In the United Kingdom (UK), every major show on every major streaming service follows a distinct line: the baddies, from Top Dog (Netflix) to Slow Horses (Apple) to Line of Duty (BBC iPlayer) are white.

Whites are the adulterers, thieves, terrorists, murderers, rapists – the overweight, the unhealthy, the stupid, the cruel and the dangerous. Whites are the new Russians of Hollywood – sly, untrustworthy, dirty, and corrupt.

If a character is black, chances are he or she will be innocent and good but most importantly, the victim of a white – be it a cryptocurrency scammer, or a sadistic border enforcement agent. Coupled to its transgender preoccupation, this is forcing Netflix account holders to vote with their feet – a trend given a shot in the arm by Elon Musk’s commentary on the subject. But just the diversity casting and the obvious motives behind it alone are enough to stop watching television altogether.

Whose motives, you ask?

Tellingly, there no black people agitating for more white villainy and there are no Muslim groups demanding that actors of the faith are cast as police snipers or crack detectives. Rather, these are the views of boomer-liberal creative industry bosses, whose views mirror those at the decision-making level across all management classes. They are all white, extravagantly educated, paid hundreds of thousands of dollars annually, married to other whites and mostly live in white suburbs. They don’t go on holiday to Pakistan or Burkina Faso, they don’t visit Mecca, and they sure as hell don’t watch Nolly- or Bollywood.

Spiritual head

Two weeks ago the new Archbishop of Canterbury – the UK’s spiritual lead – was announced. As its latest expression of ideological capture, a woman called Sarah Mullally has been asked by the synod to lead the Church of England (CoE). In 2021, at the launch of a new initiative aimed at curbing the influence of social justice theory in the judiciary guidebook, I spoke to a black man of the cloth who had been a victim of Mullaly's. Father Calvin Robinson described a bizarre conversation he’d had with her – about the Church of England’s submission to the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement in 2020.

“I told her that the CoE wasn’t racist,” he explained, “to which she responded: ‘now Calvin, as a white woman, I can tell you that the CoE is institutionally racist’.” In case you didn’t get that: a black man, with divine devotion, was denied his lived experience by a white woman, the very model of a state managerialist, whose first act as Archbishop was to permit graffiti to deface pillars inside Canterbury Cathedral, consecrated in 1070.

Mullally, Robinson later claimed, impeded his ascent to the clergy because he did not meet the conditions she prescribed to black people. Through the ages some remarkable intellectualism emerged from the CoE; now the public faithful must settle for lanyardism, hectoring, grievance spreadsheets, scolding, and the demand for perpetual atonement, primed to compliment a recent claim from a black comedian that reparations to the value of £18 trillion are owed to black people from the British public.

Trump didn’t stand a chance

So, to anyone who thought Donald Trump was going to win the Nobel Peace Prize – seek help. Trump didn’t stand a chance, despite masterful diplomacy that ended a war, because he is perceived to threaten the international order, something unforgivably offensive to the people calling the shots there.

That international order post-WWII was underwritten by defence commitments from the United States and through decades it allowed Europeans to retire early; when the internet arrived, those who enjoyed that luxury got to tell you what they thought, and you held your nose, because it wasn’t just the complacency, or the entitlement, but the cratering of standards that accompanied it – in the UK’s case – the failure to invest in infrastructure, flogging the future off as someone else’s problem.

In that room in Oslo sit expressions of that boomer consensus that became so selfish and so accustomed to easy money and opportunity that they created a parallel existence in defiance of reality – the weak-men-make-bad-times model. Thanks to the institutions captured by this logic, be they entertainment, the Church, or those who decide what to award and to whom, one consequence is already clear: the emergence of distinctly, assertively right-wing youth across Europe and other parts of the English-speaking world.

These generations are angry, ambitious and impatient with binary positions on literally everything, meaning they don’t seek “nuanced” conversations about things like men in women’s sports. This may well be the final boomer consequence – and nobody is going to like it.

Mzansi

So, to poor South Africa. Despite the enormity of its challenges evident in inquiries and ad hoc committees, it cannot escape the twitching vestigial tail of the Western boomer consensus, demonstrated by a new and now official alliance of “centrist” parties. As is clear across the European continent, parties and alliances of this view have no formula to address economics and don’t possess any willingness to reduce the size of their respective states.

Subsequently, aspiration to home ownership, entrepreneurship, and risk has vacated. This contemporary elitist model is exclusively reactionary: they define themselves by what abhors them, not what is better for the lives of citizens. In the fleetingly rare moments they project ambition, it is ambition tied to social justice, with the impetus being on the electorate to integrate better, accept men in women’s sports, and take responsibility for discrimination practised centuries ago.

The coalition of Build One South Africa, Rise Msanzi, and GOOD is already being hammered from its own side; recently Jonny Steinberg warned that this arrangement threatened to put distance between itself and the poor. Steinberg’s warning here is now well established in the UK, America, Canada, and Australia, where the elite have magically gravitated toward the kinks of wealth accumulation and preservation – despite what they say in public.

Such is the frequency with which it happens that it can no longer be dismissed as coincidental, or a flaw in the well-intended operating model. Distancing themselves, Jonny, from the unwashed and the inferior is exactly the point.