If dispassionate debate of ideas is the theoretical means by which policy is formed in liberal democracies, in these increasingly hostile and desperate conditions of late capitalism, culture war has become the reality. By culture war, we mean the polarisation of debate, the ‘Othering’ of opponents, the use of ‘wedge’ issues loaded with any number of unspoken prior assumptions to hijack debates, and the adoption of a permanent victim complex.
The latter in particular is conspicuous for its intimate ties to an associated conspiratorial mentality that sees the world in terms of ‘us’ and ‘them,’ and alleges ‘our’ way of life to be under siege from an endless parade of what H.L Mencken once referred to as ‘hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.’ The function of mostly imaginary hobgoblins, he noted, was to provide a means with which rulers might menace the populace, who, thus alarmed, would be ’clamorous to be led to safety.’
To the extent that the ‘Father of the Constitution,’ James Madison, argued during the 1787 Constitutional Convention that the proper role of governments out to be to ‘protect the minority of the opulent against the majority,’ this is consistent with the fundamental (yet typically unspoken) agendas of a class-divided society: domination of the vassals, playing the vassals off against one another using divide-and-conquer techniques to prevent collusion and forestall resistance, ready supply of the proverbial bread and circuses and religion soaking fallibility in guilt and shame for social control.
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