Whoever first came up with the saying, “the left won the culture war, the right
won the economic war and the centre won the political war,” deserves some kind of prize for encapsulating the politics of the late 20th century. It is a sign of the extent of the shock the
current crisis has brought that none of this trio of truisms now holds true.
The left won the culture war?
So it once appeared. But look at the boomerang that has whirled back through the air and smacked the children of the 1960s in the face.
As liberal-leftists they knew that racists, homophobes and misogynists were bad people with terrible ideas and so they built a cultural order that accepted excessive restrictions on free speech to protect marginalised groups. They ought to know better now. Because they decided that they must do more than fight bad ideas with better ideas, and allowed “offence” rather than actual harm to be grounds for censorship, they could not defend liberalism against Islamists, who were indeed a marginalised group but also racists, homophobes and misogynists.
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