Like it or not, the culture wars matter to all of us

The progressive view that a sense of identity and loyalty to place and tribe has little importance in the modern world is unlikely to persuade the many Britons who fear falling foul of a cultish, bullying drive for diversity, says Trevor Phillips

When I hear the word culture, I reach for my gun” is credited to the Nazi apologist and playwright Hanns Johst. At its worst, it represents the response of the cultural vandal to great art. At its mildest, it satirises the British aversion to elite intellectualism, which partly explains why so many in our country regard what Americans call the “culture wars” with a wary eye. In our culture, nothing that takes place in a museum, on a university campus or in the pages of a literary magazine is more divisive than whether you prefer playing sport with a round or an oval ball.

I was introduced to politics by the Marxist Guyanese leader Cheddi Jagan when I interviewed him for my school newspaper. He held me spellbound for more than two hours and by the time I left his office I was ready for the revolution. Jagan belonged to the Stalinist tradition in which culture served only one purpose: teaching the masses to be good Leninists. Any exploration of the human condition was greeted with deep suspicion: race was a taboo topic, homosexuality a deviation, and under socialism there would be no disabled people. The only struggle that mattered was between the bosses and the workers, who had no sex or colour worth mentioning.

So I can see that for many on the old left of politics the results of a study published this week on “culture wars” and “wokeness” came as a great relief. At first sight the research suggests that Brits have little time for the linguistic disputes over race, abortion and trans rights that have convulsed America. There, James Carville, Bill Clinton’s former adviser (he of “It’s the economy, stupid”) has applauded Joe Biden’s decision to swerve what he has dubbed “faculty lounge” politics. “You ever get the sense that people in faculty lounges in fancy colleges use a different language than ordinary people?” said Carville. “They come up with . . . a phrase like ‘communities of colour’. I don’t know anyone who speaks like that . . . I know lots of white and black and brown people and they all live in . . . neighbourhoods.”

The “Culture wars in the UK” study, led by Bobby Duffy and Ben Page, does indeed show that most Brits are only mildly animated by the culture wars. Based on a survey of more than 11,000 individuals, 72 per cent of us have no idea what is meant by a microaggression (for example, a white child asking, usually in wonderment, if she can touch a black child’s hair). More than half claim not to have come across the term “woke”, and most have no idea whether it is a compliment or an insult. At a more prosaic level, the actor Laurence Fox has attracted a vast online following for his anti-woke views, yet his campaign for the mayoralty of London attracted a miserable tally — less than 2 per cent — among real voters who don’t spend their time in the sewers of social media.

Some in the political and media elite are rejoicing, arguing that this survey proves we should ignore these sideshows and focus on what Tony Benn would have called the “ishoos”. Their case is threefold. First, that the culture wars are a media fiction, mostly caused by right-wing provocations. Second, that none of this cuts through to the public, who are too busy worrying about Covid or getting their kids to school. Third, that none of these questions has any relevance to the everyday lives of citizens. Each of these propositions is categorically wrong.



https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/8aea148e-bfc7-11eb-8144-d3653cd81e51?shareToken=f1e489c28db02b7eb064881fb5142bef


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