You almost certainly read, think about and discuss race more in 2025 than you would have twenty years ago. Race has become a poisonous and politically contentious topic, and nowhere more so than in online spaces. Videos of ethnic minorities committing crimes or engaging in anti-social behaviour are blasted into the feeds of everyone on Twitter, whether they want to see them or not. Racial slurs, spurious race science, open fascism and Nazism can all be seen more easily than ever, and find a shockingly large audience. This surge in racism reflects the growing and negative role of racial division in British politics. There are regular riots outside of migrant hotels, and Labour, the Tories and of course Reform are all promising to clamp down on migration. Across the pond, Trump is attempting mass deportation of illegal immigrants from Latin America, and a growing ecosystem of white nationalists have emerged with their own podcasts, channels and merchandise.
Yet the growing salience of race is not an artefact of the right, or of some sudden social collapse into irrational race hatred. It started, in fact, on the left, with an increasingly radicalised and racialised worldview emerging in university departments, media organisations and political parties. In America the massively unpopular policy of “positive discrimination” saw jobs and university places given out on the basis of racial quotas, a policy that has been covertly imitated by the UK. A new “progressive” ideology shifted public conversation from the generally successful and popular policy of equal opportunity and equality before the law to the nebulous territory of “structural racism”. Western culture and history was villainised as uniquely wicked, whilst non-Western groups were presented as virtuous victims. As all this was going on, migration expanded to unprecedented heights across the West, including in countries, unlike America, with no history of racial diversity or migration.
Far from being content with their gains, progressives took this ideology to ever further extremes, culminating in the worldwide George Flloyd protests over the wrongful killing of an American black man by the police. Activists called not merely for police reform, but for the “abolition” of law enforcement as an instrument of white supremacy and capitalist oppression. Institutions across the West performed grovelling public penances for the sins of slavery, Frantz Fanon was put on the curriculum and old white men were taken off, statues and portraits were torn down, politicians kneeled in penitence.
The backlash has struck, and struck hard. Trump won the popular vote and a second term, nationalist parties are topping the polls across Europe, and an entire alternative media system has emerged. Whilst the most prominent and successful elements of the populist right are non-racist, racism has gained serious traction both on and off line. The most simple and persuasive rallying cry for this movement is that every other group is allowed to be proud of their ethnicity — so why not whites?
Having asserted for so long that Western history is nothing but a chronicle of White supremacy and imperialist violence, it is perhaps little surprise that young men in particular might respond by saying “fine then, I’m a fascist and a racist”. Being a young white man is certainly not much fun in the progressive universe — you’re presumed to be uberprivileged just by virtue of your sex and race, even as you’re sent to the back of the queue for university places and jobs. Everyone wants to be the hero of the story, and nobody wants to be the villain. Not even progressive people are really willing to be the bad guy, and white liberals generally identify out of privilege by asserting their disabilities or sexuality.
There are then two different forces at work in the rise of race on the right. On the one hand there is a largely reactive embrace of a self-flattering narrative and identity of white achievement, pride and power (and consequently non-white failure, aggression and subversion). On the other there is a far more real and dangerous sense of fear and existential risk raised by the scale and speed of migration. Trying to assess these related but distinct strands is incredibly confusing for an academic and media elite trained on the simplistic moralism of post-WW2 liberalism and late 20th century progressivism.
For one thing, fears of migration are far more widespread than overt racist ideology, yet also far more likely to result in violence and political change. By contrast, far right ideology online, swathed in irony and flirting with national socialism, is obviously and often consciously performative. Further confusing the issue is that both groups are themselves multiracial — there are plenty of non-whites who support nationalist parties, oppose migration or even endorse white supremacist and fascist worldviews. Though incomprehensible to conventional liberals, this fact should be unsurprising. Migration can disrupt and undermine settled immigrant communities as much or more than natives, and the heroic rather than victim-based politics of the far right is no less appealing to young African or Asian men than it is to Europeans.
