his book, Bray implies all Trump voters are “everyday fascists”, but doesn’t clarify whether he and his comrades therefore consider half the US electorate legitimate targets for violence.)

Lately, Antifa has lost much of the prominence it enjoyed in the Trump era but the questions raised by its activities persist. Amid the Gaza war, pro-Palestinian protesters have used Antifa-style tactics to prevent pro-Israel speakers and groups from holding events, but have also fallen victim to tactics long used by Antifa, such as doxxing. If the San Diego prosecution of Antifa succeeds, we can expect further crackdowns on Left-wing protest by conservative DAs along similar lines — but this, in turn, may only confirm fascism is imminent, prompting more aggressive action on the Left. The question, it seems, is less whether we are lurching into a new age of illiberalism than which side will go further, sooner.

This week, he spoke to Mary Harrington at the UnHerd Club about populism, Tucker Carlson, and how to swerve the next big catastrophe. Below is an edited transcript.

Mary Harrington: Peter, tell us the thesis behind your fascinating new book.

Peter Turchin: Ever since the ancient Greek historian Polybius wrote about how the Roman Empire was able to grow quite so relentlessly, people have also tried to explain why societies collapse.

There are many different theories, but the only way to adjudicate is with mathematical modelling. First of all, you translate those theories into mathematical language, so that the predictions follow inevitably from their premises. Then you bring on lots of data to work out which theory best fits the reality.

My colleagues and I are currently working on building a large historical database — our “Crisis DB” — in which we log incidents when past societies got into a state of crisis. What we have found is that all complex societies in the past 5,000 years have experienced an integrative phase, when peace and order reigned — and then an inevitable descent into an “end times”.

I hope that, with all this information, eventually we will make it possible for society to escape this cycle. But why do these end times happen at all? One common theme that we see over and over again, in all of the different routes to crisis, is a condition that we call “elite overproduction”.

Let me explain what I mean by that. First of all, who are the elites? Put simply, they are neither good people or bad people, they are simply a small proportion of the population who concentrate social power in their hands — whether that’s in the military, economic, political, or ideological sphere. In medieval times, the elites were the military nobility of England or France, for example; or in Imperial China, they were the class of mandarins. In the United States, where I live, simply put, it’s the proverbial 1%.

Of course, it’s all a bit more complicated than that. Complex human societies are organised as pyramids, and so there are different levels of elites; the 0.1% rule within the one-percenters, and so on. There are no sharp boundaries necessarily, unless you live in a society like medieval France, where legally you were either nobility or a peasant.

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The next big question is how are elites produced and reproduced? They’re reproduced by ambitious young people, or, to use the technical term, “elite aspirants”, who want to gain positions of power. Elite overproduction occurs when, during some historical periods, we get too many elite aspirants for the slowly changing number of power positions. That creates intense competition, and while some competition is very helpful and good, excessive competition is harmful as it corrodes the social norms and institutions of the society.

When you have huge numbers of losers in this game, a proportion of frustrated elites will decide to break the rules. We saw that very clearly in the 2016 US presidential election. At that point, the number of candidates in the Republican primaries was the largest in history.

Disgruntled elite-wannabes are far more threatening to societal stability than disgruntled workers. In England during the Middle Ages, there was a huge peasant uprising led by Wat Tyler. And what happened? A small group of armoured knights on horseback destroyed them without raising so much as a sweat, because non-elites are not organised. As long as the state is strong and the elites are unified, they can keep a lid on popular discontent.

MH: In the book, you use the arresting phrase “the iron law of oligarchy” to describe why we end up producing too many elites. Once you have a bunch of people in charge of the levers of power and money, they will start funnelling resources towards themselves because they can.

PT: Exactly. What we see in the historical record is that all complex societies go through periods of good times, maybe a century or so long on average, and then periods of disintegration. During the good times, after a couple of generations, the elites get used to the fact that life is good and stable, and that’s when the iron law of oligarchy kicks in. The elites are very strongly tempted to convert their power into goodies for themselves — and if there’s nothing stopping them, that’s what they do. They basically reconfigure the economy in a way that depresses the wages of workers and creates a “wealth pump” that funnels riches directly to the owners and managers of corporations.

MH: You’ve described this happening under Thatcher and Reagan, after several decades of the post-war consensus.

PT: Precisely. Those elites in the US and the UK had 30 glorious years. But by the late Seventies, they started getting selfish. That’s when we began to see the separation between worker productivity and worker compensation. And immediately — within another 30 years — the numbers of uber-rich people exploded in the United States. The number of decamillionaires, those with $10 million or more, increased tenfold from the Eighties to 2010.

That’s the wealth pump at work. And that’s what drives one part of elite overproduction in the US, which is the overproduction of wealthy people who try to become candidates for political office. That’s one of the reasons why the cost of campaigning for political office has completely exploded.

MH: You say in End Times that “America is in a revolutionary situation”. In your view, is it too late to avert the predicted crisis?

PT: We are in crisis, but it’s not too late to avert the worst outcomes. I’m not a collapsologist. The possibility of a social revolution in the US seems to me outlandish. But the Ancien Régime nobility in France could not imagine that in 1789 they would be put under the guillotine, just as antebellum Americans could not imagine a bloody war that would leave 600,000 dead. It is typical that we cannot fully see the possible nastiness of a situation before it unfurls.

We have close to 200 cases of societal crisis right now, and the majority are fairly severe — some leading to outright collapse. But there are also maybe 10-15% of cases where the elites pull together and, cooperating with the rest of the population, they find the right mix of reforms and avoid the worst outcomes. For example, in the mid-19th century, the British Empire was the only large European state that was not affected by a revolution. Of course, there were bad moments, like the Peterloo massacre, but there was no civil war. That’s partly because a group of social elites got together and convinced the rest of their number of the need to reform.

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MH: What about elite dissidents today? In your book, you give a fictionalised example of a young, far-Left, woke, upper-middle class revolutionary who wants to smash the system from within. She joins Antifa, the autonomous anti-fascist movement, and wants to abolish the police — even if that makes life worse for the working class. But is she really a revolutionary at all if none of her opinions have any resonance with the working class?

PT: She is a failed revolutionary, clearly, because she cannot harness popular discontent. In fact, it’s the populists on both the Left and the Right who resonate far more with the working class in the United States.

Antifa is really quite ineffectual, except at beating up Right-wing extremists and smashing things. That’s why Jane, this character in my book, grows disenchanted after some years in the Antifa movement because it’s not going anywhere. She then realises that the way to get ahead in the US, if you want to have a revolution, is through the legal channels because the state is very strong. I am Russian, and I can tell you that nothing like a Bolshevik Party is possible in the US. We don’t want a violent revolution, really. Instead, people on both the Left and Right work their way through the structures of power.

MH: Do you think the elites who want to abolish the police are genuine believers?

PT: Yes. Antifa is fairly secretive, and for good reason, because they don’t want to be penetrated by the FBI. So let’s look back 50 years, at the Marxist militant group the Weatherman Underground, because many of those people have now written memoirs, and we have a pretty good idea of what motivated them. They were clearly fighting against what they saw as an unjust American society, where the poor went hungry and where minorities and women were oppressed. They had a genuine cause — but they were completely unrealistic about their ability to start a revolution. And so they started blowing up monuments, killing people, all because they wanted to trigger the outpouring of popular anger against the elites.

