The “cultural battle” is incompatible with liberalism

The so-called “new right”, misunderstood as liberalism (because there is nothing liberal about it), is obsessed with what it calls “cultural battle”, a term long used by Marxism or the left. This dangerous term it can be incredibly tricky, anyone can fall for it and that’s why it’s important to understand.

The idea of ​​the “cultural battle” is a contradiction in terms, great intellectual dishonesty and a mechanism for creating internal purity that divides society into two: the impure and the crusaders.

The starting point is that culture develops spontaneously through the millions of human decisions and actions that compose it. So, talking about this battle is a contradiction: cultures evolve, develop, advance when people synthesize values ​​in open discussions, in a free society, without coercion and without impositions.

Using a war or military term like battle when talking about cultures is something completely incompatible: culture does not grow by fighting Those who think differently, as the left or the right claim, do not grow by fighting against those with different values ​​or traditions, and grow less with the moral and religious crusades that right-wing movements claim. For this reason, the “cultural battle” is incompatible with liberalism.

Neither does culture have a life of its own, and to analyze it is simply to observe it as a global phenomenon, there is nothing contractual or performative in it to which one must obey. Any culture change becomes part of the culture. Anything that is not allowed to change is not culture, it is social discipline, social engineering. When we talk about “our culture”, we are talking about our limits. If we speak our language it is because we know it, but we try to learn from others to enrich our culture. It is part of our culture to broaden our vision with others, incorporating them or getting to know them. Our culture is our limit.

For Antonio Gramsci, an Italian communist who emphasized the concept of cultural hegemony, this battle was to be fought by the left as a mechanism to overcome and end the “opposite side” paradigms. For Gramsci, hegemony was the term with which one could identify or describe the domination of one class over the other, when the “subordinate class” naturally accepts the world order or the culture of the “ruling class”. However, Gramsci claims to program the class struggle through his Marxist version, as he interprets that the workers should be Marxists, but they have been culturally colonized. The class struggle vision of Marxism is wrong, the only way Marxism develops is by promoting its ideas, workers have never responded to the class model of this conception. It follows that Marxism is also fought by refuting its ideas, by not programming the culture backwards from what a Gramscian mind intends to do.

Today this “cultural battle” also claimed by the right seeks to impose its own values ​​and paradigms. In part, they are disguising their project as an attempt to reverse the Gramscian strategy, which, as I have pointed out, does not deserve such a response because it is a plan delusional. If they do not refer to Frankfurt School, which in its first version was based on the fact that National Socialism had seduced the worker by a more ethereal cultural conditioning, as if those intellectuals shot in the Soviet Union had spent a century reconfiguring the culture to become Marxist. What is curious about this conspiracy thesis is that what they interpret as culture-changing Marxism is what the culture itself has changed: increased tolerance of different forms of life, an end to state persecution of homosexuality and its subsequent acceptance as part of reality, expansion of women’s freedom and dignity. Everything the current alt-right puts into this plot coincides with what the Christian churches wanted to keep forbidden because they consider it a sin. This is where the supposed Marxist plans become input for a mid-21st century crusade against any increase in tolerance for what Christians have persecuted to murder in their history.

This “cultural battle” brings together the most illiberal models observed in the current right, also called the new right, under the pretext of “defending the West”. Juan Jose Sebreli meditated on god in the labyrinth on the fact that conservatism tends to define itself as Western and Christian, assuming that the two concepts are one. Well, despite the rejection of modernity, Catholics see Christianity as the origin of Western thought, when in fact the ultimate root of Westerners is not Christian, since Christianity has its roots in Jewish religion, in Egyptian mythology and its endless ramifications and beliefs.

Everything seems to fall within the framework of a “Western culture” which gave rise, let us recall, to both Jefferson and Torquemada. GOOD culture is only the result of an exchangeso that with the device of this cultural battle, water and oil are twinned by means of a dialectical resource that synthesizes liberalism with anti-liberalism.

From an individualist point of view, the culture does not grant any legitimacy to the use of force, and should not be the subject of political debates, but it is, like so many other abstractions used to manipulate identities and feelings, a useful tool for populist factions. There is not even something in us that makes us speak Spanish, it is the people with whom we have been in contact, it is a result and not an identity. Although we speak the same language, we have different accents as soon as we move a few hundred kilometers, a consequence of ways of speaking that have separated in periods of less communication. Our culture is the product of our geographical limitsbecause, if we had the internet and had them before, we would have more common codes, but differences are falsely used as a method of political identification to generate division and threatening “others”, simply because race does not matter more good figure and nationality refers to the true origins of this discourse, which they do not want to demonstrate. Well, it is clear that the cultural battle is another way to create inner purity, impure and crusaders.

Through this “cultural battle”, he intends to exercise a kind of moral control over the development of culture, stirring up the famous “fear of change” or “fear of the new”to pursue a conservative, religious, protectionist, anti-immigration and anti-globalization agenda.

Ultimately, the culture battle is another empty invitation in the style of the Cultural Revolution of Mao, they who believe themselves so opposed to Marxism, in which to float guilt in the air and allow the worst in society to tear merit apart. Quite simply, anything that looks hip is declared a cultural attack suspect, and anything that looks retrograde is treated as the antidote. The guides, those who designate the symbols to be destroyed, concentrate the power of the crusade.

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