This month marks the 50th anniversary of the essay that observed the moment when all of this began: Tom Wolfe’s August 1976 cover story for New York, published under a headline that lodged itself permanently in the language: “The ‘Me’ Decade and the Third Great Awakening.” It was Wolfe at his most gleeful and profanely merciless, a 10,000-word safari through Human Potential Movement talks, encounter groups, Aquarian communes, and the new therapeutic religions, which pointed toward a single insight. Americans had discovered a subject more absorbing than God, country, or class: themselves. The great national project of the age was self-actualization. “Let’s talk about Me,” Wolfe wrote, and he meant it as the era’s Lord’s Prayer.      

Fifty years later, the Me Decade is best understood as more than just a diagnosis for the 1970s, that itchy, sweaty waiting room wedged between the revolutionary ’60s and the acquisitive ’80s. The essay now feels like a Rosetta Stone for understanding the shift to permanent navel-gazing that followed the collapse of the postwar order. The ’60s promised to remake the world, and when the world declined to be remade, the great “we” of the New Left splintered into 1,000 private quests for meaning. In the mid-2020s, after the hyperpolitics and populist moments of the late 2010s and early 2020s burned out, Wolfe’s Third Great Awakening has returned in the form of self-care and therapeutic identity on the Left; and looksmaxxing, longevity, and personal sovereignty on the Right.

Rereading the essay now, it’s clear that Wolfe, the thin white duke of New Journalism, wasn’t simply mocking the narcissists. Across his books like The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, the author, who died in 2018, had watched the New Left and the counterculture at close range and seen the dream of political revolution giving way to the search for private revelation. By the bicentennial of the United States, he was performing what he called a “social autopsy” on the ’70s. Wrote Wolfe: “The new alchemical dream is: changing one’s personality — remaking, remodeling, elevating, and polishing one’s very self … and observing, studying, and doting on it. (Me!).” 

Wolfe’s deeper claim was that this was something genuinely new under the sun. For most of human history, he argued, ordinary people had no self to speak of — not in the way we mean it. They understood themselves less as sovereign individuals than as a link in what he called the “great biological stream,” living not only their own lives, but those of their ancestors, their children, their neighbors. The self was a vehicle, not a destination. What changed, he believed, was money.

America’s postwar bargain between capital and labor had handed the working and middle classes — unevenly, and with enormous racial exclusions, but on a mass scale — more leisure, privacy, mobility, and bodily freedom than their grandparents could have dreamed of. The great question posed by midcentury American abundance was: now that the masses have security, leisure, and disposable income, what would they do with it? 

The hope, Jefferson’s hope and the labor movement’s hope and the hope of every civics teacher who ever lived, was that they would use it to become enlightened citizens. Some did, perhaps, but the rest — Wolfe said — bought ranch houses, ever-larger televisions, diet books, and the right to be left alone. “Once the dreary little bastards started getting money in the 1940s,” he wrote, “they did an astonishing thing, they took their money and ran … they discovered and started doting on Me.”

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My father went to war with a demon bird

By Ryan Zickgraf

Wolfe called this the Third Great Awakening because the self-serious seminars and encounter groups and Diet Coke Buddhisms had the structure of religion but had inverted its ancient formula. Where the old faiths began with self-abasement before something larger — God, the congregation, children, the dead — the new religion began, in his phrase, “with the most delicious look inward; with considerable narcissism, in short.” The sacred object was the self. You did not join to submit but to be affirmed or, as the kids say now, to be seen. It was the miserable little Protestant sinner reborn as buried treasure.

Denominations appeared across the ideological spectrum. On the Left, the energies of the ’60s diffused into the human-potential movement, mass-market psychology, communes, feminism, gay liberation, racial identity, and a boutique marketplace of occult and imported spiritualities. Among conservative Americans came charismatic Christianity, born-again politics, and the Jesus People, movements that spoke the language of salvation but placed enormous weight on personal testimony, personal crisis, and personal rebirth. For yuppies and upper-middle-class strivers — on both the Left and the Right — came the cult of the body: dieting, jogging, aerobics. These groups often hated one another, but all shared the belief that the inherited self was inadequate and the chosen self might be glorious.

By the end of the decade, Wolfe wasn’t alone in sensing that something had cracked in America. In mid-1979, Jimmy Carter delivered what history lazily remembers as the “malaise” speech, although the 39th president never used the word. Officially an address on energy, it became a diagnosis of a country losing its appetite for sacrifice, common purpose, and the future. That same year, the heterodox historian and social critic Christopher Lasch published The Culture of Narcissism, which offered a darker, Freudian analysis of the Me Decade. 

Lasch’s narcissist wasn’t simply vain, because vanity is almost too healthy a word for the creature he described. Lasch’s American, rather, was psychically dependent on recognition, terrified of aging, suspicious of the future, estranged from the past, and unable to locate himself inside any stable order beyond therapeutic self-preservation. Carter, Lasch, and Wolfe differed enormously, but all three understood that the old postwar world was giving way to a society in which the individual self would become the central arena of politics, religion, consumption, health, and meaning (as it happens, Carter staffers hosted Lasch at the White House to discuss his runaway best-seller; to have been a fly on the wall!).

What none of them could have known was how durable — and how renewable — that hyperindividualism would become. The obvious objection is that the ’70s ended, and the ’80s, ’90s and everything since have looked rather different. The hippies got haircuts and jobs. Reagan arrived to explain that the void in your private life was actually a tax problem, and “Morning in America” turned a spiritual crisis back into a consumer proposition. The yuppies swapped mantras for corporate mergers. Conservatives found purpose in the flag after 9/11; liberals found purpose in Obama. The inward turn looks, from a distance, like one phase among several.

But ultimately, what the last 50 years have proved is that freedom from society — freedom from the human chain, from the obligations of the democratic experiment — has only been part of the ideal. What people also wanted was recognition — to be seen not by the neighbor or the congregation, whose gaze came bundled with obligations, but by the only thing that now seems to confer reality: the spectacle, the media discourse, the national screen. 

That craving for recognition found a perfect delivery mechanism in the smartphone and social media. Your phone’s central demand — the thing it asks of you dozens of times a day — is that you perform, curate, optimize, and, above all monitor, the self. And while “phones bad” may be the most exhausted take in America, the point isn’t that social media rotted our brains. It’s that social media offer the infrastructure the first Me Decade lacked: continuous self-regard with measurable feedback that’s always on, where every injury becomes content, every hobby a possible side hustle, and every political position both an opinion and a costume. It even swallows its own antidote: log off, move to the country, bake bread, cultivate the simple, local life — congratulations, you’re making content about the moral superiority of not making content. The exit door opens into the gift shop.

You can measure the deepening in the negative space left by everything Americans have quietly stopped doing. This is the story Robert Putnam told in Bowling Alone, published in 2000, and every line on his chart has kept sliding. In 2020, membership in a church, synagogue, or mosque fell below half of American adults for the first time in Gallup’s eight-decade series. Barely 1 in 10 workers belongs to a labor union. Each week, two local newspapers stop publishing; a quarter of adults told Pew they hadn’t read even part of a book last year; off-cycle municipal elections draw a rounding error of the electorate. The Rotary Club, the Girl Scouts, the precinct meeting — the dense mesh that, for Tocqueville, sustained American democracy — has thinned to gossamer.

The present looks more like Wolfe’s 1976 than we care to admit. The engine of the ’70s was the failure of the ’60s. Fast-forward, and you can see that the years from roughly 2016 through the early 2020s were America’s most feverishly political stretch in generations, an instance of what the historian Anton Jäger calls “hyperpolitics”: intense politicization without durable organizations or proportionate consequences. On one flank stood a populist insurgency that promised to burn down the establishment and drain the swamp. On the other, the Great Awokening, a convulsion that swept through universities, newsrooms and corporate America promising a national reckoning. Both were maximalist, and both failed to build the transformed society their rhetoric advertised.

And what does thwarted revolutionary energy do when it has nowhere durable to go? As it did after 1968, it goes toward the one realm that still seems transformable, the self. It splinters into private quests for meaning — the pattern documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis keeps tracing in his video essays such as The Century of the Self, and the one Bono identified back in 1981 when he sang, “I can’t change the world / But I can change the world in me.” 

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We are all Bryan Johnson now

By Matthew Gasda

You can see it split down the familiar seam. On the Left in the late ’70s, disillusion flowed into the New Age and the human-potential movement, into a rediscovered occult, modern art, and academia, and a smorgasbord of invented and imported religions. Today, it flows into many of the same things but rebranded as “self-care,” a term associated with Audre Lorde’s 1988 description of caring for herself during cancer as “an act of political warfare,” and since domesticated into a marketing category for Johnson & Johnson and expensive spas. It now flows into astrology, which is newly commercialized through subscription apps and personalized notifications, and into the figure of the witch reborn as a political identity with the imagined power to “hex” Trump. A generation that lit a candle for George Floyd in 2020 now lights a scented candle in the bathtub.

And on the Right, we see the mirror image. The ’70s had the cult of fitness, the sudden national mania for jogging, aerobics and dieting, the body as a project to be perfected. The overlapping worlds of MAHA, the manosphere, and Silicon Valley have looksmaxxing and testosterone infusions, ice baths and the carnivore diet, along with the tech billionaire spending millions to reverse his own aging and streaming his blood work to the world. It is the cult of the body again, but now with the promise cranked up from mere fitness to immortality — forever youth, death itself reframed as a solvable engineering problem. 

For all the tedious arguments about who is and is not woke, both sides now qualify in Wolfe’s older and more useful sense of the word awakening: each is trying to fashion a self strong enough to survive the collapse of everything the self was once supposed to belong to.

This is also why so much of our politics feels counterfeit even when the emotions appear sincere. In the Me Decade, Wolfe sardonically noted that journalists of his own time compulsively applied the F-word (fascism) to hippies, Scientologists, and Moonies, then reminded them that the term derives from the fasces: sticks bound into a single, unbreakable bundle. Whatever else Trumpism may be, including a movement with real authoritarian appetites, it isn’t fascism. It doesn’t ask its followers to dissolve their personalities into a common national will. 

Trumpism offers almost the opposite fantasy: national restoration through the elevation of a man who appears gloriously free from every obligation, inhibition, and shame that binds ordinary people. It is cheap, televisual, consumerist, and American — and it demands no genuine self-abnegation. It is Spirit Halloween nationalism, a longing for the symbols of midcentury cohesion without the institutions that made such cohesion possible. Trump himself is perhaps the purest Me Decade product America has elevated: a man of appetites, brands, and grievances whose supporters love him precisely because he appears unbound, unashamed, and entirely himself.

Likewise, much of what passed for radical Left-wing politics in the last decade consisted of locating yourself on the grid of identity and curating a public self certified as virtuous. It offered the profoundest pleasures of the Me Decade — the look inward, the moral distinction, the separation from the unenlightened — while allowing the seeker to experience all of it as selflessness. 

None of this is a forever destiny. There is a backlash now, a genuine one. You can feel it stirring in the emergence of in-person reading clubs, and the sudden fashions among Zoomers for organized religion, “third places,” and “touching grass.” It’s also visible in the small revolt against phones, AI, and the data centers that power them. I have written in praise of it in these pages. But it is worth being honest about the scale of this counter-movement: withdrawal from society is the mainstream, and the return to it is still a hobby. 

We are now half a century into the inward gaze, and we are not climbing out. We are, at most, coming up for air. Wolfe’s cruel joke was that Americans had discovered Me. Our problem is that, 50 years later, we haven’t found a reason to drop the mirror, and we’re more than ever transfixed.

