In the UK, Johnson took a more pragmatic mainstream stance after briefly favouring herd immunity. In the US, Donald Trump went into full conspiracy mode, suggesting that bleach may be a cure for Covid. In Brazil, President Jair Bolsonaro described Covid as “little flu”, and to this day continues to claim he has not been vaccinated, though nobody knows for sure. Populist right leaders were quick to take advantage of this, seeing in Covid scepticism yet another opportunity to show the gulf between the priorities of progressives and ordinary people. The emergency unleashed a flood of disparate conspiracy theories about the virus and vaccines that spread rapidly on social media, while “anti-mask” and “anti-lockdown” protest movements framed contagion prevention measures as a “health dictatorship”. But it may be one that the right will end up regretting. Since the beginning of the Covid-19 crisis, the pandemic has become yet another stage for the culture war. The plan worked: culture war tactics were instrumental in the right gaining support among disgruntled workers increasingly suspicious of a centre-left that had little to offer in terms of socio-economic policies. It claimed that, by dint of their alleged control of the media and academia, unpatriotic and elitist progressives were imposing radical changes – like openness to immigration and the demolition of the traditional family – against majority will. In the ensuing decades, the right closely adopted the strategy proposed by Buchanan.

“This war is for the soul of America, ” Buchanan said, and called on fellow citizens to “take back our culture, and take back our country”.

Campaigns for environmentalism, abortion and LGBT rights weren’t just about policy, he claimed, but were in fact intended to destroy wider American traditions and identity. A t the 1992 US Republican convention, the paleoconservative pundit and presidential candidate Pat Buchanan introduced the world to the idea that politics had become a “culture war” between progressives and conservatives.

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