The Left has lost the culture war.
This is not a novel statement. Julia Gillard said as much in 2003, noting John Howard’s success in creating a hegemonic “neo-conservative political correctness that is out of touch with the values of the majority of the Australian people.”
That same year Brian C Anderson, editor of conservative policy magazine City Journal, proudly proclaimed “We’re Not Losing the Culture Wars Anymore”. Citing conservative talk radio (Rush Limbaugh), cable news (Fox), comedy (South Park), drama (The Shield), the Internet (Vice and Drudge Report), Anderson claimed that the liberal media sphere “which less than a decade ago was still the media” was “shrinking and breaking up into much smaller sectarian spheres” while the conservative media was expanding.
Anderson’s prediction was correct. 17 years later, it is not in the least controversial to claim that Roger Ailes’ Fox News (started in 1996) has, more than any other organisation, transformed America. His only real error was to conflate liberals and the left.
This conflation was not merely an American phenomenon - Gillard made the error too, referring to everyone “from Green on the left to small-L liberal on the right” as losers of the culture war. I imagine she positions herself here as the “centre left”, but given her record in office, I think she can fairly be called a “small-L liberal” herself.
Why does this matter? In the framing of the culture wars in America and Australia in the early 2000s, the left was not losing nor had it already lost - it was not even on the battlefield. The left was so culturally irrelevant that it was confused for liberalism, and not only by conservatives (who have long viewed liberal permissiveness as the beginning of a slippery slope toward Communism) but also by liberals themselves. A liberal media - one which offered some criticisms of individual politicians, of Republicans, of human rights abuses, which paid some lip service to diverse representation, but crucially never seriously entertained criticisms of capital or colonialism, white supremacy or misogyny - was as far left as could be imagined. The left’s political marginality was matched by its barely extant cultural influence.
Fast forward to 2015, and the western left began to be politically relevant again for the first time since at least the fall of the Berlin Wall. The cross-Atlantic phenomena of Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders, along with the ascendancy of Podemos in Spain and Syriza in Greece, appeared to signal a turning point. Seven years after the spectacular failure of neoliberal orthodoxy in the 2008 financial crisis, it seemed that the left had somewhat reasserted itself in the mainstream.
Now, of course, each of these political projects is a painful failure. Meanwhile, here in Australia, The Greens – the closest thing we have to a mainstream left force – languish at 10% in the polls (despite some successes). But at least, one might think, these movements revitalised us - the left is once again culturally relevant and therefore has some control over how the cultural influences the political.
I’m not so sure. If we survey the cultural landscape around us, how different does it look from the dark days of 2003, where the left was all but invisible?
There are bright spots, certainly - outlets and cultural products where leftist ideas have found some mainstream recognition. Jacobin and Teen Vogue have enjoyed success as online magazines, with the latter’s transition from a pure fashion and gossip magazine to one which also has features about Marxism being a pleasant surprise. But it is worth noting that, according website analysis from similarweb.com, Teen Vogue (2,182nd) is well behind its competitors Cosmopolitan (209th) and Refinery29 (427th) in terms of traffic to news and media sites, while Jacobin (3,673rd) lags far behind The Atlantic (272nd), Breitbart (152nd) and even The Spectator (2,482nd).
We can also look to DIY news outlets, particularly Novara Media and The Young Turks, which have provided a small but growing challenge to mainstream television news. We can be grateful, too, for an abundance of podcasts - Chapo Trap House being the most obvious example of a roaring success in this medium. None of these approach the mainstream in their reach.
In terms of popular art, can we see a left analogue for what Anderson saw in South Park or The Shield? Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite is certainly noteworthy as an Oscar-winning explicitly anti-capitalist film, which achieved critical success and a good box office return. It is, however, notable primarily as an exception to the rule. The critically acclaimed Sorry to Bother You, by communist writer and director Boots Riley, has not been widely shown in cinemas. Conversely, superhero blockbuster Black Panther was praised for its Afrofuturist and seemingly anti-colonial message, but this was more than a little diluted by its appreciation for and resolution in favour of American empire.
In television, the emerging subgenre of climate change dystopia could be seen as a sign of increasing class consciousness in popular media. Both TNT’s Snowpiercer and Stan’s The Commons accurately depict capitalist elites as the cause of our greatest crisis and offer critiques of our present state – the former through blunt but effective allegory, the latter through an eerie depiction of the logical conclusion of Australia’s border regime turned inward on its citizens. The Commons appears not to have been renewed. Perhaps there is other great anti-capitalist TV out there, but if so I haven’t found it, and like many of us I’m doing quite a lot of TV watching at the moment.
While there are of course many excellent leftist musicians, particularly in the more politicised genres of punk and hip-hop, successful mainstream artists who make anti-capitalist art are few and far between. Stormzy and Dua Lipa both endorsed Jeremy Corbyn in 2019, and in doing so probably convinced many young fans to vote for Labour. If their music does contain explicit critiques of our current capitalist system then they seem to me, as a casual fan and listener, to be fairly difficult to discern.
