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Joe Biden won Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan, and the Democrats saw an increased share of votes from white working-class voters in 2020. What did he do to win this crucial support in the heartland? Three things. He went there frequently, which Hillary Clinton did not. Biden talked about jobs, with the message that we can revitalize our industrial base at the heart of the American middle class. Most importantly, Biden treated working-class whites with respect.

After 2016, Democrats worried whether they could appeal to enough white working-class Trump voters to win in 2020 without alienating and disrespecting a key Democratic constituency: voters of color.

They just did. Biden won because he won back Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. The percentage of white working class men voting Democratic increased from 23% in 2016 to 28% in 2020, while among white working class women, support for Democrats increased from 34% to 36%. These voters played a key role in delivering victories for Biden in the Rust Belt states where Clinton lost the presidency in 2016.

But white working-class voters were not the whole story by any means. Biden also won the election this year because he flipped Arizona and probably Georgia, which had not voted Democratic in a presidential election since the 1990s, and by holding on to Nevada. Large Latinx turnout played an outsized role in both Arizona and Nevada. Black voters played a central role in Georgia, thanks to the voter-turnout efforts led by Stacey Abrams. Not to mention that Congressman Jim Clyburn and Black voters saved Bidens candidacy when it was faltering, by delivering a win in the South Carolina primary.

Bidens winning coalition was a race-class coalition. This election shows that Democrats can simultaneously appeal to voters of color and to enough (though hardly all) working class whites. The election also severely undermines the demography is destiny thesis that people of color will rote-vote Democratic. Trump won 45% of the Latinx vote in Florida, fueled by Cuban and Venezuelan Americans whom he courted for years through relentless messaging that Democrats would bring socialism. More shockingly, Democrats also lost Texas in part because Latinos in South Texas swung to Trump, cancelling out Democrats gains in urban areas. Mexican Americans within spitting distance of Trumps wall swung strongly for him. How does this make sense?

There are plenty of reasons. Many Latinos have a strong religious orientation, traditionalist views of gender and family, and a strong commitment to small business. All politics is about identity, for sure George W. Bushs as much as Kamala Harriss but demography is not identity. After all, we arent confused that all white people dont vote the same way.

What did Biden do to win crucial support in the heartland? Three things. He went there frequently, which Hillary Clinton did not. Biden talked about jobs, with the message that we can revitalize our industrial base at the heart of the American middle class. Most importantly, Biden treated working-class whites with respect, which had been sorely lacking when Clinton decried Trump supporters as deplorables and Barack Obama condescendingly described Midwestern working-class voters as bitter people clinging to guns and religion. Biden instead pointed out that Trump was a fake while signaling his own respect for working class folks: Ive dealt with guys like Donald Trump my whole life, who would look down on us because we didnt have a lot of money or your parents didnt go to college. Guys who think theyre better than you. Guys who inherit everything theyve ever gotten in their life and squander it.

In all the election coverage, theres surprisingly little discussion about that ocean of red voters in rural middle-America. These left-behind Americans are being treated as irrelevant, which is precisely what caused them to see red in the first place. Its time to reread Katherine J. Cramers The Politics of Resentment, which depicts Wisconsins veer to the right with the 2010 election of Scott Walker as governor. The class resentments Cramer found in Wisconsin reflected not culture wars about abortion and gay marriage but a sense of having been belittled and left behind. There are huge swaths of the rural U.S. with no hospitals and no grocery stores that have left many Americans with limited access to essential health care and fresh food. Cramer describes a rural consciousness: the sense that the government must be mishandling my hard-earned dollars, because my taxes keep going up and clearly they are not coming back to benefit people like me. So why would I want an expansion of government? She found opposition to Obamacare even by people in obvious need of medical care. Obamacare was too expensive to fit their families budgets; with all the focus on covering the poor, these folks in the fragile and former middle class felt left out again.

If there is any silver lining to the Electoral College (a stretch, I admit), it is that it makes it essential for Democrats to signal to the heartland not just the Rust Belt but also rural America that government will work for them. This is all the more pressing because rural votes are also overweighted in the Senate, which may well retain a Republican majority despite the flood of blue-state campaign contributions to senatorial campaigns. Until Democrats find a way to appeal to rural voters, Bidens ability to deliver, for anyone, may well be hamstrung by Mitch McConnell.

With their coalition of people of color, the white working class, and college-educated liberals, Democrats won a close election in the midst of worldwide death and the worst unemployment since the Great Depression. They need to reach out to rural voters, too, if they are to end the Gilded-age-level inequality, and help Americans of all races gain access to stable middle-class lives. For centuries, rural people in China were of shorter stature than city folk because elites kept the wealth in the cities. If we do the same, it will fuel support for future Trumps. Americans do not accept stunting as their due nor should they.

