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Many pundits and politicians seem to blame UK prime minister Boris Johnson for provoking the latest installment of the culture wars that now dominate Anglo-American public life. Sections of the media, from the New York Times to the Guardian, have claimed that Johnson wants to argue over statues to distract from his poor handling of the Covid pandemic. Others, such as Labours David Lammy, reckon Johnsons defence of the statue of Winston Churchill, against those who would deface or dismantle it, was a deliberate attempt to stoke the culture wars, and deflect attention from the Tories lack of progress on racial injustice.

These are massively disingenuous claims. After all, is it really surprising that a British prime minister would defend a memorial devoted to arguably the nations greatest modern figure? Moreover, Johnson was not initiating anything. He was responding to a movement that has been directing its energy towards the destruction of the symbols of Britains national history and culture. It takes tremendous bad faith to characterise Johnsons defensive response to an attack on British culture as an attempt to launch a culture war.

But those on Johnsons side, defending the Churchill statue, indulge in the same finger-pointing. They claim that it is their opponents, from Black Lives Matter to the identitarian left, who started the culture wars.

What is striking is that neither side seems to have anything positive to say about the culture wars. Their characterisation as poisonous, by veteran conservative commentator Charles Moore, is a sentiment shared by virtually all sides of the political argument. They disagree merely on the questions of who is to blame for them, and what they mean.

The origins of the culture war

One reason why so many observers are confused by the dynamics of the culture war is because it rarely assumes an explicit conflict-like character. It is often a silent conflict over what seem to be disparate issues gay marriage, national identity, euthanasia rather than a war between two clearly defined sides. In this sense, the modern culture war is very different to the German Kulturkampf of the 19th century, when there was an overt cultural struggle between Chancellor Bismarck and the Catholic Church.

Back then, in the late 19th century, it was evident to all observers that cultural conflict in Germany was a very real phenomenon. Matters are different today. Until recently, most commentators would insist that talk of the polarisation of culture is exaggerated; some went so far as to deny the very existence of a culture war. Those who denounced the cultural politics of Sixties radicals were often simply dismissed as backward-looking traditionalists social conservatives trying to justify their prejudices by attacking new ways of thinking and speaking.

But the culture war is real. Historically, it was set in motion in Western societies by a powerful impulse to detach the present from the past, which emerged at the turn of the 20th century. This project of liberating the present from the cultural values of the past was most clearly formulated by the Progressive movement in the US, and by the New Liberals in Britain. But it was the experience of the First World War that gave this sentiment real momentum. For the war fundamentally undermined the cultural continuity of the West.

Disconnected from the past, post-war Western societies found it difficult to develop a compelling narrative through which to transmit their cultural legacy to young people. One outcome of this development was the phenomenon known today as the generation gap. It emerged in the aftermath of the First World War precisely because it was not simply a generational gap, but also a cultural one a gap, that is, between the pre- and post-war eras. In the decades that followed, these generational tensions would come to be experienced as the problem of identity.

Some contemporary observers were indeed aware of the cultural war against the past then being waged. Writing in the 1930s, Churchill himself observed:

I wonder often whether any other generation has seen such astounding revolutions of data and values as those through which we have lived. Scarcely anything, material or established, which I was brought up to believe was permanent and vital, has lasted. Everything I was sure, or was taught to be sure, was impossible has happened.

However, many commentators at the time, and in the decades to come, were blind to this cultural conflict. They focused on the ideological conflict between communism and capitalism, and the rise of fascism, rather than the loss of cultural authority of Western values.

One reason why Western ruling elites failed to address the loss of their moral authority was because of the difficulty they had in acknowledging that their own way of life was being unravelled by powerful corrosive influences internal to it. During the 1940s and 50s, even conservative commentators failed to appreciate the scale of the problem confronting their tradition. This became clear during what was the first significant, explicit conflict in the culture war: Senator Joseph McCarthys battle with communism and its supposed threat to American values.

