This is a slightly expanded version of the paper I presented at the British Sociological Association (BSA) 2024 Virtual Annual Conference: Crisis, Continuity and Change (3-5 April 2024).
Please note that both the British Sociological Association and the British Social Attitudes survey abbreviate as BSA, but I only refer to the latter in the paper (and in any case referred to it in full just to avoid any possible confusion).
In this paper I will discuss usage of the term ‘culture wars’ in Britain within the wider context of ongoing social change, which I see as driven by individual self-reflexive agency in relation to surrounding cultural and political shifts. I will refer to British Social Attitudes survey findings, which it should be noted are used as the primary data source for British culture warriors such as David Goodhart and Matthew Goodwin,[1] who view the apparent social liberalisation of the last 50 years as having been imposed on an unwilling British public by a ‘new graduate elite’.
In his introduction to the most recent, fortieth, British Social Attitudes report (September 2023), John Curtice proclaims that Britain is now unequivocally more liberal than 40 years ago and notes that ‘the current debate about “culture wars” is perhaps a symptom of the fact that the role of the state in upholding particular social and cultural values is now more contentious than it once was’ (8). It is worth keeping this characteristically wry statement in mind, along with its implication that this ‘current debate’ is really about whether the government should be imposing authoritarian social norms. For example, following a trip to the UK last summer, the conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat complained that ‘notional conservative rule has done nothing to halt the resilience of progressive biases in government and the advance of American-style wokeness in [British] culture.’
According to the 2021 ‘“Culture Wars” in the UK’ report from KCL, while there has been a huge surge in media discussion of “culture wars” in the UK, particularly in the media with an increase of UK newspaper articles focusing on the existence or nature of culture wars in the country rising from just 21 in 2015 to 534 in 2020. As the report notes, the public are much less convinced and show little sign that cultural and social change are a strong concern for them. Of 134 articles the research team reviewed from 2020, 25% take the position that culture wars are either overblown by the media or manufactured for political reasons. However, dismissal of the importance of the concept is itself divided with the right-wing press seeing the left as overstating the existence of culture wars in its “obsession” with identity, while the left-leaning press tend to depict the right – including the current government and prime minister – as weaponising cultural issues in order to distract attention away from the woeful economic state of the country.
In general, there is still a strong sense in the UK that economic issues are of more material importance than cultural issues, especially those related to ‘identity politics’ – a term that is infinitely more often used than defined. Significantly, however, Goodwin dismisses this privileging of the economic as the patronising disdain of ‘new elite’ remainers for leave voters as being too stupid to vote in their own interests. In contrast, he sees the ‘explosion of American style “culture wars” over free speech’ (ix) as one of a number of manifestations of ‘a deep-rooted and unfolding “realignment” of politics [… and] shift in the balance of power’ (xvi) over the last decade. Goodhart takes yet another position in explaining why the culture wars have apparently only just emerged in the UK, arguing that ‘the left did not win the cultural argument so clearly [as they had in the UK], in the US, hence the long “culture wars”’ (63). There are several points to note here:
First, neither Goodwin nor Goodhart frame their argument with reference to culture wars, which they mention as little as possible and distance themselves from with quote marks. Indeed, while both write extensively about culture and identity, they rarely draw on the work of historians or cultural-studies scholars, instead taking data from the British Social Attitudes Survey, and drawing on applied psychology and behavioural science for their explanations. For example, drawing on the work of Karen Stenner,[2] Goodhart defines the phenomenon of cultural ‘backlash’ as the result of a predisposition within human nature to become violently intolerant ‘when one’s values or security or in-group feel under threat’ (30). Thinktank policy reports are now legitimising ‘backlash’ as a sign that politicians and policymakers have gone too far beyond the public, as though it is some sort of natural feedback loop.[3]
Second, despite the apparent difference in their positions, both Goodwin and Goodhart subscribe to the idea that the ideology of the ‘new elite’ is ‘double liberalism’. Audaciously, Goodwin claims that the rise of this elite takeover can be dated from 4 May 1979, with Margaret Thatcher introducing economic liberalism, which was reinforced in 1997 by Tony Blair, and compounded by his unleashing of ‘radical cultural liberalism’.[4] Leaving aside the fact that Blair, who advocated compulsory homework and asbos and argued that rights were dependent on responsibilities, wasn’t actually very culturally liberal, I think Goodwin’s use of ‘cultural liberalism’ rather than ‘social liberalism’ is guided by the idea that what the supposed new elites have done is to impose cultures of dependency and permissiveness on an unwilling public. Neither Goodwin or Goodhart display any sense of culture as an autonomous, material sphere in its own right or of the British cultural studies tradition of Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall. No informed account of cultural and social change since the 1960s could possibly conclude, as Goodwin does, that the liberalisation that has taken place was the exceptional product of top-down imposition.
