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Coronavirus cases are once again exploding in the United Kingdom. Yet Prime Minister Boris Johnsons Conservative government, dominated by extremist ideologues who value their notion of individual freedom above the public good, is again unwilling to impose necessary measures a reluctance that has already cost innumerable lives in previous COVID-19 waves.

Last month, about a hundred Tory Members of Parliament voted against a very modest government plan that mandates the wearing of masks and vaccine certificates in some places. As hospitals fill up again with COVID-19 patients, they talk about an ancient British tradition of liberty. Were not a papers please society, Tory MP Marcus Fysh claimed, This is not Nazi Germany.

Given such anti-government rhetoric, you might not guess that Johnson, who has been dogged by reports he was partying at his official residence during a general lockdown last year, and has often appeared maskless in public spaces, matches Donald Trump in his disdain for public health regulations.

Or that the British media, overwhelmingly right wing, provides the background chorus for freedom from COVID-19 restrictions. In fact, it led the Tory celebrations of Freedom Day in July this year.

The celebrations were as foolish as they were premature. These days, the world watches again in appalled fascination as omicron spreads fast, and rowdy invocations of personal responsibility and individual choice delay preventive moves in the United Kingdom and, by extension, everywhere else.

Public-spiritedness is by no means alien to Britain; its present-day embodiment, the National Health Service, was widely applauded during the early weeks of the pandemic. Tory fanboys of Winston Churchill like to invoke his lonely defiance of Nazi Germany as they insist on their right to remain maskless. But there is no record of Tory freedom-lovers keeping their lights on at night during the blackout enforced by Churchills government in 1940.

Contemporary Tory libertarianism derives from the American ideologue Ayn Rand more than any ancient British tradition of liberty. And the present-day contempt for collective welfare is largely a legacy of the revolution launched by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s. Thatcher notoriously doubted the existence of society; Reagan claimed that the nine most terrifying words are Im from the government, and Im here to help.

The strange thing is that the battles launched by Reaganites and Thatcherites against tax rates, protectionist industry and labor union privilege were won a long time ago. Libertarians in the United States even managed to discredit major government involvement in health care.

So, what makes Anglo-American individualists so dangerously inflexible, even self-destructively fanatical, today?

Two recent events have spoiled the show for them. First, the rise of China, which proved again after the previous successes of Japan and the East Asian countries that government intervention is crucial to national success in education and health care as well as industrial growth and technological innovation.

The other, arguably more unnerving event, which has occurred right at home, is the increasing assertiveness of historically silent, often disenfranchised peoples: women, non-white immigrant populations, and sexual minorities.

During two centuries of Western expansion and hegemony, a minority of white men enjoyed a relative freedom to do and say whatever they wanted without much regard for the rights and sensitivities of others. Unsurprisingly, many of them loathe the demand from previously voiceless peoples that old attitudes ranging from the narcissistic to the selfish and cruel be re-examined and, preferably, abandoned. The demand is frequently and unfairly derided as woke.

Those still clinging to political power and cultural capital would rather stoke conflict and polarization than admit that their societies are irrevocably diverse, and ought to acknowledge the dignity of people who were once systematically degraded by the gender and racial hierarchies erected by white men.

They naturally fear and loathe scholarship that underlines long-established facts: that the unique wealth and power of a male minority in the West was built on slavery and imperialism rather than any innate superiority, and that the white mans burden was actually carried by black, brown and yellow men.

Instead, faced with the smallest challenges to their moral and intellectual authority, many historically advantaged males have chosen to double down, accusing activists and intellectuals of promoting cancel culture and historical revisionism.

Johnsons government has prosecuted its war on woke with remarkable zeal and clinical efficiency throughout the pandemic. Indeed, rightwingers talking of freedom are shriller than ever before in Europe and America. Their battle against COVID-19 restrictions has become part of their larger, and very desperate, war against political correctness an existential struggle, no less, something as urgent as the existential struggle of many today against severe illness and premature death caused by COVID-19.

The consequences for the rest of us are incalculable. While freedom-loving Tories make their last stand, the mounting evidence from elsewhere is that coordinated action by governments and solidarity among citizens are what will contain the pandemic.

Indeed, the lesson from the U.K. epicenter of delta and now omicron, and home to a dysfunctional government and failed ideology is profoundly ominous: That in societies deliberately divided by culture wars, trust and confidence in an unscrupulous ruling class will inevitably run low, and the pandemic is what will enjoy true freedom.

