When listening to debates from either side of the political divide, it is striking how similar the accusations are. Both sides use ‘power’, as a way of undermining the position of the other side. Within polarised political debate, the assumption is that the opposing side is in the business of seeking power. The other side, the argument goes, are in collaboration with a political elite, acting as their mouthpiece, creating an ideology the purpose of which is to deceive the masses into agreeing with them, and blindly legitimising their power. This accusation, that the other side is actually spouting an ideology which serves the interests of the powerful, undermines the actual content of their arguments. Each side claims to expose this by having, themselves, captured reality.

I remember encountering these concepts through the study of Marx and Engles. In ‘The Communist Manifesto’, they criticise bourgeois intellectuals for providing moral justifications for capitalism. Within this category of ‘intellectuals’ they refer to are Renaissance thinkers of the 17th and 18th century who wrote of the emerging ‘modern liberty’ in Europe. This liberty was distinct from both the period of feudalism that had just ended, as well as the liberty of the ancients. Distinct from feudalism because, the capitalist state had the potential to allow individuals to take decisions in the free market to serve their own best interests, protected by a state which would enforce the law to keep markets free. It was distinct from the liberty of the ancients because it was liberty through representation rather than participation; people agreed to hand over political decision making, including the monopoly over the use of a coercive, violent state, in exchange for a degree of liberty in their personal lives. For Marx and Engles, this notion of freedom through capitalism was a lie. This ideology, they said, serves only the bourgeois class, who the state coercively protects at the expense of the proletariat. During my study, I remember wondering ‘do the bourgeois class consciously use the ideology of modern liberty through capitalism to perpetuate their own power and oppress the masses, or are they themselves convinced of it?’. An answer to this is provided by Runciman (History of Ideas, Marx and Engles on Revolution, 1st May 2020), who says the honest Marxist answer is that ‘it doesn’t matter’. If they are deceivers, they are monsters, they are deliberately exploiting the masses for private gain, and need to be removed from power. If they are fools (they believe it themselves), well, they are fools, and need to be removed from power.

Marx is a useful reference point because this basic argument, that those in power are either deceivers, or fools, operating a system and spouting a supporting ideology which serves their interest at the expense of the masses, is the basic argument underpinning much of the present discourse. On the right, for example, there is Matthew Goodwin, who on his Substack wrote ‘At its core, radical progressivism, woke ideology, is and has only ever been about the pursuit of power’. On the left, there is Novara media, who say ‘right wing media want to direct our fear and anger at societies most vulnerable… backed by billionaire interests and corporate greed, all they want is to protect the super rich at all costs’. Interestingly, both seem to agree on the question, ‘are the mouthpieces of these ideologies deceivers, or fools?’: For both, they are deceivers. The deceivers are an elite which span across politics and the media. The presence of this elite underpins both Novara media’s raison d’etre (during the video including the above quotation, they show a series of images of Rishi Sunak rubbing shoulders with the British aristocracy), as well as Matthew Goodwin’s, who clumps civil servants, MPs, journalists and architects into an ill-defined set of dominant institutions which are now run by a new elite of ‘woke’ liberal graduates.

But the arguments of both sides suffer through the instinct to accuse the other of ideology. Whilst I am not denying the connection between political power, economic power and ideology, the conviction of both sides that the other have succeeded in crystallising power around these three domains mean they appear blind to the potential validity of what their perceived enemies are saying. This has been particularly evident to me as I have observed two debates within our public discourse, the first discussing whether the UK is governed by a new elite of liberal, university graduate ‘anywheres’, and the other around the Palestine/Israel conflict. Both sides agree broadly on what defines a victim; both fight in the name of victims of unjust violence, oppression, systemic economic disadvantage, and discrimination. By these markers, there are legitimate victims being defended by both sides of both debates. Yet still too often people are blind to the possible legitimacy of opposing arguments in favour of the accusation of ideology, and the analysis suffers. It is on this basis that I argue for nuance.

