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In 2019, after BuzzFeed and Verizon Media announced a combined 1,000 layoffs on the same day, many people who had shared their layoffs on Twitter were inundated with replies telling them to learn to code.

It wasnt just ill-timed career advice. It was a targeted harassment campaign against media workers that was organized on 4chan by people on the right who hate the mainstream media.

Memes have been used to target marginalized groups for at least a decade now. A new book by researchers at Harvards Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy documents how memes and the online communities that produce them sow disinformation and erode trust in the government and the mainstream media. Meme Wars: The Untold Story of the Online Battles Upending Democracy in America explains how the Stop the Steal movement the false idea that the 2020 election was stolen from former president Donald Trump started online and resulted in the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, and used examples from Gamergate, theOccupy Wall Street movement, and Donald Trumps rise to the presidency to develop its playbook.

Meme wars are culture wars, the authors write accelerated and intensified because of the infrastructure and incentives of the internet, which trades outrage and extremity as currency, rewards speed and scale, and flatten the experience of the world into a never-ending scroll of images and words.

In April 2020, co-authors Joan Donovan, the research director at Shorenstein, and Brian Friedberg, a Harvard ethnographer studying online fringe communities, launched a newsletter, Meme War Weekly, that got really grim very quickly, they told me. It was impossible to write about the political impact of memes on a week-by-week basis without noticing their significant social and political impacts over time. Their Media Manipulation Casebook, a series of case studies published in October 2020, was a precursor to their new book.

I caught up with Donovan, Friedberg, and Emily Dreyfuss, a technology journalist and 2018 Nieman Fellow, to talk about their book and what journalists can learn from the last 10 years of memes to inform their future coverage of American democracy. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Hanaa Tameez:At what point in your research did you realize you had a book on your hands?

In 2016, I had written an article in MIT Tech Review about meme wars in the 2016 election. We had a lot of interesting data lying around and wanted to put it into an internet history. We realized very quickly that our starting point would be the Occupy Wall Street movement and the use of memes to mobilize people in that moment in 2011. Many of the books and writings about the Occupy movement didnt attend to the fact that it was just as mobilizing for the right as it was for the left. And so we wanted to begin with our understanding of where Andrew Breitbart, Steve Bannon, and Alex Jones got their foothold in social media and meme wars.

It wasnt out of nowhere, but hearing people ask how it could be happening really clarified for me that we actually do know, [whereas many] other people dont know. Joan and Brians research about meme wars had been ongoing for years, but it struck us that this was the perfect vehicle to explain something that other people thought was unexplainable. That night, we wrote the outline for the book.

Tameez:After writing this, what are your takeaways about where we stand as a society, as a democracy?

What are the comparable big movements within [the Democratic Partys political communication]? You have the much discussed adoption of the Dark Brandon meme by more mainstream Democratic figures, potentially signaling an entrance into the meme wars. We have yet to see if thats actually going to impact the midterms. But there is definitely [increasing] adoption of us versus them messaging among most political factions in the U.S. I think we saw the foundation for that in the 10 years leading up to the book.

The media itself is a proxy for all types of institutions, including academia and government. I was awakened to that through the course of researching this book, and then I couldnt unsee it. With Roe v. Wade and whats going on with the Supreme Court in the U.S. right now, I think were watching that lack of trust in the system increasing on the left, as well as the right. Our book focuses a lot on the right, and there are a lot of people who feel that way on the right, but in the U.S., a lot of people feel that way on the left as well.

Tameez:Where do you think the press first went wrong?

One of the things that is important to understand here is that memes dont just come in the form of an image with some quippy text. Theyre viral slogans, too. Theyre the activation of peoples confirmation bias and stereotypes. As we watched political opponents begin to memeify one another and push these tropes some with the intention of sowing disinformation, others with the intention of spreading propaganda I think many journalists were initially very dismissive.

One big example is the way in which the alt-right arrived in the media landscape. Its not that journalists were unable to understand the rise of a white supremacist movement, but they refused to call it what it was. Instead, they used the branding and memes that had been drudged up by these groups that were specifically seeking to rebrand themselvesthey didnt know they were being played.

