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Thirty years ago, the philosopher Judith Butler*, now 64, published a book thatrevolutionised popular attitudes on gender.Gender Trouble,the work sheis perhaps best known for,introduced ideas of gender as performance. It asked how we define the category of women and, as a consequence, who it is that feminism purports to fight for. Today, it is a foundational text on any gender studies reading list, and its arguments have long crossed over from the academy to popular culture.

In the three decades sinceGender Troublewas published, the world has changed beyond recognition.In 2014,TIMEdeclared aTransgender Tipping Point.Butler herself has moved on from that earlier work, writing widely on culture and politics. But disagreements over biological essentialism remain, as evidenced by the tensions over trans rights within the feminist movement.

How does Butler, who is Maxine Elliot Professor of Comparative Literature at Berkeley, see this debate today? And does she see a way to break the impasse? Butlerrecently exchanged emails with theNew Statesmanabout this issue. The exchange has been edited.

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Alona Ferber: In Gender Trouble, you wrote that "contemporary feminist debates over the meanings of gender lead time and again to a certain sense of trouble, as if the indeterminacy of gender might eventually culminate in the failure of feminism. How far do ideas you explored in that book 30 years ago help explain how the trans rights debate has moved into mainstream culture and politics?

Judith Butler:I want to first question whether trans-exclusionary feminists are really the same as mainstream feminists. If you are right to identify the one with the other, then a feminist position opposing transphobia is a marginal position. I think this may be wrong.My wager is that most feminists support trans rights and oppose all forms of transphobia.So I find it worrisome that suddenly the trans-exclusionary radical feminist position is understood as commonly accepted or even mainstream. I think it is actually a fringe movement that is seeking to speak in the name of the mainstream, and that our responsibility is to refuse to let that happen.

AF: One example of mainstream public discourse on this issue in the UK is the argument about allowing people to self-identify in terms of their gender. In an open letter she published in June, JK Rowling articulated the concern that this would "throw open the doors of bathrooms and changing rooms to any man who believes or feels hes a woman", potentially putting women at risk of violence.

JB: If we look closely at the example that you characterise as mainstream we can see that a domain of fantasy is at work, one which reflects more about the feminist who has such a fear than any actually existing situation in trans life. The feminist who holds such a view presumes that the penis does define the person, and that anyone with a penis would identify as a woman for the purposes of entering such changing rooms and posing a threat to the women inside. It assumes that the penis is the threat, or that any person who has a penis who identifies as a woman is engaging in a base, deceitful, and harmful form of disguise. This is a rich fantasy, and one that comes from powerful fears, but it does not describe a social reality. Trans women are often discriminated against in mens bathrooms, and their modes of self-identification are ways of describing a lived reality, one that cannot be captured or regulated by the fantasies brought to bear upon them. The fact that such fantasies pass as public argument is itself cause for worry.

AF: I want to challenge you on the term terf, or trans-exclusionary radical feminist, which some people see as a slur.

JB: I am not aware that terf is used as a slur. Iwonder what name self-declared feminists who wish to exclude trans women from women's spaces would be called?If they do favour exclusion, why not call them exclusionary?If they understand themselves as belonging to that strain of radical feminism that opposes gender reassignment, why not call them radical feminists?My only regret is that there was a movement of radical sexual freedom that once travelled under the name of radical feminism, but it has sadly morphed into a campaign to pathologise trans and gender non-conforming peoples.My sense is that we have to renew the feminist commitment to gender equality and gender freedom in order to affirm the complexity of gendered lives as they are currently being lived.

AF: The consensus among progressives seems to be that feminists who are on JK Rowlings side of the argument are on the wrong side of history. Is this fair, or is there any merit in their arguments?

JB:Let us be clear that the debate here is not between feminists and trans activists. There are trans-affirmative feminists, and many trans people are also committed feminists.So one clear problem is the framing that acts as if the debate is between feminists and trans people.It is not.One reason to militate against this framing is because trans activism is linked to queer activism and to feminist legacies that remain very alive today. Feminism has always been committed to the proposition that the social meanings of what it is to be a man or a woman are not yet settled. We tell histories about what it meant to be a woman at a certain time and place, and we track the transformation of those categories over time.

