Culture warriors ride again

An attempt to give the coronapanic some legs, while social distancing in the Bourdieu sense with this:

Boris Johnson's lockdown is the latest target for the right's angry culture warriors 

For weeks we have heard that merely asking questions about the government’s handling of the coronavirus outbreak is “politicising the crisis”. But now some people on the right are indeed making the pandemic political – firing up the culture wars forged in what now feels like the prehistoric age of Brexit....

Luminaries of the leave campaign have jacked up familiar themes to revive a well-worn narrative: of patriotic ordinary people set against “whingeocrat” metropolitan elites and woke leftists who hate Britain. [but, symmetrically,] critics of the government’s slow, muddled response to the pandemic... may overlap with the remainers of old

Warming to hir (aka his/her) theme, R Shabi says:

the lockdown... is being presented as a freedom-sucking con – much like the EU....Mirroring the dynamics of climate denialism...the culture-war narrative is, as ever, a rhetorical smokescreen, deflecting substantive arguments. And just as Brexit was a delivery mechanism for hard-right ideas, lockdown scepticism is about promoting an ideological agenda.

Looking to future campaigns, but with an excuse already prepared..

What’s really being contested is the kind of society that will emerge once this is over....Brexit populists and big-state haters are worried....battles we will face over the shape of our future society... show... how existing divisions may be manipulated for political advantage [heaven forbid!].

The sceptics are currently out of sync with public opinion. But as we know from painful experience, we can’t assume this will always be the case [the stupid old public again --what are they like?] .

It is well established in Grudina minds that culture wars are now waged only by sinister right wing forces. Their own pathetic efforts have been ridiculed, and the term become one of abuse, so now they use it only for opponents. But it takes a threatened cultural warrior to recognise a culture war, and this is a group that can recognise an opportunity for culture war in anything. There seems to be positive delight in returning to the struggle, being able to reinforce social boundaries and to weave together whole worldviews -- classic new petty bourgeois cultural activity.

Meanwhile, in a so-far silent and tactfully indirect dialogue with P Toynbee, J Harris notes a tendency to neglect or downgrade the elderly in recent events, partly because:

Far too many people have fallen into the habit of using the generational split in views about the EU as an excuse for thinking of older people as impossibly reactionary and therefore worthy of sneering contempt.