But there was no popular anger at that time. This was before the wealth pump got turned on: American workers were doing very well, and every new generation was doing better than the previous one, so they were completely turned off by these wannabe revolutionaries. Just because somebody is a revolutionary doesn’t mean that they are going to be a successful revolutionary.

MH: You say in your book that the Republicans are on their way to becoming a revolutionary party. And, as we saw with Brexit and long before that — with the repeal of the Corn Laws — that alliances between political elites and a disaffected working class are often somewhat cynical. Is revolution more likely to come from the Right? 

PT: We have to remember that there’s not just one counter-elite party; they’re all splintered. It is a constant struggle between the different radical groups. That’s why, in the US, we have Left-wing populists and Right-wing populists who cannot work together, even though Bernie Sanders sometimes says things that are identical to Republican Senator J.D. Vance.

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MH: In your book, you note that Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News commentator, represents a kind of lightning rod for some of these dissident forces on the conservative side, and that he actually has quite a coherent ideology. You also say that Rupert Murdoch appears to care more about his bottom line than about the interests of his class. So why did he fire Carlson?

PT: Well, I’m not a Freudian psychologist, but let me reconstruct what I think happened. Rupert Murdoch, who really does care about his bottom line, is embedded in a network of like-minded, wealthy people, and he must have been growing tired of them carping on for years about Tucker Carlson and how he is undermining their interests. Finally, Murdoch broke and fired him. It’s not a matter of money — they’re still paying his salary — they just wanted to shut him up.

MH: In cases where the elite view is in conflict with the popular view, do the elites always win?

PT: The great political scientist Martin Gilens conducted some fascinating research into the legislation passed through Congress. He found that 90% of the American population had zero effect on the actual legislation that passed — zilch, nada. Their technique was not fine enough to distinguish between the final 10 percentiles, but they suspect that it’s really the 1% who drives everything. This is why I argue in my book that the US is not a democracy anymore, it’s a plutocracy.

MH: Did those liberal democratic norms ever do anything in the first place? What’s the point of democracy at all?

PT: Democracy works — just look at the quality of life in Denmark and other socially democratic Nordic countries. Of course, it’s all comparative: autocracies are even more dysfunctional than democracies. But even the US plutocracy has, in the past, been capable of pro-social action. During the progressive era, reformist American elites persuaded and browbeat their cohort into passing the New Deal reforms, which essentially shut down the wealth pump for three glorious decades.

MH: Can you envision a coalition in the present day with the capacity to hold the elites to account — and perhaps even frighten them into shutting off the wealth pump?

PT: Let me first say that I am completely non-partisan, and regularly criticise both the Republicans and Democrats. I think that the populist factions, both on the Left and the Right, often talk a good talk, but they have not yet delivered.

There was an American populist party in the 1890s, which never won elections but did put pressure on the establishment at a time of political tension. Riots and insurrections were becoming more frequent. By the early Twenties, it seemed to many that America had reached a revolutionary moment, especially with the Soviet Union presenting an alternative model to the US system. The first Red Scare broke out in 1921, when a segment of American elites were convinced that a Bolshevik Revolution was imminent.

It was this combination of internal and external pressures that propelled Franklin D. Roosevelt’s reforms. He must have realised, like the Russian tsar Alexander II before him, that you either make reforms from above or you end up having revolution from below.

MH: The entire thesis of your book is that we have always had elites — and, in fact, the important thing is not to get rid of them, but to hold their feet to the fire to make sure they’re behaving. But it’s my observation that the current reigning elite is overtly anti-hierarchical, and that we must get rid of hierarchies, wherever there are, wherever they exist. Where do you stand on the sacred values of anti-hierarchicalism?

PT: For 95% of our evolutionary history, we humans lived in small-scale societies, which were very egalitarian — unusually egalitarian — when you compare us to the great apes, for example. The first elites appeared about 7,500 years ago, in chiefdoms. My argument is that a large-scale society can only function in a reasonable way if we have hierarchies of managers and administrators, because we are not ants. We cannot deal without elites. Elites are necessary because, without them, we wouldn’t be able to cooperate and coordinate in large numbers.

But let’s separate their managerial needs from huge differences in wealth. In principle — and, in fact, in history — many elites who start at the beginning of those integrative eras, they’re fairly unselfish. They live quite modestly. Just think about Republican Rome and the senator class: they were just farmers that were somewhat a little bit wealthier than the citizens. The economic differences were quite minimal.

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In principle, it is possible to have elites and have them act in procedural manners. But it is like riding a bicycle: you have to balance all the time. So in order to keep elites from acting in selfish ways, there have to be constraints on them. Democratic institutions provide a set of such constraints, but they have to be supplemented — by other things that we have not yet evolved. Because, inevitably, even democratic society gets into a situation where inequalities start to grow.

My main point is that we can separate the managerial parts of the elites from their accumulating huge wealth and unfettered power.

MH: But what do you make of this societal insistence that we must abolish all hierarchy?

PT: Okay, you want to abolish hierarchies? First, pay yourself the same salary as the median worker in your 500 Fortune company. Put your money where your mouth is.

But take a moment to read the sign on the shop’s window as you enter, and it soon becomes clear that Petunia’s has been drawn into a far darker chapter of the Portland story; one that tells of a city in free fall due to an almost accidental anarchist takeover, where residents have as much to fear staying home as going out and even the most harmless of shops is liable to have its windows smashed in.

The sign is Petunia’s special take on a Portlandian phenomenon that my wife Heather has come to call a “don’t-hurt-me wall” — a now-widespread attempt by local business owners to make anarchists think twice before vandalising their shop or café.

“We are a small, women and locally owned business,” Petunia’s sign pleads. “We are struggling like so many of us in this hard time, and love our community. Please don’t cause us any damage.” Welcome to Portland; the progressive dream that has turned into a nightmare.

When Heather and I moved to the city three years ago, after being spectacularly driven from our jobs at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, there was little to suggest that municipal embrace of anarchy was on the horizon. We considered moving to more than a dozen cities across the US, Canada and Europe — but in the end Portland won. With the city’s proximity to nature and world-class food culture, it seemed to provide the perfect balance. And then suddenly last summer, with the confluence of the George Floyd protests and the Presidential election, Portland came unmoored.

For what it’s worth, Petunia’s “don’t-hurt-me wall” is more explicit than your average Portland business. It has, for example, resisted the urge to simply and loudly proclaim that BLACK LIVES MATTER, presumably because its owners know that Portland is entirely composed of people who already agree with this obvious decree — including the police.

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But its attempt to reason with the anarchists — by highlighting how it is a struggling small business, locally owned and run entirely by women — speaks volumes about day-to-day life in my home city, where negotiating with vandals has become an essential skill. Indeed, Portland is full of signs in windows and on lawns pleading with anarchists to move on and hurt someone else. These residents know they cannot depend on the police to either prevent crimes or arrest those who commit them, and who can’t manage to come together and face down a small but violent mob of misanthropes.

The streets of downtown Portland, once a bustling home to independent boutiques, are now lined with boarded-over windows and closed businesses. No neighbourhood is secure from the current wave of terror; the breaking of shop fronts, arson and harassment of sleeping citizens in their homes are all commonplace.

