The Floor: Uncommon Ground?
Part one of this essay series ended with a question: who benefits from the culture war? I have been considering that question for some time. The answer, when it comes, is not comfortable for either side.
The culture war does not sustain itself. Outrage on this scale, the daily cycle of denunciation, the endless scroll of things to be furious about, the sense that the other side is not merely wrong but monstrous, requires fuel. That fuel is supplied, reliably and profitably, by those with an interest in keeping the fire burning. Media organisations whose revenues depend on engagement. Platforms whose algorithms reward the inflammatory over the considered. Politicians who need an enemy more than they need a solution. Behind all of them, power, which has always understood that a divided population is easier to manage than a united one.
Real grievances, fed through machinery designed to inflame rather than resolve, become weapons pointed sideways, at the nearest available target, rather than upward, at the structures that created the problem. Both sides, absolutely convinced they are resisting manipulation, are dancing to the same tune.
There is a dimension to this that both sides of the culture war consistently fail to see.
A social media pile-on and an update to employment law are not the same thing, even if they might feel similar to the person on the receiving end. One is social pressure. The other is the coercive power of the state, arrived at through a democratic process, carrying a legitimacy that no amount of outrage can claim.
Law matters here in a specific way. Most of the legal protections that exist against discrimination, harassment, and incitement did not appear from nowhere. They were argued for, contested, voted on, amended, and revised over decades. They represent something the culture war almost never produces: actual collective agreement, however imperfect and provisional. Democratic law is slow by design. It is reversible by design. It is the legitimate mechanism by which societies decide, together, that a norm has changed sufficiently to be enforceable. That is categorically different from a norm enforced by social sanction alone, however widespread.
The problem is that this mechanism is not neutral and it never has been. Laws can be made and unmade, and the people with the greatest influence over that process are not, in the main, those arguing loudest on either side of the culture war. They are those with the resources to fund political campaigns, employ lobbyists, own media organisations, and purchase platforms. Concentrated money and power do not need to win the argument or tell the better story. They can simply move the terrain on which the argument takes place, rewriting the rules, redirecting enforcement, and shaping the legal definition of what is acceptable while both sides are occupied fighting each other.
This is the layer the culture war obscures. While each side is convinced it is engaged in a battle for the soul of society, the conditions under which that battle is fought, who owns the platforms that amplify or suppress, who funds the politicians who write the laws, who controls the institutions through which norms are enforced, are being quietly arranged by a much smaller group of people, using mechanisms that have nothing to do with democracy, story, or argument. The outrage is real. The stakes are real. The fighting, largely, is the point.
There is a further tension this essay cannot leave unexamined. Democratic law has been offered here as the legitimate arena for collective norm-setting, slow, reversible, carrying a mandate that social sanction cannot claim. If concentrated money shapes the terrain on which law is made, then the legitimacy of that law is itself under pressure. The answer is not to abandon democratic process, it remains the best mechanism available for collective decision-making, but to recognise that defending it is a separate and more important battle than the culture war being fought on social media. The culture war captures attention. The capture of democratic institutions is where the real decisions are made. That is where the real risk lies, and both sides, focused on each other, are largely missing it.
A population arguing about flags at National Trust properties is not a population examining who is writing the rules. The culture war is in this sense the opposite of the agreement it prevents, loud, consuming, and almost perfectly designed to keep both sides from noticing what they share, and what they collectively risk losing in the process.
So what might a middle way look like?
I’m not proposing a resolution here, but something I think that both sides could agree on. The contest between left and right over how society should organise itself is not a problem to be solved, it is the democratic process working as it should. Disagreement about the pace of change, the limits of tolerance, the rights of communities to maintain their character, these are legitimate arguments that will continue, and should. A society without that contest is not a tolerant one. It is a captured one.
What is possible is agreement on the floor. Beneath the culture war, beneath the competing claims about who is silencing whom, there are people being harmed simply for existing or simply for being who they are. A gay teenager in a rural community. A veteran who finds that the culture he believed he was defending no longer seems to have a place for him. A woman subjected to violence her culture excuses. A person of colour navigating institutions that were not built with them in mind. A man from a former mining town whose sense of identity, rooted in place and community and honest work, has been quietly dismantled and then dismissed as mere nostalgia or worse, as prejudice. These are not culture war abstractions. They are specific human beings experiencing specific harms, and the protection of those people from that harm is not a left or right position. It is a prior commitment, a minimum below which no side in a legitimate democratic contest should be willing to go.
What might that floor actually consist of? Perhaps something like this: that racism, misogyny and homophobia are abhorrent and unacceptable, wherever they are found and whoever they target. That hate, when it crosses the line from belief into harm, has no place in a society that calls itself civilised. None of this requires agreement on the harder questions, on policy, on pace, on the right way to address any of it. It requires only agreement that these things are wrong, and that everything built above that agreement should have to clear that bar.
If that floor could be named and agreed upon, not as the end of the argument but as its precondition, the contest above it becomes more honest. The left could argue for progressive change, stronger enforcement, greater institutional commitment to inclusion, without being accused of totalitarianism. The right could argue for measured progress, greater respect for inherited culture, and the protection of those it believes are being silenced, without being accused of hatred. Both arguments become legitimate once the floor is established. Neither is legitimate if it requires standing on the people below.
The question at the start of this essay was who benefits from the culture war. The answer, as I said, is not comfortable for either side. The people who benefit most are those who never appear in it, who fund it from a distance, who own and yes, manipulate the platforms that carry it, who shape the terrain that laws are made under while both sides are occupied fighting each other.
The floor is not a solution to that. It is something more modest and perhaps more durable: a prior commitment, a place to stand together before the argument begins. It will not silence the culture war. It will not resolve the disagreements that drive it. It will not stop the machinery from running.
What it might do is remind us what the argument is supposed to be for: a society in which the protection of the vulnerable does not depend on which side wins this week’s outrage cycle. That is not a compromise. It is the whole point.