How Adversary Culture Became Elite Culture
Historical reflections on the ascendancy of the politicisation of identity
As I argued elsewhere, by the late 1970s, the influential status of adversary culture, particularly in the university and America, was indisputable.
One reason the 1960s counter-culture succeeded in making such rapid headway was the weak resistance to its advance. By the 1960s, the conventional norms and values that prevailed in Western societies had appeared to many as irrelevant and pointless. Instead of reinforcing conventional bourgeois norms, the consumer culture that arose in the 1950s appeared to diminish its relevance to people’s lives. Some commentators blamed the new prosperity for helping to undermine conventional values. ‘Life has ceased to be as difficult as it used to be, but it has become pointless’, wrote the author of a study on Permissive Britain.Though prosperity may have facilitated the growth of the 1960s counter-cultural lifestyle revolt, the real issue was the loss of legitimacy of the norms that underpinned the institutions of Western societies.
What’s often overlooked in discussions about the ascendancy of adversary culture is that the transformation of cultural life in the 1960s was at least partly a result of a discrete or unconscious revolt of the elites. In his major study of his period, Arthur Marwick suggests that the outcome of the sixties was in part influenced by a ruling elite ready to give way to new demands1. Marwick indicates that the changes were not simply an outcome of protest but due to the reaction of the so-called enlightened elites. He characterised the ascendancy of what would eventually crystallise into woke culture as due to a ‘conjunction of developments, including economic, demographic, and technological ones and critically, to the existence in positions of authority of men and women of traditional enlightened and rational outlook who responded flexibly and tolerantly to counter-cultural demands’. He referred to this ‘vital component of sixties transformations as “measured judgment” to signify… that it emanated from people in authority, people very much part of mainstream society’.
There is little doubt that sections of the political elites responded flexibly to the cultural revolt and, in some cases, enthusiastically embraced the demand for change. But whether this response is best characterised as a case of ‘measured judgment’ or a crisis of elite self-belief is a moot point. What mattered was that those in authority were reluctant to enter the battlefield of culture. Their equivocation indicated that there was little appetite for upholding the way of life into which they were socialised. Not all sections of society felt that there was little of value to defend. At least an influential minority of traditionally minded people concluded that there was something important to uphold. One of the outcomes of their backlash was to transform the cultural revolt of the 1960s, setting in motion a conflict that gradually mutated into a full-blown Culture War.
It was significant that the new moral rejection of traditional Western cultural norms acquired its greatest support amongst the principal beneficiaries of the system. Although the cultural revolt against the classical Western norms was often portrayed as ‘left-wing’ or ‘progressive’, it did not express the political impulses associated with radical ideologies of the past. This movement expressed the disenchantment and disorientation of sectors for whom everyday life had little meaning. Indeed, at the time, the politicisation of everyday life permitted radical 1960s youth to distance themselves from the doctrines of the Marxist and socialist movements. This embrace of everyday personal issues allowed ‘activists to address a variety of pre-political, “existential” concerns: issues pertaining to psychology, sexuality, family life, urbanism, and basic human intimacy’, claims Richard Wolin. The rhetoric of the ‘personal is political’ and the attachment of the term political to activities carried out in the private sphere – politics of the family, politics of sex, politics of identity – indicated the energies devoted to activism were now focused on battles that contrasted strikingly with those of the past.
At the time, some interpreted the politicisation of everyday life as simply an expression of the libertine impulse of ‘anything goes’ and a rejection of all forms of authority. The term loss of respect for authority was frequently repeated to account for the escalation of conflict over issues that directly bore on the conduct of everyday life. Western capitalist society appeared to lack the moral resources with which to legitimise itself, and as a result, authority in all of its different dimensions was exposed to contestation. The most striking manifestation of the moral crisis of the West was that it was not simply one form of authority but the authority of authority that was put to question.
In the 1950s, the political philosopher Hannah Arendt claimed that authority had become ‘almost a lost cause’. In an essay that referred to authority in the past tense, which was self-consciously titled ‘What Was Authority?’, Arendt insisted that ‘authority has vanished from the modern world, and that if we raise the question what authority is, we can no longer fall back upon authentic and undisputable experiences common to all’. Arendt’s narrative of loss left little room for retaining illusions that authority in its classical form could survive. Arendt drew attention to a dramatic development in the ‘gradual breakdown’ of ‘the authority of parents over children, of teachers over pupils and, generally, of the elders over the young’. She observed that this is ‘the one form of authority’ that existed in ‘all historically known societies’, as it is ‘required as much by natural needs, the helplessness of the child, as by political necessity’. But ‘ours is the first century in which this argument no longer carries an overwhelming weight of plausibility and it announced its anti-authoritarian spirit more radically when it promised the emancipation of youth as an oppressed class and called itself the “century of the child”’. Arendt was less interested in the implosion of generational authority itself as in the extent to which it signified ‘to what extremes the general decline of authority could go, even to the neglect of obvious natural necessities’.
