When a war is won, retribution against the losers and waverers follows. Some will escape their past and blend into the new regime, but others will pay the price for their poor decisions.
In the aftermath of the Cass Review there is a strong sense that the battleground over this bitterest of issues has shifted in favour of the gender critical movement. My suspicion has long been that many people went along with certain ideas because they were worried about being seen as on the wrong side of history, as those who opposed gay liberation now are - despite the two movements being different in many ways. (Besides which, many progressive ideas do not end up winning, it’s just that there isn’t much of a cultural memory about their excesses).
Because of this, many liberals and even conservatives, in politics, the media and public life more generally, signalled their support for the transgender movement and even condemned its opponents, despite their instincts and discomfort. Far more simply expressed neutrality, by suggesting that both sides should be less toxic, or that we ‘shouldn’t start a culture war’ over it. Now that one side looks like they’re going to win, many will be tempted to hold them to account.
While Andrew Sullivan asks whether those responsible for medical excesses will be held responsible, there will also be (milder) repercussions for those who stayed neutral. As Alex Massie wrote in a typically measured piece: ‘The people who most decidedly are not vindicated by the Cass Review are those who have spent recent years decrying a so-called “culture war” and, as a consequence, have pretended that the subject is so “toxic” it must be ignored.’ He wrote:
Well, as I suggested a year ago, there is a “culture war” here but the people who most frequently complain about “culture wars” are often the people happiest fighting them (Nicola Sturgeon is a prime example of this). They, of course, are never “culture warriors” themselves. No, that label is reserved for their foes and it may easily, and popularly, be implied that these people are themselves allied with, or in some other vague sense connected to, nefarious dark forces made all the more disturbing by being, conservative or American or - even worse - both conservative and American.
The accusation is sufficient to indicate that concerns must be fabricated or be being used as a “wedge issue” to undermine an impeccably progressive agenda that would otherwise be accepted as Obvious Truth by all good-thinking people. Your opponents’ arguments, you must understand, may never be made in good faith.
The ‘starting a culture war’ thing has always annoyed me, and I’m not the only one. It’s one thing to want to change the world, another to do so while claiming your opponents are the people trying to shift the terms of the debate.
The line that ‘conservative start culture wars, liberals win them’ always struck me as odd as ‘Catholics start reformations, Protestants win them.’ Surely, one might argue, it’s the side proposing radical change who are starting a culture war, and what can be more radical than revolutionising the eternal biological definition of man and woman? This is their right, because what people mean by ‘culture wars’ are actually ‘deeply important questions about human nature, society and social norms’. And they, of course, matter; they might not matter in the same way as material things, but it’s disingenuous to suggest that cultural issues are not worth arguing about. Man does not live by bread alone and all that.
The idea that conservatives are starting culture wars is maddeningly frequent. Keir Starmer has accused the Tory party of starting culture wars. Kemi Badenoch is often labelled a ‘cultural warrior’. Rishi Sunak is even ‘fuelling culture wars’ for taking the side of motorists, and while I happen to disagree with Sunak on the issue, the price of fuel is clearly a material issue. Chris Bryant talked about Tories launching culture wars which made him even feel unsafe as a gay man, a classic example of political hypochondria.
But even Conservatives make the same accusation about their own side. Penny Mordaunt, who like many Tory MPs was on board with the idea that ‘trans men are men and trans women are women’, argued that her party should stop ‘talking about culture wars, because it doesn’t move the country forward’; Caroline Nokes, the chair of the Women’s and Equalities Committee, declared: ‘The thing I reject is that there has to be a culture war at all.’ She was speaking on The News Agents, a podcast which epitomises the sensible, centrist mentality that only conservatives are fighting culture wars.
A leading Conservative businessman even quit the party because ‘It was made pretty clear the plan is to run a culture war to distract from fundamental economic failings.’ The man in question was a chair of Stonewall, who I hardly think can be entirely blameless on the culture war front.
