Not that the trivial is undeserving of serious attention. Alongside a shared interest in the primal and the religious, Berger and Dillard each had things to say about the trivial. They make us wonder if events as momentous as the US elections of 2016 and 2024 and everything calamitous that followed from them — let alone what might still, as they say in America, be coming down the pike — involved, to a not trivial extent, contesting ideas of the trivial.

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Bob Dylan has no philosophy

By Geoff Dyer

In her memoir An American Childhood (1987), Dillard recalls how she and a group of other young girls at school were “vigilantes of the trivial”. She’s referring to matters of fashion but no phrase better describes the habits of thought-policing, constant jeopardy and apprehension that underwrote — and undermined — the cultural politics of the American Left over the last dozen or so years. This over-zealous policing was undertaken, as so often in the past, in the name of an entirely worthy cause: social justice. In America, though, this lofty aim co-existed — until Luigi Mangione burst into the debate with a vengeance — with a widespread if grudging acceptance of the idea that healthcare is run on a for-profit basis. Take the case of Joseph Heller who, in No Laughing Matter, tells the story of a long illness and extremely costly recovery. Through sheer inadvertence, as Martin Amis observed, Heller failed to pay a $20 premium which would have meant he got an extra $40,000 of health coverage. “He minds about that,” Amis continues, “but he doesn’t mind about the system” — a system in which, as he succinctly puts it, “you are getting charged for every Kleenex”.

The only concern more ultimate than illness is the least desirable prognosis, death, but in recent years much of the Left — and I think the repetition here is useful — left not just opponents but allies exposed to a creeping ideological infection whereby every little infraction of a constantly updated code (Dillard refers to herself and friends as “enforcers of a code”) risked exposure to the full force of unwritten laws. For every triumph and vindication — the conviction of Harvey Weinstein, most obviously — there was a collateral sentence of undue severity for some relatively trivial offense. Often this sentence was the opposite of lifetime imprisonment without the possibility of parole: indefinite expulsion, and the sentence could never be appealed because the perps were rarely tried. Across American campuses and institutions Arthur Miller’s The Crucible was effectively being re-staged, in real time, in contemporary dress. There’s no shortage of books — Woke Racism by the fearless John McWhorter, The War on the West by Douglas Murray, Unwanted Advances by the ferociously brilliant Laura Kipnis — documenting the absurdities and excesses of this extended moment. Inappropriate jokes, infelicities of language, slips of cultural etiquette, were punished while huge threats were underway, collective resistance to them weakened by the politics of outraged identity. Some issues sailed east across the Atlantic more successfully than others. Micro-aggressions were not such a big deal in Britain where actual aggro and old-school bovver are never more than a head-butt away. Charges of cultural appropriation also proved tricky since many of us — Peter Blake, most famously — could not be persuaded that our Saturday afternoons, our cultural heritage, had not been enriched by the magnificent Kendo Nagasaki.

Meanwhile, like a game show offering ever-escalating prize money, an addictive competition was underway to see who could be most quickly and severely offended, often vicariously, on someone else’s behalf. Ostensibly a weapon of the Left, identity politics helped to do the Right’s work, splintering what are actually shared interests and goals into competing factions of the variously aggrieved. Consciousness raising is a good thing, always, but militant doses of this variant were often consciousness lowering.

The absurdity of much of what was happening went beyond the satirical reach of Tom Wolfe in the Seventies. The prosecutorial dragnet of critical race theory was all the more irresistible because, while it was couched in the idioms of academic rigor, it had — as John McWhorter has repeatedly pointed out — many of the qualities of a cult. While Wolfe had reported hilariously on precursor fads in Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak-Catchers (1970), Karl Popper had pre-diagnosed the condition in 1962, in Conjectures and Refutations. He was referring specifically to Marxism and psychoanalysis, but critical race theory had the similar “effect of an intellectual conversion or revelation, opening your eyes to a new truth hidden from those not yet initiated. Once your eyes were thus opened you saw confirming instances everywhere: the world was full of verifications of the theory. Whatever happened always confirmed it. Thus its truth appeared manifest; and unbelievers were clearly people who did not want to see the manifest truth; who refused to see it, either because it was against their class interest, or because of their repressions which were still ‘un-analyzed’ and crying aloud for treatment.”

The irony is that the various courses of treatment could easily serve as a distraction from the larger condition to which they were a justified response. That seems to be changing. So although the BBC — of all places — recently published an article about bare nails as an expression of white supremacy, it was quickly withdrawn. During the years when so much fiddling of this kind had been going on, however, Rome, or its contemporary manifestations in Ukraine and Gaza, were busily burning. Broadening the focus beyond armed conflict to include climate change, swathes of the world were literally on fire. And the blaze continues.

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The summer of Idiossey

By Geoff Dyer

Which brings us to the other part of the triviality wars. In the Nineties, a Dutch TV crew took what was by then a well-trodden pilgrimage route — I had taken it myself in the Eighties — to make a film about Berger at his home in the village of Quincy. At one point Berger is asked if he has become more religious and conservative with age. I have transcribed his answer here, with minor edits, but do please try to watch A Touch of Grace on YouTube, from about 28 minutes 44 seconds in, as he reflects on the global triumph of the free economy:

“This system, for the first time in human history, judges and makes decisions about what is happening to our entire planet by the criterion of only one value, which is the value of increasing profit. And this is of a fanaticism by which the so-called fanatics in other parts of the world are really complex, tolerant, nuanced people, the most fanatical of them even. Because this is the absolute fanaticism, and it is a fanaticism of such triviality if one thinks about the needs and the structure of the human spirit, that everything is judged only by this one criterion… What this does is produce colossal injustice [Berger concludes with increasing passion] and against that injustice I feel more militant than ever.”

This was filmed before 9/11, before the advent of ISIS, so it’s necessary to amend what Berger says about tolerant, nuanced people. That aside, to claim that he has been proved right is an understatement. The twice-elected American President is someone who only understands the deal, who recognizes no currency or morality other than profit. The price paid for this, in oil, in land, in maiming and lives, in injustice, is, to him… trivial.

By the time this little article is published, the American midterms will be fast approaching. They may offer encouragement, but the choice is not between competing forms of the trivial. As Berger put it in a poem published more than 60 years ago, we:

go backwards or forwards
There are two directions
But not two sides.

When I tried to appeal, the manager, a black man, shrugged and said, “I’m not offended, but … this is just the way things are now.” He didn’t expand on what he meant by the word “this” — because wokeness was the great force animating culture and politics in the decade roughly between 2013 and 2023. Most progressives couldn’t or wouldn’t even name it back then. But they lived by it. And had word spread about my verbal misstep, I could have been ruined.

So it was infuriating to hear Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez try to laugh off — giggle off, really — what she now calls the “Woke One” era and pretend it was all a Covid fever dream.

On ABC’s This Week on Sunday, Jonathan Karl asked AOC about Francesca Hong, the Democratic Socialists of America activist running for governor of Wisconsin. In 2020, Hong tweeted that she backed “defunding the police as a first step towards abolishing the police,” and that “police exist to uphold white supremacy.” Hong has also called for canceling Thanksgiving: “Should have done this in 1621. If it takes a worldwide pandemic for us to realize we should stop celebrating colonialism and the original superspreader event that killed indigenous folx and women, so be it.” AOC chuckled in response and reached for a line she’d picked up from a New York City councilman: “Woke One was crazy.”

Sorry, but this non-admission-slash-admission is incredibly weak tea. Though woke has now been largely quarantined to Bluesky, indie coffee shops flying the Pride Progress flag, and experimental theater companies, it wasn’t always this way. 

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The Me Decade — 50 years later

By Ryan Zickgraf

For a decade, a highly online horde of academics, journalists, techies, and activists operated like America’s unelected HR regime — a petty administrative state with a mob of reactive nerds attached. They were authoritarian, coercive, and sustained by the threat that anyone who failed to master an ever-expanding vocabulary could be publicly humiliated, professionally ruined, or expelled from polite society. Latinx one year, Latine the next: choose the wrong suffix, and HR might open a case file.

Ironically, the AOCs of the world wanted to abolish the uniformed police, even as they behaved like a secret police defending the tenets of hyper-progressivism. Were you a white guy wearing a sombrero on Halloween? You’re guilty of a hate crime. A scientist wearing a shirt covered in cartoon women? Made to weep on camera. Wait, you’re not putting your pronouns in your email bio — what kind of an asshole are you? 

Careers were destroyed, reputations vaporized, and institutions bullied into submission, often over transgressions so slight that nobody outside the movement’s tribunal could explain what crime had actually occurred. 

Worst of all, for those of us on the Left: Woke One was politically disastrous. It handed MAGA a decade of free material and discredited the Bernie-era proposition that universalist class politics could be popular politics. 

Woke One offered a stark binary choice: identity politics or fascism. The writer Sam Kriss has described the function of the thing better than anyone: wokeness gave the ruling class a way to justify its position without ever mentioning the wage relation, swapping exploitation for “a vast mishmash of various forms of prejudice, hatred, and exclusion, which could be embodied in entirely ordinary words, hand gestures, or sometimes large and inert rocks.”

The Left is now confronting the specter of woke, but not because of a true internal reckoning; it’s only because the movement’s political candidates are getting cross-examined by the news media in this year’s elections about the things they said and did not that long ago. 

Facing such scrutiny, Hong went on a podcast and produced one of the great non-sentences of the cycle: “My views have only become stronger in that I’m serious about public safety and I will not abolish the police.” Stronger! She has grown so radical she now supports the police. Give her another two years, and she will become a police chief herself.

At the height of the madness, Cea Weaver, who today serves as Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s rental-housing czar, posted that “private property including and kind of ESPECIALLY homeownership is a weapon of white supremacy.” Doorstepped earlier this year by the New York Post about her mother’s $1.4 million mansion in Nashville, Weaver burst into tears. She has since said that she regrets “some” of it. 

Somewhere in there is a lesson about what it feels like to become a stranger’s content, one the movement she helped build could once have explained to her at length, and for free. Darializa Avila Chevalier, who knocked off five-term incumbent Rep. Adriano Espaillat with Mamdani’s backing, had a whole deleted account’s worth: abolish the police, prisons and borders, and seize the landlords. Mamdani said he hadn’t seen the posts before endorsing her, and that her views had evolved.

He’d know. In June 2020, he tweeted that the NYPD is “racist, anti-queer & a major threat to public safety”; that November, two days after winning his Assembly seat, he posted: “Queer liberation means defund the police.” Then he ran for mayor on rent and buses and childcare, apologized for the language, and called himself “a candidate who is not fixed in time.” To quote Kamala Harris, who stumbled on her own woke-era statements: You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?

AOC is now trying to explain the woke era away as a symptom of something like Covid cabin fever. You see, lockdown opened the Overton window, in AOC’s telling, and suddenly the Left entertained “any and every policy” that might improve society. Those debates were “quite fruitful,” she said, but candidates would not use the same rhetoric now. Voters should judge Hong by what she says today: she will not abolish the police; what was once “aspirational” is no longer primary — Thanksgiving is actually Hong’s favorite holiday!

Call it the Lockdown Alibi, and expect a great deal more of it between now and November. We were all a bit odd during Covid. I made sourdough bread; other people wanted to abolish the carceral state — different strokes, right? 

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Woke 2.0 is here

By Valerie Stivers

But forgiveness usually follows an admission of guilt. What the new DSA-adjacent generation of Democrats wants instead is amnesty without a full accounting for wokeness, its irrationalities and its cruelties. It isn’t clear what “Woke One” includes, which ideas have been abandoned, or why. Is it police and prison abolition? Abolishing borders? The claim that homeownership is white supremacy? Can you at least admit that land acknowledgments make you sound ridiculous? Or that Ibram X. Kendi is Miss Rachel for people with humanities degrees?

This, of course, doesn’t mean every cause associated with Woke One was wrong, or that its critics have been vindicated in everything. The anti-woke Right has produced its own identitarian grotesqueries, and its answer to racial essentialism was apparently to dust off the calipers from the 19th century.

But admission of some guilt on the Left would be nice. Instead, we have gone, in six years, from woke doesn’t exist — it’s just basic decency to: of course it existed, and it was crazy, and also it was 2020, and also can we talk about your high grocery bill? We went straight from denial to nostalgia, skipping the bit where anyone apologizes. 

In 2016, the writer Lauren Duca published a viral Teen Vogue essay arguing that Donald Trump was gaslighting America — training us to distrust our own memory of what he’d said the week before. By that logic, large swaths of the Left have also been gaslighting America for years. It’s now time to say the obvious thing: there was a woke movement, it had a program, they were in it, and it lost. Take it slowly if you need to. 

I know how hard some words are to get out.

Given this, should we be forgiving of people who are caught cutting corners? The short answer is also a very online one: yes, but only if the culprit is on your political team. In line with this, recent revelations that political commentator and Reform Party activist Matt Goodwin appears to have used AI to write sections of in his latest book, Suicide of a Nation, may land differently depending on whether or not you otherwise enjoy Goodwin’s work.

It’s a safe bet that his haters will seek to weaponize the cruel but catchy moniker “MattGPT” to discredit everything Goodwin has ever touched. The academic-turned-pundit has since been spotted hiding comments pointing to evidence of ChatGPT in his book’s endnotes, which doesn’t help matters. But though this will all be music to the ears of those who already thought Goodwin a propagandist, race-baiter, or just “the Alan Partridge of the far-Right”, I doubt any of it will make the slightest bit of difference to his audience.

Goodwin himself has stated that the book is intended not for academics or wonks but a general audience, with the explicitly political aim of shifting the Overton window. But the likelier audience is less those open to persuasion, than those already on Team Goodwin. For Suicide of a Nation isn’t a book in the conventional sense, so much as a tranche of internet, lightly edited into book form. Even if the form implicitly lays claim to the more academic connotations conventionally associated with book-length writing, the people for whom it is compiled will read it as something more like a book-length social media post for an established digital fandom.

In this context, legacy book-type concerns such as exact quotation or factual precision are secondary to more net-native attributes, such as emotional intensity and a sense of epistemic validation. But lest you imagine for a moment that I’m suggesting there’s something unique to the Right about this, think again: whether we like it or not, this is the new normal.

The transition happened gradually, then all at once. It began to gather speed with the arrival of the first iPhone, which put on-the-go scrolling in millions of pockets, and scored its first political scalps with the 2016 election of Donald Trump — and, the same fateful summer, the Brexit victory that catapulted Goodwin to prominence. But full immersion in internet discourse was still optional until Covid forced everyone online. Since then, the world has gone wildly, iridescently hyperreal. In tandem, it’s become clear that a cluster of phenomena that used to be decried as “woke”, and treated as a distinctively Left-wing pathology, only seemed that way due to an accident of history.

Back in the 2010s, aspects of so-called “wokeness”, such as nuance-free sloganeering, binary friend/enemy thinking, tribalism, and purity spirals seemed to happen overwhelmingly on the Left. But really this is just what political debate looks like, under internet conditions — and the Left embraced internet culture before the Right.

And now that everyone is extremely online, everyone does politics in the “woke” style. By this I mean every topic is hyper-partisan, reduced to viral slogans and simplistic binaries, policed via social swarms and scapegoating, and utterly sure of its own epistemological foundations and moral rectitude. (If you don’t believe me, pick a fight with MAGA about Iran.)

Why? It’s a byproduct both of the way digital platforms shape their messages, and also of the way they shape us. The sheer volume of internet content incentivizes simplicity, brevity, and high emotion. The e-Right culture of “shitposting” is one variant on this theme, but you might also ragepost, or thirstpost — or doompost. You’ll get much more traction for posting a message that’s deliberately provocative or reductive, or otherwise bad-on-purpose to make people click.

The volume invites users to build up a picture of some issue or other by scanning for patterns across multiple pieces of short-form, highly emotive content. Whether it’s men dressed as women, genocide in Gaza, mass immigration or whatever, the patterns become governing signs for someone’s reality. In turn, high emotion and a generally agonistic tone encourages tribalism and moral certainty.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, this fries people’s ability to concentrate or follow long-form arguments. Nicholas Carr was already warning about it in 2010: in The Shallows, he describes his own faltering concentration as he shifted from reading long-form books to lateral, associative, multi-tab screen content, alongside studies that show how internet reading does reshape our patterns of thought along less analytic lines. Given this, perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised if, as the FT suggested last year, we may be past “peak brain power”.

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Donald Trump’s post-liberal war

By Mary Harrington

Put this together and you have a world where creators are incentivized to make their content simpler, more emotional, and more attention-grabbing, even as the medium itself reshapes our minds in less analytic directions. This is all consolidated by algorithmic curation, intentionally monetized. For many it’s now the principal medium for social life.

The Left entered this mode of media consumption at scale before the Right, and the result was the 2010s “Great Awokening”. But the Right has now well and truly caught up: witness the convergence of activism, entertainment, and (maybe) crypto hustling that animates the Tommy Robinson fandom.

This is the context in which Suicide of a Nation should be read. It’s not meant to impress people who still get their ideas from long-form books. It’s meant to collate and summarize the online patterns noticed and amplified by primarily digital readers of UK anti-immigration content.

I mean this as a qualified defense of Goodwin’s book, on its own terms if not on conventionally bookish ones. On these older terms, conventional within mainstream print publishing, citing AI-generated fake “quotes” is obviously inexcusable. But there exists a large and avid audience for whom accuracy is by the by — and that can, on occasion, tempt academics into more heated and sometimes dubiously fact-checked territory.

This evidences a further affordance of digital communications: the power of audience capture. This simple but potent feedback-loop, whereby a creator gets approbation and money for a certain kind of content, powerfully incentivizes both making more of that content, and making it by degrees more extreme and catchy. More Trump-hating, more migration-hating, more whatever. As for the content itself, precision is less important than pattern recognition, emotion, and vibes.

The American commentator Heather Cox Richardson, for example, began as an historian but has mutated by degrees into an avatar of pure Trump loathing, and now regales her 2.9 million Substack subscribers with daily doomposts about America’s slide into fascism. By the standards of such tribal devotees, the Right-wing partisan response to the allegations against Goodwin should be an indifferent shrug. Who cares, as long as it’s directionally correct? In any case, under digital conditions, the footnotes are mostly there for decoration. Everyone who pays for your content is already in the tribe, and has already seen the memes.

Partisanship evidently hasn’t triumphed everywhere on the Left. Recently, Prospect magazine pulled an article criticizing me and another female writer, after the author, James Bloodworth, used an AI-hallucinated “quote”. By the same standards, should Goodwin fail to supply evidence of his reportedly AI-generated quotes, those on the Right who value truth would be justified in joining those on the Left who already treat his output with suspicion.

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Neom’s fate awaits us all

By Mary Harrington

But arguably, what Respectable Book People think of Suicide of a Nation doesn’t matter much anyway. This is not a book written for academics, or intellectuals, or even really the kind of laypeople who check end-notes. It’s a fan event: more akin to a sing-along performance of The Rocky Horror Show than an argument. And its rhetorical end is less persuasion than epistemic reassurance: you’re not mad, other people see this pattern too.

Leaning into this kind of tribal filter-bubble, via the sweet embrace of audience capture, is good for business. Though still a minnow compared with Richardson’s 2.9 million readers, Goodwin has over 90,000 subscribers to his Substack newsletter. Even if the conversion rate to paid subscriptions is low (and there’s no reason it would be), an audience of that size will deliver a tidy monthly revenue. Similarly, at the time of writing Suicide of a Nation is in the Amazon top 10, meaning it’s selling hundreds or even thousands of copies a day. Goodwin self-published, meaning he will pocket 60-70% of the cover price for each copy sold. Do the sums. For that money, who cares what Politics Joe, or even Ben Sixsmith, makes of your argument?

But we should take note of what has been disregarded: implicit adherence to the legacy belief that the best vector for persuasion is facts and logic. If the chaotic new world of internet discourse tells us anything, it’s that this was only ever ambivalently true. Now, it’s demonstrably false. What persuades people now, and perhaps always did, is lots of short-form, emotive, relatable, story-based snippets of information, that coalesce over time into a coherent picture of “how things actually are”. Do that persistently enough, then reinforce with longer-form versions of the same reality-picture and a sense of belonging, and you’ll have a loyal movement on your hands — and, better still, they’ll buy anything you sell.

In this sense, Suicide of a Nation represents the apex, or perhaps nadir, of an intensely contemporary career arc: one that started in academia, spun out into polling and think-tankery, parlayed those achievements into an increasingly frenetic Substack, then added a grueling schedule of political campaigning and, somehow, also a new book. I can’t have been the only person wondering how Goodwin managed to fit it all in. The answer, apparently, is that he didn’t.

But you’d better get used to it. To the language, the emotion, the Manichaeism, and the cavalier attitude to footnotes. This is what political discourse looks like now. Anyone who is serious about political activism, or indeed propaganda, is already operating in this register — or if not, soon will be. The rest of us are just paddling like mad, to keep our noses above the slopaganda. And as for how any of it maps onto real-world policy, that’s anybody’s guess.

When these episodes of mass outrage get going, no nuance, reasonable objection or difference of opinion is allowed. And for Americans in the educated classes — those who, in a better world, would have the social and professional power to put on the brakes — the environment becomes coercive. If you’re a nurse in New York City, for example, this week a union strike-briefing turned into a harangue by the Democratic Socialists of America on how to resist ICE, with no regard for the participants’ politics.

It’s a dismaying turn of events: woke seemed to be on the wane from 2022 to 2025, but it has come roaring back in 2026 in a new form that’s both purified and more vicious. The Leftist freedom-fighters have cut out the middle man of the oppressed subject — African Americans in 2020 — and taken center stage themselves. It’s the natural evolution of the #resistance. 

To be clear about context of the new wave of protests: Americans have democratically elected a president who promised to close the border and deport illegal migrants, especially those with criminal histories. It was a popular plank of his platform. America also has laws regarding immigration, and a democratic process for changing those laws. At no point, even when Democrats have been in control, has wholesale naturalization of illegal immigrants or a legal open border been a political possibility. 

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Why you should eat the RFK diet

By Valerie Stivers

Thus, whether we like the tactics being deployed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol, the basic premise of the agency’s activities reflects the will of the people in a democracy. For Leftists to subvert it through direct action against law enforcement is illegal and anti-democratic. It is true that illegal migrants have died or been killed in government custody, and also true that bad things have happened to the people protesting arrests of such people — and these things are reason for criticism or compassion or distress. No one wants people to be killed with impunity in government custody, or a world in which law enforcement regularly guns down citizens for being really fucking annoying. And there is a single correct way to read the videos of the Renee Good and Alex Pretti killings — neither one appeared to be posing a danger to law enforcement at the time they were shot — but there’s no single correct view of the meaning of these events. Attempts to override democracy or the rule of law in their name are controversial at the very least.  

Yet at the moment, you’d be forgiven for thinking otherwise. Because, just as in 2020, for an influential subset of the professional classes, it has become mandatory to signal outrage. 

In this sense, the anti-ICE protests currently roiling America look and feel very much like their Black Lives Matter predecessors. This is true in the way anti-ICE hysteria is shutting down the discourse: if you support the immigration authorities anywhere near Left-wing spaces, you will be abused at a pitch that feels newly foul. UnHerd’s own Sohrab Ahmari, for example, was called out online by a prominent labor organizer merely for talking about something other than Pretti’s death. Kat Rosenfeld, an UnHerd contributor, was called a “shitty coward” for a thoughtful Substack exploring Alex Honnald, Alex Pretti and the concept of “plot armor.” And the congregants at Catholic church service led by a Jesuit (more Left-wing than you’d think) that I attended in Brooklyn on Saturday, were told that those who failed to protest could not be expected to be admitted to the Kingdom of Heaven. 

Anti-ICE also resembles 2020 in terms of its fundamental delusion: protesters are unaware that their activities benefit them more than the people whose rights they’re supposedly championing. (Defunding the police work didn’t work out too well for low-income black communities, recall.) But this time around, the movement has burned away the elements that made its previous iterations subject to mockery and reemerged purified and perhaps stronger. Gone are the fake compassion (black lives matter); the abstruse theory (what is a woman?); the dopey therapeutic culture (training to become un-racist). Even the focus on identity is gone — notice that no one is really talking about the own-voices of the migrants, or new forms of speaking in order to show them the greatest respect, or how to actually solve their problems in a systematic, policy-oriented way. Woke 2.0 is just fighting to keep them here, undocumented. 

Put another way: woke 2.0 is eschewing both theory and institutional takeover for militant action and sheer rage, in a way that feels individual, atomized, and newly dangerous. Protesters physically interfere with law enforcement, spit and kick cars, track ICE vehicles and those belonging to conservative journalists, get phone numbers, doxx people, and send death threats. The threats are now going to phones and homes instead of social-media accounts. 

No longer “mostly peaceful,” protesters smash hotel windows without apology or disclaimer. And the internet is flooded with videos of random private citizens making grotesque threats. A Florida nurse wearing a T-shirt with a rainbow on it that says “Trump sucks” announced that “as a labor and delivery nurse, it gives me great pleasure” to wish Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary,  “a fourth degree tear” during her upcoming labor. A Virginia nurse suggests that young women go on dates with ICE agents in order to put Ex-Lax in their drinks. In other videos, she suggests carrying needle syringes in order to inject the agents with a temporary paralysis drug or filling water guns with poison ivy and aiming for their faces and hands. Baby-faced young girls in rainbow hair clips give up saying anything coherent at all, instead yelling, “Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you.”

In this newly badass version of the #Resistance, every protester is the star of her own movie. And while the turn to sheer rage is no doubt sincere, it also represents an evacuation of content — the political cause, the political solution — and allows woke-ism to become the most perfect version of what it always in some senses was: a vehicle for the elite conception of self, and a very convenient one. If you have any doubt that it’s become all about professionals, look at who the movement’s martyrs are: not any one of the 32 people who’ve reportedly died in the custody of ICE custody last year, but Renee Good and Alex Pretti. 

And the more it’s about the protesters, the more they think they should get their own way. This is not the America we want. Indeed. And they’re ready to take it by force, and feel justified in doing so. Nevermind that, as in the George Floyd protests before this, there is no goal that will help the victimized population beyond “stop enforcing the law.” 

This, of course, was always the problem with woke, and one of the reasons why it drove its rational opponents so mad. The sociologist Musa al-Gharbi, writing in his landmark 2024 survey, We Have Never Been Woke, contended that while a loose, historical meaning of woke was “an awareness of social injustice, and a commitment to rectifying it,” the movement’s claims to be operating on behalf of the poor, vulnerable, and marginalized have long been co-opted as a way for the elite to rationalize inequality.

In Al-Gharbi’s telling, this has always been delusional. The urban-protester demographic is the middle and upper-middle class. Anyone who resides in a household that makes more than $150,000 a year, he writes, is part of America’s top quintile, which controls a stunning 71% of the country’s wealth. This group benefits disproportionately from inequality; this group is the one that hoovers up services performed by mostly black and brown low-wage workers, who are often lacking legal authorization to work and thus vulnerable to hyper-exploitation. The top quintile’s attempts to blame “the 1%” are scapegoating and an attempt to deny its own guilt. “When people are consumed by anger over a problem, but the real object of their anger is untouchable (or is in fact themselves), folks have long tried to collectively focus their rage on some other target instead,” Al-Gharbi writes. He adds that “progressive politics, in particular, seems to increasingly serve as a means through which highly educated, relatively affluent whites find purpose, transcendence and community in their lives.”

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The ‘woke Right’ is nothing new

By Sohrab Ahmari

Al-Gharbi’s book is devastating in its depiction of the ways in which the wave of wokeness that began around the 2010s and peaked in 2020 made no impact on the “bread-and-butter” crises that afflict the poor, vulnerable and disadvantaged. Inequality continued to rise, and is rising still. Despite what people believe is a sincere commitment to social justice, he writes, their devotion to it comes primarily in the form of symbolic activity that takes the place of “sustainable, viable coalitions that could achieve concrete change,” while also mystifying the problem and making change harder to accomplish.    

In other words, all the protesting, Signal chats, cruising in your vehicle making videos, delivering casseroles, walking out of work, getting pepper-sprayed, and engaging in scuffles with authority won’t, fundamentally, allow the supposed beneficiaries of the activism to live equally as Americans. To do that would require real sacrifice and compromise, things that our increasingly violent political polarization, and demonization of each other, make ever less likely to come about. On the uglier side, the casseroles and scuffles will continue to allow migrants to be low-paid service workers for the people helping them stay. 

The new wrinkle of anti-woke, which gained real power in America mainly after Al-Gharbi’s analysis appeared, serves the same cultural function as woke, he writes. Once again, it’s a form of jockeying for power amongst an elite that has no intention of real reform. Following this logic, the deportation theater may be popular with Trump’s low income voters, but it’s also unlikely to change the conditions of their lives. 

The battle between ICE and anti-ICE, thus, even as it turns real, is still mainly symbolic. What’s needed in response is not more theater, or an ever more enraged doubling-down, but an attempt to see and inhabit a shared reality, and find a compromise. Some tactics are too much. Some humans are illegal (until we legally decide otherwise). If we don’t, we all may look back some day at woke 1.0 — the dumb yard signs, the vapid DEI PowerPoints, the unserious death threats — with a kind of rainbow-hued nostalgia. 

He has “reposted” or approvingly quoted posts claiming that South Africa is our future; that the United States is at risk of turning into a “Global Favela”; that the Left is “import[ing] a new voting block from the Third World”; that “all other [racial] groups show extreme in-group preference and particular hatred for white people”; and that New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani seeks to “eradicate white people”. 