Rioting has occurred like clockwork, and often anarchist “direct actions” are announced in advance, so the police are never taken by surprise. And yet the city’s officers, under the command of our cartoonishly liberal mayor (who is also our police-commissioner), have stood by and — night after night — allowed the city to descend into chaos. Last September, rioters even targeted the Mayor’s own apartment building, breaking in and setting a fire in the lobby. The Mayor’s response? To announce that he was moving out of the building to keep his neighbours safe, a move any competent parent would recognise invites more terror. The anarchists have gained a strange kind of control over the city in their fight against Nazis and white supremacists they appear to have conjured in a quest to give their anger meaning.

America may be being torn apart by the tension between Democrats and Republicans, but that is not what afflicts Portland. The problem in Portland, as in so many the cities along the West Coast, is that the progressives have fully defeated conservatives, and without any opposing political force, their liberalism has become unhinged.

Anarchism has deep roots in the Pacific Northwest, but until 2020 it largely persisted on the fringe — they would blockade the federal ICE facility, or take over an occasional intersection, harass drivers and direct traffic. This, of course, caused them to be regarded by most Portland citizens as an irritant.

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But that all changed last summer when, during the Black Lives Matter protests, the city’s anarchists discovered that, so long as they shouted certain slogans, citizens who once grudgingly tolerated them would now cheer them on with gusto. Suddenly, the absurd claim that “All Cops Are Bastards” became a mainstream belief, and “Abolish the Police” went from being a threat to a policy proposal.

Of course, all reasonable people understand that black people have faced oppression in North America since their ancestors were brutally imported as slaves. Liberals can be justly proud of our role in fighting this evil, from abolition to the civil rights movement and beyond. But as the current situation in Portland demonstrates, “the right side of history” has now been ceded by voices of reason on the Left to extremists who deliberately conflate a demand for racial justice with a desire to burn civilisation to the ground.

And this has put those of us who consider ourselves “of the Left” in a dangerous predicament. I am not a gun enthusiast. I never wanted to own guns, but I do — for the same reason I would if I lived in a war zone. The civil authority has abandoned the law-abiding citizens of Portland, and in so doing it has created a new Wild West in which we are each responsible for protecting ourselves from bands of roving bandits.

Sometimes, their threat is purely symbolic, as when they topple public monuments. In these situations, the city responds by helpfully removing the offending statue. But in other cases, these habitual rioters attempt to exert power, both directly and indirectly, over their fellow citizens. Graffiti in downtown Portland calls for the killing of local journalist, Andy Ngo, who continues to report on Antifa violence regardless. Having failed to intimidate Ngo, the rioters succeeded in shutting down Powell’s Books for several days when Ngo’s book went on sale.

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Knowing the store would not be protected by police, Powell’s had already decided the book would only be sold online. Yet the unsatisfied rioters forced Powell’s to suspend operation, and the city for its part offered no defence of free speech, or of a free press, or of Portland’s iconic bookstore or of Andy Ngo, a citizen of Portland being openly threatened with murder. The city has also allowed rioters to march freely through residential neighbourhoods, where they intimidate sleeping residents by chanting “wake up, motherfucker, wake up”, shine spotlights into people’s windows and harass anyone who comes out to face them.

So long as rioters claim to fight for the oppressed, they appear to have carte blanche. If they decide they don’t like this article, if they come to my house to menace my family as they have done to Andy Ngo, Mayor Wheeler and countless anonymous citizens of Portland, will the police intercede? I honestly don’t know.

The truth is, I rarely see any evidence of even basic law enforcement here in Portland. The police are extremely slow to respond to emergency calls. The citizens and businesses have, over the last year, been left to fend for themselves against criminals thinly cloaked in progressive slogans. And given the way the Mayor and City Council have undercut the police and allowed them to be demonised by the anarchists, it is easy to understand their reluctance — they are doing a difficult job, under a microscope, where only their mistakes count.

And this is the great tragedy of Portland. As people flee New York, San Francisco, Seattle and Los Angeles, Portland has everything it needs to pick up the slack and be the next booming metropolis — everything, that is, except the political will to resist following those once great cities into a self-inflicted, depressive spiral.

Instead of capitalising on those cities’s errors, Portland is making them too, and in even more spectacular form. The combination of runaway taxes and a municipal authority that sides with criminals, against working people, is sealing the city’s fate. And the needless, coming collapse will fall disproportionately on the most precariously positioned.

Portland, ultimately, is a great city headed in the wrong direction. As Heather and I watch it fall to pieces, we can’t help but feel we have seen this happen before. Portland’s meltdown is, after all, eerily similar to the collapse of Evergreen. A city’s hapless mayor hamstringing the police at the behest of a woke mob that claims to see racists around every corner; it’s uncannily similar to what we saw in 2017.

And the result will be the same, albeit at much greater scale, with much higher stakes. Once again we are left with the question: Can anything be done? And once again, I fear that the answer is no.

In theory, the American political mainstream believes that extremism is not acceptable. The minute that people take up arms or act violently against agents of the state is the point at which all democrats (with a small “d”) unite in condemnation. In practice, too, that theory is borne out: a recent Washington Post-ABC News survey found that 89% of Americans denounced the actions of the Capitol rioters.

In the past year, however, both the Left and Right have seen political violence carried out in their name — and both have floundered in their responses to it. Just as the recent Capitol riot tainted the Right, so the violence of last summer’s protests following the death of George Floyd shamed the Left. Yet while both sides have been at fault, neither seems any closer to facing up to that fact. Instead, both prefer to the blame the other, all the while denouncing the unfairness of their own treatment.

The consequences of this are deeply worrying. Polls show that almost a fifth of Republican voters feel some support for the actions of the Capitol rioters. That is a significant, and concerning, chunk of the Republican base. But it is analogous with those on the Left who continued to support the Black Lives Matter movement, even after weeks of nationwide rioting and looting. Indeed, three months after the protests began, 28% of the American public continued to express “strong support” for the movement — a fall of just under 10% in three months.

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By Douglas Murray

So why have both the Left and Right struggled to control their extremes? It seems to me that there are three principal reasons. The first is a by-product of the information age: namely, that today’s fringes are amorphous. In 1964, when then Republican candidate Barry Goldwater sought to draw a clear line between the conservative movement and the far-Right, he was famously urged to excommunicate the extremist John Birch Society. In recent weeks, people have called on Republicans to do the same with the “alt-right” and those associated with the Capitol riots. Last summer, meanwhile, many thought it would be shrewd for the Democrats to disassociate themselves with BLM and Antifa.

The trouble, however, is that today, unlike with the John Birch Society, political groupings on both the Left and the Right rarely meet physically, while their leadership and membership structures are anything but clear. It’s all very well demanding that the Republicans sever ties with the “alt-right” — but how do you decide who is “alt-right” and who is not? On the other side, how — other than referring to the law — do you identify which parts of BLM are acceptable and which are not? The answer may not be impossible, but it is certainly harder than in the past.

What makes this even more tricky are the second and third challenges to reining in political extremes. The second – a feeling of unfairness following the condemnation of political violence – has been evident throughout conservative commentary in recent weeks. The American Right has been almost unanimous in its condemnation of the violence at the Capitol. But, at the same time, there has been a tendency to caveat this denunciation by contrasting it with the reluctance of Democrat officials to criticise the violent BLM-Antifa activists last summer.