That’s why, I propose that we would be better off in the UK with a more American-style understanding of the Culture Wars. As the historian Andrew Hartman, argues, the real exceptional coercive top-down political state was the postwar ‘normative America’ of the 1945-63 in which:
Normative Americans prized hard work, personal responsibility, individual merit, delayed gratification, social mobility, and other values that middle-class whites recognized as their own. Normative Americans lived to stringent sexual expectations: sex, whether for procreation or recreation, was contained within the parameters of heterosexual marriage. Normative Americans behaved in ways consistent with strict gender roles: within the confines of marriage, men worked outside the home and women cared for children inside it. Normative Americans believed their nation was the best in human history… (5)
Similarly, Britain 1945-63 was also a state of exceptional normativity. As with the overturning of coercive ‘normative America’ in the 1960s, the overturning of ‘normative Britain’ was the culmination of longer social trends, dating back before the war, and the slow spread of ideas (which long preceded French theorists) of cultural relativism, with the resultant understanding that much which had been taken as natural was actually cultural. As the sociologist Margaret Archer argues, the capacity for self-reflexivity (evaluating the consequences of one’s own practice and altering to achieve desired effects) that is characteristic of modernity ‘is prior to, relatively autonomous from and possesses causal efficacy in relation to structural or cultural properties’ (15). In other words, since the First World War, the biggest driver of social and cultural change has been ordinary people weighing up their personal ambitions in relation to their social circumstances and then deciding on their course of action. As the historian Jon Lawrence shows, this shift in the worldview of the British working class ‘from habit to self-reflection’ became dominant from the 1960s onwards; one consequence of which was that ‘voters increasingly chose their politics rather than being born to them’ (162-3). The form of this self-reflexivity that Archer describes as meta-reflexivity inclines people to think for themselves rather than accommodate to social norms – and that is the history of both the UK and the US over the last century.
The real significant difference between the two countries is the fact that the political struggles that defined America over the closing decades on the twentieth century were understood even as they happened as ‘culture wars’. Not acknowledging this longer culture-war history in Britain allows theorists such as Goodwin to portray ‘explosions of American-style cultural wars’ as resulting from, and therefore by implication being evidence of, deeper ‘natural’ divisions in the British public. The point of such an argument being to return to a situation where social behaviour is framed in terms of traditional values and human nature rather than in relation to the widespread public capacity for cultural self-reflexivity, registered variously by Archer and Lawrence, which has actually shaped public life in Britain over the last half century.
In ‘BSA 39: Culture Wars: Keeping the Brexit divide alive?’, Butt, Clery and Curtice note that leavers and Remainers diverge on ‘culture war’ issues in line with the divide between authoritarian (socially conservative) and libertarian (socially liberal) outlooks. They provide a sizeable amount of data before concluding that
there does appear to be the potential for ‘culture war’ issues to maintain the electoral division between Remainers and Leavers that was central to how people voted in the 2019 general election. (25)
However, they go on to point out that this ongoing divide might not continue to play out in the same way as in 2019 because the long-term trend shows the balance tilting from ‘anti-woke’ to ‘woke’:
The ‘anti-woke’ rhetoric in which some politicians have recently engaged is perhaps an implicit recognition that Britain’s attitudinal landscape has changed in a way that means that once widely-shared assumptions are now being challenged, and that this development is not confined to a supposed cultural and educational elite (25).
Yet, while this is a blunt refutation of the position that Goodwin adopts, it has not stopped him drawing freely on the data from this same BSA report to illustrate an opposing argument in his book Values, Voice and Virtue.[5] The following year’s 40th BSA report (2023) shows more clearly how over the last decade – the decade that Goodwin and Goodhart describe as characterised by legitimate backlash to the cultural liberalisation of the new elite – public opinion has shifted on the libertarian-authoritarian axis away from the idea that we should all follow a particular moral code and set of social norms, towards individuals being left to decide such issues for themselves.
While Curtice notes in his introduction that it would be a mistake to think that Britain will simply continue to become more liberal due to generational turnover, this is because some of those generational effects are now exhausted (i.e. even most 70-year-olds see nothing wrong with pre-marital sex) but also because while the state might not be imposing liberalisation, it still clearly has the power to overturn it, as demonstrated by the decline the survey records in the support for trans rights over the last three years.
In Elizabeth Clery’s chapter ‘BSA 40: A liberalisation in attitudes?’, the question mark at the end is largely in relation to what she describes as ‘attitudes to a more contemporary moral issue – people who are transgender’ (35). At this point, I should note that I am not entirely happy either with the report’s use of trans people as a kind of case study to demonstrate how this analysis might function or with the way in which it portrays the existence of trans people as a moral issue. The key findings are summarised as follows:
Attitudes towards people who are transgender have become markedly less liberal over the past three years.
64% describe themselves as not prejudiced at all against people who are transgender, a decline of 18 percentage points since 2019 (82%).
Just 30% think someone should be able to have the sex on their birth certificate altered if they want, down from 53% in 2019.
While women, younger people, the more educated and less religious express more liberal views towards people who are transgender, these views have declined across all demographic groups.
