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The journalist, author and filmmaker picks his five best books about the culture wars, which form the subject of his new eight-part series, Things FellApart, available now on BBC Sounds and Radio 4.

One of the pleasures of makingThings Fell Apartwere long walks listening out for buried treasure in audiobook memoirs. This extraordinary life story gave me episode one. A boy in an alpine evangelical commune, dreaming of making avant-garde movies, inadvertently kickstarts a campaign of murders in the 1990s.

Da Capo Press 11.95

In his exhaustive culture wars history, Hartman includes fascinating conflicts I couldnt fit in like Piss Christ, an artwork of a crucifix dipped in urine that caused wild ructions in the 1980s but is now largely forgotten, as many of the conflicts that overwhelm us today will surely soon be.

University of Chicago Press 17;The Week Bookshop 13.99

Walkers father was a Jewish lawyer; her mother was Alice Walker, author ofThe Color Purple. Her beautiful memoir tells how, after their split, her childhood was spent moving between universes that never overlap. The experience inspired her to invent a new movement third-wave feminism in the 1990s.

Out of print

Tammy Faye Bakker was an ostentatious 1980s televangelist. While undeniably fraud-adjacent her husband Jim was imprisoned for misusing viewer donations Tammy was a wonderful oasis of curiosity among her deeply homophobic peers.

Tarcher 10.99

Dick Gregory was a hugely successful comedian before he quit it all for civil rights activism in the 1960s. His memoir does not asterisk the n-word. Its spelt out. As a result, it was banned by Christian conservatives in the 1970s. And now it has been banned again this time by progressives on college campuses. Illiberalism mutates.

Plume 13.99

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Jon Ronson: my five best books about the culture wars - The Week UK

The last time I wrote for The Spectators diary slot, over the summer, theatres were tentatively beginning to turn their lights on again, following the historically long closures at the height of the pandemic. On Monday night the West End went dark once more, but thankfully only briefly. Theatres along Shaftesbury Avenue and beyond dimmed their lights at 7 p.m. to mark the legacy of Stephen Sondheim, who died last week. I came to Sondheims work quite late myself, and Im sure a new audience will be found following the affection generated at his passing. Sondheims impact is felt as much on the theatre scene here as it is in America, but he didnt write about British politics, of course or did he? This song from A Little Night Music is in reference to the theatrical tactic, deployed when a show isnt going well, of bringing on a clownish figure to offer some distracting jokes: Where are the clowns?/ Send in the clowns./ Dont bother, theyre here.

Im in the final days of rehearsals for my own new play, which opens at Londons Young Vic theatre this week. Best of Enemies covers the 1968 US television debates between the father of modern American conservatism, William F. Buckley Jr, and the liberal playwright Gore Vidal. These exchanges the first real example of the modern cultural phenomenon of pitting opposing pundits against one another to create debate only came about because ABC, the lowest-rated and poorest of the television networks, needed a cheap innovation to their coverage of the Republican and Democratic conventions that year. What occurred, by accident or design, was a ratings winner that pretty much transformed political coverage for ever.

Buckley and Vidal loathed one another and saw the others ideology as immoral and reckless. Their clash was a gladiatorial match of minds for the soul of a nation. And yet even though it could be seen as a moment when mainstream political discourse became overtly petty, personal and adversarial the origins of the culture wars being played out across our more modern media platforms today it also was the kind of serious discussion its hard to imagine existing any more: 15 minutes of uninterrupted, primetime conversation, each night, between two public intellectuals speaking in philosophical terms about the nature of society and governance, tax systems and racial divides, foreign policy and the role of the state. They spoke in poetry, but they were also precise about the problems facing the West. Buckley proclaimed that Vidals hobgoblinisation of Marxism would lead to a spiritual world of stagnation. Vidal believed that these were revolutionary times when radical changes were needed, otherwise to be perfectly bleak and to be perfectly blunt, I think were headed toward total disaster, this empire.

There was drama on BBC Radio 4 this week too, but not in its Afternoon Play spot. I, like millions of others, felt a pang of existential dread when the Today programme was taken off air for a full 30 minutes on Monday as an errant alarm caused the presenters and technicians to be evacuated. Nick Robinson and Martha Kearney tweeted photos of themselves outside in the cold to reassure listeners all was fine, but perhaps also to avoid unleashing nuclear catastrophe, as the failure to broadcast Today remains on the countrys doomsday protocols. So unconscionable is the programmes absence that its disappearance remains an official measure that Royal Navy captains use to determine if the nation has been obliterated with atomic weapons, and must therefore retaliate. Thankfully, a documentary about the history of the T-shirt was broadcast to fill the dead air until the presenters could re-enter the building.

