Living and Dying In the New Culture War

HERE ARE TWO IMAGES of the culture war raging in the West, but bound to echo far beyond, featuring the dead and the living, one from America, the other from England, both telling the same story in varying degrees of extremism.

Charlie Kirk,31, died, at a rally on the Utah Valley University campus, talking with the passion of a proselytiser, engaging with a generation he thought was being assailed by progressive pieties. On issues ranging from immigration to transgenderism, the founding leader of Turning Point USA, conservatism’s most influential movement for the MAGA youth, was a slayer of everything the Left held as virtues of the free world. His alleged assassin, Tyler Robinson, 22, reportedly texted his roommate: “I had enough of his hatred. Some hate can’t be negotiated out.” Prosecutors described the descent of a young man from a middle-class family into radical isolation, seeking justice with his grandfather’s rifle.

Across the Atlantic, in Warwickshire in the English Midlands, Courtney Wright, 12, was sent home for wearing a dress depicting the Union Jack on the school’s culture day. Students were instructed to wear traditional cultural dress—“your attire must reflect your nationality or family heritage”—instead of the school uniform. She had reached the school ready with her speech on traditional English culture ranging from the weather fetish to fish and chips. She didn’t get a chance, for her sartorial allegiance to the national flag marred the principles of diversity.

Kirk died in an America divided by the arguments of exclusion. The election of Donald Trump, after the glorious Obama years, in the liberal telling, was a plot against the American Dream by a plutocrat, a vulgarian to the core. The second coming of Trump, after the inglorious Obama-lite years, in the liberal retelling, was a case of self-mortification by the Left. The sociology of Trumpism was overlooked by his degraders in their hurry to reduce a nation’s disaffection to the size of a rumbustious man.

Trump was the idea around which America played out its worst attitudes. The spectre of George Floyd, the African American who died under the knees of a white cop, would not have set the streets on fire and amplified the progressive rage against history itself had there been no Trump toxin in the air. From the repackaging of Critical Race Theory to the marketisation of white guilt, from the purification rite by the cancel crowd to the woke code of conduct in media and academia, from the war on the past to the casual deployment of the fascism slur, from the deportation of chained immigrants to the anger over a dehumanised Gaza, it was the context of Trump that made the culture war so pervasive and polarising. The war has reached a point of no return with the killing of Charlie Kirk.

Returning to Courtney Wright, she is not out of place in a country where free speech is being interpreted as an act of terror, and where a popular urge for the restoration of Englishness, which is more than scones and the countryside, is seen by the cosmopolitan left as an attack on diversity. Wright’s father had his revenge by making the Union Jack and St George’s Cross a badge of patriotism. Inspired, many English villages began to announce their English heritage from the rooftops. And it was an extreme expression of Wright’s England when the massive Unite the Kingdom rally, led by Tommy Robinson, the new rightwing mobiliser of Englishness, engulfed London, with a leg-up from Elon Musk. In a city that usually preferred the solidarity marches for Gaza and black lives, this was the counter-protest, the Brexit sentiment renewed for the age of anti-immigration. It was a rally tailor-made for Nigel Farage’s England, not Keir Starmer’s or, for that matter, Kemi Badenoch’s.

Kirk and Wright, a martyr for the MAGA cause and a victim of diversity dictatorship respectively, have become totemic reminders of how the new edition of the culture war, in its relentless baying for enemies, copies from the original Cultural Revolution—only the execution is metaphorical, not the public trial. The progressive left treats the popular yearning for restoring the lost or diluted national identity as cultural exclusivism. For the right, the transgressions of diversity politics are a provocation against the rising nationalist chorus of Who are we? The argument is no longer confined to chat shows or seminar rooms or op-ed pages. It comes from Tyler Robinson’s rifle. It comes from the fairness weapon of Bilton School in middle England.

In the new culture war, the choice is between the vanishing nation and the universalisation of identity.

Charlie KirkCourtney WrightEnglandMAGArightwing mobiliserTommy Robinson