Liz Truss’s recent high-profile speech laying out her priorities as Equalities Minister reminded me of an event I attended last year featuring conservative writer Douglas Murray in conversation with the philosopher Roger Scruton. As expected, I agreed with very little of what I heard. But there were a few interesting moments, especially when Scruton raised the topic of Michel Foucault. The postmodernists, he said, have for decades been responsible for undermining morality, culture, value, and, most importantly, “the idea of truth.” Murray, agreeing, responded: “I finally read Foucault last year and, I have to say, I’m so appalled still. Because I’d read about it, I heard about it – I’d always known I sort of instinctively disliked it – but the catastrophe of what he does, this sort of perversion of all life...”

“Who are the good guys? ‘Common-sense’ conservatives who reject structuralism and defend ‘facts’ and ‘the truth.’ Except when they don’t.”

This is a tried and tested rallying point for the right. Who, by this view, is the enemy? ‘The Left’, enthralled by last century’s postmodernists (whose work we’d better not read too closely), representing the “perversion of all life.” Who are the good guys? ‘Common-sense’ conservatives who reject structuralism (or is it post-structuralism?), and defend ‘facts’ and ‘the truth.’ Except when they don’t.

Fast forward to 2020 and it seems that in Liz Truss’s speech exactly this strain of conservatism has become government policy. But rather than unveil a bold new platform, all Truss did was reveal the intellectual barrenness of this world-view. This was particularly evident when she started talking about her school in the 1980s: “While we were taught about racism and sexism, there was too little time spent making sure everyone could read and write,” she said, to cries of joy from some corners of the internet. What does she think is to blame? “Post-modernist philosophy – pioneered by Foucault – that put societal power structures and labels ahead of individuals and their endeavours.” She continued: “In this school of thought, there is no space for evidence, as there is no objective view – truth and morality are all relative.”

There are many problems here. First, what exactly is she saying about schools? That there was a stifling orthodoxy of political wokeness at the height of Thatcher’s Britain, and that a generation of students suffered as a result? This is hardly plausible. Rather, she is tapping into a deep cultural insecurity and blowing it out of proportion as a means of obscuring the fact that social problems can be fixed on the level of day-to-day policy, and that Conservative governments have conspicuously failed to do so. She rails against Birmingham City Council for “promoting new streets named ‘Diversity Grove’ and ‘Equality Road’”, but as hollow as such gestures might be, there is no zero-sum game at work here. Councils run good services when they are empowered by central government, and the Conservatives’ history on this front is dire. Funding services can and must happen alongside difficult conversations about injustices and prejudice, and symbolic street naming is neither here nor there.

“Rather than worrying about ‘a tyranny of low expectations,’ Truss needs to abandon the tyranny of false dichotomies.”

The same is true with the problem of regional inequality. The Tories think their recent gains in the north can be strengthened by arguing that the regions can only be levelled up by those who reject ‘woke orthodoxy.’ This is not only logically absurd, but overlooks the huge role the Conservative party has played in creating these disparities in the first place. Rather than worrying about “a tyranny of low expectations,” Truss needs to abandon the tyranny of false dichotomies.

Even stranger is the trope among conservatives that they are the stalwarts of truth, that the liberals and leftists attack facts and substitute it for wokeness. We are probably all guilty of jettisoning facts to make our arguments. But it is predominantly the right, not progressives, who encourage and benefit from (but did not cause) our present culture, where an overload of information has crowded out truth and democratised knowledge. Not all knowledge, by any means. But the sort of knowledge relevant to making informed decisions at the ballot box.

One type of truth Truss attacks is the idea of “lived experience,” which she presents as a thoughtless red herring that undermines equality. Yes, perhaps politically engaged students have imbibed Foucault to the point of cliché; the philosophy of the man himself provides the conceptual tools for understanding the in-groupishness which, driven by the internet, is making young people into a more homogenous political force, with our own distinct dogmas, political slogans and weird, self-referential online humour. But to argue, based on an instinct of reaction, that the idea of “lived experience” is some sort of invention is simply a way of avoiding the hard questions which arise when we consider how people shape and are shaped by the structures around them.

Rather than engage with social justice in the 21st century, the Conservatives are keener to channel the resentment that has been provoked by modern trends. That’s why Liz Truss wheels out “postmodernism” and “Foucault” - as a cynical attempt to sidestep the ideas behind the things she doesn’t like, in order to avoid steering any distance at all from the strange formula: conservatism = truth = morality.

“To argue that the idea of ‘lived experience’ is some sort of invention is simply a way of avoiding the hard questions which arise when we consider how people shape and are shaped by the structures around them.”

Foucault’s favourite philosopher, Nietzsche, wrote: “The overturning of opinions does not immediately follow upon the overturning of institutions: the novel opinions continue, rather, to live on for a long time in the deserted and by now uncomfortable house of their predecessors, and even keep it in good conditions because they have nowhere else to live.” Say the Conservative Party somehow managed to overturn the institutions of its cultural enemies - the mainstream media, the liberal universities, the advocates for various identity groups. It would still continue to do what it has always done, and what it thinks the left is doing: value party management above truth, play to a base rather than generate new ideas, foster reaction instead of serious engagement. When it comes to truth, the real postmodernists wear a blue rosette.