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Republicans have been pushing hard on parents rightsmeaning book bans and elimination of any LGBTQ+ representation or serious discussion of race from public schools. Its an effort to simultaneously fuel their base with culture war hysteria and win back the white suburban mom voting bloc with a subject theyre supposed to care about more than any other: protecting their kids.

Its a campaign thats created a great deal of noise and a series of state laws limiting what can be taught. In 2022, as far-right school board candidates took over in many places, it looked promising for Republicans. This week, though, groups like Moms for Liberty hit serious opposition, losing a substantial majority of the races where they endorsed candidates.

There are explanations for this. Most broadly, Americans are rarely quite as hateful as Republicans are banking on these days. But in the wake of Tuesdays elections, its important to talk about something else Republicans may be missing: Parents of school-age kids in 2023 are younger Gen-Xers and, increasingly, elder millennials. Those are, broadly speaking, people who have grown up and lived their whole lives on the other side of the culture war.

Every age group has its hard-right members, of course. The founders of Moms for Liberty are in their early 40s, and theyre hateful, bigoted, frightened people. But when Republicans try to use these issues to peel off swing voters in places like Loudoun County or Fairfax County, Virginia, they may not be on the friendly territory they had imagined. Part of this is the widespread failure to realize that millennials have grown up. People got so used to them being the wacky kids that its only just starting to sink in across the national discourse that millennials, who were born between 1981 and 1996, are full-fledged adults now. And theyve brought their formative cultural influences with them.

Theres long been a generational divide on much of this culture-war fodder, and on LGBTQ+ issues in particular. In 2006, a Gallup poll found 50% support for a constitutional amendment banning marriage equality, with 47% opposed to it. In the same poll, though, A majority of women aged 18-49 say marriages between homosexual couples should be legally valid. Three years later: A majority of 18- to 29-year-olds think gay or lesbian couples should be allowed to legally marry, while support reaches only as high as 40% among the three older age groups. The 18- to 29-year-olds of 2009 are many of todays parents of school-age children, and 14 years after they reached majority support for marriage equality, the idea that their kids might go to the school library and check out a book with LGBTQ+ characters isnt that scary.

The difference between generations goes well beyond support for same-sex marriage, though. While elder millennials and young Gen-Xers arent at the core of the gender identity revolution being carried out by Gen Z, theyre not baby boomers on this issue, either. Parents of todays K-12 students went to see The Matrix in drovesand then saw its makers come out as trans women. They were at formative ages when Hilary Swank won the best actress Oscar for playing a trans man in Boys Dont Cry. They are of a similar age to prominent trans women like Laverne Cox and Janet Mock. That trans people exist and are fully human is not a brand-new idea for them, and while theres still a long way to go, polls do reflect an age gap on trans issues just as, 15 years ago, there was an age gap on marriage.

Todays parents are also exposed to what their kids are bringing home. Part of what makes Moms for Liberty members so angry is seeing the diversity of thought and identity that their kids are embracing, not so much because of teachers and librarians as because of peers and the broader youth culture. People ages 30 to 49 are more forward-thinking on trans issues than older generations, but the gap is still bigger between that age group and those ages 18 to 29. Its a pretty safe bet that if you polled 12- to 17-year-olds, thered be another jump. Many parents may struggle with how to use they/them pronouns (and be chided by their kids for it), but the ones who arent reacting with reflexive hatred and ragethe ones whose kids can talk to themare catching the edges of that gender identity revolution. Maybe they read some of the massively popular Wings of Fire books, with their panoply of LGBTQ+ characters, to or with their kids. Or were in the room as their kids watched any of the many childrens TV shows with nonbinary or gender-fluid characters, from Netflixs Ridley Jones to Disneys The Owl House.

The Moms for Liberty Republican culture-war appeal isnt just about LGBTQ+ issues, of course. Its also extremely racist. And once again, you dont have to claim that elder millennials and young Xers are immune to racism to know that they are a more racially diverse population than older generations and grew up in an increasingly racially diverse United States of America. Certainly some members of these generations are scared racists in a defensive crouch, enraged by any acknowledgement of Black and brown people in this country (again, see the founders of Moms for Liberty), and heaven knows too many white people in this age range are susceptible to I want equality for everyone but theyre demanding too much-type arguments. But people under 50 are more likely to recognize fundamental inequities in the U.S. and the need for more progress on racial equality. And, as with LGBTQ+ representation, theyre people who grew up seeing enough racial diversity in popular culture to think its weird and wrong that banning efforts are disproportionately targeting books and movies about Black and brown characters.

Todays parents of school-age children had childhoods during which The Cosby Show was the biggest show on TV year after year, then came of age during the 1990s boom in Black movies and sitcoms. Similarly, during their lives, hip-hop became widely popular with white audiences. Many other forms originated by Black musicians had become popular with white audiences over the preceding decades, of course, but in the past, it was more common for white musicians to take up and take over Black-originated forms. While there are plenty of notable white rap and hip-hop artists, it has remained a Black-owned form in a way that rock and roll, for instance, did not as it was popularized by white musicians for white audiences.

Film and television remain disproportionately white, and #OscarsSoWhite went viral in 2015 for good reason. Simple representation is not enough to fully transform peoples politics, but a lot of elder millennials and young Xers are going to bristle at the suggestion that white kids must be protected from depictions of Black and brown people.

Republicans have spent the past two years thinking theyre going to win over white suburban moms with school-based culture wars centered on a so-called parents rights argument. It seems to be a big motivating issue for the younger faction of the Republican base, and it might help the party turn out its own voters. But this arguments reach into the messy ranks of swing voters doesnt appear to be what Republicans hoped for. This weeks election results suggest that as people start paying attention to whats really going on with these policy pushes and the candidates trying to bring them to local school boards, theyre rejecting all of it.

