The West is in the midst of a culture war which is often dull, sometimes hilarious, and always exhausting. Fighting Back: Defending Britain and the West in the Culture War, produced by The New Culture Forum, dispels such fatigue and whets the appetite for battle. With nine short essays, it aims to rejuvenate ordinary people with thoughtful reflections and practical advice on how to navigate a relentless culture war which otherwise saps them of strength.
Who is the enemy? It is nowhere near as brutal as the Nazi or Soviet totalitarian experiments, though its lack of solidity or a defined outline can make it more challenging to confront directly. The ‘wokesters,’ as they have come to be called, prefer Kafkaesque probes into alleged thought crime to the torture rack, they opt for digital cancellation before reaching for the iron rod, and they skilfully weaponize liberal values, such as freedom and equality, rather than dragging them through the mud like unsubtle tyrants.
Still, as Nick Timothy writes in his foreword, people are increasingly conscious of the ways in which they are being “bent into shape by the ideology of our time.” As everyone must realize, “militant identity politics” is no longer a fringe phenomenon. On the contrary, it is making an assertive, gradually more successful bid to become the new public religion.
“Fighting back” is easy to say. It is considerably more difficult when you are not paid, as some of us are, to blab for a living. Nine chapters on how to do so, all of which contain positive recommendations across several aspects of life from the workplace to local party associations, could not be more necessary.
As Peter Whittle says in the introduction, “It is no longer a case of ‘something must be done’ but ‘this is what can and must be done.’” He kicks off with one or two proposals of his own, saying among other things that “institutions which stray from their remit by prioritising ideology should be challenged and if necessary lose public funding.” Libertarians, even the anti-woke ones, will complain that such drastic action offends the basic liberal value of tolerance. But there is a difference between tolerance in private life and active promotion through the public sector. Technically speaking, wicker-worshipping druids are free to go about their pagan business. Their existence is, so to speak, tolerated. But they are unlikely to be allowed to infiltrate Britain’s education system or civil service. The goal of a true conservative should be to make militant ‘wokesters’ as publicly irrelevant as any other cultish set.
It opens with “Why the West is Worth Saving” by Konstantin Kisin, who charts the unique achievements of the free world as compared with the tyrannical systems in Russia and China, warning that the ideals and institutions which made Western hegemony and its civilizational accomplishments possible are taken for granted at our peril.
Dr. Philip Kiszely, writing first-hand from the “wreckage” of Britain’s higher education system, then takes inspiration from Hungary’s Mathias Corvinus Collegium to advocate a revival of the classical spirit of learning. In the West, he argues, feelings are increasingly foregrounded over knowledge, so that education becomes about therapy as opposed to robust, often challenging engagement with the real world. In creating havens from the “alleged harms” caused by, say, offensive views or by unsettling content, “universities cater first and foremost to the most debilitating levels of instability.” On learning from the MCC, Kiszely writes: “The MCC is an awarding body, and there is no reason why it cannot partner a cultural organisation in Britain.”
The problem is that our otherwise celebrated educational heritage creates conditions in which university start-ups are unlikely to thrive, still less outperform the established institutions, at a significant scale—or at least not for centuries. They are forced instantly to compete with Oxford and Cambridge, as well as the other illustrious places of higher learning founded in the 19th century. By contrast, the MCC can offer “supplementary” teaching to degree-level students. It should therefore seek to forge links with the few conservative professors to have survived the culture wars at British universities, rather than vainly challenging the hegemony of these established titans.
In “Resisting Cultural Socialism: How to March Back through the Institutions,” Dr. Eric Kaufmann encourages us with reams of data showing that, far from being fringe, rooting out ‘wokery’ from our public institutions or outlawing the teaching of CRT as though it were incontrovertible fact in schools are popular positions, even reliable vote-winners: “these issues actually unite the Right, and they divide the Left.” As such, Conservative politicians have no ‘pragmatic’ excuse for neglecting culture any longer and should thus be held to much higher standards by the people who have kept them in office since 2010. Most of the Tories, argues Kaufmann, are “running scared” of the media and other “progressive institutions that would accuse them of ‘stoking the culture war’ when, in fact, the culture war is being waged primarily by the Left in elite institutions.”
Cowardice is clearly a strong motivator, or rather dissuader. But a lack of principle and understanding is also behind the problem, both perfectly evidenced by Rishi Sunak’s naïve statement during the leadership campaign that he is not the kind of person to “to cross the road to start a culture war,” as if such a conflict is not already raging right under his nose. Tory governments, urges Kaufmann, need to be more confident: “Elected government is the last institution that reflects the views of the mainstream of the population. So we need to use government intelligently to try and reform the unelected and opaque intermediate institutions, for example non-governmental bodies, monopoly corporations, that are not rendered accountable and not scrutinised by the media to anything like the same extent as governments are.”