Pankaj Mishra is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. His books include Age of Anger: A History of the Present, From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia, and Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet and Beyond.

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Boris Johnson and the woeful and costly Tory war on woke - The Japan Times

I moved to Hull in 1971 because it was the most unlikely place in the world to start an experimental theatre company plus rents were cheap and social security were unlikely to find us any proper jobs. I was 23 and I believed that theatre could change the world. I still do.

I wanted to make uncompromising, provocative, funny, tough, sexy plays about people you didnt see in plays, for people who didnt go to the theatre. I wanted Hull Truck to be a nuisance.

Number 71 Coltman Street was cold and dark. On the ground floor was a room full of broken furniture and feral cats. We lived and rehearsed upstairs. The play Children of the Lost Planet was devised over 12 weeks. It was about a bunch of young people of our age living in Hull and trying to negotiate their way through the minefield of sex and drugs and rocknroll always write what you know about.

The winter of 1972 was freezing. We only had a small fan heater and rehearsed under a tent of blankets. The heater blew up so we burnt the broken chairs from downstairs. We bought a clapped-out Morris van for 35 and a lad from the youth theatre stole us a tax disc.

We didnt have many bookings, possibly because the administration office was the phone box outside.

When we performed Children of the Lost Planet in York, the local paper wondered why we wanted to bring such disgusting people to the stage. On the way to our first London show the van broke down and we abandoned it in a pig farm in Gilberdyke. We hitched to the gig with the props and costumes.

But we carried on. After Children of the Lost Planet came The Weekend After Next, The Knowledge, Oh What!, Bridgets House, Ooh La La! and Still Crazy After All These Years. We performed countless kids shows, pub shows and musical cabarets. Our quest for always telling the uncomfortable truth often got us into trouble. Ironically The Knowledge getting banned in Manchester proved to be our biggest break. The theatre took exception to a rude line spoken by the ex-biker dope dealer Dooley. The day the show was pulled off there was a rave review in the Guardian, which the next day printed a piece about the ridiculous ban. We loaded up the van and headed straight for the Bush theatre in London where we performed an impromptu showcase gig. The word had got round, and we got a standing ovation. The theatre immediately booked us for a month in November. The run was a sellout.

After that followed grants, wages, a proper van, rave reviews and a telephone.

We toured the length of the country garnering accolades and abuse in equal measure. One particular scene from Bridgets House in 1976 caused a lot of fuss. Bridget (Rachel Bell) and Mo (Cass Patton) are discussing their sex lives. At one point Bridget observes that most men wouldnt know what a clitoris was if it jumped up and bit them on the leg.

One night in Gainsborough a couple in the audience split up during the scene. He stormed out and drove off into the night. We had to give her a lift home in the truck. That same year we were invited to perform Bridgets House at the new National Theatre.

One of the few people who saw those early plays was a very young Richard Bean. When he told me he was going to write 71 Coltman Street, a dramatised story of Hull Truck, he said I would hate it. I dont. Richard has written a terrific show. Not a word of it is actually true of course, but he has captured the spirit of what he thinks the spirit of Hull Truck was. Thats not an easy thing to do when most theatres seem to be giving in to neo-puritan censorship and politically confected culture wars.

The bargain of real, proper theatre is when a group of human beings on stage get together with a group of human beings in the audience to fearlessly celebrate their human being-ness. Pass it on.

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I wanted to be a nuisance: the riotous rise of Hull Truck - The Guardian

In the year since a mob invaded the Capitol, the trend lines for political violence in the United States have worsened. According to a new poll from The Washington Post and the University of Maryland, about one in three Americans believes that violence against the government is sometimes justified. But even more disturbing than the hardening of attitudes is the governing pattern coalescinglike an array of magnets pulling one another nearin pockets of the country. In some localities, conservative politicians and law-enforcement officials are melding with armed vigilantes who have similar politics. In Grand Traverse County, Michigan, last January, a citizen asked local officials at a virtual public meeting to denounce the Proud Boys, a right-wing gang that took part in the Capitol riot and had previously introduced a local gun-rights resolution. Instead of disavowing the group, the county commissions vice chair stepped off-screen and returned brandishing his rifle. Closer to Michigans capital, Barry County Sheriff Dar Leaf made news in August by speaking approvingly of militias and claiming the power to recruit posses to suppress rioting.

