America has a black-youth gun-violence problem. It’s long been with us, but the latest iteration is different, and it is getting worse in ways that the country’s establishment liberals and urban leaders seem either unwilling or unable to confront.

You won’t find much about this crime surge in the national mainstream news. Since the wave picked up speed during the pandemic, establishment liberals have remained largely uncomfortable talking about it. The press coverage of teen takeovers illustrates this tendency. Local police departments have been documenting and responding to these gatherings since at least 2023, yet it took The New York Times and CNN nearly three years to cover the phenomenon in meaningful depth. They finally did so only last week, as takeovers and shootings continue to grow across major cities this spring. Even then, CNN’s piece ran nearly 1,000 words on the violence without mentioning race once. And in typical fashion, the Times mentioned race only to suggest that concern about the gatherings was itself a form of racial bias.

To get a real picture of what is happening, you have to piece it together yourself, poring over local news coverage, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention records, and state-level data. What emerges is a crisis defined by two characteristics: a younger perpetrator profile and crimes more brazen and senseless in nature. 

The shooters are younger than before, many of them school-age black male youth between 12 and 19 who obtain firearms illegally through social media, which have made acquiring a gun easier than ever. The disputes that trigger the violence increasingly begin as interpersonal conflicts with other black male teens, escalating through online exchanges before erupting in person. In March, for example, a 15-year-old approached 16-year-old Jaylen Bailey at a mall in Champaign, Ill., over an existing dispute, before he shot Bailey in the parking lot, near his mother and siblings. 

Others erupt more wantonly, with many occurring during the alcohol-and-marijuana-fueled teen takeovers, whose young male participants often arrive armed. What begins as a fun gathering can turn violent quickly. An accidental bump or shouted insult can be enough to escalate into drawn firearms and open fire. In the majority of such events broken up by police across the country in recent months, officers have recovered multiple firearms among those arrested.

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This gun violence is also no longer contained to low-income residential neighborhoods. Increasingly, it’s spilling into the few remaining malls, commercial districts, and public parks that Americans of all walks of life share. And in doing so, it is injuring and killing a growing number of bystanders who had no part in the dispute. 

On April 23, at the Mall of Louisiana in Baton Rouge, the largest shopping center in the Bayou State, 17-year-old Markel Lee drew a semiautomatic weapon during a dispute with another young black teen in a crowded food court and opened fire, killing Martha Odom, a high-school honors student from Ascension Episcopal School, and seriously injuring five other bystanders. In a state that ranks third in the nation in overall gun homicides and first in child gun deaths, the Mall of Louisiana shooting drew a swift and unusually sharp response from lawmakers. Gov. Jeff Landry held a news conference the following day alongside more than a dozen visibly frustrated state law-enforcement officials, using the word “spillover” to describe how the violence had reached one of the state’s most popular commercial destinations, and took the opportunity to criticize the Democratic-run city of Baton Rouge for its failure to stem it.

 The numbers behind this crisis are stark. According to CDC mortality data, firearm homicide deaths among black youth 19 and under spiked to 1,553 in 2024, up from 1,125 six years earlier. The 1,553 deaths represented 65% of all youth firearm homicide deaths nationally, despite black youth comprising roughly 14% of the youth population. 

In Florida, homicide arrest intakes of black youth 18 and under rose 52% between fiscal years 2018-19 and 2024-25. Felony firearm arrests in the Sunshine State among black youth rose 31% over the same period, from 656 to 859. This surge is almost entirely isolated to black youth. Over that same period, felony firearm arrests among white youth in Florida fell 27% and homicide arrest intakes were flat. 

In Texas, homicide referrals to the state’s juvenile justice system doubled by fiscal 2024 compared to 2018, and firearm offenses rose 58%. By 2024, nearly 1 in 12 youth admitted to the Texas Juvenile Justice Department had committed murder, up from 1 in 100 in 2018. In Washington, DC, the share of homicides and nonfatal shootings committed by perpetrators aged 15 to 20 rose to more than 21% of all such cases by mid-2024, up from roughly 11% in 2021.

The data tell a more nuanced story than a general surge in black youth crime. Data from the Florida Department of Juvenile Justice shows misdemeanor offenses among black youth have declined since 2018, and felony property crimes have returned to pre-pandemic levels, a pattern that has been observed by other local law enforcement agencies across the country. It’s not that more black youth are getting into trouble with the law — but the nature of that trouble has changed. The lethal presence of firearms in adolescent interpersonal disputes that once ended in a fistfight and a juvenile-court hearing is turning mistakes into felony assault and even murder charges that prosecutors are compelled to bring in adult court. Taken together, the data point to a troubling reality: the first post-Obama, post-Black Lives Matter generation of black teens are more likely to die by firearm homicide than at any point in at least a quarter century or serve lengthy sentences in adult prison than any earlier generation.

All the more troubling: the surge wasn’t inevitable. It is, in large part, the consequence of progressive groups and establishment liberals abandoning effective crime-reduction strategies in favor of activist narratives. To understand how this unfolded, we have to go back to 2013.

On July 11 of that year, the CDC released a public-health report with a remarkable finding: the nation’s youth homicide rate had fallen to a 30-year low. After holding relatively steady through the early aughts at around 9.3 per 100,000, the rate had fallen to 7.5 per 100,000, the lowest recorded since 1981, and remained on a downward trajectory. 

The report should have been a moment of national celebration. Buried within it was data indicating real progress was being made to stem the staggeringly high murder rates for black youth. That figure had plunged to 25.9 per 100,000 in 2013, down from 32.8 per 100,000 in 2006 — a 21% decline.

But there would be no celebratory announcement from the Obama administration, nor would the findings receive significant national attention. That’s because a debate about race and policing that had been building for years in the country’s most liberal universities and law schools, catalyzed by works like Michelle Alexander’s influential 2010 book, The New Jim Crow, was about to spill into the broader culture.

On July 13, two days after the CDC study was published, a Florida jury acquitted George Zimmerman in the killing of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, a legal outcome that would ignite a national debate and dominate American political life for the next decade. Hours after the verdict, the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag was created, and it would serve as the rhetorical basis of a new social movement asserting that law enforcement and other public institutions systematically mistreated black Americans, particularly black male youth; fixing this, in the BLM telling, required fundamentally dismantling or restructuring policing itself.

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In the ensuing years, the movement proved remarkably successful at influencing mainstream media, the Democratic Party, and academic and corporate institutions. That institutional legitimacy would eventually be converted into a powerful political force, as philanthropy organizations, including the Open Society Foundations and the Ford Foundation, poured well more than $1 billion into a growing network of racial-justice nonprofits, advocacy groups, and the campaigns of office-seekers who adopted the movement’s worldview. 

The policy reforms that followed were sweeping, including reducing patrols in high-crime communities, ending cash bail for most misdemeanor offenses, reducing or outright eliminating punishment for property crimes, and cutting local police budgets in favor of alternative programs like social workers and “violence disruptors.” Democratic-run cities across the country began uncritically implementing these changes, driven by a new class of well-funded, ideologically driven nonprofits that had rapidly proliferated across major American cities.

The movement reached its peak in the summer of 2020, when the death of George Floyd following his arrest by Minneapolis police ignited protests and riots across major American cities. In the months that followed, multiple Democratic-run cities, energized by the political moment and the broader anti-Trump coalition, moved to slash police budgets and roll back law-enforcement practices that had brought about the successes of the previous decade. But instead of delivering racial justice, the concrete result was the single largest surge in youth violence in a generation. A CDC analysis found the youth homicide rate for Americans aged 10 to 24 jumped 37% between 2019 and 2020, to nearly 11 in 100,000, up from 7.8. For black youth, the picture was even more grim. Their homicide rate jumped 39% in that same single year, to nearly 46 per 100,000, up from 33, and continued climbing to a peak of 47.3 in 2021, nearly double the rate recorded at the low point of 25.6 in 2014.

Over the course of a decade, the movement carved a swath of destruction across American cities, defunding and demoralizing local police departments, stripping prosecutors and the criminal justice system of their most effective deterrence tools, and convincing a generation of young black Americans that the institutions around them were illegitimate instruments of oppression. It is the ultimate indictment of Black Lives Matter that the movement wiped out the very progress in reducing homicides that had been underway when it first launched.

The current black-youth gun-violence surge is a problem worth solving. Failing to address it means condemning still more members of this generation and future ones to death or lengthy incarceration, two outcomes that should be unacceptable, especially since American policymakers have shown before that it is possible to break crime waves, most recently in the mid-2010s. 

Any meaningful solution requires major reform, including the return of many of the hard-on-crime approaches used to stem previous crime waves, as well as more funding of the criminal- and juvenile-justice system, particularly at the local level. Republican-led states are better positioned to pressure Democratic-run cities into making the policy corrections they have grown increasingly reluctant to make on their own. But in Democratic strongholds like California, Illinois, and New York, meaningful change is unlikely so long as establishment liberals retain their outsized influence over state and local policy, while refusing to acknowledge that a decade of uncritically embracing radical progressive ideas dismantled what was working and set the conditions for this surge. Until they reckon with that, the crisis will only worsen.

The coming summer will make that reckoning harder to avoid. More shootings and more teen takeovers will likely mean more confrontations between GOP-led states and Democratic-run cities, which will keep the issue in the public eye. The Trump administration, which has shown little hesitation in pursuing federal intervention on crime, will likely raise the pressure further. Establishment liberal institutions will find it increasingly difficult to ignore the crisis — or their role in creating it.

That moment, captured on video and shared with the world, changed the country. Whatever debates linger about the precise medical cause of Floyd’s death, we all saw what happened: a man’s life ebbing away beneath the knee of an officer sworn to protect and serve. The immediate reaction focused on the alleged racial dynamics at work: white cop, black victim. 

But was this a racial incident? Or were we just making it one? And what happens when the world ceases to recognize the difference?  

The outrage was instant, visceral, and — to a point — understandable. But what struck me then, and still troubles me now, was the totalizing confidence with which commentators, politicians, and activists announced their verdict: George Floyd was murdered because he was black. The phrase “racist cop” became redundant. The nation’s moral diagnosis was rendered before the autopsy had even commenced. 

The moral panic that followed Floyd’s death imposed a set of demands on the country at large, but specifically on white Americans: acknowledge the nation’s past and ongoing crimes against African Americans; either submit to “antiracist” reeducation or admit to complicity with America’s ubiquitous white supremacy; accept that whiteness itself confers ineradicable social privilege (regardless of one’s actual social position); acquiesce to biased policies that compromise meritocratic selection processes; and, above all, do not voice any objections. 

I worried that white Americans who resented the imposition of these unworkable demands would revolt against them. I worried that a backlash would ensue, and that black Americans, and blackness itself, would bear the brunt of it. And now, five years later, racial politics in the United States have reached an inflection point, and the future of black America hangs in the balance.

The summer of 2020 witnessed the largest protest movement in US history. Millions of people — young and old, white and black, urban and rural — flooded the streets to proclaim that Black Lives Matter. Their anger was not limited to Floyd’s death. They invoked a roll call of tragedies: Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Freddie Gray, Ahmaud Arbery, Walter Scott. The litany of the dead took on a universal symbolic meaning that outstripped the evidence: this is what happens to black men in America, because of their race. 

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However, there was something else animating those demonstrations. After months of confinement during the pandemic, Americans were restless and afraid. Many had lost jobs, loved ones, or simply faith in the institutions that governed their lives. The protests became, in part, a national exorcism — a chance to affirm one’s moral standing in a world turned upside down.

The protests were not entirely baseless. The research of economist Roland Fryer had shown that police use of non-lethal force was indeed more frequent against black suspects than white ones. Yet the movement’s rhetoric quickly escalated to the metaphysical. Protesters called for abolition: of the police, of prisons, of “whiteness” itself. What had begun as a demand for reform metastasized into a crusade against a civilization. Reminders of the great achievements of that civilization — the enshrinement of the rights of free expression and protest, the abolition of slavery, the expansion of full citizenship to all Americans regardless of color, and so on — fell on deaf ears.

This escalation did not come out of thin air. For years, the intellectual soil had been fertilized by theories — not least, Critical Race Theory — that framed America as a systemically racist project whose every structure was implicated in white supremacy. By 2020, these ideas had migrated from the academy into the bloodstream of our public life. Politicians mouthed the movement’s slogans, often without understanding their implications. 

Whiteness came to animate even seemingly innocuous institutions and cultural practices, inhabit our speech and thoughts, and possess our history. “Systemic racism” became a liturgical phrase that purported to explain every racial disparity. Corporate executives and elected officials at every level knelt in performative penitence. Schools rewrote curricula to emphasize racial oppression as the organizing principle of the republic.

Many of those who embraced this rhetoric did so cynically — seeking votes, donations, or absolution. Others were simply afraid. Either way, the effect was the same: moral panic masquerading as social criticism. That era’s stunts — the BLM signs in storefront windows, the black avatars on social-media accounts, the demands to “take a knee” at public events, the untold millions spent on struggle sessions at corporate retreats — look in retrospect like embarrassing, panicked attempts to preempt accusations of racism, that did nothing about inequality in the end.  

The irony is that the people most harmed were the black Americans in whose name this theater was performed. Calls to “defund the police” produced predictable results: officers pulled back from proactive policing. Fryer’s later research documented what followed — rising homicide rates that disproportionately victimized black residents. To those proclaiming that Black Lives Matter, the black lives themselves were apparently beside the point. Meanwhile, resentment grew in those who disagreed with these self-conscious displays of faux-solidarity, but feared the consequences of saying so.

I feared this outcome from the start. What worried me most was not that the Black Lives Matter movement would succeed in “abolishing” anything, but that it would provoke a furious reaction. And so it has. 

When people are compelled to mouth pieties they do not believe — when they must sit through hours of racial-sensitivity trainings, nodding along to theories that brand them as beneficiaries of invisible systems of guilt — resentment festers. Such “spirals of silence,” to borrow a phrase from political scientist Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, are unstable. They end abruptly, when someone decides to call the bluff. That moment arrived, in part, with Donald Trump.

Trump’s 2020 campaign drew strength from the backlash against progressive overreach. He presented himself as the tribune of the silenced, the man who would say aloud what others only whispered. His supporters were not, for the most part, the caricatured racists of media imagination. They were, in the main, ordinary Americans who felt unjustly accused — white citizens born long after Jim Crow, bewildered at being told that their country and their color made them complicit in murder, and angry at the institutions that, they felt, abetted their exclusion from respectability and honor.

The reactionary energies unleashed by that resentment have not yet subsided. We see them today in the rollback of affirmative action, the shuttering of diversity offices, and the rise of aggressive “anti-woke” politics. Granted, some of these developments were overdue; many of those programs had outlived their usefulness. But this backlash comes with a creeping repudiation not only of racial politics, but of blackness itself. 

By this I mean not a wholesale excision of blackness from public discourse, but a constellation of phenomena that view blackness as a cause for skepticism. Black public employees regularly face, without evidence, charges of being “DEI hires” — a code phrase meant to imply incompetence. Videos of black teens acting out circulate with comments suggesting that we should expect nothing better. The Trump administration has scrubbed mention of historic black figures — like Harriet Tubman and the Tuskegee Airmen — from government websites. After the chaos of 2020, an increasingly vocal segment of the country seems eager to wash its hand of what it regards as an unassimilable minority.

We might ask why such elisions would be wrong, given the excesses of 2020. For in this moment of retrenchment, it is tempting to retreat to a comforting slogan: colorblindness. Indeed, conservatives have, with varying degrees of sincerity, championed colorblindness as an antidote to the lingering effects of societal bias, and as an alternative to post-Civil Rights Movement entitlements. This sounds plausible. Indeed, I have long argued that colorblindness is a necessary condition of social justice. But it is not sufficient.

True justice in matters of race requires more than the refusal to see color; it demands the cultivation of conditions under which color ceases to determine opportunity. A just society would not be indifferent to this concern. To allow blindness to justify indifference is to betray the very ideals of the Civil Rights Movement. One needn’t be a critical race theorist to appreciate this point.

We can acknowledge racial disparities without invoking the language of white supremacy. And we can pursue equality without promoting guilt or resentment. The work of the great reformers of the 20th century remains incomplete — not because they failed, but because their victories created new, more subtle challenges. To complete their work, we must balance two imperatives: to transcend race as a moral category; and to honor the historical particularity of the black experience.

Implicit in those aims is an underlying claim about identity: blackness has content that is relevant to American politics. It is not, as some would have it, a matter of genetics or phenotype. It is the inheritance of a history: of slavery and emancipation, of migration and struggle, of spiritual creativity and cultural innovation. It is a social and moral formation — an evolving conversation among those whose forebears endured a particular ordeal and made of it something enduring. To be black in America is to inhabit an existential predicament shaped by that past. It is to grapple with the meaning of freedom in a country that once denied your ancestors their humanity. It is to claim a stake in the American story not as perpetual victim or permanent outsider, but as co-author.

That past is plural. There is no single “black experience.” The son of Nigerian immigrants in Houston does not share the same historical consciousness as the descendant of slaves in Mississippi. Yet both participate, however differently, in the ongoing project of defining what blackness means in the 21st century.

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To imagine that the end of racial politics will mean the end of race itself is to mistake the symptom for the substance. We may aspire to a future in which racial identity no longer structures opportunity or moral worth. But we should not yearn for a future in which the memory of blackness — its music, its language, its ironies, and insights — has been erased. And that is what the anti-race backlash threatens to do. 

Preserving that memory entails acknowledging that the racial question in America is changing. The old binary of black and white, which structured the politics of the 20th century, is giving way to a mosaic. Immigration has diversified the country. Hispanic, Asian, and multiracial Americans are reshaping the demographic and cultural landscape.

In this new dispensation, the claims once made in the name of “the Negro” or “the black community” may carry less political weight. The vocabulary of guilt and redress that dominated midcentury liberalism is losing its purchase. The very category of “race,” as a political identity, is being transformed apace with the nation’s demographics.

That is not necessarily a bad thing. But where does it leave blackness?

It could wither into irrelevance — reduced to a museum exhibit, a set of grievances recited on anniversaries, a dead limb on the political body. Or it could evolve into something richer: a cultural inheritance accessible to all Americans, a moral resource for understanding suffering, resilience, and renewal.

The choice is ours.

The task before us is not to erase race from public life, but to reimagine its meaning. The formal remedies that remain — equal access to quality education, fair enforcement of the law, investment in families and communities — should aim not to privilege, but to prepare. We must attend to the formation of our citizens in addition to the fairness of our procedures. But while we rightly prize meritocracy, it loses its moral force under conditions where individuals experience sometimes vastly unequal opportunity to acquire skills, knowledge, and experience. Rightly understood, meritocracy is not the cold calculus of test scores, but the cultivation of human potential across lines of class and color. This is a thick meritocracy, grounded in opportunity and responsibility alike.

In the face of persistent racial disparities, the alternative is grim: a society divided between those who weaponize grievance and those who hide behind denial; a politics oscillating between sentimental guilt and punitive backlash. We already have an inkling of what such a society could look like: hobbled democratic institutions, ethnic tensions, loose talk of civil war, and increasing social and geographical segregation between those with conflicting beliefs. 

It was not inevitable that the summer of George Floyd would lead us this close to the brink. But I fear it has. The lesson to draw from that moment is neither that America is irredeemably racist, nor that race shouldn’t matter. Rather, we must distinguish between seeing race and being ruled by it. 

Many years ago, when I began writing about race for a public audience, I declared that the Civil Rights Movement was over — that the strategies, programs, and policies of the past were unfit for the present. But the spirit of that movement — in its ambitions for true equality to reign as the guiding principle of the nation as a whole — is still alive. Its work remains unfinished, and we must complete it.

The Guardian merch is made by New York brand Lingua Franca, best known for putting what it calls “thought-provoking and culturally resonant phrases” on expensive sweaters in cursive script, and getting celebrities to wear them on the red carpet. And — a bit like the newspaper — the fashion label’s current political messaging seems somewhat chastened compared to former cocksure progressive hectoring. Indeed, the semantic trajectory of the company’s sweaters would make for a fascinating modern history project: from the uncompromising “time’s up”, “we say gay”, and “Dr Fauci fan club” messages of yesteryear to the sullen “exhausted American”, “I didn’t vote for him”, and “I read banned books” of the current collection. Even the writing on women’s chests seems to have got smaller — or maybe the breasts got bigger. Either way, things have definitely changed.

During the first Trump presidency, company founder Rachelle Hruska McPherson was apparently able to claim with a straight face that luxury goods activism might change the world. “This is not a time to be silent,” she told Fortune magazine in 2020 “Virtue signaling to our communities on where we stand on issues is literally how change has happened historically, and it’s how it will continue to happen today”. This year, though, there are signs of adjustment to new political and commercial realities, and not merely in those defeated-sounding new mottos. According to a recent interview in Elle magazine, McPherson now “considers herself just as much of an activist… but she wants to fight that fight in a different, more measured way than she did the first time around”. She says she sometimes looks back and thinks: “‘Oh, that’s a little cringeworthy.’ And then I’m like, ‘Is it? We all were doing it.’”

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Many fashionistas were, indeed, doing cringeworthy things in the heady days of woke, spurred on by their bottom line. “The future is female”; “transwomen are women”, and “I can’t breathe” were just three of the sartorial shortcuts to canonization in a cotton-polyester blend. The makers of such garments didn’t seek to persuade by appealing to reason: t-shirt slogans are not exactly Aristotelian syllogisms. And nor did they even try to invoke much emotion — you can’t tug on heartstrings when limited to four words per line. Instead, they sought to appeal to the self-interested desire of the consumer. If you wear this, people will think you are a good person; and being a good person is very in right now.

Thankfully, things have moved on, and the cool kids these days wouldn’t be seen dead in a Guardian-Lingua Franca collab, assuming they could afford one. I know this because I read it in a Guardian article two years ago, and — as we now know — the paper treats facts as sacred. As the story explained, Gen Z hates “peppy but shallow” slogan tees: including “painfully tone-deaf” jumpers from, er, Lingua Franca.

But it’s not that the hipsters and taste-makers have gone off words on t-shirts per se. It’s just that they now prefer jokey, amoral, gnomic ones. For while Lingua Franca has stuck to the moralizing high ground — “history has its eyes on you” etc. — a brief perusal of what the kids are into gives us slogans like “hardcore” or “I’m gonna win” or “follow me, I’m a cult leader”. You might even say that there’s been a Trumpian turn.

Perhaps the new generation is just more clear-eyed than its elders about the fact that wearing words on your clothes to bring about meaningful political change was always bogus. Unless you design your own, the words in question are nicked from someone else. In that sense, wearing a slogan tee is barely a genuine communicative act at all. And as soon as you are photographed wearing the item to put on your socials — essential for the pretense that you are making any kind of political difference — whatever independent meaning faintly resided in the slogan to begin with is now subsumed into the meaning of the person wearing it, as just one more visual aspect for the viewer to interrogate. Onlookers are asked to consider, not whether black lives really matter, or whether this is indeed what a feminist looks like, but rather the question: “what kind of person would wear a slogan like this?”.

As such, sloganwear fit seamlessly into a post-literate internet culture. Context collapse is a thing: the simultaneous exposure of your words to different kinds of audiences, with alternative ways of reading the same sentences; so that your in-joke or political point, meant for one group, can cause accidental outrage in another one. The desire to say as little as possible that might be challenged or misunderstood — while still saying something that gets you attention — means that the sort of vaguely ironic exclamation or sanctimonious tautology you might put on a t-shirt (or jumper) starts looking irresistible to many.

In face-to-face communication with a person you know, understanding what the other is saying depends on at least a rough understanding of the sort of person you are talking to. There’s a reciprocal relationship between interpreting the words — is what she just said meant to be sincere? funny? kind? patronizing? — and assumptions about the deeper personal characteristics of the speaker. Very occasionally, a person’s saying something in isolation can radically change your view of who they are; most of the time, your prior view of who they are modulates your understanding of their individual statements. A benevolent and a malevolent person can say the very same thing, but you will hear it in very different ways.

This is also true of understanding great novels: the deep reader tries to build a picture of the sort of creative mind that wrote the text, at the same time as building a picture of what the text actually means. Is this a mind capable of irony? Of rich symbolism? Is it cynical or optimistic about human nature? Judgments about the author affect how the book is read, and vice versa. Despite the “death of the author” nonsense in Sixties French literary theory, great artists remained alive and kicking, way past their actual deaths. But on the internet of strangers, such subtleties break down. In this domain, at least, Barthes and Foucault were right.

Here there are lots of orphaned phrases, dislocated from concrete facts about the identity of the speaker and her accompanying thoughts. You publish or post something; I have no real idea of your character or history, which means I have no well-defined idea of what you, personally, mean by those words. Texts become detached from the intentions of their producers, floating about the internet like ghosts. This creates interpretive perils, but also opportunities in the marketplace of mass communication: I can write down stereotypically righteous, funny, or clever-sounding things, in a compressed way, and naïve observers will just assume I am righteous, funny, clever. Getting reposted by a big X account is a bit like persuading a red-carpet celebrity to wear your words, and so promote your brand.

At least the untrustworthy communicative dynamics are more obvious when the words are on someone’s chest, right there in front of you. No matter the thread count, sloganwear in the wild is usually easy to see through: the disconnect between desired effect, and the perceptible reality of the wearer, is often too great. The owner of the sweater wants you to believe she is the sort of person who holds facts sacred; but what you see instead is someone who wants you to believe she is the sort of person who holds facts sacred — and that is completely different. It’s a lesson in the complexities of human interpretation we would do well to hold on to elsewhere. You might even say that — for once, at least — thanks to the Guardian, we get close to the whole picture.

That night and its aftermath, I now believe, were the biggest factor behind the backlash rippling through US culture today. That was when a Covid-era tension finally snapped; and many millions resolved that every claim issuing from reputable authorities must be a lie. The beneficiaries: YouTube crackpots, semi-literate weightlifting bros, amateur Holocaust revisionists, manosphere goons, spittle-flecked “X” racists commanding huge audiences.

The political consequences: allowing the Trumpian Right and its new tech allies to justify a raft of self-interested, pro-oligarchic measures by simply gesturing at the very real bogeys of that era: woke, DEI, debanking, censorship. This, even as many of these same moves will only deepen the power imbalances — between corporations and consumers, individuals and institutions — cast into stark relief in the plague-and-pandemic year 2020.

Watching the looting on Lex that night, I told myself they wouldn’t bother with our block, bereft of any cool shops. I was wrong. By the time I returned to our building’s lobby, I spotted those roving packs moving down the street. Over the next four hours or so, I joined our two doormen as they kept vigil, unarmed, while more and more looters came, some clearly pausing to size up our lobby. We were spared, but a restaurant and a salon downstairs were smashed.

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In the Bronx, a car deliberately slammed into a black NYPD sergeant, sending his body flying like a ragdoll. Another officer was run over by an SUV in the Village. I’d never felt so unsafe, and I’d filed datelines from northern Iraq during the ISIS takeover. In a place like Iraq, you know you’re dealing with war and terror, and as a reporter, you typically move with the security forces. This, by contrast, was our home, and the police were overwhelmed and seemingly ordered to stand down.

As unnerving as these events were, the mainstream-media coverage was somehow more so. By about 3am, when things seemed to calm down, one of the doormen tuned into a newscast on his iPhone: “Protests continue tonight throughout New York,” the anchor began. We both burst out laughing. Protests — mere protests — was how the local affiliate of a major network was describing what looked more like a scene of war.

But the coup de grâce came on 4 June, when public-health experts at the University of Washington published a letter encouraging mass gatherings in the name of BLM. “We do not condemn these gatherings as risky,” they wrote. “We support them as vital to the national public health.” Some 1,200 health experts and practitioners worldwide would sign the letter. The same authorities had pushed for restricting Catholic masses, Jewish funerals, kids playing in the park.

I remember feeling at the time: This one might fucking break my mind. Up to that point, I’d spent my entire career at mainstream publications (albeit on Right-of-center comment pages). Yet I could see why many Americans would come to react to any assertion by mainstream outlets, even the Right-coded ones, with a skulk: What kind of ideological bullshit are you trying to pull on me now?  

Strengthening this hermeneutic of permanent and total suspicion was the social-media censorship that accompanied dishonest coverage. The New York Post, where I served as the op-ed editor at the time, faced the business end of this censorship more than once. In February 2020, Facebook banned a Post opinion essay for raising the possibility that the novel coronavirus had leaked from a lab. The piece didn’t assert definitively that the virus had leaked, mind you. It merely noted that it might have, given that the epicenter, Wuhan, was home to a major Chinese virology lab.

Today, the CIA assesses that a lab leak was the “more likely” cause. By banning even the Post’s reasonable speculation about the possibility in 2020, and numerous other steps of the kind, Big Tech and its media allies helped stoke public mistrust. They thus lent a powerful mystique to opportunistic nutters offering a kind of gnostic progression: They banned lab leak. Justified looting. Called women “bodies with vaginas” in their medical journals. In which case why not: They lied about 9/11. Are you sure Hitler was the bad guy in the Second World War?

I don’t know how mainstream institutions — do they even deserve that label anymore? — can repair what broke over the past decade or so, and especially in the pandemic. What I do know is that our society is in desperate need of repair. Because there is still no substitute for the truth procedures of rigorous institutional journalism, reasonable public deliberation, and scientific inquiry free from progressive or RFK-style Lysenkoism.

As it is, the so-called Tech Right led by Elon Musk (and increasingly joined by the likes of Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos) are weaponizing the — well-earned — public mistrust against the professional classes who were supposed to uphold these ideals. And they are doing so for their own profiteering and power-grabbing ends.