Education would make a wonderful start, as Kaufmann explains:
A 2016 New Culture Forum study by Dennis Sewell showed that 7 in 10 students had not heard of Mao and were taught nothing about the Russian Revolution. Most had positive views of socialism and were taught negative things about conservatism, such as that it supports authoritarianism, fears diversity and is insular.
If only the patriotic, conservative side in this culture clash were not so “dramatically underpowered,” full of sound and fury but lacking teeth. Kaufmann’s list of practical recommendations is thoughtful and encouraging. Here is a flavour:
- We need the equivalent of the Federalist Society in the United States, an organisation designed to “nurture conservative talent” and encourage young right-wingers “into the government bureaucracy, into schools, into universities and so forth.” Rather than lamenting the power and the resources of the modern administrative state, we should marshal it to our purposes.
- We should also imitate the National Rifle Association (NRA) in the United States. Kaufmann, being Canadian, is careful to point out that he does not admire the NRA’s unqualified attachment to the Second Amendment. However, the NRA does do an effective job rating Republican politicians in line with their record on gun control. In Britain, he argues, “MPs should be rated and scrutinised on their record on culture war issues, and they should be held to account if they are not doing anything about these issues.”
In “Resisting Woke,” Emma Webb urges ordinary people in their everyday lives not to go along with the new ideological agenda and to challenge the sudden overthrow of basic truths we all accepted until yesterday. The idea that “2+2=4” reinforces “ethnomathematics” or white supremacy, that the definition of ‘woman’ is so elusive as to excuse equivocal rambling on national television by members of our political class, or that Britain’s national heroes from Churchill to David Livingstone must be torn down as hateful racists—such stuff must be unequivocally repudiated when encountered. Only then will the successor ideology die the premature death it deserves. Webb quotes Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn on the urgency of bold resistance:
Let us not glue back the flaking scales of the ideology, not gather back its crumbling bones, nor patch together its decomposing garb, and we will be amazed how swiftly and helplessly the lies will fall away, and that which is destined to be naked will be exposed as such to the world.
Then we have Dr. David Starkey’s characteristically enlightening contribution, “Is Patriotism Enough?” Universal values, he claims, are merely a pretext for global tyranny, subversion, or artificiality. Hence his love of Edmund Burke, who is celebrated for confronting “the false and febrile universalism of the French Revolution with the solid local reality of the spreading British oak.” Lack of patriotism, loss of connection to a particular homeland, breeds complacency, or perhaps it is the other way around. Either way, modern Germany is offered as the cautionary example: “the model state in terms of Fukuyama’s prophecy, that is to say, the universal, homogeneous state that is purely driven by economic criteria and has nothing to do with old-fashioned vulgar considerations like foreign policy or power politics or whatever.” This is the mentality of decline.
It is true, of course, that we are driven by bonds of kinship and a shared sense of historical rootedness to care first and foremost for our own, starting with family, then on to local neighbourhood, to country, and gradually to more distant, though always human, levels of generality. Moreover, an attachment to some universal moral template, Starkey argues, can encourage decadence. If the foundational truths of Western civilization are held to be “self-evident,” they do not need to be defended. We are left to trust the community of globalist institutions to represent them for us. However, a question neither anticipated nor answered by Starkey arises: if Western values are not objectively morally binding, if they are not universally upheld either by divine natural law or some rationalistic secular doctrine of human rights, why should we care? It seems odd to say that we ought to love or even risk dying for what, on Starkey’s historicist account, is merely the consequence of random social development and cultural contingency.
When galvanized by the spirit of Christianity, conservatives can have greater confidence in their mission, secure in the belief that the particular things which they wish to preserve are fully connected to and supported by a higher universal. “We have to declare,” says Starkey, “that the West is best.” Indeed. But if there are no universal values, what can the word “best” possibly mean? ‘Wokeism,’ with its annual feast days and creedal incantations, pitches itself to a generation of Westerners all but completely starved of religious purpose. By de-emphasizing Christianity, modern conservatives risk ignoring one of the most powerful tools, the spiritual core, in our intellectual arsenal.
Still, secular conservatism remains a considerable force, particularly in a disenchanted modern world where, regrettable though it might be, not everyone is blessed with Christian faith. And Starkey, to his credit, certainly advocates moral restoration: “we need to recover that sense of patriotism, of pride in our past. But of humility too, because we did nothing to create it. We are merely the fortunate inheritors. But the blame, the bitter blame, will be ours if we let our inheritance slip through our fingers.”
