Culture wars now worry npb journos #25

This really is getting a bit tired, but journos have to make a living and they are probably locking down as much as anyone in London. Even so, N Cohen's piece today is poor. The headline alone makes it readily skippable (but I persisted):

The right cannot resist a culture war against the 'liberal elite', even now 

Poor old liberals, helpless victims of culture wars as ever.

It begins with a kind of look back to the analytic journalism he once practised:

conservatives are warning of the dangers of jumping to hasty conclusions. Before I go any further, I must therefore say our newly scrupulous masters have a point. The league tables of national Covid-19 death figures are not the last word on the crisis, and may look different in a few weeks. 

But that might get in the way of a good rant so:

That’s that done, then. Everybody happy? Good. Let’s get on with it.

 Ooh --cynical! There are certainties after all:

In the world as it is, rather than as it may be [positivism even] , a shameful fact [a fact with a value] is undeniable. The highest Covid-19 casualties are in the US and the UK, where the mendacities of the populist right have deformed society. It turns out that being governed by Anglo-Saxon conservatives is a threat to the health of nations. Their rule kills the old and blights the futures of the young

When he says 'highest Covid-10 casualties' he means the gross figure, no doubt, not the rate per million, where the USA lies near the bottom of the table with Italy and Spain currently above the UK too. He clearly thinks there are no problems with the 'factual 'status of these measures. Once, he thought citing gross figures was misleading, of course, especially if they appeared on the side of buses during a campaign.The Covid death rate gross figures have become sacred for Newsnight and C4 News too.

Warming to his own class war:

The British new right, “alt-right”, populist right, call it what you will, sees itself as sceptical and independent, even if its supporters’ reactions to all events are as predictable as speaking clocks. Class plays its part, as it always does in England. We are witnessing the Oxbridge arts graduate’s fear of expertise, particularly the expertise of scientists who cannot cut a good figure or turn a catchy phrase. In Johnson’s days at Oxford, they were dismissed as “northern chemists” ...Confronted with an emergency they do not understand, modern rightwingers reduce complexity to culture war, and dismiss advice they cannot take with the only reason their limited minds can comprehend: the political bias of the “liberal elite”....

The accompanying photo for the story does show just how diverse modern Oxbridge arts graduates must be:

 
Cohen would need separate analysis for the leading right wingers in the USA, of course, who are not Oxbridge arts graduates on the whole, but, apparently ideologies are not that closely connected to class differences after all:

differences with the US are more of tone than substance....

 It's enjoyable stuff,and there is much with which to agree, although I would add that new petty bourgeois groups are also unable to cope with complexity and opt equally enthusiastically for simple virtues and culture war. But then we get to pretty obscure stuff

Neil Ferguson’s [ace stats modeller and chief pessimist] liaison [highly publicised for breaking social distancing rules] with his lover [moves] from a personal failing to abide by his own guidelines into evidence of a leftwing plot... [Evidence for this?...] Toby Young, Johnson’s friend and I would say his greatest admirer on Fleet Street, said that, because the lover had campaigned for leftish causes, he was “99% sure” that the majority of scientific advisers everywhere in the world were leftists with an ideology that was pushing governments into panic measures.

Odd to give so much weight to desperate controversialist Toby Young.  Also odd to finally ally yourself with scientists and experts against arts graduates [he did PPE at Oxford]  but needs must. All that remains now is to rebuke the lower orders too. It is rather attenuated this time though:

As faith melts away [that's all it ever was], people will be less inclined to believe ministers when they say it is safe to end lockdown, and less inclined to trust the government’s tracking apps