Freddie Sayers spoke to Glenn about Joe Rogan and Whoopi Goldberg, Joe Biden’s new Supreme Court Justice, and how to fix America’s torturous racial politics.

Joe Biden has pre-announced that his nominee for the Supreme Court will be a black woman. What do you think about this? 

I think it is strange. I think no one needs to be apologetic about reacting to that announcement with a bemusement and kind of quizzical ‘what?’ This comes out of Joe Biden’s political ambition, and the character of American politics. During the South Carolina primary when Biden was uncertain of prevailing in the contest for the nomination of the Democratic Party, in 2020, he wanted to appeal to the black vote and so he made this announcement. He announced that his vice presidential selection would be a woman and that his first appointment to the Supreme Court, should he be fortunate enough to have one, would be a black woman.

You could call this craven pandering. I’m bemused by it because it unnecessarily raises questions about the fitness of whomever he might appoint, when he might have simply chosen a black woman as his nominee, and crowed about it after the fact. To avoid casting any doubt over the choice that he would have made, he could have said this is the best, most qualified person that I could find. But in any case, as he’s done it now, he’s limited his range of options to a very small percentage of the total population of people who might have been selected, and, you could say, has put an asterisk by the name of whomever it is that he might ultimately select.

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By Tomiwa Owolade

This is, by the way, the Supreme Court of the United States of America, this is the final stopping point for any legal dispute. There are nine justices serving there, the quality of an appointment is not a small matter. We’re not now admitting a marginal student to an elite college campus, we’re selecting the people who are going to govern the country. The President might have engaged in a kind of subtle and tacit preference, rather than crowing about it and making it overt and explicit. It sows a kind of contempt for the standards that we ought to be employing.

Is it right to aim for public bodies to be “representative” of the population? 

What do we mean by representativeness and who can represent whom? How many Catholics are there on the US Supreme Court? I’m pretty sure there are more Catholics on the court in proportion than there are Catholics in the population. Dare we ask the question: how many Jews, how about gays, how many openly gay people are on the Supreme Court? How dare we. That’s a rabbit hole that we don’t really want to go down.

And it’s kind of silly because it presupposes that something as superficial as racial identity or sexual orientation is of such fundamental significance that legal counsels must have members present who, when they act out in that context, are acting on behalf of, quote unquote, their group. Well, these individuals are not only women, or blacks, or gays, or Catholics. These are human beings whose humanity supersedes and reaches beyond the categories that we might impose on them.

You were the first African American to become a tenured professor at Harvard. Would you have felt differently about this achievement had the governors at Harvard pre-announced before selecting you that they were going to choose someone of African American heritage? 

My appointment as professor of economics at Harvard, which happened in 1982, was accompanied by an initiative at Harvard to enhance the quality of the Afro American Studies department there. I was jointly appointed: economics and Afro American Studies. I was 33 years old. It would have been entirely fair, for some outside observer looking at that to say: “Oh, well, fine. But if he hadn’t been black, they wouldn’t have appointed him.” That’s probably true. So such is the condition that we find ourselves in.

How do you think someone like Whoopi Goldberg can get to the point where said that the Holocaust was not about race? 

I assume it’s because she thinks Jews are white. I would chalk that up to ignorance and naïveté — just not being immersed in the long history of modern Europe and anti Semitism and the ideology of Nazism, in which the notion of race had a very particular meaning. I think Whoopi just didn’t appreciate the actual meaning of the word race, in the context in which the Holocaust arose, revealing her ignorance. She ought not to have put it that way. It is a misstatement or mischaracterisation to say that the Holocaust was not about race — it just wasn’t about ‘race’ in the way in which we in the United States might be talking about race.

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By Eric Kaufmann

One finds anti-Semitism not only on the far-Right, with ‘Jews will not replace us’ kind of sentiments, but also in ethnic minority communities. Especially among African Americans, there’s quite a bit of anti-Semitism; there are attacks on Jewish interests. The Reverend Al Sharpton, a prominent civil rights leader, got his start in part by demagoguery over incidents in which there was conflict between blacks and Jews. He has a history in which I think anti-semitism would be a fair descriptor.

Why is there not more sympathy for the Asian community among progressive activists? 

The Asians are called a model minority — people say that sardonically. And of course, the subtle implication there is that you must be anti-black if you compare blacks to Asians, and you find the blacks wanting — or anti-Latino.

Some of the corruption and decadence of the legacy population here, black and white, in American society, is exposed by Asian success. They expose the lack of depth and seriousness of too many of our people by their assiduous self application, and their excellence in the mastery of the currency of the modern world. I’m talking about calculus, I’m talking about biochemistry.

Do you think this kind of thinking actually makes racial tensions worse? 

So George Floyd is killed — murdered, a jury has spoken — by Derek Chauvin in Minneapolis, in 2020. A policeman inappropriately applying force, he had his knee on the man’s neck, the man expires. Was that a racial incident? Now the police officer was white, the man was killed, George Floyd was black — it became a racial incident. A whole movement was launched or abetted by the racial characterisation of that incident. But why should we understand it as a racial incident?

There is very little evidence at all, if any, that Chauvin was motivated by racial animus when he acted. And on the victim side, George Floyd, the fact that a policeman might over use his power and harm a citizen — that’s something that happens to white people, too. There are cases parallel to the George Floyd case in which the victim has been white, which have not occasioned national attention. So that’s one thing.

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By Asra Q. Nomani

But the other thing that I would say is that by cultivating a practice of looking at such incidents in racial terms, invites a parallel practice of looking at criminal victimisation of citizens in racial terms. You want to count the number of white cops who have killed unarmed black men, somebody is going to start counting the number of black murderers who have abused, black carjackers who have robbed and threatened, black assaulters who have bludgeoned and beaten white people. There are an endless number of such cases.

There is enough racial blame to go around, and I’d hate to live in a country in which when a white person was victimised by a black criminal, the first words out of their mouth were “a black criminal victimised me”. That’s not good for black people, because there are many black criminals. And that’s not good for our country because the issue is a criminal victimising a person; the criminal’s blackness doesn’t stand in for his race. He doesn’t represent his race when he acts badly. The victim’s whiteness doesn’t stand in for her race.

What would happen if Affirmative Action is deemed unconstitutional by the Supreme Court? 

The Supreme Court has six conservative justices, the majority of whom have publicly stated that they have serious doubts about affirmative action. There’s a very good chance that racial affirmative action will be stricken by the Supreme Court.

If it happens, I assure you, there will be mobs in the streets of this country. No progressive activist is going to take the Supreme Court’s ruling as an opportunity to turn within and consider: “if we want to be at Harvard or the University of North Carolina in larger numbers, why don’t we get busy preparing our youngsters from the cradle to be competitive in this great country that we live in where competition is the coin of the realm?” No, they’re not going to do that. They’re going to interpret that as an anti-black move by a racist Supreme Court. I assure you that it is a disaster and I think we’re headed toward it.

In the past week there has been a big, powerful movement to get Joe Rogan removed from Spotify over historic cases of him using the N-word. What should we make of this?

I’m not going to say the N-word on your programme, but I should be able to say it, it’s just a word. I’m talking about a word — I’m not talking about a slur. And neither was Joe Rogan’s use of it a slur. He wasn’t pointing to a person and calling them one in a way of being a derogation, of an insult. He was speaking about speaking. That is to say he was saying that the word exists and then he was saying the word in the context of quoting someone else’s use of it or whatever.

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By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

We have a genre here of music, it’s called hip hop or rap, in which the word is used regularly. And they are not using it as a slur either. It’s a part of the English language. Now, this thing that we’re doing here — where we’re making the utterance of certain sounds an indication of a person’s racism, and then seeking to cancel people for it being revealed that they uttered sounds, without any reference to their intent — is a bizarre phenomenon.

And I think that it’s actually not a sign of strength, by the people, black people, who insist that the sound of the word is so injurious to them. I think it’s a sign of their weakness. There’s something almost pathetic about requiring people to indulge you by not making certain sounds with their mouth because hearing it reminds you of lynching, of nightriders coming down on black people who are defenceless and are being set upon and whatnot.

It seems like a lot of the voices that were most upset about this were white. And it seems like more of an intra-elite power battle to do with the nature of the media, in which the race issue is used as a battering ram. What do you think?

Who are those people who listen to Joe Rogan? They are mostly not latte-sipping, National Public Radio-listening, coastal elites in New York City or Washington DC or San Francisco or whatever. They are mostly, or more often than not, male, more often than not, white. There’s some truck drivers among them. There’s some Trump voters among them.

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So this culture war that’s well-advanced here in the United States in which we are in effect, mutually contemptuous of one another based upon what camp we belong in — Joe Rogan is right at the centre of it and his audience substantially is on the ‘wrong side’ from a progressive’s point of view. A lot of this enmity directed toward Rogan is really directed toward his audience.

How do we make it better? 

I’d like to tone down the emphasis on race and be more concerned about the humanity of people. If we want to talk about disadvantage, poverty and the lack of wealth in America, there are more poor white people than there are black people. And anything worth doing, whether it be reform of education, or changes in the tax laws or extension of the welfare state programmes, anything worth doing to help black people is worth doing to help people who are in need of of help. I would have our arguments, that is our African American arguments, couched in broad, humanistic terms. And I think that less attention to racial identity and more attention to human common need is healthy for the country.

This transcript has been lightly edited.

By the time that Capt Cook set sail for the South Pacific in 1769 he had grown confident in a remedy, the only problem being that it was sauerkraut – never a particularly popular meal in England, and at a time when vegetables were looked down upon. How to convince the crew to eat 7,860 lbs of fermented cabbage on their long journey east? Cook simply ordered it to be a served only at the Captain’s Table, not to the men. As he noted in his journal: “The moment they see their superiors set a value upon it, it becomes the finest stuff in the world.”

“Sure enough, the lower ranked players began requesting it,” Will Storr writes in his excellent new book, The Status Game. “Before long, sauerkraut had to be rationed. The number of men that died from scurvy on that expedition was a record-breaking zero.”

The battle for status has defined human history; in the form of kleos or “glory” it provides the impetus for Homer’s heroes; it has been the subject of countless works of English literature; and the inspiration for absurd fashions from codpieces to ruffs to unwearable high heels. More recently, as status markers like accents or dress have levelled, and traditional barriers to social climbing (or abseiling) reduced, so the ways of signalling status have become more nuanced. And in some ways more competitive and vicious.

Life is a status game, and Storr identifies three methods by which we reach the top: dominance, competence and virtue (although most people use a combination of two or all three). It is the last of these which is the most interesting, and sometimes the most dangerous, inspiring immense cruelty.

Status is extremely important to wellbeing, so much so that it can have a profound effect on our health. People more successful in their careers tend to live longer, even taking into account confounders like smoking. The demoralising feeling of lower social status can send our bodies into a sort of crisis mode which in the long term puts us at higher risk of neurodegenerative disease, heart disease and cancer.

Being a loser can be fatal, and people who feel low status are also more likely to become ungenerous towards others and pick up destructive personal habits such as eating more sugary food — unsurprisingly, being overweight is an obvious status signal in rich countries. They are also more likely to kill themselves, with loss of job or divorce being the biggest risk factors for male suicide in middle age, for men who find themselves no longer provider or patriarch. Some people find the status game so stressful they simply drop out, most notoriously in Japan where more than half a million hikikomori have “social withdrawal syndrome”, locked in their bedroom doing God-knows-what.

Such is the beneficial effect of high status that most workers would choose a fancier title over a pay rise; in comparison having more power does not equal a happier life, heavy being the head that wears the crown. Our lust for status, in contrast, is insatiable.

