Is the culture war over, with victory going to the Marxists? Well-known social commentator Kevin Donnelly thinks so. The evidence seems to support him. A true conservative sees nothing but a wasteland before him – the wreckage and debris of the traditional, Christian society we were so used to. But we need not despair. If I can paraphrase Rousseau: What has been taken away from us, can by the same means be taken back.
Badger, Toad, Ratty, and Mole, with their trusty weapons, to the rescue!
Culture War? It’s Over and We Lost
Kevin Donnelly, Quadrant, Jun 09 2026
Two essays in The Australian, one by Greg Sheridan titled ‘How relentless progressive orthodoxy is politicising life and crushing debate in Australia’ and another by Henry Ergas, ‘ABC’s Tame shame is an abject breach of trust’ are well worth reading.
Both highlight the way institutions including the Climate Change Authority, the Human Rights Commission, the Australian Law Reform Commission, schools and universities and the ABC have been captured by a progressive, cultural-left ideology.
While detailed and persuasive, there is nothing new in what Sheridan and Ergas complain about. The cultural Left’s long march through the institutions has been ongoing since the expression was made famous by the German Marxist Rudi Dutschke during the cultural revolution of the mid-to-late Sixties. The Australian author Alan Barcan describes the Sixties’ cultural revolution as promoting an ideology that “favoured relativism [where] absolute beliefs, based on Christianity or liberal humanism, became unfashionable. Politically, a new radicalism and a new concern for minorities emerged”.
While Dutschke is associated with the ‘long march’, it was the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci who earlier introduced the concept of cultural hegemony. Gramsci describes cultural hegemony as the way capitalist society and the bourgeoise dominate by controlling society’s institutions. Such domination leads to false consciousness where, even though they are the victims of an oppressive and self-serving system, citizens believe all is well. Women happy being wives and mothers are deluded by a culture that is chauvinistic and male dominated.