What’s the culture war really about? And are the Left losing?
The ‘culture war’ is a key part of a very effective overall strategy adopted by the populist nationalist Right in Britain, America and beyond.
Nurtured, sharpened and accelerated by Steve Bannon, his ideas have become widely disseminated with the help of US Libertarian billionaires, to the extent that every single day, we face often utterly absurd news stories about ‘intolerant woke Leftists’ posing a great threat to our ‘freedom, indigenous culture and way of life’.
The rhetoric and narrative deployed throughout print and broadcast media is simply a gentler version of far-right and outright fascist discourse that has been circulating in Britain since at least the 1930s, but which has recently undergone an alarming shift: ‘undesirable alien ‘Others’ — enemies of ‘the people’ from within or without — pose a threat to ‘our’ national culture, traditions, and identity, and thus ‘our’ entire way of life’.
In the past it was generally reserved for foreigners, certain ethnic and religious minorities, and non-heterosexual minorities, but the rhetoric has now extended to all manner of groups and organisations — in addition to the decade or more of grotesque demonisation of migrants, asylum seekers and refugees (misleadingly mischaracterised and grouped together as ‘illegal migrants’ or just ‘illegals’) specific organisations like the National Trust, the England Football team and the RNLI are attacked, as well as Universities and charities in general, and especially, anyone having ‘progressive’ views or demonstrating a concern about what might be called ‘social justice’ (issues like poverty, racism and inequality of opportunity).
A professor who taught me, and who cut his teeth at the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies alongside Stuart Hall, told me thirty years ago that if we wanted to know what was likely to happen in the UK in the near future, we should look at what was happening in the USA in the present.
So many social issues have migrated from the US to the UK — from moral panics about satanic ritual abuse and ‘mugging’, to crack cocaine use and gang culture, to grotesquely partisan propaganda channels masquerading as “News” channels.
And the speed of that migration has increased over the years: the recent intensification of the ‘culture war’ is another classic example, and for anyone caring to look at the vitriol and division it’s causing in the USA right now, we should all be extremely concerned — especially given that we have a government and national print and broadcast media intent on pouring fuel on the simmering culture war fire at every available opportunity.
How did we get here?
In the 1980s, the once niche philosophical and linguistic idea that words may have more consequences than we previously thought, began to permeate mainstream academia: the broad idea that the habitual use of particular words not only described the world, but framed it in particular ways, giving rise to thinking about and understanding the world in particular ways, which in turn gives rise to behaviours.
Gradually, this idea became more widely understood and more widely accepted, and British society was gradually persuaded — not least by ‘alternative’ (mainly young, anti-establishment) comedians — not to use grotesquely prejudiced pejoratives to describe Black, Chinese, Gay or Asian people or women — so, for example, the words ni**er, ‘chin*y’. P*ki, bu**er and b*tch largely disappeared, which coincided with British society making significant steps towards a more civilized, tolerant and humane society.
By the early 1990s, the backlash from the Right was to call this process “political correctness”, and it was widely and relentlessly derided and demonised in the press and by right-wing politicians and pundits.
In the early twentieth century, we made further progress: for example, opposition to gay marriage has all but collapsed, and progress was made on creating a more equal society by ethnic minority people becoming more visible in senior roles, in sports, on TV and radio, and in taking other measures to reduce discrimination. The Race relations Act of 1976 incorporated the earlier Race Relations Acts of 1965 and 1968, and was later amended by the Race Relations Amendment Act 2000, which imposed a statutory duty on public bodies to promote racial equality and to demonstrate that procedures to prevent race discrimination were effective.
The tragic Stephen Lawrence case in 1993 made it crystal clear that institutional and structural racism were real and had tragic even barbaric effects.
Society finally seemed to recognise and overwhelmingly accept that the London MET police was institutionally racist, although the Macpherson report’s objective at the end of the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry to “eliminate racist prejudice and disadvantage and demonstrate fairness in all aspects of policing” has still not been met.
9/11 was another tragedy, in which the actions of a handful of extremists resulted in attacks on and demonisation of Muslims across the western world, manifested in distorted newspaper stories, reactionary political rhetoric, the return of the far-right, increased incidents of racism and Islamophobia, and the mainstreaming of racist ideology — for example high profile commentators who had occupied senior positions in supposedly anti-racist organisations such as the EHRC were able to proclaim the idea that Muslims are “not like us”.
In addition to dramatic cultural shifts, Britain and America’s preference for deregulated free-market capitalism, over a more ‘mixed economy’ popular across much of Europe, led directly to the catastrophic financial crash of 2008. Sadly, lessons were not learned, and very little changed.
