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Where to next for the National Party? Ben Thomas reviews the post-election wreckage.

The National Party is undertaking a review of its campaign. Presumably this will not be to determine the cause of its historic defeat.

The cause is well known. The cause screams out from the pages of The New York Times, The Economist, The Guardian, The Sydney Morning Herald. The cause haunts the dreams of Nationals vastly reduced caucus of 34. The cause is Jacinda.

More specifically, it is the relationship the prime minister formed with the public during the first lockdown, and the promise of stable and secure leadership through three years of unknown dangers as Covid continues to wreak havoc on the worlds economy and population.

Instead, it must focus on how National could have done better and, perhaps, where to from here. Already debate has begun about how to reframe the partys policies.

Its findings will highlight certain obvious logistical and management issues. It appeared candidate advertising had either sloppy or no sign-off from the central campaign. The leaders itinerary was a moveable feast, one which the rest of the campaign struggled to keep up with.

The review will probably conclude that walkabouts should happen in busy areas where voters are free to speak, not on windswept streets with the cast of a Tory Westworld making rote conversation. It may find its possible to argue the state should not have a role in regulating the interaction of personal choices with social and environmental factors, without insulting fat people. Depending on its thoroughness, it may finally answer the question who was Todd Muller anyway?

The review will have to address the issues of caucus composition and diversity. One possible outcome of the election failed to materialise: the much discussed conservative caucus within National which in the past year or two has come to mean those MPs with very socially conservative views based in religious belief has not become more dominant as a result of the loss. Instead, its numbers have thinned dramatically. Christopher Luxon in Botany is the only addition to this very loosely conceived group, assuaging fears that the party will recede away further from urban liberal centre voters, and swelling the ranks of identikit bald white men to record highs.

Former conservative caucus members Harete Hipango, Alfred Ngaro, Paulo Garcia and Agnes Loheni are gone. That list of electoral casualties also illustrates another problem facing National: its notable lack of diversity. The religious bloc was also the diversity bloc, in relatively strong positions on the list (with the exception of Ngaro, who had alienated key party figures with increasingly strident social media posts), but now wiped out.

The future of veterans Nick Smith and Gerry Brownlee is under scrutiny after both lost their seats. But the reality is that their retirements would do nothing to reinvigorate the caucus. The next cabs off the rank as listed above were none too stellar performers for the party in government.

For National to bring in the candidates who represent the future of the party to join the handful of accomplished new candidates like Nicola Grigg in Selwyn it must somehow convince armies of has-beens and never-weres to step aside and make way for Tania Tapsell, Megan Hands, Emma Mellow and Katie Nimon. Its likely an impossible task.

That should focus the party on the real question: knowing the tide was going out, did it bring in enough new talent, from different backgrounds? The answer is almost certainly no.

These are issue for the board and the successor to president Peter Goodfellow to deal with. The parliamentary National party must play the hand its been dealt.

Judith Collins and Gerry Brownlee lead out the National caucus after their selections as leader and deputy, July 2020. (Photo: Robert Kitchin-Pool/Getty Images)

There are big decisions ahead. Chief among them is whether, or more likely when, Judith Collins is replaced as leader. The days of major party politicians being given two campaigns to win an election are a distant memory, although the recent experiences of both Labour and National (twice) with leadership churn while in opposition have been decidedly mixed.

Luxon has been touted as the next John Key by no lesser personage than the previous John Key. The former Air New Zealand chief executive stands out for his high level management experience, and for being the only National caucus member caught on camera smiling on Monday. His business credentials are catnip to National activists, and he has been busy networking throughout the campaign.

However, he remains entirely untested in national politics, and was poor in media appearances during his ill-judged and overhyped candidacy launch last year. The unfortunate experiment of Todd Muller will give caucus pause before they stuff another CV in a suit and present it as the next prime minister.

Former defence minister and security firm owner Mark Mitchell remains in the mix, but his public profile and record of scoring hits on the government doesnt yet match his ambition.

