This article is taken from the August-September 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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“The era of culture wars is over,” announced Lisa Nandy, in her maiden speech as the new Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport in July. For Nandy, our recent “polarisation, division and isolation” will soon be a distant memory, once the UK becomes a “self-confident, outward looking country”. 

Naturally some will doubt whether the arrival of a new Labour government really will move us out of the darkness into the light, where socially liberal lambs may find sudden comfort at the prospect of lying with hard-left wolves in the field of culture. For the sceptically inclined, it is all too plain that the manifold issues which have given rise to our present “culture wars” are simply too knotty, important and even plain ugly to be nonchalantly dismissed as ephemeral trivia with a brisk wave of the hand and a chippy soundbite. 

In their new books, Helen Pluckrose and Eric Kaufmann agree with this assessment. Both authors have been moved to write repeatedly on culture-war topics, and whilst they know all too well the depths of the problems at hand, both — in different ways — see some cause for buoyancy and optimism. 

Each book accordingly offers something of a plan of action for anyone concerned about certain tendencies that have gathered steam in our current cultural milieu: whereas Pluckrose offers grassroots how-to guidance to her readers (how might a frustrated individual confront a particularly thorny culture-war scenario?), Kaufmann is more concerned with the big picture: his book concludes with a set of macro-level proposals about law and policy.

Whilst Pluckrose writes as a left liberal who takes aim at “Social Justice Ideology” and Kaufmann as a conservative who addresses what he designates (a trifle provocatively) “Cultural Socialism”, both writers clearly have the same broad target in view: a particular style of left authoritarianism (aka wokeism) which both perceive as an increasingly noteworthy and concerning feature of public discourse across the Anglosphere. 

Kaufmann begins his book with some admirably cool and terse remarks about his own experience of being targeted by online mobs as well as cancel-culture practitioners at his former university, Birkbeck College. One hopes that freedom of thought and expression is in better shape at his new academic home, the University of Buckingham. The sheer human misery to which “woke” commissars subject their targets is all too seldom lamented as a grisly feature of the culture wars. 

Kaufmann himself offers no plaintive outpourings or angry misgivings. Instead, he rises above the heat and noise, dwelling upon other cases of appalling “cancellations”, including the recent cases of Professor Kathleen Stock (Sussex) and Professor Jo Phoenix (Open University).

There are several main strands to Kaufmann’s argument in the book. A contestable (and central) claim is that the main contours of contemporary wokeism owe most to a style of race activism which emerged in the 1960s. This argument is made somewhat cursorily: this reader, at least, felt that hard-nosed secularism, radical feminism and (in particular) the prerogatives of global capitalism and the depredations of mass culture deserved fuller recognition as essential elements contributing to the formation and propagation of “woke”. 

Many of the best sections of Kaufmann’s book successfully connect the dots between different elements in the woke story. In an early chapter, a punchy, lucid discussion is offered of how different areas of New Left thought coalesced to develop woke in embryo. Many major figures of this formative era are gracefully touched upon: Fanon, Sartre, Sontag, Wright Mills, Adorno and more. 

The major influence of Marcuse is briefly, but devastatingly, portrayed: an advocate of censorship, intolerance and of stopping (intellectual) enemies “before they can become active”. The North American foundations of woke are correctly identified: it has no roots, for instance, in the left tradition of the Oxford historians Christopher Hill or A.J.P. Taylor, who flourished in the same period.

Kaufmann is not a simple denouncer of all things New Left: Vietnam War protests and the 60s sexual revolution, as well as a lessening of racism, sexism and homophobia, are all credited as boons of the movement. Where, though, does he think the left is going wrong? His broad-brush answer hits upon the growing alienation of the working class, growing division and polarisation and a growing climate of illiberalism, fear and unreason. 

Polarisation is perhaps the thorniest of these: in a climate where reasoned objections can be denounced or waved away as products of “wrongthink” or attempts at “both-sidesing”(so that even considering the merits of different positions can be discounted as an act of bad faith), people increasingly feel bound to silence for fear of offending the more truculent members of a particular cultural or political tribe. If such a climate develops further, Kaufmann warns, the impact on the culture at large, and on educational institutions in particular, will be unquestionably noxious. 

Kaufmann devotes important and unnerving paragraphs to the “medicalisation of everyday life” and “concept creep”. Activists’ fusion of political radicalism with psychotherapeutic jargon is undertaken with the aim of spreading “care/harm terminology to less serious phenomena” in order to place “a wider sphere of behaviour beyond the pale of what’s acceptable”. It is a form of thought-and speech-policing. 

We might think here, for example, of so-called “microaggressions”. Kaufmann is scathing about the creep of any such care/harm-based taboos, “which are used to form binary good versus bad judgments” and “collapse the distinction between serious, minor and trivial offences”.

Polarisation, again, is the result: these activist strategies are corrosive of the possibility of serious intellectual exchange and disagreement and destructive of social trust. They are also excessively confident in their determination to find the worst in others. The problem, of course, is that things are complicated here, too. Certain elements of once publicly acceptable discourse are now rightly regarded as beyond the pale. Determining what is and isn’t appropriate, however, is not the job of thought-policing left authoritarians, but for society as a whole to work through (in good faith). 

The antidote to the problem of wokeism and the problems it generates, Kaufmann concludes, lies in the field of law and policy. He accordingly enumerates a 12-point plan for change. His most convincing proposals cover the protection of free speech, the importance of political neutrality and non-discrimination and the importance of teaching more adequately about the failures and excesses of utopian movements in schools. Some of his other recommendations may prove difficult to implement.

Kaufmann tells much of his story about the genealogy and spread of wokeism using the tools of social science and detailed academic research; Pluckrose, by contrast, rolls her sleeves up and addresses people directly affected on the ground. Have your friends or colleagues (un)wittingly swallowed the messaging of a divisive or ideologically-loaded campaign? How, if at all, might you respond? 

These are questions, Pluckrose recognises, that many people now have to ask themselves. As a founding member of the organisation Counterweight, which aims to offer support to anyone in this situation, Pluckrose has clearly done sterling work. Her book teems with the fruits of hard-won wisdom. She leads readers through the different steps they might take in questioning, troubleshooting and dealing with the sort of illiberalism which the uncritical adoption of woke ideology can produce. 

Pluckrose’s emphasis is always on moderation and reason: the aim is not to expunge or eliminate woke, but to situate its claims alongside those of rival and alternative exponents of the same subject matter. Thus, for instance, if we are to consider the divisive ideas of Ibram X. Kendi or Robin DiAngelo, it’s important to look also at the more reconciliatory thinking of Thomas Chatterton Williams or John McWhorter. 

Pluckrose is a thorough and supportive coach who appreciates the sort of bravery it takes to speak up on hot-button topics. She is a master of the art of writing polite but firm letters, amongst other things. She is also a believer in the power of reason and common sense, but unlike Kaufmann she does not elaborate a detailed programme of legal and policy measures to address wokeism. Her expectation is that if good people stand up for truth and reason on a local level and in their institutions, the woke fad will pass, as — she surmises — it has already started to do. Some may feel this to be far too optimistic. 

Glance across the shelves of your local bookshop and it won’t be long before a glut of recent books tackling the issue of wokeism catches your eye. The excellent work of Kaufmann and Pluckrose will now appear there alongside the work of Helen Joyce, Douglas Murray, Joanna Williams, Jonathan Haidt, John McWhorter, Christopher Rufo and others.

These are important books which confront, with unflinching seriousness, a distressing set of issues which affect us all. All such books, one feels sure, are books their writers would rather not have felt compelled to write. But the obvious has never so much needed saying.