Nevertheless, Bolsheviks and woke militants do have some things in common. In late nineteenth century Russia, under the influence of their progressive parents, a generation of educated young people was convinced of the illegitimacy of the Tsarist regime. Dostoevsky’s Demons (1871) is a vivid chronicle of the tragic and farcical process by which progressive liberals discredited traditional institutions and unleashed a wave of revolutionary terror. Not only Tsarism but any form of government came to be seen as repressive. As one of Dostoevsky’s characters put it, “I got entangled in my data…Starting from unlimited freedom, I conclude with unlimited despotism.”

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Liberalism: the other God that failed

By John Gray

The woke generation have learned a similar lesson from their elders, this time about the failings of American democracy. Rejecting old-fashioned liberal values as complicit in oppression and essentially fraudulent, they extend their power not by persuasion but by socially marginalising and economically ruining their critics. As in the show trials orchestrated by Lenin’s disciple Stalin and Mao’s “struggle sessions”, woke activists demand public confession and repentance from their victims. Like the communist elites, woke insurgents aim to enforce a single worldview by the pedagogic use of fear. The rejection of liberal freedoms concludes with the tyranny of the righteous mob.

Yet the impulses that animate the woke uprising are different from those that energised Lenin or even Mao. For the Bolshevik leader — an authentic disciple of the Jacobin Enlightenment, or so he always insisted — violence was a tool, not an end in itself. In woke movements such as Antifa, on the other hand, violence seems to be mainly therapeutic in its role.

One may abhor the type of society Lenin aimed to construct as much as the methods he adopted to achieve it, as I do myself. Tens of millions were enslaved in forced labour camps, executed or starved to death in pursuit of a repellent fantasy. Even so, Lenin attempted to fashion a future that in his view was an improvement on the past.

Woke activists, in contrast, have no vision of the future. In Leninist terms they are infantile leftists, acting out a revolutionary performance with no strategy or plan for what they would do in power. Yet their difference from Lenin goes deeper. Rather than aiming for a better future, woke militants seek a cathartic present. Cleansing themselves and others of sin is their goal. Amidst vast inequalities of power and wealth, the woke generation bask in the eternal sunshine of their spotless virtue.

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Bristol's woke hypocrisy

By James Bloodworth

The key scenes in the woke uprising that followed the killing of George Floyd are rituals of purification in which public officials have washed the feet of insurgents, and acts of iconoclasm in which public monuments have been destroyed or defaced. These are symbolic actions aiming to sever the present from the past, not policies designed to fashion a different future.

The only concrete measure proposed has been to defund and disband the police. As some of the insurrectionaries’ placards have proclaimed, there will be no more police violence when there are no more police. Once repressive institutions have been methodically dismantled, a peaceful anarchy will prevail. As could have been foreseen by anyone with a smattering of history, outbreaks of mass looting in Chicago and other cities have not borne out this confidence.

New, ‘transformative’ systems of law enforcement will confront problems not unlike those faced by the police forces that have been dissolved.  ‘Autonomous zones’ of the kind that have been announced in Seattle, Portland and Minneapolis will need to resolve disputes and enforce their decisions. Local warlords and prophets — some of them no doubt armed — will become arbiters of public safety. When they overreach themselves and fail to protect even minimal levels of security, vigilantes and organised crime will fill the void. Where this proves costly or unstable, federal government may step in and impose order. In other cases, cities may be abandoned to become zones of anarchy.

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The case for Tory anarchism

By Aris Roussinos

The history of the medieval millenarians illustrates this process. They were antinomians, heretical believers who anathematised the Church and considered themselves released by divine grace from any moral restraints. While asserting their superior virtue, their signature practice was self-flagellation. Forgiveness — whether of themselves other others — was notably absent.

As Norman Cohn writes in his seminal study The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages (1957), “in Germany and southern Europe alike flagellant groups continued to exist for more than two centuries.” Probably originating in Italy in the mid-thirteenth century, the flagellant movement reached a peak in Germany in 1348-9 when it was inflamed by the Black Death. There, as in other parts of Europe, the flagellants turned on sections of the population they accused of conjuring up the pestilence, particularly Jews, many of whose communities were wiped out.

Two hundred years later, the Anabaptist prophet Jan Bockelson seized control of the city of Munster, turning it briefly into a communist theocracy in which forcible baptisms and public executions became daily spectacles. Bockelson’s rule ended when, after a long siege, the city fell to armies acting for the Church. He was tortured to death in the town square.

