Culture War as Doxic Conflict

If you want to see a masterclass in the Culture War™, watch Nick Ferrari clashing ‘with Black Lives Matter activist Femi Nylander over whether it’s right for Oxford University students to remove a portrait of the Queen from their common room,’ as LBC headlines it. This is a particularly useful document, because it helps us see, a) the falsity of the claims of ‘cancellation’ that much of this debate is fuelled on, b) the very pernicious policing of values that ‘free speech defenders’ actually do in the name of opposing it, and c) the actual discursive-political logic of the culture war as a doxic conflict.

As for a), LBC’s ticker tape reads ‘QUEEN CANCELLED.’ Suffice to say, the Queen is not cancelled. If the Queen really was cancelled, I imagine it would mean she would no longer be the Queen, and I highly doubt it is within the power of a group of Masters students at Oxford to do so, nor that it could be done so swiftly by removing a portrait. (Lots of people in the past have indeed ‘cancelled’ Kings and Queens, sometimes spectacularly so — but I think it took a little bit more effort than that). In any case, the story has already been propagated with further falsities. Some claim Magdalene College themselves choose to remove the portrait, but this is not true. It was, as I say, the private decision of a group of Masters students to choose what wall adornments they did or did not want.

But, b), the deposition of the Queen is clearly not what Ferrari means by cancellation. What Ferrari means by cancellation is ‘someone does not share the values that I have, and therefore their values are illegitimate threats to my own.’ Note that the second clause does not actually follow from the first, but this doesn’t matter, since it is politically, not logically, expedient to pretend it does (as we shall see in a moment). We can see this in his grilling of Nylander on what goes through his ‘heart’ or ‘mind’ when he sees a picture of the Queen. It is an odd line of questioning, because precisely the point of freedom of speech and conscience is that it really shouldn’t matter what goes through someones heart or mind. If Nylander or the students at Oxford don’t feel particularly enamoured by a picture of the Queen, and indeed might oppose the values they consider the Monarchy represents, it is well within their rights of freedom of speech and conscience to not have a picture up. The whole framing, though, as well as Ferrari’s militant gammonism, seems to contest this obvious fact: LBC’s headline — of ‘whether its right […] to remove a portrait of the Queen from their common room’ — suggests a very insidious attempt to police the private sphere. The whole point about the liberal division between public and private, about the pluralism within the private sphere that it protects, is that it is neither wrong nor right to choose whether or not one has a portrait of X on the wall — so long as it doesn’t hurt anyone by doing so. Moreover, to suggest that to exercise one’s freedom of speech on this is tantamount to ‘CANCELLATION’, suggests that it is totally illegitimate as itself an attack on freedom of speech, such that it is only by agreeing to hang portraits of the Queen on one’s wall that one is respecting free speech. If ‘expressing dislike for the Queen or the values the Monarchy represents’ is an affront to our cherished freedoms, then the implication is that only ‘expressing appreciation for the Queen or the values the Monarchy represents’ is a legitimate position.

In effect, then, we see an inversion of the whole claim made by ‘free speech defenders.’ The point of liberalism is that people can think what they think about the Queen and the Monarchy, and attempts to litigate over whether it is legitimate or not to do so is an insidious attempt to police exactly that which they claim to be defending. Here we get to our final point, c), the real political logic of the culture war: the moral panic over cancel culture is just a reactionary attempt to maintain orthodox value-systems under cover of ‘free speech’ being under threat. The effect is then to make the doxa synonymous with speech itself, such that all criticisms of it are de facto illegitimate. This move, which is evident in Ferrari’s screeching above, is interesting in two respects.

First, it is a conscious, explicit, deployment of the normal logic of doxa. Doxa is a term I’ve taken from the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, which denotes the orthodox, hegemonic, forms of thought present in a given social order, the ‘undisputed and undiscussed.’ In a way, if by ‘cancellation’ we mean a kind of group attempt to designate things outside the boundaries of acceptable debate — for instance, being unable to do black face; or have a conference on eugenics; or, for Ferrari, to take down a picture of the Queen — then it has always been with us, will always be so, and is more often than not deployed against subordinate groups. In the 2000s, to say one was a committed socialist, to argue for alternative forms of ownership or radical redistribution or what have you, was to be seen as a fool, a fundamentally unserious person or some militant plant who did not deserve a place in ‘legitimate’ debate. It is testament to the success of the New, New Left movements in the long tail of the 2008 crisis that this has shifted, and the Economist, Financial Times, and so on are having to seriously grapple with such policies. Bourdieu would say that such positions are now ‘heterodox’: not yet doxic, but nor are they outside the boundaries of debate any longer. By contrast, ‘doing black face is bad’ has become doxic in a way that it wasn’t only some decades ago, and this is indicative of the success of black liberation movements in changing the cultural mores and codes that assisted the reproduction of their subordination. The culture war, then, is just an explicit conflict over what should or should not be an acceptable part of public discourse, provoked by the real successes made by emancipatory projects from the latter third of the 20th century up-to today.

