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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.

See the original post here:
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.

Here is the original post:
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.

Read the original:
Do GOP voters trust Tucker more than their own doctor? - The Week Magazine

National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins served for 12 years under three presidents and presided over an expansion of the agency's budget and efforts to develop new cures to diseases. Graeme Jennings/Pool/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins served for 12 years under three presidents and presided over an expansion of the agency's budget and efforts to develop new cures to diseases.

It's Dr. Francis Collins' last few weeks as director of the National Institutes of Health after 12 years, serving under three presidents.

Collins made his name doing the kind of biomedical research NIH is famous for, especially running The Human Genome Project, which fully sequenced the human genetic code. The focus on biomedicine and cures has helped him grow the agency's budget to over $40 billion a year and win allies in both political parties.

Still, in a broad sense, Americans' health hasn't improved much in those 12 years, especially compared with people in peer countries, and some have argued the agency hasn't done enough to try to turn these trends around. One recently retired NIH division director has quipped that one way to increase funding for this line of research would be if "out of every $100, $1 would be put into the 'Hey, how come nobody's healthy?' fund."

In a wide-ranging conversation, Collins answers NPR's questions as to why for all the taxpayer dollars going to NIH research there haven't been more gains when it comes to Americans' overall health. He also talks about how tribalism in American culture has fueled vaccine hesitancy, and he advises his successor on how to persevere on research of politically charged topics like guns and obesity and maternal health even if powerful lobbies might want that research not to get done.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Selena Simmons-Duffin: After you announced you'd be stepping down from the director role, you told The New York Times that one of your "chief regrets" was the persistence of vaccine hesitancy during the pandemic. How are you thinking about the role NIH could play in understanding this problem?

Francis Collins: I do think we need to understand better how in the current climate people make decisions. I don't think I anticipated the degree to which the tribalism of our current society would actually interfere with abilities to size up medical information and make the kinds of decisions that were going to help people.

To have now 60 million people still holding off of taking advantage of lifesaving vaccines is pretty unexpected. It does make me, at least, realize, "Boy, there are things about human behavior that I don't think we had invested enough into understanding." We basically have seen the accurate medical information overtaken, all too often, by the inaccurate conspiracies and false information on social media. It's a whole other world out there. We used to think that if knowledge was made available from credible sources, it would win the day. That's not happening now.

So you mentioned the idea of investing more in the behavioral research side of things. Do you think that should happen?

We're having serious conversations right now about whether this ought to be a special initiative at NIH to put more research into health communications and how best to frame those [messages] so that they reach people who may otherwise be influenced by information that's simply not based on evidence. Because I don't think you could look at the current circumstance now and say it's gone very well.

Looking at how America has fared in the pandemic more broadly, it really is astoundingly bad. The cases and deaths are just so high. CDC Director Robert Redfield, when he was leaving, told NPR he thought the baseline poor health of Americans had something to do with how powerfully the pandemic has hit America. What do you think about the toll of the pandemic, even as it's clearly not over?

It's a terrible toll. We've lost almost 800,000 lives. In 2020, before we had vaccines, there was not a really good strategy to protect people other than social distancing and mask-wearing, which were important, but certainly not guarantees of safety. And yes, it is the case that the people who got hit hardest, oftentimes, were people with underlying medical conditions.

But in 2021, we should have been better off. We had vaccines that were safe, that were available for free to all Americans. The ability to get immunized really went up very steeply in March and April, and yet it all kind of petered out by about May or June. The [vaccine] resistant group of 60 million people remains, for the most part, still resistant. Unfortunately, now, with delta having come along as a very contagious variant and with omicron now appearing, which may also be a real threat, we have missed the chance to put ourselves in a much better place.

Let's step back from the pandemic. In your 12 years as director, the NIH has worked on developing cures and getting them from the lab to patients faster, and the agency's budget has grown.

But, in that time, Americans haven't, on a broader scale, gotten healthier. They're sicker than people in other countries across the board, all races and incomes. When you were sworn in in 2009, life expectancy was 78.4 years, and it's been essentially stuck there.

Does it bother you that there haven't been more gains? And what role should NIH play in understanding these trends and trying to turn them around?

Well, sure, it does bother me. In many ways, the 28 years I have been at NIH have just been an amazing ride of discoveries upon discoveries. But you're right, we haven't seen that translate necessarily into advances.

Let's be clear, there are some things that have happened that are pretty exciting. Cancer deaths are dropping every year by 1 or 2%. When you add that up over 20 years, cancer deaths are down by almost 25% from where they were at the turn of the century. And that's a consequence of all the hard work that's gone into developing therapeutics based on genomics, as well as immunotherapy that's made a big dent in an otherwise terrible disease.

But we've lost ground in other areas, and a lot of them are a function of the fact that we don't have a very healthy lifestyle in our nation. Particularly with obesity and diabetes, those risk factors have been getting worse instead of better. We haven't, apparently, come up with strategies to turn that around.

On top of that, the other main reason for seeing a drop in life expectancy other than obesity and COVID is the opioid crisis. We at NIH are working as fast and as hard as we can to address that by trying to both identify better ways to prevent and treat drug addiction, but also to come up with treatments for chronic pain that are not addictive, because those 25 million people who suffer from chronic pain every day deserve something better than a drug that is going to be harmful.