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When Republicans target K-12 parents in culture wars, they don't know who they're dealing with - Daily Kos

A protester holds a placard during a protest against Moms For Liberty in Philadelphia.Matthew Hatcher/Sipa USA via AP

Is the parental rights movement slowing down?

In 2021, there was a broad push after the pandemic from the right to retake education institutions. Across the country, Moms for Libertya sprawling national organization the Southern Poverty Law Center labeled an anti-government extremist groupran school board candidates to challenge inclusive policies and push book bans. The group helped successfully elect conservatives. But now there seems to be less appetite for such radical policies.

There is no better example of this backlash to the backlash than elections this year in Central Bucks, Pennsylvania. Two years ago, three Republican school board candidatestwo of whom were members of a Moms for Liberty local Facebook grouprode to victory to form a 6-3 majority on the Pennsylvania school board. Upon taking control of the prized school district in a key presidential battleground state, Republicans passed a series of controversial policies to challenge and remove books and bar advocacy activities, and, more recently, were pushing for a measure to separate athletic teams on the basis of sex.

But after almost three years of seemingly never-ending negative press coverage and contentious school board meetings, voters in Central Bucks have rejected the new status quo in this weeks elections. All five Democrat school board candidates running as the CBSD Neighbors United slate won their racesincluding a first-time challenger to President Dana Hunterflipping the board.

Last night, the voters of Central Bucks sent a strong message, the groups executive committee wrote after the win. We want leaders who will serve with compassion and common sense. We want leaders who trust and value experts. We want leaders who protect our tax dollars.

I wrote earlier this week about how the Central Bucks school board election has attracted a once-unusual kind of attention and money for a down-ballot race, with more than $600,000 pouring into the dispute, and why the stakes were so high:

In the past three years, contentious disputes about race and gender, personal attacks, calls for resignation, and even paper-throwing-chair-wingingaltercationsseem to have become regular occurrencesat Central Bucks school board meetings. Once a source of pride, the 18,000-student school district sends almost90 percentof graduating high schoolers to colleges and universities and is home to some of thebesthigh schools in Pennsylvania.But it is now a cautionary talein the state and beyondfor what can happen when outside money and national extremist politics seep into local school board elections with effects that drastically change the social dynamics of a community.

In response to what many Central Bucks residents have described as the districts descent into chaos, calls for a return to normal rose ahead of the election. I long for the day that no one talks about us anymore because we are just doing the right thing all the time, Tracy Suits, a former school board president and member of the executive committee for the Neighbors United slate, told me before the election.

This isnt just a victory for me or my fellow candidates, re-elected Democrat Karen Smith said in an email. This is a victory for our students, our teachers, our support staff, and our community. With this vote, we showed that love is stronger than hate and compassion is stronger than fear. And voters made clear they will not be divided or distracted from working togetherall of usto solve the real issues facing all of our students. She vowed to work towards restoring civility to board meetings and revising policies that have so divided us over the last couple of years.

Democrats also swept school board seats in another culture wars-plagued district in Bucks County. In Pennridge, where the Republican-controlled board voted to adopt a curriculum from a conservative education consulting firm and enacted an anti-trans sports policy, Democrat candidates beat their Republican contenders to claim all five open positions, according to unofficial election results.

Paul Martino, a Doylestown venture capitalist who bankrolled the Republican slate Central Bucks Forward that included his wife Aarati, said on Facebook that he was disappointed with the outcome.

We won in 2021 and lost in 2023, he wrote. Thats 1 for 2 if I am doing my math right. We will need to figure out plan for 2025, which is EXACTLY what the Ds did the day they lost in 2021 for 2023. Republicans losses not only in school districts but also for State Supreme Court and other offices, Martino added, bodes poorly for the 2024 nominee for president.

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Pennsylvania Voters Rejected the Culture Wars in School Board ... - Mother Jones

It was among the most heated culture clashes of the 1980s: Stanfords decision in 1988 to cashier its freshman Western Civilization requirement.

If youre my age, you vividly remember the battle cry of the proponents of change: Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western cultures got to go.

The required reading list, which consisted of 15 classic texts, was reduced to six. Dantes Inferno was replaced by I, Rigoberta Menchu: An Indian Woman in Guatemala. Thomas Aquinas and Thomas More were out; Zora Neale Hurstons Their Eyes Were Watching God was in. John Locke and John Stuart Mill were replaced by the UN Declaration of Human Rights and examples of Rastafarian poetry, while Virgil, Cicero and Tacitus gave way to Frantz Fanons The Wretched of the Earth, a veritable handbook of revolutionary practice and social reorganization (according to the books dust jacket).

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The Wall Street Journals editorial board was outraged by what it saw as Stanfords decision to compromise the universitys intellectual seriousness. A number of Stanford faculty members, including the Pulitzer Prizewinning historian of slavery, race and gender Carl Degler, also voiced opposition to the change. With words that havent aged well, the author of books like Neither Black Nor White: Slavery and Race Relations in Brazil and the United States and At Odds: Women and the Family in America From the Revolution to the Present insisted that Few historians believe that the culture of this country has been seriously influenced by ideas from Africa, China, Japan or indigenous North America.

I bring up this episode because it underscores the centrality of the humanities to the late 20th centurys culture wars. At stake, many academics and intellectuals believed, was, in the words of the intellectual historian Andrew Hartman, nothing less than a war over the nations soul.