The same could be said, I think, of Ariana Grande, Cardi B, Mykki Blanco, Belinda Carlisle, Lizzo, The Strokes, Bon Iver and many others who endorsed Bernie Sanders for President. This is an observation, rather than a criticism, and is not to dismiss as unimportant the lyrics of many of these artists which challenge racism, misogyny and other forms of discrimination. We should note, though, that such messages can easily be co-opted by capital on a surface level if there is no anti-capitalist critique to go with them – see, for example, the surface level adoption of the Black Lives Matter slogan by companies, such as Nestle, that incorporate the brutal oppression of Black people as part of their business model.
Material culture – fashion, architecture, etc. – is so intimately bound up with capital that it is, in my view, scarcely worth discussing in this piece, but I would be delighted to hear any arguments to the contrary. Equally, I would love to hear about leftist pop culture that I have missed. (Comment below with your suggestions.)
Barring some massive oversights on my part and despite a few hopeful sparks, the left is at present still largely culturally marginal, perhaps only a little less so than in 2003. The result of this, in the phrase of cultural theorist Mark Fisher, is that our desire is nameless, and it seems – both to us and to people we need to reach - easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. You would not know it to read any columnists in the Murdoch press (or, indeed, listen to any number of talking heads across Western media) but leftist ideas are scarcely ever expressed in the media or in popular art. Why not? And, if we take it as read that cultural influence is important, how do we fix it?
In this instance, the simplest explanation is also a correct one – the left lacks money and power that the right has in abundance. If the left could afford to bankroll a proper national daily newspaper to rival The Australian, and perhaps a TV channel, then things would undoubtedly be better. This is tautology, and it also pointless – we will never have the capital that the right has. However, this is not the only explanation.
While we rightfully mock the far-right’s favourite antisemitic myth of “Cultural Marxism”, which imagines a “long march through the institutions” by Jewish intellectuals in order to destroy Christianity, the family, etc., it is true that the left wields most of its cultural power within institutions, and particularly academia. Academia is of course far more contested than the right’s mythology would have us believe, but it is nevertheless a place where leftist ideas can be discussed with relative openness.
Unfortunately, the extent to which academia has become the left’s greatest cultural outpost is reflected in the way the broad left engages in discourse and presents itself to those it has not yet won over. Few seem willing to acknowledge the reality of the urgent need to meet people where they are. In the wake of the Black Lives Matter revolt against police brutality and the racist state, and as liberals demanded that white people read White Fragility, leftists called instead for them to read Marx and Angela Davis – apparently under the impression that any significant number of people would actually do this.
We routinely talk in a language that is entirely foreign to the vast majority of people – dialectics, materialism, microaggression, class consciousness, positionality, white privilege, cisgender, comrade, the list could go on for a good few pages. This is not to say that these phrases are worthless, that they should be banished, that they do not have meaning (I have already used two of them myself in this article), nor that the left should abandon theory and theorising. My only point is that I do not see many fascists imploring people to read The Protocols of the Elders of Zion or Mein Kampf, nor do they regularly deploy phrases that are not commonly understood (except as code when they wish to hide their true natures). The fascists, at present, are winning.
Perhaps worse still is our collective obsession with talking and debating amongst ourselves. While the reality of the climate crisis bears down upon us, we argue incessantly over differences that are, in the grand scheme, minute. We spend a lot of time debating the finer details of the policies we would enact if we had power, without any actual path to power. Those of us who accept that capitalism is the problem may not agree on everything, but we agree on that. Our task is to rapidly build a coalition - whether it is electoral or revolutionary hardly seems to matter at this point, so long as it is united by a common goal for a better world. We cannot build that coalition only by talking to ourselves.
We can, of course, talk to people directly through doorknocking and phone banking. These are important, but I suggest that we need to reach people through mass media too, broadly defined. Projects to start a leftist daily newspaper in Australia have been floated but have yet to materialise. A leftist streaming service, MeansTV, holds much promise, but as yet no mass appeal. It seems unlikely these projects, though admirable and certainly worth supporting, will ever be able to compete with capital’s propaganda machines.
The left is certainly more culturally relevant than it was in 2003, or even ten years ago. It is increasingly difficult for liberals and centrists to claim a progressive stance as leftist ideas about anti-capitalism and, in particular, anti-racism once again begin to seep into the cultural zeitgeist. Still, it is hard not to feel as though we are primarily marginal, a fringe force in mainstream culture as much as politics.
Can we turn “cultural Marxism” from far-right fantasy into reality? We must hope so. Those musicians, writers, and artists who have declared their interest in supporting left political movements must turn their talents toward imagining a collective future and the end of capital. Those of us less artistically inclined should help our comrades, in whatever way we can.
Tristan Ryan lives in Warrang (Sydney) and is a member of the NSW Greens and Climate Justice Collective. He has a particular interest in how spaces for social change can be created in cities.