When a high-status individual does something, Storr writes, “our subconscious copy-flatter-conformprogramming is triggered and we allow them to alter our beliefs and behaviour… We mimic not just their behaviour but their beliefs. The better we believe, the higher we rise. And so faith, not truth, is incentivised. People will believe almost anything if high-status people – whether priests, generals, actors, musicians, TikTokkers – suggest them.” Indeed they will profess to believe quite obviously untrue things.

Unsurprisingly, therefore, a huge amount of effort goes into signalling and detecting. “High-status people tend to speak more often and more loudly,” he notes, and “are perceived to be more facially expressive; achieve more successful interruptions in conversation; stand closer to us; touch themselves less; use more relaxed, open postures; use more ‘filled pauses’ such as ‘um’ and ‘ah’ and have a steadier vocal tone”. In fact our voice tone and even the frequency of our voice – the hum – changes to match the higher-status people. I’ve known workplaces where people come to imitate the laugh of the boss; you could hear them howling together, vocally members of the same tribe.

These signals dominate office and corporate life. A friend who works in finance recounted how Zoom conferences were far more exhausting because in real-life meetings you can easily tell from body language who was important, and mentally zone out when low-status clients started babbling away.

The human need for status can be hugely beneficial. Visit any major art gallery and you will see the result of this intense competition in late medieval Italy, where rival families hired the greatest artists and architects to raise their status. In 18^th century Britain, membership of clubs and societies became a social marker, the result being that the number of learned societies rose from 50 in 1750 to 1,500 in 1850, with an enormous impact on education levels, wealth and a variety of other measures.

Another example he cites is British cooking, which improved from the 1980s with the rising prestige associated with leading chefs, influenced by the very alpha male Marco Pierre White. (It is worth noting that, where something is low status, it will often be female-dominated because men place huge emphasis on employment status: whereas the traditional English male chauvinist believed that women belonged in the kitchen, his French equivalent saw it as the exclusive domain of the all-male culinary art.)

But just as often status games can be toxic, and do dreadful things to people — especially if religion, politics or some other marker of identity are involved.

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America has become its own worst enemy

By Ed West

I’ve long believed that political beliefs work as status-markers, and have become more so in recent decades as other signals have declined in importance. People will adopt positions not just out of sincerity, partisan loyalty or conformity, but because they signal social status. Crime and immigration are the most obvious examples, because liberal positions are associated with higher education levels. Low-status members of society are less likely to benefit from freedom of movement, and more likely to be victims of crime. At best these views are vulgar.

This can have perverse results, the most visible example being with architecture. Post-war architecture is almost universally loathed, which is why pre-20^th century buildings consistently sell for more, even though they have huge technological disadvantages. Polling shows that a dislike of modernist architecture is one of the few things that every demographic agrees on – black, white and Asian, male and female, rich and poor, young and old. They all prefer the vernacular style.

The one section of society which disagrees happens to be architecture students — and the longer someone has been studying architecture, the more pro-modernist their views. That suggests an opinion which has become a status signal, marking the sophisticate out from the hoi polloi who share Prince Charles’s love of “pastiche”. If the public suddenly decided they actually liked the stuff that wins architecture awards, the high-status people would all be trying to build the new Poundbury.

That may be just my cynicism, but humans will repeat untruths if they feel it helps their position, and Storr cites various social science experiments showing that participants will make statements which they know to be false if other, high-status “participants” (actually actors) say it first. Worse still, “those asked publicly not only endorsed the false majority view, they punished the sole teller of truth by down-grading them.” If you’re ever mobbed on social media for a bad opinion, it might be of some comfort to know that a lot of the people throwing stones will secretly agree with you. Or perhaps it won’t.

To some extent all societal debates are in part a status competition, especially with regards the modern quest for moral status. Although dominance games are behind a great deal of violence across the animal kingdom, humans have evolved to live in far larger groups than other great apes and have therefore become much less violent. Instead, we we have learned to use virtue to raise our status, a quality which shows commitment to the wider community.

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The West's cultural revolution is over

By Ed West

Unsurprisingly, it has been the strategy of choice for manipulative bullies since time immemorial, with virtue games inspiring some of the most appalling cruelty in history, ranging from the witch hunts of the 17^th century to the ritual child abuse panics of the 1980s.

Those responsible for these atrocities played a virtue game, creating the narrative that they were fighting some all-powerful, evil enemy, with the “maintenance of conformity, correct beliefs and behaviours being of heightened importance.”

The same process is clearly at work behind social media-led bullying, These are always framed in terms of protecting the weak, the urge to care and protect from harm; the more people imagine themselves aiding the vulnerable, the more horrendous their behaviour, giving them free rein to commit what Jonathan Sacks called “altruistic evil”. People do terrible things more out of love than out of hate. But it is also a status game, the aim being to “seek the maximal removal” of their opponent’s status: “ideally, reputational death.”

“When their mob grows into a status goldrush, a massive blast of vindictive energy gets directed at the victim. Attracted by the prizes, more and more ambitious players pile in and the game becomes an animal of attack, glorying in the ecstasy of dominance.”

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Why young Asians are now woke

By Rob Henderson

This is all especially dangerous because status is important not just to individuals but to groups, too, and many people feel that collective success and failure intensely. When a group is on top, its people feel happier; Storr cites a study tracking language across millions of books and newspaper articles which suggests that the British were most content in the 1880s. I don’t find this implausible: despite the huge amounts of poverty and early death relative to today, it was around the period when “to be born an Englishman was to win first prize in the lottery of life”.

Modern-day identity politics is dangerous because it unleashes a competition for status that can never really end. Many idealists hope to make the world fairer by raising the status of one group, often by increasing the prestige of their ancestors through historical reinterpretation. Yet status is a zero-sum game, and unlike wealth the pie cannot be expanded: if your group rises in status, others must fall, and the psychological and even physical effects of losing status are real.

Most of humanity’s problems have to some extent been solved or alleviated by technology and progress; we have never been richer, healthier or more at peace. But desire for status is the one thing that can never be overcome, because it is not enough that I succeed — others must fail.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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What liberals get wrong about race

By Eric Kaufmann

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Despite appearences, Cryptofash — his pseudonym mocks the tendency of online leftists to accuse their critics of “cryptofascism” — is not your typical Right-wing internet troll. He’s a Marxist who regards “leftism” as the ideology of bourgeois supremacy, the twenty-first-century equivalent of the classical liberalism that Karl Marx spent his mature years attempting to demolish. “My critique focuses on the Left,” Cryptofash writes in one of his periodic straight tweets, “not because they are worse than the Right, but because they are better than the right at precluding proletarian class consciousness.”

Cryptofash is one of the more visible members of a political tendency known as the “post-Left”, the latest in the endless stream of new and strange ideologies thrown up by social media. Although professing commitment to traditionally Left-wing goals such as anti-capitalism, the post-leftists are defined mostly by their aggressive hostility to both the Democratic Party and the radical Left — including the Democratic Socialists of America and the academic-literary Left of magazines such as Jacobin, n+1 and Dissent.

Aside from Cryptofash, other leading lights include What’s Left? co-hosts Aimee Terese and Oliver Bateman, editor of The Bellows Edwin Aponte, the Irish writer Angela Nagle and a coterie of pseudonymous Twitter accounts, such as @ghostofchristo1. Red Scare co-hosts Anna Khachiyan and Dasha Nekrasova might be considered fellow travellers.

The core assertion of the post-Left is relatively simple: The real ruling class in America is the progressive oligarchy represented politically by the Democratic Party. The Democrats are the party of Silicon Valley, Wall Street, the Ivy League, the media, the upper layers of the national security state and federal bureaucracy, and of highly educated professionals in general. The Republicans, however loathsome, are largely a distraction — a tenuous alliance between a minority faction of the ruling class and petit bourgeois.

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Effectively incapable of governing outside the bounds set by the Democrats and Democrat-aligned media, corporations, NGOs and government bureaucracies, the GOP’s real function is to serve as a sort of ideological bogeyman. By positioning itself as the last line of defence against phantasmic threats of “fascism” and “white nationalism” coming from the Right, the ruling class is able to legitimise its own power and conceal the domination on which that power rests.

Leftists, in this telling — whether Ivy League professors or Antifa militants on the streets of Portland — are thus little more than the unwitting dupes of the ruling class. However much they profess to hate the Democratic Party, they are, in practice, its running-dog lackeys. They support the party electorally, harass and cancel its designated enemies and enforce pro-Democrat ideology in the media, academia and the workplace. Crucially, they also help maintain the permanent state of moral emergency that serves as a pretext for the expansion of ruling class power, whether in the form of the increasingly direct control that tech monopolies wield over political discourse or the pursuit of Covid policies that transfer wealth upward and subject workers to a dystopian regime of medical surveillance.

At the core of this diagnosis is the idea that “identity politics”, “antiracism”, “intersectionality” and other pillars of the progressive culture war are mystifications whose function is to demoralise and divide the proletariat.

Similar criticisms have been made by Left-wing writers such as Adolph Reed and Walter Benn Michaels, but whereas these “class-first” leftists tend to regard “identitarianism” as a liberal deviation from authentic leftism, the post-leftists regard the idea that there still is a radical Left meaningfully distinct from the Democrats as meaningless. And because post-leftists see the Democrats, and by extension the Left, as their primary enemy, they have no problem engaging and even entering into provisional alliances with the populist Right, especially on cultural issues. Hence the right-wing memes.

Of course, the post-leftists operate at varying levels of coherence and theoretical sophistication, and most of them have produced far more in the way of podcasts and tweets than sustained considerations of political theory. (Cynically, one might say they are less of a “tendency” than a Twitter clique centered around Aimee Terese.) But it would be a mistake to dismiss it altogether on those grounds — the Dirtbag Left’s Chapo Trap House podcast, after all, has played an outsized role in the revival of millennial socialism, and it is always difficult to predict which of today’s shitposters will be setting the tone of the culture five years from now.

For one thing, the post-Left channels powerful currents of Marxist and post-Marxist critique that have been downplayed or forgotten during the “Great Awokening” and the recent socialist renaissance: from Amadeo Bordiga’s communist hostility to “anti-fascist” collaboration with the bourgeoisie to Christopher Lasch’s early writings about the medical-therapeutic state as a tool of class domination.

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But perhaps the most obvious spiritual predecessor to the post-Left is the Italian-American philosopher Paul Piccone, the founder and long-time editor of the critical theory journal Telos and another Marxist who eventually left the Left only to find himself in a strange alliance with the Right.

Piccone began his career as a disciple of Herbert Marcuse and proponent of his theory of “one-dimensionality”, which held that capitalism had advanced to such a degree in the West as to effectively abolish all opposition to itself. With the proletariat co-opted by consumerism, radicals, in Marcuse’s view, should instead look for resistance from racial minorities and other outcasts who had yet to be integrated into the system.

But by the late 1970s, Piccone, reacting to the failures of the New Left, had broken with Marcuse. He began to argue that the new social movements that Marcuse had perceived as expressions of anti-system negativity had in fact been forms of what Piccone dubbed “artificial negativity” — pseudo-radical protest movements generated by the system itself.

Piccone agreed with Marcuse that by the mid-20^th century, capitalism had triumphed over all internal resistance. But he believed that because the system required such resistance in order to periodically restructure itself and avoid stagnation, it had begun to manufacture its own controlled opposition. He interpreted the initial Civil Rights movement, for instance, as a product of the system’s need to “rationalise” the segregated labour market of the South, after which it seamlessly transitioned to promoting black nationalism in an “attempt to artificially reconstitute an otherness which had long since been effectively destroyed”. The allegedly radical protest movement against the Vietnam War had, similarly, merely allowed an evolving US capitalist class to abandon an imperial quagmire that had become obsolete.

