Mediaboss Marketing

Donald Trump made a lot of promises during the 2016 campaign. Four years later, it has been mostly a relief to see them all broken. Theres the big, beautiful border wall, still largely a figment of the Presidents imagination (as was Mexicos interest in paying for it.) A plan to replace the Affordable Care Act, supposedly just around the corner for years, clearly does not exist. And despite much bloviating to the contrary, multiple Hillary Clinton sightings in the months and years following the election confirm that she is not, in fact, locked up.

But perhaps most importantly, Trump made a lot of noise about extricating America from endless wars instead, hes left us embedded in a brand new one.

The Culture Wars are our new Forever War. They are all-encompassing and constant; there is nothing they do not touch. Books and movies, basketball courts and football fields, late night television and daytime talk shows, art museums and corporate offices. Somewhere in between the rise of woke capitalism, the fall of the girlboss, Melissa McCarthys Sean Spicer impression, and the deep-dive investigative reports on whether Star-Lord might be a secret Republican, the entire cultural landscape has become a battlefield. Unlike our actual military engagements, participation in this war is not optional. Everything is political, including being apolitical; if youre not with us, youre one of them.

Even before pandemic lockdowns, police violence and mass protests ramped tensions up to a fever pitch, the political capture of the national consciousness was already in the works. If Donald Trumps campaign for the presidency ignited a spark of awareness, his election turned it into a wildfire. In place of frivolous trends, we now had haute-couture emblazoned with Not My President; institutions like Saturday Night Live and The Late Show stopped looking for laughs and went all-in on clapter (perhaps understanding that the alternative was four years of nonstop anguished screaming.) Even now, with what appears to be the end of the Trump presidency looming ever closer, the entertainment landscape is pretty much Resistance cheerleading as far as the eye can see.

The question, then, is what happens if (or, inshallah, when) we wake up on November 4 to a victory for Joe Biden? After four years of dialed-up-to-11 political engagement, does all that energy just evaporate?

***Get a digital subscription toThe Spectator.Try a month free, then just $3.99 a month***

Some folks the single-issue voters who just want to make America normal again would answer that question with a resounding Yes, please. Perhaps they imagine 2021 as the year when the nation will collectively unclench its sphincter and breathe a sigh of relief; when athletes will go back to being famous for their ability to play sports; when people neither want nor expect their lipstick, snack foods, and grocery store to swear loyalty oaths to the proper politics; when people neither know nor care who the Incredible Hulk voted for.

But even if we still remember how to be normal, even if we could get back there, would we? Will anyone believe, after this, that its safe to let our guard down? Electing a Democrat to office is no guarantee; after all, we had eight years of President Obama to make us complacent, and look how that turned out. Even if America evicts Trump in November, the traumatic effects of his presidency wont just disappearand maybe more to the point, some of us, the ones whove existed since 2016 in a state of aggrieved symbiosis with the Orange Man, will be loathe to just let it go. Breathing a collective sigh of relief, and getting down to the business of governing, would require relinquishing the drama of the Trump years that has been both an addiction and a livelihood to so many. News organizations will have to find something else to write about; comedians will have to get new material; people who constructed an entire identity around underdog resistance will have to accept the obscurity that follows victory and the hard, unglamorous work of leveraging power productively.

But those people, the dedicated culture warriors, are few and far between especially compared to the majority, who are, above all things, exhausted. Thats the thing about forever wars: the longer they rage on, the more apathy they breed among people who would, at some point, like to stop resisting and start living again. And since the populist right, despite eking out a narrow win in 2016, have never been much for mass organizing (compare the multiple thousands in attendance at the various Womens Marches to the hundred or so screaming tiki-torchers who constitute a right-wing rally), a hopeful vision of the US under a Biden presidency emerges. Not normal, necessarily, but at least less noisy. Its a start.

Continued here:
Culture war forever - The Spectator US

Since his election, it has become an article of conventional wisdom that Donald Trumps presidency was not an aberration or a brief historical detour but heralded the beginning of a political realignment. Some on the right decry the dead consensus of yesteryear and call for a new conservatism, one less scrupulous about its traditional adherence to American constitutionalism, taking no prisoners in new culture wars, and upending the decade-long consensus in U.S. foreign policy in favor of a nationalist outlook. On the left, meanwhile, woke-ism and its young radical voices have mounted a challenge to liberal orthodoxies.

