There was a time in the UK when “culture war” conjured up a certain ugliness that disfigures political discourse across the Atlantic. Particular kinds of Americans, went the narrative, “get bitter, cling to guns or religion, or antipathy to people who aren’t like them”, as Barack Obama put it in 2008, nearly torpedoing his quest for the Democratic presidential nomination. His opponents put rocket boosters under so-called culture war strategies when he was president – from racist conspiracies about Obama’s birth certificate to unabashed Islamophobia. The Donald Trump phenomenon was forged in those fires.
You can see why the British right would seek to import this poison, because there have been political dividends Stateside. We also already had significant homegrown sources, thanks to our highly aggressive rightwing newspaper ecosystem. Regardless of the provenance, in simple terms, the approach allows you to flood the airwaves, drowning out discussion on substantive issues. When vulnerable minorities are in the firing line, attention is deflected from the rich and powerful. The “culture war” strategy seeks to place opponents on a defensive footing. As Ronald Reagan once summed up: “If you’re explaining, you’re losing.”
But a new report by the centrist thinktank More in Common both suggests that the culture war strategy may have run out of road, and that there are limitations in how the topic is framed. Just a fifth of the population are familiar with the term and its meaning, according to its polling. That said, the report itself lacks a clear definition of what a culture war is for people to refer to and evaluate. My own view is that it’s an orchestrated backlash against the claims of minorities, as well as the more progressive social norms of younger generations. This definition will be disputed, but at least it is clear.
The report finds that if voters receive leaflets from parliamentary candidates promising to deal with bread-and-butter issues – such as creating jobs, saving the high street or fixing potholes – they are far more likely to read on than if they receive, say, leaflets offering plans to “save us from the woke blob” or to “protect our children from drag queens”. This is unsurprising, though not unhelpful to have it spelled out.
Voters, the research finds, believe politicians talk about divisive social and cultural issues to attract attention, and should instead focus on more pressing concerns, such as the economy and the NHS. A significant number wisely believe “they are only doing it to distract from the poor job they are doing”.
But while the culture wars are reportedly becoming tiresome for voters, they are not going away. First, the failure of all the different flavours of Tory rule we have been subjected to since 2010 means the party has no convincing policy solutions to offer, leaving it with little option but to double down on culture wars in opposition. Second, because Labour has stripped away its own substantive policy offer that leaves a vacuum that must be filled, which is why we get Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer engaging in the deeply unserious pantomime of condemning the new England football kit design.
Culture wars are lethal to leftwing politics for a very straightforward reason. For the left, the fundamental divide that matters is who has wealth and power and who does not. Culture wars create new coalitions of identities that encourage those in precarious economic circumstances to align their interests with the powerful. Brexit did just this: we became “remainers” and “leavers”, as though a young Black supermarket worker in east London who voted remain was on the same team as David Cameron, or an ex-miner in Mansfield was allied to Jacob Rees-Mogg.
With its obsessive flag-waving, Starmer’s Labour believes it neutralises Tory culture wars by leaning into many of the same narratives. With a landslide Labour victory near-inevitable, this strategy appears vindicated; but as new election polling shows, the opposition has weaker ratings than Ed Miliband’s Labour had before his crushing defeat – it’s just this time Tory self-immolation leaves the government in a far more parlous state.
The worry must be what happens next, and we can see in Germany and the US that when Labour’s sister parties triumphed with similar political prospectuses, they swiftly became unpopular and the far right surged. Labour retaining a Tory fiscal rule that bakes in austerity risks driving more of the public disenchantment that was always at the heart of our years of political turmoil. That fury will have to go somewhere, and the danger is a Tory opposition defined by culture war will channel it in disturbing directions, much as Trumpism has.
So what, then? The More in Common report sets up a false equivalence between a Tory and Labour culture war approach. A hypothetical but entirely plausible quote from Sunak committing to “taking our country back from the woke mob who have taken over” was found to reduce Tory support. On the other side, they were shown a Starmer culture war quote promising to “[take] our country back from the racist and classist elite who have taken over” and prevent the rise of “white supremacists”. This reads like a caricature of leftwing prose – Labour didn’t speak like this under Jeremy Corbyn, let alone now – but, interestingly, it had little impact on the party’s support.
What the report does suggest is that Labour pushing messages around protecting public services is a better approach. True, but given its self-constrained economic approach is an obstacle to investment, such rhetoric may prove hollow in government. Labour should instead tie credible policies to a portrait of society that emphasises the real divide: asking those booming like never before to pay a fairer share of tax to secure the investment our country desperately needs, for example.
This is not culture war, but it is an issue that will generate strong responses and force the Tories on the defensive, thus dominating the political conversation. The danger, otherwise, is Labour will win by default with an unpopular leadership team and few answers to the country’s problems – and a new Tory party, perhaps taken over by Nigel Farage, will take the inevitable disenchantment to the darkest possible places.
Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist
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