Typically, they invoke the case of Kamala Harris, who in June gushingly told the comedian Stephen Colbert: “This is a movement. I’m telling you. They’re not going to stop, and everyone, beware… That they’re not going to let up. And they should not, and we should not.”

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By Kat Rosenfield

Of course, it is clear that America’s new Vice President was admiring protests, rather than the violence that followed them. Yet a Republican could be forgiven for holding it up as proof that there are double-standards at play. If, after the storming of the Capitol, Donald Trump or Mike Pence had said that the rioters were “a movement”, that they “were not going to stop” and “should not”, they no doubt would have been accused of legitimising violence.

The problem is that this perception of asymmetry – that feeling of unfairness – cuts both ways. For their part, Democrats claim that whereas the BLM protests had a legitimate cause, the Capitol riot did not; that whereas their perception of police racism in the US is accurate, Trump’s claims about the “stolen” election are not; that while the person they blame for instigating the violence was in the White House at the time, the people accused on their side were not in comparable positions of power. Both sides believe themselves to be in conflict with an opponent who is stronger — and that sense of injustice will not just disappear.

Then there is the third structural problem faced by both sides when dealing with their own extremists: the way in which their political opponents gleefully disrupt what should be moments of reflection to score political points. Since the Capitol riot, for example, the words “terrorist” and “domestic terrorist” have rarely had such a good outing on left-wing cable news channels such as CNN and MSNBC. For instance, CNN presenter Don Lemon made the following claim on-air:

“If you voted for Trump you voted for the person who the Klan supported. You voted for the person who Nazis support… You voted for the person who incited a crowd to go into the Capitol and potentially take the lives of lawmakers. Took the lives of police officers. Took the lives of innocent lives who were there on the Capitol that day.”

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Here, Lemon used a shocking but isolated incident to take a broad swing at the entire Republican movement. It was a crude tactic, but I suspect few on the Right would not have done the same had the crowd in Washington on January 6^th belonged to the far-Left. Few would have been able to resist the opportunity to present events in a way that tarnished all of their political enemies.

Yet such opportunism only serves to deepen the cycle of division. It was hardly surprising that, immediately after Don Lemon’s monologue went viral, the GOP sent out a fundraising email to its supporters titled “Did you see what CNN said about you?”.

So what can the American majority — the people who disapprove of political violence on all sides  — do to stop the spread of extremism across American politics? Well, the Left and the Right could start by agreeing that both sides house extremists who need to be identified. Then, when that’s achieved, they should be fair, consistent and nuanced when apportioning political blame.

All of which may seem remarkably straightforward —and, to an extent, that is true. But at the same time, we must not forget that the future of American politics is at stake. At present, it is riddled with hatred. And with politics, like anything, you get out what you put in.

Last week he was arrested (then released) in Washington DC, after burning a BLM flag stolen from a black church, once again confounding white Americans with his supposedly distorted racial identity. I found it hard, as I do every time he pops up in the news, not to roll my eyes at the media’s portrayal of Tarrio as some great instigator of racial discord. Because, like me, he’s a Cuban-American from Miami, which is to say that I’ve seen plenty of Tarrio-types in my day.

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Tarrio is what I’ll call a petty Miami schemer — the kind known to anyone who lives in the city, which was built on schemes and grifts in its days as a swampland backwater. In Miami, guys like Tarrio, from the personal trainer who tries to sell you steroids after your first session to the sleazy foreign investors who buy up entire high-rises, are a dime a dozen. The Proud Boys leader was first convicted, of theft, at the age of 20; nine years later, in 2013, he was sentenced to 30 months in federal prison for rebranding and reselling stolen medical devices. Before that, he spent some time in North Florida and ran a poultry farm. And let us not forget Tarrio’s failed 2020 congressional run.

That Tarrio leads a white supremacist group can be explained not by national race relations, but by the fact that he grew up in Miami: a place where “whiteness”, as it’s defined by the woke media class, simply doesn’t exist – for the simple reason that there are basically no white people here. It’s the only American city where Hispanics completely dominate the political and cultural landscape, and the few white people who remain no longer feel themselves to be “culturally white”. Everything in Miami, including racial dynamics, is filtered through a Hispanic lens, not an American one. Miamians don’t even consider themselves Floridians, because the rest of the state resembles Miami as much as Zimbabwe does. Those who grew up here are unrestrained by traditional ideas of race.

As a Miami cliché, Tarrio isn’t remarkably interesting. He’s merely an opportunist with some street smarts, who, due to his urban look, cuts an imposing figure. What he represents to the media class — and how they frame him — is far more interesting. The conversation about race in America always revolves around the supposed animus between blacks and whites, with other POC automatically siding with African-Americans due to some assumed melanated kinship. The fact that Tarrio is even a member, not to mention the leader, of a white supremacist group is inconceivable to most liberals. Their paradigm, in which all POC are locked in an interminable struggle against their white oppressors, removes all possibility for the fluidity and nuance with which POC, and especially Hispanics, navigate ideas of race and colour.

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In Miami, the main animus Hispanics have is with other Hispanics. The Puerto Ricans and the Dominicans have beef with one another. The Chileans and the Argentinians despise each other for reasons beyond just soccer. Hell, my people, the Cubans, have issues not only with other Hispanics, but with each other! The Cubans who immigrated shortly after Castro took power view themselves as entrepreneurial hard workers; they look down on the “newer Cubans” as lazy dope dealers and Medicare fraudsters.

These disparate Hispanic demographics, in order not to have to deal with one another, have segregated themselves into neighbourhoods where they only associate with themselves. The idea that anyone in Miami is thinking about white supremacy is preposterous; to someone like Tarrio, the “spectre of whiteness” — or any other concept used by the Left to explain American race relations — is completely foreign. Herein lies the problem with a term like “people of colour”; something as surface level as pigmentation doesn’t bind distinct subgroups into some kind of coalition.

If liberals find the impossibility of Hispanic solidarity distasteful, it’s only because they believe that kinship between groups is only achievable if all animus ceases to exist. People who live in cities where cultures are constantly clashing, Miami being the greatest example, get that a utopia in which every single group loves each other isn’t necessary. It’s only those suffering from white guilt who advocate this communal POC lovefest, because they are convinced that “whiteness” — and not natural and historic differences between groups — is what’s keeping the utopia at bay. One of the only things Hispanics seem to agree on, though, is that merely tolerating one another is often all the tolerance that’s needed. Some may find this “division” disconcerting, and maybe even sad, but if there isn’t a deep affinity among disparate Hispanic groups, there is in Miami a begrudging camaraderie that permeates personal interactions and animates the culture, and the city.

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Steeped in this culture, a figure like Tarrio, despite all his petty idiocy, has a more acute understanding of American racial dynamics than any African-American Studies major from an elite institution. The race-obsessed commentariat — the same people who’ve pushed the word “Latinx” on Hispanics in the hope of inducing an inorganic solidarity — would be mystified by the Hispanic view of blackness, if they ever bothered to listen to it. To white liberals, if a person looks black, they must automatically identify as black, which isn’t necessarily the case. A Dominican friend of mine, who is very dark-skinned and would be considered “black” by an outside observer, bristles if you jokingly call him so, quickly saying, “I’m Dominican.” Like a lot of Caribbean islanders, he’s not invested in the African-American racial project as understood by those who dominate the race conversation.