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How Elon Musk lost the plot

By Richard Hanania

Consider social-media censorship. After 2020’s banning spree — and especially in the wake of the Hunter Biden laptop censorship that also targeted the Post — the populist Right began to take up serious reforms aimed at altering the power balance between individual users and platforms wielding Tolstoy-length “Terms of Service” written entirely in their own favor.

There was talk of abolishing Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a Clinton-era law that allows bulletin-board style platforms like X and Facebook to act like publishers — that is, to censor and editorialize — without carrying any of the libel liabilities of a traditional publisher. The Right also invoked the so-called common-carrier rule — the ancient Anglo doctrine according to which private operators of public services like toll roads may not unreasonably discriminate against customers. A social-media platform shouldn’t be able to boot you for your views, the argument goes, any more than your landline provider could remove you based on what you said on the phone.

Then came Musk with his purchase of Twitter (renamed X). Immediately, he began giving ideological succor to the embittered Right, including the very-hard Right, agreeing with a white-nationalist user who claimed that Jews are behind multiculturalism: “You have said the actual truth.” Talk of Big Tech reform all but dissipated on the Right. Nothing has changed in the fundamental power imbalance between user and platform, and the latter’s arbitrary ability to shape how billions of people perceive and think about the world.

Instead of offering a genuinely free and productive digital public square, the new X (and Facebook, too) algorithmically de-emphasize news links, meaning that if you embed a news story in your post, other users are less likely to see it, regardless of the ideological bent of the story or opinion in question.

The content that thrives, especially on X, is monetized slop: “What do you notice?” asks a post depicting a tourist site — say, Niagara Falls — visited by Asian tourists: Get it? Foreign tourists are overrunning our … tourist sites. These posts typically garner thousands, and sometimes tens of thousands, of reposts and “likes”. The platform and the slop-monger profit; the user is rewarded with irrational anger and dead brain cells.

Or consider the problem of debanking. Beginning in 2021, financial institutions began to arbitrarily remove customers based on their political views. Most of the early victims belonged to the populist Right. Yet in one of his last acts as the Biden administration’s outgoing director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Rohit Chopra promulgated a rule that would have barred banks from engaging in such practices.

Upon taking power, however, Trump II all but collapsed the CFPB. The new administration put the agency under the acting directorship of a hard-core pro-business libertarian, accepted a GOP proposal renouncing federal oversight of online payment processors, withdrew the Chopra anti-debanking rule, and iced an agency lawsuit against the banking association over the very issue of debanking.

“RIP CFPB,” Musk gloated. The Tesla and SpaceX boss has made no secret of his desire to turn X into a money app, meaning that by attacking CFPB, he preemptively defanged a potential regulator. At the same time, the Trump administration continues to raise the specter of “debanking” — to justify loosening regulations against the scammy crypto industry.

Or consider campus free speech and inquiry. In 2021, I was asked to join the advisory board of the University of Austin, a new institution that was to champion the old-fashioned academic values abandoned by elite institutions in the name of woke. Yet more recently, UA parted ways with an administrator, she claims, after she made a mild post defending the idea of diversity — even as she criticized institutional DEI. Her post — “We can have criticism of DEI without wanting to tear down the whole concept of diversity” — enraged a Right-wing donor.

The university told advisers that this was a long-term programmatic decision. Yet in its on-record statement to the outlet that published her story, it only highlighted a ferocious opposition to diversity, thus seemingly confirming the ex-admin’s account: “UATX is unapologetically opposed to DEI.” Moreover, one of the university’s most powerful donors publicly rails about the need to root out “Communism” on campus — which, to his mind, seemingly means anything to the Left of Attila the Hun. (I resigned from the advisory board.)

There are many other examples. The point is this: there is a clear effort by a subset of the oligarchy to use the epistemic madness that peaked in 2020 and 2021 to bring about a regime that is even more corrosive to authentic freedom, sanity, and the common good; that doesn’t even pretend to keep to the guardrails that have guided the West for centuries, ensuring its success.

Can the institutions and the “responsible people” make a comeback? I’m really not sure. But any revival will have to involve a much deeper reckoning with the failures of that mad, mad year — 2020. Maybe start by calling riots and lawlessness what they were. Make peace with the biological reality of two sexes — man and woman. Retract the ahistorical claptrap of the 1619 Project, which still enjoys the imprimatur of The New York Times. When ideology corrodes public trust, there’s only one path to winning it back: intellectual humility.

Floyd’s criminal past does not mitigate the tragedy of his death; it is always lamentable when human life is prematurely and needlessly cut short. Yet the fact that he was so rapidly canonized tells us a great deal about the religiosity of the woke movement. A piece for The Guardian in 2020 surveyed the various depictions of Floyd by street artists, from his bewinged and behaloed image on a wall in Houston, Texas to a mural in Naples which portrayed him as weeping blood “like a saint pictured in a southern Italian church”.

Some of the viral footage from this period was even more explicitly ecclesiastical in nature. In one video, white people were seen kneeling to their black neighbors to beg forgiveness on behalf of all their race. In another, white crowds had raised their arms in supplication, repeating the chant: “I will use my voice in the most uplifting way possible and do everything in my power to educate my community.” We had already seen Greta Thunberg fulfilling a role similar to the child saints of medieval Christendom, and were later to witness the astonishing spectacle of a protestant congregation at a church in Dallas being led in a liturgical prayer before a muster of drag queens to “celebrate this divine diversity”.

All of which is to say that the rapid ascendency of woke can be partly explained as a kind of pseudo-religious hysteria. The killing of Floyd had galvanized the movement, but its decline was swift and inevitable. A poll by The Economist has found that support for woke causes began to grow in 2015, peaked in 2021, and has been steadily falling ever since. With vaguely utopian goals in mind, activists had taken a wrecking ball to society, and it is only now that the dust is settling that we find ourselves struggling with the question of how so much sound and fury could end up signifying so little.

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Europe wants to 'pre-bunk' you

By Andrew Doyle

The Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests and riots of 2020, and the subsequent mainstreaming of nebulous notions of “systemic racism”, had the unintended effect of heightening racial tensions rather than weakening them. Children in America were suddenly being taught that “all white people play a part in perpetuating systemic racism”, and parents were being encouraged to become “white traitors” and support “white abolition”. Mountebanks such as Robin DiAngelo — a supposed expert in “Whiteness Studies” — were being paid thousands of dollars by major corporations to berate their employees and instruct them to “try to be less white”. In hindsight, it is remarkable that so many were gulled into believing that any of this was progressive.

Worse still, Critical Race Theory (CRT) was being imported into the UK, in spite of the fact that its analytical framework made little sense when applied to any historical context other than the US. Protesters in London were crying “Hands up, don’t shoot” at police officers with imaginary firearms. The American School in London — the most expensive day school in the UK – organised after-school activities in which children were separated by race. Brighton Council introduced an “anti-racist schools strategy” informed by the tenets of American CRT.

Above all, the years of racial identity politics that followed Floyd’s death have served to nourish what was once a dying white identitarian movement. It should surprise precisely no one that when those in power continually insist that human beings should be perceived first and foremost through their group identity, this might provide succour to race essentialists who have always thought in such terms. The phrase “woke right” might be hotly contested, but there can be little doubt that identity-obsessed authoritarians exist across the political spectrum, and that the excesses of the woke movement have rehabilitated racialized thinking to the benefit of some very sinister groups.

In particular, we are seeing the rise of Right-wing conspiratorial thinking that wallows in victimhood and perceives white people to be an oppressed class. The tactics of the woke are being replicated explicitly on the Right. In the midst of the BLM protests of 2020, the Associated Press stated that its style guide would be amended so that “black” was capitalized and “white” was not, a convention that was quickly followed by other outlets. Now, the identical strategy is being embraced by figures on the Right. “Different identity groups will always strive to protect and promote their own interests,” writes Andrew Torba, CEO of Right-wing social media platform Gab. “This is common sense and White people are starting to wake up to this reality and realize that if they don’t advocate for themselves no one else will.”

Similarly, the view that Western society is unregenerable was once the cornerstone of woke thinking, but has now taken hold among what some call the “Very Online Right”. The “degeneracy” of contemporary western culture is taken by some as evidence that it might have been preferable had the allies lost the Second World War. Neo-Nazi discourse is flourishing in the online space, particularly on X, and memes that praise Hitler are becoming more frequent. Kanye West recently posted an image of Hitler along with a goat emoji (“GOAT” means “Greatest of All Time”).

This narrative has been nourished by academics on both sides of the culture war debate, “problematising” the history of the Second World War, and specifically taking aim at Winston Churchill. Many will recall the academic event at the University of Cambridge in 2021 in which a panel of Left-wing activist academics sought to frame Churchill as an irredeemable racist. One panellist, Kehinde Andrews, branded him the “perfect embodiment of white supremacy” who helmed an empire that was “far worse than the Nazis”. Over the past year, many Right-wing culture warriors have made identical or similar claims. Most notoriously, podcaster Darryl Cooper appeared on Tucker Carlson’s show to denounce Churchill as the “chief villain” of the Second World War.

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I was the target of Guardian misinformation

By Andrew Doyle

That one form of authoritarian grievance-rooted identity politics might birth another, albeit from an opposing political tribe, should not have been all that tricky to anticipate. The notion of color-blindness advocated by the likes of Martin Luther King was once widely agreed to be the ideal, meaning that identitarians from the Left and the Right found it difficult to gain traction. The culture war has destabilized this consensus. For many on both sides of the political spectrum, racial identity is now their lodestar.

As for BLM, many of its key figures failed spectacularly in their self-appointed roles as champions of their communities. Having raised approximately $90 million in the aftermath of Floyd’s death, only a third actually went to charitable bodies. By May 2023, the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation was facing bankruptcy. One of its co-founders, Patrisse Cullors, was found to have spent $3.2 million on luxury homes, although she claimed these were private funds. Its tax filing of May 2022 revealed expenditure on luxury properties to the tune of $12 million, with significant sums paid to Cullors’s relatives for security services.

Moreover, the legacy of BLM has been anything but positive for people it purported to represent. The defunding of police has meant that crime in black areas has soared, black businesses were looted and destroyed, and black victims of murder were mourned only when the perpetrators were white. As the Equiano Project — a forum for debate about race and politics — has pointed out, radical politics was prioritized over the material challenges facing black communities: “Instead of focusing on crime, education, or work, BLM UK pushed anti-capitalism and identity-based ideology.”

In short, the BLM movement has been a disaster for race relations. Quite apart from the myriad failings of the movement, the push for social justice through authoritarian means — censorship, intimidation and public shaming — was always guaranteed to generate resentment from those who would eventually learn to mimic their tactics. We may quibble with the term “woke right”, but the phenomenon it describes is becoming impossible to ignore, particularly when one considers the new emboldened form of white nationalism and pro-fascist messaging on social media. It is regrettable those who sought to redress racism in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd might have created the conditions within which it can flourish.

In fact, the long view is looking good.

First, the bad news. On Monday, President Trump proclaimed that the police deserved an entire week in May. America should figuratively pat the boys in blue on the back, he suggested, while the administration attempts to reverse the awkwardly titled “Advancing Effective, Accountable Policing, and Criminal Justice Practices to Enhance Public Trust and Public Safety.” That’s Joe Biden’s 2022 executive order directed at mild and fair-minded police reform. Trump also called on Congress to pass a new crime bill intended to swing the pendulum in the opposite direction — to restore immunity to police officers and a mandatory death penalty for those convicted of killing a cop. In doing so, he’s trying to create more George Floyds, rather than help solve the problem.

This federal Police Week comes on the heels of a late April ribbon-cutting ceremony in Atlanta celebrating the opening of the so-called Cop City. For four years, a motley crew made up mainly of the “A’s”— anarchists, activists, and academics — bitterly fought the construction of the police-and-fire training center under the banner “Stop Cop City.” Atlanta Democrats were asking for it: they tried to quietly fast-track a $115 million facility in early 2021, a time when progressives were still making noise about abolishing and/or defunding cops in the wake of the George Floyd protests.

To make matters worse, the ruling Democrats would raze a patchy forest in the ruins of Atlanta’s defunct Prison Farm to make room for the project. It was, as the kids say, not a good look, and soon the anti-police and prison activists teamed up with NGOs and environmentalists to rabble-rouse against the project, which ranged from petitions to the city government to acts of arson against police motorcycles and construction equipment. The movement tried to expand its jurisdiction and make the fight over a police training complex on the outskirts of Atlanta a national flashpoint, the sequel to the Standing Rock protests, which in 2016 won the sympathy of environmentalists, celebrities, and eventually Barack Obama.

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Trump’s purge of the professionals

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The problem: as it turns out, almost no one wants to actually abolish the police, which is why the Democrats are now pretending that their flirtation with the movement never actually happened. Plus, since Oct. 7, the Cop City protests have been absorbed into a much broader — and spurious — ideological campaign against white supremacy, settler colonialism, and Western empire. That’s why slogans like “From Atlanta to Palestine” circulate on social media, and in their No Cop City, No Cop World book out this month, Stop Cop City activists suggest that Houthi missile strikes on oil tankers in the Red Sea are inexplicably connected to their effort to — say — shower the Atlanta City Council with ping pong balls. What Stop Cop City looks like now is the Left’s Waterloo, a final death of the movement to abolish police and prisons that became a boutique cause de jour in 2020.

So far, so good for those who think we need cops, right? Not exactly.

Even as #Defund fails, it’s not as if the police are an ascendant institution, at least, not on the local level. Two things can be true at once: Trump is granting federal agencies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement expansive and unconstitutional new powers, even as he has little control over the hundreds of thousands of uniformed officers funded and controlled at the county and municipal levels. The latter is slowly going the way of the dodo.

Consider the numbers. The United States employs more police officers today than half a century ago, but population growth has outpaced that increase. Density matters. In 1973, the country had roughly 4 officers per 1,000 people — a ratio that placed it slightly above Canada and Australia, but below Spain, France, and Austria, and nearly identical to England’s per-capita figure of 3.9. That ratio peaked in the early Nineties at 4.3 officers per 1,000, coinciding with the crest of the late-20th-century crime wave during the first Bush administration. (Even then, the American police force was only about a quarter the size of Russia’s in the years following the collapse of the Soviet Union.)

But from 1990 to 2020, a paradoxical trend emerged. The national crime rate fell precipitously — by some measures, mysteriously — even as the police presence, relative to population, remained flat. By 2013, the Department of Justice counted approximately 600,000 full-time personnel in local police departments, bringing the officer-to-resident ratio down to about 3 per 1,000 — roughly 25 percent lower than four decades earlier. By the time Joe Biden took office in 2020, the size of the overall police force had contracted even further, placing America’s police density below average for countries in Europe and the Americas.

America’s depolicing trend has only worsened since the pandemic. According to a recent survey by the International Association of Chiefs of Police, departments across the country are operating with, on average, a 10 percent shortfall in personnel. To compensate, 65% of responding agencies reported cutting back on services or eliminating specialized units, like detective bureaus or community outreach teams, to preserve basic patrol coverage. In Washington, DC, the police force has fallen to its lowest level in half a century, prompting the city’s police union to describe the situation as “dangerous.” Likewise, Philadelphia has a 19% vacancy rate, and in Gotham, the NYPD has seen its headcount decline by 11 percent since 2019.

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By Mary Harrington

As a result, fewer than 50 million people reported contact with police in 2022, according to the Bureau of Justice’s statistics — the fewest number of police encounters since 2008. That’s mainly because traffic enforcement is disappearing. By the end of 2023, officers in Baltimore, New Orleans, and San Francisco were making fewer than half the traffic stops they had made before the pandemic. Not coincidentally, road fatalities have jumped to startling highs, including a 74% increase in Memphis from 2019 to 2022, which has lost 22% of its force since 2011. All over America, you can spot “Slow Down!” signs in lawns, but little in the way of enforcing those requests.

The problems are structural. Young people, generally, are more cynical and don’t trust institutions, including the police, and are increasingly not willing to accept relatively low pay, long hours, and a lack of remote work possibilities. It’s the same reason military recruitment is down overall (notwithstanding a recent uptick) and civil service jobs everywhere aren’t being filled — even why pools are closed. Why be a cop or a lifeguard when you can get an email job, work from home, and sell photos on OnlyFans? That explains why one of the biggest growth industries is the private security industry, which, according to one report, is expected to more than double in value in the decade from 2022 to 2032.

That America is actually under policed is not an issue that the Left wants to talk about, because progressives only seem to care about state-inflicted violence, not the vastly more common interpersonal kind. However, the truth is that the decline of policing — both in terms of quality and quantity — is a social-justice issue. Eventually, the police departments, the ones publicly accountable to citizens, will abolish themselves and, like nearly everything else in America, public safety justice will become a privatized luxury good.

In the past week, a viral video emerged of Hendrix’s verbal altercation about an African-American child at a Minnesota playground. Hendrix, holding her own infant, is in an argument with a man recording her — asking her why she referred to the black child using the N-word. She defends using the slur to the man and repeats it, arguing that she’s justified because the black child tried to take her child’s things.

The exact timeline of events is not clear. What’s beyond doubt is that she is enraged — and unapologetic about her use of the epithet. The episode thus marks a turning point in America’s video-and-race wars. Not just Hendrix, but her legions of online supporters have dug into their tribal trenches. It’s a reaction to the excesses of racial progressivism in recent years, though no less discomfiting for what it reveals: the evaporation of American liberal universalism.

We’ve all witnessed at least one iteration of this cycle over the past decade: someone, usually a white person, gets caught being racially offensive. Online outrage erupts, followed by some kind of real-world consequence for the offender: losing a job or even facing personal threats.

Hendrix has flipped the script. “My name is Shiloh, and I have been put into a very dire situation”, she begins her fundraising appeal. “I recently had a kid steal from my 18-month-old son’s diaper bag at a park. I called the kid out for what he was.” She then complains of online abuse and solicits financial support: “Anything will help! We cannot, and will not live in fear!”

The appeal became as viral as the initial video. As of this writing, she has raised more than $683,000. Provided she doesn’t have any extraordinary debt, this makes Hendrix many times richer than the median American. Thus we have the first case, maybe in American history, of a woman quickly getting rich as a result of publicly using the N-word.

To Hendrix’s defenders, that’s a blinkered explanation. They aren’t celebrating a racist tirade or trying to turn an ugly moment into a stranger’s good fortune. Rather, they believe they’re turning the tables on years of Left-wing social repression that destroyed people for even minor social transgressions. They have a point.

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By Geoff Shullenberger

During the “racial reckoning”, proportionality was discarded. If someone committed the sin of racism, their life was forfeited. They didn’t deserve a job, friendships, or a moment of peace. They had to be un-personed. This included even those who were merely misperceived as racists, such as the University of Southern California professor suspended for using a Mandarin filler word which sounds like the N-word (but which has nothing to do with it).

I remember how, in 2020, The New York Times turned a brief verbal altercation in Central Park between a black birdwatcher named Christian Cooper and a white dog walker named Amy Cooper (no relation) into a national referendum about racial tensions in the United States.

Christian wanted Amy to make sure her dog was leashed — unleashed canines being a pet peeve of his. Amy refused to do so, and this resulted in a war of words between the two. Eventually, Christian tried to get Amy’s dog to come to him with some treats, resulting in Amy calling the police on him. Speaking to the emergency dispatcher, a clearly distressed Amy made sure to mention that Christian is black.

All of this was recorded by Christian, who uploaded the video and made it go viral. The nation’s news networks and newspapers all jumped on it, tsk-tsking that this was what America had come to: Central Park Karen calling down a police assassination on an African-American man who had inconvenienced her.

Amy ended up going into hiding after losing her job and receiving a mountain of online hate. As far as I can tell, she still lives in hiding today. Christian, by contrast, became a national celebrity. A couple of years ago, he even wrote a bestselling memoir, published by Random House. For much of the progressive Left, this was a perfectly reasonable set of outcomes. A “racist” white lady was shunned into oblivion; her “victim” was rewarded by a karmic load of riches and fame.

But over time, the nuances of the story became more apparent (not least thanks to a podcast feature produced by the African-American journal Kmele Foster). Amy had suffered sexual assault in the past and was clearly triggered by the interaction with Christian, who, it turns out, had a bit of a reputation for accosting people. Was Amy right to cite Christian’s race in the phone call with the police? Maybe not.

But it was also the kind of thing she thought she could say in that moment that would get him to back off. Remember, in 2020, much of liberal America believed that police were systematically murdering black men. If two liberal New Yorkers ran into each other in Central Park, chances were that they shared some variation of that belief. If her assault trauma was triggered, then, she would say anything to get away from the man drawing her dog away from her.

Yet the era of Left-wing racialism didn’t allow for these nuances. It told a simple story of racist white people persecuting minorities. And when you have such a simple story guiding your morality — you can expect a simple response. Maybe a brutally simple one.

All of this cut strongly against how I thought about these issues growing up in a diverse corner of Georgia in the Nineties. My social circle was white and black, Indian and Latino, and it was common to see arguments over race and culture spill over from private to public. People got into heated disputes, then made up the following day; sometimes, they just agreed to disagree. We were making our own way towards a more tolerant world without having every moment judged in a digital Thunderdome.

The viral video ended all that. And what is happening with Hendrix is a sort of middle finger to what came before. It’s a dialectical boomerang, slamming back to the hand that cast it — or the face that forgot it.

Hendrix is telling the world that she won’t be broken. In that sense, you can understand why so many conservatives and white people have been rushing to her side. I agree with her defenders that she shouldn’t be subjected to social death. People screw up, and calling a child a racial slur is a big screw-up, even if he did take something that wasn’t his. But people should also be mature and figure out ways to work through screw-ups without inciting a mob to bludgeon the offender into social oblivion.

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By Martin Gurri

That said, Hendrix’s boosters have also learned the wrong lesson from the years of progressive racialism. Many of her backers have compared her case to that of Karmelo Anthony, a black teen who allegedly stabbed a white teen to death in Texas. Anthony’s family has raised more than half a million dollars not just for legal fees, but to support themselves. If Anthony’s family can raise money, why can’t Hendrix’s?

The problem is that both Hendrix and Anthony have been turned into avatars of racial grievance. We have to support “our side” — meaning, white people or black people — even if they happened to be in the wrong in the given case. The co-founder of GiveSendGo, which hosts both fundraisers, had to disable comments on both of them owing to the deluge of racist remarks.

While these currents in American society are marginal for now, we shouldn’t underestimate the anti-American ideology pulsing through them. Contrary to the narratives told by the critical-theory Left and the race-fixated weird Right, America isn’t a country founded for the purpose of defending one race, religion, or creed. It’s not a country based on blood or soil.

Encouraging people to bestow loyalty based on skin or ancestry never ends well in this country, or any other. Both Shiloh Hendrix and Karmelo Anthony are Americans first and foremost, and they should be judged based on their adherence to the law and norms that we all have to abide by.

We should demand the best behavior from anyone, black or white. We should extend grace and mercy, regardless of race, when people fail to meet the standard. What we shouldn’t do is start celebrating and rewarding bad behavior out of some sense of racial revenge. That way lies national perdition.

Yet something seems off about these pieties in 2025. Against a backdrop of broad discontent with liberalism, including among black Americans increasingly drawn to Trumpism, it’s worth returning to a provocative set of questions posed by the black writer Harold Cruse in the wake of civil rights: what if separate but equal contained a good idea, a better idea than advocating for racial integration above all else? Shouldn’t black activism focus on building the capacity of black communities, rather than looking to open up opportunities for the black elite?

While Cruse is rarely remembered today, his name was often mentioned in the same breath as those of Frantz Fanon and Malcolm X in the Sixties and Seventies. As a writer and professor (who achieved his position without a college degree), he was deeply influential in establishing the field of black studies. The Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. reports that as an undergraduate in the Seventies, he was assigned Cruse’s masterpiece, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, in three separate courses. Indeed, Gates said he “received the call to be an intellectual through Harold Cruse”.

Cruse was unlike the dissenters from the civil-rights consensus we have come to expect. He harbored few fantasies about bootstrapping self-improvement in the manner promoted by black conservatives such as Thomas Sowell and Shelby Steele. Nor did he have patience for black radicals’ overheated rhetoric extolling a black separatist utopia. Rather, the problem with the civil-rights consensus for Cruse was that it advanced the interests of the black professional class over and against those of the black masses.

Middle-class professionals, black or white, push their particular material interests in the name of universal ideals. In the case of black professionals, Cruse thought, the earnestness — and thus the self-dealing — are doubly intensified. They serve at the leisure of the white middle class, which, in turn, serves those in the commanding heights of economy and society. As a result, there are very few public voices advancing the genuine interests of poor and working-class black people.

Whether or not a few more blacks are admitted to elite universities or the boardroom matters far less than ensuring that everyone has access to a safe place to live, sufficient food, playgrounds for children, and dignified work. Yet middle-class, integrationist black politics cashiered these communal goods in the bargain of more and better university placements and corporate jobs for themselves.

From Cruse’s perspective, the black middle class obfuscated the difference between morality and politics to advance its own interests. Just because policing the social boundary between the races is immoral doesn’t mean breaking down those boundaries ought to be the top political priority, as the mainstream civil-rights movement insisted. Rather, Cruse thought, the priority should be the needs of poor and working-class black people. This required strengthening local communities economically, politically, and culturally.

Cruse advocated for boycotts of businesses that were not based in his community, and he urged that businesses in his community shift to cooperative ownership. He argued for community-controlled initiatives to combat violence and drugs, with a leading role for cultural and religious organizations, not least the black church. He saw the development of community-owned media as an important complement to the new institutions of grassroots democracy he envisioned, like community planning boards.

The black history we ought to care about, Cruse argued, is the history of movements with broad popular support, even if they included regressive tendencies or eccentric personalities — and even if the black middle classes would turn up their noses at them. For Cruse, groups like the Nation of Islam, Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association, and the network of small businesses associated with Booker T. Washington reflected the interests of the black working class in a way that the NAACP and black elected officials never could. The black masses aren’t moved by get-rich-quick schemes, he showed, but by the promise of economic self-determination, especially when it is braided with political and cultural self-determination.

Yet throughout the Eighties, Nineties, and Aughts, black politics trended in the opposite direction from the one Cruse advocated. Multiculturalism reigned, and race politics was largely captured by the black professional-managerial class, including the public intellectuals who laundered that class’s narrow interests with pseudo-sophisticated affirmations of black identity and culture. The corporate ideal of “diversity” was used to legitimize existing power structures: you haven’t received a meaningful raise in a generation, but take solace, your CEO is now black. The minute policing of ordinary language substituted for material reforms.

Then came the Black Lives Matter movement. Launched as the reality of a black president, Barack Obama, grotesquely mismatched the continuing experience of racial violence, BLM broke with integration and multiculturalism, denouncing “respectability politics”. Behind that movement’s embrace of Blackness-with-a-capital-B was a radical shift in the political frame. Instead of relying on the state, communities needed to develop their capacity to care for themselves and to keep themselves safe. “Abolish the police” wasn’t a slogan meant to win elections. It was meant to fuel a long-dormant imagination about what investing in community and experimenting with new institutional forms at the local level could achieve.

In short, Cruse’s ideas were back. But just for a minute. The professional-managerial class embraced BLM in 2020. Amid the lockdowns, in between enjoying loaves of home-baked sourdough and their newfound science fetish, the professionals transformed insurgent political energy into bureaucracy and branding.

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America doesn't want a civil war

By Batya Ungar-Sargon

Instead of experimenting with innovative ways for local communities to address the problems they faced, corporations, governments, and, especially, universities hired multicultural managers who knew how to parrot the slogans of black justice movements without threatening the interests of their employers. Amazon led corporate America’s BLM advocacy — even as the mega-retailer terminated a black employee, Christian Smalls, who had sought to organize his fellow warehouse workers on Staten Island, with the company’s general counsel describing Smalls as “not smart or articulate” in an internal memo.

It isn’t hard to see why there would be growing skepticism among black voters of liberal leadership, even as black voters know all too well the continuing effects of racism. As for the alternative? Moral outrage at this or that affront to “our democracy” voiced by the chattering classes — norms created by and for the wealthy and white — rings hollow among the black masses.

What does this history tell us about our present moment? The multicultural model for managing racial diversity was attacked from the Left during the Obama presidency but temporarily resuscitated by the liberal capture of BLM energy. Now an enfeebled multiculturalism is being attacked from the Right, and its prognosis is grim. From the perspective of the black poor and working class, a dramatic shift in elite discourse creates severe vulnerability, but it also opens new opportunities to put forward a vision of justice that centers the black masses.

To create space for that new paradigm, we must be unsentimental about the old paradigm, even as we guard against the barely disguised racism that motivates many of its Right-wing critics. Here again, Cruse can be instructive. His imperative to imagine what community ownership in its richest sense could entail offers a guide for our tumultuous times. Imagine local black organizing efforts that call out the oligarchy’s control of our food, our homes, and our entertainment as they grow community-owned grocery stores, apartment buildings, newspapers, and sports teams.

In fairness to the early integrationists, aspects of Cruse’s position are not so different from that of MLK. After the success of the Montgomery bus boycott, King offered an expansive but localized vision of the next steps needed for his city in a hostile national political environment. Black people, King thought, needed to start a credit union, support cultural organizations, do voter outreach, and develop adult education programs.

At another parlous moment, just after Ronald Reagan was inaugurated with a promise to enact sweeping changes to the federal government and cuts to education programs, Harold Cruse was asked for his reaction. “There are tough times ahead, and blacks are going to have to change”, Cruse predicted. And he offered advice: instead of focusing on the noise of national politics, as objectionable as they may be, blacks must work collectively to develop local organizations that will “take more responsibility for the community in which they live”.

Professional-class aspiration, corporate “diversity”, top-down multiculturalism — all have failed us. Black Americans cannot afford to fail ourselves.

Because a human epidermis only has so much square footage, Leonard has to be ruthless about retaining only the information that serves his purpose, resigning the rest to the abyss. But the twist of Memento, when it comes, reveals more than the limits of a life defined by a quest for vengeance that will be forgotten as soon as it is achieved; it reminds us that memory can be treacherous, that history is narrative, and that sometimes, in the single-minded pursuit of justice, we do things we’d rather forget.

I was reminded of the film while reading Morning After the Revolution, the new book by journalist Nellie Bowles. Described as “a moment of collective psychosis preserved in amber”, it is a look back at the social justice movement which had been simmering under the surface of American society since roughly 2014, then exploded into a reckoning four years ago tomorrow, when George Floyd was murdered by police in Minneapolis. The book is, among other things, a historical record — one that the movement in question would definitely not choose to permanently inscribe on its skin. The fact that Bowles used to be a New York Times writer and card-carrying member of the woke crowd herself makes her account at once more credible to the reader and less convenient to its subjects.

If the summer of 2020 was a party that eventually devolved into a chaotic rager, Morning After the Revolution is the album of unflattering photos taken by a guest who left before the police showed up. Look: there’s the moment from the pandemic where Donald Trump said he wanted schools to reopen, so we shut them down until 2023. There’s the time a male spa-goer displayed an erect penis in front of a 14-year-old girl, and media commentators hurried to dismiss the entire thing as a Right-wing hoax. There’s the one where we started recreationally destroying the lives of random white women who looked a little too much like manager-callers; there’s the $3,000 anti-racist dinner party and the “Defund the Police” banner!

The revolutionaries are in this picture, and they don’t like it. Even as early as 2022, there were signs that people were happy to forget the movement once the marching-shouting-posting action was over; when reporters discovered that the $90 million raised by Black Lives Matter had been squandered on, among other things, a party house in Los Angeles, the response was a studied incuriosity. But even then, it’s hard to exaggerate how much this attempt to defund, dismantle and drastically remake every institution in service of social justice has been… well, not-that. Four years after his death became the spark that lit the flame of revolution, George Floyd’s lingering impact can mainly be seen in the hastily-installed DEI programmes in corporate offices nationwide, where hourly wage workers sit through interminable sensitivity trainings — and where the main beneficiaries are 28-year-old college-educated white women from HR, who now receive six-figure salaries to lecture their coworkers on the importance of daily pronoun exchanges and the scourge of microaggressions.

Meanwhile, in Minneapolis, the vacant gas station parking lot that was the site of Floyd’s death, and which used to be flooded with so many protestors that it had to be closed to traffic, is now deserted save for the occasional social justice tourist. They come to photograph the murals, the graffiti, the tattered plastic flowers around the perimeter of a former bus shelter, where a high-contrast portrait of Floyd’s now-familiar face has been painted on a piece of plastic sheeting — but there’s little to keep them there. The city has promised a plan to redevelop the memorial site, although it’s more like a plan to have a plan; the neighbourhood remains blighted by crime and vandalism, partially owing to lack of police presence. The third precinct police station in the neighbourhood remains permanently closed after being burned by rioters in 2020.

As for the anniversary of Floyd’s death, it has quickly faded from a national event to an afterthought; this year, the George Floyd Global Memorial will be hosting a “Self-Care Fair”, including “free wellness services including bodywork, meditation, arts and crafts”. The arc of the social justice universe is long, but it bends toward free massages and macaroni art.

Nobody who proudly and vocally fancied himself on the right side of history back in 2020 wants to admit that this combination of corporate bloat and urban blight is the primary legacy of that moment — or indeed, that this was entirely predictable. What did we expect from a movement in which “doing the work” became synonymous with guilty liberal white women paying thousands of dollars to engage in racial struggle sessions? In which the lives of ordinary black people were overlooked in favour of more photogenic diversity efforts centered on politics, corporate boardrooms, and prestige industries like the arts, the media, and Hollywood? In which the mark of an enlightened ally was to cheer for policies, like defunding the police, which were not just unpopular with marginalised communities but often actively harmed them?

In the cold light of day (and with black men now dying from homicide at rates not seen since the Sixties), of course the people who took to the streets en masse in 2020 would rather not think about how much momentum they squandered. They would, like Leonard in Memento, prefer to remember the story’s origins: a grotesque injustice and surge of revolutionary zeal. As for what happened next, ah, well, who knows? Who could have known? Better to push it under the rug; there is, after all, a new election to worry about. 

But, as Bowles pointed out in a recent interview, this refusal to remember doesn’t change what was: “It happened. I was there. People did argue to abolish the police, that toddlers know their true gender and that 15 years old is fine to begin cross-sex hormones, that accelerated math is racist.”

Bowles’s insistence on pursuing the truth — on being curious about what is true, and what is going on — is an animating feature of Morning After the Revolution, much as it was the animating feature of her journalism at the New York Times. This, as she writes, was a boon to her career until it wasn’t, as the questions she was asking became inconvenient to the increasingly partisan goals of the paper’s leadership. Among the dishier parts of the book is the revelation that Bowles’s proposed reporting trip to the anarchist “autonomous zone” that sprang up in Seattle, with the mayor’s blessing, was met with raised eyebrows; why on earth, an editor asked, did she want to go there?

“Antifa was nonsense, fake, a nothing-burger, a non-story, not interesting and not real, he said. The reason he doesn’t go to Seattle and cover things like this is because he knows right now is time for white people to sit certain things out. Some things that are not important things shouldn’t be covered. The Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ) and whatever was going on there wasn’t important. Antifa wasn’t important. Why do you care? No but seriously why do you care?”

Of course, Bowles would say this, particularly when stories like the one about a New York Times editor calling her then-girlfriend Bari Weiss “a fucking Nazi” were guaranteed to go wildly viral on social media, confirmation of every sordid rumour about how mainstream media had become nothing more than a middle-school lunch room ruled by adult mean girls. Perhaps it should all be taken with a grain of salt.

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And yet, for people who did go a little mad in 2020, and particularly those who engaged in some of the more vicious forms of social policing while in the thick of revolutionary fervour, it’s not hard to imagine that Bowles’s account of the moment is an unwelcome, embarrassing reminder, and the critical response to her book from most mainstream media outlets has a definite air of hit dogs hollering. The New York Times declared it “an attack on progressive activism”; the Washington Post called it “a deeply anti-democratic document”; a New Yorker headline scoffed at Bowles’s “failed provocations”. 

This, too, made me think of a moment in Memento, in which another character tries to tell Leonard things about his life; things that would contradict the narrative he has indelibly inked on his body. In an impulsive act, Leonard takes a photograph of this man and scrawls an aide-memoire on the back. One gets the sense of this same message, the same desperate desire to forget, lurking unspoken beneath much of the contemptuous snarling over Morning After the Revolution.

It says: DON’T BELIEVE HIS LIES.

According to the late political theorist Charles W. Mills, Kant’s oeuvre contains the resources to establish a variety of “Black radical Kantianism”. Numerous others have presented him as a proto-feminist, with a recent monograph by US-based philosopher Helga Varden claiming that “despite his austere and even anti-sex, cisist, sexist, and heterosexist reputation, Kant’s writings … yield fertile philosophical ground on which we can explore … abortion, sexual orientation, sexual or gendered identity”.  All of this is quite unexpected for a 18th-century Prussian bachelor of Lutheran upbringing, of the opinion that sex should occur only within Christian marriage, black people were natural slaves, and women unfit to have a vote.

Also surprising, at least initially, is the fascination Kant’s systematic philosophy still exerts over many in academia, despite the famed dullness of his prose. In an unusually striking phrase, he once wrote of “the miserly provision of a step-motherly nature” — and indeed, step-motherly nature doesn’t seem to have been liberally doling out the bantz the day young Immanuel was born. According to one biographer, he was “extremely stern with himself from his early youth”: determined to be economically independent, “because he saw in it a condition for the self-sufficiency of his mind and character”. Throughout his life, he never left his home city of Königsberg; later on, his neighbours there would set their watches by his exactly timed daily constitutional walks.

Valiant attempts of hagiographers to make him seem like a fascinating demimondaine only reinforce the impression of squareness. “He was a very social type who often went to parties and sometimes drank too much,” protested one fellow German author to the Guardian 20 years ago, a little too insistently.  “At times Kant could not find the street where he lived because he was so inebriated.” There were also “amorous interests” in at least two women, it was reported, though no evidence the relationships were consummated.

If not his innate charisma or worldliness then, what explains the lingering attraction of Kant’s elaborate philosophical system to today’s thinkers? For many, it is surely the ingenuity with which he dealt with a number of disquieting sceptical challenges that emerged during the Enlightenment. Over the course of several mature works, Kant built an intricate cathedral of interlocking justifications, providing support for certain traditional assumptions that new scientific discoveries and encroaching atheism would otherwise seem to leave dangling in mid-air.

For instance: answering to David Hume’s worry that humans could neither directly observe nor otherwise prove the existence of fundamental natural laws such as the connection between cause and effect, Kant got rid of the underpinning assumption that the human mind and the natural world were wholly separate. Instead, in a reversal he likened to Copernicus’s revelation that the Earth revolved around the Sun and not the other way round, he wove an understanding of such laws into the fabric of sensory experience, so that allegedly it now made no sense to seriously doubt them.

Faced with the creeping fear that there could be no free will in Newton’s mechanistic universe, Kant then leaned upon his own picture of the physical world as a realm of partly mind-constructed appearances, and placed the free, unmoved-yet-moving self safely in a separate realm beyond it. To the increasingly urgent complaint that without God as a foundation, traditional Christian precepts must surely lose their authority, he responded by instead putting free will and autonomous human reason at the heart of objective moral decision-making, conveniently preserving many austerely Protestant-looking practical conclusions as he did so.

In all of this Kant gave the cognitive faculties a crucial role, painting the mind not just as a discoverer but also as a partial inventor of our universe and its fundamental rules — a suggestion flattering to susceptible brainboxes in universities, secretly pining for a superhero role in life befitting of their intellectual talents. And despite the often flatfooted and prosaic presentation, there is also a thrilling intimation of spookiness to the metaphysical picture Kant ultimately offers readers: on the one hand, the world of knowable appearances, and on the other, a supernatural realm of things-in-themselves, whose existence humans cannot apprehend directly but only infer.

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But perhaps the aspect of Kant’s thought most attractive to today’s professional academic is that — like many of them — he is an intellectual conservative of sorts. Though he rearranges the metaphysical furniture, sometimes fairly radically, he usually leaves his fellow citizens sitting almost exactly where they were beforehand. The structure of the universe is still predictable; humans continue to have free will; it is still the case that one shouldn’t kill, break promises, or lie. Effectively, Kant often starts with conclusions he wants to preserve and then works backwards.

To some extent, this is also the strategy of some of his modern interpreters, beginning with a particular set of now-fashionable political conclusions, then casting about in Kant’s writing for the resources to prop them up (usually, by making extensive use of his emphasis upon the importance of freedom and self-governance). Though in his ethics Kant railed against using another person instrumentally as a “mere means” to your own personal ends, in practice commentators don’t seem to pay much attention to that bit, as they haul him off down the gender clinic or to the BLM march. Superficially, it may look sexily avant-garde to employ the ideas of a thinker as buttoned-up as Kant, in order to underpin arguments for the rights of people to have polyamorous orgies or to cut body parts off at will. In reality, though, these anachronistic uses of his thought would never have escaped the seminar room and made it out into the wider world alive, had society not already rendered it perfectly permissible or even profitable to pursue such endpoints.

Of course, there are also differences between Kant and the new crop of academic apologists for contemporary mores. Perhaps the most obvious is that, over the last 300 years, hundreds and thousands of people from many walks of elite life have read and responded to Kant’s works; a trend helped along by the assumption, popular until relatively recently, that a grasp of the central figures in Western philosophy was a requirement upon any decent education. But these days, almost nobody who isn’t already studying or researching philosophy reads academics like Mills and Varden. So who or what are they doing it for, exactly? It would be madly grandiose to think that, in the 21st century, anyone has ever been converted to black radical politics or pansexual people’s rights by reading opaque monographs from academic presses priced at £25 a pop.

A more charitable take, perhaps, is that both Kant and those modern thinkers loosely inspired by him are each using reason to perform a kind of sense check upon certain key presuppositions of their time. They start off with some folk-conclusions that are believed by many, though with no clear idea of why; next, they ask themselves whether there are convincing rational arguments available that might support those conclusions, and so lend them extra weight. In other words: can philosophers, with all their specialist technical skills in argument construction, produce a solid-enough rational scaffolding for some of the important-looking things that people already think?

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But if this is the strategy, it is a risky one. The more byzantine the layers of argument offered for the truth of a particular set of presuppositions, the more keenly the suspicion grows that it might have been just as easy — or certainly, no more difficult — to offer neat and ingenious arguments that seemed to show exactly the opposite. Kant’s sprawling system, with its host of interwoven technical assumptions ranging across metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, aesthetics and politics, already invites this worry; by the time commentators start to lean upon that system in order to justify social-justice mantras about abortion or cis privilege, the edifice looks in danger of collapsing.

Or perhaps these present-day commentators assume that the only way to redeem Kant from his intermittent episodes of racism and sexism — to cleanse him of those everyday 18th-century sins — is to demonstrate that, despite appearances, his philosophical system has the potential to generate a progressive position on those very matters about which he was so reactionary. For some academics, this may well be the best explanation: attempting an absolution of sorts for their hero.

Either way, it’s hard not to conclude that in thinking about Kant’s legacy, we are better off going back to the extremely rich source material directly, and trying to see it in its proper historical context — for better or worse. There is no need to mess around with any quasi-religious new adaptions. It is a strange irony that, in the 300 years since Kant was born, those working in universities only seem to have got more puritanical.

In hindsight, it’s now accepted that the therapists were frequently implanting these “memories” in their suggestible patients. Recovered memory was a social mania — a.k.a. a moral panic, social contagion, mass formation psychosis, or mass hysteria. In the throes of the popular delirium, many people found this exercise in psychic archaeology wholly convincing (and no little titillating). For a few years, recovered memories were even accepted as factual testimony in American courts. Only from a distance does the sordid psychological dowsing look barmy.

For me, since roughly 2012, what has therefore been more disturbing than the content of any given hysteria is our continuing susceptibility to collective derangement, which can spread and take hold with alarming rapidity in a digital era. To examine the unnerving phenomenon of the communal fever, often destructive but rarely contested at its height, in my most recent novel Mania I invented my own. Suddenly everyone accepts that all humans are equally intelligent, and “cognitive discrimination” is “the last great civil rights fight”. In other words, there’s no such thing as stupid. Because that assertion is itself stupid, my concocted mania seems apt.

Within the astonishingly short time frame of 10 years, I count four real-life collective crazes: transgenderism, #MeToo, Covid lockdowns (which spawned sub-crazes over masks and vaccines), and Black Lives Matter. I also worry we’re already in the grip of social mania number five.

Take trans. Gender-identity disorder was not that long ago an extraordinarily rare psychiatric diagnosis largely constrained to men. Abruptly circa 2012 — on the heels of such a successful crusade for gay rights and even gay marriage that homosexuality became passé — a profusion of television documentaries hit our screens about little boys who wore dresses and played with dolls. Fast-forward to the present, and the renamed diagnosis has exploded by thousands of percent across the West and now pertains abundantly to girls. Teachers tell toddlers that they have to decide whether they’re a girl or a boy or something in-between. We’re subjecting children to powerful, life-altering experimental drugs and surgically removing healthy breasts and genitals, even at the cost of permanent sexual dysfunction and infertility. “Some people are born in the wrong body” has become a truism, which sounds to me as medically credible as phrenology or bloodletting.

The social mania displays a few consistent characteristics. First and foremost, it never seems like a social mania at the time. In the thick of a widespread preoccupation, its precepts simply seem like the truth. Trans women are women; get over it. Or: masculinity is toxic; virtually all women have been subject to sexual torment and male abuse of power; regarding any accusations they make, no matter how far-fetched or petty, women must be believed. Or: Covid-19 is so lethal, and such a threat to our endurance as a species, that we’ve no choice but to shut down our whole economies and abdicate our every civil liberty to contain the disease. Or: all Western countries are “systemically racist”; all white people are genetically racist; the police are all racist (even if they’re black) and should be defunded or abolished; the only remedy for “structural racism” is anti-meritocratic, over-compensatory racial quotas in hiring and education.

While the seeds of a mania have often been planted earlier, for most ordinary people it comes out of nowhere. Transgenderism rocketed to a cultural fetish over a matter of  months. After one fully fledged creep was exposed as a serial sex abuser, #MeToo spread on Twitter like potato blight. Literally overnight, citizenries in March 2020 took it for granted that their “liberal democracies” could justifiably deny them freedom of movement, assembly, association, press and even speech, while many became eager enforcers of the chaotic, despotic, and sometimes positively silly new regime. It took only a few days for George Floyd’s death to trigger huge protest marches all over the world. This hyperbolic response to a single undeserved killing in a one mid-sized American city was partially fed by the pent-up frustrations of whole populations under house arrest during Covid. But for Koreans to troop down the streets of Seoul chanting, “Black lives matter!” when the country has hardly any black people was insensible. Likewise, Britons chanting “Hands up, don’t shoot!” when their constabulary is unarmed. Moreover, all these recent examples illustrate how moral panics have become more international in scope than ever before.

Manias are fuelled by emotion. The cult of trans has capitalised on our yearning to seem enlightened and compassionate.  It has been presented as the logical next step after gay rights, the movement plays on our craving to feel ultra-contemporary. #MeToo both fed off and promulgated resentment, self-pity, and vengeance; in standing up to abuse of power, it tempted some women to abuse their own power to ruin men’s lives. Covid lockdowns stirred primitive terror of death and contagion, until we came to view other people as mere vectors of disease. BLM stimulated the nascent Christian proclivities for guilt, repentance, and penitence even in the secular, while offering black people opportunity to vent frustration, self-righteous fury, and even hatred. All manias thrive on our desire to be included by our own herd and on our anxiety about being exiled — or, if you will, about being UnHerded.

Because a proper mania brooks no dissent. In its grip, everyone believes the same thing, says the same thing, and even uses the same language. A quasi-religious fervour makes anyone outside the bubble of shared obsession seem heretical, dangerous, insane or outright evil. Opponents of lockdowns were granny killers; the unvaccinated were pariahs who shouldn’t be allowed to fly, eat out or obtain healthcare, while some argued “anti-vaxxers” should be imprisoned or put to death. Their rhetoric and affect often violent, transactivists tar critics as murderers; not long ago, writing a single discouraging word about the mutilation of children would end your career. (Self-protectively, I kept my own journalistic mouth shut for a good four years; most journalists are still prudently bumping along on the trans bandwagon.) Women who expressed reservations about the indiscriminate sweep of #MeToo were traitors to their sex. In 2020, even tweeting “All lives matter” got you sacked.

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Manias are prone to grow increasingly extreme, accumulating evermore casualties before collapsing from their contradictions. Stalin’s show trials, Cambodia’s killing fields, Mao’s cultural revolution, obviously Nazism; the eugenics movement in the West (which we like to forget), the rage for lobotomies, and the paranoia about Satanism in day-care centres and the contagion of multiple personality disorder of the Nineties — all these misguided infatuations got worse before they imploded.

Hula hoops were harmless, but most manias are malign. The trans movement has warped primary school education, demented our culture with confusion over biological reality, condemned thousands of children to painful surgery and pharmaceutical side-effects, encroached on women’s privacy, and corrupted female sports. #MeToo contaminated relations between the sexes with such mistrust that it may have alone lowered the Western birth rate, while destroying the careers of countless men whose sins were at most venial. Covid lockdowns ravaged our economies, fuelled inflation, and exploded sovereign debt, while damaging the prospects of a generation of school children. BLM has exacerbated racial animosity, demonised meritocracy, and fostered a wasteful, parasitical managerial class of DEI enforcers whom it will be laborious to get shed of.

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Some hysterias die an easier death than others. Although the fragile, whiny accuser of a US Supreme Court nominee was once heralded as awesomely “courageous”, Christine Blasey Ford’s recent memoir has drawn weary disdain. Ergo, #MeToo is over. Nevertheless, a social frenzy seldom subsides because its agitators announce they were addled, just as the masses of ordinary people caught up in the derangement seldom acknowledge having been led astray. Everyone simply moves on, only to become consumed by something else.

There’s rarely an identifiable point at which a mania is debunked (barring a world war or counterrevolution). Few will recant, much less apologise to the victims of their excesses. A funny amnesia sets in, as forgetfulness is more palatable than shame; the Chinese have simply erased the cultural revolution from their history books. Occasionally, when folks outside the dogmatic bubble prosecute, the cheerleaders of utter tosh are called to account. We did have Nuremburg, and the belated Pol Pot trials in Cambodia. By contrast, the UK’s farcical Covid inquiry is conducted by the same establishment it’s investigating. The subsequent report may criticise single politicians for not having locked down sooner, but it can’t conclude that the lockdowns were a cataclysmic mistake, lest practically everyone at the top be implicated.

Once manias die down, most people pretend they never believed these things to begin with. Having contracted Covid five or six times post-vaccination, multiply boosted mRNA fanatics aren’t prone to advertise their vicious denunciation of the unvaccinated only two or three years ago — any more than recovered memory patients are inclined to advertise that they destroyed their relationship with their parents over an erroneous psychiatric fad. We like to think that we’re “modern” (and what peoples in the present have ever fancied themselves otherwise?) and that we base our beliefs on fact. But we’re just as prey to mass delusions as we ever were.

Accordingly, how’s this for mania number five. It isn’t a mania; it’s just the truth: check. It’s suddenly all anyone in the media seems to talk about, and they use all the same language: check. It’s powered by emotion: check. It brooks no dissent, refuses to acknowledge there’s even a debate to be had, and doghouses all sceptics as evil “deniers” who will bring about the end of world: check. It’s malign, getting increasingly extreme, and is driven by the very best of intentions: check, check, check. I’m not about to get into the argument here, but the escalating hysteria over climate change — or the climate “emergency”, climate “crisis”, or climate “collapse” — displays all the markers, does it not?

Advocates for the independent Indigenous Voice to Parliament body, upon whose shoulders the burden of colonial guilt weighs heavily, are perplexed. Who wouldn’t want to end the torment of the powerless and erase the nation’s shame, especially when the 24-strong panel’s considerations would be merely advice and not constitutionally binding?

Most of Australia, apparently. Talk of equity, inclusivity and compassion is failing to soften hearts. In February, support for the Voice was at 56%. A Newspoll survey in mid-July found support had slipped to 41%, compared to 48% for the No case.

Its supporters blame ignorance, disinformation and lingering prejudice. Yet the polling tells a different story, of revolt against what the American economist Thomas Sowell identified as “the vision of the anointed”, one that will be familiar to followers of the Brexit referendum. As with the UK in 2016, the Voice is popular in the metropolises of Sydney and Melbourne, but has failed to win support in the regions. It is favoured by millennials and Gen Z, particularly those with a university education; baby boomers and those even older will vote No by a large majority. Support splits along party lines: highest among Greens, but widely rejected by seven out of 10 Liberal and National voters.

Whatever the result, it is clear that the referendum won’t be the “unifying Australian moment” Albanese hoped for when he announced it at a national Aboriginal gathering a year ago. And faced with potential failure, his supporters have proved reluctant to understand how those who reject their modest proposal could be motivated by anything other than hate. “While it is not true to say that every Australian who votes No in the Voice referendum is a racist,” says columnist Niki Savva, “you can bet your bottom dollar that every racist will vote No.” Marcia Langton, a distinguished Melbourne-based Aboriginal leader, says it would be “terribly unfortunate” if the referendum were to sink into “a nasty, eugenicist, 19th-century style of debate about the superior race versus the inferior race”.

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Yet the most commonly heard objection to the Voice is anything but discriminatory. At its heart, the notion of special treatment for anyone offends the Australian spirit of egalitarianism, hardwired in since the convict days. Every citizen stands on an equal footing regardless of why they came here. It makes no difference whether your Australian ancestry goes back 60 years or if you took the Citizenship Pledge 60 minutes ago. Here, no one gets special favours simply because of their race.

In the last referendum about the standing of Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders, which was held in 1967, Australians voted nine-to-one in support of amendments to remove the last vestiges of official discrimination against native people. Like the dismantling of the White Australia policy — a set of historic racist laws designed to limit non-European migration, the last of which was abolished in the Seventies — it was an affirmation that the state was blind to colour.

But campaigners for the No vote have argued that the referendum would reintroduce a racial element to Australian politics, granting special privileges to one group to the disadvantage of others. If there is to be a voice within government for Indigenous peoples, is it not also unfair to exclude the voices of other ethnic minorities? Why not appoint an Asian voice to parliament, a Greek voice, or even a Pommie voice, since immigrants from the UK have formed a relative majority of new arrivals since the early Sixties? Opponents fear that the Voice will effectively become a de-facto third chamber in the bicameral Parliament of Australia, one with political muscle over legislation if not a power of veto. They also fear the mischief that an activist Supreme Court might wreak in interpreting its output.

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Most of all, opponents worry about what comes next. After all, the Indigenous Voice to Parliament could yet prove a mere staging post on the road to the more substantive structural reforms outlined in the “Uluru Statement from the Heart”, a 2017 petition by Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander leaders which called for separate sovereignty over land and reforms to address structural “powerlessness”. The petition has since risen to the status of a sacred document among Voice supporters, and its proposals have been accepted in full by Albanese. It describes an Indigenous Voice to Parliament as the first step towards a truth commission and a Makarrata Agreement — a treaty — empowering Aboriginal Australians to reclaim control over their economic and social destiny.

Some Indigenous activists would go further still, and are not afraid to say so. Thomas Mayo, a prominent Yes campaigner, says the Voice will be a vehicle to force non-Indigenous Australians to “pay the rent” for living on stolen land. In a series of tweets from 2020, Mayo claimed the “Blak [sic] rep body” would have the resources to demand “reparations, land back, abolishing harmful colonial institutions, getting ALL our kids out of prisons & in to care, respect & integration of our laws & lore, speaking language, wages back – all the things we imagine”. Unsurprisingly, Mayo’s various social media posts and similar intemperate remarks by other pro-Voice supporters have been widely used in the No campaign’s advertising script.

Yet perhaps the Yes campaign’s strongest card is the appalling poverty that blights the lives of roughly one-tenth of Australia’s Indigenous population. The most confronting poverty is found in remote communities that were given partial autonomy by well-meaning reformers in the Seventies. The disparities between indigenous Australians are as stark as they appear intractable. Australians have the eighth highest life expectancy in the world; 86 years for women, 82 for men. Life expectancy in 2018 for Aboriginal women in remote communities is 70 and 66 for men, roughly on a par with Ethiopia.

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Decades of welfare and countless government programmes have barely shifted the dial. Indeed, the social fabric in remote Aboriginal communities has rapidly deteriorated. The prevalence of alcoholism, domestic violence and child sexual abuse is badly under-reported in the mainstream media; editors have self-censored for years to avoid stigmatising Aboriginal people. Few have taken the trouble to spend time in Australia’s own developing world to see the empty schools, the runny eyes, the overcrowded settlements beset by feral wild dogs. Those of us who have will never forget.

Supporters of the Voice, however, have conspicuously failed to explain how a Yes vote will change these conditions. Presenting contemporary welfare challenges as the legacy of colonialism and lingering prejudice had fallen out of fashion in Australia until the influence of the Black Lives Matter movement revived it. Even then, it failed to take off in the same way as in the US. Perhaps its lack of an empirical basis was more obvious in Australia. Is historical injustice causing higher rates of cardiac illness and cancer? Or might it be a tobacco consumption that is more than five times higher in remote Aboriginal communities (59%) than in the general community (11%)? Might the high incidence of kidney failure be related partly to patterns of alcohol consumption? Could higher rates of type-2 diabetes partly be due to poor diets?

Faced with such widespread cognitive dissonance, it is hard not to be reminded of Sowell’s empirically grounded arguments about the US Civil Rights movement: that the political advancement of an ethnic group does nothing to reduce social and economic disparity. That is an observable fact in Australia, where the political influence of Indigenous Australians has been steadily increasing since the late Sixties. The Aboriginal population is disproportionately represented on the floors of the Commonwealth Parliament, and the Aboriginal political class holds significant influence in the corridors of power and the media. Corporates have enthusiastically backed periodic reconciliation campaigns and the acknowledgment of the traditional owners of the land has become a secular prayer recited at the start of corporate meetings, uttered by airline stewards upon landing, and appended to corporate emails. Yet the gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians is barely closing.

There is little doubt that an Indigenous Voice to Parliament would enrich and empower the Aboriginal political class, giving them an even stronger hand on the levers of power. Every new inquiry, committee or compliance board established is a job creation scheme for a subset of Indigenous people who are suffering no apparent disadvantage themselves. Yet it will be a further blow for Indigenous people firmly grounded in the country, the “somewhere”, as opposed to the “anywheres”, in this debate.

In Australia as in America, the most grievous effect of insisting that everything boils down to race is the theft of agency from people who, by dint of their genetic inheritance, are considered incapable of changing their lives, for good or ill. Administering welfare in compensation will only make matters worse. As an increasing number of Australians plan to make clear, the tyranny of low expectations it breeds is anything but emancipatory.

The Black Adder, as it was originally titled, is 40 years old this week, first airing on 15 June 1983. After a shaky start, it would run for four series, though in its day it was never as popular as the other great historical comedy of the decade, ’Allo ’Allo. But its 24 episodes, spread across four time periods, have secured a cherished place in the British TV pantheon: second greatest sitcom ever, according to a 2004 BBC poll of the public; 16th greatest programme ever made, according to the British Film Institute in 2000.

