The right are in power everywhere – but they can't stop playing the victim

So this is how liberty dies. “A monstrous imposition!” is how our modern-day Boudicca, the Tory backbencher Sir Desmond Swayne, decried the new law compelling customers to cover their faces before entering a shop. Sir Desmond does not have a blanket objection to covering his visage, you understand: he has previously described blackface as an “entirely acceptable bit of fun” after boasting of dressing up as the late soul singer James Brown. But while Sir Desmond may believe that all freeborn Englishmen have a sacred right to racist fancy dress, measures to stop the spread of a pandemic that has killed one in every 1,000 of his fellow citizens represent objectionable tyranny. He is far from alone: social media abounds with Tory activists ripping up their membership cards, assailing an authoritarian government that “is not remotely conservative”.

The anti-mask revolt on the right is a global occurrence. In Texas, anti-mask activists believe such an imposition belongs in a “communist country”, while Oklahoma City backed off from imposing a compulsory mask order after threats of violence. On one level, this is just another expression of dog-eat-dog individualism: to hell with the common good if it requires sacrifice on my part, however minor. But it is entirely in keeping with another phenomenon: of the modern right’s embrace of victimhood.

A common critique of the left is that it nurtures a victim culture. What is pejoratively described as “identity politics” – more accurately, the demands of long-marginalised minorities for acceptance – is provided as the example par excellence. The claim is that the very act of highlighting structural inequalities infantilises and seeks excuses for individual failure. But from Donald Trump to the Tory Brexiteers, we live in the era of the “sore winner”: their politics express resentment at being unjustly treated. When Trump bellows “PRESIDENTIAL HARASSMENT!” intermittently through his Twitter feed, or when rightwing commentators complain of society’s institutions being rigged against them, or even compare coming out as a Tory to coming out as gay, they clothe themselves in the garb of the downtrodden, maligned and oppressed.

Here in Britain, we are ruled by a Tory government with an 80-seat majority; most of the press swear editorial allegiance to it, with the two dominant newspapers, the Daily Mail and the Sun, appointing themselves the protectors of the nation’s moral code. In the US, Trump is supported by nearly every Republican officeholder and has his own cable TV propaganda channel in Fox News. You would think that triumphalism alone would reign, but on both sides of the Atlantic, it is mixed with profound insecurity. The populist right fears that the ground it has conquered in the so-called “culture wars” and in the corridors of power could be lost, and abruptly so, with its progressive opponents using the first opportunity in power to go further than ever in asserting the rights of minorities and women.

The right’s insecurity is twofold. Rightwingers point to what is described as the “long march through the institutions”, a concept inspired by the work of the late Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci: that the left has secured cultural hegemony, not least in universities. The BBC, in this narrative, is a primary antagonist, regarded as institutionally hardwired against the right’s aspirations, despite its flagship interviewer, Andrew Neil, chairing the rightwing magazine the Spectator, and the corporation having played a pivotal role in bolstering the careers of rightwing demagogues from Nigel Farage to Katie Hopkins. That the right can boast a network of lavishly funded and well-connected thinktanks is ignored, too, because it is inconvenient to a myth of victimhood.

The other is a straightforward fear of the younger generation, among whom progressive values are hegemonic. On issues ranging from LGBTQ and women’s rights to anti-racism and immigration, younger people are attempting to communicate their moral values on social media to the older generation who dominate the commanding heights of the nation’s media. This is at the root of the “culture war” or “cancel culture”: rising demands that the values of the nation’s institutions are aligned with the worldview of the under-40s has provoked a moral panic. Black Lives Matter is just one flashpoint in that struggle: another is trans rights, an article of faith among much of the country’s youth.

The sense of victimhood is of course entirely misplaced, as prominent figures ironically use newspaper columns or primetime TV and radio slots to complain about being silenced. Which voices are really not being heard? Is it those who speak of trans people much as gay people were once discussed – would-be sexual predators defying the laws of biology – or is the 50% of the British public, including 57% of women, who support self-ID for trans people? No trans newspaper columnist or MP can loudly claim to be silenced, because none exists. While rightwing newspapers routinely engage in anti-Muslim bigotry, 2016 research found only 0.4% of British journalists are Muslim; in the age of Black Lives Matter, very few are black.

But the right’s claim on victimhood does not need to be based in reality to be successful: rightwing politicians have long understood better than their leftwing counterparts that politics is more about sentiments than facts. From their positions of power and influence, rightwingers can portray themselves as the defiled victims of a dangerous rabble; the crybully is an effective silencer, forcing their opponents on to the backfoot, and to debate on their terms. These supposed underdogs just happen to be ensconced in No 10, ministerial departments and the editorial offices of most British newspapers; their detractors are mostly millennials complaining on Twitter. But on the brutal battlegrounds of the culture war, better to be seen as the victim than the aggressor. This is not just the tactic of the modern right: it is their art form.

• Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist