Liberals, eh? Dontcha just hate ‘em? Or should I say ‘so-called’ liberals, who aren’t really liberal at all because they want to silence their opponents. And whatever happened to John Stuart Mill? He’s been taken off the curriculum of course — because he’s a Dead White Male and the Cultural Marxists who control the universities don’t think their snowflake students will be able to read him without bursting into tears…Want to hear more? Sign up to my YouTube channel…
Of course, I don’t really have a YouTube channel, but a lot of people do. And this sort of Right-wing dissent from liberal orthodoxy proliferating on social media and video-sharing websites these days.
The raucous and antagonistic online culture has sprung up as traditional media’s gatekeeper role has diminished. And such are the financial incentives — rewarding controversy and gotchas rather than reasoned debate — that decent money can now be made from stoking the Right-wing id with jeremiads about millennial snowflakes and Cultural Marxism and post-modernist wreckers. It’s a problem.
The circuit of this alternative media is now pretty well established: mostly YouTube-based discussion programmes, broadly opposed to the progressive cultural consensus. There are different styles. For example, the Triggernometry podcast is presented by two very funny comedians and has a fairly informal approach, full of jokes and occasionally quite profane, whereas Conversations, hosted by former Deputy Prime Minister of Australia John Anderson, is more polished and old-fashioned. Nevertheless, the programmes have the same kind of guests, who tend to make the same kind of points, in the same kind of way.
There are two topics that arise time and time again. First, cultural decline, i.e. the gradual loss of knowledge and understanding of the great art, the great literature, the great achievements of Western civilisation. This is usually ascribed to the dominance of the academy by highly politicised Left-wing academics with a bad case of what Sir Roger Scruton called “oikophobia”, that is a strong feeling of dislike and repugnance towards their own cultural and religious inheritance.
The second subject is the increasing censoriousness of culturally dominant progressives, who are keen to silence and delegitimise critics of the Current Year social consensus. A stern and humourless progressive piety reigns in the citadels of the British cultural establishment, empowered and encouraged by the dynamics of social media.
These are important subjects. However, they cannot be the only topic of conversation. Clearly there’s a problem. What about the solutions?
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SubscribeCould someone please explain what “Cultural Marxism” is?