People who like to look on the bright side of life are starting to say the culture wars are over now because they didn’t seem to play much part in the last election.
The Labour winners may have been cautious, sensible — and borderline boring, and yet I don’t believe it for a moment. We live in a bigger world where the UK’s new centrist government is an exception.
Populist parties who do practically nothing but culture wars are taking ever more power across the West. These are people who give their followers a “Daily Hate” in every speech. The fact is the early election date here, and the disintegrating Conservative Party, put culture wars back to the margins for the moment. It won’t stay that way. Just wait for the campaigns, the speeches, and deepfake films that will come the world’s way in the run up to the US elections in November. And just look at this week’s riots.
But what are culture wars anyway? Who is behind them? How can you tell? “Culture wars” are, like “woke”, part of everyone’s new political vocabulary. And, just like “woke”, no-one has ever explained them properly.
Boris Johnson, our recent prime minister, explained culture wars by describing what his favourite political campaign manager, Sir Lynton Crosby, actually does: “There is one thing that is absolutely certain about throwing a dead cat on the dining room table — and I don’t mean that people will be outraged, alarmed, disgusted. That is true, but irrelevant. The key point, says my Australian friend, is that everyone will shout, ‘Jeez, mate, there’s a dead cat on the table!’ In other words, they will be talking about the dead cat — the thing you want them to talk about — and they will not be talking about the issue that has been causing you so much grief.”
All culture wars are really meant to do is divert and to divide people by getting them worked up about something hugely emotive but ultimately unimportant
I’ve just written a book about culture wars; they have a big title but all they are really meant to do is divert and to divide people by getting them worked up about something hugely emotive but ultimately unimportant.
The former Conservative MP for Ashworth, Lee Anderson, explained on February 14 last year how he saw the inevitable Tory strategy for 2024. Because the Tories no longer had the glorious electoral advantages afforded by a) having Jeremy Corbyn as their opponent, b) Brexit — still to be campaigned for and Got Done and c) the performative talents and all-round appeal of Johnson, they had to think of something else.
Without those substantive advantages in 2024, he concluded “it’ll probably be a mix of culture wars and trans debate”.
In other words, culture wars were something you had to do, like advertising and marketing for brands or giving the people bread and circuses. They were a technique, meaning you had to find — and pay — people who did that stuff. Anderson, who by the time of the election had deserted his party for the tender embrace of Reform UK had rather let the cat out of the bag by acknowledging that the Tories thought they had nothing left to say, and no achievements to boast about. Culture wars were what you had to do instead, namely make things up.
And you always need a shadowy “‘them”’ in culture wars. Shadowy “thems” are always not-like-you elites; they’re “metropolitan liberal elites” for instance’s (whoever they are) or the “deep state” — harassed and overworked civil servants; or “enemies of the people” — the judges.
You need the right mindset, too. You can’t have people who argue with each other about the rightness of the strategy and whether they’re telling fibs or being fair to people they attack. To create any real outrage or discussion about a new culture war, you have to have people who are completely shameless and focused on creating a story with emotional power and resonance. Something that gets people in the heart, not the head.
Culture wars aren’t for brainboxes and policy wonks; you can’t get people in the heart with a bar-chart. There needs to be a grain of truth in there, and a good culture wars story needs to build on existing beliefs and suspicions people already have. And the resources you need are expert, inspirational and shameless — experienced campaigners like Dominic Cummings ( or the original Dead Cat supplier, Sir Lynton). People who enjoy the fight for itself. These people are in short supply. And very expensive.
So what happens now? Labour are unlikely to start any culture wars soon, and the Tories are probably quite busy trying to rebuild the party, but post November 6 we might expect a fresh outbreak of culture wars fuelled by a sour-faced man with an orange tan.
