Why fear a society that’s tearing itself apart?

In my teens, rubbishing the implacable edifice of the United States felt like kicking a tank in trainers. Richard Nixon’s ‘silent majority’ was patriotic. Railing about my country’s disgraceful historical underbelly — slavery, the Native American genocide — seemed edgy.

Fast-forward, and in the West trashing your own country has become a central preoccupation of the ruling class. University administrators, corporate board members and media pundits compete with one another over who can denounce their disgusting society with more fervour. Shame, or what passes for it, is the new ostentation. America’s own President decries his country’s
‘systemic racism’. Far more than singing along with ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ at a football game or (God forbid) ‘Rule Britannia’ at the Proms, joining the chorus proclaiming the odiousness of America or Britain has become downright conformist — one reason why pooping all over the land of my birth ceased long ago to be any fun.

Now that self-loathing has gone mainstream, the government-commissioned report last week attesting that the UK is not ‘institutionally racist’ is what qualifies as genuinely edgy; its assertion that, rather, Britain should act as a model for other white-majority countries is what qualifies as genuinely brave. For sure enough, its lead author, the head of the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities, drew comparison to Goebbels. On Twitter, a Labour MP equated the commissioners with cross-burners in the Ku Klux Klan. On the Guardian’s front page, the mother of murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence decried the report’s heretical conclusions as giving ‘racists the green light’. On Channel 4 News, a former Met police superintendent slammed the document as having ‘set back racial equality for decades’ (now, that’s one powerful pile of paper). So over-the-top, so foam-at-the-mouth, so eye-bulgingly hypertensive was the immediate response to the ‘gaslighting’ report that the exhibition was almost comical.