We depend on gender as a historical category, and that means we do not yet know all the ways it may come to signify, and we are open to new understandings of its social meanings.It would be a disaster for feminism to return either to a strictly biological understanding of gender or to reduce social conduct to a body part or to impose fearful fantasies, their own anxieties, on trans women... Their abiding and very real sense of gender ought to be recognised socially and publicly as a relatively simple matter of according another human dignity. The trans-exclusionary radical feminist position attacks the dignity of trans people.

AF: In Gender Trouble you asked whether, by seeking to represent a particular idea of women, feminists participate in the same dynamics of oppression and heteronormativity that they are trying to shift. In the light of the bitter arguments playing out within feminism now, does the same still apply?

JB:As I remember the argument in Gender Trouble (written more than 30 years ago), the point was rather different. First, one does not have to be a woman to be a feminist, and we should not confuse the categories. Men who are feminists, non-binary and trans peoplewho are feminists, are part of the movement if they hold to the basic propositions of freedom and equality that are part of any feminist political struggle. When laws and social policies represent women, they make tacit decisions about who counts as a woman, and very often make presuppositions about what a woman is.We have seen this in the domain of reproductive rights. So the question I was asking then is: do we need to have a settled idea of women, or of any gender, in order to advance feminist goals?

I put the question that wayto remind us that feminists are committed to thinking about the diverse and historically shifting meanings of gender, and to the ideals of gender freedom.By gender freedom, I do not meanwe all get to choose our gender. Rather, we get to make a political claim to live freely and without fear of discrimination and violence against the genders that we are. Many people who were assigned female at birth never felt at home with that assignment, and those people (including me) tell all of us something important about the constraints of traditional gender norms for many who fall outside its terms.

Feminists know that women with ambition are called monstrousor that women who are not heterosexual are pathologised.We fight those misrepresentations because they are false and because they reflect more about the misogyny of those who make demeaning caricatures than they do about the complex social diversity of women.Women should not engage in the forms of phobic caricature by which they have been traditionally demeaned.And by women I mean all those who identify in that way.

AF: How much is toxicity on this issue a function of culture wars playing out online?

JB:I think we are living in anti-intellectual times, and that this is evident across the political spectrum.The quickness of social media allows for forms of vitriol that do not exactly support thoughtful debate. We need to cherish the longer forms.

AF: Threats of violence and abuse would seem to take these anti-intellectual times to an extreme. What do you have to say about violent or abusive language used online against people like JK Rowling?

JB: I am against online abuse of all kinds.I confess to being perplexed by the fact that you point out the abuse levelled against JK Rowling, but you do not cite the abuse against trans people and their allies thathappens online and in person.I disagree with JK Rowling's view on trans people, but I do not think she should suffer harassment and threats. Let us also remember, though, the threats against trans people in places like Brazil, the harassment of trans people in the streets and on the job in places like Poland and Romania or indeed right here in the US.So if we are going to object to harassment and threats, as we surely should, we should also make sure we have a large picture of where that is happening, who is most profoundly affected, and whether it is tolerated by those who should be opposing it.Itwontdo to say that threats against some people are tolerablebut against others are intolerable.

AF: You weren't a signatory to the open letter oncancel culturein Harper's this summer, but did itsarguments resonate with you?

JB: I have mixed feelings about that letter. On the one hand, I am an educator and writer and believe in slow and thoughtful debate.I learn from being confronted and challenged, and I accept that I have made some significant errors in my public life.If someone then said I should not be read or listened to as a result of those errors, well, I would object internally, since I don't think any mistake a person made can, or should, summarise that person.We live in time; we err, sometimes seriously; and if we are lucky, we change precisely because of interactions that let us see things differently.

On the other hand, some of those signatories were taking aim at Black Lives Matter as if the loud and public opposition to racism were itself uncivilised behaviour.Some of them have opposed legal rights for Palestine.Others have [allegedly] committed sexual harassment.And yet others do not wish to be challenged on their racism.Democracy requires a good challenge, and it does not always arrive in soft tones.So I am not in favour of neutralising the strong political demands for justice on the part of subjugated people.When one has not been heard for decades, the cry for justice is bound to be loud.

AF: This year, you published, The Force of Nonviolence. Does the idea of radical equality, which you discuss in the book, have any relevance for the feminist movement?