The agents of collapse are unassimilated immigrants, aggrieved black Americans, and progressive elites who have inflamed resentment through years of identity-based moralizing. The implied endpoint is civil conflict, for which he wants whites to prepare themselves.

These claims would be alarming coming from anyone. From a man of Musk’s unparalleled resources and influence, they warrant loud and unambiguous rejection. The hundreds of thousands of likes and millions of impressions garnered by Musk’s posts suggest that his views are shared by more than a few others. Despite flashpoints over immigration and high crime in a handful of American cities, the conditions in the country are generally peaceful. The streets are generally safe. The crime spike we endured in 2020 has fallen off. So why has “the race war is coming” proven to be such an attractive rallying cry?

I thought I had an answer. In my inaugural essay for UnHerd, I offered a short genealogy of our present political moment. I argued that President Trump’s rise had been abetted by a backlash against progressive overreach, especially on matters of race, and I expressed concern that the reactionary energy unleashed in 2016 — and again more intensely in 2024 — would culminate in a repudiation not only of racial politics, but of blackness itself. 

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But the “backlash” frame, while not inaccurate, isn’t what is most important about the present moment. It captures the direction of political motion but misstates its mechanism.

Backlash suggests something like a political analogue to Newton’s third law of motion: progressive excess produces an equal and opposite reaction; grievance is answered by grievance; and if the reaction takes on a racial coloration, that is only because the initial action was racially tinged. In this view, Trump’s return appears as a kind of inevitability — an elastic band released after being stretched too far. But this way of thinking drains politics of agency. Human beings are not rubber bands. They choose, within limits, how to respond to strain. Those limits are shaped by politicians, institutions, and the culture at large. These organize raw dissatisfaction into strains of discourse, thought, and belief, with varying degrees of coherence. 

The Right’s response to progressive identity politics has not chiefly taken the form of repudiation. It has taken the form of adoption. A focus on racial identity remains the coin of the political realm. What we are witnessing is not merely a backlash. It’s a convergence.

For years, identity politics was treated — rightly — as a pathology of the Left. It displaced the individual as the bearer of moral and political claims, and instead proposed group membership, defined by race, gender, and sexuality, o as the proper grounds for justice. Classical liberals warned that once politics was organized around groups rather than persons, the state would become an arena of zero-sum contestation among identities, with predictable consequences for social cohesion. During the “racial reckoning” of the late 2010s and early 2020s, we saw enough of that dynamic to last a lifetime.

Yet in the months since Trump’s return to office, it has become clear that identity politics has not been defeated. It has just been rebranded. An insurgent movement on the Right has concluded,  quietly but unmistakably, that identity politics is not a moral error so much as it is a powerful political technology. As a democratic ideal, it is corrosive. As a tool of mobilization, it is extraordinarily effective. What I had previously described as backlash (against overly aggressive anti-racism) now looks more like a realization: the right has decided it can no longer afford to leave the weapon of race-identitarian politics unused. 

Enter Elon Musk. 

Before dismissing the Tesla and SpaceX boss’s vision of open racial conflict outright, it is worth steel-manning it — internet parlance for presenting the strongest version of an argument before proceeding to contest it. Musk’s framing resonates because it speaks to genuine disorder that many associate with race. Crime has risen in some cities. Immigration has strained administrative capacity. Progressive elites have often appeared more interested in moral signaling than in competent governance. Many citizens reasonably feel that institutions no longer enforce rules impartially or tell the truth about trade-offs. Against such a backdrop, warnings about social fragmentation do not sound like hysteria. They sound like realism.

But realism requires discrimination and discernment. Musk’s diagnosis leaps from institutional failure to demographic destiny, from policy breakdown to fighting in the streets. That leap is not evidence-based; it is interpretive. And it is here that thoughtful analysis must reassert itself.

As I see it, the imagery Musk deploys draws on two sources: conspiratorial narratives about demographic “replacement”, and his own reading of civilizational failures in post-apartheid South Africa. In one widely circulated episode, Musk endorsed a post claiming that if white men were to become a demographic minority, they would face slaughter, and that only white solidarity could ensure survival. The meaning was unmistakable. This was not a critique of identity politics; it was a remarkably disquieting embrace of it.

Not long ago, open calls for white solidarity from a figure of Musk’s stature would have been politically radioactive. Today, they are met with a mix of alarm, rationalization, and — in some quarters — approval. That shift itself is the real story. Musk did not invent white identity politics. But he legitimizes them. His importance lies less in the sincerity of his beliefs than in his role as a permission-granting figure. When ideas migrate from fringe spaces into elite discourse, they change character. Errors that might remain contained at the margins become dangerous when voiced by powerful actors. Such is the case here.

Musk’s central error is conceptual. He is importing a post-colonial model of race politics into Western multicultural societies where it does not apply. Post-apartheid South Africa was not renegotiating the status of racial groups within a stable constitutional order; it was adjudicating the inheritance of the state itself. Questions of sovereignty, land ownership, elite replacement, and historical authority were all in play at once, in a context of racial domination and dispossession and a setting in which institutions were weak and legitimacy was racially compromised. Under those conditions, identity became destiny — because in the end, there was no other dimension along which to mediate political conflict.

Today’s pluralistic Western societies are not in that position. However bitter, their race-related conflicts take place within settled, universalist constitutional frameworks with entrenched property regimes and comparatively high-capacity institutions. Their arguments are about distribution, recognition, and status, not the wholesale transfer of political power. To read these conflicts as incipient post-colonial struggles is simply a grave category mistake.

What makes this mistake so consequential is that it is structurally enabled by a political culture already organized around identity. Once politics is understood — on Left and Right alike — as a contest among morally freighted groups, the temptation to treat race as a civilizational variable becomes overwhelming. In that context, Musk’s rhetoric is weirdly logical. It mirrors the structure of progressive racialism while reversing its moral valence. History still marks groups, in this view. Power still reproduces itself through institutions. Racially disparate outcomes still function as moral evidence. Only the identities of the winners and the losers, the offenders and the victims, have changed.

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Whether Musk genuinely believes in white cultural superiority is beside the point. What matters is the effect on the discourse. Once race is treated as destiny, society reorganizes itself accordingly. Institutions, insofar as they operate according to the disavowed pluralist precepts, fade into irrelevance. Demography becomes fate. Politics become a struggle for survival among groups. Race war seems to be imminent.

Institutional realism provides the best alternative to this logic. A serious response to rising crime asks whether policing, prosecution, and punishment are functioning coherently. A serious response to immigration asks whether borders are enforced, asylum systems administered, and newcomers integrated through work and civic obligation. A serious response to inequality asks how education, housing, and labor markets actually operate, rather than how they are symbolically narrated. These are institutional questions. They admit of failure, reform, and learning. They do not require racial metaphysics or “civilization-or-barbarism” histrionics.

This is also, in part, a story about the evolution of the American Right. Identitarian, white racial paranoia on the Right has filled the vacuum created by an earlier ideological unraveling. After World War II, the so-called fusionism associated with William F. Buckley and his National Review magazine attempted to unite three distinct, occasionally contradictory strands of American conservatism into a single governing philosophy: economic libertarianism, a hawkish foreign-policy , and moral traditionalism. The viability of that alliance depended on general conditions of peace and prosperity in the United States, and a kind of gentleman’s agreement that adherents of each strand would mostly overlook their disputes with the others. They were stronger together than apart. And it helped that they were together in the trenches against a common foe: Soviet Communism and those who sought to expand its influence in the West.

But then Communism collapsed; the shared enemy went away. The forever wars and financial crises of the millennium’s early decades broke the accord, with neoconservatism discredited abroad, libertarianism discredited at home, and religious traditionalists left to pursue their own ends. The rise of Trumpian populism marked the definitive end of the fusionist project. But Trump’s distaste for consistency created an ideological vacuum, and a need for a coherent program to organize the resentments he brought to the surface. 

It would now appear that identity politics rushed in to occupy the space, because it is emotionally energizing and cognitively cheap. It offers a mirage of moral clarity without institutional analysis, and solidarity without responsibility. Racial fatalism on the Right thus functions as a substitute for a serious account of institutional decay.

The deeper tragedy is not that identity politics has migrated from Left to Right, but that it has become the shared grammar of political conflict itself. We now argue loudly about which identities deserve protection or priority, but we no longer argue about whether identity is the proper battlefield. That tacit agreement is more troubling than any particular tweet. For once that terrain is fixed, escalation becomes inevitable.

Liberalism’s achievement was never the denial of any group’s level of historical suffering, but discipline in managing the present. It sought to thin out identity enough that a sense of shared citizenship could survive our grievances and differences. That achievement is fragile, and it is now under open assault — from a Left that moralizes identity and a Right that weaponizes it.

If the most influential figures in our public life continue to teach citizens to read pluralistic democracies through the lens of post-colonial struggle, the consequences will not be confined to rhetoric. Today’s permission structures become tomorrow’s political programs. Ideas that begin as tweets harden into expectations. Right-wing advocates of identity politics promise a restoration of order. What they will more likely produce is the acceleration of distrust and a descent into chaos.

The New York Times defined “Dark Woke” last year as “an attempt to step outside the bounds of the political correctness that Republicans have accused Democrats of establishing.” In the Gray Lady’s telling, it “requires being crass but discerning, rude but only to a point.” Examples range from Gavin Newsom’s meme warfare to Jasmine Crockett’s alliterative insults (“Will a vindictive, vile villain violate voters’ vision?”). GQ, meanwhile, observed that the objective is to “subvert the qualities that people think made wokeness cringe — the virtue policing, the polite ‘when they go low, we go high’ posturing — and go Joker mode to make Democrats cool again.” 

These aren’t mutually exclusive definitions. Dark Woke is a meme with amorphous contours. Sometimes, it’s merely rhetorical; other times, it offers serious strategies to challenge MAGA with a dose of its own post-liberal medicine. Either way, it’s rooted in the same demand posed by grassroots Democrats to the party establishment: throw some punches, or we’ll primary you into oblivion.

Since Good’s demise on the icy streets of Minnesota, videos of enraged anti-ICE protesters are proliferating on social media. In one clip posted by the Fox News reporter Matt Finn, an ICE agent goes up to two shiny SUVs blocking traffic, warning the women in them not to “make a bad decision.” The women, both of whom appear to be Millennials, aren’t intimidated. “I think I’m making exactly the right decision,” one says. When the officer signs off with, “Thank you, have a good day,” she replies with a grin: “I hope you have a terrible day.” In another viral clip, a gaggle of whistling women surround a reporter; one gleefully taunts him as another screams, “Nazi!” 

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Or there’s the TikTok video circulating on X, in which a blue-eyed, salt-and-pepper-haired woman who describes herself as a 42-year-old single mother and “relationship anarchist” slips sexily into her Carhartt overalls while spelling out a “dating-profile request” for a man whom she can “call, right now, and say, ‘Hey, get in the passenger seat and let’s go fuck some shit up.’” 

These street soldiers aren’t the antifa types torching cars or the rioters looting stores. They are, like Good, Millennial moms in the Midwest. They’re people from normal quarters of American life who are spending time during the workday putting their bodies and vehicles on the line to protect illegal migrants, some with serious criminal records, from deportation. And they see ICE as a neo-Gestapo that calls for more than rhetorical condemnation.

The Washington Post this week wrote about the growing activist coalition: “As the Trump administration deploys thousands of federal immigration officers and agents around the nation, a loose-knit but increasingly organized network of activists is tracking their whereabouts and documenting arrests.” With whistles and messaging apps, these ICE “watchers” or “verifiers” are often trained by nonprofit groups, according to the Post article, which adds that they are “dispatched to spot arrests, record interactions, and, where possible, get contact information for family members of those arrested.”

This partly explains why Dark Woke is growing amid President Trump’s immigration crackdown. Tracking ICE supplies a sense of agency and community at a time when people feel powerless and atomized. It is also a clue as to why there are so many upscale white women in the ranks of the Dark Woke army. 

Last fall, the GOP pollster Alex Tarascio “asked likely voters if they agreed that it’s acceptable to go beyond peaceful protest in response to ICE enforcement, even if it breaks the law,” as he put it in an X post. “Overall, just 24% of Americans agreed. But among white women, 18 to 44, who identify as liberal? The number shoots up to 61%.” Half that number, only 30%, disagreed. Among all liberals, the number was nearly 20 points lower, at 42%. And among all likely voters, the number dropped to less than a quarter of the population.  

Why are white liberal women especially eager for battle? People like Good are motivated by a sincere commitment to social justice, to be sure. Good was so moved by the prospect of ICE deportations in Minneapolis that she joined a midday protest after dropping off her 6-year-old at school.

However, there is also no shortage of research in recent years showing that young women on the Left struggle more with mental health than do other cohorts. In 2024, Times columnist Thomas Edsall dug into studies on the “happiness gap,” noting “one of the findings emerging from this research is that the decline in happiness and in a sense of agency is concentrated among those on the Left who stress matters of identity, social justice and the oppression of marginalized groups.”

In 2025, a study published by Zach Goldberg at the Right-of-center Manhattan Institute found that “females and liberals tend to rank higher than their male and conservative counterparts in certain personality traits that are associated with greater susceptibility to internalizing symptoms. These symptoms are characterized by inwardly directed emotional distress, including feelings of sadness, worry, and fear, which can manifest as conditions like depression and anxiety.” 

Research from the Institute for Family Studies has likewise found that “when we control for education, race, age, and income, …  liberal women ages 18 to 40 are over three times as likely to report frequent feelings of loneliness compared to their conservative peers.”  

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Renee Good, of course, was married and — at least in the tragic record of her final minutes — cheerful in demeanor. Unhappiness and lapsed agency may or may not explain her personal decision. However, it’s fair to speculate that rational disapproval of Trump is not the only explanation for why more and more young progressive women are training as “ICE watchers” and joining physical protests. Tellingly, the Institute for Family Studies found that “a large part of [the] loneliness gap comes from different rates of marriage and church attendance. … Adding controls for marriage and church attendance, ideology becomes less important, with marriage being the strongest predictor of feeling less lonely.”

Feelings of misery and powerlessness, especially acute on the young female Left, will ensure Dark Woke lingers, and reemerges as opportunities for catharsis present themselves. These opportunities will be especially compelling when they offer a perceived sense of community, or of self-sacrifice for the common good. 

Satisfaction, though, will prove illusory, because the source of the young women’s pain is not really injustice, except in the sense that a grave injustice has been committed against happiness in the destruction of our communities, social bonds, and overall humanity.

Severance is a classic “mystery-box” show. Prototyped by J. J. Abrams’s Lost (2004-2010), mystery-box narratives offer audiences a series of puzzles, with the promise that they will all be satisfyingly resolved eventually. In real life, there are no writers scripting our reality (so far as we know). However, the paranoid forms of political explanation taking shape on both the contemporary Left and Right share an affinity with the speculative uncertainties of the mystery-box show. 

Conspiracy theories (“fan theories” about reality) abound, and not just on the fringes of the far Right and far Left, but among the sensible denizens of the establishment center as well. The spread of a conspiratorial worldview reflects our current crisis of authority. But more than this, it distorts our understanding of what is really happening. We find ourselves searching for hidden hands and shadowy conspirators rather than facing our problems.  

In Britain since Brexit, neither the Conservatives nor Labour seem to have relished being in power. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak sometimes seemed as if he were trying to pass himself off as the leader of the opposition, promising to “put things right” after the next election, rather than when he lived at No. 10 Downing Street. 

Since Labour came into power in August 2024, both it and large portions of the British media have often behaved as though Reform UK (with five MPs) and the far Right (with no MPs) were the actual government, and Labour only the beleaguered opposition. As with The Board’s speaker in Severance, it is by no means clear where the voice of authority in Britain is actually radiating from. The suspicion that political power always lies somewhere else, and that whoever purportedly possesses it is actually power-less, provides perfect conditions for conspiratorial thinking.

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In the United States, meanwhile, the sense that power itself is out of power is a mainstay of political discourse. The Trumpians and the online-Right more generally are fond of speaking of an amorphous “they” directing the course of events. “They” don’t want you to know. “They” want you to live in fear. A permanent elite called “the regime” — a Left-leaning cabal comprising elements from the media, Big Tech, education, the NGOs, and “woke capital” — really controls things. The background assumption behind such rhetoric is that although it controls all three branches of government, the Trump GOP is, in fact, still at the mercy of malign and hidden forces.  

Like the world of Severance, our political imagination appears to be fundamentally adrift in time. Many on the Left have convinced themselves that their Right-wing political opponents are literal throwbacks to 20th-century fascism. Conservatives have succumbed to the same tendency: for them, the political opposition are really communists. For the Right, corporate DEI, “woke” capitalism, the use of critical race theory in schools, the increased emphasis on heritage justice issues, and the new zeal in progressive circles for open borders — all have become signs of old-school Marxism. 

Conservative commentators seem unable, however, to explain why supposedly extreme Left ideas have been so successful at capturing what were until recently slow-moving, conservative institutions and corporations. So they offer us spy-novel scenarios in lieu of political explanation. Conservative writers such as Christopher Rufo describe a multi-decade “long march through the institutions” by a global cadre of far-Left conspirators, who are now supposedly poised to bring about the revolution. As with the “Right-wingers are really fascists” thesis, there is a sense of time-slippage at work in these narratives. We are being invaded by the forces of a nightmare past. Unmask your opponents, and the eternal enemy will stand revealed.

A more plausible explanation can be found in the writings of the Left-conservative French philosopher Jean-Claude Michéa. Rather than a battle between communism and fascism, Michéa sees a struggle taking place within contemporary capitalism. Two forms of contemporary liberalism — economic liberalism (or neoliberalism) and cultural liberalism (progressivism or so-called “wokism”) — are working together and reinforcing each other, in order to enable global capitalism to function. Indeed, according to Michéa, it is “dual liberalism” that typifies the current establishment.

Michéa, in his 2007 book, The Realm of Lesser Evil, describes contemporary neoliberalism as a “vast, humanity-crushing machine” that is busily “dissolving the extraordinary diversity of existing cultures into the icy abstraction of the global market.” Neoliberalism dictates that there must be unrestricted flows of capital, goods, and labor across borders. To achieve this, it redefines the world in terms of transparency and metrics. During the ’80s and ’90s, under the New Public Management or so-called audit culture, public sector bodies were compelled to recant their previous objectives and justify their existence in value-for-money terms. The long-term result has been a kind of capitalist version of the Leninist permanent revolution. When applied to institutions, it produces a new normal of continual restructuring. All existing organizational structures are turned upside-down and inside-out. Whatever was there before must be reformed. All sense of prior mission and long-term stability is lost.

Rather than resisting neoliberalism, Michéa observes, many progressive elites have allowed themselves to be recruited into its service. Whereas socialist politics was once concerned with protecting the interests of working people and safeguarding national populations, the progressive or neoliberal Left is hostile to the nation-state and any sense of continuity with the values of past cultures. Elites have thus created a highly selective, pared-down version of Left-wing ideology that is compatible with the needs of global business, and manifests itself as the current iteration of “woke” cultural liberalism. 

This new liberalism embraces the principles of openness and boundary-breaking, and focuses on overcoming what it identifies as society’s dominant norms. In doing so, it claims to free people from the oppressive structures that restrict human potential. In reality, it is attacking the last vestiges of the pre-capitalist traditions that once made societies distinctive entities. Unburdened by past values or cultures, nations can be redeveloped in the standardized terms of the new global capitalism. 

Schools and universities have accordingly aligned their teaching curricula with environmental sustainability goals and “global challenges,” and now go about the business of producing outward-facing global citizens, rather than passing on traditions. Heritage institutions, such as museums and art galleries, have sought to make themselves relevant to the current moment by critiquing their own former missions, turning their collections into exercises in moral repentance rather than commemoration. Dissent has become compulsory, so long as that dissent is aimed at the status quo. Of course, what this means is that our actual dominant norm is the compulsion to attack dominant norms — which conveniently fulfills the larger neoliberal project of dissolving all prior structures. 

Cultural liberalism and economic liberalism are not opposing forces. Rather, they work together to further the interests of the current system. Once we view the contemporary workplace through the lens of this dual liberalism, much that might have otherwise seemed puzzling begins to make sense. Corporate DEI and environmental and social governance frameworks are not, as many on the Right would have it, forms of “Marxist” indoctrination that have somehow captured the corporate sphere. Instead, they enable the extension of managerial logic into new domains, both legitimizing private enterprise and providing new opportunities for growth. 

The “woke” capitalism that emerged in many corporate workplaces during the 2010s was a particularly evocative example of dual liberalism at work. Corporate managers once defended the value of the work they did in the old “audit culture” terms of efficiency and value for money. After the 2008 financial crash, however, capitalism sorely needed a new justification. The restatement of corporate missions in moral terms, as well as the new corporate tolerance for workplace activism, reassured progressive employees that their workplaces and professions had meaningful responses to contemporary crises. And management’s newly compelling moral framework silenced dissent. How could anyone defy managerial decision-making when management had become fluent speakers in the languages of social inclusion and environmental justice?

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By the end of the 2013 film The Congress, much of humanity has mentally migrated into a simulated world, leaving their withering bodies (and the physical world itself) neglected and abandoned. Our current tendency to operate within a dreamland of historical analogies is strikingly similar. The ubiquitous accusations that one’s political opponents are really fascists or communists are an easy means to win an argument — but also to evade reality. 

In truth, dual liberalism creates problems for both Right and Left. As Michéa observes in The Realm of Lesser Evil, Right-wing conservatives champion free markets and then purport to be shocked by the world those markets create. Their focus on communism allows them to not follow economic incentives to their logical conclusions. And it also allows them to blind themselves to the fact that woke is simply what neoliberal capitalism had evolved to look like in the late teens. Right-wing populism of the sort offered by Reform UK has no intention of breaking with economic liberalism, and thus no answer to economic problems. Instead, the party proposes reviving exhausted Thatcherite economic policies. There is no recognition that these policies have already been tried and that they led here, to this precise — and problematic — moment.

The realities of dual liberalism are just as disquieting for the Left. While progressive rhetoric might resist marketization, progressive principles — choice, openness, autonomy — inevitably create spaces and opportunities for the free market to exploit. Relaxed border policies and the low-wage precarity of the gig and outsourcing economies are inextricably linked, as much as moral defenders of the former might decry the social consequences of the latter. Whereas anti-globalization was until recently a mainstream position on the Left, suggestions that we should reimpose restrictions on cross-border labor flows are now increasingly labeled “fascist” or “far Right.” The influence of the economic strand within dual liberalism — a deep commitment to flows and radical progressive change for its own sake — has rendered the contemporary Left strikingly different from previous Left-wing traditions.

One of the complaints from viewers of mystery-box shows is that their final reveals are usually disappointing. The buzz surrounding online fan theories conceals the less-appealing reality that the writers don’t have the answers, and are making it up as they go along. We can have answers, if we choose to, but we must wrench ourselves out of the dream world of rhetoric, and confront the escalating problems that face us in the real world.

Pie is one of America’s most glorious traditions, and one of the few dishes that’s oddly untranslatable to other cultures, as any American who has watched early pie episodes of The Great British Bake-off knows. Every culture has pies, but American pies are a specific thing, requiring a sweet, deep-dish filling usually of fresh fruit, angled sides, and a flaky pastry crust (crumbs or crushed cookies are a distant second). Pies can have some variety: they can be open-faced, or have a lid or a lattice or a pile of whipped cream on top. And their crusts and garnishes offer endless opportunities for decorative flourish. Still, there are rules: if you aren’t making it in an American pie dish, it’s a tart.  

My aunt, now in her 80s, still makes six pies every year for our family Thanksgiving: pumpkin, apple (two of them), pecan, chocolate and banana-cream. Her fillings are simple; her Crisco crusts are perfectly fluted; and we need nothing more.  

This is not to say that all innovation is bad. I’ve gone early-American, with a vinegar pie topped with whipped cream and sugared cranberries, inspired by the spread of pies at the country fair in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Farmer Boy (recipe found in The Little House Cookbook). And I’ve gone bougie-American, making a cranberry pie with pecan-crumble topping, from the website Smitten Kitchen. These offerings suit my palate for acid and unusual flavors. My relatives have been … polite. 

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But if you’re going to innovate, your innovation should be beautiful, well-executed, and have a good flavor profile. The Food & Wine pies, in this regard, are suspect. 

But does anyone really want a cranberry-lime-curd pie, with a crumb crust made from rye flour, complicated by a topping of blackberries, pomegranate arils and large strips of lime zest? That is too much going on, and cranberries and eggs together sound yuck. 

The peanut-butter chess pie drizzled with chocolate sauce gives the impression of appealing Americana, but only on first glance. Like so many early desserts, the chess pie was a response to scarcity, and is basically just a bland, sweetened custard that went out of style for a reason. Peanut butter might punch it up, or it might not — usually, these pies get a flavor spike from acid, either lemon or vinegar. And peanut butter and chocolate together are fine, but no one is going to be excited about the combination as pie. 

Lastly, there’s the sweet potato pie with cocoa crust and a flambéed meringue piping. My aunt skips this classic Thanksgiving offering for the sensible reason that sweet potato pie just isn’t a crowd-pleaser. The chef-upgraded magazine version might look a little better, but sweet potato and chocolate aren’t a natural pairing (unlike pumpkin and chocolate); Food & Wine’s piped meringue layer and blowtorching are 1950s-retro in execution; and the topping is a lot of work just in order to add one extremely sweet, low-flavor element (meringue) atop another (sweet potato). The Food & Wine pie also has a random scattering of pecans on top, and requires chocolate-pearl topping that many people will have to mail-order. 

These are pies that only an editor could love. They sound original, they fit a story-concept, and it doesn’t matter what the cooking or eating is like. And it’s not just Food & Wine. Bon Appétit’s recommended Thanksgiving desserts are scarcely better. The magazine suggests cake instead of pie: marbled chocolate-pumpkin, pecan, and white-chocolate cranberry. Again, these desserts sound original, look nice in photos, and fit a story-premise, but they’re just not likely to find a wide audience on a Thanksgiving table. Here kids, have a slice of pecan cake. No? How about the chocolate-pumpkin bundt? 

It wasn’t always like this. The early aughts saw an explosion of cool food culture — Anthony Bourdain published Kitchen Confidential in the year 2000; the website Eater launched as a New York City restaurant guide in 2005. The formerly stodgy, high-end food publications transformed around the same time. Editor Dana Cowin took over at Food & Wine in 1995. Adam Rapoport remade Bon Appétit for bros and young people in 2011. This was an era in which both titles had great ideas and great aesthetics. Their recipes were often aspirational, but in the best sense: these were dishes ambitious home cooks would want to try, and would enjoy serving to friends once they’d done so. 

Such content has mostly moved online now, onto platforms such as YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok. And in some respects, the decline of the food magazines is just part of the greater death of the legacy print media. Yet food is also one of the few remaining semi-success stories in print. While so many titles have folded, reduced publication schedules, or gone online-only, both Bon Appétit and Food & Wine are still with us as monthlies. The creature-comfort of flipping through a tangible artifact displaying photos of food is not easily digitized. Nor is it a small thing to cook from a computer — which requires clean, dry hands and no splatters. I still prefer a piece of paper torn from a magazine when I have a choice. 

Food magazines should have an advantage, then, so why aren’t they better? 

It’s not just Thanksgiving; I often flip through my monthly subscriptions and find not a single dish I’d want to cook. One answer is ideological. Like most other spheres of culture conferring status on coastal elites, food went super-woke during peak woke, and is only slowly recovering. Rapoport, the visionary Bon Appétit editor, was canceled and forced to resign in 2020. Parent company Condé Nast replaced him with a black editor with no experience in the food space. (She lasted a year, and was succeeded by Jamila Robison.) Time Inc., the owner of Food & Wine in 2017, replaced the legendary Cowin with Hunter Lewis, a white man presumably intended to compete with Rapoport. Lewis has been carefully virtue-signaling ever since. 

The need for a display of the correct ideology in these magazines’ pages has resulted in many specific sins and one overarching one — a lack of focus on what used to be the core mission: promoting beautiful food the reader is drooling to cook. 

The de-rigueur level of “diverse” content isn’t really a problem in itself — Americans these days have diverse palates — but it becomes homogenized and unappetizing in context. On one page of November Food & Wine, we have “Hong Kong”-style French toast; on the next, cemitas, a “Pueblan-style” sandwich.

I like both French toast and sandwiches, but Hong Kong for breakfast and Latin for lunch seems a little much. And really, if I want authentic Asian or Latin recipes, I won’t get them from Food & Wine. Also, aren’t these cultures and foodways supposed to be meaningfully different? The magazine’s Thanksgiving package offers stuffed butternut squash with curry-coconut rice, tandoori roast turkey, sweet p otatoes with maple chili crisp, and porchetta with “cheesy chard-and-leek” stuffing. If Asian, Indian, Southern-American and Italian can all sit on the same table, how diverse can they really be? 

There’s also the other kind of ideology, which holds that fresh, local, seasonal, organic food is better for our health and for the planet. The Food & Wine “chef-upgrade” story on Thanksgiving pie offers adaptations of recipes by chef Camille Cogswell, of Walnut Family Bakery in North Carolina. Cogswell “constantly pulls ingredients from the farmers and artisans around her.” She’s most likely legitimately making a small-scale, artisanal product.

But can the magazine’s readers do the same? Fresh, seasonal, farmer’s-market ingredients are great, and Food & Wine is for the type of reader who can afford them. But such ingredients are  also, by definition, hard to scale. The recipe suggests chocolate pearls from Michaels to garnish the sweet-potato pie, and tops the cranberry-lime one with blackberries, which are out of season. These are dishes muddled in flavor and concept, of a piece with the braindead diversity mission. 