Sure, the humanities were often wielded by neoconservative editorialists and politicians as a political cudgel to attack the multicultural left. But an essential fact remains: the humanities mattered in a way that they dont today. As Hartman puts it in the second edition of his history of the culture wars of the 1970s, 80s and 90s:

A debate about whether Locke or Fanon deserves a place in a national curriculuma debate about what should constitute common knowledgecould only happen between people who share an understanding that education is a social good.

We are talking about a moment in time when a University of Chicago classicist and philosopher could write an anti-utilitarian defense of the humanities that treated learning as an erotic act and sell an astonishing 400,000 copies of the book in its first year and double that number in its second. Allan Bloom regarded a humanities education as:

A space between the intellectual wasteland [an undergraduate] has left behind and the inevitable dreary professional training that awaits him after the baccalaureate.

The kulturkmpf of the 1970s, 80s and 90s foregrounded the humanities as they had never been foregrounded before. Perhaps you recall some of the major controversies of that era:

Sure, the humanities were often wielded by editorialists, intellectuals and policy makers as a political cudgel. That said, the humanities mattered in a way they dont today. Better to be the subject of bitter political debate than to be marginalized or dismissed as irrelevant. In Hartmans words:

The left won those culture wars. But the victories have proven Pyrrhic. These days, not enough students want to study the humanities and justify their existence to cost-conscious administrators and few public voices are heard defending them, especially conservative voices.

Superficially, todays cultural conflictsover The New York Timess 1619 Project or critical race theory or intersectionality or postmodernism or gender ideology or decolonizationresemble those of three, four or five decades ago. Yet something profound has changed. As Hartman explains, some of the older struggles subsided due to the progressive lefts success in taking over major cultural institutionsart museums and foundations, as well as many academic humanities programs and professional societies. At the same time, economic anxiety and class resentment have mapped onto cultural divisions to make the culture wars angrier [and] more tribal.

Then theres the growing prevalence of political theater. Thanks, in part, to social media and the internet, public debates today favor the sensational over the substantive, the superficial over the serious and the visceral over the thoughtful. Hyperbole, overstatement, deliberate provocation are the order of the day. The academy has, I fear, fanned the flames, with activist scholars blurring the line between political action and scholarly claims, further debasing public discourse.

The temptation to speak out, even among those with no special expertise or insight, is apparently unstoppable. Artists, authors, intellectuals, professors and scholarly associations are signing open letters. Their purpose is a bit unclear, apart from simply saying something, showing their allegiance, signaling their virtue and engaging in a bit of self-promotion and networking.

With acid words, Nina Power, the English philosopher, writes, For someone working in the culture industries, the only thing worse than having the wrong position on a political controversy is having no position at all. These figures feel impelled to pronounce on anything and everything, staking a political stand on matters ranging from microaggressions to macropolitics. She is struck by the seeming hypocrisy of those who in the past de-platformed, ostracized and deprived of income, that is, canceled, others, who now speak out against what they regard as a new McCarthyism.

What happened?

James Davison Hunter, a professor of religion, culture and social theory at the University of Virginia, offered an explanation in an important if now largely forgotten 2017 Washington Post essay. In this piece, the author of a classic 1991 study, Culture Wars, traces how the earlier conflicta battle over sexuality, religion, family and the humanitiesmorphed and metastasized into a class war over globalization, immigration and the changing boundaries of legitimate pluralism, pitting the college-educated professional class against the non-college-educated lower middle and working classes.

For many middle- and low-wage workers, stagnating wages, declining union membership, lost manufacturing jobs and soaring income inequality undercut their hopes for a better life. Even worse, these groups saw their values and beliefs ridiculed as bigoted, homophobic, misogynist, xenophobic and backward by a relatively privileged and powerful elite.

Hunter cited a UVA survey that reported that seven of 10 of the less educated believe that the most educated and successful people in America are more interested in serving themselves than in serving the common good. Cynicism, mistrust and a sense of powerlessness were much higher among those with lower levels of schooling:

The poorly educated are one and a half times more likely than the college educated to hold the highest levels of distrust of the government; nearly three times more likely to be highly cynical of politicians; and over twice as likely to express the highest levels of alienation from the political process. Among the poorly educated who are religiously conservative, the levels of distrust, cynicism and alienation are even higher.

The cultural and class divide has had profound consequences for the humanities.

Today, the humanities increasingly exist on the cultures margins, with humanities faculty largely dismissed as politically predictable, their professional societies regarded as hyperpoliticized, their scholarship treated as irrelevant at best and partisan claptrap at worst.

Not surprisingly, humanists voices grow ever louder as their impact and influence grows progressively weaker.

To be sure, the most vocal attacks on the humanities are found in red states like Florida. But the real threats to the humanitiesthe continued decline in majors, the downsizing and even closure of departments, the increasing reliance on adjuncts, falling sales of academic books in humanities disciplines, flagging attendance at professional meetings, and shifting gen ed courses into high schoolis occurring apace in the blue states, too. Equally worrisome is the fact that the programs that do attract a growing number of undergraduates, including those in ethnic studies and gender and sexuality, increasingly think of themselves as part of the social sciences, not the humanities.

In a recent essay on the humanities future, the Times opinion columnist Ross Douthat makes a powerful case that in an era of scarcer resources, declining birth rates, sustained political conflict and students seeking a marketable credential, the humanities need Republican friends.

Instead, he avers, the humanities are doing a lot to alienate potential supporters. He quotes at length Tyler Austin Harper, an environmental studies professor at Bates College and a man of the left:

How did anyone think we could get away with being nakedly ideological for years without any chickens coming home to roost? Universities have always been tacitly left-leaning and faculty have always been openly so, but institutions have never been this transparently, officially political. Almost every single job ad in my field/related fields this year has some kind of brazenly politicized language.