So you saw the rise, not just of the alt-right, but of a key figure in the alt-right with Richard Spencer, who was able to use all of that media attention to garner and recruit people into this movement, which then manifested and moved [into the real world] at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, where many people were injured and a woman died.

When were trying to understand where the media is culpable in meme wars, its not just that they dropped the ball, but also that some in the mainstream media thought use of the term alt-right wasnt something that they needed to concern themselves with. In doing so, they spread the meme very far.

The media treating Twitter like an assignment editor is one of the fundamental errors that enabled meme warriors to play everyone. It showed that if they could get [something] to trend enough, then theyd get a story about it. In the era of social media taking all the ad sales out of journalism, it became even more important for journalists to write more, have a lot of content, and be covering the thing that everyone was talking about, which then created a snowball effect.

If something trended and someone covered it, a million other people covered it as well. It really reinforced things like the term alt-right, and if you then asked where the term alt-right even came from, it was very hard to find the origin because of all that content that used the term without questioning it. At Wired, we used alt-right for a very long time until it occurred to us: Whoa, wait, is this a problematic phrase? But at that point, wed already written a million articles adding to the problem.

Tameez: In the book, you write about hate facts, or misrepresented statistics and pseudoscience that often come up in these communities and target marginalized people. What role does the press play in perpetuating those?

One of the concurrent problems with the media coverage is that there will often be stand-ins, particularly in the right-wing press. Instead of saying Black people are doing something, theyll say inner city or Chicago. While they might not be directly quoting these [hate facts], they all line up with the comment sections and the Facebook shares. Theres a lot of informal knowledge-making that happens underneath the mainstream news stories that the outlets arent necessarily responsible for. One of the things that weve talked about is how the alt-right comment bombed and raided the comment sections of the conservative press, which is why a lot of comments sections on websites disappeared.

So there are placeholder words and frames that are being accepted, and a lot of uncritical adoption of official statements and statements by police that further criminalize marginalized communities. I think thats the next frontier that needs to be addressed [and understood]: That this stuff feeds into narratives that keep people impoverished and oppressed.

Tameez:What do you think are the major takeaways for journalists from Meme Wars?

[Journalists need to ask]: Is calling attention to these memes going to improve the audiences understanding? And then, is covering this going to be damaging in some way? Is it going to give oxygen to those who are trying to wage culture wars?

The point at which journalists should pay attention to these things is always a tough call, unfortunately. But weve noticed over the years that the far right is going to lie to you about who they are. Theyre going to lie to you about their intentions are, because their views are fringe, unethical, and antisocial. Journalists are going to have to learn the methods of digital internet forensics and become much more adept at internet sleuthing if theyre going to survive writing about these meme wars. We caution journalists not to get into things that they dont quite understand.

My broad advice to journalists is to get to know your beat, and to stay on top of those who are using media manipulation, disinformation, and meme wars to carry out their politics or to make a profit.

Tameez: Some people say that theres no difference between culture and internet culture anymore because the internet is a driving part of our lives and society. Does that logic apply to meme wars, too?

The impact of meme wars, central to the book, is Joans theory that meme wars drive something online to happen in the real world. The meme wars fail if something doesnt happen in the real world, because the point of them is not to just be online, but to actually influence culture.

Donovan: I would add that theres no more offline. If youre a child of the early internet days of AOL, it was very clear when you were online, because you literally were plugged into a phone line that was plugged into the wall. We started the book with the Occupy Wall Street movement because it was the first huge instance in the U.S. of social media moving into public spaces and promoting civil disobedience.

Tameez:What is your tech stack? How do you protect yourselves online and mentally?

The work is rewarding when you see things getting done that are outside of your purview. As researchers, we know the work that we do is of global importance. When journalists give us feedback saying that they were able to write better stories because of our research, when technologists say they were able to create better software because of our work, when civil society actors say they were able to influence culture or policy in certain directions, when members of Congress say thank you for the research that we do that, to me, is a really important protective element.

If we were doing this work and sort of screaming into the void and watching as democracies fail, it would be hard to keep doing it. But we know the work that were doing is getting taken up by important decision-makers and stakeholders, and is protecting other people from going through some of these very damaging campaigns. Theres a sense of justice in the work that you dont get from many other jobs.

