Legion

Remember all those women that were abused on the streets of Cologne on new Year’s Eve in 2015 by men of supposedly ‘North African’ appearance? 

The way it was reported in some quarters suggested it was really just some sort of unfortunate cultural misunderstanding: the sort that might occur if the newcomers hadn’t picked up the right handbooks. 

Nobody really wanted to face up to the fact that this was actually something more systematic and deliberate - these men had set about offending progressive western values in the most outrageously public manner possible. 

Now, the xenophobes among us might conclude that this is essentially a problem of dark people on the outside determined to push their way into our bubble and burst it, out of some sort of twisted envy. But right now this is the least of our problems, because there's a far more numerous demographic of white people on the inside who are also out to aggravate all the sensitive liberals. 

You don’t even need a nihilistic medieval outlook, you just have to be uneducated, self-consciously downtrodden and pissed off. Tolerance has enemies on all sides now, because tolerance has become associated with smugness and privilege. The discontents of globalisation are legion. 

Trump voters might not be about to commit atrocities in public places, but in an America that anyway finds it hard to distinguish between an act of terror and a common-all-garden gun massacre, voting for the Donald is perhaps the greatest act of terror one can inflict on the affluent and open-minded.