An alarming graph published in a new study from the Policy Institute at King’s College London traces the nearly exponential explosion of newspaper articles about the culture war in the past few years. After trundling benignly along the x-axis, the line leaps into the air about a decade ago. It has now been shooting up almost vertically for two years in a way that, after a year of Covid, prompts the instinctive reflection that somebody, somewhere, should be imposing a national lockdown.
As a phenomenon, the culture war is patently fascinating — a fair few of those articles are mine. But contemplating the chart I felt a certain exhaustion, even a creeping despair, at the prospect of more and more unproductive, bad-faith arguments about statues