At the time, it wasn’t considered to be as controversial as Gove suggests, overshadowed by far noisier arguments about Britain’s history. A few months before Blackadder was first broadcast, it had been suggested to Margaret Thatcher that what she believed in were essentially “Victorian values” — and she leapt at the phrase with great enthusiasm. When she was asked to identify which bits of the 19th century she particularly approved of, she ran through the standard list — thrift, charity, personal responsibility — and added “the British Empire that took both freedom and the rule of law to countries that would never have known it otherwise”.

Her words were carefully chosen at a time when the public interpretation of the Empire was a contentious issue. It was an era of TV dramas such as The Jewel in the Crown and The Far Pavilions, of films Heat and Dust, A Passage to India and, biggest of all, Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi. When it won eight Oscars in 1983, an editorial in the Daily Mirror celebrated the man who “took on the mighty British Empire at the peak of its power and defeated it”. It was, it said, a film that had been made by a “new Britain” that Thatcher didn’t understand, one in which Gandhi was a hero and which “matched the mood of the moment, especially among the young”. (Though Attenborough also claimed that, were he still alive, Gandhi would have voted for the SDP.)

The other reason Blackadder wasn’t seen as controversial was simply that it was a comedy. When the BBC broadcast Alan Bleasdale’s First World War drama The Monocled Mutineer in 1986, its treatment of an Army deserter was met with a barrage of complaints; it was “blatant Left-wing bias”, complained Tory MP Neil Hamilton. Blackadder Goes Forth — the series to which Gove was to take belated exception — attracted no such condemnation in 1989, despite its depiction of the conflict as a futile, idiotic exercise in slaughter. Comedies weren’t taken seriously.

But even as the Right was winning the economic battles in the mid-Eighties, some were beginning to worry that it was losing on the cultural front. John O’Sullivan, later an advisor and speechwriter for Thatcher, wrote of how popular culture had been “invaded” by moral equivalence, undermining the West’s authority in the Cold War. It still wasn’t comedy that concerned him — more the replacement of John Buchan by John Le Carré as the country’s favourite thriller writer — but he was sure that there was a concern here: “This invasion may be more significant than at first appears. Popular culture, after all, is one important way in which national myths and loyalties are transmitted.”

And those myths were important in shaping national identity. The counter-balance was to be found in education, in the teaching of history, where the focus should be on social cohesion and unity. And if the “national myths” that were taught turned out to be not exactly the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, then that could be dealt with later on. “We must learn loyalty before we learn scepticism,” O’Sullivan wrote.

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This chimed with the views of Thatcher’s education secretary and mentor, Keith Joseph, who called for schools to foster “through the teaching of history, a sense of pride in one’s country and its achievements”. This was not happening because, as the Daily Mail explained in a 1990 editorial, for 20 years, “Left-wing educationalists have been given a free rein to denigrate this country’s past, to scorn its achievements, to make children almost ashamed to be British”. It was a particularly British phenomenon, argued John Rae, ex-headmaster of Westminster School: every American or French child learned about their respective revolution, but the same was not true in Britain of the Glorious Revolution. There was too much Peace Studies, not enough Civil War. Joseph’s successor as education secretary, Kenneth Baker, was shocked to discover that more children could tell the difference between a brontosaurus and a tyrannosaurus than could distinguish Charles I and Oliver Cromwell.

It was Baker who supplied the supposed solution: the national curriculum, a centrally approved agenda that would specify what was to be taught in primary and secondary schools. At its core, said Baker, should be “the history of Britain, the record of its past and, in particular, its political, constitutional and cultural heritage”. Or, in the words of a delegate to the National Union of Teachers conference, “the purpose of the national curriculum is to sell the ideas of present-day capitalist society, market values, profit, the beauty and joys of the British Empire”. As John McGregor, the next Tory education secretary, pointed out wearily: “History is by far the most political subject.”

The national curriculum was introduced in 1989 and was intended to be a decisive moment in reversing the advances made by the Left. You may have noticed, however, that it didn’t prove to be the last word in the debate. A 2021 Daily Mail editorial was still using exactly the same language when denouncing “those who love to denigrate this country’s history”. On the other hand, Sathnam Sanghera told a literary festival this week: “No country is as far behind in talking honestly about Empire than Britain.”

Much of the dispute comes down to the issue of what history is for. Sometime historian and erstwhile Labour MP Tristram Hunt once complained that “history on television is in danger of telling comforting stories about ourselves to ourselves, rather than confronting the past”. He was probably right — but there remained the question of whether that’s such a bad thing. Maybe people prefer comfort to confrontation. There’s a huge public appetite for television drama covering a wide spectrum of British history, from Wolf Hall and The Tudors, through Victoria and Downton Abbey, to The Crown and Call the Midwife. It’s possible to enjoy, to be engaged and stimulated, even to learn without having to confront.

In any event, confronting the past doesn’t necessarily bring any clarity. When an opinion poll in January 2016 asked how people saw the British Empire, 44% said it was something to be proud of, 21% said something to be ashamed of. When the same question was asked in August 2020 — at the height of the Black Lives Matter protests — both figures had fallen significantly, with the largest group now the 40% (nearly doubled since 2016) who couldn’t say whether they were proud or ashamed.

Maybe there’s a parallel between O’Sullivan’s “we must learn loyalty before we learn scepticism” and how most of us understand, say, physics. I’m aware, in an abstract, ill-informed sort of way, that Newtonian mechanics don’t apply at a sub-atomic level or when approaching the speed of light, but it doesn’t really matter to me; I find Newton perfectly sufficient in my life. I “know” — because I’ve been told — that the atoms making up the table at which I’m sat are mostly empty space, but I can still work on the assumption that it’s a solid surface.

I don’t feel the need to confront my simplistic understanding of gravity; rather, the predictability of matter is comforting in its certainty, even if it’s not the whole picture. Likewise, national myths. There’s a point to them, a usefulness in a common identity. Social cohesion is manifestly a good thing, and so too is patriotism.

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The stories that comprise that mythology change, of course (despite the slow-thinking likes of Otto English furiously tilting at windmills that were left derelict four decades ago). Michael Gove recognised that when he complained about the “myths which have grown up” around the First World War, and called for greater nuance in our understanding. He was right: the assumptions that underpinned Blackadder Goes Forth were crude and narrow. But that interpretation of the conflict — “a series of catastrophic mistakes perpetrated by an out-of-touch elite”, as Gove summarised it — is now part of the national mythology.

Even if it sometimes feels as though there’s been a 40-year stalemate in the culture war to end all war, myths evolve. And that process is influenced more by TV such as Blackadder than by the national curriculum. Which is one in the eye for Conservatives — or, as Edmund Blackadder called them, “fat Tory landowners who get made MPs when they reach a certain weight”.

The woke discourse today is confusing because it appeals to emotions traditional to the Left: empathy for the marginalised, indignation at the plight of the oppressed, determination that historical wrongs can be righted. Those emotions, however, are derailed by a range of theoretical assumptions — usually expressed as self-evident truths — that ultimately undermine them.

Take a sentence the New York Times printed shortly after Biden’s election: “Despite Vice President Kamala D. Harris’s Indian roots, the Biden administration may prove less forgiving over Modi’s Hindu nationalist agenda.” If you read that quickly, you may miss the theoretical assumption: political views are determined by ethnic backgrounds. If you know nothing about contemporary India, you may miss the fact that the fiercest critics of Modi’s violent nationalism are themselves Indian.

Now, the New York Times is neither unique nor particularly leftist, but it does set standards for progressive discourse in more than one country. What concerns me most here are the ways in which contemporary voices considered to be progressive have abandoned the philosophical ideas that are central to any liberal or Left-wing standpoint: a commitment to universalism over tribalism, a firm distinction between justice and power, and a belief in the possibility of progress. All these ideas are connected. The Right may be more dangerous, but today’s Left has deprived itself of ideas we need if we hope to resist the lurch to the Right.

This Rightwards lurch is international and organised. The solidarity between them suggests that nationalist beliefs are only marginally based on the idea that Hungarians/Norwegians/Jews/Germans/Anglo-Saxons/Hindus are the best of all possible tribes. What unites them is the principle of tribalism itself: you will only truly connect with those who belong to your tribe, and you need have no deep commitments to anyone else.

It’s a bitter piece of irony that today’s Right-wing tribalists today find it easier to make common cause than those on the Left whose commitments traditionally stemmed from universalism, whether they recognise it or not. Woke discourse is confusing because so many of its goals are indeed shared by progressives everywhere. The idea of intersectionality might have emphasised the ways in which all of us have more than one identity. Instead, it led to a focus on those parts of identities which are most marginalised, and multiplied them into a forest of trauma.

Wokeness emphasises the ways in which particular groups have been denied justice, and seeks to rectify and repair the damage. But in the focus on inequalities of power, the concept of justice is often left by the wayside. Wokeness demands that nations and peoples face up to their criminal histories. But in the process, it often concludes that all history is criminal.

The concept of universalism once defined the Left; international solidarity was its watchword. This was just what distinguished it from the Right, which recognised no deep connections, and few real obligations, to anyone outside its own circle. The Left demanded that the circle encompass the globe. This was what standing Left meant: to care about striking coal miners in Wales, or Republican volunteers in Spain, or freedom fighters in South Africa. What united was not blood but conviction — first and foremost the conviction that behind all the differences of time and space which separate us, human beings are deeply connected in a wealth of ways. To say that histories and geographies affect us is trivial. To say they determine us is false.

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The opposite of universalism is often called “identitarianism”, but the word is misleading, for it suggests that our identities can be reduced to, at most, two dimensions. In fact, all of us have many. As Kwame Anthony Appiah reminds us: “Until the middle of the 20th century, no one who was asked about a person’s identity would have mentioned race, sex, class, nationality, region or religion.”

The reduction of the multiple identities we all possess to race and gender isn’t about physical appearance. It’s a focus on those dimensions which experienced the most generalisable trauma. This embodies a major shift that began in the mid-20th century: the subject of history was no longer the hero but the victim. The impulse to shift our focus to the victims of history began as an act of justice. History was told by the victors, while the victims’ voices went unheard. To turn the tables and insist that the victims’ stories enter the narrative was just a part of righting old wrongs. The movement to recognise the victims of slaughter and slavery began with the best of intentions. It recognised that might and right often fail to coincide, that very bad things happen to all sorts of people, and that even when we cannot change that we are bound to record it. Yet something went wrong when we rewrote the place of the victim; the impulse that began in generosity turned downright perverse.

The limiting case of this trend is the story of Binjamin Wilkomirski, the Swiss man whose claims to have spent his childhood in a concentration camp turned out to be invented. Wilkomirski was hardly alone. In the two decades since, there has been a rash of contemporaries inventing worse histories than they experienced — a trend which runs counter to some of the heroes of postcolonial thinking, such as Frantz Fanon, whose Black Skin, White Masks proclaims: “I am not the slave of the Slavery that dehumanised my ancestors.”

Identity politics not only contract the multiple components of our identities to one: they essentialise that component over which we have the least control. I prefer the word “tribalism”, an idea which is as old as the Hebrew Bible. Tribalism is a description of the civil breakdown that occurs when people, of whatever kind, see the fundamental human difference as that between our kind and everyone else.

Universalism is now under fire on the Left because it is conflated with fake universalism: the attempt to impose certain cultures on others in the name of an abstract humanity that turns out to reflect just a dominant culture’s time, place, and interests. This happens daily in the name of corporate globalism. But let’s consider what a feat it was to make that original abstraction to humanity. Earlier assumptions were inherently particular, as earlier ideas of law were religious. The idea that one law should apply to Protestants and Catholics, Jews and Muslims, lords and peasants, simply in virtue of their common humanity is a relatively recent achievement which now shapes our assumptions so thoroughly we fail to recognise it as an achievement at all.

Let’s also consider the opposite: the Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt, who wrote that “whoever says the word ‘humanity’ wants to deceive you”. Instead we might say: “whoever says ‘humanity’ is making a normative claim.” To recognise someone as human is to acknowledge a dignity in them that should be honoured. It also implies that this recognition is an achievement: to see humanity in all the weird and beautiful ways it appears is a feat that demands you go beyond appearances.

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Which do you find more essential: the accidents we are born with, or the principles we consider and uphold? Traditionally, it was the Right who focused on the first, and the Left who emphasised the second. This tradition has been inverted. It’s not surprising, then, that theories held by the woke undermine their empathetic emotions and emancipatory intentions. Those theories not only have strong reactionary roots; some of their authors were outright Nazis. Ideas influenced by Carl Schmitt and Martin Heidegger and their epigones take up plenty of room on the progressive syllabus. The fact that both men not only served the Nazis but defended doing so long after the war is old news. Outrage, today, is reserved for racist passages of 18th-century philosophy.

In fact, many of the theoretical assumptions which support the most admirable impulses of the woke come from the intellectual movement they most despise. The best tenets of woke, such as the insistence on viewing the world from more than one geographical perspective, come straight from the Enlightenment. Contemporary rejections of this period usually go hand in hand with not much knowledge of it. But you can’t hope to make progress by sawing at the branch you don’t know you are sitting on.

It is now an article of faith that universalism, like other Enlightenment ideas, is a sham that was designed to disguise Eurocentric views which supported colonialism. These claims are not simply ungrounded: they turn the Enlightenment upside down. Enlightenment thinkers invented the critique of Eurocentrism and were the first to attack colonialism — on the basis of universalist ideas. When contemporary postcolonial theorists rightly insist that we learn to view the world from the perspective of non-Europeans, they are echoing a tradition that goes back to 18th-century thinkers, who risked their livelihoods, and sometimes their lives, to defend those ideas.

This is not merely a historical matter: we need Enlightenment ideas if we have any hope of moving forward against what are politely called the authoritarian tendencies of the present. But there is no time for politeness when many elected leaders around the world are openly undermining democracy.

My book Left is not Woke sketches the theoretical underpinnings of much woke discourse, and argues for a return to those Enlightenment ideas which are crucial for any progressive standpoint: the commitment to universalism over tribalism, the belief in a principled distinction between justice and power, and the conviction that progress, while never inevitable, is possible. Such ideas are anathema to thinkers such as Michel Foucault, the most-cited philosopher in postcolonial studies, or Carl Schmitt.

Both rejected the idea of universal humanity and the distinction between power and justice, along with a deep scepticism towards any idea of progress. What makes them interesting to progressive thinkers today is their commitment to unmasking liberal hypocrisies. Schmitt was particularly scorching about British imperialism, and American commitment to the Monroe Doctrine; both, he argued, used pieties about humanity and civilisation to disguise naked piracy.

But Land and Sea, his book expanding these views, was published when Germany was at war with Britain and America. It’s an old Nazi trope. Schmitt wasn’t wrong that universalist claims of justice meant to restrain simple assertions of power have been abused for centuries. He concluded that unvarnished power grabs like those of the Nazis were not only legal but legitimate. You may think that’s the best we can do. Or you may go to work to narrow the gap between ideals of justice and realities of power.

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As for Michel Foucault, his style was transgressive, but his vision was gloomier than any traditional conservative. You think we make progress towards practices that are kinder, more liberating, more respectful of human dignity — all goals of the Left? Look at the history of an institution or two. What seemed to be steps towards progress turn out to be more sinister forms of repression. All of them are ways in which the state extends its domination over our lives. Once you’ve seen how every step forward becomes a more subtle and powerful step towards total subjection, you’re likely to conclude that progress is illusory.

Woke activists fail to see that both these theories subvert their own goals. Without universalism there is no argument against racism, merely a bunch of tribes jockeying for power. Any by the fall of 2020 few voices defending Black Lives Matter, of whom I was initially one, were universalist. If that’s what political history comes to, there is no way to maintain a robust idea of justice, let alone coherently strive for progress.

Enlightenment thinkers, meanwhile, proclaimed that progress is (just barely) possible; their passionate engagement with the evils of their day precludes any belief that progress is assured. Still, they never stopped working towards it. As Kant argued, we cannot act morally without hope. To be clear: hope is not optimism. Hope makes no forecasts at all. Optimism is a refusal to face facts. Hope aims to change them. When the world is really in peril, optimism is obscene. Yet one thing can be predicted with absolute certainty: if we succumb to the seduction of pessimism, the world as we know it is lost.

You need not study philosophical debates about the relations between theory and practice to know at least this: what you think is possible determines the framework in which you act. If you think it’s impossible to distinguish truth from narrative, you won’t bother to try. If you think it’s impossible to act on anything other than self-interest, whether genetic, individual or tribal, you will have no qualms about doing the same.

It is often recalled that the Nazis came to power through democratic elections, but they never won a majority until they had already grasped power. Had the Left-wing parties been willing to form a united front, as thinkers from Einstein to Trotsky urged, the world could have been spared its worst war. The differences dividing the parties were real; blood had even been spilled. But though the Stalinist Communist Party couldn’t see it, those differences paled next to the difference between universal Leftist movements and the tribal visions of fascism.

We cannot afford a similar mistake.

I thought of these children when a friend from Massachusetts complained to me about the Black Lives Matter flag flying outside her son’s school. These flags have become a common sight outside American classrooms since the summer of 2020, and my friend isn’t the only one who’s concerned. The Diocese of Worcester recently ordered a local school to stop identifying itself as Catholic over its refusal to remove BLM and Pride flags, and similar controversies have erupted in Utah and Tennessee.

My friend’s complaint was that BLM is corrupt, which it almost certainly is. Reporting from earlier this year showed that the group’s founder had been spending BLM funds on lavish real estate purchases and payouts to family members. Only last week, Shalomyah Bowers, the leader of the BLM Global Network Foundation, was accused of stealing more than $10 million for personal use.

But complaints over the organisation’s corruption miss the point. Even if BLM were a paragon of transparency, its flag should never have been flown outside an American school — for the simple reason that its core principles are antithetical to a sound education. In other words, it is not a flawed organisation with noble ideals; it is a flawed organisation whose ideals are, at best, misguided and, at worst, actively destructive, with the most disastrous results for black children.

Take BLM’s views on the family. In the guiding principles of its school programme, BLM states that it is “committed to disrupting the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement”. That may seem like an innocuous principle, one that is unremarkable in progressive circles. But in the real world, it is hard to think of a worse idea to teach black kids. As the academics W. Bradford Wilcox and Hal Boyd have noted, the percentage of children in two-parent families in a given community is the “strongest and most robust predictor of economic mobility”. This holds for children of all races, but particularly for minorities. And yet BLM’s manifesto calls for the creation of “black villages” that “collectively care for one another” — even though black boys do much better when their fathers are around.

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Even more dangerous to children are BLM’s ideas about a “national defunding of the police”. What does defunding the police mean in practice? The short answer is: more black death. After the murder of George Floyd in 2020, various cities experimented with defunding and otherwise handicapping their police forces, only to find their streets filled with blood. In Oakland, the city planned to slash its police budget in half, until murders nearly doubled from 2019 to 2021 — an extreme version of a pattern that has played out across the United States. Indeed, homicides and shootings spiked across the country in the aftermath of the Floyd riots, driven in part by police demoralisation and in part by “decarceration” policies such as bail reform advocated for by BLM.

Focusing solely on curbing the police also takes much-needed attention away from the suffering inflicted on black children and their families in predominantly black areas where violent crime is rife. Why do we hear so much from BLM and so little from, for example, the organisation Voices of Black Mothers United (VBMU)? VBMU’s website states: “While a black death at the hands of police is the subject of national outrage, the numerous black deaths that occur every day in our communities are ignored. The victims are often children, and their mothers are seldom given a platform to voice their opinions.” And as its Director, Sylvia Bennett-Stone, who lost her own daughter to gun violence in 2004, has said: “It would be devastating to any community to defund or weaken the police force.”

If police presence in black communities is necessary to stop such horrific violence, then why do BLM want to reduce it? The undeniable fact is that black lives matter and police save black lives. And black people seem to agree: while distrust for the police in the black community is high, many black people are staunchly against defunding and are deeply concerned about crime on their streets. In Floyd’s home city of Minneapolis, three-quarters of black residents believe the city shouldn’t reduce its police force.

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Add to this the psychological effect of BLM’s catastrophism and it beggars belief that schools think it suitable to fly its flag above their buildings. When young black Americans are told that their country is irredeemably racist, with bigotry baked into its very DNA, then what hope can they possibly have? Never mind the great strides of progress made by black Americans over the past two centuries or so; all of that is a lie, and we are doomed to be subjugated forever — unless you embrace their radical ideology.

Will this really help black children? Or will it teach them nihilism and despondency, and thus become a self-fulfilling prophecy where black people don’t succeed because there’s no point in even trying?

The BLM movement, then, does not represent justice for black Americans; it will not lead to a future of racial harmony. It is the enemy of black prosperity and education. America’s teachers shouldn’t be flying its symbol — they should be using it to illustrate the dangers of divisive racialism. The BLM flag is a red flag: it should be a warning, not an inspiration.

Now, as the House fell silent, he reported that he had recently visited a “big theatre” in Regent Street, where he had seen a silent film called What Price Glory? It had been billed as a comedy, but Lieutenant-Colonel Applin was not laughing. Set in the trenches, the film had dared to joke about the lives of men at war. Worse, it had shown men flirting with French girls! Surely, he told his fellow MPs, his voice trembling with rage, this was “not the kind of thing we British people want to see”.

But then he contradicted himself. Shockingly, such films were, it seemed, the kind of thing British people wanted to see. He reached into his pocket and produced — yes! — an editorial from the Daily Express. Grimly he began to read: “The plain truth about the film situation is that the bulk of our picture-goers are Americanised to an extent that makes them regard a British film as a foreign film… They go to see American stars; they have been brought up on American publicity. They talk America, think America, and dream America. We have several million people, mostly women, who, to all intent and purpose, are temporary American citizens…”

I’ve been thinking about Lieutenant-Colonel Applin ever since the US Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade, apparently filling millions of Britons with existential horror. I thought of him when I saw the former tax accountant turned Corbyn economic adviser Richard Murphy tweeting: “Where the Republicans go the Tories follow. We take the right to abortion, contraception, gay rights and same-sex marriage for granted now. We shouldn’t. Very soon Tory think tanks will have their sights on all of them. Fascism is on the march.”

“Mad,” I thought. I saw that more than 3,000 people had retweeted this ridiculous prophecy, while another 10,000 had “liked” it, and I shook my head in despair. And then I saw another effusion, this time from the Labour MP Stella Creasy: “To every one of our American sisters, we are with you. We will not rest until your rights are restored… You think what you see in America couldn’t happen here? Then you don’t understand who is organising in UK politics.”

Again I thought of poor old Lieutenant-Colonel Applin. And then, as if to complete the set, I saw that the Prime Minister had weighed in, too. “In a sense, it’s for the United States, it’s not for the UK,” Boris Johnson told CNN. Alas, he just couldn’t help himself: “But the Roe v. Wade judgement, when it came out, was important psychologically for people around the world…”

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This isn’t another essay about Roe v. Wade. Like every single other British observer, I have nothing worthwhile to say about it. Why would I? I’m not American. And that’s what this column is about — not being American.

What is it, I wonder, that blinds so many ostensibly intelligent people to the fact that the United States and Great Britain are two different countries? “Where the Republicans go the Tories follow,” says Richard Murphy. But that just isn’t true. There are some similarities, of course; but if you’re hoping to win selection for a safe Tory seat by talking about ending abortion, outlawing socialised medicine and encouraging the high-street sales of automatic weapons, then I’ve got a nice padded cell for you. “We will not rest until your rights are restored,” Stella Creasy tells her American sisters. But what does that mean? How much influence does the Labour MP for Walthamstow have over the American judiciary? Can you truly measure something so small?

“You think what you see in America couldn’t happen here?” asks Ms Creasy. Well, I suppose it’s just possible that in the next few years we could completely change our political system, radically reshape the relationship between the executive, the legislature and the judiciary, adopt a version of the US Constitution, develop a deeply religious political culture and set up a fervent anti-abortion movement — all of which would be the cue for our own Supreme Court to hand down a judgement allowing individual counties (Dorset? Wiltshire?) to outlaw abortion. Yes, I suppose it’s possible. It’s certainly no more implausible than a major British political party campaigning to throw out the 1967 Abortion Act — another thing that is clearly never going to happen.

Britain is not America. According to the most recent YouGov survey, just two in a hundred people — two! — think abortion should be illegal. What’s more, only 6% of people think access to abortions is too easy, compared with 8% who think it’s too hard, 47% who think it’s about right, and 36% who don’t know or don’t care. To repeat, Britain is not America.

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By Kat Rosenfield

We’ve been here before, of course. When a Minneapolis policeman killed George Floyd in May 2020, thousands of people defied Covid regulations to demonstrate in British cities, while The Guardian’s Afua Hirsch insisted that “the racism that killed George Floyd was built in Britain”. But in their racial politics and attitudes, as Tomiwa Owolade wrote last month, the two countries are completely different. The plain fact is that if you’re black and you’re British, your chances of being shot by the police are vanishingly small.

To point this out in progressive circles, though, is to identify yourself as the enemy. America’s struggles are Britain’s struggles, and only a fascist would deny it. “The prejudice that black people in America face is the same prejudice we face here. When one is hurt, we’re all hurt, because it could have been us,” a demonstrator told the BBC in the summer of 2020. You’d never guess that the two countries’ histories have been utterly different — or that most of our police are unarmed, so that actually it probably couldn’t have been us. Nor would you guess that there are, in fact, more than two countries on earth.

Do you remember the story of Victoria Salazar, the Salvadorean woman who was killed when a Mexican policewoman pinned her to the ground and broke her neck in the resort of Tulum? No, you probably don’t, because people didn’t march about it in the centre of Oxford. What about the 28 people killed during a Rio police raid on the Jacarezinho favela in 2021, or the 21 killed in another raid on the Vila Cruzeiro favela a few weeks ago? I don’t expect you remember them either. Why would you? “When one is hurt, we’re all hurt.” Yes, but only if they’re American.

Is it pointless to stand against the tide of knee-jerk, unthinking, virtue-signalling Americanisation? If Lieutenant-Colonel Reginald Applin could join us now from beyond the grave, he might admit that it is. Even so, I think rolling news, the internet and social media have made things immeasurably worse, blurring the lines between America and the world, convincing millions of otherwise sane people that what happens in Tuscaloosa matters more than what happens in Towcester.

Here’s just one small example. When I heard Boris Johnson say that “the Roe v. Wade judgment, when it came out, was important psychologically for people around the world”, I decided to check. It’s hard to be sure, of course, but I’m pretty confident it wasn’t. Abortion had been legal in Britain since 1967, so why would anybody care about the US Supreme Court? The Times briefly reported the story on its front page, but that was it. The Guardian ran a slightly longer report, but there were no editorials, no exultant columns, no readers’ letters. Some other papers had a tiny news item, buried on an inside page. Most didn’t mention it at all. In Ted Heath’s Britain, it just wasn’t a story. Tell that to a BBC website editor in 2022, and they’d probably shake their heads in horror.

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Does all this matter? I think it does. Obviously we can’t live in a national bubble: our public discourse has always been influenced by trends and events overseas, from Lutheranism in the early 16th century to Jacobinism in the 1790s. But the intense and growing obsession with America isn’t just a curious Anglophone quirk. It’s a poison infecting our public life.

Almost everything about political life in the US today strikes me as deeply unhealthy. The general tone, perfectly reflected in that Richard Murphy tweet after the Roe v. Wade judgement, is relentlessly hysterical. The stakes are always sky-high; every setback is a shattering defeat. Death and despair stalk the land; the very existence of the Republic hangs by a thread, and the world of The Handmaid’s Tale may be only a few years away. And your political opponents are not merely misguided, they are positively wicked. Evil conspirators — militiamen, abortionists, gunowners, critical race theorists — are plotting subversion and civil war. How can you compromise with such people? How can there be a common ground?

Perhaps, as the historian Richard Hofstadter famously argued, it was ever thus. The American colonies were born as a kind of apocalyptic fantasy: a shining city on a hill, safe from the corrupt crypto-Papists of 17th-century England. The Republic, too, began with a conspiracy theory, casting the kindly, avuncular, quietly anti-slavery George III as a monstrous tyrant. And violence — whether rhetorical or actual — has been part of American political life from the very beginning. The violence of the Puritan firebrand and the violence of the frontier; the violence of the wars against Indians and Mexicans, the violence of slavery and the violence of the Civil War. Violence was America’s past; perhaps violence is America’s future.

But Britain isn’t America. Why would we want to import their hysterical tone? We have plenty of issues of our own, of course; but they’re ours, not theirs. Our race relations aren’t perfect, but they’re among the very best in Europe, not that you’d know it from much of the media. Boris Johnson really, really isn’t a fascist, and the worst thing you can say about Keir Starmer is that he’s incredibly boring. And yes, we do take “the right to abortion, contraception, gay rights and same-sex marriage” for granted. But why wouldn’t we? Who’s threatening them? Does anybody seriously think Boris Johnson, of all people, is going to abolish contraception?

Don’t get me wrong. It’s not that I don’t think the Roe v. Wade judgement matters. It does, but it matters for Americans. Sometimes things just aren’t about us. “You think what you see in America couldn’t happen here?” Yes, I do, actually. Let’s see who’s right.

For all that, many of us have developed the habit of reading multiple accounts of any given news item, because so often reports are filtered through an ideological lens. There was, for instance, Omar Jimenez’s coverage of protests in Kenosha for CNN, described as “mostly peaceful” in the chyron running under the report in spite of the clearly visible backdrop of burning cars and buildings. Similarly, the BBC was roundly mocked for its description of “largely peaceful” protests in London, in which 27 police officers were injured.