Simon Bridges, the former leader, has publicly demurred from taking back the leadership, which probably means he is waiting to be begged, in the manner Collins was. He is clearly much more comfortable in his own skin now, but the yak-renaissance remains a mostly online phenomenon, and his previously formidable majority in the blue chip seat of Tauranga was slashed by almost 75% on Saturday. National is running out of warm bodies to replace Collins.

If she is to remain, however, she must realise there is no future in the culture wars into which she dipped a little toe in the preceding months. Firstly, because National is a broad church party, which means it must have diversity of voices. There is of course nothing wrong with religious MPs Chris Penk is a valuable caucus member and a strong rule-of-law advocate, for example. But New Zealanders have shown an admirable disdain for US-style culture wars based on scratching itches around abortion and gay rights that should have been left behind in the 1970s.

Secondly, because the issues affecting the New Zealand electorate for the next three years will be decidedly materialist, not cultural. There is a recession, there is still poverty, there is shit spilling onto the streets of the capital from ancient sewerage infrastructure. Theres a pandemic and theres climate change. Theres the chilling spectre of corruption at previously unknown levels in New Zealand, with gangs co-opting border staff to facilitate drug deals.

The good news for National is that this means the battle for its soul (which may strike some as an oxymoron) can be parked until much later in the term.

Polls at the beginning of 2020, approximately 3,000 months ago, had National poised to win the election. It was a position based purely on the governments lack of delivery to that point, helped by excellent opposition work from the likes of Collins in highlighting failures on (in particular) Kiwibuild, light rail and gangs, and other promises.

Although Ardern and Grant Robertson seem to have learned their lessons about over-promising and under-delivering, new challenges arise all the time, requiring new and untested government responses. Labour excelled at this in 2020. There is no guarantee they always will, or that the solutions wont cause problems of their own.

Months ago, economists were predicting house prices would fall. Now, thanks to the wash of low interest cash coming from the Reserve Bank, prices are skyrocketing, and the housing crisis is back in the public mind.

The National Party of October 2020 has no idea how those issues will pan out yet, or what kind of response will be required in 2023.

The review could find, simply by doing a word cloud of 2020, that we live in unprecedented times, and sometimes its good to have the luxury of opposition to wait and see.

The Spinoff Weekly compiles the best stories of the week an essential guide to modern life in New Zealand, emailed out on Monday evenings.

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For National, umpteen tough questions and one small ray of light - The Spinoff

Over the next 200 years, this scientific and intellectual lengthening of the time span we could imagine paved the way for great strides in our understanding of ourselves and the planet. It allowed Darwin to propose his theory of evolution, geologists to carbon-date the true age of Earth, and physicists to simulate the expansion of the universe.

Our awareness of deep time was here to stay, but thats not the same as paying attention to it. The 18th-century European contemplation of a long, bright future was not to last. Periodically, perspectives would shorten, often through crises such as the French Revolution. Hlscher argues that you can see this transformation in writing from the late 1700s into the dawn of the 1800s: optimistic, far-reaching predictions about the world gave way to more circumspect descriptions of the future, focused on next steps and nearer-term improvements in standards of living. A similar contraction, he contends, took place with World War I, following the hopeful future-gazing of the early 20th century.

According to historian Franois Hartog, the author of Regimes of Historicity, we are in the midst of another shortening right now. He argues that at some point between the late 1980s and the turn of the century, a convergence of societal trends took us into a new regime of time that he calls presentism. He defines it as the sense that only the present exists, a present characterized at once by the tyranny of the instant and by the treadmill of an unending now. In the 21st century, he writes, the future is not a radiant horizon guiding our advancing steps, but rather a line of shadow drawing closer.

On the scale of civilization, it is difficult to test empirically the assertions of those who say we are living in a short-termist age. Future historians may have a clearer view. But we can still perceive the lack of longer-term thinking from which our society suffers.

You can see short-termism in business, in populist politics, and in our collective failure to tackle long-term risks like climate change, pandemics, nuclear war, or antibiotic resistance.

You can see it in business, where quarterly reporting encourages CEOs to prioritize short-term investor satisfaction over long-term prosperity. You can see it in populist politics, where leaders are more focused on the next election and the desires of their base than the long-term health of the nation. And you can see it in our collective failure to tackle long-term risks: climate change, pandemics, nuclear war, or antibiotic resistance.