Read the rest here:
How Biden Won Back (Enough of) the White Working Class - Harvard Business Review

If indeed Donald Trumps presidency has been cut short after just one term, then the next several months will be devoted to defining Trumpism and interpreting the countrys repudiation of it.

The theories will be diverse, but one to anticipate is that Joe Bidens victory suggests the rehabilitation of political centrism, which has sustained challenges by perceived outsiders of all stripes over the last decade. The window for experimental alternatives to sanctioned establishment politics represented in the minds of many moderates by Trump and Bernie Sanders alike, never mind the diametrically opposite politics of the Right and the Left will be declared closed.

That explanation is attractive in its simplicity, and especially seductive for anyone with a major stake in restoring popular confidence in the existing political elite. But it doesnt accurately reflect the nature of the race. Biden as the establishment versus Trump as the gate-crasher is a throwback to the last election, when Trump was a real estate mogul and reality television star with no political experience, not the incumbent presiding over a nightmarish series of interlocking crises.

This election was different. It was chiefly a referendum on which menace the American people wanted their leaders to focus on: the coronavirus and its associated economic catastrophe, or an assortment of left-wing bogeymen. In other words, it was less a contest between political insiders and outsiders than between main attractions and sideshows. The politically vacuous Biden campaign certainly failed to do justice to the main attractions, but when American voters chose him by a fraction they also chose to elect a leader who at least gave the impression of focusing on ending the pandemic rather than, say, alleged roaming bands of Antifa.

Reality in the United States is exceedingly grim, so Trumps primary campaign strategy was to deflect it. In particular, he sought to rile up his base about the fabricated threats of Democrat-run cities falling to anarchists and looters, cancel-culture totalitarianism perpetrated by evil people, and imaginary large-scale voter fraud, all while flattering fringe elements of his coalition like the Proud Boys, QAnon, and the right-wing militia movement. Bidens strategy, on the other hand, was to lay low, keep things simple and vague, and passively absorb support from anyone more concerned about the coronavirus pandemic and economic recession than Trumps culture-war melodrama.

On many questions, from climate to health care, Bidens ambitious promises regarding the crisis and recovery were not very specific and his specific promises were not very ambitious. But he at least cleared the low bar by acknowledging the severity of the nations situation, in which 230,000 have died, twelve million have lost their employer-sponsored health insurance, eight million have been pushed into poverty, and so on. That acknowledgment appears to have been sufficient to distinguish him from Trump, who routinely downplayed both the public health and economic dimensions of the present catastrophe.

Trumps apparent disregard for the gravity of the pandemic left plenty of people cold, including elements of his own base. Take the example of Arizona seniors, a crucial demographic in this race. In 2016, Trump won Arizona voters over the age of sixty-five by 13 percentage points, a level that he will not even come close to matching this time.

Why the reversal? One profile of voters in Maricopa Countyfeatured a steadfast Trump supporter living in a retirement community outside Phoenix who fretted about distant Black Lives Matter protests and the need to restore law and order, despite the fact that her own suburb of Peoria recently made a list of the fifteen safest cities in America. Another profile of Arizona seniors featured a man who had voted Republican all his life, but who was switching to Biden because Trump is not accepting responsibility for the coronavirus pandemic and doesnt talk about the vulnerability of people in our age, 65 and older, group, even though he is part of that group.

All evidence points to a situation in which those who abandoned the president were concerned about things that concretely threaten them, while the Trump holdouts were preoccupied with the phantasmic picture of apocalypse the president spent the campaign painting. In other words, those who stayed with Trump were stubbornly attached to a fantasy, while those who abandoned him were lured away by reality.

Theres an important lesson here, and it isnt that the path to electoral victory runs through centrism. Its that when push comes to shove, more people care about their material conditions than cultural shadowboxing.

Increasingly Americans are the captives of sprawling, convoluted, perpetually-evolving partisan storylines conservatives and liberals alike which colonize their minds and feed an intense political tribalism that disables all other modes of reasoning. Trump placed his bet on the idea that this type of cultural bogeyman politics would always be stronger than the allure of, for example, not dying of a deadly virus or not filing for bankruptcy after months of unemployment without relief. Yes, it was too close for comfort, and clearly plenty of people still bought what Trump was selling, but in the end Trumps instinct was wrong.

The crisis heightened peoples attention to their own uncertain well-being. Biden did the minimum required to take advantage of this. He predictably refused, for example, to run on a broad expansion of public health insurance, even during a public health crisis and when a supermajority of the nation supports it. Nor would it be accurate to suggest that the Democrats this time were never guilty of hysterically demonizing their opponents; per usual, there was plenty of paranoia and vilification to go around. But what mattered was that in the end, the pandemic was Bidens issue. Voters associated him, and not Trump, with attention to the crisis at hand.

