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No one is trying to cancel Green Eggs & Ham. No one is trying to cancel Dr. Seuss. If either of those things were happening, that would certainly be a big story, bolstering the narrative being pushed by those obsessed with illiberalism on the left. Instead, Dr. Seuss Enterprises is updating its standards in a way that has long precedent. The estate of the Belgian cartoonist Herg, for example, did the same thing with some of his works, most notably the infamous Tintin in the Congo. (And if thats your thing, you can still buy it online!)

What principle is at stake here? It is still not clear. Yascha Mounk conjured a good-faith argument out of thin air, claiming that there was an actual furordriven by people upset that some books of one of Americas most beloved authors will no longer be published and that these fans were genuinely upset by this news. But again, these are books selling in the hundreds of copies, competing with other, more popular Dr. Seuss titles that litter every childs bedroom in this country. If people were outraged, it was based on the suggestion that all of Dr. Seusss works were being pulled from circulation.

People like Mounk want to elevate this controversy to Fahrenheit 451 levels, making it a question of intellectual freedom and censorship. But the actual argument, as far as I can tell, boils down to this: that racist caricatures of nonwhite people are not a sufficient justification for ceasing to produce new copies of a book.

This is all reminiscent of another very dumb recent controversy. Last week, the right erupted over news that Mr. Potato Head would now be simply a gender-neutral Potato Headyet another example, the usual suspects shouted, of the left imposing its values on everyone else. Never mind that Mr. Potato Head is gender neutral by designyou can make it look however you want! Never mind that the allegation also wasnt trueHasbro was still making Mr. and Mrs. Potato Heads, it had just changed the name of the umbrella brand. And never mind that, in the end, its a toy potato.

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Dr. Seuss! Mr. Potato Head! Why the Culture Wars Have Never Been Dumber - The New Republic

Whatever we once were, then senator Barack Obama declared in 2006, we are no longer just a Christian nation; we are also a Jewish nation, a Muslim nation, a Buddhist nation, a Hindu nation, and a nation of nonbelievers. The statement was both descriptive and aspirational. Because the United States has many varieties of Christianity and many religious minorities, Obama argued, democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values. Democracy itself unites Americans of all faiths and those of no faith.

Obamas invocation of both religious diversity and democracy resonated with many Americans, but it also met with pushback. During the 2008 campaign, John McCain gingerly but repeatedly described the United States as a Christian nation. In the years that followed, conservative Christians sought a political savior who would preserve freedoms they insisted were under assault.

What were we? What are we? How do we dream the landscape of American religion? asks K. Healan Gaston. Terms such as Christian, multireligious, and secular are at once descriptive, aspirational, and even coercive. Gaston excavates the history of one such dream, that of a Judeo-Christian America.

The term Judeo-Christian first gained broad currency in the 1930s, when educators, theologians, and scholars used it to differentiate the democratic West from both the Nazi and Soviet forms of totalitarianism. Today, Americans who have any knowledge of the construct tend to associate it with a midcentury movement of inclusion, with a tri-faith America in which Protestants finally extended toleration to Catholics and Jews.

The story is not nearly so simple and sunny, Gaston argues. The loose consensus that began to form around the idea of a Judeo-Christian tradition . . . masked profound and deeply political divisions. Gaston divides Americans who embraced the label into two rough camps, pluralists and exceptionalists.

When pluralists spoke of Judeo-Christian America, they leaned on civic definitions of American identity, definitions that stressed a commitment to a shared set of democratic assumptions and values. Pluralists used the term not to suggest that only Christians and Jews could be good Americans but as a shorthand way of inviting religious minorities and even nonbelievers into the public sphere.

The exceptionalists, by contrast, argued that American democracy would perish unless its citizens hewed to certain modes of Christian and Jewish faith. Few Jews found any version of Judeo-Christian rhetoric attractive, but they especially recoiled at exceptionalist critiques of secularism and attempts to undermine the separation of church and state. Jews knew that many Americans lauded Judeo-Christian values while working to make the public sphere more explicitly Christian and Protestant, not more inclusive. Indeed, many Protestant defenders of the Judeo-Christian civilization spoke disparagingly about Judaism and expressed hopes that Jews would come to their senses and convert to Christianity.