These risks make it increasingly important to extend our perspective beyond our own lifetimes; our actions are rippling further into the future than ever before. But as the Oxford philosopher Toby Ord has argued, this power to shape the future is not yet matched by foresight or wisdom.

There may be multiple forces fostering a short-termist mindset in our age. Some point to that often-blamed scourge, the internet. Others lament the intersection of 24-hour news media and politics, which encourages decision-makers to focus more on headlines or polling than future generations. Hartog blames the capitalist, consumerist norms that came to dominate Western culture by the late 20th century. During this period, technological progress kept forging ahead, and the consumer society grew and grew, he writes, and with it the category of the present, which this society targeted and, to an extent, appropriated as its particular trademark.

As with many ailments, there is probably no single cause: rather, the convergence of many is responsible. But we need not despair. If this account is correct, then short-termism is an emergent property of the cultural, economic, and technological moment. It need not last forever, nor is it totally out of our control. The assumption that things must always stay the way they are today is actually itself a form of presentism. But if we understand some of the psychological pressures that nudge us toward short-termism in daily life, we can find ways to combat them.

During a recent fellowship at MIT, I investigated how our psychological experience of the future can change. I was curious about what role the far future plays in our day-to-day lives, if any. I also wanted to know what psychological pressures might cause us to lose sight of the long term in everyday decisions. I call these pressures temporal stresses.

Some themes surfaced again and again, to which Ive given the convenient acronym SHORT:

S SalienceH HabitsO OverloadR ResponsibilityT Targets

First, salience. Striking, emotionally resonant events tend to dominate our thinking more than abstract happenings. Its a facet of the availability heuristic, a cognitive bias that means people are more likely to imagine the future through the lens of recent events.

This means that slow, creeping problems like global warming dont pop up on the attentional radar until something is burning or flooding. Before the covid-19 pandemic, even disease scientists were more focused on the salient dangers of Ebola and Zika, rather than coronaviruses.

Entrenched yet invisible habits play a role here. Its harder to overcome the shortening effects of salience when we are doomscrolling on our phones through political controversy, crime, culture wars, disasters, or attacks. These events, while important, populate our imaginings of the future to a disproportionate degree.

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Humanity is stuck in short-term thinking. Heres how we escape. - MIT Technology Review

Margaret Cho is sitting in her Los Angeles home. The five-time Grammy and Emmy nominee looks maybe half of her 51 years and is attended by a small devoted dog named Lucia Katharina Lawlor Cho. Lockdown has not been easy for the lively, outspoken comedian, actor, designer and singer-songwriter.

This is a sad time for America, she says. Its really difficult but its something we have to deal with. I havent done stand-up comedy for a while, which is really hard. But Im here with my dog. And were safe.

Cho first came to prominence as the quintessential 1990s stand-up heroine, a Joan Rivers for the grunge generation who took the world of comedy by storm at a moment when comedy was the new rocknroll. She was barely in her 20s when she featured on a Bob Hope special, became a regular on The Arsenio Hall Show and was the opening act for Jerry Seinfeld. Her no-holds-barred style has touched on race, bisexuality and the sexual abuse she experienced as a child. Recent tours have examined everything from menstruation to colonics.

I think comedy is still the highest art form, says Cho. Im glad I decided to be a comedian. I still love it even though I dont have the ability to do it right now. It is both cheap therapy and a way to get paid. But its also good to figure out what to think about and how to think about things and then to think about things so that I can work out what I want to say to my actual therapist.

Cho, who worked as a phone sex operator and a dominatrix in her teens, was an early, characteristically vocal proponent of sex positivity during the culture wars of the 1990s. Speaking in the days after the Trump administration has requested to reinstate medication abortion restrictions, she expresses alarm over ongoing developments at the US supreme court. Sex in America, she notes, is politically charged.

Its so uncomfortable right now, she says. Ruth Bader Ginsburg is barely dead and we are doing the things that she did not want. Amy Coney Barrett is the worst person you could put forward for that job. And she could possibly sit on the supreme court for 50 years.