Dreyfuss: There is power in explaining something that is happening in the world and figuring it out. The existence of this book, and a lot of the work that we do as a team, is about recognizing that something is happening and figuring out why. Life is full of unknowable things and unknown things. There is some power and calmness that comes from [the recognition] that this is not an unknowable problem.

Friedberg: I almost exclusively consume some kind of indie media. At this point, the far right is just one of the many voices I listen to on a daily basis. I would rather triangulate between a real Nazi podcast and a real lefty podcast than between CNN and Fox News. I prefer this side of the media world.

Tameez: Is there anything else you want to add?

The people who have most been marginalized by our political system use the tools of new media to be seen and be heard. But that doesnt necessarily make social media good for a society. Social media is now overrun with very powerful politicians and very powerful rich men who have a very particular political agenda.

Even though social media as a technology hasnt really changed that much over the last decade, its users have, and its become much more ubiquitous. Its become much more of a tool of the powerful to oppress, rather than a weapon of the weak to liberate. As journalists are thinking about what stories they should be telling, they should turn their eye to the groups of people who are the most marginalized, who are struggling for recognition. They should not assume that just because a few accounts on social media are being loud that that means the whole multiplicity of that identity is represented.

The way in which social media is structured is almost like a distorted mirror of our society. Its imperative that journalists understand that they are on the front lines of the meme wars, and that they can really shift the balance if they shift who they spotlight and what stories they choose to tell.

Read the rest here:
You don't know which side is playing you: The authors of Meme Wars have some advice for journalists - Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard

The Brooklyn Public Library hosted a virtual panel on Wednesday evening, September 21, in honor of Banned Books Week, called Open Eyes: Banned Books, Kids, and the War on Reading. The panel was moderated by Washington Post journalist Hannah Natanson, who covers K-12 education news, including the education culture wars beat, and featured Jeffrey Blair, owner of EyeSeeMe African American Childrens Bookstore in University City, Mo.; Josh Block, staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union who specializes in LGBTQ issues; Melissa Jacobs, director of the New York City Department of Education/School Library System; and Linda Johnson, president and CEO of the Brooklyn Public Library.

Introducing the panel, Marcia Ely, Brooklyn Public Library director of programs, noted that this past spring, the library, which is the fifth largest public library system in the U.S. extended an offer to teens living anywhere in the country that they could obtain a library card at the BPL and thus receive access to digital editions of books that might be challenged or banned in their communities. This has opened up floodgates, Ely said. Weve received more than 5,000 applications for cards from every single state and the District of Columbia.

The panelists began their lively hour-long conversation by explaining the current situation concerning banned books. Its bigger than any recorded effort in the last 20-some years, which is when book challenges became something that we were counting, Johnson stated. In parts of the country theres legislation that is actually banning material from being used in classrooms and public libraries. Its becoming a formal way to circumvent First Amendment rights. Referencing BPLs efforts to provide library cards for teens who do not live in Brooklyn, she said that besides wanting to put books into the hands of teenagers, the goal of the initiative is to get everybody involved and fight this assault on the First Amendment.

Jacobs emphasized that school librarianswho are educators as well as librariansare thoughtful and have policies and procedures for selection and curation of their collections. All librarians, she said, want young readers to see themselves in books as well as to emphasize with others and to better understand the world around them. It is really challenging and frightening and frustrating, she added, that so many excellent books are being challenged and banned after so much thought and selection has gone into these titles.

Its not just a bunch of books on a shelf, she noted, while describing what goes into selecting and curating library collections, and that there is always an emphasis on providing books written from different points of view. A school library, a public library, theyre living, breathing entities, she insisted. There are programs and there are professionals who are driving those programs, selecting and curating those materials. Its not just someone looking at a catalog and circling a picture.

Book banners often judge a book by its cover, she added. They frequently take controversial passages or images of books out of context when presenting challenges and demanding their removal. Those books have to be read as a whole, she insisted. You cant just take a snippet and say its inappropriate.

