How to Lose a Culture War
The right will try and amplify extremist voices on the left in the hope that progressive politicians will close ranks
"Hippie Bus - a Volkswagen Type 2 Van" by skeggy is marked with CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.
Right-wing culture warriors love picking a fight with progressives over lifestyles and values because they are so good at choosing their battles. They also have a good track record of using these duels as a way of winning elections. The basic strategy is simple: Find an extremist voice on the other side that is unlikely to resonate with ordinary people; amplify it; and maybe exaggerate it a little. If the left, broadly defined, closes ranks, then the right wins.
The reason why this approach is so powerful is also basic and simple. Extremist voices on the left are likely to be concerned with ways of redesigning society in new and possibly untested ways. By contrast, culture warriors on the right defend old-fashioned lifestyles and values that have lasted many generations. At best, this can reflect a conservative concern about society changing too fast. At worst, it can be a shield for bigotry. In either case, the right-wing defence of tradition can have the atavistic force of a dirty joke.
I first became aware of this approach when I was a left-wing teenager in the UK in the 1980s. Britain’s tabloids had great fun covering “loony left” councils. Well-meaning local politicians from Labour often pushed for more inclusive language and other similar reforms. The tabloids would run sensationalist stories on the excesses. Ordinary people, who were busy keeping the wolf from the door, thought the left looked a little silly; and the Conservatives won victory after victory.
Labour leader Tony Blair eventually worked out that the trick to sidestep a culture war was to stop closing ranks. By the time he won his first landslide victory in 1997, the party - rebranded as New Labour - had fought and won a battle with the hard left on the party’s long-standing commitment to nationalization as part of the party’s Clause IV.
Around the same time, Democrat Bill Clinton was using “triangulation” to consolidate his position in power. He had won the 1992 Presidential election, but the Republicans scored a landslide victory in the midterm elections two years later. His political advisor Dick Morris came up with the idea of presenting ideas that transcended the left-right spectrum. Clinton was able to borrow ideas from the right, like deregulation and balanced budgets, while distancing himself from traditionally left-wing ideas about increasing the size of the state. He was able to win a landslide in 1996.
The left-leaning centrism of Blair and Clinton exploits a statistical phenomona known as the bell curve. If you track issues along a horizontal axis, the distribution of views will often look like an upside-down bell. What this means in practice is that a left-wing politician who cuts himself or herself off from relatively unpopular ideas on the far left of the curve will be able to win many more votes on his or her right.
"The Bell Curve" by c r i s is marked with CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
Clinton’s successor Barack Obama learnt the lesson about not closing ranks well. In 2008, as he was running for President of the US, the press investigated controversial sermons by his pastor Jeremiah Wright. The politician denounced the sermons, but the scandal quietly smouldered. In May, he resigned his membership of the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, successfully putting the issue to bed. He was able to win a landslide in November of the same year.
Term limits meant that Obama wasn’t able to run for a third time in 2016. Clinton’s wife, Hillary, ran instead. Her campaign was a little lackluster and uninspired; and she was unwilling to pick a fight with the hard left after a bruising primary battle with Bernie Sanders. Clinton’s opponent, Donald Trump, ran a reactionary campaign about the dangers of immigration and “political correctness” and - as we all know - won a surprise Electoral College victory.
Around the same time, there was an interesting culture-war experiment in the UK. A hard-left campaigner called Jeremy Corbyn became leader of the Labour Party in 2015. Meanwhile, a soft-left politician called Sadiq Khan first ran as Labour candidate for mayor of London in 2016. Both politicians had shared anti-imperialism platforms with Islamist extremists over many years beforehand.
Corbyn - who had also publicly aired antisemitic conspiracy theories in 2012 - doubled down with an unapologetic tone. He then lost two elections in a row, mishandled Brexit and was forced to resign from the party after Labour was found guilty of unlawful discrimination against Jewish people. On the other hand, Khan - a Muslim who regularly breaks his Ramadan fast in Jewish synagogues - successfully distanced himself from the extremists and won back-to-back elections.
One interesting exception to the general trend is Spain’s Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez. He won two elections in a row in 2019 by fighting a culture war from the left. Although he didn’t achieve a majority in either election, he was able to form a coalition government after the second one. His success as a culture warrior is helped by Spain’s history. Francisco Franco’s long right-wing dictatorship makes many Spaniards more uncomfortable with hard-right views than their neighbours in other European countries.
Even so, Sánchez’s willingness to cut deals with radical separatists, populists and communists is unpopular with liberals, centrists and moderates. The next Spanish election, likely in 2023, will involve a fascinating public debate on which parties are and aren’t acceptable coalition partners for mainstream parties.
Elsewhere, the next frontier in the culture war is clear. Right-wing politicians across the West have realized that opposition to “wokeness” can be a fertile source of votes. If the other side closes ranks with the most extreme voices on the “woke” left, the right has a good chance of winning.
“Wokeness” developed in elite US universities. Its core is uncontroversial: It is radically inclusive of all minorities. Old-fashioned discrimination is frowned upon as it can make some people feel unwelcome.
However, the border between what can and what can’t be said is often fuzzy. The most extreme proponents of “wokeness” take a hard line on areas like cultural appropriation, which rest on questionable assumptions, and then react badly to any debate. This second layer of “wokeness” is a gift to right-wing politicians, who can sell it as snobby academics telling ordinary people how to live.
There are three big problems with this second layer of wokeness from a skeptical perspective. First of all, the rules on what can and can’t be said are never written down anywhere. Secondly, they evolve fast in unexpected ways. Thirdly, the cost of making a mistake can be catastrophic.