Our society desperately needs the humanities and a functional public higher education system more broadly. And at the very moment were under sustained assault, some of us are still pouring fuel on Chris Rufos bonfire.

Douthat makes it clear that humanities programs cant build support among those who want to demote higher ed into a high-class trade school offering vocational training and building human capital, no matter how much we speak about imparting transferable skills or instilling critical thinking abilities or cross-cultural competencies.

But there are other conservatives who do respect the traditional value of a humanities education: cultural literacy, aesthetic appreciation, civic-mindedness, ethical thinking and historical perspective. Shouldnt we do more to appeal to those people, too?

What these folks wantand what I also desireis a greater emphasis on rigor, analysis, writing and communicating. Dont worry: imparting those skills wont make the humanities disciplines instrumental. Especially in the age of generative AI, when coding might be replaced by Alexa-like human commands, its hard for anyone in any political party to say, well, we dont need creative thinkers anymore or problem solvers, just coders/engineers.

Sure, students can read literature or history or popular philosophy books and visit museums on their own. But much of what I most enjoyed about my humanities classes was responding to the same work together, discussing it and having others to bounce ideas off. Or, in the case of experiencing an opera or film or other artistic work, bearing witness to something magical together.

The real failure of those of us who teach in the humanities today is not partisanship or politicization or an embrace of postmodern relativism. Its that as a result of hyperspecialization, prioritization of research over teaching and mentoring, and the production of scholarship inaccessible to a broader public, weve lost sight of the humanities true purpose.

That purpose is to understand the human experience in its complexity across time and place, to cultivate empathy and ethical insight, nurture aesthetic sensibilities, preserve collective memory and achievements, encourage social critique, inspire creativity and debate enduring questions about beauty, divinity, evil, human nature, justice and morality.

Disagree with this understanding of the humanities purpose if you wish. Treat the humanities as a pathway to advocacy and social justice if you will. But if you do that , dont be surprised to find our fields pushed even more into the cultures margins.

Youll be free to pontificate as you wish, but no one will be listening.

Steven Mintz is professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin.

Excerpt from:
The culture war, version 2.0 - Inside Higher Ed

With help from Derek Robertson

Elon Musk. | Alain Jocard/AFP via Getty Images

This weekend, Elon Musk unveiled the beta version of Grok, his new AI chatbot, which drew deeply on science fiction references: the bots name refers to the Martian science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land.

Musks early pitches for the project emphasized how politically different it would be from existing chatbots like ChatGPT. He unveiled it in an April interview with conservative pundit Tucker Carlson in which he described his interest in AI as motivated by fears that existing models, like the ones created by OpenAI, were baking in lefty bias. Im worried about the fact that its being trained to be politically correct, he said.

But his latest framing offers a vision of the future that is more, well, future-y. Per this weekends announcement, Grok has been released to a small number of users for beta testing, with plans to roll it out to premium subscribers of X, formerly known as Twitter.

In unveiling the bot on Saturday, Musks firm, xAI, cited a very different kind of inspiration: Grok, the announcement began, is an AI modeled after the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.

Tech industry watchers say there is a good reason for this evolution. While stoking culture war controversy can help generate buzz, many are skeptical outrage can attract a large number of users.

Sarcastic replies will entertain Musk superfans, but theyll ultimately be measured by their accuracy, said Nu Wexler, a former Senate staffer who has worked at Facebook and Twitter. Like social media platforms and search engines, theres not a big market for anti-woke AI, or any chatbots with a distinct political bent.

Musks brand has long been wrapped up in the futuristic technologies produced by his companies, which he has tied to long-term goals for the future, like colonizing the solar system.

In recent years, though, his public persona has become more political. Hes become an outspoken critic of progressive mores, describing his acquisition of Twitter since rebranded as X last year as part of a quest to defeat the woke mind virus. Musk has tied his anti-woke quest to his hands-off approach to moderation, an approach that has also allowed him to cut costs and led to a European Commission investigation of Xs compliance with the continents digital content rules.

With Grok, Musk appears to have taken a new tack. He has pledged Grok will be based (the antonym of woke in online slang), but hes leading his pitch with the vaguer offer that Grok will be spicy.

The bot is not yet widely available for testing, but so far spicy seems to be more PG-13 than politically explosive.

Asked for help making cocaine, in one exchange highlighted by Musk, Grok offered vague instructions like obtain a chemistry degree before adding Just kidding and adding a disclaimer that disavows illegal activity. Another Grok answer that Musk tweeted compared a computer programming challenge to trying to keep up with a never-ending orgy.

Oh this is gonna be fun Musk remarked.

What about the technicals? One of the big selling points touted this weekend was the capability to use data from X to provide up-to-date responses. OpenAIs ChatGPT does not incorporate information about events that have occurred in recent months. GPT-4 cited an April 2023 cutoff when explaining that it could not respond to DFDs request to discuss the recent news about Grok.

But that would not exactly revolutionize the current state of AI. Microsoft Bings Copilot, for one, already offers responses that incorporate information about recent events. Asked by DFD Monday morning about the release, Copilot responded, Grok is being trained by having real-time access to information from the platform, meaning X, before going on to cite more details of the rival chatbots release.

So for the moment, Musks promise for the future of AI is leaning heavily into zaniness and cinematic allusion. Hes also invoked Terminator and 2001: A Space Odyssey in discussing his AI ambitions. What if they just one day get a software update and theyre not so friendly anymore? Musk mused in a conversation with British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak on Thursday, Then weve got a [Terminator director] James Cameron movie on our hands.

Given Musks sweeping ambitions for his AI, its probably not a bad thing that hes mining sci-fi for scenarios to avoid: For one thing, he tweeted this weekend that hed like to one day integrate Grok into his Tesla vehicles.