Books Open Hearts and Minds

Blair noted that controversial books that contain difficult themes, like Toni Morrisons The Bluest Eye, can be essential reading. Young people today are exposed to a lot of things outside of books, he pointed out, including violence in their daily lives and/or in the world around them. Complex and difficult thingsthat is the whole point of educationwe want to prepare our children to encounter a difficult world, he said.

Johnson pointed out that teens, especially those who are exploring their identity or confronting difficulties in their lives, often feel isolated in their communities. I know this because the emails we are getting from the students requesting the library cards, she explained, speak specifically to this point. These books help them form their opinions and get over these feelings that they are experiencing in their communities. And theyre doing it through literature. Thats exactly the point of a great book: to open your eyes to other points of view, and to know yourself better and to know those people not like you better. Empathy.

The escalation in books being challenged or banned, Block noted, is part of a political and ideological movement right now. These are not random examples of parents looking in their students backpacks and seeing a book with a dirty word in it. This is part of a society-wide backlash to #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, to the increased visibility and acceptance of LGBTQ people. The same social movements that are pushing for Dont Say Gay Bills and anti-CRT laws in schools are also pushing for the censorship of books.

Jacobs noted also that there is a nationwide shortage of school librarians, which is having a huge impact concerning the defense of books that are challenged. You dont have librarians there to defend their collections, she said. And you dont have librarians tending to the curation of these materials and who are able to speak to how and why these materials are selected for schools.

She added that weeding collections of controversial books will have an impact that extends far beyond schools and into the future, warning, The smaller we make our collections, the less our kids are going to learn about the world, and how to interact with it and how to be a part of it, and how to develop their abilities and skills and be part of a democratic society. To me, thats really frightening.

Blair explained that a lot of book challenges and bans have to do with racism and homophobia. Individuals want to prescribe a particular narrative about America: about how America is formed, about who is an American. To me, its offensive: were trying to train the next generation to be critical thinkers and not individuals who are going to continually consume what they already know, what they already think. The whole point of education is to help our children be able to live in a world that is quite diverse, that has people they dont agree with, but they still have to live and work with.

The smaller we make our collections, the less our kids are going to learn about the world, and how to interact with it and how to be a part of it. To me, that's really frightening. Melissa Jacobs

He added that parents may have the right to determine what their child reads or does not read, but they do not have any right to determine what other peoples children may or may not read. Those who would deny other peoples children access to books, he declared, [are] trying to narrow the perspective of what America is all about, and we cannot let that happen.

Freedom Is the Right to Read

Referencing the Supreme Courts overturning of Roe v. Wade, and the fact that lower courts in some regions have conservative judges sympathetic to book bans, Block noted that the courts as they stand now do not always protect individual rights. We need a culture of people working together to protect their rights and the rights of others, he said, expressing his admiration for a group of teenagers in Texas who recently formed a banned books club to read and discuss books that had been taken off library shelves in their community.

While some government officials receptiveness to banning controversial books is pandering, to their more extremist constituents, Block noted, a lot of it is about shaping peoples reality. Theres a reason why the 1619 Project is being banned and then replaced with nonsense, made-up history.

Jacobs urged parents to read the same books as their children and discuss the contents with them. You can disagree with what is happening in a book and feel uncomfortable with something. But conversations are so important.

Nothing like telling a teenager they cant read something, right? Johnson interjected. Any enterprising teenager is going to find that material, whether its taken out of the classroom or the school library.

Parents dont own their children, especially when youre talking about children in their teens, Block pointed out. Children have their own Constitutional rights, independent of what their parents might want. Teenagers have their First Amendment rights to speak, their First Amendment rights to read. They may well want to read things their parents disagree with or dont want them to read. They are their own people. Its not all about the parents and the parents rights.

Blair recalled how in St. Louis, Mo., a group of students sued their school district for removing The Bluest Eye from library shelves, forcing the school district to reverse its decision the very next day. Blair said that this case provides an excellent example for students on the importance of civic engagement: Freedom is not free: you have to fight for it, and to guard it. If its important to you, you cant stay on the sidelines. You literally can have your rights taken from you if youre not diligent.