Indeed, Piccone grew so pessimistic about the “artificial” nature of Western leftism that he spent much of the rest of his career seeking out extant pockets of, and resources for cultivating, “organic negativity” — his term for social practices and political formations that genuinely stood outside the logic of the system. Some of these he found on the far-Right, in the regionalism of the Italian Lega Nord, the anti-liberal political theory of Carl Schmitt, the paleoconservatism of Paul Gottfried and Samuel Francis, and the right-wing “identitarianism” of Alain de Benoist. Such explorations, or flirtations, were justifiable because, in Piccone’s view, nearly all of what passed for radicalism in the mature societies of the West was pseudo-radicalism that ultimately served capitalist interests. 

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In defence of the Woke Left

By Mary Harrington

Although Piccone could be more than a bit conspiratorial, it is not hard to see how his “artificial negativity” thesis could be applied to a great deal of the officially sanctioned cultural radicalism of today, which may help to explain why ideas similar to his are beginning to resurface. One can also point to the experience of leftists during the Trump years who found themselves corralled into an anti-Trump popular front that had them allying with not only centrist Democrats but also Never-Trump Republicans, including many of the architects of the Iraq War.

Bordiga had famously argued against this sort of broad-based “anti-fascism”, which he warned would “breathe life into that great poisonous monster, a great bloc comprising every form of capitalist exploitation, along with all of its beneficiaries”, and this is indeed what happened — socialists such as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, initially popular for their opposition to the “corporate” establishment of the Democrats, ultimately fell in line behind the party’s leadership and urged their followers to do the same.

The Trump years also revealed something about the nature of power in the United States that, once seen, is difficult to unsee. For all the warnings that Trump would turn out to be Hitler, he in practice turned out to be more like Berlusconi — a vulgar entertainer with a sordid personal life who in most respects ended up governing like a normal politician.

What happened on the other side of the aisle was more subtle but also, in the long run, more sinister. We saw the national media collaborating with shadowy intelligence agents and researchers to launder a conspiracy theory about Russian collusion and, later, employ the same playbook to block Trump’s planned withdrawal from Afghanistan. We saw constant media-generated and wealthy NGO-funded campaigns against racism and sexism welded to the electoral priorities of the Democrats. We saw “Critical Race Theory”, a crude ideological rationalisation of the Democrats’ coalitional logic, elevated to the level of quasi-official religion. We saw Twitter suspending The New York Post for publishing embarrassing information about Joe Biden’s son in the run-up to the election and payments processors such as PayPal partnering with progressive NGOs to monitor their customers and report “extremists” to law enforcement.

In short, we saw the consolidation of a near-unified ruling class bloc explicitly aligned with the Democratic Party against the potential disruption of Trump. This development has already created a host of strange new political alliances. If it holds, we should not be surprised if more than a few anti-capitalist radicals begin to reassess who their real enemies are.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was the internet wot done it: as enterprising startups began to offer affordable, personalised underwear options that catered to customers of all shapes and sizes, Victoria’s Secret could only linger in the background like a reminder of the bad old days, with its narrow range of sizes, unimaginative designs, and bras aiming solely to shove the wearer’s breasts in the direction of her chin. “Lift and separate”? Strapless underwires? Okay, boomer.

But now, like so many 1990s-era properties steeped in cultural nostalgia, Victoria’s Secret is trying to reboot itself for a new and enlightened age — clipping the wings of its Angels and hiring a new cadre of spokesmodels who better represent the diverse tastes of the modern consumer. The new squad, who will not just model and promote the brand but serve as advisors to its majority-female board, includes actress and UNICEF ambassador Priyanka Chopra Jonas, plus-size model and activist Paloma Elsesser, and trans swimsuit model Valentina Sampaio. In other words, Victoria’s Secret has traded its stable of unattainably gorgeous models for a set that is no less gorgeous but also has the proper politics. Its most famous, and most unexpected, new model is Megan Rapinoe, the all-star soccer player who was named FIFA’s best player of the year in 2019.

For a brand that has always shamelessly catered to the heterosexual male consumer, strategically airing its runway show and debuting its new collections just in time for Valentine’s Day, as boyfriends rush to lingerie stores en masse in search of gifts, the hiring of Rapinoe as a spokesmodel is like a hot poker to the eyeball of the male gaze. The new face of Victoria’s Secret is a tough-as-nails athlete and longtime gay rights activist, married to a women’s basketball player. And while she did once famously show up to an award ceremony wearing formal shorts and an oversized blazer with nothing underneath, she’s not generally known as an icon of either fashion or femininity.

But of course, that’s the point: Rapinoe is as far as it’s possible to be, in aesthetic and public persona, from the leggy, lacey look of the Angels era. And she is therefore the perfect choice to spearhead Victoria’s Secret’s awokening, at a time when straight men — and, by extension, the women who want them — are being pushed to the cultural margins.

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In an interview with the New York Times, Rapinoe decried the old Victoria’s Secret for being “patriarchal, sexist, viewing not just what it meant to be sexy but what the clothes were trying to accomplish through a male lens and through what men desired.” Worst of all, Rapinoe said, the brand “was very much marketed toward younger women,” which she described as “really harmful.”

Rapinoe, for obvious reasons, does not particularly care what guys think about her underwear (or, one imagines, anything else.) But the young women who desire men — as in, the vast majority of young women — might question the notion that they were harmed by the existence of lingerie designed to appeal to their intended sexual partners. If you want to attract men, it stands to reason that your choice of undergarments might be at least sometimes influenced by what they consider sexy. (And vice versa; one might even argue that buying your underwear with an audience in mind, if you have one, is only polite.)

But the contemptuous dismissal of men, and their tastes and opinions and desires, is as trendy in our present moment as the lace bralettes that have replaced the underwire bra as the lingerie du jour (and like those bralettes, it doesn’t suit everyone.) The broader tendency is to treat any desire for men like a character flaw, a burden, an embarrassment. The writer Indiana Seresin invented the term “heteropessimism” to describe this phenomenon — an excellent coinage that’s nevertheless overbroad in its implied gender neutrality, when the sense of heterosexuality as something in between a cursed affliction and a personal failing is almost exclusively held by women. To be horrified by one’s own sexual orientation, and every possible expression thereof, is the side effect of a culture that flattens everything from personal relationships to aesthetic taste into a political framing: if you like men (as most women do), but men are trash (as every good progressive feminist must surely agree is true), then what’s a girl to do?

Whatever she wants, modern feminism tells us, as long as it’s not conventional. And so the new lingerie model is defined by how much she differs from the old, bad, “Angel” ideal: from the fresh-faced and un-photoshopped girls of Aerie to the 81-year-old bodybuilder featured on Athleta’s blog in a midriff-baring sports bra. It’s not just about smashing outdated beauty standards; it’s about rejecting an entire mode of feminine existence as embarrassing and passé.

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It’s not a coincidence that the hottest brand for young women by far is Rihanna’s Savage x Fenty line, where not just the models but the clothes themselves purport to be a flipped bird to all things boring, basic, and heteronormative. Its models come in every possible shape, size and skin tone. The lingerie evokes queerness and kink, bondage and burlesque; it’s daring and dark and occasionally bizarre; it wants to be something bigger and more important than just underwear. The Fall 2018 runway show was Fashion Week’s biggest bombshell event, heralded by critics as “moving, empowering — spiritual, even” in its “unapologetic celebration of women,” a claim echoed by the brand itself: “Savage X Fenty celebrates fearlessness, confidence and inclusivity,” says the website’s About section.

This isn’t about the products, which are not different by design than any other underwear; it’s pure branding, of the most persuasive sort. The Savage x Fenty wearer stakes a claim on a desirable, cool identity, one that makes her fundamentally more interesting than the boring straight ladies who wear other, more conventional brands (that the Savage x Fenty wearer may well be heterosexual herself is irrelevant.) If Victoria’s Secret catered to the male gaze, then Savage x Fenty explicitly rejects it: this lingerie, we are told, is not for men.

Men, it must be said, would be surprised to hear this. As much as the Savage x Fenty runway show might read as subversive to fashion insiders, it is still, at the end of the day, a bunch of beautiful women walking around in complicated, gorgeous lingerie; to imagine that straight men would not enjoy this is frankly ridiculous. They’re not that picky.

But men don’t matter; they are the subject but not the object of Savage x Fenty’s siren song. This message is for women, malleable and impressionable creatures that they are, who are expected to follow the latest identity directives just like they’re expected to follow fashion trends: heterosexuality is boring, heterosexual desire is embarrassing, and dressing with any thought of appealing to men is a gross offence against feminism.

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Never mind that these directives create their own set of pressures and impositions, or that what makes a woman (or anyone) feel sexy is inextricably bound up in cultural expectations and societal standards that govern our notion of what sexy is. Never mind that a woman who has dressed for herself is far more likely to be wearing comfortable underwear (or none at all) under her clothes than a complicated set of garters connected to a bondage corset connected to a pair of fishnet leggings with no crotch. What is the practical difference between this fearless, confident, inclusive Savage x Fenty body harness, and the 2003 Victoria’s Secret runway getup worn by Heidi Klum, featuring a “matching white choker, sort of like a dog collar,” which a scandalised writer at the New York Times described as “not just retrograde but practically unimaginable”?

The most obvious answer is simply that one of these items is currently on sale for $32 — from a company that knows the value of wokeness in a millennial consumer market. In a world where young women are particularly anxious not to be seen as less-than-perfectly progressive, Savage x Fenty is here to assure them that unlike the bad old offerings of its patriarchal forebears, this dog-collar-resembling piece of lingerie is fierce, feminist, and on the right side of history — and so are you.

This marketing model, which Victoria’s Secret now seems to be attempting to cash in on, may have begun as a needed corrective to the notion that a woman’s only value is in her sexual attractiveness to men — a poisonous idea that we were wise to dispense with. But lingerie is not just underwear; it is made to package a woman’s body in a way that is all form, no function. These garments serve no purpose but to make us pleasing to somebody’s eye.

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Who is served by the notion of underwear that rejects the male gaze, even when its wearer might like nothing better than to be seen wearing it by a man? Who is served by Megan Rapinoe’s assertion that marketing such a thing to young women is not just immoral but harmful, that it feeds an impulse which ought to be stifled? Who is served by the increased stigmatisation of male desire as inherently predatory, dreadful, traumatic in its very expression — and what are young women to make of the message that not only should they not want men, but that they should mistrust and fear them? Perhaps it’s no surprise that the current crop of young people are dating less, and having less sex, than the generations prior.

At a moment when the corporate world is plastering every available surface with rainbows to assert its support of sexual minorities, the world’s heterosexual women are getting a different message: that desiring men is not ordinary and healthy, not genuine passion stemming from an innate orientation, but something to be apologised for, and at least performatively resisted if not actively suppressed. The tragedy is that some will try to do this, and feel ashamed when they can’t. The irony is that what’s bad for us is very, very good for selling us things.

All of this is by design. Nobody makes an easier mark for the woke industrial complex than a young woman convinced that she’s bad and broken and can only get better — morally, spiritually — if she buys the right products. Our misery is their profit margin. The unhappier you are, and the bigger the void inside you, the more you’ll spend to feel validated — which the brands are only too happy to do for you, at an affordable price. Forget the male gaze; forget men, period. Forget the things you want, those frustrating intangibles, like intimacy and love. Just think, ladies, of how sexy and empowered you’ll feel when you’re sitting at home alone in your lingerie, buying still more lingerie to feel sexy and empowered in.