Of course, some would argue that this is a result of internalised anti-blackness. Whether that’s true or not — I don’t buy it — the fact remains that in the Hispanic world, black isn’t always black. Which goes a long way in explaining why a guy like Tarrio, who personally identifies as an Afro-Cuban, seems to suffer no cognitive dissonance in leading a white supremacist group.

What his opponents fail to understand is that Tarrio, in a twisted way, is a post-racial man. If I had to guess — and as I said, I’ve known many like him — he truly isn’t concerned with thoughts of colour and race. The only colour that matters to him is the green of the American dollar. In his albeit disturbing quest for finding the ultimate grift, he would’ve fit in just as well with Black Lives Matter as he does with the Proud Boys. He just so happened to have fallen down one internet rabbit hole and not the other.

After the recent events at the Capitol, groups like the Proud Boys will certainly be monitored more closely — and possibly even be forcibly disbanded. But Tarrio, a nasty Miami grifter through and through, will just move on to his next scheme.

The former Vice-President is not exactly the type you would imagine clad in all-black combat-style street apparel, hurling commercial-grade fireworks at police officers. Rather, he drafted the infamous 1994 omnibus crime bill in concert with the National Association of Police Organizations. He is even known to venerate the arcane institutionalist ethos of the US Senate — whereas to insurrectionary anarchists, such institutions could only be tools of oppression.

But the Trump Era has an odd way of bringing about unexpected ideological convergences. In the announcement video that formally kicked off his 2020 presidential campaign, Biden paid homage to what he called the “courageous group of Americans” who descended upon Charlottesville, VA in August 2017 to confront an assembly of Right-wing rally-goers. Among that “courageous group” were Left-wing activist factions broadly classified under the banner of “antifa”.

For Biden, what transpired in Charlottesville was a “defining moment,” and formed the basis for his decision to launch a third campaign for the presidency at age 76. While Biden did herald generic American idealism in that announcement video — which would be anathema to most insurrectionary anarchists — in the gravity he assigned to the Charlottesville episode, he also affirmed a core tenet of the “antifa” worldview: the notion that a uniquely pressing fascistic threat has gripped the country, and crushing this threat is a matter of unparalleled world-historic urgency.

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By Michael Tracey

Certainly, if you picked any “antifa” member at random, there’d be an almost 0% chance that they would express any kind of personal enthusiasm for Joe Biden. But there’d be a virtually 100% chance that they’d express a great deal of enthusiasm for the theory that “fascism” is an accurate characterisation of America’s current state of governance. Biden would be similarly enthused to present a variation of this analysis, albeit from a slightly different ideological angle. He typically intones things like, “This is not who we are”, rather than “All Cops Are Bastards”.

Still, where Biden is united with “antifa” is in assigning such outsized importance to the role of small-time “fascist” agitators like the ones who gathered that weekend three years ago in Charlottesville (despite ultimately being outnumbered by Left-wing activists) on account of the validation they are purported to have received from Donald Trump. For both Biden and “antifa,” this dynamic constitutes the chief prism through which contemporary American political affairs must be viewed.

And for both Biden and “antifa,” this mode of analysis has been hugely successful. “Antifa” has succeeded in stoking nationwide insurrectionary fervour on a scale unseen in decades. Given their opposition to Trump as the alleged fascist-in-chief, as well as their appropriation of the “Black Lives Matter” protest mantle, they’ve received an extraordinary amount of mainstream liberal legitimation.

Democratic Party operatives have even gone so far as to exalt “antifa” activists as the modern-day equivalents of US soldiers fighting in World War II — while apparently exhibiting no embarrassment for invoking this comparison.

Another clear beneficiary of the “fascism” panic, somewhat paradoxically, has been Biden. A supreme irony of the outsized role that “anti-fascism” has played in post-2016 US political discourse — as popularised by both liberals and leftists, who often claim to be at odds with each other but nonetheless overwhelmingly agree on the underlying “fascism” prognosis — is that it has ultimately limited the possibility of actual Left-wing policy reform.

Democratic presidential primary voters had been traumatised by the non-stop barrage of Trump-related hysteria churned out each and every day by profit-driven corporate media outlets, and laboured under the sincere belief that Trump’s America bears some bonafide relation to Weimar Germany. As such, a plurality were understandably uninterested in foundational reform to the Democratic Party.

That was bad news for socialist Bernie Sanders, who ended up losing handily in the 2020 primaries to a former Vice President whose entire campaign was predicated on little more than restoring the pre-2016 Democratic Party to power.

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And in a way, you can’t particularly blame those Biden voters. Because if your main sources of information tell you for years on end that the reins of state have been seized by an out-and-out fascist, who is fuelling a siege of “Nazi” street agitators, whatever deficiencies the Democratic Party might have at the moment are of little or no concern. Now even Sanders himself has called for a “united front” against Trump ahead of the election, seeming to suggest that the precedent of Francisco Franco is historically apt. Wasn’t the whole problem with Franco that he couldn’t be voted out?

Never mind that Trump would have to be quite a feckless fascist to allow himself to be constantly maligned in the country’s major media, plotted against by his own administration underlings, and impeached. The decidedly unsexy reality is that Trump has been a fairly weak executive, at least relative to his predecessors in the postwar era.

But his radically unorthodox communications style belies any dispassionate assessment of this record, thus the fascism-mongering persists more-or-less unabated. And for all the warnings of a Reichstag Fire moment always supposedly being around the corner, the past six months of Covid and riots were a missed opportunity for any genuine fascist seeking to consolidate power. Trump appears largely content with issuing inflammatory tweets.

So as riots continue around the country, and corporate news networks describe post-protest scenes with raging infernos as “mostly peaceful”, the temptation can be to write this off as mere partisan side-taking. Certainly there’s an element of that — most journalists desperately don’t want to see Trump win in November.

But thanks to the prevailing “fascism” framework, their opposition to Trump isn’t just a matter of ordinary election-year preference. It’s imbued with existential, civilisation-altering significance. How could anyone in their right mind not do everything within their capacity to ensure the defeat of fascism? Once you accept the premise that fascism does in fact accurately describe the current state of American governance, all bets are off — journalistically and otherwise.

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Stop pretending the BLM protests were peaceful

By Michael Tracey

So even if the “anti-fascists” in the equation are burning down cities, they will still never exist on the same moral plane as the actual “fascists” whose champion occupies the White House. Hence, riots which result in the destruction of huge swaths of Kenosha, WI magically become a “mostly peaceful” affair according to CNN and the New York Times.

Yes, journalists also presumptively ascribe a certain virtue to any protests that occur with the imprimatur of “Black Lives Matter”. But racial disparities have been a fact of American life since the dawn of the republic. The unavoidable explanation for why they’ve taken on such frantic energy in the past several months is the alleged spectre of fascism, namely Trump. With a Democratic President, even one as vanilla as Biden, there will doubtless be future race-based controversies. But they won’t have the cosmic weight as those that occur when a “fascist” president also looms.