For Cohn, the study of medieval millenarians was an essential part of understanding modern totalitarianism. It is also useful in understanding the woke movement. Medieval flagellants and woke militants combine a sense of their own moral infallibility with a passion for masochistic self-abasement. Medieval millenarians believed the world would be remade by God when Jesus returned after a millennium of injustice (millenarians are also known as chiliasts, chiliad being a thousand years), while the woke faithful believe divine intervention is no longer necessary: their own virtue will be sufficient. In both cases, nothing needs to be done to bring about a new world apart from destroying the old one.

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The myth of the anti-science Middle Ages

By James Hannam

There are some differences between the two movements. Mediaeval millenarians attracted much of their support from illiterate peasants and poor urban workers. The woke movement, on the other hand, is mostly composed of the offspring of middle class families schooled in institutions of higher learning. Like their medieval predecessors, woke activists believe themselves to be emancipated from established values. But, possibly uniquely in history, their antinomian rebellion emanates from an antinomian establishment.

The rise of the woke movement has not occurred as a result of a takeover of American institutions by a dictatorial government. Key American institutions have overthrown themselves, while Trump’s attempts to assert dictatorial power have so far been ineffectual. It may be that the scenes of anarchy that are part of the uprising will work in Trump’s favour in November. At least a third of the American population is opposed to woke values, a number that could increase substantially the more the uprising involves public disorder. Equally, Biden may prevail by promising a more peaceful future and find himself compelled to rein in the insurgency in order to preserve some degree of public order. Either way America will remain more or less ungovernable.

The foundational crimes of the American regime — black slavery and the seizure of indigenous groups’ lands that followed the War of Independence—are real enough. But so, in its continuing formative influence, is the mythology from which America was born. A Lockean fusion of Protestant religiosity with an Enlightenment faith in reason was the founding American religion.

Throughout most of American history Lockean liberalism has reflected the realities of power. Locke himself helped draft constitutions for Carolina that legitimated slavery, and argued that indigenous peoples could be suppressed on the ground that they had not cleared the wilderness and made their land productive. On occasion — as in the Rooseveltian settlement that followed the Second World War and made possible the civil rights movement in the Fifties and Sixties — America’s divisions were partly transcended. For the most part a redemptive myth has gone hand in hand with repression. The record suggests this will continue. Icons will be smashed and antinomian passions ventilated, while social and racial antagonisms remain brutal and intractable.

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The disturbing history of statue-smashing

By Sean Thomas

More than the faux-Marxian musings of postmodern thinkers, it is the singular American faith in national redemption that drives the woke insurgency. The self-imposed inquisitorial regime in universities and newspapers — where editors and journalists, professors and students are encouraged to sniff out and report heresy so it can be exposed and exorcised — smacks of Salem more than Leningrad. Saturated with Christian theology, Locke’s Enlightenment liberalism is reverting to a more primordial version of the founding faith. America is changing, radically and irreversibly, but it is also staying the same.

America’s ungovernability is morphing into a distinctive pattern of governance, with power shifting to institutions that are dismantling their traditional structures. Universities have become seminaries of woke religion, while newspapers are turning into sermonising agitprop sheets. At the same time mass unemployment and accelerating automation are stripping workers of what remained of the bargaining power they exercised before the neoliberal era.

The system that seems to be emerging is a high-tech variation on feudalism, with wealth creation concentrated around new industries and most of the population disenfranchised and dispossessed. While this metamorphosis gathers speed, the American media are manufacturing fictional narratives of national redemption.

America is on the way to becoming a semi-failed state. Its soft power has collapsed, probably irrecoverably. Yet it does not follow that it will cease to be a globally powerful actor. In a competition with totalitarian China, an American regime that mixes authoritarian control with zones of anarchy may have a comparative advantage. Classical totalitarianism is as obsolete as classical liberalism, and American mercantilism may be more resilient and innovative than Chinese state capitalism. A ruling elite shaped by figures like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk may prove more capable of deploying new technologies than a communist emperor who has put China into a deep freeze. One of the most surreal moments during the insurrection occurred when Musk’s SpaceX, almost unnoticed, launched astronauts into space.

As the woke movement spills over into parts of Europe and the UK, it should be clear that this is no passing storm. Here, as in the US, woke militants have few, if any, definite policies. What they want is simply the end of the old order. The paroxysm we are witnessing may be remembered as a defining moment in the decline of the liberal west. Perhaps it is time to consider how to strengthen the enclaves of free thought and expression that still remain, so they have a chance of surviving in the blank and pitiless world that is being born.

