How culture wars have ruined politics
An inability to accept alternative points of view, exacerbated by confusion of the personal with the political, is leading to the rot
s a “culture war” coming to Britain? Some certainly fear so. Questions of identity have entered the front-line of politics, exposing generational and class divisions on subjects that were once considered to be matters of conscience or non-partisan — everything from gender and the criminal justice system to free speech.
Even on a more benign level, we do not have to look far to see how identity has permeated political life; whether or not Britain should leave the European Union was and is still a question about the sort of country Britain wants to be, as much as whether the United Kingdom should be free to sign its own trade deals. Recent focus groups of voters held by the think tank Demos found participants prefacing their answers to unconnected questions with whether they are a Brexiteer or a Remainer.
The culture wars boil down to an inability to accept alternative points of view, and are exacerbated by confusion of the personal with the political. It is not simply on sensitive questions of privacy, race or class that Britons find themselves without common ground. At any given point in time, about half of the country will see any form of legislative progress as a sign that the “enemy” is “winning”. Britons feel sure that their beliefs are based in absolute truth and that everyone who does not agree with them is simply wrong. Rejection, be it in the form of a failed bill or lost election, is not simply a matter of losing an argument; it is now a fundamental rejection of oneself and one’s values.
Those feelings of rejection were magnified dramatically on the morning after Donald Trump was voted President of the United States. Being a creature of Washington, I found it difficult to see his election as anything other than a personal rebuke by the rest of the country to people like me. It wasn’t just that they wanted a different set of policies — they actively disliked me and my kind and felt that we were morally deficient. It mattered not at all that many of us were Republicans, too; ideology is not the glue that binds the Trump coalition together. In this brave new world, political decision-making is turned on its head (or, as the short-lived government shutdown showed, ignored altogether) in favour of what feels good, or the avoidance of what feels bad.
Oprah Winfrey’s fleeting presidential run, which she thankfully put to bed last week, was precisely the sort of baffling result that this brand of politics tends to produce. Because the classic test of modern presidential politics is “Could you see yourself having a beer with him?”, she appeared to skyrocket to the top of the list of Democratic hopefuls for 2020. Oprah is high priestess of the American religion of “Me!” and that her potential ascendancy to the highest office in the land was even considered should be taken as a sign of how infused with “self” our political life has become.
Simply being known is enough to guarantee that a certain number of people will vote for you every time, party affiliation and policy proposals be damned. This celebrity-worship at the ballot box has been generously re-branded as “energising voters”, but engagement needs to be based on more than recognising someone from television if that supposedly energised base is to be expected to stick around for the next election cycle.
Everything about the federal government was designed to prevent the sort of division we see in American politics; decisions were to be kept far away from the passions of the people, whom the Founders recognised were separated from a mob by only a matter of degrees. And yet presidential contests have become a breeding ground for the worst sort of politics, with little recourse in sight. Such a fate is more difficult to imagine in Britain, but there are perhaps reasons to be worried. Molly Kiniry is a researcher at the Legatum Institute.
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