Read more:
The Right to Read: Brooklyn Public Library Hosts Banned Books Week Panel - Publishers Weekly

School board elections in Washington are mostly non-partisan, but that hasnt stopped the polarization thats infected much of our political system from showing up at their meetings.

Soundside headed to Spokane for a recent example, to Northwood Middle School, and a recent board meeting of the Mead School District.

School boards set policy for their districts and adopt instructional material like textbooks. Thats making them another battleground for the culture wars playing out in Facebook groups, on cable news, and around dinner tables across the U.S.

At issue in Spokane were a pair of proposals from Mead School Board President Michael Cannon. The first policy would have banned so-called critical race theory instruction from the school district, while the second would police gender studies materials in elementary libraries.

Nate Sanford , a reporter for The Inlander in Spokane, provided his perspective from the board meetings at the Mead School District.

Of more than 100 community members who signed up to speak at the Sept. 12 meeting, nearly 60 were able to actually give their statements during the two-hour public comment period. Those who spoke up ran the gamut from parents to students, along with a number of teachers and faculty members from district schools.

Another target for critics has been the expansion of diversity and inclusion training for teachers and school officials. Last year, Gov. Jay Inslee signed a number of bills addressing racial equity at state-funded schools. The highest profile bill, SB 5044, which aims to teach school officials about equity with the aim of "dismantling institutional racism in the public school system," took effect earlier this year.

Tricia Lubach of the Washington state School Directors Association explained that school boards have two main goals. The first is to update Washington School Board standards with an eye towards ensuring that those standards include the ways that school directors do their work in a way that's thoughtful about cultural competency, diversity, equity and inclusion.

The second goal is to develop and to deliver training to school directors around the state in regard to educational equity.

Lubach says they approach their job without a political lens.

"I think we're in a polarized time, right now in a number of different areas, certainly within education policy," she explained. "Our focus is really on providing them with the training that they need, that helps them best serve every student in their district."

See original here:
'Critical Race Theory' and gender studies take center stage in Spokane - KUOW News and Information

A majority of the public agree with so-called woke positions on issues such as racial equality, immigration and sexual identity, according to the latest annual poll of British social attitudes, in the latest sign that once-marginal liberal views are increasingly mainstream.

Although such issues are used by Conservative politicians and the media to fuel culture wars and whip up antipathy towards a supposed politically correct cultural elite, the survey shows the balance of public opinion in Britain has shifted in favour of more inclusive attitudes over the past 20 years.

These suggest a rapid and significant shift in attitudes in Britain over recent decades. As a country we are as liberal as we have been at any point since this survey started in 1983, said the political scientist Sir John Curtice, a senior fellow at the National Centre for Social Research (NatCen), which carries out the survey.

The surveys other key findings indicate public support for increased taxation and public spending, including on social security benefits, remained strong as Britain prepared to endure a punishing cost of living crisis. Support for redistributing income from the rich to the less well-off was at its highest levels for nearly 30 years.

The pro-tax and spending were shared across the political divide, with 61% of Labour voters and 46% of Tory voters in agreement. Overall, 52% said the government should raise taxes and invest more in health, education and social benefits.

The publics healthy appetite for state intervention, a legacy perhaps of the perceived success of Covid support measures, may suggest they will support new prime minister Liz Trusss 150bn cost of living support package. However, her support for tax cuts and disdain for redistributionary fiscal policies may be more jarring.

Our survey suggests the public faces the cost of living crisis with as much appetite for increased government spending as it had during the pandemic. Despite the marked increase in public expenditure during the pandemic, support for increased taxation and spending is relatively high, even among Conservative supporters, said Gillian Prior, NatCens chief executive.

The survey also revealed the striking degree to which socially liberal views were far more prevalent in London. A third of Londoners (34%) are socially liberal, compared with just 19% of those in urban areas outside the capital. Sarah Butt, a research director at NatCen, said: London looks very different from the rest of the country.

Culture war rows have become increasingly prominent in recent years, ranging from disagreements over Britains colonial legacy, to whether moves towards and racial, sexual and gender equality have gone too far, with anti-woke critics specifically targeting liberal institutions such as the BBC, universities and national charities.

