On Monday some 300 people marched through the streets of Canterbury in a three-issue show of values: Donald Trump (bad), Brexit (bad), migrants (good).

In many ways it was a protest as much about everything as it was about nothing. Melding these three issues together lent the march a sense of the vague and nebulous.

But then again this paucity of identifiable or attainable goals is a hallmark of modern political activism.

Contrast this with the activism of the past – the civil rights movement of the post-war United States, the Suffragettes of the early 20th century or the Chartists of the 1830s and the 1840s to name but three. In each case the goal was definable and ultimately proved achievable.

What was the Canterbury march about? Those who attended were told it was about “division” and “hate” and “community alienation” – abstractions plucked from a devil’s dictionary of life’s worst concepts.

One march supporter took to KentOnline to explain the protest was about “diversity, unity...and humanity”. In other words, it’s about difference of being, sameness of being and all people in all places at all times.

Another less sympathetic voice from the city took to social media to ask: “What’s the point?” The answer is the purpose of such an event is itself. Modern political activism is no longer about the realisable goals but is the product of the liberal middle-class mind’s need to project itself into society.

At its most fundamental, activism is the external manifestation (marching, placard-waving, slogan-chanting etc.) of internal tumult (cravings, desires, passions, disorders etc).

Its most telling characteristic is revulsion or disgust with the world. As the American social philosopher Eric Hoffer once pointed out those who join such movements and attend such rallies see the world as “an aberration and deformity” and “derive as much satisfaction – if not more – from the means a mass movement uses as from the ends it advocates”.

Such movements portray what they oppose in the blackest terms. Thus Donald Trump is elevated to the status of Hitler or the source of all evil while Brexit is painted as some sort of racial apocalypse which is unleashing a frenzy of hate.

At present migrants occupy a unique place in the minds of social activists. They have become a chosen people, a species whose cause, whatever that may be, is the activists’ duty to champion.

In reality, Trump and Brexit are scapegoats. They did not happen by magic or luck, but the by the hands of ordinary men and women who visited polling booths either side of the Atlantic last year.

Looking at the Canterbury march’s trinity of issues, it’s difficult not to escape the conclusion that the Brexit and Trump ingredients were an afterthought tossed into the cauldron of this white witches’ brew.

The true aim, of course, had been the celebration of migrants or refugees.

At present migrants occupy a unique place in the minds of social activists. They have become a chosen people, a species whose cause, whatever that may be, is the activists’ duty to champion.

Activism divides the world into three: 1) victims, the oppressed, the suffering; 2) evil monsters who must be destroyed and; 3) the eternally good, the crusaders, the heroes of a drama authored by the activists themselves.

Having dispensed with the cause of the British working class (too white, too nationalistic, too concerned with material rather than social issues) activists needed a new image of the benighted to which to devote themselves.

It had to be an object worthy of worship and pity in equal measure. The migrant embodies this.

As the French philosopher Pascal Bruckner, who seems to understand the world better than anyone alive today, says: “It’s no longer the needy who go looking for a helping hand, it is the impatient benefactor who drops everything to go looking for a victim to help.

“This type of kindness smacks of cannibalism, hungry for outcasts to feed its image of generosity.”

To the activist, the migrant is the image of purity and innocence. However, such labels can only make sense if the society in which he is placed is a monstrosity. Thus the use of such words we heard on Monday – “hate”, “division”, “community alienation” – are necessary to describe it.

The location and celebration of the existence of racism takes on the role of life-affirming narcotic. Modern political activists simply cannot live without racism. If it disappeared overnight, they would need to reinvent it.

This explains why since June 23, any footage of a drunk on public transport mouthing off in racially abusive language is brandished as evidence of a broken and divided society. This lack of perspective and scale should be contrasted against the events of other countries where racial genocides have been facts of life for decades.

Neither is the view of Britain which Monday’s protesters would have you believe borne out by facts. How can a country apparently so convulsed by racism, which treats its new arrivals so shabbily, be one to which hundreds of thousands of people are willing to cross a continent to get to?

There is no question of a protest such as the one in Canterbury not taking place. This is a fundamental democratic right.

But it is equally important to understand such protests are about the personal needs of those who take part rather than the message they promote.