Instinctively, it feels as though these reporters must be peddling these untruths knowingly, perhaps out of a misguided sense of paternalistic responsibility to prevent further discord. But even more troubling is the possibility that they have bought into their own fictions. If one accepts the postmodernist belief that our experiences are solely constructed through the language with which they are expressed, then to describe an event as “largely peaceful” makes it so.

Such blunders are only the more egregious examples of the kind of white lies and misrepresentations we find on an almost daily basis in the national press. Occasionally there is a backlash, such as when the BBC modified the quotation of a rape victim so that her attacker was not misgendered. But on the whole this routine twisting of the truth goes unnoticed. We have grown accustomed to reporters telling us what to think about a story, rather than simply relaying the key facts and leaving us to judge for ourselves.

Even reputable academic journals are willing to jettison inconvenient truths if they better suit their desired reality. When the New England Journal of Medicine argued that “sex designations on birth certificates offer no clinical utility”, few of us were surprised. The Journal of the Royal Society of Chemistry has even produced new guidelines to “minimise the risk of publishing inappropriate or otherwise offensive content”. If the truth hurts, it ought to be avoided.

When journalists, academics and politicians advance a worldview in direct opposition to observable reality, they risk creating what Jürgen Habermas once described as a “legitimation crisis”, by which trust in figures of authority is irreparably depleted. This seems particularly germane given reports this week that the head of the World Health Organisation privately believes that Covid-19 leaked from a laboratory in Wuhan. It wasn’t that long ago that the scientific consensus dismissed this as little more than a racist conspiracy theory.

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Throughout the pandemic we saw experts silenced or marginalised if they offered views that deviated from the accepted narrative. YouTube videos that posited the lab-leak theory were removed. An UnHerd interview featuring Professor Karol Sikora was taken offline after he suggested that the virus was likely to “burn out” and that levels of public immunity had been underestimated. Wasn’t this former advisor to the WHO entitled to an opinion?

Meanwhile, experts who peddle “accepted” narratives remain free to indulge in blatant untruths that we are expected to take on trust. In June 2020, more than 1,200 medical practitioners signed a letter arguing that existing restrictions put in place to curb the spread of coronavirus ought not to apply to Black Lives Matter demonstrations. The epidemiologist Jennifer Nuzzo wrote: “We should always evaluate the risks and benefits of efforts to control the virus. In this moment the public health risks of not protesting to demand an end to systemic racism greatly exceed the harms of the virus.” Are we to believe that the virus would take some time off so long as the protesters’ cause was just?

That figures of authority are so often caught in lies has brought about an erosion of confidence in our institutions. I barely scraped a GCSE in Biology, but when esteemed scientific journals are publishing authors who maintain that “sex is a spectrum”, it gives the false impression that my understanding of the subject is superior to theirs.  Experts appear to have forgotten that the legitimacy of their claims is grounded in evidence and research, not by waving around a doctoral certificate.

Perhaps this is why we are now so familiar with the spectacle of academics humiliating themselves on social media. As Helen Pluckrose once pointed out to me: “It’s a worry when you can’t tell whether the person yelling at you is a 12-year-old whose parents need to take their Twitter account away, or a Professor of Sociology.” While we may laugh at the truculent behaviour of authority figures degrading themselves — this, after all, is the basis of traditional farce — there is a sinister aspect to all of this. When experts are so patently captured by an ideology, they surrender their capacity to think critically. And that’s not good news for any of us.

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In some cases, this deviation from the truth is deliberate and tactical. Consider, for instance, the phenomenon that Peter Boghossian describes as “idea laundering”. The process begins with a moral impulse among certain ideologically driven academics. Journals are founded, papers are published, classes are taught, and before long what was once the vaguest intuition is supported by a body of academic literature. Boghossian offers the example of “Fat Studies”, an area of study which seeks to lend credence to the view that: “the clinical concept of obesity (a medical term) is merely a story we tell ourselves about fat (a descriptive term); it’s not true or false – in this particular case, it’s a story that exists within a social power dynamic that unjustly ascribes authority to medical knowledge.”

What begins as a fanciful theory emerges as “knowledge” through this laundering process.  It explains why a notion as nebulous as “whiteness” is now so widely and uncritically accepted. Ideas that have little basis in reality emerge from universities as de facto truths, and those brave enough to challenge them are quickly and mercilessly subdued. And while most of us are happy to conform for the sake of an easy life, our trust in those institutions supposedly dedicated to the production of knowledge quickly deteriorates.

Scepticism about expertise is important: no human being is infallible or free from bias, however well-qualified. Yet at the same time, we rely on figures in authority with specialist insight for the practical business of living. When journalists begin to conflate truth and fiction, or when academics substitute wishful thinking for empirical knowledge, we are left unmoored from reality. For the sake of our collective sanity, we need to restate the primacy of the truth.

As DEFUND BPD graffiti took over a prominent billboard on North Avenue, Scott was one of the few candidates who seemed in sync with the activist moment. He questioned the authorities’ over-reliance on police presence as they attempted to curb the violence plaguing the city. What Baltimore needed, he argued, was an expanded social safety net. But the darling of the activist Left would soon find himself at odds with his earliest supporters, as the reality of running a city with a spiking homicide rate became clear.

These tensions between activists and politicians were happening all across the country. Activists had been campaigning to end police violence for years when the death of George Floyd caught the world’s attention: finally, and abruptly, the words “defund the police” and “prison abolition” were appearing on the front page of the New York Times. Local politicians started running on issues such as bail reform. A handful of cities, from Philadelphia to Chicago to Seattle, all announced they were reallocating funds from bloated police budgets to other city services. Approximately $870 million was slashed from police departments nationwide. The idea was that with fewer police there would be more money to spend on the other services people want, which are typically underfunded. This in turn would boost the sense of community and stability — which should create a higher quality of life and theoretically bring down crime rates.

And then the homicide rate started to climb in cities across America. Many other crime statistics remained flat, but opponents to police reforms now had a frame for the backlash. Enthusiasm for slashing police budgets has faded — as has the idea that other services, such as housing, health, and drug rehabilitation programs, should be prioritised.

The debate is now absurdly binary: either you care about police violence, or you care about the homicide rate. Both these issues disproportionately affect the same demographics: economically vulnerable people living in under-serviced neighbourhoods are more likely to experience violence at the hands of both police and non-police. But anyone hoping to be an accepted member of either the Left or the Right must exaggerate one issue and erase the other.

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Baltimore, a city plagued by poverty and violence, is a microcosm of what the defund debate has become. Brandon Scott’s main rival in the hotly contested 2020 mayoral race was former mayor Sheila Dixon. She started in the lead, despite the fact that she’d had to resign after being accused of stealing and using gift cards that had been donated to the city for distribution to needy families. One reason for her popularity, despite her alleged crimes, was her previous ability to bring the homicide rate to its lowest level in decades. Her success was mostly credited to “focused deterrence”, a strategy that includes police presence in high-risk communities and police intervention in the lives of high-risk individuals. Despite being effective and popular, this approach was mostly abandoned in the wake of Freddie Gray’s death, after anti-police sentiment had swept the city (the six officers involved were charged and their trials resulted in a mix of a mistrial, acquittals, and dropped charges; all officers returned to duty).

Still, it was Scott, who was city council president, who won out in the end. For years, he has approached gun violence as a public health crisis — one that requires sustained engagement from services beyond law enforcement. He has discussed the reallocation of resources to give other forms of intervention priority; activists interpreted this as support for the idea of defunding the police. And yet when he released his first city budget for approval, and the police budget remained around the same level as his predecessor’s, he was roundly condemned by critics on social media.

In response, Scott gave an interview in the Baltimore Sun, in which he criticised the “defund the police” slogan and its activists for focusing on the means rather than the ends. “We have to do a better job of explaining to folks what we’re talking about.” The goal should be a city in which every citizen is given the opportunity to flourish, and defunding the police doesn’t in itself achieve this. Moving numbers around on a budget is not policy; it is a symbolic gesture. And it’s a gesture that will only satisfy a small number of activists; a large percentage of residents would prefer the same or more police presence in their neighbourhoods. The majority support police reform over abolition.

Scott still believes in reallocating resources and ending the dependence the city has on police, but, he said in an interview with The Trace, “I need time.” He continued, “I have been consistent that reimagining public safety and the budget would not be overnight work.” But time is not something many activists have been willing to grant him. He has been in office for a year and a half, and has already become a target for those on the far-Left, who often point to this one budgetary marker as a sign of his failings rather than fairly assessing his policies. Scott’s first municipal budget increased funding for police to cover rising healthcare and pension costs. During the Taxpayers’ Night — an open forum for citizens to give feedback about how the city’s funds are being spent — multiple activists waited in line to express their anger and frustration with him. Many said they regretted voting for the young mayor.

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When I moved from Baltimore to Philadelphia last year, I found a similar dynamic, with complicated realities obscured by the binaries, opportunism and bitter rivalries of local politics. Since the summer when 66,000 people marched in support of Black Lives Matter here, Philadelphia has been moving up the list of metropolises with the highest homicide rates in America. In 2019, it was fourteenth; now, it is twelfth. Last year, there were more murders here than in New York and Los Angeles.

Meanwhile, police shootings here have not made national headlines. Earlier this month police officer Edsual Mendoza was charged with murder. He shot 12-year-old Thomas Siderio in March. Between 2013 and 2021, 39 people, 26 of them black, were killed by the police.

Still, only a very small percentage of Philly’s population actually wants a decrease of police presence — including in neighbourhoods where police have killed or brutalised residents. They want services, such as affordable housing and free health clinics and public transportation and better schools, but they also say public safety is a top priority, and see police presence as a part of solving that problem.

Only 44% of Philadelphia residents feel “safe” in their neighbourhoods at night, and the largest percentage of residents who do are white. There is some truth to the criticism that the liberals who support defunding the police often don’t live in the neighbourhoods most afflicted by gun violence and homicides. And it doesn’t help that the most prominent professional activists in this arena, whether part of Black Lives Matter or the Women’s March, make headlines for lucrative book deals and expensive real estate purchases. The people on social media who most frequently and loudly talk about defunding the police often have extensive media bylines in their bios.

The city’s District Attorney, Larry Krasner, is adjacent to this demographic: a white civil rights attorney whose  education from University of Chicago and Stanford has been brought up in a few of the conversations against him I’ve overheard. Krasner was elected in 2017, following widespread protests in Philadelphia against police violence — and the arrest of the previous DA Seth Williams on federal corruption charges. Krasner ran on a platform of ambitious reform, and he has delivered: his office has declined to prosecute low level prostitution or marijuana possession, and it is also implementing the controversial bail reform measures. Requiring cash for bail has for a long time left the poorest people in jail for weeks, months, and, in at least one high profile case, years, awaiting trial for nonviolent crimes. Krasner and other reformist DAs like him have pledged to put an end to this possibility, letting low-level offenders go home to wait for trial.

Krasner’s platform and unapologetic manner have brought him national attention, including an eight-part documentary series on PBS that gives an inside look at the work in his office and the controversies that have sprung from his tactics. Bail reform is an easy target for the Right: if someone with an extensive record commits a heinous act, a conservative will inevitably go on television to demand to know why that person was “on the streets” in the first place and not in prison. Locally, Krasner has been blamed for the increasing homicide rate, by both politicians and members of the police.

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But like Scott in Baltimore, the most serious criticism that Krasner faces comes from his own side, the Left. In the mind of his most prominent critic, Michael Nutter, Krasner is a white saviour, thinking he knows best how to order the world while underserving the black people in neighbourhoods hardest hit by violence. The former mayor, who is black, said in an interview with the Washington Post: “It all goes back to supremacy, paternalism. ‘I’m woke. I’m paying attention. I spend a lot of time with Black people. Some of my best friends…’ All that bullshit.”

Nutter has referred in speeches to young black men as an “endangered species”, threatened by imprisonment, poverty, and violent death. He has long been an advocate for public safety, both before and after his eight years as mayor, and his term saw a significant decline in the Philadelphia homicide rate. Although there is no consensus about why or how that drop happened, but Nutter’s work, like Sheila Dixon’s in Baltimore, has often included a close relationship with the police, including controversial measures such as stop and frisk. As soon as Nutter left office, the white progressive Jim Kenney was elected as mayor and Krasner was elected DA, and those tactics were discontinued. And the homicide rate once again started to rise.

The most recent city budget presented by mayor Kenney significantly increased the funding for “anti-violence” programs, including neighbourhood organisations, after-school and summer programs, and workforce development programs — the same types of programs Defund the Police advocates have argued should take priority over policing. Philadelphia has also been slowly implementing other police-related reforms, such as a citizen oversight committee and the deployment of mental health professionals alongside police for certain emergency calls. Krasner enjoys widespread support from black voters, and his reforms have been largely popular in the city, despite the fact that a small handful of crimes have involved people who had been released on charges awaiting trial. But the effects of his work are not yet visible. The homicide rate for 2022 is already above what had been recorded by the same time last year.

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The reality is that when crime rates go down, it’s hard to pinpoint a specific reason. Everything from neighbourhood development to the removal of lead paint from homes to robust police forces were credited with Philadelphia’s drop in violent crime in the Eighties. Similarly, when the homicide rate increased during the pandemic, many contradictory reasons were given. Gun sales had gone up — but was this cause, effect, or unrelated? Unemployment had gone up, but when it declined again it had no effect on the rate of violent crime. Were the police effectively on “strike”, refusing to engage in the prevention or intervention of dangerous situations because they were concerned about being blamed for bad results? Something similar had happened in Baltimore after the uprising that followed Freddie Gray’s death. But maybe other problems contributed too, such as rising rents or the difficulty of accessing health services during the pandemic.

The lack of clarity has allowed anyone, with any agenda, to speculate publicly about why homicide rates are climbing. For the head of the police union, it’s because the police force is underfunded and under-appreciated by the community. For conservatives, it’s because of broken families and lack of personal responsibility or because authorities are soft on criminals. For liberals, it’s the lack of gun control laws or poverty.

The truth lies somewhere in the middle, just as effective policy lies somewhere between anti-police activism and an unquestioningly pro-police stance. Crime rates aren’t predictable or easy to change, as local leaders across America are discovering. To pretend otherwise is to fail its victims.

Many of the protests in the summer after the death of George Floyd looked like festivals; people swayed as they sang. And at a time when actual festivals were banned, the events possessed an especially transgressive allure. We were breaking out of a recently organised old world of restrictions into a new one where the cause of racial justice transcended the obligations of social distancing.

The rules, the protestors affirmed, should not apply to them. In the first month after the murder, over 14,000 American protestors were arrested. In Washington DC, cars were burned down and bathroom stalls were spray painted with the “Amerikkka”. A fire was lit in the nursery of the parish house of a church called St John’s Episcopal Church, which is known as the “church of the presidents”, because every American president has attended it at least once since it was built in 1816.

But the nature of the protests constituted a break at a deeper level too, a new paradigm shift in racial thinking, both in America and across the rest of the world. There were protests in over 60 countries and all continents — including Antarctica. Now, racial justice is a matter of reflexive urgency; there’s no time to consider national or cultural context. Many expressions of anti-racism look like religious revivalism, any analysis of the complex realities of black people obscured by penance and sanctimony.

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The basic outline of what happened on the evening of May 25, 2020 was reported in every major newspaper on the planet. A middle-aged black man called George Floyd was choked to death in Minnesota by a police officer named Derek Chauvin, because Floyd was suspected of using fake money to buy cigarettes. His Name Is George Floyd, a new book by Washington Post journalists Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa, substantiates this outline with a glut of information. It is a detailed investigation into the life of Floyd, the nature and context of his murder, and the impact of his death on wider American society.

The authors conducted over 400 interviews for the book. They interviewed Floyd’s siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces, lovers and friends. We get a solid picture of the man. We also learn a lot about Floyd’s ancestors — who they were, what they did, and where they fit within the narrative of America’s vexed racial history.

But there is very little in the book on the global impact of Floyd’s death. The authors do not have a lot of interest in the wider world, nor do they seem to have a great understanding of it. In one historical passage, for instance, they write that Scotland was a country that was dominated by “the British”. Colonies always know more about the metropole than the metropole knows about the colonies; faced with such American ignorance, it’s easy to conclude that the former colony has become the coloniser.

Culture changed so rapidly in America in the wake of that summer of protests, and we in Britain soon followed suit. Many American publications, for instance, started to capitalise the b in black —  including the New York Times, Washington Post and the Associated Press. Many British publications swiftly did the same: the b in black is now capitalised in the London Review of Books, for example, and the Times Literary Supplement. It’s become de rigueur so rapidly in British publishing that, when I submitted a proposal for my book, about the way American race discourse influences Britain, in 2021, I had to explain why I didn’t capitalise the word black.

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Lori Tharps makes the case for capitalising black: “Black with a capital ‘B’”, she writes, “refers to a group of people whose ancestors were born in Africa, were brought to the United States against their will, spilled their blood, sweat and tears to build this nation into a world power and along the way managed to create glorious works of art, passionate music, scientific discoveries, a marvelous cuisine, and untold literary masterpieces. When a copyeditor deletes the capital “B”, they are in effect deleting the history and contributions of my people.” Unlike Tharps, though, I am not American.

My ancestors were not brought against their will to the country where I’m currently living. In fact, most black British people are now black Africans, which means recent immigrants, or the children of immigrants, from independent African nations. The particular historical relationship between the transatlantic slave trade and black Americans does not neatly apply to the contemporary black British population. Pretending that it does would be to deny the history of my people, to borrow the argot of Tharps. Black people in Britain are essentially immigrant communities — the average black American, by contrast, can trace his ancestry further back than the average white American.

But in the aftermath of Floyd’s death, the catch-all framework of “Black Lives Matter” was imported to every corner of the planet, even though race relations are not the same throughout the world. They are instead mediated by a country’s unique history and culture. Now as then, insufficient attention is paid to the different contexts of the black people who do not live in America; we are simply put in the mould of black Americans.

It was bizarre, watching the majority of liberal democracies use the example of America to make sense of race in their own countries. People on the streets of central London were screaming “hands up don’t shoot”. British university students were passionately denouncing discrimination against BIPOC people — black, indigenous people of colour — without recognising that speaking for the interests of indigenous people in Britain makes one sound more like Nick Griffin than 20-year-old Molly studying History at Bristol University.

Robin DiAngelo’s book White Fragility and Ibram X. Kendi’s How To Be an Anti-Racist monopolised the nonfiction bestseller’s charts in Europe for many months. And this trickled down to social media. Instagram listicles stipulated you needed to read those books if you wanted to understand the condition of black people. Not black American people (though these books are not even useful for that) but black people in toto.

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And, while the liberal democracies were committing penance, countries with distinctively worse human rights records swooped in like hungry vultures. The supreme leader of Iran, Ali Khamenei, said dark-skinned people face the prospect of being killed “within minutes” whenever they walk down the streets of America. The Russian Foreign Ministry condemned America’s human rights abuses.

Another patron saint of anti-racism, Layla Saad, was born and raised in Britain and now lives in Qatar. She has never lived in America in her life. Yet her book, Me and White Supremacy, is explicitly targeted at an American audience, and reached number five in the New York Times bestseller list in the summer of 2020. There is no mention in the book that she lives in a country that imports slave labour; there is a lot about the devastating toxicity of microaggressions. Although she doesn’t live in America, Saad lives on the internet (she has 650k followers on Instagram) and being on the anglophone internet is like inhabiting a terrain utterly dominated by America. The Atlantic writer Helen Lewis compared it to being in a room with a giant rhinoceros.

What is lost in all of this is the specific circumstance of Floyd’s death — aggressive policing, economic deprivation, the fraught relationship between black American communities and the police, drug dependency, and America’s war on drugs. And herein lies the value of His Name is George Floyd.

Samuels and Olorunnipa tell us that George Perry Floyd Jr — known simply as Perry to his family and friends — was born in October 1973 in Fayetteville, North Carolina, to George Floyd Sr and Cissy Floyd, two people who wanted to make it as singers. North Carolina was their native state, but Floyd Jr grew up in the Third Ward of Houston, Texas, a poor and largely black area. He attended schools that were racially segregated and underfunded. His high school, Jack Yates Senior High School, has a student population that is 90% black and 10% Hispanic. This kind of education and upbringing is inconceivable for a black British person.

As a kid and teenager, Floyd wanted to be a rap star, a pro football player, and a supreme court justice. His life turned out very differently. He was arrested more than 20 times in his life by the police, often for dealing drugs, and he spent almost a third of his adult life in jail. He suffered from high blood pressure, anxiety, depression and drug addiction.

He moved to Minneapolis from Texas in 2014. A year earlier, he had been released after serving four years in prison for aggravated robbery with a weapon, a charge he personally denied but nevertheless accepted as part of a plea bargain for a reduced sentence. In Minnesota, he wanted a reset in his life. He worked variously as a security guard at a nightclub and as a truck driver. But he lost those jobs during the 2020 Covid pandemic.

You cannot show genuine respect to a group of people if you do not acknowledge their context — their origins, their distinctive lives, the communities and cultures they inhabit, who they are rather than what they represent. Expressing solidarity to communities victimised by racism is a good thing. But the global conversation about race went past the expression of solidarity after the death of George Floyd. And this heightened pitch is reflected in Britain to the detriment of black people, as we lose sight of the fact that they are not all the same — which of course should be the very first insight of anti-racism.

On May 25, 2020, a black man was murdered in Minneapolis, Minnesota, by a white police officer. The incident was filmed by onlookers and posted on social media; suddenly, the whole world could see what American racism looked like. It was devoid of compassion. It was deadly. It cloaked itself in a white man’s uniform.

Two years later, almost to the day, there was a mass shooting at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York. Thirteen people were hit; ten were killed. Eleven of the victims were black; the suspected killer is white.

Racism almost certainly explains the attack in Buffalo. Payton S. Gendron, the suspect who broadcast a livestream during the attack, claimed he had been plotting an ambush since January. Police have since revealed that he is not from Buffalo and that he travelled for three and a half hours to the supermarket, which sits in the ZIP code with the highest proportion of blacks in upstate New York. Officials are investigating “a manifesto” he allegedly wrote, in which the author describes himself as a fascist, a white supremacist and an anti-Semite.

On the Saturday the shooting took place, I was in Dallas at a conference attended by a range of distinguished African Americans, ranging from Glenn Loury to the Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. The key question we addressed was the following: what is holding back black America? The answer, it quickly became clear, had little to do with the phantom of systemic racism.

We started by acknowledging the huge progress that blacks in America have made since desegregation in 1964. We have had a black president who won landslide elections and remains popular. We have two black Supreme Court justices. We have black billionaires, academics, media personalities, actors and comedians.

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None of which is to say that America is any sort of utopia for black Americans. We also acknowledged the racial disparity in education, housing, crime and broken families. We expressed horror that while blacks make up only 12% of the population, they account for 55% of homicide cases.

What explains this disproportionate representation of black Americans? Taken in isolation, the tragedies in Minneapolis and Buffalo appear to suggest that answer lies in the behaviour of racist police officers and white supremacists. Given the nature of the atrocities, perhaps this conclusion is inevitable. What happened in Buffalo, for instance, can only be described as horrific: the cold, calculating shooting; the loss of life; the heinous views of the suspected shooter. How can we view such an atrocity and not let it overwhelm our judgement? How can we not conclude that such evil merits nothing sort of societal change?

Yet if the past two years have taught us anything, it’s that monocausal explanations are almost always misguided and, as a consequence, almost always ending up harming the vulnerable. As the Black Lives Matter movement mobilised following the murder of George Floyd, America descended into anarchy, fuelled by riots and slogans about systemic racism. When activists demanded that police departments be defunded, local stations were not exactly closed down, but they were intimidated to the point that many stopped serving in black neighbourhoods. The consequences of this swiftly became evident: in the same year that BLM fever seized the country, at least 8,600 black lives were lost to homicide, an increase of more than 1,000 on the year before. Thrown into a frenzy by their overzealous conviction that white racism is the root cause of all evil, BLM turned a blind eye to the large number of black Americans who were being killed, or who found themselves forced to live in neighbourhoods terrorised by gangs.

There were no protests or demands for meaningful policies to make black neighbourhoods safer. Rather, the movement’s organisers busied themselves by throwing parties at their $6 million Los Angeles mansion and deciding how to spend the $90 million received in donations. Why save black lives when you can while away your time spending more than $37 million on grants, real estate, consultants, and other expenses?

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Still, at least that information is now available. Patrisse Cullors, a BLM co-founder, recently dismissed calls to make public BLM’s finances, describing the prospect of filling out an IRS Form 990 as “triggering” and “deeply unsafe”. Of course, it’s all too easy to dismiss her disingenuous victim fantasies as farce. But it is not just personal accountability that is missing here: ideological scrutiny is also effectively avoided, as critics are inevitably accused of being racist. Take, for instance, Roland Fryer, the celebrated African American economist at Harvard. He debunked the persistent narrative that the police kill more black than white Americans. For that, as well as his criticisms of education policy, he was effectively cancelled by his university. His research was deemed traitorous — and looking at the response to the Buffalo shooting from black activists and Leftist politicians, it is clear a narrative that trumpets the suffocating impact of racism still prevails.

But the facts are the facts. As Professor Fryer explained in Dallas at the weekend, there are racial differences in the use of non-lethal force by police officers, with blacks largely at a disadvantage, but not in officer-involved shootings. In his speech afterwards, Shelbey Steele, the author of White Guilt, summarised the implications of this reality: despite the fact that some racism does still persist, America remains the best country in the world to be black. We all applauded when he said that. It should not have been a sensational remark. And yet it was.

Everyone in that room understood, as the attack in Buffalo demonstrated, that certain individuals are motivated by a loathing for black people. But this shouldn’t define us, let alone the country we live in. For black Americans to progress, we need to cast off today’s dependency on white guilt for recognition and support. What is the way forward if you accept that blacks in America are free? It is to have the courage to live that freedom. It means holding ourselves accountable for our behaviour. It means learning to shape our destiny regardless of skin colour. And it means ignoring the divisive rhetoric propagated by those such as  Patrisse Cullors, Kamala Harris and Ibram X Kendi.

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In Texas the day after the Buffalo attack, a shootout between five Hispanic men at a crowded flea market left two dead and three wounded. Roughly two hours later in California, a 68-year-old Asian gunman walked into a Taiwanese church and opened fire, killing one person and wounding five others. This is what crime looks like in America. It is chaotic, disordered and irreducible: the skin colour of its victims and perpetrators is far from fixed.

Racism, then, is not the whole story. In fact, racism has never been the whole story. Yet faced with an election year and an uphill battle to retain the House and Senate this November, perhaps it is unsurprising that so many Democrats are keen to turn the Buffalo shooting into another George Floyd moment: an excuse to deflect difficult questions, and to turn politics into a binary realm of Good and Evil. Once again, we’re told, either you’re with us or you’re a racist — even if being on the side of Good means exploiting the misery of others.

This was especially true in elite liberal communities on America’s highly segregated coasts, including the part of Connecticut where I’ve lived for the past ten years. These towns are geographically diverse — from Scarsdale, New York, to Hillsborough, California, to Short Hills, New Jersey — but they have a unique collection of traits: a highly educated, Democrat-voting population; an astounding concentration of wealth; a median home price upwards of $1 million; and, most crucially, almost no black people at all.

Needless to say, these places aren’t usually big on racial awareness, save for the occasional self-conscious acknowledgment of their homogeneity. But as the Black Lives Matter movement swept the nation, the mounting social pressure to demonstrate one’s support forced a confrontation with what had long been undiscussed: how does one demonstrate a commitment to black lives when virtually none of them are being lived in your zip code?

The result was, to put it mildly, remarkable: a rash of extremely fancy white people performing near-hysterical levels of hyperawareness for an issue that had absolutely no material bearing on their lives. Black Lives Matter signs popped up like weeds in the front yards of multimillion dollar homes, in neighbourhoods where they would be seen by approximately zero black people save for the odd delivery man. Pricey boutiques hung Black Lives Matter signs in their windows. In Darien, Connecticut, a town with a black population of less than 1% and a median household income of $365,528 that regularly ranks it on lists of America’s wealthiest communities, a sea of white people in designer sunglasses marched down the leafy main street screaming, “No justice, no peace!” before gathering politely in a local park to listen to the main speaker: a black woman who had traveled up from Brooklyn just for the occasion.

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It’s hard to overstate the irony of a town like Darien, whose racial demographics are in part a direct result of the infamous “white flight” from nearby New York City in the Seventies, having to import people of colour from that same city in 2020 in order to demonstrate its commitment to social justice. It also speaks to the peculiar relationship that places like Darien have with more local communities of colour. The town where I live, Norwalk, is just five miles down the road from Darien and has a 15% black population — but not only did Darien not ask its black next-door neighbours to participate in its Black Lives Matter protest, they also recently rejected a plan to allow just over a dozen Norwalk kindergarteners into their top-ranked school district. And so the de facto segregation of these communities has always served to insulate them from ever truly feeling the impact of America’s racial reckonings — or from having to think about them once they’re over.

Two years after George Floyd’s murder, in some cities, ubiquitous murals, statues, and street art stand in commemoration of the moment; in others, the boarded-up remains of empty, smashed-out storefronts are a stark reminder of the revolution’s less-glorious moments. Many of the places where the movement found the most purchase are now struggling to realise its promise, with rising crime rates serving as a direct challenge to progressives’ dreams of defunding the police.

In Connecticut’s wealthy enclaves, some Black Lives Matter signs are still there — albeit faded by the sun and a bit tattered around the edges, in what seems like almost too perfect a metaphor for the legacy of BLM in elite liberal communities. But in 2020, those three words weren’t just a slogan, but a brand, as conspicuous a class signal as owning a Birkin bag and knowing which fork to use.

