Oh! The Wokey Cokey

Oliver Dowden's Culture War

It’s one of the defining features of our government-of-none-of-the-talents, that politicians who would once have been lucky to work in marketing for a paper company sales company in Slough, should now be regularly representing the UK on the ‘world stage’, and generally making fools of themselves and their country as they go about their government’s business.

The tone is set by the World King himself. Whether cracking jokes about Kermit the Frog at the UN General Assembly or having a quip about European dependency on Russian gas, Johnson never ceases to remind those who can bear to look how unerringly he fails to rise to almost any occasion.

With a prime minister like this, no one can be surprised to see Nadine Dorries ‘strengthening cultural ties’ in Saudi Arabia, or the hilariously out-of-her-depth Liz Truss posting a video of herself with musical accompaniment, wandering around Moscow supposedly telling the Russians where to get off with no apparent knowledge of where Russia is.

And now a new mummer has joined this dance of the dead, in the form of Oliver Dowden, Conservative Party Co-Chairman and Minister without Portfolio. This week Dowden rocked up in Washington to give a speech to the Heritage Foundation, which has generated a few headlines in the last few days, as it was intended to.

Before we go on to the speech itself, lets remind ourselves what the Heritage Foundation is. It is the most influential rightwing thinkthank in America, which first rose to prominence in the Reagan era, when it helped design the world’s first ‘global war on terror’ and supported the Reagan administration’s ‘rollback’ policy, of using covert operations against pro-Soviet or leftist regimes.

Even Reagan couldn’t bring himself to back the Renamo organisation in Mozambique, one of the bloodiest and most violent insurgent groups in twentieth century history. The Heritage Foundation did, and even allowed Renamo an office in its Washington headquarters.

This hardright agenda also applies to domestic policy. The Heritage Foundation supported the Tea Party, and Donald Trump, and it supports the Republican Party’s attempts to reduce the vote by promoting spurious claims of voter fraud. Given that its donors included billionaires connected to the fossil fuel industry, like the oil tycoon Richard Mellon Scaife and the Koch brothers, no one will be surprised to hear that it is climate denialist, and anti environmentalist.

This was the bastion of paleoconservatism that the Right Honourable member for Hertsmere addressed on Monday, in a much trailed-speech that was aimed as much at a British audience as it was at an American one. Much of Dowden’s speech was concentrated on the murky subject of ‘wokeness’ that has become an obsessive component of the new right’s culture wars.

Dowden begins by sketching out Western or conservative ‘values’ which he clearly regards as synonymous. At a time when the Johnson government is trying to move away from the pandemic and the new role of the enabling state that came with it, it’s significant that Dowden now insists on ‘limited government’, ‘free markets’ and ‘individual responsibility’ as core conservative values.

After genuflecting at the altar of Reagan and Thatcher, he then launches into a scattergun attack on ‘the Left’s fashionable nostrums’, most of which will be drearily familiar to anyone who has paid any attention to the ‘culture war’ politics propagated by the new generation of radical conservative politicians and by their many thinktanks and institutions such as…the Heritage Foundation.

Dowden rails against ‘social media mobs’ who ‘cancel you’ - as if social media pitchfork mobs were a uniquely leftwing phenomenon. All this is part of a ‘pernicious new ideology…sweeping our societies’ whose adherents call themselves ‘social justice warriors’ or ‘claim to be “woke”’.

Like most people who make such claims, Dowden, appears to be oblivious to the use of ‘social justice warrior’ as a pejorative sarcastic term invented by the right to ridicule the people it supposedly describes. ‘Woke’ serves a similar purpose, which has more or less obliterated the original Afro-American use of the term as ‘alert to social justice.’

Cold War Redux

What does Dowden mean by it? He insists that the adherents of this ideology ‘pursue a common policy inimicable to freedom’. They claim that ‘free speech is hate speech’ and that - the horror! - certain social groups are collectively privileged, a suggestion that is an insult to Dowden, the humble son of a shop worker and factory worker.