Two weeks ago, I saw Mathew Goodwin and David Aaronovitch debate ‘Is Britain run by a new out of touch elite?’ at Conway Hall. Matthew Goodwin has built a large following arguing that yes to that question, and his views are summarised in the passage below;

Put simply, we are living through the greatest radicalisation of the elite class since the 1960s. Increasingly, especially since Brexit, Trump, and the summer of 2020, the white, urban, liberal graduates from elite universities and comfortable backgrounds who have joined, and are now replacing, the old ruling class have been moving sharply leftwards on cultural issues. On all the issues which have been surging up the agenda —immigration, multiculturalism, borders, race, sex, gender, diversity, anti-racism, and more— they’ve simply turned inwards and away from much of the rest of Britain. And as they’ve moved leftwards, they’ve taken the institutions they dominate with them —the BBC, the civil service, the universities, the advertisement agencies, the museums, the galleries, the public bodies— using their social and cultural power to impose a narrow set of strongly socially liberal beliefs on the rest of society which, as the latest British Social Attitudes survey shows, are supported by no more than 20% of Britain. (Matt Goodwin, Substack,What Happened To Me? 24th October 2023)

There are aspects of Goodwin’s argument that are pertinent to a negative aspect of our society which requires addressing. I believe Goodwin’s arguments are legitimate in the following ways. Firstly, I have felt and observed a snobbery by university educated professionals, in which a segment of British society, particularly the white working classes, are morally denigrated. I addressed my experience of this at the school I work at in a previous blog post. Secondly, this snobbery can manifest in the blacklisting of certain views (which should be treated as legitimate, grounded as they are in genuine moral concerns, and culture) as racist, sexist, homophobic or transphobic. Goodwin believes that, within the liberally dominated institutions, these classifications have come to extend to ‘acceptable’ political standpoints, such as wanting to lower immigration, strengthen borders or protect sex-based rights. The liberal retort to this would be that underneath opposition to these policies exists racism and transphobia, and they are therefore unacceptable.

Regardless of my opinion on the policies themselves, people have the right to hold these positions with dignity. To deprive people of the dignity of having their views considered legitimate misunderstands and devalues the cultural environments which have produced these views. This is negative for two reasons, one, it demonises people for the community they were raised in, and two, it wrongly blacklists legitimate political and moral concerns. Labels of ‘racism, and sexism, and transphobia’ are significant because they code for views that go beyond being wrong; they signify something totalising in the individual that possesses them. When applied to someone, these labels reduce the individual into something less, someone morally and intellectually bad.

Remarking on her own homophobia when she arrived at Cambridge University having been raised in a Morman community, Tara Westover said in a recent podcast (Past, Present, Future, Why J.S Mill Matters w/Tara Westover, 29th June)

‘we live in a time where people are exquisitely attuned to privilege in all its forms except for in education…. It’s not as if, if I’m wrong about this one thing my entire life is bad. We still have a mythology that people have access to education on their own [and therefore should be blamed for not having the ‘right level’ of education].

Similarly, people do not access culture ‘on their own’. They are exposed to cultural values growing up, which may or may not be of value in the environment they find themselves in. In my life, my ability to articulate the liberal set of beliefs I grew up around has been an exclusive positive in facilitating advancement in my educational, professional and social life. Had I possessed conservative cultural values, I would have experienced barriers. In Michael Merrick’s talk on social mobility (BBC Radio 4, Four Thought, Socially Mobile?, 29th October 2021), he explains how conservative values can jar against the liberal values promoted in schools. Yet the values of children from conservative cultural backgrounds should be given the space to exist without being demonised. As Merrick articulates, in education, we too frequently force students into a choice; loyalty to the norms of their community but ostracisation in education, or loyalty to the norms in education and denigration of their community.

When thinking about peoples right to determine their own sense of right and wrong, without having that dictated to, I am always reminded of an anthropological text called ‘The Politics of Piety’, by Saba Mahmood, where she describes an Islamist political movement amongst Muslim women in Cairo, Egypt. Contrasting starkly in content with the campaigns of white, western feminism, Mahmood describes women campaigning earnestly for a more traditional application of Islam. This text questioned who we attribute with a free-thinking, rational mind, deserving of its own agency, and who we regard as ‘cultural dupes’, manipulated by an oppressor ideology. Mahmood argues that to assume these women are not aware of what they truly want is to deprive them of a certain human dignity. It is fascinating because it brings into question what the ‘liberal’ attitude to this movement should be. Do we deny the agency of Muslim women and tell them their sincerely held beliefs are wrong, or do we empower these women to realise them? The left would be well served to engage in a similar self-reflection with regards to its perception of socially conservative viewpoints within our own politics.