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Cogswell’s pie is seen above on the left; the Food & Wine slice is on the right. The bakery version isn’t necessarily practical for the home cook to execute. It has cute stamping on the crust; the chef has done something loose and updated with her meringue piping; and someone hand-made those chocolate pearls. The other slice looks (and probably tastes) conservative in comparison.  

Conservative — mainstream, though the high-end version — is what food magazines have always done well. They should get back to it, and give the readers what they really want, too: an apple pie for Thanksgiving.

I happened upon the portrait on my “X” (formerly Twitter) timeline this week, because the woman in it had been canned from her job. A popular Right-wing account crowed about the termination, and thousands of X users reposted the news, often accompanied by messages like, “Bye, loser” and “FAFO” (“fuck around and find out”). 

The fuck-around that led to the find-out: the woman in the photo told her small group of followers on social media that she was happy Charlie Kirk had been killed. The conservative activist had “spread harmful rhetoric about marginalized communities and actively worked to strip those communities of their rights.” His assassination, she went on, meant there would be “one less man with power and influence teaching our youth that these beliefs are OK.”

Hers is one of numerous cases of the kind: a ferocious eruption of Right-wing anger targeting Left influencers and ordinary people who greeted Kirk’s killing with chilling callousness or even outright celebration (and some who merely dared to criticize his views, even as they lamented the assassination). Many have lost jobs — not just celebs like Jimmy Kimmel, but random teachers and nurses and lawyers — while others have faced haranguing and harassment. 

The frenzy has drawn comparisons with the aftermath of George Floyd’s killing in Minneapolis that led to a similar canonization of a victim and hysterical hunt for heretics who doubted the new public cult. Cancel culture is back, we’re told, only now it’s practiced by the Right — which is much less shy about using state power, where progressives mostly relied upon corporations, colleges, tech platforms, and other “private” institutions to quash dissent. 

The woke Left, it’s tempting to conclude, has given way to the woke Right. Yet there is something too easy about these 2025-is-2020-redux takes. This is because most of the original critiques of the woke Left were themselves shallow and ahistorical. Some sharper lens is needed to understand these febrile moments, and to defuse the threat they pose to basic civic friendship and social stability.

There is truth to some of the parallels being drawn, to be sure. I’m particularly struck by AI-generated illustrations and videos showing Kirk being embraced by Jesus, or hanging out above the heavenly clouds with JFK, Martin Luther King, and other civic martyrs. These recall the religious imagery used to sacralize 2020’s holy victim, not least a pietà showing the Virgin Mary weeping over Floyd, displayed at a chapel at the Catholic University of America.

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But the question we should ask about this mirroring is: so what? 

Liberal and conservative critics of wokeness have long harped on the religious dimensions of the movement. And it’s true that the woke Left had a credal aspect, a theology upheld by various liturgies: original sin (racism and colonialism); confession of said sin (white activists literally kneeling before black people); a priestly hierarchy (led by the likes of Ibram X. Kendi); the shattering of old icons (Jefferson, even Lincoln); and the persecution of heretics.

But noticing all this wasn’t exactly an earth-shattering discovery of the anti-woke mind. The religious undercurrents of modern secular ideologies has long been a staple of cultural criticism. A classic of the genre is the French liberal intellectual Raymond Aron’s Opium of the Intellectuals, which shed light on the messianic dimensions of Communist ideology. 

Nearly two centuries earlier, the counterrevolutionary thinker Joseph de Maistre noticed that the Jacobins couldn’t rest content with ransacking churches, attacking priests and religious, and restricting public expressions of Catholicism. They also installed statues to the Goddess of Reason, who supposedly guided their cause. 

For a time, an atheistic Cult of Reason gained traction, with several Catholic cathedrals and churches repurposed to serve as its “temples.” This movement, however, was short-lived. The arch-Jacobin Robespierre soon replaced it with the state-sponsored Cult of the Supreme in Being, a more theistic substitute religion that exalted civic duty and belief in a creator.

The iconography and liturgical quality associated with wokeness today merely reaffirm Edmund Burke’s observation, prompted by the events of the French Revolution, that “man is by his constitution a religious animal.” To be shocked by the sacralization of Floyd in 2020 or Kirk in 2025 is to betray ignorance of this basic dimension of human normality: that we members of the species Homo religiosus can’t help but erect altars, whether it’s to God or an ideology or, indeed, the suffering planet Earth.

Ditto for the mania for smoking out heretics, which elicited so much hand-wringing from critics of Left woke-ism in the movement’s heyday, who would describe themselves as “actually liberal, what it used to mean.” The linguist and New York Times columnist John McWhorter, for example, wrote a whole book to explain this phenomenon as a betrayal of Enlightenment values and a reversion to pre-Enlightenment unreason and barbarism.

Yet As I noted at the time, the author displayed a serene unawareness of how Enlightenment values generated persecution (cancellation by guillotine, if you will); and equally, of how the world’s great religious traditions have served, at their best, to  harmonize belief with reason and philosophy — and to regulate a community’s expression of its values. The “real,” “old-fashioned,” “Enlightenment”  liberals are too prone to write off all aspects of religion as fanatical and mindless — ignoring the labors of Aquinas, Averroes, and Maimonides — and then to class Left wokeness as an instance of religious superstition.

It will be even easier to do the same thing in regards to the “woke Right,” since the conservative iteration of the movement is often married to the precepts of more traditionally familiar faiths (hence, those AI pictures of Kirk hugging the Lord Jesus). 

But what such analyses miss is the fact that all culture is, to some extent, cancel culture. The word “culture” has roots in cult (the Latin cultus), which in turn comes from colere, meaning care, cultivation, tending to a garden or an ancestral hearth: acts that involve, among other steps, pruning, rejection, throwing out. It takes an especially pinched view of cultural history to imagine that the only people “guilty” of doing such things were those mad witch-burning medievals — and racial progressives in 2020 or Trumpians in 2025.

In reality, not even the most supposedly high-minded, coolly disinterested liberals can avoid some degree of cancellation (or excommunication, if you insist). The liberal philosopher John Rawls, for example, had his infamous footnote excluding from the realm of public reason “any comprehensive doctrine that denied this right [abortion],” i.e., easily a good chunk of the world’s population. More sensibly, even anti-woke liberals generally exclude overt racists and anti-Semites from their mastheads and conferences.

The point is this: if you noticed a religious and cancel-culture aspect to 2020’s Left woke-ism, and you now see the same forces at work in Charlie Kirk mania, it might be worth wondering if these movements merely instantiate fundamental, enduring and necessary human qualities. Not an abnormality or deviation from the ordinary course of things, but only the latest expressions of deeply normal patterns. I, as a practicing Catholic, find comfort in my tradition’s acknowledgment of these necessities, and the centuries of wisdom and scholarship brought to bear on them. 

This isn’t to discount the achievements of modern democratic pluralism: the way it allows multiple expressions of these cultic impulses to share the same community in relative peace; the procedural protections it affords heretics and dissidents; and the demands of public reasonableness it imposes on all — even if, as Pope Benedict XVI insistently argued, the moderns have defined “reason” too narrowly to mean only that which can be scientifically measured and mathematically expressed, leaving out the great metaphysical questions.

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Still, if the passion to sacralize holy figures, invent ersatz cults, and persecute dissidents continues to erupt with regularity in democratic, pluralist systems like America’s or Britain’s, then it suggests that some fundamental itch isn’t being scratched.

Is it the case that, having dethroned the authoritative religious traditions, the ones that spent millennia grappling with the tension between faith and reason, Western societies are now menaced by more unreasonable faiths, a more pitiless breed of Homo religiosus? Or could it be that our present social and economic arrangements are so brutally competitive that many people, especially the striving professional classes, are compelled to use quasi-religious victimologies to attack rivals and bolster their own position — whether the religion in question is Black Lives Matter, gender ideology, or cornpone MAGA evangelicalism?

Which brings us back to the woman in the photo. That smile, those words, her repellently cheerful disposition toward murder — these things stir two sets of incommensurable reactions in me. The first is bad memories from half a decade ago, when people like her had the whip hand and scourged those even slightly to their Right: mainly liberals and Leftists who rejected full-spectrum 2020-style progressivism, but also conservative friends who lost jobs and book deals. I also remember the well-founded anxiety that my own book contract with one of the big imprints was one woke campaign from being canceled. “Fuck around and find out” — now others have the whip hand.

This bundle of dark recollections and vengeful yearnings is met by countervailing intuitions, however: pity, or something like it, for that dumb fanatical smile; the conviction that we can’t go on treating each other this way. I can’t give myself credit for this generosity, however. It arises from my Christian faith. It’s had its own fanatic eruptions across two millennia, to be sure, but I see no other way. 

One of the most important representatives of that bygone PC era is back in the press: the African-American feminist critic Bell Hooks, (1952-2021) whose writing on art and politics has been recently reissued as a Penguin Modern Classic. Originally published in 1995, Art on My Mind: Visual Politics helped put in circulation a set of concepts that have since become, we might regret, part of both academic and middlebrow criticism. From “problematic” and “cultural appropriation” to “palimpsest” and “the politics of the visual”, her theoretical vocabulary remains current on the cultural Left, far beyond the specific intersectional feminism and anti-capitalist thought in which Hooks was most grounded. Even as the resurgent American Right, for all its supposed populism, reprises those signature economic policies of Reagan that Hooks railed against, her views on art and culture might now offer it some warning.

To get an insight into her contradictory desires and demands on art, it is helpful to start with her name. Hooks, who died in 2021, was born Gloria Jean Watkins and re-named herself in honor of her great-grandmother. For some decades in the late 20th century, a number of prominent African-American intellectuals and celebrities, such as Malcolm X (Malcolm Little) and Muhammad Ali (Cassius Clay), took on new names to express their sense of distance from the dominant white establishment. More generally, giving oneself a new, chosen name, even outside of any obviously political context, is an act of self-determination and experimentation that it seems rude for others to begrudge (even if the name is cringe). But Hooks also insisted on having her name spelled in lower-case, supposedly to draw attention away from herself and towards her work. This is, of course, an awfully ostentatious way to be humble.

While I think civility requires us to call somebody, say, called “Jennifer” “Jen” (or, for that matter, “John”) if that’s what she wants to be called, civility still has its limits. One of the reasons for both the overreach of and subsequent backlash against PC culture in the Nineties and wokeness today is that polite, well-meaning liberals prove again and again unable to admit this. Just as I’m not going through the grammatical inconvenience of using Judith Butler’s preferred “they/them” pronouns to refer to, well, her, neither am I going to irritate Spellcheck by decapitalizing “Bell Hooks”. We can refuse requests for attention, deference, and extra-delicate care, even minor ones, even ones made by members of disadvantaged groups, without thereby enrolling ourselves on the side of Reaction. Besides the truly political choices we have to make about who is included in our communities and what is owed to them, there are many decisions of far lower stakes in which our moral status is not at issue.

Hooks’ thinking about art, and much else besides, turned on her shifting, troubled thinking about the boundaries between these two kinds of choices. On the one hand, she wanted art to be many things that are not political, and that are indeed likely to appear incompatible, or at least in tension, with being political: personal, excessive, transgressive, and sensuous. “Political art” as a phrase, conjures up images of propaganda posters with simple, unambiguous messages, commanding audiences to buy war bonds, unite with workers throughout the world, or otherwise fall in line. Defending artists she admired, like the sculptor Alison Saar, from critics who found their work insufficiently engaged with representing the problems of African-American life, Hooks argued that providing expansive and enfranchising sites of pleasure is its own sort of political work. It’s an argument that at times seems convincing, and at other times seems no more than an alibi to protect unpolitical beauty. Her prose, too, could slip into lyrical self-indulgence and celebration of irresponsibility. An essay, “Women Artists: The Creative Process”, begins charmingly:

“I am a girl who dreams of leisure, always have. Reverie has always been necessary to my existence. I have needed long hours where I am stretched out, wearing silks, satins and cashmeres, just alone with myself, embraced by the beauty around me. I have always been a girl for fibers, for textiles, and for the feel of comforting cloth against my skin. When I have adorned myself just so, I am ready for the awesome task of just lingering…”

This lovely evocation of herself covered in blankets on the couch leads, improbably, to musings on what her writing and thinking owe to the white men of the Black Mountain school, one of the main scenes of 20th-century avant-garde poetry in the United States. One is reminded of Robert Duncan, who expanded the range of American poetry, linking the open, vatic rhetoric of Walt Whitman with the erudition and syntactical innovation of Ezra Pound and Louis Zukofsky. It is one of those stirring, thought-provoking essays where the reader really cannot know what will come next, and even one thoroughly prejudiced against PC sacred cows will find himself surprised and disarmed.

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But Hooks, like almost all of us, wanted art to be something other than a domain where we can linger in pleasure and surprise. Only the most radical aesthete approaches the museum, cinema or magazine rack without some desire, conscious or not, to find among the images displayed something that will be good for a community of which he is a member (which might be as small as himself, or as large as humanity). We might, if we are liberals of a certain kind, hope for art that is so beautiful and so apparently unpolitical that it distracts its beholders from the clash of polemics that constitute our unending “culture wars” — but this too is really a wish for art to serve a political end (the end of suspending politics).

Hooks wanted art to be a political force by which desirable representations of minorities would be disseminated, and structural inequalities exposed and challenged. Throughout Art on My Mind, she praised artists who seemed to produce such images, and attacked those who she sees as trafficking in negative stereotypes or in giving too much attention to white, male, etc., artists, critics and institutions. Hooks had a political scorecard, and everything — really, everything — could be tallied on it.

She blasted, for example, the painter Jean-Michel Basquiat as a sell-out whose art and “life” she alleged amounted to a “minstrel show” for wealthy white art patrons. Still more deliriously, she criticized Black basketball star Michael Jordan for appearing alongside Loony Tunes characters: “In the commercials where he speaks to the cartoon figure of Bugs Bunny as though they were equals — peers — his elegance and grace of presence is ridiculed and mocked.” Whatever one might think about Basquiat’s art (to my mind, neo-expressionist crap making lazy “references” to history, worth throwing in the dumpster of Eighties mistakes with Julian Schnabel and Anselm Kiefer) or Space Jam, it seems at best highly debatable that their success was driven by anti-black racism.

Conservatives today who roll their eyes at such dubious, over-the-top analyses should keep in mind that there are thousands of YouTube video essays and tens of thousands of lengthy X threads in which hysterical white men denounce the super-abundance of racial minorities in advertisements and super-hero movies. Still more embarrassingly, Right-wing intellectuals such as Stephen Adubato desperately try to attribute political significance and “based” messages to the work of Andy Warhol and Bad Bunny, while Matt Walsh bemoans that the Left “hates beauty” (an accusation that unfortunately invites reflection on his own appearance). Even as cultural critics on the Right have bemoaned that a censorious, tediously insistent sort of progressive politics has stifled creativity in the arts, and fantasize that the “not Left” is a freer and more expressive space for beautiful, non-political art, the cultural Right remains mired in the contradictory logics of the old PC Left.

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This will make it, perhaps, difficult for the Right to grapple with its recent success. In the United States and elsewhere, whether by winning elections or shifting the terms of political debate, the Right has won a number of victories that may add up to a reconfiguration of common sense on matters ranging from immigration to gender. Recent sympathetic New York Times profiles of figures like Curtis Yarvin and Jonathan Keeperman demonstrate that just as powerful mainstream institutions once ushered into the spotlight black, feminist, and other culturally Left radicals, now they pivot to integrate spokesmen of the far-Right.

Much of Art on My Mind finds Hooks obstinately, seethingly, refusing to acknowledge that by the Nineties liberal institutions, and a broad American public, even amid the rollback of New Deal and Great Society-era progressive economic policies, were eager for black art and culture. And that even included works that seemed thoroughly oppositional, sometimes hostile, to the white audiences who loved them. Amid this confusing conjuncture of economic, political and cultural shifts, Hooks often held to a narrow, unenlightening opposition between sell-out artists and intellectuals who allowed themselves to be thus commodified, and stalwart resisters who refused the compromises success demanded. Yet often, in both the eras of PC and woke, what white critics and audiences most desired was black art (and writing — witness the success of Hooks herself) that declared itself to be in the latter category.

The spiral of denunciations against supposed sell-outs only disguises the fundamental dynamics by which the liberal establishment periodically wobbles from Right to Left by co-opting yesterday’s radicals. At least since Trump’s first election almost a decade ago, Right-wing intellectuals find themselves regularly attacked by former fans, and each other, not only as “sell-outs” but often as “feds”, “glowies”, and other terms suggesting they are only a controlled opposition actually serving the establishment. In this respect, and in its constitutive tension between a wish to save “beauty” from politics and a wish to politicize beauty on its own behalf, today’s Right is heir to Hooks. If only the boys at Passage Press shared her dream of leisure!

I’m referring to the Trump administration’s shock-and-awe campaign against the hard-to-define strata of college-educated Americans who perform “knowledge work”. They are often dubbed the professional managerial class, or PMC for short. This month, scribes at The Atlantic and New York published essays lamenting the Trumpian war on the professionals. PMCs are “being targeted for political, cultural, and perhaps economic extinction” by the White House, wrote Ed Kilgore. He’s got a point. Now that we’re entering the fourth month of Trump II, it’s clear that when the President repeatedly uttered, “I am your retribution” with comic-book-villain bravado on the campaign trail, he wasn’t bluffing.

Trump has mounted a multi-pronged assault on the PMC by eagerly siccing a rabid Department of Government Efficiency on vast swathes of the civil service, the scientific establishment, non-Trump media, the university system, and NGOs, while wielding executive orders like Thor’s hammer to smite these workers and their institutions.

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The story that liberal commentators tell is that the New Right hates the PMC due to their disloyalty or perceived treachery, or bloodthirsty hatred of the cognitive elite. They just hate the pencil-pushers who won the meritocracy game after American deindustrialization. Now the jocks have returned to power to stuff the nerds back in their lockers. But while this “they hate us because they ain’t us” analysis has a kernel of truth, it doesn’t tell the whole story, and I can’t help but think about how the Democratic elite were warned for years — decades even — that the establishment was rotting from the inside and was vulnerable to a sacking.

Ironically, critiquing the PMC was once the province of the Left. The conservatives say they hate globalists now, but in the second half of the 20th century, Reagan Republicans openly embraced neoliberalism and a strategy of globalization, free trade, and deindustrialization. The fortunes of blue-collar workers declined as those of the professionals climbed.

As far back as the early Forties, Trotskyite philosopher John Burnham identified the power of the PMC and predicted that the capitalist class would lose to them in what he called “the managerial revolution”. More than three decades later, in the late Seventies, the socialist intellectuals Barbara and John Ehrenreich first coined a more specific term for these ruling class managers: the “professional managerial class”. It originally described “salaried mental workers” — doctors, lawyers, academics, social workers, PR consultants, nonprofit administrators, and corporate middle managers — the knowledge workers and culture shapers who managed people, systems, and information and socially reproduced capitalism, even if they didn’t quite own it.

Admittedly, PMC is a clumsy moniker, but it’s better than “white collar” so as not to confuse professors and DEI executives with, say, nuclear technicians, radiation therapists, or civil engineers. (I also appreciate the term MANGOs, as in Media, Academia, and Non-Governmental Organizations, coined by writer Alex Hochuli). This third class, as the Ehrenreichs noted, caught between capital and labor, often expressed solidarity with the working class in theory, while undermining it in practice by opposing unions and imposing neoliberal reforms in health and education.

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Social critic Christopher Lasch’s book The Revolt of the Elites, published in 1995, argued that the PMC worshipped credentials and proceduralism, and like all priesthoods, believed itself immune from corruption by virtue of its own enlightenment. Ultimately, he said, they were responsible for dismantling the old society and civic life while preaching inclusion from behind the safe havens of tony suburbs and tenure-track appointments (or, we might add in our time, password-protected Zoom calls).

Their power only grew over the last three decades, as the Democratic Party evolved from the party of farmers and workers to the Party of the PMC. Its financial and philosophical bedrock became Hollywood, the tenured thinkers of academia, the mainstream media, and the itinerant members of what Richard Florida once breathlessly called the “creative class” (Silicon Valley used to be on this list but has been partially won over by MAGA).

In his 1998 book, Achieving Our Country, Richard Rorty explicitly predicted that working-class Americans would rebel against this arrangement. They’d eventually realize their government, including both parties, had abandoned them by allowing wages to fall and jobs to vanish without a fight. They would see that timid PMCs weren’t about to sacrifice their own comfort to help anyone else. When that moment came, Rorty warned, something would snap, and disillusioned voters from outside the suburbs would rally behind a strongman who promised revenge on the elites. Decades later, Rorty’s grim prophecy found its avatar in Donald Trump.

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That didn’t prompt the Democrats to change their tune and return to working-class politics. They went harder for the PMC. For a decade, starting roughly in Barack Obama’s second term, identity-politics-obsessed liberals led a top-down shift in culture that ranged from the stifling of speech (cancelling comedians, the overreach of #MeToo) to the forced symbolic diversity of entertainment, plus the pressure to put pronouns in email signatures. What we now call “woke”, a soft totalitarian ideology of cosmopolitanism and the elevation of identity over class, was prophesied about by Lasch. He described how the liberal elite were waging class war on the working class by creating “parallel or alternative institutions in which it will no longer be necessary to confront the unenlightened at all”.

The PMC label returned with a vengeance during this period of parallel institution-building, this time as a half-ironic slur from the old class-based Left critiquing the Democrats’ version of neoliberalism. Wokeness was anathema to many of the classic Marxists, like Adolph Reed, but when they pushed back against woke, they were lambasted by the PMC-heavy millennial Left. In 2020, the Democratic Socialists of America’s Afro-socialists and Socialists of Color Caucus called Reed “reactionary, class reductionist, and, at best, tone deaf”. Likewise, UnHerd contributor Catherine Liu’s 2021 polemic, Virtue Hoarders, whose subtitle was The Case Against the Professional Managerial Class, was pilloried or ignored.

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The MAGA Right meanwhile, homed in on the crises generated by free-for-all of globalized free markets. It was just then, at the dawn of the MAGA era, that the PMC’s power in the Democratic Party solidified and the atomized working class began voting for Trump. This political realignment meant that when Left-wing essayist Amber A’Lee Frost wrote that the PMC “can — and should — be brought to commit to its own abolition”, it wasn’t in the pages of a Left-wing publication, but the vaguely New Right intellectual journal American Affairs.

The problem is that while the New Right has adopted and tweaked the Left-wing critique of the PMC, its support for the working class has been largely rhetorical. Taken together, Trump II’s domestic policies surely represent a class war of sorts, but not one you’d easily recognize in a textbook. This fight isn’t the proletariat pitted against the capitalists or vice versa. Instead, Trump versus PMC is an asymmetrical clash involving a billionaire president and conservative PMCs and techno-capital attempting to excommunicate a subset of the liberal bourgeoisie, all in the name of the “War on Woke”. It’s less Marx and more like a mirror world version of Mao’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China, with the purge of Left-leaning meritocrats. The philosophy is A Great Leap Back — to restore nationalism and capitalism as the nation’s civic religion.

As for the working class? They’re just collateral damage in this intra-elite class war.

Then it all went downhill precipitously, as the stifling conformity and outright thought control associated with “wokeness” gripped my campus. Strange as this may sound amid the Trump administration’s crusade to extirpate DEI from the executive branch, I have found a relative refuge from these practices and ideologies at — yes — my federal workplace.

A dour brand of identity politics had been a part of American academia long before the rise of wokeness. In the late Eighties and early Nineties, it was called “political correctness” and mostly inspired mockery. Scholars and students who disagreed rolled their eyes and could get on with their academic lives. But the latest iteration was different. It changed the climate on American campuses quickly — and dramatically.

“Wokeness” accelerated. Pronouns became a sort of badge of loyalty, and a way to sift prospective faculty in place of academic merit. My religious students were vilified for expressing principled disagreements about changing social norms. It didn’t matter that they were reasonable, even compassionate in their discourse. I witnessed as one professor labeled as “extremists” Orthodox Jewish students who practiced gender separation. A term typically reserved for suicide bombers now ensnared a perfectly peaceful community.

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The hostility influenced the career trajectories of students. A brilliant psychology doctoral student who happened to be an evangelical was pressured by her adviser to leave the program. The adviser feared she would discriminate against LGBTQ people — never mind that her research had nothing to do with sexuality or that she had never expressed a single anti-LGBTQ sentiment; her religious identity alone was enough to cast suspicion on her fitness for academia.

Before resigning, I spent more than a year exploring alternatives to the professoriate. I needed a place where I could earn a reasonable salary, maintain work-life balance, and stay in my current city. I also wanted to work in an environment that allowed for intellectual heterodoxy. I didn’t want to be encircled by ideological conformity, whether from the Left or the Right.

To my surprise, the federal government emerged as my top choice.

Beyond public policy, I knew little about the day-to-day realities of federal work. I personally knew few federal employees. During my rebellious college years, I often railed against the federal government, convinced every single inch of it was riddled with corruption, inefficiency, and bureaucratic excess. Frankly, I also assumed it was a painfully dull place — filled with uninspired suits, yes-men, and offices decorated in Seventies beige. I feared leaving a space dedicated to ideas — however stifled by the woke dispensation — for a slow-moving, bureaucratic machine. Still, I took the plunge because I could no longer stay in academia in good conscience.

It turns out that my fears were justified. Federal work can, indeed, be boring. The amount of paperwork is staggering, and the adoption of modern technology is painfully slow. There are rules for rules. One of my colleagues — another exile from academia — once dryly observed that many federal bureaucrats lack even a basic grasp of political science. They are so absorbed in navigating outdated and sometimes nonsensical regulations that the broader purpose of their work can get lost. It is not that they are incapable of higher-level thinking, but the machinery of government breeds submission to the minutiae.

Yet I also found that the common caricature of the “deep state” as an unaccountable cabal of unelected bureaucrats engaged in shadowy conspiracies is overblown. Nor is the federal workforce a bastion of radical Leftism requiring a scorched-earth response, as some critics argue.

Yes, federal employees have partisan leanings like anyone else, but most ultimately follow the directives of the sitting administration. In my own office, I have heard leadership with Democratic views explicitly state their commitment to carrying out the new administration’s policies — not because they personally agree with President Trump, but because they respect the Constitution and the rule of law. The executive branch, they believe, must be responsive to its head, and the people who elected him.

What often gets overlooked is the intellectual heterodoxy within the federal workforce. My colleagues come from all walks of life. I regularly attend meetings with liberal gay and lesbian colleagues, and in those same meetings, I work alongside conservative evangelical Christians — including pastors and ministers — who say “Merry Christmas” and “Amen” without fear or hesitation.

Having spent years in academia, where self-censorship was often the price of survival, I was stunned by this level of open expression. Conservative employees, in particular, seemed far more comfortable speaking their minds than they ever could on a university campus. This was true under both the Biden and Trump administrations. Unlike in academia, no one has ever forced pronouns on me. Instead, we focus on our jobs and work faithfully to serve the nation.

Now, however, many of these same colleagues — both liberal and conservative — are worried about their jobs. Some of my center-right colleagues live in rural areas, where remote work has allowed them to contribute meaningfully to government service without relocating. But with return-to-office mandates looming, they face a difficult choice: leave their jobs or uproot their families. Ironically, it is often my liberal colleagues, who live in major cities with multiple federal buildings, who will have an easier time complying with these policies.

I understand that, from a high-level perspective, it is difficult to separate the genuinely problematic elements of federal bureaucracy from the rank-and-file employees who are simply doing their jobs. President Trump and Elon Musk, among others, have championed sweeping measures to “drain the swamp”. But my hope is that there is still time to craft a more precise approach — one that targets entrenched bureaucratic dysfunction without indiscriminately dismantling the institutions that, for many of us, have provided a refuge from the excesses of wokeness.

There are federal workers like me who found in federal government service a space for intellectual heterodoxy — one that no longer exists in academia. For that reason, I am hoping for a controlled burn, not scorched earth.

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.

In recent days, commentator James Lindsay has been on various podcasts, claiming that the radical Right has been nicking the master’s tools — or at least, their make-up brushes. In his words, the Right has gone “woke”: cancelling their enemies, obsessed with identity politics, and conjuring hidden structural forces responsible for oppressing them. Attempting to prove the point, he has also revealed that last month he duped conservative Christian website “American Reformer” into publishing an amended section from Marx’s Communist Manifesto; an apparent counterpart to the hoaxes on progressive academic journals he co-authored with Helen Pluckrose and Peter Boghossian in 2018.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, all of this has riled denizens of the internet with chiselled jaws and flinty conservative opinions, outraged at the very idea of Volk-gone-woke. As any playground brawler knows, when an insult is hurled at them, the first line of defence is the “no, you are” reverse attack. Accusations that self-styled classical liberals like Lindsay are the real woke offenders have duly followed.

But is he right? The hoaxing of “American Reformer” shows little, since the amendments Lindsay made to Marx’s original text are so heavy — and in any case, the fact that both radical Right and Left hate many aspects of bourgeois liberalism is hardly breaking news. Those already familiar with Lindsay’s intellectual hammer-wielding with respect to postmodernism and critical theory might suspect that to him, everything looks like a nail. He is, after all, someone who can smell “neo-Marxism” in capitalism-friendly identitarian posturing of the most superficial kind, and who traces the alleged roots of irrational wokeism as far back as that famous “Counter-Enlightenment” figure, Immanuel Kant (albeit that he helpfully adds “This point is complex”).

