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In the hard news business, it is well understood that if it bleeds, it leads. In cultural news, the same principle applies. Not a day goes by that we dont see a story of a panel discussion in jeopardy or cancelled, a controversial film withdrawn, or an academic on the incorrect side of a cultural debate de-platformed. One could be forgiven for assuming that cancel culture reigns supreme in the public forum.

Its gratifying, therefore, to report that a speaking engagement featuring a highly controversial researcher and clinician in the hot-button field of gender dysphoria will take place as planned at McGill University. The cancel-culture mould in this case was not broken by chance. A good strategic plan prevented a predictable brush fire of protest from becoming a conflagration.

Within the Department of Psychiatry at McGill University, the Division of Social and Transcultural Psychiatry (DSTP) pursues and promotes research, training and consultation in the domains of social and cultural psychiatry. Under the rubric of the Culture, Mind and Brain Program, an ongoing sub-division of the DSTP, with links to affiliated faculty in other McGill departments and worldwide, the DSTP is presenting a lecture, titled Children and Adolescents with Gender Dysphoria: Some contemporary research and clinical issues, to be delivered Jan. 23 by Dr. Ken Zucker, professor of psychiatry at the University of Toronto.

The cancel-culture mould in this case was not broken by chance

Dr. Zucker, a pioneer and leading expert in the field of gender dysphoria, is a cancel-culture veteran, and remains a magnet for trans activists ire. In 2015, when he headed up the Gender Identity Clinic at Torontos Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH), a post hed held for decades, he was targeted for condemnation by trans activists, who accused him of practicing conversion therapy, a false allegation that led to his summary dismissal. Dr. Zucker successfully refuted the charge in a later lawsuit against CAMH, resulting in a payout and retractions, but not in reinstatement. Dr. Zucker does in fact endorse supervised hormone therapy where warranted for adolescents on a case-by-case basis, but is a proponent of watchful waiting and for treating patients holistically.

DSTP Professor Samuel Veissire, organizer of this event, has been keeping me up to date on responses. To be honest, when I received his invitation to the talk and I saw Dr. Zuckers name, I entered it into my calendar with a question mark. I assumed the odds were high that he would be de-platformed by an administration browbeaten by activists. Im happy to be proven wrong.

Thats not to say there was no opposition. Queer McGill issued a warning on its Facebook page, repeating the canard about conversion therapy and advising friends that the talk would be given from a non-trans perspective. Prof. Veissire made a point of meeting with Queer McGill to hear their complaints and concern. Their position was basically no conversation without us at first, but he argued persuasively and respectfully that it is also reasonable for parents to assume their right and to honour their responsibility to be involved in decisions around radical physical changes in their children. This outreach in itself, letting people who object to the talk know that their perspectives are welcome in the conversation, I imagine went some distance in calming potentially roiled waters.

The Facebook pages comments were refreshingly diverse, and maturely considered. One queer woman of colour posted, I understand that this talk isnt for everyone, but I feel like we tend to be quick on condemning what we perceive like an attack, and police each other instead of practicing patience with different levels of understanding or even taking the opportunity to speak our truth.

Prof. Veissire also sent out a call for support on a sex research email list. Other scholars then shared it on Twitter. Responses were intended for both the administration at McGill and the public record, to show people or groups who had asked for the talk to be cancelled that there was widespread support for Dr. Zucker.

The Facebook page's comments were refreshingly diverse

Letters attesting to Dr. Zuckers eminence in his field flowed in from authoritative colleagues, such as Northwestern University psychology professor J. Michael Bailey, Columbia Universitys Developmental Psychoendocrinology Program director Heino F. L. Meyer-Bahlburg, University of Toronto psychiatry professor Ray Blanchard, and Harvard University psychology professor Steven Pinker.

Most touching was an ardent testimonial from Pique Resilience Project, a support group for detransitioned women. They wrote that they themselves would greatly have benefited from the more careful, evidence-based treatment approach that Dr. Zucker uses in his clinical practice. Their email concludes, Perspectives like Dr. Zuckers are critical to ensuring that more individuals dont make the mistake we did.

Most people, Prof. Veissire believes, want to see more brave conversations on difficult topics, but are reluctant to be publicly associated with politically unorthodox views. His private conversations with students have convinced him that when they see evidence that other people they trust are also open to these conversations, peoples fears ease up a bit.