Yet despite its merits, in his assertion that all liberal perspectives only serve the interests of power, Goodwin’s argument becomes more divisive, and more destructive, and encourages a politics which is blind to all causes promoted by the left. Whilst advocating for the dignity of the working classes, he positions himself against what he calls ‘luxury beliefs’, which;

Bring them few costs but impose heavy costs on others —like their passionate support for mass immigration, their dismissal of calls for border security as “racist”, their obsession with gender identity and dismissal of sex-based rights, and their strong support for illegal migrants, or refugees from Gaza’

This represents full participation in the culture war because he seeks to crystallise the division. Yes, it may be true, that there exists a trend in which university educated professionals morally denigrate conservative perspectives. This does not mean, however, that all liberal causes are fabricated to serve the interests of a narrow elite.

The implication of Goodwin’s rhetoric is that you should reject trans-rights, and the rights of asylum seekers, because these viewpoints serve only the narrow elite. Firstly, for those that already have these beliefs, they are encouraged to become more intolerant of these causes, because, as well as being wrong, they represent the ideological beliefs of the oppressor class. Secondly, people that do not belong to the ‘liberal, university educated group’ are encouraged to disagree with these beliefs out of hand because they only serve those exerting power over them. For this reason, I applauded Aaronowitch when he criticised Goodwin for being a ‘culture war entrepreneur’. Politicians and commentators fuel division and tribalism by creating clear divisions of ‘us’ and ‘them’, of ‘reality’ and ‘ideology’, benefit from it, because they present themselves as the figureheads of a fight against the enemy in the culture war. On Monday last week, Goodwin shared an article on by Niall Ferguson entitled ‘What irony! The deranged defence of Hamas on campuses across the West is fuelling a counter-revolution that could finally loosen the stranglehold of wokeism’ written for the Mail Online, which demonstrates the absurdity of some of the positions taken up to maintain the rigid boundaries of ‘us’ and ‘them’ which the culture war necessitates. Ferguson begins by again outlining the horror of the October 7th attacks, before describing the various shows of support for the Palestinian cause in universities across the UK and the US. He writes:

‘Like all cults and sects, the woke have their own idiosyncratic language and rituals. More than 30 Harvard student groups, for instance, published an abhorrent statement saying they held ‘the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence’.

Ferguson being a historian, it is difficult to understand how he has arrived at such a black and white position, to say that believing Israel to be ‘entirely responsible for the violence’ is the belief of a cult, if not to participate as a ‘culture war entrepreneur’. Granted, the statement from the Harvard students is reductive, requires qualification, and is polarising, but, like Goodwin, the fact that Ferguson is not using his expertise to contextualise the statement represents active participation in the culture wars. Again, he is reinforcing associations between identity groups and political opinion, between graduates and defence of Palestine, between the ‘anti-woke’ and defence of Israel. He denies the reader the opportunity to take up a nuanced position by associating criticism of the Israeli state with a ‘cult’, bent on controlling the minds of the masses through a wholly incorrect ideology. Surely anyone which a complex understanding of history, as Ferguson has, can accept that the state of Israel is at least partially responsible. Yet instead he encourages readers to see this statement solely as part of an leftist elite ideology.

Unfortunately, the left do the same. As I will show through reference to Novara Media’s coverage of the Palestine/Israel conflict, the left also create intolerance of opinions which differ from their own by claiming opposing opinions solely serve the interests of power. This weakens their analysis as they participate in culture war politics, blind to the legitimacy of arguments made on the other side. For example, last week, Novara reported on the reaction to the story of an underground train driver in London shouting ‘free, free Palestine’ on the tannoy to a train of people made up in part by attendees of the free Palestine launch, and who had been subsequently suspended from his job (Novara Live, The Right Wing Backlash to Massive Pro-Palestine Protests, 23rd October 2023). As evidence of a concerted ‘right wing backlash’ to this, they then played the following reaction by Lee Harpin (political editor of the Jewish News), who was speaking on LBC, he said:

‘We have to look at what this chant means…its quite undefined, but to a lot of Jewish people at the moment, free free Palestine means the annihilation of the world’s only Jewish state. We only have to go back a couple of weeks to see what the annihilation of the Jewish state would look like.. so its very frightening.. now I’m not saying ‘free free Palestine’ always means that, it could very well mean a free Palestine along side a safe and secure Israel… but its ill defined and at a time of horrible conflict, no train driver should be using it.