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As AI policy fights take over Washington, K Street is cashing in.

POLITICOs Hailey Fuchs and Brendan Bordelon reported over the weekend on how the growing field of AI policy has all the makings of a big payday for the lobbying industry think the crypto lobbying blitz, but bigger.

Hailey and Brendan write that AI lobbyists say nearly every industry has realized it will have to reckon with AI, with groups from Nike to the Mayo Clinic looking for an information advantage. But theres just one problem, at least for now: institutional Washington isnt exactly crawling with AI experts.

Every lobbying firm in town is trying to make themselves out to be an expert in everything to try and lure in clients, so AI is just one of them, one lobbyist said. Id be hard-pressed to name you an AI expert downtown. Its hard enough to pick the AI experts in policymaking positions. Derek Robertson

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Now that last weeks AI Safety Summit is over, whats going to actually happen?

POLITICOs Morning Tech U.K. newsletter recapped some of the actionables this morning, from international research collaborations to the important topics that didnt get covered during the summit. A few of their takeaways:

Setting up a research network. The Bletchley Declaration called for a research group meant to complement all involved countries AI safety programs. A difficult enough task in its own right, this group also notably includes China, with whom there are plenty of barriers to that level of cooperation already.

Pulling together a report. And that research partnership also calls for a state of the science report on frontier model capabilities and risks. Mariano-Florentino Cullar, president of Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and one of the key advocates for this push, called for reports at a pace of every one to six months.

Oh yeah, and killer robots. The military use of AI went strangely undiscussed at a summit ostensibly all about safety. Also last week, the United States made a declaration on responsible military use of AI that 31 countries have already endorsed.

Stay in touch with the whole team: Ben Schreckinger ([emailprotected]); Derek Robertson ([emailprotected]); Mohar Chatterjee ([emailprotected]); Steve Heuser ([emailprotected]); Nate Robson ([emailprotected]) and Daniella Cheslow ([emailprotected]).

If youve had this newsletter forwarded to you, you can sign up and read our mission statement at the links provided.

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Musk and AI: Less culture wars, more Star Wars - POLITICO

Not everyone thinks that the Culture Wars are real. Many on the left think or purport to think that theyre a fantasy of the right-wing imagination, conjured up and put about in order to distract from the failures of Tory rule and win votes. A prominent proponent of this view is Sathnam Sanghera, Times journalist and author of Empireland, published in 2021 during the premiership of Boris Johnson. Focusing on the colonial front, Sanghera writes of the government-endorsed front in this imperial culture war, of taxpayer-funded culture warriors who are in the troubling business of propounding the inane idea that to be proud to be British you need to be proud of British imperial history, and who endors[e] campaigns to defend free speech and fight cancel culture. (I cant imagine to whom hes referring.) What is driving the government culture war? he asks. Answer: The most convincing explanation [is] that it was a deliberate political strategy propelled by long-time Tory fixer Douglas Smith. He concludes, This new breed of culture warriors is not interested in national unity: they will sow division, encourage racial discord, do anything, if it wins them elections.

This is stubborn, head-in-the-sands nonsense. How do I know that? Because the colonial front of the culture wars came uninvited to my doorstep eighteen months before Boris Johnson became Prime Minister. In late November 2017 I published an article in The Times, making the utterly moderate case that we British can find cause for both pride and shame in our colonial past. A fortnight later I posted an online description of my Oxford research project, Ethics and Empire, which entertained the possibility that imperial rule may sometimes be legitimate.

War only broke out when Dr (now Professor) Priyamvada Gopal of Cambridge University responded on 13 December with a tweet at 8.45am. She called her political allies to arms with the immortal words, OMG. This is serious shit We need to SHUT THIS DOWN. What followed was a campaign of repression, starting the very next day with an online denunciation by a body of Oxford students. This was then supplemented by two further mass denunciations within the space of a week, the first signed by 58 Oxford colleagues, the second by 170 or so worldwide. None of them was addressed to me, and the third was directed explicitly at my university, urging it to withdraw its support from the Ethics and Empire project.

That was my lived experience. Boris Johnson and Dougie Smith had nothing whatsoever to do with it. Those who chose to make war came from Sathnam Sangheras political stable. Indeed, the fourth of the 195 signatories to the third mass denunciation was an historian on whom Sanghera relies heavily in his book, Kim Wagner. He tells us that they travelled together to India.

If you dont believe me, ask Kathleen Stock. I dont know how Kathleen votes, but as she is a gay feminist philosopher, I rather doubt she puts her X by the Tory option on the ballot paper. In October 2021, she felt compelled to resign from her professorial post at the University of Sussex, perhaps ending her career in her early forties, because of a sustained campaign of harassment by students and some colleagues a campaign that her university somehow failed to stop. What was Kathleen Stocks sin? She held philosophical objections to prevailing views about transgender self-identification, and she persisted in expressing them.

So, no, Sathnam, it really, really wasnt Boris wot done it. It was your political tribe.

The silencing of free speech versus the future of liberal Britain

Not everyone on the left thinks that the Culture Wars are real and not everyone on the right who thinks theyre real, thinks theyre important. Many Tory MPs insist that the cost of living, funding the NHS, building more homes and improving productivity are more politically urgent and electorally more crucial. Yes, they very probably are. The issues at stake in the Culture Wars are crucial to the well-being of this country in the long-term, however, and fighting them will bring electoral dividends.