The survey asked a range of questions around issues of Britishness, national pride, the economic and cultural effects of immigration, and attitudes over equal opportunities. Its findings included:

While most people had a strong sense of Britishness, more than half (54%) agreed it was not important to be born in Britain to be truly British up from 25% in 2013. Similarly 34% agreed Britain is a better country than most others, down from 54% in 2013.

The proportion of people stating that immigration was bad for the economy fell from 42% in 2011 to 20% in 2021. Those saying it was good rose from 21% to 50%. There were similar shifts in views on whether immigrants enriched or undermined Britains cultural life.

There was growing public support for the proposition that equal rights had not gone far enough for black and Asian people (45%, up from 25% in 2000). In contrast, the proportion who felt race equality had gone too far fell from 35% in 2000 to 19% in 2021. About a third felt things were about right..

73 % of people thought rights for lesbians, gay men and bisexuals had not gone far enough or were about right, compared with 62% who thought this in 2013.

About 64% of people thought rights for transgender people had not gone far enough or were about right compared with 34% who believed they had gone too far. The question had not been asked in previous years.

There was a further, and significant fall in the proportion of the public who agreed transgender people should be able to change the sex on their birth certificate, from 58% in 2016 and 53% in 2019, to 32% in 2021. However, the survey said the wording of the question had changed slightly after 2019 to make it clearer it wanted the publics views on the recording of sex on the birth certificate, rather than whether a person should have the broader right to change gender.

It may be that some people accept that people should be able to secure some form of legal recognition of their acquired gender but also believe that this should not involve changing the sex that is recorded on their birth certificate.

For the most part our indicators suggest that, whereas it might once have represented a widespread view, now the anti-woke position on culture war issues often appear to be more of a minority one, the survey found.

The relatively rapid change in views suggested it was not just generational, but that more older people were becoming more socially liberal.

Nonetheless, leave and remain supporters were divided in their views on culture war issues, the survey found. For example, 65% of Brexit supporters said it was important to be born in Britain to be fully British, compared with 34% of remainers.

While pushing a culture war agenda may successfully enthuse core Tory voters and potentially rekindle post-Brexit electoral divisions between remainers and leavers that audience appears to be diminishing, and there is no guarantee that the anti-woke effect will be powerful enough to win an election, the survey concludes.

Curtice said: Inevitably some people are uncomfortable with such change in society, and will quite reasonably look to politicians to express their concern. But we cannot assume the politicians who express that concern will find that their stance brings them electoral success.

Health service satisfaction down but faith in NHS principles strongLong waiting times for hospital and GP appointments and lack of government funding drove a dramatic decline in public satisfaction with the NHS in 2021. The 17-point year-on-year fall showed public satisfaction dropped to 36%, its lowest level since 1997. However, 76% supported keeping the NHS free at the point of delivery. Rationing of services and poor staff pay drove record public dissatisfaction in adult social care services (50%).

Support for change in the UK voting system?There was majority public support for the introduction of a proportional representation system for voting MPs into the House of Commons for the first time since the survey began in 1983. Just over half (51%) favoured reform, up from 27% in 2011). While a majority of Labour voters supported PR (61%) only 29% of conservatives favoured electoral reform.

Increasing concern over the environmentWorries over the climate crisis are increasing, with 40% saying they were very concerned, almost double the proportion in 2010. More than half (57%) said they were willing to pay to protect the environment either through higher prices, taxes or a cut in living standards. While 60% blame human activity for climate change, just 6% denied there had been any decline in the environment.

The 2021 British Social Attitudes survey consisted of 6,250 interviews with a representative, random sample of adults in Britain. It was conducted just under a year ago between 16 September and 31 October 2021.

This article was amended on 22 September 2022 to add details from the survey about sexual identity; this was referenced in an earlier version, but relevant figures had not been included.

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Majority of UK public agree with liberal views on race and sexual identity - The Guardian

Amidst a backdrop of global conflict, the culture wars continue to compel us. But whilst social and cultural issues are often hotly contested, our obsession with the culture wars may spell the end of progressive politics, writes Frank Furedi.