These officials beliefs might be shared by their constituents. Or notthe prospect of intimidation from violent citizens supported by governing powers makes dissenters less likely to speak up. Gang-backed governments fundamentally distort democracy. Public authority and private muscle collude to maintain power and narrow the range of people who can vote. In the resulting mobocracy, supporting policies, rights, or candidates outside accepted boundaries becomes difficult and in some cases dangerous.

David Frum: Dont let anyone normalize January 6

These dynamics are familiar in countries such as Nicaragua and India, but they also represent the most serious realistic danger to the stability of American democracy. In fact, the United States also has considerable experience with such a system. To comparative-government scholars, the Jim Crow South was an authoritarian enclave, a bastion of one-party rule nestled within a broader democracy. In many states, laws kept a large fraction of the population from voting. Vigilante violence, backed by partisan police and judges, kept citizens from altering the situation through the political process.

The return of any such system may feel far-fetched. Fortunately, rifles remain a rare sight at local-government hearings. Modern America has 3,000-odd counties that appear to function in reassuring bureaucratic drabness. The U.S. also has about 800,000 law-enforcement officers, the majority of whom are, no doubt, committed to the rule of law. But January 6 and subsequent revelations should shift Americans understanding of what is possible. While commander in chief, Donald Trump chose to spur on a violent mob and let its riot continue long enough to disrupt congressional certification of the presidential vote. Rather than provoking revulsion from political elites, that days events may have offered a guidebook. Allen West, the chair of the Texas Republican Party, posed with militia members just days later, and in March he appeared with the leader of the Oath Keepers militia after the latter had been charged with involvement in the January 6 attack.

Our current moment has some commonalities with the period following the Supreme Courts 1954 ruling that the Constitution forbids official segregation in public schools. The intimacy of the federal government intruding on whom ones children might sit next to in school drove a furious response. Citizens councils mushroomed across the South. Composed of white professionals, these groups normalized and sometimes abetted a revived Ku Klux Klan. Bloody extremism mingled with mainstream sentiment among white southerners. Perpetrators of violence enjoyed impunity because of the tacit or explicit support of local authorities.

In the Jim Crow South, mobocracies exercised tight control over state and local governments. Southern courts excused white vigilante justice. Murderers, such as those who killed Emmett Till in Mississippi in 1955, went free. Politicians used state security to uphold their campaign of massive resistance to school integration. Arkansass governor ordered the states National Guard to block nine Black students from integrating a Little Rock high school. Law enforcement took a side. One notorious Mississippi sheriff, Neshoba Countys Lawrence Rainey, was suspected of playing a role in the murder of three civil-rights workers.

From the September 2021 issue: His name was Emmett Till

The mobocracy now unfurling has so far been less violent than its Jim Crow forebear. But it has a broader political and geographic base. Should it succeed, it will not be confined to the South, nor will it be based solely on race. Extremists use todays mainstream causessuch as opposition to COVID-vaccine mandates and disputes about school curriculaas gateways for recruitment. Conspiracy theories, culture wars, and a generalized antipathy toward the concerns of women and people of color are fueling the growth of mobocracy in states such as Oklahoma and Iowa, where legislatures have already passed bills granting immunity to drivers who strike protesters with their cars.

In some ways, the left is feeding right-wing fears of tyranny. Especially in academia and other high-profile fields, the muzzling of dissent from progressive orthodoxies drives conservatives claims that they are the ones facing cultural autocracy. The enactment of COVID-related emergency measures, while necessary for public health, has abetted authoritarianism in other countries and fueled similar fears on Americas right.

Anne Applebaum: The people in charge see an opportunity

Commentators, particularly on the right, have been chattering about civil war for some time. Since Americas founding, insurgency has been linked to patriotism. This framing taps into a strong mythos of patriots taking up arms against tyranny. Yet since 2013, the Global Terrorism Database has charted skyrocketing violence on the right and only a slight increase on the left. The left has no equivalent of an interlinked political, militia, and state-security infrastructure. The term civil war makes violence sound citizen-led, and it tends to confer blame on each competing camp. But a two-sided war is not what America is facing.

Moreover, though many Americans distrust their government and bear arms at the highest per capita rate in the world, most political-science research suggests that weapons and grievances dont correlate with combat. The U.S. does have serious risk factors for political violence, chief among them political parties defined by racial, geographic, and religious cleavages. But insurgents dont attack wealthy democracies with the military strength of the United States. They seek to govern them.