Adding to the growing list of ironies, Trump’s primary conception of the presidency has less been Fuhrer, than “Pundit-in-Chief”, whereby he proudly brandishes the role of world’s loudest media critic — with media criticism having been one of his life-long passions. Given that experience, Trump knows how to expertly pry at tensions in how pundit narratives get constructed, and the “peaceful protest” cliché provides all the material that could ever be desired in that respect. Kayleigh McEnany, in tweeting a photo of a recent Trump air hanger rally in Pennsylvania, described the attendees (only half-jokingly) as “peaceful protesters”.

The reason she did this is because if one follows the recent patterns of media nomenclature, any and all “peaceful protesters” should be painstakingly accommodated, even if their gatherings produce widespread arson attacks or increase the Covid-19 infection rate. There is no impartial explanation for why the “peaceful protests” of this past summer deserved praise, adulation, and rousing defences from the standpoint of pandemic mitigation. Again, only does this make sense when inserted into the blinkered fascism vs. anti-fascism context.

One wonders if these protesters and rioters have ever paused to consider why it is that so many establishment media outlets are so consistently eager to advocate on their behalf, with the phrase “largely peaceful” having been stretched well past the point of absurdity. And one also wonders why so many powerful forces are so willing to join in affirming their “anti-fascism” worldview — up to and including, in his own way, Joe Biden. For all the talk about dismantling systems of oppression, those who actually wield power in 2020 America seem to view the “fascism vs. antifascism” dichotomy as awfully convenient to their own self-preserving interests.

It makes for a bizarre dynamic, as Democratic Party pundits and politicians routinely describe avowed insurrectionists as nothing more than benign “peaceful protesters”. And since the protests came to be arrayed against the federal forces dispatched to Portland by Donald Trump, more conventional elements of the Left/liberal “Resistance” have made common cause with these revolutionary anarchists who regard the very essence of the US political system — not just Trump — as innately fascist and “white supremacist”. On a recent evening, for instance, an older white couple in a pair of matching “Resistance”-branded T-shirts could be spotted in attendance among the radical activists, as well as a man sporting the slogan “Ridin’ with Biden”.

To characterise what’s gone on in Portland as a traditional “protest” is a misnomer, however. Pay a visit to the area around the Federal Courthouse in Downtown after midnight and you are greeted by brigades of black-clad “Antifa” foot soldiers — geared up in full body armour, complete with industrial-grade gas masks, shields and even customised radio systems. Being overwhelmingly white, they are strategic about public presentation: the speakers appointed to address the nightly “rallies” are almost exclusively black, as “amplifying black voices” to whom whites must dutifully “listen” is a central tenet of the Summer 2020 protest ethos.

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By Michael Tracey

If there is any foundational idea operative in Portland, it’s to keep a frenetic confrontation with the state going for as long as possible, so as to maximise the chances that an incendiary incident might occur and catalyse a larger insurrectionary uproar — similar to the killing of George Floyd in May, which sparked nationwide riots. One fateful tear gas canister fired into the temple of a “protester” could reverberate rapidly across the country; “Portland solidarity” actions have already sprouted up as far away as Richmond, Virginia. This is by design: a former occupant of the so-called “CHAZ,” the former anarchist commune that took over a portion of Seattle in June, told me a number of people who previously set up shop there had headed south to Portland.

As I milled around one night livestreaming on my phone, a “protester” wielding a heavy-duty shield emblazoned with the anarchist “A” symbol demanded that I cease recording. When I declined to obey this command, I was confronted by several additional “protesters” — all white, of course — one of whom snatched the phone out of my hands. It was only returned after I agreed to recite the phrase “Black Lives Matter” with sufficient vigour. This friendly fellow subsequently threatened to “fucking stomp me out,” and then ejected me from the protest zone — forcing me to run, not walk, away — as another associate hurled a projectile at me. Certainly not behaviour I’ve encountered at any other “protest”.

The pandemic is far from the minds of participants — in contrast with most working-class Americans. One night, I tried to put a question to Portland’s mayor, Ted Wheeler, about the advisability of mass protest gatherings as Covid cases spike in the state of Oregon. Wheeler had ventured out in a show of support for the protesters, and was even permitted to address the rally, despite being widely loathed. “Fuck you, Ted Wheeler,” his detractors shouted, unimpressed by his pleading. Still determined to demonstrate his solidarity, however, he subjected himself to a choreographed tear-gassing from federal forces (a New York Times reporter was right next to him at the time, surely by sheer coincidence.)

“The most important thing right now is the Black Lives Matter movement,” Wheeler replied to me, at which protesters in the vicinity became enraged, accusing me of engaging in “white supremacy” and “silencing” blacks for posing a question they (the whites) deemed “inappropriate” to an elected official. “That is a premise that doesn’t concern this movement at all,” one protester said of the pandemic, as others demanded that I “get the fuck out of here”.

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Wheeler’s fallacy is imagining that any incrementalist policy reforms will satisfy the ideological core of these protesters, whose goal is abolition of the country’s entire criminal justice apparatus in addition to general insurrection. But as expected, even getting tear-gassed wasn’t enough to placate Wheeler’s critics. The following day, Jo Ann Hardesty, a Portland City Commissioner, dismissed Wheeler as “a privileged white man”. (Having received a sizable helping of tear-gas myself, I can confirm that it was highly unpleasant.)

The source of the animosity toward Wheeler is the conduct of the municipal Portland police, which a number of residents (and even officers) find genuinely baffling. “We are probably one of the most progressive law enforcement agencies I’ve ever had the opportunity to be around,” one veteran Portland Police Bureau officer told me as he monitored the protest action from afar one night, semi-hidden in an unmarked vehicle parked on a side street, with the massive booms of the “mortar”-style fireworks being fired at the Federal Courthouse crackling in the background. “And it’s just sad to me that we’re getting shoved back into this stigma of these jackbooted thugs again. All the outreach we’ve done — all the gang outreach we’ve been a part of — it’s all been taken away from us.”

Indeed, take a look at the official Portland Police Twitter account and you will find a banner image of an officer happily wearing a LGBT Pride Flag-coloured facemask. A left-wing political activist in Portland who asked to remain nameless for fear of retribution attested to having a friend in the Bureau who is a black lesbian woman with several children. “She’s one of the most thoughtful, intelligent people that I know,” the activist said, “who went into becoming a police officer because she wanted to see more people like her on the force in her community.”

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They added: “We have a lot of people running this protest who have never been outside of this Portland bubble. And the Portland bubble is very comfortable. They don’t understand what real suffering is like.”

That black lesbian woman would presumably be implicated in one of the chants that has become a staple of the protests: “A – C – A – B… ALL COPS ARE BASTARDS” — which is unlikely to be a notion dispelled by marginal policy changes of the kind politely suggested, for example, by Wheeler. Nor would the withdrawal of federal forces from the area satisfy their insurrectionist demands. When protesters chant “NO GOOD COPS IN A RACIST SYSTEM,” the “system” to which they are referring is the foundational system of governance of the United States — again, deemed inherently “fascist” and “white supremacist”, and therefore impossible to reform. As one sign wielded by a protester declared: “The Revolution will not come by asking or voting,” with the customary anarchist “A” symbol scrawled onto the cardboard. Other protest phrases visible around Portland include “Die Piggies” and “Dead Cops,” as well as calls for the assassination of Trump.