Still, the idea of Judeo-Christian America flowered during and after the Second World War. Reinhold Niebuhr and Will Herberg rarely used the exact term, but they popularized the idea that only explicit and vigorous formulations of Christianity and Judaism could underpin democracy against godless communism. As the Vatican made peace with religious diversity and the separation of church and state, increasing numbers of Catholic leaders found the idea of tri-faith America useful, especially when Protestants joined them in denouncing Supreme Court decisions that held school-led prayer and Bible reading unconstitutional.

By the mid-1960s, the fragile consensus about Judeo-Christian America broke down. Pluralists now found the constraints of Judeo-Christianity far too narrow, and they defended the place of other religious minorities and nonbelievers in American civic life. As pluralists abandoned the phrase, exceptionalists waved the Judeo-Christian banner all the more fervently.

The term was especially useful to Republican politicians courting the votes of evangelicals. In August 1980, Ronald Reagan made a campaign stop at the National Affairs Briefing, addressing an audience of 15,000 conservative Protestants. Traditional Judeo-Christian values based on the moral teaching of religion, Reagan warned, are undergoing what is perhaps their most serious challenge in our nations history. As Gaston notes, no president employed the rhetoric of Judeo-Christianity more frequently than Reagan. It lent a veneer of inclusivity to his courtship of evangelical voters. I know that you cant endorse me, he quipped at the National Affairs Briefing, but . . . I want you to know that I endorse you. (Gaston might have included the irony that Southern Baptist leader Bailey Smith told the same gathering that God Almighty does not hear the prayer of a Jew.)

By the 21st century, the idea of Judeo-Christian America was confined to one part of the American political spectrum. Less artfully than Reagan, but no less effectively, Donald Trump blended Judeo-Christian rhetoric with pandering to evangelicals. We are stopping cold the attacks on Judeo-Christian values, President Trump told the Values Voter Summit in 2017. Were saying Merry Christmas again. Forget Hanukkah.

Gaston presses us to contemplate fundamental questions about American identity and democracy. Can Americans know who they are . . . without delineating who they are not? She doesnt provide definitive answers to such thorny questions, but she rightly warns us to ask how our fears and hatreds shape the way we describe the United States. In the future, as in the past, Gaston concludes, our dreams of America will powerfully shape our language and our actions alike.

Dreams or nightmares? January 2021 provided a window into some of those fears and hatreds, a toxic mixture of misogyny and White supremacy rooted in the culture wars of the past several decades. With right-wing insurrectionists pledging their allegiance to both Donald Trump and Jesus Christ while engaging in mass violence, the Cold Warera idea that secular Americans threatened American democracy seems laughable today.

Gastons book serves as both a patient prehistory of this moment and a necessary caution. Unity is elusive. All labels divide. Inevitably, some groupsfairly or unfairlyfeel unwelcome in the public sphere. While Christian nationalists represent a clear threat to democracy, the overwhelming majority of conservative Protestants do not. All Americans are prone to project their fears and hatreds onto others.

We sorely need religious and political leaders to seek common ground with all Americansregardless of beliefs and practices, regardless of party and policieswho are committed to democracy and our constitutional order. That process isnt sacred, but it is still our best civic hope, something to keep dreaming for.

A version of this article appears in the print edition under the title A Judeo-Christian nation?

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How the dream of a Judeo-Christian America shaped the culture wars - The Christian Century

PARIS Stepping up its attacks on social science theories that it says threaten France, the French government announced this week that it would launch an investigation into academic research that it says feeds Islamo-leftist tendencies that corrupt society.

News of the investigation immediately caused a fierce backlash among university presidents and scholars, deepening fears of a crackdown on academic freedom especially on studies of race, gender, post-colonial studies and other fields that the French government says have been imported from American universities and contribute to undermining French society.

While President Emmanuel Macron and some of his top ministers have spoken out forcefully against what they see as a destabilizing influence from American campuses in recent months, the announcement marked the first time that the government has moved to take action.

It came as Frances lower house of Parliamentpassed a draft law against Islamism, an ideology it views as encouraging terrorist attacks, and as Mr. Macron tilts further to the right, anticipating nationalist challenges ahead of elections next year.

Frdrique Vidal, the minister of higher education, said in Parliament on Tuesday that the state-run National Center for Scientific Research would oversee an investigation into the totality of research underway in our country, singling out post-colonialism.

In an earlier television interview, Ms. Vidal said the investigation would focus on Islamo-leftism a controversial term embraced by some of Mr. Macrons leading ministers to accuse left-leaning intellectuals of justifying Islamism and even terrorism.