Instead of worrying about the 1860s, Americans should consider how modern democracies disintegrate. In 1920s Italy, Benito Mussolini gained power legally after 25,000 of his Blackshirt paramilitary devotees marched on Rome and a co-opted establishment bowed to his leadership. In 1970s Chile, street skirmishes between the left and the right led to middle-class cries for law and order, ending in General Augusto Pinochets coup. India, long praised as the worlds largest democracy, recently dropped to partly free in Freedom Houses ranking after its popularly elected governmentsupported by riots and upheld by Hindu-nationalist policepassed too many laws that tilted elections, quelled protest, and stifled speech.

The United States, too, is dropping fast in rankings such as those compiled by Freedom House and the Economist Intelligence Unit. International experience suggests that centrist politicians arent capable of stopping the slide on their own. When the researcher David Solimini and I examined countries that had faced similar forms of democratic degradation, we found that ineffectiveness and infighting sidelined pro-democracy legislators, while populist or authoritarian leaders quickly transformed their parties into sycophantic amplifiers of their own demagoguery.

Robert A. Pape and Keven Ruby: The Capitol rioters arent like other extremists

Far more important in upholding democracy is a neutral, nonpoliticized security sector. But retired American generals are so concerned about turmoil in our armed forces that they are writing op-eds to put the public on alert. In the past decade, the number of U.S.-military veterans arrested for extremist crimes was more than 300 percent higher than in the previous decade. One in 10 of the rioters who stormed the Capitol had served in the military. Twelve National Guardsmen sent to protect President Joe Biden at his inauguration had to be removed after a last-minute extremist screening. The anti-polarization organization More in Common found that more than half of Afghan War veterans feel like strangers in their own country, betrayed and humiliated by officers and civilian leaders for the pullout debacle. The militarys recent initiatives to curb radical behavior are at best a first step.

Still more worrying is the politicization of state National Guards. In November, Oklahomas governor fired the states top general in order to find someone willing to challenge federal authority. Most news coverage has framed this story as a fight over vaccine mandates enacted by the Biden administration. It is actually a contest for control of the military. National Guards are federally funded, although they are generally under gubernatorial leadership. They are subject to federal requirements for troop readiness, because they can be called for federal service at any time; Guard and Reserve units composed nearly half of the forces sent to Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet Texas, Alaska, Mississippi, Iowa, Nebraska, and Wyoming have joined Oklahoma in contesting the federal governments authority over military forces.

The U.S. military, however, has a long tradition of disciplined political neutralitya doctrine that should enable it to prioritize democratic civics if it chooses. Law-enforcement politicization is more advanced and a harder problem to solve.

The fear long harbored by some communities of color that local police sometimes choose not to uphold the rule of law is spreading. A lawsuit credibly alleges that officers in San Marcos, Texas, laughed off multiple calls for help as Trump supporters tried to force a Biden-campaign bus off the road in 2020. Despite sharp increases in far-right political violence and hate crimes, and evidence that right-wing protests are twice as likely as left-wing ones to turn violent, U.S. police intervened one-third as often in right-leaning protests as in left-leaning ones in 2020, according to the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project, an information-analysis nonprofit. In 2021, the group found that police intervention in far-right protests had decreased further, even as the Proud Boys in particular had become more violent.

Meanwhile, the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, which grew out of a 1970s white-supremacist movement and promotes the idea that law-enforcement officers can personally interpret the Constitution, has flourished since Trumps pardon of its board member Joe Arpaio. One Michigan sheriff is refusing to uphold the secretary of states ban on guns at election sites. In Wisconsin, Racine County Sheriff Christopher Schmaling recommended criminal charges against members of a bipartisan election board who had directed clerks to send absentee ballots to nursing homes. Former Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke, a prominent Trump surrogate, told a QAnon conference this fall that the next insurrection needs better planning. The conservative Claremont Institute, a think tank whose chairman believes that the U.S. is in a cold civil war, has launched a fellowship in which sheriffs discuss topics such as todays militant progressivism and multiculturalism.

Read: Trumps next coup has already begun

Jim Crow ended thanks to a federal government that worked assiduouslygoaded by community leadersto stop impunity, often against the will of local law enforcement and politicians who had gone rogue in states such as Mississippi. Bidens administration is not quite there. As Republican and Democratic election officials face unprecedented death threats for refusing to bend to electoral conspiracy theories, the Justice Department has been slow to prosecute cases of intimidation and harassment.

