That adage, however, cuts both ways: for progressives to make the most of their current spring — to make it last — they have to make good on their core material commitments on affordability, broadly shared prosperity, and a just and restrained foreign policy. And they have to eschew the boutique cultural causes and hectoring tone that turned voters against them the last time around. Otherwise, spring will turn to another winter before too long.

The midterms were a victory for the Democratic Party, of course. But more consequentially, the election was a triumph for the party’s Left flank. The biggest win on the ledger was that of Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed, a standard-bearer of what Matthew Yglesias has called the “clean-living Muslim wing” of the Left. El-Sayed won despite the GOP’s relentless efforts to tar him as an Islamic extremist and the pro-Israel lobby’s expenditure of tens of millions of dollars on behalf of his opponents in both the Democratic primary and the general election. Perhaps more remarkably, even in a red state like Florida, Angie Nixon — a member of the Democratic Socialists of America — came within three percentage points of winning, despite receiving little support from the national Democratic Party.  

The Left clearly has a winning message: a dogged focus on affordability and shared prosperity, and a strong stand against American complicity with Israel’s destructive wars. The atrocities in Gaza on their own might not have been enough to sway voters. But the Israeli government’s role in pushing for a US military intervention against Iran further soured on Americans, who (correctly) tied the war’s inflationary effects to their own struggles to make ends meet. 

Vice President JD Vance, in a blistering postmortem, cited the war and his own administration’s close relationship to Israel as two of four key reasons a significant share of Trump-Vance voters shifted their support to Democrats. On Election Day, Trump himself seemed to acknowledge this when he said of US aid to Israel, “Why should we suffer the slings from lunatics like El-Sayed when [the Israelis] don’t need it? It’s a bad talking point.” 

There is little downside, then, to Democrats criticizing Israel. Some centrist critics of El-Sayed worried that his focus on Israel’s misdeeds — they would call it something worse, an obsession — would ultimately hurt him. It didn’t. A majority of Michigan Jews voted for El-Sayed.

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Religion can save democracy

By Shadi Hamid

This isn’t to say that every progressive should make criticism of Israel a focal point of their politics. But they can and should at least make clear where they stand. While the Rev. Adam Hamilton of Kansas didn’t talk much about Gaza, his basic orientation in defense of Palestinians — in line with his neighbor-love vision of Christianity — was not in dispute. As early as Oct. 13, 2023, a week after the Oct. 7 terror attack on southern Israel, Hamilton issued a statement that: “I also stand with Palestinians who, for a variety of reasons, live as second-class citizens in the land where they have lived for hundreds of years.” Such statements didn’t stop Hamilton from turning Kansas — yes, deep-red Kansas — blue.

But being on what progressives call “the right side of history” is no substitute for governing well and wisely, something that Zohran Mamdani intuited from the start of his tenure as New York City mayor. You have to get things done and deliver tangible results for the citizens you serve. 

Luckily, there is the “sewer-socialist” tradition — recalling unabashedly Leftist mayors in the previous century who won renown (and re-election) by focusing relentlessly on basic good government and the delivery of services to the working majority. That tradition, which Mamdani has sought to revive, teaches that ideological purity can only take you so far, which is to say, not very far. 

It is here that the past must not be a prologue. Beginning in the mid-2010s through the early 2020s, progressivism came to be defined by “wokeness” — a puritanical approach to politics that divides the world into oppressed and oppressor according to racial and gender identity. In addition to grating on voters with its hectoring tone, woke politics undermined class-based solidarity — once the linchpin of Left and labor politics — by dividing populations along identitarian lines.

It’s telling, then, that in 2026 “wokeness” was no longer the animating issue it had been in previous elections. Here, the Republican Party became a victim of its own success. After Trump’s 2024 victory, wokeness receded in many progressive institutions, which made it harder for conservatives to evoke its specter to motivate voters.

A broad “vibe shift” was the result, with even the likes of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the New York Times writer Nikole Hannah-Jones wondering out loud whether the whole enterprise had gone too far. The obsession with race and gender identity didn’t actually work: it alienated large swaths of the American public and led, at least in part, to Joe Biden’s catastrophic decision to elevate Kamala Harris as vice president.

Going forward, the Left must resist the temptation to re-entertain racial and gender-based identity politics. The danger is that, as enjoyable as power and success may be, they breed overconfidence as well as overreach. Whatever the midterm elections were, they were not a mandate for divisive cultural politics. The good news — for Democrats, at least — is that wokeness has been replaced by Israel-Palestine as the primary progressive litmus test. And unlike many woke causes, this one brings Democrats in line with the median voter. More Americans today sympathize with the Palestinians over Israel, a dramatic reversal from just a few years ago. Fact is, Israel-skepticism is now the majority, mainstream position in American political life — including among Republicans under age 50.

Some on the pro-Israel Right will no doubt counter that the criticism of Israel amounts to the latest iteration of wokeness. But that isn’t quite so. For one thing, this is an issue that implicates world-historic events, such as the Iran war and the stability of the Middle East, unlike pronoun preferences and so-called “microaggressions” at the workplace. 

For the most part, Palestine’s advocates speak not the language of special pleading — “as a member of oppressed class X” — but that of universal rights. At stake aren’t the cultural preferences of the urban precariat, but the principle that Washington can’t underwrite and diplomatically back a permanent military occupation of a people who aspire to self-determination. That sort of Enlightenment-based moral universalism is a much more comfortable place to be for the Left, historically speaking. It also has the benefit of being intellectually coherent.

What the decline of wokeness means, in practice, is that progressives don’t have to be particularly “progressive” on hot-button issues like trans athletes participating in women’s sports, as long as they’re progressive on Palestine. The reason a relative moderate like Georgia’s Sen. Jon Ossoff is largely accepted by the Left is that he’s sufficiently critical of Israel. So he gets a pass. (Ossoff is also Jewish, and the fact that Democrats may very well nominate him for president belies the accusations that the party is in the grip of an anti-Semitic fever.)

But it’s not just a matter of resisting the siren call of woke. It is important for the Democrats to continue moderating on cultural issues in order to solidify their majorities and build as big a tent as possible in the years to come. Culture matters. People don’t vote solely on their material interests. With young men falling behind on a wide array of social and educational metrics, and amid a loneliness epidemic and a birth-rate crisis, Democrats need to be able to speak to America’s broader social malaise.

Fortunately, the midterms were a great day not only for democracy and Democrats — but for religion, too. In the post-Obama years, the Democratic Party became the secular party, with little space for outward expressions of faith. But that appears to be changing. Democrats are finally “getting” religion. Three of the most prominent Democratic candidates — El-Sayed, James Talarico, and Hamilton — were openly and unapologetically religious. They made their faith a central part of their pitch to voters. And they won, including (again) in red states.

Talarico and Hamilton are now standard-bearers of a new and emboldened Christian Left. It was less clear exactly how El-Sayed’s faith informed his specific policy positions, although he did occasionally sound more “conservative” notes on cultural issues like gambling and porn addiction. While critics tried to smear him with the Islamist label, if anything — as Yglesias amusingly noted — it might have helped him to be “a bit more ‘Islamist,’” in the sense of being broadly traditionalist on cultural values, which would have appealed to moderate voters.

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Get ready for Left populism

By Ryan Zickgraf

But religion isn’t just, or even primarily, about being socially conservative. As the evangelical theologian Matthew Kaemingk and I argue in our new book Can Religion Save Democracy? (excerpted here in UnHerd), both the Christian and Islamic traditions lend themselves to pluralism, intellectual humility, and learning to live with deep difference. Final, definitive judgments about our fellow citizens are God’s alone. If God is the All-Knowing, then not knowing is part of what makes us human. This opens up space for a more generous and forgiving approach to politics.

This generosity has more direct political implications for Democrats. Another temptation — and this one will probably be harder to resist — is to interpret their electoral mandate as a license to punish Republicans, hearkening back to the endless Russiagate investigations and impeachment proceedings of the first Trump term. Retribution might feel good, but it will only narrow the tent and alienate independents and disaffected Trump voters. 

Talarico’s and Hamilton’s “neighbor-love” Christianity offers a much more inclusive and affirmative vision, in stark contrast to the Christian Right’s apocalyptic preoccupation with vengeance and casting progressives as enemies of both God and the state. If vengeance is God’s alone, then we can be confident that God will sort it out, not necessarily now but in the next life. Adopting a posture of what Kaemingk and I call “delayed justice” can help relieve tension and minimize the existential tenor of our politics. Knowing that Trump will have to give account to a higher power — amusingly, Trump himself seems aware of this possibility — relieves the demand to punish him in the here and now.

The Left has always been animated by a utopian impulse. One might even call it a “religious” impulse in that it speaks to a yearning for transcendence as well as deliverance. To be a progressive, after all, is to believe in progress, that the arc of the moral universe “bends toward justice” — a phrase not coincidentally coined by a theologian. This faith in politics and in human nature has often served the Left well, spawning the great moral crusades of American history, including the abolitionist and civil-rights movements. But it must be tempered by a recognition of its limits. The arc of history may bend toward justice, but it is long and uneven. Politics can help us, but it won’t — and probably shouldn’t — save us. 

Meanwhile, the Republicans’ political winter should be a lesson for Democrats: all it takes to lose a broad coalition is betraying a core pledge and becoming distant from voters’ real concerns. The roadmap for the Left, then, is clear enough: focus relentlessly on affordability, demonstrate competence at every level of government, and stay principled on Palestinian rights while reimagining the American relationship with Israel. Lastly, resist the twin temptations of cultural overreach and political retribution. Easier said than done, of course, but saying it would be a good start.

At Donald Trump’s rally in Vandalia, the Republican nominee for governor invited a 10-year-old boy onstage and attempted to lift him to the microphone. The boy lurched backward, and Ramaswamy scrambled to keep him from falling. “Whoa!” he said. “Big guy!” To be fair, the kid was a bit of a chonker, but the problem wasn’t that Ramaswamy had failed a strongman contest. It was that he should have been smart enough to stick to the traditional baby-kissing photo-op. Instead, he managed to turn another opportunity to look like a normal human being into a viral demonstration of the opposite. 

Consider the video in which Ramaswamy shows off his baseball skills, or lack thereof. Last month, his campaign released a quick hit in which he recited his “10 Things I’ll Do for Ohio” agenda, filmed partly inside a batting cage. This was presumably meant to communicate several things at once: youth, vigor, and quintessential Ohio regular dudes-being-dudes stuff. But instead, viewers became fascinated by Ramaswamy’s swing, which, if I’m being generous, looked like a 6-year-old waving around a foam pool noodle. According to an eyewitness, Ramaswamy made contact on a mere five of 25 pitches in the slow-pitch cage, and the finished video simply replayed the “best” swings. The clip was mocked into oblivion within hours and quickly deleted from Instagram, though it lingered on TikTok, where the top comment asked the essential question: “Why would u post that swing?”

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It’s hard to imagine a more perfect political own-goal. Ramaswamy is actually athletic (he was a nationally ranked junior tennis player), but tennis presents an obvious problem: it’s the sport of country clubs and Wimbledon (which Ramaswamy also attended last year). Baseball, by contrast, is Americana. So we got the spectacle of the rail-thin Ramaswamy playing badly at the sport focus groups presumably recommended. Maybe he should have stuck to eating stadium hot dogs instead?

Then there was the clown in the three-piece suit who had a serious question for Ramaswamy about health care policy. Or rather, the mime asked a serious question, and the clown translated it. That was the surreal scene at a Turning Point USA event this spring at Ohio State University, where the Republican nominee for governor found himself fielding a question from a silent man in white face paint assisted by a red-nosed interpreter. The clown introduced himself as a “red-blooded American clown,” apparently to distinguish himself from the more Left-wing faction of Big Clown, and assured Ramaswamy he hadn’t been infected by the “woke mind virus.” It felt like a hilarious Nathan Fielder bit, yet the fact that this anecdote has barely registered nationally says something about Ramaswamy’s feckless Ohio gubernatorial bid — the whole thing feels like a clown show. 

The trouble follows him even into rooms that ought to be friendly. At the Young Americans for Liberty convention at Xavier University in Cincinnati in July, Ramaswamy was heckled from the moment he walked on stage, pressed on Israel among other issues, and he left after several minutes of a scheduled 30-minute speech. The trouble peaked when, speaking to a room full of young people, he said people of his generation had “already made it” and would be fine, while their generation would “pay the price.” To an audience of college-age libertarians already primed to revolt, it sounded like a billionaire shrugging at their future. “You’re a political cretin, and you need to get the fuck out of here,” one audience member reportedly yelled at Ramaswamy. The candidate then told the room that the real divide was between “winners and whiners” (and a crowd that didn’t see itself as whiners, therefore whined), prompting a columnist for The Columbus Dispatch to say the speech belongs to “the hall of fame of embarrassing political performances.”

Ramaswamy keeps tripping over the same rake because he is attempting something more difficult than winning an election — he’s trying to change genres mid-career. His 2024 model was a different product: fast, combative, and hyperverbal — tailor-made for the internet. Put him in a television studio like fellow talk-a-mile-a-minute conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, and he would redirect hostile questions, deliver six provocations in 90 seconds or fewer, and walk out with enough clips to feed Twitter for a week.

Running for governor requires a different breed of creature. You can’t govern the Buckeye State entirely from the replies to an Elon Musk post on X. (On a similar note, Musk’s 2024 barnstorming campaign on behalf of President Trump drew yawns until he pulled out his giant pocketbook.) Here’s the thing: state politics remains stubbornly physical. It requires church basements, county fairs, football games, college auditoriums, and prolonged conversations with men who would like to explain exactly what happened to the bridge on Route 7. Hence, the Harvard- and Yale-educated biotech multimillionaire turned national MAGA celebrity seems stuck in what might be described as an elaborate Normal Ohio Guy Simulator, and keeps failing all the side quests. 

Did you hear the one about how he told Ohio reporters that he loves long drives? His campaign finance reports told a different story. The data shows that he has spent nearly $690,000 leasing aircraft since launching his campaign, including nearly $560,000 paid to a company whose listed address is a house he owns. Federal flight records reviewed by the Ohio Capital Journal found that some of those flights were the kind of journeys most Ohioans would undertake armed with a Honda Accord and a hot Sheetz coffee: Columbus to Cleveland, Columbus to Youngstown, Columbus to Port Clinton. So not long drives, short flights then? One Republican put it to him bluntly: “Park the damn jet.”

When childcare costs came up last year, he suggested Ohio could make life easier for parents by keeping children in school until 4 p.m. and potentially moving toward year-round schooling. It was an impressive inversion of populism: instead of making childcare cheaper — simply make childhood shorter. The proposal was contained in a casual social-media exchange, rather than a formal policy announcement, his campaign later stressed. That nevertheless disappeared when the video was reposted. Oops. 

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None of this would matter if Ramaswamy were cruising toward the governor’s mansion, which should be a given for a Republican in Ohio. Donald Trump carried the state three times, most recently by 11 points. Republicans hold every statewide non-judicial office. The last Democrat elected governor was Ted Strickland in 2006. Yet according to the latest Suffolk University/USA TODAY report, Ramaswamy is down nearly 10 points to Democrat Amy Acton, the former state health director who became one of Ohio’s most recognizable figures during Covid. Polymarket has dropped Ramaswamy’s odds of victory to just 34%. No doubt, some of Ramaswamy’s struggles are by proxy, driven by his affiliation with MAGA and the country’s growing dissatisfaction with the second Trump administration. But the own goals aren’t helping.

Some of the hostility is coming from an especially awkward direction. Ramaswamy spent years cultivating the Very Online Right, but portions of that movement have become increasingly hostile to him due to racism. Nick Fuentes has urged his followers to deny Ramaswamy the governorship and attacked his Indian heritage in explicitly racist terms. At conservative events, hecklers have challenged him on immigration and H-1B visas (of which Indians are the largest recipients by far). Ironically, the candidate who made his national reputation arguing that America should transcend identity politics has thus found himself confronting an identity problem inside his own coalition. 

This may explain the increasingly desperate Ohio cosplay. But you have to pull the act off convincingly. Yes, you can memorize the right folksy talking points and put yourself in all the right photo-ops, but the ease with which a successful politician moves through those encounters is harder to acquire. Now, there’s a clip of him almost dropping a 10-year-old boy everywhere, with New York Times columnist Lydia Polgreen declaring it “worse than Dukakis in the tank.”

Perhaps, but the real tank job here is one rapidly fading campaign for governor. 

Tariffs come and go; the deal to end all deals with Russia over Ukraine came and went; the vow to end the war in Gaza is as if it had never been made; Canada, Panama, Greenland, an Iran “deal”: whither? Musk is riding high, he’s withdrawing, he’s back, he’s gone; he and Trump are over, the media and social media convulse in sound and fury, all of it signifying… what exactly? Cabinet secretaries prove their authenticity by their lack of merit, then don white coats of anti-expertise and proceed to euthanize the “deep state”.

After months of turbulence, the sensation of being tossed about in a heaving sea gives way to the feeling of being rocked insensate. Behold the new American dynamic: the frenetic-anesthetic. And yet it seems that behind nearly every outrageous policy announcement is one ultra-mundane goal, cruel as its consequences often are: to save money. Has there ever been an autocratic regime whose principal instrument of terror was to withhold funds? Isn’t that what parents do?

Cecil Rhodes declared: “I would annex the planets if I could.” Trump would monetize them. To hell with even the pretext of la mission civilisatrice. Civilization merely gets in the way. So do politics and policy. When Max Weber observed the disenchantment of the modern world, he had no idea a Trump would rob science and reason themselves of their power and replace them with business. Trump’s deals, after all, require little wit, culture, intellect, knowledge. Or politics. Or policy. That’s all liberal elite stuff. The President’s diehard supporters, convinced they have been swindled for generations by puffed-up eggheads with no vitality below the waist, are delighted.

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The closing of the Democratic mind

By Lee Siegel

The only constant in Trump’s scatter-brained reign is his self-promotion as he sells the American presidency off, bit by bit, in cryptocurrency. His face now appears on a giant banner hung over the front of the Department of Agriculture (of all places). More banners, to be draped over other public buildings, are said to be in the works. He posted a picture of himself as Pope. He is throwing a nearly $50 million military parade to celebrate his birthday this month. At a recent Oval Office meeting, the President of the United States was hawking hats that said “Trump Was Right About Everything!” Enthralled by the idea of war, though averse to an actual war, he is, incredibly, sending thousands of troops, spy planes and two warships to the border with Mexico. But don’t generalissimos take land, like Putin, instead of keeping people out of it? Well that’s where Greenland comes in.

And yet it seems that the massive military presence on the border, like the illegal deportation of immigrants to other countries, and the abduction of foreign students off American streets, and the threat to suspend habeas corpus — that it is all simply meant to fascinate Trump’s followers, and to terrify his critics. You could be next, citizen status or not. Thuggery with a policy-face.

Trump straddles America in the manner of an erotic asphyxiation. The choke-release-choke-release rhythm of his tariffs characterizes the dynamic of his regime. He brings the country close to some type of crisis that will bring relief through clarity, releases, then tightens his grasp again. Just when you fear Trump is going to come through on his administration’s threats to suspend habeas corpus, the cornerstone of American liberty, he posts an insult to Taylor Swift, then follows that with a threat to Bruce Springsteen, who had been critical of Trump. What is the word for disgust mixed with relief? There is no word for that. All the cascading historical analogies aside, there has never been, as Trump himself might say, a phenomenon like this: malevolence, ignorance, greed and open corruption moving together in seamless harmony in a still-functioning democracy.

At this point, the question of opposition to Trump is moot. The Democrats hold powerless minorities in Congress. Sanders and AOC rallies attract mere low tens of thousands of the faithful. The civil rights March for Jobs and Freedom on Washington in 1963 drew hundreds of thousands of people; so did the 1967 March on the Pentagon to protest the Vietnam War. Today, everyone is on their screens. And the media would rather obsess over the former president’s afflicted prostate than seriously and steadily address the current president’s corrupt and unstable mind.

Something has to give, and it’s this: the Democratic and democratic opposition has to abandon its educated reserve, its decorous outrage. It has to adopt a post-apocalyptic strategy. It has to begin, as Trump began, outside norms, beyond bounds, and from scratch, “lie down where all the ladders start”. Heaven knows, the Democratic Party has unlimited wealth, as Kamala Harris’s candidacy showed. They have the means to start from scratch.

The first thing they can do, then, is act like what they have become, a government-in-exile, and not like a gaggle of atomized, disconnected elected officials. They need to hold a weekly, if not daily, press conference that mirrors the form of those mind-blowing news conferences led by Trump’s fealty-bot, Karoline Leavitt. They need, first of all, a press-secretary-in-exile who will present a perfect counterpoint to Leavitt: earthy, unscripted, independent, funny, honest, open and not on the verge of exploding.

Now, the opposition’s press secretary has to be the face of something. Obviously the Democrats are not about to choose the representative of their party at this juncture. There is too much ambition, too much rivalry. And that’s what primaries are for. Let them, in lieu of that, settle on a quorum of a few figures whose steady presence will establish itself, regular press conference after regular press conference, in the mind of the public. Let them start with Andy Beshear, the Democratic governor of red Kentucky, a promising hybrid of (seemingly) true Christian morality, broad and deep liberal sentiments, and almost earthy American rectitude. Bring in Tim Walz, Ruben Gallego (and try to win back Hispanic voters from Trump) and Connecticut senator Chris Murphy.

Naturally our quorum will insist that they would never question the authority of an elected president. This will establish the morality of their challenge to the authority of this American president. The goal is to fascinate, as Trump has fascinated. You do that by making the act of watching you, and listening to you, an original experience.

Jettisoning any association with celebrities will help — how depressing that for liberals the fact that Biden didn’t recognize George Clooney at a crowded dinner is the definitive proof of his mental decline. The Left needs ordinary-seeming figures like Trump — but with substance and principle — to outperform Trump’s self-burlesquing swagger and rise to the outsize audacity and originality that celebrities are so good at counterfeiting.

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By Justin H. Vassallo

Most crucial — and controversial — of all: at a time when the least powerful people are in danger of losing access to food, medical care and basic income thanks to the big, beautiful bill, this is no time for empty symbolism. No time for another Kamala Harris. The fact is that Trump and his white MAGA legions are the response to black Obama. It’s almost as simple as that. So, appalling and even repellent as it might sound, in 2025, the Democrats are going to have to steel themselves and keep it, mostly, white. For now. If you want to defeat the MAGA obscenity that regards blacks as inferior, Jews as sinister, immigrants as “vermin”, women as wombs and housekeepers, run circles around it. It’s not pandering. It’s what the Chinese call “Chi Sau”, the trick of using an opponent’s force against them. (They do it surpassingly well, especially when the opponent obliges at almost every turn.)

I write — or so I flatter myself — as an Old Left, cosmopolitan Jewish intellectual who would want nothing more than to see a Ras Baraka/Elizabeth Warren — or vice versa — ticket. (Baraka, the mayor of Newark, New Jersey, is, to my mind, the most original and authentic politician in America.) I also write at a time when Harris, who lost both the electoral and the popular vote to Trump is, mind-bogglingly, leading in polls for who should be the Democratic candidate for president in 2028. This will only lead to certain defeat again. So make like the Trojan Horse, and find a white candidate who will empower America’s diversity instead of a token candidate who will pay lip service to the “rainbow” and betray it in the end. See what happens. If the Democrats sweep the midterms, then, by all means, open the doors to politicians of every stripe. Just be sure to elevate the content of character over the self-flattering pieties of identity politics. Harris didn’t lose because she was a woman of color. She lost because that’s all she was.

Liberal pundits repeat, ad nauseam, the cliché that what people want from the Democrats is “ideas” and “vision”. They want to know what Democrats “stand for”. But in this moment, people want nothing of the kind. People want big, baggy, flattering and unthreatening concepts like “make America great again” that they can fit all their ordinary feelings and frustrations and aspirations into. They don’t want “ideas” about what other people “stand for”. If people wanted “ideas” showing what other people “stand for,” they’d be forming human cordons around Harvard and Columbia. They want stories bursting with vivid, clarifying, and, yes, entertaining sentiments. They want people in government they can imagine relaxing with. Give them someone they can relax with who isn’t an unhinged buffoon.

Trump once spoke of his intention to make every day of his presidency an episode in a TV drama. He has succeeded at that, brilliantly. The Democrats must do the same. They must start pouring all their dollars into the one strategy that will save the republic: an ongoing story that will reflect Americans’ ordinary feelings, frustrations and aspirations. A story that will, all at once, refute Trump’s, push it into the margins, and offer a riveting, satisfying alternative.

Here is an idea for a timid time of no ideas: an epic campaign commercial to end all campaign commercials. Something, unfolding in episodes, that will run, day after day, for months. It will have a representative American personality at the heart of it. An everyman for our time. It will tell an ongoing story, episode after episode, about this fictional, exemplary figure as he passes through his days and nights on earth. Screen it on TV, cable, TikTok or somewhere new, and show him suffering from illness, striving to make a living, worrying about his children, sacrificing for his children, confused and concerned about the future, celebrating life’s small triumphs and enduring life’s setbacks. Make the exemplary figure a male because, well, that is now the decisive segment of the American electorate.

Construct this episodic epic the way a great story is constructed: conflict, suspense, resolution. In this mad, unfocused time, give people the inherent rationality of a tale; make them focus intensely on something that will be dear to their own experience; that will gather up and order the loose ends of these chaotic days. In every respect, structure it like a simple, straightforward story. A tale that anyone would tell anyone else at a bar, in a park, on a train.

Amid the narrative arc tell other stories: show Trump boasting, Trump spewing middle-school insults and abuse, Trump hawking Teslas on the White House Lawn; Trump cavorting with the wealthy and the powerful; Trump contradicting himself; Trump barking at Zelensky; Trump’s regime fawning all over him; Trump allowing his insecurity to erupt when asked to respond to the charge that “Trump Always Chickens Out” (the fragility of his ego is breathtaking); Trump golfing, golfing, golfing — all of this as the Main Character struggles, suffers, grieves, endures.

A mortal life is a tale; the opposition has to return to life and tell a simple, undogmatic, non-didactic, existentially gratifying tale.

D.H. Lawrence wrote about the power of novels to tell stories: “They are only tremulations on the ether. But the novel as a tremulation can make the whole man alive tremble.” Like it or not, a tremulating tale got America into this mess. A better tremulating tale might help get us out of it.

In papers and newsrooms, with their psychologically unhealthy receptiveness to barely detectable swings in the public mood, there was of course an immediate, erotic thrill in the air the morning after Trump’s victory. Finance, and other parts of the private sector too, were apparently eager to toast important political victories such as their newly regained freedom to use words like “retard” and “pussy” with impunity.

The ivory tower of higher education, on the other hand, absorbs tremors such as the vibe shift in the manner of a studiously tremor-proofed Japanese skyscraper, the people on the top floor barely sensitive to the shuddering ground outside. Publishing, too, one might have thought. But a few weeks ago came the news that the first male-only publishing house, Conduit Books, is to be launched in an effort to undo one of the most remarked-upon literary trends of the “woke” age: the death of male novelist.

Until fairly recently, even mentioning that the male novelist had died was the kind of conversational gambit liable to provoke wilfully confused or overdrawn reactions on the part of whichever literary types you were talking to. To go so far as to suggest an industry-wide initiative to save the male novelist would have sounded akin to a recruitment appeal on behalf of spinster librarians or homosexual choreographers: a basically pointless intervention. Even now, mention his death in a certain kind of bien pensant company, and you should expect your interlocutor to oscillate in a characteristically inconsistent way between denying that he really has died and insisting that it is a good thing that he has.

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That he has, in fact, expired, seems to me a question no longer much worth debating. The evidence is in. A recent cultural autopsy report in the American magazine Compact laid out the statistics with arresting clarity. Over the course of about a decade, the once-dominant figure of the white American male novelist has simply vanished from longlists and shortlists, from the ranks of prestigious literary fellowships, and from the end-of-year fiction round-ups of magazines, even those outwardly geared to male readers. Most astonishingly, not a single white male born after 1984 has ever had a piece of long fiction published in the New Yorker. A similar story could no doubt be told about the UK. By my count, the number of male millennials to have ever been shortlisted for the Booker Prize comes in at a grand total of three. Though any one of these facts could be brushed off as an anomaly, collectively they are much harder to dismiss.

Less obvious than whether the young male novelist is actually dead, is the matter of whether he was hunted to extinction, or died out as a result of ecological changes in the wider cultural environment — to which he couldn’t adapt quickly enough. Perhaps instead of being actively discriminated against, young ambitious men are simply self-selecting out of the literary scene. Faced with the appearance of collapsing industry-wide sales, and a remaining readership of literary fiction largely composed of women, that would certainly be a rational market response.

Explanations like those might settle the question, were it not that writing has always been a comparatively unpromising path. What remains particularly striking about the present day is the total absence of even a single outlier case: an instance of the competitive, prototypically-masculine male novelist for whom the culture was spoiled for choice only a few decades ago. More pressingly, what has happened to the kind of helplessly inventive, self-driven artist who can do nothing but pursue his calling, whatever the costs or barriers? His disappearance suggests there may be something more insidious at work in the structures of contemporary publishing.

The theory that there are more subtle ways of creating an unfavorable environment for specific kinds of people or behavior is one that has been richly developed by progressives in other contexts; but they apply its lessons in unprincipled ways, forgetting it entirely in cases that risk producing politically unwelcome conclusions. Though the feminization of publishing — today, 68% of those employed in it are female — and the accompanying feminization of the tastes that rule it, are one possible explanation, there is another more obviously culpable development.

That trend, which mirrors a wider one in all artistic enterprises, could be glossed as the replacement of merit by perspective as the governing priority of cultural life. Any book reviewer who has glanced through the promo material for a debut novel in recent years will be familiar with the mandatory references to the author’s backstory, whether eccentric or mundane; their lived experience; their “unique” “authority” to “tell” this particular “story” from whatever marginalized perspective they feel best placed to make a claim on.

Such desperate self-siloing is a marketing technique that is the natural counterpart of the invidious identitarian prohibition on writing from any politically-salient perspective other than one’s own, a transgression that one senses is fittingly regarded by some as a kind of creative theft. What, on the other hand, is virtually never front and center of the publishers’ sales pitch is any suggestion that the book might be “good” or the author “talented”. All fiction, within this framework, is a mode of biography, its value that of an elevated kind of social commentary.

The assumptions of this cultural turn have become so widespread that it can be difficult to recall how tedious and dysfunctional they are. They amount to the gradual corruption of artistic activity by outside concerns. At the limit, the view that art’s value consists in shedding light on extraneous social issues or political identity is one that denies art any kind of distinctive value at all, since other things achieve those tasks too — and often more effectively.

Philistines have always held the view that art’s value is at best derivative; that this view should have become the reigning ideology within cultural life itself, however, is perverse. Yet skim, for instance, this year’s Observer magazine splash celebrating the best up-and-coming novelists of 2025 and you will find the inclusion of virtually every entry justified on the purely instrumental ground that it addresses some extraneous social theme or other. Pieces like this read like a greatest hits reel of all the most eye-rollingly worthy subjects you can think of: “coercive control”, “queer romance”, “the opioid crisis”, “toxic masculinity”, “the northern black experience”, “empire, populism and global warming”, “male violence”, “taboos around the body”.

As many of the more generic social themes get done to death, it clearly pays with publishers to get a little more specific. One listed novelist claims to be channeling the disarmingly specific “feeling of growing up after 9/11 in an Iraqi-Pakistani household in Manchester”, another the experience of turning “16 the year that section 28 of the Local Government Act 1988” was passed. (I conjecture that someone who can directly feel the passage of local government legislation needs a doctor, not a book agent). Then, with the usual comic twist, one of the novelists announces their book is interesting because they are “dyslexic” and the list mercifully comes to an end.

What is to be done? Conduit Books and the new publishers for men to the rescue? Hardly. A quick glance at its self-characterization, and recent comments by its founder Jude Cook, reveal it to be yet another symptom of the disease it claims to fix.

Speaking to The Guardian, and with appropriate anguish, Cook dutifully acknowledges the “toxic male dominated” scene of the Eighties and Nineties. This, he tells us with a strange combination of vagueness and inaccuracy, was the tail-end of “3,000 years of patriarchal domination”. But in recent years, as the reading public will have noticed, an epoch-defining event has taken place in which literally thousands of years of artistic injustice have been set in reverse by the arrival of “Sally Rooney et al” as a “timely corrective”. (If three thousand years late now counts as “timely”, I feel considerable reassurance about my own filing habits).

Still, Cook can’t help but notice that the anti-male correction may have been an over-correction. There’s something wrong with today’s crop of up-and-coming novelists. The men all write like women, and the women all write like Irish women. And where’s the — buzzword coming — diversity there?