Yet if one sees Trumps presidency with all its idiosyncrasies as a contingent result of fewer than 80,000 votes in just three states, and not as an authentic expression of the will of the peopleremember, he received nearly 3 million fewer votes than Hillary Clintonthen the idea that nothing will ever be the same again finds itself on less firm ground. More importantly, political and ideological shifts are not result of vast, impersonal historical forces. Rather, such shifts are products of human agency, intellectual leadership, and political entrepreneurship. The question of how lasting a footprint Trump and Trumpism will leave is up to the people who make up the Republican party and the conservative movement.

If Trump is soundly defeated on November 3, the GOP will have an opportunity similar to that provided to the U.K.s Labour Party after its crushing defeat in the general election last year. Jeremy Corbyns radicalism did not disappear under Keir Starmers leadershipbut it has been firmly relegated to the partys fringes. Similarly, if Trump is repudiated by the voting public, those who care about the long-term viability of conservatism should seize the months that follow to reject some of the ideas and tendencies that have characterized Trumpism. They should be buried alongside Trumps presidency, alongside his unhinged political style, alongside his penchant for conspiracies and racism. Here are five of them.

While the center-right and the center-left need to adapt, political life in the United States does not need successor ideologies to liberalism and conservatism. If conservatives want to be constructive actors in Americas political life, they have to rediscover their appreciation of the importance of fiscal probity, free markets, thriving families, and American leadership in the worldadjusted, of course, to the realities of the 21st century.

The caveat is important, because critics are correct in pointing out that the partysand the movementsmonomania with marginal tax rates and size of government are increasingly out of sync with a reality in which a dynamic market economy has to be complemented and even sustained by robust social safety nets and government-provided infrastructure. Likewise, in the light of seemingly fruitless interventions in the Middle East and new realities such as Chinas growing assertiveness, Americas centrist foreign policy consensus needs a rethink and a recalibration. Climate change is not a hoax and needs thoughtful policy responses from conservatives, compatible with the worlds and Americas long-term economic prosperity.

Still, the fusionism of free-marketeers, social conservatives, and foreign policy hawks has by and large served the center-right well. Instead of trying to destroy it and replace it with some half-baked nationalist ideology, it is time to update it and clean it of unhinged and nativist undertones brought to the foreground under Trumps presidency.

Not so long ago, the GOP could credibly claim to be the party of policy ideas, good or bad. Its platform in 2020, however, is limited to its enthusiastic support of President Trump. Republicans recent legislative accomplishments are scarce, perhaps with the exception of a run-of-the-mill tax reform. Instead, the partys and the conservative movements energy lies in fighting cultural wars, emoting, and tweeting memes, providing evidence for the writer Bruno Maess thesis that political life in America has become unmoored from reality, moving to the realm of fiction and entertainment.

As an aside, woke-ism, with its emphasis on symbols, words, and imperceptible slights as opposed to policy reform, provides a similar temptation to Americas left. Yet policies still matter, and the current flight of Americas political class from reality, accelerated by the countrys tweeter- and entertainer-in-chief, has real-world consequencesas the country has learned the hard way during the current pandemic. Yet, the looming defeat of Republicans at the hand of the most anodyne, conventional, and uninspiring candidate in decades should be a wake-up call. Perhaps the politics of tribalism and owning the libs is a dead end after all.

No, America is not on the verge of descending into a totalitarian dystopia if the other side winsno matter who is on the other side today or in 2024. After all, the very fact that the United States government has survived four years of Trump largely intact is a testament not simply to its resiliency but also to its highly complex, unwieldy naturewhich does not make it susceptible to the sudden, autocratic centralization of power observed in countries such as Hungary or the Philippines. It is true that the United States is heavily polarized and that its present environment is unlikely to provide respite from the all-encompassing cultural conflicts. Still, contrary to the hopes of those who want to see the public square re-ordered to the common good and ultimately the Highest Good, seeking to use national politics as the venue to settle such conflicts is a disastrous idea, risking tearing America apart. But what if the current woke-ism on the political left gets out of control, you ask? Especially in those circumstances it is the job of adults on the center-right to bring down the temperature by reaching out to concerned left-of-center liberalsinstead of thoughtlessly upping the ante.

One can argue that Trumps admittedly crude version of foreign policy realism provided a helpful corrective both to neoconservative overreach and to the blind faith in historical progress. In that sense, there is a legitimate place for a dose of foreign policy realism in both parties, balanced by a clear moral compass and long-term vision of Americas place in the world.

Some Trump admirers see his gut instincts and his disruptive behavior as a foundation for a distinctly realist approach that could guide U.S. foreign policy in the coming years and perhaps become the defining feature of the GOPs foreign policy outlook. Jeremy Stern, Ambassador Richard Grenells ex-chief of staff, argues in realist terms that future administrations ought to break free of the West, namely our traditional European and other allies, and presumably forge partnerships with undemocratic and nationalist regimesas long as doing so gives the United States leverage over its adversaries.