But the Justice Department could get serious. The FBI could prioritize protection for secretaries of state and other officials. The Department of Homeland Security could fund proven techniques to help states and local governments reduce violent crime, whose rapid growth makes voters more likely to acquiesce to gang-backed government. Senators could rise to the historic moment and pass the Freedom to Vote Act, a moderate bill that would protect election officials and voting itself. They could remove some incentives for targeted violence by passing the John Lewis Act, which would restore voting-rights protections gutted by the Supreme Court, and reforms to the Electoral Count Act, which governs the vote-certification process that insurrectionists tried to thwart on January 6.

Without these and other steps, America may soon face varying levels of mobocracies supported by unfair balloting, police batons, and vigilante bullets. Activists who protest these dynamics may find themselves facing armed individuals, without protection from law enforcement. In the 16 months after George Floyds murder, more than 100 car rammings of protesters occurred; the drivers faced charges in less than half of those cases. The perception that police are taking sides is likely to fuel further polarization. Left-wing militias would form for protection, spurring backlash and calls for law and order.

Because of recent experience, nightmare scenarios are easy to imagine: Civic leaders find armed mobs at their home, and if they call 911well, unsympathetic local police might respond a trifle too late. Elected officials trying to right these wrongs might find their children facing threats at schooland then be told that the intimidation just doesnt quite meet actionable levels. Election officials who quit would be replaced by mob supporters. In winner-take-all elections like ours, modest changes to the rules or the composition of the electorate produce radical differences in outcomes.

If the mobocracy gains a foothold, laws and voting procedures could be changed legally to discourage opposition voters. If law enforcement becomes more politicized, good cops would find other work. Vigilantes would gain greater impunity. Dissidents in localities falling under mobocracy could keep fightingor just move somewhere more welcoming. Many would. Over time, majorities would support the local system. Ironically, one danger of mobocracy is that it may not require much overt violence. Just an occasional reminder that the authorities and the extremists have become one and the same would be enough to keep the peace.

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What Gang-Backed Government Could Do to America - The Atlantic

The 2022 Kentucky General Assembly session reflects many other political situations: Theres a decent amount of room for opportunity, and even more room for failure.

By the time you read this, the redistricting process will most likely be well under way, and that will be a lightning quick, shadily quiet and absolutely partisan move by the Republican supermajority, right as the session begins on Jan. 4. There will also inevitably be childlike grandstanding, toxic culture wars waged, gross dog-whistling and shows of power from certain factions within the supermajority. Arguments about critical race theory and COVID will happen, and abortion rights will come under attack. This wont be a session that brings people together.

On the borderline bright side, it will almost certainly be more unified than the special session back in September, where the GOP-dominated legislature essentially inherited control of the states coronavirus response after a Kentucky Supreme Court ruling shifted policymaking power. The special session was pretty much one big middle finger to the Gov. Andy Beshear, who angered the Republicans via his executive orders early on in the pandemic. It was about GOP payback, and tearing down what previously was built, instead of carving out the future of public health during a rapidly-changing crisis. It was messy, and the states COVID numbers are not exactly very good right now.

So, is there room for a little bit of optimism for this session even very, very cautious optimism?

There and I could very easily want to Sharpie this line out of every single issue of LEO that gets delivered this week probably is.

Thats mostly because the state has money to spend. Kentucky is holding onto a $1.1 billion fiscal year budget surplus and is looking forward to the incoming American Rescue Plan Act funds. And, this year, the General Assembly will pass its first two-year budget since before the pandemic.

At a Louisville Forum event addressing the session back in December, House Minority Leader Joni Jenkins (D-Louisville) who appeared alongside her Republican peer Sen. Paul Hornback expressed some positive thoughts, saying the budget could keep the session focused.

It tends to take a lot of discussion and air out of the room, Jenkins said of the budget. And it is a good year for us because revenues are up, there is lots of one-time money, but for every dollar theres been probably three or four people asking for that dollar. Theres lots of hard decisions to make.

A lot is riding on this 60-day session. Some of its going to be chaotic, some of its going to be depressing, some of its going to be a blatant waste of time that doesnt serve anyone, but there has to be some common ground during a long session with a decent chunk of money. Lets address tornado relief, poverty, equity, essential worker shortages, infrastructure, child care and economic development. Lets create prosperity for everyone, and look to the future. Lets move forward. We have the resources. But, at the end of the day, we have to hold out hope that a volatile supermajority gives more than it takes.

