A president can’t win or lose the culture war
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An admirer of Donald Trump will vote for him in November, whatever is said. A sworn sceptic of the man also knows what to do. This column is interested in a certain kind of waverer: one who thinks Trump is dangerous but hates all that is “woke”. I know several. The writer Andrew Sullivan is the most fluent communicator of their views. As much as their vacillation is mocked for drawing spurious equivalence between great and small evils, the election will be settled by people who are more like them than like the decided. They are entitled to hear a worthwhile argument.
Which is? Not that Kamala Harris is a cultural moderate. (I can’t tell either way.) But that it doesn’t matter. If the past few decades have shown one thing, it is that governments don’t make or even much influence culture.
The Republicans have supplied four of the last seven presidents. They have held the House of Representatives for the great bulk of the time since 1994. Republican-nominated judges have constituted a majority of the Supreme Court since 1970. This is as close as politics gets to hegemonic in a split nation. And the cultural outcome has been — what? In the right’s own telling, progressive tenets have spread. These include a stress on racial and other group identities, an unduly guilt-stricken account of the western past and a selective approach to free speech.
Political strength, cultural retreat: if this is the lot of America’s conservatives, think of Britain’s. The 14-year Tory government that fell this summer wasn’t even the longest-running one of my lifetime. Yet their complaint is one of pervasive progressive drift.
It’s obvious, isn’t it? If culture matters to you, who runs the central state is of secondary importance. What counts are campus faculties, publishing houses, film studios, museum trustee meetings, advertising agencies and other makers of the normative atmosphere.
And, being realistic, the left will forever have the edge in those settings. Some of this is self-selection. People with conservative or classical liberal views might be drawn to business over the institutions of the Marxian “superstructure”. Or perhaps the left, being collectivist in outlook, are better organisers. Oscar Wilde’s gripe with socialism (“it takes up too many evenings”) wasn’t entirely facetious. Once in a while, I will receive an internal group email that I think is too preachy and politicised for a work setting. But what am I going to do? Join a committee? Attend a meeting? Ensure a quorum? Make my case? Take a vote? Distribute the minutes? Follow up? “Over a coffee”? Yeah, no.
Woke didn’t emerge because of politics, hasn’t crested in recent years because of politics and won’t resurge because of politics. Voting against Harris on tax, antitrust and perhaps immigration, I can fathom. But doing so out of generalised cultural despair? Whatever else is wrong with Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, he at least comprehends the importance of winning “out there” in civil society.
Conservatives will object that, had they not held so much official political power, the cultural trend would be worse. Perhaps. The state can make ultimate interventions: against this curriculum, against that medical treatment. But I wonder if the political imperium itself begets the problem.
In 1987, Allan Bloom wrote about the postmodern debasement of the humanities in The Closing of the American Mind. That was seven years into the Reagan era. Two of the previous three presidents had been Republican, and the other was a Southern Baptist. The peak-woke summer of 2020, when protests went past my kitchen window in Florida Avenue in Washington, was year four of Trump. Most of the subsequent counter-reaction, such as against ESG, happened under Biden.
Look at these dates. Either politics is irrelevant to culture or, if anything, culture evolves against the powers of the day. That is, an idea has a better chance of spreading if it has the cachet of subversion and dissent.
In recent weeks, the prime Oasis era of 1994 to 1997 has been aired a lot. As a son of that time, I am glad it is recognised now as a moment in Britain’s cultural evolution, when a newly irreverent and unbuttoned people swaggered towards the millennium. It happened in the 15th to 18th years of a Tory government.