Despite the fears I have over the pointlessness and nastiness of conversations on social media, Twitter can be a great place for a writer to discover absurd moments in history that might inspire new work. I read that Switzerland has accidentally invaded Liechtenstein on quite a few occasions in history, most recently in 2007 when the marching Swiss soldiers took a wrong turn over the border and quickly apologised. I went down an internet rabbit hole of research that dragged up the time the UK accidentally invaded Spain in 2002, when some Royal Marines misjudged a training-exercise landing meant for Gibraltar, storming a beach some yards away in neighbouring Spain instead. A Ministry of Defence spokesman at the time said: They were informed of their error by local policeman and only spent about five minutes on the beach. The Ministry reiterated that we were not trying to take Spain and have no plans to do so. Although taps nose we would say that, wouldnt we?

See more here:
The birth of the culture wars - Spectator.co.uk

Senate Republicans will not issue any sort of a platform before next years midterm elections. At a meeting of donors and lawmakers in mid-November, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said that the Republican Partys 2024 nominee would be responsible for deciding on an agenda. The Republican senators in 2022 will simply attack the Democrats.

Rather than advancing any sort of a positive program, Republican Senators will be focusing on culture wars. Those have devolved to a point that Republicans are denying the legitimacy of any Democratic victory because, by their definition, Democrats are destroying the country.

As Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) said yesterday in a video from a parked car: Joe Biden is a communist. And thats what the Democrats are theyre communists. A lot of people are swallowing down the word socialist, butthey are communists.

In fact, the Democratic Party advocates neither socialism nor communism. Socialism is a system of government in which the means of production are owned by the government and, through the government theoretically by the people. Communism is the final stage of that form of social organization. It abolishes private ownership of land, farms, and factories, giving control of all those things to the state, which, in turn, provides everyone with jobs, housing, education, and medical care.

Democrats are a far cry from calling for this system of government. What they are calling for is for us to maintain the system of government we have had in this country since 1933. In that year, under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the government began to regulate business, provide a basic social safety net, and promote infrastructure projects that were too big or unprofitable for private industry.

In the years after World War II, Republicans joined Democrats in advocating this system, which filed the sharp edges off unrestrained capitalism and stabilized the economy, preventing another Depression.

On Tuesday, Representative Tim Ryan (D-OH) called out the political reality of todays America. What youre seeing here before the United States Congress is two clear, different visions of America and where we want to go and what we want to do, he said. He insisted that a strong middle class after World War II was key to our national prosperity.

Our greatest strength has been we reinvested into the United States. We reinvested into our communities. We invested in the technologies, and we dominated the industries: steel, glass, aerospace. he said. He called out Republicans for their opposition to that reinvestment into America: And now were hearing from the other side, Shut government down, dont do anything. We dont want to be an honest broker. Tyranny? he said, What are you people talking about? Were talking about universal preschool, and they have it as a communist indoctrination of the American student. Its insane. We have to rebuild our country!

The American horror of socialism came long before Russias 1917 Bolshevik Revolution tried to put socialism into practice. Americans began to worry about socialism in 1871, the year after the federal government started to protect Black male voting with the Fifteenth Amendment.

Also in 1870, Congress had established the Department of Justice to guarantee that Black southerners could enjoy the rights former Confederates were trying to terrorize them out of. Suddenly, attacking their Black neighbors on the basis of race became unconstitutional, and the federal government began to prosecute those who did so.

In 1871, unreconstructed white southerners began to argue that they did not object to Black rights on racial groundswhich was unconstitutional but objected rather on class grounds. They did not want Black men voting, they said, because formerly enslaved people were poor and were voting for leaders who promised them things like roads and hospitals.

Those benefits could be paid for only with tax levies, and the only people in the South with property after the war were white. Thus, Black voting amounted to a redistribution of wealth from white men to Black people, who wanted something for nothing. Black voting was, one popular magazine insisted, Socialism in South Carolina.

After World War II, Americans of all parties rallied around the idea of using the government for the good of the majority. But the idea that Americans who want the government to work for the good of the community were socialists regained traction with the rise of Ronald Reagan to the presidency. Republicans under Reagan focused on slashing regulations and the social safety net.