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Kentucky's 2022 Legislative Session Will Likely Be A Chaotic, Grandstanding Mess. We Still Have Hope. - Louisville Eccentric Observer

Last week produced an eventful but not untypical weather-front of news stories about culturally contentious issues. There was the microstorm about the Queens photo being taken down in the common room at Magdalen College, Oxford; the tiny tempest of Test cricketer Ollie Robinson being dropped for racist tweets dating from when he was a teenager; the squall over the England football teams commitment to taking the knee; and the sudden shower of Oxford academics boycotting Oriel College over its decision to retain its reviled Cecil Rhodes statue.

These, along with the deathless headline Law student cleared after saying women have vaginas, were examples of what might also be called skirmishes in a larger and ongoing series of battles: the culture wars.

As a recent report by the Policy Institute at Kings College London shows, there has been an exponential rise in the past couple of years of news stories that use the term culture wars. Exactly what constitutes a culture war is just one of the many issues that people fight about in the culture wars, and theres a sizeable minority of participants who go so far as to argue that the main characteristic of this present culture war is that its not really a culture war.

According to the Policy Institute, a quarter of the articles it analysed took the position that culture wars are either overblown or manufactured if they exist at all. If thats just the media being contrary, then take a look at the public at large. In a Times Radio poll conducted in February, respondents were asked When politicians talk about a culture war, what do you think they mean? Only 7% came up with a relevant answer, 15% got it wrong, and a slightly concerning 76% said they didnt know.

Just because people dont know what a culture war is doesnt mean theyre not in one. For, as all those feverish headlines suggest, there does appear to be something afoot.

I do think were in a culture war, says Matthew dAncona, an editor at Tortoise Media, where he has written perceptively about the politicisation of culture. There have always been cultural conflicts but its become much sharper in the last 20 years thanks to declining trust in institutions that were meant to hold together the cohesion of society, some of the growing inequalities, and most of all the proliferation of technology that enables and indeed encourages people to cluster in their cultural groups.

The historian Dominic Sandbrook agrees that a culture war is under way but cautions against overstating its dimensions. I think one of the mistakes people make when they talk about culture wars is they think that its something that necessarily sweeps up the whole of society, and everybodys invested in it. He thinks that more often than not its a dispute between two sides of an educated elite.

What does seem clear is that symbolic issues and questions of identity occupy a larger and more antagonistic position in the general culture than they did 10 or 20 years ago. As dAncona suggests, this development and the explosion in social media, where millions of people can seek out like-minded opinion-holders, are unlikely to be coincidental.

Just as significantly, confidence in the traditional concerns of politics political parties, economics and wealth redistribution has taken a bit of a battering. Bill Clintons campaign strategist James Carville famously said Its the economy, stupid to explain what made the difference between electoral victory and defeat.

While thats still a vital factor, the financial meltdown and the bailout of banks in 2008 left many voters baffled as to what was going on.

As old-style political parties struggled to articulate what needed to be done, the opportunity was there for populist politicians and narratives to fill the comprehension void.

For the simple truth is that while its not easy to express an informed opinion about the effect of collateralised debt obligations on the American housing market, it doesnt take a doctorate to decide whether a statue should be pulled down, or to work up an unbending judgment about the character of the Duchess of Sussex. As Sandbrook puts it: People are more interested in flags than inflation.

If public focus has shifted towards more symbolic and emotive issues, then its a change that can be both exploited and directed by the cynically astute.

There have always been stories like the one about Magdalen College and the image of the Queen, says dAncona.

Whats interesting now is the speed with which cabinet ministers or indeed No 10 respond. That to me signals were into a different kind of political game. One where a strategy is at work.

He points out that the combined effect of Brexit, the pandemic and the governments commitment to a levelling-up agenda means there is an extremely challenging period ahead in terms of policy and its implementation. Everything the government has on its to-do list is hard.

Its a human instinct and practically a political rule that when confronted with a number of tough priorities, the first job is to hunt around for easier options. The culture wars suit the Johnson way of doing things, says dAncona. Hes good at things that involve short, memorable slogans and showmanship. Is he good at test and trace? Not conspicuously so. Is he good at PPE? No. Is he good at lockdown timing? Absolutely not. But the thing that hes quite good at is spotting a dividing line.