It started with film. I was watching Armando Iannucci’s The Death of Stalin, which portrays the last hours of the dictator’s life and the scrabble for power afterward in bleakly hilarious fashion, and then Bridge of Spies, the Tom Hanks espionage vehicle, and I realised: I know embarrassingly little about the Cold War.

It’s not that I didn’t know anything. I lived through about a decade of it, for a start. But I mainly knew the big events, and mainly either as little more than names, or as set-pieces somewhat devoid of context: the Cuban missile crisis, the Berlin airlift. I didn’t have a good grasp of the sweep of it, how all the pieces fitted together.

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Does liberalism need global conflict in order to thrive?

By Peter Franklin

Someone recommended to me The Cold War by John Lewis Gaddis, a much-respected historian of the period. It’s not a long book – fewer than 300 pages, not counting the references and index, which isn’t much when you’re cramming in the better part of a century of complex geopolitical history. But it covers that ground brilliantly. It doesn’t travel in strict chronological order, but breaks the narrative up into various themes that Gaddis considers relevant, such as “Command vs Spontaneity”, on the differences between the two ideologies that faced each other, or “Actors”, on the individual men and women (Reagan, Gorbachev, Thatcher, Walesa, John Paul II) who “widened the range” of historical possibilities and helped bring the conflict to an end. It’s a brilliant, quick overview of a vital part of history.

While it was fascinating, though, it only really went back to 1917, and, when in passing it described Lenin’s accession to power as a “coup d’etat” rather than a popular movement, it occurred to me that I didn’t know much about the Russian Revolution either. So I looked on Amazon, which recommended Orlando Figes’s A People’s Tragedy. That was a very, very different book – 900 pages, and rather than skimming over decades in a few pages, it might, for example, spend a similar number of pages examining serfs’ farming techniques in a particular village a few miles outside Moscow in 1888. It was, it should be admitted, a fair old slog, and I kept getting bogged down and wandering off to re-read old Iain M Banks books. But I know an awful lot more about the Russian Revolution than I used to. If you’re in the market for a properly in-depth discussion, it’s worthwhile.

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Today's voguish communists should remember Budapest

By James Bloodworth

A similar journey happened to me with the English reformation. I started by reading Dissolution, book one of CJ Sansom’s Shardlake series, about a 16th-century lawyer whom Thomas Cromwell asks to solve a murder. Then I read book two, and then books three to six. They’re gripping and evocative, if a little silly, and I was hooked. Having done that, on the recommendation of a friend I read An Instance of the Fingerpost, by Iain Pears, set in the aftermath of the English Civil War, which similarly revolves around politics and murder, but is a much cleverer and more moving work.

But, once again, I realised: I don’t know enough about the English reformation. In fact, I don’t know enough about British history in general. I’ve spent a lot of my life reading about science, but very little about history. So I embarked on Simon Schama’s splendid A History of Britain (volume 1), which takes us from Stone Age settlements to the last days of the reign of Queen Elizabeth the First (spoiler: she dies at the end).

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Understanding the 'gilets jaunes'

By John Lichfield

I said at the beginning that I found these books oddly heartening. And I did. Because although we think we’re divided as a society now, with Brexit and the culture war, at least we’re not as divided as Tudor England, when the Protestant/Catholic divide nearly drove us to civil war on several occasions (and arguably did, depending on whether you count the Pilgrimage of Grace and the other rebellions against the crown as “civil wars”). And we don’t have the tsarist Third Section secret police, or the Soviet Cheka, or William Cecil’s network of informers, listening to whispers from neighbours about whether we’ve ever spoken ill of the Tsar or Comrade Stalin or Queen Bess. And even though we think we live in a dangerous time, we no longer have two impossibly powerful states staring at each other through the radar screens of nuclear missiles, fingers on the buttons.

Maybe this is naive. I’m a naturally optimistic person; maybe someone else, of a more pessimistic – or as they would see it, realistic – disposition, would read the same books and think “this shows us how easy it is to go from this world of ease and peace to darkness and violence”. The question, perhaps, is whether we should assume that the (relatively) peaceful time we live in is now the norm, and we have left that darkness in our past, or whether it is a thin veneer that we have built over a pit of despair and that could be stripped away at any moment.

But for me, at least, it felt like a reminder. Things aren’t perfect now. But human progress is real, and we have made the world a lot better than it was 50, or 100, or 500 years ago.