What are culture wars? Let me explain.

Populist parties that do little more than fight culture wars are gaining more and more power across the West. These are people who hurl daily hatred at their supporters in every speech they make. The fact is that the early election date here and the disintegration of the Conservative Party have relegated culture wars to the margins for now. It won’t stay that way. Just wait for the deepfake campaigns, speeches and films that will arrive around the world in the run-up to the election. US Elections in November. And look at the riots this week.

But what are the culture wars? Who is behind them? How do we know? Culture wars are, like woke, part of everyone’s new political vocabulary. And, just like woke, no one has ever explained them properly.

Boris Johnson, our recent prime minister, explained the culture wars by describing what his favourite political campaign manager, Sir Lynton Crosby, actually does: “There is one thing that is absolutely certain when you throw a dead cat on the dining room table, and I don’t mean that people will be outraged or alarmed or disgusted. That’s true, but that’s beside the point. The main thing, says my Australian friend, is that everyone will shout, ‘My God, mate, there’s a dead cat on the table!’ In other words, they will talk about the dead cat, the thing you want them to talk about, and they won’t talk about the problem that has caused you so much trouble.”

I just wrote a book about the culture wars; they have a great title but their sole purpose is to entertain and divide people by getting them excited about something extremely emotional but ultimately unimportant.

Former Ashworth MP Lee Anderson explained on 14 February how he saw the Tories’ inevitable strategy for 2024. Because the Tories no longer had the glorious electoral advantages offered by a) having Jeremy Corbyn as their opponent, b) a Brexit yet to be delivered and c) Johnson’s performance skills and all-round appeal, they had to think about something else.

Without these substantial benefits in 2024, he concluded, it will likely be a mix of culture wars and trans debates.

In other words, the culture wars were activities that had to be done, like advertising and marketing brands or giving people bread and circuses. They were a technique, meaning you had to find and pay people to do these kinds of things. Andersonwho had abandoned his party at the time of the election to join Reform UK, rather let the cat out of the bag by acknowledging that the Conservatives felt they had nothing left to say and no achievements to boast about. Instead, they had to engage in culture wars, that is, invent things.

And you always need a ghost in the culture wars. Ghosts are always elites who are unlike you; they are, for example, metropolitan liberal elites (whoever they are) or civil servants who are harassed and overworked by the deep state; or enemies of the people the judges.

You also have to have the right mindset. You can't have people arguing among themselves about whether the strategy is right and whether they're lying or whether they're being fair to the people they're attacking. To create real outrage or discussion about a new culture warIt takes people who have no shame and are focused on creating a story with emotional power and resonance. Something that touches people in the heart, not the head.

Culture wars are not for brains and policy wonks. You can’t touch people’s hearts with a bar graph. There has to be some truth to it, and a good culture war story has to play on people’s already-held beliefs and suspicions. And the resources you need are expert, inspiring, experienced campaigners like Dominic Cummings (or Dead Cat’s original purveyor, Sir Lynton). People who like to fight for themselves. Such people are rare. And very expensive.

So what happens now? Labour is unlikely to start a culture war any time soon, and the Conservatives are probably very busy trying to rebuild the party, but after November 6th we could expect a new outbreak of culture wars fuelled by a sour faced man with orange tan.