Perhaps, as Prof. Veissire mused, 2020 will be the year of reason in the culture wars spin. Perhaps. Just minutes before filing this column, I was made aware that the Pride Therapy Network of Montreal had sent a letter dated Jan. 20 to Prof. Veissires asking that Dr. Zucker be de-platformed. And on Wednesday McGills Joint Board-Senate Subcommittee on Queer People also wrote the organizers to express disappointment and ask that the event be cancelled. It wont be. A more constructive approach would be for their members to attend the presentation and contribute their perspectives to the discussion in a civil fashion.

Email: kaybarb@gmail.com | Twitter:

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Barbara Kay: Will 2020 will be the year of reason in the cancel-culture wars? - National Post

(Anne Mimault/Reuters)

The opening chapter of the book that launched the modern conservative movement was about God. That is, the first chapter of William F. Buckleys 1951 book, God and Man at Yale, was about the modern universitys subversion of faith in God. The conservative movement thus arose out of a dispute in the halls of the academy over the nature of ultimate things. This pattern continues to hold.

It has recently been argued that the sharp decline in the popularity of the humanities on campus is the result of a second secularization, a collapse of our regard for high culture that parallels and reflects the broader decline of religious faith. The second secularization is not new, however. It entered public consciousness with the modern campus culture wars, the opening shot of which from the conservative side was the publication of Allan Blooms 1987 book, The Closing of the American Mind. The 198788 dispute over the teaching of Western Civilization at Stanford swiftly followed, as did books like Roger Kimballs Tenured Radicals (1990) and Dinesh DSouzas Illiberal Education (1991).

The ultimate things in dispute in the second secularization are the goodness, continuity, and even the very reality of Western Civilization, and of Americas place within it. From the left side, the second secularization began with works like Stanley Fishs 1980, Is There a Text in This Class? There Fish challenged our faith in the very existence of objectivity, reality, and truth. In the wake of declining belief in God, faith in almost any anchor outside ourselves had dimmed.

We can think of politics today as the effect of continuing conservative pushback against both the first and second secularizations. Just as it has taken more than three decades for campus humanities departments to commit enrollment suicide by destroying faith in Western Civilization, the Great Books, objectivity, and reality itself, so it has taken several decades for the specifically political consequences of the second secularization to emerge.

What began as a fascinating cultural sideshow has become our politics. The dispute between campus multiculturalism and traditional American conceptions of citizenship launched at Stanford in 1987 is now the everyday stuff of our debates. Controversies over race, gender, and ethnicity are ubiquitous. The ideal of global citizenship contends with faith in America and the West. Even the core Western commitment to freedom of speech is challenged now by intersectional orthodoxy. All of this was in play at Stanford in the late 1980s. It has taken three decades, but today who we vote for has everything to do with how we see these disputes.

Is the Great Awokening really part of a quasi-religious argument over ultimate things? Cancel culture seems awfully distant from Stanley Fishs philosophical challenge to objectivity, reality, and truth. (In fact, Stanley Fish himself was canceled recently.) Yet the postmodern challenge to objective reality is also a claim that so-called neutrality and truth are cloaks for the interests of the powerful. The systematic skepticism of Fish, Foucault, and their postmodernist colleagues is a technique for repudiating classical liberalism in the name of the new gods: race, class, gender, ethnicity, and such. The twitterati absorb these postmodernist debunking techniques in college, and now from the cultural air itself. Whereas the politics of woke may seem the opposite of skeptical relativism, in fact it flows from unbelief. The Great Awokening is a product of the second secularization.

In the matter of the first secularization, Buckley could not have been more correct. So complete has been the collapse of religion at our universities that its tough to even imagine a national controversy over the place of faith in elite college classrooms. Yet in 1951, Yale denied everything. Working with a thinned-out definition of religion, Yales grandees may even have believed those denials.

Buckley is rightly credited with almost single-handedly shattering Americas liberal consensus. From another perspective, however, he simply recognized that the liberal consensus was unraveling on its own. Buckleys argument had teeth because he could invoke a paean to the place of Christianity at Yale from President Charles Seymours Inaugural Address of 1937. Seven years before Buckley wrote, President Roosevelt had led the nation in a prayer to Almighty God on the eve of the D-Day invasion. That prayer would startle coming from a Democratic president today. Once Americas liberal consensus expelled religion, that consensus was no more. Thus was modern conservatism born.

This was the most controversial passage from God and Man at Yale:

I believe that the duel between Christianity and atheism is the most important in the world. I further believe that the struggle between individualism and collectivism is the same struggle reproduced on another level.

Buckley links the central political battle of his day with a cultural struggle over ultimate things. Politics is culture on another level.

