This article is taken from the November 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £25.
Cultural change is never only about winning the argument, but about making people desire to side with you. What matters just as much as the Renaissance ideal of eloquent persuasion is attraction: a pull made of je ne sais quoi that wins instincts and dissolves resistance. Call it zeitgeist, moving the Overton Window, or even “vibes”. All are shorthand for deep change in a society’s psyche.
The shift is, for instance, evident in attitudes to immigration. Even the New Statesman, hardly a natural ally, put deportations on one of its September covers — something simply unthinkable a few years ago. A similar pattern can be seen in the debate over transgenderism, where in the UK the argument was shifted not so much by politicians but, years ago, by individual victims of cancel culture who refused to stay silent, and by institutions like Mumsnet. In other words, a parenting forum has more cultural clout than most MPs.
Yet this took years of isolated voices and nascent heterodox outlets pushing against a massive liberal establishment lavishly subsidised by the taxpayer as well as progressive-minded private donors. On the issue of immigration in particular, it may have succeeded more by accident than design: the asylum system had become untenable, the crisis too visible to suppress. On another timeline, with decline more carefully managed, the old status quo might have endured. The former Spectator editor, Fraser Nelson, might never have entertained even faint doubts about “Britain’s integration miracle”.
There is little sign of a clear, coordinated strategy from anyone on the right willing to challenge the liberal order on any other social or cultural issue. Must the signs of collapse always come before change becomes possible? Or, more cynically, will the hollow performance of change distract us once again?
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The Right badly needs to get its act together. Winning the cultural battles means more than drafting policy papers. It’s about cutting through the dead language of the mainstream, swimming upstream from politics, and giving people the tools to think about themselves in ways not dictated by the managerial liberal elite.
In January 2025, in the aftermath of Trump’s second presidential victory, the successful American activist Chris Rufo warned: “The right is ascendant for the moment, but long term, we cannot delegate the function of cultural legitimation to outlets like New York Magazine. We need to invest heavily in aesthetics, design and prestige media, so that we can rival, rather than require, these outlets.” It was a fair challenge. Almost a year later, it hangs in the air unanswered.
Are people on the right simply incapable of working together? This seems like another by-product of the culture of narcissism, not so far removed from the managerial class that James Burnham, Christopher Lasch and Allan Bloom each diagnosed in their own way. We have been warned often enough about self-absorption and the closing of elite minds — ailments hardly confined to the left. So the diagnoses are all there, but we are still without a cure.
In America this culture of narcissism is pervasive and all-consuming: the endless fixation on defining the self at the expense of engaging with what is real, what is true. Europe, America’s dutiful vassal, has imported the same pathology wholesale, along with the postmodern culture wars.
The situation betrays something deeper: the right does not understand culture well. Its leaders treat it as decoration, its politicians as a photo opportunity, its commentators as an afterthought.
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Dominic Cummings has lamented that our institutions remain mired in automating paperwork rather than embracing ideas that simulate the future, and that most computing aimed at education merely apes the worst of television instead of nurturing new forms of thought. How could politicians hope to master something as intricate as culture?
Frequent calls for “right-wing film studios” or “conservative festivals” often come from people who can scarcely watch a film or attend a play without turning it into a personal grievance. If you dislike something, you are under no obligation to endure it. If you find it puzzling, try to understand why it exists instead of immediately assuming that it was created purely to provoke you. If you are truly unsettled by the state of things, the remedy lies not in complaint but in action, in the real world.
Instead, the right squanders vast sums on the same weary circuit of podcasts, policy papers and conferences — gatherings of the like-minded who mistake the comfort of “being together” for a strategy, and the shallow repetition of their creed for thought. Worse still, the growing appetite for online personality feuds and empty signalling has flooded conservative spaces with audiences who can grasp little else. Ideas don’t really matter; only self-definition does.
Tocqueville saw the beginnings of this malaise in Democracy in America, where democratic societies, he noted, “habitually prefer the useful to the beautiful” and even demand that the beautiful be useful. In such conditions, the guilds and academies that once set standards give way to art recast as commodity, judged by its market traction rather than its intrinsic worth.
A few, by strength of character, can still resist the drift into mediocrity — that “which judges itself” — but today it is precisely character, virtue and the canon that stand under threat. Keeping out destructive audiences, then, is no less vital than resisting the demagogues and fashions they enable.
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Modern conditions have produced generations of conservatives incapable of addressing substantive issues in a substantive way. Liberals, by contrast, thanks to schools, media and the other institutions they control, at least know what they believe — however foolish or self-destructive those beliefs may be. It scarcely matters, because they all believe roughly the same thing, and those beliefs rarely obstruct their pursuit of real-world goals. Their creed may be thin, but it is serviceable.
On the other side, conservatives tend to have patchwork worldviews with far more limited utility. In a contest of coherence against incoherence, it is clear which side will prevail. When it comes to the deeper issue of actual political beliefs, it is bemusing how few conservatives understand what conservatism means. Many are content with the vague conviction that as long as everyone is broadly against their opponent, nothing else is required. A friend once described to me the Tory party as a crowd at a music concert: all facing the same direction, but each wearing radically different costumes and behaving in their own way. Is that enough to make a party, let alone win power and use it intelligently?
