The Transition

The Great Awokening and the end of the cultural revolution

Imagine a society where morality enforcers patrol what publishers allow to be printed. Where risqué comedians have their venues cancelled. A society in which a religious magisterium ruins the lives of people with heretical views. Where satirists studiously avoid offending the powers that be and stay clear of issues of public morality. Where gender non-conforming children are forced to live as the opposite sex because of society’s rigid view about masculine and feminine behaviour. A society where racial segregation is permitted, even celebrated, if it is for the benefit of the favoured group. Where offensive and blasphemous views might even land you in jail.

This described much of the English-speaking world before the social revolution of the 1960s changed everything. Following the huge moral upheaval of the early 21st century, it also describes the English-speaking world of the 2020s. After decades of transition, we’ve settled seamlessly into a new age of rigid morality and censorship, much of it patrolled by the same sort of moralisers who once prevented teenagers going to the dance or listening to music with risqué lyrics. The cultural revolution of the 1960s, the movement that promised sexual, political and intellectual freedom, has transformed into something that is much more conservative. That revolution is now over, and as with most revolutions, the immediate period of liberty has given way as the former radicals have come to police moral norms and suppress controversial ideas.

In many ways the American-led Anglophone culture of the 2020s has more in common with the 1950s than it did with the 1990s and 2000s, a period that now appears outrageously provocative and transgressive. Numerous television shows, comedies and films that could only have been made after 1970 are now once again impossible, at least without heavy editing, just as they were before censorship rules were abandoned.

In a similar way, many practises from before the sexual revolution have now returned in new guises. Censorship boards are back in publishing, six decades after the Lady Chatterley trial, in the form of sensitivity readers. Comedians are banned from playing in small towns for fear that their acts will offend. Other signs of a new conformism have arisen, including the expectation that people should conform with the ‘values’ of their employers, and the support of younger voters when corporations sack deviant thinkers.

The 21st century has seen growing intolerance towards people with dissenting views, as well as support for the idea that they should not be allowed to voice them. This represents a generational shift, with younger people – especially in the US – far less tolerant than their elders, especially compared to parents who identified as political liberals.

There has also been political transition between left and right, so that today, Americans identifying as liberal are more opposed to free speech than Americans who see themselves as conservative, a total historic anomaly.

We have got used to ‘free speech’ being a Right-wing talking point without dwelling on how strange that actually is. Freedom of speech is historically a liberal cause, set against conservative authorities who feared that it would encourage morally deviant behaviour, or help spread dangerous and subversive ideas. It has only now become the preserve of the Right because the revolution of the 1960s has ended, with progressives now fully in charge of most institutions - and people who come to power tend to want to hold on by suppressing dissent.

The 2010s was a transformative decade, a period known as the Great Awokening, during which upper-middle-class American views shifted drastically to the Left. It reflected, in some ways, the Left’s victory in the culture wars which had begun in the 1960s and became articulated in the 1990s. One direct cause of the Awokening was the exodus of conservatives from many professions from the 1990s, most particularly in academia. They Left had, to use a word very popular in academic circles, achieved hegemony, so that many of the hot-button moral issues had been settled to many people.

Their forebears, the radicals of 1968, saw themselves as being in opposition to bourgeois society and the establishment; they were rule-breakers who were sticking it to the man. Yet the patterns of revolution continues to repeat itself, and once in power, those same radicals and rule-breakers begin to behave like those in authority always have. Revolutionaries come to fill the prisons they once emptied, and invariably more than the old regime managed. It is the insecure nature of revolutionary regimes that ensures they must do.

They also come to ape the behaviour and style of the old regime in other ways, and attract members of the ruling class drawn to power, whatever its form. Just as the Red Army came to be filled with former tsarist officers who swore allegiance to the Bolshevik regime, so it is that British public schools and elite US colleges have become the most overtly progressive today, denouncing their ancestors and promoting the sexual ethics of the post-Christian order. When the upper class adopt a radical idea, it is usually because it has gained total dominance, and with that hegemony comes the end of the transitional, free-wheeling stage of the revolution.

When the young people of the satire boom, the Paris student protests and Woodstock threw off the shackles of social constraint, they created a revolutionary social atmosphere that ended in a predictably authoritarian way. They rebelled against a stultifying conformism and blew it apart, before a new stultifying conformism took hold. It is forbidden to forbid, as the 68er slogan had it – but not in a way they might have imagined. What we’re experiencing today, in the 2020s, is merely the end of the transition.

It’s not politics, it’s just decency

The world in which Mad Men begins, the spring of 1960, was one of moral certainty, at least compared to the years that followed. Politics was often highly contentious, but most moral issues relating to human relationships were relatively uncontested. If you were to ask an upstanding member of the community that year whether their views on same-sex relations were a ‘political’ issue they might not even understand what you meant; it was a moral issue, not a political one, and one mark of hegemony is that people tend to stop seeing their beliefs as even political.