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The book he co-authored with Helen Pluckrose, Cynical Theories, although instructive about the way academics steeped in race and gender studies manipulate language in order to make various political power-grabs, is sloppy on some of the details. And it also posits a naïve dichotomy between, on the one hand, postmodernism and the idea that truth is relative, constructed through language (bad); and on the other, classical liberalism and the idea that truth is objective, accessed through free speech and debate (good). What seems to go unacknowledged is that, even in a perfectly liberal society, there would be many debates about reality that no amount of reason and evidence could ever definitively settle: most obviously, about the nature of moral and political reality itself. Background values are going to be relevant here, and there will be no simple rational adjudication between them.

True to form, on closer scrutiny, the positive arguments offered by Lindsay for the existence of the Woke Right also turn out to provide scant justification. There are two prongs to these: behavioural and ideological. The first says that members of the radical Right act like woke social justice warriors at their worst. Just like their Left-wing counterparts, they brim resentfully with a sense of grievance and victimhood, banging on about how straight white conservative males suffer under the status quo. They, too, favour free speech for friends not enemies, and “react to disagreement with name-calling, ostracism and bullying” as pundit Konstantin Kisin — also a fan of the Woke Right theory — puts it.

All of this perhaps sits as oddly with Nietzschean virtues of honour and nobility as the behaviour of feral Left-wingers does with their championing of kindness and empathy. But, still, such behaviour scarcely distinguishes the Right from any ill-disciplined online tribe who feels it is on a losing side. From Scottish Nationalists to feminists to Taylor Swift fans, the problem here is less likely to be substantive political allegiances than human nature and the dynamics of social media, bound to drive most people insane sooner or later.

Indeed, no better evidence could be offered here than the existence of the part-time internet troll James Lindsay, a man apparently obsessed with the idea of having sexual relations with the mother of every one of his intellectual foes. And as has been pointed out this week, classical liberals tend to get partisan when it comes to the free suppression of political enemies, most notably on the pro-Palestinian Left.

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The ideological story Lindsay offers us is scarcely more compelling. Essentially this says that, like the Woke Left, the Right believes in the existence of hegemonic power structures, hidden to most people, resulting in the systematic oppression of particular groups. The paranoid structure of choice, according to Lindsay, is the “post-war liberal consensus”, introduced with the sort of elaborate scare quotes and ironic tone he formerly reserved for the existence of things like “the patriarchy” and “systemic racism”. Right-wingers think that the function of this concealed power structure has been to marginalise true conservative thought, plus the groups that conservatives tend to stand up for. It is therefore attempting to raise “critical consciousness about the way the world is organised” — an activity otherwise known as red-pilling on the Right, and awokening on the Left — in order to overturn liberal and Left-wing structures and regain power for themselves.

It is not as if all of this is obviously false as a broad-brush summary of some Right-wing thinking, though Lindsay’s treatment of the idea that there is a post-war liberal consensus as theory about a deliberate and sinister conspiracy against the Right seems forced for the sake of a neat comparison with the Left. The bigger problem is that it is hard to imagine a modern political worldview anywhere on the ideological spectrum that does not contain the supposedly “woke” elements to which he alludes.

Described abstractly, these are: a vision of society as systematically distributed into winning and losing groups along some dimension of value, in a way perhaps “hidden” to the naked normie eye; the production of conflict and resentment as a result; the telling of some background narrative, perhaps with added historical elements, to explain how the winning groups came to win and the losers lose; and attempts to rectify the situation in favour of the losers.

Put this skeletally, the schema applies as much to Ba’athism as to Blairism. And it also applies fairly easily to Lindsay’s own framing of Anglophone society in recent times: divided into university-educated “neo-Marxists” with hegemonic cultural power, and everybody else; and with a whole background story supplied about the nefarious means by which the former got that power, and what sinister ideas sustained it. As a good classical liberal squeamish about the idea of group rights, Lindsay may be too fastidious to focus on the groups that lost out during this period — working-class people being an obvious candidate — but it doesn’t mean there aren’t any.

If every possible political outlook ends up counting as “woke” according to a given definition of the term, the definition was faulty in the first place. But it doesn’t follow that there must be some objectively true definition we should look for instead. The real truth about wokeness is that rationality and debate alone can never conclusively determine its real nature.

As with other political concepts that imply value or disvalue in the mouths of those who use them — such as “social justice”, “the Left”, “the Right”, and indeed, “liberalism” itself — “wokeness” is what philosopher W.B. Gallie called an “essentially contested concept”. Though there are applications of a concept like “woke” which are obviously wrong and do not hit the target, equally, there is no single objectively “right” definition. Rather, an inherently contestable concept like “woke” is permanently open to the possibility of new interpretations, partly in light of speakers’ background value commitments and the uses to which the concept is being put. And in this sort of case, there is no rational way of deciding an outright winner. To argue this way is not particularly “postmodern” — there are red-blooded analytic philosophers with a great respect for scientific truth and a perfect horror of modern French philosophy who would readily agree that noticing some bits of reality partly depends on prior value judgements, making the truth about them relative rather than objective.

Personally, I like Eric Kaufmann’s definition of “woke”, understood as “the sacralisation of historically disadvantaged race, gender and sexual identity groups”. You will have your own preferred version, and both of us might be equally “right”. The meaning of wokeness will be intractably tussled over by adversaries for as long as there is a need for the word, each participant likely wishing the concept to explain somewhat different things.

And it’s worth noticing that Lindsay’s own definition of “woke” has changed significantly over time too. Formerly confined explicitly to Leftist thinking and activism, in adapting an existing conceptual tool to aim it derisively towards rivals on the Right, he is apparently aiming for the subjugation of whole new territories. When you think about it, it’s almost like someone is manipulating language in order to execute a political power grab.

To read the accusations levelled at Silber, you could be forgiven for thinking that he was a blood-curdling white supremacist who turned up to class in white robes and a pointed hood. His sins, however, were somewhat different: his course focused on Islamist terrorism, he had previously worked for the New York Police Department (NYPD) as Director of Intelligence Analysis (2005-2012), and he had co-authored a NYPD-sponsored report of jihadist radicalisation. “It is extremely and violently Islamophobic, racist, unconstitutional, and imperialist,” wrote the organisers, referring to the course, without bothering to substantiate how or why it was all of those things. “Hence, another key demand,” they went on, “is that Silber be fired, his course cancelled forever.”

I drag up this pitiful episode from the US-Derangement File because it sharply parallels a recent case that has been doing the rounds here in the UK: the demonisation of King’s College London (KCL) as a citadel of progressive infantilism that endangers the British security state. It all started on 9 January, when a journal that nobody had heard of (Fathom) published an article by a former civil servant that nobody had heard of (Anna Stanley). Within days of its publication, Douglas Murray (who everybody has heard of) was calling for the suspension of a senior KCL academic; and now the Security Minister Tom Tugendhat has ordered a review into “biased” civil service training.

There are differences between the two cases: most notably, the cancellation effort aimed at KCL is coming from the Right, whereas Silber’s antagonists were coming from the Left. But in their ideological zeal and hyperbole, KCL’s most vocal critics sound every bit as puritanical as the progressive types they loathe.

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In her article, Stanley recounts a three-day course she attended last year at KCL while she was working at the Foreign Office as an open-source intelligence analyst. The course, “Issues in Countering Terrorism”, was organised by the Centre for Defence Studies and was attended by around 40 civil servants from the Foreign Office, Ministry of Justice, Ministry of Defence and Home Office.

It was “a deeply, existentially depressing experience”, she wrote. This was not because of the dark subject matter of the course, but rather because so much of its content was informed by “typical post-modern identity politics”. Indeed, she charged, the course was not so much an educational training programme as a form of anti-government “indoctrination” that downplayed the threat of Islamist extremism, which, she rightly pointed out, remains the most serious security threat in the UK.

According to Stanley, the course went downhill as soon as it started. It began with definitions: “What is Terrorism? Without anyone providing an opposing standpoint, we were taught the adage, ‘One man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist’.” This was rank “cultural relativism”, she argued. One lecturer told the class that “labelling a group terrorist can increase the state’s power”, while another used slides that showed Left-wing inanities about how condemning terrorism is siding with the oppressor and how the real problem isn’t terrorism but state power. Yet another lecturer, Stanley alleged, smeared William Shawcross, the government’s independent Prevent reviewer, as an anti-woke zealot and spoke scathingly about Douglas Murray and podcaster Joe Rogan: they were far-Right demagogues and needed to be suppressed, the lecturer said.

It is hard to know what to make of these accusations. On the one hand, they are extremely damning, suggesting that instead of cultivating an atmosphere of open inquiry about a subject as fiercely contested as terrorism and national security, KCL was imposing a radical pedagogy fundamentally at odds with official government policy on terrorism. But on the other hand, as Stanley herself partly concedes, many of the progressive platitudes she mentions were obviously used to facilitate discussion and were not intended to express the views of the lecturers.

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If the KCL lecturers had indeed sought to impose their “post-modern identity politics” onto students then this would be an unforgivable breach of their calling as educators, and the government should never work with them again. But the problem with Stanley’s polemic is that it’s short on supplying the contextual evidence to prove this, whereas the problem for KCL is that it will need to prove otherwise if it is to keep the public’s and government’s trust. “What I want to know,” a senior KCL academic who had no part in delivering the course told me, “is were they [the course’s attendees] exposed to a range of views, or was it all completely one-sided?”

The lecturer who made the disobliging remarks about Shawcross, Murray and Rogan, and who Stanley chose not to name in her article, has since been outed by Murray as Peter Neumann, who is Professor of Security Studies at KCL and the former founding director of the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation. Neumann, for his part, rejects Stanley’s portrayal of the course and the academics who taught on it. He told The Times that, far from being a woke ideologue, he was in fact a “centre-right liberal and, as such, am highly critical of ‘cancel culture’, whether from the Right or Left”. However, he did acknowledge that he had “criticised the Shawcross review for prioritising the threat from jihadism at times when security agencies said that Right-wing extremism was more dangerous”. What he neglected to say is whether he’d described Murray or Rogan as Right-wing.

For what it’s worth, I think Neumann is wrong about Shawcross and the severity of the jihadist threat, but as academics we’re allowed to disagree over these sorts of things. And quite what Neumann was doing in bringing up Douglas Murray and Joe Rogan in a counter-terrorism class isn’t clear. Perhaps he was discussing the opinion, common among progressives, that they have provided rhetorical cover for dangerous far-Right extremists. But whether or not Neumann actually believes this, he is nonetheless entitled to express it in his classes. What he isn’t entitled to do is foist off his views onto his students, and Stanley supplies no evidence to show that he had tried to do so.

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Stanley is no doubt right to worry about the civil service being captured by progressive ideologues and the most damning observations in her article concern the robotic Left-wing platitudes of the participants she attended the course with. One, apparently, gave a biased talk on Prevent — accusing it of being racist — and had a brother who went to Syria to join Isis, both of which are hardly the fault of the course’s organisers. But it’s a bit of a stretch to think that KCL’s security department is a bastion of progressive radicalism or that Neumann, a centrist who himself has been subject to accusations of Islamophobia, is its dastardly avatar.

There are certainly far more deserving targets, such as the dismal apologia of a recent hire at KCL, a certain Doerthe Rosenow, who reposted an appalling tweet celebrating the October 7 attacks on the very day they took place. The tweet, posted by another academic called Kai Bosworth, showed a photo of Hamas militants breaching into Israeli territory with a bulldozer. It was captioned: “Seeing these border infrastructure come down just so fucking beautiful. this could become the dominant image of our future, if we make it so.”

Rosenow, who is a lecturer in international relations, was not on the staff delivering KCL’s counter-terrorism course, according to an anonymous source at KCL. But in her unreadable prose and radical politics — she aspires to “move understandings of (global) colonialism(s) beyond unitary and homogenous notions grounded in predominantly Anglo-American experiences” — she is indicative of a broader rot in UK academia. And had Stanley been minded to find further evidence of it she wouldn’t have needed to venture far.

She would, for instance, have found no shortage of low-hanging fruit to pulp from my own field of criminology, where abolitionist sentiment and liberal sentimentality towards terrorists, such as Usman Khan, is common and of a piece with the kind of ideological puritanism that came for Mitchell Silber in 2020. But instead she chose to identify a problem where there probably isn’t one. And unsurprisingly, it seems to have backfired, alienating potential allies while soothing sworn foes.

Yayoi Kusama creates demons too, although they don’t look like the fictional Pickman’s. Her pet horrors are all the more frightening for their ordinariness. She is afraid of sex, and men, and war, and food. Most of all, she’s afraid of disappearing into the endless white noise of the universe — or, in her parlance, of “Obliteration”. The polka dots she’s been famous for since the Sixties obscure the physical boundaries of whatever form they’re applied to, human or otherwise. Walk through one of her mirror rooms and the singular you disappears. In her autobiography, Infinity Net, Kusama describes watching helplessly as a net-shaped pattern spills off one of her canvases and begins to cover the table, the walls, the contours of her body; it’s difficult to say where the hallucination ends and the art — or the artist — begins.

While her work flirts with the concept of suicide — the ultimate obliteration of the self, by the self — Kusama’s career has been astonishingly long-lived: today, she is a 94-year-old grande dame of the art world. This year saw the publication of a retrospective essay collection, Yayoi Kusama: 1945 to Now, as well as the opening of yet another solo show at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the first two months of tickets for which have already sold out. Kusama has not yet been obliterated.

She might, however, be cancelled.

“Yayoi Kusama Apologizes for Past Racist Remarks”, reads a recent headline from the New York Times, while the San Francisco Chronicle laments Kusama’s upcoming show at the city’s modern art museum: “Japan’s Yayoi Kusama, one of the world’s most prominent creators, has produced work that objectified and demeaned Black people. Does the art community care?”

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The allegations of racism centre largely on the autobiography, which came out in 2002, and details Kusama’s fraught relationship with her family, her struggle to be taken seriously as an artist in her native Japan, and the mental health issues that eventually resulted in her voluntary residence at the Tokyo hospital where she has lived since the Seventies. The most damning line from the book, though it does not actually appear in the English version of Infinity Net, is one in which Kusama describes the real estate values of her NYC neighbourhood tanking due to “black people shooting each other out front, and homeless people sleeping there”.

Although the New York Times describes Kusama’s problematic commentary being “surfaced” by the website Hyperallergic in June this year, it would be more accurate to identify this cancellation attempt as the particular obsession of just one man, a writer named Dexter Thomas.

Thomas is the author of the Hyperallergic essay in which he accuses the artist of a “troubling record of anti-Black statements”, and to which as far as I can tell, every story about Kusama’s supposed racism can be traced. His interest in Kusama in turn traces to an earlier essay he wrote for Vice News, in which he describes being banned from the artist’s studio for reasons unclear, though Thomas coyly suggests that his being black might have had something to do with it. And while multiple outlets, including the New York Times, have reproduced the claim that Kusama describes black people in her autobiography as “primitive, hyper-sexualized beings”, the implicit attribution appears to be in error. This is not a quote from Infinity Net; it is Thomas’s subjective interpretation of Kusama’s words.

In fact, reading the autobiography, it struck me that most of Thomas’s claims rely on a subjective (and in some cases, motivated) reading of Kusama’s work or behaviour, rather than her own explicitly stated views. And his main criticism — that “black people make several appearances… as exotic or primitive beings” — I found to be in astonishingly bad faith.

In one case, Kusama recalls that she became fascinated by the idea of travelling to the US after seeing “the exotic face of a little black girl with braided hair” in a picture book — a description that may be off-colour by 2023 standards, but also captures something essential about how strange and inaccessible America seemed to a Japanese child living on the other side of the world in the Forties. In another case, Thomas complains that Kusama describes the lips and genitals of a black participant in one of her naked performance art pieces, the obvious implication being that white characters do not receive similar treatment; he apparently missed the scene just 35 pages later in which Kusama’s boyfriend, a white man, begs the disgusted artist to touch his penis: “It was like a big, desiccated calzone.”

And then there are Kusama’s actual and explicit observations of the way that the sexual liberation of the Sixties became intertwined with issues of race and class, which suggest a far more conscious and critical perspective than Thomas gives her credit for. In one passage contextualising her naked performance artworks against the backdrop of the sexual revolution, she archly notes the phenomenon of privileged white women coming to New York in explicit pursuit of black lovers, “drawn by the legendary sexual prowess of dark, muscular men”.

“Blacks were still discriminated against in mainstream society, but the tendency to prize them as sexual playthings was taking root,” she writes. Perhaps Kusama could have done more to condemn this tendency — that is, if you believe that the job of an artist is to not just observe the world as it is but bloviate about how it ought to be. It’s hard to square the woman who wrote the above lines with the bogeyman conjured by her critics: an unapologetic racist who “seems to luxuriate” in stereotypical depictions of blacks as “hyper-sexual and primitive”.

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And it’s hard to see what, exactly, is to be gained from analysing her work through the framework of contemporary American racial politics in the first place. Soleil Ho, the writer at the San Francisco Chronicle who denounced Kusama’s upcoming museum show, suggests that the Yayoi Kusama: 1945 to Now book should have analysed her career in racial terms, lamenting that “the many esteemed curators and critics in the volume also opted to look away”. What Ho and others seem not to realise is that there’s a difference between looking away from a thing, and looking at it from a more productive angle. Despite the myopic convictions of certain American culture critics, not everything is best evaluated through the lens of race; not every story, person, or artwork is best understood as a parable for power, privilege and oppression. And in Kusama’s case, trying to reframe her life and legacy via a reckoning with her alleged racism is like trying to interpret her work by standing blindfolded inside one of her installations and licking the wall. Whatever information you might glean, it will not help you understand the art.

Often, the defence of this or that elderly or deceased artist is a plea for context: people must be understood as a product of their time, their culture, their unique and often immense personal struggles. Yayoi Kusama, who grew up in a famously insular and non-diverse country, who has spent most of her life institutionalised, and who is literally older than Scotch tape, has arguably earned a pass for being less than perfectly enlightened on the issues of 2023 — and anyway, she’s already made the standard-issue apology for her “hurtful and offensive language”. Her critics can hardly ask for more.

But the more important point here isn’t about how woke a 94-year-old mentally ill Japanese woman should be; it’s about what an artist does, and must do, which is to express the truth of the world as he or she sees it. Kusama’s perspective is bleak and terrifying, but it also makes no pretence of moral authority. The woman is terrified of macaroni; she’s not telling anyone else how to live. All she does, and all she has ever done — in paint, in words, in naked choreography — is to describe what she sees. To paint from life, as Lovecraft’s Pickman put it.

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Punk's spirit is broken

By Lias Saoudi

Sometimes that means capturing beauty; sometimes it means terror, or something worse. There’s a famous, and famously controversial, painting by Gustav Courbet called “L’origine du monde”. It’s an image of an anonymous woman, naked from the waist down, her thighs spread to show her vulva. The painting has often been criticised as misogynistic, and perhaps it is, but it also articulates something true: Look, it says. This is where we come from. This is how we are made.

Yayoi Kusama, with her dots, her obliteration, is saying something true, too: this is how we unravel. And her autobiography, insensitive though it may be, is a truthful articulation of reality as she experienced it. Rather than punishing her for this, or demanding a reckoning and an apology, perhaps we might reckon with that reality ourselves, as we do with her art, and leave the artist out of it.

Kusama has always showed us the same thing; what changes is who else is looking, and how. The dot paintings that once challenged and infuriated her critics are now considered pop art masterpieces; a naked performance art piece that once resulted in scandalised calls to the police by MoMA officials is now lauded on the museum’s website for its daring irreverence. But Kusama’s view of the world — her obsessions, her fears, her fixations — remains the same. She is still seeking obliteration. She will probably chase it until she’s dead.

And what does she owe to the rest of us? Only the truth of the world as she sees it. Nothing less, nothing more.

At the end of “Pickman’s Model”, the narrator, Pickman’s friend, views a ghastly portrait of a monstrous creature in Pickman’s studio: “The monster was there—it glared and gnawed and gnawed and glared—and I knew that only a suspension of Nature’s laws could ever let a man paint a thing like that without a model”. It’s only after he unrolls a small scrap of paper that was pinned to the canvas that he understands the source of his friend’s demons. The secret of those horrible, haunting paintings. Because there it is: the same glaring, gnawing monster.

“By God,” he says. “It was a photograph from life.”

One of the founders of Extinction Rebellion boasts that he wouldn’t let an ambulance through if he was blocking the road, even at the cost of a patient’s life.

A biological male with criminal convictions for kidnap and attempted murder says at a Trans Pride rally: “If you see a Terf, punch them in the fucking face.” The crowd, holding placards about love, kindness and human rights, cheer and applaud.

Students at California State University glorify a Hamas terrorist paragliding into Israel to slaughter the innocent, while Harvard students write an open letter blaming Jews for their own execution. They grieve the “slow and sudden” deaths of Palestinians.

Acts of kindness bear witness to our shared suffering. But when kindness becomes pathological, it is cruel and divisive — as with these examples. And it is on the rise. In the West today, there are people whose suffering is deemed to be non-existent or of little value, and so judgement takes the place of understanding, punishment that of mercy. The result is a purity spiral whereby extreme kindness towards an in-group gives unlimited licence to act with cruelty towards an out-group. It’s this licence that gives progressive activists permission to clothe antisemitism as anti-colonialism.

Following the Hamas massacre, a lecturer at Stanford University used “identity-based targeting” to force three Jewish students to stand in a corner so they could feel “what Israel does to Palestinians”. He asked them how many Jews died in the Holocaust. One of the students said “six million” and the lecturer replied that “colonizers killed more than 6 million. Israel is a colonizer”. In New York, activists tore down posters pleading for the safe release of Jewish hostages, many of them women and children, while London saw a 1,353% increase in antisemitic attacks.

In the intersectional narrative inhaled by activists, kindness for the “oppressed” legitimises unspeakable cruelty against the “oppressor”. For normal people, whose instincts are not numbed by ideology, the dissonance of cruelty clothed in kindness is disorientating. In 2021, Milli Hill, founder of the Positive Birth Movement, challenged use of the phrase “birthing person” to describe a pregnant woman. Fellow birthing professionals denounced her — in the name of kindness. As the attacks intensified and the language became increasingly violent, Milli lost her sense of reality, telling an interviewer: “Am I the person I think I am? Do I have this dark side that’s violent and hateful and toxic and all the things they say I am?”

Polish psychiatrist Andrew Lobaczewski, who spent his early life under Nazi occupation, analysed the political and psychological processes that generate this loss of reality. He called it ponerology, or the “the study of the origin of evil”. Collaborating, in secret, with a number of dissidents in post-war communist Poland, he sought to explain the “pathological inversion of a normal social hierarchy” in which “psychological deviants” take power and create a “pathocracy…wherein a small pathological minority takes control over a society of normal people”.

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This minority is the “pathological underbelly” present in every society, about 6% of the population, of which a tenth are psychopathic — characterised by grandiosity, narcissism, personal charisma, impaired moral and psychological reasoning, a systemic incapacity for self-criticism and the sadistic pursuit of pleasure. Under communist rule, Lobaczewski witnessed such people, riven with mediocrity and oblivious to their incompetence, become leading members of the party. As their grip on power tightened, one malignancy bred another, until academics, scientists and psychologists succumbed to communist ideology. They acted as if in possession “of some secret knowledge; in their eyes we became their former colleagues, still believing what the ‘professors of old’ had taught us”.

From Mao’s attack on the Four Olds — old ideas, old customs, old habits and old culture — to the assault by critical race theorists on the universalism of the civil rights movement and the sublimation of antisemitism into support for Hamas atrocities, a defining factor of pathocracies is historical amnesia and psychological naievety. This allows for the separation of the “Old” from the “New”, and the metastatic transformation of what Lobaczewski called the “pathological underbelly” of society into the ruling elite.

In the West, progressive activists are denying their cultural dominance, despite using this dominance to shame, de-bank and destroy their enemies. They compete for status by aligning themselves with intersectional destitution to manufacture a world in which discrimination, inequality and climate deaths are increasing, when the evidence shows the opposite is true. Ultimately, elite pathocrats become totally isolated from the world of normal people. Their language becomes esoteric and they speak only to each other. The Polish philosopher Angnieszka Kolakowska described this descent into unintelligibility among Communist Party members as a defence mechanism: when they “feel cornered, they automatically lapse into textbook communist jargon”, she wrote. “Their words simply fail to refer and the result is gibberish.”

Gibberish, in the mouths of elite pathocrats, becomes wisdom, creating a utopia of nonsense, detectable in sentences like this, from the activist Rosa Lee: “By remembering the metaphorical character of any scientific model, we can draw out the insights of the theory of performativity while putting it into conversation with our other Marxist metaphors.” The end point is “communisation, the transition to new communist selves”. The mystique of this language cements the separation of ideology from reality and pathological elites from the “normal man”. Faced with struggle sessions, shaming, bullying and violence — and fearing for their sanity — normal people lapse into silence, unable to comprehend the pathocratic trauma unleashed upon them. When an individual is compelled to violate what she knows to be true, to substitute an ideological fantasy for reality, the result is psychological disintegration.

When an individual is compelled to violate what she knows to be true, to substitute an ideological fantasy for reality, the result is psychological disintegration. Such a spectacle is a source of pleasure to the dominant elites for whom “forcing others…to feel and think like themselves becomes an internal necessity, a ruling concept”. This “necessity” can never be satiated. No level of deindustrialisation can cleanse the West of its “abuse” of Mother Earth, no ritualistic recitation of pronouns can redeem the “sins of the cis” and no atonement can ever be sufficient to repay the debt owed by the Jews for their “crimes”.

This impossibility of salvation makes sadism eternal.

This process is viscerally described in Juliette, a novel written by the Marquis de Sade. In it, the eponymous heroine meets Pope Pius VI and demands that he offer up a dissertation on murder. The Pope obliges, arguing that to commit murder is in accordance with Nature:

“from time immemorial, man has taken pleasure in shedding the blood of his fellow man and to content himself he has sometimes disguised this passion under a cloak of justice, sometimes under one of religion. But, and of this let there be no doubt, his purpose, his aim has always been the astonishing pleasure killing procures him.”

Ideology, in other words, is used to conceal the sadistic desires of the libertines, to legitimise the raw exercise of power. Normal, virtuous people are imprisoned, tortured, brutalised and killed by aristocrats, priests and popes — purely for the pleasure of it.

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Pathocrats who seek the collapse of open societies do everything they can to conceal the “astonishing pleasure” they get from having the power to punish. They do so by redefining concepts like “justice”, “safety” and “kindness” in a language accessible only to the elite. Like contemporary identitarian progressives, Sade’s libertines speak only to each other. This enables them to hide the sadistic psychology that drives them.

And because it is impossible to prove that people are thinking “correctly”, the elite’s desire can never be satisfied. Pathocrats and libertines cannot be appeased. In a futile attempt to appease her attackers, Milli Hill offered her online platform to a Bame birthing expert. For this, her accusers amplified her guilt by adding racism to the accusation of transphobia. They shamed her for not paying the Bame woman for her work, and accused her of being a “white saviour”. The simple fact of Hill’s continued existence was an irresistible invitation to degrade her further. But still, they cloaked their cruelty in the language of kindness. Lacking the courage of the Sadean libertine, her tormentors clung to their progressive ideology, for fear, as Lobaczewski observed, that without it “nothing would remain except psychological and moral pathology, naked and unattractive”.

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By Jacob Howland

It’s that nakedness we see when a mob is implored to “punch a fucking Terf” or a Hamas terrorist decapitates a dying Jew with a garden hoe. Yet those who raise their fists in support are, without doubt, on “the right side of history” — that is, the winning side. Pathocrats almost always win, the few silencing the many, because it’s easier to be kind than to love.

If we are to survive this cruelty in the name of kindness, we need to separate what’s benign and beautiful in progressive ideologies from the pathological underbelly that’s overwhelmed them. We need to salvage tolerance and inclusion for all trans people from the attack on science and single-sex spaces undertaken in their name. We need to rescue the universalism of the civil rights movement from an anti-racism that reverses the terms of a malevolent racial hierarchy in the name of justice. We need to protect present and future generations from the consequences of environmental degradation without sacrificing the poor to gratify an apocalyptic vanity. And we need to seek justice for Palestinians without glorifying unspeakable violence.

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The rise of post-truth liberalism

By John Gray

Lobaczewski concluded that normal people protest against pathocrats “from the depths of their own souls and their human nature”. They protest against the evisceration of their language, the denigration of their values and the unjustified status of the elites who govern them. If we allow pathocrats to control our institutions and corporations, the future will #BeKind.

We must remember that it’s their weakness, not their strength, that compels the pathocrats to silence dissent. As the anti-apartheid campaigner Nadine Gordimer wrote: “No social system in which a tiny minority must govern without consent over a vast majority can afford to submit any part of control of communication.” To break their power means isolating the minority within the minority from the decent people who have become cruel out of fear, contagion and opportunism. In this struggle, we’ll find unexpected allies.

Having been one of the last prisoners in the Bastille when it was stormed in July 1789, the Marquis de Sade later found himself in the improbable position of a revolutionary judge. When the family of his estranged wife, responsible for his long years of incarceration, were brought before him for judgement, he chose mercy and spared them from the guillotine, saying: “Such is the revenge I take upon them.”

Freddie Sayers: Is it your view that liberal civilisation has passed into history? 

