Why today's culture warriors are marching to same beat as 1930s fascists

One lesson of the 1930s is that, when humans start to see one another not as individuals but as members of implacably opposed groups, bad things happen

I’m probably the world’s worst Aberdeen FC fan. When I lived in the city for five years, I didn’t go to see them once and have been to perhaps half a dozen games in my lifetime, an average of one for every decade.

When I belatedly remembered it was the Scottish Cup final on Saturday afternoon, I checked to see the score and watched the last 10 minutes of normal time. I was mildly pleased that the Dons won in the end.

However the thing that struck me most was something I didn’t quite like: the ‘togetherness’ of the crowd, the sea of red in the Aberdeen end and of green and white in the Celtic one. It felt like they were surrendering their individuality a little too enthusiastically.

Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists, inspects a parade of supporters before calling off a march through London's East End in 1936 (Picture: Becker/Fox Photos) | Getty Images

A loss of confidence

Now, I realise that social togetherness is often a good thing, but there’s a nasty side to it too. And in politics and society in general, it feels like ‘identitarian’ ideas are on the rise, as if people have lost confidence in themselves as individuals and increasingly see life through a clannish, tribal lens. There’s safety in numbers, or so they say.

It can be seen in an appalling remark by a member of Northern Irish rap band Kneecap at a 2023 gig – “The only good Tory is a dead Tory. Kill your local MP” – and in the social media call by Lucy Connolly, a Conservative councillor’s wife, for “mass deportations” and for people to “set fire” to “all the hotels” containing those she wanted to deport, following the murders of three young girls in Southport last year.

Connolly recently lost her appeal against a 31-month prison sentence for inciting racial hatred and police are currently considering the Kneecap rapper’s comment. The band later offered their “heartfelt apologies” to the families of murdered MPs David Ames and Jo Cox, saying they rejected “any suggestion that we would seek to incite violence against any MP or individual” and that “an extract of footage, deliberately taken out of all context, is now being exploited and weaponised, as if it were a call to action”.

Nothing to do with Southport murders

However, in of themselves, the remarks strip members of a particular group – Conservatives or asylum seekers – of their right to be treated as an individual.

In Connolly’s mind, when she posted on social media on the day of the murders, the actions of a single person justified the collective punishment of countless others, from a number of different countries, who had nothing at all to do with the Southport murders.

Whatever the moronic, metaphorical Kneecapper’s intended meaning, the words “the only good Tory is a dead Tory” paint Conservatives as so irredeemably evil that they deserve the ultimate punishment, rather than people who could be won over by reasoned argument.

A cultural tsunami

I disagreed with the late, great Scotsman journalist Bill Jamieson on a number of issues, but he was always thoughtful, often entertaining and both interesting and interested in other people’s ideas.

In 2018, in an article bemoaning the politicisation of gender, sexuality and identity, he wondered why his “self-identification as ‘Bill’ is not sufficient declaration of ‘who I am’” and, jokingly, whether LGBT would eventually become “LGBTTTQQIAA”.

“To draw a line against this is nothing to do with a rejection of male or female homosexuality, but resistance to a politicisation that is deeply divisive and corrosive of individual privacy,” he wrote. “... with the cultural tsunami now breaking around us, who will stand in the way of it? And in this rush to self-identification with public labels and initials, how may we be more certain, or less, of who we really are within?”

This ‘cultural tsunami’ is not just about gender, with concepts of race and nationality – which are not real things but ideas invented by humans – seemingly becoming more important to many people’s sense of themselves and of others.

The importance of ‘I’

To me, an excessive focus on shared identity, as opposed to individual identity, is almost bound to lead humanity in a dangerous direction. In Sarah Bakewell’s excellent book, How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer, she writes about how Leonard Woolf, husband of writer Virginia Woolf, was “much affected” by the 16th-century French philosopher’s essay, On Cruelty.

After reading it, he remembered being asked as a young boy in the late 19th century to drown some day-old puppies. “I put one of them in the bucket of water, and instantly an extraordinary, a terrible thing happened. This blind, amorphous thing began to fight desperately for its life... I suddenly saw that it was an individual, that like me it was an ‘I’, that in its bucket of water it was experiencing what I would experience and fighting death, as I would fight death if I were drowning...”

Bakewell wrote that Woolf “went on to apply the insight to politics, reflecting especially on his memory of the 1930s, when the world seemed about to sink into a barbarism that made no room for this small individual self... On a global scale, no single creature can be of much importance, he wrote, yet in another way these ‘I’s are the only things of importance. And only a politics that recognises them can offer hope for the future.”

Today’s culture warriors, on the right and the left, appear to be marching to a similar beat to those 1930s fascists. Their chosen collective identity is something sacred to them and anyone who criticises it or appears to be in opposition to it is considered an enemy.

Once upon a time, the crowds at Saturday’s cup final would have seemed perfectly ordinary to me. But displays of collective identities, however benign, no longer feel as positive as they once did. There is no ‘I’ in team but, in many ways, there should be.