JB:My point in the recent book is to suggest that we rethink equality in terms of interdependency.We tend to say that one person should be treated the same as another, and we measure whether or not equality has been achieved by comparing individual cases.But what if the individual and individualism is part of the problem?It makes a difference to understand ourselves as living in a world in which we are fundamentally dependent on others, on institutions, on the Earth, and to see that this life depends on a sustaining organisation for various forms of life.If no one escapes that interdependency, then we are equal in a different sense. We are equally dependent, that is, equally social and ecological, and that means we cease to understand ourselves only as demarcated individuals.If trans-exclusionary radical feminists understood themselves as sharing a world with trans people, in a common struggle for equality, freedom from violence, and for social recognition, there would be no more trans-exclusionary radical feminists. But feminism would surely survive as a coalitional practice and vision of solidarity.

AF: You have spoken about the backlash against gender ideology, and wrote an essay for the New Statesmanabout it in 2019. Do you see any connection between this and contemporary debates about trans rights?

JB: It is painful to see that Trumps position that gender should be defined by biological sex, and that the evangelical and right-wing Catholic effort to purge gender from education and public policy accords with the trans-exclusionary radical feminists' return to biological essentialism.It is a sad day when some feminists promote the anti-gender ideology position of the most reactionary forces in our society.

AF: What do you think would break this impasse in feminism over trans rights? What would lead to a more constructive debate?

JB: I suppose a debate, were it possible, would have to reconsider the ways in which the medical determination of sex functions in relation to the lived and historical reality of gender.

*Judith Butler goes by she or they

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Judith Butler on the culture wars, JK Rowling and living in anti-intellectual times - New Statesman

Legal experts are increasingly alarmed by Attorney General William Barr's efforts to help President Donald Trump win re-election.

The attorney general has joined the president in attacking voting integrity and civil rights demonstrators, and he has described his role in the election in explicitly religious terms that show Barr believes he represents "moral discipline and virtue" against "individual rapacity,"reportedThe Guardian.

"His abuses have only escalated as we have gotten closer and closer to the election, and as the president has felt more and more politically vulnerable," said Donald Sherman, deputy director of the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. "I can't put it more plainly than this: The attorney general is a threat to American citizens having free and fair access to the vote, and is a threat to American having their votes counted."

Barr has recently asked federal prosecutors to consider charging protesters with sedition and designated New York City, Portland and Seattle as "anarchy" zones, which helps Trump whip up hysteria about public safety.

"I think this attorney general is demonstrably more committed to the political success of the president, and the president's political agenda than any attorney general in history I can think of," said Neil Kinkopf, a Georgia State law professor who worked in the Office of Legal Counsel under Bill Clinton.

Kinkopf testified against Barr during his 2019 confirmation hearing, when he warned senators the deeply conservative Washington veteran believed in giving the chief executive "breathtaking" powers.

"When I testified against him, I recognized how dangerous the unitary executive theory is," Kinkopf said. "But what I didn't appreciate, and I don't think anybody appreciated, was just how fully he would deploy that theory in advance not of rule-of law values, but in order to advance both the president's political agenda, and I think more deeply for Barr, his own social and religious commitments."

The attorney general has accused Black Lives Matter protesters of fomenting chaos as part of a socialist revolution, and he has described himself as a bulwark in a battle between good and evil.

"The attorney general sees himself clearly as fighting culture wars that are to him moral and religious," Kinkopf said, "and those are deeper, I think, commitments for him than the commitment to federalism, and so to the extent that the balance of federal and state power gets in the way of achieving what he wants to achieve in the culture wars, he's willing to cast that aside.

"So if there weren't a culture war angle on it, I think he would take the position that states and local governments should be left to police their own communities, and the federal government should keep its nose out," Kinkopf added. "But because he sees something at stake in the current protests that jeopardizes what he feels as being the proper order of society, he's not troubled about using federal power to pursue what he views as being the right results."

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Legal experts are freaking out about Bill Barr's actions to help Trump win - Salon

David Frum: 4 reasons to doubt Mitch McConnells power

The Republican Party knows how to use polarizing rhetoric to split people along tribal lines. Donald Trump spent most of the 2018 midterm campaign talking up the caravan, the Central American refugees who were marching toward the U.S. border seeking asylum. Their numbers were small to begin with, and they dwindled further as they neared the border. Nonetheless, they made a useful talking point for Republicans, who wanted to remind their base on which side of the ideological divide they belonged. When Trump sent the U.S. military to the border, the subsequent outrage was justified, but it was also a trap: It drew attention away from real-life issues and encouraged voters to think they had to make a false choice between the caravan, crime, and illegal immigration on the one hand, and tradition, safety, and law and order on the other.

