"Those politicians can't stop me eating meat. I won't eat beetles just to save their damn planet."
We should call out the tactics of the culture war right but we need more than aloof holier-than-thou giggles and fact checking
Yesterday the UK Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, used a series of lies to justify breaking promises he made on climate change.
But what really depressed me was the reaction of many “sensible” people. It’s almost like people are falling over themselves to be the caricature “heavy-handed” “net-zealots” the right wing media like to caricature. We’ve seen a predictable resort to fact checking Sunak’s rhetoric and poking a condescending type of fun at his claims about “meat taxes” and “seven bins”.
It doesn’t matter that the seven bins stuff is untrue. All the public have to believe is that making people sort rubbish into seven different bins is "the sort of thing" a bunch of do-gooding politicians and bureaucrats would do.
This is how modern right wing rhetoric works, and I find it depressing that no-one in the media or commentary class has thought through how best to respond to this stuff.
It’s all well and good us chattering classes laughing at Sunak’s nonsense, but if we aren't calling out WHY Sunak chooses this rhetoric then his nonsense wins.
Did we learn nothing from Trump, or Johnson or Brexit?
If Sunak is going to use red meat culture war rhetoric to run an election campaign then we really need to try - once and for all - to understand how that rhetoric works
AND CALL IT OUT.
Because the tactic is ALWAYS the same, even if the issue (climate change, trans rights, cost of living) changes*. The tactic is ALWAYS to point a finger at a caricature, elite (aloof, ideological, authoritarian, yet effete) that's hellbent on destroying the way “decent ordinary people” live.
If you are reading this blog then this caricature elite is probably YOU!!
"Those politicians can't stop me eating meat. I won't eat beetles just to save their damn planet."
The quote above is a more-or-less verbatim extract from a conversation I had with a reasonably comfortable, retired older relative recently. It’s utter hyperbole, it’s caricature. But it speaks to something people have been told by some politicians and media “could be true” about how lives might need to change to meet the challenges of climate change.
We need to prioritise creating a space so people can question - even if just for a second - why they they’re being told to eat beetles or sort rubbish into seven bins. That means calling out the tactics underlying this stuff in media interviews, on TV, in press conferences, online and in person.
We need to interfere with and disrupt this tactic. We need to point out that it is not bin sorting that’s caused the biggest drop in living standards since the Queen’s coronation, it’s the political choices of people like Rishi Sunak that has seen to that.
But most of all we need to stop engaging on the terms presented to us by the culture warriors. We need to stop trying to fact check rhetorical lies. If we must engage with the lies, then we always call out the underlying tactic first. And please, we need to stop self-righteously laughing at this stuff because that's doing the culture warrior’s job for them.
*the only thing that changes is the ethos of the people using the rhetoric - eg - we’ve had the endearing buffoonery of Boris, now we’ve got Silicon Valley Sunak).