Long before the raised fist became an high-class accessory, writer Rob Henderson identified the rise of what he called “luxury beliefs” among privileged progressives — including the attention-seeking brand of anti-racism that became so ubiquitous that summer. “Affluent whites are the most enthusiastic about the idea of white privilege”, he wrote, “yet they are the least likely to incur any costs for promoting that belief. Rather, they raise their social standing by talking about their privilege. In other words, upper-class whites gain status by talking about their high status.”

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That a person can successfully preserve his power by flagellating himself for undeservedly having so much of it certainly goes a long way toward explaining the position that communities like Darien took vis-a-vis Black Lives Matter. (See also: the popularity of “defund the police” in communities that are safe and wealthy enough to be wholly unconcerned with crime.) One year after the peak of the protests, the New Yorker noted that all this shrill awareness-raising had been largely nothing but noise: people in positions of influence had “mastered the language of racial contrition, lamenting the conditions that nourish inequality, while doing the bare minimum to change them”.

The people who spent an afternoon parading around and shouting in their pretty town square before returning to business as usual in their comfortable, lily-white neighbourhoods may not have been consciously engaging in a cynical performance, but they nevertheless seemed to grasp the game intuitively: you can be the living, breathing embodiment of privilege, but nobody will ask you to give it up if you just make enough embarrassed noises about it — and, perhaps, if you make a generous enough donation to the cause, to the tune of the $90 million raised by BLM in 2020 alone.

Here, the mind boggles: not just at the sheer volume of both attention and money generated by this movement among people who have no skin in the game, but at their utter incuriosity about just where their money went. When stories surfaced earlier this year about the shady misappropriation of Black Lives Matter funds to, among other things, purchase a $6 million party house in Los Angeles, the response from donors was revealing in that there was hardly a response at all.

But of course, there was no outrage. Those donations were indulgences: a tax-deductible expense after which you, the giver, were free to keep living your privileged life. Whether the money did anything to help was immaterial. The point was to give, and to be able to say you gave.

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But then, the intersection of wealthy white Left-leaning lives with the black ones which they profess to value has always been thus. As genuinely progressive and avowedly anti-racist as these good white liberals may be, the only black people they encounter day to day are invariably paid to be there. The gardener. The maid. The personal trainer. An endlessly rotating series of cashiers and delivery people. In lieu of actual connection, transaction. In lieu of relationships, reparations.

And in lieu of using their influence to push for actual change, the most powerful people in America — the CEOs, the philanthropists, the hedge fund managers, the people who sit on boards — raise an empty fist. At home, they plant a Black Lives Matter lawn sign and write a check for the cause; at work, they sign a bigger check alongside a polished solidarity statement crafted by the in-house PR team for maximum engagement. It is all signal and no substance, designed to mask a deep and abiding investment in the status quo — as demonstrated by what happens when you ask the folks with the lawn signs how they’d feel about a low-income housing unit being built in their neighbourhood.

Which brings us to the question of what will happen now, when Black Lives Matter is no longer the hot new trend, the must-have status symbol. Already, the black-and-white BLM banner has been largely replaced in the progressive Twittersphere by the Ukrainian flag. And in a world dominated by performative activism, where causes are less about principles than they are about keeping current, this is all but inevitable. How long will it be before the conflict in Ukraine is eclipsed, too, by some shiny new tragedy?

And sometime soon, if it hasn’t happened already, the glue holding together the last Black Lives Matter sign in the front yard of someone’s multimillion dollar mansion will give way. The hedge fund manager who lives there will come home from work to find it face-down, covered in dirt, curling with damp at the corners. And maybe he’ll pause a moment before tossing it in the trash; maybe he’ll make a mental note to order a new one from wherever that was. But by the time the men who collect the garbage come to take the bin away, its contents will have been long since forgotten — as if it was never there at all.

That same evening, less than five hours after the ceremony, someone levered the plaque off the wall with a crowbar and stole it. West Yorkshire Police immediately classed the incident a hate crime and opened an investigation. Hilary Benn, MP for Leeds Central, spoke for many when he declared: “It is not who we are as a city.”

In recent years, attempting to do justice to the memory of David Oluwale has been central to Leeds’s hopes of presenting itself as a more inclusive and tolerant city. Just weeks before the Leeds Civic Trust blue plaque was fixed in place last month, a bridge bearing Oluwale’s name was completed, spanning the river where he was found drowned in May 1969. More than half a century later, Leeds now finds itself contending with uncomfortable memories the city thought it had overcome.

When David Oluwale arrived in Britain as a stowaway on board a cargo ship carrying groundnuts from Lagos to Hull, he hoped to find a “New Jerusalem”. Within a few years, those hopes had been firmly dashed: in 1953, he was committed to a mental asylum following a violent altercation with Leeds police officers. Oluwale didn’t surface for another eight years. The effervescent dancer known to fellow Nigerians in Leeds as “Yankee” emerged a broken man. Now homeless, he picked up the kinds of criminal convictions born of living on the streets.

In the late Sixties, the climate across Britain was becoming more hostile for black people. Nowhere was this more pronounced than in Leeds. In April 1968, the same month Enoch Powell delivered his notorious “Rivers of Blood” speech, Inspector Geoffrey Ellerker was assigned to Millgarth police station in Leeds city centre, teaming up with Sergeant Kenneth Kitching in a pairing that would make Oluwale’s grim life even more hellish. The two officers made it their mission to clear vagrants off their patch, but Oluwale came in for special attention. Calling him their “playmate”, they urinated on him while he slept, forced him to bang his head on the pavement as “penance”, and drove him to the city limits where they would dump him in the dead of night. When Oluwale was arrested for disorderly conduct, the police entered “WOG” as his nationality on his charge sheet.

On 4 May 1969, a group of boys found his body when they were out walking by the River Aire close to Knostrop sewerage works, a few miles downstream from the city centre. The only mourners at his pauper’s funeral were the undertakers. But 18 months later, after a police cadet reported rumours he’d heard about Ellerker and Kitching, Oluwale’s body was exhumed. A Scotland Yard investigation concluded that the officers had pushed or caused Oluwale to fall in the river in the early hours of 18 April 1969, and the two were eventually tried for manslaughter and several assaults.

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Yet the trial at Leeds Town Hall brought further attacks on Oluwale. “What right have we to call him a citizen?” Basil Wigoder QC, representing Ellerker, asked the jury in his opening speech. “His only claim to being a citizen was that every now and then he was lodged in the local prison.” Even the judge failed to hide his distaste, describing Oluwale as “a dirty, filthy, violent vagrant”. Though Ellerker and Kitching received prison sentences for a number of assaults, they were ultimately found not guilty of manslaughter on the direction of this judge: the witnesses who’d seen two uniformed men chasing someone by the river could not identify Ellerker or Kitching and could not even be sure of the colour of the man being pursued. Despite the two officers’ violent hounding of Oluwale over several months, the judge concluded that there was no evidence they had caused him to drown.

That didn’t stop football fans taunting the police from the terraces: They’re the boys from Millgarth and they don’t care, they threw Oluwale in the River Aire. But the unsettling story of Oluwale slipped slowly from the broader public mind.

In the Seventies and Eighties, no northern multicultural city was without its racial antagonism, and none could boast of healthy relations between its police forces and black communities. As the socio-economic climate worsened, those strains intensified. And Leeds entered a particularly dark period. During a riot in the Chapeltown area on Bonfire Night 1975, several West Yorkshire Police officers received serious injuries.

Days before the Bonfire Night riot, Wilma McCann — a woman from Chapeltown — became Peter Sutcliffe’s first known victim. The Yorkshire Ripper was known as the “Leeds Ripper” in the early days, as his first three murders were in the city. This was the Leeds that David Peace excavated in his blistering Red-Riding quartet: a grey concrete hell “abandoned to the crows and the Ripper”. All the ills of the Seventies — the misogyny, the civic corruption and police violence — were rampant in Peace’s city.

It was in this same period that Leeds became synonymous with racism, mostly down to the reputation of the followers of its football club. National Front publications such as Bulldog were sold outside Elland Road containing proud league tables of the “most racist fans”: Leeds United were usually near the top. Black visiting players were regularly pelted with bananas.

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Tony Harrison’s 1985 state-of-the-nation poem V. didn’t help Leeds’s reputation. It achieved notoriety with a film adaptation aired on Channel 4 in 1987, becoming the first time the word “cunt” was uttered on British television. V. was inspired by a visit to Holbeck cemetery during the Miners’ Strike, when Harrison saw tombstones, including that of his parents, desecrated with swastikas and NF slogans and the ground littered with Harp lager cans.

“What is it that this aggro act implies?” the poet asks in his clash with the vandal, an alienated skinhead who’d “been on t’dole all my life in fucking Leeds!”  The poet wants to suggest that the hooligans’ “mindless desecration” is something more than lager-fuelled frustration at Leeds United letting them down every week. He portrays it as springing from feelings of loss: of real jobs, a sense of place, dignity and security. Harrison’s V. was a moving cry for a more united country, a revival of post-war decencies and solidarity.

I was teaching in Leeds in 2004 when I came across the then-obscured story of David Oluwale. In those days, I was immersed in the novels of David Peace, though the contemporary city was confident and buoyant.

But there was another Leeds that stood outside this new prosperity. The British National Party’s anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim message resonated in poorer parts of the city, particularly after the suicide bombings in London on 7 July 2005. Three of the bombers had been raised in the Beeston area of Leeds, coming from the close-knit terraced streets near to the cemetery that had inspired Harrison’s poem. A leaked membership list revealed that Morley, a few miles down the road from Beeston, had more BNP members than any other constituency in the country. Though the BNP had been picking up council seats in the region, it still came as a profound shock when, in June 2009, a BNP candidate was elected to the European Parliament for the Yorkshire and Humber area. The declaration of what was the party’s first major breakthrough into the political mainstream was made at Leeds Town Hall, the setting for Oluwale’s trial.

Lifting Oluwale’s story from the shadows of Leeds’s memory into the centre of its public history, and onto a plaque, had been a long, slow process. My own 2007 book was part of that effort. When it was adapted for the stage by Oladipo Agboluaje two years later, a large image of Oluwale’s face — a mugshot after one of his brutal arrests — was plastered onto the theatre wall, facing accusingly towards Millgarth police station.

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Back then, however, there was little appetite for a permanent memorial to Oluwale. Leeds Civic Trust acknowledged that his was a tragic case, but I was told this was not sufficient to merit a plaque. Such honour was bestowed on celebrated scientists and writers, the great brewers and tailors of Leeds, sporting heroes or social reformers. Marking a terrible event so that later generations might learn its lessons was not deemed good enough. It took the death of George Floyd at the hands of police in the United States to change hearts and minds in Leeds.

Fast forward to last month, and the desecration of Oluwale’s memorial serves as a bracing reminder that Leeds is still doing battle with its historical demons. This was no random act of hooliganism; the perpetrator was no “HARPaholic yob”, as Harrison calls his Holbeck cemetery vandal. In an echo of the original offences against Oluwale, someone had set out to deny his citizenship and humanity.

The perpetrator might well turn out to be a solitary, embittered individual, but it comes in the context of a white English backlash against multiculturalism and against those calling, with growing confidence and assertiveness, for a different vision of Britishness. The recent Black Lives Matter assaults on monuments to white power and dominance seem to have provoked a kneejerk response: you tear down our history; I’ll tear down yours.

But the desecration of Oluwale’s memorial has also proved to be a spectacular own goal. The removal of the plaque was bigger news than its unveiling. Many more people, in Leeds and beyond, are now aware of the story of Oluwale. His name cannot be erased: a replacement plaque has already been crowdfunded and an image of the original one has been projected onto screens and billboards across the city. For all that Leeds is wrestling with its past, Tony Harrison’s dream of a more united society might not be a vain hope after all.

For much of its history, Japanese politics was characterised by conflicts among its ruling daimyo, and later between the great industrial zaibatsu who replaced them as dominant powers. Similarly, America’s politics is now being shaped by a civil war not between classes, but within the ruling capitalist elite.

As the 2022 congressional elections approach, two sides are polishing their armour and fletching their arrows. In one corner stand the daimyo of the gentry corporate elite, largely drawn from the ranks of tech oligarchs and much of Wall Street. Their focus lies in the creation of a capitalist utopia rooted in paternalistic state control, much along the lines of the corporatist “Great Reset”. In the other corner, meanwhile, stand their opponents to the Right, largely made up of those who own private capital and are therefore anxious not to see their activities curbed.

These divisions reflect profound differences in industry, reminiscent of the 19th-century conflicts between aristocratic merchants and British manufacturers, or the one that broke out between the daimyo who embraced industry and those samurai who stubbornly hewed to traditional ways. Drawing on this, the French economist Thomas Piketty aptly divides our capitalist class into what he calls “the Brahmin Left” and the “merchant Right”. One side, as its caste association assumes, tends to see itself as more spiritually enlightened, as priests of the progressive secular religion. The merchant side, however, is more concerned with market competition (particularly from China), the cost of goods, and the impact of regulatory policies on their core businesses.

Today, the Brahmin Left has its base in large corporations and investors, and has allied itself with the academic and media establishments, financing non-profits and generally supporting increasingly intrusive government. By contrast, the merchant Right draws its natural support from the traditional middle class — skilled workers, high-street businesspeople, and small property owners — who also have become the bulwark of the Trumpian Republican Party.

Until recently, these two opposing capitalist groupings have contented themselves with near-peaceful coexistence. But the recent massive hysteria among progressives over Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter could signal the start of a more heated conflict, pitting competitive, market-oriented business interests against the conformist gentry progressivism of so many of the largest firms.

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This corporate shift to the Left, particularly since the Black Lives Matter protests, has created a backlash within the capitalist class, with many concerned at what they see is the creation of a highly regulated, less competitive and openly politicised economy. Add to this Biden’s own embrace of progressive ideology and it’s hardly surprising that many traditional capitalists now fear for their future.

Some of this reflects understandable concern over Biden’s energy policies and taxes on the analogue economy — where food is grown, products are manufactured and shipped, and oil and gas are drilled. In recent years, Republicans have reaped support from many of the families tied to the “old economy” that markets tangible products. Looking at contributions, the differences between business sectors are stark: with manufacturers and agribusiness favouring the GOP by three to one, while the entertainment, internet and publishing industries overwhelmingly support the Democrats. To some extent, this is a conflict between those who invest and make stuff, and those who gorge on media and digital tools.

What makes Musk so different from his tech counterparts is that he remains, primarily, an industrialist, more in the mould of great Valley founders like Robert Noyce or Jerry Sanders — building cars, spaceships, and tunnel-making equipment. Like any manufacturer he needs reliable, affordable energy and worries about overregulation, which sets him against California’s ultra-progressive legislature.

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By contrast, Meta, Google, Apple, and Microsoft manufacture almost nothing in the United States, and primarily make their money based on advertising or charging for services without much in the way of competition. So while many industrial firms support some protectionist measures against China, Silicon Valley is largely resistant to the idea. After all, on those rare occasions when they do manufacture products, they outsource their most critical production to China. Wall Street follows a similar post-national script, financing Beijing’s industrial machine with its notoriously high carbon supply chains.

A year or two ago, these elite divisions would not have been so pronounced. After the chaos of the 2020 election, big business seemed to welcome Joe Biden’s presidency as a return to normality. Many capitalist elites, particularly in the tech and finance industries, invested heavily in elevating the somewhat doddering warhorse into the White House. Biden, they reasoned, was far more reliable than Trump, whose greatest talent seemed to be widening already serious divisions in the country.

And at first, this corporate class seemed to support the Biden administration’s priorities on immigration, racial “equity”, gender, and climate change. But the government’s incompetent Afghanistan withdrawal, the intensifying border crisis and its own economic programme weakened this capitalist ardour. Most critical has been Biden’s stunning failure to address the roots of rising inflation. While costs of living soared, his supporters claimed everything was either temporary or Vladimir Putin’s fault. But it is clear inflation was rising rapidly before the Ukrainian invasion, and is now considerably higher than key competitors, such as Japan, Germany, France, Canada and China.

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Meanwhile, those who would have previously moderated the Democrat machine, as occurred during Bill Clinton’s ascendency, find themselves unable to restrain a party now dominated by its far-Left fringe. And for all its alleged benefits, wokeness is not generally a good business strategy; it just cost Disney an estimated $50 billion, while causing firms such as Netflix to lose subscribers, in part due to what Musk describes as a “woke mind virus”. Yet so deep are the partisan divisions that it’s unlikely that much of the Silicon Valley and the Brahmin Left are ready to seek refuge in the clutches of the GOP .

Amid a contentious climate, who will win this new capitalist civil war? Hopefully neither side, at least not too decisively. As unromantic as it may seem, the middle and working classes rely on political competition between the elites to survive, as it forces them to make concessions to those below. Just look at the Meiji Restoration, or the socially democratic turn of the British Conservative Party, in Disraeli’s time as well as in recent years. Both are proof that the enemy of mass progress is in the uniformity of elites: when autocracy thrives, and when a small group of people — be they feudal lords, oligarchs or party cadres — control the political field, it is the middle and working classes who suffer.

To put it simply, a capitalist civil war isn’t necessarily all bad news. Although voters should not expect either side to defend their core interests, conflict between corporate moguls gives leverage to the middle and working classes. Like the plebeians in the Roman Republic, the average American could use this conflict to their own advantage. This could, for instance, take the form of a pro-reshoring strategy, which would lead to better paid blue-collar jobs, greater incentives for home-building, more skills education and greater access to healthcare. It’s not an ideal situation; in fact, it’s thoroughly depressing. But it’s far better than letting the rich gorge without conscience or concerns over popular pushback.

When asked about the inspiration behind Americano last month, two weeks after its first broadcast, CEO Ivan Garcia-Hidalgo cited the 2016 election, in which Trump made massive, surprising gains with Hispanics. Recent polling suggests that the rightward drift of the demographic, on which Trump capitalised, has continued since then. There is a growing audience of conservative Hispanics, Garcia-Hidalgo points out — and what they, and America, needed was a “Fox News in Spanish”.

The first evidence of this political shift was met with incredulity by both Left and Right. But those of us on the ground had known for some time that Hispanic-Americans were turning to the Republican Party in unprecedented numbers. In my working-class Miami neighbourhood, I consistently encountered enthusiastic Trumpists. Sure, Trump was always going to attract traditionally Right-leaning Cuban-Americans, but the fervour — and the youth — of his fanatics back in 2015 and 2016 hinted at the beginnings of a new political realignment. Trump’s unorthodox style and abrasive anti-elitist rhetoric had connected with working-class Hispanics. Friends and family who were previously apolitical or tepid independents with centrist leanings had surprisingly hopped on the Trump train.

Trump may be on the fringes again, but in 2020 he gained even more support among working-class Hispanics than he had in 2016. This was a result not purely of his own qualities: since his election, the Democratic Party had alienated another Hispanic demographic. The BLM riots of 2020 were incisive: after the fire and smoke had cleared, polling showed that Hispanics, traditionally law and order types, were against the protests and strongly rejected the Black Lives Matter organisation. At the same time, Democrats were demanding that regular Americans kneel at the altar of the new social justice religion. Many Hispanic-Americans who had previously considered themselves centrist Democrats were repelled.

They might previously have been turned off by Trump’s inflammatory language; now, they were even more turned off by the actual flames destroying American cities under the guise of wokeness. They might not have been Trump supporters in 2016, but they certainly had a rabid Trumpist tio or abuelo who was now pointing at the fires and looters and saying: “See, Trump was right. Democrats want to destroy America.” Hispanics didn’t wake up en masse, but the Right-wing shift became a phenomenon that wasn’t strictly driven by Hispanic Trump supporters.

According to Garcia-Hidalgo, “the only way to save America is with the Hispanic vote” — a  sly rhetorical move that subscribes his new network to the Trumpian view that America is under attack, while positioning patriotic Hispanics as the antidote. Garcia-Hidalgo understands that conservative Hispanics, even if they still have strong ties to their homelands, essentially identify as Americans above all else. Trump understood this, too, which is why some of his more “problematic” language directed at Hispanics — the “bad hombres” rhetoric — didn’t hurt his chances with the demographic. After all, conservative Hispanics, along with the white working-class, are the last group that is unironically patriotic.

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Trump understood the power of culture war as a binding agent. While the Democrats’ socialism-tinged rhetoric became blatantly anti-American, he continued to offer an unabashedly pro-America shtick. Since many Hispanics have ties to failed socialist countries, their American dream is a simple one: they want to work hard, make some money, and be left alone in their free time. This sentiment is perhaps the greatest tenet of classic Americanism. Hispanics do not believe that the nation is illegitimate, undermined by “whiteness” or “cis heteronormativity”, or in need of a radical restructure.

The summer of 2020 may have solidified the Trump-triggered Hispanic rightward shift, but the Democratic response to the pandemic ensured its short-term viability. According to blue-state governors, it was okay to get fresh air only if you were marching for a liberal cause or torching a small business. After the riots subsided, schools remained closed, as did the small businesses left standing after the summer of BLM. All the while, Democrats elevated disconnected bureaucrats like Anthony Fauci to deity-status and robbed the little man of all agency. Working-class Hispanics, of course, were still carrying out their essential jobs throughout the entirety of the pandemic, connected to the physical reality that the laptop class had had the luxury of abandoning.

Still, now that lockdowns and mask mandates are subsiding, will the Republican’s Hispanic gains last? Outside of Trump — and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis — no politician on the Right knows how to communicate effectively with Hispanics, which is why the long-term rightward shift is anything but a guarantee. Garcia-Hidalgo understands this reality, which is probably why he announced, on the Americano show “La Politica,” that presenter Maria Herrera Mellado will be interviewing Trump today.

Of course, the success of Americano isn’t tied to Trump, per say, and nor is the growing conservatism of Hispanics. Even if Trump doesn’t run again in 2024, there’s no doubt that a Trumpian “America first” sensibility plays well with Hispanics and must hold a significant role in any outlet — or movement — if the rightward shift is to continue.

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The best way for the Republicans to sustain the rightward shift is to consolidate a fragmented Hispanic demographic. The same goes for Americano. Conservative Hispanics are accustomed to regional outlets catering to mostly localised obsessions: prior to the network’s inception, the Spanish-language news options available to them were regional outlets, like Miami’s Radio Mambi. These stations cultivate their audiences for decades, through a fine-tuned understanding of what their listeners’ desire, resulting in a family-like ecosystem in which listeners and commentators build decades-long relationships. They don’t individually pull in massive numbers, but overall listenership is in the millions.

It’s tempting for a network, or a Republican politician, based in Miami to focus on the concerns of Cuban-Americans — they, and the Mexican-Americans along the Rio Grande Valley, are the two Hispanic demographics usually cited when pundits speak of the rightward shift. But if the Right strictly focuses its efforts on the interests of these groups — which sometimes, but not always, dovetail — their rhetoric will be far too insular to reach a broad-based Hispanic coalition.

In my recent listens to Americano’s programming, it’s clear that the station is in Miami, but not of Miami, which bodes well for its future prospects. Instead of placing too much emphasis on a single Hispanic group, Americano is melding “America first” Trumpian Republicanism with the socially conservative elements that have traditionally appealed to disparate Hispanic demographics. For instance, on the night I caught the 8pm show “Entre Nosotras”, the three female presenters were joined by a former officer from the Phoenix PD to discuss the border crisis and the attendant drug scourge precipitated by President Biden’s porous border policy, which is causing a “domestic war”. The Trump-like takes on immigration — which are very popular with Hispanics — and the machinegun-like, emotionally charged delivery of the presenters will appeal to old-school talk radio veterans.

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It’s worth noting, too, that many of the network’s stars — including the presenter who will interview Trump — are strong women, which highlights the savviness of the management. Recent polling has shown that Hispanic women have shifted to the Right more than any other demographic; a show that foregrounds educated Latinas is likely to be a hit. It’s also as fine a way as any to make a splash and draw in younger Hispanics, which will be the key to expanding the rightward shift and the station’s reach; younger Hispanics are still skewing progressive.

Meanwhile, Americano’s other programming, including the first show of the day, “Amanecer Con Dios” (Waking up with God), which is hosted by a priest, and “Sabor Caribeno,” which focuses on Dominican and Puerto Rican issues, speaks to a network attempting to attract disparate Hispanic elements.

The Trump campaign was likewise able to bring together the fragmented Right-wing Hispanic coalition. What’s most impressive is that the shift occurred without the help of major networks, which often serve as messaging apparatuses for the parties. In the lead up to 2020, the Trump campaign blitzed South Florida, the Texas Rio Grande Valley, and other Hispanic-heavy areas with targeted ads painting Democrats as light on crime socialists hellbent on reshaping America. But its project certainly would’ve been easier if a national Spanish-language network existed, which is why Americano’s appearance on the scene is such an interesting development. Whether or not it succeeds will reveal whether Trumpism can hold onto Hispanic voters who feel themselves drifting to the Right.

The Republican Party, then, should be watching the network’s fortunes closely. Even if Trump doesn’t run in 2024, his brand of Republicanism is so popular with Hispanics that it will play a crucial part in the election. Meanwhile, the budding Spanish-language media ecosystem can provide an insight into what the ascendant Hispanic-American conservative coalition desires — an insight the Democrats might benefit from, too.

That such woes should afflict one of the richest cities in the country, with a median household income of over $100,000, cannot be blamed on economic decline. Yet much of Seattle’s core looks like a pockmarked ghost town. Businesses on both sides of Third Avenue, a major thoroughfare, are boarded up. Blocks from the Four Seasons hotel and the Fairmont Hotel, tents crowd the sidewalks, and drug users sit under awnings holding pieces of foil over lighter flames. Traffic enforcement is minimal to nonexistent. The year 2020 saw a 68% spike in homicides, the highest number in 26 years, and the year 2021 saw a 40% surge in 911 calls for shots fired and a 100% surge in drive-by shootings. Petty crime plagues every neighbourhood of the city, and downtown businesses have paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to fund their own security.

What happened to Seattle? The answer, of course, depends on your politics. In the news section of the Seattle Times, for instance, a reader is unlikely to see any consideration of a link between policing and public safety. “No single cause for 2021’s surge in gunfire in Seattle,” declared a typical recent headline over an article that points only to possibilities such as the pandemic or an unlucky cycle of “retaliatory violence”. But the majority view in Seattle appears to have shifted toward an acknowledgement that the unrest and destruction that occurred after the killing of George Floyd in 2020 marked a turning point and that the city’s policies toward its police force, whose ranks are now depleted, are relevant to understanding the story. What follows, based on interviews with a number of past and present police officers — five of whom are on the record in this article — is an attempt to offer an obvious but unheeded perspective. It is a cop’s-eye view of Seattle’s undoing.

On Monday 25 May 2020, in Minneapolis, a man named George Floyd died after police officer Derek Chauvin pinned Floyd face-down on the pavement with a knee to Floyd’s neck for over eight minutes. Video footage of the incident circulated around the world in the days that followed. One of those to watch it was T.J. San Miguel, a canine handler who had moved from the Big Island of Hawaii to join the Seattle police in 2008. “I thought it was disgusting,” she says of Chauvin’s actions. “You don’t do that to somebody. That’s just basic fucking stuff that we knew and learned and had trained on for years and years. It became pretty apparent that there’s a big difference in training and tactics and procedures in the West Coast versus East Coast and other places.”

The knee to the neck also surprised J.D. Smith, a Marine veteran of the first Gulf War and a Seattle police officer since 1998. Smith had spent years pursuing drug dealers, killers, and pimps and had subdued a lot of people. “That’s not even a proper technique,” says Smith. “We put a knee in between the shoulder blades, and it never chokes anybody out.”

Matthew Kruse, a young patrol officer who had joined the force in 2018, was struck that a handcuffed man would fail to get immediate medical care. “Especially in Seattle, we really emphasise once they’re in handcuffs and they’re under control you turn to the medical attention,” he says. “It’s kind of ingrained, but it’s also just doing the right thing. Do you need something? Do you want to get checked out by medical? If I have water on me, do you want some water?”

But any potential differences between the police in Seattle and those in other places mattered little to the mood of the city in the late spring of 2020. Protests spread from Minneapolis across the country, and the first large-scale demonstrations took shape on Friday night, 29 May, in Seattle’s Chinatown district. Matthew Kruse was among the cops standing guard. “We go down there, and we’re in the riot gear, and people were pleasant,” he says. “For the first three hours, I was just having a conversation with people.” After 10 o’clock, though, the mood shifted. “People were throwing stuff,” Kruse says. “They were starting to shine flashlights in our face.”

On Saturday, the crowds grew destructive. Groups of protesters shattered windows up and down the retail corridors of downtown and emptied many of the stores of their merchandise. Some of those in the crowd torched police cruisers parked outside of the Nordstrom flagship store at Pine Street and 6th Avenue. Protesters also pulled firearms, including M4 rifles, out of the abandoned vehicles. Mike Magan, a robbery detective who had been on the force for over three decades, was home that evening, watching the mayhem on a screen. “I was beside myself,” he says. He recognised the abandoned van of a co-worker, whom he phoned. The colleague, a forensics video specialist, answered in a whisper and said that he and other colleagues were taking shelter in the Nordstrom’s and videotaping what they could of the violence outside.

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The following morning, Magan got called into the office to start investigations of 30 to 40 people who’d been arrested for crimes such as trespass, burglary and property destruction. Five or six hours in, he began to suspect they’d given the police false names. But there was no point looking into it further. “We found out they’d all been released from custody prior to even being questioned,” he says.