Ego and identity now dominate discourse, and the right has no coherent cultural strategy to resist them. After decades of dysfunction, many treat their beliefs not as beliefs but as badges of status or membership in a subculture. When those beliefs are challenged, it is perceived as assaulting an identity, rather than a potentially fruitful dispute about ideas, as was traditionally the case. Debate is not received as rational discourse, planning or delivery; it is taken as a personal attack. Issues no longer exist in their own right. They’re used as props for people to talk about themselves.
So much of “culture wars” discourse is just this: a way of saying “I don’t like you” or “I am better than you” to one’s opponents. It is a counterfeit debate, telling us nothing about what culture could or should express, and nothing about how to restore the broken bonds of a society that has systematically emptied its own symbols of meaning.
Take immigration again. As this magazine’s art critic Pierre d’Alancaisez recently noted, a progressive charity, Rainbow Migration, responded to the spontaneous reappearance of the English flag by draping itself in the St George’s cross to declare that queer migrants “represent England”.
That this could be done with a straight face shows how thoroughly cultural signifiers have been emptied. Progressive control of the means of cultural expression makes it possible to project the liberally-tainted categories of “welcome” and “tolerance” onto St George’s crosses — just as the Union Jack has already been hijacked to mean everything and nothing.
The right must contend with vast philanthropic charities, NGOs and other quango structures devoted to progressive aims and upon which their favoured recipients have become dependent. This is money that can hold the arts sector captive in its anti-cultural policies, celebrating an artless society pressed into the service of social engineering. The “practices” through which the Soros Centres for Contemporary Art influenced culture in Eastern Europe are a case in point.
In contrast, the anti-establishment mood that now exists across the US, the UK and Europe is not culturally robust in any meaningful sense. Witness the recent Reform Party conference: Andrea Jenkyns, clad in sequins, belting out her own composition, “Insomniac”. Honestly, what’s that about? Or consider America’s own populist kitsch, such as the golden Trump sneakers and NFT trading cards presented as if it were political seriousness. Is that it? Is that the best supposed defenders of Western civilisation can do?
The truth is that most of these self-styled insurgents will (more likely than not) implode, taking their followers down with them. If or when they do, the vacuum will not remain empty for long. The left, with its professional class and decades of cultural momentum, will supply the replacement — something potentially worse, and far more destructive.
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There are signs that cultural renewal is possible and successful. Anonymous accounts on Twitter, such as “Bouliboulibouli” or “Drukpa Kunley” and the “MythoYookay” aesthetics, have used satire aimed at immigration and its effect on the social contract to shift the tone of mainstream debate. They have efficiently helped push the Overton window away from the old consensus on multi-culturalism. The now-famous “Nicolas, 30 ans” meme has been used as a hook on French television, its templates used as far afield as Brazil.
The rest of the time, people on the right are the worst self-marketers — when they bother to take culture seriously at all. Many often lapse into a lazy libertarian hostility to any role for the state. They see subsidy misdirected and, in their impatience for reform, argue that the state should abandon culture altogether, leaving it to markets and private taste. This is the cure that kills the patient.
The state cannot be indifferent to culture, for culture is the living expression of the ineffable habits and character that sustain a civilisation. It is our link to the past, our way of making sense of the human condition, our celebration of what lifts us above the bleakly material, our consolation in the face of death. That is why the cultural debate needs a radical revision: away from culture as process, emptied of itself, fuelled by political performance.
The right must build a culture that does not live and die by political skirmishes. That means places where the brightest young minds can escape the noise of ideology and encounter something higher. Places guarded against the mediocrities who would cheapen them. It also means discipline: choosing a handful of works to rally around, a canon to be revived and handed on. Without such common ground, the next generation will be left with nothing but TikTok ephemera, internet conspiracies and a radical severance from the past — a past whose civility they will never even have the chance to imagine.
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If high art feels out of reach, there is no shortage of ground to claim in the ordinary stuff of culture: films, television, videogames, the seemingly apolitical spaces where most people actually live. What the right needs are places where politics feels out of place — where conversation turns naturally to what is good, exciting or beautiful, rather than to slogans. Where they can enjoy things together without the constant shadow-play of political performance. Give people platforms rooted in shared interests and curiosity, and they will build cultural fluency.
Conservatives talk too much about being conservative. Liberals never needed to. They built cultural dominance by implication: a film, a novel, a classroom lesson, all carrying their worldview without a label. The message was absorbed because it felt natural, not declared. Only when they began stamping “liberal” on everything did their power begin to fade. That is a core lesson.
So how should the donors and sponsors of the right spend their money? Not on inflated egos, but on genuine, creative talent. For the cost of one media celebrity, stipends could sustain hundreds of young people capable of actually generating new culture and constructive participation.
At present, too much of this money is wasted on vanity projects and personality cults that leave very little behind. The alternative is to back those who, selfless and humble, possess the energy, intelligence, skills and imagination to renew culture if given the chance. They could become the architects of a future no one else dares to build. Left unsupported, they will continue to drift away into private life, or burn out altogether.