Since 2009, the wealth of Britain’s 1,000 richest individuals has increased by almost half a trillion pounds, while ideological austerity resulting from the greed and irresponsibility of those working in the catastrophically deregulated financial sector, meant essential public services were slashed.
Homelessness and poverty have increased dramatically, children go hungry, life-expectancy is falling for the first time since WWII, our public services struggle to cope, our National Health Service, to which we all owe so much, is in almost perpetual crisis, and low-paid insecure jobs have replaced well-paid permanent jobs.
The generic phrase given to the process of campaigning for policies and measures to tackle racism, homophobia, misogyny, and other forms of irrational prejudice, as well as reducing grotesque inequality, fighting man-made climate change, and improving the conditions and lives of society’s most vulnerable, is ‘social justice’.
The contemporary backlash from the Right against campaigns for progressive policy and action, involves using the phrase ‘Social Justice Warrior” (SJW) as a pejorative, and demonising anyone or anything subscribing to any of these goals as “woke”.
Anti-woke
The point I want to emphasise here is that in Britain — for the past 300 years — it has been the Left who have always pushed for the improvement of social conditions, who have taken seriously and challenged inequality and prejudice.
It has always been the Left who have stood up to successive waves of grotesque prejudice: against Oswald Mosely and his Blackshirts; against Nick Griffin and the BNP and the National Front; against Tommy Robinson and the English Defence League; against Paul, Golding, Jayda Fransenthe and Britain First; against the worst excesses of Nigel Farage and UKIP; against the grotesque tabloid press which for two decades has been demonising and scapegoating migrants and Muslims; and now against our intolerant hard-right Government, filled with free-market fundamentalists, sociopathic liars and charlatans, which has overseen 138,000 deaths in the last eighteen months alone.
Using the linguistic and philosophical insights I outlined earlier, the Right’s strategy is to attack the STRENGTHS of the Left (the desire to create a fairer society by reducing poverty, prejudice and inequality of wealth and opportunity) by framing and reducing these heartfelt desires to mere ‘wokeness’, and through constant misrepresentation, exaggeration and repetition imply an ‘intolerant authoritarian Left’ who ‘hate indigenous people and traditions’.
This is arguably the key strength of Steve Bannon’s strategy, now relentlessly disseminated across the entire Right establishment, including across all their media outlets, think tanks, institutions and foundations, and perhaps especially, among their political establishment: ignore the structural and systemic problems of inequality, poverty, poor physical and mental health, economic insecurity and environmental degradation caused primarily by deregulatory free-market capitalism, and focus instead on the ‘intolerant authoritarian Left’s’ threat to ‘our entire way of life’ — our culture.
So whenever you hear the words “woke”, “social justice warrior” or “virtue-signaller”, or you hear absurd allegations of racism against life-long anti-racists, see them for what they really are: the Right, somewhat ironically mobilising those linguistic insights I described earlier.
Why have the Right stepped up their culture war?
Since at least 2016, British people have been more likely to view socialism favourably than capitalism, and it’s now crystal clear to a growing majority of the younger generations in the USA and the UK that greed, the accumulation of wealth among a tiny elite, the influence of money in politics, the rise of corruption, the erosion of our democratic institutions, the lack of permanent well-paid jobs, failing public services, endemic environmental destruction and for the first time outside of wartime falling life-expectancy, are all the direct consequence of a failed economic system which is being mercilessly exploited by a grotesquely wealthy elite.
The Right are desperately trying to deflect from the conditions of rising inequality, prejudice and environmental decay that THEY, THEIR MEDIA, and THEIR POLICIES have given rise to over the last forty years, by making innovations in framing and language use.
There’s a global billionaire-funded industry dedicated to undermining the Left, and it will NEVER stop. They have the wealth and resources to own or fund much of the press, the most influential think tanks, institutions, charities, magazines, radio channels, TV “news” channels, and political parties such as the US Republican Party and the UK Conservative Party.
And what they try to do — all day every day — is to meet two priority objectives:
1) to justify, legitimate and accelerate their accumulation of wealth and power
2) to demonise the Left and anyone else criticising, challenging, or exposing their exploitation, opportunism, corruption, cronyism, barbarism or anti-democratic impulses.
The Right insist on “free speech” in “the marketplace of ideas” and the right to hold views that others may find offensive — even as they fill our public institutions with their funders and supporters, demonise and try to ‘cancel’ anti-colonialist discourse and Critical Race Theory — they’ve even banned the debating of anti-capitalist ideas in our schools, and are now keen to criminalise protest.
