The supposedly “conservative” populist Right is trickier because its members claim to be the most unadulterated defenders of Western values, patriotism, tradition, and cultural inheritance. Their fanboying of Putin prior to his invasion, mindless parroting of Kremlin propaganda, and limp-wristed prevarication after he launched his war reveal just how much of a sham this always was. Instead of a robust defence of the West, we get self-described American “conservatives” such as Candace Owens arguing that Putin’s invasion isn’t a big deal because “Ukraine wasn’t a thing until 1989,” Tucker Carlson being so effective at making Putin’s case that his monologues get featured on Russian state TV, and Ted Cruz complaining the US military is “emasculated” compared to Russia’s. In Europe, populists like Farage and Le Pen are desperately trying to make everyone forget their years of warm words for Putin. Meanwhile, the Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán has refused to let military aid for Ukraine pass through Hungary and used his election victory as an opportunity to describe Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky as one of his “opponents.”

The reality, of course, is that the populist Right was never interested in the West’s values or intellectual tradition—because this is the very tradition they hate: liberal universalism, individual liberty, freedom of speech, democracy, freedom of religion. The populist Right is interested in the idea of tradition only as a symbol of authoritarianism and old-fashioned machismo for its own sake. They cannot bear to see the West stand up to Putin because he is the one that embodies the values they really care about—not the West…

The ideas that unite the hard Left and the populist Right against the West itself are the same ones that make them both so excited about culture war. The very idea of a culture war is illiberal—and it cannot be fought without also undermining the very existence of liberal democracy. One of the most important principles underpinning Western liberalism is the idea that what you think and believe is nobody else’s business unless you chose to make it so. For a culture war to even make sense, that foundational idea must be dispensed with. What the culture warriors are working towards is a society where it’s everyone’s business what everyone else believes. An old man in Liverpool said something insensitive about women? He must be punished! A café owner in California hung up a rainbow flag by her window? Her promotion of immorality must be stopped!