On the podcast, Michael Walker responded (incredulously):

‘If free Palestine is triggering to you.. a simple demand… is too much, if that worries you.. maybe you need to rethink your politics.. because if you can’t be free and happy if Palestinians are free.. than that is not a particularly positive politics’.

This response reflects an incorrect interpretation of what Lee Harpin said. Firstly, Harpin’s response was actually quite measured. He said that the chant ‘is quite undefined’, which is fair, given the ongoing contention surrounding what a solution to the Israel Palestine conflict would be. Secondly, his point was that saying this over a tannoy is wrong, not necessarily because of the inherent content of the chant, which is poorly defined, but because of the possible interpretation of the phrase by a Jewish population which feels vulnerable. This is why, he argues, saying ‘free free Palestine’ over a tannoy would be inappropriate, because of its possible interpretation. Do the Jewish population have the right to feel sensitive at this time? Surely, yes. But Michael Walker ignores the emphasis that Harpin places on interpretation, and reframes his comments narrowly to mean ‘Palestine and the Palestinian people should never be free’. Later on in the same podcast, Ash Sarkar reflected on the attention given to the chant ‘from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’, heard in Pro-Palestine marches across the world, most notebly from Suella Braverman, who questioned whether in some contexts it should be understood as an expression of a violent desire to see Israel erased from the world’ and should therefore be criminalised. Again interpreting this reaction as part of a ‘right-wing backlash’, and thereby diminishing its validity Sarkar said:

‘The right appropriate the Jewish experience and use it for authoritarian ends.. That kind of discourse.. of ‘if I say I feel threatened that means you have to act on it regardless of whether what you have done breaches the law’ is not the pathway to equality or a more progressive society’

But is this a fair, balanced analysis of why this chant is controversial? No. To provide some historical context around the chant, and the place it occupies within the political project of Hamas, Ayman Dean on the podcast, Conflicted, said…

‘The project of Hamas is the so called liberation of Palestine, from ‘the river to the sea’, the so called historical Palestine, this is why you hear the chants of the leftists and the Islamists in the streets of London, New York, Chicago, in Paris and Berlin’, so the whole idea is really the uprooting of all the Israelis and sending them to Europe, Latin America wherever. So it is to some extent genocidal, an ethnic cleansing aim and goal’ (What was Hamas Thinking?,11th October 2023).

There is clearly, then, a legitimate sensitivity to the chant on behalf of the Jewish, given both the content of the chant, which describes a geographical area that encompasses the whole of Israel (from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean), and its association with Hamas. Sarkar’s analysis fails to offer this context. Secondly, her point that ‘feeling threatened’ is not enough for the police to intervene, because what has been said does not technically break the law, surely contradicts a central pillar of leftist politics, namely sensitivity to racially aggravated discourse, and the right people have to be free from it. Either she is denying that Jewish people are actually feeling threatened because of their race/religion, that this is just a lie used for ‘authoritarian ends’, or that Jewish feelings of vulnerability are illegitimate and do not have the right to be defended. Each of those positions is difficult to defend without nuanced qualification, qualification which would surely have to involve a measure of sensitivity to the Jewish experience. Instead, Novara Media have used ideology and power as a way of characterising opposing viewpoints, and in doing so have failed to represent the nuance of the story.

What reasons lie at the root of this impulse to represent opposing positions in this way? I have argued so far that this representation is the defining feature of the culture war, and one reason is the fact that it sells. Total disagreement is an emotive rallying cry, when compared with the alternative of saying ‘they make some good points, but I would add this…’. A political call to arms, promoting the idea that there is a conspiracy of power keeping society from knowing the truth, is powerful. This was commented on by David Aaranovitch, who, reflecting on his time trying to get columns through to the editors for publication when he was working as a journalist at The Times, said;

One of the things I was aware of in my time at The Times was …. If you were to suggest something from out of the culture wars, you could always get it on the page… because it sells. You can have a view on a culture wars issue, where you cannot rise to having an opinion on an economic issue because it is too complex. People are making considerable personal success from monetising the culture wars. There are people that do nothing else but monetise the culture wars’ (The Prospect Podcast, Is Britain run by an out of touch elite?, 25th October).