On some level, this should encourage an otherwise fairly demoralized American left. After all, were the ones whose program consists of securing good health care, housing, education, infrastructure, and employment for everyone. While we didnt have a candidate in the race this week, we should interpret the result as smuggling in a small affirmation of the basic premise animating our political approach: that while ordinary people may have all kinds of perverse ideas and reactionary attitudes, direct appeals to what people need to survive and live decently have the power, on occasion, to dislodge delusions.

Now, imagine the kinds of margins wed have seen if Trumps opponent had actually campaigned on an ambitious platform that connected politics directly to peoples material conditions. Whatever else it accomplished, such a campaign would have helped to snap millions of people out of the fog of political hypnosis. For the Left, that is the first step toward victory.

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Trump's Culture Wars Were Meant to Distract From the Crisis. It Didn't Work. - Jacobin magazine

In 2017, when a biology professor in a state college in Washington protested against a proposed day-long ban on the presence of white students on campus, radical students shut the campus down.

The ban was part of a yearly college event designed to give black and minority students and staff a separate space in which to discuss the issues they face. Tensions were high that year. White nationalist groups had invaded the campus, targeting black students and members of staff.

The comments by the professor, Bret Weinstein, and his opposition to the collleges equity programs, led to campus protests against him. In protest against the failure of the college administration to quell the students, he resigned from his job.

Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, the authors of the new book Cynical Theories: How Universities Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity and Why This Harms Everybody regard Weinstein as a victim of an ideology they call Social Justice Theory.

They hold humanities departments responsible for bringing it into existence, and their aim is to explain why it is so pernicious.

Read more: Is 'cultural Marxism' really taking over universities? I crunched some numbers to find out

Pluckrose, a US magazine editor who describes herself as an exile from the humanities, and Lindsay, a mathematician and writer on politics and religion, were participants in the controversial 2018 Grievance Studies project, which aimed to discredit gender and race studies by submitting hoax articles to academic journals.

By getting articles on bogus topics through the reviewing processes of respected journals and into print, the authors believed they were proving that studies focusing on identity issues are corrupt and unscientific.

One hoax article, published in a journal of feminist geography looked at human reactions to rape culture and queer performativity at dog parks in Portland, Oregon; another purported to be a two-year study involving thematic analysis of table dialogue to explore why heterosexual men like to eat at Hooters.

Critics of their hoax quickly pointed out there was no scientific evidence to suggest that journals in fields focusing on identity are corrupt indeed such hoaxes had happened in other areas of study too.

Pluckrose and Lindsays book, which grew out of the 2018 project, traces the evolution and growing influence during the late 20th century of theories about how the language we use to think and talk about the world structures our relationships.

The book takes aim at postmodern and post-structuralist thinkers, particularly the French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault. The authors blame him for propagating the view that all discourses, including science, create relations of power and subordination.

Read more: Explainer: the ideas of Foucault

In the new millennium, these postmodernist and deconstructionist projects morphed according to Pluckrose and Lindsay into the political weapon they call Social Justice Theory, or simply Theory.

In Cynical Theories, the pair trace the march of Theory as a political ideology through post-colonial studies, queer theory, feminism, and studies of race, disability and body size.

In their view, Theory is a harmful, anti-scientific ideology. It divides society into the oppressed whose subordinate identities are constructed by hierarchies of power and the oppressors who, wittingly or not, maintain oppressive relationships through their participation in political and social discourses and institutions.

This Theory is cynical, according to the authors, because it finds oppression everywhere even in the best intentions of progressive people and their movements of reform.

And it is bad for everyone, including disadvantaged groups, they say, because it gets in the way of an empirical approach to understanding and correcting social ills.

One aim of Pluckrose and Lindsay is to defend the central liberal value of freedom of inquiry against what they regard as an attack on free speech by the rise of identity politics spawned by Theory.

The application of Theory is also harmful, they say, because it provokes a backlash from people who cannot understand why being white or male puts them into the camp of racists or sexists.

The result, they argue, is a racial politics that becomes increasingly fraught. We hear that:

racism is embedded in culture and that we cannot escape it. We hear that white people are inherently racist. We are told that only white people can be racist. [] Adherents actively search for hidden and overt racial offences until they find them.

According to the authors, these categories race, sex, gender, being gay or straight, abled or disabled, fat or of normal body size are forced onto individuals by the organising power of dominant discourses in politics, social life and science.

Adherents of Theory, they say, then argue these constructed identities are, nevertheless, real and inescapable experiences. For Theory, identity determines how a person thinks, acts and what she knows. A black person is not an individual who happens to be black. Blackness is central to who he is. Being black makes him into a victim of discourses that privilege whites.

