The Madness of Crowds

by Douglas Murray Bloomsbury 280pp £20 The Week Bookshop £15.99

Douglas Murray is an author who excels at expressing what people sort of know, but are afraid to say, said Lionel Shriver in The Times. His 2017 bestseller, The Strange Death of

Europe, was “the most courageous book I have read about mass immigration”. Here, he offers a similarly trenchant critique of our “indignationsteeped era of identity politics”. Murray (pictured) divides his book into four sections: Gay, Gender, Race and Trans. Perhaps because he is gay himself (and so has the “right” to comment on the subject), his thoughts on homosexuality are especially interesting. In a society that goes out of its way to celebrate being gay, he argues that same-sex attraction these days is seen as “not only equal” to heterosexuality, but even “slightly better”. Similarly, he accuses today’s feminists of both wanting equality with men, and the right to present themselves as superior.

Murray’s basic thesis is that since “most of the great civil rights campaigns have been won”, modern progressives have little left to fight for, said Tim Stanley in The Daily Telegraph. Rather than laying down their swords, however, they have set about waving them at “invisible dragons”. Today, their ambition is to police language and thought ever more tightly – a project whose authoritarianism offends Murray’s “old-fashioned” liberalism. But Murray ignores the fact that real oppression still exists, said William Davies in The Guardian. His chapter on gender refers to #MeToo, but not Harvey Weinstein or the “power structures” he built. His chapter on race makes no mention of Black Lives Matter, presumably because that would mean mentioning “black men gunned down by police officers”. Murray’s main claim – that people have been duped into a “fantasy of their own oppression” – can’t withstand too much contact with reality.