The UK, of course, has longstanding institutional racism issues, and countless cultural sores of its own. When Dowden told the Heritage Foundation that the government had told schools that it was “illegal to teach the concept of ‘white privilege’ as though it were undisputed fact”, his audience surely heard a clear echo of the US freakout over critical race theory.

In general, America’s culture war discourse is so ingrained that it is impossible to simply uproot it and replant it in Britain, where political life is less structured around hot-button cultural controversies.

Sure, people care about patriotic songs and the union jack, often quite a lot. But these symbols aren’t permanent, inflamed points of contention. (Keir Starmer may be keen to emphasise them, but he seems to see them as a post-Corbyn prerequisite for electability, not a finished political offer in and of themselves.) We have tabloids, but we do not have a Fox News mainlining grievance day and night. GB News looks tinpot in comparison.

Moreover, the cultural schisms that we do have don’t always reinforce each other. Brexit got nasty, but did not map neatly on to existing divisions. (Dowden voted for Remain.) Covid rules, a key driver of the US culture wars, have not been as viciously polarising here. When Dominic Cummings broke lockdown, he tried to fight his way out of accountability, Trump-style, but was met with a wall of public fury. Ditto Boris Johnson. As of a year ago, nearly 60% of Britons didn’t know what “woke” meant. A roughly contemporaneous poll found the equivalent US figure to be around 30%.

It’s easy to oversimplify any transatlantic comparison, and it’s facile to say that culture wars are always a distraction from weightier, kitchen-table issues – culture matters. But the relentless, totalising focus on grievance surely is a distraction. In keeping with their “with or against us” tone, the woke wars, if they are to be effective electorally, need to be an all-or-nothing political strategy. Many US politicians are all in. Most Tories are not. And it’s far from clear that their voters would reward them if they were.

Source: The Guardian

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