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Crikey is this week publishing a series of stories on Dark Emu and its much-lauded author Bruce Pascoe, in light of the recent critical examination of Pascoes thesis by anthropologist Peter Sutton and archaeologist Dr Keryn Walshe.

Through the publication of Farmers or Hunter-Gatherers? The Dark Emu Debate, Sutton and Walshe have effectively blown the whistle on Pascoes work. Given how influential Dark Emu has become in recasting Australias history, this forensic unmasking represents an important moment.

In tackling this topic, Crikey is aware of how caught up Dark Emu has been in the tiresome culture wars that dominate the public discourse. That makes it a fraught exercise.

There is a good argument that the culture wars are really between white people playing their own game of identity politics: the conservatives versus the progressives is getting as old as the Hatfields and the McCoys and about as useful to the rest of us.

In the middle are the people who are, rightly, fed up that they cant raise a question about a prevailing ideology without getting their heads blown off.

Journalist and author Stan Grant, one of Australias sharpest observers of Indigenous affairs, puts it this way: It is really interesting what this whole story reveals about us. It is a real culture war issue. And I just cant stand either side of the culture wars.

Human rights lawyer Dr Hannah McGlade told Crikey: We are not left or right in this debate. We are Indigenous people. This is about our culture, identity and human rights.

The veteran Tasmanian Indigenous leader Michael Mansell has pointed the finger at the failure of journalists to ask questions that might not accord with their progressive view of the world.

The Sutton and Walshe critique was released with a careful media strategy aimed at avoiding the work being framed as a shot in the culture wars. The book was unveiled in the Nine mastheads rather than News Corp (which might have brought the book larger readership). The journalist who wrote the Nine feature, Stuart Rintoul, is an experienced hand with no barrow to push.

The real concern especially for the Indigenous people Crikey has spoken to is ultimately about cultural appropriation: that a white take on history, such as that Pascoe is accused of propagating in Dark Emu, insults Indigenous Australia and passes the wrong information to Indigenous kids about their peoples achievements.

This appraisal needs to be set against white Australias need for a myth as a salve for its guilt about the colonial invasion of Indigenous Australia. That is what Dark Emu offers: a description of a peoples achievements that white people can relate to and a way to atone for it.

There is an ancillary debate, which the Sutton/Walshe book has inadvertently reignited that about Bruce Pascoes claimed Indigenous identity. The topic is usually avoided in polite company. It is seen as off-limits to question someones bona fides when they say they are trying to piece together their past.

At the same time, though, the identity question matters more and more to the integrity of Indigenous Australia. As Crikey has become aware, there is a heated debate about Pascoes identity among Indigenous people because false claims are, in the words of one person Crikey has spoken to, contributing to the breakdown of Indigenous identity.

Bruce Pascoe has accused his opponents of using questions over his identity to discredit Dark Emu. Yet the author himself insists that he be known as an Indigenous man, repeatedly claiming links to three separate groups the Bunerong, Tasmanian and the Yuin despite two of these groups outright denying his claim, and the third claim now being subject to serious dispute, as we reveal in our series.

At its most serious, the Pascoe story is potentially an indictment of Australias cultural and arts organisations. The University of Melbourne has its own questions to answer over the appointment of Pascoe to a professorship. It also raises genuine questions for the so-called progressive media, which has largely vacated the space when it comes to any scepticism of the Pascoe enterprise. Sutton and Walshe have themselves pointed to the failure of journalists to go to the primary Indigenous and academic sources of knowledge.

In so doing, it has been left to the lefts bogeyman, News Corp columnist Andrew Bolt, to make the most telling points on Pascoe and Dark Emu.

There are two vital voices missing from the debate. One is the author, who has not responded to our requests for comment. The other is influential academic Professor Marcia Langton, who has been one of Pascoes strongest supporters. Langton has described Dark Emu as the most important book on Australia which should be read by every Australian.

Langton is also the natural foil to the anthropologist Sutton. She graduated with honours in anthropology from the ANU in the 1980s and gained a PhD for her work on Aboriginal society in the Cape York Peninsula. Like Sutton, she is a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia. Langton, however, has declined our requests for comment.

Link:
To understand Bruce Pascoe, we must go beyond the culture war - Crikey

When progressives talk about the culture war, they tend to place themselves in a passive role.