John Gray: Yes, and it’s not coming back. Something else might emerge — something which is new, which may revive or reinvent some elements of liberalism. I hope that’s the case; I hope that there can be something like the practice of tolerance again. But what I think has not been noticed by many commentators is that two things have undermined the post-Cold War model of convergence on a liberal civilisation.

One is that other models of society — not ones I would like very much, but the Chinese model is an example — have emerged, which clearly challenge the claims of liberal societies to be potentially universal. But perhaps the biggest change has been in liberal societies themselves, which is that both as economic models and as embodiments of tolerance, they’ve morphed out of existence. 

When people said back in the Nineties that liberalism would become universal, they assumed that the liberal societies that then existed would continue to exist and would extend their reach. But we all know now that practices of cancellation, practices of de-platforming, practices more recently of debanking, have developed whereby people with views that are regarded as beyond the progressive pale, which don’t conform to some progressive ideology — which doesn’t see itself as an ideology, just as diversity and inclusion. They can’t actually see that what they’re promoting is an ideology. Politics is something that goes on in a small way in Westminster. 

And there’s a rather crucial feature of this, which I think has to be taken fully on board. The restraints on freedom of speech and expression that exist in formally liberal societies are not imposed by a dictatorial or authoritarian government. On the whole, they’re imposed by civil institutions themselves. They’re imposed by universities, by arts associations, by museums. All the kinds of things that happen in China, because people are terrified to deviate from the government, happen by themselves spontaneously here. And that’s a profound metamorphosis. I can’t see how we can get back to a situation in which tolerance and freedom of speech and expression for some very wide range is taken for granted. Which it was — I’m old enough to remember the Seventies and Eighties, and even almost up to the Nineties, it was simply taken for granted that you could think and say what you like. 

I remember for example, one of my intellectual mentors was Isaiah Berlin, and he said, “Read this really good book, bit of a Nazi, but read it.” And it was a book by Wyndham Lewis called The Demon of Progress in the Arts. “Brilliant, brilliant, pity he was a Nazi.” Now, you couldn’t say that, couldn’t recommend a book by someone suspect. You could joke, you could talk, you could make references, you could say that people who were in general poisonous or toxic had important insights, you could discuss them and swap them. And that was all taken for granted. If it ever comes back, which I doubt, it will be as a result of a tremendous struggle. 

FS: Should we be trying to rescue that liberal settlement? Or should we just accept that it’s passed?

JG: One feature of earlier generations of liberals is that they understood that a liberal society needed to be maintained politically, that there had to be political action, political discussion and political compromise. Keynes understood that very well. He says somewhere that we can only keep this going by guileful compromises, devices, political stratagems, coalitions, that kind of thing. And one of the features of the liberalism that’s come to prominence in recent years, is that it’s wanted to take more and more issues out of politics, so that they can’t be contested at all. To establish them as rights, legal rights, or in some way whereby they’re just beyond contestation. And of course, the end of the road for that is visible to some extent in the United States.

I say this immodestly, but back in 1991, I said that I thought America would unravel around abortion, partly because there was no general consensus when the issue was constitutionalised — I’m pro-choice, but put that aside. And about a third of the society rejected that right and thought it should be curbed or even reduced to almost nothing. What then happened was a long process of 30 years of attempted political capture by conservatives of the Supreme Court. When I wrote that 30 years ago, people thought it was a sort of fantasy conspiracy theory. But that’s what happens. If you politicise the judicial institutions, if you extend rights, unconditional rights, further than they can be extended in terms of general welfare, or in terms of general ideas of what’s acceptable, then inevitably over time there’ll be an attempt by those who feel they’ve been excluded from this to capture the institutions. 

The stage after that, though, this is the stage we’re getting into. Politics becomes Schmittian — another Nazi, by the way. He developed this notion of politics, which I think is a terrible conception of politics, that it’s a matter of friends and enemies — not of opponents, but friends and enemies. So then it becomes a battle, politics becomes a war. The next stage in America will come probably after the next presidential election, in which whoever wins will not be accepted as illegitimate by about a quarter to a third of the population. That’s when you’ll have Schmittian politics. I’m not saying there will be a civil war, but there could be civil warfare. 

So these processes taking together have eclipsed liberal civilisation in a fairly conclusive way. I don’t see it coming back; I don’t think any of you in this room will see it come back. But what you might see are enclaves of it, enclaves which are hard to shut down. That’s what we should be thinking about: spaces where you can say what you think. 

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FS: Could a major war — such as one between China and America — inspire some sort of revival? 

JG: War is not generally redemptive. We are a bit spoiled by the Second World War, which despite all the myths, I think, was a just war and which we didn’t lose. We didn’t have the experience of occupation, which is a very important point. If we’d had the experience of occupation, we would know that most people collaborate. Most of the authorities, most of the middle classes — which are now touted in liberal theory as the beacons of autonomy — they would collaborate as they did right across Europe. But on the whole, I don’t hold out any hope of redemption through war. 

FS: You’ve previously said though that you think war between America and China could come quite soon. 

JG: I did, and I still think it’s possible in the next 18 months. It’s not a firm prediction. It’s such an impenetrable regime, more impenetrable even than Russia. But one can easily imagine them seeing the next presidential election in America as a time of maximum uncertainty in America or maximum introversion in America and maximum distraction in America. So if they’re going to launch anything military, which I think is their second strategy, not their first, it might be then. Because they would say: “Will they react? Will they respond? Maybe they won’t.” 

There is another strategy which they might pursue after the elections in Taiwan. And they might want a way of setting in motion a process of unification without military action. I’m pretty sure that there have been some public hints to that effect from the leadership, that they would prefer that, but there are obstacles to it. And one obstacle is Hong Kong. If they’d respected “two systems, one country” when they took over Hong Kong, they’d be much more likely to succeed in a political strategy in Taiwan. But if people in Taiwan fear the lid coming down on all their freedoms, then they might not vote for it. 

In the slightly longer term, if I’m wrong about the next 18 months to two years, I see the absorption of Taiwan by China as practically inevitable, partly because a lot of Taiwanese business has interests on the mainland, but also because there are vast amounts of American capital in China. And what you should be aware of is when people talk of a “second Cold War” as some sort of natural continuation of the first, this is completely different. In the actual Cold War, the two main protagonists were not economically codependent. The Soviet Union had some impact on the oil price and various industries here and there, but nothing like this. Whereas, the West — America and Europe — are joined hip and thigh to China. But there’s no way Xi Jinping or any other post-Xi Jinping leader, will give up the claim on Taiwan. It’s the jewel in the crown for them, having been to China, having talked to various people, having heard them say what they do. 

FS: You’ve previously written a lot about the green movement, and in recent weeks there’s been a rolling back of the net zero plans. When we spoke before, you were saying you think that’s one of the big issues that is turning across Europe, and that in some years’ time, we might look back at the net zero era and almost laugh. Do you think that’s possible?

JG: I do. I think it’s more than possible. I should say, I’m not a climate sceptic. I’m a disciple in that regard of a great friend who died recently, James Lovelock. He used to say, climate science is inexact but if it has a bias it’s probably towards underestimating the speed of climate change. He thought that climate change would consist of sudden jumps and it could transform things quite quickly, in a couple of decades. We might be in the middle of it. That’s my view — I’m not a climate sceptic. What I am very sceptical about is net zero, and the kind of conventional green policies that are being launched, for a number of reasons. First of all, they were launched before the infrastructure was there. They were launched before the technology was developed that could make them work. No consideration was given to the fact that many of the raw materials that were needed for the inputs, the batteries and so on, were now substantially or even largely controlled by China in Africa and elsewhere. It’s in Africa that the Great Game of the 19th century is being refought.

Now, they might be found in other countries — in Sweden and America, various deposits have been found. But they’re not quickly developed. And in the meantime, these programmes can’t go ahead. Nor were the economic costs of these green programmes properly assessed. There was a constant insistence that they would be job-creative. Well, even in America, they haven’t been that job-creative, actually. And remember, America is very big, and they can throw very large amounts of money at these things — the Green New Deal is largely a protectionist scheme. So they can do it. We can’t do that because we’re too small, we’re too exposed to flows of international companies. So the idea that in Britain or in Europe these programmes could ever possibly work — it’s a bit like suffering from cancer and using candle therapy. That’s how it will be remembered — candle therapy. 

And then people might say, “But we’ve got to, we’ve got to show that we’re on the right side, we’ve got to accomplish it, even if other people don’t do it.” I think that’s the politics of narcissism: “I want to feel good.” But in the meantime, you’re wasting resources and you’re wasting time. There is a serious possibility that we’re now in the early stages of runaway climate change. We should be focusing everything we’ve got — not on having an infinitesimal impact on global carbon levels, which would be the case even if the whole programme was implemented — but on policies of adaptation. And adaptation is not going to be easy. Remember, most climate scientists agree that once human-induced climate change is in the works, it goes on for decades or even centuries. You can’t just stop it. There’s a general idea among environmentalists that we started this so we can stop it. No. We started it, probably, but we can’t stop it. 

Last time Freddie and I spoke, I said we were in an age of tragedy. I’m not too sure about that anymore. I think we’ve advanced further than tragedy. We’re entering an age of absurdity. An example of that would be German climate policy. Germany, as we know, is incomparably more adult, more advanced, more modern, and in every way superior to bungling Britain. But in Germany, the result of their closing down of nuclear and going for renewables has been an increased reliance on the dirtiest kind of coal. Well, that is tragic, but it’s even more than tragic. It’s completely absurd. The world is advancing rapidly, I think Western society particularly, into utter absurdity. That’s one of the things we’ve got to cope with. And if you put these arguments forward, it’s difficult to do because people start shouting at you or they start crying or they say they can’t get up in the morning. I rather brutally suggest: “Well don’t. Stay in bed till you get a better reason for getting up. And if you don’t, well, there we are. Progress always has casualties.” 

One of the great books of the last century in English was a book by the American scholar, Philip Rieff, called Freud: The Mind of the Moralist, in which he said Freud was a stoic moralist. He quoted a wonderful letter of Freud’s, where Freud said his aim in therapy was not to enable people to realise themselves or to achieve happiness, his aim was to change hysterical misery into the everyday suffering of normal human life. Now, that was somehow forgotten. And he wrote a later book called The Triumph of the Therapeutic, in which he said that a therapeutic model of behaviour was spreading in every part of society. Rather than using moral terms or even political terms, people started using psychoanalytical terms. “What do you want out of this? I want closure.” Well, the thing about Freud is there’s never any closure. Closure is impossible for Freud. We bear the scars as well as the good things from infancy, whatever we do. We can’t change ourselves in these fundamental respects, according to Freud. And so I think, climate policy, conventional climate policy, is for therapeutic people to feel good. They don’t want to feel powerless, so they deceive themselves. 

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FS: If you’re right, at least, on the politics of that issue, what kind of collapse follows the descent into absurdity? 

JG: If there’s an optimistic scenario, which there may be, then it’s one that involves the rebirth of politics. Because the trouble with technocratic pragmatism is it doesn’t work. Because what technocratic pragmatism means is approaching what are carefully defined problems defined by conventional thinking, by groupthink, and applying some conventional medicine. That’s it. 

But there’s also the question of political legitimacy. And what’s being discovered now, is that there are limits to political legitimacy for policies that severely disrupt the practical lives and incomes of large numbers of people in society. So if you impose a Ulez scheme in an area where there’s practically no public transport, so most of Britain or large parts of Britain, or it’s unreliable or scarce, that has a severe impact on people trying to get to work. And there’s also the subjective feeling, which is very important, a feeling of being imprisoned in one of these 15-minute cities, of somebody doing something to you which you resist. 

In the taxi that brought me here, the taxi driver was saying that he knows that lots of people who are going round and smashing or disabling the Ulez cameras. And what will happen is the numbers build and the policy will eventually be overturned, or you’ll have a period of anarchy. I remember, when Thatcher having trialled and failed to impose the poll tax in Scotland, she did it in England. And this happens to all leaders, whether they be liberals or not. They tend to become anti-empirical. They double up instead of learning from their mistakes. And that resulted in riots and her being toppled. Something like that, I think, could happen in the case of these green policies. Because it’s a huge blow, not only to the faith, the worldview of the technocratic elites that support it, but also to the perception of them, as their competence hasn’t delivered any of the results it’s supposed to deliver. 

And people are supposedly converting to electric vehicles when there are hardly any charging points. By the way, someone who is an expert on this made a point to me, which I hadn’t thought of, he said one thing which is commonly neglected is that if these charging points were installed, they’d be very, very large, much larger than ordinary petrol stations, because it takes a long time to charge up. If each car in line charges up for half an hour, it’s going to be huge. So basically none of this is going to happen and enormous amounts of money will be wasted. People’s lives will be disrupted, and then it will be forgotten. It’s more like prohibition in America than it is like a rational solution. It’s the most nakedly irrational solution you can have to the growing danger of climate change. 

So what’s the solution? In Britain, I have a tiny sliver of hope. I’m hoping for a hung parliament, which might not happen because Labour has been rejuvenated in Scotland. But if it doesn’t get a working majority, there’s a realistic chance of electoral reform. The only way you can really have any new ideas filtering into politics is by creating new incentives, which involves the destruction of the existing party framework. The parties would split, they’ll split immediately. Perhaps two or three parts of Labour will split: you could have a real socialist party (hopefully non-Corbynite); you could have a green party but not a not a conventional green party; you could have a Liberal Party; you could have a Libertarian Party. You can have a variety of parties, and I think that would be a much healthier situation. There’s the sliver of hope.

*      *      *

FS: I think now is a great moment to open it up to our audience.

Question One: I understand you’re familiar with the work of Fritz Stern, particularly his essays and his books on the failure of liberalism in Germany pre-1933. He’s quite clear that for all the attraction of liberalism, there is in his words a terrifyingly large part of the population that is attracted to coercion, and ultimately it always fails. Ultimately, liberalism is the least worst of all outcomes. Do you agree with that? 

JG: I’ll answer your question with an historical example. If you thought that liberalism was the only thing — in my own view, this is slightly pessimistic — and everything else doesn’t work, the question is, at what cost does it not work? And how can you get the next best mix? Let me give you an example. Back in the early Nineties, I actually took part in a debate with Jeffrey Sachs, some of you will know who that is, who was tremendous advocate of radical market policies in post-communist Russia. I was a critic of radical market policies in post-communist Russia, because it had been communist for 70 years, and large parts of the Soviet economy were military-industrial Rust Belt, there was cataclysmic pollution practically everywhere, and the only entrepreneurship even before the communist collapse was often criminal. 

I thought an attempt to push a strong liberal line in Russia would — and you can read what I wrote in the early Nineties — lead to disaster. I thought the best thing in Russia was a hybrid, some elements of authoritarianism — after all, in its long history, it’s had practically no extended period of removal on freedom. A tiny little bit of anarchy under Yeltsin; a certain amount of feeble constitutionalism coming to nothing and then being withdrawn under the last tsars. But almost nothing. So the difference — by the way, any argument about Russia and fascism is too optimistic because actually during fascism in most of the European countries, even in Germany, there were institutions and civil society relics was still there that could be revived. There’s almost nothing in Russia. So I think the danger of saying only liberalism works is you focus everywhere on trying to get a liberal model, rather than getting something more mixed, and more realistic. So I disagree with him.

Question Two: I just wanted to go back to your point now about economics, and to understand what we’re experiencing now is that the development of capitalism is also having an impact on the decline of liberalism from a political point of view. Would one way to solve that be to act more on the economic structure?

Question Three: You talked about cancel culture in universities. And I understand that one university is running a programme called disagreeing well, with an attempt to develop what is known as epistemic humility. In other words, you don’t diss the other person because you think their data is rubbish immediately. And I wondered what you thought about it? Is this something that will work in restoring liberal and civil debate within universities?

JG: Well, any such initiative can be valuable. I’m glad there are such initiatives, but it tells you something that what used to be good manners and fair play and decency is now called “epistemic humility”. You haven’t got epistemic humility if you think I’m going to cancel you! I’m joking — I think they’re important. But it shows the difficulty that we have to somehow have a theory of what “disagree well” means in order to try and get back to what used to be an accepted practice of tolerance. But if you ask what the main problem is, I think the fundamental idea that reasonable people can have divergent beliefs and values has been lost. I noticed this in the Brexit debate (it wasn’t a debate; it was a hate-fest). Basically, my view — I was pro-Brexit — my view was that it was an issue that reasonable people could differ profoundly on. And by the way, the best argument against Brexit that was put by one of my friends turned out to be true. I said, “Why are you voting Remain?” He said, “Because I think the British political class simply isn’t up to making Brexit work. They’re hopeless.” I think that was a very powerful argument and a very perceptive argument.

FS: You’re still pro Brexit?

JG: It’s been botched and bungled, and aborted to the extent to which it’s hard to see how it can be saved. I don’t think we’ll go back into any complete EU. I don’t think we will rejoin. I don’t think that could be democratically legitimated. What we’ll end up with is in some halfway house, which is worse than being in or out. But every progressive opinion will be tremendously pleased by this, because the one thing that progressive opinion is not interested in is Europe. Europe is becoming a hard-Right bloc for various reasons, and you’ll never see this mentioned. People say, “We’ve got to get back into Europe; total disaster; leaving Europe was catastrophic…” It’s more illiberal than it was when we left. They’ll probably blame that on Brexit — they were very convoluted arguments. 

Where does economics fit in? I’m a bit of a dissident on this. I think that those of you who are market liberals or libertarians will find this really shocking. But I think there’s a good argument for renationalising, or taking back into some other kinds of public ownership, various public utilities. Because I think just looking empirically: it hasn’t worked in water; It hasn’t worked with the railways; it hasn’t worked on the whole with the banks. They’re very good at stripping people of their civil liberties, but they’re not so good at keeping their branches open, or giving people a decent return on their savings. They’re dreadful entities.

Question Four: In terms of the practices that we see in Canada around assisted suicide, or in the Benelux countries, would you see that as hyper-liberalism or post-liberalism? Particularly in relation to the idea that there’s something about faith, about Christianity, that’s welded into the human ethic and the ethic against killing in forms of enlightened liberalism. Do you think there’s a moment where society reverts to a sort of post-liberal paganism or is that not how you see it?

JG: No, I don’t see it quite like that. But I do agree with you on the earlier part of your question which is: what stopped? There are a lot of people who say, “This is a problem with the decadent liberalism or the hyperbolic liberalism we’ve got now, but if we get back to classical liberalism, everything will be alright.” But classical liberalism was an offshoot of Christianity. The roots of the early modern — the root of the practice of tolerance, of conscientious objection in the wars of religion, of the idea of an inner life in which people perceive the truth not obstructed by external authorities — wasn’t in the Enlightenment. Most of the Enlightenment thinkers — Voltaire might be an exception — were not that keen on freedom of thought and expression. Auguste Comte, a very influential later-19th century enlightenment thinker, said there’s no more reason for tolerance in ethics and politics than there is in physics or chemistry. You just have experts. If you want to know what to do, ask an expert. It’s ridiculous, because that’s the age of absurdity.

I was told this by a friend of mine who advised American governments — I think it might have been Libya — he raised an issue with some high-level American officials and said, “What shall we actually do about this?” They said, “Don’t worry, we’ll send out some experts, they’ll solve it.” So they destroy a dictatorship or tyranny, they destroy the Gaddafi tyranny, and it leads to a situation of anarchy in which there are two governments at least, i.e no government, under which it’s practically impossible to control the people smugglers because there’s no government to control them. The damage has been done. 

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FS: And on euthanasia?

Well, is it hyper-liberalism, or repaganisation, a kind of post-liberal repaganisation? I don’t think it’s paganism because, as I say in my book, the extraordinary thing about paganism is its moral modesty. One of the advantages Christianity had over paganism in the ancient world, is that when there were plagues, the Christians didn’t all run away. That’s what the pagans did. The Christians bound themselves together. They thought it was something sent by God as a trial. They had to show their virtues to each other. The pagans just say, “It’s something meaningless; do what you can; run away.” So actually, Christianity had a kind of Darwinian advantage, you might almost say, over paganism at that time. I think one of the fundamentally mistaken views is that this is repaganisation. Actually what it is, is a corrupt and hyperbolic and hollowed out form of Christianity. The woke movement, the hyper-liberal movement is liberal, it comes from liberalism. But what restrained the matrix of theology and metaphysics and values beyond the human will, that restrained liberalism in an earlier period, has gone. So this kind of development is inevitable.

I’ll give you a different example. Once you get rid of this theological background — I’m not a Christian myself, I’m an atheist — but once you get rid of it, it’s very difficult to stop things emerging like the technological pursuit of immortality. Most, not all, but most of the billionaires, the American oligarchs, are deep into this. Because, after all, what could be more of a curb on human autonomy than mortality? Now, the euthanasia case is in a sense the obverse of that, where you turn death into a chosen choice. And I think that one of the key things that happens in a post-Christian society or a society which contains many people for whom Christianity means nothing, or even theism means nothing, is that suicide becomes an option. You can’t get away from that. And then you’ve got to consider how that can be contained within a legal and a moral and a social framework without really having a Canada-like result. Or you can take the view which Christians might take, which is it should be prohibited altogether. 

But I don’t actually think that’s sustainable in a modern society, or even in an ancient society, because the key thing that tolerance was a solution for was the fact that human experiences and human values have always been, are now, and will always be, dissonant. So we will always be living among others, some of whose values and beliefs we despise, and hate. That will always be the case. That’s why we need tolerance. But of course, we say, “The solution is that we get rid of people who don’t have the right opinions, or we gradually educate them out of their opinions, or any difference from the progressive incentive is a sign of stupidity, or wickedness.” That simply takes you down the road to the kind of soft totalitarianism that some people have complained about — although, once again, never underestimate the fumbling stupidity of the people who try and impose this.

Question Five: I just wanted to come back to your comments about universities, because when I joined the University of Sussex in 1991, as a teacher, the ideology at the time was poststructuralism, and the deconstruction of everything. And there was no such thing as truth, there was no such thing as a self, there was no such thing as an author, and it was quite a struggle to take an alternative view at the time. Now, it seems almost like a volte face, that maybe what post structuralism did is to create a philosophical vacuum where everything’s been deconstructed. And now we have the reaction to that, which is that we must have an ideology to replace all the ones we’ve deconstructed, and this one is not deconstructible. What’s your view?

JG: I remember myself when that was a strong influence in universities, but I don’t take the view that postmodernism and poststructuralism are at the back of what’s now called the woke movement. I think that suggests that if there hadn’t been postmodernism or poststructuralism — if there’d been no Derrida or Foucault — we’d be in a much better situation. I interpret hyper-liberalism, as the term suggests, as a metamorphosis within liberalism. Ask yourself a question: why is the woke movement strongest in the Anglosphere? They’re probably most strong of all in Canada now, then maybe America, thirdly, Britain. People interpret it as a universal movement, but it definitely isn’t when you talk about it to people in China. They regard it partly with contempt and partly with incredulous glee, because it means their chief rival is deconstructing itself before their very eyes. It’s not a universal, it’s something that has spread throughout the Anglosphere. 

But I’d say, having read Derrida and Foucault, that the playfulness of Derrida never comes through among any of these woke writers and the mordant wit, the almost cruel wit of Foucault, doesn’t come through. And equally it’s not Marxism — in fact it’s almost the opposite of Marxism because one of the things about hyper-liberalism is it doesn’t locate inequalities where they partly are, which is in what used to be called class, which affects different ethnicities. It locates them in microaggressions, in cultural things, in historical interpretations of what happened during colonialism. 

I interpret it in the book as partly a revolt of the professional bourgeoisie against their own superfluidity. They’re increasingly redundant. The cognitive elite doesn’t know anything, most of it. It knows a patois, a vernacular, that it learns at university, then it moves out into the world and finds that the opportunities for that are not infinite and they’re shrinking, shrinking for various reasons, one of which is now AI. So they’re all on the hiding to nowhere actually, those people. And therefore they get an idea: how can I possibly be safe; how can I get on a career ladder when most of the career ladders have been destroyed, or the rungs have been pulled out? Well, you can get a career if you’d like as a guardian of society, as an enlightened guardian of society. 

So there is an economic explanation for it, as well as a deep, spiritual, civilisational explanation of these movements, in terms of a narrative of meaning in life, a narrative of advance in history, like that in Christianity, in which, rather than a succession of events, history is an intelligible narrative of redemption. Although it’s not quite clear what redemption is in woke. Because one of the features of it is it doesn’t allow those who sinned very easily to stop sinning. But that was true in American puritanism. It was hard to get redemption from having been a witch. You were much more likely to be killed or subjected to various terrible trials. So I guess the answer is, I don’t believe it’s something extraneous like Marxism or postmodernism or poststructuralism. I think it’s internal to liberalism. 

And that’s why, to go back to our very start tonight, I do think that particular civilisation is over. The liberal-conservative strategy of saying: “Let’s find a form of liberalism which is pure and authentic; let’s find one which isn’t doesn’t have all these horrible intolerant, censorious elements.” I think it’s hopeless. You’ve got to do something new, something fresh, something which tries to recreate spaces of free thought and inquiry that are not late, faded copies of ones that might once have existed. And maybe some people — UnHerd and the New Statesman where I write — they’re practising this. So, my optimistic message is: don’t calculate whether you’re going to win or lose. Just live like this as long as you can.

To an extent, this shift is already taking place, as leading Democrats, from Biden to California’s Gavin Newsom, start to inch away from orthodoxies of 2020. Take the movement to “defund the police”, which, observes former Clinton advisor Bill Galston, “is now over”. Even the increasingly Left-leaning USA Today admits the slogan has little support and that it is particularly resented among Latinos and African-Americans.

Aware of this change, Biden has correspondingly worked to bolster his crime record. He recently dropped his opposition to a Congressional initiative to clamp down on a lenient sentencing bill that would have lessened penalties for property crimes and even carjacking in Washington D.C. — to the great agitation of his progressive media allies. On the southern border, meanwhile, the administration has begun revamping its stricter asylum policies, particularly in border states with large Hispanic populations.

Perhaps more remarkably, the Democratic “post-woke” turn has also extended to climate policy. Of course, the spectre of ecological crisis still obsesses many on the Left. But barely 3% of the broader population consider it America’s most pressing concern, something some Democrats appear to have finally registered. Biden, for instance, recently stopped echoing the extreme predictions of the climate lobby. Instead, he appears more relaxed about fossil fuel development than early in his term — to the chagrin of green activists — and has taken tentative steps to restart the US’s largely moribund nuclear industry. Such changes are critical, notes long-term Democratic strategist Ruy Teixeira, to winning over the increasingly diverse working class.

Even in the bluest of states, political reality is reasserting itself. California’s Gavin Newsom has kept nuclear and natural gas operating (in large part to prevent politically unpalatable blackouts) and has even suggested amending the state’s landmark environmental law. Newsom and other Democratic governors are also having to revise their free-spending ways. Faced with an economy weakened by Silicon Valley’s meltdown, Newsom has tried to reinvent himself as a fiscally conscious moderate in the mould of Bill Clinton, making budgetary trims while avoiding the large wealth taxes which could prompt a brain drain from his state.

After all, it is increasingly embarrassing that the two rival states Newsom likes to criticise — Florida and Texas — enjoy large budget surpluses, and that several red states are initiating tax cuts. Aware that disorder in Californian cities is becoming a potent talking point on the Right, Newsom has also abandoned several other progressive shibboleths. Last year, for example, he even vetoed a bill that would have legalised “shooting alleys” — so-called safe drug-injection sites — in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Oakland.

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Despite this necessary ideological moderation, it is unclear whether this is anything other than a short-term feint. By and large, there has not been any wholesale change to the party’s approach to education, once a Democratic prop, and now a Republican hammer. The largely Democratic educational establishment continues to defend a system that has produced the first reduction of the average American IQ in 100 years and which has increasingly allowed China to dominate STEM fields. The progressive embrace of critical race theory, overwhelmingly opposed by most Americans, remains unbroken and increasingly threatens Democratic allegiance among aspirational groups such as Asians and Jews. The parental rebellion against race and gender-dominated teaching has instead made stars of its Republican champions, particularly Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and Virginia’s Greg Youngkin. The recent election of far-Left union hack Brandon Johnson as Mayor of Chicago, by contrast, suggests that the core urban base of the party is nuttier than ever and will, once 2024 is over, reassert their agenda.

However, for the time-being, moderation will be needed, particularly to win the suburbs and exurbs who will determine the election. On economic and tax issues, in particular, the Democrats may need (at least for the short-term) to temper their redistributionist obsessions. No longer the party of the working class, Democrats now rely on an increasingly gentrified base, who will not want more of their wealth siphoned away. The ultra-rich now tend to be on what passes for the Left, and have consistently outraised and outspent the political Right in recent years by a margin of nearly two to one. These realities could, at least in the future, constrain the Democrats from proposing radical tax increases.

In California, Newsom seems likely to resist progressive attempts to raise the state’s income tax, already the nation’s highest, or add new payroll taxes to pay for universal healthcare. Yet there remains an initiative within the state’s party for a wealth tax that even would apply to some people who move out of the state. In reality, though, California and other blue states may need to lessen, not increase, the tax burden, if for no other reason than to keep their main funders in the state to to pay for pensions, climate change initiatives and maintain basic infrastructure. Newsom seems to recognise this, as do blue-state governors such as New York’s Kathy Hochul and Illinois J.B. Pritzker, who fear the loss of high-income residents. Biden, as President, is not so challenged, but proposals to raise taxes, as are now being contemplated, are not likely to appeal to those who stock the party larder.

