If politics is downstream of culture, we are told we have to work to change the culture before we can win politically. Are we too late?

Ed West in an article titled “The West’s Cultural Revolution is Over” on the British site unherd.com says we are indeed too late. He begins with an anecdote of a soccer star in England who wrote in defense of the English players who took the BLM knee.  I know nothing of the player, but West uses him as a surprise candidate for BLM actions, stating that he exhibits all the presumed conservative virtues in his life. Then he gets down to the more general point:

The past 50 years or so have seen a cultural revolution in western society comparable in scope to the Reformation. Most of us have known only that period of transition, when morality and norms were up for debate, but perhaps it is now over. Perhaps we have returned to the sort of world we lived in when England last reached a final, in 1966 – a world of strictly enforced social mores.

He then points out that in 1968 protestors were fringe, and virtually all the public institutions (higher ed excepted) were very conservative in outlook. Even the people in favor of the major changes the protestors were seeking tended to disapprove of the unseemly way they went about it. In 1968 I myself was sympathetic to some major goals of the protest movement, but I would not join in because I thought they way they were going about it was wrong.

Ed notes how the society has changed by 2020:

In 2020, almost all the major institutions in the US, aside from the actual President, were loudly vocal along with corporations, charities and NGOs in their support for the BLM protests. Parts of the media were sympathetic to the point of actively playing down some of the violence, the phrase “mostly peaceful protests” becoming an example of American journalism’s Pravda-like bias.

The protesters themselves tended to come from America’s upper-middle-class, displaying a feverous zeal that felt alarming. And there was no debate to be had about race and policing, opponents simply had to educate themselves.

He makes a note about the cultural changes over time using comedy as the example:

… from the mid-Sixties onwards, television regularly made fun of the habits and beliefs of the powers-that-be, with Monty Python — the most prominent product of the satire boom — pointing fun at the people who ran the country. Their 1979 film Life of Brian even mocked the beliefs of that old establishment. Two of the Pythons debated an Anglican bishop and Catholic writer Malcolm Muggeridge, but no one serious tried to stop the film.

Life of Brian couldn’t be made 20 years earlier, and neither could it be made now; its satire of Jesus, a prophet of Islam, would risk upsetting Muslim sensibilities, which it’s fair to say people have become slightly wary of doing. At the very least it would need to cut out the scene pointing fun at a man who, absurdly to the filmmakers and audiences, identifies as a woman; absurd in 1979, as it had been in 1879 and 1779 and in every year before that, but a sacred idea in 2021. …

This is not some dark new age of cancel culture, however, it’s just a return to normality. Those who grew up in the late 20^th century were living in a highly unusual time, one that could never be sustained, a sexual and cultural revolution that began in 1963 or 1968. But it has ended and, as all revolutionaries must do after storming the Bastille, they have built Bastilles of their own. The new order has brought in numerous methods used by the old order to exert control — not just censorship, but word taboo and rituals which everyone is forced to go along with, or at least not openly criticise. …

The Nineties and Noughties were a time of outstanding comedy partly because so much of public morality was up for grabs, and in transition; it was a period in between two quite rigid societies.

So his basic point is that we have left behind the era where the culture was changeable. If you buy his premise (and I mostly do) it means that we are not going to easily change the culture now that it has solidified. Perhaps it isn’t as solid as he sees it but I think it is headed that way quickly. If you’re going to change the culture, you’d best be getting on with it now.  One closing quote:

Perhaps the most powerful, and obviously quasi-religious, symbol of the new order is taking the knee. Indeed, intelligent people have even argued that taking the knee before games or displaying the rainbow flag at stadiums are not “political” acts, when critics have pedantically pointed out that they clearly are; because when you doubt your politics so little it barely registers as politics anymore. And to believers, something like racism or homophobia is non-negotiable; there is no moral relativism allowed.