But while working with unsavory regimes and being aware of our and of other nations interests is necessary, unchecked foreign policy realism can be as reckless as its intellectual alternatives, if not more. For one, Americas principles and its moral standing in the world are not burdens but our most valuable foreign policy assets. And for all the deals that can (and occasionally should) be struck with the worlds autocrats, the United States will never have better and more reliable friends than the democracies of the North Atlantic space, with which we are bound by much more than a fleeting alignment of interests.

As a general rule, openness to trade and immigration has not come at the cost of Americas workers. Technological change accounts for a much greater proportion of destroyed jobs than international trade and immigration. Efforts to impose tariffs during the Trump era have been overwhelmingly counterproductive for job creation and economic dynamism. Likewise, halting working-age immigration is bound to reduce growth prospects, especially given the demographic headwinds the U.S. economy is going to face in the coming decades. To be sure, openness to trade and immigration leads to dislocationhence the need for robust domestic policies fostering social and geographic mobility, and providing a degree of economic security to those who need it. But if the post-Trump GOP becomes the party of pulling up drawbridges, ham-fisted immigration policies, tariffs on imports from our closest allies, or attacks on the World Trade Organization, it will deserve to lose much more than the November election.

Read the original:
Five Trump-Era Ideas That Should End with His Presidency - The Bulwark

A Binghamton University historian argues in a new book that Americans are not divided when it comes to the teaching of evolution: The real disagreements relate to creationism.

I dont want to make anyone an atheist, says Adam Laats, a professor in the Department of Teaching, Learning, and Educational Leadership at Binghamton. No public school should have that as its goal, just like no public school should be trying to teach kids any religious idea, which would include creationism.

Laats new book, Creationism USA: Bridging the Impasse on Teaching Evolution, was published in October by Oxford University Press.

Creationism is a private issue, and most Americans are some kind of creationists, Laats says. Most Americans have some sort of belief that, you know, all this didnt just happen.

A Gallup poll last year found that 40% of American adults believe God created humankind within the past 10,000 years. Another third of those polled said humans evolved over millions of years with Gods guidance. Just 22% said they thought humans evolved without any divine intervention.

Most people who are creationists want their kids to learn evolution in schools, Laats says. Its not a problem.

The problem arises when people insist that their particular religious beliefs form part of the curriculum. Laats sees two key characteristics of what he terms radical creationism.

The first is that it disputes the legitimacy of mainstream science. Radical creationists say mainstream science is entirely wrong, he says. Evolutionary science cant be right.

The other part is that radical creationists try to impose their beliefs into the public square. That includes public schools, but also questions such as: Should there be a prayer before a public meeting? Should people say Merry Christmas instead of Happy Holidays?

A former middle school and high school teacher, Laats says researching this book helped him understand certain anti-science attitudes present in the country today.

The 2020 political moment, this crisis-fueled moment, has parallels in the history of creationism, he says. Understanding that history helps people understand how it is possible that some large number of Americans have confidence in these statements that seem, to me, patently false.

Laats says theres a pattern going back to the 1960s of aggressively dissident, competing science that today is expressed when someone labels facts as fake news. Its not that someone like Scott Atlas, a physician and advisor to the White House coronavirus taskforce, hasnt heard what epidemiologists are saying about the pandemic. Its that they dispute the legitimacy of the people with whom they disagree, Laats says. And were experiencing an acute outbreak at the very top. Its very easy for people to dismiss what seem like they might be obvious in-your-face truths if you dismiss the source of those ideas.

Although debates surrounding creationism have certain elements in common with controversies about climate science, Laats says its not a fair comparison.

They get lumped together because theyre the two most prominent science denialism issues out there, he says, but they actually have both different histories and different trajectories. Climate change denialism is a lot more like tobacco science.

Large, well-funded tobacco companies paid to have scientists go over peer-reviewed reports in the 1950s and 60s and issue statements highlighting the limitations of findings about the dangers of smoking. Some people who cast doubt on climate science have similar financial motivations, Laats says.

Its a deliberate, well-funded, intentional, cynical attempt to spread ignorance, or at least doubt about established science, he says.

The creationism debate isnt rooted in money, for the most part.

For science educators, this has been an issue for 50 years. And for many of them, it feels outlandish, Laats says. How can there be a debate? Its not a debate. Theres science. And then theres this other thing.