The Government knows who its enemies are: Housing Minister Robert Jenrick has attacked the “woke worthies and town hall militants” trying to remove statues, while Jacob Rees-Mogg has criticised the “woke brigade”.

But what do they mean by this very overused four-letter word? I imagine most people, when they hear the word “woke”, rather feel like King Théoden after a day of Wormtongue whispering in his ear. It’s a boring, overused, culture-war term used to denote people arguing over nothing. Even the Prime Minister doesn’t seem to know. When asked if there was “nothing wrong with being woke”, his spokesman said: “I’m not sure what you mean specifically.”

Some Tories certainly don’t see being woke as a problem. Lord Vaizey, once MP for Alfred the Great’s home of Wantage, has labelled the whole War on Woke “pathetic”, adding for good measure: “Maybe I’m not good enough or noble enough to be woke. I want to be woke.” Rather than getting excited by statues, Vaizey said, the Government should “lean in” to issues of social and racial justice, and be more like Joe Biden — “woke in the best way” — by celebrating both tradition and diversity.

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Because it isn’t clear what it means, woke has become synonymous with either “leftie”, “liberal” or just “nice”. And that is why it will win – just as happened with its ideological forerunner in the 1990s.

One of the reasons that “political correctness” eventually proved successful, or at least overcame the initial disdain and contempt it inspired, is that a less important aspect of it was more attention-grabbing than its central component. PC was, in one respect, a form of political politeness, the desire to use language that was more inclusive and forgiving. But it was also — more importantly — a way of enforcing political orthodoxy, a belief that certain ideas should and could be made unsayable, even unthinkable, with enough social pressure.

Theodore Dalrymple called PC “communism writ small”; it emerged out of radical left American academia in the 1960s, and had certain similarities with the stifling orthodoxy of Soviet Russia. But it might better have been described as a mutation of Christianity, another successful form of behavioural enforcement with a long history of intolerance towards unbelievers, especially heretics.

Woke is not “kindness”, nor is it even “political correctness” — although it is rooted in that ideology. To be woke is to believe particular things about human society and human biology, and with a zeal that is often described as religious. One of the most useful definitions was made by the brothers Bo and Ben Winegard, who identified some of the main credal points of the woke Left, including the idea that “bigotry is pervasive” in America (and the West), that “almost all disparities among demographic groups are caused by bigotry”, that “if we all work really hard, we can create a more just, multicultural society” and that “diversity is almost always a good thing.”

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Unlike political correctness, however, woke — originally an African-American term to mean “awake” to social justice — is primarily about race, although gender is a secondary issue. To be woke in particular means to believe in “equity” rather than equality, that is equality of outcomes rather than equality of opportunities between groups.

The term has been around since at least the 1970s but grew in use and salience during the “Great Awokening”, the name for the seismic, radical shift in American upper-middle-class opinion from around 2013. The link between the smartphone and the Great Awokening is as clear as that between printing and the Reformation – and, thanks to social media, this period saw a dramatic shift in attitude towards racial injustice, diversity and immigration.

Social media encourages conformism, which was most visible last summer when huge numbers of people around the world displayed black squares on their Instagram pages following the death of George Floyd. Yet most people know fairly little about US homicide rates and statistics; they imitate the belief systems of their friends, colleagues and people they look up to, and will adopt beliefs if they appear socially desirable or moral.

This can include some quite implausible beliefs that would not survive rigorous scientific analysis and, if the roles were reversed, would resemble conspiracy theories. It is now taken as given that “systemic racism” prevents some minorities from achieving equity in terms of education, income or imprisonment rates, while the fact that other minorities far exceed that average is left unspoken. Indeed, some of the most vocal supporters of the idea that the United States is overwhelmed by systemic and systematic racism come from groups who outperform white Americans on any metric.

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Diversity is a central part of the Creed, and while it clearly has some benefits, especially in restricted settings — such as science — there is also a vast literature on diversity’s negative impact on trust, political stability, corruption and various other social ills. But the mainstream conservative movement has largely given up on this issue, partly because the social cost of debating such a sacred idea is too high. A few narcissistic show-offs on the Right like to be hated; most of us don’t. And when conservatives are no longer willing to fight for their beliefs, they launch wars over symbols instead.

It seems bizarre for a government to flag up the issue of statues and street names while over 1,500 of its citizens are dying each day from a virus they failed to control. But statues and street names don’t actually matter. They are a proxy for the far more important issue of diversity and demography; perhaps people worry about statues of dead Englishmen disappearing from city centres because they worry about Englishmen disappearing from those cities.

America’s iconoclastic spasm is certainly related to the country’s transformation from an overwhelmingly European country to a multicultural liberal caliphate, a bold experiment which is yet to produce its end results. African-Americans, though small in number and in relative overall decline, are a totemic group for the multicultural “Blue Tribe”, and their all-American narrative of slavery and redemption echoes the country’s Christian ideals.

What we call “woke” has become the court religion of that Blue Tribe which, despite or because it is led by wealthy whites, has become obsessed with “whiteness” as a form of original sin. But this strange, apparently masochistic tendency also, perversely, acts as a form of elite justification, distracting from more material injustices and allowing the privileged to present themselves as part of the moral vanguard, protecting society from the bigoted masses. Beliefs can be genuinely held and at the same time be manifestations of class interests; it’s happened throughout history.

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When conservatives liken current Left-wing ideas to religion, they are not doing so to undermine faith, only to point out progressivism’s power to create a strong belief-community — religio means “to bind” — glued together by rituals and creeds and without the need for empirical facts. The mostly peaceful protests we saw last summer, with white protestors washing the feet of black protesters, contained a goldmine for anthropologists studying the binding power of religious ritual — well, they would, if there were any conservative anthropology professors left.

The most obvious religious echo is with Calvinism, which holds that humanity is divided between the saved and the damned. In the 17^th century, Calvinists would agonise over this issue, and in many cases it caused acute psychological distress, just as the desire for moral purity in the social media age does today.

Calvinists also believed that some people were more morally righteous than others, and that these Godly folk should make laws for the betterment of others. Overthrowing the natural hierarchy was an extremely alarming idea to more traditionally-minded Englishmen — and it was in response to this that the political philosophy of conservatism was born. As historian Jerry Z Muller put it:

“Conservatism arose in good part out of the need to defend existing institutions from the threat posed by ‘enthusiasm,’ that is, religious inspiration which seeks to overturn the social order. The critique of religious enthusiasm, which was central to [David] Hume’s conservatism, was later extended… into a critique of political radicalism.”

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It is this “enthusiasm” that makes woke politics dangerous, because to its adherents their opponents really are bad people and, because there will always be inequality, this is a forever war. Equality of outcomes, a doctrine now so all-encompassing that it even enters the vaccine debate, might be theoretically desirable, but by definition it is also a zero-sum game. One group’s success is another’s failure, or injustice, and so it inevitably sets some minorities up against the weakest, poorest and least educated members of the majority, who have nowhere to turn except to Right-wing populists.

This is not just about things like censorship or quasi-blasphemy laws, although these are concerning; the American homicide rate increased 20% after the George Floyd protests, and an additional 3,500 are now dead as a result. These are real-world consequences.

Nothing that spectacular will happen in England, but the underlying ideas behind the Great Awokening will lead to endless bitterness and division, often ostensibly about the pettiest of issues but, deep down, about everything. And conservatives will lose because our own thought-leaders will convince the world that this is about well-meaning kindness vs the performative toughness — vice-signalling — that characterises so much Right-wing politics.

I’m not “anti-Woke” because I care about statues of slave-profiteers, or because of people using their pronouns in emails. I object to it because I think its ideas are fundamentally untrue and dangerous, just as our forefathers believed that “enthusiasm” was untrue and dangerous, as they did of Jacobinism and all the utopian ideologies of the 20^th century, too. That is what conservatives believe — and if our own prime minister cannot even agree on that, then we really are damned.

Ed West’s Tory Boy: Memoirs of the Last Conservative is published by Constable

That year, the United States was rocked by riots, assassinations and political crisis, and half a century later, history seems to be, if not repeating itself, then certainly rhyming. Yet while there are huge differences between the 1968 and 2020 disturbances, the one continuous theme running through both uprisings, and indeed all revolutions down the years, is the prominent role of the middle class. In particular, the upper-middle-class, the haute bourgeoise, are the driving force behind revolt and disorder throughout history, especially — as with today — when they feel they have no future.

Today’s unrest involves two sections of US society, African-Americans and upper-middle-class whites, who together form the axis of the Democratic Party, but it is the latter who are far more engaged in racial activism. The “Great Awokening”, the mass movement focused on eradicating racism in America and with a quasi-religious, almost hysterical feel to it, is dominated by the upper middle class.

Of course, when journalists say that any group of protesters are ‘middle class’ (in the British, rather than American, sense) they often mean to downplay their grievances or the value of their argument. Political debate, in British life in particular, is often about who genuinely represents the mystical proletariat, or ‘real people’, and opinion formers are obsessed with class and elitism. Most discourse goes something along the lines of ‘you’re the elite’, ‘no, YOU’RE the elite’, an endless, tedious game played by both Right and Left. I don’t think the composition of a group gives it any more moral weight, but it is true that revolutions and protests, even those ostensibly about the working class or other downtrodden groups, have historically been a bourgeois thing — and 2020 is no different.

The rich have always paradoxically been radical, something G.K. Chesterton observed over a hundred years ago when he wrote “You’ve got that eternal idiotic idea that if anarchy came it would come from the poor. Why should it? The poor have been rebels, but they have never been anarchists: they have more interest than anyone else in there being some decent government. The poor man really has a stake in the country. The rich man hasn’t; he can go away to New Guinea in a yacht. The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all. Aristocrats were always anarchists.”

Before the industrial age established a political divide in which a middle-class conservative/liberal alliance opposed a working-class socialist movement, radicalism was usually an elite or at least bourgeois concern. The Reformation was disproportionately popular among the urban educated; later, while the Whigs were dominant among the wealthy London merchants, Toryism was much more common in the country as a whole.

When the French Revolution degenerated into violence a few intellectuals and aristocrats based in what is now Notting Hill sympathised with the Jacobins, but the English poor were largely unsympathetic, and showed their feelings with the brutal Priestley riots in Birmingham.

That revolution was itself largely a bourgeois affair, most of its leaders being lawyers, journalists or similar. The sans-culottes were idolised as an almost sacred group everyone had to pay lip service to, but they were often preferred in the abstract. Jean-Paul Marat called his newspaper L’Ami du peuple but in reality he despised them, partly because ‘the people’ are not that radical.

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This the revolutionaries learned when they tried to overturn the old order and build the world anew, met with fierce resistance by the conservative peasantry in the Vendée region. In southern Italy French Jacobins invaders intent on liberating the country from religious oppression faced the Sanfedismo (‘Holy Faith’), a rural army fighting to defend the faith and king.

Likewise, the Russian Communist movement. While Karl Marx made endless references to the proletariat, he made very little effort to actually deal with them in the flesh, and when he did, he was disappointed by their moderation; when Marx’s comrades formed the First International they made sure that working-class socialists weren’t allowed anywhere near the important positions.

Marx had one proletarian colleague, Wilhelm Weitling, who he ended up putting through a ‘quasi-trial’, in Paul Johnson’s words, because he didn’t agree with all of Marx’s doctrine. The great communist intellectual believed that workers had to be instructed with a “body of doctrine and clear scientific ideas”, and because Weitling had his own opinions, he was cancelled — although Marx’s followers had a more permanent way of cancelling people.