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Men, Cook imaginatively suggests, are the new font of “overlooked narratives”, their voices in need of amplification and platforming as they describe their very own lived-experience of “fatherhood, masculinity, working class male experience… and negotiating the 21st century as a man”. And just in case that doesn’t sound dull enough, Cook adds the oddly neutering constraint that it “cannot be over-stressed” that his new press will not “seek an adversarial stance”. Indeed so keen is he to trip himself up in pursuit of his stated goal, that Conduit is actively soliciting the work of “queer, non-binary and neurodivergent” authors in its attempt to court the lost male market.

There is a lesson here: both in Conduit’s wonky diagnosis of what has gone wrong in literary life, and its ill-conceived attempt at a cure. Thinking about the problem in perhaps the only way he knows how, Cook has attempted to conceive of young men, the only demographic that still robustly resists such treatment in the social imagination, as constituting yet another dimension of potential political marginalization. As his framing dictates, male artists’ only possible artistic interest could be to act as a filter for the kinds of social experience typical of their group. Though it parades as a solution, this is an expression of exactly the same diseased thinking that got us into this mess to start with.

It is not that young white men need to be added in, like an almost-forgotten ingredient, to the stew of social morality tales from which the literary world may draw. It is that no such extraneous social priorities should ever have been imposed on literary activity to begin with. They are the kind of thing bound to artificially constrain creative work in ways more likely to generate failure. It is hard enough, for writers of either sex, to produce intelligent art to begin with — without further forcing it to pass irrelevant tests as demographic survey or social commentary. But perhaps there is no way to force the publishing industry to internalize this simple lesson, short of some up-and-coming writer authoring a debut novel about the oppressive social experience of having to deal with an industry whose first response to identifying the consequences of its own errors is to implement its mistaken theory with more determination than ever.

But the woke Left apparently hasn’t received the memo. Witness the social-media mobbing of Vivek Chibber, a professor of sociology at New York University and the editor of the socialist journal Catalyst, after he dared to historically analyze wokeness as an illiberal, authoritarian tendency.

Chibber made his comments last week on a Jacobin magazine podcast titled Confronting Capitalism: The End of Wokeness. It triggered a firestorm of angry “X” comments that ranged from mischaracterizing him as a Right-wing goon to outright obscenity. Ajay Singh Chaudhary, the director of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, dismissed Chibber’s critique of wokeness as “tripe” and a “carbon copy” of the Right’s.

Laleh Khalili, a Mideast scholar at the University of Exeter, denounced Chibber as a “brownshirt waving a red flag.” William Clare Roberts, an assistant professor of politics at McGill University, suggested that Chibber is “no different” from liberal writers like Matt Yglesias or Jonathan Chait: “I am weary of having to treat him like he’s a serious thinker on the socialist left, much less a Marxist”. Many other commenters didn’t even bother with full sentences. Instead, they simply called Chibber a “pedophile” and the like.

So much for the vibe shift. But what did Chibber actually say that so incensed the professional Left? Perhaps it was because he dared to point out that wokeness is not popular. Or perhaps it was his definition of wokeness that rankled its acolytes: Chibber defined wokeness as a professional-class movement for social justice that excludes socialism from its political project and that is highly intolerant to boot.

A pile-up on X when a Leftist like Chibber criticizes wokeness is politically significant, because it demonstrates that for much of the Left, there is no difference between the neoliberal micromanagement of diversity in the ranks of the professional class, on one hand, and the struggle to empower the American working class relative to capital, on the other. Progressives in states like California have successfully transformed the language of human resources, while neglecting problems like skyrocketing housing costs and working-class wage stagnation.

If Democrats had been successful on both the language and the wage fronts, there might be less explosive hostility to the party’s politics of hypocrisy. November’s massive shift to the GOP in the Golden State and similar blue areas reflected a silent protest against one-party rule: it is the combination of Democratic identity politics and liberal compliance with the demands of the party’s wealthiest donors that has bred resentment and nihilism among downscale Americans.

Unable and unwilling to contemplate the limits of wokeness in building mass politics, identitarian Leftists have taken out their rage against Chibber. In Chinese, there is a saying that reflects the tyrant’s wisdom when controlling a crowd: “kill a chicken to scare the monkey”. You do a symbolic murder of a critic of woke dogma in order to silence anyone else with doubts in their mind about the priorities of Left politics. The X mob can live off the pleasure of group psychology, following an imaginary woke leader by mobbing an enemy online. It is a disgusting spectacle and bodes ill for the evolution of Left liberalism.

It is critical to attack the authoritarianism at the heart of contemporary liberal politics from the Left: if the Left fails to sound its own alarm about the professional-class takeover of identity and diversity, then the Right will continue to draw upon the rage that animates working-class, non-college-educated people of all races, genders, and sexualities. They have seen liberalism deliver nothing but empty promises of inclusion when they hunger for an actual change in the political field itself. Trump sees the hypocrisy of woke elites and acts as a vehicle for catharsis.

If anything, Chibber didn’t go far enough in his critique. At a key point in the podcast, he dared to ask a question most of us don’t pose any longer: why couldn’t ethnic and gender studies be integrated into existing departments of history, sociology, English, American Studies, and the like when they first emerged in the 1960s? Why did they have to be carved out as separate disciplines? Chibber argued that this owed to “grassroots” demand for separate identity-based departments.

But this is mistaken, and any serious Left critique of the rise of identity studies — a key vector of what came to be known as woke ideas — must reckon with the granular history. In fact, the establishment of the first-ever ethnic studies departments, at the University of California, Berkeley, and San Francisco State University, was engineered by a lifetime FBI informant named Richard Aoki.

This is notable, because the upshot of Aoki’s work, and that of the wider movement he helped incept, was to defuse campus radicalism and turn would-be revolutionaries into credentialed race professionals of the kind who would soon become familiar to anyone who has faced the business end of a university diversity office or corporate HR department.

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In his 2012 book, Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals and Ronald Reagan’s Rise to Power, the journalist Seth Rosenfeld used the Freedom of Information Act to extract documents from the FBI about its activities against California militant groups during the Sixties and early Seventies. In the course of his research, he discovered that Aoki, the first Asian member of the Black Panther Party, was recruited by the FBI when he was in the Army during the Fifties to inform on student radicals. Aoki, as it happens, also midwifed the Asian American Studies section of Berkeley’s ethnic-studies department, the first of its kind in the United States.

This origin story sheds a cold light on identity- and grievance-based disciplines, which were designed to emphasize “visibility” and “representation” over critically analyzing and attacking capitalism itself. Other American universities would soon follow Berkeley’s path and create ethnic-studies departments to signal their commitment to progressive causes.

Thanks to identity politics, militancy and activism became institutionalized within the academy and, later, the corporation and the security apparatus. Is it possible that Aoki abandoned his early commitment to anti-Communism and had a genuine conversion to the sort of identity politics he would espouse as a chief promoter of ethnic studies? Certainly. And I am not suggesting that identity politics was solely a product of the American security establishment; life is much too complex and contingent to permit such single-cause explanations. Still, there is no denying that university-based ethnic studies came to supply a new “dialect of power”: a way for the likes of the FBI or Goldman Sachs to deflect questions about their decisions by showcasing the “diversity” of the people who make those decisions.

The point is that those of us on the Left need more discussion of the origins of identity politics, the role it has played in creating nominally progressive liberal institutions, and its complicity with defanging actual radicalism. Chibber’s intervention in this debate wasn’t inflammatory. It was conversational, accessible, and reasonable. Chibber’s work is the answer to the millions of Americans who crave a critique of Democratic identity politics but have only found it on the Right. The viciousness of his critics only vindicates his arguments.

It is as if, somehow, conservatives imagined that the cultural worldview best expressed by T.S. Eliot in his “Tradition and the Individual Talent” could long thrive in a capitalist culture. As if Eliot’s view, that the true significance of an artist’s work lies in the relationship between the artist and those who had come before, could be compatible with capitalism, an ideology that is by definition “presentist” and utterly disdainful of the past. Or, to put it another way, as if what Daniel Bell described as capitalism’s “radical individualism in economics, and [its] willingness to tear up all traditional social relations in the process” could somehow still leave room for traditionalism in culture.

For tradition is, at least in the long run, the cultural, and perhaps even the moral, opposite of innovation which is what the free market perpetually aspires to. To use the business school boilerplate, new technologies give rise to new industries, which in turn produce new goods and services. In the process, social relations are transformed. Even if it is correct to believe that capitalism, through what Joseph Schumpeter described as “creative destruction”, is the best economic system in history for creating prosperity, the price for that prosperity was always going to be high culture.

In his 1976 book, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, Daniel Bell rejected Marx’s idea that culture was a reflection of the economy — that it was “integrally allied to it through the exchange process”. Instead, Bell argued that culture had become ever more autonomous. And yet the connection he made between the growth of discretionary income, and the advent of a cultural order that proudly proclaimed itself the adversary of the established social order, actually fits in better with Marx’s view than his own. Towards the end of his essay, Bell conceded that the breakup of the traditional bourgeois value system was, in fact, brought about by the bourgeois economic system — by the free market, to be precise.

But Bell doesn’t seem to have understood something quite crucial about the role of the arts. It is unquestionably the case that from the middle of the 19th century, despite a few dissenting voices such as Eliot’s, artists in the West saw their mission as the dissolution of the social status quo. With hindsight, however, it is clear that their more important role, in world historical terms, was to serve as a kind of inadvertent avant-garde of the free market: by systematically destroying the Protestant Ethic with all its moral and economic commitments to what Bell called “Malthusian prudence”. Bell’s language is elegiac. American capitalism, he wrote, “has lost its legitimacy, which was based on a moral system of reward, and the Protestant sanctification of work”. And, writing as he was in 1970, it is understandable that he thought that the replacement of Protestant moralism with hedonism, with a new “voluptuary system” of “social permissiveness and libertinism”, would be unsustainable.

And had it stopped there, perhaps Bell would have been right. Every social system needs some kind of moral warrant, and in 1970 it was anything but clear what that new moral warrant would be. Half a century later, though, we now know what it has been: wokeness, Critical Race Theory, intersectionality, LGTBQ+, and the rest. These doctrines have moralised the voluptuary system, disciplined the libertinism, and politicised the permissiveness. As for the cultural contradiction Bell warned of, that, too, has been settled — and in Carthaginian fashion, by condemning and repudiating the past as racist, which in practical terms means calling for the erasure of the high culture of the past. It could hardly be otherwise, since high culture in every society has always been the product of the rich and powerful, of kings, empires, princes, or plutocrats.

High culture became the only thing standing in the way of the free market, and now that too has been taken care of. Art can co-exist with Schlock, but it cannot indefinitely survive the onslaught of Kitsch — the only kind of culture the free market can really tolerate. And there we have the unimaginable combination of Schumpeter and Fanon. Yet, once imagined, obvious; perhaps, even, inevitable. Because, at least in the long run, it is impossible to have an economic system based on obsolescence and destruction (“creative” or otherwise) and a cultural system based on pious continuity. We have moved from the Grand Inquisitor to the Grand Therapist.

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And so now only 8% of university students in the UK are enrolled in humanities subjects. The madness of wokeness and the barbarous inanities of “anti-racism” are well on their way to destroying high culture in the Anglosphere and, probably, in parts of Latin America and Western Europe as well. And this despite the Rightward turn, because most of the Right in the US, Canada, and Australia are no more committed to high culture than to the preservation of the environment. In Western Europe and Latin America, high culture has at least for a century not been a monopoly of the Left — from Borges to Houellebecq, a conservative tradition remains alive. By contrast, in the Anglosphere, once one gets past Chesterton, Eliot, Flannery O’Connor, and Walker Percy, the cultural pickings are slim indeed.

Let us for once be honest: what is on offer in terms of contemporary culture on both sides of the woke/anti-woke battle line today is a penumbral shadow of the culture of the past. This is not to say that there aren’t any people of talent in both camps. But, if we are being rigorous, it is simply a fact to say that the greatest days of Western culture are behind it. There is nothing unusual in this. Cultures and civilisations are as mortal as human beings. The great Renaissance historian and politician Francesco Guicciardini said that a citizen must not mourn the decline of their city. All cities decline, he wrote. If there is anything to mourn it is that it has been one’s unhappy fate to be born when one’s city is in decline.

If there is a new culture waiting to be born, it will certainly not be born of wokeness, of neo-tribalist nostalgia, of notions of race that would have pleased the worst 20th-century race scientist. But nor will Western high culture ever ascend to the place it reached so gloriously in the period between the Renaissance and the middle of the 20th century. That race has run its course. And somewhere, deep down, everyone knows this. Given that, why in God’s name would one want to study a subject in the humanities? There are, of course, material reasons for the death of the humanities as well. One can be materialist here, but not too materialist; allegro ma non troppo, as it were. The old culture is dying, and what purports to be its successor has come into the world stillborn.

***

A version of this essay appears in David Rieff’s new book, Desire and Fate, published by Eris and out now.

“The 2016 election cycle will be remembered for many things, but for those who work in politics, it may be best remembered as the year that political data reached maturity.”
— Andrew Therriault

In 2004, 22-year old Andrew Therriault wanted to get a Democrat president elected. “I got in my car and drove to Ohio,” he told me. “I walked around college campuses, signing students up to vote and all that.” But John Kerry did not get elected, and Therriault “wound up after the election, back at my parents’ house, broke, depressed and unemployed”. Talking to strangers about politics, he concluded, was not his forte.

Ten years later, Therriault found a job that did feel right: Director of Data Science for the DNC, the organising body of the US Democratic Party. By 2016, he was editing the O’Reilly publication Data And Democracy, from which the above quote is taken, describing in detail exactly how data can be used for political campaigning.

With hindsight, the 2016 election cycle was probably not best remembered as “the year that political data reached maturity”. It was, however, the year that many journalists and researchers discovered for the first time how data-driven, personalised political campaigning works, when they sought explanations for the political shocks of Britain voting Leave and the US voting Trump.

But Barack Obama had already won two Presidential elections using those techniques with increasing sophistication. A Guardian article in 2012 spared a single paragraph to privacy concerns between gushing about “a vast digital data operation that for the first time combines a unified database on millions of Americans with the power of Facebook to target individual voters to a degree never achieved before”, and the way, probably unconsciously, “the individual volunteer will be injecting all the information they store publicly on their Facebook page — home location, date of birth, interests and, crucially, network of friends — directly into the central Obama database”.

Despite the furore over Cambridge Analytica, and the supposed (but implausible) psychological manipulation of 2016 voters via social media, digital political campaigning remains the norm. Hardly surprising, in a world where we increasingly turn to personalised channels, and especially social media, for our news and commentary. How else could campaigners reach potential voters?

In the recent UK local and mayoral elections, the Labour Party spent over half a million pounds (£570,160) on advertising via Meta alone — that’s Facebook and Instagram. The Conservatives lagged behind with a mere £336,668, perhaps because their adverts tended to target pensioners who spend less time on social media: one with the headline “Tax the Codgers” was shown only to over 55s. Thanks to WhoTargetsMe you can now dig into the broad strategies of digital political campaigners, though not the details of how specific ads are targeted.

I asked Andrew Therriault how many data points he would have on a typical voter — dozens? Hundreds? Thousands? “Thousands,” he says, as if that’s obvious. But to think of that as a list of thousands of things he’d know about an individual voter would be misleading. Yes, it would include voter registration details — name, address, age — and perhaps answers previously given to surveys. But to that basic voter database Therriault’s team would add census data for the neighbourhood. Political campaigns also regularly use commercial data from data brokers such as Experian and Acxiom, collected from our interactions with businesses. Even though it’s hard to match data from those sources to individual voters, they can be used to build models, so what they do know about you can be used to predict things that they don’t know.

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Being able to profile individual voters helps a campaigner decide who to target, and tailor the message to them. There are two kinds of people worth targeting: those who might be persuaded to support your side, and those who need a push to get out and vote. “Persuade or mobilise,” as Andrew Therriault puts it.

Like other kinds of personalised advertising, political campaigns aim to show the most effective message to the right person, at the right time. And, also like other adverts, digital media allow the advertiser to monitor which ads are the most effective for this kind of person, by running trials of different variants to see which gets the best response. It is, in short, a huge feat of digital technology. It would be a mistake, however, to see the technology itself as driving this political change. Rather, the change from mass movements to “The Personal Is Political” predates the capacity to deliver a tailored message to an individual on a device that accompanies them everywhere.

The era of mass politics is not very old. In 1848, “the springtime of the peoples”, a huge Chartist demonstration in London tried to deliver a petition calling for universal male suffrage, secret ballots, and other reforms to parliament. According to the Illustrated London News, it took a cart drawn by four farm horses to carry the signatures in “five huge bales or bundles”. The government fortified all the bridges in London to prevent the assembled masses reaching Westminster, and went on to arrest the leaders and suppress the movement.

The road to every citizen getting a vote would be long and hard. In the US, race was the bar to democratic equality: in the UK, it was property, which excluded some men until 1918, and a third of women until 1928. In France, where all men did get the vote in 1848, women would wait until 1944.

But the ability to vote a government in — or out — was not the only form of mass politics. By 1874 around 10%  of the adult population of Britain were members of TUC-affiliated unions (mostly men). Organisations pressing for equal rights for women, or for non-whites in America, also demanded equality beyond the vote. However, by the time Martin Luther King made his “I Have A Dream” speech in 1963, the character of those mass movements was changing. Even as King called on the US Government to make good the “promissory note” to all Americans, black and white, guaranteeing “the unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”, that universalist vision was fragmenting and turning inwards.

Tom Hayden, later Senator Hayden, was in the immense crowd that heard King that day. After being inspired by Jack Kerouac’s On The Road to hitchhike across America, Hayden became a Civil Rights activist and spent some time in jail. There he drafted what would become the 1962 Port Huron Statement, a manifesto for Students for a Democratic Society:

“We oppose the depersonalisation that reduces human beings to the status of things,” it declares. “The goal of man and society should be human independence; a concern not with image or popularity but with finding a meaning in life that is personally authentic.” Politics, he said, should be a “means of finding meaning in personal life”, imbuing it with a therapeutic sensibility. The Port Huron Statement captures a moment at the beginning of a new political age. It talks of “loneliness, estrangement, isolation”, and “the felt powerlessness of ordinary people.” It matters not only that people lack power, but that they feel powerless.

The distinction between politics and personal feelings was fraying, and as the Sixties drew to a close, a slogan emerged to capture this new kind of politics. “The Personal is Political” is the title of a short 1969 article written by Carol Hanisch, an activist in the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement, and a founder of New York Radical Women, the group that protested at the Miss America contest in 1968. They were all women who were active in other movements — Civil Rights, Anti-War or the New Left — who wanted to discuss politics without men present. After the meeting ended, they kept arguing into the small hours at a nearby restaurant over apple pie a la mode.

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I asked Hanisch what she thought of the shift towards seeing the world in terms of identity. “It cannot be a positive change,” she told me. “We lose all sense of a need for unity to take on the source(s) of our oppression. Instead it invites us to escape the real world by “living in our heads”. It allows us to believe that if we can change ourselves and/or just a few people, everything will be fine, which is, of course, nonsense. We’re talking society-wide oppression here, not just individual attitudes. You can’t ‘identify’ yourself out of oppression, though over the centuries people sure have tried!”

Today, we take disagreement very personally. Not only issues that are entangled with our everyday lives, our feelings or how we see ourselves: even geopolitical issues or which political party we vote for are taken much more personally. People are less open to social connection with those who disagree with them politically. Survey after survey has shown that, increasingly, we are more likely to see those who disagree with us politically as closed-minded, selfish, hypocritical, immoral or lazy, and less likely to call them intelligent or honest. Negative feeling towards the other side, politically, has been steadily increasing since the Eighties.

I asked Andrew Therriault if he thought politics in general had become more personal.  “Yeah, from both the voters and the candidate side it’s become more individualised, in terms of even the basic facts we’re working with,” he says. “This idea that your political reality can be whatever you want it to be, and whatever someone else wants to tell you it should be. And there does not seem to be that sort of common grounding we once had when things were less personalised.”

Politics, in other words, is turning into a form of self-expression. It is no longer an arena to which we all bring our conflicting visions of how the world should be, and try to persuade others to join us in working towards ours — or even, in which we might listen to other people’s ideas and change our minds.

***

This article includes material drawn from Technology Is Not The Problem, published by HarperCollins.

Good old Lionel, hitting on the sort of woke nonsense you couldn’t make up. But, hold up, what’s this? The real world has decided to compete. It has just been announced in the Bookseller that a female academic is publishing a book calling for the emancipation of the last class of people it’s still okay to oppress: children.

Allen Lane — one of our most prestigious publishers, by the way — boasts of acquiring a book by the philosopher Lorna Finlayson called Child Liberation: The Oppression of Children and the Case for Change. But this isn’t a put-on. In the words of its acquiring editor, it “reminds us that children are subject to legal and social discrimination, denied basic freedoms of movement and speech, and disproportionately likely to be in poverty and subjected to violence”.

But, but, but (you may think) aren’t some of those restrictions intended to reduce their chance of being subjected to violence? Aren’t things like, say, requiring children to go to school intended to reduce their chance of poverty? Apparently that’s not how the author sees it.

Dr Finlayson complains that nobody takes the idea of child lib seriously. “I think we have a bit of a collective mental block about childhood […] even within politically radical circles. If the idea of child liberation comes up at all, it’s reduced to caricature and summarily dismissed.”

Well there’s a tempting invitation if even I heard one: reducing the idea to caricature and summarily dismissing it is exactly what seems appropriate, not least because the book’s ahead-of-publication hype machine is reducing it to caricature already.

We can recognise that our ideas about what constitutes the span of childhood are culturally contingent and historically determined. We can recognise that there’s no natural or immutable law that tells us how we should police and protect children, or that tells us at what age they should be allowed to smoke, drink, take international flights and make whoopee. But to argue categorically — as the puffery for this book unequivocally seems to — that we should “break the consensus that children’s lives are not their own” is eye-catching but bananas.

I don’t know if Dr Finlayson has any children, or has even met any children, but if she has, they are clearly out of the usual line. Children, in my experience as the parent of a 14-year-old, a 13-year-old and a 10-year-old, are not to be trusted with implements any sharper than a butter knife — let alone a vote, bodily autonomy or the decision as to whether they should go to school.

“Basic freedoms of movement and speech”? Any radical progressive in favour of giving children more freedom of speech than they already have will get a nasty surprise if they check out what teenagers say to each-other on their class WhatsApp groups. The last time I gave my 12-year-old freedom of movement, he left his guitar lesson, climbed on the W3 bus instead of the 144 and my co-oppressor, his mum, had to miss her Thursday football game to go and rescue him from the far side of Alexandra Palace.

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Children are maniacs. Left in charge of their own lives, they will subsist entirely on Lotus Biscoff Spread eaten from the jar with a dessert spoon. They are excellently good at losing things, breaking things, and setting things on fire. Given a free choice as to how to spend their days, they would play Rocket League on the PS5 or browse early Nineties indie songs on Spotify until their eyeballs fell out. Were we to take seriously the notion that children should be put in charge of their own destinies, I feel confident we could reverse the goods of western civilisation, patiently accumulated over millennia, in a generation or two.

An “oppressed group”? Sure, my 14-year-old will regularly make clear that she feels oppressed by the way that the boss-class, ie me, occasionally asks her to do her homework, stop looking at her phone, go to bed on time, leave for school before midday, empty the dishwasher or wave even a cursory hello to members of her extended family when they come to visit. By the orthodoxies of identity politics — in which her “lived experience” is sovereign and it is your task to listen humbly and “educate yourself” — you could construct the case that she is indeed oppressed. But it is not oppression as the medieval Russian serf, the plantation slave or the employee in a Chinese iPhone factory will tend to recognise the term.

Let us grant, for the sake of argument, that the feral delinquency of my own children and all the children I have ever met may be a symptom of living under the normative yoke of late capitalism. Let us suppose that, were they only freed from the crypto-fascist structure of the nuclear family, the little brutes would at once become public-spirited, communistic, outward-looking, self-directed and responsible: pint-sized versions of the “organic intellectuals” mid-century Marxists dreamed of springing up in the proletariat like mushrooms after rain.

Nevertheless, it bears noting that the state of childhood autonomy for which Dr Finlayson appears to campaign — a state in which age discrimination is cast off, and children enjoy the freedoms and responsibilities of adults — isn’t a glorious and untried future. It’s an inglorious and well-tried past.

Childhood itself — at least as we conceive it now, of a period between toddlerhood and early adolescence associated with play and education and (thank you, the Romantics) “innocence” — is an invention of the early modern period. Until relatively recently, in historical terms, children were to all intents and purposes treated as tallness-challenged apprentice grown-ups. The strong version of this case — the historian Philippe Aries’s flamboyant declaration in Centuries of Childhood (1962) that “in medieval society the idea of childhood did not exist” — has been largely discredited. But the weak version is unarguable.

Daniel Defoe, touring the UK in the early 18th century, reported approvingly from Norfolk that “the very children after four or five years of age, could every one earn their own bread”.  It was only after decades of campaigning through that century and right up towards the end of the 19th century in this country that laws were passed to protect — sorry, oppress — such children.

Writing in 1818, Samuel Taylor Coleridge took aim at the “free labour” of children (the term given to those child workers who still lived with their parents rather than being formally apprenticed), pointing out sourly that “If the labour were indeed free, the contract would approach, on the one side, too near to suicide, on the other to manslaughter.” Coleridge’s view, gradually, won out. Children were oppressed first by an 1819 Act which prevented children under the age of nine from being employed in cotton mills, and limited working hours for those over nine. They were oppressed again by the 1908 Children Act, which removed their right to the death penalty, their right to visit brothels, their right to buy tobacco and — unkindest cut of all — raised the legal drinking age to five. There’s a whole two-century long, hard-fought history of campaigning to remove rights from children, and personally I’m all for it.

And to state what will perhaps be obvious: no matter how high-minded the philosophical case for Child Liberation, we should be uneasy that there are people who will cheer such a case to the echo for non-philosophical reasons — specifically, those who will find distinctly appealing the idea that a liberated child will be capable of consenting to sex with adults. Nambla (the North American Man/Boy Love Association) and the UK’s now-happily-defunct Paedophile Information Exchange — both of which surfed the wave of contemporaneous late-20th-century liberation movements — were very keen on respecting the rights of children to express their sexuality freely.

I don’t for a second suggest that this is the agenda that Dr Finlayson is pushing, but it should give us — and in my view should have given her publishers — serious pause. Not all radicalism is a good idea just because it’s radical, and it’s possible to construct a theoretical position that’s very clever but doesn’t have a lick of sense. Perhaps the book itself will prove more sensible and more subtle than its hype, but from this far off it sounds just a tiny bit s-word.

On the sense side, there is Rob Henderson’s Troubled: the story of the author’s turbulent childhood in America’s foster care system. Removed from a drug-addicted, criminally neglectful mother, Henderson ultimately escapes the delinquency to which many of his peers succumb, to become a highly educated member of the media class. On the sensibility side, there is Molly Roden Winter’s More — in which the author, a middle-aged writer and musician who lives in upscale Brooklyn, ruminates about the ups and downs (and ins and outs) of her open marriage.

More, which was released last month, was fortuitously timed — or, possibly, the catalyst — for a surge of public interest in polyamory. The question of what form romantic and sexual commitment should take, or if it should be taken at all, has been visited and revisited countless times through the years, often in rhythm with evolving questions about how women should live, and love. Freely, perhaps — but how so? And at what cost?

The polyamory discourse, including Roden Winter’s memoir, circles these questions in much the same way Austen’s Regency-era heroines do. When Elinor Dashwood cautions her younger sister that what is pleasurable and what is proper are not always one and the same, Marianne protests that of course they are: “for we always know when we are acting wrong, and with such a conviction I could have had no pleasure.” This vaguely hedonistic notion — that if it feels good, it must be good — is echoed in the conviction of contemporary polyamorists that having multiple partners is the path to not just sexual satisfaction but a more enlightened state of being: a commitment “to the journey of the truth of my own soul”, to quote one polycule participant from a much-discussed article in The Cut. One imagines these 30-something Brooklynites confronting some poor, monogamous schmuck with the same earnest indignation that Marianne aims at her stoic sister: “Always resignation and acceptance. Always prudence and honour and duty. Elinor, where is your heart?”

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If 17-year-old Marianne Dashwood had lived in contemporary Brooklyn instead of late 18th-century England, perhaps her marriage to the older, honourable Colonel Brandon would have seemed like less of a compromise: perhaps she would have ended up like the heroine of More, bed-hopping her way across the boroughs in middle age, wondering why, if this is the path to self-actualisation, she feels so damned miserable all the time. “This is supposed to be about my fun, my pleasure, my freedom,” Molly laments, after a partner stealthily removes his condom and then ghosts her immediately after sex. “How have I arrived at this point?”

More may read like a portrait of a life ruled by sensibility in the Austenite sense, but this looks very different on a frustrated mom in her forties than it does on a flighty teenager — especially given that the sensibility in this case isn’t actually the author’s, but instead belongs to her husband, Stewart, who both wants to sleep with other women and gets off on the idea of his wife schtupping other men. As other reviewers have noted, the idea of More as a memoir of sexual fulfilment à la Eat, Pray, Love is belied by Molly’s obvious unhappiness in her open marriage, which she agrees to more out of duty than desire. Polyamory is a pile of lemons from which she relentlessly makes pitcher after pitcher of barely palatable lemonade. She doesn’t want this life so much as she wants to be the kind of person who wants it, which turns out about as well as you’d expect it to. “I feel like shit,” she eventually tells her therapist. “I thought freedom was supposed to be fun.”

Meanwhile, Henderson’s Trouble puts in a good word for sense, rather than pure sensibility. His story is one of an unruly youth for whom prudence, honour, and duty were not just social graces but a path to a better life. The irony, as Henderson notes, is that he had to join the military to get the structure and stability he needed; meanwhile, people who’ve benefited from these things all their lives tend to performatively dismiss their importance.

The current vogue for polyamory is a prime example of what Henderson has termed “luxury beliefs”: the phenomenon whereby wealthy, educated progressives talk a big game in favour of prison abolition or permissive sexual norms to signal their political bona fides, safe in the knowledge that they’ll never bear the costs of the ideas they promote. His classmates at Yale, for instance, would privately acknowledge that they themselves planned to get married, have kids, and practice monogamy — but only after loudly decrying the practice as old-fashioned, outdated, and unnecessary. “We now live in a culture where affluent, educated, and well-connected people validate and affirm the behaviours, decisions, and attitudes of marginalised and deprived kids that they would never accept for themselves or their own children,” he writes.

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Prior to writing his book, Henderson was best known for his concept of luxury beliefs, and his tart critiques of America’s ruling class — from a guy who fought his way into their spaces but nevertheless dissents from their orthodoxies — have made him a thorn in the side of those who might have been otherwise sympathetic to him on the basis of identity alone. It’s not unusual to see progressives denouncing Henderson as the purveyor of a particularly noxious brand of old-school, bootstraps conservatism, while ignoring the fact that he is, by any definition, a marginalised person who has succeeded against enormous odds.

By some coincidence of the seasonal publishing schedule, Henderson’s memoir has ended up being not just an ideological counterpart to Roden Winter’s but a competitor in the same genre, which makes for an interesting exercise in the revealed preferences of the publishing community and readers alike. Roden Winter, who had virtually no public presence before More made her an overnight sensation, has been criss-crossing the country on a multi-city book tour while her memoir climbs the New York Times bestseller list. Henderson, who has a six-figure following on X, tens of thousands of Substack subscribers, and an extensive publication history including bylines in the New York Times itself, reportedly approached multiple bookstores about hosting an event, only to be rebuffed.

Henderson describes this as political snobbery, pure and simple: “If you grow up poor and aren’t willing to pledge fealty to the right causes, these places don’t want you. If you grew up poor, remake your fortunes, and then speak truthfully about the factors that fuel success (hard work, determination, sacrifice) rather than the factors elites speak about (luck, systemic forces, privilege), then these places don’t want you,” he wrote, before drawing a pointed comparison between himself and Roden Winter. “Maybe if I were a polyamorous upper-middle-class author with 94 followers and wrote a memoir of having an open marriage I would have better luck. Right background, check; right boxes, check.”

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But having read both books, I wonder if Henderson’s snubbing is a matter of pedigree and politics, or if it’s down to something more basic — the same thing that makes Marianne’s Sense and Sensibility storyline so much more exciting and compelling than her sister’s. Because in many ways, Trouble and More are meditations on the same issue, just from different angles and through different lenses. Both books consider the implications of a belief system which argues, among other things, that a fully actualised life must be lived in defiance of the traditional social strictures that sometimes place honour and duty above desire and passion. Henderson points to the benefits of climbing into that box, while Roden Winter disconsolately kicks at its confines. But they’re still talking about the same structure, the same expectations, and the same culture that suggests we stop at nothing to achieve authenticity, no matter the destabilising effects of that journey on everyone else.

