To many, the concept of the “Culture War” is a political meme, peddled mainly by neoconservative and alt-right commentators, and essentially it is. The term was popularized by American conservative commentators like Pat Buchannan and Bill O’Reilly, and is now parroted by the alt right subculture warriors like Alex Jones and Paul Joseph Watson of Info Wars fame, or recently banned from YouTube Steven Crowder, of voice acting Brain from the Canadian kids tv show “Arthur” fame. It has also been imported to UK political subculture on social media, with British “thinky men” Carl “Sargon of Akkad” Benjamin and Mark “Count Dankula” Meechan using the term when speaking disingenuously about what they perceive to be the leftist threat to British “Culchah”.
While the origins of the term, and it’s popularization may be well documented as a right wing euphemism to better organise conservative and fundamentalist demographics against new progressive agendas, there is some value in understanding how the concept functions as a euphemism, and how it fits into the modern Foucauldian “discourse”.
What is the Culture War?
The Culture War is a right wing euphemism loosely tied to the concept of the Kulturkampf in Prussia, which described the slowly dwindling control of the Roman Catholic church in the education and legislative sectors. The term generally described the loss of control of the culture by the church, with a strong anti-Polish component, unsurprisingly as the modern Culture War similarly has strong anti BIPOC and LGBTQ+ components.
While the political landscape is comprised of seemingly loosely connected issues, such as abortion laws, race relations, class economics and the social safety net, the concept of the culture war within right wing ideology ties these subjects together by seeing them as a metaphorical “front” in a war between tradition and progressivism. In this way, while people within the same political camp tend to vary wildly with regards to their ideologies, positions on different issues, and outlooks, the issues of the modern political landscape can be tied together under the idea that a “loss” on any one issue, can be seen as a loss for your cultural team, therefore weakening your position on all of the other issues, and thus incentivising the “team spirit” and homogeneity that bolsters a party’s electorate.
Even in believing this, there is a truth to the idea that many seemingly unconnected issues can actually be interlinked in nuanced ways, and while “the left” is not as homogenous in it’s ideology as the new right, the idea of intersectionality on the left also incentivises a similar idea of a shared cause between left wing activist groups, as without being able to explain the concept as well as I would like to, by their nature, oppressed minority groups need each other to enact meaningful change and benefit from each other’s support (side note: This is not what intersectionality means, just an inferred outcome of the idea).
A critical component of the Culture War, is the shifting perception of what is political. While politics was once seen as a realm/arena where ideas of legislation and hierarchical organization was discussed, usually within prescribed spaces (congress, debates), the more modern concept of the social political posits that things that many believed were outside the “realm” of politics, were inside the realm of politics when not viewed as a societal default, but instead something that we had control over as a society. The idea that we can change social views on issues that were before deeply ingrained in people’s understanding of “how things are” is either tedious, or deeply dangerous to people who benefit from the status quo, and thus a strange contradiction in the discussion of the Culture War from the right. The discussion of topics like abortion, LGBTQ+ rights and racial equality, are both a tedious subject no longer in need of discussion, and an inherent danger to the fundamental structure of society to the people with a vested interest in the traditional and orthodox way of things.
How is the idea of the Culture War maintained?
Simply put, any inherently contradictory euphemism is maintained through repetition by authority, the only change from the original days of the culture war is how that authority is expressed and by whom. While in the times of Pat Buchannan, those expressing the idea of the culture war were respected (but not respectable) politicians and news hosts, now the main open proponents of the culture war, are “countercultural” alt-right “thought leaders” on the internet, mostly hosted on YouTube but now slowly being weeded out as you can only break terms of service so often before action is required by the company profiting from your hatred.
The media figures that push this idea not only have to maintain the guise that the Culture War is a threatening and all encompassing fight for society’s soul by pushing the message of the connection between issues, and adding new issues to the pile such as the recent Potato Head rebranding as (according to right wing talking heads on YouTube) a nonbinary icon, but they also have to maintain the idea that the issues being discussed are nuisances rather than threats to the status quo, as acknowledging that they matter, also acknowledges our ability to change things that were previously considered fundamental parts of a working society.
How this could be applied to a game
My first goal is to identify an objective for the player to accomplish or maintain. This does not have to be an actual objective, but more so an idea that the game presents for the player to strive towards.
My initial idea is to pose the player as an unwitting “foot soldier” or “general” in the culture war. With this in mind, a couple of objectives that come to mind are:
- As a general balancing the amount of missions you give, vs the public perception of your “cause”. Too much and you appear to be the extremist ideologue that you are, too few and your soldiers realise that the cause is a fabrication aimed at maintaining control.
- As a foot soldier winning the war by taking part in missions to win the war for your side. Too few missions too slowly, and you lose the battle, and nothing changes, as the outcome of the loss is just progress and justice for those that don’t yet have it. Too many missions, and you win the culture war, the outcome of which is nothing, as there is no way to win a euphemistic war. It does however mean setbacks for progress which I would have to reflect in the game end screen.
My current plan for implementing the gameplay is to have “action points” spawn on a wartable, each of which contains a minigame or small set of actions for the player to accomplish within a given period of time at which point the point disappears and the player gains or loses points towards their perceived objective.
My other option would be to have the player place the mission points at key areas to create mission tokens for their foot soldiers to accomplish, putting the player in the position of one of the media figures that leads the narrative on the culture war.
Either way I have my initial direction and will be building out the base codebase and assets to create the setting for the game, and from there deciding on the best course of action moving forwards. One thing to consider is the ethics of putting the player in the middle of a morally questionable at best, and anti-Semitic at worst movement, and if I were to do so how to justify providing that experience and negate some of the potentially more harmful takeaways that could create. Another I will need to address is how to best portray the experience as both engaging and distant from the player’s perspective, to engross them in the game for the short period of time they will play it, and allow them to stay detached enough to draw their conclusions from the experience on their own terms.
Bibliography
https://iasculture.org/research/publications/culture-wars-struggle-define-america
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/336871927_Foucauldian_Discourse_Analysis_Second_Edition