The rise of McCarthyism in the US is often seen as an attempt to deploy anti-communist hysteria to silence political dissent. Yet it was also an attempt to roll back the cultural influences threatening traditional norms and values. McCarthyism in the 1950s, observed the political sociologist Daniel Bell, represented an effort by some traditionalist forces to impose a uniform political morality on the society through conformity to one ideology of Americanism and a virulent form of anti-communism. (1)

At the time, McCarthyism was influential and it did intimidate many liberal and left-wing individuals. But it failed to establish cultural hegemony. In particular, McCarthy never made serious headway among intellectuals or gained any cultural credibility. McCarthyisms failure to gain and retain moral authority is demonstrated by its almost entirely negative legacy. As one critic recalled in 1997, McCarthy soon became a symbol of the moral exhaustion of the right so much so, in fact, that he is generally held in cultural contempt (2).

McCarthys anti-communist crusade can be seen as one of the earliest attempts (and failures) after the Second World War to revitalise traditional values in the face of their rapid demise. One of the most astute analyses of the McCarthy episode was provided by the conservative commentator, Jeanne Kirkpatrick. Kirkpatrick understood that McCarthyism was not so much about communism as it was a struggle for jurisdiction over the symbolic environment (3). What was at issue was who would serve as the arbiter of culture and whose narrative would prevail.

Senator Joseph McCarthy stands before a map which charts Communist activity in the United States, 9 June 1954.

The failure of McCarthy to hold the line and the rapid decline of his reputation had important implications. These things indicated that, although a potent political resource, anti-communist ideology on its own could not contain the corrosive outcomes of the moral depletion of Western culture. Kirkpatrick asserted that McCarthys demise and the victory of his critics was a precondition of the rise of the counterculture in the 1960s (4). Whereas during the McCarthy era, the term loyalty was rarely openly contested, by the 1960s it had lost some of its cultural value. Anti-war demonstrators, draft-dodgers and ordinary members of the public rejected loyalty as an unwelcome imposition on their ability to be themselves. As Kirkpatrick recalled, the peace marchers were far more aggressive in their defiance of traditional taboos than the timid victims of Joe McCarthy. This, Kirkpatrick concluded, reflected the distance that the cultural revolution had proceeded (5).

The moral depletion of the West

The casual manner with which traditional taboos were derided in the 1960s showed that those who upheld traditional values could no longer assume that they occupied the moral high-ground. In this, the cultural assault on the values of capitalist consumer society played a significant role. However, this assault should be seen as a catalyst for, rather than a cause of, the unravelling of the Cold War consensus on Western values. The inner corrosion of the ethos of capitalism had been at work for many decades, and the lack of self-belief among the ruling elites contributed to its diminishing influence.

Since the interwar era, capitalism as a social system has found it increasingly difficult to justify itself against its critics. Matters were made worse by the reluctance of conservative and liberal thinkers to confront this problem directly.

The absence of an intellectually compelling, normative foundation for capitalism meant that even at the height of the postwar boom, capitalism was exposed to a cultural critique of its values. Consequently, even in these very favourable circumstances, capitalism acquired only a limited influence over intellectual and cultural life. This estrangement of capitalism from its own culture emerged with full force in the late 1960s, when many of its values were explicitly challenged in what would turn out to be an interminable culture war.

Writing in 1973, Irving Kristol, a leading conservative commentator, drew attention to the moral depletion of Western culture:

For well over 150 years now, social critics have been warning us that bourgeois society was living off the accumulated moral capital of traditional religion and traditional moral philosophy, and that once this capital was depleted, bourgeois society would find its legitimacy ever-more questionable. (6)

The depletion of moral capital became evident with the emergence of the counterculture, or what its opponents called adversarial culture.