Its a worst-case scenario for womens rights in America. We are looking at going backwards to the time before Roe v Wade. Well be living in The Handmaids Tale. Im terrified for the future of America and American women.

Everything is riding on this election. We have a terrifying situation in America at the moment. Of course the pandemic has made the world a very scary place in general. But we are also looking at a supreme court possibly overturning a lot of things theyve been really important in terms of womens rights, gay rights and immigration.

Rodney King was in 1994 and we are still having the same conversations about race. And being queer or being a queer ally is very important and political right now. We want change. We need change.

The fierce Cho isnt necessarily the first person one thinks of when it comes to family entertainment, but she has a history with younger audiences and animation, having lent her voice to Pound Puppies, The Mr Peabody & Sherman Show and now Over the Moon, a major new release for Netflixs ascendant cartoon catalogue.The very old-school fairytale musical from Disney veteran Glen Keane and Oscar-winner John Kahrs recasts the Chinese moon goddess Change in a contemporary adventure about belief, bereavement and blended families.

Its an ancient story and its about family and about grief and loss, says Cho.But its also about saying goodbye and hello. I think its really beautiful and its great for kids of all ages. Its a very old-fashioned classic story. I think people will love it. Im really so excited to be a part of it.

Arriving on heels of Searching and Crazy Rich Asians, Over the Moon is the latest studio film to feature an all-star Asian cast, including Cho, Ken Jeong, John Cho, Sandra Oh, and Hamiltons Phillipa Soo.

Its incredible that we have an all Asian-American cast, says Cho. And the calibre of talent is really amazing. These people are such big stars. Everybody was so excited to be a part of this. So its a really special project and were proud to be in it. I think we are experiencing a moment of wanting to be seen and realising that we can be seen.

Cho, of course, was seen earlier than most. Born in a Christian Korean family in San Francisco her grandfather was a minister who ran an orphanage in Seoul she largely grew up in the gay bookstore her parents bought when she was six. (Her first HBO Comedy half-hour features an impersonation of her old Korean mother asking: What is ass master?) Her father wrote joke books and a column for a Seoul-based newspaper. The family business was next door to the comedy club where Cho first took up a mic aged 15.

In 1992 she was cast in the short-lived Golden Girls spin-off The Golden Palace alongside Betty White, Rue McClanahan, Estelle Getty, Don Cheadle and Cheech Marin. She made TV history in 1994 as the title character of All-American Girl, a semi-autobiographical sitcom rooted in her stand-up routines, and the first primetime network show about an Asian-American family. Guest stars included Oprah Winfrey, Jack Black and Chos then boyfriend, Quentin Tarantino.

Fortunately, I got pretty successful right away, she recalls. I was able to make a fairly good living as a stand-up comedian. By the age of 19, I was living on my own and I had my own apartment and a car. My parents were like: oh, shes got a job now; I guess we have to be proud.

So that was good. I do think I missed out on a lot of things. I do sometimes think I wish I had spent more time in school. I wish I had memories of spending time with kids my own age. Because from early on I was spending time with successful people who were a lot older than me. So I missed out on a lot. But thats okay. Comedy is still the best decision I ever made in my life.

Shes delighted, she says, to be working at a moment when representation is a big deal.

It was weird because we had to explain why it was necessary, she recalls. There was just never any call for representation. People would say, I dont know why we need this. And we had to explain to a world that wasnt calling for representation why we needed representation.

That was really hard to do. It was weird to even bring questions of race up. Its strange and disconcerting when youre too early to the party.

She has subsequently worked with a wonderfully wacky array of talents, including directors Greg Araki (The Doom Generation) and John Woo (Face/Off), RuPaul Drag Race winner Bianca Del Rio (Hurricane Bianca), Cyndi Lauper and Debbie Harry (on the True Colours Tour), Awkwafina (Green Tea), and Weird Al Yankovic (on the Happy parody, Tacky). She has appeared on Sex & the City, cult animations Duck Man and Rick & Steve: The Happiest Gay Couple in All the World, and played Kim Jong-Il in an Emmy-nominated recurring role in 30 Rock.

Anybody who wants to hang out with me can hang out, says Cho of her starry collaborators and chums. But I have been really lucky to hang out with all those people. I enjoy their work. And I got really lucky with the friends I have.