Buckley faced challenges that conservatives concerned with culture still confront. He complained of conservatives so averse to cultural controversy that they hesitate to take even their own side in a public battle. He insisted that the immense cultural and political significance of education was being slighted by a single-minded focus on communism.

One of Buckleys targets offered a preview of what was to come. Looking beyond Yale, Buckley had gone after Harvards influential 1945 report on General Education in a Free Society (aka the Redbook) on grounds that it short-shrifted the place of religion in the curriculum. Instead, Harvards Redbook elevated and reinforced the already-existing trend toward the teaching of Western Civilization as a foundation for democratic citizenship.

Buckley was all for the teaching of Western Civilization. His point was that the lesson would not take hold in the absence of religious faith. Yet the Redbook set religion aside, looking instead to sustain a free society through a secular course on the great themes of the Western heritage: representative government, rule of law, the philosophy of natural rights, the power of reason, free markets, etc. Within a few decades, however, even the glories of Western Civilization were under attack. The second secularization was in motion.

The process began in earnest in the 1960s. Western Civilization courses were swept away, along with most other requirements, by students who rejected such constraint. The faculty was reluctant to make the case for the requirement, in part because it was losing its own faith in the West. At Stanford and some other schools, Western Civ had returned by the 1980s, setting up the next great battle. By then, Sixties radicals had joined the faculty, helping to kick-start identity politics on campus. Now Western Civilization would fall under attack on overtly ideological grounds. American multiculturalism was about to be born.

Just before the Stanford dustup of 198788, Allan Bloom literally picked up where Buckley had left off. Waiting until the very last paragraph of his survey of Yales antireligious curriculum, Buckley finally mentioned the substantial contribution to secularism that is being made at Yale and elsewhere by widespread academic reliance on relativism . . . Bloom, for his part, eschewed Buckleys concern for religion and began instead with the following sentence, There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative. Bloom worried that abandonment of the search for truth would bring neglect of the Great Books and the fundamental life-choices they made possible. His target was the second secularization, not the first.

The nascent multiculturalist left at Stanford quite consciously viewed their attack on the Great Books as a form of secularization. The radicals charged campus traditionalists with treating the canon as a collection of sacred texts. Traditionalists replied that a list encompassing the Bible, Locke, Marx, and Darwin could hardly purvey a uniform orthodoxy. Yet the critics had a point. Insofar as the canon constituted a distilled repository of the fundamental alternatives in life, the fruits of a long civilizational struggle, it carried an air of the sacred about it. Even a glint of such sanctity was more than the radicals could bear.

As with Yale in 1951, the Stanford administration in 1988 denied everything. Conservatives, supposedly, were making a mountain of a molehill. Replacing the Western Culture requirement with a multicultural alternative was little more than a tweak. In retrospect, Stanfords defense was nonsense. The result of this minor retooling was everything conservatives had feared: the final nail in Western Civs coffin and the launching of a multiculturalist movement at war with traditional American conceptions of citizenship to this day.

At the end of his critique of Stanley Fishs relativism in Tenured Radicals, Roger Kimball warned that postmodern skepticism was incompatible with the intellectual foundations of liberal democratic society. Similar sentiments could be found across conservative critiques of the second secularization. Looking out at what remains of free speech on American college campuses, its tough to disagree.

The idea that the humanities have been done in by a second secularization, a loss of faith in high-culture following on religious secularization, was suggested recently by Simon During, Professor of English at the University of Melbourne. Ross Douthat has picked up on the idea as well. Unfortunately, Durings perceptive essay suffers from the usual academic blind-spots. Only in passing does he acknowledge the academys own role in de-sacralizing the humanities. Capitalism, were told, is the greater culprit. During seems to think that the second secularization has emerged quite suddenly, when in fact it has taken three decades of concerted postmodern debunking to kill the humanities off.

Durings hopes the humanities will be saved by a continuing academic crusade against capitalism, as if it was possible to separate the anti-capitalist animadversions of literature professors from the postmodern skepticism and accusatory multiculturalism that During himself gently deplores. In the academy nowadays, all these agendas are joined. Professor During also worries that public support for government funding of the humanities is disappearing. Yet this is as much because professors like During have launched English departments on anti-capitalist crusades as because postmodern skepticism has made serious literature look meaningless. Durings proposed antidote to the second secularization is just more of the politicized curriculum thats been killing the humanities to begin with.