It's conservatives who are the aggressors, they claim, with Republicans driving "asymmetric polarization" while being cheered on by a right-wing media complex that cynically increases its own profits by encouraging a relentless march toward outright authoritarianism. And all of it is made possible by thebigotry racism, sexism, nativism, xenophobia, homophobia, and transphobia of the Republican rank-and-file, for whom cruelty is the entire point. Faced with this furious onslaught of anti-democratic rage, progressives merely insist on standing their ground, defending the rights of the oppressed against their historic and present-day oppressors.

As with most self-serving political narratives, there is considerable truth to this story. On some issues, Republicans have indeed moved further right. Donald Trump really did appeal to and activate dormant (or barely concealed) prejudices among some GOP voters. His lies especially those wrapped up with the 2020 election have been extraordinarily damaging to American democracy, far surpassing anything we've so far seen on the left.

Yet that doesn't mean progressives have been merely defensive in the culture wars. On the contrary, as a series of charts recently compiled by center-left political commentator Kevin Drum show, progressives have been aggressors, moving left further and faster than conservatives have moved right, on numerous issues wrapped with the country's cultural conflicts over the past two decades. If this is true, or even partly so, it complicates in an illuminating way the story of a unilaterally belligerent right and virtuously defensive left.

Drum'scharts coverpublic opinion over the past 20-25 years on a range of issues. The takeaways are striking. (I have interpreted the data somewhat differently than Drum on a few of the charts, so the conclusions I come to don't always match his.)

On immigration: Republican views have bounced around a lot since 2000, but the overall trajectory has been a shift of about five points in the more conservative (restrictionist) direction. Over that same period, Democrats have shifted about 35 points to the left, in favor of fewer restrictions.

On abortion: Since 2000, there has been a 7-8 percentage point rise in the number of Republicans holding the most extreme pro-life position (abortion should be illegal in all cases). Over the same time period, there has been a 20-point jump in the number of Democrats holding the most extreme pro-choice position (abortion should be legal in all cases). The middle position of "legal under certain conditions," meanwhile, is currently about 30 points more popular among Republicans than the extreme position. Among Democrats, the extreme and the moderate positions have been held by similar numbers for much of the past decade.

On same-sex marriage: Democrats have moved 50 points in the leftward direction since 1997, while Republicans have also moved left, though only by 39 points.

On guns: The GOP has become roughly 10 points more conservative (in favor of gun rights) over the past two decades, whereas Democrats have become about 20 points more liberal (in favor of gun restrictions).

On religion: Between 1998 and 2018, the number of Republicans describing themselves as "very" or "moderately" religious has bounced around between 65 and 75 percent. Democrats, by contrast, held mostly steady above 60 percent until around 2013, when a decline began that has left them at just under 50 percent.

All of these trends culminate in an additional chart Drum shares in a second blog post.

This one, from the Pew Research Center, shows the rise of political polarization from 1994-2017 in a series of graphs. Back in 1994, the two parties overlapped considerably, with the median Democrat and Republican quite close to each other. By 1999, both had slid left, though the median Democrat somewhat more so. Five years later, the median Republican had followed the Democrat leftward. The median Democrat didn't move much between then and 2011, but the median Republicanmoved significantly back to the right. Over the next three years, the parties moved away from each other, but between then and 2017, the median Democrat moved significantly to the left, with the median Republican staying mostly put.

Focusing on the median member of each party misses another dimension of the change over time. In addition to the center of each party pulling away from theother between 2011 and 2017, and the Democrats moving quite sharply left during the last three years covered by the graphs, the overlap between the parties as a whole has significantly diminished. That's the process of partisan polarization in visual form.

But the shape of each party's distribution of voters has also changed. Where both parties once looked like standard normal distributions, with the bulk of voters in the middle of theirrespectiveideological clusters, now the Republican hump (the place on the spectrum where the greatest numbers of voters are found) falls to the right side of its distribution and the Democratic hump falls on its left side. Moreover, the Democratic hump is higher than the Republican one, showing that Democrats now have somewhat greater ideological consensus in support for the left than the Republicans do in support for the right. This difference between the parties was also picked up in a widely discussed scatterplot of the 2016 electorate produced by the Voter Study Group. It showed that Democratic voters were more ideologically clustered than Republican voters.

What does all of this amount to?

For one thing, it shows that American polarization is happening much less asymmetrically than many Democrats would like to believe and that on certain issues wrapped up with the culture war, Democrats have moved further and faster to the left than Republicans have moved to the right. This has been obscured by a greater embrace of brinksmanship on the right, from willingness a decade ago to shut down the government and risk default on the debt to Trump's thoroughly reckless mendacity surrounding the 2020 election.