Samuel Brittan, a British economist and journalist, offered a sobering analysis on the difficulty that capitalism faced in offering a compelling and authoritative account of its values. He wrote:

For a long time capitalist civilisation was able to live on this feudal legacy, and the aura of legitimacy was transferred from the feudal lord to the employer, from the mediaeval hierarchy of position to that derived from the luck of the marketplace. But this feudal legacy was bound to be extinguished by the torchlight of secular and rationalistic inquiry, which was itself so closely associated with the rise of capitalism. (7)

Brittan believed that modern politicians and middle-class leaders lacked the glamour and the heroic qualities of the leaders of the past. And therefore their authority over the masses was limited. At most they are tolerated on the strict condition that they bring results, he wrote. Brittan asserted that the personal qualities of middle-class leaders did not help to kindle that affection for the social order which is probably necessary if it is not to be blamed for the inevitable tribulations and disappointments of most peoples lives (8).

By the 1970s, it became clear that supporters of adversarial culture had gained the upper hand. As a memo from Daniel Moynihan to Nixon in 1970 stated:

No doubt there is a struggle going on in this country of the kind the Germans used to call a Kulturkampf. The adversary culture which dominates almost all channels of information transfer and opinion formation has never been stronger, and as best I can tell it has come near to silencing the representatives of traditional America.

Since the 1970s, the representatives of traditional America have been constantly on the defensive. Instead of initiating debates and attempting to set the agenda, they have been continually forced to react to the latest blow directed at their way of life. This cycle of defensive responsiveness can be seen on many issues, from gay marriage or trans rights to claims about white privilege.

The paralysis of traditionalists

The pessimistic diagnosis offered by Moynihan and Brittan was widespread among conservative thinkers. Periodic attempts to promote back to basics campaigns in the 1970s and 1980s proved to be singularly ineffective. At this point in time, the mainstream conservative and right-wing parties attempted to evade the consequences of their cultural isolation by emphasising their ability to achieve economic success. The high point of this strategy arrived during the Thatcher-Reagan years, when their brand of economic liberalism gained hegemony over public life. However, what the supporters of Thatcher and Reagan failed to notice, or acknowledge, was that despite the electoral success of their parties, their opponents were winning the culture war. Paradoxically, it was during the Thatcher and Reagan years that what came to be known as political correctness gained ascendancy and identity politics became institutionalised, first on campuses and later in the public and private sectors.

Today, when the reality of a culture war is widely recognised, it is worth noting that until recently almost all sides of the political divide were reluctant to draw attention to it. That is why supporters of political correctness went out of their way to deny there was such a thing as PC. Similarly, until recently, advocates of identity politics insisted that identity politics was a dishonest invention of their opponents.

Patrick Buchanan delivers his 'culture-war speech' at the Republican Party conference, August, 1992 (YouTube).

The culture war was not a suitable topic for discussion in polite elite circles. When Patrick Buchanan made his famous culture-war speech at the 1992 Republican Party conference, he faced a tirade of hostile criticism for what was described as his extreme rhetoric. Buchanans call to arms went against the grain of the prevailing narrative. Buchanan insisted that differences over values were far more significant than who gets what arguments over economic resources:

It is about who we are. It is about what we believe. It is about what we stand for as Americans. There is a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we will one day be as the Cold War itself

His denunciation of what he perceived as a threat to the American way of life showed that this was now being conceived of as a war, rather than as party-political rivalry within a shared moral universe. Buchanan later expanded on this point by contrasting the conflict faced by 1990s America with that of the interwar depression. Citing Roosevelt, who said that our common difficulties concern thank God, only material things, Buchanan noted that, in contrast, our national quarrel goes much deeper.

What was noteworthy about this speech was not simply its content but that Buchanan articulated it in public, at a major party conference and in front of television cameras. Hitherto, the conflict that Buchanan drew attention to had essentially been a silent one.

One reason why Buchanans speech caused such a stir was because, by 1992, the old traditional elites had more or less been entirely sidelined by their adversaries. The countercultural movement had been institutionalised, and its representatives dominated institutions of culture, higher education and the public sector. And, since then, businesses and the private sector have also come under its sway.

Having gained hegemony, members of this countercultural establishment are now less and less afraid to impose their own values on the rest of society. From their standpoint, Boris Johnson is an elite outlier, and his defence of Churchill offers them a reminder that there are still obstacles to the realisation of the project of detaching society from the legacy of its past. They now constitute the cultural establishment, and people who wish to defend the statues of Churchill or Abraham Lincoln are their countercultural adversaries.

At present, the culture war is a one-sided conflict that is directed at a defensive traditionalist target. Why this is so, and what are the issues at stake, will be discussed in part two of this essay, next Friday.

Frank Furedis How Fear Works: The Culture of Fear in the Twenty-First Century is published by Bloomsbury Press.

All pictures, unless otherwise stated, by: Getty.

(1) The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, by Daniel Bell, Heinemann, 1976, p77

(2) Dynamics of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War, by A Kramer, Oxford University Press, 2007

(3) Politics and the new class. by JJ Kirkpatrick, Society, 16(2), 1979, p42

(4) Politics and the new class. by JJ Kirkpatrick, Society, 16(2), 1979, p43

(5) Politics and the new class. by JJ Kirkpatrick, Society, 16(2), 1979, p44

(6) Capitalism, Socialism and Nihilism, by Irving Kristol, Public Interest, issue 31, 1973, p12

(7) The Economic Contradictions of Democracy, by S Brittan, British Journal of Political Science, Vol 5, No 2, 1975, p149

(8) The Economic Contradictions of Democracy, by S Brittan, British Journal of Political Science, Vol 5, No 2, 1975, p149

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The birth of the culture wars - Spiked

With no police officers, CHAZ was established. Over the weekend, Black Lives Matter activists renamed the area Capitol Hill Organized Protest, arguing that the area was not actually aspiring to autonomy or secession. But by then, the demands of the CHAZ had ballooned far beyond addressing systemic racism in policing: In an open letter published on June 10, the activists listed several reforms they hoped the city would undertake, including degentrification initiatives, free college programs and investment in community mental health services.

Conservative reaction to Seattles autonomous zone has a particularly Trump-era undertone to it, Ross said.

Rather than letting local and state officials deal with the protesters, Trump doubled down on vilifying a group that had nothing to do with the organization of the protests not just dog whistling, but calling out his protesters or Second Amendment people to basically get out into the streets and get into the vigilante mode.

The broad support for the racial justice protests indicates the issue will not recede anytime soon, putting pressure on lawmakers of both parties to enact police reform. But while Trump has made some concessions to the movements demands, signing an executive order on Tuesday offering incentives for police departments to adopt some reforms, activists say his offerings have fallen woefully short of what is needed.

Trump has also found political utility in ranting about certain proposals from Black Lives Matter activists, including defunding or abolishing the police, and constantly reiterating his ever-present claim that antifa terrorists are floating among the protesters. And though CHAZ itself has not been a base camp for a leftist insurrection, its existence is based on rejecting existing governing and policing structures. Trump has reacted to that with calls for LAW & ORDER.

They've already walked away from the founding consensus, McCabe said. They're already at the point where they can have an autonomous Seattle zone.

The MAGA sphere has also latched onto the fact that visibly armed members of progressive gun groups are patrolling CHAZ, confirming their belief that the zone is, purposefully or not, incepting an anti-government plot. Far-right groups, Ross said, have used the presence of armed individuals as a pretext to travel to the area under the auspices of protecting civil society, not to protest against CHAZ.

The whole working purpose of the militia in the far right, is they kind of form this sort of porous membrane through which people travel in and out of the extreme right based on whether or not they're open racists, he noted. If you're going somewhere to stop the looting and to protect protesters from antifa outsiders, then you've got a narrative. You've got something clear that you can explain to people that doesn't make you sound like you're just there because you hate anti-racists.

Ultimately, CHAZ may amount to a weekslong encampment in the middle of Seattle, maintained by rather enthusiastic activists, that eventually fades.

To the extent they've avoided violence, that's admirable. But even just trying to take it over is silly, said Scott Walter, president of the conservative-libertarian think tank Capital Research Center, pointing out that the zone still relied on city services such as trash pickup.

Read more:
How 6 blocks in Seattle became a microcosm of the culture wars - POLITICO

President Trump ended his three-month hiatus from the campaign trail by plunging straight into the culture wars.