The bedlam in Seattle caused police leaders to institute a so-called “blue/gold” schedule, meaning that officers had to work 12-hour shifts up to seven days a week. Christopher Young, a detective in the investigative support unit (previously named the criminal intelligence unit), who has been on the force since 1994 and never experienced such a schedule, calls June 2020 “the most stressful month of my life”. Young found himself working 16-hour days for weeks straight. “Even our homicide detectives were sitting at their desks working their cases in battle dress uniforms with their helmets ready to run outside to protect their own office building,” he says, adding that an eight-hour day is already demanding in the world of policing, where split-second decisions are the norm. “There’s been plenty of criticism of how we handled it, but people don’t realise how stressful it was just from the sleep deprivation alone.”

Of the hundreds of businesses that reported being damaged or looted over the weekend, Nordstrom’s flagship store was the most prominent. There had been an attempt by someone to set it aflame. On 1 June, Mike Magan and a colleague from the Seattle bomb unit entered the site to look for possible video footage. The first floor, he says, was destroyed. “All the jewellery cases had been smashed,” he says. “All the cosmetics were gone. All the makeup was gone. Shoes were gone — bags. Everything.” As for tracking down the looters, that wasn’t on the agenda. “We were told: you will not investigate any of those things,” Magan says. “The city attorney wouldn’t file charges on them.”

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That night, Magan, who had been out of uniform for decades, had to don riot gear to guard the East Precinct on Capitol Hill. Demonstrations began peacefully but changed after dark. “We were getting pelted with bricks, rocks, frozen water bottles,” says Magan. “There were shots fired. Here I am, 33 or 34 years on the department and I’m like: why am I on the front line here?”

The 12-hour shifts exhausted everyone, including the younger officers. Matthew Kruse was working from 7pm to 7am, mostly on his feet, and if he was out on patrol he had to have riot gear with him in the car in case he was needed for crowd control. Once a week or fortnight, he’d get a day off and spend it all sleeping. “Some nights I slept at the police station,” he says. “And I remember at least a couple of times I just slept in my car, because I was like, if I try to drive home I’m going to kill myself or someone else.”

J.D. Smith, stationed at the West Precinct near the turmoil, was spared a direct confrontation with the violence. His job at the time was to process online crime reports, which were now rolling in faster than ever. But he could see the toll being taken on his coworkers when they returned to the station from the protest sites day after day. “The looks on their faces — it just reminded me of the Gulf War,” he says.

When the protests grew violent, police officers began to use various non-lethal weapons to control the crowd, including pepper spray and tear gas. This led to complaints, lawsuits, and stinging condemnation in the local press. On 5 June, Seattle’s mayor, Jenny Durkan, declared that officers “do not need to be using tear gas at protests as a crowd management tool” and banned the use of it for 30 days. Many officers felt they were being asked to maintain order in violent crowds while surrendering all of their crowd-control tools. “People were throwing bottles and rocks, and we had to split this thing up. God forbid after multiple, multiple, multiple warnings that we’re gonna throw gas, guys, you better disperse, we throw gas,” says J.D. Smith. “So then what? Oh, Seattle PD, look how heavy-handed they are.”

Seattle has never been as police-friendly as some other cities, but outright hostility to law enforcement had until 2020 been confined to a minority of residents. Lots of officers on the force had even been accustomed to positive public attention. T.J. San Miguel and her German Shepherd, Pele — named after the goddess of volcanoes in Hawaii, San Miguel’s native home — had been featured on “America’s Top Dog,” a series putting dogs through obstacle courses, and had cheery write-ups for her work. Mike Magan received regular cards from people he’d helped and, when Covid hit, even a crate of cleaning supplies from one grateful Vietnamese-American family whose jewellery store he had saved when he tracked down four robbers and got all of the stolen goods returned. J.D. Smith became a brief celebrity in 2016, when while off-duty he pulled over on a mountain pass on Interstate 90 to rescue an unconscious woman from a flaming car. All of the cops could point to times when they’d helped save a victim from a bad guy.

Prior to the summer of 2020 the department had been receiving encouraging communications from the mayor’s office, and city officials were planning to ask the federal government to lift a consent decree that had been imposed on the Seattle police in 2012. In 2016, Barack Obama had even invited the department’s then-chief, Kathleen O’Toole, to the State of the Union, and a federal judge had ruled in 2018 that the city was in “full and effective compliance” with the decree. T.J. San Miguel expected that city officials would take a moment to let the worst of the public anger pass and then speak up for their police force. “I’m like, okay, it was horrible and people absolutely need to say what they need to say,” she says. “So we’re going to give it a minute here in our department, but then our city is going to say: Hey, that was horrible. It was disgusting. It was bad. And guess what? You’ll never see that in the Seattle Police Department.”

That statement did not come. Mayor Jenny Durkan announced on 3 June that the city would no longer seek to lift the consent decree. Seattle city council member Teresa Mosqueda vowed to lead an “inquest” into the budget of the Seattle police and said she wanted to cut funding by half, a view echoed by fellow council members Tammy Morales and Kshama Sawant. City Council president Lorena Gonzáles blamed the police response to the protests for turning “our densest neighbourhoods” into a “complete war zone”.

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“In May of 2020, our political leadership considered us a necessary evil,” says Chris Young. “In June of 2020, they started to think that we were an unnecessary evil. Every cultural institution in the city turned on the police.” That included educational institutions. In early June, Young, as a parent of children in Seattle Public Schools, was one of thousands of recipients of an email from school superintendent Denise Juneau announcing that cooperation with the police would be suspended in light of “the perpetuation of systemic racism, the murders of Black people by police officers across our country, [and] the violence displayed by some law enforcement officers here in Seattle”.

The perspective was palpable on the streets, too. T.J. San Miguel would hear jeers out of open windows on Capitol Hill. “You have people in an apartment several stories high just yelling and screaming at you as you’re out there walking down the block,” she says. In one case, a crime victim had called for police help, only to start showering the responding officers with anti-cop abuse when they arrived. “It was very shocking,” she says. “And it’s just like: Okay, bye, have a nice night.”

“We were hated,” says J.D. Smith. “We were literally hated overnight.”

On Sunday 8 June, Matthew Kruse and coworkers from the North Precinct got an order to go down and help back up his colleagues in the East Precinct on Capitol Hill. The plan, he says, was to let crowds march past the precinct unimpeded, unless there was criminal activity, and Kruse and his colleagues were stationed a couple of blocks away, watching the area on camera. No one was trying to break into the precinct, says Kruse, but people started to pitch tents near it. At that point, according to Kruse, a police captain went over to talk to the protesters. “He started talking to protesters and telling them, hey, you guys have got to move along, and they got in a verbal altercation,” says Kruse. “Then they [senior officers] came back to us and said we’re just going to let them stay there and do their thing.” The East Precinct, already boarded up, was now abandoned.

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News of the surrender of the East Precinct hit cops hard. “I just felt sick,” says Chris Young. “It was humiliating.”  Matthew Kruse found the about-face on holding the fort versus leaving it insulting. “At first they had said: no, we’re not going to let them take the precinct,” says Kruse. “The next day it’s being cleared out.” J.D. Smith remains incredulous. “I’m still embarrassed,” Smith says. “We gave away a precinct.”

What followed for the next few weeks was an impromptu test site for improvised maintenance of public order in what came to be called the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, or CHAZ. A few days into the CHAZ, the New York Times described it as “an experiment in life without the police — part street festival, part commune.” Donald Trump weighed in from the Oval Office to condemn it. “Domestic Terrorists have taken over Seattle,” he tweeted. Seattle’s mayor, Jenny Durkan, responded, “It’s not terrorism. It’s patriotism.” Asked by CNN’s Chris Cuomo how long the CHAZ would last, Durkan quipped, “I don’t know. We could have the summer of love.”

For police stationed out of the East Precinct, there was no base of operations anymore. “They couldn’t deploy from there,” says Matthew Kruse. “They had to deploy from the West Precinct or North or South or Southwest or any other precinct. So response times got slower, and that affects everyone from a shop owner to a person who lives there.”

Where some observers saw a harmless street fair others saw something more menacing. “All these businesses are failing and they’re asking for help,” recalls J.D. Smith. “There is nothing, and I mean zero, we can do because the mayor is saying summer of love.” Chris Young says that officers received an email instructing them not to enter the six-block zone of the CHAZ, although he made his way into the off-limits area after some unsuccessful arson attempts against the precinct building. “I was sent with a fancy camera to take pictures of the crime scene of where they tried to burn it down,” says Young. “You had to go by a checkpoint with guards, and God knows what they’d do with me if they found out I was a cop. I had to basically go undercover to sneak in and look at my own precinct.”

On Saturday 20 June, about 12 days after the East Precinct was vacated, T.J. San Miguel got called in to respond to a shooting of two men in the CHAZ, one of whom was now in a serious condition. “So everybody just goes rolls down there and then, you know, they have to come up with a plan,” she says. “Like, how are we going to get in there?”

By the time a group of officers made it into the CHAZ, they were told the most endangered victim was already being taken to the hospital by activists on the scene. Over the radio in her car outside the CHAZ, San Miguel heard that the victim was being driven in a plain white van toward the Harborview Medical Center, and she happened to look up. “There’s this van driving just crazy,” she says. “The back doors are open and swinging. There’s a bunch of people in the back of the van working, I guess, on this person that was just shot, and I’m just like, oh my god.” San Miguel decided to alert Harborview and escort the van there. “I just jumped ahead of it, lights and sirens,” she says, “and I blocked all the intersections as it went, so it safely got there and no other cars got in the way of it.” In the end, the victim, 19-year-old Horace Lorenzo Anderson, made it to Harborview but didn’t survive.

The CHAZ lasted another ten days after that, until Wednesday 1 July, when officers reclaimed the precinct without a struggle. In the meantime, a 17-year-old had been shot in the arm on 21 June, a 30-year-old male shot and wounded on 23 June, and two black teenagers, 14 and 16, shot and wounded on 29 June as they drove into the CHAZ. The older of the two, Antonio Mays Jr., died of his wounds. Witnesses have stated that members of CHAZ security were the ones who opened fire on them, but police have never tracked down the responsible parties.

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Despite the retaking of the East Precinct, the city continued to be racked by protest and strife throughout July, with further vandalism and looting by a subset of the protesters, few of whom ever faced charges. City officials continued to direct their ire toward the police department instead, and on 10 August the Seattle City council voted to cut the pay of senior police staff, including Chief Carmen Best, who enjoyed widespread respect from officers on the force, including all of those interviewed for this article. “It was demoralising,” says Chris Young. “She was a great chief and a very progressive leader who happens to be black. But she still got run out of town on a rail because she wouldn’t agree that her department needed to be abolished.”

Carmen Best immediately announced her resignation. At that time, T.J. San Miguel, who calls Best “excellent, just excellent,” was already deep into looking for an exit. A move like that, when she’d spent years to secure the job of her dreams, working in the K-9 unit, would have been unthinkable in the recent past. She considered herself one of the biggest cheerleaders of the department. But the hostility from the city in June and July changed her outlook. “I realised I could do everything completely right, and if the optics aren’t good, then they’re going to hang me out to dry,” she says. “Once I came to that realisation, it was like a bad breakup where you just shut somebody off.” San Miguel left the force when Best did.

A change in public safety began to be noticeable across the city, not just in protest zones. Seattle’s city attorney, Pete Holmes, and King County’s prosecuting attorney, Dan Satterberg, had always taken a lenient approach to so-called quality-of-life crimes, but after June 2020 they began to ease up across the board toward a range of other offences. Most of those who committed vandalism or looting during the protests escaped any punishment. Matthew Kruse said that storeowners would call the police about shoplifters, not realising that prosecutions of that offence had effectively ceased. On one occasion Kruse and his partner watched a man walk into a store, shoplift about $20 in goods, and walk out. “He was like, what are you guys going to do — arrest me?” says Kruse. “And we knew we weren’t going to arrest him, because with any misdemeanour stuff, we had to go through the prosecutor, and stuff like that wasn’t going to get prosecuted. You could I.D. the suspect and could get a full confession, and they were going be like, ‘We’re not gonna take it.’”

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One case in which prosecutors did take action proved to be the last straw for Matthew Kruse’s partner. It involved a shooting that, according to Kruse, everyone involved in investigating believed to be obvious self-defence. A 40-something white Seattle male with no criminal record had shot a homeless Hispanic male who had attacked him in a parking lot at night. The directive from the prosecutors’ office was to jail the man in preparation for pressing murder charges, Kruse recalls, “because of the optics.” Kruse says the case went to trial and ended in swift acquittal, but Kruse’s partner, disgusted by what he viewed as politicised decision-making, quit his job.

With an incentive structure that made officers feel they had little to gain and much to lose from taking the initiative on crime prevention, cops began a dramatic — and some would say resentful — pullback in enforcement. Patrol officers no longer drove or walked about looking for suspicious behaviour like someone climbing a fence but stayed put and responded after the fact. Mike Magan said that one of his colleagues got investigated and punished for responding to a call of shots fired without logging into his computer first. “It was like we were biting our own necks, and you began to see that a lot of these officers would go park their cars at certain location and not go out and patrol,” he says. “You could track the cars and you could see that these officers were parking in parking garages.”

Kruse wanted to keep patrolling, even if it was in a more low-key way, but one day his supervisor advised him to avoid it. “I was told straight to my face: don’t leave the precinct unless you’re going to a call,” Kruse recalls. “He says: I’m looking out for you, still fresh in your career. I don’t want you to get in trouble for doing the right thing.” Kruse says a lot of his coworkers began to rely on an imaginary colleague they dubbed “Officer Time,” so named because most criminal behavior stops on its own after a while. “If it’s a shoplift, the building is going to close, or if it’s someone that’s just trespassing, they’re eventually going to leave,” says Kruse. “So just let them off and let Officer Time handle it.” Kruse quit in October of 2020. The following month, the city council voted to cut the budget of the department by 20%.

For Mike Magan, the pullback in enforcement spread even to his fellow detectives, causing him to hit breaking point. “One of the robbery squads just decided they weren’t going to work anymore,” he says. “They wouldn’t leave the office, they wouldn’t help you on search warrants, they wouldn’t come out and conduct interviews with you. They wouldn’t come out and track video. It was heartbreaking.” Magan couldn’t stand it and decided to retire early. He had banked eight months of sick leave that he intended to exhaust prior to his official departure date, but his ordinary work hours ended after February of 2021.

An exodus of officers led to a manpower shortage that prompted J.D. Smith to quit as well. As someone whose interactions with the public were mostly online at this point in his career, Smith was relatively cushioned from classic hazards of the job. The severe shortage of officers, however, made him certain that he’d be put back into uniform and on street patrol, which he believed spelled trouble for someone out of practice. “It’s tough even when you’re out there every day,” he says. “But you take somebody who has been off the streets for 10 years — they’re rusty.” Returning to the work of chasing down violent criminals in a time of hostile public scrutiny seemed untenable. Smith picked April Fool’s Day of 2021 as his date of retirement. “I had eight more years,” he says. “I needed to stay, financially, but I decided no, I’m going to quit.”

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The departing officers left a severely diminished department. Even before the unrest of 2020, the number of officers in the Seattle Police Department was low by the standard of other cities. With about 1,400 police officers in 2019, or 18.5 officers for every 10,000 residents, policing in Seattle could never be as comprehensive as in New York City, where the ratio is 43.6 officers for every 10,000 residents, or Washington, D.C. where it is 54 per 10,000. But with 186 separations from the department in 2020, nearly three times the historical annual average, and another 150 or so in 2021, Seattle started 2022 with well under 1,000 deployable officers department-wide.

Almost all of the officers spoken to for this article seemed to be in low-key mourning over their alienation from the city they served. “I loved going to work every day, and I had a fantastic career,” says Mike Magan. “It’s a beautiful city, but I watched it go from really good to really bad.”

“The mayor and the city council were telling us, basically, that we’re the bad guy,” says J.D. Smith. “The truth is 99% plus of us are amazing people that are only there for the reason that I was there: I don’t like people in fear, and I don’t like people in pain.”

“I’m actually a Left-wing guy on just about every issue,” says Chris Young. “I want the United States to be a Scandinavian-style welfare state. So I’m very sympathetic to people’s concerns.” Forming a complementary department of 100 people comprising community service officers, social workers and others who could do the sort of enforcement that doesn’t require a gun would have been a worthy experiment, Young feels. “But they didn’t do that,” he says. “They just demonised the police and chased good people out of town. It was, let’s slash budgets and hope something good happens.”

Today, T.J. San Miguel works for the police department of Marysville, a town about 30 miles north of Seattle. She had to take a $10-an-hour pay cut, she says, and abandon her work with Pele, starting over as a patrol officer once more. (She did get to keep living with Pele, who is now a full-time pet. “She’s fat and happy,” San Miguel reports.) But the first day of patrol among Marysville residents was a revelation. “People told me face-to-face: We love you. We support you. Thank you for doing your job,” she says. “People were waving. You couldn’t buy your own coffee.”

Matthew Kruse found a job in the police department of Lynnwood, a suburb about 15 miles north of Seattle. Like San Miguel, Kruse was astonished by the contrast between his new workplace and the one he left. In Lynnwood, he says, cops crack down on illegal drug paraphernalia. When someone gets a warrant to show up in court and fails to show, police will arrest the person for ignoring the warrant. When someone shoplifts, that person gets arrested and charged. “I ask people when I catch them shoplifting up here in Lynnwood, ‘What are you doing up here?’” he says.

J.D. Smith moved to Idaho, near Priest River, not far from the Washington border. “It’s affordable, and it got me out of the area,” he says. “I have a chance to start a new life and not be a police officer anymore. I’m hanging the badge up.”

Mike Magan moved to Bozeman, Montana, where he is building a house. In the months that followed his departure from the office, he continued to show up whenever he was needed to wrap up a serious case and make sure the perpetrators were prosecuted. But most of that work has wound down. “I look forward to the transition,” he says. “But I do miss it.”

Remaining on the force is Chris Young, who has seen repeated changes of role as more and more of his colleagues leave. “A few months ago I was just a detective. Now I’m a permanent acting sergeant,” he says. “Half the people in my unit are gone.” Any lull in enforcement that might have existed in the fall of 2020 has long since been replaced by a frantic rush from call to call, as ever fewer officers confront ever higher numbers of crimes.

Part of Young’s job now is to keep more people from leaving, even as the city steps up efforts to repopulate the force. Last October, as vaccine mandates caused even more officers to leave, the mayor put in place an emergency order offering $25,000 bonuses to new hires. But the mindset of the city seems to have mattered just as much to the officers in this story as financial considerations. “My young rockstar detectives are sniffing around these other departments where they’ll get treated like royalty,” Young says. “How do I compete with that?” The answer to that may depend on how much Seattle cares.

In Stage Three of this process as seen during the Black Lives Matter protests, you’ll remember, right-wing media were filled with hair-raising scare stories about what BLM really wanted. “Revealed:” burbled the Daily Mail. “The British arm of Black Lives Matter’s full agenda – abolish the police, smash capitalism and close all prisons”. No reference to this loose and decentralised racial justice movement went unaccompanied by mention that three of the prominent figures in it had described themselves as “trained Marxists”. You feel on stronger ground, I suppose, resisting a movement that you’ve decided wants to tear capitalist society and its institutions to bits than one that asks us to give people of colour an equitable stake in society and the hope of walking the streets without being harassed by the cops.

Yet, capitalism being miraculously forgiving, we have now entered Stage Four. Robin DiAngelo, of White Fragility fame, makes her main living as a “diversity consultant”, and is reported to charge north of £10,000 for a speech. She lectured Coca-Cola last year on “Confronting Racism”. And a brace of new books in her tradition indicates that far from wanting to smash for-profit workplaces, the diversity-industrial complex now wants to make capitalism safe for diversity. We have reached the stage, in other words, that trained Marxists would call co-optation.

Two books — one by Y-Vonne Hutchinson, How To Talk To Your Boss About Race: Speaking Up Without Getting Shut Down, and the other, A Judgement-Free Guide To Diversity and Inclusion for Straight White Men by Felicity Hassan and Suki Sandhu — are similar in scope and approach, though Hutchinson’s primary focus is race, while Hassan and Sandhu cover racism, sexism, ageism and homo/bi/transphobia too. They’re both aiming squarely at the business how-to market, most shamelessly in the case of the latter, which again and again mentions the “business case” for diversity and inclusion and barely makes the moral case at all.

In genre terms, we’re seeing the collision of two well established discourses: the boilerplate of antiracist discourse folded into the numbing cliches of the business self-help manual. This has the unfortunate effect, at least stylistically and in publishing terms, of making the case for antiracism or workplace diversity read like another vogue in management style — the new “mindfulness”, say — rather than an urgent moral imperative.

The books adhere to the same, by now familiar, theoretical framework — with leading anti-racists DiAngelo, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Ibram X Kendi liberally and respectfully cited, and microaggressions and privilege given the traditional working over. They both address the reader in a buttonholing, folksy way. “If you feel concerned that you may now be labeled ‘cisgender’ for the first time in your life, hold onto that thought”, say Hassan and Sandhu. “It’s all part of the learning curve”. Hutchinson opens with the words: “Let’s cut the bullshit”. If you resist any of this, in other words, it’s just another sign that you need to do “the work”.

That doesn’t mean, I should say, that the ideas they’re selling are in broad strokes wrong. We can agree that people from historically marginalised minorities continue to be disadvantaged even when they achieve de jure equality. To take one of the most obvious examples, racial disadvantage in the US is generationally baked in in all sorts of ways, and prejudice survives and adapts to legal remedies. This is why it makes sense to talk about “structural racism”.

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There is much evidence — cited generously in both these books — for the notion that not only are black and brown people disproportionately under-represented in agreeable and well-paid jobs, but that more black and brown people in those jobs would make everyone, not just the black and brown people, richer and happier. And that what goes for black and brown people goes, in the broadest sense possible, for other minorities. It’s also true to say, as both these books do, that privileged people – white, cis-male, straight, able-bodied etc – can get a bit defensive when confronted with their complicity in such a system. Hassan and Sandhu address themselves, primarily, to the notional white dude standing in the way of reform; Hutchinson, primarily, to the person of colour seeking to start a Difficult Conversation with that white dude.

They both offer, in styles apt to the genre (Hassan and Sandhu: Venn diagrams, bullet-points, away-day exercises and wince-making tint-panels in which the likes of Richard Branson puff themselves by spouting abstract bromides about how much they value diversity), explanations of the jargon of the territory for bewildered newcomers, and hand-holding step-by-steps on how to help to centre marginal voices, be a good ally, and be the change in the world that you want to see. Most of the practical advice is not unobvious. Hutchinson, that said, has useful points to make about the way in which the task of changing workplace culture can all too easily fall on the unpaid labour of minority employees, and warns all too plausibly of how corporate HR departments are generally more interested in shielding the company from legal and financial risk than treating individual employees fairly.

But there’s little sense in either book that the received ideas or the received vocabulary of antiracism or gender politics needs any interrogation. This is, perhaps in keeping with the turn in identity politics where an individual’s own sense of themselves (in the case of the argument over aspects of queer and trans identity) or of their experience of oppression (in the case of much race discourse) holds an almost theological authority: that unless you have “lived experience” you don’t just have an inferior standing to consider the issues, but no standing at all.

Both books proceed from a position of epistemic confidence. “Is your workplace racist?” asks Hutchinson. “The short and simple answer is nearly certainly yes. The more nuanced answer is still nearly certainly yes”. What can the reader do? They can start, say Hassan and Sandhu, by “learning the language of diversity and inclusion”. A set of terms, rather than a set of ideas. “Set up a debate to debunk the philosophy that women compete more with each-other than their male counterparts”, they advise chirpily at one point. Foregone conclusions, regardless of the subject, isn’t what debates are traditionally about.

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Yet the vocabulary is contested; and the remedies, when it comes down to fine detail, are contested too. Hassan and Sandhu make a distinction, for instance, between “diversity” and “inclusion” (though they seem to muddle the two at other points) and between “equity” and “equality”. They disagree with Hutchinson, a little, on “unconscious bias”. The Judgment-Free Guide finds the notion useful; How To Talk thinks we should stop pussyfooting around and call it racism, so as not to centre white people, their intentions and their feelings in a conversation about the harms done to people of colour. Do you capitalise “Ally”, as Hassan and Sandhu do, but leave “white” lower-case; or do you capitalise “White”, as Hutchinson does, and leave “ally” lower-case? At this point, I should say, my fragility is perhaps causing me to indulge in what Hutchinson identifies as the racist-in-denial tactic of “sealioning”: “focusing on details and small points of argumentation rather than the larger themes of the discussion”.

What I can say, which I don’t think is my fragility talking, is that however we may endorse those larger themes, or humbly submit to be educated by the emotional labour of their authors, this subject’s established orthodoxies can make for wearyingly abstract and repetitive writing. “Power is not binary”, Hutchinson writes, “It’s multifaceted and fluid”. I lost count of the number of times Hutchinson uses the word “leverage”, or Hassan and Sandhu — the front of whose book promises “everything you need to lead positive change” — talk about “journeys” and “driving change” (though, be it said, these are more the failings of bollocksy business books than identity politics books per se). As a side-note, isn’t it careless when writing about diversity and tolerance to quote, as Judgement-Free Guide does, Henry Ford and Chairman Mao — one antisemite, one mass-murderer — with approval? That’s a bit more judgement-free than many of us will be comfortable with.

Both these books default too often to a tissue of generalities and buzzphrases that tend to leave little or no impression on the mind. That isn’t sealioning. You can agree that the elimination of structural racism and all the other structural-isms is an urgent necessity, and still wish that writing on the subject were lively and original and precise; indeed, the more you recognise the urgency the more you’ll want some decent books on the subject. It’s a bit depressing to think that wine made from the vineyards of Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass and James Baldwin has found its way into bottles designed by Tom Peters.

Watching the mainstream accept, or even welcome, such incivility, in defiance of public health directives that had banned even the smallest of public gatherings, was a dizzying experience. After months in which Americans had been cajoled and sometimes ordered into staying isolated and indoors, the script had suddenly changed.

It changed yet again after January 6, 2021, when “riot” no longer meant an eloquent expression of the “language of the unheard”, something to be championed or at least sympathetically understood, but a despicable betrayal of the nation, akin to treason or terrorism. For the establishment, norms around civility seemed to matter only as a weapon against the Right.

For the political scientist Alex Zamalin, however, the problem with America is simply that there is too much civility. A self-defeating desire for moderation and compromise at the expense of radical-Left politics, he argues in Against Civility: The Hidden Racism in America’s Obsession with Civility, is “everywhere you look”.

According to Zamalin, “a consensus narrative” has emerged in American elite political discourse. While he avers that without civility, our “everyday life” would be impossible, he argues that “politics is not everyday life” — it is a distinct “arena of power and struggle”. And our obsession with finding “common ground” with opponents and preserving “nonpolitical” spaces in our society is holding back anti-racist movements.

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Zamalin is certainly right that politics shouldn’t be everyday life. Preserving the political character of politics — that is, making sure that it remains an enclosed arena of competition over power — is as necessary as protecting everything outside that arena from politics’ crushing intensity. We might describe civility, rightly understood, as the formula that lets us keep politics in its proper place — as an intense but limited contest among rivals who see each other as belonging to the same community.

For Zamalin, however, civility is a central theme of American history, and it has always been an arm of white supremacy. In its historical sections, Against Civility offer a wearingly familiar story that pits villainous white racists and misguided black moderates like Booker T. Washington against virtuous radicals like W.E.B. Dubois and Malcom X.

In Zamalin’s telling, the failures of America’s black radicals are inevitably the result of their having adopted “white” standards of civility. When Martin Luther King, Jr. excluded the gay writer James Baldwin from the 1963 March on Washington, the civil rights leader was, Zamalin argues, “applying the same standards of civility found in the white racism he denounced”. Two decades later, when Baldwin, in a public conversation with Audre Lorde at Hampshire College, declared that he couldn’t understand why Lorde, a lesbian feminist, insisted that black women faced struggles distinct from those of black men, he too was replicating the moral failures of whites.

It is hard to understand why prejudice against gay men or resistance to feminism among black intellectuals should require explanation in terms of white people’s moral failings, or what this has to do with civility. Unless, of course, one shares Zamalin’s implicit premise, common across a swath of the American Left, that only white people possess real moral agency. When black people err, it is through a kind of excursion into, or infection by, whiteness. Indeed, white people appear in this conception as the authentic protagonists of history, which they drive forward by their nefarious will to dominate.

The role of non-whites, by contrast, is to offer romantic but ultimately ineffective resistance. Every generation’s valiant struggles for justice are suppressed by open enemies and unreliable allies who insist on upholding civility rather than seeking racial equality. That this narrative might be insulting, given that repeatedly trying the same thing and failing is a sign of political ineptitude, doesn’t seem to compute.

Zamalin appears equally dense about recent history. In his account, the years since Trump’s election in 2016 saw elite moderates punish those who bravely spoke out against racism, such as former NFL player Colin Kaepernick. In fact, Kaepernick’s activism was lionised by the mainstream media — GQ magazine named him “Citizen of the Year” in 2017 — and led Nike to offer the ex-quarterback a multimillion dollar sponsorship and his own branded clothing line. Likewise, while the Black Lives Matter movement might seem to have imposed its slogans throughout many of America’s prestige institutions, Zamalin can only see it as a force at the margins of society, “dismissed” and “treated with disdain” by elites.

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It is certainly true that BLM has not managed to effect meaningful changes to American law enforcement, except insofar as violent protests and riots in the summer of 2020 lead many municipal governments to constrain the policing of sensitive neighbourhoods, causing a spike in crime that has led to hundreds more murders than might otherwise have taken place. But while it has been unable to achieve substantive legislative changes, BLM has been taken into the bosom of American elites, neutralising the movement’s radical potential while draping the country’s institutions in the moral authority of anti-racism.

