Remembering 2020
It is important to remember what an irrational and hostile time it was
Six years on, 2020 feels like it must have been a fever dream. It’s hard to keep in mind that it actually happened.
COVID struck the world, killing millions but also inspiring authoritarian policies that had at best diminishing returns. I’m sure I am not the only person who regrets their initial support for shutdowns.
But 2020 was also the year of the Black Lives Matter demonstrations — a phenomenon that seems just as surreal in the rear view mirror. I worry that people are forgetting just how surreal it was.
The death of George Floyd, who asphyxiated under Derek Chauvin’s knee — six years ago this week — inspired protests that spread across the world. That people outside the US protested at all is difficult to explain, though I think it had something to do with people overestimating the scale of police violence in the USA. Certainly, police in the USA can be violent. But left-leaning people often think that thousands, if not tens of thousands, of unarmed black men are killed by the police in the USA when the real number is about ten to twenty. (This is not to suggest that it is a non-issue. Each of those ten to twenty people is a person. But is it an urgent political priority for non-Americans? I don’t think so.)
Soon, everyone from Keir Starmer to the English football team was taking a knee. Others were out on the streets. In the USA, demonstrations ripped through American cities, often becoming violent. Dozens of people died. A billion dollars was done in damage thanks to vandalism and looting. Still, left-wing and liberal Americans tended to be sympathetic if not outright supportive. Bold Type Books even released a polemic called In Defense of Looting. Such was the unwillingness to criticise rioters that one liberal data scientist caused outrage for suggesting that violent demonstrations make progressives unpopular. He was fired very shortly afterwards.
Calls to defund the police and abolish prisons went mainstream. “Yes, We Literally Mean Abolish the Police” was the title of one column in the New York Times. Some have argued that a decline in “proactive policing” in 2020 led to a spike in murders, with hundreds more Americans dying than in previous years.
There was also unrest in the UK, where opportunistic left-wing commentators promoted a radical iconoclastic agenda. “This is amazing,” Owen Jones enthused, “A website set up to document the statues and monuments to slavery and racism that need to be taken down.” The “amazing” site included statues paying tribute to Admiral Nelson, Captain Cook and Robert Peel.
All these demonstrations, incidentally, were taking place at a time when left-wing people were fiercely opposed to any other kind of social gathering.
It was a time of radical censoriousness. All you had to do was point a camera at a white person and claim that they said the n-word and you could reduce them to terrified tears. (Yes, this actually happened.)
Elite liberals and left-wingers rushed to flaunt their anti-racist virtues. It was an amazingly profitable time to be a diversity trainer. Books like Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility could sell like hot cakes despite being pseudo-intellectual garbage. Ibram X. Kendi was given tens of millions of dollars to set up a Center for Antiracist Research that did almost nothing. Middle-aged white women were even paying people to go to their houses and call them racist. The organisers of Black Lives Matter took well-meaning donations and bought a mansion.
That irrationality and aggression has not disappeared — it is just being channelled more carefully
A lot of the rhetoric of the period has been scaled back now. I think sane left-wingers, who know that it wouldn’t actually be a good idea — in practical or PR terms — to empty prisons and fire police officers, quietly changed the terms of the debate. It became acceptable to admit that Ibram X. Kendi was not actually a great thinker. Nelson’s Column was not brought down.
But it is important to remember how irrational and aggressive that period was, because that irrationality and aggression has not disappeared — it is just being channelled more carefully. Ideas such as that, say, British people should be paying trillions of pounds in reparations are still out there — they are just being promoted less belligerently. It is essential to maintain a fact-based, historically balanced perspective in the face of outbreaks of ideological resentment and oikophobic shame.
