“The woke wars have sapped the West of its ability to fight true evil.” So read the headline of an article by Sherelle Jacobs in the London Daily Telegraph back in March, when the Russo-Ukrainian war was entering its second month. “True evil” was, of course, a metonym for Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Her idea was a variation on one that was appearing elsewhere in the British press at about that time. A few days earlier, James Marriott had written an article titled “Culture war dwarfed by real clash of values” for The Times of London. In The Sunday Times, a piece by Camilla Long appeared with the title “A real crisis puts the internet whingers into perspective and, yes, your suffering is trivial.” Over at Spiked, Brendan O’Neill announced “The end of the Age of Fragility.” Most, if not all, of these writers were implicitly relying on a common contempt among the privileged classes in Britain for both sides of the culture wars, which they see as a conflict between two equally unlikeable antagonists—fanatical and possibly deranged leftists, on the one hand, and jingoistic nostalgists for empire plus the religious conservatives whom they call “God-botherers,” on the other—over trivialities that have nothing to do with them.

This attitude rarely appears in America, however. Grady Means of The Hillsees an “unexpected weapon against woke politics” in the Ukraine crisis, but on the cis-Atlantic side, despite our media’s being as unanimous in their enthusiasm for