The Rage Less Traveled

In his devastating new book The Madness of Crowds, Douglas Murray examines the 21st century’s most divisive issues: sexuality, gender, technology and race. He reveals the astonishing new culture wars playing out in our workplaces, universities, schools and homes in the names of social justice, identity politics and ‘intersectionality’. We are living through a postmodern era in which the grand narratives of religion and political ideology have collapsed.

Peter McLoughlin spent years believing the Leftist narrative, namely it was "a racist myth" that organised Muslim groups in Britain and the Netherlands (grooming gangs ) were luring white schoolgirls into a life of prostitution. But in 2009 he first encountered people who said their children had been groomed like this. These informants had non-white people in their immediate and extended family and were thus unlikely to be racists.  

Many Remainers reported waking up the day after the Brexit vote feeling as if they were living in a foreign country. In fact, they were merely experiencing the same feeling that many British people have felt every day for years. Goodhart shows us how people have come to be divided into two camps: the 'Anywheres', who have 'achieved' identities, derived from their careers and education, and the 'Somewheres', who get their identity from a sense of place and from the people around them, and who feel a sense of loss due to mass immigration and rapid social change.

Across the West, there is a rising tide of people who feel excluded, alienated from mainstream politics and increasingly hostile towards minorities, immigrants and neoliberal economics. Many of these voters are turning to national populist movements, which have begun to change the face of Western liberal democracy, from the United States to France, Austria to the UK. This radical turn, we are told, is a last howl of rage from an aging electorate on the verge of extinction. 

At the age of 23, Brian Wood was thrust into the front line in Iraq, in the infamous Battle of Danny Boy. Ambushed, he led a charge across open ground with insurgents firing at just five soldiers. On his return, he was awarded the Military Cross. But Brian's story had only just begun. Struggling to reintegrate into family life, he suffered from PTSD. Then, five years later, a letter arrived: it summoned him to testify at the Al-Sweady Inquiry into allegations of war crimes by British soldiers during the Iraq invasion of 2003.