The first thing at stake is freedom of speech. If it is freedom of speech, then also of thought: because what we dare not say becomes, over time, too burdensome to carry on thinking. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that the freedom to voice perfectly reasonable thoughts about colonial history, transgender identity and race in Britain has come under threat. It has been constrained in recent years. This should be obvious to anyone whose eyes are open: the many cases of repression have been widely publicised in the press.

A single incident of repression chills the air around thousands of onlookers

It is true that, in my case and in Kathleen Stocks, attempts to silence us have failed. We have continued to say what we believe to be both important and true, but that should not have cost Kathleen her job. It is a practical certainty that there are many who share her gender-critical views or are sympathetic to them but, having witnessed the high penalty she has been made to pay, have resolved to keep their sympathy to themselves and their mouths prudently shut. A single incident of repression, made public, chills the air around thousands of onlookers. If anyone should think that my case and Kathleens are rare exceptions to an otherwise liberal rule, they should apply to the Free Speech Union for the depressingly long list.

Certainly, the vice-chancellors of most of Britains universities should do that, since they have been dogged in underestimating the scale of the problem. In its September 2021 memorandum on the then Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill, the Russell Group claimed, in defiance of ample evidence, that the problem is confined to a tiny handful of cancelled events. As Sir Tom Stoppard has observed and I have just implied the problem is far less cancellation than it is self-cancellation. Rather, single cancellations cause multiple self-cancellations.

Whats at stake here is not just the freedom of individuals to speak their minds. Nor is it just the testing of prevailing orthodoxies. Whats at stake is the liberal temper of culture and politics amongst us in Britain. If Britain is not to suffer the alarming degree of political polarisation now afflicting the US, we need liberal citizens who have the strengths of character the virtues that make them capable of responding to alien viewpoints thoughtfully and civilly. Universities have an enormously important civic responsibility to help student-citizens grow such virtues.

The good news is that two initiatives have improved the prospects of free speech in this country over the past three years. The first was the founding of the Free Speech Union by Toby Young in February 2020. (I have an interest here: I chair the FSUs board.) The FSU now boasts over 11,000 subscribing members, and it is helping to support legal cases that will nudge the future interpretation of the law in favour of freedom of speech. It has also spawned sister organisations in South Africa, Australia and New Zealand.

The second encouraging initiative was the Conservative Governments Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill, which became law in May of this year. By requiring universities for the first time to both defend and promote freedom of speech and academic freedom, by creating a system that will allow individuals complaints to rise above their universities to the Office for Students, by creating a new statutory tort that exposes delinquent universities to litigation, and by creating a new Director for Freedom of Speech whose sole mission is to enforce legal compliance, the Act will help liberate the tongues of students and professors currently tied by fear of harassment and institutional abandonment.

Transgender self-identification versus the well-being of the young

On the gender front, theres plenty of reason to doubt the intellectual coherence of transgender-self-identification. When a biological male believes that his inner, authentic self is female, what exactly does he think being female is? Im still waiting for someone to persuade me that this doesnt trade on gender stereotypes that feminists rightly taught us to throw overboard decades ago.

Theres even more reason to doubt that the well-being of young people is well served by taking their asserted genders at face value and allowing them to align their bodies by making irrevocable physical changes. According to Hannan Barnes shocking chronicle of the scandal at the Gender Identity Development Service (or GIDS) at the Tavistock Institute here in London, there was widespread doubt amongst clinicians about young peoples claims of an inborn trans nature, awareness that these were sometimes correlated with eating disorders and self-harm, and suspicion that they might be caused by abuse or trauma. Furthermore, the long-term effects of using puberty-blockers were largely unknown. There was considerable uncertainty about which patients would benefit from them, and the health of some young patients actually seemed to worsen whilst on them.

The basic narcissism of progressive virtue-signalling is exposed

Notwithstanding all this, the clinical team never discussed as a group what it even understood by the word transgender, clinicians never dream[t] of telling a young person that they werent trans, and they always prescribed puberty-blockers unless the patient actively refused them. Whats more, expressions of doubt by staff were discouraged. Someone would raise concerns, and someone else would move in to shut it down, writes Barnes. Those who persisted in asking difficult questions were not received well those who spoke out were labelled troublemakers. [According to one witness,] There were always scapegoats and they were always driven out one way or another [] Junior staff looked on and learnt.

Note the chilling effect.

Barnes book bears the title Time to Think because she identifies the general problem at GIDS as that of not stopping to think. This raises the question, why? Barnes gives several reasons. One was the fact that GIDS was propping up Tavistock financially, so senior managers had a material interest in not disturbing its assumptions. Another was the unwillingness to offend transgender lobby groups such as Mermaids for fear of a backlash. Most important of all was concern for the progressive reputation of the management. According to David Bell, consultant adult psychiatrist at the Trust and whistleblower, The senior management regarded [GIDS] as a star in our crown, because they saw it as a way of showing that we werent crusty old conservatives; that we were up with the game and cutting-edge. That was very important to the management to show we were like that. Observe how that has nothing at all to do with the care of patients, and how it has everything to do with the self-regard and political standing of the managers. Not for the first time, the basic narcissism of progressive virtue-signalling is exposed.

Whats at stake in the culture war over trans-gender self-identification? Amongst other things, there is the genuine mental and physical well-being of disturbed, vulnerable young people. Second, there is the freedom of transgender sceptics to give lawful expression to important and reasonable doubts, without suffering damage to their careers or the loss of their jobs at the hands of noisy, aggressive activists who want to stop us thinking, lest we see the truth.