Lenin’s Bolsheviks followed in this fashion, radicalised by their experience at universities, not factories. The Russian revolutionaries were so bourgeois that, as Daniel Kalder observed in Dictator Literature: “Only one solitary worker ever sat on the executive board of Lenin’s party, and he turned out to be a police spy.”

That noble tradition of haute bourgeoisie revolution continues today, especially in the US. The Occupy movement, for example, is deeply opposed to the 1% but largely because they come from the 2-5%; Amy Chua cited figures suggesting that in New York, more than half it members earned $75,000 or more while only 8% were on low incomes, compared to 30% of the city. They also have hugely disproportionate numbers of graduates and post-grads among their members.

The wider Great Awokening, of which the 2020 disturbances are a part, is a very elite phenomenon, with progressive activists nearly twice as likely as the average American to make more than $100,000 a year, nearly three times as likely to have a postgraduate degree, and only one-quarter as likely to be black. Likewise with the radicalisation of American academia, with the safe spaces movement most prevalent at elite colleges, where students were much more likely to disinvite speakers or express more extreme views.

This indicates a significant radicalisation of the rich, a process that began in the 1960s when the heavily class-based politics of the 20^th century began to shift. That social revolution, referred to in Britain as the permissive society, was entirely led by from above, a conflict epitomised in Britain by Midlands housewife Mary Whitehouse and her hopeless crusade against the public school liberal Hugh Greene.

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In France, while Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialist philosophy made huge headway among students of philosophy and future Cambodian mass murderers, it was less successful when he turned up at a Paris car factory to proclaim revolution. In 1968 the workers of Paris famously refused to side with the students, while in the US, as Christopher Caldwell noted in The Age of Entitlement, that year’s protests and the wider political conflict was partly about social status, with Ivy League students fighting working-class cops, many of whom had sons or brothers in Vietnam fighting a war they still believed in.

“When 135 students affiliated with Students for a Democratic Society occupied Harvard’s University Hall,” Caldwell writes: “the Harvard professor of Irish literature John Kelleher, a working-class Irishman from Lawrence, Massachusetts, called them ‘spoiled brats with an underdeveloped sense of history and a flair for self-protection’”. After 1968, “privileged Americans took out of the Vietnam era a sense of their own moral authority that was not battered but strangely enhanced.” The new class war had begun.

This trend would only accelerate, driven by a combination of media, expanding education and globalisation. In his highly prophetic The Revolt of the Elites, published after his death in 1994, Christopher Lasch argued that the new ruling class was becoming far more radicalised as its values diverged from a more parochial lumpen bourgeois. This more global-minded elite, used to seeing the world at 30,000ft, now embraced diversity as a mark of status but also a faith, with identity politics a replacement for religion — “or at least for the feeling of self-righteousness that is so commonly confused with religion”.

The Great Awokening certainly draws on America’s sectarian religious tradition, in a country formed by Calvinists, Quakers, Baptists and a dozen other Christian sects, but there are also materialist causes, in particular the expansion of the university system and runaway housing costs.

High house prices, in particular caused by planning restrictions, make it harder for the urban elite to settle down and have families — something likely to have a civilizing effect — and also pushes them radically to the Left.

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Meanwhile, the expansion of the university system has created what Russian-American academic Peter Turchin called ‘elite overproduction’, the socially dangerous situation where too many people are chasing too few elite places in society, creating “a large class of disgruntled elite-wannabes, often well-educated and highly capable… denied access to elite positions”.

So while around half of 18-year-olds are going onto college, only a far smaller number of jobs actually require a degree. Many of those graduates, under the impression they were joining the higher tier in society, will not even reach managerial level and will be left disappointed and hugely indebted. Many will have studied various activist-based subjects collectively referred to as ‘grievance studies’, so-called because they rest on a priori assumptions about power and oppression. Whether these disciplines push students towards the Left, or if it is just attending university that has this effect, people are coming out of university far more politically agitated. 

While the evidence on that is not clear, it’s arguable that a tiny number of very intelligent people being taught the theories of Marcuse or Foucault is probably going to have a limited social impact; when these ideas are disseminated among huge numbers of the young, many of them conformists sensitive to the social cues around them, then quite extreme ideas about dismantling society become normalised.

This has been bubbling up for years — and then along came the coronavirus, throwing millions of people out of work, many from exactly the sort of sections most likely to cause trouble. And what makes it slightly spooky is that a few years back Turchin predicted that there would be a violent flashpoint in American politics — in 2020.

History teaches us that disaffected and bored members of the elite can become a destabilising influence on society. In medieval Europe, the younger sons of lords, destined to never inherit land, were at the centre of numerous rebellions and wars, with the crusades acting as a pressure valve for their violent impulses. In China the term ‘bare branches’ is used to describe those excess males unable to find mates and who then went on to cause trouble, and modern America has record numbers of single people.

Perhaps the most famous example of elite overproduction is the War of the Roses. Edward III’s seven surviving children married into the most powerful families in the realm, helping to stabilise politics during his reign, but this fecund group produced huge numbers of grandchildren and great-grandchildren chasing a limited number of baronial positions, during a period when post-pandemic population decline had hugely decreased the wealth of the landowning class. When the king descended into listless insanity the rival factions turned English politics into a Shakespearean bloodbath.

The lesson of that crisis, as of every crises since, is that discontent and boredom among the rich and powerful can quickly descend into violence; it is they, in the words of the Beatles’ 1968 hit, who usually want to change the world.

So if everything is going so badly for conservatives, as I believe, how come they’ve been in Downing Street for ten years now – and are likely to be there for the next ten, what with the current state of the Opposition?

Well, welcome as Agent Corbyn’s successful destruction of Labour has been, the Tory victory belies some huge structural demographic problems facing the centre-Right. The Conservative Party is still effective at winning elections, against a hopelessly divided opposition, but conservatism as a movement is facing a very difficult future, a result of demography, cultural trends and its disappearance from many national institutions and sectors.

I began writing Small Men on the Wrong Side of History a number of years ago, partly as a form of therapy, to understand why I was unusual in being more Right-wing than my friends and contemporaries. I wanted to understand why some people turn out conservative and others progressive, and whether the latter are really more glamorous and charismatic, as I suspected.

I began to notice that, contrary to what we had all believed, the people around me weren’t following the old dictum that you become more Right-wing as you got older. Many seemed to be more progressive in their mid-30s than in their student days, because the acceptable parameters of belief had shifted, and were continuing to move.

By the time of the 2017 election it became clear that conservatism was completely repulsive to a majority not just of the very young but people well into their 30s and even 40s. And this was a new development; even in 1979 and 1983 the Tories came first among 18-24-year-olds, and traditionally a form of social conservatism had started to kick in around the age of 30. That wasn’t happening anymore.

There was Brexit, of course, but it was also a sign of something deeper and more fundamental. Conservatism was as much in demographic decline as the Christianity from which it once emerged, and indeed the two trends were linked.

It was not the young who had turned out to wreck the Tories that year, despite the term ‘youthquake’ being bandied around, but the middle aged; this wasn’t the natural rebelliousness of adolescence but a more permanent shift of social mores, changes that made conservatism socially abnormal and anything associated with it electoral excrement.

Indeed, despite long-held assumptions that people will always grow into conservatism, surveys in the US at least showed that those from Generation X (born between 1965 and 1980) were actually moving to the Left as they got older, and in the US the proportion identifying as liberal had increased from 29 per cent in the mid-1990s to almost half today. The same thing was happening with the cohort after us, the Millennials, who were not showing any signs of becoming more Right-wing as they aged.

By any conceivable measure what is regarded as mainstream, normal opinion had shifted rapidly in the preceding decades, but the rate of change now also seemed to be speeding up, almost as if we were heading for some sort of progressive singularity with the “Great Awokening” and the rapid shift to the Left among the American upper-class.

Most of the influential publications and broadcasters among people who matter, including the BBC, Times, Guardian, Financial Times and Economist, had become considerably more socially liberal in that period, a shift that was accompanied by a shrinking bracket of what was permissible to say without social sanction. On almost any non-economic issue most of my friends hitting 40 were more progressive than in their early 20s; they might resent paying more tax or even dislike trade unions, but that didn’t make them conservative.

The adoption of Brexit as a policy only helped to expose how much the Tory Party’s brand was entirely built around their reputation for economic competence and how unpopular conservative philosophy actually was once financial considerations were removed. This sense of revulsion was felt not just by a large proportion of young and middle-aged Britons, but the overwhelming majority of the most educated and influential.

Despite all the liberal lamentation about Brexit and Trump — and the live-action nervous breakdowns of so many members of the commentariat — these events are most likely mere blips in the onward march of progressivism; the former supported by the old and the latter by the prematurely dying in America’s depressed, opiate-riddled heartlands.

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There are today very few important areas of British or American society in which progressives do not have dominance. The influential film industry of southern California is overwhelmingly liberal, as is the even more powerful tech industry of northern California. Technology giants like Google or Facebook overtly side with progressive causes in funding and policy, and within these companies Left-wing identity politics is so embedded that according to one employee at Google ‘the presence of Caucasians and males was mocked with “boos” during company-wide weekly meetings, one of many examples where ‘white males’ were subject to abuse.

That these progressive outfits are all pretty much led by white males is beside the point; it’s a creed with inherent inconsistencies and contradictions, just as Christian leaders throughout history have been absurdly wealthy or warmongers, and yet still genuine believers.

Outside of tech increasing numbers of corporations, including Nike, Starbucks and Heineken, openly promote progressive causes, either in advertising or in donations, in a way no mainstream company would once have done for fear of alienating a large section of customers. Likewise, most prestigious American newspapers and news outlets are not only pro-Democrat but since 2008 have become far more openly partisan, while conservatism has retreated to the shouty, tabloid ghetto comprised of Fox News and smaller non-mainstream sites of varying degrees of sanity.

This cultural trend is reflected in the shifting axis of the two-party system. In the US the Democrats have become the party of graduates with a huge education divide in voting, but in Britain a similar trend is now developing. The Conservatives, once the party of the more educated middle classes, are now haemorrhaging support amongst all professionals, while making advances in once improbable ex-industrial towns in the midlands and north.

In contrast, in upmarket urban areas are slowly emptying of Tories, and in this we are following the US pattern, where the overwhelming majority of the wealthiest ZIP codes vote Democratic.

It’s all very well Right-wingers complaining about the “liberal elite” while citing semi-exotic vegetarian foodstuffs eaten in upmarket postcodes, but it doesn’t really matter if this much-caricatured group are “out of touch”. History shows that elite opinions tend to become adopted by society as a whole because people imitate the belief systems of those higher up the social ladder. If left-liberalism has become dominant among the elite, then like many historical faiths its popularity among a high-status minority will lead to universal adoption in just a couple of generations.

Historically the religions and belief systems that flourish and predominate are those that carry the most prestige, and which bring with them more social benefits than costs to followers. What matters is how much ideologies are associated with high-ranking and successful people, and how much social proof their believers have. When that happens, they will inevitably become dominant.

A crucial indication of the way things are developing is the extent to which younger women have become far more Left-wing than men, with a pro-conservative bias among females born before 1955 turning into a heavily Left-liberal one among younger cohorts.

Faiths that attract large numbers of women tend to predominate, the most obvious being Christianity, where females heavily outnumbered males in the early centuries. Men tended to become “secondary converts” to Christianity, adopting the belief system of women — a pattern noted throughout the ages.

