Rejoice! The culture war is over. This week’s announcement by the UK’s new culture secretary, Lisa Nandy, of a cessation of hostilities was greeted with scenes not witnessed since 1945. Crowds danced in Trafalgar Square. Trans allies and gender critics shook hands and warmly wished each other well for the future. Baillie Gifford was reinstated as sponsor of the Edinburgh Book Festival and Jeremy Corbyn was welcomed back into the Labour Party.
Well, not quite. Nandy did indeed announce the “end of the era of culture wars” while addressing her department for the first time on Tuesday. However, despite her job title, an armistice is not actually within her remit. Many may welcome her promises of a different approach to the job, following a dismal string of Tory predecessors who hacked at the roots of internationally admired institutions such as the BBC, while cutting back on central and local government support for the arts and creative industries.
The result has been a drastic thinning out of the UK’s cultural capital and a justified perception that a career in the arts is now only available to those from wealthy backgrounds. It’s been a sorry tale of mean-spirited vandalism of one of the country’s greatest assets.
Nandy, a surprise appointment following Labour shadow culture secretary Thangam Debbonaire’s loss of her Bristol seat to the Greens in last week’s election, has plenty of work to do to repair that damage. Part of that will include ending the partisan sloganeering which became a staple of the later years of Conservative culture policy under the likes of Nadine Dorries.
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“Calming the divisive and pointless culture wars that Conservatives have fomented will, happily, come naturally to someone as level-headed as Nandy,” observed Charlotte Higgins approvingly in the Guardian.
Not all is sweet and light, though. Joan Smith in Unherd wrote that Nandy’s use of the phrase “culture wars” signals “an astounding lack of self-awareness”. “It’s a lazy sneer, trivialising justified concerns about the impact of identity politics on a wide range of issues, from prisons policy to sport,” Smith wrote.
So not quite peace in our time. These writers articulate two very different perspectives on what is meant when we say “culture wars”. Do the words describe a manufactured set of controversies designed by the reactionary right to stoke division for political advantage? Or is it an equally artificial phrase devised by the progressive left to deny the reality of legitimate political differences over conflicting individual and social rights? The choice you make will decide which uniform you’ll be issued for basic training before being sent to the front.
At the risk of getting shot by both sides, I would suggest there is some truth to both positions. This week’s speech by Tory leadership hopeful Suella Braverman attacking the LGBTQ pride progress flag as “disgusting” was a transparent rallying call to prejudice and bigotry (and, to be fair, has been rejected by many members of her own party). But Labour has been less than sure-footed in its own approach to some issues of gender and diversity in its efforts to regain support in “red wall” seats it lost to Boris Johnson in 2019. It is far from clear what its approach will be now it is in power.
Since the word Kulturkampf first emerged to describe the conflict between German Catholicism and the Prussian state in the 19th century, it has mutated to cover pretty much any issue that moves beyond the idea of politics as a simple struggle over economic power. The progressive secularisation of Irish society over the past 40 years certainly fits the definition of a successfully prosecuted culture war. So does the rise in American Christian nationalism initiated by Pat Buchanan in the 1990s and currently finding full expression in the modern Maga movement. So do the campaigns for marriage equality and reproductive rights. In an age when traditional concepts of class politics and party loyalty have loosened or disappeared, everything seems to be framed as a culture war. Importantly, unless you venture to the fringes of the internet, that framing is usually pejorative. War, obviously, is a bad thing.
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Smith rightly criticised this very familiar circumlocution, rolled out in a thousand opinion columns. “Anyone who uses it [culture wars] is taking a side in a conflict they dismiss as spurious, while pretending to be above such petty behaviour,” she wrote. It’s hard to argue.
So, one side denies there’s a war, then goes on to make clear which side of that non-existent war they’re on. And the other side is saying there’s a conflict, but it’s not actually a culture war at all. Meanwhile, those of us who don’t wish to sign up to either side of this Manichean binary just hunker down and hope it’ll all be over by Christmas.
