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NewsOpinionColumnistsIn America, they call them counters; the old British-English word tellers seems to have vanished from Americas election vocabulary, at least in the knife-edge states that still remain undeclared as I write, following this weeks US election.

Friday, 6th November 2020, 7:00 am

Whatever the differences of language, though, the intense coverage of the election process over the last few days has served to remind us of how little we see of everyday America, on our screens, and particularly of America outside New York, Washington and Los Angeles. We see crises and killings and protests, of course; and we see the glamorous high-profile journalists who rush to cover those dramatic events for the main television channels.

Its relatively rare, though, for us to spend hours watching ordinary America, in Georgia, or Arizona, or Pennsylvania, just going about its business; in this case, huge rooms full of volunteers and state staffers counting votes, verifying them, inviting adjudicators from both main parties to rule on any uncertain ballots, and trying in the face of a historically high voter turnout, and a pandemic that has decimated the labour force while generating an unprecedented surge in postal votes to deliver a fair and accurate result.

In the face of this calm and methodical effort to get a vitally important job done, the disruptive comments emanating from Donald Trumps White House seem not only tasteless and insulting, but also somehow unreal; as if they come from some different planet where Trump is not the leader of the Republican Party, and his party does not have designated observers present, at every count currently under way.

This sense of detachment from reality, though, has been a distinguishing feature of Trumps politics since the start of his first presidential campaign. Like right-wing populists across the world from Nigel Farage in the UK to Viktor Orban in Hungary and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil he relies on his ability to conjure up, for his followers, a largely fictional world of dire threats and simple, aggressive solutions.

The classic example is Trumps characterisation of most migrants crossing the Mexican border as criminals and rapists, and his declared policy of "building a wall to stop them. Such tropes and visions, though, are the common stuff of reactionary politics in our time; and its therefore perhaps not surprising that this week, America has seen the election to Congress of at least one, and possibly several, elected representatives who are fully paid-up subscribers to the Qanon conspiracy theory, a complete bizarre belief-system entirely elaborated and spread via social media, since 2017 that now commands the support of millions worldwide; to the extent that the family and friends of those affected in the US, Europe and beyond are beginning to seek advice on how to get through to loved ones who have become obsessed by their Qanon beliefs.

Whoever emerges as the winner of this weeks historic US election battle, in other words, the country will remain deeply divided between those who have embraced Trumps world-view and the conspiracy theories to which he has often given online support and those who regard these beliefs as delusional and dangerous.

It is good, of course, to hear Joe Biden affirm that he will, if elected, try to unite the country; but its also wise to note that under 21st-century conditions, those who seek unity and reconciliation will often be dealing not just with the usual differences of political opinion about ends and means, but with differences of world-view so categorical that they seem, at first glance, to make conversation, argument or persuasion all but impossible.

Whether the subject in hand is the Trump presidency, the Brexit debate, or the idea of Scottish independence, What world are you living in? has become one of the most commonly used phrases in all internet debate; and in these times, it is often something more than a rhetorical question.

Yet there are still, I think, a few reasons to be cheerful about the long task of restoring a more productive and realistic dialogue about our possible futures; not least because persuasion does not always have to be verbal.

If people who believe in a society founded on freedom, democracy, equality, and mutual respect among citizens make a point of going out into their communities and trying to embody those beliefs; if they set agreed goals for that community, and work to deliver those with the same practical, methodical dedication shown by those vote counters this week; if they are kind, accepting of diversity, willing to listen and to share small pleasures well then, they can show by example how a good society should look, and draw people into that network of shared values and conversation.

National politicians can try, of course, to win the culture wars that have disfigured our recent politics by meeting rhetoric with rhetoric, and toxic speeches with more conciliatory ones.

In the end, though, it seems likely that a renewed sense of unity, in any nation wounded by division, can only be rebuilt from the grassroots up, through the kind of patient, hard work that draws people away from their screens, and forms real human bonds.