Respecting the standpoint of those who have a subordinate position in hierarchies created by the ways we speak and act blacks, women, people with minority sexual identities, victims of colonial power, the disabled and the fat is a key political demand for activists influenced by Theory.

Social hierarchies exist. Prejudice can be perpetuated by the unthinking behaviour of individuals. Discriminatory treatment of women and black people is sometimes embedded in institutions.

Pluckrose and Lindsay do not deny this.

They admit legal reforms have not eliminated racism, sexism and other forms of discrimination. They recognise discriminatory treatment and prejudice can blight the lives of victims and undermine their ability to access the opportunities of their society.

What, then, is wrong with what they call Social Justice Theory?

The authors main contention is that Theory is relativist and unscientific. For its theorists, there is no objective truth only the perspectives of people with different identities. And they demand the same respect for the standpoint of an oppressed group as for the views of scientists.

Pluckrose and Lindsay write:

It is no exaggeration to observe that Social Justice Theories have created a new religion, a tradition of faith that is actively hostile to reason, falsification, disconfirmation and disagreement of any kind.

Because Theory is a faith, it can insulate itself from criticism, say the authors.

It can dismiss dissenters, like the aforementioned biology professor, as the purveyors of an oppressive discourse.

Is Social Justice Theory as pernicious as Pluckrose and Lindsay want us to believe? Their criticism gets most of its plausibility from applications of Theory that do seem harmful and even absurd.

Disability, for instance, is not merely a social construction. Treating it as such may prevent the use of treatments that could make the lives of people better.

When doctors tell obese people they should lose weight they are not engaging in an act of oppression, but in healthcare.

Pluckrose and Lindsay are right to point out that campaigns to expose oppressive speech and behaviour can cause unjustified harm to individuals who are called out and cancelled for minor misdemeanours, or for stating a view that identity activists deem unacceptable.

The abuse heaped on J.K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series, for saying that sexual differences are real and not constructed by discourse is an example.

Read more: Is cancel culture silencing open debate? There are risks to shutting down opinions we disagree with

In my opinion, however, the authors overstate both the illiberal tendencies of Theory and its influence on culture.

You do not have to be a relativist to think the opinions and feelings of people from minority groups ought to be respected. You are not anti-science if you think scientific research sometimes ignores the needs and perspectives of women and minorities.

Advocates of Theory aim to make institutions more inclusive and respectful of differences.

Liberals as advocates of critical engagement should be open to the possibility that Theory, despite faults, has detected forms of prejudice our society tends to overlook.

The most problematic aspect of Pluckrose and Lindsays book is the blame it heaps on humanities departments of universities for stirring up a cancel culture and the culture wars.

This gives ammunition to those who want to defund humanities and discourage students from taking humanities courses.

It gives support to the position of the Australian Federal Education Minister, Dan Tehan, who thinks that Australian universities have succumbed to a left-wing culture that cancels conservatives and their opinions.

This accusation, also made by conservative groups like the Institute of Public Affairs, is the reason why critics of universities want to force them to sign up to a free speech code.

But according to Glyn Davis, Professor of Political Science at the Australian National University, there is no evidence of a meaningful or growing threat to free speech in Australian universities.

Read more: Special pleading: free speech and Australian universities

Those who emphasise the dangers of a cancel culture often ignore more serious threats to universities and an open society. The students at the Washington college were reacting to the presence of groups that threatened the safety of black students.

They were responding to a real threat.

Pluckrose and Lindsay agree that threats to free speech can come from the right as well as the left, but their preoccupation with the latter indicates where they want to put most of the blame.

Cynical Theories is, on one hand, a scholarly book. Pluckrose and Lindsay are well versed in the literature they criticise, as their participation in the Grievance Studies hoax indicates.

Their book provides an in depth discussion of the works they want to criticise. Their critique of what they call Social Justice Theory deserves to be taken seriously.

But by overstating their case and aiming their weapons at humanities and universities they cannot pass themselves off as objective contributors to a search for truth.

They are combatants in the culture wars.

Cynical Theories: How Universities Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity and Why This Harms Everybody, by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, is published by Swift Press.

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Friday essay: a new front in the culture wars, Cynical Theories takes unfair aim at the humanities - The Conversation AU

On a rainy Tuesday evening, a couple of weeks ago, Tom not his real name, for reasons that will become clear took his 12-year-old son to football practice. Training is two miles away, and usually they would travel by car. But, over the summer, the area where they live in Ealing, west London, was designated a low-traffic neighbourhood (LTN). This meant that its streets would be altered to encourage active transport such as cycling and walking, typically by placing planters and bollards across key intersections. The introduction of the LTN scheme in Ealing had created confusion among motorists and congestion on the main roads. It also led Tom to dig out his bicycle, which he bought when he moved to London in 2003 but which had been gathering dust for 15 years.

