Am I a culture war addict?

Reading Melissa Lawford’s excellent analysis in the Sunday Telegraph, “Putin can’t afford peace — Russia’s economy is hooked on war,” I had a queasy sense of recognition. Lawford claims that Vladimir Putin has no real desire for a peace deal in Ukraine, because both his personal political power and his country’s militarized economy depend on the conflict. She quotes an IMF former chief economist as saying: “He’s enjoying the war. It’s awful. But he doesn’t want to end the war.”

Doing the podcast rounds in London during the past week, I’ve felt a sheepish kinship with Vladimir. Have I, too, been enjoying the war? The culture war, that is. If so, do I really not want it to end?

It may be too early to say if the woke wars are over. The perceived Trumpian “vibe shift” may constitute a mere temporary setback for the inexorable “march through the institutions” by the deranged progressives who’ve dominated us commonsensical normies for over a decade. More ideally, a loudly slammed door consigns all that racial hysteria and gender woo-woo behind it to the status of a bad dream. But the dogma is still out there, and the same brainwashed fanatics still occupy many positions of influence.

A sea change does seem to have taken place, from my perspective for the better. While more battles await, summary defeat of “the sacralization of historically disadvantaged race, gender and sexual identity groups” (thank you, Eric Kaufmann) now seems a real possibility. But that prospect makes me feel oddly empty and even a little panicked. Good lord, what would I write about then?

The opposition has their champions: Ta-Nehisi Coates, Ibram X. Kendi, Robin DiAngelo, Judith Butler, etc — and what a humorless bunch they are. But over the past decade, a range of academics, commentators and podcasters have risen to the occasion and fought back: Eric Kaufmann, of course; Jordan Peterson, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Victor Davis Hanson, Thomas Sowell, Bill Maher, Niall Ferguson, Matt Goodwin, Glenn Loury, Winston Marshall, Konstantin Kisin and Francis Foster, Andrew Gold; folks at UnHerd, Spiked, Quillette, City Journal, multiple fellow writers in this magazine. A comprehensive list would be far longer, and I wager the total IQ points on our side come to at least twice theirs. Since circa 2016, I have regarded manning the anti-woke barricades as a part-time job.

No regrets, either. The terms for the antagonism — cancel culture, wokeism, even the culture war — have sounded consistently trivializing, but the questions at issue aren’t small. Can ideology successfully impose itself on biological reality? Is the only solution to racism more racism? Can you make up for the sins of the past by sinning in the present? In the name of “justice,” are mere slips of the tongue grounds for destroying a whole career? Is what you are more important than who you are? Should “diversity” trounce meritocracy, and what are the stakes when you drastically lower standards in medical school? How does a country keep it together or even defend itself after teaching whole generations to revile their homelands? To be commercially viable, need an artist be morally pure? Is guilt heritable? Lives have been ruined over this stuff. Somebody’s had to put a stop to the madness, and I’m glad to have played a small part.

Still, a certain topical dependency has developed. Enemies are invigorating to columnists as well as to Putin. Even anti-factionalists can fall into clubbiness; the same usual suspects play musical chairs on the podcast circuit. Just as its armaments industry is the Russian economy’s only growth sector, anti-wokeness has developed its own conflict-dependent economy. Many of those podcasters rely on culture-war aggro for a living. Yet nothing is more deadly for any movement than success.

Since circa 2016, I have regarded manning the anti-woke barricades as a part-time job

If you’re halfway on the ball, too, refuting woke shibboleths is shooting fish in a barrel. Continually controverting the self-evidently barmy (“Some people are born in the wrong body”) can lead to intellectual flabbiness. Tangling with the tedium of “intersectionality” hardly involves wrestling with humanity’s Great Questions.

I suppose in a warped way I have enjoyed my war. It’s heartening to have a purpose. Coming to the defense of the unjustly persecuted is rewarding, even if a mere comment piece can’t offer the same salvation as representation by the Free Speech Union. And the progressive left has provided such great material! As the comedian Bill Maher has noted, he picks particularly on the left, because they keep doing and saying things that are funny.

Yet fighting a war you don’t want to win is hypocritical. When that war entails casualties, as this one, not to mention Putin’s, certainly does, dragging out the fight for personal gain is wicked. I cannot imagine missing this era once it’s truly over, and if I lack for subject matter without Woke World to poke fun at, it’s time to hang up my hat. Fortunately, I cultivate a range of passions, and I wager we’ll all see the back of this nonsense with relief. In fact, I’ve grown increasingly fascinated by how this period will be recalled in historical retrospect, and that’s assuming this spell of savage if often small-minded scrapping isn’t swallowed by more momentous events and forgotten altogether. Should all that doctrinaire excess make any impression on our descendants, I’ve little doubt which contingent will appear to have been on “the right side of history.”

It ain’t over yet. American universities still sneak racial preferences into their admissions process, in defiance of the Supreme Court. American hospitals still perform mutilating surgeries on bamboozled kids. Academics are still sacked for political and rhetorical missteps. Freedom of speech, which should be a nonpartisan issue but isn’t at present, is more endangered than ever in Europe, especially in Germany and Britain.

Worry not about running short of material, whether for formal commentary or send-ups at the pub. Progressives are so, ah, flexible that post-October 7 they’ll ally themselves with rapists, kidnappers and baby killers in a spirit of incensed self-righteousness. Should they abandon critical race theory, these people will promote something even more preposterous in no time.