In all of these instances, as a research enterprise because that's our mandate it feels like we're making great progress. But the implementation of those findings runs up against a whole lot of obstacles, in terms of the way in which our society operates, in terms of the fact that our health care system is clearly full of disparities, full of racial inequities. We're not at NIH able to reach out and fix that, but we can sure shine a bright light on it and we can try to come up with pilot interventions to see what would help.

A 300-page report called Shorter Lives, Poorer Health came out in 2013 it was requested and financed by NIH and conducted by a National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine panel. It documented some of the things you just talked about, in terms of how Americans' health falls short compared with people in other countries. And it is filled with recommendations for further research, many specifically for NIH, including looking to how other countries are achieving better health outcomes than the U.S.

I'm curious, since this report came out when you were director, if it made an impact at the agency and whether there's been any progress on those recommendations or was there a decision not to pursue those ideas?

I do remember that report and there have been a lot of other reports along the lines since then that have tried to point to things that other countries may be doing better than we are. One of the things I've tried to do is to provide additional strength and resources to our Office of Disease Prevention, because that's a lot of what we're talking about here. One of the knocks against the National Institutes of Health is that we often seem to be the National Institutes of Disease that a lot of the focus has been on people who are already diagnosed with some kind of health condition. And yet what we really want to do is to extend health span, not just life span, and that means really putting more research efforts into prevention.

One of the things that I'm excited about in that regard is the All of Us study, which is in the process of enrolling a million Americans, following them prospectively, many of them currently healthy. They share their electronic health records, they have blood samples taken that measure all kinds of things, including their complete genome sequences; they answer all kinds of questionnaires, they walk around with various kinds of wearable sensors. That's going to be a database that gives us information about exactly what's happened to the health of our nation and what could we do about it.

You've served under both Democratic and Republican administrations. One thing you've talked about in interviews is the culture wars. What role do you think NIH has to play in terms of developing trust and trying to get past some of that tribalism that you talked about before?

I think medical research should never be partisan. It should never get caught up in culture wars or tribal disagreements. But in our current society, it's hard to think of anything that hasn't at least been touched by those attitudes.

My goal as NIH director over these 12 years, serving three presidents, was to always try to keep medical research in a place that everybody could look at objectively and not consider it to be tainted in some way by political spin. I've made friends in Congress in both parties and both houses, in a way that I think has really helped the view of medical research to remain above the fray. And many of the strongest supporters for medical research over these 12 years have been in the Republican Party.

This is not something that people can really disagree about. You want to find answers to medical problems that are threatening yourself or your family or your community or your constituents. So I don't have a hard job in terms of explaining the mission or why we work so hard at what we do.

But I do have to sometimes worry that for whatever reason, politics will creep into this. And certainly with COVID, politics has crept into the space of misinformation in a fashion that has not helped with vaccine hesitancy. Frankly, I think it's pretty shameful if political figures trying to score points or draw attention to themselves put forward information about COVID that's demonstrably false.

Some of the reasons why Americans tend to be less healthy than people in other countries can get political pretty quickly like healthy environments and gun injuries and drug overdoses and maternal health. But the research is important.

Do you have any guidance or thoughts for your successor on how to support the kind of research that's not as universally embraced on both sides of the aisle?

I think the guidance is you have to look at all the reasons why people are not having a full life experience of health and figure out what we, as the largest supporter of medical research in the world, should be doing to try to understand and change those circumstances. A lot of this falls into the category of health disparities. It is shameful that your likelihood of having a certain life span depends heavily on the ZIP code where you were born, and that is a reflection of all of the inequities that exist in our society in terms of environmental exposures, socioeconomics, social determinants of health, et cetera.

We are ramping up that effort right now, especially not just to observe the situation or, as some cynics have said, admire the situation. We actually want to try pilot interventions to see if some of those things can be changed. But that's about as far as we can go. Again, if there's a major societal illness right now of tribalism and overpolarization and hyperpartisanship about every issue, probably the NIH is not well-positioned all by ourselves to fix that. We have an urgent need, I think, across society, to recognize that we may have lost something here our anchor to a shared sense of vision and a shared sense of agreement about what is truth.

You are leaving this post. Where do you imagine the agency might go next? I know you're still going to be doing your work on Type 2 diabetes you'll still be a part of it. So what do you see in NIH's future?

I think it is in a remarkably positive place right now as far as what we are called to do, which is to make discoveries, to learn about how life works and then apply that in a way that will lead to answers for diseases that currently don't have them. I think of NIH as not just the National Institutes of Health, but the National Institutes of Hope, and we are able now to provide hope for lots of situations that previously couldn't have really been confident in that. Look what's happened in terms of gene therapies we're curing sickle cell disease now, something I thought would never happen in my lifetime, with gene therapies. Look at what we're able to do with cancer immunotherapy, saving people who have stage IV disease, in certain circumstances, by activating the immune system. And of course, in infectious diseases not only have we now got mRNA vaccines for the terrible COVID-19 situation, we can apply those to lots of other infections as well.

So, anybody listening to this who's thinking maybe of moving into a career in biomedical research, this is the golden era and we need all the talent and the vision that we can possibly recruit into our midst because it's going to be a grand adventure in the coming decades.

Read more:
Francis Collins on medical advances, vaccine hesitancy and Americans' ill health : Shots - Health News - NPR