On Wednesday night, those thousands of patient counters across the United States succeeded in making the strident voices from the White House look both marginal and irrelevant. And with that kind of dedication, ordinary people in communities across the world can finally deliver the same verdict on those who attempt the politics of hysteria and hate; the judgment that, while frightening and sometimes alluring, those ways of thought are finally, in the practical business of life, just empty of substance, and of no real use at all.

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Can democracy cope amid the rise of dangerous conspiracy theories and toxic culture wars? Joyce McMillan - The Scotsman

Ding-dong, the jerk is gone. Finally, we have come to the end of Donald Trumps season of extreme misrule. Voters have rejected what can only be described as the crassest, vainest, stupidest, most dysfunctional leadership this country has ever suffered.

Congratulations to Joe Biden for doing what Hillary Clinton couldnt, and for somehow managing to do it without forcefulness, without bounce, without zest, without direction and without a real cause, even.

It is a time for celebrating. Let us praise God for victory, however meagre and under-whelming. But let us also show some humility in our triumph. Before we swing into a national sing-along of the Hallelujah Chorus, I urge you to think for a moment about how we got here and where we must go next.

We know that 2020 has been a year for reckoning with the racist past, for the smashing of icons and the tearing-down of former heroes. Also for confronting the historical delusions that gave us this lousy present.

In the spirit of this modern iconoclasm, let me offer my own suggestion for the reckoning that must come next, hopefully even before Biden chooses his cabinet and packs his bags for Pennsylvania Avenue: Democrats must confront their own past and acknowledge how their own decisions over the years helped make Trumpism possible.

I know: this was a negation election, and what got nixed was Maga madness. The Democrats are the ones who won. Still, it is Joe Biden who must plan our course forward and so it is Biden who must examine our situation coldly and figure out the answer to the burning question of today: how can a recurrence of Trumpism be prevented?

Bidens instinct, naturally, will be to govern as he always legislated: as a man of the center who works with Republicans to craft small-bore, business-friendly measures. After all, Bidens name is virtually synonymous with Washington consensus. His years in the US Senate overlap almost precisely with his partys famous turn to the third way right, and Biden personally played a leading role in many of the signature initiatives of the era: Nafta-style trade agreements, lucrative favors for banks, tough-on-crime measures, proposed cuts to social security, even.

What Biden must understand now, however, is that it was precisely this turn, this rightward shift in the 1980s and 90s, that set the stage for Trumpism.

Let us recall for a moment what that turn looked like. No longer were Democrats going to be the party of working people, they told us in those days. They were new Democrats now, preaching competence rather than ideology and reaching out to new constituencies: the enlightened suburbanites; the wired workers; the learning class; the winners in our new post-industrial society.

For years this turn was regarded as a great success. Bill Clinton brought us market-friendly reforms to banking rules, trade relations and the welfare system. He and his successor Barack Obama negotiated grand bargains and graceful triangulations; means-tested subsidies and targeted tax credits; tough-minded crime measures and social programs so complex that sometimes not even their designers could explain them to us.

Almost all of the celebrated policy achievements of the centrist era lie in ruins

In the place of the Democratic partys old household god the middle class these new liberals enshrined the meritocracy, meaning not only the brilliant economists who designed their policies, but also the financiers and technologists that the new liberalism tried to serve, together with the highly educated professionals who were now its most prized constituents. In 2016 Hillary Clinton lost the former manufacturing regions of the country but was able to boast later on that she won the places that represent two-thirds of Americas gross domestic product the places that are optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward.

However, there are consequences when the left party in a two-party system chooses to understand itself in this way. As we have learned from the Democrats experiment, such a party will show little understanding for the grievances of blue-collar workers, people who by definition have not climbed the ladder of meritocracy. And just think of all the shocking data that has flickered across our attention-screens in the last dozen years how our economys winnings are hogged by the 1%; how ordinary people can no longer afford new cars; how young people are taking on huge debt burdens right out of college; and a thousand other points of awful. All of these have been direct or indirect products of the political experiment I am describing.

