What Happened?

The first time I encountered the phrase “culture war” was back in the mid-’90s. I don’t remember the title of the book. I wish I still had it, but I lent it out years ago and never got it back. But I do remember why that collection of essays caught my eye. It brought together evangelical Christian thinkers with right-wing pundits. And the proposals they had for the future of politics were stunning.

Up to that point, elections had been contests over policy. The personality of the candidates mattered, but electors chose between competing ideas about specific policy issues. Candidates articulated broad and detailed plans. They demonstrated detailed knowledge of healthcare, foreign policy, education, social services, the environment. These policy proposals had to evolve from election to election as the economy and social conditions changed. And their inherent complexity often required expert explanations.

All that was hard work.

Elections were easier to win if detailed policy expositions were avoided. What if elections could be focused on emotionally potent topics instead?

Culture war was the alternative to policy conflict. Topics like racial equality, reproductive rights, acceptance of homosexuality, the role of the family, whether evolution should be taught in schools, and the importance of the church are issues everyone has an opinion about. They don’t need experts to unpack them. Most people are confident their opinion is right. And their opinion is unlikely to change over time.

There was already evidence this could work. The campaigns of Phyllis Schlafly, the electoral appeal of Pat Robertson, showed this path had popular appeal.

Having a smaller set of more clearly defined issues also made it easier for pollsters to study the electorate. Increasing computational power made identifying the specific parts of the country where elections could be won easier as well. Politics became more granular. Politicians presented themselves in broader brushstrokes. Sometimes little more than a pastiche of grievances.

The coverage of elections also changed.

In the mid-’90s, James Fallows wrote about the way political coverage was increasingly becoming like sports coverage. In place of the what of government policy, the positive role an administration plays in people’s lives, media focussed on the how of winning elections, dealing with conflicts and debates and crafting an electable image. This turned political discourse away from the role of civic duty and encouraged people to believe politics was nothing more than a cynical race to win elections.

“Step by step, mainstream journalism has fallen into the habit of portraying public life in America as a race to the bottom, in which one group of conniving, insincere politicians ceaselessly tries to outmanoeuvre another. The great problem for American democracy in the 1990s is that people barely trust elected leaders or the entire legislative system to accomplish anything of value. The politicians seem untrustworthy while they’re running, and they disappoint even their supporters soon after they take office. By the time they leave office they’re making excuses for what they couldn’t do.”

In this context, the role of political journalism was to create heat and conflict and ask gotcha questions. This only went into overdrive with the rise of late-night political satire.

Politics was now entertainment.

But the face of entertainment was also changing. Professional wrestling went from being a fringe carnival-like spectacle into mainstream entertainment. The thing about professional wrestling is the crowd knows it’s fake. “Kayfabe” is the word the world uses for the agreement between the crowd and the wrestling entertainers to pretend the fights are real. That the blows and injuries cause pain.

Then came UFC where fighters actually beat the crap out of each other instead of pretending to do so. This retained the spectacle of professional wrestling. And the showmanship. UFC has been one of the fastest growing sports in recent times, with a predominately young and male audience. There is no Joe Rogan without UFC, where he has been a longtime commentator.

Violence became central to cinema as well. While movies with violence were not new, they became unavoidable, thanks to the long fight sequences that became central. The man who solves problems with violence went through increasingly intense iterations, from James Bond to Jason Bourne to John Wick. Cars became stand-ins for hyper-masculinised violence in the Fast and Furious franchise. The era of comic book film adaptations had us watching a generation of actors transform into the same kind of bodies we saw wrestlers inhabit so as to dish out moralistic violence.

As much as I enjoyed seeing characters from my childhood become the heroes of blockbuster films, I have to admit there were several problems with the films. The first was, of course, that these were characters from my childhood. Captain America and Thor might have everything a young boy needs to be entertained for a few minutes while reading a comic. But they are hardly the stuff of adult conversations about good and evil. The apocalyptic morality of their storylines, much like those of The Lord of the Rings, or Harry Potter, is not an analogy of how modern societies work.

We watched a generation of actors transform their bodies to emulate the wrestling aesthetic. Bodies built for pretend violence in front of green screens and CGI. Yet more kayfabe.

These fabulous bodies were for fighting and not fucking. As RS Benedict pointed out, this was a fantastically unhorny era. Perfect bodies. No desire. This culminated in Oppenheimer, which, for a film about a known philanderer, was so relentlessly asexual it managed to make a naked scene with two key protagonists feel as vapidly sexless as an online debate.

“…speaking of Christopher Nolan’s inexplicably sexless oeuvre—did anyone else think it odd how Inception enters the deepest level of a rich man’s subconscious and finds not a psychosexual Oedipal nightmare of staggering depravity, but… a ski patrol?”

Which brings us to pornography.