Racist attitudes are at historic lows, and interracial marriages are more common than ever
Trying to understand these essentially post-modern movements in modernist terms raises endless confusions. Despite the rhetoric of fascism proliferating online, there are no paramilitary organisations fighting running street battles, no torchlit parades, no Oswald Mosely’s addressing cheering crowds, no Krystalnacht’s in Rotherham and no reichstag burnings in Westminster. Racist attitudes are at historic lows, and interracial marriages are more common than ever.
Yet that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be worried. Just as the postmodern identity movements of the Left sewed chaos and distorted lives, so too could the identitarianism of the Right. Trump has fully broken any connection between conservatism and civic virtue, giving necessary vent to populist frustrations, yet offering a politics built only on cheap glamour and crude power.
The future that the postmodern left and right offer is not an attractive one. Both are ultimately individualistic, trading in a politics of force, competition and group rivalry. Ultimately, both serve to reinforce the power of markets, and extend them into the most intimate parts of our lives. Both progressive ressentiment and neoreactionary vitalism are about the commodification of identity, status and power, whether that of victim or strongman, as the individual barters themself in the political, social and sexual marketplace. And on both sides there is a retreat from virtue and a redeployment of moral significance away from means and acts, and towards ends and identities. In this resurgence of totalitarian ethical thinking, the goodness of a policy flows squarely from the friend-enemy distinction, and the notion of the common good has collapsed entirely. This new, more zero-sum politics is a reaction against not the old classical political model, but instead the failings of a liberal cosmopolitanism which considered aggregate good rather than common good and worshiped the virtues of procedures rather than persons.
Race is but one identity in this world, but it perhaps the most potent, because it is subject to scientific or pseudo-scientific measurement, because it offers a material basis for the nation state, and because it flatters the desire for individual status and dignity. On both left and right, it is the natural fallback position for a modern worldview that is godless and reductionist, and thus struggles to articulate immaterial goods mapped onto physical reality such as culture, nationhood and kinship. The hermeneutic of suspicion deployed against traditional religion and civilisational mythologies has opened up a void that is readily filled by the almost childlike tribalism of skin colour and racial conflict.
Globalisation has only accelerated this tendency, as individuals are at once uprooted from their traditions, confronted with greater diversity, and given fewer forums to reconcile their differences. Yet the same forces of fragmentation driving the salience of race also set considerable limits on the ability of racial groups to organise or engage in large-scale violence. As ultimately individualistic creeds, the racial theories of left and right have failed to result in revolutionary change. Instead, they serve as accelerants to the power of impersonal state and market, which must ever more intercede to mediate between atomised individuals who have lost the vital capacities to trust and organise.
This new racialised thinking does of course address real problems — the disadvantages faced by ethnic minorites or the bleak jumbled chaos of mass migration are political facts whose existence fuels legitimate concerns. The danger and the fantasy of racial politics lies less in the recognition problems, however distorted, than it does in the framing and the solutions. The racialism of left and right tends towards extremes that escape the bounds of reality; from the ambition of a white ethno-state to the dream of a policeless society. This reflects, amongst the most ideological, a lack of earnest desire to effect change, and this is evident in the ultimate despair at the heart of both visions. In the world of structural racism, there is no escape from the evils of white supremacy, which has infiltrated all of Western thought, culture and politics. In much the same way, the far right sees no end to the world of racial conflict, or the supposed burden of “inferior” races on the world. Strikingly, both worldviews are hostile to the idea of integration and of cross-racial unity in a shared political project.
These twin councils of despair, when probed, are revealed for what they are: sinister projects of demoralisation and apathy. We should not be surprised that they are flourishing in a world of digital deracination and cultural commodification. They seem to offer what we have lost — dignity, meaning, justice — yet only serve to keep us isolated and powerless. In the place of these two imposters, we need to look to the spiritual as well as the material basis of society, and rediscover a sense of our culture as civilisational, rather than racial.
