If you can beat them, keep beating them ?

This is an interesting observation. Despite the left rarely and barely having any political clout in British politics, the right continuously acts as though the left have already won - or at least, as though their political position were far less secure than all the evidence suggests it actually is.

In the United Kingdom, the spectre of a Marxist takeover is also invoked across the rightwing spectrum, including the attorney general. Conservative commentators like to claim that the left in Britain “controls almost every institution”. What exactly is going on here?

“Control” cannot refer to the classical liberal notion of representative government: winning elections and forming governments... when it comes to political representation, the left in Britain has been in opposition for the best part of the last 100 years. Even in the few cases in which it succeeded in winning elections, it did so while relinquishing traditional leftwing commitments, promoting an image of itself as competent and pragmatic, neither right nor left.

The usual state of affairs in Britain seems to be to view the right as unlikable but competent and necessary while the left is well-meaning but ineffectual and misguided. Case in point : the Liberal Democrats. This isn't an absolute by any means, but it's a useful generalisation to keep in mind.

The Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci coined the term “cultural hegemony”, by which he meant the capacity to exercise influence in society through educational institutions, the arts or the media. When the right claims that the “left is in control”, it is pulling a Gramscian move: they know the left has no political or economic power, but claim that it nonetheless pervades society and culture.

But to some degree I think it does; nothing cannot come of nothing. If I can make a totally unjustified anecdotal observation, most mainstream fiction does seem to have a left-liberal bias. Because how could you make a drama in which exclusion and intolerance were the order of the day ? You can't, because they never solve anything. When was the last time you saw a fictional fat cat trying to do what's right against the evil machinations of their downtrodden and poverty-stricken underlings ? You never did, because it would make for terrible, nonsensical television.

On the other hand you do see plenty of stories about fighting oppression, because absolutely everyone can get behind fighting oppression - be that a local bully, and evil corporation, or an authoritarian government. Perhaps Firefly comes to mind as a chilling vision of a left-wing dystopia or government "meddling" gone amok, but in general, everyone wants to be free both to act as they wish and free from other people stopping them from doing this. Everyone can agree the fictional Alliance in Firefly goes too far. Everyone can agree that some non-total level of freedom is a good thing. Everyone can agree that evil alien invaders are something you should fight against. Those black-and-white cases are easy, and largely transcend political boundaries. Nobody wants total government control. Nobody wants ungoverned anarchy. Well, anarchists do, but they don't count.

So perhaps I'm wrong in claiming that most fiction has a left-wing bias. Perhaps it just has a bias towards a universal, politically independent morality. When one of the evil aliens turns out to be good, who could stand up and say, "they should kill him anyway" ? Probably no-one. Nobody ever knowingly defends unfairness.

If that's so, then what would a genuinely left or right-leaning work of fiction actually look like ? We can perhaps glimpse it in the way that right-wing celebrities often play parts that the left would say espouse their own values. To the left, the orcs are the forces of intolerance; to the right, they're the EU or Muslims or something. To the left, the Rebel Alliance are an oppressed minority fighting against fascism; to the right, they're standing up for traditional (Old) Republican values and fighting against Communist tyranny. That's the gist of it, anyway. Doesn't have to be taken too literally or 100% accurate.

But if fiction can easily be interpreted to suit the viewer's inclinations, is there any charge at all in a left-liberal fiction bias ? Maybe. Diversity is an inherently leftward position. The right does value fairness, but it doesn't go out of its way to help the unfairly treated. The right, correctly or not, says that you should achieve success by yourself and not rely on anyone else to get you there. So diversity of race, age, gender etc. are all indicators of a left-leaning bias. When a fictional character argues for inclusivity of cultures, that is a left bias. Who would ever write a popular mainstream fiction of separate but equal and defend it as desirable ?

Despite the blog's title I do at least try to keep each post at least internally self-consistent. Here I'm on far less steady ground. I started with the view that yes of course most fiction is inherently left-leaning, but now I'm far less sure of that. Okay, there might be some inherent preference to it, but much less than I might have insisted upon at the start. Eye of the beholder, and all that - just as I'd ascribe values and behaviour to the right that they do not at least profess to hold. The right, surely, do not identify themselves as intolerant, unfair, ruthless and uncaring - that's my bias assigning them the values I see them upholding. Of course, the values they truly believe and uphold are another matter; there's not usually all that much wrong with the ones they claim to cherish.

(You'll have to excuse me for feeling intolerant today. There are honourable, sensible people on the political right, but it feels increasingly to me that the majority are hypocritical nutters. It's not their values - for the most part - that I have a problem with but their implementation. Sorry about that.)

This may explain how so much apparently left-leaning fiction can persist in a conservative society : everyone sees only what they want to see. No-one wants to see themselves as the villain. Fiction is inherently open to interpretation, so unless a moral message is absolutely explicit, it's rarely problematic to those who disagree.

But this means that the right's attempts to depict the left as an ungracious winner seem even stranger. Why bother to attack someone with much less (but not zero) political or cultural clout than yourself ?

For the right, those who question the legacy of the empire or making efforts to decolonise university curriculums have created a situation in which “the very underpinnings of western liberal democracies are being subverted and destroyed”. Instead of asking why so many of the songs we sing, roads we walk down and statues we pass contain traces of an injustice whose legacy continues to shape the present, Conservative MPs are urged to be “the vanguard” of the opposition to the left’s “remorseless cancel culture”.

It would be a formidable achievement for a left that has neither adequate political organisation (in both Britain and the US, the leading progressive parties, in opposition, are run by their centre or right factions) nor any kind of significant control over the economy to be culturally hegemonic. 

The fantasy of leftwing hegemony in rightwing countries is not about principles, but tactics... Cultural Marxists explained how narratives developed to ensure that those who would have reason to protest against a failing system ended up being co-opted, and how progressive struggles lost ground just when they seemed to have gained momentum. They emphasised that it was not enough to focus on material oppression; one must also understand forms of injustice based on discourse, symbols and culture, and learn from the conflicts they provoke.

When representative political institutions fail, and when the economic system faces its worst crisis since the Great Depression, the only way to secure compliance is to demonise leftwing alternatives.

Just as you should never trust a skinny chef, so no-one fears a poor thief. Thus it behooves the mainstream right to exaggerate the influence of the left and underplay their own success in going against a fearful opponent*. This may also explain why Americans can seem (to Europeans) incredibly insecure in their apparent own world domination. The apparent successes are at least partly illusory and depend more on belief than any more solid foundation. There is, in the right, perhaps a subconscious fear of the fragility of their own genuine achievements, that, for example, economic success has been achieved at the enormous cost of environmental sustainability; a guilt that their actions do not actually reach the high ethical standards they claim to value. After all, if they really thought things were going as well as they claim, they wouldn't need to shout about it so much. A case of "methinks they doth protest too much" writ large.

* A sort of weird variation on the straw man fallacy, in which the opponent is easy to disparage but in this case is depicted as having a whole array of dangerous weaponry they do not, in fact, have. I propose we call it the "Scarecrow" fallacy after the villain in Batman of the same name.

Why does the right keep pretending the left runs Britain? | Lea Ypi

ost of my students would struggle to name any "cultural Marxists". The work of social theorists such as Theodor Adorno, pioneer of the so-called cultural turn in post-war Marxist studies, is barely taught in humanities and social science departments these days.