Thus, ironically, policies rooted in the belief that all human peoples are equally capable of harmonious coexistence has helped to impel the West’s transformation into a real-life multicultural society, which is to say one increasingly governed by the politics of ethnic in-group preference. As this has accelerated, so too the American empire has begun to pivot institutionally from official colour-blindness to its inverse. And today, as evident in recent disputes over antisemitism and race-first ideologies in Ivy League universities, this worldview is so mainstream that one January 2024 Hollywood release is big-budget fantasy about African-American magicians tasked with keeping the dangerous, violent white majority quiescent, by making them feel comfortable.
At the geopolitical level, too, the shift from universalist race neutrality to race-consciousness is echoed in the fracturing of America’s large-scale universalist project: the “rules-based international order”. Since Iraq and Afghanistan took the shine off this order qua moral project, it has become markedly more contested, not least in recent outbreaks of territorial war and ethnic cleansing even at the edges of Europe. But where the new American domestic racism has elite support on the Left, the retrenchment of American internationalism finds its advocates on the new American Right. There, figures including J.D. Vance argue that the US should wind down internationalist commitments such as the war in Ukraine, and refocus on ending illegal migration via the southern border. More broadly, those jockeying to shape a putative future Republican foreign policy lean toward international restraint rather than internationalism, including arguing for an end to US defence spending in Europe.
None of this is to say that America is finished as imperial hegemon. On the contrary: the scale of its influence is evident in the seamless transition America’s satrapies have made in turn to re-align with the new American race-first ideology. This has been eagerly adopted in the peripheries’ increasingly multicultural populations, with the vehemence and volume of Left-wing pro-Palestinian support in the UK since 7 October being a case in point.
UnHerd reporting from one such march showed an emerging coalition of racially and religiously inflected minority in-group identities, that skews very young and often frames Jews in virulently racist terms as the outgroup. There is considerable overlap with a broader, youth-inflected Left-wing politics of race: one young interviewee told UnHerd (also in a Jafaican accent) that the last protest he attended was during the 2020 BLM disturbances.
Mirroring this coming to racial consciousness of a young and multicultural cross-section of Britain’s Left, race discourse is also re-emerging on the youthful Right. But this isn’t the stereotypical British racism of centrist demonology, coded white working-class and headed by demotic figures such as English Defence League founder Tommy Robinson. Britain’s emerging racist Right is more likely to be young, middle-class, and anonymous, reflecting their lives as students, or as recent graduates employed in sectors where only Left-wing forms of racism are socially acceptable.
The central material grievance for this group is the tension between mass immigration and the lifestyles, earning capacities, and home-owning aspirations of young graduates. In line with this more knowledge-class demographic, they produce well-researched newsletters, and display knowledge-economy communication skills such as a polemical use of statistics comparatively lacking among the Tommy Robinson set. And their converging economic and ethnic disaffection is discernible in the young commentators who point to the preponderance of foreign-headed occupants in inner London social housing, or the memes that frame every Western “social contract” as an extractive one, that tax-farms young professionals and redistributes their earnings to foreigners.
More provocatively still, the race-conscious Gen Z Left and Right now evince a shared belief that ethnic in-group advocacy is a central dimension of mainstream politics. But where on the Left this is granted mainstream form in support for policies such as reparations, or top-down imposition of racial equity, the Right extends this to the one demographic for which this remains taboo: white Europeans. From the perspective of a young Gen Z graduate educated to foreground race, working in a multicultural environment where his own demographic does not predominate, and regularly confronted with evidence of routine discrimination against people like him, it is perhaps difficult to see why doing so should be off-limits.
And so race-based advocacy for Europeans is re-emerging. The recent announcement by Bradford University of a scholarship for white working-class males indicates the direction of travel, while a rising number of public-facing Gen Z exemplars gesture at related ethnic talking-points already commonplace on the more explicitly race-first anonymous Right. These include the fresh-faced anti-immigration activist Jack Anderton, and the 21-year-old student Felix Gilroy, who made waves when he explained to far-Left activist Owen Jones outside the 2023 Tory conference why he believed that Enoch Powell’s much-maligned “Rivers of Blood” speech was prophetic.
Does this mean that every Gen Z is a rabid racist? No. One swallow does not make a summer; there are plenty of young men and women still indifferent to or disgusted by the new race politics. But the influence of America is overwhelming, whether geopolitically or via the media, and the message from the hegemon is now that race must be front and centre. It’s also a good rule of thumb that politics will tilt toward whichever group cares the most, and as things stand, the race-conscious Gen Zs across both Left and Right exhibit an ideological vigour that leads me to suspect they will be influential.
It may come, then, via the Left-wing attack on equality under the law. It may come via the Right-wing attack on liberal internationalism, egalitarianism, and human rights. It may be a mix of the two — but it’s coming. Having grown up amid the 20th-century intra-ethnic ceasefire, reporting this gives me no pleasure. But my prediction for 2024 is that as we see Gen Z maturing to political agency, its radicals will bring the politics of ethnic in-group advocacy definitively back, to unpredictable but potentially seismic effect. Older generations may pine for Hands Around the World, and the long 20th-century peace. But we must all brace ourselves for the coming to political consciousness of a generation that no longer believes peace is in their interests.
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