Hes optimistic that American schools will continue to teach mainstream scientific principles related to evolution. Even the most ardent anti-evolution groups, like Answers in Genesis, want their kids to learn evolution, Laats says. They just dont trust people like me to teach it to their kids. They dont want their kids to learn from people that they dont trust, including secular, politically liberal, union-member types. So its not evolutionary theory anymore that they actually have a beef with their children learning, even though they think its incorrect.

From a public policy perspective, that needs to be the end of the discussion, he says, even if some people view that as accommodating science deniers. Lets stop fighting, he says. Lets agree to stop talking right there because the rest of it isnt our business. The rest of it is culture war talk. The way that I think of it is that Americans dont disagree about evolution. We just dont like each other. Or maybe a more polite way to say it is we dont trust each other.

Laats is the author of three other books about the history of American education: Fundamentalist U: Keeping the Faith in American Higher Education; The Other School Reformers: Conservative Activism in American Education and Fundamentalism; and Education in the Scopes Era: God, Darwin, and the Roots of Americas Culture Wars. He earned a doctorate in U.S. history at the University of WisconsinMadison in 2007. His next project focuses on the first systematic attempt at urban school reform in the United States.

Like this article? Please share!

Read more:
Book traces disputes over teaching evolution - Binghamton University Research News - Insights and Innovations

As Republicans ram through Trumps third Supreme Court nomination with an election underway, Democrats are increasingly contemplating expanding the court. But rather than cover it with the objectivity they claim to strive for, the countrys dominant media outlets have adopted a right-wing frame of the issuecalling it court packingthat delegitimizes court expansion.

New York Times (9/19/20): Democrats call expanding the court a defensive move, while Republicans call it radical and undemocratic.

Ruth Bader Ginsburgs Death Revives Talk of Court Packing, announced a New York Times headline (9/19/20). What Is Court Packing, and Why Are Some Democrats Seriously Considering It? asked the Washington Post (10/8/20). In that piece, the Posts Amber Phillips explicitly acknowledged the bias inherent in the phrase, yet presented it as practically official:

Expanding the Supreme Court to more than nine seats sounds like a radical idea, and the term for it, court packing, sounds derisive because it has created controversy every time it has come up.

In typical corporate media style, such articles often present the issue as a he said/she said dispute. In the WaPo piece, Democrats are frustrated that the Supreme Court could get even more conservative, while Republicans paint that as sour grapes; over at the Times, Democrats characterize court expansion as a defensive move against Republican actions, not a unilateral power grab, while Republicans have called the idea radical and undemocratic.

In these formulations, one side must win and the other lose. But the reality they gloss over is that those arent the real teams here. The struggle over the Court is at heart a struggle between anti-democratic forces and the interests of the vast majority of people in this country.

In recent years, massive amounts of corporate money have been directed toward efforts, led by the right-wing Federalist Society, to capture the US courts for corporate interestsdismantling voting rights, favoring corporate rights over individual rights, and stripping the power of government to regulate corporations (CounterSpin, 10/16/20). By framing the issue as one of Republicans vs. Democrats, media ignore the more important threat to democracy as a whole. And by accepting court packing as the term for expanding the court, journalists lend a hand to those anti-democratic forces.

The phrase court packing isnt new. President Franklin D. Roosevelts opponents coined it to delegitimize his plan to expand the court after it repeatedly struck down parts of his New Deal in the name of restraining government power (federal andin some cases, like the courts rejection of New Yorks effort to set a minimum wage for womenstate). In the end, FDRs plan languished in the Senate, but the president won the war; in the wake of his public campaign against it, the court began issuing rulings more favorable to the New Deal and other economic recovery plans. One of the conservative justices retired, giving FDR the opportunity to swing the balance back in his favorno thanks to the media, which ran predominantly unfavorable stories about FDRs plan.

The circumstances are different this time around, with Republicans on the verge of installing a 63 conservative majority, and none of the conservative seats likely to open under a Biden term; the oldest conservative justice, Clarence Thomas, is just 72, and hasnt given any indication that hes interested in retiring. Plus, its unlikely Biden would push forcefully for a court expansion the way FDR did, putting pressure on the court to temper its rulings. But the rampant journalistic use of the biased term court packing hasnt changed.

A Nexis search of US newspapers for the past three months (7/24/2010/24/20) turns up 244 headlines with some version of the phrase court packing (including, e.g., pack the court or packing the court). Less than half as many, 98, used a version of the more neutral court expansion (such as expanding the court), and almost half of those (48) also used the phrase court packing within the article.