Sandbrook is less inclined to see debates about national and personal identity in terms of political distraction. He thinks they plug into deep-rooted and timeless matters of belonging and place. Along with his fellow historian Tom Holland, he co-presents a podcast, The Rest Is History, which recently looked at the history of culture wars.

For Sandbrook, culture wars have always existed. They are what was fought as the Roman empire moved from paganism to Christianity in the early fourth century, and just as today that process involved clashes over statues and shrines.

What is certainly true, he says, is there are moments in history when disputes about history, identity, symbols, images and so on loom very large. Think about so much of 17th-century politics, for example, when people would die over the wording of a prayer book. The same applies, he believes, to any number of periods, including the arrival of the permissive society in the 1960s, in which there is an attempt to establish new mores.

For Holland, the term culture war has a stricter meaning, relating to the German word Kulturkampf, which described the clash between Bismarcks government and the Catholic church in 1870s Prussia. It is therefore specifically a dispute between religious and secular forces. Certainly if we look at America, where the modern incarnation of the culture wars was first identified, the conflicts over abortion and gay marriage have been fought, at least by one side, from an explicitly religious perspective.

The US sociologist James Davison Hunter gave popular currency to the term in his seminal 1991 book Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America. He argued that they were about the orthodox versus the progressive. That division remains visible in the UK, but without the religious component.

I dont think the Christian side of it matters, says Sandbrook, disagreeing with Holland. You can have culture wars in a non-Christian society. Yet he agrees there might be a religious impulse at root.

The Puritans took the culture wars with them, he says. Now America has re-exported the arguments back to us.

He says that Holland thinks that woke social justice warriors dont realise theyre really 16th- and 17th-century Christian Puritans.

If, as Holland believes, todays social justice warriors are the unknowing heirs to Puritanism, then their preoccupations are less about morality than identity, even if dissenting opinions can still be denounced with a puritanical zeal. Nowhere is this tendency more evident than within the university system. The drive to decolonise the curriculum has led many academics to complain, usually off the record, of what one English professor described as a dispiriting witch-hunt atmosphere and professional intimidation.

As much of the intellectual motivation for challenging established power structures has emerged from the humanities, and in particular the field of critical theory, it is hardly surprising that this should also be the scene of some of the most conspicuous stands. In any war there are always innocent victims caught in the crossfire and no doubt thats how the 150 Oxford academics boycotting Oriel think of the students they are refusing to teach.

Whats notable is that the left initially saw issues of identity those concerning race, gender and sexuality as an area of straightforward progressive gain. The struggles were all about liberating oppressed minorities from under the yoke of white male power. But as the battles became both more complex and particular whats the correct position on whether self-identifying trans women with birth-male genitalia should have access to womens lavatories? so did rights begin to conflict and solidarity fray.

The divisions that have opened up within the Labour party are to an increasing extent grounded in differences in cultural politics between its middle-class metropolitan supporters and its traditional provincial working-class base. But there are also other tensions, for example between trans activists and gender-critical feminists. At almost the same time last week that Maya Forstater was winning her appeal against an employment tribunal, after saying that people cannot change their biological sex, the Labour leader Keir Starmer was reaffirming the partys commitment to introducing self-identification for trans people.

The former leader Tony Blair has publicly advised Starmer to steer clear of these culture wars, because they are polarising areas that have limited voter appeal. But dAncona believes thats an unrealistic ambition.

A modern left-of-centre coalition has to include that social justice movement element Starmer cant just turn to BLM [Black Lives Matter] or #MeToo and say, away with you all.

By contrast, there is a sense that each of No 10s pronouncements on cultural or identity issues is calculated to maximise public support, even if it offends metropolitan sensibilities. As dAncona notes, this is why, in the run-up to a crucial G7 meeting, which is also President Joe Bidens first foreign visit and the first time the international community of leaders has gathered in a long while, Boris Johnson was able to find time to admonish the England and Wales Cricket Board for suspending Robinson over his historical racist tweets.

And its probably a measure of how keenly No 10 studies the national mood that after the England manager, Gareth Southgate, wrote a stirring letter calling for support for his players, Johnson went from refusing to condemn England supporters for booing the team over taking the knee to appealing for the booing to stop.

Its one thing to generate social media noise, and provoke a few high-minded columnists, but its hard to know if Johnsons strategy has any deeper meaning or political capital. Were in a new world of unpredictable directions and strange manifestations. Look at Oliver Dowden, says dAncona of the culture secretary, who used to be a centrist in David Camerons government. Hes reborn as a kind of woke-buster.