Islamo-leftism corrupts all of society and universities are not impervious, Ms. Vidal said, adding that some scholars were advancing radical and activist ideas. Referring also to scholars of race and gender, Ms. Vidal accused them of always looking at everything through the prism of their will to divide, to fracture, to pinpoint the enemy.

France has since early last century defined itself as a secular state devoted to the ideal that all of its citizens are the same under the law, to the extent that the government keeps no statistics on ethnicity and religion.

A newly diversifying society, and the lasting marginalization of immigrants mostly from its former colonies, has tested those precepts. Calls for greater awareness of discrimination have met opposition from a political establishment that often views them as an invitation to American multiculturalism and as a threat to Frances identity and social cohesion.

In unusually blunt language, the academic world rejected the governments accusations. The Conference of University Presidents on Tuesday dismissed Islamo-leftism as a pseudo notion popularized by the far right, chiding the governments discourse as talking rubbish.

The National Center for Scientific Research, the state organization that the minister ordered to oversee the investigation, suggested on Wednesday that it would comply, but it said it firmly condemned attacks on academic freedom.

The organization said it especially condemned attempts to delegitimize different fields of research, like post-colonial studies, intersectional studies and research on race.

Opposition by academics hardened on Thursday, when the association that would actually carry out the investigation, Athna, put out a sharply worded statement saying that it was not its responsibility to conduct the inquiry.

The seemingly esoteric fight over social science theories which has made the front page of at least three of Frances major newspapers in recent days points to a larger culture war in France that has been punctuated in the past year by mass protests over racism and police violence, competing visions of feminism, and explosive debates over Islam and Islamism.

It also follows years of attacks, large and small, by Islamist terrorists, that have killed more than 250 French, including in recent months three people at a basilica in Nice and a teacher who was beheaded.

While the culture war is being played out in the media and in politics, it has its roots in Frances universities. In recent years, a new, more diverse generation of social science scholars has embraced studies of race, gender and post-colonialism as tools to understand a nation that has often been averse to reflect on its history or on subjects like race and racism.

They have clashed with an older generation of intellectuals who regard these social science theories as American imports though many of the thinkers behind race, gender and post-colonialism are French or of other nationalities.

Mr. Macron, who had shown little interest in the issues in the past, has won over many conservatives in recent months by coming down hard against what he has called certain social science theories entirely imported from the United States.

In a major speech on Islamism last fall, Mr. Macron talked of children or grandchildren of Arab and African immigrants revisiting their identity through a post-colonial or anticolonial discourse falling into a trap set by people who use this discourse as a form of self-hatred nurtured against France.

In recent months, Mr. Macron has moved further to the right as part of a strategy to draw support from his likely main challenger in next years presidential election, Marine Le Pen, the far-right leader. Polls show that Mr. Macrons edge has shrunk over Ms. Le Pen, who was his main rival in the last election.

Chlo Morin, a public opinion expert at the Fondation Jean-Jaurs, a Paris-based research group, said that Mr. Macrons political base has completely shifted to the right and that his ministers use of the expression Islamo-leftism speaks to the right-wing electorate.

It has perhaps become one of the most effective terms for discrediting an opponent, Ms. Morin said.

Last fall, Mr. Macrons ministers adopted a favorite expression of the far right, ensauvagement, or turning savage, to decry supposedly out-of-control crime even though the governments own statistics showed that crime was actually flat or declining.

Marwan Mohammed, a French sociologist and expert on Islamophobia, said that politicians have often used dog-whistlewords, like ensauvagement or Islamo-leftism, to divide the electorate.

I think the government will be offering us these kinds of topics with a regular rhythm until next years presidential elections, Mr. Mohammed said, adding that these heated cultural debates distracted attention from the governments mishandling of the coronavirus epidemic, the economic crisis and even the epidemic-fueled crisis at the nations universities.

The expression Islamo-leftism was first coined in the early 2000s by the French historian Pierre-Andr Taguieff to describe what he saw as a political alliance between far-left militants and Islamist radicals against the United States and Israel.

More recently, it has been used by conservative and far-right figures and now by some of Mr. Macrons ministers against those they accuse of being soft on Islamism and focusing instead on Islamophobia.

Experts on Islamophobia examine how hostility toward Islam, rooted in Frances colonial experience, continues to shape the lives of French Muslims. Critics say their focus is a product of American-style, victim-based identity politics.

Mr. Taguieff, a leading critic of American universities, said in a recent email that Islamophobia, along with the totally artificial importation in France of the American-style Black question sought to create the false narrative of systemic racism in France.