Biden cant take us back to the happy assumptions of the centrist era even if he wants to, because so many of its celebrated policy achievements lie in ruins. Not even Paul Krugman enthuses about Nafta-style trade agreements any longer. Bill Clintons welfare reform initiative was in fact a capitulation to racist tropes and brought about an explosion in extreme poverty. The great prison crackdown of 1994 was another step in cementing the New Jim Crow. And the biggest shortcoming of Obamas Affordable Care Act leaving peoples health insurance tied to their employer has become painfully obvious in this era of mass unemployment and mass infection.

But the biggest consequence of the Democrats shabby experiment is one we have yet to reckon with: it has coincided with a period of ever more conservative governance. It turns out that when the party of the left abandons its populist traditions for high-minded white-collar rectitude, the road is cleared for a particularly poisonous species of rightwing demagoguery. It is no coincidence that, as Democrats pursued their professional-class third way, Republicans became ever bolder in their preposterous claim to be a workers party representing the aspirations of ordinary people.

When Democrats abandoned their majoritarian tradition, in other words, Republicans hastened to stake their own claim to it. For the last 30 years it has been the right, not the left, that rails against elites and that champions our down-home values in the face of the celebrities who mock them. During the 2008 financial crisis conservatives actually launched a hard-times protest movement from the floor of the Chicago board of trade; in the 2016 campaign they described their foul-mouthed champion, Trump, as a blue-collar billionaire, kin to and protector of the lowly the lowly and the white, that is.

Donald Trumps prodigious bungling of the Covid pandemic has got him kicked out of office and has paused the nations long march to the right. Again, let us give thanks. But let us also remember that the Republicans have not been permanently defeated. Their preening leader has gone down, but his toxic brand of workerism will soon be back, enlisting the disinherited and the lowly in the cause of the mighty. So will our fatuous culture wars, with their endless doses of intoxicating self-righteousness, shot into the veins of the nation by social media or Fox News.

I have been narrating our countrys toboggan ride to hell for much of my adult life, and I can attest that Bidens triumph by itself is not enough to bring it to a stop. It will never stop until a Democratic president faces up to his partys mistakes and brings to a halt the ignoble experiment of the last four decades.

Should Joe Biden do that, he might be able to see that he has before him a moment of great Democratic possibility. This country has grown sick of plutocracy. We dont enjoy sluicing everything we earn into the bank accounts of a few dozen billionaires. We want a healthcare system that works and an economy in which ordinary people prosper, even people who didnt go to a fancy college. Should Biden open his eyes and overcome his past, he may discover that he has it in his power to rebuild our sense of social solidarity, to make the middle-class promise real again, and to beat back the right. All at the same time.

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Ding-dong, the jerk is gone. But read this before you sing the Hallelujah Chorus - The Guardian

To begin with, I am no big fan of the term inner city left-wing elites. Anyone using that term largely deserves the attacks it provokes. Like all lazy clichs, it obscures more than it reveals and feeds into the increasingly polarised public slanging matches between ideological hardliners who bore the rest of us silly. Its as if we are all being forced to watch an endless, low-scoring football match between The Fascists and The Socialists and we must pick a team. Our every word and gesture is pored over constantly to determine which side we support.

What an exhausting way to live our lives.

Rather than seize on that unfortunate phrase and immediately jump to the conclusion that the ABC has joined The Fascists, Id rather focus on the broader message the ABCs current news strategy is trying to send. Its called More Relevant to More Australians and it argues that the ABC needs to be there for all Australians. Ive heard that message before.

The ABC should not be readily conscripted into the culture wars.Credit:Steven Siewert

Back in 2013, then chairman of the ABC, James Spigelman, gave a speech at the National Press Club. As a former adviser to Gough Whitlam, former chief justice of the Supreme Court of NSW and a man with a lifelong commitment to social justice, Indigenous issues and the arts, he was one of the best and fairest champions of public broadcasting ever to hold the ABC chairmanship.