Why it matters: Trump is trying to tie former Vice President Joe Biden to demonstrators taking down statues across the country.

Between the lines: On stage, Trump called COVID-19 the "Kung-flu."

The big picture: Masks to prevent the spread of COVID-19 were scarce and couldnt be seen on the supporters behind him.

At one point in the speech Trump said he'd asked officials to "slow the testing down," complaining that high testing rates were to blame for America's high number of confirmed cases.

Reporters traveling with the president said that BOK Center, with a capacity of 19,000, was far from sold out. And the campaign cancelled a planned outdoor rally.

The big picture: Trump's revamped stump speech, given one day after Juneteenth, was directed at his base. He is showing no signs and no inclination of trying to unify the country.

Trump had an extended defense of his stage performance at West Point, insisting that he was wearing slippery leather soles, not the sticky rubber ones that were sported by his military escort.

The bottom line: Trump seemed to spend as much time focusing on Democratic mayors and governors as he did on Biden.

Editor's note: This article has been updated with the Biden campaign's comments.

More:
Trump returns to the campaign circuit: "So far tonight Im average" - Axios

In the anthology Sites of Memory, the architectural historian Kenrick Ian Grandison recounts the story of Robert Moton, President of Tuskegee Institute. In 1923, Moton secured federal funding to build a hospital for black World War I veterans. When local white leaders heard that the hospital would be managed and staffed by black management and health care workers, a mob gathered at Motons home with an agreement to sign. If he did not agree to white management, they would blow up the campus within 24 hours.

We have the legislature, we make the laws, we have the judges, the sheriffs, the jails. We have the hardware stores and the arms, he was told by one among the mob.

Grandisons essay, Negotiated Spaces, captures the racial conflict between black colleges and the segregated towns around them. The unevenness of the stakes is vivid. On one side, a mob who touted control of the government and the legal system, and weapons to kill Moton and destroy the college. On the other side, a community that wanted to build a hospital and care for black veterans.

The Moton attackers made clear that their way of life couldnt tolerate black growth because their culture relied on black compliance. A failure to comply would then require domination and possibly violence. Again, they were mad about a hospital.

The veterans hospital was built, despite the violent mobs that were normalised in America. The threat that stopped at Motons doorstep in Tuskegee did not stop in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where in 1921 a white mob burned down 40 city blocks in Greenwood, an African-American neighbourhood famous for social and economic mobility (see the image above). Men dropped kerosene bombs from airplanes and used firearms on the ground. By the end of the massacre on June 1, many of the 300 victims were buried in unmarked mass graves before being properly identified. The injured had no hospital, because it was burned as well.

After Trump officials announced their plans for a June 20th campaign rally in Tulsa, the violence of the massacre has been widely discussed. Beyond that, the echoes of Tulsa can be heard in President Trumps racist rhetoric. For another President, the Tulsa trip could be coincidental, but the cultural agency of President Trump relies on violent protection of the status quo.

After white supremacists staged a violent and deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017, Virginia, Mr. Trumps referred to attendees as good people. His language choice welcomed comparisons to the countrys history of racial violence. The mobs in Charlottesville, Tuskegee, Tulsa, are consistent with the viewpoint Mr. Trump has championed in the so-called culture wars.

As the threat to Moton showed, government forces and mob justice were both means of forced compliance and domination. Sometimes they worked in tandem, and sometimes they were separate paths to the same violent ends. We have the judges, the sheriffs, the jails

The Presidents most overt calls for domination have come through calls for aggressive policing. In a July 2017 speech to Long Island police officers, he urged them not to be too nice, when arresting suspects. He not only condoned violence during arrests, he encouraged it. The current Department of Justice has abandoned most oversight of police departments, and this, coupled with the Presidents encouragement, has worsened historical tensions. The sense of a culture war between police and the citizens has either ignored or minimised the harm inflicted on the people whom law enforcement officers are meant to protect.