On one hand, the freedom to love with wild abandon is also the freedom to make a trainwreck of your life; on the other, the rules that seek to protect us from harm and heartbreak can easily turn into a cage of decorum. This tension, between the yearnings of sensibility and the principles of sense, is not easily resolved; nor is the question of what sexually liberated women want, and whether what we want is good for us, which is why we continue to revisit it in memoir and novels, dramas and documentaries, political polemics and religious sermons. And yet everyone who tackles such tensions, from Jane Austen to Rob Henderson to Molly Roden Winter, tends to reach the same conclusion — or at least, to point their audience toward it. More may style itself as a memoir of self-discovery, and its author may even believe that it is, but those who read it are unlikely to conclude that an open marriage is the key to personal growth — or a good idea in general.

And what of Henderson’s book? It’s more straightforward, more prescriptive, and yes, more conservative, but its weakness is not in its message. It’s that the responsibility and restraint he advocates make a good soldier, a good student, and a good man — but not, as it turns out, a good story. Troubled lacks the shamelessness, the self-evisceration, the sordid drama that is the hallmark of so many compelling memoirs — and that More offers up in spades. Henderson’s trauma is in his past, and he holds both it and his audience at a remove; his memoir reads more like a TED talk than a diary entry.

Roden-Winter, on the other hand, straps her audience into the passenger seat of her life and then pilots the whole thing over a cliff, naked, screaming all the way down. And given the choice between two stories that beg more or less the same moral conclusions, of course people are going to want the one where someone gets to third base in a karaoke bar.

Rob Henderson will be discussing his new book at the UnHerd Club on 12 March. Book tickets here.

Some old men lose their edge as they age, while others develop a sharper one. Otto Penzler, the white-haired proprietor of the storied Mysterious Bookshop in New York City, would seem to be the latter. Now 81, Penzler is a polarising figure within the mystery writing community, the kind of person whose name elicits either a grin or a wince. In addition to building from scratch the biggest mystery bookshop in the world, he has edited dozens of mystery novels and anthologies and overseen multiple publishing imprints. At the height of his power, a good word from Penzler could make a writer’s career.

But his good words, his critics note, were reserved largely for white, male, heterosexual writers — and Penzler has a reputation for being less than reverent about the sacred cows of his more progressive peers. In 1991, he publicly criticised the women’s mystery writer’s group Sisters in Crime in an interview with the Chicago Tribune: “It’s a negative, flawed concept. It’s an organization that espouses non-sexism but is sexist.” In 2005, he described cosy mysteries as “not serious literature”, adding: “Men take [writing] more seriously as art.” More recently, he excoriated the Mystery Writers of America after the organisation, under pressure, rescinded its plans to honour mystery novelist and former prosecutor Linda Fairstein with a “Grand Master” award for literary achievement. (This was part of a broader campaign to cancel Fairstein over her role in prosecuting the Central Park Five, spurred by a Netflix series that portrayed her as the case’s chief villain; a defamation lawsuit brought by Fairstein against the series’ creators is currently making its way through the courts.)

Among those who dislike him, these incidents are seen as damning evidence in favour of Penzler’s defenestration. A recent X thread, prompted by his upcoming appearance at a mystery event called Bouchercon, bemoans his continued influence despite what the author describes as his “terrible opinions and inexcusable behavior” — although the behaviour in question, as I discovered in the course of reporting this piece, is more a matter of rumour than record. For those who remember the MeToo-era debacle of the Shitty Media Men list, it’s character assassination via whisper network: people will tell you that there are stories, but plead ignorance when asked to relate one. Penzler’s status as a Bad Man is entirely vibes-based. A snub here, a brusque comment there. Once, perhaps, there was a confrontation with a female critic who had panned a book written by one of Penzler’s friends, after she showed up uninvited to a party at his bookstore.

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Penzler told me he doesn’t remember this incident, but admits that it’s in the realm of possibility. “Did I possibly call her a bitch, yes. Because she was,” he says, mildly — and if a comment like this makes you leap up in outrage, you are almost certainly not a person who would enjoy Penzler’s company. He’s friendly but blunt, impatient with foolishness, and — as he is the first to note — his personality doesn’t always play well in a world where people increasingly expect a soft touch.

When I first stumbled across that X thread, it initially struck me as no different from a hundred other minor publishing squabbles: the tiniest of tempests in the teensiest of teapots. But look through the lens of the zeitgeist, and there’s something intriguing here: an evolving and increasingly fraught relationship between the archetypal codger and a culture that no longer reveres him. We used to extend some grace to society’s granddads, acknowledging the possibility that a person old enough to have watched the moon landing live on TV might reasonably, if not wisely, see things differently from the strident 25-year-olds among us. But that grace has been replaced by a conviction that such opinions aren’t just embarrassing in an “old man yells at cloud” sort of way, but intolerable, harmful, toxic — and that a person who holds them needs to either get with the times, or be ostracised from polite society.

Mystery writing, like the rest of publishing, has undergone a reckoning in recent years — and what the diversity activists want is nothing less than a metaphorical asteroid hit, an extinction-level event that clears out the pale-male-stale old guard, and ushers in a colourful new world order. There’s just one problem: metaphorical asteroids, unlike their physical analogue, don’t actually kill the dinosaurs. And while it’s one thing to campaign for the ouster of dead white men from their various places of honour in the sciences, or the arts, or atop the lists of history’s greatest works of literature, it’s quite another to be confronted with live white men — men who’ve worked hard all their lives to get where they are, who do not agree that they have outlived both their relevance and respectability, and who are not about to slink off into obscurity just because the passage of time and the sensibilities of a new generation have rendered both their identities and opinions unpopular.

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This all-encompassing presentism, in which every person must be judged by his worse offences against the pieties of the Current Thing, has found an even easier target than our oldest living citizens: those who are recently dead. It’s a phenomenon that makes for some interesting reads in the newspaper’s obituary section. “Herman Cain, a former Republican presidential candidate and supporter of President Donald Trump who pointedly refused to wear a mask during the coronavirus pandemic, has died after contracting COVID-19,” reported Reuters in 2020, while a New York Times obituary for former Interior Secretary James Watt informs readers that he “insulted Black people, women, Jews and disabled people”, before it describes his life or contribution to politics. As the writer Oliver Traldi quipped, “before you read about this man’s life, let’s precisely calibrate your sense of to what extent he was on the right side of history as conceived by readers of this absolute rag in the current year”.

Meanwhile, some progressives have taken it as an article of faith that we cannot wait anymore for these living relics to exit the world’s stage; we have to just push them out of the way. This sentiment was palpable in the MeTooings of people like Garrison Keillor, Al Franken, Leon Wieseltier, and Frank Langella, as well as the ouster of older white men from positions of influence in media, the arts, and more during the Covid-era Awokening. Even if you didn’t necessarily think these guys had done much — or anything — wrong, there was a sense that perhaps they should just go away on principle, for the sake of the cause. Hadn’t they been in power long enough? Wasn’t it time for them to step aside, and give someone else a turn?

On this front, Otto Penzler makes for an interesting case study: in 2021, he was fired from the Best American Mystery anthology series he’d edited since 1997, and replaced by editor Steph Cha, a young Korean-American novelist with whom he had butted heads over the MWA’s treatment of Linda Fairstein. In most situations like this, the outgoing editor is expected to go quietly, perhaps releasing an unctuous statement about the importance of making way for a new, more diverse generation of writers. Penzler, on the other hand, immediately launched a competing anthology that sold so well it currently stands at #13 in its category on Amazon. “We buried them,” Penzler says — a statement which, though difficult to truly quantify, seems roughly accurate: the 2021 edition of The Best American Mystery and Suspense, the first in 24 years not edited by him, is ranked #1312.

You come at the curmudgeon, you best not miss.

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Of course in a previous, and perhaps less ridiculous, era, this disagreement — Penzler’s opinion of cosy mysteries and the mystery community’s opinion of Penzler — would be chalked up to a matter of taste. There was a time when it was possible to merely dislike someone, for whatever reason, without claiming that your personal animus was actually rooted in a bigger, braver struggle against oppression and isms and phobias. There was also a time when inviting a man to speak at a conference in his chosen field was understood as a narrow acknowledgment of that man’s achievements and expertise, rather than an endorsement by the organisers of his every opinion. Perhaps most important, there was a time when reasonable people would have agreed that if you are still citing the less-than-articulate comment someone made to a newspaper 33 years ago as a top 10 reason to destroy his reputation, you are engaged not in the advancement of social justice but a bizarre personal vendetta.

But in this moment, in which every personal beef is blown up into a proxy war for the ideological soul of the nation — or, in this case, the mystery writing community — the grumpy old men among us are seen less as human beings than reactionary avatars, a blight on progress. The result is a remarkably aesthetic-driven notion of what the proper distribution of power would look like, as with Joe Biden’s 2022 vow to consider only black female candidates as replacements for retiring Supreme Court justice Stephen Breyer, or the FAA’s strange attempt to stack the deck in favour of everyone except older white men in its hiring processes. But it also explains the furore surrounding someone like Penzler — who, despite his alleged disdain for women, has published, collaborated with, and championed scores of them over the years. This isn’t about the man himself, but what he represents: the bad old days, and bad old ways, which publishing’s self-appointed new guard have found dismayingly difficult to uproot. To get him booted from the Bouchercon stage would signal a shift in the power dynamic. It would mean that the asteroid had hit at last.

To fail to do this, on the other hand, would signal that the identitarian spasm in publishing — and whatever little power and credibility it once conveyed — is already on the wane. For the vibes, they are a-shiftin’ — but the grumpy old man endures.

November 2008 marked the theatrical release of Twilight, the first film adaptation of the romance novels that centred on a love triangle between a vampire, a werewolf, and a teenage girl. By this point, they had already become a transformative force in the book world — but this was only the beginning.

Within a year, you couldn’t swing a cat without hitting something Twilight-themed. There was a Twilight-themed makeup palette, and Immortal Twilight perfume to dab on your pulse points. You could drink your coffee from a Team Edward mug in the morning, roll up to the Burger King drive-thru in Edward Cullen’s Volvo C30, order a Twilight-themed kids’ meal for lunch, then go home and curl up in the arms of your Edward body pillow beneath your precise replica of Bella’s purple duvet. The franchise’s rabid fanbase was a market force unto itself: brand something as a Twilight tie-in, and they’d snap it up.

These fans weren’t just a reliable income stream, though: they were a powerful, even political, faction that was not to be trifled with. I was a reporter on the Young Hollywood beat for MTV News at the height of the Twilight craze, and so great was their cultural power that an editorial edict instructed we refrain from calling them “Twihards”, because they didn’t like it.

At first, Twilight‘s cultural influence was chalked up to its popularity among adolescent girls. Edward and Bella’s romance was a love story, but also an obvious abstinence parable, making it a perfect vehicle for teens to explore the burgeoning passions for which they otherwise had no words. This, at least, was not surprising: every generation has something that both captures the imagination and inspires the lust of a young female audience. I was too old to be swept up in the Edward Cullen craze, but just the right age to spend long hours earnestly debating with my friends which of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles would make the best boyfriend. (Raphael, obviously.)

But the way Twilight captured the broader discourse was more unusual, which had as much to do with timing as with the story itself. Twilight dropped directly into the midst of a digital revolution that catapulted fandom from niche communities to a global, quasi-political force. The iPhone, Goodreads and Tumblr all debuted in 2007; when Twilight the movie was released a year later, it was the spark in an armoury already filled with 10 different types of ammunition.

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The resulting explosion wasn’t just in consumption: fans were curating mood boards, making memes, writing their own fanfics, and engaging in direct conversations with creators courtesy of social media. Stephenie Meyer might have written Twilight, the book, but the ever-expanding universe in which it existed? That belonged to the fans — who increasingly felt a sense of entitlement, control, even ownership over the stories, the characters, and the culture they loved.

For this, we may credit Twilight‘s ageing fanbase, who rather than discarding fandom in favour of more grownup concerns ended up simply carrying it with them into the adult world. For teenage girls, the Edward vs Jacob debate offered a way to explore romantic relationships — who you liked and what you wanted — within the safe framework of fiction. But for adult women, Twilight was more than an excuse to be horny on main; it was a framework for discussing literally anything, from race to religion, to romantic mores, to decolonisation. Was Bella a victim of Stockholm Syndrome, or a feminist icon who persisted in chasing what she wanted at all costs? Was Jacob cruelly and undeservedly friend-zoned, or was he a total incel? Was Twilight racist because the vampires were pale — or should it be celebrated for representing Native American characters? Then there was the question of the age gap between Edward and Bella: you say immortal teenage dreamboat; I say creepy 108-year-old man.

All this was happening against the backdrop of a collapse in the distinction between teen and adult content in publishing and entertainment: 2008 was the era of Peak YA. As many not-so-young adults suddenly discovered a passion for content aimed at teenagers, bookstores were overwhelmed by “chosen one” stories, in which a heroine who doesn’t know how beautiful she is has to fight the forces of evil — while caught in a love triangle between two equally strapping suitors. For decades, this type of content had been written off as frivolous, a passing fancy; now, its power could not be denied. Twilight was perhaps the first property to make clear that, in the digital age, young women’s passions are not to be taken lightly.

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Twilight itself has now faded from view, but its influence lives on; it taught us to see absolutely everything as a question of teams. It wasn’t just the Edward-or-Jacob debate, which would always be a sort of friendly rivalry owing to its predetermined resolution (you could make a good enough case for Jacob, but Bella was never going to end up with him). It was the Twilight fandom itself, and what it became for its adherents. Loving Twilight was a cause, a chance to be part of something bigger than yourself — as was hating Twilight, if that was your thing, for whatever evils you felt it represented.

And by the time the final film in the series was released — one week after Barack Obama’s successful re-election to the presidency — American culture at large was beginning to look a lot like American politics: a highly polarised world of in-groups and out-groups, where the rivalries weren’t so friendly anymore. At the same time, a new mode of cultural critique had arrived in the form of Your Fave Is Problematic, a witch-hunting Tumblr that indicted celebrities and content creators (and by extension, their fans) for various sins against social justice. The whole thing was a guilt-by-association machine. If an admired creator was called out for some -ism or -phobia, you had two choices: denounce the sin and renounce your fandom, or be tarred as complicit.

In this moment, the cult of fandom and the culture of consumption fully collided to create something monstrous — but also, something deeply compelling. If art and politics were inextricable — as both Tumblr users and mainstream culture critics now reliably assured us they were — then so was fandom and activism. Fandom mattered. Fans mattered. And whatever you were into, it was more than mere interest; it was your identity. In this world, what you like is who you are.

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And in a world where fandom had become political, it was only a matter of time before politics became fandom: tribal, facile, and tailor made for our current moment. As a mode of engagement, fandom neither rewards nor leaves room for nuance; the whole point is that it’s obvious which team you should be on, which makes it the ideal medium for a political culture that thrives on simple sloganeering, Instagram-sized infographics, and 60-second TikTok explainer videos. Fandom is what fuels the blonde college student in a keffiyeh, rolling her eyes as she explains that once Israel has ceased to exist, the Jews who lived there can simply return to wherever they came from — like Yemen, or Ethiopia. It fuels, too, the pro-Israel activist who thrusts a camera in her face, knowing she’ll beclown herself.

It’s not just the tribalism but the blazing certainty — that there’s a right side, and that identifying it is both uncomplicated and fun. For people coming of age on social media, Twilight offered the first inkling of how good being part of a mob could feel. How wonderful to just pick a side and root for it: fiercely, loyally, unconditionally and absolutely. And once you had done this with sparkly vampires, it was surprisingly easy to do it with everything else.

First there is the implicit geographical parochialism. In response to the invocation of the notion of “the Left”, one might reasonably ask: the Left where? Do we mean the Left in Hungary, or China, or Russia, or Iran, or Afghanistan, or India? Might the Left in some places not be different from the Left in others? If so, this would give us many Lefts, not the Left. For example, some Lefts might be libertarian in nature, not least where forms of social authoritarianism reign. In such places, a system of rights and free markets might look like liberation. Yet for some, such a position can only count as being on “the Right”.

This suggests that there is a circumstantial relativity to the very idea of Left and Right. Devotees on both sides dislike this fact. They usually deny it. For them, there is some essential content residing in the concept of the Left. They contend that it is an ideology with roots. Therefore, they believe, it constitutes a tradition. But when did this supposed tradition begin? We know the spatial metaphor derives from the period of the Legislative Assembly in Revolutionary France. Looking back, actually both sides (Left and Right) had merit. Consequently, neither position need awaken dogmatic partisanship. Equally, modern political attitudes can hardly be divided in terms of this antiquated polarity.

Was Friedrich Hayek on the Right? I personally don’t think this characterisation makes much sense, even if recent activist historians insist on connecting his ideas to an ill-defined “neo-liberal” resurgence. Hayek, as an Austrian, was a critic of German nationalism in both its economic and political manifestations. For good or ill, he came to regard Stalinism and National Socialism as extreme expressions of the same basic worldview. He called himself a Liberal, never a Conservative, and for those in the Eighties opposed to Hungary’s or Czechoslovakia’s communist leaders, he might plausibly have been identified as Left.

These clarifications are not offered as a defence of any form of Hayekian dogma, but they are meant to imply that there is a need to correct prevailing misrepresentations. From the point of view of scholarship, it makes no sense characterising Hayek relative to our own concerns. Times change, and the meaning of political affiliations changes with them. Equally, at any given moment, party loyalty can cover a great variety of positions. Was Winston Churchill on the Right in the sense that Margaret Thatcher was? How close was Boris Johnson ideologically to the very ideological Liz Truss?

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The true Left is not woke

By Susan Neiman

Was Oliver Cromwell on the Left? Or was Thomas Paine? Was George Orwell? I think it depends on whom you ask. Was Mahatma Gandhi Left? Is Xi Jinping? Was Stalin, or Erich Honecker? Some may think that all these figures could be grouped by family resemblance. Others might repartition these Lefts into a new Left and Right. Still others would insist they make up a venerable tradition. But this, surely, could not be squared with historical fact. Instead of a tradition, this Left would be an invented tradition.

Dispassionate commentators do not need the crutch of Left and Right. Their job is to study and describe processes impartially. For example, at least in principle, academics are not required to locate themselves, or their subject-matter, along some imaginary spectrum. One would hope the same would apply to journalists. On the other hand, politicians are openly obliged to display their colours. They need to appeal to partisan sensibilities by compartmentalising positions into good and bad.

Strangely, despite their hard-won independence and their enjoyment of intellectual freedom, academics are often moved to mimic the attitudes of politicians. This is perhaps especially the case in more recent years. Over the last century, the politicisation of the academy has come and gone in waves. Over the past decade, signalling ideological preferences has become a sort of fashion. As a result, it is astonishing, but true, that most lecturers are afraid of saying something that their peers might arbitrarily identify as “Right” wing. By “Right”, they mean wrong. They mean it’s morally bad, at least in the eyes of the dominant peer group.

I say this is astonishing because historical investigation commonly shows that political choices are not simple. They never present a straightforward good opposed to an unambiguous bad. Academic historians and philosophers should know this: circumstances are usually ambivalent and consequences uncertain. Naturally party politics is impelled to streamline and moralise the alternatives. However, academic evaluation need not do this. It does not have to resign itself to party-political categorisations.

The most important elections we face are national elections. During the hustings, the prevailing political configuration will likely be compared with the state of affairs elsewhere. But the national scene won’t so much be juxtaposed with Ethiopia or Azerbaijan as it will with Europe and the United States. This shows that when we ask where the Left is today, we are asking a local rather than a world-historical question. In Britain, “the Left today” largely refers to something altogether smaller than Nato. Roughly, it encompasses affinities between French, German, British and American politics. To repeat, then: our understanding is historically and geographically parochial despite claims that the Left embraces a cosmopolitan worldview.

While the Left, like any other set of political attitudes, is parochial, its commitments are inevitably partisan. Although the rhetoric is outwardly universalist, the orientation is nearly always sectarian. In fact, the determination to capture and purify the Left is a symptom of this narrow partisanship. On average, Left particularism assumes that virtue resides in just half of the population. This refers to that portion which votes in the preferred way. In certain constituencies, for example in universities, that cohort shrinks to less than 20%: only this faction is “truly” Left. Since this proportion can never constitute a real electoral force, it must make up for its lack of power with the intensity of its beliefs.

But while the Left in the educational sector lacks immediate political power, it enjoys significant influence. Members of the teaching profession, the publishing and heritage industries as well as the print and broadcast media are products of a broadly conceived university culture.

Since the Eighties, if not earlier, generations have been inducted into a diffuse postmodern ideology commonly denominated “identity politics”. The resulting fetishisation of the rights of personhood is often accompanied by confected outrage. It registers an obsession with negligible degrees of marginalisation and tends to abominate just mildly unfavourable attitudes. The assumption is that no one should feel “offended” or “uncomfortable”. What was once disliked as an opposing view is now abhorred as a kind of evil. Disadvantage is mostly conceived within the bounds of middle-class privilege. Consequently, the approach tends to verge on narcissism. The main casualty in all this is a sense of proportion and coherent social policy.

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Where, then, is the Left today? It is not fighting an age-old struggle or advancing the cause of international fraternity. It is waging a provincial campaign in a struggle with forces slightly further to the Left and with various opponents on the Right, all deriving their meaning from the fairly recent past. This Left is operating after the demise of socialist planning of the soft and hard varieties. The soft kind fell at least partly at the behest of the electorate at the end of the Seventies after a postwar period of high expenditure failed to alleviate social dissatisfaction or deliver in terms of growth or mobility. The hard kind fell in 1991 with the collapse of Soviet power. An era of Left disorientation has followed.

As I’ve been suggesting, this disorientation has a cultural and a political axis. The cultural side is concentrated in sectors that influence opinion. It is preoccupied with “inequities” in race and gender. Its focus often lacks demographic specificity — which “races”, we are left asking, and gender in which class? What is championed is a rudimentary egalitarian programme constructed around the concept of “balance”. Its focus is on comparative advantage in the professions and symbolic capital in society at large.

The cultural agenda is poorly integrated with the other hinge of the Left, the party-political wing. This side for the most part is concerned with public sector funding, which is basically a matter of fiscal policy. To the extent that the two flanks overlap, they align on the issue of mobility, without necessarily agreeing on what mobility is intended to achieve. The cultural sector is without clear questions while politicians lack definite solutions. In the end, just one thing is plain: neither the cult of victimhood nor the obsession with the “microphysics” of power will be of any help. As the Labour Party tentatively prepares for government, it stands in need of a fundamental rethink.

This week, he joined Freddie Sayers at the UnHerd Club to discuss the delusions of the progressive Left, the possibility of a universal politics, and the revival of nationalistic conflict across the world, most recently seen in the attacks on Israel. Below is an edited transcript of the conversation.

Freddie Sayers: What was your initial reaction to the attacks on Israel?

Yascha Mounk: I think one of the things it shows is both what an achievement tolerant, prosperous, liberal societies are, and then, of course, that we mustn’t be naive about what it entails to defend those tolerant and prosperous societies against extremists and theocrats who want to destroy them. Many people have missed the moral implosion of this moment. The Israel-Palestine conflict is incredibly complicated, and I certainly think that Israel is not without its blame, or without its faults in all kinds of ways. But to react to the murder of hundreds of innocent people at a Music Festival, to the kidnapping of an elderly Holocaust survivor and of some toddlers, to the indiscriminate slaughter of civilians with the “both sides” rhetoric that we’ve seen — not just from some parts of the far-Left, but also from many mainstream newspapers, including The New York Times and The Washington Post — is just shameful. 

FS: You mean referring to Hamas as “militants” instead of terrorists or talking about how there’s been difficulties on both sides and not taking a clear moral stance?

YM: Yes — there was a really interesting contrast, yesterday evening, where the German newspapers were leading with “Hundreds dead at a music festival” while The New York Times headline was something like, “Israel fights back against militants”. And The Washington Post had “both sides reeling”. After 9/11, many papers around the world, including in Britain, put the faces of 9/11 victims on the front page, and we’ve seen nothing like that in the United States or in Britain. And I think that that is very strange morally. Now, by the way, if Israel goes on to commit atrocities in Gaza, which is certainly imaginable, we should be just as outraged by those atrocities and portray the victims of that as well. But right now, what we have is one of the worst terror attacks we have seen in a long time. 

FS: Your new book narrates the rise of identity politics and the loss of that liberal ideal of the state. Taking Israel as an example, it strikes me that it’s a place where there are no universal values that could reasonably apply to both of the country’s communities. And the ideas that you talk about of tolerance and due process, treating people as individuals trying to forget about their ethnicity or tribe, almost aren’t relevant in that kind of context.

YM: I don’t think, right now, there are the preconditions for a great liberal state in which Israelis and Palestinians live side by side. I think that’s naive. But I certainly think that it has universal principles that should be applied. And one of those is what lawyers and philosophers know as jus in bello, the law that governs the conduct of war. Precisely one of the things that I’ve found so shocking over the last days is the failure to distinguish between forms of military action that are targeted at military targets, and that may at times result in civilian loss of life — although you’re trying to minimise that as far as you can — and the deliberate and indiscriminate slaughter of civilians. I think even in situations of war and of conflict, we have certain universal standards of behaviour that we have to try to enforce precisely if we are to stop conflicts from becoming bloodier than they need to be.

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FS: What are the preconditions for a liberal society?

YM: Well, one of the preconditions is that you have to be able to see each other as parts of the same polity, parts of the same state. That is what’s absent in the case of Israelis and Palestinians. They don’t have a history as compatriots. And I think it’s unrealistic, given the kind of scenes we’ve seen on Twitter in the last days, that that is going to happen anytime soon. But it’s important when it comes to a place like Britain or the United States. I think one of the key tasks in a deeply ethnically and religiously diverse society is to make sure that people have space where they can have freedom of religion, which is a core liberal value, where there can be freedom of association, where people can continue to be proud of the cultural heritage of origin. 

In that way, I’m not anti-identity in the sense that I want everybody in a melting pot pretending they don’t have roots or origins. But at the same time, we need to make sure that they see each other sufficiently as citizens of the same state — as people who might not have certain things in common, but share something else important because they’re both citizens of the United States, or, as you like to say here, subjects of the crown.

Humans throughout history have defined themselves in all kinds of different ways. But then, once you’ve defined yourself as part of the same group, and think of those people over there as part of another group, you’re going to sometimes be capable of great courage and altruism towards members of your group — but you’re also going to treat with disregard, or commit horrific violence against, members of another group. Encouraging young Americans or Britons to think of themselves first and foremost as racial beings — with race trumping any other sense of common identity they might have — sets us up for the worst kind of zero-sum conflict between ethnic groups. 

FS: So what is your diagnosis for why issues such as race have come back with such force?  

YM: Well, I’ll say two things about that. One is that I think on many metrics, we have continued to improve, certainly in the United States, on race. In the Sixties, less than 5% of Americans thought that interracial marriage was morally acceptable. Now, less than 5% of Americans think that it’s morally unacceptable. And we’ve gone from a vanishingly small number of children having parents of different ethnic groups, to six, seven times more than we did 20 years ago. And that’s just one indication of the ways in which American society has become much more racially fluid. So it’s really a question about the intellectual developments on the Left, based on a fundamental rejection of the kind of universalism that has historically characterised it. 

When you go back to the Nineties, all the great internet evangelists had this idea that the thing that’s stopping us from talking to interesting people in Nigeria, or in Japan, is that it’s so expensive to interact. Calling Lagos or Tokyo would have cost you a fortune every minute —  and so the idea was that, with costless communication, we’d be able to have a great intercultural exchange. What we’ve found out over the last 30 years is that once you have costless communication, paired with the discovery mechanisms of social media, where you can tag people and things can go viral and so on, what you actually have is people seeking out those who are as much like them as possible. This has revealed something rather sobering about human nature.

FS: How should we fight back against this — you’re a critic of using state power to do so, as is the case in Victor Orbán’s Hungary or Ron DeSantis’s Florida. 

YM: Part of our fundamental political settlement is that we have principles that regulate our political competition: that what I’m allowed to say is not decided by Rishi Sunak. At least it should be like that. But in Britain, it’s not always like that. I don’t think that everything is better in America than in Britain, except for the food and the housing and the weather. Many things are better in Britain, but the First Amendment is one of the great things about the United States. And I think we need much more robust protections for free speech here. But that is not just because I care about the great things that come from having free speech. It’s about the terrible things that happen when you don’t have free speech. 

And one of those terrible things is that politics becomes an existential battle in which your very ability to make your case and to speak your mind comes to depend on your access to political power. So there’s a very fundamental principle at play here, which is that trying to legislate what you can and can’t say in a university is a fundamental breach of our political settlement. I find it very strange that all of those post-liberals or anti-liberals on the Right and the Left are very naive about how this is going to play out. 

On the Left, there are all of these people who are used to just arguing about speech codes at Smith College or Harvard University saying: “We should get rid of free-speech, we should make sure that Silicon Valley companies can censor whatever they want, and perhaps we should have governments being able to persecute you for things that are considered offensive.” But the Left assumes that, even though Britain and the United States are terrible, racist, white supremacist countries, the people who are going to be making those censoring decisions are always miraculously going to be on the side of social justice. That is deeply naive. 

So what you actually have is a society that’s completely split, in which, at Smith College, I’m not allowed to talk about this book, and at the University of Florida, people aren’t allowed to criticise free speech or make the case on the other side. And what I want is for the United Kingdom and the United States to have lots of spaces where we can all debate with each other and express our opinions. 

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FS: Given the depth of the culture war, is it feasible to just say: “Play fair everyone, start getting on and being tolerant with each other, and then everything will go back to normal”?

YM: A lot of the intellectual energy is absolutely on the extremes — so I get what you’re saying. I think people are never liberals in the sense that they have deep down liberal convictions or that they’re able to explain the grand principles of John Stuart Mill particularly well, but I think people especially in Britain have a strong sense of fairness. And I think that sense of fairness is a sense of liberal fairness in that when we do illiberal things — when people get punished for what they say or do in illiberal ways — people are quite horrified by it. On many really important issues, I do think that there is a reasonable majority. 

Let me give you two examples: one from the United States, one from the United Kingdom. In America, Democrats think that Republicans don’t want to acknowledge the evil of slavery and Republicans think that Democrats don’t want to acknowledge that George Washington and other Founding Fathers were great men. But a great study by More in Common has shown that that isn’t true. Actually, a huge majority of Americans, including Republicans, want kids to be taught about the evils of slavery, and the huge majority of Americans, including most Democrats, want to be taught about the great achievements of the Founding Fathers. And you can believe both of those things at the same time. 

Similarly, the same organisation did a study of opinions about trans issues in the United Kingdom, and you have a clear majority of people in Britain having a lot of compassion for trans people, recognising that trans people have historically been discriminated against in terrible ways, and that we should allow people to live in accordance with the gender identity that they choose. At the same time, the majority have concerns about access to single-sex spaces where biological women are particularly vulnerable. And they reject the idea of athletes who have gone through male puberty being able to take part in female sports at the highest levels. Again, you might agree with some of those views, you might disagree with some of those views. But I think that most citizens are actually capable of making fine distinctions. And we shouldn’t give up on defending that reasonable majority.

FS: What would you make of the suggestion that a lot of the problems from 2016 onwards — the divisions, the populist outrages, etc — have come from an overly naive faith in universalism? That, in fact, there is a tribal element, whether it’s religious or cultural or ethnic, and there are things that do divide us that actually people prefer to stay in touch with. Perhaps people find an overly devout faith in universalism alienating and inhuman?

YM: I like and celebrate the fact that in places like the United Kingdom and the United States, people have origins in different parts of the world and have some ongoing commitment to some of those cultures. And I certainly think that it is naive to be blind to the power of those collective instincts. Human beings are group-ish creatures. We have a tendency to think in groups and to prioritise the members of in-group over the out-group. Perhaps your criticism would be fair if you were addressing the 20-year-old version of me, who believed that we should get over patriotism and nationalism, and all those kinds of things and feel equal duties and regard for everybody in the world. I still find that sort of charming ideal, but in reality, we’ve seen over the last 20 or 30 years that nationalism is a very powerful force. 

FS: So where does that put you on an issue like immigration? Take Sweden: two million out of the 10 million citizens of Sweden are new arrivals, in that they came in the past 10 years. Many of them are from Somalia, Syria, Egypt, and Turkey. And it certainly feels to a large minority of Swedish voters, who are now voting for quite radical parties, that inviting that volume of people in was precisely a kind of overly universalist ideal that has not worked out and has really damaged the country. 

