The left are the ones waging a proactive culture war
We are conditioned to believe that the radical sweeping changes the left are making to our family structures, our institutions and our education system should be blindly accepted.
We’ve seen it time and time again. When the Government or any one person or collective group makes any move to reverse a culturally progressive change, they are accused of being part of a populist right-wing fringe who are waging (utilising that classic phrase) a ‘culture war.’ This always amuses me because I view it as a pot-kettle-black situation in which the left are themselves the ones guilty of proactive cultural changes to impose their ideals on society.
The gender-neutral bathroom debate especially illustrates this rather well. It has always been the norm to have single-sex toilets and changing rooms; the idea of mixing the sexes wasn’t something we’d have considered a few generations ago, outside of single-occupancy cubicles. But now we are being told that we must accept this change or be labelled transphobic.
The campaigners that have raised safeguarding concerns, substantiated by real cases of sexual harassment and assault in mixed-gender spaces, have forced a policy change on this issue. Yet across social media and on left-wing publications, the tired claim was made that the genuine concerns were all just mere outrage stirring, an attempt once again to foster a culture war.
We, as the public, are conditioned to believe that the radical sweeping changes the left are making to our family structures, our institutions and our education system should be blindly accepted because, apparently, they’re just small reforms. Our concerns are told to be unfounded, when time and time again they are proven correct.
There are more examples of this phenomenon. In the area of education, one springs to mind regarding the backlash against those who made claims that one day we would see Shakespeare taken off the curriculum for English literature. This was not a claim that Shakespeare would be immediately stripped away, more that things were moving in this direction. And, of course, the concerns that were, and are, dismissed by the left were partially realised when Philip Larkin and Wilfred Owen were taken off the literature palette by exam boards. In education, this rejection of past writers and poets as colonial has been going on unchallenged, and so each of us has a right to be worried and our anxieties about our nation’s heritage should not be dismissed because they are anxieties that are slowly being realised each passing year.
Be it statues being actively pulled down, or recontextualised in ways that amount to historical vandalism, the Puritan-esque nation-hating movements in our universities and heritage sector continue on. A culture war is being fought, but it is the left who fights it, and conservatives of all stripes should feel no shame in fighting back against it or soon we won’t have a platform on which to to wage this fight.
