Have you heard? The war is over. Not the ones in Ukraine or Gaza, unfortunately. The figurative war. The conflict of ideas. The culture wars.
At least that’s what Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy has said this week. “For too long, for too many people, the story we tell ourselves about ourselves as a nation has not reflected them, their communities or their lives,” she said in her first address to her department.
“This is how polarisation, division and isolation thrives. In recent years we’ve found multiple ways to divide ourselves from one another. And lost that sense of a self-confident, outward-looking country which values its own people in every part of the UK.
“Changing that is the mission of this department. The era of culture wars is over.”
She’s right for the most part, of course. We – some sections of the media, politicians and some public figures – have needlessly fixated on fanning the flames of moral panic over divisive issues. Or issues that, thanks to that exploitation, have been framed as divisive when, in reality, they’re simply reflections of the fact that we do not live in a homogenous, socially static society.
It’s been a useful tool for those threatened by the onward march of social progress, who erroneously see the advancement of civil rights as a threat to their interests. It has also been, as we’ve seen with sinister distraction tactics from politicians who will stop at nothing to avoid culpability for failing to serve the public, a very effective elixir.
But is the potency of that particular potion beginning to diminish? Are the culture wars really “dead”?
It’s a nice thought. And I suppose it’s not totally baseless in the sense that people’s patience for culture wars really is wearing thin. For the past couple of years, polls and surveys have pointed to a decline in people buying into the myth that the biggest threats to their lives and lifestyles are groups that those stoking these conflicts have labelled the “wokerati”.
According to 2023 research from King’s College London and Ipsos Mori, six in 10 people now agree that “politicians invent or exaggerate culture wars as a political tactic” – that’s up from around four in 10 in 2020.
Two months ago, polling organisation More In Common found that people across the political spectrum had far more interest in political campaigns that focused on local issues than those that used culture war tactics to win support.
That we’re beginning to emerge from this era now is not simply a matter of people becoming bored of it all. It’s about the culture wars’ inability to divert attention from reality in perpetuity.
It may be easy for a while to believe that you’re living in poverty, without proper healthcare and housing and so on, because of a small minority of historically oppressed people becoming more visible, or vocal, or gaining marginal rights.
But eventually, the architects of those inequalities will expose themselves, usually following overzealous reliance on such rhetoric, as having no material solutions to change anyone’s circumstances.
It’s naive, however, to suggest that this emergent departure from culture wars is permanent, or that we’re entering an age of neutrality. We made that mistake in the 2000s and early 2010s, believing ourselves somehow in a golden age so devoid of discrimination and social issues that talking about it at all was often framed as unnecessary.
We were told we were in an age of “new prosperity”, that we were “post-racial”, while our deepest issues bubbled violently under the surface.
It’s also historically inaccurate to suggest that these wars are new, as historian Dominic Sandbrook outlined in an interview with The Guardian. “There are moments in history when disputes about history, identity, symbols, images and so on loom very large,” he said. “Think about so much of 17th century politics, for example, when people would die over the wording of a prayer book.”
Nandy may have declared the culture wars over, but we need to remember that as long as there are cultural and social power struggles in society, there will be attempts to apportion blame somewhere.
So, if we want to ensure minority groups aren’t caught up in the fray, and that we stick to the task at hand of making society better and fairer, we can’t be complacent. We can’t pat ourselves on the back for no longer being susceptible to propaganda – that’s not going to prevent a future war by another name.