Then it stopped being a moral issue, and from the late 1960s until the 2010s issues of sexual morality became a hotly-contested debate in the public sphere. It was the age of uncertainty, and because a wide range of views were held on most moral issues, so society felt compelled to accommodate them. The same went for a number of questions over which there was an intense tussle; the costs and benefits of diversity, for instance, or the status of working women vs the prestige of the traditional family. A great deal of situation comedy centred on people with different social values rubbing against each other uneasily; British comedy in particular often reflected the central theme of liberalism, the need to tolerate people you can’t stand.

This period, somewhere between 1960 and 2015, was one of unusual openness, because almost no moral issue was completely unquestioned, and no side of the culture war was in total control. Comedy flourished, in particular, and censorship almost disappeared altogether; toleration for sexual extremes reached an intensity that looks shocking to the more prurient 2020s.

Most of us growing up at the time knew nothing else, and assumed that this was the direction of travel we should expect indefinitely, rather than seeing it for what it was: a transition. We were still in the midst of the sexual revolution, and all revolutions have these brief moments of liberty when the old order is removed and before a new one takes its place - often worse.

Revolutionary transitions, offering an illusory freedom, occur during the period in which neither the old nor the new guard are completely dominant. After the legalisation of Christianity by the Emperor Constantine in 312 there was, for several decades, relative freedom of religion in the empire as pagans and Christians struggled for control – but as Christianity became dominant, the period of tolerance came to a close. By the last decades of the century, the now-dominant Christians had started to pass laws making open pagan belief increasingly difficult.

One orthodoxy was replaced by another, the transition ended, and the new faith proved just as intolerant than the old – in many ways more so. Today, similarly, many of the great moral debates of our time are over, something which became clear during the epoch-defining year of 2020 – and its clearest signal came in the form of sport.

Sport is a central part of civic society, but also the most vivid display of controlled tribalism. It has a long history of provoking violence among rival factions, dating back to Byzantine chariot-racing teams; the Nika riots of 532, which began with fighting between supporters of the Blues and Greens, led to 30,000 deaths. Many sports have attracted violence – the Serbs and Croats even managed to invent tennis hooliganism – but none has provoked anything like as much as football. The beautiful game has long had a problem not just with fan violence, but in particular violence linked to wider religious or political divisions. In the west of Scotland the sport runs along sectarian lines, an intense hatred mirrored in Northern Ireland where the main Catholic club closed down after a riot by Protestants. In Yugoslavia, football hooligans played an active part in the lead up to the country’s civil war. Across Europe, football firms have been associated with extreme nationalist movements.

It is for that reason that football authorities have always prohibited the use of political messages by players or teams. Liverpool’s Robbie Fowler, for example, was fined in 1997 for displaying a T-shirt in support of Liverpool’s striking dockers, and that was hardly the most contentious issue in the country. There was no minute’s silence after Margaret Thatcher’s death, for the same reason. It’s a bad idea to mix politics with sport, but with football it’s deadly.

That norm was abandoned almost overnight in 2020 when Black Lives Matter was given official support by English football’s governing body, following the George Floyd protests. It was that year when progressive moralising reached its pinnacle, an excess which provoked in many a response that has been described as a ‘vibe shift’ - although whether that ‘backlash’ proves successful is one for future historians.

That BLM was clearly a political organisation making some highly questionable claims – and that BLM supporters had in fact been behind acts of political violence, including several murders – was largely ignored by the authorities. ‘Black Lives Matter’ was not, apparently, a statement representing the organisation Black Lives Matter, which had popularised the slogan and had its logo almost everywhere the phrase was used. The issue was beyond politics, authorities declared, it was just a matter of basic decency.

The following year, European football authorities gave their support to German players wearing rainbow armbands in support of gay rights because, again, it wasn’t a matter of politics but a ‘team symbol of diversity’ and therefore ‘a good cause’. Few seemed to mind that it clearly was about politics, the armbands being paraded for a game with Hungary, whose conservative government was the bête noire of western progressives. Under Viktor Orbán’s rule, gay and lesbian couples had civil partnerships recognised, but same-sex marriage and adoption were not legal, and the Hungarian government also prohibited the teaching of materials likely to encourage gender dysphoria in children.

All of these issues had been until very recently matters of debate, a question of trade-offs between the rights of adult self-actualisation and the best interests of children; but to those who believe their politics are simply a matter of ‘decency’, such compromises are not just unacceptable, they are an existential threat to their existence. When the football World Cup was hosted by Qatar in 2022, it likewise provoked much moral outrage. The BBC used the opening ceremony to denounce the country’s moral stance on the issue, Qatar being the first World Cup host in which homosexual relations had been illegal since England in 1966 – an England of a totally different world.