In a few key states, that gimmick worked. The caravan helped him, former Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri bluntly said after she lost to Josh Hawley, a Republican. She noted that her opponent was also helped by the Kavanaugh thing, meaning the story, presented by Republican media, of an upright conservativea man trying to protect familiessmeared by dangerous liberals.

Inciting a culture war didnt work everywhere. And in places where it didntin all those suburban House seats won by centrist Democrats, for examplethat was often not because candidates loudly denounced the presidents use of troops at the border, but because they changed the subject. When undecided voters were thinking about jobs and health care, they were prepared to break their habits and vote for Democrats.

Read: What Ruth Bader Ginsburgs death means for America

Politicians in other parts of the world also use culture wars to their advantage. In 2018, I wrote about the Philippines, a country whose president, Rodrigo Duterte, managed to keep voters minds on his shocking policy of murdering drug dealers. Rather than thinking about poverty or illiteracy, his electorate argued about whether they were for him (and thus for law and order) or against him (and thusas he would put itin favor of crime and drugs). A recent study I helped design also showed, among other things, how the Italian populist Matteo Salvini gained traction by keeping Italians focused on the polarizing subject of migrants, even as the number of actual migrants dropped dramatically. Polarization is a well-known authoritarian tactic, too. Russian President Vladimir Putin has his state-controlled media cover the perfidy of the West rather than the countrys declining living standards. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoan has used anti-Greek rhetoric in the run-up to elections to avoid discussing his own countrys economic mess.

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Don't Make the Election About the Court - The Atlantic

BBC Director of News and Current Affairs Fran Unsworth delivers the BBC Lecture at the Prix Italia on how public service media newsrooms need clarity of values to ensure they are serving all audiences in these challenging times.

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Thank you Marcello for that kind introduction and may I say first of all how pleased I am to be here to meet some in person and others virtually.

We live in stormy times and are all trying to navigate through them with intelligence and with good hearts and good intentions. We need each other so I thought I would share my thoughts and I welcome yours.

Like all news organisations and most companies all over the world the BBC Newsroom has had to significantly adapt to how it fulfils its role of providing badly needed accurate information and explanation to the public to help it survive a pandemic.

Initially, there was a lets all pull together spirit, but in the United Kingdom as the death toll rose, hospitals became overwhelmed, and the economy tanked, the political divisions soon resurfaced.

Those political divisions are more than even now not just focussed on policy differences but on symbols. We live in the so called culture wars and the BBC finds itself regularly accused not just of political bias, but also cultural bias.

What I want to explore today is how many actors wish to co-opt us into their side of the culture war; how increasingly hard this is to resist, but how if we dont, we will undermine our future as universal public service media organisations, taking money from everyone.

While nations tend to divide on left/right lines, public service news organisations can roughly divide their coverage on mathematical lines.

I use the term roughly advisedly. As our editorial guidelines state, due impartiality usually involves more than a simple matter of balance between opposing viewpoints, its about a range of voices.

But impartiality applied to culture is harder.

Especially when most newsrooms run very fast just to stand still.

In our job, the clock is always there. Deadlines don't just come once a day. They come every hour, sometimes many times within the hour. Our judgements are instant.

Every day of every week of every year we race to meet a deadline.

As the Red Queen put it in Alice Through the Looking-Glass: It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that.

The Red Queen got it right. I know what she feels like. We measure our newsroom lives in seconds.

But at the same time our jobs are timeless too.

A newsroom has to capture the moment to have a sense of where the news is heading.

To decide, why is this story significant and not that other one?

We aren't historians but we have to have a sense of history a sense of what is froth and what is important; a sense of what is fleeting and what is significant

We need crystal balls.

Our ways of thinking our thought processes - need to range across the past, present and future. And to do it with instant judgement with that accursed clock ticking towards the top of every hour.Any newsroom that can live and thrive and serve our audiences in this difficult environment needs clear editorial direction, by which I do not mean dictatorial rule-from-top but clarity of values.

Too often though, I think we suffer from a confusion of identity.

And let me explain why.

Newspapers have always had a stronger sense of their identity than broadcasters. They take a stance.