Anti-racism versus the correction of ethnic disadvantage

The discrepancy between progressive virtue-signalling and the effective relief of human suffering is also evident on the racial front of the culture wars. In his recent book Beyond Grievance: What the Left gets wrong about ethnic minorities, Rakib Ehsan points to evidence that Britain today is remarkably lacking in racial prejudice. This includes the 2018 report of the European Unions Agency for Fundamental Rights, Being Black in the EU, which showed that racial discrimination was least prevalent in Britain amongst all EU member states. Ehsan also observes what Kemi Badenochs Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities reported in March 2021, namely, that average outcomes vary significantly between different ethnic groups. Chinese and Indian Britons usually outperform West Africans, West Africans outperform Caribbean Britons, and all non-white groups outperform poor whites.

These data simply do not support the claim of anti-racist activists that Black and Ethnic Minority (BAME) people in Britain are generally disadvantaged because of the racial prejudice of white Britons that systemic racism is the cause of the problem. They also suggest that some ethnic minorities tend to perform better than others because of internal cultural factors not least, strong families and high educational aspirations. By the same token, it suggests that the cause of relative disadvantage often lies in culture, not racism. Family dynamics and internal cultural attitudes, Ehsan writes, can have a very real impact on the life trajectory of people living in Britains competitive society.

Yet, Ehsan notes, in defiance of the empirical data, the Labour Party has given itself over to the Black Lives Matter movement, brainlessly importing racially polarising identity politics from the US. This holds, as a matter of political dogma, that we may speak of BAME people as if they are a single homogenous body, united in their common disadvantage, which is simply attributable to a systemic racism rooted in every white persons privilege. Ehsan comments that modern left academivists often prioritise the aggressive promotion of their regressive politics over rigorous academic investigation. Moreover, he thinks that the identitarian left would love nothing more than to psychologically imprison all of Britains ethnic and racial minorities in a hopeless state of grievance, so as to preserve their precious white-privilege narratives and their perception of Britain as a hellish island of rampant institutional racism.

They react with the fist of repression, desperate to freeze thought with fear

All of which raises the question, why are such narratives and perception so precious to the progressive Left? What are they valuable for? People who really care to correct unjust economic and social disadvantages are eager to understand the causes correctly, since accurate diagnosis is requisite for effective remedy. When presented with evidence that their wonted diagnosis say, systemic racism simply doesnt stand up empirically, they react with keen curiosity, albeit with scepticism. Thats because what matters above all else to them is solving the real problems of human distress and injustice.

That is not how the progressive Left react. Instead of words of doubt and criticism, they react with the fist of repression, filling the air with abuse and threat, desperate to freeze thought with fear. What do they really care about? Ehsan suggests that money is one thing, writing that the financial health of bad-faith actors ultimately rests on the peddling of fundamentally warped interpretations of British society and its institutions. Then, of course, there are anti-racist political careers built upon carefully fashioned personas, which attract social status and power.

There is more to it than that. It is notable that members of the Cultural Left are determined to think the very worst of their own country. It is important to them that Britain is, and remains, a hellish island of rampant racism. They dont need to believe this. The hard evidence says that they shouldnt, but they do, regardless. Why? Whats going on here psychologically, even spiritually?

One plausible candidate is the operation of a degenerate Christian sensibility. For Christians, the paradoxical mark of the genuinely righteous person is a profound awareness of their own unrighteousness. The saint is distinguished as the one who knows more deeply than others just what a sinner he really is. There is considerable virtue in this, for it tempers self-righteousness with compassion for fellow sinners, forbidding the righteous to cast the unrighteous beyond the human pale.

Yet, like all virtue, it is vulnerable to vice. It can degenerate from genuine humility into a perverse bid for supreme self-righteousness, which exaggerates ones sins and broadcasts the display of repentance: holier-than-thou because more-sinful-than-thou, signalling ones personal virtue by inflating the collective vice of ones people. The Jesuit-educated French philosopher, Pascal Bruckner, captured this when writing of contemporary, post-imperial Europe in the Tyranny of Guilt:

This is the paternalism of the guilty conscience: seeing ourselves as the kings of infamy is still a way of staying on the crest of history. Barbarity is Europes great pride, which it acknowledges only in itself; it denies that others are barbarous, finding attenuating circumstances for them (which is a way of denying them all responsibility).

There is a self-obsessive quality about this. Whilst the rhetoric claims the mantle of the oppressed, the action completely ignores them:

[B]y erecting lack of love for oneself into a leading principle, we lie to ourselves about ourselves and close ourselves to others In Western self-hatred, the Other has no place. It is a narcissistic relationship in which the African, the Indian, and Arab are brought in as extras.

Whats at stake in the culture war over race? First, an accurate diagnosis of the causes of unfair disadvantages suffered by particular ethnic groups or social classes, which is the prerequisite for effective relief. Second, the avoidance of a demoralising, polarising politics that excites groundless, Manichaean antagonism between blacks and whites.

Decolonisation versus the security of the West

The colonial front of the culture wars is related to the racial one. British colonial history has become controversial in part because it is used by the British representatives of Black Lives Matter to argue that the systemic racism of Britain today is rooted in our colonial past, which can be equated with slavery. Therefore, we must repudiate our colonial past, pulling down the statues of imperial heroes, in order to exorcise our lingering racism.

In addition to a more truthful account of race relations in Britain today, whats also at stake on the colonial front is the integrity of the United Kingdom. This is because some Scottish separatists make an argument that can be distilled into this equation: Britain equals Empire equals Evil. Accordingly, Scottish independence would be an act of national self-purification. By cutting the cords binding it to a Britain discredited by the imperial abuse of hard power, Scotland is free to sail off into a bright, new, shiny, sin-free, European future.