Why does it sell? One answer comes from the writers within or adjacent to ‘Moral foundations theory’. Though people are capable of understanding issues in a nuanced way, writing from within the culture war encourages us to see issues in black and white by engaging our affective connections to our (cultural) ‘tribe’. As has been shown by Haidt (The Righteous Mind), Kahneman (Thinking Fast, and Slow) and Thaler and Sunstein (Nudge), when our affect is engaged, the range of possible thoughts narrow to fit our affective experience. In other words, we are far more likely to wholly agree with a cause if our affect has already been ‘nudged’ in its direction.

The second reason culture war representation is perpetuated is because of the difficulty objectively quantifying the worthiness of one cause over another, especially when immense suffering and death are involved. Both sides are armed with ‘facts’ and ‘evidence’, which, when used within highly polarised debate, only further entrench each side. People’s political positions within polarised camps means each side can accuse the other of totally ignoring the facts they have set out, which foments the mutual incredulity. Below are two contrasting ways of telling the 1948 ‘Nakba’. The first is from Rory Stewart on the podcast The Rest is Politics:

‘[Then came] the defining horror of the Second World War, the holocaust.. in which 6 million Jews are killed and which absolutely demonstrates to the world the extremity of the threat that Jews face and the requirement for a Jewish homeland, which then drives large numbers of Jews into Palestine after the war’.

The next is from an interview on Novara Media with Mohammed El-Kurd, a Palestinian poet:

‘[The 1948 Nakba involved] over 70 massacres- the Tantura massacre, the Deir Yassin massacre where pregnant Palestinian women were stabbed and had their bellies split open before they were killed. These massacres that Israeli film makers are making films about and receiving awards for’.

Here, the facts set out by both commentators lead the listener to very different political positions on the moral legitimacy of the formation of the Israeli state. When the scale of human suffering is such, ‘facts’ can be used by both sides convincingly, and nuance requires conscious effort.

And nuance is particularly important when the scale of suffering on both sides is so great. Doing so allows you to occupy a political position on matters which is able to accept the legitimacy of all suffering. You do not want to find yourself in a political position when you are trying to downplay the suffering of Palestinians massacred at the hands of Zionist militias, for the sake of maintaining the boundaries of your position within the culture wars. Nor do you want to undermine the significance of the holocaust, or the suffering of the families of the 200 or so hostages still held by Hamas, for the same purpose. There are of course others who have acknowledged the pitfalls of black and white politics.

Aaron Bastani, the founder of Novara media, said:

‘One luxury of only seeing politics in black and white is that actual thinking is optional. In an age of such heady challenges – from climate change to spiralling inequality and national decline – that is particularly unacceptable.

More bizarre still is that within this vacuum, all sides believe their opponents have triumphed….Central to all of these assumptions is the idea that the media is partisan and one-sided. Here, once again, both left and right contend that the other is all-powerful’. (Novara Media, The Media is Biased Against the Left – And the Right, Feb 2023)

Though the point he is making in this article is that, under normal conditions, these two forces can usefully check each other and inform a balanced national dialogue, here he speaks directly to the point I am trying to make: when the other side is presented as ‘all-powerful’, politics becomes a matter of black and white. It becomes a zero-sum game.

But the debate can go somewhere, when some concessions from either side are made. When the discourse softens from the mutual belief that the other is under the spell of ideology, a productive debate which produces a form of consensus, even if that consensus is ‘if nothing else, this is what we agree on’, seems more possible. Bastani illustrates this by arguing that the left should defend free speech, even if it means defending the rights of those they disagree with. At least, then, he argues, there is an agreed upon principal, with which future debates can be anchored. He says:

When Farage was being debanked I cared about it, because it [caring about it] is going to help the left. And people thought ‘its good Farage has been debanked’, believe me, when Novara is being debanked or someone on the left is being debanked, many people on the centre right who claim to care about issues of free speech will be cheering it on, and we won’t have a leg to stand on’ (Novara Live, Israel Airstrike Kills Dozens at Gaza Hospital, Sunak Wants to Ban Palestine Protests, 3rd November 2023).

What Bastani illustrates is that concession to the legitimacy of at least some of what the other side are saying creates a shared field of consensus, and that this is politically useful. Once a field of consensus is established, it can be invoked during real debate, and can be used to move us, collectively, to somewhere new. To use the example he gave this might look like this: ‘we agreed that free speech is important, and we fought for that together… what you are doing contradicts that’. This is kind of argument has the potential to move people from across the political divide, and would escape the pattern of mutual accusations of ideology and power.