[However] 71% of women describe themselves as not at all prejudiced against people who are transgender, compared with 57% of men (40)
Overall, the proportion adopting the liberal position has diminished since 2019: ‘These changes in attitudes are substantial, and their direction and timing suggest that they have been largely triggered by the intense political debate and media discussion on both sides of the border regarding the easing of the circumstances in which someone can be diagnosed as transgender (and thus allowed to reflect this on their birth certificate)’ (39) The allusion to ‘the border’ refers to the much publicised use by the Secretary of State for Scotland’s of a Section 35 order to block the 2022 Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill. Nevertheless, Clery speculates as to whether ‘policymaking has moved too far beyond the public consensus in the past three years, instead provoking a backlash’ (42).
Here the implied meaning of ‘backlash’ is, as I’ve already discussed, as though it’s the natural consequence of the upsetting of some sort of cosmic balance rather than angry people vehemently rejecting something they don’t like. The fact that the negative change in attitudes to trans rights correlates to increased media and political coverage rather than traditional and religious attitudes as measurable in relation to other ‘moral issues’ suggests that what we are seeing here is the result of a people being encouraged by the press and politicians to identify as culturally conservative by self-consciously rejecting liberalism. The BSA 40 report’s implication that this reversal means that ‘future trends are difficult to predict’ leaves a slightly bad taste in the mouth (although this might also be seen as a comment on the quality of the UK government and press), which is offset by the recognition that ‘we may be seeing a period effect similar to that which we witnessed in the 1980s for attitudes to homosexual relationships, with the emergence of HIV-AIDS and the introduction of Section 28 [in 1988, at which point the proportion of the British public agreeing that “same sex relationships are not wrong at all” sank to 10%, its all-time low for the 40 years of the BSA].’ (42). One thing that both the 1980s and the post-2019 Conservative Governments have in common is the use of repressive legislation (such as Section 28) and executive power (such as the use of the Section 35 order to block the Scottish GRR Bill) to advocate a self-conscious reactionary identity as part of their political appeal to voters.
The ‘culture war’ is often discussed as a distraction designed to split people apart and draw their attention away from more direct economic and political forms of struggle in which common cause needs to be made, but this is miss that the ‘culture war’ has evolved from simply being resistance to social liberalisation into pursuit of the political goal of validating repressive, authoritarian government to enforce a ‘normative Britain’. Without acknowledgment of the fact, it is impossible to provide a balanced analysis of the liberalisation of social attitudes in Britain. Moreover, this tendency in itself is an implicit acknowledgment that social change is not driven by an elite-led project of cultural liberalisation, but rather the product of a widespread modern self-reflexivity that exists beyond the control of any elite.
Bibliography
Margaret Archer (2007) Making our Way through the World: Human Reflexivity and Social Mobility. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sarah Butt, Elizabeth Clery and John Curtice (eds.) (2022), ‘BSA 39: Culture Wars: Keeping the Brexit Divide Alive’. London: National Centre for Social Research: via https://natcen.ac.uk/publications/british-social-attitudes-39-broken-britain
Elizabeth Clery (2023) ‘BSA 40: A Liberalisation in Attitudes?’ https://natcen.ac.uk/publications/bsa-40-liberalisation-attitudes
John Curtice (2023) ‘40 BSA: Secular or Cyclical?: 40 years of tracking public opinion’ https://natcen.ac.uk/publications/bsa-40-overview
Ross Douthat (2023) ‘How America Made James Bond “Woke”’ New York Times, 6 September.
Bobby Duffy, Kirstie Hewlett, George Murkin, Rebecca Benson, Rachel Hesketh, Ben Page, Gideon Skinner and Glenn Gottfried (2021) ‘“Culture Wars” in the UK’. The Policy Institute, King’s College London: https://www.kcl.ac.uk/news/uks-culture-war-risks-leading-to-us-style-divisions-although-not-there-yet
David Goodhart (2017) The Road to Somewhere: The New Tribes Shaping British Politics, London: Penguin.
Matthew Goodwin (2023) Values, Voice and Virtue: The New British Politics, London: Penguin.
Andrew Hartman (2019) A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars, second edition. Chicago, Il: University of Chicago Press.
Jon Lawrence (2019) Me Me Me? The Search for Community in Post-war England. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
[1] See Goodwin’s comments on how to ‘win the culture wars’ as quoted in Jon Bloomfield and David Edgar’s ‘Goodhart, Goodwin, Glasman and Gray: The Vanguard Spearheading British National Populism’, Byline Times, October 2023.
[2] Karen Stenner (2005) The Authoritarian Dynamic. New York: Cambridge University Press.
[3] See, for example, the ‘Review of the UK Constitution: Final Report’ (September 2023) by the Institute for Government and the Bennett Institute for Public Policy, pp. 26, 30.
[4] The recent examples of leading Labour Party politicians such as Rachel Reeves and Keir Starmer apparently endorsing 1980s Thatcherism or the role of supply-side economic reforms in ‘national renewal’ at the time, potentially gives some credence to the ‘double liberalism’ label, although again it depends somewhat on how culturally liberal one considers the Starmer Labour Party to be.
[5] See Goodwin 2023, pp. 30, 67, 79, 83, 173.
Social Humanities 