Zamalin cannot seem to comprehend the double-sided nature of the contemporary politics of anti-racism. As an ethical discourse, it is hegemonic throughout US universities, corporations, offices of government, and even the military. At the same time, it appears totally impotent as a political force. Making sense of this would mean sounding the strange gulf between discourse and power in our era. It would mean, for example, asking how Donald Trump — who, as Zamalin recognises, flamboyantly transgressed norms of civility — managed to violate all the political pieties of the conservative establishment only to fail to achieve any of his goals once in office.

For the nationalist and anti-establishment Right, Trump’s orgy of incivility was the beginning not of its empowerment but of a detour into spectacle, in which the imaginary pleasures of “owning the libs” and annoying the media took precedence over winning actual political victories. The January 6 “insurrection” was the ultimate drama in this theatre of resistance. Clueless conspiracy theorists stormed the Capitol on Trump’s behalf, as if, once freed from the shadowy forces holding him back, he might finally accomplish his stated goals.

No sensible person on the Left should wish such a fate for their own side. Or rather, sensible people on the Left might grieve that their own side has for years been caught up in the same fantasies of uncivil resistance, and the same unmooring from the realities of power, that now characterise the populist Right.

In the 21st century, the dramaturgies of protest against the Iraq War led by groups like Code Pink were as elaborate as they were ineffective. These protests were the template for the Left’s resistance to Trump a decade later — both were noisy, lame, and brought Nancy Pelosi to power as Speaker of the House.

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Incivility of this sort is dangerous precisely because it is impotent. Theatrical gestures like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s appearance at the Met Gala in a “Tax the Rich” dress and Trump’s mockery of journalists share with the BLM riots and January 6 a common perversion of the difference between politics and everyday life. Performative incivility disrupts our normal, non-political lives with attention-seeking dramatics while at the same time draining politics of its specificity and substance.

What we need is not more incivility — more self-aggrandising antinomianism by narcissists posing as radicals — but a painstaking recommitment to a kind of civility that, by keeping politics off the streets, out of schools, and out of our private lives, channels it back into contests over policy.

If we want real change, from the Right or the Left, we need to depoliticise everyday life and repoliticise politics. If we do not, we will remain stuck together in an unbounded arena of shrill, but pointless, symbolic struggle.

Almost six decades later, from Massachusetts to Colorado, Jim Crow is being resurrected in public schools — this time through euphemisms such as “affinity circles”, “affinity dialogue groups” and “community building groups”. Centennial Elementary School in Denver, for instance, advertised a “Families of Color Playground Night” earlier this winter, on a marquee board outside the school. Last week, the Wheeler School in Providence, Rhode Island, hosted a “meet and talk” with actress Karyn Parsons from “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” — exclusively for its “Students of Color affinity group”. “If you are a student of color or multiracial, please join us!” the invitation from a seventh grade teacher read.

Bigotry, meanwhile, is back on the curriculum, thanks partly to a “Black Lives Matter at School” campaign, which last week recommended the book Not My Idea: A Book about Whiteness to children as young as six in Evanston/Skokie School District 65, outside Chicago. “Whiteness is a bad deal”, the book argues; it amounts to signing a “contract” with the devil, who is illustrated with an indelicate pointy tail. Meanwhile, in an English lesson in Fairfax County, Virginia, students played a game of “Privilege Bingo”; even “Military Kid” has been shamed as having “privilege”.

It’s a tragedy that today’s schools are more segregated than mine was. I arrived in the United States in the summer of 1969, a four-year-old who knew not a word of English. Born in Bombay, I was part of the first generation of post-colonial Indians. My parents had survived the “white supremacy” of British rule, and witnessed Mahatma Gandhi’s nonviolent movement, which was an inspiration for the American civil rights movement.

The Civil Rights Act was passed the year before my birth, and I learned the alphabet at Martin Luther King Elementary School in Piscataway, New Jersey. My class photo from 1975 shows 25 diverse, smiling children lined up shoulder-to-shoulder in three rows — organised by height, not skin colour.

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It makes me shudder to think what I would have felt if I had been told, then, to attend a “Families of Color Playground Night”. I happened to be a shy, “brown” girl raised in a Muslim immigrant family. I didn’t understand our classroom “Secret Santa” ritual or Valentine’s Day card exchanges. But I thrived in integration, not segregation.

I learned to read English with the fictional detective Nancy Drew — a white girl — as my best friend. My teachers never told me to check her privilege. Moving to mostly-white Morgantown, West Virginia, I became pen pals with a white friend named Barbara I’d left behind in Piscataway; at my new school, I was blessed with exemplary teachers who happened to be white, without whose efforts I couldn’t have become a reporter for the Wall Street Journal at the age of 23.

The beauty of Martin Luther King Jr’s America was that everyone’s humanity, worth and potential was appreciated, not undermined. Fighting racism used to mean rejecting the notion of a hierarchy of human value. But today the morally twisted teachings of “anti-racism” preach that a new hierarchy of human value, with whiteness at the bottom, is acceptable — and even evolved and “progressive”. Education activists seem intent on pushing the race-shaming, bigotry and segregation of “anti-racism”.

Take the example of Wellesley Public Schools (WPS), 17 miles west of Boston. It is a system with about 4,800 students in seven elementary schools, one middle school and one high school. According to its most recent demographics, it is about 70.6% white, 13.6% Asian, 6.7% multiracial, 5% Hispanic and 4.1% Black. It offers a window into the problem — and the fix: parents standing up with moral courage.

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In September 2019, Charmie Curry, a black former teacher, became Wellesley’s director of “diversity, equity and inclusion”. In her “entry plan”, Curry wrote that she would “hit the ground, learning”. But after George Floyd’s death, it wasn’t “learning” Curry pushed, but activism. In 2020, she released her “Entry Plan Report”, asking, “Who Am I in Anti-Racist Practice?”

At the start of the last school year, the school district’s superintendent David Lussier (who is white) put in place a new procedure, “Responding to Incidents of Bias or Discrimination”. Reports of “bias or discrimination” could, parents were told, lead to disciplinary action. In the age of cancel culture, it was easy to imagine this new policy being misused.

That year, WPS also released a five-year “Equity Strategic Plan”, promising to “amplify the voices” of certain students through “affinity spaces” for those with “shared identities”. On 25 January 2021, Curry emailed the middle school and high school principals about the first “affinity group” meeting on 10 February, for “our Black and Brown students and alumni”. She called it a “Listening Space”.

If such spaces had existed in my schooldays, they would have carved up my diverse yet tightly-knit class. Barbara and I would have been separated.

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But Wellesley is far from unusual. During the 2020 summer of race riots, schools across the country clamoured to virtue signal their message of “social justice”. “Affinity groups” have sprung up everywhere.

At Pierce Middle School in Milton Public Schools, Massachusetts, the “Mosaic Club” meets for “students of color who identify as African American/Black, Latinx/Hispanic American, Native American, Middle Eastern American, Asian/Asian American, or Multiracial”. Across the country, at Pathfinder Elementary School in Seattle Public Schools, students meet in  “Lunchtime Community Building Groups for BIPOC & Multiracial Scholars, K-8”.

And in Indianapolis Public Schools, “affinity groups” have held meetings with this potpourri of names: “Ability Diverse”, “Black/African American”, “LatinX”, “Asian/Pacific Islander”, “Native American/Indigenous”, “Jewish”, “Muslim”, “LGBTQIA+”, “Women’s Network”, “Multi-Racial”, “Multi-Lingual” and “Confronting White Privilege”.

The school district noted that the members of “Confronting White Privilege” picked their own name — presumably knowing how they could do in the oppression Olympics if they didn’t frame their identity with a mea culpa.

In private schools, too, children are segregated. Allen-Stevenson School in New York City hosts meetings of “BOCAS: Boys of Color at Allen-Stevenson” and “WISE: White Identifying Students for Equity”.

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The second “affinity” group meeting at Wellesley revealed the dangers of this new segregation. It took place on 18 March 2021, two days after a gunman killed eight people in three Atlanta spas, most of them Asian women. That day, Curry hosted a “Healing Space for Asian and Asian American students (grade 6-12), faculty/staff, and others in the BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) community who wish to process recent events”.

A Wellesley Middle School teacher asked Curry if white students could participate. Her question answered, the teacher wrote to her students:

“This is a safe space for our Asian/Asian-American and Students of Color, *not* for students who identify only as White. If you identify as White, and need help to process recent events, please know I’m here for you as well as your guidance counselors. If you need to know more about why this is not for White students, please ask me!”

On the morning of the “healing space”, a white fitness and health teacher, asked Curry, “I wanted to check first, is it appropriate for me to go this healing space? I wasn’t sure?” (Her email signature read, ironically: “Be your own color and dance with joy”.) Later that morning, Curry replied and told her, “This time, we want to hold the space for the Asian and Asian American students and faculty/staff”. She wrote: “I hope this makes sense”.

It didn’t make sense. In fact, it is nonsense. And many parents saw through it. One mother wrote to the school in protest, arguing that:

“The email immediately pits one group of kids against another, ascribing guilt by mere identity to an entire population of children and adults who are equally scared by the events in Atlanta. I am concerned that in creating spaces for specific groups of students we are perpetuating the feelings of separation, isolation, and difference that we are trying to overcome”.

She pointed out, in measured tones: “Unfortunately, the healing space provided by the school further divides us at a time when we most need to come together and support one another”.

In response, the school doubled down. One Wellesley teacher circulated an “FAQ” document, written by a colleague. It advised that affinity-group sessions were a “safe space for members of the same identity or community” — where they can “share their experiences without risk of feeling like they will offend someone from another group, and without another group’s voices”.

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The morning after the “healing space”, a mother sent an email to the Wellesley Middle School principal, pointing out the hypocrisy at the heart of anti-racism. “We are all horrified by recent events”, she wrote. “I would hope this would be an opportunity to bring our student community together”.

She continued: “However, the reaction at WPS has been to discriminate against white students. I find this message a little confusing. Are we focusing on inclusion or exclusion? How does separating kids by race teach them anything?”

“We must do better for all of our students”.

The principal responded: “Affinity spaces are a known strategy in education that offer time for marginalized groups to process feelings and concern in productive ways. Our Office of DE&I [Diversity, Equity and Inclusion] for WPS feels this space is important for those who want to attend”.

Then, in the early afternoon of 12 April 2021, the Office of Diversity, Equity & Inclusion sent an email to school district staff, grousing about “hateful messages” it had received. “Sometimes, this work puts us in the crosshairs of those who find this mission to be a threat”.

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Across the country, “diversity” officers and “equity” consultants are spinning a tale that segregation is virtuous. The historically progressive Southern Poverty Law Center, established in 1971 to fight racism, now provides schools with an online “Toolkit” to create “affinity groups”, through lesson plans it calls “Learning for Justice”. It argues that “affinity groups help marginalized students to be seen and heard”. It even shows schools how to “troubleshoot questions”, like the obvious: “Aren’t affinity groups exclusionary?”

But in WPS, the backlash could not be quashed. On 19 October 2021, Parents Defending Education filed a lawsuit against the school district on behalf of Parents A, B, C, D and E and their children, alleging violation of the 1965 Civil Rights Act and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, as well as the First Amendment for its “Bias or Discrimination” hotline, “weaponized by certain students to punish classmates who express unpopular views”.

This resulted in a partial victory. On 9 November 2021, Superintendent Lussier rescinded the original “Responding to Incidents of Bias of Discrimination”. But the school district wouldn’t back down on the “affinity groups”, segregated by race.

This week, however, in a significant victory for justice, lawyers for Parents Defending Education filed a settlement with the school district, which agreed to end its practice of race segregation. On Tuesday night, at a virtual meeting of the school board, Lussier read these four remarkable statements:

• Under existing School Committee policies regarding Nondiscrimination and Student Organizations, membership in and attendance at all student clubs, listening sessions and affinity spaces is open to all.
• The Constitution and federal laws prohibit schools from excluding students from affinity-based group sessions or any other school-sponsored activities on the basis of their race.
• No students will be excluded from affinity-based group sessions or any school-sponsored activities on the basis of race.
• When any affinity-based group session is held, all grade-eligible students are welcome to attend — regardless of their race — and notice of the event will be publicized so that all students are aware of the event.

Any announcement of an “affinity-based” group will also include this disclaimer: “This event is open to all students regardless of race, color, sex, gender identity, religion, national origin, or sexual orientation”.

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It’s strange to think that in 2022, a declaration that disallows racial segregation is a victory not against “white supremacy” but against the bigotry of “anti-racism”. Like most people, I am appalled by actual racism — but I am also appalled by the efforts of doctrinaire progressives to impose their divisive worldview on children. As the case of WPS illustrates, a new Jim Crow is being promoted, often by stealth, by a small cadre of illiberal activists — woke school boards, “diversity” officers and compliant teachers. They often steamroll a community with their bad ideas, which they try to conceal with enthusiasm: “If you need to know more about why this is not for White students, please ask me!”

Their doctrine is abundantly clear. Whites — and only whites — are the oppressors and must acknowledge their “privilege”, and admit their shame. Blacks and “people of color”, meanwhile, are portrayed as perpetual victims, people unable hold their own against white people, hence the need for “affinity spaces”.

Could anything be more racist? This philosophy is blatantly cultish, peddling the idea of original sin, but without the forgiveness. No wonder clear-thinking parents of all races rebel against such transparent nonsense. Teaching children that there is a hierarchy of human value is as illiberal — and regressive — today as it was when King called it a “tragedy”.

In the UK, Hicks was acclaimed as the stand-up who might define the Nineties but back in the US he felt stuck. “Today he would be a mad prophet of the airwaves,” comedy manager Jimmy Miller says in Cynthia True’s Hicks biography American Scream. “He’d be on HBO, interviewing people, saying whatever’s on his mind. But back then the comedy business just hadn’t matured. They didn’t know what to do with him.” Miller said that in 2002. Twenty years on, Hicks, who died of cancer in 1994, wouldn’t need an HBO deal; he would be hosting a podcast.

Stand-ups played a foundational role in the podcast industry. In 2009, just as the format was becoming mainstream, Marc Maron launched the interview show WTF and Joe Rogan recorded the first episode of what became The Joe Rogan Experience. Two early podcast networks, Earwolf and Nerdist, were established by comedians; Nerdist’s Chris Hardwick compared podcasting to the comedy LP boom of the Sixties.

The symbiosis of comedy and podcasting isn’t hard to understand. Stand-ups love to hear themselves talk and a rambling chat is a much more congenial vehicle than the intense, time-consuming labour of writing and honing a tight one hour of killer material. With a successful podcast, a comedian can circumvent the usual gatekeepers and build a cultishly loyal fanbase without even having to leave the house or — and this is crucial — worry about being funny. What do you call a comedian who doesn’t make people laugh? A podcaster. Ba dum tss.

While old-fashioned one-liners and wry observations are doing just fine, many of the innovations in comedy are in the realm I call post-funny. Some of the most acclaimed comedian-fronted projects of recent years — including Master of None, Feel Good and Bo Burnham: Inside — see laughter as a secondary concern. The Closer, Dave Chappelle’s final Netflix special, is a prickly monologue about cancel culture and why he’s not actually transphobic, with occasional jokes. Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette was a Netflix sensation in 2018 precisely because Gadsby deconstructed her duty to make people laugh: “I must quit comedy. Because the only way I can tell my truth and put tension in the room is with anger.”

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Comedians increasingly want to be philosophers. (No philosophers want to be comedians, except perhaps Slavoj Žižek.) This can make them rather pompous. Over the weekend, Whitney Cummings tweeted: “Comedians did not sign up to be your hero. It’s our job to be irreverent and dangerous, to question authority and take you through a spooky mental haunted house so you can arrive at your own conclusions.” To which Marc Maron replied: “Maybe add ‘to be funny’ to the list.”

The first great philosopher-comic was Lenny Bruce. In Comedy at the Edge, Richard Zoglin describes the evolution of stand-up comedy between the Forties and the Seventies as “a long march from joke-telling to truth-telling”, with Lenny Bruce as its gung-ho general. Starting in 1953, he was not alone in reinventing comedy but he established a new template for the stand-up: raw, authentic, discomfitingly honest, ferociously intolerant of hypocrisy and cant and sometimes messy. Comedians in that mould couldn’t just make people laugh; they had to offer a point of view. “With Bruce a smile is not an end in itself, it is invariably a means,” wrote the critic Kenneth Tynan.

As Kliph Nesteroff explains in The Comedians, some critics didn’t consider what Bruce was doing to be comedy at all. Time complained that he “merely shouts angrily and tastelessly at the world”, while the Los Angeles Times deplored his “soaring, if uncertain, egotism rooted in the eroded soil of unlettered knowledge, snippets of cliché liberalism, borrowed erudition, and a conviction he has a Messianic message”. Bruce, who died of a drug overdose in 1966, claimed for comedians the radical freedom not to be funny all the time.

At that time, only three kinds of people enjoyed the privilege of speaking their minds to an audience for an hour: politicians, preachers and comedians. In fact, the priest delivering Bruce’s eulogy said “he was in a sense an evangelist, on a street corner”. After Bruce’s death, the baton of comedian as social critic passed to the likes of Richard Pryor (“the Picasso of our profession,” according to Jerry Seinfeld) and George Carlin, whose aphorisms now circulate, like Orwell’s or Gandhi’s, in the form of earnest Twitter memes.

These pioneers cast a long shadow. A 2017 Rolling Stone list of the best stand-ups of all time was topped by Pryor, Carlin and Bruce, with others in the same tradition — Louis CK, Chris Rock, Dave Chappelle — close behind. At number 13 was Bill Hicks. “To me, the comic is the guy who says ‘Wait a minute’ as the consensus forms,” Hicks told the New Yorker in 1993. “He’s the antithesis of the mob mentality.”

The politics of this brand of comedy are, more often than not, libertarian. Comics want the freedom to say whatever they like as long as it’s funny so have often ended up on the frontlines of the battle for free speech. Bruce was twice tried on obscenity charges, while Carlin was arrested for disturbing the peace when he performed his celebrated routine ‘Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television’ in 1972. When an English vicar complained of blasphemy in Bill Hicks’s 1992 show Revelations, he replied: “This is about freedom and freedom of speech and words can’t hurt you.”

The culture has changed somewhat since then. In comedy, at least, there are now more taboos on the Left than on the Right and the spectre of cancel culture is to someone like Chappelle what the NYPD was to Lenny Bruce, minus the court cases. In The Closer, Chappelle expresses the comedian’s licence to say anything in a less noble form than Hicks: “Comedians have a responsibility to speak recklessly. Sometimes the funniest thing to say is mean. Remember, I’m not saying it to be mean: I’m saying it because it’s funny.”

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This licence is immensely powerful. Take Jimmy Carr’s Roma Holocaust joke, for example. In the context of his recent Netflix special, it’s still, I think, grotesquely misjudged — but Carr goes on to talk about the forgotten victims of the Nazis and why he made the joke. It clearly didn’t shock the audience in the room, nor the huge number of people who watched the special during its first six weeks. It only became scandalous when a 40-second clip went viral on TikTok and Twitter: the land of no context.

Even in a stand-up environment, though, Chappelle’s disclaimer isn’t enough. I don’t buy the popular binary division between comedy that “punches up” (good) and the kind that “punches down” (bad). Comedy doesn’t cleave so neatly, and nor does society. But I’m equally unconvinced by the “just jokes” defence.

For one thing, it’s not the case that anything goes. No major comedian currently delivers the kind of racist jokes that were commonplace in the Seventies, however deftly constructed they might be. (Carr celebrates Black Lives Matter in his Netflix show before getting laughs out of the Roma.) For another, it’s inconsistently applied. Ricky Gervais has arguably replaced Richard Dawkins as Britain’s most famous atheist and on that issue he wants to be taken seriously. Increasingly, comedians want to say whatever they like even when they’re not being funny.

You can see this double standard at work in Jon Stewart’s famous appearance on CNN’s Crossfire in 2004. I agreed with Stewart that Crossfire was a toxic travesty of debate but notice how he positioned himself. When Crossfire co-host Tucker Carlson criticised him for asking politicians soft questions, Stewart replied that he’s on Comedy Central: “The show that leads into me is puppets making crank phone calls.” But when Carlson complained, “I thought you were going to be funny, come on, be funny,” Stewart said, “No, I’m not going to be your monkey.” Depending on the moment, he is Schrödinger’s comedian: just a funnyman but also not just a funnyman.

Rogan uses this trick, too. He would not be interviewing politicians, authors and epidemiologists if he were only about the laughs, but he keeps his comedian’s licence in his back pocket in case of emergency. Last April, Dr Anthony Fauci criticised him for advising young, healthy people not to get vaccinated. In his self-deprecating response, Rogan said: “I’m not a doctor, I’m a fucking moron and I’m a cage fighting commentator who’s a dirty stand-up comedian who just told you I’m drunk most of the time and I do testosterone and I smoke a lot of weed. I’m not a respected source of information, even for me.”

This is very convenient. Rogan is half a conspiracy theorist: he has the curiosity but not the commitment. To his credit, he sometimes admits to being wrong. But he has that particular blend of scepticism (towards mainstream expertise) and credulity (towards anybody challenging it), so he becomes a conduit for false information, even when he’s not explicitly endorsing it. In the case of the present Spotify controversy, whether Rogan himself is an anti-vaxxer (he claims he isn’t) is a moot point if he is sympathetically conversing with vaccine sceptics to an audience of millions.

Russell Brand, too, has been described as “a powerful voice for anti-vaxxers”. He’s been on a journey. In 2013, Brand abruptly transformed himself from verbose dandy lothario into revolutionary seer in a Newsnight interview with Jeremy Paxman in which he urged people not to vote. His ensuing book, Revolution, was a peculiar mix of rehab memoir, New Age mysticism and solid policy proposals from Left-wing thinkers such as David Graeber and Thomas Piketty, liberally salted with self-deprecation: “I’m not Noam Chomsky, you’ve probably noticed; I’m happy to be Norman Wisdom.”

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During the pandemic, Brand’s obsession with political alienation and challenging official narratives has led him a long way from Piketty. The breathlessly clickbaity titles of his YouTube videos are often indistinguishable from those of the conservative guests he gently interviews on a regular basis: “Why The Left Can’t Handle Donald Trump”, “Vaccine Gold Rush: Do You Trust Gates?”, “They’re Eliminating FREE THOUGHT!! Billionaires’ Plan To CONTROL The Internet”, the latter bearing the hashtag #GeorgeSoros.

Brand claims that he is “breaking down the news, providing you with information you won’t get in mainstream media”. Is it true? It doesn’t matter. “What do I know?” he says in a recent video defending Rogan. “What could I claim to know? I’ve never been to university or higher education of any kind, except for showing-off school.” To his fans, of course, this makes him all the more reliable: one of them, not one of Them. That video is called “The Truth”.

Comedians should be free to switch lanes, but when Al Franken runs for the US Senate, or David Baddiel writes Jews Don’t Count, they aren’t doing so as comedians and they are making a choice. Comedians who express political opinions through the discipline of stand-up (a discipline which inevitably tests and sharpens those opinions) are also making a choice. Just as a musician has more freedom in a protest song than in an essay, or a film-maker more liberty in a drama based on a true story than in a documentary, the criteria are relatively clear. Rogan and Brand raise an interesting question: does the privilege of comedy apply even when you’re not doing comedy?

I do wonder if Hicks, with his nascent taste for conspiracy theories and spiritual self-discovery, would have wound up in a similar role. 70 years after Lenny Bruce’s comedy revolution, Rogan and Brand represent a very modern, very online mutation which is both post-funny and post-truth-telling. Rather than establishing a point of view and crafting it into a routine, they offer a muddy, non-committal version of “anything goes” in which misinformation is simply another interesting idea for the open-minded to consider and pushback is establishment intolerance of free speech.

By hedging their bets, they have achieved a freedom that Carlin and Hicks could only have dreamt of. If you say they should clarify their own positions, or take responsibility for the opinions they promote, well, they say, they’re comedians, not intellectuals. Why so serious?

One owns a popular restaurant; the front door was destroyed, and the cash register robbed. The other was renting a car, the entire rear window of which was smashed to bits and the contents swiped. So common is this sort of looting and thievery that when he returned the rental car, he noticed that the car company’s lot was full of vehicles with broken windows.

Since November, throughout California, thousands of dollars have been stolen from stores including Apple, CVS, Louis Vuitton, and Burberry. In San Jose, over $40,000-worth of inventory was stolen from a Lululemon before the robbers escaped in getaway car. In Carmel-by-the-Sea last week, thieves wielding sledgehammers broke into a high-end jewellery store, smashing, grabbing and then fleeing. Right before Thanksgiving, 80 individuals rushed a Nordstrom in the Bay Area to participate in what authorities called “organised theft”.

Cannabis dispensaries are another favourite target. In Oakland, the Police Chief LeRonne L. Armstrong explained that most of these attacks turn violent: “more than 175 shots were fired” during cannabis robberies in Oakland last month alone. Even a physical therapy office in Beverly Hills was robbed this month by armed, masked burglars who entered the office and stole the doctor’s Rolex. The list of robberies is not limited to stores or businesses.

Many of the victims are ordinary individuals, walking down the street in broad daylight. As Jamie McBride, the head of the union representing LAPD officers, told tourists last week: “We can’t guarantee your safety. It is really, really out of control. I said it to people before. It’s like that movie Purge, but instead of 24 hours to commit your crime, these people have 365 days to commit whatever they want.”

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Once upon a time, we would have been shocked by this level of crime. Today, citizens fatalistically adapt their behaviours. I know countless women who no longer walk alone after dark in California’s cities. Everyone knows to hide anything they leave in their cars. Those who can afford it are installing gates and building tall fences around their homes. The wealthy are hiring personal security and no longer relying on police for protection. I’ve seen this all before — in Nairobi as well as other places in Africa, Latin America, the Middle East and India.

Stores are boarding up their windows and closing earlier. They are hiring security staff and implementing new safety processes. A Safeway in San Francisco has installed gates that “let customers easily enter the store but swing quickly shut behind them, preventing would-be thieves from dashing out with shopping carts full of stolen items”. Rental car companies, like the one my friend used, are hiring glass repairmen to work full-time fixing the overwhelming number of broken windows.

As for those who cannot or will not adapt, they are faced with one option: to leave their city and often the state. High taxes are not the only reason so many big companies have pulled out of California over the past two years.

But how did we arrive at a point where people either have to adapt to the crime surrounding them or to flee; where the police union’s spokesperson has to warn the public that they are no longer in control?

The answer lies in an abundance of affluence. Affluence has allowed us to overcome many constraints in a way past generations could never have imagined. For long periods, a majority of people in the West have not had to worry about what tomorrow might bring. Questions over where future food, water and shelter will come from are no longer bother the majority of Americans. We’ve got apps on our phone that tell us what the weather will be not only tomorrow, but ten days hence; apps that allow us to buy meals, drinks, cars and even apartments with only a click or two; apps that even think for us.

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But with that increased quality of life, we’ve become lazy. We’ve stopped paying attention. We’ve come to take for granted the institutions that hold up our affluent society. We have assumed that they would continue functioning without our personal involvement and investment. It seems that when a society is as wealthy as ours and as insulated from day-to-day threats, the vigilance to maintain its institutions wilts.

What makes this affluence particularly damaging is the fact that the rich are the furthest removed from the consequences of their negligence. In California, those with enormous wealth are often also the loudest advocates for leniency towards criminals. Those individuals, who have the least contact with crime, are frequently the most enthusiastic proponents of reforms that reduce the safety of the average American. Democratic donors give their money to candidates who support defunding the police. They campaign against stop-and-search, three strikes, and “broken window” policies. They argue for lighter sentences or even the decriminalisation of certain crimes — shoplifting, for example, has been all but legalised in San Francisco.

Wealthy liberals for some reason feel more compassion for those committing crimes than for their victims. They believe in a form of “progress” that ignores human nature and social reality. As Mary Harrington recently wrote: “Team Empathy… tends to skew wealthy: it’s easier to believe people are naturally good if you’ve led a sheltered life.”

Meanwhile, some of the politicians they support, such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, even deny problems such as smash-and-grab exist. Others urge the public not to be distracted by rising crime, but to follow the “arc of history” towards the utopia of social justice, diversity, equity, inclusion and anti-racism. Melina Andullah, founder of Black Lives Matter LA, recently said of those concerned about the rising tide of crime: “They’re trying to move us backward. We don’t want to move backward; we want to move forward.”

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On December 1, Jacqueline Avant, the wife of Clarence Avant and mother-in-law of Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos, was shot and killed in her home in Beverly Hills. The suspect, Aariel Maynor, was attempting to rob her home when he shot her. He also attempted to kill her security guard.

On hearing the news, Abdullah’s response was to condemn it as “appalling”, yet also called on officials not to use it as an excuse to introduce tougher measures on crime. Elsewhere, Oprah Winfrey mourned the loss of her friend with a social media post that ended with the comment: “The world is upside down. And deeply in need of some love today.”

Love, as Oprah imagines it, is an ideal. Who knows? Perhaps, one day, we will achieve universal love. But, in the absence of any meaningful proposals, to hold it up as the solution to criminal activity is pure decadence.

Far more important is the need to keep in place the infrastructure of policing, investigating, trying and punishing that has evolved in the Western world — a system that seeks to strike a judicious balance between the safety of society and the rights of any accused individual. Tweak that system by all means. No one claims it is perfect, and much has been achieved in recent years by the movement for criminal justice reform.

But don’t delude yourself with talk of “love” or proposals to defund the police. For the perpetrators, the best kind of love is tough love. For the victims, whether they’re affluent or not, the best kind of love is being protected. We don’t need “social justice”, just plain justice.