If the culture war is real, then who are we meant to be fighting?

Is the culture war real and, if so, who’s fighting who? Once upon a time, every right-leaning edgelord on the internet believed “social justice warriors” were fighting a war against anyone and everyone, attacking people who didn’t toe the woke line relentlessly while also defending themselves loudly against imagined grievances. And even as a bleeding-heart socialist, I’d happily admit that some of these keyboard soldiers went too far. There was the time a scientist broke down in tears while apologising for wearing a shirt with half-naked women on it, for example. Was it a stupid fashion choice in the workplace? Yes. Did he deserve eviscerating to the extent that he cried on national television? I think few of us would agree the punishment fits the crime.

Twitter pile-ons that turned into career-ending consequences have existed pretty much since the microblogging site began. They were the subject of Jon Ronson’s phenomenally successful book, So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed. They happen in the Hollywood celebrity world, the literature world, the journalism world, and the furry kink world. But the reality is that these pile-ons are as common on the right as they are on the left, and that perhaps is the reason why we’ll have to admit that we really are, and always have been, at war with Eurasia.

As the head of an opinion desk, I have a little more front-line experience of this type of human behaviour than most. In early 2020, I spent two long evenings on a phone call with a writer who wrote for Voices admitting to breaking one state’s lockdown because of a family emergency. She was torn apart online by people who believed the right things – that if you can, you should stay at home during a pandemic; that social responsibility is paramount when a deadly virus is circulating and there are no vaccines or treatments – but became downright cruel while exercising those beliefs. Similarly, I have seen a writer reduced to tears for advocating for the male contraceptive pill (something that now seems within scientific sight). And every year, I get a predictable surge of detractors on Twitter who want to let me know how much they hate an article I wrote seven years ago about why we need an International Men’s Day about as much as we need a White History Month (an opinion I still maintain, but guess what – it doesn’t even matter! Because there is an International Men’s Day and it’s on 19 November). Usually, of course, they don’t just let me know they hate the article; they want to let me know that they hate me personally, because I’m “a bitch,” “a feminazi,” or “a dumbass”.

I don’t think most people are like the people who crawl out from the annals of 4chan to insult me like that – but I do think they show something interesting about human nature. Usually, if you engage with these people (and sometimes I have done, for instance when I’ve written features about hardcore Trumpists or members of underground groups like the Boogaloo Bois), they will tell you a bitter story about how “they could’ve done it better”. They often talk about wanting to be journalists themselves, but being rejected for jobs or living in places or being in financial situations where that felt impossible. They believe that reporters and editors owe them something because there’s a parallel universe in which they would have been in our positions. And I sympathise with that in many respects, because there is a lot of untapped talent across the country and indeed across the world.

On the other hand, I also think this comes from a general feeling that writing is not a “skill”. Mathematicians or particle physicists are not the target of many people’s ire; it’s accepted that through a combination of natural aptitude and hard work, they got where they are and they deserve it. Are there other people out there who, with more supportive parents or better finances or less disinterested teachers or a nationality that allowed for more opportunity, would have become just as good at physics or maths as the scientists currently working at Nasa, MIT or Harvard? Undoubtedly. But because most of their work happens behind closed doors, people don’t feel so much that they’ve missed out – and because (most) people tend not to run maths blogs or numbers channels for fun but do communicate through writing all the time, there exists a general impression that writing “can be done by anyone”.

And so the culture wars chug on, fuelled by right-wingers who tell their followers that liberal writers “believe they’re better than you” for having a skill they don’t even believe is a skill. Education itself becomes suspect and elitist in that environment; teachers are enemies, and good, salt-of-the-earth, belt-and-switch-if-you’re-bad, didn’t-do-me-any-harm parenting comes back into vogue. The “don’t say gay” bills recently passed in Florida and Alabama effectively prevent schools from talking about sexuality or gender at all, under the guise of “giving power back to parents”. And there are some writers out there who support this kind of thing, too, as one playwright and new right-wing culture warrior reminded us all on Monday, when he went on Fox News to claim, absurdly, that teachers in general are prone to paedophilia and that male teachers, in particular, are predators just waiting to get their rocks off discussing sex with your children.

David Mamet is one of a handful of authors, and probably the most surprising, who have taken this side. I remember being personally devastated when Lionel Shriver, author of the brilliant and highly empathetically written We Need to Talk About Kevin, came out as a conspiratorial Brexiteer (she’s not even British!), but I’d say most normal people are more au fait with the works of Mamet. In response to his bizarre Fox News outburst, Bernie Sanders’ foreign adviser wrote that it simply proved “Rupert Murdoch is the world’s most dangerous oligarch”. Perhaps. And perhaps I’m wrong to have expected more from someone who writes for a living. After all, razor-sharp observation of human interaction doesn’t necessarily imply empathy. Sometimes it implies the complete opposite.