Over the Moon is on Netflix from October 23rd

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Margaret Cho: Comedy is still the best decision I ever made in my life - The Irish Times

During the NBA Finals, as LeBron James Los Angeles Lakers fended off the pesky Miami Heat, two basketball fans got into a Twitter spat. It had nothing to do with basketball and everything to do with an issue that seemed to consume these bubble finals: TV ratings.

The finals were setting all-time lows for viewers, and Sen. Ted Cruz , R-Texas, had a theory for why: The NBA is engaged in a concerted effort to (1) insult their fans & (2) turn every game into a left-wing political lecture. Thats dumb, he tweeted at Mark Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks.

Weaponizing ratings slips has become a hallmark of Trump-era Republicans, who routinely blame low viewership on the athletes and leagues that speak out about social issues. This years historically bad NBA playoffs viewership The Finals fell about 50% from last season were gleefully noted by President Donald Trump and across conservative media, from Fox Newss Laura Ingraham to the Daily Wire to Breitbart. Their rallying cry: Get woke, go broke.

But viewership of major sporting events is down across the board, including in leagues with no social-justice messaging to speak of. According to data compiled by the website Sports Media Watch, Golfs U.S. Open was down 42%. The Kentucky Derby: 43%. The Stanley Cup finals: 61%. The vaunted NFL is down 13% early in its season. Major League Baseballs division series was down 40%. A World Series between, potentially, Atlanta and Tampa Bay isnt likely to change the tide.

Several factors are fueling the drop, according to data and interviews with TV executives and industry observers: the intensity of the political news cycle; a glut of sports on TV; and viewers lives being upended by the global pandemic. A new survey shows that some Republicans say theyre tuning out over social-justice messaging. But the data tells a different story.

We just believe so strongly that the whole business of sports fuels social connection and is fueled by social connection, said Mike Mulvihill, head of strategy and analytics at Fox Sports. For obvious reasons, our whole environment of social connection is completely inside out. So sports and the ability of sports to act as a unifying force is really undermined.

Added Cary Meyers, ESPNs senior vice president for research and insights: What were seeing is casual fans are having a hard time putting other things aside. And, obviously, there is also cable news.

As the NBA prepared to return in July, with hockey, baseball, football and other sports on the horizon, networks predicted pent-up demand for live sports. ESPN touted a poll in which 59% of fans said they planned to watch as much as they could when sports returned, with a renewed appreciation for the role of sports in their lives.

Executives say theres some evidence that happened, at least for some die-hard fans. Over the first five weeks of the NFL season, the total number of minutes of live sports consumed was up 2% over the same period last year, according to ESPN. A similar analysis by Fox found that from baseballs restart through Week 4 of the NFL season, total sports consumption was up 7% this year.

And, as usual, sports still rule live television: 39 of the top 40 rated programs last week were either sports or news, with Saturday Night Live the only entertainment property in the mix, Mulvihill pointed out on Twitter.

Still, overall sports viewership will be down from a normal year, with sports spread across the calendar. According to ESPNs Meyers, 92% of sports fans are tuning in more often and for longer durations this year compared with last, apparently turning the condensed sports calendar into a quarantine coping mechanism. But they cant get to everything.

You have an oversupply of premium events, Mulvihill said. Its causing the total pool (of consumption) to not be affected that much. But on a sport by sport basis, everyone suffers.

The other 8% are casual fans, Meyers said, who simply arent watching this year. Fans tuning out cite several factors, according to a recent survey by the Marist Center for Sports Communication. Thirty-five percent blamed concerns over the coronavirus; 20% said they are more focused on election coverage; and 19% said they had no free time for sports.

Cable news viewership numbers support the Marist findings. The average total day viewership on MSNBC, Fox News and CNN is up to 1.49 million in 2020, from 1.01 million last year.

People are telling us sports are no longer the priority in their lives, said Jane McManus, Director of the Marist Center for Sports Communication. Think about it: Youre watching your kids Zoom into classes and you may have stared at a screen all day for work, so youre less inclined to turn the TV on for a game.