He warned then that journalists, including those at the ABC, were more interested in issues such as gay marriage than electricity prices, and they had an obligation to engage with those sections of the community who are concerned with the latter.

Of course, for most Australians, both issues are hugely important, but the point is to ensure both are covered and covered well.

Four years later when he left the ABC, he made a similar point, telling this newspaper that there isnt as much attention on the issues of the Howard battlers, working families, people in the suburbs as there should be.

Three years after that, Gaven Morris seems to me to be essentially saying the same thing, and with good reason.

In my 23 years at the ABC, I saw lots of audience data. Much of it highlighted a generally understood challenge ABC radio and television rated highly in the inner city (both traditionally progressive AND traditionally wealthy and conservative suburbs) and it rated highly in rural and regional areas, but more poorly in outer suburbs.

I have no reason to believe this is not as true now as it was then.

Former ABC Chairman James Spigelman.Credit:Dominic Lorrimer

Anyone who thinks this isnt an issue that needs to be tackled doesnt understand what public broadcasting is. All Australians pay for the ABC out of their own pockets, and they are entitled to a service that is relevant to them. They are entitled to fair, accurate and impartial news about the issues that are important to them in their lives, as well as to entertainment, drama, comedy, childrens content, music and so much more.

Its not about deciding whether to be left-wing, right-wing, conservative or progressive to feed the prejudices and preferences of the ABCs critics and commentators.

Its not about saying things the government might like in the hope that more funding might be forthcoming. The ABC is funded by the people of Australia. Governments more often than not just get in the way by trying to starve, bully, neglect or pressure the public broadcaster.

And its not about dumbing-down, avoiding difficult or complex issues, or replacing one issue with another. Its about working to build the biggest possible audience for the kind of work the ABC is there to do.

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If you look beyond the headlines, the occasional poor turn of phrase and the attempts that are constantly being made to enlist the ABC in a culture war that most of us dont care about, you will find a consistent aim the ABC sets for itself, even though it falls short from time to time. That aim is to cover all of the issues that matter to Australians with the same level of integrity and independence.

And yes, that means being as relevant to and valued by the people of central Queensland or Tasmania as it is to the people of Melbourne or Sydney.

Alan Sunderland was Editorial Director of the ABC from 2013 to 2019.

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Don't conscript your ABC to the culture wars - Sydney Morning Herald

J.H. Binford Peay III

J.H. Binford Peay III, superintendent of the Virginia Military Institute, has submitted his resignation, stating that Governor Ralph Northam and senior legislations had lost confidence in his leadership. The VMI board accepted his resignation with regret.

Peays departure follows a Washington Post article alleging an atmosphere of relentless racism at the military college. Two days later, Northam and top legislators announced an independent, third-party review of VMI culture, policies, practices and equity.

While racist acts have occurred at VMI in the past several years, most cited by the Washington Post were punished by the administration or involved private expressions of opinion by students or staff. I detailed my response to the Post article here.

Peay had tried to thread the needle between maintaining long-held VMI traditions, which revered Stonewall Jackson and the role of the cadets in the battle of New Market, and being sensitive to the feelings of African-Americans who comprised an increasing percentage of the student body. He enacted several reforms earlier this year but critics charged they did not go far enough.

We are now in the witch hunt phase of the anti-racism hysteria as the definition of what constitutes racism broadens inexorably and anyone who fails to submit to the ever-mutating orthodoxy is crushed.

Remarkably, Northam, whose VMI nickname was Coonman, has not only survived his blackface scandal but has emerged as popular in public opinion polls as ever. He earned indulgences from fellow Democrats and the media by implementing anti-racism Critical Race Theory in Virginia public schools, embracing the doctrine of opposing environmental racism, and implementing other anti-racism measures in state government.

JAB

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The Latest Casualty of the Culture Wars - Bacon's Rebellion

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?

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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