Even today, when the cost-of-living crisis haunts society, it appears that it is cultural conflicts that captures our imagination. Debates on gender ideology and trigger excites the media. Prominent figures from the past from David Hume to Edmund Burke are denounced for their complicity with slavery.

It is as if disputes about competing values, lifestyles and perceptions of cultural threat have come to dominate public life. The political vocabulary that has served western societies in the 19th and most of the 20th century has become exhausted and has been displaced by the idiom of culture. Even disputes that were once conveyed through the rhetoric of class, social injustice or ideology tend to come alive only when communicated through the grammar of culture. Attacks on the Bullingdon Clubs old boy culture or the culture of cronyism of Etonians are met with denunciation of the culture of entitlement or that of dependency culture. Hostility to the police is expressed through the denunciation of its canteen culture.

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When culture becomes politicised it tends to drag the personal dimensions of everyday life into the public domain to the point where what you wear, who you sleep with, what you eat and consume, how you bring up and feed your child or what you read are often presented and interpreted as political statements

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It is evident that it is through the contestation of norms and values and of cultural authority that conflicts of interests and disputes are expressed. But culture is not simply a medium for expressing disputes that have emerged in other domains of social experience. When culture becomes politicised it tends to drag the personal dimensions of everyday life into the public domain to the point where what you wear, who you sleep with, what you eat and consume, how you bring up and feed your child or what you read are often presented and interpreted as political statements. What in another context, Freud described as the narcissism of minor difference has acquired a ubiquitous presence in western society.

The Origins of the Culture Wars

Disputes informed by contrasting cultural values have a long history. However, as I note elsewhere it was during the 1950s that the unravelling of the prevailing political consensus in Western societies begun to open up the realm of values, lifestyle and personal life to conflicts that were hitherto conducted through the language of politics [1]. These disputes, which were motivated by competing claims to moral authority initially assumed the polarised form of a clash between traditional and moral values. In the 1960s these conflicts were further politicised and gained definition through the growth of the Counter-Culture and the backlash that it precipitated by their traditionalist and conservative opponents.

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At the time the main battlefield was the pre-political domain of private life. But throughout the 1970s disputes regarding family values, sexuality, inter-personal relations expanded and began to touch on attitudes to consumption and the environment. The politicisation of these values contained a powerful imperative towards intensifying the conflicts surrounding them. Because such conflicts touch on the fundamental principles that guide peoples conduct in their everyday life they have the potential to engage and mobilise peoples emotions. As Francis Fukuyama noted conflicts over values are potentially much more deadly than conflicts over material possessions or wealth' [2]. It is always possible to come to a sensible compromise over the way that material resources are divided up or the way that political offices are distributed. Values express a persons identity and beliefs to the point that if they are not affirmed an individual may experience it as a slight on their persona or as an existential crisis. That is why conflicts involving religion, value or moral claims are rarely resolved through compromise.[ii

One of the first important studies to draw attention to the significance of what would turn into the contemporary Culture Wars was Gabriel Kolkos 1968 study The Politics of War. In this text he drew attention to what he perceived as the cultural realignment of public life in the United States. According to Kolko this realignment in Americas public culture represented allegiances to different formulations and sources of moral authority. He claimed that these contrasting sentiments were expressed through the 'institutionalization and politicization of two fundamentally different cultural systems. Kolko pointed out that the battleground for the conduct of this conflict was now the pre-political domain of private life. And he warned that this conflict was not susceptible to the usual formulae of compromise because each side of the cultural divide operate with a different conception of the sacred and the mere existence of the one represents a certain desecration of the other. [3][iii]

The introduction of cultural conflict into American politics occurred sometime before they gained importance in other societies. But even in the 1970s it was evident that conflicts over culture would play an increasingly significant role in other societies. In Britain the tension between modernisers and traditionalists always lurked in the background. Samuel Beers study of this conflict, Britain Against Itself has as its main theme the decline of civic culture and of deference. Beer is aware that in this battle between modernity and tradition the latter has prevailed and he sensed that result of this technocratic turn would be the erosion of the British way of life. [4][iv

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In the literature on the Culture Wars the conflict was generally perceived as a split between orthodox and progressive view of morality. Divisions over issues that are considered moral dominate the Culture War, particularly in the United States. But the conflict is by no means confined to disputes about the family, sex, abortion or the role of religion. These are key issues for social conservatives and for movements that are hostile to the influence of traditional values in the private sphere. But the wider cultural critique of capitalism is far more directed at issues that transcend the private or pre-political sphere. It targets consumerism, materialism, the work ethic, technocratic ethos and numerous Enlightenment values such as individual autonomy, rationality and progress.