Outside the core of the Downtown protest zone, the same mass-produced “Black Lives Matter” posters which have become ubiquitous across so many other American metropolitan areas dot the front porches and storefront windows of Portland establishments. (It’s certainly more culturally fashionable than “Joe Biden 2020” insignia, although the electoral implications are roughly similar). But a trip around the city also reveals hand-made yard signs posing questions such as, “DEAR WHITE PEOPLE, WHAT ARE YOU DOING TO END WHITE SUPREMACY?”

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One potential answer to this question might be: “elect a black head of state,” as the overwhelmingly white Multnomah County, Oregon — home to Portland — did by a whopping 56-point margin in 2008 and 55-point in 2012. But a strange feature of this protest movement is that one would barely know Barack Obama, a black man elected president in a majority white nation, ever existed. Not that Obama’s mere election was supposed to have eradicated every last trace of racial inequities in the United States: of course it wasn’t. But you’d think it would at least inform popular conceptions of the role of race within the nation’s elite power structure. Instead, Obama seems to have been simply “erased” — the significance of his tenure not even worth mentioning. Are we to believe that a country so intractably defined by “white supremacy” — a totally uncontested truism among protesters and their media allies — nonetheless elected a black man not once, but twice? Apparently.

Like so many other cities across the US, much of Portland remains boarded up as a result of riots that initially broke out in early June after the George Floyd killing — compounded by decreased economic activity brought on by the pandemic. (Again, the virus is evidently not a “premise” of “concern” to protesters.) Even VooDoo Doughnut, a popular independent Portland shop featuring items like Vegan Maple Cream, was boarded up as of July 26, after one of its windows was smashed by “BLM protesters”, according to a security guard. “We had some threats,” he said. Overtly left-wing food carts — the mere existence of which is already something of a conundrum — also report being “damaged during the protests” and indefinitely closed.

While “The Feds” have reduced their visibility in recent days, that doesn’t mean the rancour will subside any time soon. Notwithstanding talk of a “peaceful transition,” one Department of Homeland Security agent told me: “There may be some unrealistic expectations. There’s never going to be a 100% withdrawal of federal officers from the federal building.” And one of the “voices” appointed to address a nightly rally last month explicitly likened Portland’s action to the Montgomery Bus Boycott of the 1950s, which lasted for 381 days.

Apart from highlighting the elevated historical terms in which these protesters see themselves, it’s an indication that Feds or no Feds, the Portland anarchists have every incentive to keep the chaos going in perpetuity. And why wouldn’t they? Clearly, their strategy is paying off.

Instead of knuckling down in a Big Four consulting firm like much of my graduating year, I spent most of my twenties flip-flopping between temp work and jobs I hated in industries that filled me with cynical despair, living in sketchy house-shares while pursuing trendy but unremunerative activities such as avant-garde writing, conceptual art and political activism.

In the course of this I met many anti-capitalists, the forerunners of today’s Antifa militants, the far-left radicals behind much of the violence in the United States.

But then of course, because of America’s extreme polarisation, many believe it’s not Antifa fanning the flames of riot in the US, but neofascist accelerationists. Rumours are swirling about provocateur involvement in the rioting by hard-left groups, as well as white supremacists.

Depending on your filter bubble, it could be white nationalists seeking, as Gavin Haynes put it in these pages last week, to give the system “just one final heave-ho before it crumbles” in favour of a new racist utopia. Or if you follow different blue-ticks on Twitter, it’s Antifa creating mayhem in order to bring down Donald Trump.

To muddle things further, far-right activists may be posing as Antifa in order to heighten both these narratives. Trump himself has come down firmly on one side of the partisan divide by designating Antifa a terrorist group.

Between hyper-partisan reporting and confused messages from the front lines, perhaps there is no making sense of US events — certainly not from this side of the pond. But if we step back from trying to pinpoint one ‘side’ as ‘goodies’ and the other as ‘baddies’, and see both Antifa and the alt-right as two sides of the same phenomenon — alt-right and alt-left in fact — there are plenty of warnings here for British politics.

Both alt-left and alt-right have a presence in Britain, though their antagonism doesn’t (yet) approach the running battles that now regularly occur in the United States. Plenty has been written about the constellation of beliefs on both alt-right and alt-left. But — demographically speaking — who are they?

The fact that the radical fringes are often less than keen to have their real identities known makes it difficult to find reliable data on the demographics of these groups today. But a look at past studies offers some clues. First, Ukip: though many ‘Kippers would be offended to be described as ‘alt-right’, the 2018  three notorious alt-right social media figures joining the party in 2018 does little to dispel the sense of at least some relationship. And 2017 YouGov data shows Ukip members be typically less educated and heavily concentrated in the lowest income brackets.

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Over the pond, 2018 research from the US-based Institute of Family Studies supports the contention that adherents of the kind of white identitarian politics common on the ‘alt-right’ is associated with lower education levels, lower earnings and higher unemployment.

This is complicated somewhat by recent reports suggesting that far-right groups such as Generation Identity are focusing their recruitment efforts on young graduates. But the longer-term picture suggests the stereotypical alt-righter is male, working- or lower-middle-class, without a degree, frustrated by stagnation in economic opportunities and liable to blame his problems on immigrants and the ‘globalist elite’.

In contrast, the alt-left are seen as being far higher up the social scale, and in the war of words between Left and Right, figures such as Carl Benjamin and Brendan O’Neill accuse Antifa of being pampered middle-class leftists playing at activism. But from my own recollections, I don’t think it’s that simple. Rather, I think the new alt-left is deadly serious — just pointing the wrong way.

My overwhelming recollection of the movement was a mixture of middle-class culture with economic precarity: people with serious smarts and groaning bookshelves working jobs in bars to fund activism, while complaining about The System that excluded them. (I include myself in this description, in case you think I’m sneering.)

I argued recently that the massive expansion of higher education is creating a new ‘Everywhere precariat’. This group comprises graduates who’ve absorbed a worldview that trains them for ‘metropolitan elite’ job types that turn out to be far scarcer than the graduates competing for them.

The result is a frustrated would-be middle class, treading water in what the writer Venkatesh Rao has called ‘premium mediocre’ lifestyles, a rented simulacrum of a genuinely prosperous existence designed to signal preparedness for the day when, by luck or application, they make it into the dwindling numbers of the real bourgeoisie.

These graduate left-behinds are then stuck in a holding pattern, in precarious housing and employment, as opportunities to take the big steps into adult life — traditionally home ownership, coupledom and kids – recede ever further into the distance. A recent Pew report showed 30% of millennials living with a spouse and child, a fall of 10% on Generation X and a whopping 40% drop on the 1968 generation. That’s America, but ONS datashows the age of first child climbing relentlessly in Britain too — while the birth rate is falling in all cohorts save the over-40s.

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Pity the poor avocado-eating graduates

By Mary Harrington

Ed West argued back in 2016 that the disappointed also-rans in the graduate-job Ponzi scheme were increasingly turning to far-left political figures. Both Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders, who proved popular especially with 18-30 voters (if not to anyone else) have made heavy use of words such as ‘rigged’. A 2017 NBC interview with an American Antifa student at an elite Bay Area university expresses this sense of a receding dream:

“These false promises we’ve been told throughout our lives that we just have to follow the American dream of working hard and things will be all right. We’ll get a middle class existence with house, lawn and the picket fence,” Daniel said. “This promise, this future has never materialised, and we kind of realized that the system’s rigged against us and we need to do something about it.”