Sarah Mazouz, a sociologist at the National Center for Scientific Research, said that the governments attacks on these social theories highlight the difficulty of the French state to think of itself as a state within a multicultural society.

She said the use of the expression Islamo-leftism was aimed at delegitimizing these new studies on race, gender and other subjects, so that the debate does not take place.

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Heating Up Culture Wars, France to Scour Universities for Ideas That Corrupt Society - The New York Times

It was a rain-sodden Friday night at the end of another week of lockdown ennui and anxiety; what could be more soothing than pottering about, aperitif on the go, listening to some decent tunes? And hark! A brand new radio station to ring the changes, one promising not merely a schedule brimming with aural treats but one carefully curated to reflect the tastes, the sensibilities and the vitality of an entire generation.

Boom Radio, launched last week on Valentines Day, set its stall out in uncompromising fashion, with a poem, an Ode to Boomers that is part mild grievance (You are the original influencer, it insists, there when music was fearless and came from the heart, when live performances were more than an experience to film on your phone) and part rallying cry to the postwar babies who, it says, changed the world and are still running at full speed (Theres still too much to live/Too much to love). As I listened, adverts for fresh-fish deliveries and Dormeo mattresses punctuated a beguilingly odd mixture of numbers from post-Manfred Mann Paul Jones, Tom Petty and Jamie Cullum.

Friday nights host and, in Groundhog Day fashion, also Saturday mornings was Roger Twiggy Day, an alumnus of Radio Caroline and Manchesters Piccadilly Radio, more recently heard on the Costa Blancas Bay Radio, which explains why he was celebrating falling Covid infection rates not merely in the UK but also in Spain. He has a pleasantly random presenting style, flexible enough to take in the challenges of getting to grips with new technology, exhortations to cheeriness No gloom on Boom! and, somewhat startlingly, an expression of sadness at the recent death of US talk radio controversialist Rush Limbaugh.

But early-days output is often a little uneven, and Boom Radio has some heavyweight expertise behind it, not least in the shape of industry veterans Phil Riley, who launched the listener-magnet Heart FM and relaunched LBC, and David Lloyd, who has done his time at several radio stations and the UK Radio Authority, now part of Ofcom. They have identified the UKs 14 million boomers, noticed the money in their pockets, and realised that in the great identity-driven media land-grab, they are catnip to advertisers.

Alongside Day, theyve signed up DJs David Kid Jensen, David Diddy Hamilton and Nicky Horne. Esther Rantzen will chat to her daughter, Rebecca Wilcox; distinguished agony aunt Anna Raeburn will advise on listeners problems; Grahame Dene, who inherited Kenny Everetts breakfast show for Capital in the 1970s, will wake them up every morning.

Booms overwhelming message is one of empowerment, its mantra also the title of Rileys interview show, which today features Chris Tarrant that its audience is Still Busy Living. And it is not alone in understanding that, as platforms and technologies converge, audiences themselves are ripe for atomisation. Bubbles whatever defines them are how to maximise returns on investment.

Hence, of course, the emergence of Andrew Neils GB News, busy signing up a roster of presenters from Sky News and TalkRadio; hence the boom of TalkRadio itself, whose most voluble and contrarian presenters, from Julia Hartley-Brewer to Dan Wootton and the mask-ripping Mark Dolan, have created a very special niche for themselves during the pandemic by taking a position of so-called lockdown scepticism.

Age, though, is something else. Who are these boomers? I am listening to Boom Radio illegally, as it were; I was born four years after its official cut-off birth year of 1964 and must, I suppose, wait for a radio station dedicated entirely to me. But my partner himself a radio broadcaster, and music addict sneaks under the wire. I shout downstairs for him to come and listen to this new channel created for him, but he is too busy curating his own experience, playing his collection of singles by the reggae genius, U-Roy, who also died last week. What else is on his turntable at the moment, I ask? Fontaines DC and Fiona Apple, comes the answer.

And therein lies the issue. If you love music, you dont stop listening to it; you dont freeze it in time and, as much as you cherish and replay the songs of your youth indeed, your Big Youth you make room for the new.

Which is not to say that Boom Radio isnt on to something. Nostalgia is big business; but so too is the creation of identity silos, in which those who feel or, indeed, might be encouraged to feel that their needs are not catered to will be welcomed and made to feel at home.