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Before she became prime minister Tory politician Theresa May once commented that they were viewed as the ‘nasty’ party, which was true, especially after she gave everyone the catchy phrase. However, the image problem of conservatism more generally is even worse than that — it’s seen as low-status, and the number of people in professions receptive to conservative ideas is rapidly shrinking.

Whole fields, among them teaching, academia, medicine, journalism and science, have gone from being politically mixed a generation ago to overwhelmingly Left-liberal today. Indeed, there is growing evidence in many areas that dissenting thinkers increasingly keep their opinions to themselves.

In education, some 65 per cent of primary school and 72 per cent of secondary school teachers voted for the most Left-wing major leader in British history, compared to just 7 and 8 per cent respectively for the Tories.

This domination is just as pronounced in academia, which in the US has gone from a political ratio of two liberal professors to every one conservative in the early 1990s to five to one now, and that figure is only that low because less-ideological STEM subjects tend to be quite evenly balanced; in contrast the ratio in the social sciences varies from between 10 and 40 to 1.

The same trend has been happening in Britain, too. In 1964, some 35 per cent of British academics voted Tory, compared to 47 per cent for Labour; by 2015 just 11 per cent supported the Conservatives, only half that of the Green Party.

Elsewhere, among doctors, scientists, the civil service and even the leadership of mainstream churches, conservativism is becoming marginalised. There are a number of reasons for this, among them the expansion of higher education, as well as changing family patterns and the decline of religion, and leftist ‘capture’ of many institutions, including charities, broadcast media, government, social services and education, which have all become culturally progressive.

People’s political identity tends to be heavily influenced and shaped by the individuals in their social circles, so the disappearance of conservatives in the professional middle class has a domino effect; people grow older in an ideologically homogenous environment, and so continue to identify as liberal even as their tastes change. Indeed, one of the most popular political insults of the 2010s, “centrist dad”, applies to a growing demographic of men who see themselves as liberal but whose lifestyle is recognizably quite conservative – marriage with children, weekend visits to the Cotswolds and rock-based musical tastes frozen in the 1990s.

Pretty much the last refuge of conservatism is the Army, and even Sandhurst has equality and diversity classes while the armed forces’ social media accounts tweet out prog mantras just as their 17^th century forebears would have quoted scripture, as if the raison d’etre of the Army was to promote inclusivity and LGBT rights rather than literally killing foreigners.

The establishment in the 21^st century is centre-Left, if by ‘establishment’ you mean people who hold most power and make the important decisions, rather than those who have archaic titles or take part in Ruritanian traditions. Except for a shrinking number of toffs who follow the old faith, progressive views are the norm among the future leaders of tomorrow, even at Britain’s top public schools.

Indeed the most expensive schools and colleges, both in Britain and the US, are now leading the way in liberal causes, whether it’s gender-neutral uniforms or no-platforming conservatives, and in America there is a clear correlation between how much a college charges its elite students and how intolerant it is of Right-wing speakers, a phenomenon nicknamed “radical privilege” by one blogger.

What better way to signal high status in the current year than banning conservatives from being able to speak?

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As Left-liberalism has become the prestige faith with a moral monopoly, dominant in academia and the most elite professions, so conservatism has retreated into comforting stupidity. It has become characterised by shock jocks and outrage-merchants, as well as an aversion to commonly-accepted science, the most prominent examples being scepticism over climate change. In America it has become the preserve of “the Stupid Party”, as Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal referred to the Republicans, echoing John Stuart Mill’s jibe about the Tories. Perhaps no one better epitomises this better than Donald Trump, a man with the seemingly unique gift of having no redeeming features whatsoever.

Some Right-wing commentators, in an appeal to their increasingly male audience, have tried to make the philosophy seem more macho than it actually is, when in reality many conservatives by nature are quite fearful. Likewise in Britain, where tabloids take on the conservative banner against a socially liberal broadsheet and broadcasting media, the Right has become associated with deliberate anti-intellectualism and even yobbery.

Yet by aiming low, to paraphrase Michelle Obama’s expression, conservatives are only further helping to make their brand irredeemably vomit-inducing to almost anyone under the age of 40. It is a view summed up by the thirty-something Bridget Jones when she said: “Labour stands for sharing, kindness, gays, single mothers and Nelson Mandela as opposed to braying bossy men having affairs with everyone shag shag shag left right and centre and going to the Ritz in Paris then telling all the presenters off on the Today programme.”

Bridget Jones is fiction, obviously, but the words reflect widespread middle-class thinking, and applies even more so today than when it was written in the 1990s, at a time when the Tory Party seemed to disgrace itself with sexual peccadilloes while they were lecturing the rest of us on morality. Indeed a Bridget Jones 25 years ago would have known many conservatives in her upper-middle-class social circle; today there would be very few indeed, at least openly.

Since the 1960s the west has gone through the biggest cultural shift in half a millennium, an epochal change similar in some ways to the Christian takeover of pagan Rome and the 16^th century Protestant Reformation. Both of these events led to revolutions in public ideas about morality and eventually to culture conflicts – and conservatives, like the polytheists and Catholics before them, are today on the losing side.

The bad news is that this second reformation is going to be long, painful and boring, and both sides are going to get more tedious and hysterical, just as divisions the last time around drove Catholics and Protestants into prolonged periods of insanity. Conservatism will see revivals but it will become increasingly dominated by the sort of identity politics the centre-Right once hated, a phenomenon already developing in continental Europe and Trump’s America.

But the Left is winning and we’re losing. As the dashing, gentlemanly and high-status liberal Barack Obama said of al-Qaida, another group of guys not entirely comfortable with the modern world, we’re Small Men on the Wrong Side of History.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Like the 1920s, the 2020s will be an age of anxiety

By Richard Overy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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By Daniel Kalder

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

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

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

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

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

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

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What would 'living with less' actually look like?

By Peter Franklin

So, if you could snap your fingers and wish those years away, would you? I’m placing the decision entirely in your hands. There is a catch however. If you do decide to turn back time, you don’t get any younger. Nor do the people in your life. The dearly departed don’t come back, but on the other hand any children you might have aren’t erased. Rather, it’s the state of the world that goes back by two whole decades: politics, society, culture, technology — that sort of thing.

By the way, if you’re currently doing a job that didn’t exist at the Millennium, this is magicked into the nearest equivalent. Thus if you’re an Uber driver then you’d be working for a regular taxi firm instead. If you’re a journalist at a current affairs website, then you’d be working for the dead tree press. You get the idea. That said, I’m not sure what a social media ‘influencer’ would be doing in my scenario — but let’s pretend it’s something useful.

Anyway, for the purposes of this thought experiment, assume that your personal circumstances are more or less as they are now, it’s just the bigger picture that’s been reset to the 1st January, 2000.

With all that understood, do you still snap your fingers? I’d imagine those of an optimistic disposition definitely wouldn’t. Why wish away 20 years of progress? But the pessimists might ask: what progress?

At the start of the 21st century, 9/11 hadn’t happened yet. We hadn’t ploughed into Afghanistan and Iraq. Indeed, George W Bush had yet to be elected President. And even if the hanging chads were still to swing the same way, we shouldn’t forget that Dubya was elected on a foreign policy platform of non-interventionism. In re-setting history, there’s a chance that the hijacking plot would be foiled. Failing that, the response of the US (and UK) governments might not be to invade a country that had nothing to with 9/11.

Obviously, the Middle East featured a pretty horrible set of governments in 2000, but they’re still pretty horrible now. Certain groups — such as the Iraqi Kurds and Shiites — are less downtrodden, but other populations have been devastated by civil war and brutal persecution. Would things have been as bad had the Second Gulf War never happened?

However, I’m getting into the realms of alt-history here and my purpose is much simpler: to ask whether we’re better off now than in 2000.

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For most of the developing world, the answer is definitely yes. Across a range of issues, including poverty, malnutrition, disease and illiteracy, there’s been real progress. It’s not all good, obviously — the blessings of development must be weighed against the curses, for instance traffic deaths and industrial pollution. But, on the whole, humanity (if not the natural world) is better off than it was 20 years ago. This is the strongest argument — indeed, an overwhelming one — for not hitting the reset button.

Okay, but what if the question was limited to the developed world? Just how good has the 21st century been for us in the UK and the West more generally.

Well, it’s certainly not all bad. Cancer survival rates have improved, for instance. Since the mid-1990s there’s been a long-term decline in crime, including violent crime. Indeed, young people in the 21st century are generally more sensible than previous generations at the same age, with lower levels of drug use and teenage pregnancy. The Post-Millennial generation appears to be especially cautious — almost to a fault. However, patterns do vary from country-to-country — with America’s multi-generational opioid epidemic and the rise in ‘deaths-of-despair’ casting a shadow over the last decade.

In many ways, western societies have become more tolerant over the last 20 years, with big shifts in social attitudes on issues like same sex marriage and associated changes in the law. But, again, there’s a countervailing tendency — support for populist political movements is now at a level that would have shocked us 20 years ago.

At the start of the 21st century, liberal internationalism was all but unchallenged. Bill Clinton was still President in the US, Tony Blair Prime Minister in the UK and Gerhard Schröder Chancellor in Germany. The Euro had been launched the previous year, but Greece wasn’t a member yet. In both Russia and China, those in charge were assumed to be reformist and well-disposed to us. The ex-Communist countries of central and eastern Europe were in the process of integrating with the West, and in the world as a whole globalisation was the order of the day. Francis Fukuyama’s End of History, published in 1992, looked like a pretty good guide to the future.

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How to beat the politics of punishment

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But there were early signs of trouble: on 31 December 1999, Boris Yeltsin resigned to be replaced by Vladimir Putin. Earlier that year, an obscure political party called UKIP won its first MEPs in the European Parliament, including a chap called Nigel Farage. The US presidential election of 2000 was unusually divisive, culminating in a bitterly polarising battle over the Florida result. 2000 also saw the dot-com crash — an advanced warning of the bubble-prone weakness of 21st-century capitalism.

However, the cracks in the system went unnoticed — not least due to the external shock of 9/11. And yet the warnings kept coming. In 2002, there was a major upset in the first round of the French Presidential election — when Jean-Marie Le Pen knocked-out the Socialist candidate to make it through to the run-off. He was then trounced by Jacques Chirac, but the result prefigured a new pattern for western politics — the rise of the populist Right and the decline of the centre-Left.

Pre-occupied with the Middle East and an economic boom back home, political establishments across the West didn’t see themselves as under threat. The Le Pen thing was written off as a French aberration. But then came disaster after disaster: The Iraq insurgency. The Afghan quagmire. The credit crunch. The banking crisis. The Great Recession. The Eurozone crisis. The Syrian civil war. The rise of ISIS. The refugee crisis. Brexit. Trump. Populist revolts in western Europe. Populist governments in the east.

This wasn’t just bad luck, but the result of errors of judgement and lapses in responsibility on the part of the rich and powerful. Furthermore, people can feel this failure in their daily lives: the weakness of wage growth, the unaffordability of home ownership, the escalating cost of higher education. Despite the deepest recession in living memory, most economies have grown since 2000. But for a lot of us — especially the young and those left behind by the geographical concentration of economic opportunity, things haven’t got better — and certainly not 20-years’-worth of better.

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What if we were to lose the last ten years of technological progress?

By Peter Franklin

Oh, but what about technology? Would you really want to swap your iPhone 11 for a BlackBerry 850? Your Samsung Galaxy A50 for an original Nokia 3310? Would you want the squat mass of CRT monitor sitting on your desk again? Do you miss the weird sounds made by a dial-up internet connection? Or download speeds that would make a tortoise blush?