What a shame, then, that the Church of England has forgotten its spiritual mission—bringing people to Christ—instead courting popularity with the very people who will always regard established churches as empty relics of an irrelevant dark age. The vulgar practices of the hour, laments Calvin Robinson in “Returning the Church to God,” are now pushed alongside (and in some cases more forcefully than) Biblical teaching. “Queer theology,” “‘re-baptism’ for people who have changed gender,” and voguish diversity quotas for what should be a purely sacred vocation are spreading like wildfire through an institution which was once mocked, with some justice, as “the Tory Party at prayer.” It should be re-Christened: “the neo-Marxists in committee.”
Rafe Heydel-Mankoo kicks off his contribution, concerning the failures of immigration and multiculturalism, with some awful statistics. In Britain, the Pakistani and Bangladeshi Muslim communities are ultra-segregated, “accounting for 90% of the population of parts of towns and cities like Blackburn, Birmingham, Burnley and Bradford.” Integration is impossible in such conditions: “whilst 6% of German Muslims and 4% of French Muslims sympathise with Islamic fundamentalists, in Britain the figure is an alarming 15%.” Even worse, 36% of young British Muslims believe that someone “should be put to death if he or she leaves the Muslim faith (apostasy).”
Heydel-Mankoo is scrupulously fair. He does not blame Muslim migrants alone for the fact that the ‘ghettoized’ neighbourhoods in which they live, lacking exposure to British norms, have become
Petri dishes for the cultivation of cultural practices that are abhorrent to our values: honour killings, forced marriage, acid attacks, female genital mutilation, and so-called ‘grooming gangs’ that are all too familiar to us today.
After all, it is hopeless to expect new arrivals to assimilate, even assuming they wish to do so, if the host society lacks confidence in its own historical achievements and present ideals. “In that context,” asks Heydel-Mankoo, “who can blame a young boy for cleaving more to the well-defined culture of his father?”
Better still, Heydel-Mankoo takes inspiration from Denmark—last time I checked, a highly civilized, advanced democracy—to offer practical policy solutions to the most horrendous by-products of unwanted mass migration. Along with other measures, the Danes have reduced benefits by 50%, committed to abolishing every ‘ghetto’ by 2030, and mandated Danish language classes alongside a revamped civics curriculum focussed on promoting the Nordic nation’s own history and culture. Denmark’s proactive steps to heal the damage wrought by decades of state-sponsored multi-culturalism should inspire conservatives across the world to emulate their approach. While the dividends will not be instant, Heydel-Mankoo’s hymn to Denmark’s success makes for a welcome contrast with the grief one usually encounters on the Right. The strange death of Europe may yet be averted.
In “Birds of a Feather in the World of Media?,” the veteran journalist Robin Aitken thoroughly exposes the institutional left-wing bias at the BBC, marshalling his own ‘lived experience’ as a former employee of the national broadcaster to suggest ways in which it can fulfil its original mission.
The book then concludes with a spirited contribution, peppered with learning, by author and commentator Marc Sidwell. Again steering clear of despair, he encourages us by insisting that rumours of the West’s death have been greatly exaggerated. Still, the more we believe such rumours, the likelier they are to become self-fulfilling: “our delusions over China and Russia,” Sidwell explains, “until very recently have been infused with [Arnold] Toynbee’s idea that the West’s time was over, and every power would modernise, democratise, and blend into one global order.”
The West must be appreciated as the guardian of liberty or it will perish. However, the West’s tradition of freedom is not just worth defending, but a fearsome weapon in its own right. Our open system based on “one law for all and liberty under it,” Sidwell affirms, has an edge on its authoritarian enemies, because it “releases energy from below, rather than imposing it from a strongman who sets himself above the law.”
Life as a conservative in the modern world can feel like an ordeal, even grounds for cynical resignation. The musings of Shakespeare’s borderline depressive speaker in the early lines of “Sonnet 29” seem appropriate:
When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself and curse my fate…
Fighting Back does more than simply hope that this dire state of affairs can be reversed. It offers practical strategies, workable across every aspect of life from the personal to the political, for turning things around and emerging victorious. Moaning can be great fun. Long may glorified typists be able to make money off the activity. But only by treating our institutions as battlegrounds, as radical Leftists so skilfully do, can we restore the greatest treasures of the old world which our societies, veering left-wards, at some point abandoned in a fit of collective madness. Then and only then might we scorn to change our state with kings.