They disingenuously claim that “free speech is under threat” in our universities from “woke students” and “Leftist academics”, that “deplatforming” and “cancel culture” are rife and are a threat to “common sense”, democracy and even civilization itself.
Yet a recent study revealed that a review of 10,000 UK speaker events found that just six had been cancelled: four lacked the required paperwork, one was a fraudster recruiting for a pyramid scheme, and the other was Jeremy Corbyn, whose rally was simply moved to a larger venue off-campus.
This is not to deny that occasionally certain issue-based groups can mobilise quickly to object to ideas and policies they disagree with (which is how democracy is supposed to works in so-called pluralist societies), nor that this can sometimes result in threats to academics, which is always wrong — but to argue this comes exclusively from the Left or ‘the woke’ is absurd. As an academic, I’ve received threats and experienced attempts to get me sacked for my views, and they certainly weren’t from the Left or ‘the woke’.
What is to be done?
HOWEVER, there is another side to this, which in my humble opinion, the Left MUST recognise, accept, and confront.
If Brexit has taught the Left anything, it is that personal attacks, intolerance of opposing views, calling out, and demonisation MUST be reserved for context-specific actions and utterances.
When a far-right activist says that British born second generation Muslims should “f*ck off home”, or a football fan makes monkey chants at black footballers — fill your boots, call them out, and throw the book at them. Most people on the Right won’t disagree with you.
BUT if someone voted for Brexit, criticizes Meghan Markle, believes mass migration may have some negative consequences, or believes men cannot become female, instantly, loudly, and publicly shaming these people by describing them as “bigots”, “racists” or “transphobes”, is a BIG mistake.
Similarly, when an academic uses their hard-won rights of academic freedom to make an unpalatable claim that some people find offensive, over the years, a robust system for debating ideas has evolved within academia. This system ensures that ideas are peer-reviewed, robustly challenged, and if invalid, are ridiculed or left to wither. Simply screaming “bigot” at academics or actively trying to get them sacked for doing their job, feeds, perpetuates, and strengthens the powerful and easy to understand framing of an ‘intolerant authoritarian woke Left’.
This, I believe, is why the “woke authoritarian Left” narrative has gained so much traction, why the Left IS losing the culture war, why many of the accusations stick, why voters in the UK have stuck with the grotesque and incompetent Conservatives over the last few years, and partly why millions of voters increasingly see the Left as at best an out of touch joke, and at worst a dangerous authoritarian cult.
When David Starkey went on Newsnight after the 2011 riots to say that “whites have become black”, and when he recently shared his views with Darren Grimes about there being “so many damn blacks”, he was rightly and almost universally condemned for his unhinged racist rhetoric, proving that there ARE cases where people saying awful things ARE widely condemned, with all decent people of whatever political persuasion rightly appalled by such outbursts.
I of course appreciate it can be a fine line, and one that can be difficult to judge, and which I struggle with.
Finally, there is ALWAYS a danger that ‘charismatic’ (in the eyes of some) people saying awful things will gain traction — Oswald Mosley, Nick Griffin, Katie Hopkins, and even Boris Johnson are all examples — and we all have a duty to challenge and expose their lies, prejudices, and hypocrisy.
Not many people are alive today who were alive when Hitler was. We must always be vigilant against creeping fascism, rising populist nationalism, and the demonisation of ethnic and religious minorities, disabled and gay people, and communists, socialists, and trade unionists — all groups which ended up in concentration camps.
As we are now acutely aware, democracy is very fragile, and it is under attack on multiple fronts from our own Government.
Progressives must be more strategic, better organised, use better communication, and become much better at identifying our own contribution to this mess, which I feel many on the Left are in denial about.
We must persuade people to take a different path to the one on offer, which benefits only the already powerful and succeeds by demonising, manipulating and exploiting the poor and marginalised.
Fewer than 3 in 10 of the electorate voted for the Conservatives in 2019 — just 29%. While we on the Left must do far more to inspire the 71% who did NOT vote Tory, given our antiquated electoral system, which we are stuck with until at least the next general election, we also have to persuade a significant proportion of that 29% why they should NOT vote Tory again — and this will certainly not be achieved by insulting them.
Insulting people is not an effective way to persuade them to think differently: we must be cognisant of our own role in fuelling the so-called ‘culture war’ — because, like the everlasting battles against prejudice, exploitation, poverty, and inequality of wealth and opportunity, it’s a never-ending war we must keep fighting, and never lose.