What can the two secularizations tell us about politics today? Conservatism is now, in significant measure, an alliance between opponents of the first and second secularizations. Many conservatives are concerned over attempts to restrict religious liberty and eject religion from the public square. Others, including many or most religious conservatives, are dismayed by the rise of globalizing multiculturalism, with its hostility to our Western heritage, to traditional conceptions of American citizenship, and to fundamental liberal principles like advancement by individual merit and freedom of speech.

The idea of the two secularizations helps explain why conservative opposition to Trump is increasingly marginalized. Conservatives, we are sometimes told, should focus on positive principle instead of being merely reactive. In his personal life and habits, however, President Trump is an imperfect embodiment of some important conservative virtues. His adherence to conservative policy-principle may at times be a matter of convenience as well. For the presidents conservative opponents, these considerations are foremost.

Yet if many conservatives care deeply about upholding virtue in their personal lives, modern conservatism as a political movement is at root a defense against the two secularizations. Ever since Buckleys day, the conservative movement has grown in response to the departure of secular radicals from the national consensus, first with the increasing rejection of traditional religious morality by the left, more recently with the lefts departure from core tenets of liberal democracy and its refusal to embrace our national and civilizational stories.

President Trump has won over conservatives because he has made it his business to fight the two secularizationspicking and winning battles that more culturally timid conservatives have avoided for decades. In this sense, at least, President Trump is heir to Buckleys courage and perspicacity, both in recognizing the collapse of the traditional consensus, and in striking out against the radicalism of an arrogant and unbelieving elite (unbelieving in more ways than one). When it comes to conservatism as a political phenomenon, he who fights the secularizers wins. All things being equal, conservatives prefer to avoid public battles, upholding traditional virtues in their personal lives and local communities. A young Buckley found this frustrating. When the trend of the culture makes a quiet life of faith impossible, however, as it has in the wake of the second secularization, the battle goes national, noisy, and tough.

I dissect the second secularization in my new report for the National Association of Scholars, The Lost History of Western Civilization. (The report is summarized here. Download a free pdf here.) There I debunk the debunkers, exposing the falsity of postmodern deconstructions of Western Civilization. I also trace the rise of multiculturalism and its newfangled offspring, intersectionality, laying out the ways in which the postmodern academy has spawned the half-mad politics of our day.

Buckley struck back against militantly secular socialism during its American infancy. Since then, the forms of the secular left have mutated and multiplied in ways that could scarcely have been imagined in 1951. Its time for a closer look at this second secularization. The character of this new unbelief will shape the conservative movement for the foreseeable future.

Read more here:
Two Secularizations and the Fate of Conservatism - National Review

Laura Dern is everywhere these days, and that alone is proof that no matter what hill you occupy in the current culture wars, all is not lost. Emmys, Golden Globes, Oscars for the last few years, virtually every project she touches turns to gold Twin Peaks, Big Little Lies Seasons 1 and 2, The Tale, and this year, Little Women and Marriage Story, both of which are best picture nominees, with Dern nominated as supporting actress in Marriage Story.

She was even part of Ellen DeGeneres receipt of the Carol Burnett Award at this years Golden Globes; Dern played the woman to whom DeGeneres character Ellen came out during the famous boundary-breaking Puppy episode. The decision to play an openly gay woman on broadcast television in 1997 damaged Derns career (though far less than it damaged Degeneres). It wasnt until 2008, with the HBO movie Recount and then, three years later, the HBO comedy Enlightened, that she came roaring back.

For reasons still baffling and regrettable, HBO killed Enlightened after its second season, but Dern got an Emmy nomination all the same and, more important, everyone suddenly remembered how good an actress the star of pre-Ellen films including Rambling Rose, Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart and Smooth Talk really was.

Really is.

At this point, most everyone agrees that Enlightened was just a few years ahead of its time; had it premiered a few years later, when the notion of prestige television had become mainstream and female stars were less confined by sexist strictures of likability, the burning wire of Amy Jellicoe would have lasted at least another season.

But Dern has always been a performer ahead of her time, and 35 years after she decided to turn down a Brat Pack lead for a small role and a chance to work with Peter Bogdanovich in Mask, the industry is finally beginning to catch up.

Dern is a character actor who is also a star, a very rare breed. She is also a character actor who never appears to be playing a character, a breed rarer still. No matter how radical the part (Enlighteneds Amy, the napalm-equipped helicopter parent Renata in Big Little Lies, the take-no-prisoners divorce attorney in Marriage Story), Dern humanizes it. And no matter how human the part (the self-deluded documentarian in The Tale, Marmee in Little Women,), Dern radicalizes it.