YM: I don’t think that any form of liberal philosophy necessitates open borders. And I think it’s absurd to think that it does. On immigration, my sense is that the great majority of citizens in virtually every country understandably want their nation to have clear control of its borders, and to be able to decide who gets to come in, and to make sure that the people who come in don’t present a danger and that they share some of the basic values of that society. And then we can have debates about what the right level of immigration is. And that’s going to depend in many cases on local circumstances of all sorts. 

I think what’s interesting is that once you have very clear control of a border, a lot of people see the benefits of a healthy level of immigration, particularly when those people are highly skilled, and already speak some of the language of the country they’re immigrating to and so on. But I certainly don’t think that wanting to have control of your border is in any way irreconcilable with the principles of liberalism, and I don’t think any serious liberal philosopher in the history of the liberal tradition has claimed that. 

FS: So the book is making a “yes, but” case for that universal ideal?

YM: The ideology that I’m analysing has three main claims. Number one, that the key prism for understanding social reality, for understanding our conversation today, for understanding history and political events is race, gender and sexual orientation. That is the key prism, you should always focus on. Somebody like Robin D’Angelo, a very influential diversity trainer and bestselling author, has argued that every time a white person interrupts a black person, they’re bringing the entire power of white supremacy to them. That might be true in certain circumstances. But there’s going to be lots of other circumstances where that’s not true.

The second claim they make is that the values in the unwritten constitution settlement in Britain, the values written down in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States, aren’t what allowed us to make progress towards more just societies, historically. They were meant to pull the wool over our eyes. They were meant to perpetuate injustices like racism, and sexism. They’re the real reasons why our societies remain unjust today. And so therefore, we should reject any form of universal value, neutral rule, including free speech, by making how we treat each other and how the state treats all of us explicitly depend on the kind of group of which we’re from. 

So what is a defence of universalism? It is to counter each of those points. And liberals can do that very convincingly. It is to say number one, but of course, race and gender and sexual orientation matter. But so does social class. So does religion. So do the individual tastes and attributes of people, you have to let each situation teach you how to read it, not impose a pre-existing view on it. But number two, those universal values is how the gay rights movement succeeded, how the Civil Rights Movement succeeded. Frederick Douglass, recognising that free speech allowed people to say terribly racist things in his day, called free speech, the “dread of tyrants”, because he realised it’s also what allowed the weakest in society to make their case for more equal rights. Therefore, the way that we make progress is to recognise where we’re hypocritical, recognise where we’re not living up to our ideals, but also to double down on the goal of living up to those universal values and neutral rules, rather than ripping them up. 

FS: I think now is a great moment to take questions.

*          *          *

Question One: Is identity politics filling the vacuum caused by the decline of class politics? 

YM: You start seeing the rise of many of these identity-based Left-wing movements in the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties; they carve out a little niche for themselves, but they’re clearly minoritarian traditions. It’s only after 1989 — when Marxism and class-based politics really loses legitimacy that always came from communist regimes in the East — that that could become the majority tradition. That’s one part of it. I think there’s a parallel question about the role of religion, and whether cancel culture is filling a religion-shaped hole, especially in the United States. 

Europeans tend to think of America as a Puritan place in certain ways. And sometimes we think that’s because there’s a Bible Belt and half of Americans say they’re not going to have sex before marriage. But really, I think that the inheritance of Puritanism is about the moral imaginary, which is as strong today among the highly educated progressive Left in Boston as it is among poor people in Ohio. They’ve given up the moral precepts of Puritanism, but the desire to maintain a morally pure community, the instinct towards self-flagellation, and of course, the instinct towards purifying the community by casting any suspect people out of it remains very deeply shaped by that. 

Question Two: It seems to me that the culture wars are a result of a decline in or a destruction of trust in institutions across the Right and the Left. I think the only thing which unifies all the different factions is that none of them trust institutions anymore, which to me is much more of an existential threat than the culture wars themselves. It would be really good to hear your views on that.

YM: I half agree with that. I worry a lot about the loss of trust in institutions. You need functioning institutions, and you need some amount of trust in them for us to be able to solve basic problems and have elections to decide who should be in power, which is something we can’t take for granted any more in the United States. But the problem, of course, is that the presence of some genuinely stupid ideas in these mainstream institutions is part of what has driven the lack of trust in them. And so, I sometimes get the sense that my friends and colleagues want to tell me, “Look, it’s really important that people trust these institutions so let’s shut up about when they screw up.” And I think there’s a strain of journalists, who say, “If only we frame things in the right way, we can hold the shop together.” 

Speaking as somebody who is deeply concerned about the threat of certain forms of Right-wing and Left-wing populism to our democratic institutions, a lot of journalists have started to write stories with an eye to how to save our democratic institutions and make sure that Donald Trump is not re-elected in 2024. But it turns out that doing that is actually a really bad way of defending democracy because people aren’t stupid and they recognise that that’s what you’re doing. And so in the same way, we need to figure out how to increase trust in our institutions. But the first step towards that is to argue back loudly and proudly against the bad ideas that now have purchase in these institutions, rather than to shut up about those bad ideas because we’re fearful that talking about this might somehow make people recognise that something’s going wrong.

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Question Three: Could you expand a little bit more on the interplay between identity politics and people seeking power through it, political power, and whether that is a deliberate mechanism for undermining what you might call the liberal centre?

YM: Let’s distinguish two things: the ideology opposed to liberalism and the motivations of the people who engage in this form of politics. On the first question, this is an explicitly anti-liberal tradition. That’s a really important thing to recognise. Critical race theory has become really abused term because some people on the Right say, “It’s critical race theory if you want to say a negative word about the Empire,” or about teaching kids about slavery in American context. As a result, a lot of the mainstream has said, “Well critical race theory, that’s just wanting to think critically about the role that race plays in society. What could be wrong about that?”

And of course, race does play a significant role in our society and inspires genuine injustices and we should absolutely be clear and explicit about that. But when you go back to the thought of the founders of critical race theory, such as Derrick Bell and Kimberlé Crenshaw, you recognise how explicitly they think of liberals as the enemy — more than conservatives. Derrick Bell, who did heroic work helping to desegregate and integrate schools and businesses and other institutions throughout the American South in the Sixties, comes to think of that work in many ways as a mistake. He comes to agree with segregationist Southern senators who said that civil rights lawyers were just trying to impose their integrationist ideals and don’t really care about their clients. That’s why his first paper is called “Serving Two Masters”: they claim to serve the clients but they’re actually serving that ideology. 

And so he says, we need to reject, “the defunct racial equality ideology of the civil rights movement”. Once you get to somebody like Kimberlé Crenshaw, she explicitly says that the basic ideas of Barack Obama are fundamentally at odds with the core assumptions of critical race theory. So intellectually, this is a tradition that is founded on the rejection of Martin Luther King Jr and in some ways of Obama, and Frederick Douglass, and really the core thinkers that have dominated African-American political thought. Now, I think the motivations of people who engage in this kind of politics vary hugely from person to person. I think there are some people who are abusing this politics as an excuse to bully and to punish. And that is in general true in the political extremes: they have a surfeit of people with what psychologists call a “dark personality triad”. And that’s part of the phenomenon. 

But there are also a lot of people who are attracted to these ideas for reasons that are understandable. There are many injustices that they’re genuinely horrified by, and perhaps don’t have the historical perspective to recognise the ways in which we’ve made progress. And they genuinely believe that implementing these ideas is going to lead to a better world. And that’s why I think we should argue back, claiming the moral high ground in good faith. Because these are people who are persuadable. 

Question Four: It’s often said that postmodern philosophers like Jacques Derrida write impenetrable gibberish — not so much bad ideas, just a bad combinations of words. And, if we do anything well in this country, it’s satire and mockery, just actually saying, “Those words in that order don’t make sense”. Is it worth just pointing out the aspect of this that is just lazy writing? 

YM: In the intellectual history I tell at the beginning of the book, I was struck by the fact that the theorist that ended up being most influential, by and large, were not very obscure. So I think Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is the one person in this pantheon of influences I chronicle that is very hard and not fun to read. And she came up with this idea of strategic essentialism. It ends up being really influential but you go back to the text and read it, you think, “How could that influence anybody?’” But Edward Said and Derek Bell and Kimberlé Crenshaw are very clear writers. Michel Foucault is kind of a little hard to read in certain ways, but also has a real rhetorical power and this is in certain ways a pleasure to read. 

The sort of literary theory that really is incomprehensible post-structuralist gobbledygook is not part of the set of thinkers that really ended up influencing this. But the use of humour is really important, and Spivak is the one person I genuinely suffered through as I was researching this book, because her writing is so terrible. She recognised that herself as well. And one of the interesting little subplots is how Said and Spivak and I think Foucault did or would have come to criticise what became of their ideas, and the way that Spivak did this too. She has origins in India and with reference to the chaiiwalas, who sell tea in the streets of India, she complained about the humourlessness of the identitywalas at American universities.

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Question Five: If these ideas have captured academia, captured HR, captured the corporate world and you do not have a mainstream political party to vote for that looks anything like your classical liberalism, what are we going to do about it? A moral crusade, a new political party, changing the voting system?

YM: How did those ideas win? Not with a new political party, not with some grand new law or anything like that but through public debate, through influencing how people think, and through gaining a kind of — ironically, this is a postmodern concept — discursive hegemony. And so how do we change that, again? By convincing people and speaking up and winning the argument. Most people don’t have very strongly held beliefs. They’re going along with whatever they think is the sensible thing to say, whatever the consensus of their colleagues seems to be. But that means that you can change what that set of ideas and norms is by making some noise. 

I do think that we’re starting to see a little bit of pushback in important ways. One example is Ibram X. Kendi, one of most effective popularisers of these ideas, and one of the less sophisticated ones. He was beyond criticism in the United States over the last three years. I know of many friends who had stories, criticising the content of his views or reporting on some of the things he’s been doing at a centre in Boston University, whose stories were killed. Well, suddenly, the dam broke, because he fired a lot of his staff. And it turned out that he had promised all kinds of things that he would do with his grants that he never delivered on and so on. 

Suddenly, everybody’s saying what they have been quietly thinking for three years. And that’s genuinely changed the tenor of the conversation. So now I often have people come to me and say, “Look, I want to argue back against this, but I’m so worried about cancel culture and what’s going to happen to me,” and I understand those concerns. I’ve reported on some of the people who’ve been fired for absolutely ridiculous absurd things. I understand why people are worried about it. But I think it’s important for us not to exaggerate the hold of those mechanisms, the hold of those ideas. Because once we start speaking up, we’re actually in the majority. 

And because I think if you make it clear that you’re not nervous about pushing back, and you don’t have to behave like a jerk, you demonstrate that you’re motivated by your own vision for how to make society a better place, in most contexts, you can speak up, you can criticise, you can defend these liberal values. And if we all start to do that, I think that’ll make a difference. So I guess I am very worried about the way in which I think over the next 20 years we’re going to have a society-level confrontation over these ideas and the influence they will have. But I think that’s a winnable debate. 

After weeks of growing intimacy, the most bookish of the rebel commanders confided in me that only one westerner, more than a century previously, had ever learned the Uduk language and mastered their ancient belief system, since hidden beneath a light veil of Christianity. That long-dead westerner had written a book on the Uduk, which was now their prize possession, he told me. Retrieving it, wrapped in a cloth like a sacred text from within a thatched tukul hut, he showed me the well-thumbed work, now devoid of covers and binding: it transpired to be an ethnographic text published in 1979 by the very-much-alive Oxford anthropologist Wendy James, whose seminars on Sudan I had eagerly attended just a few years previously.

There is revealed the great ambiguity at the heart of anthropology, a discipline now threatened by the wave of postcolonial fervour crashing on our shores. As Perry Anderson remarked in 1968, Britain’s “brilliant and flourishing” tradition of Social Anthropology” — a discipline until recently distinguished from its American cousin, Cultural Anthropology, by its empirical focus on political and social order — was the nation’s sole significant contribution to 20th century intellectual theory. Yet the foundational texts were written within the context of imperial rule, by academics who either moonlighted as colonial administrators or depended on the pacification of newly-conquered natives to comfortably undertake their research, casting the discipline under a shadow of suspicion from which it has never fully emerged.

In her 1973 essay “The Anthropologist as Reluctant Imperialist“, Wendy James mounted a cautious defence of the discipline within the imperial context. Struggling, in the first flush of postcolonial enthusiasm, to reject the claim of Third World activists that anthropology was a reactionary handmaiden of colonialism, which functioned to preserve oppressive native hierarchies in aspic at the point of contact, James made the case for anthropologists as liberal critics of colonial administration, defenders of small-scale societies as coherent and sophisticated polities whose customs and social order were worthy of respect by a dismissive imperial centre.

Yet while James struggled to reject accusations of reactionary sentiment in recasting anthropologists as liberal critics of colonialism, from the perspective of today’s all-pervading culture war, an alternative argument could be made: it was precisely the reactionary desire to record and then to preserve pre-modern cultures from the corrosive effects of modernity that motivated the discipline at its height, and which was its greatest moral strength. For the 21st-century reactionary, who rejects the homogenising effects of liberal modernity, each individual human culture is precious and unique, a universe in itself.

For the Uduk, James’ careful work of ethnography preserved an orally-transmitted cosmology they are even now in the process of discarding. Just as British anthropologists in Sudan either moonlighted as colonial administrators or worked within the stable regime colonial order provided, British colonial administrators governed what is today South Sudan almost as a real-world ethnographic museum, banning Arabs from what is now Sudan from entry and preserving a complex constellation of tribal societies from the enforced Arabisation which, following Britain’s departure, they only shook off through a long and bloody conflict. The Uduks’ greatest lament is not that Britain kept South Sudan in tribal stasis, but that their tribe was unfairly disbarred from colonialism’s curatorial care.

Yet this ambiguous record of cultural engagement and preservation is threatened by today’s moralising postcolonial discourse, and it is anthropology’s outward-facing showpiece, the ethnographic museum, that is its fiercest contemporary battleground. Consider the sad case of Oxford’s Pitt-Rivers Museum, until recently a museum of museums whose lovingly-preserved Victorian layout functioned as a visual expression of the discipline’s early theoretical worldview. Its great crowd pleaser, the South American shrunken heads that have delighted generations of shrieking children, have now been removed from view, their display case literally shrouded in an expression of the fearful new taboos now governing our society. For curators like the archetypal Twitter don Dan Hicks, the Pitt Rivers is barely distinguishable from a serial killer’s collection of trophies: “brutish museums like the Pitt Rivers where I work have compounded killings, cultural destructions and thefts with the propaganda of race science, with the normalisation of the display of human cultures in material form. An act of dehumanisation in the face of dispossession lies at the heart of the operation of the brutish museums.”

On and on Hicks writes in 2020’s The Brutish Museums, roping in Trump and Brexit in increasingly overwrought prose future historians will surely cherish as a perfect distillation of our contemporary moment. “As the border is to the nation state, so the museum is to empire,” Hicks insists: “two devices for the classification of humans into types.” Well, yes, the reader is compelled to respond: the idea that human societies differ from each other in meaningful ways is not only true, but is the basis of anthropology. All cultures are bounded, by their nature: a borderless world is in practice merely a new form of cultural imperialism, now spread by progressivism’s zealous missionaries, like Hicks.

In his recent book The Museum of Other People, the anthropologist Adam Kuper— an ethnographer of anthropology, whose classic Anthropology and Anthropologists is a set text for British undergraduates — wearily documents how the intrusion of the new American ideology erodes the very foundations of the ethnographic museum. As Kuper notes laconically, with the empirical distance that once marked the discipline, in North America “a romantic conception of identity was revived in the 1960s” in “a development that greatly surprised many social scientists: far from melting away, ethnic identities were reasserted, and they were now viewed positively. Identity had become a political issue again.” This essentialised identity discourse, the sea in which our current progressive museum curators swim, is no more natural or unworthy of objective study than 19th-century nationalism, yet it is now so embedded within our institutions as to pass unremarked. Even to notice it casts the observer in the unwanted role of culture warrior, fighting vainly against the march of progress like 19th-century tribesmen against the approaching gunboats.

The result, the “vapid New Age platitudes” that dominate Washington’s National Museum of the American Indian or the mythicising narratives of the National Museum of African American History and Culture (which “does not mention that those slaves were captured by soldiers of African kingdoms who then marched them to the ports to be sold”) have drifted over from the imperial metropole to us in the periphery, with the consequence that “it was soon widely accepted in the growing field of post­colonial studies that only the native can understand the native. Foreign ‘experts’ (always referenced in scare quotes) are suspect, scholarship discounted.”

Indeed, Kuper notes sadly, “this is apparently now the official view at the Pitt Rivers Museum”, whose director, Laura Van Broeckhoeven, communes with tribal elders in rituals to determine which artefacts she may display and which must be returned. As for the shrunken heads, whose photographic representation Kuper was refused permission to reproduce in an email noting ‘‘the image you suggest is of the display which was removed last summer out of respect for the people involved”, he remarks with disbelief: “The people involved! Who were they, who consulted them, what in fact did ‘they’ believe, and why were they (whoever they were) given the right to determine the policy of a famous and long-­established university museum?” Whether the stakeholders consulted were the tribe who shrank the heads, or the neighbouring tribe whose heads were unwillingly shrunk, remains a mystery.

Though no conservative cultural warrior, Kuper nevertheless sounds like any Telegraph or Spectator columnist in bemoaning the submission to the new ideology that has rapidly overtaken our ethnographic museums. Of the Benin Bronzes held by both the Pitt Rivers and our troubled national institution, the British Museum, Kuper observes that the case for restitution is not as simple as either Hicks or the more temperate writer Barnaby Phillips asserts. Looted by conquering British troops in 1897 as part of the bloody punitive expedition to unseat the recalcitrant Edo oba, or king, the moral case for the return of the bronzes (in fact a collection of brass and ivory sculptures of extraordinary grace and workmanship) is, at least superficially, strong. Yet like Phillips, and unlike Hicks, Kuper observes that Nigeria’s record of custodianship is not impeccable: “three of the bronze plaques sent to Lagos in 1950 by the British Museum had somehow ended up in Ameri­can collections. In 1980, during a brief oil boom, the Nigerian government bought some brass heads at auction. Several soon turned up again on the international market.”

Yet while Kuper makes the incontrovertible point that “given the poor performance of the national museum service in conserving and displaying Nigeria’s own antiquities, there is ample room for scepticism” over the country’s demands for restitution, his argument would be more compelling were the British Museum not itself now embroiled in a scandal deriving from the magpie tendencies of one of its curators, and the inexplicable lack of cataloguing the case has revealed. Though the artefacts apparently sold on Ebay by their errant custodian do not include any of the Museum’s African collections, the Nigerian government has nevertheless used the scandal to revive its claims for the bronzes.

Yet who the bronzes ought to be returned to is not immediately obvious: to today’s Edo oba, whose claim and vision for their custodianship is quite at odds with that of his local rival, the Benin City authorities? To the Nigerian central government, the very existence of which is a product of the same historical story of conquest and imposed political order that brought the bronzes (and latterly, some 200,000 British Nigerians) to Britain? Even some contemporary African-Americans now demand their possession, on the basis that the brass they were forged from was the European payment for their own ancestors’ subjection.

As an undergraduate, I had the privilege to handle the ornate sword and engraved pistol of the last sultan of Darfur, Ali Dinar, whose kingdom was conquered and annexed to Sudan by British troops in 1916, and whose weapons were taken as war booty, ultimately to Durham University’s Sudan Archive. Should they be returned, and if so, to whom? To the Fur people, living in refugee camps far from home? Or to the war-wracked Sudanese state whose militias oppress them? Far from a simple narrative of looting and restitution, these questions become more complex and ambiguous the more they are looked at: it is precisely to unearth these complexities, to ask questions that may not have satisfactory answers, that anthropology is for — or was for, anyway.

Indeed, a single-minded devotion to the British Empire as a unique evil whose blood-guilt is only to be expiated through the dispersal of museum collections is a manner of inverted narcissism, which instead of viewing other societies as objects of fascination and study in themselves, views them solely through the prism of colonial conquest. Hicks’ aim, “to redefine [ethnographic museums] as public spaces, sites of conscience, in which to face up to the ultraviolence of Britain’s colonial past in Africa, and its enduring nature” is, itself, a double form of cultural colonialism. First, by emphasising the Victorian conqueror as the prime agent of history, the prism through which all other societies must be understood as passive victims, and second, in a worldview made explicit by Hicks’ then-modish expressions of fealty to the Black Lives Matter movement, through suborning the complex and ambiguous record of European imperialism to the culturally-specific racial politics of the contemporary United States. Hicks condemns his Victorian antecedents for “the claim — to which archaeologists and anthropologists were called as witness, as judge and as jury… of scientific proof that there could be no civilisation outside of white Euro-America”, quite unaware that he is replicating the process, having only updated their civilising fervour for that of today’s dominant empire.

Even before his resignation last week, the British Museum’s director, Hartwig Fischer, struggled to reconcile the institution’s African collections with the mores of contemporary progressivism. Despite his genuflection to Black Lives Matter during the moral fervour of 2020, insisting the British Museum “has done a lot of work – accelerated and enlarged its work on its own history, the history of empire, the history of colonialism, and also of slavery” and is “aligned with the spirit and soul of Black Lives Matter everywhere”, Fischer maintained that “‘the collections have to be preserved as a whole”. Yet at heart, the beliefs encoded within contemporary postcolonial discourse strike at the very essence of cross-cultural understanding at all:  the great age of the ethnographic museum is already past, struck dead by the racialised identity politics of our own imperial master.

Echoing these irreconcilable tensions, Kuper’s book ends on a desperate plea for “a Cosmopolitan Museum, one that tran­scends ethnic and national identities, makes comparisons, draws out connections, tracks exchanges across political frontiers, challenges boundaries: a museum set in the shifting sands of the past and the present but which is informed by rigorous, critical, independent scholarship”. It may be an attractive vision, but that world is already past, lost in the romantic, essentialising tide of ethnic self-regard that Americanised progressivism has bafflingly revived, whose historical course we are only beginning to chart. Kuper’s now-archaic cosmopolitanism, which appears conservative to contemporary mores, only highlights that conservatism is merely yesterday’s liberalism.

For all the British Museum stakes its claim to possession of the Benin Bronzes as artworks of shared humanity, it is the rightfulness of ethnic ownership that now strikes the contemporary observer as natural and just, perhaps correctly. The ethnographic museum is itself an artefact of a lost culture, like the Pitt Rivers’ occluded shrunken heads — an exotic curio of a society and worldview that no longer exists. “Are certain kinds of knowledge encoded in racial memory?” Kuper asks rhetorically, certain that any right-thinking person will disagree. Surveying the discourse of the moment, and the unstable definitions of indigeneity whose full consequences are yet to reveal themselves politically, the answer must be that that is indeed the spirit of the age. Now the chips must fall as they will, even if the results will surely not be those for which progressives dream.

Identity is the ruling orthodoxy of the day. Wesley Yang calls it the “successor ideology”, but it is less an ideology than a cockpit of grinding, wounding grievances contradicting one another: a perpetual conflict machine. Any piece of it, such as racial justice, can make perfect sense, but the whole dissolves into incoherence when it becomes clear that the highest ideal, equity, is a weasel word used to mask an inability to reconcile opposites.

Definitions of equity, whether provided by the White House or by elite universities, are baffling, I suspect intentionally so. Terms such as “fairness” and “anti-racist” are thrown around — but somehow this adds up to “investment” and “allocating resources” favouring designated grievance groups. Equity, in practice, means absolute equality of outcomes in all transactions, measured not in the liberal tradition, between individuals, but harking back to a more primitive outlook: between castes to which we have been assigned by birth and fate.

How does this work? The first step is simple enough. Government must intervene in every transaction to assure equal outcomes. If white males have an average “privilege value” of 100 and black males have an average of, say, 50, the government must take from one and give to the other until both share the identical value of 75. But what of black women — shouldn’t they receive a higher multiple than black men? And what of many Asian-American groups that have achieved a higher average than white males — should they be downranked and de-grievanced? And what of more intangible factors such as education, a good marriage and family life, raw ability at work and play, a sense of humour, happiness? Can government make the “historically underserved” laugh and the overserved cry?

The purpose of ideology is to lay down rules of the road that lead to a specific vision of the just society. Identity is the opposite of that. Equity is just a three-syllable sound. It explains nothing and resolves nothing. Put aside obvious questions about regressing to a system of lineage-based justice that throws overboard the legacy of individual rights, or about the overwhelming display of state power required to impose that system on an unwilling public. I’m talking about pure functionality.

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Whatever identity is, it doesn’t do the work of an ideology. Stitched together from the bits and pieces of moribund ideas received by the educated class, identity exemplifies the contemporary preference for bowing to the applause of an imaginary audience over the hard work needed to connect two consecutive thoughts. The causes of this intellectual flabbiness are frankly puzzling. The more credentials we heap on ourselves, and the more information we gather, the less connected we seem to reality.

Unnoticed, a vast chunk of the context that once measured our well-being has crumbled away, leaving us sick at heart and disoriented. Suicide and drug overdose deaths are rising. Many who are ostensibly healthy have been sucked into the moral vacuum of digital politics, substituting vehemence for meaning, posturing for productive action. Now and then, some shallow misfit detonates into a massacre of innocent strangers. Nihilism, the will to destroy whatever stands, is the guiding instinct of the day. Ideology, let us not forget, is also a creed, a set of beliefs dependent on faith, as much as it is a system of ideas — and the sterility of our moment, of which identity is a pathological example, may be derived less from intellectual failure than from a chronic and agonising spiritual condition.

***

Every ideology worthy of the name envisions a perfect end-state: a utopia. The kingdom of God may be near at hand or far in time and distance, real or fantastic, but in every case it performs an important function: it engenders hope and faith. If only we play by the accepted rules, human relations — that cauldron of selfishness and misery — will at last be reconciled. After resurrection, Jesus preached, we will be “as the angels are in heaven”. Under pure communism, the brutal strength of the state will wither away and we will each be given according to our needs. American democracy, in its high modernist phase, aimed for the Great Society; under more conservative hands, it looked to be a shining city on a hill.

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In this sense, the cult of identity is exceedingly utopian: believers judge established institutions against perfection, then reject the lot. But this is a journey without a destination — utopianism without an actual utopia. Identity is an engine that runs on rage and repudiation. Deprived of a satanic enemy to rail against, it stalls. If Donald Trump retired tomorrow to a Trappist monastery, the zealots of identity would drag him back out. If all white males and other oppressors vanished in a great culling at the end of days, the whole point of “identity” would explode in a puff of smoke. If grievance groups existed only to express their own separateness, social life would fall apart in a rush.

In the dark heart of its repudiation, identity repudiates itself, denying, by a parasitical necessity, the possibility of progress. It can thrive only so long as injustice advances. The impulse, then, is to remain implacable, irreconcilable, striking blows against anything that stands, in an ecstatic frenzy of nihilism that, when properly understood, is a form of suicide.

Reality, of course, is a tad more prosaic. I recently encountered a young man at the supermarket. He was a mass of Zoomer hair and tattoos, and when he turned, in bold white letters on the back of his black hoodie, I read a defiant message: “RISE UP. RESIST. REVOLT. REBEL.” Below that, in more modest script, a warning: “To not speak up is death.”

I considered the meaning of this apparition. Rise up, resist, revolt, rebel — against what? Everyone and everything, I suppose. Speak up — on behalf of what? That was the wrong question. You speak up to resist, revolt, strike blows. You stand forever against. Yet there he was, this would-be destroyer of worlds, at the fruit counter, contemplating the cantaloupes. Apparently, even nihilists have appetites.

***

In The Will to Believe, William James observed that certain explanations about the nature of things are “live options” while others are “dead options”. James was a psychologist. He understood that history and culture condition the mind, driving many theoretically possible propositions out of consideration. Does the universe rest on the back of a turtle? That was once a live option, but no longer. Is there no God, only atoms? That statement will get you shot in Kabul but elicit yawns in Harvard Square.

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By Irvine Welsh

There has been, in the 21st century, a great slaughter of live options. Truth and knowledge are largely mediated: we receive them from some trusted authority. But trust in the mediators has utterly collapsed and a fatal crisis of authority has spread to every subject. We now dwell in the Tower of Babel. Hope and faith, under such conditions, must dissolve into a shrieking, incomprehensible noise. The mindless contradictions of the cult of identity, and the dismal poverty of our ideological imagination, follow directly from these disasters. Religion, patriotism, love of place and family — these are dead or dying options. Conservatism and liberalism, Right and Left, are tribal stickers detached from any serious content.

The path to Communist revolution, wrote Marx in the Manifesto, “involved the most radical rupture with traditional ideas”. I was born into a world alive with hope and faith, fertilised by a running quarrel between ideas old and new. Utopia was not only possible; for many, it was inevitable. Revolution, these people thought, would purify the human race. Radical ideology was wholly oriented to that transcendent moment. In democracies, socialists and liberals believed we could get to the same place by peaceable stages. Artists and poets everywhere longed for the “bliss in that dawn” Wordsworth had experienced in Paris.

Then came the night. In December 1991, the Soviet Union went out of business. Rather abruptly, revolution became a dead option. The cry for it fell terminally quiet because faith was lost in its magical powers of transformation. Insofar as ideology had usurped the place of religion, the death of revolution was like the death of God. For radical thinkers, bereft and bewildered, deprived of direction, it felt like murder. A seething anger replaced coherent projects of political change. Pierre Rosanvallon describes the consequences of the end of “the idea of revolution”: “To be radical is to point a finger of blame every day; it is to twist a knife in each of society’s wounds. It is not to aim a cannon at the citadel of power in the preparation for a final assault.” Blaming and knife-twisting, I note, accurately describe the central rituals of the cult of identity, a post-utopian conduit for rage rather than change.

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A dead zone like the present moment might be conceived of as a great silence, a darkness, an emptiness that sucks the life out of new ideas. We emerge from nowhere and have no idea which way to turn — no idea whether the world is round or flat, whether it’s run by God or atoms, what words like “justice”, “integrity”, or “happiness” mean in practice. Every option at hand is either dead or in the process of dying. To attempt a coherent explanation of such a graveyard of dreams would be an exercise in despair. Anger at least has a pulse, and if intense enough feels like a facsimile of the spiritual life.

But all this, I think, amounts to a half-truth. The graveyard isn’t quite still. Dead options and failed ideologies twitch, moan and clutch at us zombie-like, stopping us in our tracks. We haven’t broken free from the past: just the opposite, we are overwhelmed by memory, so that our best thoughts have been thought before, and thought more brilliantly, and tested and exposed in their inadequacies. We seem to lie at the bottom of a century-deep well crushed by the weight and inertia of dead time, where we can accuse one another of being Nazis or fascists or communists, revolution lingers with its impossible promises, Ronald Reagan smiles over America, Jim Crow persecutes forever, and the Beatles perpetually top the charts. We aren’t empty but overfull. The Tower of Babel isn’t a silence but an unbearable noise.

The reflex to smash blindly at society, to obliterate the present and abolish the past, must be understood on these terms. Barbarism, with its true silence and true darkness, has acquired the aspect of utopia.

***

The last surge of ideological vitality in this country took place in the Sixties. That decade witnessed the rise of modern conservatism, destined to swell into a dominant political force in the Reagan years, and of the New Left that announced its arrival in the Port Huron Statement and, after many strange mutations, has become a sort of totemic ancestor to identity. The two movements were each other’s nightmare monster, yet in hindsight it’s remarkable how many goals and assumptions they shared. Both embraced history as an ally, not an enemy, for example. Both partook of that sense of infinite possibilities associated with the American frontier. In politics, both exhibited a Jeffersonian antipathy to state power and glorified a robust, almost anarchistic, individualism.

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Hippies and Goldwaterites had more in common than they knew, starting with the conviction that they were making the world over. A newborn ideology is a redrawing of the map — a radical shift in perspective. Doors suddenly swing open that have stood locked for an age. Everything is alive again, even the past, which isn’t repudiated so much as recruited and synchronised to the concerns of the present and future. No part of this need be destructive or nihilistic. It’s just a moving forward and a leaving behind.

Energy from these movements propelled American politics for many years, but inevitably the environment changed and momentum ran out. We are now stuck in the muck. We require explanations and aspirations that address the peculiar character of the digital age, and our inability to produce these is telling. Whatever their intrinsic worth, the ideologies of the Sixties were healthy attempts to change the world: they truly aimed at justice. Our sickness is that we speak of justice but we really crave meaning. We desperately wish to fill the spiritual void left by the decline of religion, community, and family, and when we engage in pseudo-ideological dabbling we are pleading on our own behalf, not that of society or the oppressed — we are praying to a silent heaven that our sickness might be healed. But that is not the province of ideology or politics.