The journey to football was unremarkable, wobbling through unfamiliar streets, scrabbling to make it on time. Cycling back, though, the rain falling harder now, a strange feeling came over Tom. There were no cars around, he recalls. It was dark. It was wet. But it was magical. It was just seeing the place where I live in a totally different light. Everybodys quite angry at this moment in time, and I just felt for the first time in a long while that lift and that mood change. When he and his son got home, they decided they would go on their bikes again the following week. I hope maybe when he gets older, if we keep it up, hell remember cycling to football with his dad, Tom says. Rather than sitting in the back seat of the car.

Its a sweet story. Just something normal, says Tom, or something that should be normal. Its also exactly the kind of experience that low-traffic neighbourhoods were designed to encourage. There have been similar, albeit more limited, initiatives in the past in the UK, but the LTN proposal only dates back to May this year, when Boris Johnson announced during prime ministers questions that we would soon be entering a new golden age for cycling. He put his money where his mouth was: soon after, the Department for Transport released 250m of emergency active travel funding to English local authorities. Encouraging walking and cycling was now regarded as essential to avoid overcrowding on public transport systems as we begin to open up parts of our economy.

LTN schemes would be trialled in cities including Sheffield, Manchester and Birmingham, but their introduction was deemed particularly essential to London. In May, Transport for London (TfL) needed a government bailout of 1.6bn and was required to institute LTNs as a condition of the recovery package. The fear was that Londoners, wary of using buses and the underground, would take to their cars, causing unprecedented congestion and pollution. TfL outlined a strategy to increase the number of journeys made on foot by a multiple of five, and the journeys made on bike by 10. By the end of the summer, at least 160 new schemes had been introduced across the majority of the capitals 32 boroughs. It was perhaps the most dramatic reshaping of these streets since the second world war.

The scheme generated by Johnsons Conservative government was rolled out with great enthusiasm by Labours mayor of London, Sadiq Khan. At last, something was being done to address the problem of traffic on Londons residential streets, which had increased by 72.2% between 2009 and 2019, and of air quality that had become filthy, toxic and a public health crisis, according to Khan. Increasing the use of active transport would make citizens fitter, improve their mental health and give them greater resilience to Covid-19. Low-traffic neighbourhoods were a win, win, win one of the few potential positives to come out of the pandemic.

You wonder whether Covid has to some extent given the government cover for forcing certain things through

Just a few months after the first low-traffic neighbourhoods were introduced, its safe to say that few people think they are a miracle policy any more. In Ealing, which was given more than 600,000 by TfL for active-transport initiatives, opposition has been especially fierce. Planters marking the new road layouts have been defaced and overturned, the bollards have been stolen and the holes left in the road filled in with cement. A march to protest against the LTNs in September had a turnout estimated at 2,500, while more than 10,000 people have signed a petition objecting to the scheme.

Low-traffic neighbourhoods have been similarly contentious in other parts of London. John Locker, a Conservative councillor in Wandsworth, said: It is clear that the LTNs are not delivering the benefits we want to see. In fact it looks like the combination of changes are unfortunately having the opposite effect. The borough scrapped its scheme in September.

Lewisham plans to make significant changes to its LTNs this month. In Hackney, Labour councillor Jon Burke received a death threat over the new measures. We intend to burn down your house while you are sleeping, a scrawled note read. Stop this traffic open all road now or we will get violence [sic].

Start looking into low-traffic neighbourhoods and the vitriol, suspicion and chicanery is disturbing. It is no surprise that Tom from Ealing asks to use an assumed name. I know a lot of the parents that were marching against the LTNs, even the ones holding the banners, he explains. And you think, OK, do I really want any hassle or blowback next time we turn up to football?

Some of the objections to low-traffic neighbourhoods come from predictable sources: motorists, for example, who now find a five-minute errand takes them 20 minutes or who have had a chunk of time added to their commute. Delivery drivers, an essential service in the Covid age, have been inconvenienced by the new measures, forced to adapt to new road layouts while still making their requisite number of drops per hour. But what has been unexpected is the diverse nature of campaigners within the anti-LTN groups. Even some of the individuals themselves are surprised. Rosamund Kissi-Debrah says: If you randomly rang me up and said, Rosamund, what do you think about a low-traffic neighbourhood?, Id say, Ooh, that sounds great definitely. But where I live, and I can only talk about Lewisham, it has been a disaster.