The GOP has also appeared to lurch especially far to the right because Trump flipped the party's official positions on immigration, trade, and (somewhat less so) foreign policy. But while those changes represented a genuine rightward shift of position for some, the evolution also brought the institutional party into greater alignment with the longstanding views of manyRepublican voters.

Why would progressives deny this reality? Aren't they committed to constantly pushing the moral envelope and furthering justice in our national life? One might think this would lead them to own these ideological shifts and speak of them with pride.

Yet doing so would require that they cede some of the moral high ground in their battles with conservatives, since it would undermine the preferred progressive narrative according to which the right is motivated entirely by bad faith and pure malice. The truth is more complicated. Conservatives genuinely believe themselves to be confronting an ever-changing, ever-expanding list of progressive demands backed up by the left's considerable cultural and political power. The right would be far less politically effective if the left did not continually provide it with evidence to verify the accusation.

This doesn't at all mean the left should surrender in the culture war in the hope that it will deprive the right of fuel for its own crusades. But it does mean that the left's actions in the culture war actually have an effect on what the right does, and vice versa. Too often progressives treat their own cultural commitments as following from self-evident and nonnegotiable moral imperatives rather than strategic political calculations.

Making progressive politics a little bit less about public displays of righteousness might help to encourage Democrats to choose their battles more wisely and soalso somewhat less inclined to pick fights with the right on immigration and abortion and guns and religious issues all at once. Maybe waging one or two culture-war battles while displaying intentional moderation on a few others would do much greater good by giving Democrats a modest electoral boost in a sharply divided country than taking bold moral stands on all of them and confirming the right's most paranoid claims about progressives ambitions.

But even if there is nothing directly to be gained from admitting the left's contribution to the culture war, it should still be encouraged because that contribution is real, and because a politics firmly rooted in reality is preferable to the politics of unpersuasivedenials.

Read the rest here:
The myth of asymmetric polarization - The Week Magazine

ANALYSIS/OPINION:

Critical race theory teaches that America and its institutions are systemically racist, and that some races are inherently oppressive and privileged while others are inherently oppressed and victimized (If critical race theory is correct, is America worth defending? Web, June 29). Which Americans will raise their hands and pledge an oath to support and defend our Constitution if theyre taught this document is inherently racist?

The military requires unit cohesion, high morale, good order and discipline and esprit de corps. After all, our troops face severe hardships during training, to say nothing of combat. Will we build or erode these key qualities of a strong fighting force if we teach young troops to see their battle buddies, as well as their sergeants and officers, first and foremost through the lens of race?

I served in Iraq and Afghanistan alongside soldiers of every race and background. We saw each other as fellow Americans and fellow soldiers, prepared to lay down our lives for each other and our country if necessary.

The recent extremism-in-the-ranks training was banal and, like so many other mandatory military trainings, it was a box easily checked. For those conservatives who feel that their views are suppressed, they can take comfort in the ubiquitous TV playing Fox News on a loop at so many military facilities. As for the chief of naval operationss reading list, I assure you that I continue the long tradition shared by many sailors of paying no heed to those recommendations.

Gen. Mark Milleys response at a recent congressional hearing was no doubt born out of a keen understanding that our military has many pressing issues and every breath wasted on the latest culture war is a distraction.

And that, let us recall, is the central mission of our military. If it ever fails, the consequences are not just, say, shareholder losses or more unemployable college graduates, but the eclipse of America by adversaries such as Communist China. Those are the stakes. Our military should stick to real wars, not culture wars.

BRIAN GOLDENFELD

Oak Park, Calif.

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LETTERS TO THE EDITOR: Military should stay out of culture wars - Washington Times

The GOP didnt start the culture wars, Sen. Tom Cotton told The Daily Caller News Foundation, but they owe it to normal Americans to stand up and fight back.

The liberals have been waging a culture war on normal Americans for a very long time now, and its well past time now for all Republicans to join it, fight it, and win it, Cotton, R-Ark., told The Daily Caller News Foundation during a June 29 interview in Sioux Center, Iowa.

Republican Study Committee Chairman Jim Banks, R-Ind.,sent an internal memo June 24urging his colleagues to fight back against the ideology of critical race theory and the racial essentialism that it teaches.

Heres the good news, Banks told Republicans, we are winning.

My encouragement to you islean into it, Banks added.

Cotton emphasized that Republicans did not start the culture wars, noting that even during former President Barack Obamas administration, Democrats were persecuting Catholic nuns, trying to force them to pay for birth control.

Cotton said, Fifteen to 20 years before that, no Democrat would have supported something like that, but the partys become so radical on some of these issues that they are far beyond asking for toleration for different ways of life, different viewpoints.