The internet fundamentally changed the place of pornography in society. While pornography has always existed the changes to scale and access were radically new. A generation ago you could grow up with little to no exposure to pornography. There were love scenes in films but they were clearly staged. So were more revealing scenes in magazines like Penthouse. Now you can access anything you could imagine and many things you probably didn’t.

I remember going to a talk by former advertising executive Cindy Gallup. She mentioned only dating younger men. Her provocation seemed fair. After all, male executives her age often chased younger women. She talked about her surprise when young suitors offered to ejaculate on her face – a practice commonplace in pornography but unknown to people of her generation.

Pornography is how young men learn about sex.

It’s also how they learn about relationships. Ubiquitous free pornography means you can find enough of any practice to legitimize it. This might include all sorts of violent and demeaning acts. There’s no context or framework to understand what might be OK, not OK, acceptable to some but not to others, harmful, or illegal. For example, recent research shows that consumption of pornography is influencing young men to believe that choking women during sex is universally pleasurable and does not require consent.

The ubiquity of pornography is one consequence of the pervasive growth of technology and its uncritically accepted influence. Our society has no centre anymore. Ideas that my generation cherished, like being well informed, or having your finger on the pulse of culture, don’t mean anything anymore.

There’s a whole universe of male bloggers airing all sorts of grievances and even taking over a once liberal city. But you might not be aware of any of it. In contrast, the 4B movement was all over parts of the internet in reaction to the recent election. And you’re forgiven for wondering if that has anything to do with a kind of pencil.

The spectacular rise of tech has fuelled spectacular fortunes, and these fortunes have found their political voice. Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter is the most spectacular example, unprecedented in the history of capitalism. One individual’s purchase of a company that size – and the influence it gives him and those around him – exceeds that of any former baron or industrial magnate buying a newspaper.

And while tech has fuelled fanatical fortunes, most people are stuck living on much the same wage as their parents did. Every tech lifeline to wealth – crypto, NFTs, Web3, the creator economy – was an empty chimera, an illusion built on lies.

The social contract changed, but society never debated those changes. A generation ago, a working-class family could afford to buy a small suburban house and pay it off well before retirement. Now they would have to move to the middle of nowhere, or live in an apartment and still have debt when they retire. And while rises in the cost of living were often met with wage increases, that equation has been broken for decades.

The irony is that a big part of the higher cost of living today includes the higher cost of keeping up with the latest technology. Smartphones, laptops, internet connections, online subscriptions, streaming services… all of these are costs that didn’t exist in my childhood. But they are necessities today. They are line increases, not incremental increases, to the household budget.

What has worked is the steady pipeline from Tea Party to Alt-right to Christian nationalism. From Covid-denial to outrage over critical race theory. Search for any topic about culture on YouTube and there’s a good chance the suggested videos will start feeding you prejudice and some misinformed white guy in love with his own intelligence.

A whole ecosystem of intellectual grifters now inhabits the place where public intellectuals and subject experts once lived. What these guys, with their podcasts and YouTube channels have, isn’t subject matter mastery but rather an unshakeable belief in their own intelligence. They can work it out. Do their own research. Know more than the people who work in that field.

They don’t have discussions. They destroy their opponents. Crush them. Humiliate and demonstrate the weakness or moral failure of the people they disagree with. More kayfabe. More performative violence. They talk in thought-terminating clichés. Not arguments.

The belief they all seem to have coalesced around is not caring about the effects of their actions. Put together any set of topics they hate – say, mask-wearing, trans rights, the Black Lives Matter movement, climate change – what do these have in common? My choices can hurt others. Even if I think I’m a good person, my actions can cause pain. Sometimes very serious pain. To other people.

This is a disconcerting thing to realise. My failure to wear a mask could kill someone. My instinct that forms and documents should be a certain way could make someone’s life unbearable. My failure to force the police to change could mean the police failing to restrain their force on some members of society. My insistence on driving any kind of vehicle I want leads to places on earth becoming uninhabitable.

No surprise that so many are choosing to believe anything rather than face the personal cost of their actions. Or feeling like it matters far less than alleviating their economic situation. It’s more comforting to believe the world is divided between good and evil. That superheroes, great men, will swoop in to save the day. More kayfabe. More symbolic violence. More retreating from the messy and hard to understand details of reality.

None of these alone are explanations for what happened in the recent US election. Many of these are also not harmful in isolation. Or to a limited extent. But they are the context, the background web of layers, the amniotic fluid out of which grew a coarser public discourse, a distorted image of masculinity, and an inability to make long-term ethical choices.

This is the road we’ve been travelling for more than 30 years. There are no quick directional adjustments here. Look at almost any major democracy now and you see instability. Coalitions that don’t hold. Frequent changes of government. Slim margins. Discontent in the electorates. A feeling that the existing parties don’t represent the present reality.

And culture wars.