They can campaign. Their readers know their political leaning and know that each paper appeals to a particular part of the spectrum. By and large, they do not write for the whole country. They write for their target audience. They inform, of course or at least the best of them do but some of them may find more clicks from confirming views rather than enraging readers.

As a public service media organisation, the BBC cant take positions on matters of current controversy. We take some positions, of course: racism is abhorrent, so is misogyny; we support the rule of law and so on. Fundamental democratic principles.

Increasingly, though, in a polarised, online world, people have absolute certainty of their own beliefs.And they want us to adopt theirs. And language is increasingly their battleground. On reflection, maybe this is not new.

The conflict in the Middle East is fought not just over territory but language. Occupied territories, or disputed? Legal or illegal. Fence or wall? Terrorist or freedom fighter?

But today, as the former BBC director-general Mark Thompson has argued, words hurtle through virtual space with infinitesimal delay. Argument, he says, has become cruder and more polarised.The result is a fight to the political death, a fight in which every linguistic weapon is fair game.

This is new. And it has consequences.The BBC is an accountable organisation. Its right that we should be so. We are funded by the licence fee which everyone has to pay. But, boy, when I say we are accountable, are we accountable!

Back in the day, newspapers would receive letters to the editor, which might or might not get printed, and broadcasters would receive occasional complaints, invariably in green ink. Today the BBC receives a million comments a year, some three thousand a day. At least a quarter of a million are complaints. The volume has increased by nearly half over the last four years. Complaints come in the tens of thousands for items of coverage which were probably seen at time of broadcast by a fraction of the people complaining. But they have been picked up on social media with an encouragement to protest. In short, email gives our audiences democratic access to the heart of our operation. This can be a force for good. It connects our audiences to us, and us to them, and holds our feet to the fire.

But increasingly complaints are accompanied by hostility to our work and frequently to our staff who come under vicious trolling, which they should not have to accept, but which we as employers struggle to protect them from.

It is not enough for some people that they think we have got something wrong.

No - errors and of course they happen are increasingly seen as the consequence of a grand conspiracy, a malign wish by the BBC to impose its biased view on the world.

As our regulator put it somewhat politely last year, in a time of political change social media has shaped increasingly passionate debate around news coverage."

Weve been on this path a while. The era of the internet was supposed to be the bulwark of a rational age the marketplace of ideas. But thats not whats happened.

We appear to have moved into a post fact age as one New York journalist put it.

An age where opinions and lies can sometimes carry as much weight as objective facts.

An age where it is not enough to have a civilized discussion but where battles must be won and enemies dispatched.

Recently, one of our specialist disinformation reporters posted a thread on Twitter to illustrate the level of abuse she receives. Wittily, she marked the posts out of ten.

She gave nine to the charming claim that she was a paedophile worshipper and a brainless fool - I certainly hope you get whats coming to you.

Another read:What a sad little life you must lead to perpetuate the lies of the globalists. I hope they pay you well. See you in Hell.

A third:Can you stop with your utter nonsense on the BBC? You are the essence of disinformation. You look pathetic and everybody with half a brain knows it. Have a good day.

One person sent fifteen emails over a twelve-hour period including youre really the equivalent of Josef Goebbels arent you?

Our correspondent attributes the high level of abuse she receives to a combination of radicalisation by conspiracy theories, the dis-inhibiting effect of social media, her gender, and her specialist field.

Of course, this is not unique to the BBC.

After her reports on the Istanbul protests a few years ago, the Turkish journalist Amberin Zaman was fiercely attacked on Twitter.

The messages were abusive, violent and sexual. She said "I received hundreds of tweets, using the most obscene language, threatening to kill me, threatening to rape me."

After reporting on the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris she experienced another mass attack on Twitter that she likened to a public lynching.

Some of this is from individuals but it is also from people forming wider groups on social media.

It would be wrong to pretend that specialist interest groups have never sought to persuade the BBC that it should reflect their own agenda.

By putting pressure on us, or by trying to persuade us to see the world their way.

That, in a sense, is part of the warp and weft of journalism. It goes with the territory.

It is our job to listen, to learn, and come to our own independent judgment about what to include in our coverage, and what to leave out.

To decide whats worth reporting, and how to do so which words and pictures we should choose.

But there are more interest groups now, and they are better organised through their use of social media. It is very easy to get up a petition with tens of thousands of apparent signatures.