Liberal Democrat Tim Farron said that the prime minister ‘got thoroughly duffed up on his own chosen culture war turf: asylum.’ Again, that rather stretches the idea of a culture war, since having 40,000 people a year enter your country illegally is pretty material, even existential.
Yet even non-material questions do matter. The culture war is most strongly felt in the arts, and anyone who has visited a museum or gallery since 2020 will have seen the way in which progressive politics are shoehorned into almost every area of life.
Yet Dan Hicks, a professor of contemporary archaeology at the University of Oxford, wrote in the Guardian that secretary of state for culture Oliver Dowden was ‘trying to ignite a fake “culture war” in the arts, museums and heritage sector.’ He argued that ‘Generating a “culture war” is how the right is trying to push back against the progress represented by Black Lives Matter. Resisting this framing is a key element of anti-racism today.’
Again, this struck me as strange because BLM are engaged in culture war, quite clearly. When Labour’s leader took the knee in solidarity with Black Lives Matter, he was engaging in culture war, something which was heavy on meaning and emotion but largely contradicted by the facts. You might support them, but it’s bizarre to claim they aren’t fighting a culture war.
Even one of the four people who knocked down the statue of Edward Colston accused the Tories of misrepresenting the case in order ‘to fan the flames of a divisive culture war’, yet I would have thought that toppling a statue was ‘fanning the flames of a divisive culture war’. Iconoclasm is almost the platonic ideal of culture war.
Such is the sense of denial that a New York Times headline from 2022 declared ‘Democrats, You Can’t Ignore the Culture Wars Any Longer’, as if the party had not been fighting it for decades. No publication has done more than the New York Times to fight the culture war, yet there is always a sense that they are not the ones starting it, like Romans who conquer half the known world out of self-defence. When the same paper claimed that ‘the pace of the campaign against transgender rights has stunned political leaders across the spectrum,’ there is no sense about who is acting and who is reacting. Barack Obama even accused the Right of flaming culture wars, the same man who invited race activist Al Sharpton to the White House 70 times, and whose second administration did more than any other to push the Great Awokening.
If you’re trying to change the definition of something, or policing language, or raising the status of particular identity groups, or you’re taking down a statue or renaming a street or trying to get a historical figure brought down because of his views, or campaigning for ‘equity’, you are fighting a culture war.
Tomiwa Owolade wrote about this phenomenon last year, after Oxfam’s Dhananjayan Sriskandarajah wrote a Guardian column headlined ‘Oxfam’s job is to end poverty — we refuse to be distracted by the toxic culture wars.’
‘Yet when Oxfam decided to update its inclusive language guide this month to describe women as “breastfeeding people” and “people who menstruate”; to use the phrase “sex assigned at birth” instead of the word “sex”; to incorporate a wide variety of confusing and politically loaded terminology: this shows the charity is itself waging a culture war.’
Owolade observed that:
There is a particular type of person who claims the culture wars distract from real issues — by which this person means the culture wars waged by the right, not the ones waged by self-described progressive institutions that challenge scientific reality and the intuitions of normal people. This person is probably a journalist or an academic or a politician; let us call him John.
Being on the Right Side of History is part of John’s brand. Whenever a venerable organisation such as Oxfam decides to radically change the meaning of words, John will stay silent. But if anyone objects to these changes, they will be accused by John of stoking a culture war.
John is never a culture warrior himself. He is a perfectly sensible man who just happens to be happy for women’s rights to be compromised rather than protected, for racial divisions to be entrenched instead of overcome, for a culture of narcissism to replace one based on universal solidarity. Rather than making a persuasive case for why such radical changes to language and norms should be made, John takes for granted such changes are common sense. They are not worth even debating.
As Ian Leslie put it: ‘*We* are seeking to radically redefine cultural terms and concepts. If you object, you're fighting a culture war.’