Democrats dont just want acceptance on political and religious matters, Cotton said, they want to enforce celebration and use the punitive power of the law and of the federal government to enforce their far-left worldview.

Its not even popular, not even with their own voters, certainly not with independents and Republicans, the Arkansas senator said. I think its important that Republicans realize normal Americans expect us to stand up and fight back, oftentimes in the name of common sense.

Cotton mentioned several areas where conservatives should push back against progressive agendas on commonsense grounds:

Of course, you should not have boys competing in girls sports, how is it fair to those girls? Of course, we should not teach our children the lie that America is fundamentally flawed or systematically racist, that you should be ashamed to live in America. We should teach them to be proud to live in the freest and greatest country in our history. We should teach them times weve failed to live up to our high ideals, but also teach them all the times weve made progress towards those ideals as well.

These are basic concepts, Cotton said, but liberal elites in Washington caught in their own bubble simply dont see this.

Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities for this original content, email [emailprotected].

Have an opinion about this article? To sound off, please email[emailprotected]and well consider publishing your edited remarks in our regular We Hear You feature. Remember to include the URL or headline of the article plus your name and town and/or state.

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Left Started Culture Wars, Sen. Tom Cotton Says, and 'Normal Americans Expect Us to Stand Up - Daily Signal

In the 1960s and 70s, conservatives were waging a war against what they considered an existential threat infiltrating Americas public schools. Pamphlets were circulated by the John Birch Society, a right-wing extremist group, declaring it a filthy Communist plot. And then-Governor Ronald Reagan of California decried it as a moral crisis that needed to be eradicated. What was poisoning the minds of Americas youth? Sex education.

These days, sex ed is more widely accepted, especially following the HIV/AIDS epidemic (though conservatives have still managed to beat back more progressive school curricula when it comes to sexual health), but the Republican Partys habit of identifying a bogeyman in Americas education system hasnt wavered.

Then it was sex ed. Now, its critical race theory.

Critical race theory is a legal scholarship framework that has been around in academia for four decades and asserts that racism is systemic and embedded in many American institutions. But over the past few months, the term has been co-opted by Republicans as a catch-all buzzword to signify the perceived threat of anti-white indoctrination in American schools. This has motivated a slate of proposed legislation outlawing a wide range of teachings. Since the start of this year, at least six states have enacted bans on the teaching of critical race theory or discussions of racism in the classrooms, according to a Brookings Institute analysis, while almost 20 other states have introduced similar bills. Moreover, a handful of states, like Florida and Texas, have also successfully banned the teaching of the New York Timess 1619 Project curriculum, which explores the central role of slavery in the development of the U.S. The project has been harshly criticized by conservatives who have accused its writers of recasting history through a racial lens. To be sure, the bills vary. Some bills mention critical race theory directly, while others only reference bans on divisive concepts or any teachings that imply one race or sex is inherently superior. But this concerted effort to limit what can be taught in our schools isnt new its the latest chapter in the GOPs long-standing push to target curricula that goes against its political ideology.

Republican attacks on cultural issues within Americas public schools follow a familiar pattern. First, theyre usually in response to a vague idea of what might happen that is, teaching sexual health might lead to more school-aged teenagers having sex (although theres actually been a decline in the percentage of American high schoolers having sex since the early 1990s). Second, when there is a debate over teaching often taboo, complex social issues, like racism, evolution and sex, elected school board members can exert an outsized amount of control. Considering school board members are more likely to be white and are often partisan, Republicans political agenda can get a disproportionate amount of weight in school board decisions. And if the contemporary Republican Party has taught us anything as of late, its that anti-wokeness is political catnip for its base, so its unlikely that this crusade goes away any time soon. In fact, because critical race theory deals so explicitly with racism and discrimination, it has arguably animated the GOP base in a way that previous education battles havent.

One of the oldest education battles revolves around the teaching of evolution. Its one that until recently didnt have clearly drawn partisan lines. After all, the most famous example of a legislative attempt to prohibit teaching evolution in schools was actually introduced by a Democrat: a 1925 Tennessee state law to ban teaching evolution in schools. That law was later challenged in a showy court case (complete with chimpanzees) that same year, where it was upheld, and ultimately not repealed until 1967. (It was also a Democrat who introduced a 1981 bill in Louisianas state legislature that mandated the teaching of creation science which presents religious beliefs as alternative scientific theories whenever evolution was taught. The Supreme Court has since banned states from requiring creation science to be taught, but it has remained a popular conservative cultural flashpoint.)