Failure triggers blind rage and the barbaric urge to smash at the tokens of civilisation. This is our predicament, our closed loop. We begin the search for justice by gazing into the mirror of Narcissus but end it as the monster at the centre of the labyrinth.

We might ask how such a deformed and unsatisfying creed as the cult of identity has come to achieve the status of an established church. The answer isn’t hard to tease out. Identity justifies control by those who have lost authority. The institutional elites are held in contempt by the public. Their advice is rejected and their commandments ignored.

By wielding that fuzzy and mutable ideal, equity, the elites aim to regain control of policy and prosecutorial decisions — but also of the education of children, the research of scientists and scholars, the persons and opinions that will be tolerated online, the treatment of the poor and homeless, and ultimately, the words in the mouths and thoughts inside the heads of the common herd. As a bonus, they get to surf a wave of puritanical smugness. They can call dissenters “deplorables” and treat their dissent as a form of racism or homophobia. What could be better?

It may appear far-fetched to portray elite embrace of identity as a 2020s take on Invasion of the Body Snatchers — and in a way, it is. The digital realm is virtually infinite; that’s a lot of territory to conquer and hold down. My point, however, is that the ragged engine of identity has an open road ahead and will continue its suicidal rampage through American life until opposed by a coherent set of ideas.

Even in this condition, Byrne was allowed no dignity. The city’s anatomy schools were eager to dissect his body as a scientific prize. Among these circling vultures, none was more determined than the aptly named John Hunter, eminent surgeon, anatomist, and collector of organic specimens both animal and human.

A horrified Byrne had already rejected Hunter’s offer to buy his corpse and, in a final, desperate bid to escape the surgeon’s saws, asked his friends to encase his body in lead and sink it in the English Channel after he died. But Hunter managed to pay for the cadaver to be secretly removed from its coffin and transported to his home in Earl’s Court. There he boiled it down to its bones and reassembled it as a skeleton. “I lately got a tall man,” he hinted to a friend some years after.

The surgeon’s vast collection of pickled creatures and body parts would later become the nucleus of London’s Hunterian Museum. But last month, when the Hunterian reopened after a lengthy closure, the Irish Giant had been tactfully removed from display. After almost 250 years, John Hunter’s flouting of a dying man’s wishes is catching up with him.

There are, of course, many museums that display the remnants of people wrenched from their graves — or of those never allowed to lie down in them. Stories such as Byrne’s raise uncomfortable questions about this practice. When, if ever, do human remains cease to be human? Does the sanctity of death end at the borders of our own culture and era?

These issues have arisen before. Thirty years ago, the South African government demanded the return of Sara Baartman, a Khoisan woman who in the early-19th century was paraded around Europe, only to be dissected after her death and displayed in a Paris museum until the Seventies. But the morality of displaying human remains has become more broadly contentious in recent years.

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By Mary Harrington

In 2020, Oxford’s Pitt Rivers museum removed all of its human exhibits, including shrunken heads from Amazonia’s Shuar tribe, claiming that “visitors often understood the Museum’s displays of human remains as a testament to other cultures being ‘savage,’ ‘primitive’ or ‘gruesome,’” which “reinforced racist stereotypes”. Numerous British and American museums have changed their method of displaying Egyptian mummies, an enormous crowd-pleaser, using terms such as “mummified person” in an effort to humanise the objects.

It is striking, then, how proudly the Hunterian Museum now reveals its gruesome contents to the public. It seems Charles Byrne was omitted because, like Sara Baartman, he is a high-profile case, subject to ongoing controversy after the British Medical Journal covered it in 2011. But the museum is still packed with human remains, presented no differently from the countless animal specimens floating eerily in their glass jars. There is row upon row of skulls gathered from numerous continents, pickled brains, warped spines, infant skeletons, cabinets of teeth, all manner of internal organs, and foetuses ranging from nine weeks to full term. It is a truly ghoulish spectacle.

Hunter claimed to have “dissected some thousands” of human corpses. A small number did consent; the Georgian upper classes were warming to the idea of donating their bodies for scientific enquiry. An Archbishop of Canterbury, several military leaders and a serving prime minister (the Marquess of Rockingham) were among those who volunteered for Hunter’s knife.

But the vast majority who ended up in 18th-century anatomy theatres had no say in the matter. Some were wrestled away from their families beneath Tyburn Tree, the gallows in Hyde Park where dozens of criminals were hanged every year. Others were acquired through the bribing of undertakers. Most commonly though, they were stolen from their graves by gangs of professional body snatchers. Hunter himself almost certainly robbed graves in his youth, when he spent 12 years learning the ropes at his brother’s anatomy school.

The grim provenance of Hunter’s collection is addressed only in a brief wall text at the museum. Acknowledging the specimens were gathered “before modern standards of consent”, it states: “We recognise the debt owed to those people… who in life and death have helped to advance medical knowledge.” Why, then, has the display of Egyptian mummies come to be regarded as a sensitive problem, but less so the display of an unborn child probably removed from the womb of a stolen corpse?

One reason is simply that the humanity of the dead only becomes an issue when someone makes it an issue. The controversy over mummies, for instance, reflects a particular convergence of political beliefs: some modern Egyptians, not to mention the modern Egyptian state, are now identifying as descendants of the ancient civilisation on the Nile. At the same time, Western curators have become desperate to distance themselves from the colonial period during which these objects were acquired. By contrast, there are few people in Britain who feel so strongly about scores of impoverished Londoners pulled from their shallow graves in the dead of night.

But there is another important difference. The claim that Hunter’s activities “have helped to advance medical knowledge” is a powerful one, linking his specimens with the achievements of modern medicine. It is also clearly true. Without a legal way to acquire bodies — and with religious beliefs making voluntary dissection unthinkable to many — only stolen corpses could produce the beginnings of the anatomical knowledge that we take for granted today. The museum subtly emphasises this by charting the development of surgery from the early-modern period to our own time: rather dull after the horror show of Hunter’s collection, but that’s the point I suppose.

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Charles Byrne’s skeleton might be too controversial to display, but the museum has insisted on keeping it due to its medical value. It helped an American neurosurgeon to identify pituitary gigantism in 1909, and a century later, allowed scientists to find a genetic component in the growth disorder.

What all of this points to is the special status of medical science in Western countries today. Museums and other cultural institutions are increasingly critical of the heritage they embody because, ultimately, they no longer believe it has served a positive purpose that could mitigate the brutality of the past. This goes far beyond the problem of human remains; as Guardian critic Jonathan Jones notes about Tate Britain’s recent guilt-laden rehang: “Maybe it doesn’t want to promote British art, for it seems to disapprove of much of it.” Yet there are not many people arguing that we should abandon the benefits of modern medicine since it, too, has a disturbing history. This is one area where progress is still understood as building on the past rather than overturning it: the only acceptable agenda for healthcare is more and better.

But Hunter’s collection also reveals a deep tension in the way we value medical science. If we consider it dehumanising to display body parts in jars, it is partly because we now struggle to recognise blood and tissue as human. Our technical mastery over biology has led to our alienation from it. Just as we expect our meat to arrive immaculately packaged in the supermarket, carrying no trace of the abattoir, so we banish birth, illness, and death from our everyday lives, consigning them to the clinical world of the hospital. We have never been more preoccupied with the condition of our bodies, yet we don’t like to see those bodies for what they really are.

According to liberal conventional wisdom, we are in a post-industrial, post-imperial society where shouty (white) men can no longer trumpet their entitled assumptions unchallenged, and perhaps even have to stand in line. Well, if that’s truly the case, thank fuck for it. After all, imperialism and the patriarchy cost a lot of lives, and gave us wars, bad politics and bad art. And nothing’s changed.

Ironically, however, most of those lives lost in Western society were male, white and working-class; basically, those citizens assumed by the paradigm of class-denying intersectionality to be the enemy of progress. White working-class males are now recast as the establishment’s salivating attack dogs; the overseers of imperialism, enforcing the bidding of their wealthier masters. Their role in securing most of our human rights — through workplace struggle in the trade unions, strikes, demonstrations, wars and riots — is to be erased from our collective consciousness.

Because some sections of the white working class bought into the reductive neoliberalism of unrestrained capitalism through the Thatcher-Reagan revolution, so the entire group was written off. In the “hierarchy of the oppressed” so beloved of intersectional theory, a (white) penis in the underpants is more important than the lack of an arse in the trousers in determining your place in the world.

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Bret Easton Ellis: 'My generation wanted to be offended'

By Bret Easton Ellis

So, what excludes white working-class men from this LGBT intersectional paradigm? It can’t be race, as white women are permitted. It can’t be class, as working-class women and black men are allowed in. It can’t even be sex/gender, as gay or bisexual white working-class men and women are included. But perversely, white proletarian men are lumped in with their bourgeois “brethren”; outsiders in this rainbow-coloured festival of the oppressed.

In this bizarre schematic model, working-class football supporters in Liverpool are deemed on the same side as rabid establishment mouthpieces such as The Sun’s Kelvin McKenzie, who demonised, vilified and lied about them. Conversely, black teenagers in inner London estates, continually the victims of harassment by the Metropolitan Police and at the bottom of Britain’s opportunity pile, are ludicrously deigned to have common cause with the privately-educated colonial elites placed strategically in the media and commerce through “equal opportunity” positive discrimination schemes. There’s something about the bourgeois psyche that produces a visceral reaction to that deadly combination of working-class, white and straight — irrespective of the actual views and life experiences of someone in that grouping.

The decline of class politics and its replacement by the schisms of identity is an integral part of the neoliberal order. After all, one unites and the other divides. The class war was won by the elite in Britain, probably as far back as Orgreave in the 1984 miners’ strike, when organised labour was crushed. Today, capital rules supreme, steadfastly tightening its hold, aided by a rapacious individualism that has now tipped into a demented narcissism, and a technology concentrated in the hands of corporations and its co-opted governments.

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The naked persecution of Donald Trump

By David Mamet

Therefore, in the realms of finance and economics, nothing is now contestable, unless it’s national elites using their power (and manipulating the populace) to try to gain more traction and influence at the expense of the interrelated global ones. What is presented to us as politics is a hollow civil war of the super wealthy, with the rest of us as pawns. Silver-spooned, daddy-issue Republicans, like Trump and his ilk, have long presented as comic-book versions of the most vulgar, dumbass versions of redneck USA. This is now Right-wing de rigueur, enabling exploiters to “connect” with a politically and socially displaced white America, which embraces grievance and victimhood as eagerly as any grouping that claims to be oppressed. This folksy affectation is only partly strategic: late capitalism has stupefied its winners as much as its losers. Hollywood has recycled the potty mouth of the ghetto into the boardroom, where the same tropes are now regurgitated in a decontextualised way, with defiant alienation replaced by entitled arrogance, under the depoliticised posturing of “attitude”.

Meanwhile, digital technology and its deployment solely for private profit through capital accumulation has fucked all our attention spans, and our sense of the past, as completely as George Orwell suggested. (Indeed, there’s little point in saying that: the ubiquity of Orwell as just another internet cliché has completely nullified the power of his message.)

In Britain, I believe that the traditional working man — of all colours — has had a bad rap. Recently, I was out with some old pals, and we were talking about how we’ve stayed close friends down the years, despite life, love and work taking us off in varying directions. One friend went on at length about how his partner and her friends were quite surprised at the continuing bond between us all. It’s a recurrent theme with women I know, who ask, perhaps not unjustly: how can you still be bothered with each other?

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Race is a delusion

By David Mamet

Men, whose camaraderie can seem frivolous, built on drinking, football and laughing at each other’s embarrassments, paradoxically tend to stick together down the years more than women, who talk of weightier, more emotional subjects. Several years ago, following a relationship breakdown scenario, I went through a phase where I felt like I was done with male company. I decided I could do without the gung-ho nature of the archetypal male response to such events: “Forget her. They’re all the same. Get another round up. I’ve left a line out for you in the toilets.” As a result, I basically surrounded myself with my women friends. Not for the first time, they were the ones offering real support and genuine insight into my predicament.

Then you realise: it’s not about thesis and antithesis. There’s always got to be room for a synthesis of different ideas and values. Once more, I’m appreciating the narrow, lazy affirmation that belonging to a mob of men can offer. The best thing about being a man of my generation is that we’re allowed to get the fuck out of the house. Now I feel for youth who don’t do this so much — they really don’t know what they are missing. When they do, the experience is invariably packaged for them. The biggest indictment you can offer our current dystopia is that we’ve created a society where the old pity the young. That’s just not right.

Masculinity (as well as femininity) is tied to our lost sense of community. As pubs and clubs close down across the country, teenagers are more likely to spend their evenings on Instagram, TikTok, playing video games or on some dubious porn forums than getting drink from the offie and messing around in the park or on abandoned railway lines. A social vacuum has been created at the same time as a dumbed-down visceral communication system has emerged. This creates a place where someone as pathetic as Andrew Tate can gain a limited sphere of influence. The emergence of such characters would have been impossible in the Nineties. They would have been dismissed as ludicrous wankers in a truly contested, democratic street culture, as opposed to the top-down media one we now live in. Now a noncey, supermarket transgression has gained a foothold, appealing to an entire lost generation of anxious, isolated teenage bedroom wankers, brimming with the sleazy narratives of onscreen porn.

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The narcissistic fall of France

By Michel Houellebecq

While young people are being stripped of their right to be completely irresponsible — i.e. young — those of us who spent a whole chunk of our change in the last century are often unprepared to let go of our unruly youth, still investing in bad behaviour and the institutions believed to encourage it; the pub, the gig, the nightclub, the rave, the football ground and the traditional workplace. I personally thank the higher powers for those declining bastions.

In their growing absence, the neoliberal state has gutted everyone’s lives of meaning — to the extent that we have little to cling to other than a narcissistic, media-constructed sense of who we are and our supposed entitlement to avoid personal discomfort at all costs. Thus, through toxic social media platforms, proponents of various identities get to sling all sorts of mud at each other, devoid of any social setting and real human interaction. Generally, it’s an inconsequential battle, in which people are afforded the keyboard warrior’s licence — rewarded by the dopamine hits — to abuse each other with relative impunity. The objective of the game is to goad the other party into an overreach and a subsequent pile-on, with an attendant Twitter ban or, the great weapon of our times, “cancellation”. Generally, however, in those futile wars, no party claims a feasible victory. Nonetheless, the participants are rarely shy of pompously deploying tiresome, overdramatic dictums declaring their cause or viewpoint to be “on the right side of history”.

This nonsense benefits only the continuation of the current bankrupt system. The establishment’s economic, financial and social elites once starved people into compliance; now it lures them into pointless shouting matches, allowing them to stupefy themselves in the process.

So, white men aren’t the only ones rendered toxic by our culture. Every group and demographic, as evidenced by its social media extremists, are fundamentally unhappy with their lot and in existential crisis about who they are in this changing world. Part of this is the old science of consumer capitalism: keep us feeling bad about ourselves and then give us a product or service or procedure that will make us centred, complete or alive. Ignore the fact that we’re strutting around in a zoo we’ve made for ourselves. Whatever we consume or change or alter, we remain polar bears in the same concrete enclosure, pacing up and down.

The toxicity of white rich men is more consequential than that of the rest of us, which is largely an acting out, a cry for attention. After all, they are seen to have the power to change all this. Only they don’t. The consciousness-crushing machine they’ve helped create and service brings them no substantive life benefit anymore. Can a man with £400 million in the bank really be poorer than one with £500 million? How many lives do you need to live to spend that? It’s the accumulation of meaninglessness; the buying of some kind of dominance and largely imagined status over peers. Checking figures from the spreadsheets on their screens. Seeing how efficient a capitalism no longer tied to production is in taking the resources of communities, monetising it, and transferring it to their accounts. Basically, wasting their lives away in that most futile of pursuits: making non-spendable money, while the years tick by, and dreams of love and laughter are replaced by a rancid resentment and urge to satisfy the ego-driven need for “influence”.

The continuing war of capital upon consciousness, on what makes us human, continues apace. In an economy that can produce everything at zero cost, the wealthy are coming to the end of their ability to control us by paying wages. Now, this can only be done through the steady erosion of human consciousness. AI is a backstop here, just in case our spirits rebel in reaction to this, and we cut up too rough. After all, a robot or a computer doesn’t need food. And crucially, it’s not changed by anyone looking at it. It is not self-conscious. But if the system can’t make robots quickly enough to replace us, it’ll try to make us all into robots.

“We’re not allowed to say that” is the factory bleat that resonates throughout social media from all we older, toxic, white working-class males. How excited we get on our dopamine hits, when some papier-mâché faced ponce seems to stick it to the poker-arsed gatekeepers of neoliberal morality with a racist or sexist quip — while they (quietly) endorse an economic system of gross inequity that now almost literally defecates on us. Our participation in “politics” is reduced to watching a Frank Drebin from Police Squad/The Naked Gun look-and-soundalike clownishly annoy some uptight disapprover.

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Britain needs a cigarette

By David Hockney

What we certainly are allowed to do, is to be nostalgic. The system plays on our need to make sense of our existence by processing our past, but only in a way that all conflict is taken out of it. Thus, our need to validate our lives in a fake “golden age” haze becomes a de facto endorsement of a system that has limited the potential of those lives. It encourages us to sit around crying into our beer about how things ain’t what they used to be, reconstructing a collective rose-tinted past designed to sustain us in our dotage, while ensuring this state creeps ever closer as mindless aphorisms — ubiquitous, circular — rot our brains.

Fuck that. Pick up a book instead. Let’s get educated. The smarter we are, the less easy it is for the unenlightened greed junkies to fuck things up for us. The world is changing, let’s change with it, but in ways which make sense to us, not to the blueprint of white-collar fascist controllers or soulless tech nerds who need to get properly laid. (They are the ones who’ve swamped our brains and culture with the shabby dictates of their crass dating algorithms.) If I could make one solitary plea to white working-class men: do not be servile to the upper classes. They are not your amigos. They blithely dispatched your forefathers to the killing fields, and they haven’t gained any greater appreciation or respect for you since. In broader terms, Trump-Biden 2 or 3 or 4 will not do anything for the citizens of this world that the first one didn’t. Probably much less. Toxic masculinity is just that, because it exists within a toxic system.

Arguably the most important tradition is Tradition 10: “Alcoholics Anonymous has no opinion on outside issues; hence the AA name ought never be drawn into public controversy.” The Washingtonians, a group of recovering alcoholics that preceded AA by about a century, disbanded due to infighting over its involvement in social reforms like prohibition, religion and slavery abolition. AA’s founders, William Wilson and Dr Robert Smith (Bill and Dr Bob), didn’t want AA to suffer the same fate. Best their organisation remain neutral, they thought, so as to be welcoming for alcoholics from every walk of life. For nearly 88 years, AA has never weighed in on foreign or domestic policies, nor has it endorsed political candidates or legislative proposals. And so desperate drunks of every race, colour and creed have kept on coming and — together — got sober.

It is up to every individual AA meeting to uphold the programme principles. (Tradition 4: “Each group should be autonomous except in matters affecting other groups or AA as a whole”). But where many struggle, I’ve found, over the 20 years I’ve been going to meetings, is with Tradition 10. In AA, alcoholics are free to share about anything they like, so long as it pertains to alcoholism; politics and the culture wars, they can leave at the door. And yet, a lot of recovering alcoholics can’t resist hot takes when they’ve been handed a mic. I noticed this particularly after Donald Trump was elected, and especially in New York City. Members started sharing about a fight they’d had that day with their idiotic, MAGA-hat-wearing uncle on Facebook — apparently unaware of newcomers, desperate to get sober, who might now feel unwelcome because they had voted for the wrong guy.

In 2020, violations of Tradition 10 reached a fever pitch. After George Floyd’s murder, institutions across the nation absorbed progressive ideals into their mission statements. I was finishing my last year of study at Columbia University. Having entered the university in 2017 as a self-described radical progressive planning a career in LGBT activism, I was graduating an exile. I had become disillusioned with, and spoken out against, my fellow progressives’ tactics: suppressing free speech, purity policing and reducing every individual to his or her skin colour, gender and sexual orientation. During my last semester, which was moved online due to the pandemic, I’d sign on to virtual AA meetings after class, and immediately be struck by how similar the two spaces had become. Pronouns lit up the screen. Whereas opening readings once consisted of the AA preamble, the 12 Steps and 12 traditions, and details about the meeting, now some groups chose to add a thinly veiled threat: “We will not tolerate racist, homophobic, sexist or transphobic rhetoric in this space.”

From my experience of post-Trump academia, I knew these proclamations wouldn’t so much prevent inappropriate speech as put everyone on high alert, encouraging an atmosphere of self-censorship. Recovering alcoholics carry a lot of guilt about the harm their drinking has caused others; they are often irrationally fearful of causing any more. If they feel like they’re traversing a mine field of potential triggers that could set off listeners in the room, they may be reluctant to admit shameful details about the past, which they want and need to get off their chests. Recovering alcoholics’ lives depend on their ability to share honestly, and to feel like they will be accepted by AA no matter their histories or their personal views. Increasingly, certain opinions — although you could never be totally sure which ones — were no longer worthy of respect in a democratic society. Meetings were not unlike my university classes, where the silence during discussions would extend for what felt like an eternity, as so many students stayed quiet rather than risk transgressing.

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Why would you demonise Alcoholics Anonymous?

By Tanya Gold

But even silence could get alcoholics in trouble. In June 2020, Toby N. had been in the programme in New York for six years. He was raised in the Mormon church, but left it when he was 24 and came out as gay a couple of years later. On #BlackoutTuesday, when white people committed to posting nothing but a black square on Instagram for a full 24 hours, Toby decided not to partake. “I didn’t feel like it was going to do anything,” he said. Then he got a direct message from a friend — another gay man in AA — who asked: why hadn’t Toby posted anything about racial justice on social media? He accused Toby of inadequate allyship. (Toby had donated to Black Lives Matter.) In meetings, he would hear people whispering about other members’ “white privilege”.

Toby was generally in alignment with them about social justice issues, but he found the manner in which they spoke about them exceedingly “toxic”. But a line had been drawn in the sand, he told me: “You’re either with us, or you’re against us.” Exclusively attending meetings for gay alcoholics, Toby had previously found acceptance in AA, but now he felt like a stranger in the programme that had for years been like a second home. He decided to leave. The 12 steps worked for him, but the dogma and the groupthink, he felt he could do without. “It feels like I’m a man without a country,” he said. “I don’t have the gay community that I thought I did.”

For many years, I also attended affinity AA groups for gay and lesbian alcoholics. In these meetings, we felt no need to use coded language when sharing: we could say “my boyfriend” or “girlfriend”, rather than “my other half” or “significant other”. We could be honest about our difficulties with various spiritual aspects of the programme (Step Three: A decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him): the only God many of us had ever understood was one who despised us. It may seem like affinity groups violate Tradition 10, since some of the topics discussed in these meetings are technically “outside issues”. However, they are always spoken about as they pertain to alcoholism. And because these meetings are clearly labelled in the directory, straight members who attend are aware that some of the issues discussed might not pertain to them.

Sometime over the past decade, gay and lesbian meetings became “LGBTQ” meetings. After “intersectionality” leapt from university campuses into the mainstream, these meetings became the most ideological of them all. Suddenly, a whole range of difficulties had to be acknowledged. “If you suffer from chronic fatigue and don’t feel like you can make it until the end of the meeting to share, please alert me and I will call on your early,” the host of one LGBTQ meeting in New York I attended read aloud. Then: “If you want to share but you have difficulty speaking, please write what you would like to share in the chat and I will read it aloud for you.” I still can’t fathom how any member in attendance could have interpreted these announcements as anything other than disturbingly infantilising: one of the key ingredients for sobriety is personal responsibility.

Perhaps most disconcertingly, the language of one of AA’s best-known readings changed. The preamble has always read: “Alcoholics Anonymous is a fellowship of men and women who share their experience, strength and hope with each other.” On the last day of the 71st General Service Conference for the US and Canada, held virtually in April 2021, a vote was held on whether to change the wording of the Preamble from “a fellowship of men and women” to “a fellowship of people”. The motion passed. Many members were shocked. Alcoholics Anonymous is famous for its stubborn resistance to change: the first 164 pages of the Big Book have barely been amended since they were written nearly a century ago. The literature has saved thousands, maybe millions, of lives. “Don’t fix what isn’t broken” is one of AA’s unofficial mottos. Why risk changing something that works?

Another member, Justin D., says that another reason changes should rarely occur is that they are hard to reverse. At an LGBTQ meeting he attends in Baltimore, which began as a meeting for gays and lesbians, a young woman joined the group and began demanding changes to the opening literature because people were being misgendered. She called for a directive stating that only gender-neutral language should be used when calling on members to share. Group members reluctantly acquiesced to the woman’s demands. Not long afterwards, she stopped attending. Now, if members wanted to return the readings to their original form, they would have to propose it to the group and initiate a vote — which could result in accusations that they are trying to reintroduce trans-exclusionary language.

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The twilight of identity politics

By Park Macdougald

Elizabeth S. said that at a “queer-identified” meeting she attended, all of the opening readings were amended to include only gender-neutral language. However, she told me, one gender-specific pronoun had apparently managed to slip through the editing process. When the woman who read that particular announcement aloud arrived at the pronoun, Elizabeth said, she began to trip over her words and look nervously about the room, as if she was uncertain how to proceed.

Another member I spoke to, Bernadette R., remarked that for decades women have bristled at the male pronouns used in AA’s literature to describe God, or a Higher Power. “The female demographic is much bigger than the non-binary demographic. So why are they getting a space faster than women are?” She also mentioned her frustration with the new gender-neutral restrooms at the meeting she attends every week, which make many women feel uncomfortable. “Women deserve to feel safe,” she said.

And yet it has long been a principle in AA that it doesn’t matter who you are, what you believe, or what wrongs you’ve committed — AA says “You belong here.” The only requirement for membership is “a desire to stop drinking” (Tradition Three). Critical social justice ideology, which scoffs at the idea of redemption for those who may have transgressed, is inimical to AA’s core mission. If the programme doesn’t recommit to upholding Tradition 10, it could go the same way as the Washingtonians. In the meantime, many alcoholics with the “wrong politics” might choose not to join a group that could shun them for their problematic views. And, as it is said in AA, for a real alcoholic, “to drink is to die”.

Names have been changed to respect AA members’ anonymity. All agreed to participate in this article. 

Katie Law: Why don’t you start by telling us what sensitivity readers are — what are your views of them?

Lionel Shriver: For the few of you who aren’t familiar with the concept, sensitivity readers started out being hired mostly in young adult fiction — a genre that, for some reason, woked out earlier than anyone else. The idea is that these people are self-nominated experts on whatever category of humanity they happen to have been born into. So I’m a professional American and a professional white person. They’re supposed to go through, line by line, and find anything in this book that could possibly offend anyone, especially their hallowed group. And unsurprisingly, that results in a much more anodyne, boring manuscript. Basically, you can’t win, because if you have a character do something that most people in that category wouldn’t do, then it’s inauthentic; but if they do things that that category of people are renowned to do, then it’s a stereotype.

I should make it clear that no one at HarperCollins has yet had the nerve to subject me to these people. And I object to the whole idea of it. There’s nothing wrong with being professional, being accurate. If the book you’re writing requires you to write people who are credibly disabled or black or Muslim or what have you, and it’s a realistic piece of fiction, then you should probably do a little homework. But it shouldn’t be against the law not to do your homework. If you’ve made glaring errors, then it’s the part of criticism and a responsible reader to notice. But it’s a very different thing — deciding to do a few interviews or a little reading on your own account — from having your publisher sic these self-nominated experts on your manuscript to tell you everything that’s wrong with it and everything that has to go. I won’t mention her by name, but a very successful novelist who I talked to recently was subjected to multiple sensitivity readers and they reduced her to tears.

What few authors understand is that they don’t actually have to take the advice of these interfering little people. But most authors think they do and therefore make these moronic changes. What the publisher is really doing is protecting themselves, so that if this book gets it in the neck, on social media or in criticism, then they can say, “well, she didn’t do what she was told”.

KL: How have these edicts affected you personally? Have you had any pushback from an agent or your own editors in your fiction writing?

LS: I have been subjected to very little of that kind of interference, but it’s not foreign to me. One of the things that now makes people extremely nervous is the use of accents. Now, I don’t generally like heavy-handed transliteration of accents in fiction. I think you can sometimes convey an accent with a few little touches. And those little touches can be very useful in creating the character. But even expressing the way people actually talk when, for example, English is not their first language is now considered offensive. And there are whole books, therefore, that would be cancelled for this very reason.

In The Mandibles, there’s a short dialogue with African immigrants, and I had used those little touches, and I had my British editor say that it was “othering”. I find that word so repulsive. And rather than take her head on, because I wanted to keep things cool and she had restrained herself in relation to a lot of other things, I obliged, except that I did so in an underhanded way. There was a way of changing the dialogue so that you did get the accent, but I expressed it with whole, legitimate English words. So you couldn’t quite say that it was transliterating and “othering”, but I still got my way.

There was another instance where I got myself into trouble with objecting to the concept of cultural appropriation. I had written a short story in which there was a girlfriend of a white character who was black. She was a very appealing character. She’s smart and very well spoken. And she’s upper-middle class and her mother’s rich — so not a stereotype. The story takes place in Atlanta, where there is a huge upper-middle class black population. So this was credible. But my agent suggested that I changed this person to a white character, because if we submitted the story to the New Yorker — eye roll! — and they rejected it, we would never know whether or not it was rejected because I was culturally appropriating, or the story just sucked. I always allow for that possibility. Sure enough, it was rejected, and I do not know whether or not it was because I culturally appropriated or this story sucked.

KL: Authors seem to sometimes apologise too quickly if they’re accused of a particular misdemeanour.

LS: Oh, I have never apologised in public for anything as a matter of principle. Once you go down that road, you have lost the battle, you have finished yourself. And the irony is that apologies don’t even work. They’re never accepted. You never apologise enough.

But it’s worth pointing out that transparent cowardice is not so much on the authorial but on the publishing level. As I wrote in a Spectator column, one of the reasons that publishing has become so timid, and frightened, and compliant, and risk-averse, is because it’s been taken over by women. I do not say that with any pride in my sex, and there are many exceptions, but women err on the side of being fearful. They also have, as a group, a fatal desire to please. What’s needed in this circumstance is balls, and I don’t care whether they’re literal or figurative.

KL: You won a prize in 2005, The Orange Prize. It’s now been renamed as The Women’s Prize for Fiction. At the time, did you think there was a good reason to have a women-only prize? And today, do you think we still need women-only prizes for fiction?

LS: I think at the time there was some good reason for it. There was a real historical disparity in the award of prizes, especially the big prizes, to women. We just weren’t getting acknowledged. Now, I was quite forthright, even at the time, about the fact that if I had my druthers, I would prefer to have won a prize that was open to both sexes. I have no problem with going head-to-head with men and I do not feel that I need special protection. But it was at a rather low point in my career, and I would take what I could get.

I have made a habit of not doing down the Women’s Prize. For the most part, it doesn’t do any harm, it’s just one more prize. It means that there are more people out there who have a little more money and a little more profile. But if you look at the statistics of who’s being awarded what now, if anything we need a men’s prize. We now have a serious reverse discrimination situation, whereby authors, especially debut authors, simply cannot get into print if they are straight, white males. And you know what, I think even the gay white males are starting to struggle.

KL: Do you put that down to the number of women running publishing? Do you think that they are wanting to push their own interests?

LS: It’s partly a matter of fashion. Publishing is utterly obsessed with diversity. And that means that they are not choosing books strictly on the basis of whether they’re any good. This is a huge, society-wide problem and it’s not just publishing — we have ditched excellence and even competence, and all we care about is what category you belong to — but publishing is the worst of it. Women are slaves to fashion, including ideological fashion, and have this drive to please, and regard talking about diversity all the time as pleasing because that’s what you’re supposed to do now. However, I do not think the problem is female readers. I sense no demand, from the ground up. “Listen, stop foisting these male, white writers on us. We only want to read books by people from Zimbabwe.” I do a lot of events and I just don’t hear it. The readership wants good stories and good characters, and also something with a little edge, which is where I come in.

KL: A lot of the management in publishing houses are terrified of their very young staff, who are calling the shots, who are feeling offended, who are feeling uncomfortable about JK Rowling’s views. Is that something you’ve experienced?

LS: Yes, which is bizarre. It’s just a complete inversion of who has the power. I mean, we’re dealing with an entire administrative class that doesn’t realise that they’re wearing Dorothy’s shoes. They have the power; they can fire all these people. Look at what happened at Netflix. They did a trim after the Dave Chappelle brouhaha, and the first people in the firing line were the people who’d made a big stink about the Dave Chappelle comedy special.