Kissi-Debrah is a World Health Organization clean-air advocate whose nine-year-old daughter Ella died in 2013 after suffering a series of severe asthma attacks. She lives in Hither Green, south-east London, just off the South Circular, one of Londons busiest roads. Ella loved to cycle, scoot and skateboard you name it and her two siblings are similarly obsessed with two wheels. Kissi-Debrah follows behind them on a scooter: A manual one, not electric, she exclaims. So I cant be anti-cyclist.

For Kissi-Debrah, the issue with low-traffic neighbourhoods is air quality and fairness. For people who live in an LTN, yes, life is better, I dont deny that, she says. But their traffic is going somewhere. And this brings up all sorts of issues: social justice and environmental justice. You cannot live in a neighbourhood where one part has an LTN and children are cycling and playing outside and the roads are safe, then pop along a couple of roads later and theres gridlocked traffic. We cannot live in a society like that.

Kissi-Debrahs intervention in the debate appeared to be influential in Lewishams ongoing rethink of its LTNs. And she has received considerable opprobrium on social media for her stance. She says: This is the hardest time people have given me. But I can only speak my truth. No, some people are not happy with me at all. Others have told her that she has secured a victory for the anti-LTN campaign, though Kissi-Debrah doesnt like that angle either.

Its not victorious that I know a mother who had to rush her three-year-old to the local hospital to put them on a nebuliser, she says. I dont want any other family to go through what we went through. Thats my aim all the time, but unless we change things right now Im not going to get my wish, am I?

For some, the whole cycling, clean air, low-traffic agenda is about their neighbourhood changing in ways they dont like

Even the most impassioned advocates of LTNs have to concede there have been fundamental problems in some areas. Along with unprecedented investment back in May, local authorities were given the power to introduce the schemes as emergency traffic regulation orders, ostensibly because of the fast spread of Covid and the need to offer social distancing to residents. Typically, consultations on such matters might last months, even years, involving mail-outs, meetings and even local votes. The new LTNs would instead be given a six-month trial and then reviewed. In boroughs such as Ealing, where the council has a stated ambition to become the cycling Copenhagen of London, there were fears that these reviews would be akin to them marking their own homework.

Theres a set of objections that it was done too fast, says Dave Hill, editor and publisher of the website On London, which has tracked the LTN debate closely. Some of them havent been very well designed. And some people are furious, because they feel this has been done to them without anybody asking. Thats a small example of a bigger thing, about people feeling that politicians dont listen to them.

Where does Covid come in? Hill continues. Well, you wonder whether Covid has to some extent given the government cover for forcing certain things through.

Hill also thinks that the typical demographic of the London cyclist has become a factor. According to TfLs Cycling Trends Update of July 2019, only 27% of cycle trips are made by women and more than 85% of the citys cyclists are white. A high proportion often more than 20% or 30% are from households with a yearly income of over 75,000. Some of those opposed to LTNs clearly feel that the schemes encourage gentrification by stealth. For some people in some of those areas, says Hill, the whole cycling, clean air, low-traffic neighbourhood agenda is another example of their neighbourhood changing in ways they dont like and dont have any control over.

And yet, it also feels like something does have to change. There are, in 2020, 38.4m licensed vehicles in Great Britain; this number has grown every year bar one (1991) since the second world war. In 2019, according to the Department for Transport, 130m more miles were driven in Ealing alone than in 2012. TfL has found that more than a third of all car journeys made by London residents are under 2km (1.25 miles).

For a cyclist such as broadcaster Jeremy Vine, who rides at least 14 miles each day between his home and work in London, urban transport in Britain needs to be overhauled. In a city as compact as London, you cant justify people driving around in two-tonne metal boxes with an empty armchair beside them and an empty sofa behind them, he says. Its just nuts. But once you start to say, right, if you want to drive in a big metal box, thats fine, but you cant go down here, here and here people just go completely mad about it. To the point where somebody says, your neighbourhood is going to be an LTN and everyone goes, youre fucking joking! I dont want that.

Vine would start by reallocating road space and strongly enforcing penalties. If youve bought a really fancy car to whiz around London, because you want to listen to Bruce Springsteen playing Born to Run, you need to find a different city, he says. Go and rent a car in America and you can do that. You cant do that in our big cities in Britain.

I wonder what kind of parallel universe are we living in? But then I think a lot of this is blocked-up anger from Covid

At a glance, Ealing does not appear to be a community in chaos. It is a place of comfortable family homes and sprawling green spaces, plantation shutters and side returns still the queen of the suburbs, as the architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner noted approvingly. But there are some signs of the current conflict. In many of the bay windows, alongside drawings of NHS rainbows, there are either green posters to show support for low-traffic neighbourhoods (Safer, Healthier, Quieter, Greener) or red ones in opposition (Bollards to LTNs). It is not uncommon for houses next door to each other to have rival posters.