It is no surprise that an approach based on ambiguity arose in academia. Many academics in the humanities and social sciences love establishing a pecking order through complex and evolving games with unwritten and unstated rules. These kind of games are much less popular with non-academics, who often rely on values that have been passed down from generation to generation, as well as with scientists, who value absolute clarity.
Most neurotypical people outside academia react to the ambiguity around controversial topics with self-censorship and extreme caution on sensitive subjects. However, around one in hundred people are on the autism spectrum and have difficulty recognizing and understanding social cues at the best of times. Fast-changing but unwritten rules on what can and can’t be said are particularly difficult for this community.
Billionaire Elon Musk freely admits to being on the spectrum. He has expressed concern that the “woke” left is moving the goalposts. His attempt to buy Twitter (currently paused) has received much analysis in terms of left/right dynamics. The difficulty of ambiguous and changing codes of speech for people who struggle with social cues has received much less discussion than it should.
How will the left react to the challenge of right-wingers amplifying radical “woke” voices? History suggests that left-wing politicians who want to fight a backward-looking right should spend time thinking about Blair and Clause IV; Clinton’s triangulation; Obama leaving his church; and Khan breaking his fast in synagogues.
Left-wing politicians who want to sidestep a culture war should ask their pollsters about bell curves and seek out chances to distance themselves from second-layer “woke” positions that don’t resonate with the general public. Doing so in a way that doesn’t undermine inclusivity or empower bigots will be a fine art. Closing ranks, on the other hand, is likely to backfire and ensure victory for some very unsavoury politicians. See you next week!
Further Reading
Pierre Bourdieu’s classic sociology work Distinction is a fascinating look at how people with high levels of cultural capital set unwritten rules on taste - be warned that it can be a tough read
Michael Billig’s Learn to Write Badly looks at how poorly written prose and ambiguity plague the social sciences
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Opinions expressed on Substack and Twitter are those of Rupert Cocke as an individual and do not reflect the opinions or views of the organization where he works or its subsidiaries.
My perspective on so-called "wokeness" and its possible effect on elections (several years ago, known as "identity politics"?) may differ a bit from yours. In my view, being less prejudiced is one goal, winning elections is another goal, and sometimes—hopefully—they can overlap in the sense that working toward one goal supports the other. Still, those two activities don't primarily attempt to achieve each other. They're not purely instrumental to each other's goals; they are their own goals. Sometimes we (or others) fear they're in significant conflict, which is, indeed, a major life challenge. We oughtn't allow ourselves to be prejudiced, nor ought we allow ourselves to lose elections—we have different reasons for believing so, and we suffer different consequences when we fail, as they are substantially different topics, even though we might hope we can lean on links between them and reap the rewards when we do both successfully (namely, reduce prejudice and win elections).
So, I'm struggling to get a handle on the argument in this opinion article. I wrote a long response, over a thousand words, and am trying to boil it down.
Specific to this article, my basic question is: A sentence like "a left-wing politician who cuts himself or herself off from relatively unpopular ideas on the far left of the curve will be able to win many more votes on his or her right" is plainly about winning elections. But a sentence like "the cost of making a mistake can be catastrophic" seems to be about personal social consequences for someone who makes a rude comment, not the catastrophe of losing an election. So the topic of the article seems to shift. And when you note that "around one in hundred people are on the autism spectrum and have difficulty recognizing and understanding social cues at the best of times," that seems to be taking a focus contrary to the one you took at the beginning of the article. Are you saying, ultimately, that we should pay attention to the 1% at both far ends of the curve, or that we should focus on the 98% in the middle? Isn't there a way to do both? Does recognizing the existence of autistic people count as a simple acknowledgment of a fact of human diversity, or is it an embarrassing instance of "wokeness" insofar as it's letting a statistical minority drive political debate? This is a bit of a devil's advocate question, which may sound annoying, for which I apologize. I'm chopping at the logic with my own axe, and my axe might be blunt and could always be sharpened, but I hope my question might be somewhat helpful, considered at least rhetorically as reader feedback.
To be clear on my own position, I believe we do have to give serious weight to demographics who are statistical minorities, simply as a matter of ethics, human rights, and compassion. People matter, period. This entails that people from marginalized groups matter. The risk of losing an election for stating that moral truth doesn't negate the truth.
And, as a ray of hope, depending how you mathematically calculate political support, small demographics can be strategically helpful for winning elections—I am thinking of this because of an article by Tim Andersen that I read yesterday. It depends what kind of coalition you hope to build and how your coalition works. Some people are primarily self-interested, while others won't stand for throwing anyone else under the bus, for example. If you ask me to consider the feelings and experiences of autistic people, and I do, even though I am not autistic (or at least not on the 1% far end of the spectrum to which you're referring), this is an example of how we can actually help build support for each other. Whether one praises it as "inclusion" or derides it as "wokeness," it might serve a positive political function, and it might lead to more solidarity than divisiveness. It is possible. https://medium.com/@andersentda/the-math-shows-how-differences-between-republicans-and-democrats-create-an-unstable-american-67463de77876
A friend with personal experience of the autism spectrum emailed. I won't paste the whole email to protect her identity. She says this: "Your piece today on triangulation was interesting... On autism, I don't 100% agree with your premise (though I can see it would apply to *some* people on the spectrum)... [She shares a personal anecdote about how social justice can appeal to people who are drawn to black-and-white thinking]... Anecdotally, it seems that extremism can also make sense to people on the spectrum due to the black & white thinking and also a desire for rules."