A Netflix featurette on Laura Dern as a very good divorce lawyer in Marriage Story.

Its tough to think of another performer who fits so easily in, and is willing to do such a varied palette of projects. In 2017, she had roles in Star Wars: Episode VIII: The Last Jedi and The Last Man on Earth on Fox, Alexander Paynes Downsizing, Showtimes Twin Peaks and The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt on Netflix.

Following this years Oscar glory, shell next be seen in projects both tried and true and newly launched. Shell reprise her 1993 role as Ellie Sattler in Jurassic World 3 and she just signed on to a series on Quibi, the short-form streamer. In Just One Drink, shell play a bartender listening to varying customers over several episodes running 10 minutes or less.

She herself is a glorious reprimand to stereotype blond, slim and beautiful, with an A-list Hollywood pedigree, she is famous for showing up, working hard, making herself heard and being kind.

The only time I met Laura Dern, she brought macarons. She was starring in Enlightened at the time and was part of an Envelope Emmy panel I was hosting. She showed up at The Times offices camera-ready and bearing a box of cookies for her fellow panelists. I have done a lot of panels in my time and no one has ever thought to bring cookies.

Her roles this year, as a tough-as-nails 21st century L.A. divorce attorney and a self-sacrificing 19th century wife, mother and early feminist, prove what many of us have known for years: Laura Dern can do anything.

And considering that even as a supporting player she manages to deliver the best lines in both movies (So its a deal when its something you want and a discussion when Nicole wants it? in Marriage Story) and (I am angry nearly every day of my life in Little Women) its probably a very good idea to just let her.

Read more:
Hollywood is just catching up to the greatness of Laura Dern - Los Angeles Times

Yesterday, 26 January 2020, the Catholic Church's new Pastoral Plan for Southern Africa Evangelising Community Serving God, Humanity and All Creation was launched at Regina Mundi Church in Soweto. With its emphasis on evangelisation that serves God, humanity and creation, it sets the Church in a new direction, rooted in the Gospel and seeking the guidance of the Spirit in what we do.

The eight focus areas of the Plan will no doubt be analysed, and hopefully implemented, in various ways in the years to come. Some seem 'internally' focused, on the different parts of the body that is the Church: laity formation and empowerment; life and ministry of clergy; marriage and family; and youth. Others seem to look outward: to justice, peace and non-violence; healing and reconciliation; care for creation and the environment. All of these in various ways feed into its first point, evangelisation.

On closer examination the 'internal/external' dimensions blur. The building up of the people who are Church and their promotion as active servants of God cannot have but an external dimension - as witnesses to the wider society by example, whose lives challenge everyone to the values of community, service and fidelity. The best form of evangelisation is example.

Similarly, if they are to be authentic, the 'socio-political' elements promoting justice, reconciliation and ecology cannot but be the practices of the Church in itself. We must look at how values such as justice, healing and reconciliation may be implemented within the Church in this time of internal division over Church renewal initiated by Pope Francis. In particular, the idea of non-violence might mean for us a wariness at getting into the often verbally violent 'culture wars' waged in Catholic social media.

As with any plan, all of this depends on implementation. If the Pastoral Plan is to be more than a 'wish list', local Catholic communities must discern how to apply its focus areas in their contexts. They must see how they can build 'greener' parishes - while advocating for ecological justice. They must implement new or renewed formation programmes, reach out to youth, and support family life realistically, working with priests, religious and deacons. Healing, reconciliation and dialogue must inform all our efforts, both within and outside the Church.

Above all we shall need to seek and be open to the guidance of the Holy Spirit.

Sunday was the first step. Appropriately, that step starts at Regina Mundi. In his writings, many set in the Mediterranean, English novelist Lawrence Durrell used to talk of the 'spirit of place'. It is appropriate, then, that Regina Mundi was chosen to launch the Pastoral Plan. Since the mid-1970s it was the site of many Catholic (and ecumenical) socio-political and religious initiatives that impacted the wider church and society.

The launch is but a moment in this initiative. The success of the Pastoral Plan will depend on how we all, we who are Church, take it up, interpret and apply it in parishes, communities and personally.