Gay marriage went from something unthinkable to being beyond politics in just twenty years. And long before trans activists had become central players in the culture wars, numerous people in the US had lost jobs for their position on LGBT issues, or in Britain harassed by the police, a regular occurrence since the mid-2010s. The period in between – when the aims of the gay right’s movement had been achieved but people were free to disagree – was a transition.

The BLM-linked gesture of taking the knee was marketed disingenuously as simply a statement against racism, something no one would dare claim to be in favour of, but it was and is an explicitly political issue. As well as acting as a loyalty signal, it suggested support for certain policies beyond merely claiming that ‘racism is bad’. Contrary to what was claimed, ‘diversity’ is no more a good cause than BLM; it’s a political and moral belief, which in reality has been long contested and disputed.

When your political symbols are no longer considered political at all, but merely a good cause, it’s safe to say that you have hegemony - with implications for those in the minority. If you think your views are beyond politics, then you’re unlikely to give your opponents the consideration people in a free society usually expect.

There are good reasons for separating sport and politics, one of which is that political gestures soon go from being voluntary to mandatory. Not taking the knee, like not stating one’s pronouns of flying the pride flag or the various other loyalty signals of the 2020s, becomes a statement of opposition. Loyalty signals are inherently a problem for people with minority opinions, which is why the Left historically had an issue with them. Months before the Qatar World Cup, when Paris St Germain marked the International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia and Transphobia by wearing a rainbow, one player, Idrissa Gueye, was dropped for a game for refusing to do so. What had started as a gesture of a ‘good cause’ had turned into something that was mandatory: ‘Superstition shall cease’, and new gods must be sacrificed to.

Taking the knee began over the issue of police shootings of black men in America, and it took as its core premise the idea that such disparities must be the result of racism. The evidence over those claims is questionable, and it is not at all clear that such differing outcomes can be attributed to racism. Racial disparity, not ‘racism’, is the issue at the heart of BLM, and the idea that black and white Americans should have ‘equity’, that is equality of outcomes; this is a core belief, perhaps the core belief, at the heart of the revolution in attitudes that came to be called the Great Awokening, the period, from around 2012, when upper-middle-class American views on race, gender and immigration hugely shifted to the Left.

Equity is filled with contradictions. In both the US and Britain, whites fall far below various minority groups in terms of average income, education, health outcomes and imprisonment rates, as well as police shootings, but this is never addressed, because beliefs backed by taboos never have to endure those sorts of questions. That is the benefit of your beliefs being beyond politics and simply a matter of decency. Progressive ideas like equity are mainstream, hegemonic, illustrated by how little opposition there was to the gesture of taking the knee by football teams in England’s domestic football leagues, and also by the international team. What was more telling, however, was the conservatism of the argument.

In England the national football manager is one of the most important positions in the country, somewhere below the Prime Minister and above the Archbishop of Canterbury. It’s a hugely pressured job involving huge amounts of scrutiny, and one in which millions of men think they could do the job better than you. It has mentally broken previous occupants. Because of this, it felt significant that in the middle of 2021, before the European Championships that summer, England manager Gareth Southgate issued a heartfelt letter in support of Black Lives Matter, following questions asked about his players taking the knee. Many in England were confused as to why we were still continuing this American affectation, over an issue that was far less relevant in Britain, where the police are unarmed.

Southgate was not some outspoken rebel. He had always been noted for being reliable and conventional, high in conscientiousness, ideal son-in-law material. One of the five big personality traits along with openness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism, conscientiousness is the only one that correlates with conservatism, and conscientious people historically vote for centre-right parties. Southgate was the sort of footballer who in team photos from the early 1970s would have been the last man sporting a short, back and sides when everyone else looked like they were at Woodstock. During the days of Mad Men, he would have stood up for the national anthem when it was played before a film, because that’s what a decent, respectful and caring person did. Today a decent, respectful and caring person takes a knee to show his opposition to racism, tweets a rainbow flag in support of Pride, and talks about ‘men’s mental health’.

That someone like Southgate would support the gesture associated with BLM said something about how far social attitudes had changed in the last few decades. Perhaps more telling was how uncontroversial it all was, beside the complaints of a few Tory MPs who lacking any cultural influence and power. Indeed, by 2021 there had never been in most people’s lifetimes so little doubt in public life about what is morally wrong and right: the end result of the Great Awokening of the 2010s is a society with moral certainty more fixed than it has been for decades. Society’s morals have been thrown up in the air and its pieces have now landed in a different place.

The last sixty years or so have seen a cultural revolution in western society, one comparable in scope to the Christianisation of Rome, the Reformation or the Bolshevik takeover in Russia. Most of us have only known this period of transition, yet perhaps the revolution is to an extent over, and things have returned to normal, the sort of world we lived in when England last reached a final, in 1966. A world of strictly enforced social norms and morality.

This series originated with an article I wrote for UnHerd in 2021, ‘The West’s Cultural Revolution is Over’. Part Two will continue this week. I am hugely grateful to reader Aidan Barrett for his help in researching it