These ‘Maoists’ seek to ‘expunge large parts of our past’. They ignore the fact that ‘history is a living subject, one that will inevitably be revised.’ They are ‘not interested in real scholarship or nuance’ but in ‘wanton acts of iconoclastic fury’ such as trashing Churchill and defacing monuments.

Oo-er, as the one of the Bash Street Kids might say. Dowden, like many people who use this tedious ‘statues’ argument, confuses history and historiography with monumentalism and remembrance. He doesn’t even consider the possibility that toppling the statue of a slave trader say, does not ‘expunge’ history, though it can change the way that we choose to publicly remember the past, and the value that we give to specific individuals and historical acts.

Dowden rightly calls for the ‘context of the bad things that our ancestors did’, even though statues celebrating the philanthropy of slave traders provide no such context. He calls for scholarship and ‘nuance’, yet when a team of historians set out to provide both in relation to our National Trust-owned country houses, he and his government denounced them for doing so.

In language calculated to make any Heritage Foundation attendee swoon, he insists that this ‘ideology’, is everywhere’, corrupting universities, governments, corporations, and ‘hard sciences.’ All this constitutes a ‘ dangerous form of decadence just when our attention should be focused on external foes.’

Some of us may look askance at lessons on ‘decadence’ from the representative of a discredited and disreputable government heading for the rubbish heap of history, whose leader sang along to Abba and partied the night away while the rest of his country was grimly sticking to the rules that he and his colleagues had designed and then ignored.

Perhaps this was a celebration of the ‘vitality of our values' that Dowden calls for, but I doubt it. In linking this culture war to the prospect of real conflict with real enemies - Russia and China - in a period of international crisis, he was reaching back into old anti-communist rhetoric from the Cold War, with its depiction of an internal enemy sapping the West’s self-confidence.

In his estimation, the ‘painful woke psychodrama’ is undermining the West’s ability to defend the sovereignty of Ukraine and the rights of Afghan women. Where conservative Cold War governments once referred to ‘cultural enemies’ within the universities and the machinery of the state, Dowden calls for us to rediscover the ‘ instinctive pride in our national story’ and ‘essential unity of purpose’ in order to ‘stand up for what made the West great.’

Similar arguments used to emanate from the likes of Heritage and the neocon Weekly Standard during the early years of the Bush war on terror. This is clearly the kind of energy Dowden is looking for. Not for nothing does he emphasise the fact that the US and the UK are the countries where ‘the woke agenda is pursued the most aggressively’ and also the countries that are most proactive in the Ukraine crisis.

Regardless of the evidence that both the Biden and Johnson governments are being played by Vladimir Putin’s militarised demarche, Dowden boasts that ‘while others have wavered’, the UK has provided antitank weapons to Ukraine (hint: the UK is a better ally to the US than the flaccid Europeans with their appeasement diplomacy).

At a time when ‘rogue states are seeking to challenge the international order’, Dowden warns of a ‘collapse in reverse’ in which critics of Western foreign policy lead us into ‘demoralisation and despair’ and immerse us ‘irrational introspection’.

Seemingly indifferent to his own paeans to free speech. Dowden boasts that his government is making it ‘illegal to teach the concept of “white privilege” and is taking steps to challenge ‘cultural institutions…which promoted politicised agendas.’

As usual with those who make arguments like this, Dowden’s glibness has a wider purpose. In the context of the Ukraine crisis, his appearance in Washington is another attempt by the Johnson government to weld the UK to the United States as the essential guarantors of the values he describes. In talking culture war to a very well-funded hardright thinktank with identical concerns, he may well be looking for new sources of income for his party.

In his speech, Dowden hinted at tax cuts and the return to a small state. This then, is what we can expect, as his government writhes on the stake that it stuck in its own rotten heart and sinks ever deeper into the dead dreams of post-Brexit: hard conservatism, deregulation, small state, ‘individual responsibility’ re the pandemic, hardright insurgent politics, state censorship in the name of freedom, confrontation with China and Russia - hopefully with the UK riding shotgun to the US once again - and all this fuelled and oiled by endless culture war, stamping down on the human face forever, or for at least as long as it takes to save Boris Johnson’s worthless skin and getting the Tories elected again.