ARE people on the liberal left overestimating the damage from a “culture war” because of the Brexit victory?  

The damage culture wars can do to politics are real, but — with some important exceptions — the right has lost most of its cultural battles.

Culture wars are fought when politicians don’t work on competing policies based on different interests in society. 

Instead they get power by playing on cultural feelings and fears. They try binding people to their leadership by emotional “values” instead of  promoting different visions for change.

The right has always preferred “culture” to “economics” because it is easier to hang onto economic power by hiding it behind a mess of “tradition” — a culture war tries to picture the right as the friend of the “ordinary man and his wife” by saying they share the same “British” values of plain food, dull but regular sex, middle-of-the-road entertainment and unenthusiastic attachment to Christianity. 

By contrast the “left” are an alien “liberal elite” with wacky ideas who, from the comfort of their upmarket metropolitan homes, will encourage a bunch of perverts and foreigners to disrupt normal suburban life. 

By focusing on “cultural issues” not economic ones, the cultural warrior hopes to shift the terrain so that the Conservative Party, funded by bankers and stuffed with public schoolboys, looks like the party of the “common man.” 

The Labour Party, funded by the unions, are pictured as weirdo big-city snobs.

Culture wars have been especially powerful in the US: Richard Nixon’s Republicans carved votes out of the liberal Democrats by whipping up backlash fears of “Middle America” versus “coastal elites” — flag and faith values versus sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll. 

By a self-conscious culture war — which has strong racist elements — Republicans have gone on to repeat Nixon’s success to various degrees.

In Britain the right launched many culture wars, but often with less success. 

In the 1970s and ’80s the keynotes for the right included “Bring back the birch” — meaning corporal punishment for “yobs” — “Bring back hanging,” censorship of “sex and violence” with Mary Whitehouse. 

In the ’80s and ’90s the right’s culture war included John Major’s “Back to Basics” and Section 28, trying to cut gay rights. 

All these moves helped the Tories win some votes, but ultimately the Hang ’Em and Flog ’Em Brigade (as the cultural warriors of the right were then known) did not get hanging or birching back. 

Section 28 was repealed — and its values look outdated even to most Tories.

One, slightly sideways but not often discussed sign of the decline of the Great British Culture War is that public art, once central, has now been largely exempted from the battle.

The right’s culture warriors liked to pick out bits of modern art to make a case that the “liberal elite” were wasting ordinary people’s money on crap art making mockery of “ordinary” values.

There was a big famous culture war battle over US artist and photographer Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ — a picture of a small plastic crucifix submerged in a small glass tank of his  urine. 

The picture looks oddly beautiful and hazily religious, while being earthily human. 

Is it profane? Jesus himself was not afraid of “dirty” bodies, famously grappling with grubby feet and diseased people. 

Still, right-wing senators raised a ruckus about a $15,000 government arts grant to Serrano: it was a right-wing cause celebre.

In Britain the right tried similar battles. In 1983 Scottish artist David Mach created a life-size Polaris submarine out of 6,000 old tyres as part of an Arts Council-funded sculpture exhibition on London’s South Bank. 

It was an impressive sculpture with a CND-ish feeling, creating a menacing version of a nuclear sub next to the Thames. 

Right-wing newspapers — notably the Evening Standard and Daily Express, then a much more important newspaper — launched a culture war. 

They claimed the government was wasting ordinary taxpayers’ money on lefty “rubbish.”

An unsuccessful furniture designer with conservative tastes was wound up by the newspaper campaign: he took three cans of petrol to the sculpture and set it on fire. 

Viewing the burnt sculpture, George Gale — one of the Express top writers — said the fire was “the most constructive piece of art criticism we have seen this year.” 

However, he shut up when the the arsonist was later found in nearby bushes, with 90 per cent burns caused when the ignited sculpture collapsed onto him. He died in hospital.

There was an ineffectual attempt at culture war over the Young British Artists’ Royal Academy exhibition, Sensation, in 1997 that fizzled out.  

Since then culture warriors have given up fighting an art battle — the artists won. 

From Keith Haring to Banksy, artists who straddle high art and “street art” and have some political feeling, who might once have been targets, are now widely celebrated. 

In part this is because they have been absorbed into “high art” with high costs, but in part because queues of regular folk will form where they exhibit. 

Popular tastes broke past the culture warriors’ boundaries. 

In the recent “statues” fight, there was some attempt to have a culture war — but on the back foot. The culture warriors are defending dull, realist works from being torn down rather than trying to encourage maddened furniture designers to set fire to the new stuff. 

Nobody objected to Mark Quinn’s temporary sculpture of black activist Jen Reid on aesthetic grounds. The art culture war is dead. The “rubbish” artists won.

Art is one of many examples of the “liberals” and “left” winning culture wars. 

Still, liberals, having lost Brexit, fear culture has magic powers — but the real problem was Brexit was the wrong battle. 

Trying to cancel a big referendum was an uphill task. The case for the EU relied too heavily on “big business” and technocratic rather than democratic arguments — where beating a culture war really means showing that the new liberal values are popular values, while the old conservative ones are only held by an ageing minority. 

Too much of the counter-culture war for a second referendum relied on snobby arguments about being “better educated.” 

Having lost a badly fought culture war, there is a danger that one section of liberal opinion will panic, rushing from being Remain-y centrists to a “Blue Labour-y” desire to placate the socially conservative above all else. 

Having fought the wrong culture war, they might now desert the field and demand everyone put down their weapons.