Motons aggressors stopped at his doorstep. Breonna Taylors did not. Three Louisville, Kentucky police officers, Brett Hankison, Johnathan Mattingly, and Myles Cosgrove entered her home in plain clothes, without identifying themselves, looking for a man already in custody. They shot her eight times, killing her in her bed. The war on cops has become a dangerous myth, and the warlike posturing has given cover to Breonna Taylors killer. Last week when the Louisville Police Department released the incident report, the nearly empty page listed no forced entry and no injuries. In their reckoning, she has been killed and then erased.

When I read Grandisons recount, the name Robert Moton was familiar. I have visited the Tuskegee Army Air Field named in his honor and seen the artifacts that mark the history of the place. Once the Tuskegee Airmen completed their flight training, they fought fascists and helped to liberated Europe. In stories about the Airmen, its common to hear about the war they fought abroad and the one they faced in America when they returned in 1945, three years away from a desegregated U.S. military, nine years away from the Brown decision, and twenty years away from the Voting Right Act of 1965. Call this a culture war, certainly, but only one side can rightfully be called just.

See the original post here:
America's long culture war - TheArticle

Prime ministers and chancellors can sometimes boast an influence over their country so strong that it lasts long after they leave office. Such was the dominance of William Gladstones economic policies, it used to be said that the Grand Old Man occupied the Treasury from 1860 to 1930. More recently, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown enjoyed 10 and 13 years in office respectively. Yet their influence lives on in government.

Increasingly, many conservatives are scratching their heads and wondering why, in the words of Prof Matthew Goodwin, the Tories are winning elections but losing the culture war. Of course, some dispute that language: after all, unlike America, we do not suffer interminable political battles over issues like abortion rights and gun ownership. Mercifully, we have so far been spared the misery of Trump-style political debate, into which the US appears to be sinking ever deeper.

But who can doubt we are engaged in a culture war of our own? The Brexit referendum not only revealed a cultural chasm in Britain, it also helped to widen it further. It demonstrated that many millions of citizens thought very differently about their identity compared with the governing classes, and it polarised the country even further, as many MPs spent the next three years doing everything they could to thwart the result.

Yet it would be a mistake to think that Britains culture war is limited to departing the European Union. As academics and opinion researchers attest, Britains political divides are no longer defined only by economic issues, such as taxation and spending on public services. They are defined at least as much by attitudes to cultural issues, such as sovereignty, immigration and human rights.

And on these issues, many conservatives feel like they are losing. Immigration has been sky-high for approaching a quarter of a century and showed no signs of stopping pre-Covid-19. Criminals and illegal immigrants often evade the law by citing their human rights. Extremists can spout their hatred and recruit and radicalise their followers without intervention. And this is a serious problem: who will have been surprised that the suspect in Saturdays stabbings in Reading turned out to have been known by the intelligence agencies?

For public information campaigns about cervical screening, the NHS has refused to address women, instead preferring people with a cervix, for fear of offending transgender campaigners. The police, who rarely miss an opportunity to act tough with soft targets, stand and watch violent protesters desecrate war memorials and vandalise national monuments. The Archbishop of Canterbury reflecting a tendency to assert that white people are unavoidably racist simply because of their own skin colour has prayed for white Christians [to] repent of our own prejudices.

These examples show why conservatives feel they are losing the culture war. It is possible to believe in tackling racial injustice without having to accept that white people are by definition the problem. It is possible to respect those with gender dysphoria, without believing that a womans right to privacy and safety should be sacrificed. It is possible to believe that everybody has the right to protest and demonstrate, while also believing that the police should uphold the law.

So why, when Tories have been in government for more than a decade, does it seem that cultural liberals and Left-wingers are in the ascendancy?

In part, it is because a culture war is precisely what its name suggests: it is about culture as much as what governments do with the levers of power. There is little ministers can do when celebrities, or businesses, use their platform to make arguments that conservatives reject.

It is partly because we no longer have unitary government in Britain: ministers in Whitehall might be Conservatives, but there is, for example, a Labour mayor in London, and if he wants to weigh in on debates about old statues, he can do so.

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Conservatives can't win the culture wars while Blair and Brown's legacy remains intact - Telegraph.co.uk