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Cultural norms and values define communities, their way of life and their members identity. These sentiments are internalised and become constitutive elements of who we are. Conflict over the family, sexuality and the conduct of intimate relationship has rendered cultural conflicts a dramatically personal character

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The politicisation of culture is directly connected to the exhaustion of ideological alternatives. By the early 1980s and certainly by the end of the Cold War it was evident that the emotional energies that were hitherto invested in political in political ideals were increasingly channelled into moral and cultural issues. At the time, Christopher Lasch pointed out that: Longestablished distinctions between left and right, liberalism and conservatism, revolutionary politics and reformists politics, progressives and reactionaries are breaking down in the face of new questions about technology, consumption, womens rights, environmental decay, and nuclear armaments, questions to which no one has any ready-made answers. New issues give rise to new political configurations. So does the growing importance of cultural issues.' Since the early 1980s the trends identified by Lasch have- if anything intensified and today issues such multi-culturalism, immigration, sexuality as well as life-style matters dominate public debate.

Deconstructing the Culture Wars

The politicisation of culture contains the potential for expressing conflicts and problems in a form that are difficult to resolve. Cultural norms and values define communities, their way of life and their members identity. These sentiments are internalised and become constitutive elements of who we are. Conflict over the family, sexuality and the conduct of intimate relationship has rendered cultural conflicts a dramatically personal character. The phrase personal is political expressed the shift towards the contestation of values prevailing in the private sphere. Conflict in the private and pre-political sphere resembles that which pertains to wider society in one very important respect. In both spheres the absence of consensus about fundamental norms and values creates the foundation for conflicts and divisions. Moreover the privatised manner in which these conflicts are experienced means that in some cases they can acquire an intensely personal and emotional character.

One reason why it is difficult to capture the dynamic of the culture war is that this conflict rarely assumes an explicit and systematic character. Numerous studies insist claims about the polarisation of culture are exaggerated and some even go so far as to deny its very existence [5]. Conservative denunciations of political correctness have been continually met with angry denial and the assertion that such charges represent the desperate attempt by backward looking fundamentalists to justify their prejudices. Cultural politics rarely recognises itself for what it is. It cannot acknowledge its ambition to monopolise moral authority. Although advocates of lifestyle and identity cause assert that they are tolerant, inclusive and pluralistic they cannot accept the moral legitimacy of their opponents. That is why in the United States where the Cultural War is most developed the language deployed by the protagonists is so intemperate and inflammatory.

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The politicisation of culture and disputes about the art of living encourage an intolerant, petty and self-serving attitude towards public life. There are no progressive causes that can be advanced through the medium of culture. Those who flatter themselves as enlightened and inclusive are no less complicit than their opponents in creating a climate of intolerance. The Culture Wars is bad news because regardless of the cause it encourages narrow minded and parochial thinking on the part of all of its all too eager participants.

Frank Furedis The Road To Ukraine: How The West Lost Its Way is published by De Gruyter next month.

[i]

[1] See F. Furedi (2004) First World War Still No End In Sight, Bloomsbury, p.161.

[ii] [2] Fukuyama, F. (1992) The End of History And the Last Man, The Free Press : New York. p.214.

[iii] [3] Kolko, G. (1968) The Politics of War: The World and United States Foreign Policy 1943-1945, (Vintage Books : New York).pp. 118,128, 131.

[iv] [4] Beer, Samuel (1982) Britain Against Itself: The Political Contradictions Of Collectivism, W.W. Norton & Company.

[5] See for example Fiorina, M.P. (2006) Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America, Pearson Longman : New York.

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The culture war is killing progress | Frank Furedi - IAI