Leslie also wrote a piece on the same phenomenon and ‘the progressive left’s tortured relationship with its own aggression.’ He pointed out that:
The idea of a “fabricated culture war” ginned up by right-wing media and Tory politicians is a staple of liberal-left discourse. The implicit premise seems to be that if it weren’t for those pesky culture warriors, the British people would gladly accept, for instance, that there is no meaningful distinction between a trans woman and a natal woman, or that their own country is indelibly racist. I don’t think so. Propositions like those may or may not be true, but they are, to say the very least, contentious among readers and voters at large. If leftists want to fight for them, they should. What they shouldn’t do is pretend they’re not fighting.
Here is a funny thing about Britain’s “culture war”: the people who decry it the most are those who are most invested in it. Almost every time you read an article making an accusation of culture war, it’s by someone on the left who is spraying bullets at an enemy. Sathnam Sanghera, a brilliant journalist and author of an acclaimed book on the British Empire, seems to define “culture warrior” as anyone who openly disagrees with his own take on British history and cultural mores. He accuses the Conservative minister Kemi Badenoch, who argues that racism is exaggerated by the left, of perpetrating a culture war. “Badenoch is giving the mostly white and elderly voters in the Conservative Party leadership election the opportunity to claim that Britain doesn’t have a problem with racism,” says Sanghera. Badenoch is “a Trojan Horse for racism”. Whether you agree or not, this is punchy stuff, and more obviously inflammatory than anything Badenoch has said. Yet to Sathnam, he is not the belligerent here — she is.
The left used to pride itself on being openly combative — a waspish irritant in the cultural mainstream. Perhaps because it has won so many of its battles, it now tries unconvincingly to play at being merely sensible, the guardian of accepted truths which float above politics. To maintain this fiction, opponents must be painted as belligerent or bigoted or just oddly obsessed by merely “cultural” issues. Eyes are rolled at those who argue over pronouns or genitalia, for instance — even though the only reason that gender and the sexed body are hotly debated is that progressives have sought to radically redefine them.
There is a culture war, except that one side don’t follow the rules about wearing uniform.
Keynes once said that abundance would make it possible for people to devote ‘our energies’ to the ‘noneconomic interests of our lives’, and that’s what has happened. Culture wars in its modern sense dates to the 1990s, but they began in the 1960s, when a huge gap opened over society’s views on things like sex before marriage, homosexuality, race relations and religion. The term gained widespread understanding with Pat Buchanan’s famous 1992 ‘culture war’ speech, which to many on the Left epitomised a new kind of ferocity among conservatives.
What many progressives also saw was that the American Right was becoming more focussed on hot-button moral issues just as its economic policies were damaging the very poor who most cared about them. Thomas Frank, in his anti-culture war polemic What’s The Matter With Kansas?, attacked conservatives for using abortion as a distraction from material matters, lamenting that the poorest parts of America were becoming the most Republican.
Yet people do care about non-material issues; penniless rural Christians really are invested in the unborn, just as modern progressives care about protecting vulnerable transgender children, even if they might have a hundred and one more pressing problems in their lives (and don’t we all). Man is a believing animal, and prestige and status matter hugely to our wellbeing.
It’s true that most people are exhausted by woke issues, yet Britons are quite split along culture war issues, about ‘75% as divided along partisan lines as their American counterparts’. But then, even when there isn’t a culture war, as with Covid in Britain, some still acted like there are, almost as if they need the Right to behave aggressively.
So we should be fighting culture wars. We have to. We should, dare I say it, sometimes even be ‘starting American-style culture wars’, an especially maddening variation of the phrase, since American conservatives, even if often shrill and déclassé to British tastes, do actually win on occasions. Where the Right in Britain has gone wrong is that it talks about culture wars without fighting them, politicians putting their names to newspaper columns about ‘woke’ domination while not using their powers to change things.
But the real problem is John, those otherwise rational and sensible people who claim to be above the fight because these things don’t matter. Because while you might not be interested in woke, woke is interested in you.
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