The British Empire was one of the first states in history to abolish slave-trading

Bound up with this is the third thing at stake on the colonial front of the culture wars: the strength and self-confidence of the West. Britain remains an important secondary pillar of liberal democracy in the world. Not many things would delight the Wests totalitarian enemies in Moscow and Beijing more than to witness the disintegration of the United Kingdom. Recalling the final days of the Scottish referendum campaign in September 2014, the then British ambassador to the UN Mark Lyall Grant has written, My Russian opposite number sympathised with barely suppressed glee at the prospect of the UK dismembered and its permanent seat on the security council called into question. It was clear to me that Scottish independence would have had a devastating impact on the UKs standing in the world, much greater than withdrawal from the EU ever would.

What is more, the obsession of the decolonisers with the British Empire rather than, say, the Arab or Chinese or Russian or Comanche or Zulu one is curious and begs explanation. In part, their real target is the record of the West, for which the British Empire is a proxy. Certainly, the story they tell about the British Empire as a litany of racism, economic exploitation, cultural repression and unconstrained violence is eagerly picked up and broadcast all over the world by the likes of Al Jazeera. It also fuels the demand by Caribbean states for reparations for slavery from Europe, quantified in June of this year by the Brattle Group as amounting to US$108 trillion.

As I have demonstrated in my recent book, Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning, the decolonising narrative is wildly distorted, not least in its dogged refusal to recognise that the British Empire was one of the first states in the history of the world to abolish slave-trading and slavery. It then used its imperial power to suppress these practices both from Brazil, across Africa, to India and Australasia. My attempt to correct the record has been met with the thought-resistant fist of repression, not only amongst university students and professors, but also amongst the junior staff of my original publisher at Bloomsbury.

Whats at stake in the culture war over colonial history? First, the exposure of a false narrative about race relations in Britain today. Second, the exposure of a false narrative that inflates the case for Scottish independence and the disintegration of the UK. Third, the exposure of a false narrative that undermines confidence in the liberal West, at home and abroad, at a time when illiberal powers in Moscow and Beijing are rattling their sabres in Ukraine and at Taiwan.

The Culture Wars and electoral advantage

So, whats at stake in the Culture Wars? In sum, these things:

These things give anyone who cares about them a reason to vote Conservative in the next general election. The Labour Party has been at best an uncertain defender of most of them and at worst an active opponent. On gender, it is true that Westminster Labour has lately set its face against gender self-identification. The Scottish Party has not. Gender-critical Rosie Duffield, MP, reported as recently as July that she felt ostracised by colleagues because of her views.

On race, Rakib Ehsan, who implies that he himself is a Labour supporter, reports that the party has completely swallowed racially polarising BLM politics imported from the US. When the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities published its report in March 2021, it was thoughtlessly dismissed by every commentator in the Guardian. The Labour Party is now promising us a new Race Equality Act to tackle the structural racism that scars our society.

On colonial history and its legacy, I have not heard any expression of dissent from the decolonising narrative by any leading member of the Labour Party. I observe that in his book-length case for British reparations for slavery, Britains Black Debt, the Trinidadian activist-academic Hilary Beckles deliberately began most of his chapters with a quotation of British Labour MPs and Shadow Cabinet Ministers.

As for freedom of speech, the Labour Party relentlessly opposed and harried the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill in its passage through Parliament.

For the first time, Teflon Nicola found herself fatally exposed

The Conservative Government, on the other hand, has resisted the dismantling of statues such as that of Cecil Rhodes, and the concomitant triumph of the decolonising narrative with its message of white colonial guilt, by insisting on a policy of retain and explain. It sponsored the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities, whose nuanced and grounded conclusions about ethnic disadvantage Ehsan has effectively confirmed. Finally, it launched and saw safely through Parliament the freedom of speech bill, which was enacted in May of this year.

There are many important things at stake in the culture wars, and a Conservative government looks more likely to defend them. Moreover, there is evidence that it will do so to electoral advantage. No doubt the cost of living and the funding of the NHS will be foremost in voters minds when they go to the ballot box in 2024. Nevertheless, culture war concerns will often be there, too. We have recently seen two straws blowing in the political wind. One was the widespread opposition that Nicola Sturgeon aroused in Scotland by stubbornly proposing a law that would effectively permit transgender self-identification. For the first time, Teflon Nicola found herself fatally exposed as she marched out ahead, only to find that lots of her would-be supporters were standing still, their arms sullenly folded. It was the gender issue that had broken their trust in her.

The second, more recent straw was the defeat ten days ago of the Voice to Parliament campaign in Australia. That campaign would have given Aboriginal people one of many ethnic groups in Australia and comprising only 3.5 per cent of the total population uniquely privileged representation. Propelled by a sense of colonial guilt (to quote Fraser Nelson in last Fridays Telegraph), the Yes campaign outspent No by five to one. It had sports stars, companies and the whole establishment on its side, yet still lost in every Australian state. The opposition was led by an Aboriginal politician, Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, who argued that colonialism has benefited Aboriginals. The re-racialisation of Australia into Manichaean camps of white and black should be resisted, and attention should focus instead on addressing unfair disparities, no matter what the skin colour of their victims. Prices message strongly echoes those of Rakib Ehsans book and Kemi Badenochs commission and it won decisively by six votes to four.

These two straws in the wind find broader social scientific backing in Eric Kaufmanns Policy Exchange report, The Politics of the Culture Wars in Contemporary Britain. From a YouGov poll in May 2022, Kaufmann concluded that the British public leans approximately 2 to 1 against the cultural leftist position across 20 culture wars issues. These, therefore, form ideal ground on which conservative parties can unite both the right and the centre-ground, whilst creating divisions between the centre-left and the far left.

That reveals the final thing at stake in the Culture Wars: votes.

Read more here:
Whats at stake in the culture wars? | Nigel Biggar - The Critic