But Americans continued to support an active government, and to keep those voters from power, Republicans in the 1990s began to insist that the only way Democrats won elections was through voter fraud. Those false allegations have metastasized until we are at a moment when Republicans refuse to believe that a majority of Americans would vote for a Democratic president.

Although Joe Biden won the 2020 election by a majority of more than 7 million votes and by a decisive margin of 306 to 232 in the Electoral College the same margin Trump had called a landslide in 2016, Republicans are doubling down on the idea that the election must have been stolen and they must declare independence from the socialist government.

And yet, as Republicans around the country insist on the Big Lie, they are running up against reality, in the form of the legal system.

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A Fear of Legitimacy: When the only political agenda is to deny Democracy by igniting culture wars - Milwaukee Independent

The British Museum will not shrink in the face of the culture wars, George Osborne has said.

The former Chancellor of the Exchequer, who took over as chair of the museum in October, made the comments amid ongoing controversy over the repatriation of artefacts stored in the British Museum.

Last month, Greeces prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, demanded the museum return the 2,500-year-old Elgin Marbles stolen by the British between 1801 and 1805.

Boris Johnson, in a follow-up meeting with Mr Mitsotakis, said that while he recognises the strength of feeling in Greece he would not explicitly back the artefacts return.

The Prime Minister reiterated the UK's longstanding position that this matter is one for the trustees of the British Museum, his spokesman said at the time.

Writing in The Times on Saturday, Mr Osborne said the museum was open to lending their artefacts to anywhere who can take good care of them and ensure their safe return.

On the topic of the British Empire, Mr Osborne added that one risks being called a nationalistic bigot for recognising Britains contribution to the spread of democratic ideas and the defeat of fascism.

He wrote: We're leading the work in Benin City to excavate its past and build a museum space to display its beautiful bronzes.

But nor are we embarrassed or defensive. Almost three centuries on, we remain one of the very few places on earth where you can see the great civilisations of the world side by side.

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George Osborne: British Museum will not 'shrink in the face of the culture wars' - Telegraph.co.uk

What would happen if GOP voters just stopped trusting their doctors?

It's not an idle question. A new Gallup poll indicates that Republicans are feeling increasingly shaky about the medical profession: The number who say they are confident in their physician's medical advice has dropped 13 points since 2010. Twenty-two percent report they trust their doctor less than they did just a year ago.

Those numbers won't surprise Americans who have watched COVID vaccines take center stage in our partisan culture wars. Roughly 40 percent of self-identified Republicans remain unvaccinated against the coronavirus, egged on by hypocritical conservative "thought leaders" like Fox News' Tucker Carlson who have promoted anti-vax hysteria. (The results have been deadly: The death toll in counties that voted for Donald Trump is higher than in those that supported Joe Biden.) Conservatives have spent the last year being told they can't trust their doctor's advice on vaccines. Clearly they're listening.

The question now is whether the new Gallup poll is a blip, or if it reflects a wider, longer-term trend. The latter looks likely Gallup reported in July that Republican confidence in science itself has declined from 72 percent in the mid-1970s to 45 percent this year, withering under decades-long conservative assaults on questions like climate change and the teaching of evolution. Doctor mistrust might be part of the same phenomenon.

That's a problem: Trust between physicians and patients is an essential component of health. One 2017 study revealed that patients who have confidence in their doctors tend to adopt healthier behaviors and report fewer symptoms of illness. Another study the same year showed that breast cancer patients who had less trust in the health-care system were less likely to complete their course of treatment.

When Republicans distrust their doctors, in other words, the more likely it is they'll get sick and stay sick.

That could lead to other ramifications. Republican and Democratic voters tend to sort themselves by geography Democrats to the cities, GOP voters in rural areas. Those rural areas already have a tough time attracting doctors, and the result is that many sick people go without care. Gallup's poll makes it easy to imagine a vicious cycle where even more doctors would decide not to take jobs in places where they'll be ignored, which would lead to more sick people, which in turn would help hasten the decline of those rural Republican communities.

It's difficult to think that would be good for the GOP. But conservatives have been waging awar on expertise for a long time. Unfortunately for them, that war could take a serious toll on the health of the Republican Party and its voters.

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Do GOP voters trust Tucker more than their own doctor? - The Week Magazine