Cynically Exploiting a Generational Divide

In our age the grubby work of mainstream politics is far, far less a matter of building coalitions among different groups on the basis of their common interests than of playing them off against one another to push an agenda very few actually want. Thus has it been standard operating procedure to promote "culture war" for the sake of enabling a neoliberal economic program. Indeed, if for a period during the 1990s neoliberals, in a moment of utopian euphoria (or insanity, or idiocy), thought they could do without a culture war that had always been an imperfect tool for their purposes, turning to a more congenial "market populism" instead, but the way their utopian project came crashing down around them as they went from disaster to disaster in the twenty-first century had them doubling down on cultural warfare. Indeed, this seems inextricable from the way the Great Recession quickened the long rightward march of politics--with this, when one looks closely, not the end of neoliberalism but rather an attempt to save as much of it as possible.

Of course, in doing so they were already playing an old game, if more intricately. Traditionally culture war, which has been known by many names over the years (like status politics), has been a matter of ethnicity and religiosity. Today gender is a large and conspicuous part of the game in a way without precedent, while there is also an abundance of appeal to generational divides--and especially the fears and hates the old are supposed to feel for many of the young. Thus Rishi Sunak trots out his idea for National Service. The idea is bound to cost him points with the young--but to whatever extent he is actually trying to win this election, hoping that it will appeal enough to youth-hating oldsters to gain him enough points with them to more than make up for any such loss there.

Such maneuvers deserve to fail, and fail miserably. Perhaps they will do just that on Britain's own Fourth of July.