If Arendt were alive today, she would not be surprised by the attack on the authority of science and rationality as expressed in the transgenderist impulse to erase the distinction between men and women.
In Arendt’s account, the crisis of authority is not confined to the political domain. Indeed, what gives this crisis its ‘depth and seriousness, is that it has spread to such pre-political areas as child-rearing and education’, she concluded. The eruption of acrimonious debates in the 1960s over issues such as child-rearing, health, lifestyles, education and the conduct of personal relationships showed that the contestation of authority dominated the pre-political spheres of everyday life. Arendt intuited that the devaluation of authority had spread beyond the political sphere to capture all social and cultural experience domains. This trend was expressed through the powerful counter-cultural moment of the 1960s. At the time, the so-called legitimation crisis tended to be perceived as a political problem afflicting the state. However, as the historian Eric Hobsbawm noted, almost four decades after Arendt’s 1956 contribution, the loss of authority was principally a cultural phenomenon. In his account of the ‘cultural revolution’, he wrote of ‘the breaking of the threads which in the past had woven human beings into social textures’. Echoing Arendt’s point about the far-reaching effect of the loss of pre-political authority, Hobsbawm stated that ‘what children could learn from parents became less obvious than what parents did not know and children did’.
The main impact of the 1960s revolt was on the sphere of culture rather than on political institutions. Although the legitimacy of these institutions came under attack, they were able to weather the challenge. Matters differed significantly in the pre-political sphere, where the cultural revolt struck the deepest. The Italian author Umberto Eco remarked that ‘even though all visible traces of 1968 are gone, it profoundly changed the way all of us, at least in Europe, behave and relate to one another’. He added that ‘relations between bosses and workers, students and teachers, even children and parents, have opened up’ and therefore, ‘they’ll never be the same again’.2
Although the advance of this cultural revolution was fiercely resisted at the time – particularly by the more conservative and traditionalist sectors of the Establishment – at times, it appeared that the 1960s radicals were kicking against an open door. There were, of course, numerous examples of firm and repressive reactions to the activities of the 1960s radicals. For sections of the political and cultural elites, the attack on their authority was often experienced as not just a threat to their roles but their way of life. For many who were used to exercising unquestioned authority, the world appeared to have turned upside-down. However, although their response was sometimes forceful, it lacked moral and cultural depth. This was a response that also expressed an evasive sense of bad faith, for it was difficult to accept the bitter truth that it was the moral depletion of their way of life that invited the radical challenge to its cultural authority.
Sociologist Alvin Gouldner ably analysed the emergence of adversary culture in his study, The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class (1979). Gouldner argued that a new class of intellectual and knowledge workers successfully pursued the culture war in society, especially inside the University.
The most significant dimension of Gouldner’s analysis was his insights into the capture of the institutions of socialisation by advocates of adversary culture. He claimed that schools and chiefly universities assumed a central role in the socialisation of young people. They claimed the right to educate young people in line with their enlightened opinions. Even in schools, teachers felt they had no ‘obligation to reproduce parental values in their children’. The expansion of higher education further reinforced the insulation of parental cultural influence from their children. Gouldner wrote
‘The new structurally differentiated educational system is increasingly insulated from the family system, becoming an important source of values among students divergent from those of their families. The socialization of the young by their families is now mediated by a semi-autonomous group of teachers’.
As a result of this development, ‘public educational systems’ became a ‘major cosmopolitanizing influence on its students, with a corresponding distancing from localistic interests and values’. Gouldner asserted that ‘parental, particularly paternal, authority is increasingly vulnerable and is thus less able to insist that children respect societal or political authority outside the home’.[xi] Parents now found it difficult to impose and reproduce their ‘social values and political ideologies in their children’.
In the 1970s, Gouldner’s analysis pinpointed a trend that has today acquired a formidable force. It is evident that in the current era, teachers definitely feel ‘no ‘obligation to reproduce parental values in their children’. On the contrary, there is considerable evidence that contemporary pedagogy and classroom practices often work towards culturally and psychologically distancing pupils from their parents.
At the time, observers of the institutionalisation of adversary culture in higher education often underestimated the significance of Gouldner’s argument. Campus radicalism was diagnosed as the work of noisy extremist students and faculty members. The powerful drivers leading to the institutionalisation of adversary culture tended to be overlooked, and time and again, premature obituaries declared the death of campus radicalism and identity politics.
