Indeed, but what they do is leave the board and then vote for Boris and Brexit and what not, and we all suffer. I have found over the years that it is more fruitful to try not to sneer at “the Right”. Just my opinion.
Agree, up to a point. People ask what 'woke' means and it essentially boils down to any belief that causes instinctive discomfort in a lot of people - anti-monarchism, transgender rights, immigration from (especially Muslim) countries - which the Right believes it can leverage in its ongoing culture war. We are talking about
emotions, not evidence-based argument, which is why the views of people motivated by vague anti-woke attitudes are easily demolished by smarter folk - which makes the loser even more embittered and entrenched. The internet, and modern media in general, facilitates that entrenchment par excellence. Once you've sniffed the entrance to the rabbit-hole and it smells tasty, there's no going back. And the more people mock you for it, the more slavering you become.
With the death of conformist aspirations such as 'the property-owning democracy' (home ownership has declined from around 70% to 60% in the last decade or so), the American Dream (as the rust belt grew in ironic scorn), and of course the latest incarnation 'Levelling Up' , culture war/anti woke/nativist narratives are the only game in town for the Right.
The most important book I have read in the last few years is The Age of Anger by Pankaj Mishra, which traces the intellectual roots of 'resentiment' (which Nietzsche, I think, described as 'the desire for hateful revenge'). First identified by Rousseau, resentiment is a natural by-product of the 'self-creating' myth of capitalism (typified by the American Dream trope). Once, from the French Revolution onwards, we'd freed ourselves from God and 'knowing one's place', we were all 'free' to thrive and prosper as a result of our own efforts. But of course it doesn't work like that: wealth and privilege beget the same, the masses are eternally locked out of the real places of wealth and power, and of course big countries dominate poorer/smaller ones in similar fashion. For a few decades, as developed Western economies found new 'globalised' markets, wages and living standards rose (aided by progressive taxation). The oil crisis of 1973 killed rising real wages across the West but expanding credit, fuelled by the petro-dollars flooding into Western banks, kept the capitalist balls in the air until the 2008 financial crash. The political fallout from the resulting decline powered Trump, Brexit and Culture War narratives across the globe, especially the developing world, where resentiment has always been keener, bound up as it was with anti-colonialism - witness how CCP propaganda still references China's 'century of humiliation'.
Just as a German 'nation' belittled by Napoleonic conquer, was gripped by 'sturm und drang' nativism in the 1800s, eventually giving rise to Prussian militarism and thence to fascism after the ultimate humiliation of Versailles. so humiliation is leveraged by right-wing elites now: the anti-gay, anti immigrant, anti-'permissive West' Catholic/Orthodox nationalisms of Putin and Orban; the anti-Muslim Hindu nationalism of Modi.
It's vital, in my opinion, that we see the culture war in global terms, because that is exactly how the right sees it. That is why Trump's guru Steve Bannon has his former seminary in Italy, dedicated to training up future European/Western cadres of high-level politicians and bureaucrats. For some, like Bannon and Orban, the culture war is about the need for Catholic orthodoxies to prevail (against the 'socialistic' Liberation Theology tendencies of the current Pope); for others, like Peter Thiel or Elon Musk the culture war sustains their urge for a vague Social Darwinism.
For those on the left, the culture war is the Right's final great battle against genuine human liberty and emancipation.