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To win in 2024, particularly if the opponent is not Donald Trump, the Democrats therefore need to do more than lower their threadbare “woke” colours. A wholesale revision of economic outlook is required, towards a centrist pragmatism that the American middle class can aspire to. The rewards of moderation are clear. Around the country, red-state Democrats — such as Kentucky’s Governor Andy Beshear or Louisiana’s John Bel Edwards — have remained competitive with middle-of-the-road voters by cleaving to a moderate, pro-business course. But in the leading blue states, the party is dominated by diehard progressives, who make up roughly 8% of the electorate. This grouping, which will never vote Republican, might be able to dominate elections in urban centres such as Chicago, Los Angeles, Oakland , Houston and Boston, but it won’t win over the country. For that to happen, a new Democratic agenda is necessary.

What this looks like isn’t too hard to discern. A common-sense politics built on the bread-and-butter issues they used to run and win on: restoring manufacturing to the country, improving basic infrastructure, aiding low-wage service workers, student loan reduction and healthcare coverage. Such a shift in priorities will immediately be shouted down by the party’s vocal progressives. The only question then will be whether the Democrats have the political fortitude to complete the post-woke revolution that is only just beginning, but holds their surest prospects of remaining in power.

The pretext was the publication of Matthew Goodwin’s Values, Voice, and Virtue, which argues that Britain is now ruled by a class of university-educated, urban-dwelling, liberal cosmopolitans, heedlessly imposing their luxury beliefs about race, gender, and Gary Lineker upon everybody else. While working-class people are supposed to be fondling their Union Jacks lovingly, worrying about mass immigration and looking baffled when you call them “cis”, Britain’s institutions have allegedly been captured by a bunch of Oxbridge-educated she/her types who equate any disagreement with fascism, and who are gripped with existential dread whenever they glance at their post-Brexit blue passports on their way to the Italian lakes.

I’ve had many brushes with exactly this type of horror show, and I agree that they are overrepresented in certain sectors, such as academia and NGOs. Still, I am not sure I agree that the ranks of the elite are brimming with them generally. And neither does Goodwin, at least sometimes. In his book, he alternates between the safety of a relatively banal motte (our institutions are dominated by the professional-managerial class), and the exhilaration of a much more controversial bailey (our institutions throng with radical progressives, calling for compulsory pronoun rounds and telling anyone who dislikes mass immigration that they’re a Nazi).

In a more sober moment, Goodwin acknowledges that “these radical progressives are a smaller group within the new elite”. Much of the time, though, he equates the radical part with the elite whole. In The Sun, for instance, he writes that: “Routinely, the New Elite demand things which signal their status to other elites, such as open borders, a relaxed approach to dealing with the small boats, or the sexualisation of children, which they will not have to suffer the effects of themselves.” In his book, meanwhile, he writes that “By portraying their political opponents as an assortment of fascists, racists and close-minded reactionaries, the new elite seek to shut down the conversation and exclude them altogether”.

Whatever the new elite is, I’m probably a member of it. I went to Oxford and then made a career out of talking about whether the external world really exists independently of the mind or not, so I don’t think there is any way out for me on this. The majority of my university contemporaries are now at the peak of successful and lucrative senior careers. To my knowledge, only one person from my college year group is unemployed — and that’s Dominic Cummings. The idea that any of these people sit around performatively extolling the joys of open borders or the sexualisation of children to each other is simply not true.

Today, most of them work long hours in finance, business, the civil service, or the law. They earn large amounts of money, live in nice houses cleaned by other people, and send their children to private schools. They aren’t on Twitter; they don’t have the time or inclination. They are often cultural philistines and rarely talk about politics. They are as baffled as most of the rest of the country about the ideological capture of major institutions, and just as disconcerted.

Back at university, in the early Nineties, most of these people were not protesting the poll tax or joining Greenpeace. They were drinking pints until they were sick, watching Neighbours all day in the JCR, and taking movement instructions from the jukebox (sit down for “Sit Down”, jump around for “Jump Around”). Lads from up North were pretending to be Liam Gallagher; boys from the South were evenly split between Damon Albarn and Sebastian Flyte. There were hardly any girls, and their (our) sexual activity was obsessed over pruriently. Activist types were roundly laughed at, ambitious types decried as hacks. Most people were moral relativists but couldn’t say why. The Bosnian war was raging and I don’t recall a single conversation about it. The only newspaper columnist I regularly read was Mystic Meg.

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Thatcherism was on the way out and New Labour on the way in. As Goodwin notes, there was also a “depoliticisation” as Right and Left alternatives merged. If the neoliberalism of those years did anything for my peers, it loosened the bonds of group identity but put nothing else in their place. It made every kind of serious political effort something to be laughed at. This political and moral apathy, I think, is still the dominant tendency of the liberal elite in the UK, accompanied by an ironising and distancing humour gained from watching too much Fantasy Football League or Never Mind the Buzzcocks at a formative age.

It is not that neoliberalism made the new elite woke, then, but that most of them never really had an overt politics at all. The middle-aged, middle-class version of British masculinity inherited from that period dictates that there’s something faintly embarrassing about being seen to care strongly about any sociocultural issues, let alone anything as fraught as race, immigration or gender identity. This version of the elite is not anti-tradition — it just doesn’t positively value it. It is not, as Goodwin claims, particularly “supportive of abortion, homosexuality, casual sex, prostitution, divorce, gender equality and immigration”, but rather mostly indifferent. And it is not intolerant of political disagreements; it’s just that people don’t really have them at dinner parties.

Still, many of our institutions were captured by a small number of radicals nonetheless. And this happened partly because the elites running the institutions didn’t have a clue how to stand up to the incoming wave of moral cant, guilt-tripping, and bullying from younger and differently socialised generations. On what firm ground might they have stood in order to see this off? They don’t have a political vocabulary with which to counter the wild rhetoric, and nor do they have the convictions or earnestness to make it stick. What they do have is a suppressed sense of guilt for being so rich, a vague fear that they might make the wrong joke, and a fervent hope that the moralising will stop soon so they can talk about the football or cricket instead. Many of them also have children who lecture them about social justice. They can’t stand up to them either.

In other words, I think it’s simply wrong to imply that the majority of the liberal elite are now rampantly woke. The culture wars don’t need any more stoking. When it comes to traditional working-class values, assuming there still are any, most of the elite are in no man’s land, not enemy trenches. Their political inarticulacy has made the organisations they run ripe for power grabs but they are not directly waging any war.

In November 2022, the Wellcome Collection, a museum dedicated to the history of medicine, announced the closure of Medicine Man, an exhibition of artefacts relating to the history of medicine collected by its founder Sir Henry Wellcome. The decision to close this exhibition was itself perfectly reasonable. As a collector, Sir Henry Wellcome was a bit of a magpie, and the exhibition, which was 15 years old, was rather fusty. However, what mainly attracted attention was the statement which the curators published on Twitter that they had closed it because it “perpetuates a version of medical history that is based on racist, sexist and ableist theories and language”. To understand this statement, it is necessary to go back two and a half years to an earlier announcement from the Wellcome Collection in June 2020 in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Under the heading “Anti-Blackness and Racism”, it declared that the Collection was built on “racist and patriarchal narratives” and that institutional racism was enmeshed within its fabric. It went on to suggest that not only the Wellcome Collection but museums generally were “built on a foundation of white supremacy” and had replicated “racist behaviours” for decades. The curators declared their intention of “continually ask[ing] questions about power, representation and the civic role of public museums” and focussing on the “lived experiences of those who have been silenced, erased and ignored”.

What does all that mean? It is palpably untrue that medical history, as presented in Medicine Man, was based on racist, sexist and ableist theories. Certainly, museums reflect the historical outlook of those who assembled their collections and their successors who curated them. In Britain, they were generally able-bodied white males. But museums do not, just by virtue of that fact, replicate racist behaviours. Nor does our culture silence or ignore non-European experience where it is relevant. I think that what the curators meant to say was that the exhibition treated medicine as a western science of which non-white groups were passive consumers with no worthwhile contribution of their own. This, they felt, implied a hierarchy of cultures in which the west was superior to the rest, a notion which was offensive to non-western racial groups.

The Wellcome Collection is not alone. The Museum Association, which represents museums generally, has called on them to “address colonial structures and approaches to all areas of museum work”. At about the same time as the curators of the Wellcome Collection published their June 2020 statement, the Director of the Royal Botanical Garden at Kew, probably the world’s leading institution dedicated to plant science, issued a similar statement on its behalf. He began with the usual cringing confession that its history “shamefully draws from a legacy that has deep roots in colonialism and racism”. The only fact cited to support this surprising assertion is that during the nineteenth century, the Royal Botanical Garden studied the movement of plants around the British Empire as part of its world-wide botanical mission. This is said to have made the Botanical Garden at Kew a “beacon of privilege and exploitation”. The director went on to declare that Kew would in future decolonise its collections and “tackle structural racism in plant and fungal science”, with a view to achieving “transformative and societal change” in modern Britain. The inference is that merely by having existed and collected information and specimens in the great age of imperialism Kew Gardens is in some way complicit in modern inequalities in Britain. Finally this. “There is no acceptable neutral position on this subject [racial injustice;]; to stay silent is to be complicit”. This is a particularly odd thing to say. It seems obvious that one can be an excellent plant scientist and an outstanding plant historian without taking any view at all on racial injustice.

These statements have certain points in common.

The first is that they are proposing a political program for the modern day, supported by a highly selective approach to the past which sees everything through the prism of race. Race becomes the supremely important phenomenon, masking every other aspect of a complex culture. Racial politics provide the framework of values by which every institution concerned with the past is to be judged. There are many important factors in the way that human societies develop. Race is only one of them and not necessarily the most important. Any serious commentator on the current state of historical studies ought to welcome attempts to present aspects of history which have previously been ignored or marginalised. That includes the story of ethnic minorities and non-European societies. But it does not mean that the whole of Britain’s modern history should be viewed through their eyes. It does not mean that the role of slavery or empire in Britain’s economic, cultural and social history should be exaggerated beyond recognition. And it does not mean that current political priorities should determine how we understand the past.

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The second thing these statements have in common, is that they lose sight of the broader evolution of human history. Benjamin Disraeli once observed in response to an antisemitic taunt in the House of Commons, that “while the ancestors of the right honourable gentleman were brutal savages in an unknown island, mine were priests in the temple of Solomon”. Victorian elites undoubtedly regarded their own civilisation as superior to others. This been a universal habit of humanity ever since the Greek city-states and the ancient dynasties of China dismissed the whole of the rest of the world as barbarians. If these prejudices are ever justified, it is only for short periods of time, two or three centuries at the most. Empires and cultures are transient. They have their periods of power and creativity, before fading away. Medicine is as good an example as any. White males have not always dominated medical science. There have been periods when major contributions came from non-European cultures: Chinese, Indian and Arab in particular. Historians have not ignored this. Great books have been written about it, almost all in European languages. The 26 volumes of the History of Science and Technology in China by the Cambridge scientist and historian Joseph Needham is one of the most remarkable works ever written on the multicultural origins of modern science. But this should not blind us to the fact that the three centuries before the Second World War were the European centuries, in medicine as in other sciences.

With very few exceptions, such as the use of some medicinal plants, indigenous non-Europeans contributed very little. If one looks across a broader chronological range, the picture is very different. But calls for the decolonisation of academic disciplines do not do that. They generally focus narrowly on the 18th and 19th century and seek to debunk one of the few indisputable facts about that period, namely that it was a period in which cultural and scientific developments fundamental to the modern world almost all emanated from Europe or from European settlements elsewhere.

Decolonisation has been demanded of many other disciplines which were never in any meaningful sense colonised: the visual arts, music, literature, philosophy and even the physical sciences and mathematics. The only connection between these fields of study and Europe’s imperial past is that the West achieved a dominant position in them during the imperial era. The decolonisation statement of the Mathematical, Physical and Life Sciences Division at Oxford reveals the same obsession with race and the same tendentious attempt to portray racism as a perennial theme of western thinking. It begins by seeking to discredit its own subject by referring to the scientific racism of the 19th century, which posited a racial hierarchy identified by physiological characteristics, a view which no serious scientist has entertained for many decades and which has no current relevance to the subject.

It goes on to identify science with empire by pointing to the Victorians’ collection of material samples and botanical specimens across the globe. Moving to the present day, it calls for a study of deep-rooted racial biases in digital technology, artificial intelligence and machine learning. One would not have thought that the subject was capable of racial bias. But as the statement proceeds, it becomes clear that the object is to redefine knowledge itself, in a way which artificially devalues western science. “As we work towards greater inclusion”, it declares, “we need to have a broader understanding of what constitutes ‘scientific knowledge’. Among other things, this is said to involve “challenging western-centric ideas of ‘objectivity’, ‘expertise’ and ‘merit’”, and “removing structural hierarchies that privilege certain knowledge and certain peoples over others”. It is clear that the authors of this document believe that the empirical scientific method as conceived in the west since the 17th century is just one of a number of equally valid approaches to the subject, and that it is racially biased to prefer this to any other.

There are two basic ideas behind statements like these. One is about the nature of historical truth. The other is about inherited collective guilt.

The repeated emphasis on challenging the structures of power is an echo of the teaching of postmodernist philosophers such as Michel Foucault. Foucault was the leading exponent of the idea that objective truth is unattainable, because truth is by nature subjective. In The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969), he taught that the structures of power within a society determine what is generally perceived to be true. Few people outside the discipline of philosophy have read Foucault’s opaque works. But many more have read Edward Said’s influential book Orientalism, published in 1978, which applied Foucault’s ideas to the legacy of the great European empires. Said argued that powerful groups control the intellectual framework within which ideas are discussed and determines what constitutes knowledge. Historical truth, he claimed, is not discovered. It is made by historians, in accordance with unconscious prejudices moulded by the power structures of society. The power structures which had enabled Europeans to dominate much of the world between the 18th and the 20th centuries had generated a view of the world based on a hierarchy of civilisations which patronised and marginalised non-European peoples. According to Said, this frame of mind persisted. It led modern scholars to construct a narrative of the past which treated non-western races as representing an earlier stage of human evolution, less valid than the more developed experience of the modern west. The task of the historian was therefore to deconstruct the hegemonist West and substitute a different power structure in which other people’s truth could be acknowledged.

These ideas have been extremely influential among many people who know nothing of their origin and have never heard of Foucault or Said. In 2015, the organisers of the campaign to remove the statue of Cecil Rhodes from its niche outside Oriel College issued a pamphlet entitled Our Aims. Their purpose, it said, was to suppress the frame of mind which the statue symbolised. It was to “remedy the highly selective narrative of traditional academia—which frames the West as sole producers of universal knowledge—by integrating subjugated and local epistemologies…” When, three years ago, the Director of the Pitt-Rivers Museum decided to ask a Maasai shaman to divine which objects from the Maasai collections of the museum had been stolen from their original owners and to repatriate the items that he designated, she was giving practical effect to the idea that modern historical and archaeological methods are no more valid as a route to truth than mystical divination employed in other cultures. If truth is subjective, then every ethnic group may have its own truth, and the whole concept of objective knowledge disappears.

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As for inherited collective guilt, the argument is that if people once suffered what we now regard as injustice at the hands of our forebears, we owe it to their descendants to make that good. One thing that the study of history teaches us is that injustice as we conceive it has been the lot of much of humanity at most times. Much of the history of the world is a history of the brutal exercise of force: tyrannies, wars, massacres, persecutions. Historically, most people at most times have abhorred democracy, rejected political and religious tolerance and regarded the very idea of gender or racial equality as ridiculous. What should we do about this now that we think differently?

Logically, perhaps, humanity at large ought to atone for its own past. But at that level of generality, the gesture would be largely meaningless. After all, injustice is indiscriminately distributed across the centuries and continents. It would deprive what is really a political program of its political force. So the call for atonement for heritable guilt is directed against some specific sector of humanity, say, white people, the British or Oxford University. This is not only irrational. It is also morally repellent. Historically, the idea that particular groups bear an inherited responsibility for some past iniquity has been the basis of ugly prejudices and vicious persecutions.

The desire to visit moral responsibility for the past on some identifiable sector of mankind has generally focused selectively on Britain’s involvement with empire and slavery. No one would today defend the worst moments of the British Empire: the rapacity of the East India Company before its political and military operations were brought under government control at the end of the 18th century; the Opium wars; the Amritsar massacre, and so on. But it is a gross offence against historical honesty to take all the worst features of some historical phenomenon and then serve them up as if they were the whole.

Throughout history, empire and armed migration have been part of the dynamic of human development. The values which we regard as characteristic of western civilisation were born in the societies of ancient Greece and Rome both of which were founded on slavery and imperial conquest. The bloody conquests of the Arabs in the seventh and eights centuries gave rise to a remarkable middle eastern civilisation, far more impressive than anything to be found in Europe in the same period. The rise of modern Japan as a technical and industrial giant had its origin in the forcible opening up of the “hermit isle” in the 1850s by the American navy. The European colonial empires between the 16th and the 20th centuries had the same catalytic effect on the world.

The British Empire was created and sustained by force or the threat of it, as all empires, indeed all governments, ultimately are. It denied self-determination to its indigenous populations until its final years. Yet it was also a remarkable administrative and cultural phenomenon. Those who governed it were guided by a variety of motives, patriotic, economic, military, geopolitical, evangelical. But at least in the last century and a half of the empire’s existence they were also infused with a strong streak of humanitarianism and idealism. The empire suppressed a variety of barbarous practices which it would have been convenient to tolerate, including cannibalism, suttee, human sacrifice and slavery. It brought spectacular economic development, creating global networks of shipping, railways and telegraph and injecting capital and enterprise into local economies. It brought relative peace, honest administration and the rule of law to much of the world. It built great world cities: Mumbai, Hong Kong, Singapore, Sydney.

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Our forebears believed that good government was better than self-government, and that trade and economic development were better than cultural autarky. These are unfashionable views now, but there is nothing inherently disreputable about them. Would sub-Saharan Africa be better off today if Europeans had left its peoples to their own devices? Would modern India be better off if it had not inherited its subcontinental identity and economic infrastructure from Britain? Would the world as a whole be a better place if Europeans had never settled in the Americas or Australia? I do not think so.

Slavery was once among the most ancient and persistent institutions of mankind. The Arabs and the indigenous rulers of precolonial Africa were probably the greatest slavers who ever existed. The involvement of the Atlantic nations is, by comparison, relatively recent. It began with the Portuguese in the 15th century and the Spanish in the 16th. Britain was the last country to take to slave trading and the first country to reject it. In societies imbued by Christian moral teaching, slavery was only defensible on the footing that black people were not really human. In the late 18th and early 19th century, the rise of evangelical Christianity in Britain led to a major movement of moral revulsion against that idea. In 1772, the Court of King’s Bench declared that the English common law did not recognise property in another human being. The slave trade was criminalised throughout the British Empire in 1807, earlier than any other country except Denmark. Slavery itself was abolished by statute throughout the empire in 1834.

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For the remainder of the 19th century, Britain deployed its considerable diplomatic and naval power in suppressing the practice, initially on the Atlantic coasts of Africa, then in the African interior and the Indian ocean. The polemics surrounding Britain’s involvement in the slave trade concentrate on its participation in the 17th and 18th century slave trade while ignoring or belittling its involvement in the suppression of the trade. Yet historically the latter was very much more significant. The 17th and 18th century slave trade was in line with the conventional moral values of the age. But its suppression was revolutionary. It went against the tide of opinion elsewhere in Europe and against Britain’s economic interest. The global consequences were immense. The sheer size and global reach of Britain’s colonial empire was the biggest single factor in the suppression of a practice that had existed across the world from time immemorial.

To many people, all this is beside the point. Their real concern is with the present, and with those aspects of the past which serve their arguments about the present. Their anger against the past is provoked by a small number of totemic issues, of which race and empire are the most sensitive. These issues are totemic because the position which one takes on them is seen as a symbolic statement of which side one is on in the broader battle to shape the future. When an issue acquires totemic status, the actual facts disappear from view. The issue becomes a mere occasion for political self-expression. Hence the vandalism of statues and the campaigns to rename streets and buildings.

The statue of Edward Colston in Bristol was erected to honour his foundation of schools, hospitals and almshouses in Bristol. Tobias Rustat’s monument in Jesus College Cambridge was put there to mark his generous gifts to his college. All Souls College Library was once named after Christopher Codrington to mark his funding of one of Oxford’s great institutions of learning. All three individuals had some involvement in slavery, but none of these memorials and dedications commemorated that aspect of their lives. The objection to them suffers from the same partial vision of the past as the unbalanced historical accounts of Britain’s imperial record. Once a person or an institution is touched by slavery or empire, nothing else about them matters, however important or admirable. This marks the extreme point which tendentious selection can reach. David Hume is thought unworthy of commemoration by Edinburgh University because he shared the patronising indifference of his contemporaries to other races. Yet this is a fact about Hume which is of very little importance when measured against his stature as one of the intellectual giants of the 18th century Scottish enlightenment. In the eyes of a significant minority of the British population, mostly young, Winston Churchill has become a mere symbol of English imperialism and racism. Far more significant aspects of his life, such as his contribution to Britain’s survival in the Second World War and the destruction of Nazism, are swept aside.

Does this matter? I believe that it does.

The civilisation of mankind since the 17th century has been based on the notion that there is such a thing as objective truth. It may be more or less difficult to identify with confidence, but it exists. In history, the difficulty in discovering the truth is due to the uneven survival of sources and to the problems of interpreting those that we have, not to inherited prejudices or ideological mental blocks. We have traditionally built our intellectual world on the basis that we get closest to the truth by objective study of the available material, by abandoning immovable preconceptions, by logical reasoning and by willingness to engage with dissenting opinion. These are not just western constructs. They are universal principles, which are necessary if we are to discuss controversial issues in the same language. There is no alternative route to truth dependent on different racial identities or different hierarchies of power. Yet these basic principles of rational discourse are now under challenge.

The repudiation of Britain’s past in the name of a modern political agenda is currently a minority position. But there is a serious risk that it will become the orthodoxy of the next generation. It is strong in some important groups, notably the young and politically active, and a vocal contingent in the academic world. It may not be a passing phase. The habit of reinforcing one’s political instincts by adopting whatever facts suit them is too deeply ingrained in human nature. Today, it is intensified by the social media. They are a major source of information, especially for the young. But they are curated by algorithms which amplify views that already exist, suppressing nuance, balance or doubt and giving a misleading impression of a great tide of opinion when the material is often generated by a handful of fanatics.

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Those who believe that knowledge and truth are mere social constructs are almost bound to end up by suppressing competing views. If what we think we know is actually no more than an artificial consensus created by power structures invisibly controlling our schools, universities, publishers and museums, then there is no point in debate. You have to change the power structures, take control of those institutions and create a new consensus. This is what is now happening. It is happening with the enthusiastic support of many of the institutions themselves. They lack the self-confidence to stand up for a rational approach to empirical research and knowledge which alone justifies their existence. I am not going to suggest that modern academic scholars on the British Empire and slavery are all determinists in the mould of Foucault and Edward Said. However, their treatment of the past often shares the three main vices of postmodernist history: tendentious selection, exaggeration and intolerance of dissent.

Oxford’s 2017 “Ethics and Empire Project” was set up to explore the moral and factual basis of the conventional hostility to empire. It provoked vocal opposition from many academics. One opponent of the project, a professor of history at King’s College London, was quoted in The Guardian as saying that “any attempt to create a balance sheet of the good and evil of empire can’t be based on rigorous scholarship”. It is rare to find a serious scholar overtly rejecting the very idea of balance in the assessment of controversial evidence. But it is not as rare as it should be. The fact that his protest was supported by 170 academics in various open letters sends a depressing message about the current state of scholarship on this issue. It also explains why scholars who dissent from the current orthodoxy find it wise to keep quiet about it if they value their careers.

Every human society depends for its cohesion on a sense of collective identity. The French historian Ernest Renan, in his Sorbonne lecture of 1882 “What is a Nation?”, argued that the solidarities which created a nation were primarily historical. Renan’s target was the ethnic nationalism and social theories preached by overt racists such as Johann Herder and Arthur Gobineau. National identity, Renan declared, did not depend on ethnic or linguistic solidarities, but on a history of collective effort, collective sacrifice and collective devotion. It depended on a consciousness of having done great things together in the past, and wanting to do more of them in future. His definition is pithier in French: “avoir fait de grandes choses ensemble, vouloir en faire encore”.

There is a great irony to modern debates about the past. Those who claim to be the champions of ethnic minorities are seeking to undermine Britain’s past as a source of collective solidarity. They are reverting to morally questionable notions of conflicting ethnic identities which can only fragment our society, obstruct the integration of minorities and undermine any sense of community. The problem is aggravated in the case of race by a notion of hereditary moral responsibility, which requires one to recognise an entirely artificial class of modern victims defined by race. The result is to perpetuate grievances on account of past events that have no practical relevance to modern lives.

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Democratic institutions only work if people accept the legitimacy of their decisions even where they disagree with them. For that to happen, they have to identify themselves with the wider society to which they belong. The fragmentation of a society’s historic identity can only hinder that process. The problem is aggravated by the intolerant and polemical tone that characterises much of what is written and spoken about Britain’s past. The great apostle of Victorian liberalism John Stuart Mill foresaw that the main threat to its survival would come not from the authoritarian state but from the conformity imposed by public opinion. Current campaigns to vilify parts of our history are an attempt to create a new conformity, a situation in which people will not dare to express contrary opinions for fear of provoking outrage and abuse. These are symptoms of the narrowing of our intellectual world. Recently, publication of a book written by the director of the Oxford Ethics and Empire project was indefinitely “deferred” (in effect rejected) by Bloomsbury, the publisher which had commissioned it, on the ground that “public feeling” did not support its publication at the moment. This is the mentality which Mill and other apostles of liberal values dreaded.

We will never understand the past unless we recognise that human beings are light and shade and acknowledge both. Few individuals and no societies have ever been wholly good or wholly bad in any age. This mixture of darkness and light is a critical part of the process by which human societies develop. We can celebrate the achievements of our forebears as well as learning from their mistakes and iniquities. To reject what is wonderful and fascinating about humanity in favour of a monochrome view of the past, dictated by current priorities, is obsessive and fanatical. It is also very bad history

These New Roundheads,with their destructive campaigns against historical objectivity, share a deadly combination of dogmatic intolerance and sanctimonious philistinism with the original Roundheads. The earlier Roundheads ultimately failed in their attempt to produce a uniform culture in England according to their own narrow vision of virtue. A civilised society should wish the same fate upon their modern successors.

This is an edited version of the Pharos Lecture, which Jonathan Sumption delivered on February 27 in the Sheldonian Theatre at Oxford

“Now Abel kept flocks and Cain worked the soil. In the course of time Cain brought some of the fruits of soil as an offering to the Lord. And Abel also brought an offering – fat portions from some of the firstborn of his flock. The Lord looked with favour on Abel and his offering but on Cain and his offering he did not look with favour. So Cain was very angry and his face was downcast”.

As we know, Cain was so consumed with anger and jealousy that he attacked his brother in the fields and killed him. He was put under a curse to be a “restless wanderer” on the Earth.

On the surface this is a story of sibling rivalry, something tormenting Prince Harry. As reports at the weekend suggest, the rift between the young prince and his elder brother seems to be widening as publication day for the pointedly titled “Spare” draws nearer. It’s hard not to feel some sympathy for Harry. It can’t be easy being the spare, the younger brother whose role in the royal “firm” started in a position of subordination and has become steadily more subordinate as more direct heirs arrive to dilute his lineage.

There are plenty of younger siblings who have suffered in this way although none of us can imagine the particular hardship of being the “spare” to a throne.

Cain and Abel, though, is about much more than sibling rivalry. It contains deeper truths about human nature and the “deadly” sin of jealousy. It sounds something of a warning, therefore, for the spare prince.

Life, and in particular free market society, produces a constant churn of perceived “winners” and “losers”. Society and the media measure people by criteria of material wealth, fame and power. Hollow as these perceived “virtues” may be, they skew our perceptions, driving behaviour and sentiment.

It is natural for the winners and losers to be attracted to systems of belief which support their self-interest. Thus the winners from capitalism tend to support capitalism and the losers tend to seek out ideologies that would challenge or replace it. Those who resist this temptation are the honourable exception — capitalists who see the flaws in free markets, show real compassion and are willing to give their money away; or those vulnerable and poor who bear no resentment or anger.

Unfortunately the exceptions are far too rare.

Ideas of resentment and jealousy echo through time, and played a prominent part in the 19th century, when philosophers sought to create new theories of morality without God. Nietzsche borrowed a French word, ressentiment, to anchor the origins of his moral philosophy. By his estimation, Western moral thinking had its roots in the master-slave relationship.

The weak and marginalised members of society (such as persecuted Christians) resented those who oppressed them (the masters) and inverted the prevailing morality, turning humility, equality and compassion into the highest virtues.

“While the noble man lives in trust and openness with himself … the man of ressentiment is neither upright nor naive nor honest and straightforward with himself. His soul squints; his spirit loves hiding places, secret paths and back doors, everything covert entices him as his world, his security, his refreshment.”

The dominant creed of the resentful for most of the 20th century was Socialism. As George Orwell pointed out, socialists don’t generally love the poor, they hate the rich.

When Marxist materialism became discredited with the realisation of the economic failures of the Soviet Union and the rising death counts of Communists and Socialist regimes around the world, the bearers of “ressentiment” turned to other domains into which to inject their venom. Key targets were the spheres of culture, family life, sex and race.

And so was born critical theory, the bastard child of Post-Modernism and Frankfurt School post-Marxism. To this conception we owe the hierarchy of victimhood, the one to which we must now all defer; it also spawned the language of the social justice warriors — words such as “my truth”, “lived experience”, “white privilege” (or any other kind of privilege for that matter) “ intersectionality” and so on.

The virus of critical theory was smuggled into the American culture via academia (two members of the Frankfurt School — Marcuse and Adorno — actually emigrated from Germany to US universities before the war).

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From academia, critical theory (popularly understood as wokery) has infected the media, publishing, Newsrooms, Hollywood, football commentators, public administration, HR departments, and even Big Tech. Perhaps the last place you would expect it to appear is the British Royal family. Surely they are not the losers in life’s lottery?

But that is to misunderstand the nature of resentment. Even within the Royal Family there are those who consider themselves losers. Cain was only upset about his status relative to Abel. It did not matter that he was Adam’s first born son.

Harry has no doubt been deeply frustrated by his status within the family and the nature of his “spare”ness. There is resentment and there is jealousy. Of course the Woke creed appeals. And no wonder Harry adopts its language. Which leaves us, ironically, with a hereditary Prince lecturing us about “privilege”.

There are of course other dimensions to Harry’s story. There is the shadow of his mother and the influence of his wife. But to the extent that he is a victim, he is the victim not only of his family circumstances but also of poisonous philosophers. Perhaps his example can be a cautionary tale to the rest of us.

Paul Marshall is chairman of Marshall Wace. He writes in a personal capacity.

Precious few details were given about that harm. The signatories, comprising eventually more than 800 scholars, offered some perfunctory scholarly reasons for their demand, but it was clear that the article’s main shortcoming, in their view, was of an extra-scholarly nature: its conclusions went against the political sensibilities prevalent in today’s mainstream humanities, in whose name they were writing. Rather than a scholarly document, the letter was a rallying cry built around such conspicuously political terms as “privilege”, “harm” and “erasure” — which feature abundantly in the current discourse of the Left.

Separately, some of the journal’s associate editors apologised on social media for “the harms”, stating that “clearly, the article should not have been published”. Both Hypatia’s editor and its board of directors, however, stood by the journal’s initial decision to publish Tuvel’s article, which is still available online.

In another section of Anglophone academia, a team of three scholars, Peter Boghossian, James A. Lindsay, and Helen Pluckrose, were perpetrating what they ultimately called the “grievance studies affair”: over two years, they jointly wrote several hoax papers, and submitted them, under assumed names, to mainstream journals in the humanities. Even though these articles advanced blatantly absurd claims, and sometimes made little sense, some of them were accepted for publication — often enthusiastically. In “Human reactions to rape culture and queer performativity at urban dog parks in Portland, Oregon”, for example, published in Gender, Place & Culture, the authors claimed that “dog parks are ‘rape-condoning spaces’ and a place of rampant canine rape culture and systemic oppression against ‘the oppressed dog’ through which human attitudes to both problems can be measured and analysed by applying black feminist criminology”.

How did papers of no scholarly merit pass, sometimes with flying colours, the crucial test whereby a scholar’s subjective opinion becomes reliable knowledge: the peer-review process? Because the authors understood how important conformism to the dominant ideological orthodoxy is in the academic humanities. The hoaxers didn’t need to place any real knowledge in their submissions, only the recognisable markers of belonging to the same camp — dazzling buzzwords such as “rape culture”, “queer performativity”, “systemic oppression” — which mesmerised both journal editors and the external reviewers. (When the hoaxers came out of the shadows, the journals retracted the papers.) These two stories reveal, each in its own way, the outsized role that extra-scholarly factors play in scholarship — and, therefore, the extreme overall fragility of the quest for truth in today’s Anglophone humanities.

Almost a century ago, in La Trahison des Clercs (1927), Julien Benda warned against what he considered one of the greatest dangers of his time: the “betrayal” committed by intellectuals who, instead of defending les valeurs éternelles et désintéressées, chose to put themselves in the service of intérêts pratiques associated with specific ideologies, militant causes, social movements, and political parties. These intellectuels engagés pretended to seek universal values, while in fact advancing the specific agenda of one group or another. Max Weber’s theory of “value neutrality”, earlier in the century, had similarly argued that researchers need to keep their own values and personal biases in check if they are to truly understand what they are studying. Not to do so would be to fail as a scholar. Both Benda and Weber were writing at a time of intense ideological battles, not unlike ours. And yet they thought the way out of the crisis was not more politicised knowledge, but less — preferably, none.

This ideal would form the backbone of Hermann Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game (1943). Throughout the Thirties, Hesse saw the devastating effects of instrumentalised knowledge in the world around him: in Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, and fascist Italy, but also in the democracies that were preparing to confront them. In the novel, set in the 25th century, this confrontation marked the beginning of a catastrophic “Age of Wars”. Towards the end of this period, tired of all the senseless violence, social chaos, and political cynicism, people start to envision a solution: the pursuit of pure, rigorous, disinterested knowledge, sought for its own sake, and uncontaminated by any practical interests. Only such knowledge, they thought, will save society from self-destruction. The idea was that:

“…if respect for the world of the mind is no longer operative, ships and automobiles will soon cease to run right, the engineer’s slide rule and the computations of the banks and stock exchanges will forfeit validity and authority, and chaos will ensue… the externals of civilisation — technology, industry, commerce, and so on — also require a common basis of intellectual honesty and morality.”

That’s how the fictional “pedagogical province” of Castalia, the quasi-monastic setting of Hesse’s novel, is established. There, the brightest minds of every country in our future spend their lives doing nothing but playing the equally fictional Glass Bead Game. The game is never clearly defined in the novel, but we understand that it is the highest achievement of the human mind imaginable. “It has particularly taken over the role of art, partially that of speculative philosophy.” The most salient feature of the game is its contemplative dimension. The players don’t pursue it for any practical goals; they dedicate their entire existence to it without any concern for material gain, social status, or worldly fame. They are total scholars pursuing “the life of the Mind”, seeking nothing but useless knowledge.

And yet the Glass Bead Game has a vitally important function in society: through what they do, the Castalians preserve the integrity and purity of thinking, making sure that it doesn’t get contaminated by extraneous factors such as greed, thirst for worldly fame, and politics. Especially politics. For nothing corrupts the pursuit of knowledge more than power. The Castalians live, as Hesse writes, “in a state of political innocence and naïveté such as had been quite common among the professors of earlier ages; they [have] no political rights and duties, scarcely ever [see] a newspaper”. While outside of Castalia, people are free to engage in politics, as well as in business, professional careers, and other worldly pursuits, within the “pedagogical provinces” themselves, there is no place for such things. What lies at their core is not the pursuit of power, but that of service.

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Life in Castalia may strike us as outlandish, yet it’s nothing but the fleshing out of an old and widespread idea. The novel builds on the notion that there are largely two existential attitudes, two fundamental modes of relating to the world: vita activa and vita contemplativa. The distinction has been known to every civilisation, Eastern or Western, ancient or modern, simple or sophisticated. We can approach the world pragmatically, and act upon it with a view of bending it to our own needs and desires. This has always been the approach of statesmen and military strategists, politicians and policymakers, revolutionaries and activists of all stripes. Or we can approach the world contemplatively, seeking to understand it in its own terms, and not in relation to us, and hoping to grasp how things are in themselves, regardless of the use we make of them. Achieving such understanding is what the enlightened of all ages and all places have done: Zen monks and Sufi masters, sages and hermits, great theorists and visionaries, Glass Bead Game players and artists of genius — and, in their best moments, scholars, too.

After all, the primary job of the scholar is not to act upon the world, but to understand it. “Not to laugh, not to lament, not to detest, but to understand,” in the haunting words of Benedict Spinoza, the most contemplative of modern philosophers. One cannot understand something and act upon it at the same time; when we are acting upon an object, we put ourselves in a utilitarian, possessive, and manipulative mode, which makes us incapable of grasping its true meaning. On the contrary, a scholar is someone who takes a step back, stays still, and observes everything at leisure (scholē in Greek, from which our word derives). Scholarship, then, ends where action starts. Someone else may use scholarly knowledge to devise a practical course of action, but that enterprise is not scholarly. Those who seek to understand the world and those who want to change it are two different breeds of people, following separate paths. They may occasionally wave and smile at each other, have meaningful conversations, and even be friends, but they remain different.

Karl Marx’s bon mot, in Theses on Feuerbach (1845), that “Hitherto philosophers have sought to understand the world; henceforth they must seek to change it”, was not the beginning of a political liberation, then, but that of a great intellectual confusion. How can one change a world one does not understand?

Almost 100 years after La Trahison des Clercs, Benda’s “betrayal” has become the norm in the academic humanities, especially in the English-speaking world. Nowadays if a piece of humanistic scholarship doesn’t broadcast, or at least allude to, the author’s political views and ideological mindset, it is seen with suspicion by her peers. Weber’s “value neutrality” appears as an aberration. Indeed, to write in its defence, as I am doing here, may be construed as positive proof of — God forbid — the author’s un-leftist views.

For not only are we supposed to wear our politics, visibly, on our scholarship, which is bad enough, but we also need to hold only certain views, which is plainly absurd. As has been observed, over the last few decades academia has progressively shifted to the Left. This has translated into an increasing lack of viewpoint diversity, which has compromised “the ability of scholars to seek truth, and of students to learn from a broad range of thinkers”, as two commentators recently noted. Ideally, there should be no politics at all in our scholarship. Failing that, there should be a variety of political views involved, in the hope that they will cancel each other out.

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Yet that today’s humanist academics have strong political views and don’t hesitate to pass them on as real knowledge is not even their worst failure. What’s even more damaging is that the body of humanistic knowledge itself — its basic assumptions, the process though which it is produced, even the language in which it is communicated — is structured along political lines. Much of today’s humanistic scholarship is not just about politics, it is itself a form of political performance: it generates and increases power, it creates and maintains hierarchies, it splits the scholars into camps, tribalising the humanities and turning them into a power-charged field. Most of the time we think and write and act not as mere scholars, but as political actors — always on the lookout for ways to maximise their power, prestige and influence. Regardless of the topics of our research, much of what we do is shaped not by the inner logic of our work, but by something extraneous — by what is going on, micro-politically, in the world within which we operate. We don’t pursue knowledge for its sake, but for our own.

Ponderous questions keep the humanist scholar awake at night. Which methodology should we use: something time-tested, yet old-fashioned, or the latest fad that everybody is talking about and following compulsively, and which would place us in the spotlight? And on which topics should we work exactly: those we believe we have something genuine to say about, or the trendy ones, those that seem to bring instant social media attention, excellent political positioning, and prompt publication — something which the hoaxers of the “grievance studies affair” exploited to great comical effect? Whose work should we cite: that of some long-dead names, yet whose contribution is still crucial, or that of living scholars with influence, the “power-houses” in our field, regardless of their scholarly worth? And when we cite other scholars, should we consider strictly the intrinsic merits of their scholarship, or should we mention them, strategically, because of their gender, race or sexual identity? And, in general, what kind of stance should we take? A risky one, like Rebecca Tuvel’s, with potentially crippling effects on our career, or one that flatters the prevalent orthodoxy and smoothes our way to greater power, fame, and influence?

Deeply preoccupied with such dilemmas, we have seriously lost our way. Even worse, we can’t find our way back to start again, because our journey hasn’t been guided by anything but an incessant adjusting to the latest trends. Worst of all, however, is that, dazzled as we are by our spectacular successes, we may not even know that we have gone astray. Failure can’t cut any deeper.

On the surface, Japan appears to have progressed a lot since then. The latest Japanese TV drama Modern Love (a sort of Japanese version of Love Actually) features a lesbian couple who are raising a child. Male homosexuality has featured on TV before and lesbianism is hinted at strongly in the ever-popular Takarazuka theatre (an all-female musical theatre troupe). But Modern Love is the first frank depiction of lesbianism on mainstream TV.

Japan is also starting to see the sort of identity-based skirmishes that are common in the West. Novelist Mieko Kawakami made headlines when she dared to interrogate prize-winning author Haruki Murakami over the depiction of female characters in his novels. During the pandemic, she also criticised the government’s Coronavirus task force for being all male.

The tide also seems to be turning in Japan’s leading universities. Once renowned for their conservatism, many seem to be adopting a Western-style “progressive” or “woke” agenda. Waseda University has introduced speech codes for staff when interacting with LGBTQI+ students, while the International Christian University spent a fortune last year building an unprecedented suite of gender-neutral toilets, and has added “other” to the list of gender options on class registers. Japan’s Women’s University is one of several all-female institutions considering the admission of transgender students.

Meanwhile, Japan’s universities are introducing more progressive content to their humanities courses. A spate of umbrella courses with blandly innocuous names, such as Sophia University’s “Sustainable Futures”, are geared to promoting the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals: modules focus on “gender”, “race”, “climate”, and “inclusivity”. As for recruitment, applicants for university positions are often informed that if a male and female candidate are regarded as being equally qualified, the female will be chosen.

But, as ever with Japan, appearances can be deceiving. Japan’s progressive wave is merely an illusion to appeal to the outside world. Despite superficial reforms, its university campuses are as placid as ever. Student activism is virtually unknown; teachers are still held in high esteem, and visiting speakers are treated well. I’ve seen a beauty contest advertised on campus, but never a demonstration. In a society where people recoil at the idea of revealing their innermost traumas in public, and where fierce employee loyalty is deeply ingrained, the MeToo movement never stood a chance. It didn’t grow much beyond the campaign of a single victim, the TV journalist Shiori Itō, and as with Black Lives Matter hardly featured on Japanese campuses at all.

A likelier explanation for these reforms is a desire to attract foreign staff and students to boost university incomes. The Japanese government has been trying to increase the numbers of overseas students in Japan since it initiated its Global University Project in 2014, which selected 37 universities to subsidise for 10 years. In 2015, the government set an ambitious target of 10 Japanese universities in the Times Education top 100 rankings, which it is yet to achieve. There is much talk of Japan needing “globalised citizens” to revitalise the economy. To achieve these goals, a more “progressive” posture had to be struck to counter perceptions of Japanese universities as staid and backward looking.

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Ultimately, the difference between wokeness in the West and in Japan is this: in the West, much of the impetus in universities seems to be coming from the students — at least a loud and determined minority; while in Japan the process is top-down and aimed at generating revenue. It’s not real: no one is cancelled and there are no “safe spaces”. Japanese students, if they even notice reforms, are often simply baffled by it all.

Similarly with TV dramas, there is little evidence of any desire on the part of the audience for more “modern” storylines. The most popular shows are still strikingly old-fashioned: presenters are rough-looking middle-aged men in shiny suits, with perky, deferential female sidekicks. They are known as se desu ne (“yes that’s right”) girls and their role is to be attractive and laugh at men’s jokes. The same goes for the music industry. The 48 female members of pop group AKB48 are selected for cuteness, sweetness, and air of innocence. Like all TV talents, they are inevitably controlled by agencies run by men.

As for Modern Love, could envy at the success of South Korea’s Squid Game and Parasite be having an influence on Japanese TV producers? Japan is an old hand at selling its culture overseas. The country is ranked fifth in the Global Soft Power Index, and its cultural influence in the UK is growing: Hideki Noda’s (‘Q’) — a drama blending kabuki with songs by Queen — played in London recently, and the Royal Shakespeare Company’s performance of Studio Ghibli’s My Neighbour Totoro has racked up nine nominations in the WhatsOnStage awards. Perhaps progressive posturing is part of an attempt to trigger a “cool Japan” wave in the West to rival the Korean wave known as hallyu?

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To paraphrase Paul Valéry, in the modern world, everything changes but the avant-garde… and Japanese society. The corporate world remains unshakeably male, and calls to recognise same-sex marriage as constitutionally valid were thwarted in the courts in Osaka and Tokyo at the end of November. Japan languishes at 116 (out of 146) in the global gender equality rankings produced by the World Economic Forum in 2022.

It’s not clear how many Japanese people care. Long-term residents will recognise that, however dominant men seem to be, women wield considerable power in the domestic realm and beyond. A good example of this can be found in the inner workings of the formidable modern Buddhist group Soka Gakkai, whose political wing Komeito remains a coalition partner in government. Soka Gakkai is controlled, it is believed, by an all-female praesidium known as the married women’s association (the “Fujimbu”) which dictates the organisation’s policy.

Yet if progressive posturing is good for the Japanese economy, then so be it. Since the Meiji era (1868-1912), the Japanese have been renowned for refashioning foreign ideas into a distinct and efficient form. Japan’s police are based on the French gendarmerie, its schools on Germany’s gymnasiums, and its broadcasting service NHK on the BBC. The same goes for the arts: bonsai originated in China, as did the tea ceremony.

The phrase “go woke, go broke” might be a valuable warning in the West, but in Japan that message has been lost in translation. A full rejection of progressive Western values would be counterproductive: far better to appear to go along with it superficially, while changing nothing of consequence. Far better, and far more Japanese.

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But locals have long known that Democrats were due for a collapse. With his victory over perennial loser Charlie Crist, DeSantis transformed Miami from a cultural outpost to a diverse Republican haven heading into the 2024 Presidential election. It’s a fascinating turn for a city that has traditionally been considered more Latin American than American — one that highlights the ongoing political realignment stateside.

Miami has been trending red since 2016, when Trump made initial inroads with Hispanics, but last Tuesday’s “red wave” was a surprise. Most observers expected a modest DeSantis victory or a narrow defeat. But I was certain that DeSantis was poised for a big win. Miami has been steadily shifting rightward for years, and the city’s incompetent Democratic operatives have made matters worse by countering with woke talking points and a fake panic about “disinformation” in Spanish-language media.

The seeds of this shift were planted by the Orange Man himself. With his talk of “bad hombres” at the border and “making America great again”, Trump immediately connected with a sizeable number of working-class Hispanic Miamians, many of whom had previously been apolitical. In these early days, the county’s Right-wing crew was mostly a mix of youngish Miami bros and rabid Cuban anticommunists, who made their presence felt in the caravans that commandeered the streets and worsened already awful Miami traffic in the lead up to the 2016 election.

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This was a boisterous and fun crowd, enamored by the gaudier aspects of the Trumpian aesthetic, and it was not strictly Cuban. It was an intersectional crew of Hispanic dudes, and as the country was engulfed in flames in the summer of 2020, ladies began to join in on the fun. The Right-wing Latina was born. The caravans and boat parades leading up to 2020 were no doubt the best-looking, and most surgically enhanced, political events in American history — complete with one of the all-time great campaign songs. The city’s vibes were red hot. In 2020, Trump lost Miami-Dade County by only seven points, after losing it by 29 four years earlier. Miami was primed to go red, and soon.

As Miami began to shift Right, local progressive outfits, such as Cubanos Pa’lante, and Democratic Hispanic politicians, such as former US representative Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, doubled down on Latinx-style wokism and the “disinformation” gambit. Hispanic Miami, hypersexualised and constitutionally politically incorrect, is by its very nature an anti-woke city, but progressive Miami Democrats, captured and funded by the woke white Democratic establishment, cannot confront this reality head on. “Latinx” progressives, unable to deviate from the Democratic funding apparatus, could not speak up and say what they knew to be true: that the weird gender and racial obsessions of white progressives alienate working- and middle-class Hispanics.

Many Hispanics, as has been noted ad nauseum as the Rightward shift continues, are “socially conservative”. In Miami, however, such “social conservatism” often means a simple belief that men are men and women are women. The elevation of the trans woman as the embodiment of Democratic femininity was never going to play here — or with Hispanics anywhere.

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Some progressives have tried to explain the Rightward shift of Hispanics by pointing to the supposed “whiteness” of certain Latino demographics. According to woke dogma, Hispanics, especially Cuban Americans, think of themselves as white and are increasingly starting to vote that way. But this is a dodge, conveniently deflecting attention away from the fact that Democratic messaging is full of progressive extremism that appeals to the party’s elite base while alienating everyone else.

The truth is that progressives must focus on wokeness because confronting the reality of what many Hispanics believe on issues like the border, race, and gender would infuriate the elite white women who run the Democratic and media apparatus. This disconnect between the elite party brokers and working-class people of colour is most obvious in Miami, a city that prides itself on its intransigence. Due to their inability to speak honestly, Democrats ceded the most important issues for the city’s voters — crime, immigration, the economy — to Donald Trump and, later, Ron DeSantis.

If you hang around with working-class Hispanics in Miami, you’ll hear some of the most strident immigration policies imaginable: “We gotta close the border, bro. There’re too many people here already.” This isn’t a white dude from Omaha saying this, but a Hispanic guy who probably knows half a dozen people who crossed over illegally. This hardline talk has nothing to do with “whiteness” or Trumpism, but with the realities of living in a city where immigration is a constant. It’s no coincidence that Mexican-Americans living along the Southern border also flipped toward the GOP in 2020. As long as working-class reality is ignored in favor of woke talking points, a truth vacuum will be created.

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Into that truth vacuum walked DeSantis, who adopted and then refined the more popular aspects of the Trumpian brand. “Florida,” DeSantis says, “is where woke goes to die.” Like Trump, DeSantis understands that culture war issues can be winners for conservatives. Unlike Trump, he has proved that he has the focus and discipline to follow through on his rhetoric and win the ensuing battles. He went after critical race theory and gender ideology in public schools, banned medical transitions for minors, picked a fight with Disney over the company’s alleged political meddling, and passed the Stop WOKE Act, which has endeared him to traditional working-class Hispanics. According to NBC News exit polls, DeSantis not only won a supermajority of Cuban Americans but a majority of Puerto Ricans and half of other Latinos.

Of course, Hispanics aren’t the whole story here. Miami-Dade flipped in part because of their Rightward shift, but the influx of blue state lockdown refugees certainly didn’t hurt. DeSantis kept schools and businesses open, proclaimed “the free state of Florida,” and the rest is history. Tech bros flooded into Miami, as did regular Americans looking for freedom in what has traditionally been the most non-American big city in the country.

DeSantis’ strength on cultural issues, coupled with his pro-business and pro-freedom agenda, shows that big-tent Republicanism is still possible, so long as the man leading the charge is capable and competent. The expected national red wave didn’t happen, but if Republicans are smart, they’ll follow the Florida model employed by DeSantis, which will draw both working-class Hispanics and anti-woke, pro-America elites. The Trumpian approach was always going to attract the more rambunctious elements of the Republican base, but DeSantis has proven that his measured, workmanlike approach will retain the working-class types — Hispanic and otherwise — while attracting lapsed Democrats and traditional Republicans.

Miami Democrats will have to change course if they hope to retain the city, but their longstanding inability to deviate from woke talking points will make that extremely difficult. They must break from, or convince, the Democratic Party apparatus that Hispanics — the largest minority demographic in the country — are more traditionally American than they suspected.

On the island of Lindisfarne, the monks had been up for hours. Some were bent over their desks, copying the exquisitely illustrated Gospels for which their monastery was famous. Others were working in the kitchens, or cleaning in the chapel, or patiently sweeping the long stone corridors. But on such a fine morning, most of the younger men had slipped outside to work in the gardens. Life out here, two miles off the Northumbrian mainland, was often dark and wet and cold, so it was only sensible to make the most of the sunshine.

Lindisfarne, they all knew, was special, a place like no other. There had been a monastery here for more than a century, a sanctuary from the temptations of the sinful world. In recent months, pilgrims had brought reports of strange signs and omens. Some had talked of whirlwinds, and flashes of lightning, and great fiery dragons soaring through the heavens. But on such a morning as this, when all was well with God’s creation, storms and dragons seemed very far away.

And then one of the younger monks stiffened, and pointed, and gave a cry of warning. His fellows came running to see the sails… and that was the moment everything changed.

What happened that day, as a Viking raiding party rampaged ashore, smashed their way into the church, looted its treasures and carried off shiploads of slaves, has become one of the great milestones in medieval history. The newcomers, wrote one horrified churchman, “poured out the blood of saints around the altar, laid waste to the house of our hope and trampled on the bodies of saints in the temple of God like dung on the streets … Behold, the church of St Cuthbert, splattered with the blood of the priests of God and robbed of all its treasures — the most sacred place in Britain, prey for these wicked heathens!”

Today we remember this as the raid that opened the Viking Age, a 300-year orgy of violence and bloodshed, ambition and adventure, exploration, conquest, romance and horror. The gently embellished version above comes from the opening of my book about this period, Fury of the Vikings, written for children encountering history for the first time. It’s the sixth volume in my Adventures in Time series for younger readers, and judging by the feedback from my school visits, by far the most eagerly awaited.

What it is about the Vikings that fascinates us so much? In the last couple of years, we’ve been treated to the film The Northman as well as the TV shows The Last Kingdom and Vikings. One of the biggest hits this Christmas season is certain to be the video game God of War: Ragnarök — and even if you’re completely indifferent to video games, it’s worth noting that the previous Viking-themed God of War sold a staggering 20 million units at almost £50 apiece. Another, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, has made more than $1 billion worldwide, more money than all but two of this year’s Hollywood blockbusters. The Vikings, in other words, could scarcely be a bigger draw.

In some ways this might seem a bit of a puzzle, for the Vikings don’t obviously fit into our current cultural moment. Although one or two painfully progressive academics have done their best to reinvent them — open some recent books and you find yourself ploughing through long, earnest paragraphs about their radical attitudes to gender fluidity and hitherto unappreciated enthusiasm for Islamic decoration — the plain fact is that the Vikings were decidedly, outstandingly un-woke.

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Indeed, writing my children’s book, I found myself scouring the thesaurus for alternatives to “stabbed”, “smashed”, “crushed” and “splintered”, in a vain attempt to give each episode a different flavour. Severed heads naturally play a central part. “For years to come, Svyatoslav’s gold-plated skull was the chieftain’s favourite wine cup,” reads one random sentence. “The only sound was the drip-drip-drip of blood from the shattered remains of the archbishop’s skull,” reads another. To forestall any talk of the dreaded “sensitivity readers”, I made sure to recite some of these gorier bits to sample audiences and note the reactions. As I’d hoped, the children loved them, except for one little girl who frowned and shook her head. Afterwards she came up to me, still looking very serious. “Not enough beheading,” she said grimly. “More death, please.”

Some people, I know, find all this very unsettling. Visit a Viking exhibition today, and you’re more likely to be lectured about their multicultural trading links and lovely brooch-making than roused by their enthusiasm for ripping people’s eyes out and carrying off thousands of captives. The fact is, though, that violence was at the very heart of the Viking Age, because violence was how they made their all-important silver. And not just violence, by the way, but slavery. Nobody can be sure how many slaves the men of Denmark, Norway and Sweden shipped down the rivers of modern-day Russia and Ukraine to Constantinople and Baghdad between the eighth and eleventh centuries, but the total may well run into the hundreds of thousands. Some historians, such as the University of Uppsala’s Neil Price, talk of the Viking world as a “slave economy”; others have argued that the revival of the entire European economy after the fall of the Western Roman Empire was driven by slavery.

Yet more sensitive readers may be discomfited to learn that children don’t seem to find this a problem at all. Giving talks in primary schools, I’ve often noticed a frankly gleeful look in my listeners’ eyes when I describe terrifyingly tattooed raiders dragging sandal-wearing God-botherers into their longships. And when, a few months ago, I visited the excellent exhibition on the Vikings in the East at Denmark’s Moesgaard Museum, I was struck by the scene at one of the interactive terminals.

The terminal was running a kind of game, inviting children to fill their own Viking longship with a complement of slaves. You could only pack in so many, and you had to choose the captives most likely to fetch a pretty price in the bazaars of the East — a comely young woman here, a strong young man there. Most British or American curators, I imagine, would have a stroke at the very idea. At the very least they’d write an open letter to the Guardian calling for the closure of the museum, the incarceration of its employees and an end to the Tories’ confected culture war. But the kids loved it, openly salivating over the chance to destroy some imaginary villagers’ lives and earn a huge pile of silver dirhams. It was a brilliant way of teaching them how the Viking world worked, although it’s alarming to think that if the slave trade ever does return to the shores of the North Sea, it’ll give the Danes an enormous competitive head start.

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What that episode also reminded me, though, is that children don’t like the Vikings despite their bloodthirsty violence. They like the Vikings because of their bloodthirsty violence. For although children can be very sentimental about themselves and about animals, they don’t tend to be sentimental about other people — as anybody who has taken their progeny to an exhibition of medieval torture instruments will tell you. Like the Victorians, we live in an age that romanticises children and seeks to shield them from sights and ideas we consider morally harmful. But embark on a detailed description of some hideous battle, and you’ll soon have your listeners’ eyes shining with delight. “What sort of history do you like best?” I asked one class during a school visit this autumn. “The sort with a lot of fighting,” a little boy said solemnly, to a chorus of approval.

In this respect, are children any different from the rest of us? There’s a reason people watch things like Vikings or The Northman, and it’s not because they’re interested in the rich tradition of Swedish jewellery-making. The Vikings are the last great example of a non-Christian European people to whom turning the other cheek and loving your neighbour sounded like utter gibberish. Their philosophy was almost unrelentingly pessimistic, shot through with an inevitable sense of doom and decline. They saw the world as a dark, cold, cruel place: a place of terrible savagery and dreadful misfortune, where trust was at a premium and betrayal and disaster were never far away, rather like the House of Commons.

Yet they were not nihilists. They thought there was tremendous merit in standing your ground and fighting your corner, sword in hand and a smile on your lips. In one of the most enduring Scandinavian tales, the epic of Ragnar Lodbrok — which inspired the series Vikings — our hero ends up in the Northumbrian king’s snake-pit, the serpents’ venom coursing through his veins. But instead of moaning and groaning about his mental health, Ragnar raises his voice in one last, defiant song. “I am ready to die,” he roars. “The servants of Odin are calling me home. With the gods by my side I shall drink my ale. My days are done; my life is over. Laughing shall I die!” And then he does die. But what a way to bow out!

