Is the cultural revolution on gender, race and sexual orientation at risk?

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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.

 

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Conrad
Conrad
10 days ago

It is strange how much of the discourse is taken up by the culture wars now and how things like inequality are out of the public mind — especially in the US where, for example, low SES white males now have lifespans similar to what I assume is our poorest group (Aboriginal Australians). Alternatively, they seem to be rather easily targeted and swayed in politics by what are essentially non-problems or things that happen so rarely it makes no difference to 99.999% of people like trans-men in women’s sports at the elite level.

John
John
9 days ago
Reply to  Conrad

It is strange!

Geoff Edwards
8 days ago

Thanks, Nicholas for this commentary on commentary. May I dare suggest a third explanation which is that the attack on abortion, gender identity et cetera is a smokescreen, chosen because it is a point of vulnerability of the cultural Left.
While the commentariat huffs and puffs about these culture wars, the real agenda which is corporate deregulation and especially weakening of environmental regulation proceeds apace.
(It is of course rank hypocrisy by the political Right which is at least as inclined to engage in intimidation of political opponents as any modern Leftist grouping). I think there is a flavour of “look over there” about the entire “anti-woke” agenda.

Chris Lloyd
Chris Lloyd
7 days ago
Reply to  Geoff Edwards

I think you are right Geoff, at least on the core motivations of Trump and his inner circle (not to mention Murdoch).
He humiliates the woke elites who have impoverished and then scolded the working class for the last 10 years – not because he cares about the unwashed – but because he has a personal financial agenda, as well as a vague “philosophy” that great people like him and other movers and shakers should control the world and reap most of the benefits. Tax “reform” and zero regulations are Murdoch’s and Trump’s holy grail. Indeed, Murdoch created Trump – entirely in my view.
Trump does not care at all about gays or trannies or blacks. He doesn’t like them. He doesn’t hate them. He doesn’t like or hate any group. They are all fodder. He would do a deal with anyone so long as he could screw them over. And the law should entitle him to do so without legal sanction, which is why has stacked the courts with like-minded minions.

Geoff Edwards
7 days ago

Thanks Nicholas. Yes, there is a faction of the intellectual Left that is guilty of pursuing feminist, gender etc ideology to the extent of provoking a backlash of the kind that is now in full swing. And yes, feminist and gender ideology has been a significant impediment to policy reform in this country as well as the US. The people who have driven domestic violence policy for example have portrayed the problem as socially constructed maleness, blithely skating over biology as a determinant of behaviour. I don’t align with this faction and indeed have a couple of articles in press on the uni-dimensional nature of a lot of this discourse.
However, I don’t think I am guilty of your charge. I agree that there are numerous examples of excess by the cultural Left that deserve to be reversed and that has made the broader Left vulnerable to a backlash. And yes, the cultural Left hasn’t understood this.
But I also point out that the Pentecostals have been a major influence in Trump’s electoral success and, admitting that there are many factions within Pentecostalism, there is generally a strong focus on the theology of the Old Testament which does indeed hark back to an earlier era.
There are a lot of forces at work and it’s possible to overthink Trump’s orientation in rational terms. Trump is repeating back to the electorate what the electorate has been conditioned to believe. Murdoch is not the only villain in this enterprise, there are numerous other actors who have seized on the vulnerability of positions of the cultural Left to wage war on the broader Left.
It’s in matters of class that I think the “look over there” diversion applies most powerfully. The Right has cleverly glued the pejorative label of “elite” to the Left Intelligentsia away from the neoliberal “economic elite” which has been the primary cause of the misery of the working classes and of inequality– and which has also commandeered the senior positions in policy affairs. You don’t need me to lecture you on this!. The Democrats in the US, the New Labour in the UK and our own ALP have embraced the neoliberal agenda, not as rigidly as their conservative protagonists, and have made themselves targets for anti-elite rhetoric.

John
John
6 days ago
Reply to  Nicholas Gruen

Nicholas regarding Pentecostals and Trump this might be of interest
https://voices.uchicago.edu/religionculture/2018/02/18/dont-forget-trumps-pentecostal-fans/