But what weight should we put on that?

The online warriors appear to be able to capture the zeitgeist or societal undercurrents more quickly than institutions, however finely attuned our journalism might be.

They move swiftly to coalesce quickly around a position and can gain quick access to the BBC through its accountability procedures, or directly to editorial managers and staff.

They can encourage staff with a particular interest in an aspect of the news, for example from their lived experience, to seek to persuade editors that their view of the world needs to be reflected in our coverage.

Or that we should adopt the particular vocabulary they endorse.

Dont misunderstand me.Democracy is good.Debate is good.Accountability is also good.

The BBC and any news organization - must listen and learn.

But we must all decide for ourselves what is right. In the middle of the maelstrom, we have to keep thinking clearly. We need to talk to each other and not get carried by social media bullies. I don't think that is too strong a word. Social media bullies. We must always remember that there are many more people who didn't pile on with a lynch-mob appetite.

Even when we get it wrong and we, like all people and institutions get it wrong. It's in the nature of any fast-moving, highly creative enterprise which, I hasten to add, the BBC is.

Ultimately, editors edit not interest groups. They do it with intelligence and honesty and also inevitable human fallibility.

I raise this today because I think this issue has a wider resonance. I think it's really important, not just for us and our organisations but for democracy.

The problem for all of us here is to see how thin the line can be between resisting pressure to protect our independence, and being remote from how the world is moving.If our journalism is not in touch with its roots, we will fail to recognize that members of the audience, or readers, or staff, have genuine grievances or thoughts about the world that they wish us to reflect.

But we also need to recognize the danger posed by the rise of interest groups that may have no truck with views that do not match their own.

The problem is not unique to broadcasting.

Newspapers such as the New York Times have faced difficulties in trying to encompass a broad range of opinion. When an op-ed writer, a political outlier on the paper, resigned, she alleged hostility inside and outside the building was crowding out dissenting opinion She said the New York Times was now being edited by Twitter.

How in such times can a newsroom continue to serve everyone the young and radical to the highly conservative.

How do we pick our way through the TERF wars', and navigate the debate over gender and sex? How do we respond to the debate about what the word woman actually means?

How do we best respond to different communities, different groups, different people, different individuals?

How do we respond to our traditional audiences who might not understand why we have a LGBT correspondent or a gender and identity correspondent? Who believe that we are simply giving in to pressure groups and shaping the world as they see it.

How do we avoid being seen to take sides in these polarising social issues?

I said a newsroom needed to range timelessly to have a strong sense of its identity.

But today the pace of change is so quick that the past can be a hindrance to our judgment.

Clearly we shouldnt have to wait for statues to be toppled to realise that time are changing.

But we shouldn't assume either that the revolutionaries speak for all the people.

One recent example: tradition dictates that the last night of the Proms our annual festival of classical music should end with the singing of Rule Britannia and Land of Hope & Glory. This year, the BBC found itself caught in the middle of a culture war about it. For some, the tradition is redolent of empire, of colonialism and slavery, and that people would struggle to enjoy the patriotic jingoism of these songs." But others said we should all stop our cringing embarrassment about our history. People love our traditions and our history with all its imperfections, they said. Tradition or jingoism? We were caught in the middle.

I believe in the idea that different opinions are valid. We may or may not disagree with them but we are not so certain of our own that we dismiss the opinions of others.

This does not though have to be a zero sum game, in which media organisations have all the power until it is stripped away from them by special interest groups that would fashion in their own interests.But for our part it will require adaptability and fixity of purpose.

Newsrooms that are not just watching the clock but are sensitive to the times. Newsrooms which can decide on the right editorial way forward and the right language to deploy, in a clear, calm, considered fashion.

And which when challenged can explain their decisions quickly and responsively to both the outside world and to our own staff.

That can shrug off social media pressure and the cancel culture, and parry the unfair attacks on our honesty and intentions

More than anything, we need newsroom leaders who are ready to reflect a broad range of thinking, who dont always go down the same narrow, well-trodden path because it is the one they have always followed.

But if we dont analyse the dangers these cultural issues pose to public service broadcasters and think them through, we may look up and see to our surprise that the hands of that clock we watch all day are pointing at one minute to midnight.

Thank you very much.