Digital is one area where progress is unmistakable — and everyday life is different as a result. And yet, in 2000, the internet was still a hopeful place — we genuinely believed that tech would enable a great decentralisation of power. But that, of course was before Facebook and Amazon conquered the world; before the nastiness of online debate poisoned politics; before China began building its techno-totalitarian state.

In 2000, we had the convenience of mobile communication — minus the downsides we’ve come to discover since. There being no smartphones, we’d yet to be zombified by them. But what about the upsides of unlimited access to the global store of human knowledge? Well that, perhaps, is the most depressing thing about the 21st century so far. Previous breakthroughs in communication have triggered breakthroughs in science, industry, culture and philosophy. But what does the West have to show for the Internet? Science is slowing down and productivity is faltering. As for a 21st-century Renaissance or Enlightenment, where is it? (And, no, the Great Awokening doesn’t count).

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By Titania McGrath

I don’t want to be too much of a grump here. Taking a global view, I wouldn’t want to go back to the year 2000. Thanks to trends set in train decades previously, the last 20 years have improved conditions for most of humanity. As for the developed world, we shouldn’t deny the progress made this century — let’s count our blessings and be grateful for them.

And yet we could have, should have, achieved more. We’ve every right to be disappointed — both in our leaders and ourselves.

This horror is something that simply did not exist 10 years ago. According to painstaking research by Zach Goldberg of Georgia State University, there have been a series of “seismic attitudinal shifts” among white liberals in recent years. Using data from the most reputable non-partisan sources available, Goldberg shows how attitudes have shifted in a short space of time, a phenomenon commonly known as “the Great Awokening”.

So, for example, in 2016 more than 60% of white liberals thought the black-white achievement gap was caused by discrimination, a figure that was 42% in 2012. There is a similar change in answers to the question, “is the US justice system biased against black people?” White liberals were evenly split on the subject until around 2012 but now, overwhelmingly, think the system is biased.

And on the positives of a multi-racial society white Democrats have leapfrogged black party members: in 2016, 78% of them thought a greater racial mix made the nation a “better” place to live. The figure for black Democrats was 57%.

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Is there a practical impact of this new white racial radicalism? Very much so, and we are seeing it already. It is hurting Joe Biden, the “white-est” of all the candidates in the race to become the Democrats’ 2020 candidate. This is the man who has talked openly of how he used to do deals with the racist senators who still strutted their stuff back when he started his political career in the early 1970s — and seen now by many Left-wing white Democrats as toxic.

Oh the irony! Because Joe Biden is easily, comfortably, unquestionably, the most favoured candidate among… black Democrats.

In South Carolina — the first primary where black voters will have a significant impact on the Democratic race for the 2020 nomination — Biden is hugely favoured by African-American electors, around 40% of whom back him. The other candidates, including the people of colour, are, at best, in low double digits.

But back in (nearly) all-white Iowa, where the first caucus is held in frigid snow-white January, the white folks are openly hostile to poor Joe and much more in love with candidates who properly embrace the horror of white oppression.

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By Eric Kaufmann

This may in part account for the recent surge in Iowa polling of the young and highly polished mayor of South Bend Indiana, Pete Buttigieg, who has a plan to consider reparations for slavery — a policy which many believe would tear the country apart however fundamentally justified it might be. If Buttigieg were to win in Iowa and Bernie Sanders in New Hampshire (which borders his home state of Vermont, thus giving him a natural advantage) it would leave Biden needing a huge win in the third contest in South Carolina to get back on track. It might be too late for him.

There is a real and growing chance that white liberal Democrats will effectively veto the choice of black Democrats because they think he’s not properly conscious of racial issues. White privilege, anyone? To complain about it and to use it all at the same time: so 2019.

That’s the electoral impact on the Democratic primary, but is there a deeper psychological cringe that the Democratic party ignores at its peril? Self-awareness is a universally acknowledged good; so is a healthy measure of self-criticism. But the level of dislike white liberal Democrats seem to have for themselves is quite something. Could it play with their heads and those of their supporters? How positive about America will they feel they can be before coming up against the mental stumbling block that they have decided race is a massive unresolved scar on the face of their nation?

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Who are you calling a dictator?

By Daniel Kalder

This matters hugely in 2020 because a sunny disposition and a stable calm outlook on the world might well (for obvious reasons) be enough to win it. “And …. breathe!” could well be a winning slogan. John Kerry suggested as much to me on The Today Programme a year ago: all that would be required would be for the Democratic candidate to be moderate and competent, he suggested. That’ll do it.

At the time I thought this a foolishly complacent approach, but now, after another year of Trump? After the Kurds? Ukraine? Not for the first time, I think Senator Kerry displayed a better grasp of American politics than me.

But if the white liberals in his party have their way, this relaxed, genial route to power is going to be blocked by racial tensions that they themselves stoke. Who cares, they might respond: we have lost the redneck vote and frankly we don’t want it back. We can win with the suburbs, with educated women, with people of colour whose caution in these matters will be seen to have been an understandable mistake. Maybe: but these groups like sunshine too. Indeed, post -Trump, they crave it.

And it remains the case that although lefty Democrats have “found race”, most Americans have not. 41% of voters think that white people are advantaged in modern society, according to an exit poll conducted last year after the mid-terms by the respected company Pew Research.

It’s an impressive number in many respects — but it’s not a majority, and 19% (of a nation of 300 million) actually think the opposite: that white Americans are at a disadvantage to racial minorities.

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Even among the 41% I wonder if there are plenty who want to acknowledge what they see as perfectly obvious injustices but not to beat themselves up quite as enthusiastically as some liberal Democrats would like.

By concentrating on these issues Democrats would be picking a fight with majority opinion, and being less sunny about their country than many Americans want them to be. They would also be doing it on their own, racially speaking, because a striking feature of this fashion is how much it seems to be all about white people. The books that inform it, like the New York Times bestseller White Fragility, Why it’s so hard for White People to talk about Racism, are overwhelmingly written by whites.

In fact, the non-partisan pressure group More in Common has suggested that those who believe America was “established by socially dominant groups like straight white men, for their own benefit,” are the most racially homogenous political group in the country.

White people telling others how to live. Is this really the 2020 look the Democrats want to embrace? At least Barack Obama would enjoy the joke.

Time and again multinationals and public companies turn out to be as happy as junior members of the Royal Family to sign up to an ideology which will come to eat them next. If anyone is in any doubt about this trend, they should look to the men’s magazine GQ – or what we should more properly describe as the former men’s magazine, GQ.

Firstly, I should declare my prejudices at the outset. Though I have never bought a copy of GQ, I have often flicked through it at the barbers as a way to avoid conversation, and have always found it aggravating in the way that aspirational lifestyle magazines generally are.

By necessity these magazines are pornography for people who don’t have much sex, who feel that looking is the second-best thing to touching. How many of GQ’s readers could ever afford the vast price-tags on the sort of clothes the magazine made it look as though every man wore? How many went to the luxury resorts that were flagged in each issue? Or owned the cars, or generally lived the sort of James Bond-wannabe lifestyle that GQ presented as the achievable ambition of any man? If these flaws were aggravating then they were also embedded. You cannot have an aspirational lifestyle magazine which does not aspire.

Then there was the “Man of the Year” nonsense, the annual jamboree in which GQ got to display its own latest version of the modern aristocracy; a catwalk of public figures who were in turn flattered to be regarded as being in the cool club. GQ was always adept at this, hiring Alastair Campbell to give it alleged gravitas, or handing an award to Russell Brand in order to look like they were on top of each pseudo-serious trend.

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Will maths succumb to the woke wave?

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In reality, of course, such episodes showed the vulnerability of these very modern day snobs, the pretence that they were style arbiters and trend-setters rather than deeply unimaginative trend-followers. The inability to take a stand on anything until the precise moment that GQ sensed that the stand was being taken by everybody else. The sucking-up to power wherever it came from. It is an editorial talent of a kind, to be so craven that you will jump on any trend as soon as you think it no longer worth resisting.

With complete inevitability, in recent times GQ has been all too happy to join the woke bandwagon. As the Western world has gone through a set of values-alterations, so GQ has had to keep its antennae exceptionally attuned so as to know where it should follow next.

And one must pity them in some ways, for a men’s magazine like GQ really has only one objective in mind: to trick men into believing that it has the secret (or at least some of the secrets) of how men can attract women. Of course the usual pretence intermittently occurs – as it does throughout GQ’s opposite numbers in the world of women’s magazines – that all of this is only for the personal self-esteem of the readers and to make them feel better inside.

In reality the business model is to pretend that the magazine has knowledge its readers need. And the pity for GQ is that its core business – the whole business of relations between the sexes – has become exceptionally fraught in recent years.

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Meghan and Harry are playing a dangerous game

By Douglas Murray

Inevitably, GQ found a way to roll with that tide. In the year after the “MeToo” movement broke out it was necessary for them to demonstrate not only that they were totally on board with whatever the new consensus was, but that they were – if anything – positively ahead of the curve. That is why the magazine’s UK editor, Dylan Jones, last year editorialised that “For the first time in history, we’ve all been called to account for the sins of the patriarchy.” What does this surrender flag even mean? What is “the patriarchy”? What are its “sins”? Why do all men have to be called to account for them? Have I been called to account? Have you?

That increasingly beseeching, begging tone began to infuse the magazine. When Lewis Hamilton was accused of transphobia in the closing days of 2017 it was GQ which came to his rescue with a reputational repair job. As the cover star a few months later, in August 2018, Hamilton was photographed in a hideous tartan skirt. Though not forgetting to show some carefully rippled abs (for it is important for a man to still have some self-esteem while being forcibly feminised in the name of the new tolerance), the headline read “Lewis Hamilton refuses to skirt the issue”.

And now, a year later, GQ have found their latest surrender-hole. A magazine that solely exists because it pretends that it knows what masculinity is, and what women like about it, has decided instead that masculinity is a problem and that a “new masculinity” is needed.

The cover star this time is Pharrell, wearing a hideous outfit that looks like a cross between a cassock, a tent, a poncho and a dinghy – perhaps in due course it will be known as the life-raft outfit. For its aim, as with the whole pathetic mess that is this GQ issue, is to try to save men from the accusations being made about them: by promising that they have surrendered already.

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A beseeching, begging editorial by Will Welch (the new editor-in-chief) pays its indulgences straight away. He talks about the “pervasive culture of sexual intimidation and violence and blatant gender inequality”, of “victims” and the “discriminatory culture”. How should these things be addressed? Welch writes: “We see every day at GQ as an opportunity to answer that question,” continuing “one way we’ve addressed it is by making a magazine that isn’t really trying to be exclusively for or about men at all.” Which is one hell of a change of mission statement for a men’s magazine.

Inside, readers of this former men’s magazine can find advice from, for instance, someone called Hannah Gadsby, telling men why they “should be more ladylike”, and “interrogate” themselves as to why they might not want to be. Of course the ideal would be if everybody could be allowed to be themselves, whatever that self may be. But just as it is tedious and restrictive to assume that all men should behave one way and all women another, so it is equally – in fact more – ridiculous to insist that men should act more like women and all women perhaps more like men.

Sensible people will simply ignore GQ’s advice, realising that although women want many things, what they want least of all are the ex-men that GQ has now dedicated itself to creating. The magazine always relied on stereotypes, but at least they used to be amusingly aspirational. Nobody will aspire to the its ideals now, and soon perhaps GQ will learn the mantra that Gillette and others learned before them: get woke, go broke.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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