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'Culture Wars' Are a Reactionary Backlash Constructed to Distract Us

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'Culture Wars' Are a Reactionary Backlash Constructed to Distract Us DIVIDE AND RULE How the ‘culture wars’ are a reactionary backlash constructed to distract us, and how to respond CONTENTS Introduction ...................................................................................................................................................................... 3 What are the ‘culture wars’ and how do they play out? .......................................................................................4 What are the tactics that conservative commentators and institutions use to their advantage? ...........5 Exaggeration Fabrication Distraction What are the common characteristics that underpin ‘culture wars’ debates? ..............................................7 When is it useful to enter debate, and when is it not? ........................................................................................8 Decision checklist What tactics can progressives use in order to engage with these debates more effectively? ..................9 Know your stuff Talk to the audience, not the person in front of you Connect to economic and material issues Message testing Bring high vibes Case Studies .................................................................................................................................................................. 11 Case Study - Maya Goodfellow on LBC Case Study - Dalia Gebriel on the BBC What not to do ............................................................................................................................................................ 13 Don’t fight on their terms Avoid the term ‘culture wars’ Don’t feed into respectability politics Don’t play into metropolitan elite stereotypes or LARP the working class Don’t wait until it’s a media firestorm (if possible) What wider strategies are needed to support an end to the ‘culture wars’? .............................................. 14 Collective spokesperson strategy Defined endgame Deep organising and public education Focus on the media industry Structured support and coordination Final thoughts ............................................................................................................................................................... 16 INTRODUCTION In recent years there has been a noticeable increase in what have been described as ‘culture wars’ stories in the UK media. As this report sets out, the rise of these stories is no coincidence. Instead it is the result of a toxic combination of a purposeful campaign from the reactionary right and a media environment that is bent towards dangerous sensationalism and bigotry. The media landscape, especially the print media, has a long history of pushing divisive narratives. From overt racism to anti-immigrant sentiment and attacks on those seen as undeserving of state support, editorial decisions have often been driven by profiteering over genuine newsgathering. In recent years these attacks have become relentless and increasingly appear on broadcast media. A new landscape of ‘share-driven’ written media is now replacing traditional newspapers. At the same time, established broadcast shows are losing listeners and viewers, especially on the BBC, and social media platforms are becoming de facto unregulated media outlets. Those in power have utilised this dynamic to push stories they know to be divisive - using radio and television as a platform for false debates and confected outrage, often with little or no opposition from other politicians.The success of the model is already evident, with stations like LBC reporting record listening figures and Good Morning Britain (before Piers Morgan’s departure) gaining a greater audience share than BBC Breakfast. More changes are set to come about in the UK media landscape. GB News is set to launch - chaired by veteran broadcaster Andrew Neil and promising, among other things, a ‘Woke Watch’ segment. In parallel, there are rising concerns regarding the ability of Ofcom, as the UK’s media regulator, to enforce the rules on impartiality with Paul Dacre (a longtime editor of The Daily Mail) being considered as its next chairman. With these changes expected to occur in the first half of 2021, it would be safe to assume that there will be much more media content generated with the explicit goal of sowing division while creating cover for the many failings of the government and the economic system. Though the debates we have seen around the ‘culture wars’ are inherently skewed in favour of reactionaries on the right, there is a risk that by not engaging with them we give a platform and no counter argument to those sowing division. Some argue that by stepping away from the debate, even for very legitimate reasons, we may fail to provide a counter narrative to the watching and listening public. With this as background, in November 2020, NEON commissioned Align to produce a report on the ‘culture wars’ in order to generate and harness reflections on how they play out, and to explore ways of engaging differently in order to better respond to the media cycles that enable them. This report aims to provide a nuanced definition of the ‘culture wars’ and to present some tactics that can help navigate our present moment with strategic intentionality and care in order to avert situations that have created real harm to people in the past. NEON believe that the media is one of the key arenas in which the narratives that shape our society are moulded. The reactionary right know this, and they use the media to shape perceptions in favour of dangerous policies and to draw focus away from the failing of a system that has produced poverty and persecution for generations. This report is asking how we can proactively shape a narrative that eliminates the ‘culture wars’. To produce this report, Align conducted a total of 21 interviews with people who appear in the media and with thinkers, writers, academics, campaigners or activists involved in cultural engagement. Questions were posed during a one-hour Zoom interview and included the following interviewees (in alphabetical order): Adam Elliott-Cooper, Adam Ramsay, Anat Shenker-Osorio, Ash Sarkar, Carys Afoko, Dalia Gebrial, David Wearing, Elena Blackmore, Ellie Mae O’Hagan, Faiza Shaheen, Gavan Titley, Huw Lemmey, Jeffrey Ingold, Kojo Koram, Maya Goodfellow, Nim Ralph, Oli Foster, Paul Hebden, Satbir Singh and Will Davies. 3 The following priorities informed the process of selecting interviewees: Ҍ Interviewees were selected taking into consideration representation from across the progressive movement. Ҍ Interviewees represented a range of roles and experiences. Ҍ Interviewees were selected taking into account equitable representation across identity markers such as gender and race. Anonymised quotes in quotation marks come from interviews, unless otherwise indicated. WHAT ARE THE ‘CULTURE WARS’ AND HOW DO THEY PLAY OUT? “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” - Through the Looking-Glass, Lewis Carroll The term ‘culture wars’ gained prominence after the 1991 publication of a book by the sociologist James Davison Hunter called Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America. In the book he described a struggle to define public life between what he called ‘progressives’ and ‘the orthodox’ which manifested in polarities around ‘hot-button’ issues of the time, including abortion, gun control, separation of church and state, drug policy, and LGBTQ+ rights. In recent years, the term has been imported (and fuelled by sections of the UK media preoccupations with ‘political correctness’ and the ‘loony left’), co-opted and warped to include an ever-expanding set of issues. The ‘culture wars’ no longer serve as a descriptor of cultural impact alone, but are weaponised as a political strategy, sometimes by both sides of the political spectrum, but mostly by the establishment and the far-right in order to mislead the public and undermine the goals of the progressive movement. The ‘culture wars’ now serve as a conservative shorthand, the goal of which is to diminish, delegitmise and decontextualise issues that might affect minority or marginalised groups. In any ‘culture wars’ set-up or debate in the media, the underlying driver is clear - it is to ask: “Is this minority group legitimate in asking you to change how you think about things or how society is run?” The implication is always “no”. While the term may have been imported from the US, the debate format we see play out in this country’s broadcast media is very British indeed - inherited from the Etonian and Oxbridge style of debate, it is the comfort zone of many of those working in the media establishment. The impact of the debate format is monumental, reinforcing the sense that the issues at hand are just part of a wider game where the primary goal is entertainment, and where there is a clear win or lose, right or wrong. Most often, the very premise is up for debate, where the panel can’t even agree on the terms being debated, or where issues of human rights are up for debate as if they are commensurate with interest rates or tax. As one person we interviewed said, “The format of debate isn’t helpful. It’s a simplification of issues, a dumbing down of complex topics that employ banal questions, like, ‘Are trans women women?’” As we’ll explore below, the debate format is often used intentionally in order to push progressive spokespeople to defend things that are difficult to defend on the terms the media has set up. 4 WHAT
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