I borrow a bike from the Ealing Cycling Campaign, and its borough coordinator, a jovial American called Nick Moffitt, gives me a tour of the most acrimonious spots. We start with an oil slick on a street in west Ealing. Moffitt wrinkles his nose: the police were alerted, but it was impossible to prove whether the oil had been deposited deliberately to unseat cyclists, or had come from, say, a car snagging its undercarriage on the latch fitted to lock the bollard in place. But you think, gosh, are we actually this kind of neighbourhood? says Moffitt.

Moffitt, who works in IT, moved to west London in 2006, and his main reason for joining the cycling campaign was to provide safer streets for his daughters ride to school. The sabotage of the planters has been unpleasant, even scary, but Moffitt was heartened by the speed at which pro-LTN residents took to the streets to set them right, replant the greenery and water them.

With these schemes, there always tends to be a moderate-sized number of people who are loudly opposed, he says. There tends to be a smaller group who are loudly in favour, and then a vast majority of people who say: Well, it seems all right. Lets wait and see.

Opinion polls on low-traffic neighbourhoods as with everything else on the schemes are vigorously disputed, with questions raised over sample size and bias. Broadly though, there seems to be at least theoretical support for them among Londoners. A TfL survey in September found that 51% of respondents agreed with LTNs (subject to a consultation process for individual schemes) with 16% against. A survey of 2,000 residents for On London in October found 52% were broadly supportive of LTNs, while 19% were either opposed or strongly opposed.

For Laura Begg, a campaigner for the group Ealing Residents Against LTNs, it comes down to how much your life has been affected by the new schemes. A lot of the pro-campaigners in this area dont even live in an LTN, she says, when we meet in Jays Superstore, opposite one of the most controversial spots in west Ealing, or bollard land as she calls it. Whereas everyone in the anti-campaign lives in an LTN.

Begg could seem an unlikely opponent of low traffic neighbourhoods: every day she walks with her two children, aged five and two, to and from school. The family owns, and regularly uses, bicycles. And she has never taken any interest in local politics before. Beggs annoyance with LTNs comes from her experience running a dog-walking company. Every day, she has to navigate a set of LTNs to collect her dogs, go through more LTNs to get to the park, and then repeat the process on the way home. Today was horrendous, she says, with a deep sigh. I actually sent an email to the leader of the council telling him I was on the verge of having a mental breakdown.

Other local businesses in Ealing clearly feel the same way as Begg, from the owner of Jays Superstore to the hairdressers on the high street to the local pub. All of them feel the impact of the LTN scheme on their trade at a time when Covid has already made their survival precarious. And Begg reels off other examples of residents whose lives have been adversely affected, such as a disabled woman who missed her hospital appointment in central London because neither of the taxis she called couldnt reach her house. Now she wont be seen until April.

There has been annoyance, too, at the fines imposed by camera-enforced checkpoints: Lewisham council, for example, issued 3.1m in penalties on the new road layouts in about two months of operation.

These are bizarre times in Ealing, and many areas of London. Begg was walking a dog recently through the streets on a Sunday, and saw a cyclist hiding behind a planter taking photos of drivers ignoring the road signs, while a local woman berated him, telling him to stop. What kind of parallel universe are we living in? says Begg, shaking her head. But then I think a lot of this is blocked-up anger from Covid.

Any political unity that existed back in the summer feels shattered. It has been jokingly said that the whole thing is a plot by Dominic Cummings to turn people against their Labour councils, says Rupa Huq, the Labour MP for Ealing Central and Acton, whose mailbox has seen the objections far outweigh a handful of messages in support. Large numbers of my colleagues have also found these schemes contentious.

How this toxic situation resolves itself is likely to differ from borough to borough. Already, the government appears to be going cold on low-traffic neighbourhoods: No one should be in doubt about our support for motorists, wrote the transport secretary, Grant Shapps, last month in a letter to English local authorities. If there is a lesson to be learned from the LTN fiasco as both Rosamund Kissi-Debrah and Dave Hill tell me it shows what happens when politicians create a policy and dont bring the people affected along with them.

Back in Ealing, Tom hopes but doesnt expect that most of the planters and bollards will remain. Either way, he plans to be out on his bike more often, so thats one less car on Londons roads. When I look back, in 10 years, 20 years time, which side would I have wanted to be on? he says. I think Id want to have been on the one thats trying to do a bit better. Trying to make this a better place to live.

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Car-free neighbourhoods: the unlikely new frontline in the culture wars - The Guardian

US voters in Europe say the election outcome could influence their plans to move their families back to the country.

Many Americans said they were feeling stressed and were concerned about the future of the country after this election.

