The Aggrieved Subject: Culture Wars and Recognition Rights

Across the world presently there is a great deal to feel aggrieved about. Rising poverty and inequality expose many people within even many of the world's most affluent societies to lives of entirely preventable precarity and insecurity.1 Within and across many of the poorer and more politically unstable parts of the world, the lives of hundreds of millions of people are severely blighted by absolute poverty, armed conflict, political repression, and increasingly uninhabitable environments. Global warming and climate change adversely impact a great many lives in a multitude of ways.2 The interminable conflict between Ukraine and Russia has been punctuated by Vladimir Putin publicly contemplating the use of tactical nuclear weapons against NATO states.3 The effective lack of legal restraints upon Israel's retributive response to Hamas’ murderous attack of October 7, 2023 provides further evidence of the profound limitations of international law, even as a liberal democratic state allegedly perpetrates genocide against the Palestinians. 4 We have only very recently emerged from a devastating global pandemic in which, according to the World Health Organization, over 7 million people died and the financial costs of which continue to adversely impact many states.5 Disorder and crisis extend to affect many rights-based liberal democracies. A large gross domestic product (GDP) and established liberal democratic institutions offer limited and increasingly tenuous protection against external and internal mayhem. Thus, trust in government is declining sharply across the nation-states of the OECD.6 Many voters in many ostensibly liberal democratic states are increasingly drawn towards overtly authoritarian political parties and candidates who brazenly proclaim their illiberal commitments (Mounk 2019; Muller 2016). A growing number of liberal democracies have been and continue to be governed by openly authoritarian leaders, thereby raising the question of how much longer we may be able to label many of them as genuine liberal democracies7 (Freedom House 2024). A growing number of people feel increasingly insecure and pessimistic about the future, which adds to and compounds widespread disenchantment with the liberal order amongst broad cross-sections of society (Ipsos Mori 2023), Donald Trump's re-election as US President in 2024 provides the most eye-catching and arguably most consequential example of liberal democracy's descent into authoritarianism (Langfitt 2025). The palpable sense that our rights-based liberal order is in turmoil contrasts sharply with an earlier liberal triumphalism, which marked the end of the Cold War and the demise of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. According to many influential scholars, commentators, and political actors at the time, the implosion of liberal democracy's principal ideological adversary confirmed the moral legitimacy of the rights-based liberal order. The most fervent advocate of this position brazenly declared that liberal democracy's triumph over all of its ideological adversaries was grounded in a purportedly innate human striving for individual freedom. Liberal democracy was thus, so it was claimed, grounded in human nature (Fukuyama 2012). In little more than a generation, the hubristic narrative of the end of history has given way to a far darker discourse and reality of turmoil and existential crisis. Liberal democracy no longer enjoys the hegemonic status some claimed for it and has instead become a component, a symptom even, of the wider global predicament we face. I include liberal democracy's plight within what the historian A. Tooze (2022) has recently termed the “polycrisis.” An academic paper can only engage with so many existential challenges at once. The polycrisis comprises many elements and extends far beyond matters of political and legal philosophy. My specific focus in this article is the pervasive socio-cultural conflict, which has become such a prominent and divisive feature of many liberal democratic societies in recent times: the culture wars. In parallel with the broader move from collective optimism to foreboding and pessimism, which has so indelibly marked the past 30 years or so, the politicization of identity has also undergone profound changes within many liberal democracies, transitioning from the so-called age of multiculturalism, in which equality, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) were (allegedly) publicly celebrated and protected, to the current climate of conflict, mistrust, and an unwillingness to peacefully coexist with different others. The age of multiculturalism has largely descended into the age of culture wars (Doyle 2023; Ipsos Mori 2019; Sotirakopoulos 2021). Defined succinctly by the Oxford English Dictionary as “a conflict between groups, especially liberal and conservative groups, that have different cultural ideals, beliefs, or philosophies,” the ubiquitous culture wars have attracted a great deal of scholarly attention (Appiah 2018; Hunter 1991; Mounk 2023). Although domestic cultural conflict is not necessarily the greatest threat confronting liberal democracy, it is clearly extremely important and must be taken seriously. As neighbors have become adversaries and identities have become weaponized, a growing constituency of scholars have sought to analyze the socio-cultural conflicts that threaten to destroy any semblance of the modest degree of normative consensus that generations of liberal political philosophers have argued is essential for sustaining liberal democracy (Appiah 2018; Galston 2018; Rawls 1993). Beyond the theoretical literature, there is extensive empirical evidence of the socio-cultural conflicts so many of us spectate upon, are afflicted by, or are active combatants within. Although the extent and significance of cultural conflict is itself a topic of debate and disagreement, the conditions it denotes are real enough. Thus, studies in the United States (the epicenter of so much contemporary cultural warfare) have catalogued the increasingly embittered divisions between so-called conservatives and across the in the and across the of and state over a of and the of the of in the and the of and the to of conflict extends to include political and even In the United academic and into the cultural conflicts that divisions over the of towards the the of and and as for conflict 2021). 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