All over the world, the Right has gone to war against masks. Consider what has happened in Britain. Owen Jones writes in The Guardian:

“A monstrous imposition!” is how our modern-day Boudicca, the Tory backbencher Sir Desmond Swayne, decried the new law compelling customers to cover their faces before entering a shop. Sir Desmond does not have a blanket objection to covering his visage, you understand: he has previously described blackface as an “entirely acceptable bit of fun” after boasting of dressing up as the late soul singer James Brown. But while Sir Desmond may believe that all freeborn Englishmen have a sacred right to racist fancy dress, measures to stop the spread of a pandemic that has killed one in every 1,000 of his fellow citizens represent objectionable tyranny.

 The American Right also sees the mask as an assault on liberty:

In Texas, anti-mask activists believe such an imposition belongs in a “communist country”, while the Oklahoma city of Stillwater backed off from imposing a compulsory mask order after threats of violence. On one level, this is just another expression of dog-eat-dog individualism: to hell with the common good if it requires sacrifice on my part, however minor. But it is entirely in keeping with another phenomenon: of the modern right’s embrace of victimhood.

That is what is at the core of all of this: the Right revels in its victimhood:

Here in Britain, we are ruled by a Tory government with an 80-seat majority; most of the press swear editorial allegiance to it, with the two dominant newspapers, the Daily Mail and the Sun, appointing themselves the protectors of the nation’s moral code. In the US, Trump is supported by nearly every Republican officeholder and has his own cable TV propaganda channel in Fox News. You would think that triumphalism alone would reign, but on both sides of the Atlantic, it is mixed with profound insecurity. The populist right fears that the ground it has conquered in the so-called “culture wars” and in the corridors of power could be lost, and abruptly so, with its progressive opponents using the first opportunity in power to go further than ever in asserting the rights of minorities and women.

Rightwingers’ insecurity is twofold. They point to what is described as the “long march through the institutions”, a concept inspired by the work of the late Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci: that the left has secured cultural hegemony, not least in universities. The BBC, in this narrative, is a primary antagonist, regarded as institutionally hardwired against the right’s aspirations, despite its flagship interviewer, Andrew Neil, chairing the rightwing magazine the Spectator, and the corporation having played a pivotal role in bolstering the careers of rightwing demagogues from Nigel Farage to Katie Hopkins. That the right can boast a network of lavishly funded and well-connected thinktanks is ignored, too, because it is inconvenient to a myth of victimhood.

The other is a straightforward fear of the younger generation, among whom progressive values are hegemonic. On issues ranging from LGBTQ and women’s rights to anti-racism and immigration, younger people are attempting to communicate their moral values on social media to the older generation who dominate the commanding heights of the nation’s media. This is at the root of the “culture war” or “cancel culture”: rising demands that the values of the nation’s institutions are aligned with the worldview of the under-40s have provoked a moral panic. Black Lives Matter is just one flashpoint in that struggle: another is trans rights, an article of faith among much of the country’s youth.

The old guard can see who will replace them. And they're doing their damnedest to stop them.

Image: CP24