There was no more political moment in sports this year than when NBA players, led by the Milwaukee Bucks, engaged in a political strike, sitting out games in protest of the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Trump seized on it, saying the NBA had become like a political organization, and thats not a good thing, and noting the leagues low ratings.

It was familiar territory for Trump, whose attacks on Colin Kaepernick, the NFL quarterback who knelt during the national anthem to protest police brutality, helped put athlete activism front and center in the culture wars in 2016 and 2017.

The NFL was suffering through a ratings decline then, too, and Trump was quick to connect the slump with players kneeling. Back then, there may have been at least some connection: Foxs Mulvihill said the data showed some older, more rural viewers were tuning out, contributing to the lower ratings.

Today, though, kneeling and other athlete protests are more widely accepted. While the Marist Poll found that 70% of Republicans say they are less likely to watch sports because of politics, recent viewership numbers dont reflect those views.

This NBA season, before the pandemic, 28% of the viewers for ESPN and ABC games were Democrats, and 11% were Republicans, with the remaining viewers identified as unregistered or independent, according to Nielsen Voter Ratings. After the restart, the share of viewers who were Democrats increased slightly to 30%, and the share who were Republicans dropped marginally to 10%.

The NFL also hasnt seen much drop off among more conservative demographics, Foxs Mulvihill said. Even after networks highlighted the leagues social justice efforts during its opening week including players kneeling during the anthem or staying in the locker room he saw no evidence older or more rural fans were tuning out.

Im scanning the data for it, he said, and Im not seeing anything.

The same appears true across all sports. Over the first four weeks of the NFL season, Nielsen data shows that sports, as a percentage of total TV viewing for Republicans, didnt change much since last football season: it went from 9.1% last year to 8.2% this year. For Democrats, it was 7.1% last year and 7.8% this year.

There are real, mounting questions for sports networks, about the future of the cable-TV ecosystem and sports popularity with younger audiences. But these viewership dips amid a pandemic, a bitter presidential election and an unpredictable sports calendar may simply not mean what some want them to.

We have ratings panics all the time, even when they arent part of the culture wars, said Jon Lewis, the creator of Sports Media Watch.

But no one has taken less money yet, so the ratings never have long-term implications that any of these leagues have to worry about, for now.

MLB just signed a new rights extension with Turner Sports worth around $3.5 billion, and the NFL may double its billions of dollars in rights fees when it signs new deals that are being negotiated.

My expectation is that were going to come out of the other side of this pandemic and you will see the ability of sports to act as social glue, Mulvihill said. As live attendance comes back, ratings should come back, too.

Read more:
So many sports, so few viewers: Why TV ratings are way down during the pandemic - Sports and Weather Right Now

Over the last few years, a new fear has been forming in the already anxious minds of liberal and leftwing Britons. The fear is that the right, made more aggressive by an injection of populism, is no longer satisfied by dominating national politics and defining the shape of the economy. It wants to dominate British culture as well.

Starting with the Brexit campaign, the right has launched a series of culture wars: against remainers, the BBC, the universities, the legal system, the big cities and seemingly anywhere that liberal or leftwing thinking still lingers strongly, despite a decade of Tory rule. These culture wars have mobilised and united conservative Britons, ensured that debates about patriotism and social cohesion are conducted on rightwing terms and helped the Tories win a big parliamentary majority.

The latest culture war is the war on woke being waged by the Tory press, and increasingly by the government as well. This campaign caricatures as dangerous extremists those who believe that Britains power structures, social relations and national identity should fairly reflect the countrys diversity. Conservative commentators describe wokeness as a cult, an epidemic, anti-western, totalitarian, and even as cultural Marxism an interpretation that began as a far-right conspiracy theory.

In his unusually brief party conference speech this week, Boris Johnson still found room for an anti-woke passage, inaccurately associating Labour with those who want to pull statues down, to rewrite the history of our country to make it look more politically correct. Over the summer, the culture secretary, Oliver Dowden, warned a London museum that it might lose its state funding if it removed a statue of the slave trader Robert Geffrye from its grounds. Last month, the Department for Education instructed schools not to teach pupils about extreme political stances such as the desire to overthrow capitalism, or to teach victim narratives that are harmful to British society.