Follow The Jesuit Institute on Twitter @JesuitInstitute

Tags: South African Reflection, Jesuit Institute , Pastoral Plan, Anthony Egan SJ

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South African Reflection: The Pastoral Plan - It's over to us - Independent Catholic News

In an essay entitled Historically Correct, the American academic Prof Ruth Perry explained how the concept of political correctness was weaponised against progressive causes almost from the moment it was conceived. The result, she wrote, was that in an Orwellian inversion, only those who uphold the conservative status quo are exempt from ridicule. This perfect encapsulation of how the right has attempted to put itself beyond criticism would be a startling contemporary insight if it were not for the minor detail of when the essay was published 1992.

I spoke to Perry in the summer of 2018. When I asked her why nothing had changed in the quarter-century since she wrote those prescient words in fact, why the rights strategy seems to have become ever more effective she replied with the frustration of someone who had seen history repeat itself too often.

The pressure on Nandy and the Labour party to 'go high' also comes from a British establishment that skews right

The left not only does not have the funds, she said, it didnt have the tools to beat the right at its own game. It hasnt exposed the rights cynicism and hypocrisy, its use of political correctness as a way, ironically, to shut down debate. It hasnt got its hands dirty. It hasnt stooped to engage in the rights so-called culture wars.

This preciousness was evident in Lisa Nandys latest Labour leadership election campaign speech, in which she criticised Labour under Jeremy Corbyn for letting Brexit become a false culture war. Nandy believes that Labour should have somehow stayed above the fray. But to declare that the Brexit culture war is false, to believe that it is a choice whether or not to engage in it, seems naive. Its like being in a real war, coming under enemy fire and suffering heavy casualties, but refusing to retaliate because you dont agree with the premise of the offensive. Wars are either happening or they are not.

And the culture wars are happening. If anything, whats false is the idea that one can treat them as a sort of political artefact that can be picked up and played with or discarded in order to pursue the things that really matter. If anything, Labour did not spar enough.

Underlying the disdain for culture wars is the mistaken belief that they are happening somewhere else, away from the serious business of high politics. But just as military conflict is a continuation of politics by other means, so are culture wars. The false tussles to which Nandy was referring played out on the ground, affecting peoples lives.

Concerns about immigration were ramped up to a hysterical pitch, rendering the hostile environment not just a government policy but a national climate. Issues of identity became a battleground, creating a sense that the rights of some can only be won at the expense of others. Sovereignty, patriotism and history were pressed into service to paint a portrait of a nation shackled, desperate to break free from the suffocating embrace of progressive demands. A politics that is leftwing, redistributive and pacifist was framed as not just naive and idealistic, but traitorous: a poppy-rejecting, non-Cenotaph-bowing, non-Queens-speech-watching, non-nuclear-button-pressing worldview, one whose support for the beleaguered supposedly came at the expense of the majority.

Comparatively little of this political campaign was carried out explicitly. It was done in disguise, via ostensibly cultural issues. What is half a million pounds to reinstall a floor so that Big Ben can bong? What is a few more million pounds if it means we can get our blue passports back? And on it goes, with the flying of restored Spitfires around the world to promote post-Brexit trade. The Brexit culture war isnt merely a locking of horns on social media between the likes of Jacob Rees-Mogg and rabid remainers. It has been a coordinated, well-funded and, most importantly, long-term effort that had the left in a defensive position from the get-go, marking out Brexit clearly as the property of the right. It is part propaganda, part PR, and part official government messaging. This is how the discourse is shaped these days.

The left sees such aggressive narrative-building as somehow dirty. It sees the battles that define a culture war as a lowering of the tone, and assumes they require the recruitment of shadowy forces and a loss of the moral high ground. But these are simply the tools that the right has used. The left has a vast arsenal at its disposal if only it finds the right tone, and appropriate levels of swagger and conviction. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortezs communication strategy, with its strident earnestness laced with humour, is a powerful example. She makes fun of the trolling of her own boyfriend in one breath, and takes apart Republicans in the Senate the next.

This reluctance to take part in what is seen as a grubby game is embodied by the famous (and famously ineffective) Michelle Obama mantra when they go low, we go high. It is where the fixation on courtesy comes from.

But the pressure on Nandy and the Labour party to go high also comes from a British society and establishment that generally skews right. As a result, efforts by the left to fight back are portrayed as outrageous and aggressive while, as Perry said, the right is largely exempted from ridicule.

The answer isnt to avoid playing the game at all, its to do it better. To engage on the absurdity of big bong nonsense as well as on homelessness and the NHS. As long as politics by other means is dismissed as merely the culture wars, the Labour party is bringing a knife to a gunfight.

Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist

Here is the original post:
The left cant sit out the culture wars. It must learn to fight them better - The Guardian