In the last two decades, Republicans at the state level have introduced over 100 bills aimed at undermining evolution, through tactics such as allowing teachers to question established scientific concepts. Most of these bills never go anywhere a 2016 study found just six anti-evolution bills out of 110 introduced between 2000 and 2012 were enacted into law but the fact that legislatures keep proposing them means one of the U.S. public education systems oldest bogeyman is still alive and well.

Similarly, sex education in public schools has long been a target of Republicans, although once it became clear that sex education programs actually help reduce the risk of teen pregnancy and STIs and delay the age when teens become sexually active, sex ed became more socially accepted. This means that Republicans opposed to sex ed have had to change their strategy to curtailing whats taught. Sixteen states, for instance, require educators to stress abstinence education and do not require anything be taught about contraception, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research organization that advances sexual and reproductive health and rights. Another popular strategy is giving parents the right to opt their child out of sex ed, or making sex ed opt-in to begin with.

And more recently, beginning in the late 2000s, a culture war clash emerged following the adoption of the Common Core State Standards Initiative a set of K-12 academic standards that was aggressively pushed by the federal government. While the initiative was designed to promote a good education by giving students specific guidelines about what they should know, grade by grade, in subjects like math and English language arts, it faced fierce opposition from Republicans and Democrats alike.

But around 2015, the Core standards became especially politicized by politicians on the right who thought curriculum standards should be left to local officials. For instance, when Donald Trump ran for the White House in 2016, his early ads argued that education has to be at a local level. And in 2018, Trumps former Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos falsely declared the Common Core was dead even though its up to individual states, and not the federal government, whether to ditch the Core standards.

Its clear culture war issues have always had a place in how Republicans think about education, but as Terry Moe, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, a conservative think tank, told us, Republicans also used to advocate for more policy-focused solutions. He pointed to Republican-led initiatives like the No Child Left Behind Act, which, in part, sought to use standardized testing to help improve student achievement. These kinds of initiatives have since received their own criticism, but they represent a very different strategy than the one that currently dominates the Republican Party.

The Republican Party has really gotten further and further away from being a party of ideas about how to solve social problems one of them being an education system that does not perform very well and becoming a party of anger and resentment. Thats what they specialize in now, Moe said. They are, for the most part, fighting a culture war against the Democrats and trying to pander to their base.

In that sense, critical race theory fits perfectly into the Republicans agenda, as its a cultural bugbear that conservatives have co-opted to encompass a range of trends they think are unpopular with Americans. (One of the lead architects pushing the anti-critical race theory backlash, Christopher Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, has said as much.) This is particularly true for topics centered specifically around race.

Theyre worried about what happens when a reckoning takes hold in their kids schools where their kids might learn some things about American history or about themselves or people like them that are uncomfortable truths, said Hakeem Jefferson, a FiveThirtyEight contributor and professor of political science at Stanford University. This is merely another example of white Americans using schools as sites of their racial political projects, which set out to maintain dominance and do so by way of not telling the full truth of American history.

Many Americans still dont know what the debate over critical race theory is really about at this point. Just 24 percent have heard a lot about it, 25 percent know some and 51 percent know little or nothing at all, according to a June Morning Consult/Politico poll. But tellingly, Republicans were more likely than Democrats to have seen, heard or read a lot about critical race theory, 30 percent versus 21 percent. Whats more, those Republicans familiar with critical race theory overwhelmingly dislike it 78 percent have a negative opinion of it compared to 7 percent of Democrats. When asked to describe critical race theory in that same survey, one Republican respondent called critical race theory a farce, while another said it was a Marxist proposal.

Considering how much more exposure Republicans have had to it a Media Matters analysis shows Fox News has mentioned critical race theory 1,300 times in less than four months, and a query of data on the social media tool CrowdTangle from researchers at Miami University and Wright State University found that the share of posts that mention critical race theory on the Facebook pages of local Republican parties has risen exponentially the blowback among members of the GOP is not entirely surprising. Its also not just the volume of coverage: The conservative medias coverage of critical race theory is overwhelmingly negative, too, as its decried by some on the right as anti-white.

Republicans have long fought specters within education that they claim threaten the American way of life. The current blowback against critical race theory follows in that tradition, but it also represents a broader transformation of the GOP into a populist party focused on waging culture wars. Though it may seem like a misguided crusade-du-jour, the tumult around critical race theory is both a reflection of the Republican Partys past and a glimpse at its future.

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First It Was Sex Ed. Now Its Critical Race Theory. - FiveThirtyEight