If for example [Republicans] repealed the Affordable Care Act and there was no longer a protection for people who have pre-existing conditions, that would be a factor in me never moving back to the United States which I currently plan to do in the coming years with my husband, said Rachel Oakland, an American voter who has been living in Lyon, France, for four years.

If something bad were to happen and if theres no protection in the healthcare system I think that would be a huge deterrent to moving back there, she added.

For her, healthcare is a top issue in the United States, and she is closely following both the presidential and Senate election this year.

Being [in France] for so long you get used to not having to pay exorbitant amounts of money for the basic necessity of healthcare, Oakland added, stating that in the US she often had to pay hundreds of dollars for doctors or would have to prove that she did not have a preexisting condition in order to get insurance coverage.

Stacey Kruckel is an American who works at a professional services firm and has lived in Germany for two years. She also hopes for a change in the administration so that her children could feel comfortable moving to the US.

I really do feel that this is the most critical election of my lifetime. I have two small children and you know I want my children to feel comfortable moving back to America, Kruckel said.

As the mother of two Black boys, Im worried. I want my children to feel safe and that their voices will be heard and that as young Black children they have opportunity and will not be racially profiled. And I think that this president has stoked racial divisiveness to such a point that its very problematic, Kruckel said.

She began volunteering with Democrats Abroad this year to help encourage other Americans overseas to vote in the election and now is Secretary of the Frankfurt chapter.

Max N and Albert R, who preferred not to share their full surnames, have lived in Lyon, France, for the past 4.5 years and said the 2016 election was traumatic and now theyre doing all they can to help Biden and Harris.

Especially thinking about the Republicans and Trump winning the election this time, it makes me a bit more doubtful that the US will be a country that I want to live in although so many of the people I love are there and it will always be home in my heart, said Max.

Clara Abbott, a 24-year-old teacher in the UK, said that she could want to move back to fight for the issues I care about. Shes originally from St. Louis, Missouri and was inspired by the protest movement following the death of George Floyd.

I really had wanted to be back in St Louis during that time because following the legacy of the Ferguson protests, there was so much incredible organising happening, Abbott said.

Living in the UK has also impacted how she views policy issues in the US. When she was a teacher in Arkansas, she explained she had to do lockdown drills in case of an active shooter.

Coming here has made me realise how insane that is, that we have to do that and always be prepared for that situation, Abbott said.

Americans abroad said they overall felt stressed and anxious about the election and what could happen afterwards.

Many said they were closely following the current events in the United States and stayed very connected to people there.

"Im exhausted. I havent slept. Ive been talking to my mother who is crying. There have been ice storms in America so my family is not only in confinement but theyve been out of electricity for a week. Everyone I know is just completely exhausted and stressed out," said Kendall Lack, an American who has been living in France for six years and who is about to start a vegan food truck business.

Lack noted that in France she has healthcare whereas when she lived in the United States, she didn't, something that makes her feel blessed to be overseas.

Sometimes it feels like Im in a false reality living where I do and seeing what things that happen at home, said Shayna Marmon, an American voter who has been living in Aalborg, Denmark for the past year.

She said that often Europeans have a romanticised view of the United States, which is why she feels its important to follow the news of whats going on in the country. She said one of the ways she felt connected this year, was by making sure she voted.

Gabrielle Czymbour just moved to France and despite trying to get a ballot from South Carolina, said her emails went unanswered. It's "disheartening", she said, adding that she was "pretty worried" about the election.

One of the things that worry me is that people are talking a lot about a Civil War or taking to the streets and I think regardless of the results we are going to have people who are very unsatisfied, said Patricia Duroseau, an IT consultant who lives in France.

Sarah Elliott, who runs the UKs chapter of Republicans Overseas, said she was worried about potential unrest in the country regardless of the outcome.

The one thing I really hope for this election for the nations sake is that its decisive. We are literally in a culture war. We havent drawn our guns even though youve seen inklings of what can happen in our cities. Im very concerned, Elliott said.

Shops in the US have recently begun boarding up windows and hiring increased security amid fears of unrest following the election results.

Typically, just a small percentage of voters overseas cast their ballots in the country, something that many are hoping will change this year.

Trends already point towards record turnout among overseas voters who resoundingly say this is a huge election for many Americans.

Elliott said she has heard from tons of voters in the United Kingdom who wanted to make their voices heard.

Im having people who have never voted before asking how to vote this time, she said.

Every weekday at 1900 CET, Uncovering Europe brings you a European story that goes beyond the headlines. Download the Euronews app to get an alert for this and other breaking news. It's available on Apple and Android devices.

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Healthcare, race and culture wars: Why are Americans in Europe so stressed about the US election? - Euronews