But in publishing there’s just this complete failure to exert control. I’ll tell you an interesting story. I hope Douglas Murray is cool with this. Douglas recently changed publishing company from Bloomsbury to HarperCollins. And by the way, HarperCollins, in the big picture here, has acquitted itself quite well. They’re my publisher and they have not given me a hard time, much less fired me. And they have been a refuge for a number of other authors who have fallen out with their publishers. But this particular instance of leaving Bloomsbury was interesting to me because of a twist. They were wrangling over the contractual details — they didn’t actually want to lose Douglas — believe it or not but they threatened Douglas with their younger staff. They used their younger staff as a weapon and said, “you know, you’re lucky: our younger staff hasn’t gone for you. The younger staff of all the other publishing companies wouldn’t put up with you. So we’re the only people who would have you.” It’s really underhanded, really creepy. And of course, it was a lie. Douglas didn’t have any trouble finding someone else to publish him. He’s very profitable. It was using the current political situation to get what they wanted in a much more mercantile sense, not in an ideological sense.

The real problem is that, in the elevation of these ostensible values of diversity, equity and inclusion, whole organisations and corporations forget what they are for. I got myself into trouble in 2018, after Penguin Random House sent round a declaration to all the agents of their authors that, by 2025, they were going to have both their authors and their staff perfectly reflect the demographics of the United Kingdom — it’s hard to say this without laughing — in relation to sex, sexual preference, ethnicity, gender ID, of course, race, and even class. Now, that’s a hell of an algorithm. I thought it was hilarious and I wrote about it for The Spectator — about how the purpose of a publishing company is not to perfectly reflect the demography of whatever country it’s selling books in, but to sell books. And somehow that column got twisted so that, according to the Guardian — they’re so creative there! — I thought only white people wrote good books.

KL: I’ve actually got the sentence that you wrote here: “If an agent submits a manuscript by a gay, transgender Caribbean, who dropped out of school at seven and powers around town on a mobility scooter, it will be published whether or not it is incoherent, tedious, meandering and insensible.”

LS: That line was endlessly quoted back to me as somehow terribly prejudiced. If you examine each element on its own, there are no pejoratives. There is nothing insulting in that line at all. But it is, in its composite, funny — and that’s a crime.

KL: You talked on the Today programme about what you had meant when you wrote that and why you’d written it. I think you defended yourself and acquitted yourself brilliantly — but I wonder how these things affect you, and whether you come away from it feeling bolshier? Or whether you ever fear you’ve gone too far?

LS: Well, so far, I’ve got away with it. So I don’t live in fear all the time. I realise that the era we’re living in is dangerous to me — the irony being, however, that it’s also been very useful to me. I mean, you are probably here not just because you like my novels, but because I have stuck my neck out politically. And therefore I have benefitted from wokeness more than I have suffered from it. And that makes me rather gleeful.

KL: And do you feel that you can harness it for your next novel?

LS: I really broke the rules in The Motion of the Body through Space, which came out in 2020. One of the secondary characters is an incompetent diversity hire. You’re not supposed to do that. And, of course, it was widely criticised. And that made it really fun. But I don’t want to become just an ideologue and I don’t want to just write books that are shadowboxing with the enemy. I want to write books that would be interesting beyond this moronic era.

I don’t always want my novels to be focused on the culture wars, but I have used the culture wars and more broadly, I have found the whole experience of the last several years informative, not necessarily in a cheerful manner. It’s been very discouraging — in the same way that I found the whole Covid era incredibly discouraging — and I think less of humanity as a result. But I find this time period illuminating in relation to any number of other political movements that I have known about in theory, but have not known in practice. It illuminates the French Revolution and Year Zero in Cambodia and Maoism and Stalinism, the whole package of authoritarian movements which have not always been top-down but have sometimes been ground-up — instituting an orthodoxy, which if you do not hew to it, you lose your job, your livelihood. That is what’s happening. I sometimes worry that it’s petty and I shouldn’t get that concerned with it, but on reflection, I don’t think it’s petty. I think it’s real, I think it’s important. If it gets much worse, we’re really talking about total dysfunction. We’re talking about countries just not working anymore.

KL: Have we reached peak woke, or do you think it’s just going to get worse?

LS: Everyone I talk to wants to know whether or not it’s started to subside. The real problem is that it has a life of its own, because it has produced this entire class of people whose jobs rely on this DEI nonsense. And you know that theory of the overproduction of elites? If you haven’t encountered it, basically we’re sending too many people to university. There are not enough jobs. And this DEI crap, it creates lots of little useless sinecures — often very well paid — for these overproduced elites to fill, and they’re going to cling to those positions for dear life.

For the organisations involved, or the companies, they’re a terrible drain but what’s happening is that these whole layers of management are being maintained as a protection. It’s a little bit like the sensitivity readers. They don’t cost that much and it’s good PR: “look at us, we have a whole department of 30 people who do absolutely nothing”. And furthermore, the ideology, which began in the universities, is still being promoted in universities. At places like UnHerd, we may feel we’re winning the argument because the essays are so good but that doesn’t mean that they’re teaching UnHerd essays in university, as they should do. I’m afraid that none of the people who need to be persuaded are reading this stuff. It’s a very atomised media situation.

I think there is a role to be played in preaching to the choir: the choir needs sermons. And we need to reach out to each other and to feel that we’re not alone and that there are other people who are sane. It makes you feel, in the current parlance, “safe”, because everyone is not crazy. And it gives us a sense of community, a much-misused word, but this is a community. You are actually physically here, and we are of like minds, though we don’t agree on everything — that would be creepy.

KL: If the woke tide is a youthful one, and more young people are coming out of universities and going into the workplace, then what is going to stop it?

LS: The problem is not only young people. And I have to say, I feel a kind of funny mea culpa in relation to my own youth. I grew up at the tail end of the so-called Sixties, which in truth lasted well into the Seventies. And this is where a lot of this stuff was born — and by the way, as a kid, I bought into it hook line and sinker. I would still oppose the Vietnam War, if I could go back, and I still recycle. But this whole obsession with self-criticism, which has an almost communist touch and feel, started back then. And I was very proud of being critical of the United States and being ashamed of the United States and being obsessed with all the terrible things we’d done wrong. People these days act as if we only started talking about slavery yesterday. No, we were obsessed with it in the Sixties, slavery and the genocide against the Indians. A lot of the stuff that you hear harped on now, we harped on, and I’ve internalised this stuff, and I was very proud of how ashamed I was. When you’re ashamed, you’re superior, because you know how terrible you are and everyone else is dribbling around in their ignorance, and they don’t know what evil they hail from.

That lasted well into my young adulthood, until I became a permanent expat. Even for the first few years of my ex-patriotism, when I was living in Belfast, I was ashamed of being American. I was a little self-conscious about opening my mouth with my accent and giving away that I was from this terrible place. And honestly, I’m not quite sure what did it. Maybe it was just living in Belfast, where I realised there are other terrible places. I grew up politically and I grew up personally. I came to resign myself to being American.

I didn’t choose to be born American. There are worse places to be from and I was not responsible for slavery. I didn’t kill any Indians. Everyone has to be from somewhere and actually, that shame is perhaps the main thing that I should have felt ashamed for. Because it is a false pride in being so illumined and it’s an empty pride. And frankly, from the outside, it is unattractive. We don’t really like people who are ashamed of where they come from. It’s a kind of betrayal and it’s a lie. It’s as if you can repudiate that which cannot be repudiated. It’s also a denial of fact, of physical reality. I was born in the United States in a little town called Gastonia, North Carolina: that is a fact. A fact, and I can’t live it down, and for me to feel that I have to is, well, shame on me.

So, I came round — but this self-hatred stuff goes way back, this very Western-centred, “oh, haven’t we done terrible things”. And it starts with my generation. The Boomer generation brought this stuff to life. And those are the people who took over the universities. So, it is not just a bunch of young people who got some stupid notion in their head. They got it from us.

KL: On that note, shall we take some questions from the audience?

*

Do you think that books like Satanic Verses wouldn’t be published now? Or that series of books called The Number One Ladies’ Detective Agency, which was beautifully written by an elderly Scottish professor, Alexander McCall Smith, but from the perspective of a black woman?

LS: Funnily enough I had a conversation with somebody in the upper levels of HarperCollins — they publish Alexander McCall Smith — and he was bemoaning the fact that if one of those books came in today, they would not publish it. And that’s HarperCollins, the refuge. The truth is that HarperCollins’s CEO is a Brexit supporter. Very conservative. And that helps explain why HarperCollins is a bit of an island politically. But even they would probably turn down The Number One Ladies’ Detective Agency, because it’s an older Scottish white writer with a main character who is female, black and African — which is, from my perspective, admirable. It’s an extension of imagination, of empathy. I’m far more interested in reading that book than I would be if it’s about a barely disguised older, white Scottish male who happens to be the main character and writes novels for a living.

*

You said a while back that the best way to fight this war on language was to either ignore it or to laugh at it. Do you still think that?

LS: That’s a hard one because, yes, my tendency is to laugh at it. I find these lists of words we’re no longer supposed to use, which get longer and longer, hilarious. You can’t refer to a “field” of study anymore, because it’s going to remind people of slavery. I mean, it is beyond satire. These people are doing our work for us in making a mockery of themselves. The trouble is that it does start trickling down. The Associated Press guidelines set a standard that is largely observed across the journalism industry, but now they’ve said that you can’t use the word “the”. Now, obviously, it’s in certain contexts, but honestly, they are banning articles. You can’t say “the disabled” because it defines a person in terms of a particular aspect of themselves. They even said you couldn’t say “the French”. The French got really pissed off!

For this lunacy to have filtered down to even the AP Stylebook means that it’s a little more serious than I would like it to be. I would like us to be able to laugh it off. But honestly, they have successfully made it almost unpublishable in mainstream newspapers to say “slave”; you have to say “enslaved person”, because otherwise we idiots are not going to know that we’re actually talking about a human being. They’re starting to endanger whole classes of words that pertain to people. Pretty soon we’re not going to be able to talk about me as being “a writer”, because I’m also a person. So, I have to be a “writing person” or a “person who writes”. It’s dumber than dumb, but at the same time, it is starting to have an impact on what is considered acceptable use of language.

My biggest sense of upset about all of this stuff is that I just hate bad writing. I hate the mangling of language. I hate stupid use of words and that’s what they’re promoting. They honestly have people on the news saying, “people living with obesity”. And again, this is funny, but there’s another level on which it is more insidious. It is denial of reality. I gather there’s a series called Goosebumps — I haven’t read it; it is for children — which is removing the word “fat”. I mean, first off, no matter how many references to the word fat you eliminate, it doesn’t change the fact that being massively overweight is bad for you. It also doesn’t change the fact that most people do not find being massively overweight attractive. If you eliminate the word, you don’t eliminate the prejudice against that state. And by the way, that’s a healthy prejudice. We don’t want to encourage everyone to be massively fat. So I don’t think we should stop finding it funny but we do also have to take it seriously. I use the word “slave” at every opportunity.

*

I wonder whether there’s any way of engaging with a lost generation of people who are completely captured by weird, weird ideologies?

LS: Fortunately, I don’t have to confront people who have swallowed this ideology whole very often. One of the problems with the ideology is the way it seals itself off. So that part of the ideology is a refusal to have a conversation, that it causes you harm to talk to somebody or listen to somebody with whom you disagree. It’s anti-education, which is why I find it incredibly ironic that this stuff originates in universities. Because it’s the antithesis of what real education is.

I think parents may have a role to play. I’m not a parent, but I wouldn’t give up on trying to talk to your kids. One of the things that dismays me is that a lot of the parents believe the same stuff. And so the kids are not entirely against the parents. What dismays me about younger people these days is: they don’t rebel. This is what they’re being told. This is what a lot of their parents believe. It’s not rebellion, it’s anything but: it’s conformity, total conformity.

Now, what is wrong with young people who don’t tell the adults that they’re full of shit? That’s what we were like. I bought into my parents’ liberal ideology, but I grew up and I overthrew it and started thinking for myself. My first experience of asserting myself was overthrowing my parents’ Presbyterianism. Both my parents were professionally religious, and I instinctively didn’t buy it. Now it turns out everyone else is the same way, so it doesn’t seem especially interesting, but it was risky in my family, to say, “I’m sorry, I don’t want to go to church anymore. I don’t believe this.” And it gave me practice for later, when I realised that I didn’t entirely buy their political ideology. I became an independent intellectual being.

What is wrong with younger people that they don’t go through that process? It is empowering, as we used to say; it is exciting and it’s fundamentally Oedipal. It’s overthrowing the previous generation and asserting yourself and growing into yourself, and deciding that you are capable, and that you can think for yourself. Why is this generation — and even to some degree, the previous one — not going through that rebellion and that self-assertion? I’m afraid that a lot of the self-assertion we do see is an assertion of weakness, so-called vulnerability, mental illness, feeling unsafe? It’s all soft. I would like to see a little strength.

*

As a sensitivity reader, I advised somebody to remove something because he was calling able people “blessed”, implying that disabled people are not blessed. But I felt bad, because at what point does it become self-censorship?

LS: I don’t think there’s any formula. There is such a thing as being edited well, and my editor occasionally calls attention to something that’s going to alienate people. I don’t mind having that called to my attention. I’ve been a little careless, or I wrote something in such a way that it could be interpreted in a way that I don’t want it to be interpreted. So, if you’ve got a line that seems to be dissing anyone with a disability and that’s not what you’re trying to convey, then you should fix it and there’s nothing wrong with that. I don’t believe in gratuitous offence. I sometimes offend on purpose, but there’s nothing wrong with having another perspective, and I’m always willing to listen. If someone can make a good case that I should cut a line or change a word, or whatever, I’ll listen to it and I will entertain it. And sometimes I’ll reject it, but sometimes they’re right. There’s always a danger of becoming so dogmatic in the service of anti-dogmatism that you close yourself off to information that actually is very useful to you. I sometimes have to watch that myself.

*

I’m left with the feeling that this is an era of even greater polarisation than I had thought. And perhaps what we’re missing is more of a voice for the centre ground and the middle ground. And I wonder if, to get through the era, that voice might be better than the two polars fighting each other?

LS: That’s what got us here, the centre ground! I’m afraid that the centre ground is now interpreted as Right-wing. Nothing I’ve said, 30 years ago, would have been faintly controversial. And now it is. It’s funny, I was just speaking with another audience member who said that she’s from my same generation and she started out a liberal, and she hasn’t changed any of her opinions and now she’s regarded as Right-wing. And that’s what’s happened to me. The irony of the position I find myself in is that most of the positions that I advocate for are expressing the views of the majority of the population. And the views of the majority of the population are no longer acceptable. And that bothers me. It shouldn’t be brave to say most of the stuff I say, and unfortunately it has become so.

For most people, this is obviously excessive and easily dismissed as laughable, if not mystifying (cigar store Indians are such an archaic item that most Americans have never seen one). But for those who believe strongly in editing books for sensitivity, stories like this present a conundrum: to acknowledge the inanity of this particular read would be to open the door to questions about the legitimacy of the whole practice. Hence, anyone who draws attention to something like the scalp/scalpel complaint — as I did when I stumbled across the article about it — is accused of “cherry-picking“, using outlier examples to slander an otherwise noble and useful profession.

If cherries are being picked, it is from an exceptionally well-endowed tree, to the point where it surely makes sense to ask whether there’s something about the concept of sensitivity reading — or the people attracted to it — that lends itself to this sort of excess. If these incidents are not representative of the norm, they nevertheless suggest that a highly authoritarian strain of identitarianism has penetrated publishing; even the relatively uncancellable Bret Easton Ellis came in for pre-publication criticism recently from sensitivity readers, who complained that his new novel “was not a ‘positive’ portrayal of homosexuality”.

But amid all the arguments about what sensitivity reading is, what seems far more interesting is what it apparently isn’t: there is not so much as a whiff of a pretence that this type of editing improves the literary quality of a book. One of the most common responses to those who question sensitivity reading is that they’re no different from any other subject matter expert, like the palaeontologist who reads Jurassic Park. This is an argument predicated on the somewhat crude notion that simply to be possessed of a given skin tone, genital configuration, or sexual orientation automatically conveys an unparalleled expertise in what all people of that given sex, race or orientation think, feel, and/or find offensive. The one time I served as a sensitivity reader, as a favour to a male writer who wanted his manuscript vetted for potential offences, it was not my “lived experience” as a woman that proved useful. It was my embarrassingly deep knowledge of the toxic dynamics and idiotic slap fights that periodically roil the world of young adult literature; indeed, anyone who shared a similar fascination with extremely online bullshit could have done the job.

But leaving aside the problematic nature of asking one person of a given identity to speak for all people of that identity, the idea that this is just another type of editing is belied by the way that authors themselves talk about the practice, which centres not on the quality of the story but the morality of the person telling it:

“I don’t know what I don’t know, and I don’t want to be an accidental asshole — so I’m eternally grateful for the sensitivity readers who’ve saved me from myself.”

“EVERYONE is biased, we can’t help it. We are limited to our own perspective and our own upbringings and culture and education. And so it’s so important to have those sensitivity readers. Not only did they help me not offend people (I hope), they also taught me about myself.”

“It’s not being PC; it’s being a decent human being”

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It’s hard not to notice that for a sizeable contingent of authors, hiring a sensitivity reader is only nominally about accuracy, and really about ticking that “decent human being” box. The sensitivity read serves as an indulgence which, once purchased, gives you permission to tell certain kinds of stories. Whether the resulting story is entertaining or well-written is irrelevant; it’s morally good. That’s what matters.

Meanwhile, for writers who are perceived as out of step with the new orthodoxy, the conflation of getting a sensitivity read with being a decent human being can send a powerful message to capitulate and conform, or else. Nice story you’ve got there; it would be a shame if someone found it offensive. Sensitivity readers are not supposed to be censors, but in practice, the line is blurred: it is understood by authors that declining to make suggested sensitivity edits is likely to result in a book being cancelled, with all the reputational damage that entails — this, according to Anthony Horowitz, was his primary reason for not fighting the inanity of the scalp/scalpel conflation — and sensitivity readers are not above using their influence to kill a project before it’s got off the ground.

That said, this is not an argument for getting rid of sensitivity readers. Sensitivity reads are less a moral signifier than a matter of craft, one some writers will find useful, and some will not. To write fiction is to write imaginatively outside the bounds of one’s own experience, and any tool that allows someone to do this with confidence — including employing a sensitivity reader — is certainly fair game. In my own books, when writing about experiences that are truly foreign to me, I tend to collect research from multiple people and perspectives, establishing a baseline pool of knowledge and then letting imagination take over from there. But I also care less that the result is authentic than that it is engaging.

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Meanwhile, a cultish conviction has developed within the writing community of late: that the most important thing a novel can be is “authentic”. And yet, some of the best works of fiction are anything but: the satire of Gary Shteyngart, the lowkey horror of Shirley Jackson, the magical realism of Gabriel García Márquez, the time-travelling raptures of Diana Gabaldon. These books aren’t authentic, but something far better: fantastical, or imaginative, or absurd, or terrifying, and to alter them in the name of authenticity would be to drain them of their spark. What makes a story compelling is not its adherence to reality; it’s whether it feels true, in the moment, on the page.

If anything, this is what troubles me about the push to normalise sensitivity reading: that it seems to signal a narrowing of the literary landscape, a massive cultural shift in what we understand the purpose of art to be. The new paradigm is one in which we worry less about communicating an idea than about the specific words we use. Consider the recent, viral chart suggesting more sensitive alternatives to “violent” language in the workplace, the apparent intention being to make people communicate with their colleagues in the colourless, ultra-literal style that we use to make ourselves understood by Siri. Despite their alleged purpose, these guides do not actually foment better communication; they hamstring it, imbuing every exchange with the subtextual fear of how an uncharitable person might misinterpret what is being said.

If this is a bad way to be in the office, it is a worse way to write a book — or to read one, for that matter. But of course, most people don’t read this way. One of the most peculiar things about sensitivity readers is how very far their concerns are from those of actual readers, who tend to be far too interested in what’s happening on the page to wallow in the offensive implications of this or that individual word choice. Three years ago, the New York Times review of the novel American Dirt made much of the book’s “strange, excited fascination in commenting on gradients of brown skin” — the type of thing a sensitivity reader would surely flag as potentially problematic. But when I read the book myself, even despite having been primed to notice said “fascination”, the mentions of skin tone were such a seamless part of the story that they didn’t even register. One imagines that the millions of readers who made the book a massive bestseller were similarly unperturbed.

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The question, then, is: who is actually served by this type of editing? The rare reader who would actually take offence at the use of the word “scalpel” in Horowitz’s book is entitled to his feelings, but he can always read another book (or better yet, write a scathing review complaining about this one’s rampant bigotry). The implication of sensitivity reading, though, is that every book should be written with this person in mind, that his sensibilities should form some sort of literary standard. I’ve tried to imagine how this might play out in other creative fields — what would happen if, for instance, the restaurant industry employed sensitivity tasters to flag any dish that contained too much spice? Certainly, the chefs would baulk at this: why should the sensibilities of those who can’t tolerate spicy food supersede those of the people who consume ghost peppers recreationally? What greater good can possibly be served in making sure every dish is tailored to the tastes of the most sensitive, when there are so many ingredients, and the table is so very big?

Of course, some creators want to centre sensitivity in their work, and they should — because diversity, real diversity, is about there being something for everyone, including those who read books in gleeful anticipation of finding something to get mad about. But surely there should also be room for readers, and writers, who simply don’t share those sensibilities. Writers who value an engaging story over an authentic one, writers who are confident and unapologetic in their ability to imagine the interior lives of their characters. Writers who don’t want to treat their readers with sensitivity — because they would rather tear your heart out, make you swoon or rage or cry, and leave you breathless.

Tár, Todd Field’s new film about an eminent female conductor, is splitting the musical crowd. The superstar conductor, woman and lesbian Marin Alsop, was offended in the Sunday Times, while UK conductor Alice Farnham applauded Field in the Guardian, for helping to “normalise the image of a woman on the podium”.

Both responses are quite funny, though arguably Farnham’s response edges it. To watch Tár and leave the cinema thinking that the cause of female conductors has been significantly helped is a bit like thinking that Cinderella generally improves the public image of stepmothers. As played by Cate Blanchett, the film’s protagonist Lydia Tár is a ruthlessly ambitious, amoral narcissist. Major character flaws include deceit, habitual philandering with junior acolytes, and an unrepentant taste for revenge. Not only does she fail every purity test going, she also explicitly rejects attempts to classify her as a “female conductor”, behaving in general much more like a stereotypical man than woman. She insists on being called “Maestro” not “Maestra”, boxes fiercely to work off excess aggression, launches a violent attack on a rival at one point, and at another introduces herself straight-faced as the father of the child she co-parents with her long-suffering wife.

Although Alsop’s negative response to the film is quite different to Farnham’s enthusiastic one, they apparently at least agree that Tár stands or falls by how well it serves the goal of positive representation of female conductors. For her part, Alsop excoriates the director for his “antiwoman” artistic choices, saying: “To have an opportunity to portray a woman in that role and to make her an abuser — for me that was heartbreaking. There are so many men — actual, documented men — this film could have been based on but, instead, it puts a woman in the role but gives her all the attributes of those men.”

Ludicrous as it is to think that, in some alternative universe, the general public might have flocked to cinemas to see propaganda on behalf of the female conducting industry, these responses of Alsop and Farnham are hardly out of step with the zeitgeist. Elsewhere too, there’s a tendency to take a work’s fictional focus upon a particular character as having real-life implications for some wider group, and then to rate the work on that basis. Incorporating a cross-dressing murderer into a novel plot — as did Robert Galbraith (aka J.K. Rowling) in Troubled Blood or Thomas Harris in The Silence of the Lambs — was taken by some to convey something negative about trans people generally, resulting in a quick dismissal for the works in question. More recently, dramatically illuminating the life of a gay serial killer — as the Netflix series Monster did, about the cannibalistic Jeffrey Dahmer — was interpreted as pathologising gay men. (The thoughts of common-or-garden serial killers about how bad the series made them look remain unrecorded.)

There are other signs too that, as a culture, we’re increasingly incapable of reacting to art except in the crudest of moralised or politicised terms. For one, there’s all the trigger warnings and the censored university reading lists. For another, there’s the perceived prohibition on authors writing “outside of their own identities”. Only women should tell stories from the point of view of women, only black people should fictionalise what it’s like to be black, and so on — apparently ignoring the fact that human beings have imaginations, and that it’s a traditional goal of both writing and reading fiction to use them.

And then there’s the habit — seemingly endemic to Gen Z audiences but by no means limited to them — of treating the grossest of personality traits of an artist as relevant to assessing the value of his output, whether or not those traits have left any visible trace on the work. The list of entire oeuvres we are collectively implored to jettison because of the moral transgressions of their creators grows longer every day. Cases like Pound, Polanski, Allen, Hemingway, and Picasso spring to mind, but — such is the degree of churn these days in standards of public decency — practically no artist or creator living prior to 2010 is immune.

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This last phenomenon is satirised well in Tár. In a much-discussed scene, the magnificently imperious protagonist runs a conducting masterclass at the Julliard. Asking one nervous student why he didn’t choose to conduct a piece by Bach instead of one by the contemporary Icelandic composer Anna Thorvaldsdottir, he replies: “Honestly as a BIPOC pangender person, I would say Bach’s misogynistic life makes it kind of impossible for me to take his music seriously.”

Tár tries to clarify — “I’m unclear about what his prodigious skills in the marital bed have to do with B minor” — and delicately plays an extract of Prelude No 1 in C major on a nearby piano to underline her point. But the student obstinately doubles down, saying: “You play really well… but nowadays white male cis composers are just not my thing.” Not for nothing has this scene gone viral. For viewers bored of the way that pious professions of faith about identity tend to kill interesting artistic creativity at birth, Tár’s cutting of the foolish young man down to size comes as a something of a relief.

But where did all the furious moralising about art come from in the first place? Perhaps ironically, I think one contributing factor is the instruction from philosophers like Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault to liberate the meaning of an artwork from the jurisdiction of its creator. It might seem strange to link postmodern dehumanisation to the moral panic about art we now see all around us — not least because Barthes and Foucault thought that paying attention to the personality of an artist was reprehensibly bourgeois. But I think a case can be made for the connection, causally at least.

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Back in the Sixties, Barthes and Foucault told us that the idea of an author “owning” the meaning of the work he produced was as outdated as the literary humanist tradition that accompanied it. We should stop worrying about what an artist who produced a given work must have intended by doing so. As a concept, the author was now dead or soon would be — skipping blithely over the question of who exactly was telling us this, and why on earth we should take the point seriously if they were right. Henceforth readers would be in control of a work’s meaning and not the author. Like seeing shapes in tea leaves or clouds, whatever patterns a readership saw in a work would be what it meant — for that moment at least.

In effect, the Death of the Author craze — which lasted for decades in literature departments — made people focus on unintended effects of texts rather than intended ones. After all, literary scholars were not about to declare themselves out of a job. The new game became to say what a deracinated text put you in mind of accidentally, and never mind whether there was any likelihood the author might have meant it: feminism in Chaucer, say, or masturbation in the works of Jane Austen. At the same time though, making a professional living from what essentially amounted to prolonged forays into free association apparently left a lot of academics feeling hollow.

Perhaps longing for a more convincing hero’s journey for themselves — or even just something they could unembarrassedly tell relatives about at Christmas — slowly the topic seemed to turn from inadvertent effects of texts generally to inadvertent harms of texts in particular. As a fascinating book review by Merve Emre this week in the New Yorker puts it, the figure of the “Scholar-Activist” was now emerging, who thought “the proper task of criticism was to participate in social transformations occurring outside the university”. Such a critic could position himself as a clearer of literary landmines, finding and disarming them before they went off. What minority group might be hurt by this book? What harmful message might this film convey to the unwary? Though an artist’s actual intentions for her work continued to be treated as irrelevant to assessment of harm, her character defects in general could be cited a potential sources of unwitting contamination for audiences, to be rooted out by brave scholars and exposed to the light.

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Against this background, then, Lydia Tár comes across as out of fashion in several senses, despite all the beautiful clothes and glamorous accoutrements. Not only does she refuse to run her personal life according to dictates of priggish grad students, she also cares about getting the meaning of the masterworks she conducts right — right in their own terms, that is, and not just for what good or bad effects might be had on listeners. Time and again in the script, she stresses the importance of looking past the personality defects of composers to try to understand their specific intentions with respect to a work.

Even as the devastatingly funny final scenes unfold, Tár is still asking her orchestra to think about “the composer’s intent”. And as cold-eyed as the film is about the character’s many flaws, there is never any question raised about her enormous talent and artistry. Equally, though, the film does not pretend that enormous talent and artistry ultimately matter that much any more. Of this fact, Farnham and Alsop’s purely transactional takes on Field’s breath-taking artistic achievement are an additional salutary reminder.

In the digital age, however, the fresh start is more elusive. The internet is everywhere, and the internet remembers; the person you used to be still lives there, preserved in the form of archived links and deleted-but-screenshotted posts, ready and waiting to dispel any notions you might have had of leaving him behind. And while maintaining a careful separation between the digital self and your actual one can mitigate some of the risk, even the most painstakingly constructed pseudonymous identity inevitably develops a crack or two, through which the real you can be glimpsed — especially if your pseudonymous self is, not to put too fine a point on it, a bit of a flamethrower.

This brings us to a New York Times op-ed titled, “Did the Mother of Young Adult Literature Identify As a Man?”, which was published in late December to widespread consternation. The content of the essay has already been thoroughly dealt with by critics, who alleged that its author, Peyton Thomas, indulged in both contextual misrepresentation of Louisa May Alcott’s writings and no small amount of crude gender stereotyping, to support the illegitimate, retroactive transing of the Little Women author. (Among these was noted feminist critic Katha Pollitt, who in a letter to the editor wrote: “What 19th-century woman with genius and gumption wouldn’t chafe at her restricted life and long for the broad freedoms of manhood?”)

But equally interesting, and largely unremarked-upon, was the reaction to the op-ed by a smaller group — one less outraged by the essay’s content and more profoundly amused that the author was given the chance to write it in the first place. Because while for the average New York Times reader, this essay would have been the first time they encountered Thomas’s work, these commentators — who skewed generally younger and far more online — had been watching Thomas make arguments just like the Alcott one for years on the microblogging site Tumblr, where he was a sometimes controversial figure.

For those not familiar with the early-2010s dynamics of Tumblr: Katherine Dee has described the site, accurately, as the “digital sideshow attraction” from whence much of today’s weirdest and most toxic identitarian political discourse originates. It is important to note, therefore, that most of the drama surrounding Thomas, like most Tumblr controversies generally, is so overwrought, convoluted, and terminally online that it’s both impossible to parse and not worth giving more oxygen to. (For this reason, I’m not linking to it.)

What is worth discussing, however, is how easily Tumblr’s cult-like fandom culture became the default mode of engagement for its adherents, a way to not only participate in fandom but to understand the world. The way discourse functioned on the site, it was a brief step from writing gay fan fiction about, say, Sherlock Holmes and John Watson, to fantasising openly about a same-sex romance between the men who played them, Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman — and then to lashing out publicly at actress Amanda Abbington when she had the audacity to not only be cast as Watson’s love interest, but to be Freeman’s paramour in real life.

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Peyton Thomas was a content creator within multiple Tumblr fandoms, and like many young writers, developed a professional career out of his early, more informal posting in a way that made it difficult to leave Tumblr entirely behind. “Lots of writers sort of put their fandom identity to the side when they become professional writers,” Thomas told me by phone. “For me, that’s never been possible, because so many of my first assignments came out of people who’d been reading my Tumblr.”

Curiously, Thomas’s best-known work of fan fiction was one with a real-life analogue that also blurred the lines between reality and fantasy: the same month that Thomas posted a full-length fan fiction screenplay for a Spider-Man movie featuring a bisexual Peter Parker, he also sparked a rumour that Andrew Garfield had been fired from the Spider-Man franchise after two films because he wouldn’t stop pushing for the hero to have a same-sex romance.

In hindsight, Thomas says, he got a bit ahead of himself.

“That was definitely an overstatement, that he was fired because of this. I don’t have any definitive proof, and I didn’t then, that he had been fired for making those comments, or that the entire franchise had collapsed because he made those comments,” he told me. (He did note, accurately, that Garfield felt both constrained by the canonical requirements of the Spider-Man franchise — a 2011 licensing agreement stipulated that the Peter Parker Spider-Man character could only ever be portrayed as a heterosexual white man — and disillusioned by the pressure from Sony to retract his comments about making the hero bisexual.)