Its also noteworthy what that these court packing stories highlightand ignore. In arguments about court expansion, the right tends to focus on ideas of tradition (like the false claim that adding justices would be unprecedented) and the culture wars (like Roe v. Wade). Democrats often lean on the Republican hypocrisy of blocking Obamas nomination of Merrick Garland to fill Antonin Scalias seat in 2016, when the GOP insisted, eight months before an election, that the voters should have a chance to weigh in before a new justice was confirmeda principle instantly abandoned when Ruth Bader Ginsburg died seven weeks before an election.

The role of corporate money and the Federalist Society, and the threats they pose to democracy, often go unmentioned by both sides. In the last three months, newspaper stories that mentioned court packing also mentioned Merrick Garland 358 times and abortion 337 times; Roe v. Wade made 159 appearances. But these stories mentioned the Federalist Society only 33 times; of those, only seven mentioned corporate or corporation.

Abraham Lincoln (quoted in Jacobin, 9/19/20): If the policy of the government upon vital questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court... the people will have ceased to be their own rulers.

In the end, its unlikely that even ifand its a big ifDemocrats take the presidency and the Senate, there will be enough agreement within the party to expand the Supreme Court. But thats also not the only way to counter the corporate takeover of the court. In the face of an intransigent pro-slavery court, Lincoln and his anti-slavery allies recognized that their most powerful and effective strategy was not to try to add enough justices to gain the upper hand within the court; it was to undermine the false image of an impartial, democracy-protecting court that must always have the last word. As Matt Karp writes in Jacobin (9/19/20):

Lincoln persisted in rejecting judicial supremacy and also the basic idea underlying it, that law somehow exists before or beyond politics, and thus it was illegitimate to resist the proslavery court through popular antislavery mobilization. We do not propose to be bound by [Dred Scott] as a political rule, he said. We propose resisting it as to have it reversed if we can, and a new judicial rule established upon this subject.

Others have advocated for a similar approach today: marginalizing rather than trying to capture the court (e.g., New Republic, 10/13/20). Neither task would be easy, but getting journalists to talk more directly about the true problems with the court is a critical step along the way.

Featured image: Anti-FDR cartoon from the Waterbury Republican (2/14/1937).

Link:
Journalists Pick Sides When They Call Adding Justices 'Court Packing' - FAIR

Many charity professionals, including a former board member of the Charity Commission, have hit out at the sectors regulator after it mooted a possible inquiry into the purpose of the National Trust.

The Telegraph newspaper reported over the weekend that current chair, Baroness Stowell, appeared to suggest the charity could face an inquiry into the trusts purpose after it published a report into its colonial history in September.

However, the commission confirmed that there is no formal inquiry or any finding of wrongdoing against the charity.

In response, many in the sector took to Twitter to accuse the regulator and its chair of politicising their roles, and using the National Trusts report to insert itself into the middle of the UKs culture wars.

Chief executive of the NCVO Karl Wilding wrote on Twitter: The National Trust is a fantastic charity. Some people don't like it, inevitable for an organisation that is doing what all good organisations do, and changing with the times. The Charity Commission should ignore those who wish to deploy the National Trust in their culture wars.

In a blog post, former commission board member Andrew Purkis wondered why the regulator was forcing the trust to explain what is so obvious from its charitable purposes, especially when it is struggling with the financial impact caused by the pandemic.

He asked: Is it because the commission feels it has to show Oliver Dowden or the Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph that they are responding to the concerns of that part of the public energised by a culture war against wokeness?

Jay Kennedy, director of policy and research at the Directory for Social Change, said that the commission's chair, as a taxpayer-funded servant, should not be making statements in publications whose content is behind a paywall.

The regulator did not respond to any of the criticisms above, but stressed that the trust wrote to the commission in late September, updating it on the negative media scrutiny it was facing.

It was following this update, the commission said, and a wider consideration of matters, that it wrote to the charity to ask further questions in early October.

A spokesperson added: We have written to the National Trust to understand how the trustees consider its report helps further the charitys specific purpose to preserve places of beauty or historic interest, and what consideration the trustees gave to the risk that the report might generate controversy.

We await a detailed response from the charity, and in the meantime have drawn no regulatory conclusions.

In a statement, the National Trust said that The Telegraph itself reported, under a misleading headline, that there is no expectation of a formal inquiry.

We have always researched the history of our places and doing so informs how we care for and present them. As is expected of all charities, the National Trust reports to the Charity Commission on any significant issues affecting our work, said a National Trust spokesperson.

The charity said it had kept the regulator informed about the colonial history report it published, and some of the complaints it received from people who disagreed with it being published.

Baroness Stowell announced over the weekend that she would step down as chair of the commission in February next year.

See the article here:
Charities criticise regulator over National Trust remarks - Third Sector