The Changing Poles
For a long time, race was a word you expected to hear from the political right. It came wrapped in crude hierarchies, biological myths, and talk of superiority and decline. Race functioned as a blunt instrument, a way to simplify a complicated world by sorting people into fixed categories. Liberal societies pushed back against this, and rightly so. The lesson was hard-earned and clear: judging people by race leads nowhere good.
What is striking is how quietly the poles have shifted.
Race has not disappeared from our moral language. It has migrated. Today, it sits comfortably within progressive discourse, only flipped upside down. Where the old right ranked races in terms of superiority, the new moral framework assigns value through victimhood. Race has become a form of moral currency. Some identities arrive with built-in credibility, others with an assumed deficit. The categories have changed. The moral story has inverted. But the structure feels eerily familiar.
In this new system, belonging to a historically disadvantaged group confers automatic authority. Experience is presumed. Virtue is implied. Disagreement is treated carefully, sometimes suspiciously. Being white, especially white and male, does the opposite. One is expected to speak less, listen more, apologize first. Guilt becomes a prerequisite for participation. This is presented not as hierarchy but as justice. Yet it still sorts people before they speak.
That is the crucial shift.
Correctives are necessary. Societies do not heal by pretending history did not happen. But a corrective becomes something else the moment it stops addressing actions and begins pre-assigning moral status. When people are ranked before they open their mouths, debate collapses into choreography. When disagreement is no longer treated as a possible error but as evidence of moral deficiency, the framework hardens into orthodoxy. And when criticism of that framework is taken as proof of its necessity, it becomes unfalsifiable.
The consequences are not abstract. Young people learn early that moral standing is something they inherit rather than earn. Two pathologies emerge at once. On one side, entitlement, the sense that anger requires no argument. On the other, paralysis, the belief that silence is the safest virtue. Resentment does not appear by accident in such a system. It is built in.
The irony is hard to miss. A worldview that claims to have moved beyond race has made race central again, only under a different sign. Where old racists essentialized biology, the new moralists essentialize history. Individuals are no longer judged primarily by what they do or say, but by where they fall in a symbolic ledger of past suffering. Complexity gives way to accounting.
This is not an argument for returning to old right-wing fantasies. Those were destructive and remain so. It is an argument for noticing that moral inversions do not automatically produce moral progress. Turning a hierarchy upside down does not abolish it. It merely changes who stands where.
A society that actually wants to move forward has to do something harder than pick new heroes and villains. It has to resist the temptation to sort people before they speak. It has to accept that history matters without turning it into destiny. And it has to remember that equality is not achieved by flipping the poles, but by dismantling the magnet altogether.
Otherwise, we will keep congratulating ourselves for having escaped the past, while quietly rebuilding its logic in reverse, and calling that progress because the uniforms have changed.