Such episodes reveal a government that regards culture wars as more than a way of gaining electoral advantage. As the Telegraph columnist Tim Stanley recently explained, Boris and Cummings understand that you cant change Britain unless you march through the [cultural] institutions that you cant simply cede culture to the left.

To the rightwing culture warriors, subversive ideas have been allowed to spread through British society largely unchecked for far too long, regardless of who has been in government. But now the Conservatives have realised, as Stanley put it, that when youre in power and you control the purse strings of some cultural institutions, you do have a say to change their political balance. The idea that the dedicated enemies of liberalism Charles Moore and Paul Dacre should respectively chair the BBC and head the broadcasting regulator Ofcom, both supposed to be politically neutral roles, should be seen in this context. That Moore has now withdrawn his interest does not rule out further rightwing candidates.

This new Tory assertiveness owes much to populism. In 2018 the political theorist Nadia Urbinati wrote: Populism in power is an extreme majoritarianism. Populist governments act as if [they] were the expression of the one right and true majority, and consider any opposition morally illegitimate because it is not made of the right people. Such an intolerance of dissent has been one of the Johnson governments few consistent qualities. Its this seemingly insatiable need to identify and defeat enemies that many non-Tories and some Tories find most frightening about Cummings.

Yet launching constant culture wars is a sign of Tory weakness as well as strength. Even over Brexit, the partys attacks on a liberal elite have been an admission that it can no longer rely on economic arguments. And since the Johnson government has begun to struggle, its striking that its talk of a war on woke has increased.

How effective will this war ultimately be? In the short term, its given the right a cause to rally around during a difficult year. But over the long term, the evidence that culture wars work for the right in Britain is much more mixed.

Like now, the early 1980s saw an upsurge of British activism for racial, sexual and gender equality. Parts of the left became involved, in particular the powerful Greater London Council, led by Ken Livingstone, which gave grants to the activists and also diversified its own workforce and practices. The rightwing press and Margaret Thatchers government were appalled by what they saw correctly as a major threat to the status quo. But they also saw a political opportunity. Branding all practitioners of the new identity politics the loony left, they created a bogeyman that helped the Conservatives win elections for a decade.

But the effects of this culture war gradually wore off. When Thatchers successor, John Major, tried to restart it in 1993 with a speech arguing that social values should go back to basics, his provocation backfired, partly because of a succession of personal scandals involving Tory ministers, but also because public attitudes were changing. The Labour government that replaced Majors repealed clause 28, a homophobic Conservative law passed in 1988, and introduced liberal social reforms such as civil partnerships. There was no significant backlash from voters.

Nowadays, political stances widely considered loony in the 80s, such as celebrating multiculturalism, are commonplace even in the Tory party. The chancellor, Rishi Sunak, describes himself as a proud Hindu. As prime minister, Johnson promotes Black History Month.

Such inclusivity sits very uneasily alongside the war on woke. But its possible that the government will manage to sustain both. Johnson has spent his political career sounding both liberal and reactionary, sometimes in the same sentence, and generally getting away with it. Populists, and the people who vote for them, are rarely bothered about ideological consistency.

Yet the fact that todays Tory culture war (like the Tories) is most strongly supported by older Britons suggests its limits as a political strategy. Back in the 80s, Livingstone predicted that Thatchers social conservatism would ultimately fail because she was trying to restore the more monocultural, conformist country shed grown up in, a country that no longer existed. She abolished the GLC, but he was right.

Some of todays culture warriors act as if wokeness can and should be abolished. At the Tory conference this week, at events about the threat of wokeness, some of the participants spoke with such urgency it was hard to make out all their arguments, but you could hear their desperation their wish that social diversity would simply go away.

But other rightwing commentators accept that some form of wokeness is here to stay. They write about it being kept at bay. Its a reminder to fearful leftists and liberals that the right isnt always as confident and all-conquering as it seems. This may be little consolation to its victims, but for the Tories cultural counter-revolution, the clock is ticking.

Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist

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The Tories culture war is a reminder that the right isn't as fearless as it seems - The Guardian