Culture war

Conservatives suffer from a short attention span, and it largely explains their defeats in the culture war. They fight every battle as if it’s the only one they will ever have to fight. And so, win or lose, they are unprepared for what happens next. If they lose, they forget how all-important the last battle was, learning no lessons from defeat, nor about what’s vital and what isn’t. Twenty-five years ago, conservatives were adamantly opposed to putting women in combat or admitting them to institutions like the Virginia Military Institute and the Citadel. In recent years, conservative Republicans have celebrated the aspirations to office of female fighter pilots like Arizona’s Martha McSally and female graduates from Virginia Military Institute and the Citadel.

I see the establishment has a new sport: mocking Nadine Dorries. They really do hate her. Or rather, they love taking the mick out of her. She looks drunk! She only has one book on her shelf! She gives car-crash interviews! She wouldn’t know culture if it bit her on the behind! You don’t need a PhD in class studies to work out what’s motoring this frenzied Nadine-bashing: classic, old-fashioned snobbery. You know a political trend has taken off when it finds its way even on to Instagram, the only social media I use. When even this normally peaceful virtual world of cats and selfies is invaded by political memes, something’s afoot. The Nadine memes have come thick and fast. There’s a shot of her looking angry on Channel 4.

America's longest war has just come home. Last week, Fox News’s All-American Christmas Tree, standing merrily outside the channel's headquarters in New York, was set on fire and destroyed. The arsonist was quickly arrested upon which he was subjected to the fearsome rigor of our justice system: released without bail as he cussed out reporters. We should pause here to note just how banal and predictable much of the late-night jesting about the blaze has been. It isn't that the likes of Trevor Noah and Stephen Colbert shouldn't joke about the fire — crack all you like, and the Daily Show's "Pine Eleven" was pretty funny.

'A lie will gallop halfway round the world before the truth has time to pull its breeches on.’ So said Cordell Hull, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s secretary of state, long before the internet. Now we live in the virtual age. What’s true is barely relevant. No sooner has a man shot 10 people dead and been taken into custody than his suspected motives are shoved into the great culture-war grinder and splatted out of a million social media accounts. So we saw this week with the arrest of Ahmed Al Aliwi Alissa, who was presumed white as quickly as he was guilty after pictures of his arrest yesterday in Boulder, Colorado circulated online. Alissa made the mistake of looking a bit pale in the grainy images.

The bodies of the victims hadn’t gone cold, the families had barely begun grieving, when the familiar cottage industry of activists and journalists jumped in to speculate and spread misinformation on social media. What drove someone to slaughter eight people in three Asian massage parlors in Atlanta on Tuesday? A clear storyline took hold: this was white supremacy at work. A young, white man murdered six Asian women and two 'others' made the framing a foregone conclusion. Not even new information from the investigators could slow down the risk to judgment. Atlanta police chief Rodney Bryant said that it was too early to classify the shooting as a hate crime and FBI director Christopher Wray affirmed that it 'does not appear to be racially motivated’.

The departure of Nigel Farage from the stage does not necessarily mark the end of the 'revolt on the right' that has so shaken up British politics over the past decade. Followers of the fortunes of the Brexit party, which has now morphed into Reform UK, will know that Richard Tice has been the coming man for many months. Today Farage’s newly-appointed successor as party leader (the party doesn’t, as yet, do internal elections) sets out the ground on which he has chosen to take on the political establishment — for which one should read 'nibble away at the Tory vote share'. And Tice has chosen to ignore the fashionable notion that these days culture trumps economics when it comes to delivering votes.

If the first month of 2021 is anything to go by, the American culture wars show no sign of abating. The country’s institutions withstood the orgy of violent destruction on Capitol Hill, led by a minority of Trump loyalists. What had been a scene of near anarchy on January 6 was just three weeks later the setting for a peaceful, albeit safely cordoned off, transfer of power. Nevertheless, the riots of that day have badly scarred the American body politic, not least by providing the country’s liberal establishment with a convenient pretext for a Big Tech clampdown on conservative opinion.

Let’s be real, the warm-up acts are never the draw. For every Jimi Hendrix opening for the Monkees (true story) there’s, well, every other opening act you’ve ever sat through to get to the main event. But the Republican National Convention has, for better or worse, managed to flip that on its head. The most memorable speakers, so far, have not been the stars. On Monday, Nikki Haley and Tim Scott did great. But Monday night’s most important moments came from Rep. Vernon Jones and Mark and Patricia McCloskey. Jones talked about supporting Donald Trump and what kind of havoc that wreaked in his own life. The McCloskeys spoke of being ordinary people who had been threatened at their home by the mob we see on our TVs.

If we’ve confirmed anything in 2020, it is that liberal-progressives really do control the major influencers in America. This puts them at odds with a large number of Americans.The entertainment industry has long belonged to the Michael Moores and Barbra Streisands of the world. A few conservatives like Tom Selleck and Kelsey Grammar managed to scratch out careers by largely remaining silent about their political beliefs, but Hollywood inundates Americans with messages largely antithetical to faith, family and free markets.Donald Trump’s arrival made clear, too, that most major media organizations in America are far more hostile to conservatives than even the most ardent Fox News fan believed.

If the coronavirus were as deadly as the bubonic plague, which killed about a third of the population of Europe in the 1340s, there would be no doubt about the need for extreme measures. But this virus spares far more people than it kills, and is sometimes mild to the point of invisibility, even as it proves lethal to others. It’s almost as though nature had calibrated the virus exactly to the point where risk-avoiders saw the lockdown as vital for survival while risk-accepters saw it as so economically destructive as to be worse than the disease itself. America is polarized not just politically but in its attitude to risk.