More troublingly, he argues, the politics of a culture war are febrile and unstable, with the potential to inspire fundamental bigotries leading to ever greater and more damaging divisions. These are not forces, he contends, that should be toyed with.

Yet if the culture war is leading to ever more entrenchment and acrimony, dAncona complains that the standard Conservative response is, We didnt start it. Thats not the response of true leadership. Its the response of the playground.

Whoever started it, the culture wars look set to continue for a while yet. With their preference for gesture over action, they dont cost very much to participate in if you discount hurt feelings and require no great expertise or experience. Doubtless within them are worthy and perhaps essential debates, along with the familiar vices of name-calling, point-scoring and virtue-signalling.

The problem is that specific issues are seldom discussed on their merits, but packaged together into ideological job lots, the better to establish clear moral battle lines. The demarcation is not so much between left and right as right and wrong. If you accept one position, goes the thinking, its immoral not to adopt the rest.

The Nazi SS officer and playwright Hanns Johst once wrote a much misquoted line: When I hear culture I unlock my Browning. In our thankfully less violent times, the mention of culture instead unloosens the tongue. The trick is to respect the principle of free speech, while maintaining the standards of civil discourse.

But the threat of Johsts brand of righteous contempt is never far away. It would help if there were responsible figures cooling the debate. In the past, one person to whom you might look to perform that role would be the prime minister. In these culturally weaponised times hes more likely to be flame-heating it.

The murder of George Floyd

Most aspects of the culture war are vividly symbolic rather than messily actual. But Floyd really was killed; the violence wasnt silence but a police officers knee. The key thing, though, is that the murder was filmed and its documentation proved to be internationally inspirational, not least in the UK.

The Rhodes statue at Oriel College

The Rhodes Must Fall movement began over six years ago in South Africa. His statue in Oxford remains a provocative symbol of imperialism and, as its critics would say, white supremacy. This controversy is not going to go away anytime soon.

Winston Churchills statue in Parliament Square

The defacement of Churchills statue in last years Black Lives Matter protests was a galvanising moment. Whereas the toppling of slave-trader Edward Colstons monument in Bristol was met with either support or complacency, the graffiti denouncing Churchill as a racist prompted a cultural backlash against BLM.

The Last Night of the Proms 2020

The most patriotic and indeed jingoistic of musical evenings, it was announced that its traditional climax of Rule Britannia was to be played without singing, much to the annoyance of those who cried censorship. Online choirs were organised by way of cultural resistance. But the BBC caved into pressure and the words were sung by a cohort of 18.

The Keira Bell high court decision

In a judicial review brought by Keira Bell, the high court ruled that the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trusts gender identity service (GIDS) for children with gender dysphoria had been misinterpreting the law on child consent in referring children as young as 10 for puberty blockers.

The court found the potentially serious long-term health consequences of taking puberty blockers are unknown, and that virtually all children at GIDS who started puberty blockers progressed to cross-sex hormones. The decision was condemned as shocking by Stonewall. The NHS has since suspended the use of puberty blockers for under-16s unless there is a best interests order from a court.

The European Union referendum

Although it was on the surface a political decision about where sovereignty resides, the issues surrounding Brexit were as often as not cultural at root. More than anything the referendum exposed faultlines in the nation that remain open and prey to exploitation.

The Oprah Winfrey interview with the Duke and Duchess of Sussex

Its a mark of the weird political landscape that an American celebrity interview with a couple of fugitive royals could become the subject of so much hostility and polarised opinion. Prejudices and preferences concerning race, class and nationality created a meta-narrative that successfully overshadowed the banality of the conversation.

Laurence Foxs appearance on Question Time

When Fox rejected the notion that Meghan Markle was a victim of racism, he announced himself as a cultural, anti-woke warrior ready to defend white males against the racism of being described as privileged. Just over a year later he was running to be mayor of London. He lost.

Oliver Dowdens warning to cultural institutions

A policy of non-interventionism has long been the accepted relationship between culture secretaries and cultural institutions but Dowden appeared to breach this understanding when he told museum and gallery heads that they should retain and explain contentious statues, and not be drawn into rewriting history. Because history is fixed and symbols are for ever.

This article was amended on 24 June 2021. An earlier version cited, as a key flashpoint, the Last Night of the Proms 2020, and said that Rule Britannia was played without singing. In fact, the BBC reversed its original decision and the words of the anthem were sung by a small choir.

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