But less interesting than the lack of truth in this rumour is the way in which it wasn’t true, how perfectly the story of Garfield’s alleged firing fit within the Tumblr paradigm of disregarding canon (or in some cases, reality itself) in favour of a narrative that is less true but more exciting. Viewed through this lens, the gay Spider-Man fanfic, the Andrew Garfield rumour, and the Louisa May Alcott essay all coalesce into a single category of thing: they are all fantasy, all projection, all the headcanon of a super-fan imagining an alternative reality into existence. The only difference is that the first two things could be more or less written off as internet nonsense, while the latter was deemed worthy of inclusion in the nation’s most prestigious newspaper.

To be as charitable as possible to Thomas, his Alcott essay — like his Spider-Man rumour — is not based on nothing. (Among those presently struggling with the question of how to understand Alcott’s identity through the lens of contemporary gender politics is Louisa May Alcott Society president Gregory Eiselein, who is quoted in Thomas’s essay as saying, “I am certain that Alcott never fit a binary sex-gender model.”) And none of this is to say that having been a Tumblr poster, or even a Tumblr shitposter, should disqualify a person from eventually making a living as a writer or cultural commentator. Many authors working today first began honing their craft as amateur fanfic writers.

Meanwhile, in 2023, there are few young adults who don’t have a discoverable digital footprint dating back to their teens, the content of which should not be held against them, no matter how embarrassing or unsophisticated it might be. Those of us who came of age before the social web may thank the stars that our most cringeworthy adolescent thoughts are confined to the pages of a physical (read: burnable) diary, rather than preserved for all eternity on the internet. Yet it behooves us to recognise that one individual’s trajectory from Tumblr conspiracy theorist to NYT columnist is not substantively different to going back for your 10-year high school reunion and discovering that your lab partner from freshman biology — the one who always seemed to like dissecting frogs a little too much — is now an accomplished neurosurgeon.

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By Jesse Singal

Rather, I want to question the trajectory whereby an argument like this one — which ultimately hinges less on historical accuracy than the desire of its author that it be true — can make its way into the pages of the New York Times. Partly, this might be down to the existence of a commissioning editor on staff who likes to source their pitches from Twitter, where Thomas went viral last spring with a thread advancing the same thesis ultimately argued in the Alcott essay. But there is something here, too, about the ability of an ultimately half-baked idea to sneak past the gatekeepers of our most storied media institutions.

Much has been made of late over the threat of misinformation, as the public’s faith in American news media has fully split along partisan lines. Those on the Right no longer trust mainstream news, which in turn treats that lack of trust as a threat unto itself: even a casual news consumer has likely been warned about the dangers of QAnon, Russian bots, and the rise of an entire, Right-wing ecosystem dedicated to ensnaring gullible conservatives in an alternative reality made of fake news. But here we have a rare glimpse of how a similarly baseless story can spread beyond the cultish confines of the social justice Left and into the paper of record: as it turns out, even the New York Times will happily launder a narrative into news if it rings the proper, politically expedient bells on a hot-button topic.

In this case, of course, that topic was trans issues, which in addition to being a major front in America’s 2022 culture wars are also lately host to a smaller, internecine conflict between the New York Times news organisation — which has gone against the grain in recent months to report on, for instance, the medical controversy surrounding the use of puberty blockers on trans-identified kids — and its smaller, more ideologically homogenous opinion section. In this environment, something like the Alcott essay isn’t just clickbait; it signals to those readers who were inflamed by the aforementioned reporting that the NYT is still down with the cause. And of course, this willingness to bestow its imprimatur upon a story that is factually flimsy but politically correct is not exclusive to the Gray Lady: in past several years, institutions from The Guardian to Scientific American have allowed embarrassingly bad arguments to be printed in their pages because they promoted a narrative that progressives wish were true.

The truth is that bias-stroking sensationalism has a way of finding purchase in the media on Left and Right alike. Once you notice this, it’s hard to unsee it — as with last week’s explosion of news stories about the dangers (or, on the Right, the noble necessity) of gas stoves. It is just as much a problem with non-frivolous topics as it is with culture war fodder: while the Right-wing press engages in ghoulish, and foolish, speculation attributing this or that recent death to the mRNA vaccines, one recalls that the Left was no less gung-ho in amplifying nonsense stories about Covid denialists in red states gasping “It isn’t real!” as they coughed themselves to death.

If anything, perhaps we should be grateful to the New York Times for advertising that it is as susceptible to such audience capture as any other outlet. Then we might resolve, if we hadn’t already, not to simply believe everything we read.

Once upon a time, a fully realised person was something one became. Entailing education, observation, experimentation, and sometimes humiliation, “coming of age” was hard work. When the project succeeded, we developed a gradually richer understanding of what it means to be human and what constitutes a fruitful life. This ongoing project was halted only by death. Maturity was the result of accumulated experience (some of it dire) and much trial and error (both comical and tragic), helping explain why wisdom, as opposed to intelligence, was mostly the preserve of the old. We admired the “self-made man”, because character was a creation — one constructed often at great cost. Many a “character-building” adventure, such as joining the Army, was a trial by fire.

These days, discussion of “character” is largely relegated to fiction workshops and film reviews. Instead, we relentlessly address “identity”, a hollowed-out concept now reduced to membership of the groups into which we were involuntarily born — thereby removing all choice about who we are. Rejecting the passé “character building” paradigm, we now inform children that their selves emerge from the womb fully formed. Their sole mission is to tell us what those selves already are. Self is a prefabricated house to which only its owner has a key.

This is not an essay about transgenderism per se. Nevertheless, our foundational text is excerpted from Christopher Rufo’s September 2022 comment, “Concealing Radicalism”, which quotes adolescents from a TikTok video on gender assembled by Michigan’s education department:

“I am a triple threat: I’m depressed, anxious, and gay.”

“Last night at about 2am, I put in my bio that I identify as ‘agender’, which is different than non-binary because non-binary is like neither gender, right? Agender is like the grey area between genders.”

“Hi, my name is Elise. I’ve used she/her pronouns all my life. But recently, and for a while, I’ve been struggling with gender issues as well as a whole lot of other identity things. So, I finally gave in and ordered a [breast] binder for myself and it just came in today.”

“A rational observer might suspect,” Rufo notes, “that these youths are in a state of confusion or distress, but rather than explore this line of reasoning, the education department.,, promote a policy of immediate and unconditional affirmation.” He quotes Kim Phillips-Knope, leader of the LBGTQ+ Students Project: “Kids have a sense of their gender identity between the ages of three and five, so about the time that kids have language, they can start to share with us whether they’re a boy or a girl — usually those are the only things that they will identify as, because those are the only options we’ve given them.” He adds: “In response to a teacher who asked how to respond to a student in her classroom who claims to have ‘she/he/they/them’ pronouns, Amorie [a staff trainer] responded adamantly: ‘Go with what the kid says. They’re the best experts on their lives. They’re the best experts on their own identities and their own bodies.’”

I further submit: throwing kids who just got here on their own investigative devices — refusing to be of any assistance aside from “affirming” whatever they whimsically claim to be; folding our arms and charging, “So who are you? Only you know” — is child abuse.

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By Hadley Freeman

The idea that your psyche is set from birth is intrinsically deterministic and therefore grim. The vision it conjures is fatalistic and mechanical: all these traits are hardwired, and life involves winding up the clockwork toy and watching it totter across the floor until it runs into the wainscotting. If a newly emerged self already exists in its entirety, there’s nothing to do. In contrast to becoming, being is an inert affair.

We haven’t given these young people a job. Contemporary education strenuously seeks to assure students they’re already wonderful. Teachers are increasingly terrified of imposing any standards that all their wards will not readily meet, so everyone gets a gold star. The Virginia school district of the once-renowned Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology now aims for “equal outcomes for every student, without exception”. A pedagogical emphasis on student “self-esteem” became dislocated from “esteem for doing something” decades ago. Why should any of these kids get out of bed? No wonder they’re depressed.

Minors don’t know anything, which is not their fault. We didn’t know anything at their age, either (and may not still), though we thought we did — and being disabused of callow, hastily conceived views and coming to appreciate the extent of our ignorance is a prerequisite for proper education. Yet we now encourage young people to look inward for their answers and to trust that their marvellous natures will extemporaneously reveal themselves. With no experience to speak of and no guidance from adults, all that many kids will find when gawking at their navels is pyjama fluff. Where is this mysterious entity to whose nature I alone am privy?

There’s nothing shameful about being an empty vessel when you haven’t done anything and nothing much has happened to you yet. Telling children, “Of course you don’t know who you are! Growing up is hard, full of false starts, and all about making something of yourself. Don’t worry, we’ll give you lots of help” is a great deal more consoling than the model of the ready-meal self. We demand toddlers determine whether they’re “girls or boys or something in-between” before they have fully registered what a girl or boy is, much less “something in-between”. Placing the total onus for figuring out how to negotiate being alive on people who haven’t been given the user’s manual is a form of abandonment.

Adults have an obligation to advise, comfort, and inform — to provide the social context that children have none of the resources to infer and to help form expectations of what comes next.  Instead, we’re throwing kids helplessly on their primitive imaginations. The first time I remember being asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I clearly remember answering, “a bear”. I wasn’t trying to be a wiseass. I just wasn’t up to speed on the ambitions to which I was expected to aspire. Little wonder that kids are now “identifying” as cats. Next, they will be identifying as electric lawnmowers, and we will have asked for it.

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This notion of the pre-made self is asocial, if not anti-social. It separates personhood from lineage, heritage, culture, history, and even family. You are already everything you were ever meant to be, never mind where, what and whom you come from. But seeing selfhood as floating in a vacuum is a recipe for loneliness, vagueness, insecurity and anxiety.

By contrast, a self constructed brick by brick over a lifetime has everything to do with other people. The undertaking involves the assembly of tastes and enthusiasms, the formation of friendships and institutional affiliations, participation in joint projects, and the development of perceptions not simply of one’s interior nature but of the outside world. Character that is rooted in ties to other people is likely to be more solid and enduring. The elderly are most in danger of desolation when they’ve outlived their friends and relatives. Who I am partially comprises decades-long friendships, my colleagues, my fierce devotion to my younger brother, a complex allegiance to two different Anglophone countries, and a rich cultural inheritance from my predecessors.

In my teens, we employed the word “identity” quite differently. We thought having an “identity” meant not only being at home in our own skins, but also having at least a hazy notion of what we wanted to do with our lives. It meant connecting with the likeminded (I found kindred spirits in my junior-high Debate Club). An “identity” was fashioned less from race or sexual orientation than from the discovery of which albums we loved, which novels we ritually reread because they spoke to us, which causes we supported, which subjects interested us, and which didn’t. It meant figuring out what we were good at (I was good at maths, but in second-year calculus I hit a wall) and what we couldn’t stand (me, team sports). Identity was fused with purpose: I knew I was drawn to writing, the visual arts, and political activism (the latter making me rather tiresome).

We were as self-involved in our determination to be individuals as Gen Z, but that particularity was commonly assembled from the cultural smorgasbord of other people and what they’d thought and made: Kurt Vonnegut or William Faulkner, Catch-22 or The Winds of War, Simon and Garfunkel or Iron Butterfly, hostile or gung-ho positions on Vietnam. Naturally this is a version of identity subject to change. That’s the point. It’s supposed to change. I no longer listen to Emerson, Lake, and Palmer.

The self is not found but made, because meaning is made. Rather than be unearthed like buried treasure, meaning is laboriously created, often by doing hard things. I cringe a bit recalling the person I was in my twenties, because she represented an early stage of an ongoing project that I have modified much in the years since. My twenties were an early draft of a manuscript whose sentences I have revised, pruned, and qualified. Ideally, if I keep forcing myself to do hard things — take on the premise of a novel that at first I have no idea how to execute, move to still another country, cultivate new friendships — the later drafts of my eternally incomplete manuscript will be more captivating. I would arguably be a fuller person had I done the very hardest thing — having children — but as a not-half-bad second best, I have committed to a marriage of 20 years and counting and thus to a man who moors me. Only death will part us.

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Of course, in constantly reforming and refining who we are, we can lose aspects of ourselves from earlier drafts that we should have kept. I no longer dance alone for hours in the sitting room, and I miss that abandon. For years I crafted ceramic figure sculpture, and I’m not sure that substituting journalism as my primary side-line to fiction writing constituted an improvement. Towards the very end of our lives, many of us will drop pretty much every paragraph we ever added, and we’ll go from novel to pamphlet.

Nevertheless, given the choice I’d prefer to spend time with me in the present than with me at 35. I know more (although what I learn now has trouble keeping up with what I forget), my sense of humour is sharper, and rather to my surprise I’m humbler. I’ve more perspective; while that perspective is often bleak, that very bleakness — a gleeful bleakness — can be entertaining. I’m not as neurotic about what I weigh, and I am more generous, both in relation to contemporaries and younger aspirants. I’m less concerned with my professional status, and I think much more about death (which is torturous but intelligent). Some of this profitable evolution was effortlessly organic, but much has issued from a challenging career, the fruit of taking a big risk in my youth that’s paid off.

Clearly, some aspects of character, of self, are determined from the off. I’d never have become a nuclear physicist no matter how hard I tried. But the conventional “nature versus nurture” opposition still eliminates agency: you act mindlessly as whatever you were born as, or you are submissively acted upon. Where on this nature-nurture continuum does the object of all this theorising have a say in the outcome? I’m leery of venturing into the prickly no-go of sexual orientation. Yet while I’m open to the idea that some people are born gay, choices can affect what gets you off. We hear repeatedly from big consumers of online pornography that their tastes begin to change, and it takes more and more extreme videos to become aroused, until actual humans in real life will no longer do the trick. Watching porn is a choice. Even sexual proclivities exhibit some plasticity.

Following the modern script, 14-year-olds have learned never to say, “I’ve decided to be trans”, because all my friends are trans and I feel left out, but always, “I’ve discovered that I am trans”. This passive, powerless version of self has implications. We’re telling young people that what they see is what they get — that they already are what they will ever be. How disheartening. What a bore. Whatever is there to look forward to? Many victims of this formulation of existence, which apparently requires little of them besides all that being, must reach inside themselves and come up empty-handed. At the direction of the sort of educational authority Chris Rufo quoted above, they’ve undertaken a psychic archaeological dig, only to be left with a pit. So they feel cheated. Or inadequate. Convinced that they alone among their peers exhumed nothing but a disposable cigarette lighter.

By withholding the assurance, “Don’t worry about not knowing who you are; you’re just not grown up yet, and neither are we, because growing up isn’t over at 18 or 21 but is something you do your whole life through”, we are cultivating self-hatred, disillusionment, bewilderment, frustration, and fury. Young women often turn their despair inward — hence the high rates of depression, anxiety, eating disorders, and cutting. Young men are more apt to project the barrenness of their interior lives onto the rest of the world and take their disappointment out on everyone else.

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In a trenchant essay last autumn, “Mass Shootings and the World Liberalism Made”, Katherine Dee seeks a deeper explanation for the mass murders committed by disaffected young men, whose blind rage and misanthropy now express themselves in the US at a rate of twice per day.  Gun proliferation, Dee claims, is not the core driver. Rather, “we have a nihilism problem”. The videos left behind by the Sandy Hook child killer Adam Lanza suggest a belief that “even if we could free our ‘feral selves’ from the shackles of modern norms, there would be nothing underneath. Just blackness. A great gaping hole. For many mass shooters, the only reasonable response to this hole is death — the complete extermination of life. Not just theirs.”

According to Dee, all these atrocities have hailed from “a world where everything revolved around the individual”. The result is narcissism, which “is expressed through our perpetual identity crises, where chasing an imaginary ‘true self’ keeps us busy and distracted. We see it in the people who use their phones and computers like they’re prosthetic selves, who are always there, but never present, gazing endlessly at their own reflection in the pond.”

An authentic sense of self commonly involves not thinking about who you are, because you’re too busy doing something else. It is inextricably linked to, if not synonymous with, a sense of meaning. Nihilism, an oxymoronic belief in the impossibility of believing anything, can prove literally lethal. Young men who feel no personal sense of purpose are inclined to perceive that nothing else has a purpose, either. They don’t just hate themselves; they hate everybody. In telling people who’ve been on the planet for about ten minutes that they already know who they are, and that they’re already wonderful, we’re inciting that malign, sometimes homicidal nihilism. Because they don’t feel wonderful. They’re not undertaking any project but, according to the adults, inertly embody a completed project, which means the status quo is as good as it gets — and the status quo isn’t, subjectively, very good.

Transgenderism may have grown so alluring to contemporary minors not only because it promises a new “identity”, but because it promises a process. Transforming from caterpillar to butterfly entails a complex sequence of social interventions and medical procedures that must be terribly engrossing. Transitioning is a project. Everyone needs a project. Embracing the trans label gifts the self with direction, with a task to accomplish. Ironically, the contagion expresses an inchoate yearning for the cast-off paradigm whereby character is built.

We should stop telling children that they’re the “experts on their own lives” and repudiate a static model of selfhood as a fait accompli at birth. Sure, some inborn essence is particular to every person, but it’s a spark; it’s not a fire. We could stand to return to the language of forming character and making a life for yourself, while urging teachers to exercise the guidance they’ve been encouraged to forsake.

As we age, we’re not only that unique essence in the cradle, but the consequence of what we’ve read, watched, and witnessed; whom we’ve loved and what losses we’ve suffered; what mistakes we’ve made and which we’ve corrected; where we’ve lived and travelled and what skills we’ve acquired; not only what we’ve made of ourselves but what we’ve made outside of ourselves; most of all, what we’ve done. That is an exciting, active version of “identity” whose work is never finished, full of choice, enlivened by agency, if admittedly freighted with responsibility and therefore a little frightening. But it at least provides young people something to do, other than mass murder or gruesome elective surgery.

“I just heard about demisexuality a few days ago,” read the first letter I received on the topic. “When I read the description of it, I thought to myself ‘That is definitely me, wow!’”

For those not in the know, demisexuality refers to the state of not experiencing sexual attraction or desire without a strong emotional bond. The term originated on a role-playing forum back in the early Noughties, where a teenage girl assigned it to one of her fictional characters. But after it migrated onto Tumblr in 2011, it was adopted in earnest by extremely young and terminally online users who collected identity markers like they were baseball cards. Outside Tumblr, the reaction was largely sceptical; as many a snarky commenter pointed out in the moment, the whole idea of demisexuality also described the normal sexual experience of, if not everyone, then an awful lot of people, most of whom never felt the need or desire to append a label to their sexual preferences. The delighted self-discovery of the teen who wrote the aforementioned letter was only slightly tempered by this concern: “[Some] people are saying it’s people trying to be ‘special snowflakes’ by putting a label on this kind of attraction,” she wrote.

But if the whole thing seemed frankly silly and, okay, snowflakey, it also seemed pretty harmless. Gender and sexuality were just the latest lens through which young people were trying to understand their place in the world; “demisexuality” was to 2013 what being a little goth-curious was for a teen in 1995, more or less — except that with so much of life happening online, this identity was less about how you moved through the world than about finding just the right flag to affix to your social media profile. But unlike shopping at Claire’s Accessories, demisexuality didn’t stay a teenage conceit; a combination of creeping identitarianism in mainstream culture plus a general obsession with What The Youths Are Into eventually made the concept irresistible to adult millennial women.

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The death of intimacy

By Kat Rosenfield

“IT HAPPENED TO ME: I’m A Demisexual,” read the headline on a 2015 essay on the site XOJane, where the author boldly proclaimed that her inability to feel sexual attraction toward strangers made her “not quite heterosexual”.

The essay was met with a fair amount of ridicule, for all the obvious reasons — “they want to be oppressed so bad” was the unkind but not entirely untrue thrust of the critiques — but there was something about the way it lamented “the many struggles of living in such a sexually charged culture” that spoke to the anxieties of digital natives trying to navigate a post-sexual revolution dating scene. Hookup culture, dating apps, the endless sorting and filtering of potential suitors in a manner that resembled online shopping more than human connection: it’s no surprise that people struggling in this system jumped on a term, a hard-wired identity, that offered an explanation as to why. The young women who adopted a “demisexual” label as a means of opting out were less angry than their closest analogue, the young male incel, but both shared a sense that the system was broken. If male incels were made miserable by the spectre of the sex they wanted but could have, the demisexuals were perhaps equally tormented by the pressure to want, full stop.

Seven years after the XOJane essay, demisexuality remains a contested notion but also a far more visible one, in everything from beer marketing to dating guides, as with this recent dispatch from the dating app Hinge. A hypothetical demisexual dater asks, “What’s the best way to set expectations around waiting to get sexual?”, prompting a supportive but altogether unintelligible response from the app’s resident therapist that is short on actionable information and long on inscrutable axioms like: “Boundaries are bridges, not fences.” (Are they, though?)

Demisexual visibility seems to have less to do with a grassroots shift in human sexuality, and more to do with its corporate profitability. In a world of identity-driven marketing, a massive piece of the pie awaited any advertiser who figured out how to make young, male-attracted women (the group that includes most demisexuals) feel special and seen — and, of course, not quite heterosexual, thus saving them from the curse of being just another basic cishet bitch.

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At the same time, the allure of demisexuality as a label clearly reveals something about the inadequacies of the contemporary dating landscape, particularly as experienced by young women. Taking it slow, assessing your feelings, and perhaps requiring a commitment before sex enters the picture: the tenets of demisexuality are fundamentally conservative, and more or less indistinguishable from the advice your grandmother would have given you about when and whether to have sex. But affixing the demisexual label dresses up these traditional values as a form of queerness, making them not just more palatable to younger folks but rhetorically unassailable. “I don’t want to have sex unless we’re emotionally connected” is a statement open to criticism; demisexuality is an identity that cannot be questioned.

This was clearly part of the allure for the teens who first gravitated toward the term. Demisexual may have been a snowflakey word but there was safety in it, especially if you were young, inexperienced, and a little afraid of sex. The kids who wrote into my advice column not only constructed elaborate identities around the type of sex they didn’t want to have, but also an elaborate consent framework in which any negotiation of one’s sexual boundaries constituted a violation of consent. The notion of pushing the limits of one’s own comfort in the spirit of experimentation, let alone for the sake of a partner’s pleasure, was horrifying to them, even if that meant (to use a provocative example) letting young men off the hook for being serial non-reciprocators of oral sex. When I suggested in one such scenario that a couple in a committed relationship might revisit and revise their boundaries, and even compromise them in the name of mutual satisfaction, the response was outrage. To these teenagers, a no in one context was meant to be understood as a no forever, and any further discussion or negotiation was, if not rape, then somewhere on the same spectrum.

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By Kathleen Stock

Identifying as demisexual may offer a coveted membership in the “queer” community (although even this remains a subject of some debate), but it does nothing to forestall the consensual-but-not-desired encounters that so many young women find themselves engaging in, the kind of bad sex that was so vividly and memorably depicted in Kristen Roupenian’s viral short story, “Cat Person”. And more than that, it elides certain truths about when and why and with whom we choose to be intimate, truths that clash with the contemporary notion of sexual desire as a thing that either exists or doesn’t, organically and entirely out of context.

To posit the possibility of seduction, of a no that becomes a yes, is seen as akin to rape apologism. We don’t like to talk about the complex alchemy whereby indifference might give way to fondness, even lust — or how the flattering, exciting sense of one’s own desirability can sometimes stand in so fully for desire itself that it’s impossible to tell the difference. The protagonist of “Cat Person” doesn’t want the man who wants her, but oh, the thrill of being wanted: “Imagining how excited he would be, how hungry and eager to impress her, she felt a twinge of desire pluck at her belly, as distinct and painful as the snap of an elastic band against her skin.”

Instead, we instruct young people that sexuality is mainly a matter of identity, one in which the main concern is choosing not a partner but a label. Indeed, adopting a term like demisexual is a way to sidestep the question of desire entirely, along with the fraught and frightening process of learning by experience what kind of sex you want (which, inevitably, requires stumbling uncomfortably against the kind you don’t). But the result is less safe than it is strange, a funhouse-mirror version of sexuality that has very little to do with the physical act itself, or the good things associated with it. And what’s under the surface of this label? Not self-knowledge, but fear: of intimacy, of heartbreak, and of being naked.

That the industry had a diversity problem was impossible to argue with: “an analysis” of the gender makeup of the New York Times list shows how heavily it once skewed male — and how, in the last decade, a massive push to diversify publishing has enjoyed no small amount of success.

But God help any writer bold enough to say so.

When James Patterson noted in an interview last month that older white men weren’t getting writing jobs as easily as they used to, outrage ensued. After being savaged for a week online and in the media, Patterson apologised (not that this mollified his critics). This week, Joyce Carol Oates kicked the same hornet’s nest, writing on Twitter that “a friend who is a literary agent told me that he cannot even get editors to read first novels by young white male writers, no matter how good; they are just not interested”. This state of affairs, she added, was “heartbreaking for writers”, particularly those with the self-awareness to be duly aware of “their own privilege”. But the response from within the literary community was not sadness, but fury.

The outpouring of replies were split between people who argued that Oates’s assertion was false and people who argued that it was true but not heartbreaking, and in fact a real and unmitigated good. And then there were the people who argued both of these things simultaneously, sometimes even within the same breath. For whatever reason, this type of self-refuting argument is particularly ubiquitous on Twitter; the fallacy, which some have termed The Law of Salutary Contradiction, is best summed up as: “this isn’t happening, and also it’s good that it’s happening”. One representative reply read: “I am a literary agent. This is not so. And why ever would we invest our hopes in the continued success of white men in an industry which persists in shutting out queer and BIPOC authors?!”

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Is it happening? With more than one extremely high-profile person flat-out accusing Oates of lying, it’s worth surveying the statistics. This is only an informal snapshot of the data, but one that still tells a story: of the 100 most recent debut book deals listed on Publisher’s Marketplace, 83 went to women. Of the remaining 17, 12 went to white men — ten of whom appear to be under the age of 40, and thus young by literary standards. It’s not a total shutout, of course, but it’s also not parity. And the same trend can be observed in terms of not just who’s published, but who’s celebrated; for instance, of the 13 books on the Booker longlist, released this week, three are by white men, none of whom are under 45 (one is the oldest ever recipient of a Booker nomination).

Of course, there are additional layers of data here that could surface additional meaning: how big the deal, what genre the book, whether the author had previously published as a poet or essayist or journalist. And of course, those who get book deals have always represented only the tiniest fraction of aspiring novelists: if the uphill battle for young white men is marginally steeper now, it was plenty steep before.

But when Oates’s agent friend reported that, “he cannot even get editors to read first novels by young white male writers”, it’s hardly far-fetched to think he was telling the truth — if not literally, then directionally, in the sense that an exasperated parent might report that they cannot get their toddler to put his shoes on. “I can’t get editors to look at these books” is a cultural observation, not a statistical one. It’s about the vibes, the gossip, the buzz, the discourse, the things that agents hear from editors and authors hear from agents. It’s about an industry veteran’s general sense of which way the wind is blowing. And on that front, when it comes to debut authors getting book deals, it is certainly blowing more favourably in the direction of non-white non-straight non-men.

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Frankly, it would be weird if it were otherwise. From the moment that diversity became an industry cause, it enjoyed widespread, vocal support. In 2014, sparked by the revelation that white authors and characters absolutely dominated the YA marketplace, the We Need Diverse Books movement was born — and since then it has only gathered steam. Pitching contests were established for marginalised writers. Literary media pivoted to focus heavily on those writers. Submission guidelines were updated to explicitly ask for work from queer, gender-nonconforming writers of colour. Publishers announced that they were committed to diversifying their lists. Editors announced their intention to buy more books by marginalised writers. Agents publicly bemoaned how sick they were of reading submissions by white guys.

All of these sentiments were expressed vehemently, repeatedly, and in public, and all of them seemed to convey a consensus truth: an individual white man might still do okay in publishing, but categorically? White men were over, the rules had changed, and the anecdotal evidence seemed to support this. Did you hear about the guy whose book was yanked back on the eve of submission when his agent realised that his racial identity didn’t match the race of his protagonist? Or the white poet who couldn’t get published until he adopted a female Chinese pseudonym and won accolades — at least until he was found out?

The truth is, even if the data didn’t bear out the substance of Oates’s tweet, publishing culture matters when it comes to aspiring authors hoping to get a shot. Back when the problem was a lack of diverse books, it was known that the dearth of minority authors was at least in part a problem of preemptive discouragement: many promising writers, expecting the door to be slammed in their face, simply didn’t bother trying to get through at all. And yet, among those who advocated hardest for diverse books, it’s all but verboten to suggest that the movement has gained any meaningful ground, cultural or otherwise.

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The twilight of identity politics

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Why, after all this progress, do publishing’s gatekeepers resist any suggestion that diversification has been a success? It’s a paradox of the moment that a person is supposed to want this sort of change, demand it even, but also fly into a frothing rage at the notion that the desired change might in fact be happening. Maybe it’s that the survival of any progressive movement requires that you continually shift the goalposts, lest your organisation problem-solve its way into obsolescence. Maybe it’s a sense that however much has been accomplished, there’s work yet to be done. Or maybe it’s just the cognitive dissonance that always accompanies initiatives like this: everyone wants to say they’re hiring for diversity, but nobody wants to be seen as a diversity hire.

Or maybe the problem is that even a diverse publishing world will still never be fair — because this game has never been just about identity, or talent, but about timing, and resources, and pure dumb luck. If young white men aren’t the hottest commodity right now, it’s not just because publishers have convinced themselves it’s a moral imperative not to hire them; it’s because the industry follows the zeitgeist, and the zeitgeist of the moment is deeply invested in identity. The debut novels bought in 2022 thus far are not just overwhelmingly written by women, but overwhelmingly focused on race, gender, sexuality, or class.

Is this annoying? Maybe. But is it more annoying than the state of play ten years ago, when publishers were falling all over themselves to find the next sexually-charged teen dystopian-fantasy series about a merman and a werewolf fighting over a girl who doesn’t know she’s beautiful? Well, that’s a matter of taste. And like all literary trends, this one won’t last forever. Eventually, some new, attention-arresting thing will come on the scene, and the identitarian reckoning of 2020 will be yesterday’s news. Whenever that happens, and whatever it is, a handful of lucky writers will get swept up by the cresting wave of the zeitgeist and carried to glorious high ground, while everyone else looks on and makes grumbling noises.

In turn, Bernie supporters came to regard identity politics as a tool wielded by Democratic elites to deflect from their critiques of American capitalism and empire. One often heard variations of the joke that what the DNC really wanted was Cruise missiles painted with rainbow flags. Years later, that joke was made grimly literal in the viral “woke CIA” ad, in which an agency analyst announced “I am a woman of colour, I am a mom, I am a cisgender millennial who has been diagnosed with generalised anxiety disorder”. By that point, the only people around to laugh at it were conservatives and various marginal Twitter anons. 

That’s because the years from 2016 to 2020, and especially 2020 itself, were brutal to the socialist wing of this intra-party debate. The issue was not that the Democrats became more centrist or “neoliberal” over time — if anything, their centre of gravity has moved well to the Left since the Hillary campaign. It was that, in the pressure-cooker environment of the Trump years, every faction on the American Left had to either make its peace with identity politics or leave the organised Left. 

In part, the triumph of identity politics was the result of events, most notably the murder of George Floyd and the summer of riots and protests that followed it, which made progressive narratives about systemic racism and police brutality more plausible to larger numbers of people. In part it was because Trump, by railing against “political correctness” and devoting his considerable showman’s talent toward scandalising liberal sensibilities, had made even the most dyed-in-the-wool Marxist critiques of race and gender politics seem toxic by association with him. 

But mostly this victory was because, as Christopher Caldwell has observed, identity politics (or “civil rights, broadly understood”) had, by the Trump years, become the “reconciler-of-contradictions” within the Democratic coalition. In America’s emerging party alignment, identity politics is the “glue” holding together the New Economy oligarchs, white-collar professionals, disaffected graduate students, and minority voters that make up Team Blue. As long as Trump was in office, dissent from it would always appear, to the Left, as something akin to wartime treason.  

But with Trump gone — for now — we are beginning again to hear some grumblings. Facing the prospect of an electoral bloodbath in November and potential disaster in 2024, figures from the centre of the Democratic Party such as Ruy Teixeira, Jonathan Chait, and Matthew Yglesias have declared a more-or-less open war on the party’s activist-NGO Left wing, which they accuse of tarnishing the Democratic brand by associating it with a host of radical and unpopular positions.

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Further to the Left, some socialist-minded writers such as the New York Times’s Jay Caspian Kang have resurfaced critiques of identity politics familiar from the pre-Trump era: that it inhibits cross-racial solidarity, that it erases class differences and complements rather than antagonises corporate power, and that it reflects the experiences and obsessions of elite-educated professionals whose material interests conflict with those of the masses for whom they claim to speak. 

