This is fundamentally and factually incorrect, as we can see from women tweeting our opinions, gay people being allowed to marry and not being criminalised, section 28 no longer being in force, abortion being legal and 70% of people backing trans people’s rights to self ID. https://twitter.com/francesweetman/status/1298203655858982913

It’s literally about 60-40 in the UK of left wing to right wing opinion, this is evolutionary as it allows us to survive in large communities through the left being more open to new things and the right being more cautious about what will get us killed.

When people feel secure they’re more open to trying new things, there have been lots of repeated tests into how fear effects people’s political opinions, make people scared and they’ll happily endorse right wing policies, make them feel secure and they’ll endorse left wing ones

Roughly 50% of people according to a repeated Harvard experiment prefer to be relatively well off compared to others than well off in absolute terms. That is, they’re happy being a lot poorer provided others are poorer still.

From the left, or from the centre it’s easy to say that the right win every culture war argument if you’re looking at newspaper headlines and angry twitter. They create a disproportionate noise because they care a lot, and it plays to the fear response that bonds them.

The volume is in direct correlation to the insecurity. They’re upset that things they were able to say without being criticised 20-30-40 years ago they receive pushback from.

It’s why they think free speech is under attack when it’s just that they’re having to face the consequences of their speech that the groups they’re speaking out against have always faced.

And it’s humiliating and terrifying to them, not least because they also have had the political power for 40 years and without the cultural power to back it up it’s absolutely unsatisfying. It’s why they paint themselves as the “rebels” and “free thinkers”

But, time and time again we find that most people are a mix of ideas and positions and not a monolithic group, but people with various opinions and things that are important to them.

There are “white working class” people who care about flags and illegal immigrants, and ones who care about LGBTQIA rights, and ones who care about all those things.

I can’t think of a single culture war topic that the right wins popular support on, and to a degree that’s part of the problem, because the left thinks the “war” part of the name is a metaphor, and the right treats it as literal war for the survival of their culture.

So a lot of the 50% who’d rather be poorer in absolute terms so long as there are others who are *worse* off are the ones hurting the most from what they feel is their loss of status, and so are therefore engaging with a louder voice.