So perhaps I was wrong, and the Vikings are the perfect fit for our current moment. They, like us, lived in an intensely dangerous, competitive world, where rival warlords struggled for resources. They, like many of us, shook their heads with disbelief at the naïve optimism of their American (or rather, Christian) neighbours, since the Northmen knew life ended only in unspeakable disaster. And they, like us, knew that winter was coming: in their case, the Fimbulwinter, the terrible wolf-winter foreseen by the gods, which would bring the battle of Ragnarök and the end of the world.

They loved tattoos, fancy fashions and stupid haircuts; they liked drinking, having sex and smashing people’s faces in. And the people they really, really hated were pious, hypocritical do-gooders who were always telling them to behave themselves. So they weren’t so different from us, after all.

Dominic Sandbrook’s book Adventures in Time: Fury of the Vikings (Particular Books) is published today.

By the time Sacco landed at her destination and regained access to the Internet, her life had been turned upside-down. She had been branded a certified Bad Person by almost the entire Anglo-Twittersphere, including a reality TV star named Donald Trump. She was ultimately dismissed from her job.

Looking back, Sacco’s tweet may be seen as a world-historical pivot, Ground Zero for the cultural developments that characterised the 2010s: the return of Nineties-style “political correctness”; the swift destruction of lives by online mobs; the instantaneous capitulation of employers ; above all, the obscuration of important sociopolitical and material crises by a pathological obsession with language and offence-taking. Sacco, in short, inadvertently called forth the Woke Moment.

Now, nearly a decade later, the Post-Woke Moment is here. It’s a tenuous achievement, to be sure, and the woke still wield enormous political, economic and cultural power. Still, there are unmistakable signs of “a vibe shift”. In Britain, gender ideologues have suffered major setbacks, as authorities crack down on the malpractices of gender clinics. In the United States, the teaching of ahistorical nonsense in schools has run up against a wall of parental outrage. Even Netflix has told its censorious culture-managers to shut up or find another job.

The question is where we go from here. The two most plausible paths are restorationism and radicalism. (Many of the potential “third ways” ultimately collapse back into one of the two.) By restorationism, I mean an effort to turn the cultural clock back to roughly where things stood before Sacco self-destructed her life and career in 52 carelessly typed characters. The fundamental instinct of this path is that the matrix of social, economic, and cultural policy and practice that prevailed roughly a decade ago was sound. Into that happy arcadia of free speech and free markets was suddenly and for no reason injected the virus of Left-identitarianism, which conjured as a reaction the even more dangerous virus of Right-wing populism. The battle, then, is between individualists and “collectivists” of various stripes. Now that wokeism is faltering, restorationists feel, individualism must reign again.

The restorationists are essentially cautious conservatives. They believe that the sex-liberationism and gender-nominalism that have characterised the last 20 years were fine — a healthy and organic development of classical-liberal doctrine — but then suddenly things went too far with the “gender stuff”. Likewise, the liberal censoriousness of that era was fine, but then the far-Left adopted the same methods and went too far with “cancel culture”.

The dividing line between the authentic fruits of modern society and its freakish excesses was always blurry, and remains so to this day. The bigger problem for the restorationists is that, to paraphrase Mitterrand on 1968, the pre-Woke Moment contained in it many of the elements that gave rise to the Woke Moment. Restoring 2013, even if it were possible, would mean restoring the same internal contradictions — not least an obscenely unequal society, in material terms, that desperately needed the fake egalitarianism of wokeness as a legitimating ideology.

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The second path is radicalism. By this, I don’t mean extremism, but a cold appreciation for the fact that the Woke Moment was rooted in, rather than a departure from, the class rivalries and material conditions of modern society. The contradictions that gave rise to wokeness, in other words, won’t be resolved unless we work for a decent and more materially equal society — a process that will require political confrontation and compromise between the three major classes: the asset-rich few, the managers who service their affairs, and the asset-less many.

Both of the post-woke camps — the restorationists and the far less numerous radicals — must contend with a powerful woke remnant. Even more so than the restorationists, the woke are fundamentally conservative. As I have argued before, by changing how we talk about society, and altering its managerial hierarchies, they seek to preserve the existing power structure. Only now, with a backlash brewing, they must change tack.

Anand Giridharadas’s new book, The Persuaders, is representative of this subtle shift in the woke camp. In it, he aims to “reinvigorate the idea of persuasion” at a time when too many Americans view each other as “alien, menacing, and, therefore, unchangeable”. He says he wants to reverse these trends — but mostly ends up replicating their logic, in page after interminable page of saccharine prose that recalls nothing so much as a piece of corporate diversity messaging. Giridharadas is a wokester trying to strike a restorationist-liberal pose.

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The book starts out promising enough, with a discussion of the Russian troll farms that many liberals to this day blame for catapulting Donald Trump to the Oval Office. For Western elites struggling to explain rising populism, it couldn’t be that Trumpers, Brexiteers, and Gilets Jaunes revolted over legitimate grievances with progressive rule. No, it must have been Kremlin mind-control that propelled them. Where once it was chiefly the politically uneducated prole on the street who unreasonably suspected elites of conniving with nefarious foreigners, today it’s as often elites who imagine the common people are foreign agents or automatons.

Observing the workings of the troll farms up-close, Giridharadas draws a different conclusion: that the Kremlin’s influence operations merely exploited existing social discord. “As tempting as it may be to view the Russian operatives as instigators,” he writes, “to witness these moves is to witness a mission of amplification.” Even in 2016, this should have been apparent to anyone with enough faith in Americans to question their susceptibility to St. Petersburg-hatched memes depicting the Lord Jesus hugging Trump. Still, that a former New York Times columnist is now prepared to voice the obvious signifies something.

That something is, in a word, weakness: the yawning sense that despite their conquest of major institutions, progressives are alienated from broad swaths of the public. Big Tech and Hollywood, the HR department and the Central Intelligence Agency — all now speak in their vernacular. Yet comedians have begun to mock their inanities with impunity, the GOP is making electoral hay of the 1619 Project, and suburban moms are mobilising to defend the right of their sons to become merely gay men, rather than eunuchs.

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That’s where Giridharadas comes in, bearing both a warning and a hopeful omen for progressives. The warning is that unless the Left changes rhetorical course, its language and purity-policing will leave it isolated from the masses, its political causes moribund. The good news is that the Left can overcome this obstacle by making accommodations for those less enlightened than themselves. “Persuasion,” in other words, is just a matter of cultural progressives being a little nicer to the benighted many.

That, supposedly, is the great achievement of Linda Sarsour, the Palestinian-American feminist who in the aftermath of Trump’s election helped organise the Women’s March. Viewed through the lens of social class, the Great Pussy-Hat Uprising of 2017 was a movement of gentry wokeism, by gentry wokesters, for gentry wokesters. I would venture to say that it “persuaded” not a single true-believing Trumpian. So why does Giridharadas single her out as an exemplary “persuader”? Well, you see, Sarsour and her Women’s March co-founder Tamika Mallory made “a bet that a lot of their fellow activists and movement allies might not have made”: namely, working with ignorant, all-too-privileged, liberal white women.

Sarsour & Co. had to contend with the fact that it’s “difficult to deal with these white women”. But they did it all the same — a great sacrifice. Trump’s rise had thrust “white supremacy” into the spotlight but, nevertheless, the magnanimous, committed Sarsour was prepared to work with white women. In doing so, says Giridharadas with unspeakable earnestness, she defied Audre Lorde, who had insisted that women of colour shouldn’t seek to “educate white women… as to our existence, our differences, our relative roles in our joint survival”. Doing so, the great intersectional sage taught, “is a diversion of our energies and a tragic repetition of racist, patriarchal thought”. Nevertheless, Sarsour & Co. persisted.

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Likewise, we are supposed to cheer Sarsour for mildly questioning her fellow activists’ ruthless enforcement of gender pronouns. She told them:

“Everyone’s pronouns should be respected. But [for some of the activists] who are here, English is not their first language, and this is a very new concept for them. So I would ask for forgiveness, and I would ask if that would be something that maybe we’ll do next time when we’re together as we get these women through this process.”

Note that the pronouns themselves aren’t up for debate — or even a matter of persuasion. Everyone should adhere to the linguistic demands of gender ideology. It’s just that some people are new to these norms, and Sarsour’s great persuasive act lies in asking “for forgiveness” as she helps the ignorant “through this process” of mastering them.

Everyone is on a “journey” — a word that appears so frequently in Giridharadas’s text, it made me never want to leave home again. The destination is the same for all, but the author and his cast of characters are generous enough to allow that, for some, the “journey” might take longer or more circuitous paths. Giridharadas’s great persuaders are those brave few prepared to guide lesser beings to the higher gnosis of current Left commitments. Yet the rightness of the gnosis itself is never up for questioning. Thus, we meet another Left-wing activist who declares that masks are about keeping “my neighbours safe” (Giridharadas implicitly agrees, since he never introduces the slightest critical distance from his subjects). The activist’s “persuasiveness”, we are made to understand, lies in trying to find common ground with even those who don’t share this (unscientific) view of masking.

Another activist, a proponent of police abolition, encounters a woman of colour who wants more policing in her neighbourhood. She is not unusual: wider polling data shows that very few black and brown Americans want less policing in their neighbourhoods. Our activist, however, is held up as a model of persuasion because, rather than writing off the woman, she badgers her relentlessly, until she comes around to the view that maybe policing is bad.

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In defence of wokeness

By Tomiwa Owolade

Again, persuasiveness lies in “educating” the benighted, rather than genuinely listening to what they might have to say. Setting out to persuade progressives to be more persuasive, Giridharadas merely ends up ratifying the movement’s unbearable smugness. So much of what the author characterises as “persuasiveness” involves Left-liberals offering something like political-cum-psychological therapy to other Left-liberals. There is a camp, for instance — called Transracial Journeys, naturally — which offers guilt-ridden white parents a way to navigate their hang-ups over adopting black children (“I like to tell people that I’m a recovering racist,” confesses one mom).

Giridharadas’s account of persuasiveness reinforces the progressive tendency towards depoliticisation: contests over material conditions give way to therapeutic journeys for those at the top, with working-class people cast as the oafs and bigots in need of being coerced — if gently, as the author would have it — into enlightenment. It all ends up benefitting the culture-war Right and the restorationists, who are equally uninterested in improving the oiks’ material conditions, but at least don’t condescend to the many and call it persuasion.

This leaves it to the radicals to pursue a different politics, one that pays due attention to material reality and breaks through the culture-war deadlock. As one of the proponents of this approach, I admit that it is by far the more arduous alternative to merely restoring the status quo of 2013. Tech bros who think chief restorationist Bari Weiss talks good sense might be alienated and angry, but they’re not going to agitate against their own material interests. The suburban moms who are lacerating their woke school boards will never sign up for economic populism.

At best, the Post-Woke moment will be defined by a messy and unstable admixture of restorationism and radicalism, now countervailed by the regnant woke, now able to return the pressure with the help of pseudo-populist politicians — who would discipline Disney for pushing gender ideology, but not for underpaying its workers. As Justine Sacco no doubt did before her fateful flight, we would all be wise to buckle up.

Many of the fears of a “populist” or “Right-wing” drift appear to have been accelerated by a focus on identity politics, or what has become known as the “war on woke”. A piece in the Metro laments the missed opportunity for candidates to move away from the “shameless baiting” around “wedge issues” such as structural racism and trans rights. Suella Braverman said that the country needs to “get rid of all this woke rubbish”. Penny Mordaunt hit back at those who wish to “damage” her reputation by depicting her as “woke”. Even the frontrunner, Rishi Sunak, has taken a swipe at “clumsy, gender-neutral language”. According to the Metro, all of this represents “a notable swing to the Right”.

But is it really the case that “woke” politics are in any meaningful sense Left-wing? This movement’s cheerleaders are predominately middle class, and rarely seem to show any interest in the traditional leftist goal of redressing economic inequality. The overwhelming number of feminists who have been targeted for their gender-critical views in recent years have been staunchly on the Left. Yet issues such as free speech, and how the recognition of biological differences between men and women is necessary for the preservation of women’s rights, are now routinely dismissed as symptomatic of a “Right-wing culture war”.

This was particularly apparent to me at an event on Monday at the House of Lords in support of freedom of expression arranged by Riverside Advisory. I was the MC for a series of speeches which featured members of the Conservatives, Labour, Liberal Democrats and the SNP. Far from being a “Right-wing talking point”, the range of political affiliations represented on the bill demonstrated that free speech is, or at least should be, a non-partisan issue.

The first speaker I introduced to the platform was Tory leadership hopeful Kemi Badenoch. At one point, she directly addressed the common misapprehension that free speech is “a cover for bigoted middle-aged white men to spout politically incorrect nonsense”. When Badenoch pointed out that she was neither middle-aged, white, nor a man, a heckler shouted: “Are you sure?”

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Without missing a beat, Badenoch replied: “I’m sure. I am a woman and I know what a woman is.” This was greeted by cheers and applause, particularly from the strong contingent of Left-wing feminists who were present. The debates that have since raged online about the prospect of Badenoch as the next Tory leader have revealed that she has considerable support from traditional leftists by virtue of her stance on the culture wars. Can this really be described as “a notable swing to the right”?

The political designations of “Left” and “Right” date from the National Assembly established in the aftermath of the French Revolution. Members who felt that the power of the king ought to be restricted sat to the left of the assembly’s president, those who did not sat to the right. The historian Marcel Gauchet has outlined the subsequent “long drawn-out process that lasted more than three quarters of a century”, but by the beginning of the twentieth century the association of the “Right” with traditional values and the “Left” with progressive reform was firmly established.

The rise of the “woke” movement has destabilised these terms to the point of irrelevance. Many people whose socialist credentials could not be more well established have been dismissed as “Right-wing”, “far-Right” or “fascist” simply for insisting on the importance of evidence-led analysis and free speech. Queer theorist Judith Butler has claimed that the “anti-gender ideology is one of the dominant strains of fascism in our time”. Where there are no shared definitions of terms, discussion becomes impossible. Maybe that’s the whole point.

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The way in which culture warriors have taken control of our institutions — including, crucially, the civil service — has meant that their worldview will inform major policy decisions irrespective of whether a Labour or Conservative government is at the helm. We might be able to vote a particular party out of office, but we cannot do anything about the sundry quangos and publicly funded bodies who are in the grip of this ideology.

Take, for instance, the College of Policing, the body responsible for law enforcement training. In April 2021, the Home Secretary instructed the College of Policing to modify their guidance so that police no longer record “non-crime hate incidents”. In December 2021, the Court of Appeal ruled that the recording of non-crime hate incidents was unlawful. To this day, the College of Policing remains committed to this unlawful practice. With this public body seemingly so determined to ignore the Home Office and high courts, we can be certain that it has been ideologically captured.

The redrawing of the boundaries between Left and Right was escalated by the Brexit vote, another political matter that was co-opted by culture warriors. For many commentators the vote was reduced to a Manichean struggle of good versus evil, or racist versus not-racist. Few genuine socialists could have possibly countenanced our membership of a pro-corporate trading bloc with capitalism at the heart of its constitution, but to vote Leave was suddenly perceived as a vote for the “Right”. This made little sense, given that the Remain campaign was spearheaded by the Conservatives, and the most prominent politicians in Brussels at the time — Guy Verhofstadt, Donald Tusk, Jean-Paul Juncker, Michel Barnier — all hailed from centre-Right or neoliberal parties.

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The same binary thinking has been imposed onto all subsequent political disputes; even discussions about the efficacy of lockdowns during the pandemic became reduced to a question of whether one was on the “right” or “wrong” side of history. One’s position on gender self-identification, structural racism, free speech, or any of the other “culture war” topics, is now commonly deemed a marker of where one is situated on the Right/Left spectrum. This human tendency to reduce complex discussions to simple binaries is understandable, but it is a temptation to be resisted.

These circumstances have birthed some strange alliances. Many Left-wing feminists are now writing for Right-wing publications, and cross-party support for the principle of free speech is growing. That conflicts on these issues have arisen within both the Conservative Party and Labour should remind us that the culture wars cannot be understood as a battle between Left and Right. Whereas it was once possible to agree on how these terms were defined, such a consensus no longer exists. Perhaps we need to accept that the very concepts of “Left” and “Right” are now beyond the point of utility.

Many people, like Oliver Dowden, the chairman of the Conservative Party, think that the culture wars in Britain are between the woke Left and the conservative Right. This is only partially correct. They are also between the liberal-Left and the woke Left; they are also civil wars.

Dowden made a speech a couple of weeks ago at an American think-tank called the Heritage Foundation. It wasn’t exactly Churchill in Fulton, Missouri, but it made a splash. Dowden denounced woke ideology as a terrifying force: “a social media mob,” he said, “can cancel you merely because you have dared to challenge one of the Left’s fashionable nostrums.”

Dowden’s analysis of woke politics is slightly misplaced; and so too is the criticism of the speech made by the former MP and government minister David Gauke in the New Statesman. Gauke is wrong because, though he admits cancel culture is a problem, he sees it as a minor nuisance.

I can understand how: if you think it’s simply a battle between academics and conservative journalists, it can seem like a minor conflict. One that is only played out in the hyperactive transient world of social media and radio talk-in shows. But it is not just a clash between Scylla and Charybdis. It is also a family fight. And this is why the word ‘woke’ should be used.

It is now fashionable among a certain type of Left-liberal or centrist to say ‘woke’ is a meaningless term. It is certainly true that it is much abused. Some newspaper columnists relish going after ‘woke snowflakes’ with the zeal of indiscriminate big-game hunters. I can see why one would want to remove themselves from that. It’s all so vulgar, and disavowing the term ‘woke’ thus seems like a cleaner choice.

But there is no point denying that there are conflicts around the issues of gender, free speech, race and culture. And that these conflicts are not only waged by the Right-wing press, but are in fact found within many institutions largely staffed by liberal-Left people. The culture wars, which are often derided as fake and drummed up by the Right, are real. They are an extension of politics — and politics is by its very nature oppositional.

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Woke also has a sharp Anglo-Saxon sting; it’s a name that sticks. “Social Justice Warriors” is too long and its acronymic version SJW is dull. Progressive is too loose and airy. Woke gets straight to the point, and is useful in conveying, in its aggressive consonantal force, the internecine nature of this conflict.

The transgender debate, for instance, is not a conflict between reactionaries and progressives. It is a battle between older liberal-Left women and younger progressive women; between older gay and lesbian radicals and younger ones. Mumsnet and the Observer have done more than conservative think tanks to highlight the tension between biological sex and gender identity. It is not lavishly funded conservative institutions but grassroots feminist organisations such as Woman’s Place UK which are at the forefront of the fight against gender-identity politics in Britain.

It may seem like an intergenerational conflict because older women care less about what people think of them than younger women. But there are many younger people who are privately sceptical about elements of the politics of social justice. The key word here is privately.

We tend to think this conflict is made up of Right-wing cranks and irate historians (and a group of inexplicable feminists!) against an online-savvy Left. But ask many people in the publishing industry about what they really think of J.K. Rowling, Kate Clanchy and sensitivity readers — and the obscuring effect of self-censorship becomes clear. Some of them will be happy to chat to you, over the phone or in a pub, and express their views. But it has to be off-the record.

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These people are Guardian readers. They hate the Tories. They support Black Lives Matter, and are gravely worried about climate change. But they are scared stiff about saying the treatment of J.K. Rowling was terrible, that Clanchy made a mistake in responding to a Goodreads comment on Twitter but her detractors have behaved terribly, and that the use of sensitivity readers is crude and patronising. This is what they believe, but they don’t want to lose their jobs.

People who say woke is meaningless are evasive about this intra-Left conflict. They point to people such as Robert Tombs and David Abulafia, who will gladly write columns for the Telegraph excoriating the woke Left. Tombs will (falsely) claim in the Times that Churchill was not a racist. But where are the academics who will argue that Churchill was a racist but also a great man? When is the Guardian going to publish that?

Such people do exist, but if they think any criticism of woke politics will put them in the same camp as people like Tombs, they’ll prefer to stew away quietly. Many of the same people who bemoan the divisive nature of the culture wars are doing absolutely nothing to make it more nuanced. Claiming that certain figures from the past who were racist were not in fact racist is an extreme view; but so is denying that some of these racist people should not be considered heroic or virtuous or praiseworthy in other respects.

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In English departments, many academics do not want to be labelled as racists, so they publicly acquiesce to calls to decolonise the curriculum, but many of them are, again, quietly sceptical. They value the principle of diversity; they also subscribe to a humanist approach to literature that affirms great books can’t be wholly reduced to politics. They love equality. But they also love pluralism and honest intellectual discussion.

They know these things should not conflict with each other — we can consider the politics of a text without viewing that text entirely through the lens of politics; we can value both diversity and frank intellectual debate. But they live in an atmosphere in which they are in conflict. And so they do nothing about it because they don’t want to face a backlash.

This is why saying and using ‘woke’ is important. It brings what is obscure into the open. It allows the debate to be had within the liberal-Left, where it needs to be had. It is clarifying.

But many (here, here, here, here, here, and here) argue that cancel culture doesn’t really exist. It’s just a Right-wing talking point. To which I would respond: how do you know? There is so much self-censorship going on that people are not being honest about what they believe about certain sensitive issues. They don’t have the wealth or power of J.K. Rowling; they are scared of losing their jobs. That is cancel culture.

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In another liberal-Left organisation, the Labour Party, the tensions are revealed by a poll last year which found that only 25% of Labour Party voters support defunding the police — one key policy of woke ideology. Even among 18-24 year olds, the wokest demographic, it is only 44%. When asked whether we should view society’s problems through the lens of white privilege, the poll also found that only 29% of Labour voters agreed. More than half think “woke practices” have gone too far.

Of course, people have complex views. One might support taking the knee, believe statues of certain slave traders like Edward Colston should be taken down, and believe that we should learn more about slavery and colonialism at school, but such people might still be critical of other aspects of woke ideology. This is why they would be reluctant to describe themselves as anti-woke. To do so might imply opposition to all those things. But they could also describe themselves as non-woke or woke-sceptical; the fact that wokeness can be ambiguous does not mean it is a meaningless term. It just means it can be ambiguous.

Wokeness has a family resemblance to other progressive ideologies — but it is also distinct. Many socialists are non-woke; their analysis is rooted in class politics rather than identity. I also think it’s lazy to simply describe wokeness as liberalism. It is often profoundly illiberal. If woke-deniers think the Right is often misusing the term, they should take ownership of it. Simply saying ‘woke’ is a meaningless term, without offering a more attractive alternative, is a form of evasion.

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One reason why this matters on the liberal-Left is because the vast majority of 18-24 year olds now back liberal-Left parties. There is an old adage that people become more conservative as they get older. But if the changes in people’s lives which lead them to become conservative, such as owning property and having kids, are becoming increasingly rare, then that transition to conservatism might not come to pass for many young people. This is why the battle between the woke Left and the non-woke or woke-sceptical Left is especially salient. It has repercussions for all of us.

Questions such as: what is a woman, how should we examine our past, how we should think about race in an increasingly diverse society, and how we should think about free speech and tolerance are all absolutely key for trying to make sense of the nature of public discourse today and in the future. They ultimately boil down to the question of who we are, and what we should do about it.

But the military is far from alone in this new fixation with gender politics. If you haven’t yet been asked to declare your pronouns, it won’t be long. Sooner or later, your employer will suggest that you sign off emails with them, or announce them along with your name at the beginning of meetings.

Declaring our pronouns has become the most common way in which we are expected to pledge allegiance to the new identity-obsessed religion that has captured most of our major institutions. The likes of Nicola Sturgeon, Jeremy Corbyn, and Kamala Harris have all performed the ritual, but other figures have been less predictable. Who would have anticipated that Richard Moore, the Head of MI6, would suddenly decide to include “he/him” in his Twitter bio?

Such examples are a reminder of just how far the virus of Critical Social Justice has spread. Earlier this month, it was reported that members of staff at the British Library were being encouraged to wear pronoun badges with “he/him”, “she/her” or “they/them”. Last year, Scottish civil service staff were being asked to sign off emails with their preferred pronouns in order to “foster an open culture that is supportive of the LGBTI+ community”. Even the BBC has issued guidelines to encourage its staff to make similar gestures, claiming that adding pronouns to emails is a “small, proactive step that we can all take to help create a more inclusive workplace”.

Many of the more vociferous criticisms of pronoun declaration have come from the Right, which has inevitably created the impression that where you stand on this subject is a matter of political affiliation. As with so many debates in the culture wars, the issue of pronouns has been misrepresented as a simple question of whether one is on the right or wrong side of history.

Activists insist that it is just a way to be inclusive and polite — and in many cases that is clearly the intention. Yet the genuinely liberal position is to oppose pronoun declaration, and it is worth outlining this case in full given that most of us, at some point in the near future, will be faced with the choice between explaining our reasons for refusing or capitulating for the sake of an easy life.

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When you ask someone to declare pronouns, you are doing one of two things. You are either saying that you are having trouble identifying this person’s sex, or you are saying that you believe in the notion of gender identity and expect others to do the same. As a species we are very well attuned to recognising the sex of other people, so, for the most part, to ask for pronouns is an expression of fealty to a fashionable ideology — and to set a test for others to do likewise.

In her book Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality, Helen Joyce explains the notion of gender identity as “something like a sexed soul”. Some take the view that each person has an innate gender identity that transcends physiological considerations. The definition of “woman” is therefore as fluid as can be imagined, because a “woman” is simply someone who identifies as a woman. The obvious next question — “what is a woman?” — is often dismissed as transphobic, presumably because the answer inexorably directs us towards the reality of sexual dimorphism.

Yet gender identity ideology is simply not a belief system that most people share. I do not identify as male; it’s a biological fact, as mundane as the fact that I’ve got blue eyes or that I’m right-handed. I am not here talking about gender dysphoria — those people who feel as odds with their sex and seek to adapt either through medical procedures or the way in which they present themselves — but rather the notion that we each have an inherent gender that has nothing to do with our bodies. This is akin to a religious conviction, and we would be rightly appalled if employers were to demand that their staff proclaim their faith in Christ the Saviour or Baal the Canaanite god of fertility before each meeting.

In an article in the Metro this week, a young person who identifies as non-binary complained about being misgendered by doctors when seeking treatment for endometriosis, a condition of the womb. But for a medical practitioner, biological sex is an important consideration that cannot simply be wished away. In the article, the writer notes that one young doctor — who had just completed a trans inclusivity training course — “seamlessly switched to using ‘they/them’ pronouns” in their conversation, although why he would make the curious decision to start addressing his patient in the third person is not clarified.

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This point is often overlooked. Announcing one’s pronouns has little practical purpose in most scenarios, given that we do not refer to individuals by their pronouns unless we are talking about them, rather than to them. Moreover, even raising the question can be offensive. Julie Bindel has observed that women who reject traditional notions of femininity are frequently told that they “look like men”. To ask such an individual for her pronouns can be construed as a kind of attack, given that she will have struggled to achieve acceptance as a woman who simply does not conform to sex stereotypes.

Then there is the added complication of neopronouns. “They” and “them” are now routinely adopted as singular pronouns by the mainstream press, as though syntactically shambolic prose is a small price to pay for being seen to be “inclusive”. This usage has not caught on with the general public, but this hasn’t prevented staff at online dictionaries from updating their definitions in accordance with their new creed. No longer do they see their role as recording the inevitable evolutions of the English language, but rather re-engineering words and their meanings to suit their ideological preferences. On university campuses, it’s not uncommon for badges to be distributed during freshers’ week to limit the potential for faux pas. “My pronouns are he/him/his,” the badge might say, but it could just as easily be “they/them/their”, “xe/xem/xyr”, “ne/nym/nis”, “ve/ver/vis”, “fae/faer/faers” or “zie/zim/zir”. This kind of cryptic puzzle makes for quite the initiation.

Although no employers are as yet mandating pronoun declaration, there is something coercive about the request. An actor friend of mine recently told me that it is now common for members of a new cast to state their pronouns at the beginning of the rehearsal process. In such circumstances, he says, to refuse would be unfeasible. For one thing, objections to the practice are not very well understood, and you would be instigating a tense and lengthy debate just at the moment when the cast ought to be bonding. More seriously, a refusal would doubtless result in accusations of transphobia, and the actor in question would be unlikely to be cast in future productions. Who is going to scupper their own career over a couple of words?

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It is often forgotten that many transgender people are opposed to pronoun declaration for a number of reasons. It draws needless attention to them when they just want to get on with their lives. It can have the effect of “outing” people against their will, particularly if they are in the early stages of their transition. It creates a false impression that gender identity ideology is the norm even though it is a belief system shared by relatively few. Most importantly, compelled speech is a fundamentally illiberal prospect, one that should always be resisted by all.

It is strange that the objections to pronoun declaration are so often construed as being “reactionary” when they are essentially progressive. Many who believe in liberal values will therefore feel uncomfortable in refusing to state pronouns at work. But until more people are prepared to make their feelings clear on this issue, it will continue to be misinterpreted as “a Right-wing talking-point”.

A refusal to participate in these rituals need not be antagonistic, and most employers will be happy to hear your reasons. There is always the possibility that you could be accused of transphobia or hate, but this is simply part of the coercive strategy. For all the awkward conversations that might arise, there is nothing Right-wing about standing up to ideologues who insist on imposing their values onto everyone else.