A new book by the Nigerian-American philosopher Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else), promises to be an entry into the latter genre. And judging by the book’s critical reception — including a flattering profile of the author in New York magazine — many are eager to hear someone with the appropriate demographic characteristics point out that much of what is written and said on the subject of identity in America is bogus. Táíwò has two other things going for him, neither of which should be underestimated in an aspiring public intellectual. One, he looks extremely cool. Two, he has a catchy title. “Elite capture.” You get the point without having to read the book. 

That’s good, because Táíwò’s central point — made in a 2020 essay in The Philosopher on which this book was clearly based — is a sensible one. In elite progressive circles, it has become common to hear calls to “listen to black voices” and “centre the marginalised”, a practice that Táíwò calls “deference politics” after the idea that oppressors should generally defer to the oppressed. But in these circles, who counts as “oppressed”?

Generally, it is not the homeless, refugees, or the global poor who live on less than a dollar a day, who are not part of these conversations to begin with. It is people like Táíwò, who is black, yes, but also is the son of middle-class Nigerian immigrants and a tenure-track faculty member at a prestigious American university. He is objectively “privileged”, and there is something arbitrary and faintly ridiculous about treating him as if he has some special insight into the demands of “justice”. As an alternative, Táíwò suggests “constructive politics”, which emphasises working across differences for “the pursuit of specific goals or results”. 

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Unfortunately, expanded into book length, this sensible point barely gets further than what is contained in the title. Indeed, the subtitle itself is misleading, since we never actually get an account of how “the powerful took over identity politics”, only lamentations that this is what has happened, illustrated with examples such as the aforementioned CIA advertisement, the embrace of “Black Lives Matter” messaging by corporations and governments, and the fact that America’s governing class eventually abandoned draconian Covid-19 restrictions. Absurdly, given the class politics of Covid panic, Táíwò takes this last as evidence that elites “simply lose interest [in collective well-being] as soon as they feel their own security is assured”. 

Nor do readers ever get a non-tautological definition of elite capture, which Táíwò describes as what happens “when the advantaged few steer resources and institutions that could serve the many toward their own narrower interests and aims”. It is “enabled” by “racial capitalism”, but it is also “symptomatic of social systems with unequal balances of power”. So elite capture is what happens when things are captured by elites, and it is both specific to capitalism and a general product of any society in which some have more influence than others. But of course, by saying that elite capture will only be solved once all hierarchies have been ground into dust, you are saying that it will never be solved at all.   

Ultimately, Táíwò’s aim is not to dispense with identity politics but to recover the allegedly more socialistic and solidaristic form of identity politics he attributes to the Combahee River Collective, the Seventies group of black lesbian feminists who introduced “identity politics” into American political discourse. In effect, his book is an attempt to make the race and gender politics of the post-Floyd Left compatible with the traditional aims of social-democratic, socialist, and Communist organising: the uplift of the working class and the abolition of capitalism. In theory, this is not an impossible task — different strands of the labor Left have long been anti-racist and anti-imperialist. But by failing to offer any real account of why identity politics evolved into its current form, all he is left with is the assertion that people should think and act differently than they do. 

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The problem is that elite-dominated identity politics is not a result of bad arguments but of very real material incentives grounded in the American state and law. As authors such as Caldwell and Richard Hanania have persuasively argued, modern identity politics, or “wokeness”, is simply a downstream cultural effect of federal civil rights law as it has evolved since the Sixties, which has forced American corporations and universities to take ever-more elaborate steps to erase “unequal balances of power” between groups, often through elevating minority elites to positions of power (affirmative action) and prohibiting speech and behaviour that might make them uncomfortable (political correctness).

When one of Táíwò’s white university colleagues offers to defer to him on some racially charged topic or another, this is not merely the result of a flawed conception of social justice but also a reflection of the fact that, were Táíwò the litigious sort, he could use an insensitive or merely tone-deaf remark by a white colleague to sue their employer for creating a hostile work environment. It is no accident that “critical race theory”, as its defenders like to point out, emerged as a theory of legal interpretation.

Whether one thinks this arrangement is desirable is a matter of taste. It is undeniable that the American public — and, increasingly, the Left-wing commentariat — is fed up with the brand of identity politics that has flourished over the past several years, which, though often draped in radical language, ends up finding expression as a corporate-bureaucratic project catering to the petty grievances of the professional class. This may well be describable as a result of “elite capture”, but if so, the project was captured from the beginning. And as the radicals are fond of saying, you can’t use the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house. 

But even where the po-faced stop short of lamping the smart-arsed, it’s widely noted that there’s a growing societal intolerance towards offensive comedy. Discussion of this in the media tends to assume a predictable form. First, someone well-known for being funny — Maureen Lipman, or John Cleese, or Dawn French — will say that wokeism is stifling comedic impulses by making comedians (and managers, and booking agents) afraid of backlash. Editors will then scramble to find someone authoritative to say there’s no evidence of this.

If anything, though, the resulting defensive responses tend only to increase the sense that there’s a problem here. Take, for instance, comedian Russell Kane’s response to Maureen Lipman: “I don’t think anyone is saying you can’t be offended, nobody is saying that, what we’re saying is you can’t use hate speech that would prompt a gender-related crime, a sex-related crime or a race-related crime.” Phew — that’s a relief! What this answer obviously ignores is that in the feverish imaginations of many, the bar for what’s considered likely to prompt a crime is getting lower every day.

Or take this Guardian op-ed from last year by comedy commentator Rachel Aroesti. With perhaps telling overkill, Aroesti writes off each and every concern about comedy cancel culture as “scaremongering about progressive politics”, “nonsense”, and (of course) “an absurdist joke”. In prosecuting her argument, she points out, accurately, that the careers of some high-profile comedians — Jimmy Carr, say, or Chappelle again — have been boosted from scandals surrounding their routines. Differently rendered, the very same evidence might have been used to provide comfort and reassurance to would-be shock merchants, along the lines of: Dear comedians, there’s no evidence your career will suffer if you are disgustingly obnoxious on stage. So relax, get back out there, and start making no-holds-barred jokes about transmen and Roma people once more!

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Probably unsurprisingly, though, that’s not how the piece reads. Even as Aroesti insists that cancel culture doesn’t affect people’s ability to make jokes that refer to minorities, her evident disapproval for the sort of person that would do this undermines her point. An accompanying eyeroll seems to say: no, of course you haven’t been cancelled, idiots — but you probably should be. This eyeroll can be sensed, too, in an exceptionally moralistic review of Catherine Tate’s body of work, written by Aroesti last month, which stops just short of calling Tate’s material “racist and homophobic” — but only just.

The real reason that the careers of comics like Carr, Rock, and Chappelle continue to flourish in spite of, or even because of, their deliberate minority-baiting, is that, in going as far as they gleefully do, they signal that there is little real point in coming after them. Unlike cancellers on the Right, who are mostly interested in targeting the opposition, cancellers on the Left tend to go for those they think are likely to be psychologically susceptible to their criticism.

For the purposes of speech control, a good target is someone who is likely to care about being called a “misogynist”, “racist” or “transphobe” by fellow tribe-members. And it’s even better if the transgression in question has the air of an inadvertent slip-up — because in that case you’re more likely to be able to extract an abject apology from the perpetrator, simply by pointing out that offence has been caused. Comedians who stoke outrage in front of millions don’t exactly scream potential in this respect. There’s nothing that says resilience to progressive guilt trips like deliberately savage jokes on stage about vulnerable groups.

What this suggests is that the comedians most at risk of the effects of cancellation are not the big names building their brands by pushing the limits of taste and decency. Rather, it’s the more strait-laced and less confrontational ones, sticking mainly to whimsical observation but with occasional tentative forays into edginess, who are most in danger — those from whom routines that inadvertently hit a cultural nerve would stand out far more vividly.

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It’s a strange world where Catherine Tate is more likely to be criticised for the supposed immorality of her comic choices than, say, Jerry Sadowitz — described with admiration by the Guardian in 2017 as the “twisted granddaddy of abusive comedy”. But I think it’s probably the world we live in. (To be clear — as far as I’m concerned, the answer here is not to level things out by going after Sadowitz, too.)

In effect, the progressive Left has moralised huge swathes of communication, both within comedy and beyond it. Any utterance that involves a reference to a minority tends to be sliced from its surrounding context. The intentions or character of its owner are ignored. The implication is reduced to the version that the most sensitive representative of that particular minority might choose to hear, and then connected in full, psychic technicolour with hideous potential repercussions for that often completely imaginary person.

You can see this in Kane’s response to Maureen Lipman, and you can also see it in Aroesti’s review of Catherine Tate, in which the supposedly “racist and homophobic” material she mentions turns out to have come from the mouth of Tate’s Nan character — surely an important difference. Perversely, the best way for a comedian to circumvent these censorious effects seems to be to boldly march up to statements that might genuinely stoke up bad feeling against a group and then spit them out in your own voice, smirking knowingly as you do it.

Like many other parts of culture then, comedy is polarised. If you’re a comedian, you now have one of two choices: either avoid controversy like the plague or run happily towards it. There’s not much in between, and comedy has lost some of its richness because of it.

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But there is another loss here too, and it’s a loss to the political culture of the Left. For as the progressive wing has embraced the ever-evolving permutations of identity politics so enthusiastically, it has also — and probably non-coincidentally — made it impossible for anyone on its own side to laugh at these permutations, or at identity politics generally. In the reductive algebra of progressive offence-seekers, mocking identity politics is equated with mocking minorities. Of course, all politics is tribal, and no political party or movement, Right or Left, can easily tolerate mockery, especially from within its own ranks. But this is not just an understandable dislike of being laughed at by those on the same side as oneself. It is a positive taboo against it, with all the enforcing of speech codes, wilfully reductive misunderstandings, and attempted humiliation of miscreants that this implies.

And yet there is so much to laugh at! Last week alone gave us the Head of Trans Inclusion at Stonewall, on a hefty salary to oversee Stonewall’s many trans-related programmes, asking to be accompanied by a support worker, his mother, and a support dog during cross-questioning at Allison Bailey’s employment tribunal. (The judge instructed him not to discuss the case with his mother during a break; whether he was allowed to discuss it with the dog wasn’t mentioned).

We also were treated to the spectacle of 61 mainly Labour MPs, holding placards at the behest of nameless LGBTQ+ campaigners, and passing on the bonkers message to the general public that confused adolescents shouldn’t be given any therapy in their hasty rush to get rid of various body parts. Brass Eye’s Chris Morris — famous for getting celebrities to unwittingly humiliate themselves on camera in the name of various confected moral panics — couldn’t have done any better if he’d tried.

Lots of people on the Left want to mock events like these — they are, after all, preposterous. But they also know that the pinched-mouthed censors on their own side would reduce any attempts at humour to, at best, unkindness, and, at worst, hatred towards trans people. The same goes with relevant adjustments for any mockery of BLM, or indeed of any activist movement claiming to speak on behalf of a minority. And this needlessly forces those uncomfortable with the simplistic logic of identity politics to pick a side.

Those with enough rebellious spirit will eventually seek to break free from their suffocatingly humourless companions, making the Left less diverse and less robust. Worse than that, freed from exposure to that particularly bracing form of critique that is trenchant piss-taking from people whose opinions you care about, the Left’s representatives are likely to carry on doing ridiculous things in public, to the befuddlement of the voter. Until progressives are better able to take a joke — or even to understand one — I predict that Labour will give us lots more to laugh at in the next few years. And the amusement will all be that of the Tories.

The point is to get students to reflect on what is often immediately apparent about a person — such as sex, age, physical build, race — and what emerges with longer acquaintanceship. Students may bring up things like accents, levels of education or cultural knowledge — but almost always a little nervously, as if not quite sure if these are legitimate objects of interest. I’ve never had a student spontaneously suggest that one thing you might notice is somebody’s social class, and embarrassment always comes from my suggesting it. These days, it’s just not what the novelist should be thinking about.

Douglas Stuart’s debut novel Shuggie Bain, for instance — a coming-of-age story set in working-class Glasgow — was sufficiently out of fashion to lead 30 publishers to reject the manuscript. After its eventual release, it became a huge triumph. This week, Stuart publishes another novel set in the same world.

Young Mungo follows a boy whose mother is a hopeless alcoholic on the breadline; his elder brother is a thuggish criminal, living with his underage girlfriend and their baby. But his sister, Jodie, is intelligent, orderly, practical, full of possibilities: “She’s gonnae be a doctor, or an astronaut.” Mungo has ambitions, too, although he has never been outside the East End of Glasgow. He falls in love with Jamie, and together they dream of escape. But it’s not a geographical escape; there’s no doubt that it’s their social class they need to leave.

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Such frank investment in social improvement now seems unusual in a novel. Stuart knows better; in an interview he has remarked that the one positive consequence of the urban deprivation he observes is that it gave rise to masterpieces of the written word. But few novelists would be brave enough to write of Jodie’s future as a place where she “would round out her vowels and suppress her glottal stop; she would like her bread to be brown and her films to be foreign”. The urge to better oneself through education is not something novelists want to be seen praising. After all, it might look as if you thought some people were better than others, and even that some of the people left behind, like Mungo, who “would work where he could, and he would steal what he could,” might bear some responsibility for their own lives. If you’ve invented all of these cases, the misbehaviour starts to look fairly terrible to the contemporary eye. And so the subject of social advancement has largely been left to the memoirists, who can at least show that they are writing the truth, or at least “their” truth.

But social class — how people may be trapped in their circumstances, and struggle to escape them — has been at the core of the novel since the beginning. The form thrives on the differences between people, and the place people take in the world. They can be as vast as between Dickens’s Lady Dedlock and Jo the crossing sweeper, or as minute, but real, as those between Austen’s Emma and her vulgar enemy Mrs Elton. But we have to be able to tell characters apart for the novel to make sense; a story set in a society where social differences had been genuinely erased might be quite hard to follow.

Novels, too, are dynamic forms. They tell of changes in circumstances, and how characters end up in places they could not foresee. Very often, these journeys are social odysseys. Defoe’s Moll Flanders, rampaging through rich merchants and bankers as husbands before ending up as a common thief, starts it off. Proust’s Madame Verdurin, starting in obscure circumstances and ending as the Princesse de Guermantes, is an almost indecently frank example; Elizabeth Taylor’s Angelica Deverell shows that the habit of rising in society is not forbidden to artists and writers. All in all, it is not just class that has always driven the novel, but how it changes.

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But now, through a combination of nervousness, embarrassment, and an apparent concern by novelists that their observations on difference shouldn’t be mistaken for snobbishness, the subject is being cast aside. In part, I think, this is because social class seems much more complex and puzzling than it used to be. What to make of a Russian oligarch with his house in Belgrave Square? Or the Syrian professor and refugee, now driving an Uber to get by?

In part, too, it must be affected by a general squeamishness about making personal observations of a specific sort. Some readers have started to object when a novelist makes a factual note about a character’s physical nature, or their race. This style of objection might be making novelists nervous about plain statements of class. You can talk about a character’s wealth or poverty, but it is quite hard to imagine a serious novelist writing about a character’s relationship to money and status in the direct and contemptuous way Evelyn Waugh writes about John Beaver, or Rex Mottram.

What we call class is a complex but coherent association of culture, power, money, behaviour, speech and — more now than 50 years ago — education. It’s a compelling subject, but, strikingly, we seem only to be comfortable with it in fiction in the safely removed form of the historical novel or novels of different cultures: the Indian novel in English still talks bluntly about social status. Novelists who made their mark with exquisitely differentiated fiction about class, such as Martin Amis or William Trevor, are markedly dropping out of fashion.

What is taking the place of this traditionally central concern? The main interests of the novel now are such things as race, particularly racial injustice, sex and sexual preference, and (a surprisingly common interest) the world as seen by individuals who are somehow hindered by an external factor, such as a mental illness. Indeed, perhaps Stuart gets away with his analysis of class because both his novels are also concerned with one of these external factors, gay male sexuality. These factors will successfully distinguish characters; they will do a good job of showing how an individual is treated by society. They are all important and interesting subjects. But as motors of fiction they have one marked limitation — they are all unchangeable characteristics.

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In Great Expectations, Pip’s story of transforming himself into a gentleman powerfully drives the narrative through a minute attention to a shifting social standing. It’s hard to imagine how a novel focused on these other fictional concerns — even if it could reveal how essential and insurmountable differences between people often become apparent through crushing injustice — could reproduce such a journey.

Perhaps there is a larger pressure at work here, about a sort of social media-driven desire on the novelist to present themselves in as amiable a light as possible. A novelist who writes with their full attention on racial status in a post-imperial society is obviously commendably engaged; a novelist who writes about the different styles of speech of rich and poor is running the risk of being labelled the worst of men, a rampant snob. It might be easier to suppress those observations altogether, however conspicuous and interesting they are.

I walk my dog most mornings in Battersea Park. There, a huge range of society mixes; young professionals, retired working class families, those in social housing, and the seriously rich of Chelsea. You would have to be unusually slow not to register the dramatic differences between some of these people, and how they manifest themselves in behaviour, speech, the names of dogs, even the dogs themselves (Labradors and French bulldogs called Reggie are upper middle class; Alsatians and Staffordshire bull terriers called Killer or Sheba, probably working class). This is the sort of thing that novelists used to be very interested in. Now, it seems to me that there is a disinclination to talk about what is as plain as a pikestaff, because what sort of writer would even try to deduce anything from an Alsatian being called Sheba?

For this reason, Young Mungo, an excellent novel, nevertheless feels somewhat old-fashioned. But it’s very good to see a novelist entering with some of the old gusto into working class culture, exploring how its products might inhabit it, or want to get out of it at the first opportunity. Stuart is rare among contemporary novelists in saying, without the slightest apology, things like: “Clothes are often a signal for social class.” And so they are: and yet we are not expected to notice it, or remark upon it. What this sort of thing is starting to require is real nerve.

In many ways, these divisions are unique: they are not draped in the usual identitarian focus on race, gender and sexuality that has come to define the West. Rather, they are between those minority groups which embrace a sense of victimhood and those which reject it; between the strong, self-determining subject capable of rational judgement and between the vulnerable subject who demands protection. Nowhere is this clearer than in the contentious case of indigenous participation in the Freedom Convoy.

Even in my own family, the truckers’ protest sparked an unprecedented sense of discord and division, both on and off reserve. In recent weeks, I have spoken with several relatives and their contacts who participated in and organised portions of the Convoy. What emerged was a sense of division that is a microcosm for a more fundamental rupture in mainstream Canada and beyond.

This is to be expected: no matter how hard policymakers and even indigenous leaders try to convince us otherwise, the issues faced by indigenous people are not so different from those faced by people around the world. Like so many groups, they are torn between the demand for freedom and the demand for safety. It is a conflict faced by governments and populations that predates Covid-19 — but which has become manifest with lockdown measures and the resistance to them.

While Trudeau dismissed the protests as sexist, racist outpourings of white supremacy, the indigenous participants I spoke to were keen to emphasise their diversity. Some indigenous people arrived in full regalia; a mother marched with a papoose on her back and two small children in traditional dress. “We met so many people from every background,” said an Ojibwa woman from a Northern Ontario reserve who helped organise protestors in her area. “Because we’re just like everyone else. We want the mandates to end. We want freedom of choice and autonomy over our own bodies. We want a good life and we want our children to have a good life. We want the same things.”

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She pointed to problems on reserves but linked these to broader issues in Canadian society. “Like the rest of the population, we have suffered from so many drug-related deaths and suicides. Covid just made that worse. We don’t want that anymore. We’re so sad seeing this and we’re just hoping for change. Just like everyone else.”

Yet many in the indigenous community disagreed. Leaders issued statements condemning the protests, and in particular the use of traditional ceremonies and objects by both indigenous and non-indigenous people without “permission from us in order to proceed”, dismissing them as “ignorant acts of cultural appropriation”. While there was some controversy about a kitsch “pipe ceremony” that was posted online, the broader message underscored that ceremonies and ceremonial objects only have a place in certain approved protests and in relation to certain approved issues. Indigeneity, it appears, is the sole province of those who toe a certain line. And that line is not about freedom, but safety and protection.

Indeed, all these pronouncements highlighted was the insularity of Canada’s indigenous movements. Grand Council Chief Reginald Niganobe said: “Once again, we ask that you please remain vigilant within your communities where you are continued to be needed.” In a statement shared on social media, he argued: “It is counter-intuitive to the progression of our communities to be caught up in anti-government sentiment which fails to address the complexities of Anishinabe realities.”

Others framed the protests as a clear indication of racist inequality in Canada, pointing out that an indigenous-led convoy would have been met with swift suppression. The author of one such piece reflected that while some indigenous people might be attracted to the movement’s anti-establishment rebelliousness, “this is not the cause that we need to get behind because they’re not here to help our issues”.

But as Kenan Malik recently observed, racial specialness has often been used as a means of dismantling cross-race “fusion” movements that threatened the existing order. Take the struggle that brought together poor black workers and poor white farmers in the American south during the early 20th century. Rather than organising together, white workers were persuaded that their interests lay not in their class position but rather in their racial uniqueness. Of course, certain groups undoubtedly suffer individualised issues. Historically, however, the distinctiveness of one’s struggle was preached precisely to destroy the power of solidarity movements to achieve change.

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And this is a danger that still runs deep today. Indigenous people are constantly invited to believe that their problems are distinct and rooted squarely in the past. When news broke last summer about the alleged existence of unmarked children’s graves at a Kamloops residential school, the media was awash with tales of suffering and horror. While many indigenous people did suffer greatly in these schools, it is important to note that not all children attended them. Nonetheless, a predictable narrative began to emerge: that, however indirectly, all indigenous people are essentially traumatised by this past. As one academic put it at the time, indigenous people have “ongoing issues in our communities that are a direct result of these schools”, and the failure to recognise this ensures “that new generations are continuing to suffer”.

Such claims about the colonial trauma experienced by all indigenous people have not been dampened by more recent evidence that the evidence of mass graves is shaky. It fits too well with the dominant ideal of the indigenous victim. As one young woman put it: “We’re still experiencing the effects of the residential school from our parents and grandparents. We’re all damaged, and we’ll pass it on to our children, so it will never end.”

With victimhood now all but regarded as an innate indigenous characteristic, it is hardly surprising that indigenous frauds have started to fabricate entire identities grounded in this trauma: Saskatchewan professor and public health expert Carrie Bourassa was revealed last year to have fabricated claims to indigenous heritage, appearing publicly in elaborate dress as ‘Morning Star Bear’ with attendant melodramatic theatrics. While organisers of the Freedom Convoy have similarly been outed for making shaky assertions about their mixed roots, it is interesting how long Bourassa’s claims went undetected.

Bourassa climbed the career ladder for years, steadily growing bolder with expanded claims to indigenous heritage and cultural roots. Why? Because Bourassa told a story that people wanted to hear. She talked of suffering, addiction and “endemic” sexual abuse — experiences that were likely a far cry from her comfortable middle class upbringing in Regina. “Everybody around me was either an alcoholic, drug addict or suffered from some sort of addiction,” she embellished. “There was a lot of violence in my family.”

True or not, here we had a story of a virtuous indigenous victim — the sort of victim that inspires a carefully positioned Justin Trudeau to be photographed with a single tear running down his cheek; the sort of victim that legitimises his decision to exclude indigenous citizens from obeying his draconian emergency laws without needing to explain why.

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And for the people I spoke to, this can have an unintended effect: it makes them feel like frauds because that narrative of trauma is not their experience. Even if it were, I am not convinced it would be capable of fulfilling their desires for more control and freedom to decide how to live their lives.

Quite the opposite. As indigenous scholar Dian Million has warned, this narrative of virtuous victimhood runs expressly against claims to self-determination, a long established goal of indigenous communities. This is because when we assume victimhood, we often relinquish power. Constantly invited to confess endless tales of suffering and damage, the call for “self-determination” fades into “self-management” and the therapeutic “empowerment” of outside agencies.

And this is echoed throughout Canada at large. In recent years, indigenous communities have started to groan under the weight of expanding bodies of surveillance. It’s striking, then, that during the recent protest, truckers spoke of the encroachment of endless managers into their work, subjecting them to increasing surveillance, such as fitting their trucks with cameras in their cabs. And like indigenous leaders’ disavowal of indigenous participants’ demands for freedom in favour of safety, so too did the truckers’ unions retreat into threats, seeing their main role as providing not self-determination but safety.

Indigenous experiences, then, are a microcosm of Canada. We are not so different. Like so many others, some of us reject the vision of virtuous victimhood. And it is testament to the power of this unity that our community leaders should respond with such horror. They’ve finally sussed out that we too are the “Average Joe” — and as one indigenous participant told me: “The average Joe has had enough.”

The novel may be a release from a major press (Little, Brown), but its author isn’t famous; nor is his offering — a fragmented piece of autofiction about a 30-year-old named Sean Thor Conroe writing a book called Fuccboi — particularly mass-market. So why the histrionics? Well, Conroe received a six-figure advance for this first novel.

Yet while such a sum will always raise eyebrows, especially envious ones, Conroe has been subjected to levels of vitriol unusual even for the literary “community”. The dope on Conroe circulating among the disgruntled (no six-figure advance) is as follows: Conroe is nothing less than a privileged, wealthy, white-passing impostor, who, Barry Lyndon-style, has passed himself off as a dejected, pitiable, impoverished victim of white supremacy (he’s half Japanese) and capitalism (he’s a former delivery boy). That is to say, he is the kind of wretch who passes as a literary idol for the publishing world’s exacting commissars.

For a time, the indie winds were in Conroe’s favour, and praise was doled out. But since that cheque — some wager, because of it — the tides have turned. In a post entitled “Fuck, Boy!”, Sam Pink, a writer and painter of working-class extraction, put his allegations bluntly: “[I’ve had] my entire work stolen from me.” To wit, Pink accused Conroe of swiping his telegraphic, slangy style — a blend of Soundcloud rap (“side bae”, “ex bae”, “editor bae”, “peripheral bae”, “autonomous bae”) and leaden Instagram self-care argot (“This sharing permitted, even encouraged, me to consider my own patterns./To even recognize, in the first place, that patterns were created by tangible actions”). Pink is disgusted by this “offensively appropriated” “fake slang from an ivy league kid.”

Conroe, predictably, claims to be speaking in his real voice. In his acknowledgments, Conroe writes:

Ty ty ty to Giancarlo DiTrapano for not only letting me write how I talk, but encouraging me to. 
            That shit there.
            Man.
            I can’t even.

For what it’s worth, Conroe does talk like that. I briefly met him when he attended a reading at my apartment, though he seemed uncomfortable and often stepped outside to smoke in the cold. As I later learned, two other guests were the respective publisher and author of an essay accusing Conroe of, basically, slumming it. The battle, as always, is about stolen victimhood, and the writers, as always, respond by punching up their “trauma” and playing down their “privilege” to stake a claim to what is, after all, an unimpressive and even grating style.

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Authenticity aside, when Hanson O’Haver, in Gawker, dumps on Conroe’s use of “laundered rap slang” and Jonah Bromwich’s New York Times review includes a pro forma condemnation of the same as “cringeworthy”, one wonders: where have they been? Do they remember the Beatniks? Elvis? Norman Mailer’s “White Negro”? White and white-passing Americans appropriating African American slang is nothing new; what is new is skittishness to publish writing that does so. Surely, then, however unappealing you might find this hyper-contemporary style, his publisher deserves credit for taking on the political risk accompanying its use by a man not immediately identifiable as an oppressed racial minority (Conroe is, again, half Japanese).

Similarly, Fuccboi is admirably daring in its gestures toward political relevance: it’s easy to see why a publishing house would have thought this book relevant to today’s crisis of liberal masculinity. As our narrator puts it, “How tf was I privileged./I couldn’t do shit. Not only that, no one allowed me to show/admit I couldn’t.” He yearns to be “one of the good ones”; to seem “so woke and self-aware and self-deprecating about how dumb ideas of alpha-beta masculinity were”. Yet given the intense censoriousness of his “woke” circle, who accuse him of “getting lost in the men’s rights tunnel”, writing is his only “way to start tackling repression and shame” — to avoid becoming like a school shooter, or even Hitler.

Despite the title, he seems to be a pretty good guy (and pretty continent, too: only one act of fornication, in over 350 pages!). The worst things he does are listen to Joe Rogan, watch some “low-key red-pill videos”, very noncommittally question the reality of the gender pay gap, and equally casually say “bros over hoes”. The only slightly developed conservative thought is one regarding his relationship with his “ex bae”, where he reflects on her abortion: could anti-natalism perhaps be nihilistic? Could neoliberal feminism perhaps be careerist? Well, yeah. Ultimately, the “anti-woke” side of this book is so anodyne that one wonders whether Fuccboi, like the narrator’s pre-Fuccboi manuscript, may not have been a bit too edited-for-acceptability.

And yet I think this book is earnest. If anything, its issue is not a lack of authenticity, but a surfeit thereof. It will be obvious to those who finish it that Fuccboi is the genuine stream of consciousness of the author, spilled with little self-censorship onto the page. All of this is presented with what one hopes is an at least slightly satirical sense of self-important militancy, as when the narrator explodes to a perfectly polite stranger: “I’m tryna write for people who don’t read. Who don’t give a shit about books.”

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The problem, then, isn’t that Conroe’s parents were rich (which I have no cause to believe is the case), or that he didn’t, as Pink claims, “earn” his audience by publishing online before getting the big deal. The problem is that this book, like so many others in its milieu, values “authenticity” and “realness” over more venerable criteria of literary value (depth, characterisation, plot). Fuccboi does accurately represent the cretinous depravity of the Millennial generation, as well as the self-aggrandising cult of martyrdom — increasingly by self-diagnosed mental or physical illness — with which my generation shirks the responsibilities historically incumbent upon the civilised mind. But though Fuccboi is playful and lively, often funny and sometimes moving, and certainly of its time, it does not fully succeed as a work of art.

The current crop of young writers is less ambitious and less accomplished even than the minimalists and dirty realists — Bret Easton Ellis, Raymond Carver, Denis Johnson, Amy Hempel — they are (likely unknowingly) imitating. In that earlier generation’s writing, the chaotic hedonism of the everyday attains emotional depth and significance; characters are complex and differentiated, and struggling to form complex and differentiated relationships with each other. They have more than names, characteristics, and the occasional impulse; they have feelings, thoughts, and sometimes, even, ideas.

But where there once was narrative that made life seem complicated, moving, and significant, indie literature today primarily comprises trite, essentially ecological descriptions of an already familiar scene, devoid of any coherence or meaning. Men write “stories” about men with their demographic characteristics doing cocaine/Adderall and displaying traits of narcissistic personality disorder; women write “stories” about women with their demographic characteristics doing ketamine/Klonopin and displaying traits of borderline personality disorder.

Both contingents write in a mode of blasé detachment that has become achingly stale. They are averse to or incapable of subjectivity and depth. What little allowance is made for human feeling is exclusively of pharmaceutical origin. These are not works of art; they are simply unremarkable descriptions of unremarkable lives.

In the glib generational determinism so popular today, one excuses this shallowness of character and failure to depict any interpersonal conflict as a “real” and “relatable” mirror of the “autism” of the young generation (indeed, this self-serving self-ID is so common that forums for the autistic and their caretakers use the acronym AA for “actually autistic”). However, these writers, and the thinly disguised stand-ins that populate their autofiction, are not autistic. They are merely permanent adolescents, incapable of empathising with any experience outside of their own and comfortably withdrawn into a profound egotism.

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Similarly, one excuses their unambitious and unintelligible style by reference to the influence of “online” life on young minds. However, the more accurate explanation for this monotonous sea of uninspired cliché is that these writers do not read anyone except their friends, nor do they aspire to much readership beyond them. And that’s probably for the best: readers deserve better than for 20-somethings functionally addicted to psychotropics to describe their existence in turgid, unorganised prose. The generalised inability to execute the most basic fundamentals of modern narrative is not a product of an autistic or digital zeitgeist; it is a product of lazy and illiterate writers.

Does Fuccboi fall under this umbrella? For all its flaws, Conroe resists the suicidal renunciation of many of his peers. Perhaps this, in part, is why his coevals have so passionately denounced his novel as cringe: Conroe unapologetically does care about literature, in his own guileless and heartwarming way. Perhaps it sounds silly for him to talk about “That Art Life”; perhaps it feels awkward and uninformative to read his emails with Sheila Heti. But at least, unlike so many today, he believes that writing could serve a function beyond identity work or courtship, and at least expresses interest in authors outside of his immediate coterie.

In that sense, he is the exception. Of course, this nihilism is reflective of the current mood of the world. But its consequences are more severe: if our authors are as distracted and superficial as anybody else, and our literature as unnourishing as TikToks or memes or tweets, why on earth would anyone read? Much like the humanities’ wan retreat to the “digital humanities”, this attempt to stay relevant — I’m not a normal book, I’m a cool book! — will only doom the medium to total obsolescence.