I want to dwell on this for a moment, teasing out some of its implications. If the culture war is an actual fact the normal operations of political speech, of discursive conflict, then it is decidedly not an attack on freedom of speech as such. What is different about doxa to totalitarian forms of thought control is that the former is not mandated legally. ‘Common sense’ is imputed, defended, and contested in ways that are sub-judicial. To say something is ‘illegitimate’ is not to say that someone will be arrested for saying it (unless of course one veers into hate crimes, but that is another matter). When the left was thoroughly marginalised in political discourse, this was not so because people were legally prohibited from discussing socialism. Rather, the norms of political speech were such that socialist ideas seemed self-evidently outdated, redundant, dangerous or what have you, and purveyors of them were therefore implicitly excluded. Similarly, when the left might contest the legitimacy of claims that glorify Empire, it is not a matter of saying such people must be legally prevented from doing so, but that it is so wrong, and potentially dangerous, that it is not worth considering it as a ‘legitimate’ part of public debate, in just the same way that someone defending Nazism or slavery is not worth our time. The difference between defences of the Empire and those other institutions is not a moral one; it is well known that Nazism sits in continuity with the horrific techniques of racial domination and genocided perfected during colonialism. Rather, it is a matter of time: what was once a common point of debate has now become unthinkable, and that is a product of the ordinary political churn of what is or is not an acceptable position to take — rather than of legal stipulation.

Is it, then, acceptable to hang a picture of the Queen on one’s wall? Or the inverse: is it acceptable to take down a picture of the Queen from one’s wall? If doxic conflict is a natural part of political life, how might we categorise or position ourselves in relation to competing claims to legitimacy? Despite the fact that Nylander and the students correctly emphasise the personal dimensions of such a decision (the portrait itself hangs in their common room, rather than a public place, after all), Ferrari is also in some sense correct to note the public dimensions. His concern, no doubt, is that belief in the Monarchy is shifting, and that one day it might seem as odd — if not as outright dangerous — to hang a picture of the Queen on your wall as it is today to hang a portrait of a slaver. He might be right in this: if indeed the Monarchy is one-day abolished (or should we say cancelled?), then I can imagine some decades down the line it might seem highly anachronistic and in this sense ‘illegitimate’ (as in, not a ‘serious’ point of debate) to express favour for that ex-institution. (It should be said that in many European republics, they look to the Brits fascination with the Royal Family in exactly this way already).

But we should also retain a hold of the facts here: the Oxford students were not demanding the general removal of portraits of the Queen in a way similar to that of the Rhodes Must Fall campaign, and there is a reason for this. Against the lazy slippery slope fallacy often deployed in such conversations, there is indeed a discernible difference between the statues and public veneration of people like Cecil Rhodes, and that of the Queen, or even Winston Churchill. Rhodes was an unapologetic and ruthless imperialist, directly participating in the domination and expropriation of racialised peoples. Churchill’s place in history is quite distinct: a racist, no doubt, and one who was instrumental in the Bengal famine — but also a hero of sorts in the context of the Second World War. The Queen even more so: a metonym for another metonym, the Monarchy as a now-toothless artifact of old Britain. I oppose that institution on certain grounds — I do not think it fitting for a modern nation to indulge the pageantry of hereditary elites — but I do not think it as unacceptable as Rhodes. Moreover, questions of the appropriate boundaries must also confront the aforementioned public-private distinction. Statues are emphatically public objects, which radiate a certain ossified set of values that may no longer be reflective of the kind of values a multicultural contemporary Britain may have. What one has on one’s wall is a more private matter, and while one might object to it, it is not of the same priority. In short, then, the dynamics of these doxic conflicts should not be considered a slippery slope, but rather a set of political judgments based on proximity, intensity, and public-private distinctions.

The second aspect of the discursive-political logic of the culture war I’d like to draw out is important to specify what is nevertheless unique in this particular instantiation of doxic conflict. In Corey Robin’s excellent The Reactionary Mind (2018), he argues that conservatism is predominantly a counter-revolutionary politics — that it derives its potency from challenges to established hierarchies, and formulates its positions against those challenges — and, more interestingly, that this is not an unthinking reflex, but often is conducted through a very innovative co-opting of their opponents discourses. Arguably the inaugural version of this is Hobbes’ reaction to the push toward republicanism by providing The People a central place in actually legitimating the rule of absolute monarch through a covenant made amongst themselves — but Robin highlights others, like anti-feminists deploying arguments around women’s rights and so on. My proposition is that the Culture War, as framed by the right, does a similar thing: by concealing orthodox values as ‘speech’ itself, they are able to position criticisms of it as affronts to basic rights and liberties, thus making the ‘common sense’ somehow counter-cultural, under-threat; in other words, the right opportunistically deploy the same kind of victim rhetoric they accuse the left of using.

This is a very clever strategy. It at once makes the usual doxic conflict into a moral panic, radically de-legitimises their opponents as contesting the very idea of free speech itself, and therefore naturalises their value-system as speech tout court. This transforms the ordinary political play of cultural norms into an existential conflict between rabid illiberals and the Common Man whose liberties are being threatened. We should however note that this remains within precisely that doxic conflict: attempts to delegitimize challenges to doxa is the kind of move expected by the powerful in this situation. It is nevertheless a highly astute way to do so to turn it into a conflict between freedom-of-speech and a proto-totalitarianism.

So, how might the left respond to this? The first thing to realise in this regard is that the culture war is not going away, because both the Tories and the corporate media have far too great of an interest in keeping it going. For the former, beating the culture drum is a way to avoid making any daring offers on the various economic and social crises of our time, while simultaneously consolidating a populist grip over some of the more reactionary segments (often elderly) of the electorate. For the latter, the Culture War™ is a veritable goldmine for ratings, which explains why so many of these ‘cancellation’ stories — like that of the Queen that started this piece — are so patently ridiculous or plain fabricated. Because a for-profit media has no actual interest in the quality of public debate and journalistic integrity, they will continue to make mountains out of molehills so long as it pleases viewing figures.

The second thing to realise is that it cannot be won by rolling over, as Starmer’s present strategy attempts to do. The Conservatives will always have the upper-hand in the racism department, so there’s no hope of outflanking in this regard. More importantly, it is a deeply immoral and myopic move to concede defeat on this terrain, not least because it is the favoured terrain of the Conservatives, and so is politically unwise. But because the right’s attempts to ramp up the culture war, evident in the moral panic over refugees this past year, will legitimate the intensification of state-power post-neoliberalism. As neoliberal hegemony fractures under the weight of intersecting economic and ecological crises, capitalism unable to properly resolve its contradictions, a strengthening of surveillance, policing, and border regimes will become necessary to maintain order. What Christian Parenti called ‘the politics of the armed lifeboat’ is thus an imminent possibility, and the left must take a long-term view in targeting its incipient elements now.

If the culture war is not going to dissipate by itself, and if vapid triangulation is no political nor moral path forward, then the only hope for the left is direct confrontation. It is not my place here to offer a general strategy, so a few comments should suffice. First, we should strain at all times to break the framing between free-speech on one side, and totalitarian restrictions on the other, emphasising precisely that it is an attempt by the powerful to prevent criticism of their value-system and to delegitimize perfectly natural shifts in what Britain thinks is acceptable. Second, we should take a leaf from the conservative repertoire and similarly turn their discourses back on them. If part of confronting the culture war head on means not shying away from, but actively promoting, re-conceptualisations of Britain’s past and its cherished institutions, then this should come alongside a re-articulation of an idea of British identity without its reactionary implications. This is, of course, easier said than done. But Gareth Southgate’s recent personal defence of the England teams taking-of-the-knee in response to racial injustice was an exemplar of weaving together personal, political, and patriotic sentiments toward an alternative, progressive vision of Britain. Now, some purists will consider this beyond-the-pale, but the simple fact is that in politics you have to begin with where people are — even if you would like to move far beyond it — and what that involves in the present case is not trashing some minimal collective identity without providing a new one. Third and finally, since the imperatives of commercial media are largely aligned with the right’s interests in the culture war, — far more willing to parrot fake stories than open up space for nuanced engagement — then experiments with alternative media systems should be a top priority.

As ever, there is no guarantee that such a strategy will work. But if the alternative is allowing the right to set the political agenda for the next few decades, boxing us into a corner on their favoured terms, then it is absolutely crucial that we try.