Me Too and the culture wars

Start the Week on Radio 4 on Monday featured the political philosopher Francis Fukuyama, whose 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man was hailed as a tour de force when it came out but is now more often cited as a warning to intellectuals not to get ahead of themselves, or at any rate not to assume that events won’t turn around and bite them in the ass.

Fukuyama’s new book, Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment, could at one level be seen as the sequel to The End of History, or, History Strikes Back. Where his first book wrote off totalitarianism and hailed the triumph of democratic capitalism, volume two looks at where we have gone since and where we could, for all he knows, be headed over the next 25 years.

Andrew Marr’s other guests on Monday were Roseanne Chantiluke, a leading light of the Rhodes Must Fall movement during her time at St. Catherine’s College, Oxford;  Eric Kaufmann, author of Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration and the Future of White Majorities; and Josie Rourke, director of a feminist take on Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, now being performed at London’s Donmar Warehouse.

They have all been involved in the culture wars that broke out sometime after the Arab Spring and continue to rage, with ever-increasing ferocity, across the western world. The Me Too Movement obviously featured in the mix, but so did transgender issues, race and populism.

We are asked to accept that the revolutions for which George Washington, Robespierre, Lenin, Martin Luther KIng and Nelson Mandela fought, were just sooo last millennium. What really gets the juices flowing today is the struggle to establish the rights of everyone to live as they choose on the basis of equal pay and equal treatment, regardless of race, creed, sexual preference or dress-style, secure in the knowledge that humanity’s past life, from classical Greece to the Renaissance, the Englightenment and the Swinging Sixties, was but a preparation for this hour and this trial.

I find this a bit hard to take in. Maybe it’s my age. There can be only so much revolution in one lifetime, after all. Surely there has to be some space in which to take stock and to look back with quiet satisfaction at what has been achieved already: democracy, civil rights, votes for women, same-sex marriage, the right to choose, the gradual integration of ethnic and sexual minorities into the political and economic mainstream.

I could go on. Clearly, though, I’m wrong. Maybe Mao was right when he said that the revolution was like a bicycle that had to keep moving if it wasn’t to fall over or (more appositely) a shark that has to keep swimming in order to breathe.

Revolution, by its nature, is intended to bring in change in the manner of a violent storm, uprooting old values and flooding the landscape with fresh ideas. We know what the nineteenth century achieved in the West: the nation state, representative democracy, industrial expansion and the mechanisation of the means of production. The twentieth century saw its own culture wars – Empire versus Empire, Communism versus Fascism, then Capitalism versus Communism – resulting in the deaths of millions and Fukuyama’s somewhat premature interim verdict.

Laced in among all of these, at least since late-Victorian times, was the argument that ordinary people had rights, too. History – real history – was not like a Shakepeare play, in which all the big decisions are taken by the rich and powerful, with the little people only there to do the work and answer their master’s call. Except, of course, that it was. Those at the top lived “great” lives. Those at the bottom eked out miserable existences, mitigated only be alcohol and sex. But change did come. It just took its time. In Britain, we saw the rise of One Nation conservatism, followed by the birth and development of the trade union movement and the Labour Party. More recently, the Tories flirted with the idea of a property-owning democracy, while Tony Blair sought to make us all middle class, so that everyone was above average.

In the 1960s, with the end of empire and the arrival of the Windrush generation, new concerns had emerged. Suddenly, race was an issue. It wasn’t only the working class who demanded higher wages and improved living and working conditions. The children of black workers and their families from the Caribbean, who had been brought in to do the dirty work that white workers now regarded as beneath them, took to the streets to demand equal treatment. The next wave, from India, Pakistan and East Africa, soon followed their example, creating inner-city ghettos but also a new layer of Asian entrepreneurs. Finally, from the former East Bloc, now part of the European Union, came three million migrant workers and their families, with the same entitlement to employment, medical treatment, homes and school places as everybody else. Brexit Britain had arrived.

You would think that dealing with all of this would be a full-time job for the political class.  But no. Not a bit of it. Instead, with the emergence of the culture wars, identity and gender are the buzzwords that most grab the attention of the “progressive” governing class and their media attendants.

In America, while Donald Trump and his out-of-control Republican followers are busy consolidating their new brutalism, the Democrats are obsessed with transgender rights, abortion, the legalisation of drugs and same-sex marriage. They condemn Trump for his treatment of immigrants and his plan to end universal healthcare, but they have yet to come up with workable plans of their own. The alarming gap that has opened up between rich and poor, so that there are simultaneously more multi-billionaires and more people living in near-absolute poverty than at any time in the last 75 years, evokes only rhetoric.

The truth is, the Left doesn’t know how to fix these problems. Nobody does. As politicians, they have come to realise that they have less power not only than Trump but, more to the point, than the moguls of the New Economy – Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page of Google, and a hundred other internet billionaires – who more and more take the big decisions that really matter, with little or no reference to Congress.

But while we remain on hold in contemplation of difficult decisions, we don’t dodge questions of identity. Oh no. We tell ourselves that what matters more than anything is transgender rights, Me Too (in all its forms, not just rape and sexual abuse) and same-sex marriage. Why these rather than low pay, war in the Middle East, the rights of immigrants or the stagnation of national productivity? In part because their time has come (no one is denying that), but also because they are soluble and cost the tax-payer little or nothing. They have become, like Brexit, a virtue-signalling displacement activity, reminiscent of the tendency of the police to concentrate on drink-driving rather than burglary. We can swoop down on gender crimes in the same way that the police crack down on anyone who drives a car with more than 80 milligrams of alcohol per 100 millilitres of blood.

In the meantime, the rich go on getting richer and the issues of poverty go largely ignored As Fukuyama points out, white working males in America, coping with deindustrialisation and the arrival of immigrant workers, have become obsessed with their own survival and their own identity, fearing the rise of ethnic minorities, women and the LGBTQ community.

“If I’m a woman, “ he told Emily Maitlis on Newsnight, “I automatically take seriously charges of sexual assault. If I’m a man, I automatically feel threatened by the possibility that I’m falsely accused. It shouldn’t be that way … we’re moving to a position where, basically, the Republican Party is the white male party and the Democratic Party is the minority, female party, and that’s not the way politics should work.”

I think we can agree on that. What is needed is a politics, not only in the U.S., but in Britain and Europe, in which gender and identity issues are resolved as human rights issues, without recourse to the left-right spectrum, so that the more enduring difficulties rooted in immigration, the gap between rich and poor and the emergence of artificial intelligence can move to centre-stage.

As for empire, removing images of Cecil Rhodes won’t solve anything. If it were that simple, the toppling of statues of Lenin, Stalin and Saddam Hussein would already have ushered in a new era of peace and freedom. And you may have noticed … it hasn’t.