2024: The year we bury the culture war
Getting back to the politics of what you want, not who you are
Keir Starmer is not a particularly inspiring man, in his manner or his ideas. But almost as an aside yesterday, he presented us with a beautiful vision of the future of the country. It was the sort of thing I'd man the barricades for:
"I promise this - a politics which treads a little lighter on all our lives. That’s the thing about populism or nationalism…It needs your full attention, needs you constantly focussing on this week’s common enemy. And that’s exhausting."
It's one of the most welcome statements we've heard from a British politician in a good long time. The pledge of a quieter politics. A smoothing of the edges. Less high-pitched. Gentler. A government which at least aspires towards expanding its support rather than seeking to pitch one group of voters against another.
He will obviously face opposition from the Conservatives, who are now utterly soaked in identity war politics. But he will also face subtle, unthinking, uncoordinated opposition from a different direction: Commentators. Large and small. Right and left. Reactionary and progressive. The most prominent newspaper columnist and the lowliest single-digit Twitter account. Journalists, radio producers, YouTube hosts, podcasters. Because we have a dirty secret: The culture war has been good for us. And it's a hard drug to give up.
There's a little aside you hear from progressive journalists in private when they talk about the period after the next general election. It'll be great for the country, they say, but bad for business. And it's true. How many articles about the US have you read since Joe Biden was in power, compared to when Donald Trump was president? Far fewer, and many of those will have been about Trump. How many have you read about Brazil since Lula da Silva was in charge, as opposed to Jair Bolsonaro? How many did you read about Argentina before Javier Milei took over? Generally speaking, we are very attentive to cunts doing cunty things, and much less interested in flawed reasonable people doing flawed reasonable things.
There is a hint here about how populists are able to hack the media in order to secure control of the political agenda. They say something abrasive and barbaric. We split into groups who love it and hate it, it's covered extensively by the press, and so they spread their message. They barely need a communications department. We do it for them.
It's an old tactic that's been used by demagogues and charlatans through the years. Joseph Goebbels used street fighting to spread word of the Nazis in the press during the Weimar Republic. Joseph McCarthy used carefully timed pronouncements to boost coverage while limiting scrutiny. They're not just hacking the media. They're hacking the disposition of the human brain, the one that responds to bright primary-colour political narratives rather than the drab tedium of day-to-day transactional decision-making. And they rely as much on liberals for that as they do reactionaries.
Much as they've been black-pit-in-your-stomach fucking horrible, the last 13 years - and in particular the last seven - have been very good for liberal British journalism. It's brought readers in their droves, appalled by what is happening, keen to understand what's going on, and searching for people who feel like them. I wrote a book on trade, for fuck sake, and then another one on parliamentary scrutiny, and they both sold quite well. We've lived in a painfully counter-intuitive world, where our professional life and our personal morality have developed an inverse relationship. It's not a nice feeling. I would really much prefer a world where they walked in step together. But it is real.
It's not just progressives. The reactionary right has gotten in on the act too. There's a reason so many right-wing commentators like to talk about 'the elite', or 'the establishment', or 'the blob', or whatever other conspiratorial enemy they've magicked up this month. It gains them entry to the dynamic. It allows them to sidestep the inconvenient fact that we've had a right wing government for the last 13 years and portray themselves as the upstart rebels taking on those in power. It replicates the editorial and commercial opportunities of embattled opposition during a period of government.
This can become particularly egregious in an era of user-funded journalism - Patreon-backed podcasts and subscriber Substacks. The kind of thing you're reading right now. The quickest and surest way to build a financially viable product on these platforms is to establish yourself as the brave fighter against overwhelming forces. The lone tells-it-as-it-is conservative prising apart the liberal stranglehold over culture, the sole voice of socialism when the government and media are dominated by Tories. If you can convince your readers they are part of a historical struggle for the future, they are more likely to support you.
The danger in this scenario is audience capture. Commentators know what their audience wants and what it doesn't want. They can see how many likes their tweets get. They will notice the traffic a piece gets. So the tendency is to write only about the things that get them attention and, more dangerously, to write about it only in a way that is guaranteed to placate their audience.
Over the last few years we've seen plenty of commentators driven mad by this dynamic. On left and right, it is easy to think of examples where they have become a mutilated form of their original self, twisted and contorted by the positions they are forced to hold and the objections they are forced to ignore, all in order to satisfy the expectations of their audience. And as that process takes place, you can see them lose whatever it is that makes them whole. Their internal life begins to reflect the outward projection, so that in the end there is nothing left of them really, except for the horrid caricature they have made of their own sense of self. The narrative of a rebel fight against powerful forces provides the audience and then, ultimately, personal disintegration.
This year's general election will replace an identity war government with a transactional one. And that will upend a commentator ecosystem that has come to rely on primary colours and intense emotions rather than drab day-to-day policy-making.
It's clear what'll happen to the reactionary right. They've gone half-mad in power, talking all their now-standard gibberish about conspiracies and global elites and the rest. In opposition, that sense of grievance, viciousness and powerlessness is going to become truly ugly. They will have every psychological incentive to turn into the very worst versions of themselves, railing against the government in ever-more vitriolic ways, no matter how moderate its programme is. And they will now have the commercial incentives as well, at a much higher pitch. Every policy, no matter how practical or insignificant, will be framed as a conspiracy against the people and a betrayal of Britain. And that will work, by the way. It'll get them more subscribers and more likes. This part of the political spectrum will simply go insane.