Commentaries frequently portrayed identity politics in the past tense and prophesied its imminent demise. The authors of the first book to refer to identity politics in 1973 claimed that ‘identity politics swallowed itself’.3 ‘Time to Retire a Cliché – “Politically Correct” – Shopworn and Blinding’, wrote Brent Staples in The New York Times in November 1993.4 Writing in 1995, Ross Posnock, a Professor of Literature, wrote that ‘after twenty-five years of identity politics’ a ‘renascent cosmopolitanism is currently gaining ground on the left; indeed, belief that the prestige of identity politics is fading in the academy is fast becoming the received wisdom’.5 ‘After Identity, Politics: The Return of Universalism’ is the title of an essay in New Literary History in 2000.6 Eight years later, in her history of identity, Nicholson observed that ‘identity politics seems now to be largely dead, or at minimum, no longer able to command the kind of public attention that it did from the late 1960s through the late 1980s’.7 In the wake of The Brexit Referendum and the election of Donald Trump, British journalist Janet Daley declared that ‘Identity politics is Dead’.
The failure to grasp the ever-growing influence of identity politics was partly due to the inability of traditional political categories to make sense of this phenomenon. The growing influence of the politicisation of identity always had its most significant impact on the sphere of culture rather than on political institutions. One reason the conflict over values did not appear to excise the imagination of political analysts was that the cultural revolt struck the deepest in the pre-political sphere. At the time of East-West conflict, wars in South-East Asia, labour disputes in Europe and intense rivalries between soon-to-be-extinct left and right-wing parties, the disputes over values in the pre-political sphere were regarded as secondary to the big issues of the time. Although many commentators were concerned about the gradual spread of countercultural values in the pre-political sphere – particularly in relation to family life, parenting, sexuality and gender – they appeared to be unaware of its powerful and corrosive significance. Possessors of the values linked to what was sneeringly denounced as ‘outdated values’ proved singularly ineffective in responding to the challenge to their outlook.
Critics of the cultural values transmitted through identity politics deceived themselves into believing that they had matters under control during the Reagan-Thatcher years. Yet it was precisely during this era when right-wing governments appeared to be in control, that adversary culture gained ascendancy. The right may have won the economic war, but it suffered a serious setback on the terrain of culture. In the eighties and early nineties, proponents of adversary culture became the dominant force in higher education, schools, institutions of culture, the media and sections of the public sector.
The failure to comprehend that attitudes that were hitherto classified as adversarial had gained cultural ascendancy explains the prominence of the naïve assumption that ‘it was only a passing fad or phase’. This naivety re-surfaced in the aftermath of the destruction of the World Trade Centre in September 2001. For a brief moment, it appeared that in the face of terrorism, the traditional values of duty, patriotism and national unity would make a comeback in the United States. Hopeful commentators predicted that adversarial attitudes would evaporate in the face of a dangerous common enemy. Yet within a few months after this catastrophe, the usual divisions re-emerged. Counselling against the illusions that adversary culture was fatally undermined by 9/11, Hollander pointed to its spread ‘through the media’ and even through ‘American commercial culture’.8
Commentaries asserting that adversary culture was in decline were looking for it in the wrong place: the sphere of formal politics. Yet the flourishing of adversarial attitudes was most evident in peripheral areas, touching on a ‘sense of identity, cultural norms, matters of taste’.9 By the turn of the 21st century, Western society's cultural elites thoroughly absorbed the ideals of adversary culture. Today they have achieved a hegemonic status.
To this day, commentators – even those who oppose the cultural politics of identity – are often unable to acknowledge the responsibility of the Western political cultural Establishment for the ascendancy of woke ideals and practices. Their passive and active acceptance of the norms underpinning adversary culture made it possible for it to gain hegemonic status. As I argued in my last post, wokism is a top-down project. That is why only a popular revolt by people who are fed up with the colonisation of their traditional way of life can prevent the final victory of wokism. It may seem like an exaggeration to note that the battle against woke culture is, in all but name, a civilisational one.
Marwick, A. (1998) The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy and the United States, c.1958-1974, Oxford University Press: Oxford
Eco is cited in J.W. Muller (2013) Contesting Democracy: Political Ideas in Twentieth Century
Europe, New Haven: Yale University Press, p.200.
R.P. Wolff and T. Gitlin (1973) 1984 Revisited: Prospects for American Politics, New York:
Knopf,
The New York Times in November 1993; 5 December
R. Posnock (1995) ‘Before and after identity politics’, Raritan, 15(1), 95–115, at 99.
E. Lott (2000) ‘After identity, politics: the return of universalism’, New Literary History, 31(4),
665–680.
L. Nicholson (2008) Identity Before Identity Politics, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, p.4.
P. Hollander (2002) ‘The resilience of the adversary culture’, National Interest, No. 68, 101–
112, at 103.
Hollander (2002) p.103.