Seen from this angle, the principal distinction between supporters of the alt-right and alt-left is not, contra Carl Benjamin and his ilk, social class. Rather, it’s between different types of ‘left-behind’. Many on the alt-left aren’t really privileged young people playing at radicalism before settling into steady jobs.

Perhaps that’s how they planned it; but the steady jobs they were banking on settling into after a stretch moonlighting as an activist have evaporated, leaving a bleak economic future distinguished from the alt-right version chiefly by different taste in music, coffee and radical aesthetics.

This is supported by a 2017 European Union Politics paper that studied support for radical-right and radical-left parties. While ‘alt’ and ‘radical’ versions of Left and Right may not be quite the same, the paper’s conclusions are suggestive. It showed that in bare economic terms, radical-left and radical-right supporters don’t differ a great deal but where they do — significantly — is on education. That is, both are heavily drawn from economically precarious groups, but for radical leftists these economic grievances are overlaid with cosmopolitan values inculcated via higher education.

Both radical Left and Right are, the authors suggest, “different segments of the same pool of losers of globalization”. The left-behind bottom rungs of the new graduate precariat mix cosmopolitan style identity politics with a simmering anger at a system that feels rigged against them, and a demand for economic redistribution — in other words, the Corbyn/Sanders formula.

Meanwhile, adherents of the alt-right face similarly left-behind economic prospects, just without the graduate worldview. So the main mode is the same anger at a rigged system, just overlaid with the mirror-image of the cosmopolitan worldview: nativist identity politics. We might call this the Tommy Robinson formula.

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Will there be a second Covid wave?

By Tom Chivers

The urbanist Joel Kotkin has argued recently that developed economies are heading for a form of neo-feudalism. A tiny class of oligarchs, he warns, is emerging in conjunction with a ‘clerisy’ comprising universities, media and culture that propagates its values. These two classes are in the process of stripping wealth, property and influence from pretty much every other sector of society.

In Kotkin’s terms, we could see both alt-right and alt-left as different subsets of the ‘Third Estate’ losers of this hollowing-out. They may be a militant subset right now, but as we exit lockdown into the teeth of a brutal recession, the precariat is going to get bigger. It’s also likely to get angrier: coronavirus is strengthening the hand of finance, big tech and the biggest corporations, even as it’s eviscerating the middle class. In other words, the pandemic has accelerated many of the trends contributing to the twin radicalisms of alt-right and alt-left.

From the point of view of effecting political change, then, the tragedy of the alts is that they should waste their energy quarrelling among themselves. Alt-left and alt-right represent different subsets of an ever-swelling precariat, watching in real time as the last of the twentieth century social contract goes up in smoke. Right now they largely see the enemy as one another. Should that change, though, we could see our faltering political settlement shaken to its core.

So in recent years those of us who cut what teeth we possess in the humanities and social sciences have grown used to the intellectual degradation of everything. We have known for more than a generation that everything is to be considered “relative”. We have been instructed by the “studies” movement that the identity traits of an author and reader matter more than whether or not they have anything much to say.

We’ve learned that every and all text should be “interrogated”; that we should try to work out the relative “power” dynamics at play (who might be oppressed and who might be an oppressor). And we have noticed that there is nothing that the educational establishment does not wish to “deconstruct”. Apart from itself, obviously.

Yet throughout all this we know-nothing humanities types have tended to presume that other disciplines are immune to such convulsions. Surely the pure realm of the sciences and other real disciplines could not succumb to the tyranny of identity politics? In particular they surely could not fall into the zero-sum interpretation of existence through the game of understanding and stratifying “privilege”?

Surely, we naively assumed, engineers would not find any utility in constructing a bridge along relativist lines. Scientists would find no purpose in “problematising” their studies, and mathematicians wouldn’t be concerned whether their equation answers enforce some “hierarchy”.

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The truth about hate speech

By Douglas Murray

So those of us still optimistic about the water-tightness of serious studies look with especial dismay on the developing contamination of the social sciences seeping into the sciences. And our optimism will be somewhat dented by the recent news that maths in Seattle is going the way of everything else.

As readers of my latest book will know, I regard the whole Northwestern United States to be among the global hubs of our present derangements. Oregon is the source of the “food wars” in which people are only meant to cook or consume the produce cooked and consumed by their racial antecedents, and its largest city Portland is the hub of a fascist movement that presents itself as only having to do fascistic things because it is trying to defeat an otherwise non-present fascism. So the only thing less surprising than the State of Oregon deciding to do something inconceivable is when its neighbour Washington agrees to do something equally crazed. And on this occasion Seattle has beaten even Portland in the local derangement Olympics.

This week it emerged that the city’s school board has decided even maths must be subjected to the same numbing and unthinking orthodoxy of our time. In particular that mathematics must – like everything else – be seen through the prism of racism and oppression. Thus as the Seattle Public Schools guidelines for maths education show, students in Seattle schools will be invited to consider questions such as the following: “Where does Power and Oppression show up in our math experience?” Note, incidentally, the fact that “Power” and “Oppression” get the full upper-case first letter treatment. Like The Queen or The President. A real, living, major presence – unlike “math” of course.

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Liberalism: the other God that failed

By John Gray

Other questions demonstrate an equal intellectual deficit. “How is math manipulated to allow inequality and oppression to exist?” and “How has math been used to resist and liberate people and communities of color from oppression?” Just one of the sub-questions that students will be invited to consider here is “How can we use math to measure the impact of activism?” Because, of course, what matters most in this world is engaging in impactful activism. Elsewhere students will be invited to consider the following question, “Can you suggest resolutions to oppressive mathematical practices?”

It brings to mind the experience that a doctor friend of mine had some years ago. A new layer of bureaucracy had been brought into the National Health Service and all NHS doctors were having to answer a new range of questions about a range of matters, one of which was “Have you everywhere and at all times behaved in an ethical manner?”

My friend pointed out that he would only answer the question if the questioner answered two questions in turn. The first was “Who would honestly ask such a question?” and the second was “Who would honestly answer such a question?” Eventually, after some back and forth, the questioner said “Could you just say ‘yes’, so that we can move on”. Thus, of course, inviting a lie in response to a question on ethical behaviour.

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Is woke culture totalitarian?

By Eric Kaufmann

The Seattle school board’s questions have a similar dynamic at play. The cleverer students will realise that there is a “correct” answer to the questions, whether or not those answers are true – as there is to every other question of our age. They’ll work out that the answer to every question posed by the Seattle authorities will always and everywhere be the same: “more diversity”.

But the problem is not with the smarter students, who like most smart people will always find a way to navigate around the lies and dogmas of their age, but the less intelligent applicants, whose one shot at education the Seattle authorities are meant to be overseeing. A rather basic knowledge of maths would help such people and come in very handy in their lives: in ordering their finances, and working out their day-to-day interactions with others. If they do not pick up these basics at school, then it is highly unlikely that they will pick them up at some later stage, the education system offering the best chance anyone ever has to surpass their forebears.

It should, in theory, also offer them the chance to escape the ideological straitjackets of their time. How disturbing it is to learn that instead, even in a discipline like maths, students will be cocooned and imprisoned in the lies of their age rather than being given the chance to escape them.