For progressive journalists, things will be more complicated. Finally, we will have a better government. Not a perfect one, or even necessarily a very good one, but a better one. There will therefore be a corresponding decrease in audience. There simply won't be as many people reading about planning reform, net-zero and the introduction of sectoral bargaining as there have been reading about Rwanda or Brexit. And that will be a good thing. Politics should not be this interesting. The health of a society is roughly inverse to how gripping its political coverage is. In a perfect world, it would be mind-numbingly boring.
But commercially, we'll be fine. People fret too much. Unlike lifestyle journalism or cultural journalism, current affairs journalism is lucky to have a sizable minority of the population who are simply addicted to it. They couldn't stop if they wanted to. I know, because I'm one of them. I don't even understand the concept of not reading the news. It's beyond the limits of my human imagination. So the audience will be smaller, but it will still exist, and everything will be OK.
The really important business is political and psychological.
Truth is, Starmer will be good and bad. He'll do some things we agree with and some things we won't. And in an environment of audience decline, that will provide commentators with a series of incentives. Some will condemn him as a sell-out Tory bastard coward forevermore, because he did one thing they object to. Some will retreat into a kind of hero worship - a centrist version of what we saw towards Jeremy Corbyn or Boris Johnson - and defend him because he did it, rather than on the basis of the action itself.
And some, hopefully, will acclimatise to a new way of doing things: A political culture in which we recognise that people can be good and bad, that the things they do can be good and bad, and that sometimes this will all happen at the same time, in a way that is intellectually frustrating and emotionally unsatisfying. To criticise where it is required and praise where it isn’t. To return to reason, instead of identity.
This year will provide an opportunity to bury the culture war. To bury it dead and erect its tombstone. But that will involve everyone trying to be a better version of themselves - not just the government.
Odds and sods
The Traitors is back on TV. I don't watch reality television, except for this one example and I am obsessed with it. In particular I'm obsessed with the idea that its core mechanic is false. So just bear with me for a moment here while I work my way through this shit.
Here are some basic facts about the game. There are Faithful and Traitors. If there are any Faithful left at the end of the game, they get the money. If there are any Traitors left at the end, they get the money. Each day, the Faithful try to vote out Traitors and the Traitors murder the Faithful. Fine.
Now let's imagine that the Faithful manage to vote out all the Traitors in the opening weeks. Admittedly, they've never gotten close to this because they base their decision-making on prejudice and personal animosity rather than logic, but whatever. Let's say they do. What do the producers do now? The show is scheduled. It has a set number of episodes. It must go on.
Presumably they'd do what they did with Wilf at the end of the last season, when he was the last Traitor left: Let him invite people to join him. Or perhaps they'd have to use another mechanic. But either way, the result will be the same: they cannot allow the show to run out of Traitors. The stock must be replenished.
So it follows that the Faithful are not really motivated to vote out Traitors. No matter what they do, there will always be more. It only matters right at the end, in the last episode - because at that point you really do need to get rid of them to secure the cash. And just as importantly, that's the only point you can get rid of them, because the show has fulfilled its number of episodes.
Until then, your motivation is completely different. It is to take out rivals. The real incentive for Faithful is not to get rid of Traitors, but to get rid of competitor Faithfuls. And to do that while appearing as likeable, trustworthy and inoffensive as possible.
I don't think this makes it less gripping. Honestly, the opposite. There's a lot of different incentives working on a household of people, who you can see slowly going mad under the burden of them. It's a game that is presented as a war against the other side, when in fact it is a war against your own side. I'm sure there's a political metaphor in there somewhere.
“It's clear what'll happen to the reactionary right. They've gone half-mad in power, talking all their now-standard gibberish about conspiracies and global elites and the rest. In opposition, that sense of grievance, viciousness and powerlessness is going to become truly ugly. They will have every psychological incentive to turn into the very worst versions of themselves, railing against the government in ever-more vitriolic ways, no matter how moderate its programme is.”
This is exactly what happened here in Australia when the 9 year right-wing Liberal government lost the 2022 general election to the Australian Labor Party. The rump of the Libs elected an almost comically hard man as Leader of the Opposition, who has led his party considerably farther to the right - with, of course, the inevitable full throated support of the Murdoch empire.
There are just three operating principles: say no to every government measure, no matter that the Opposition supported it when in power, offer no policy substance, and fixate upon a mythical glorious past.
As always, the right are so much better at intuiting that there are a great many in our community who yearn for simple solutions for complex problems.
Whilst I am in relatively broad agreement with what you outline here, there is one huge assumption that I think needs to be addressed - that in hoping for quiet, rational politics, people can to a large extent not have to be quite so involved in politics themselves, because the "sensibles" are now in charge, which in turn serves to shore up the status quo, inadvertently or not. Putting the desperate culture war bollocks of the Right to one side, my hope is that the increased scrutiny that you describe in your article continues after a Labour win at the next general election, with all politicians having to get used to being held to account by the electorate in a more rigorous way than the current "your turn, my turn" democratic duopoly desires.