Who’ll Win the Culture War?

WHEN CULTURE WARS PEAK, they throw up a talisman. Mahmoud Khalil is the name that currently turns the conflicting streams of Trump’s nation into moral arguments. When anti-Semitism swept American campuses, where the genocidal rage of Hamas against Israel was sloganised as a necessary response, Khalil was a prominent face of resistance at Columbia, the epicentre of pro-Palestinian activism. During the siege of Columbia, with its Zionist-free zones and hate bites like “Zionists don’t deserve to live”, Khalil, an alumnus and a green-card holder, as a leader of Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD), was one of those who “support liberation by any means necessary, including armed resistance.” Which, during the period of enforced anti-Semitism, meant what mattered was not what Hamas did on October 7, 2023 but the Israeli bombardment of Gaza that followed. In the moral universe of Khalil, victimhood, totally de-contextualised to suit a warped sense of history, cannot be sustained by empathy alone; it requires a rejoinder that cannot distinguish between hate and justice. In Trump’s America, this combative conscience that denies the existence of one for the liberation of the other disrupts the MAGA order, which itself is the most forceful statement of nationalism in a democracy today.

How Khalil, whose deportation has been halted by a federal court, or foreigners like him who have sought a place within the American Dream, has become an undesirable alien in today’s America is a story that began long before Trump’s second coming. The Trump administration may give a technical explanation of how his activism goes against America’s pro-Israel foreign policy, but Khalil, who first came to America on a student visa and went on to become a much-indulged justice junkie, was made possible by the rise of an America armed by post-George Floyd rage. The day the black man stopped breathing under the knee of a white cop marked the beginning of a war on social, cultural and professional behaviour, with a thought police made of angry progressives at the vanguard. Once the arson subsided on the street, the mind project took off, and in the ensuing woke campaign, not just deviants from academia and media but history itself was subjected to retrospective exorcism.

It was a time when the righteous took over the liberal establishment. As the progressives amassed enemies in the newly built gulag, mainstream liberals remained silent when what was really unfolding in America was its own variant of a Cultural Revolution. The progressives just realised real power was an argument about power; they built one without any ambivalence. And identities were assigned to pre-determined ghettos, each eligible for an argument of emancipation. In the new McCarthyism, unofficial but effective, the arbiter was the Left. It was not a culture war in the traditional sense as one aggressive group was at full power, facing nothing but silence and submission. Wokeism as such may have worn off but mainstream liberalism’s collaboration by silence continued as righteous militancy lingered. Then came Trump and called them un-American activities.

In his inaugural speech itself, Trump emphasised his intention to take the culture war to the last remnants of wokeism. He has kept his word—and how. If his two immediate predecessors, Obama and Biden, more aptly perhaps Obama and his faded version, were apologetic about American power, Trump was so excited to brandish it with little consideration for constitutional propriety that the idea of an international disorder became a frightening reality. It was as if the realisation of American interests demanded a presidential subversion of the power structure itself. If there is one method in the so-called madness of Trump, it’s the veneration of the nation. If America is the incantation of a man possessed by power without moral or judicial clauses, so be it, for in the book of Trump, autocracy is personalised democracy.

It’s into this America that a Mahmoud Khalil barges in with his anti-Israel slogans. He fits into Trump’s idea of a terrorist, who is not just the hidden bomber. He is an arsonist of the mind, shattering nationalist ideals. Whatever he stands for negates the MAGA spirit. For liberal America, as it finds itself defenceless against the presidential rejection of conventions and constitutionalism, Trump’s cultural unilateralism has already killed America’s status as the model open society. Trump’s nation is too exclusive to open its doors to the aliens with dangerous ideas. For Trump, it is cultural cleansing; for liberals and anti-Trumps on the Right, it’s the de-culturalisation of power.

The Right, good at winning the economic war, tends to lose the culture war. If Trump loses his in the end, it will be because of his contempt for the rule of law, very American by nature.

anti-semitismCulture warDonald TrumpgeopliticsMahmoud KhalilUS politicsWokeism