In a broader context, covertly pitting the generations against one another has become a disquieting feature of our collective psyches problems. Greedy old people flouncing us out of Europe and millennials splurging their house deposits on flat whites and avocado toast are equally pernicious caricatures of disparate groups of people that foster mistrust and division.

The biggest problem with the culture wars? Theres so little culture in them. Reliant on a view of humans as unchanging, incurious and desperate to set up gated communities from which to defend their territory against all-comers, they ignore the opportunity for flexibility and renewal, for difference and diversity.

It would be unfair, of course, to project all this on to a pleasant enough radio station which, as I type, is belting out Barbra Streisand. Because, lets face it, young or old, we all love a bit of Barbra.

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Hello, boomers radio. How did you end up in the culture wars? - The Guardian

Traditional Tories and working-class converts agree on culture but little else

Feb 20th 2021

LONG BEFORE he or any of his readers had ever heard the term, Boris Johnson cast himself as the antithesis of all that is woke. His columns in the Daily Telegraph, the house journal of the Tory Party, took aim at assaults on common sense, real or imagined. If political correctness is not resisted, it will go on and on, becoming more and more irrational, he wrote. Even then, he had an eye on the culture war raging across the Atlantic. He praised the counter-revolutionaries opposing a ban on British fox-hunting, noting that their protest march was organised by an American who understands the weapons that must be used in the Kulturkampf.

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Mr Johnson has hardly changed his tune since becoming prime minister. He made clear his displeasure at the absurd form-filling initially required of volunteers helping with the rollout of the covid-19 vaccine and insisted last year that Rule, Britannia! be played at the Proms, an annual festival of music and pomp. This week, two more such sallies were enthusiastically trailed by his former employer as a major government escalation of the war on woke.

The first is an attempt by Gavin Williamson, the education secretary, to protect guest speakers at universities whose views cause offence. Mr Williamson plans to expand the scope of a legal duty to promote freedom of speech on campus to cover not just university authorities but also student unions, in the hope of preventing controversial talks being cancelled.

Such instances are rarea study at Kings College London found freedom of expression had been infringed at only six of about 15,000 events over five yearsbut attract considerable publicity. And there is more evidence that students and academics censor their own views for fear of adverse reaction from peers. Polling for Policy Exchange, a right-leaning think-tank, found only four in ten Leave-supporting students would be comfortable expressing their views about Brexit in class.

The second concerns the past. Oliver Dowden, the culture secretary, has reportedly called a meeting to urge museum and charity bigwigs to defend Britains culture and history. The National Trust, a charity that tends historic houses and gardens, caused a fuss by highlighting the colonial ties of its properties and their original owners; other bodies are mulling the removal of statues of figures such as slave-traders who are now considered villains of the empire. Mr Dowden wants the statues to stay, arguing that confident countries do not airbrush the history upon which they are founded.

Such worries may seem rather small during a pandemic that has closed the museums Mr Dowden is fretting about and cancelled even the least controversial university events. Nor do most voters care about cultural issues as much as vocal lobbies on either side. In a poll for The Economist last year, more than twice as many Britons thought the empire a source of pride than one of shame. But just under half of those polled reckoned it was neither or had no opinion.

That will not prevent more skirmishes in the culture wars. Senior Tories argue that such fights help them unite two distinct types of Conservative voter: Telegraph-reading traditionalists in southern England and working-class voters in red wall seats in northern England and Wales who switched from Labour to the Tories in 2019. That is probably true. Paula Surridge of Bristol University has shown that Labour did particularly poorly among left-leaning voters with authoritarian views, a good proxy for cultural issues. Support for Labour among such voters dropped by 17% between 2017 and 2019, the biggest decline among any group of voters. Not all cultural issues resonate equally. Voters who did not go to university themselves are unlikely to be concerned about campus politics, says one of the new breed of Tory MP, who represents an ex-mining constituency. But they are receptive to appeals to defend British history. Theres a huge sense of pride, he says.

There are two problems with the strategy. Sir Keir Starmer, who replaced Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader last spring, does not share his predecessors lack of enthusiasm for the national anthem and the queen. A greater danger for the Tories is that culture is just about the only topic on which their old and new voters agree. As the pandemic recedes, the government will have to make choices about the future role of the state and how to steady the nations finances, which cannot please both camps. How much easier, then, to put off such thorny decisions and play a little more Elgar.

This article appeared in the Britain section of the print edition under the headline "Bonfire of the insanities"

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Bonfire of the insanities - Tories bet on culture wars to unite disparate voters | Britain - The Economist