As part of a new policy, I’m going to post stuff I’ve published on my substack here where it’s substantial enough, or where I want to be able to link to it without the distraction of all the other stuff I pack into my weekly substack digest.
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In any event, this piece was in response to a recent return to public discussion by Robert Manne. He sees the Trump victory as a turning back from the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. He seems to be saying that the victory is a victory for those seeking to set the clock back on equality for women, blacks and gay people. Horrible as electing Trump is, I don’t think he’s right. My response has been worked up from a comment made on his site.
However much I abhor Trump and his minions, enablers and thinkers like Bannon, almost all of them think of themselves as reacting against the excesses of the Cultural Revolution, rather than setting course for pre-Cultural Revolution values.
I think the core achievements of the Cultural Revolution are all largely safe in the hands of what Manne calls the Cultural Counter-Revolution.
The exceptions I can think of are access to abortion (which will only be seriously curtailed in some states) and the fact that the counter-revolution also contains crazies — old style racists and white supremacists. (But that’s politics — just as the left contains Stalinists, Maoists and all kinds of riff-raff). The Counter-Revolution has also got all kinds of bad things associated with it from my point of view — from being hostile to climate action to being headed up by a criminal and the first President in history who does not respect the result of elections he loses.
But beyond that, the cultural-revolution is largely safe. There are no great resets on the rights of women, black or gay people. Just a new allergy to excesses of identity politics — which should be welcomed.
And that raises the question of what went wrong for the revolution.
I’d say two things — First its identity politics ended up weaponising discourse sufficiently that centrists somehow felt themselves unable to push back against extremists. Second, it obliterated class.
Nicola Sturgeon sent a rapist who was born a man to a woman’s prison. She did so because of a slogan. “Trans women are women”. This made perfect sense as a general social sentiment — about how generally to behave towards trans women in most cases, but was nothing more than that. But, like deers in the headlights, progressive politicians couldn’t push back against this. Many found it hard to say what a woman was. Some still can’t.
New circumlocutions, genuflexions and pieties increasingly infest corporate and bureaucratic life — as sent up in the TV program Utopia. These things matter because they completely hamstring our ability to discuss difficult subjects.
We can say that domestic violence hurts aboriginal women particularly, but not that aboriginal men are major perpetrators. I’m just reading a book now by David Goodhart documenting the social costs of family breakdown. He notes that children of single-parent families have substantially higher rates of crime and poverty than the average, but that that has been airbrushed out of National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children stats so as not to stigmatise single-parent families. And on it goes.
Second the cultural revolutionaries somehow built a revolution that obliterated awareness of the unique privileges and injuries of class. Indeed, in so far as their instinctive response to those who disagreed with them was to brand them sexists, bigots, racists and xenophobes, the Cultural Revolution ended up hostile to what used to be called the working class, but might now be called the “less formally educated class”.
They jumped ship, even at some cost to their own material wellbeing — which was almost certainly so in the case of Brexit and I expect will be the case with Trump. Dignity and respect generally trump material wellbeing. Always have, always will.