LOOK LEFT / TT21
‘CULTURE WARS’: THE LEFT CAN HIDE NO LONGER LU K E H ATC H / WA D H A M , C H I N E S E
The idea of a ‘culture war’ within society has come to define politics at home and abroad. Over the past few years, issues including Brexit, the election of Donald Trump, and the rise of the far-right in continental Europe have been caught up in this concept. Raging against the “elite” and crusading against anything “woke” (defined as being aware of social injustice) have become a favoured pass-time of the political right, who claim they are waging a war for traditional cultural values. Right-wing figures all over the western world have attempted to rebrand themselves as straight-talking populists, focussed on conservative cultural values perceived to be close to the hearts of “the people”. Ironically, the politicians pushing this agenda are some of the most strident examples of the political and economic “elite”, but even more astonishing is that the Left has repeatedly failed to highlight this folly to the electorate. The ‘culture war’, ought to be viewed as the natural consequence of widespread grievances amongst
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people who have long felt ignored and marginalised by the political establishment. The right’s success in manipulating this discontent, and steering it into a reactionary political movement, can be put down to the left’s failure to address the socio-economic issues affecting its traditional working-class support base. The right’s hollow cultural populism has filled the vacuum created by the left’s failure to capture the public’s imagination. That the left has even allowed itself to be portrayed as the ‘elite’, no matter what role hostile media has played in this, speaks volumes of the serious image problem that left-wing and progressive politics have developed over the last two decades. One reason for the mass appeal of the populism underpinning the ‘culture wars’, is that disenfranchised voters, fed up of a system and an establishment that fails to listen to or provide for them, are more likely to be receptive to movements that purport to offer a clear alternative that promises to upset the existing order. Brexit captured the