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After the Pandemic - News in the 2020s - European Broadcasting Union

Anti-racist and anti-fascist protesters face off against far-right militias and white pride organizations in Stone Mountain, Georgia on Aug. 15.Logan Cyrus/AFP via Getty Images

David Frenchs Divided We Fall, which warns that the U.S. is at risk of a literal breakup if current trends in political polarization continue, is one of those books thats almost too timely. Its long-range predictions already feel out of date.

French imagined California splitting from the United States, presumably before Gov. Gavin Newsom declared California a nation-state in response to federal failures to combat the coronavirus. French puts forth a scenario where roadblocks are set up on state borders. During the early days of the pandemic, that happened. French foresees Democrats trying to pack the Supreme Court in order to protect abortion rights well, you get the picture. The problem with Frenchs nightmare scenarios isnt that they seem implausibleits that, as of now, they seem like wishful thinking.

French has more credibility than most when it comes to decrying blind partisanship. Hes a veteran of the culture wars: a Christian evangelical attorney who used to be best known for suing American universities on religious liberty grounds and writing for National Review. But since 2016, hes become better known as a leading conservative critic of Donald Trump, in the process enduring a torrent of abuse from right-wing trolls including disgusting racist attacks directed at his adopted Black daughter. Today, he describes himself as a man without a party and acts as an all-purpose defender of free speechsomeone willing to go to bat for both James Damore and Colin Kaepernick.

The first part of Divided We Fall is a very familiar overview of current trends in partisan polarization: Americans have become much less likely to associate with people with whom they disagree in politics, and increasingly live in overwhelmingly blue or red communities. Politics overwhelm every other form of social, cultural, and religious identification, and people become more extreme as they tailor their views to those of their peers. Partisans dont want to just defeat one another in argument; they want to destroy one another.

An even more familiar litany of alleged perpetratorsFox News, overly woke college activists, the NRA, antifaare trotted out as French decries the vitriol and winner-takes-all spirit that have taken over our democracy. Given the party identification of the White Houses current occupant, and which side is perpetrating the vast majority of political violence in the country today, it seems to me that French is reaching a bit to make both sides seem equally responsible for this state of affairs. Then again, according to his schema, I would think that, so its worth just conceding the point to get to the more provocative part of the book, which imagines the end result of these trends.

If the best argument for the continued existence of the United States is the security of Estonia and Taiwan, maybe it really is time to pack itin.

Putting on his speculative fiction hat, French imagines two scenarios for the breakup of the United States, one representing fears of the left, the other the right. In the first, California bans private gun ownership in the wake of a horrific school shooting, setting up a constitutional showdown that leads the states on the West Coast to conclude that the union is no longer worth preserving. In the second, Southern states ban abortion, setting a similar scenario in motion. In both cases, a subsequent act of accidental violence prompts the final crackup.

Whats odd about Frenchs scenarios is that its a little hard to tell why he thinks theyre a bad thing. After 244 yearsmuch older than most currently existing constitutional regimesif weve really become completely incapable of existing as one cohesive political community, then why, other than a sentimental attachment to the Stars and Stripes, should red and blue Americans continue to share a country? At the end of the Calexit scenario, he even writes that Americans mainly felt relief after it was all over.

Instead, he thinks the worst consequences will be international. After the split-up of the United States, he writes, the peace that had been maintained through the overwhelming military and economic might of the United States would not hold. This is an accelerated version of the argument Robert Kagan and others have made about Americas ongoing disengagement from the world. Without the U.S. security guarantee, French imagines a return to great power conflict, with China and Russia moving to invade their smaller neighbors. With all due respect to these countries, if the best argument for the continued existence of the United States is the security of Estonia and Taiwan, maybe it really is time to pack it in.

The completely unsentimental reason to be worried about the breakup of the United States is that its unlikely to be as tidy as Frenchs scenarios suggest. Peaceful national divorces are few and far between in world history. Examples like Czechoslovakias velvet divorce are far less common than nightmare scenarios like the Partition of India or the splintering of Yugoslavia. The Soviet Unions fragmentation did not lead to the Yugoslavia with nukes that many U.S. officials feared at the time, but it did spark decades of brutal war in the Caucasus. Russian resentment over the stranding of ethnic Russians across international bordersby what Vladimir Putin called the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th centuryculminated in Russias annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the ongoing violence in eastern Ukraine.

The problem with drawing new borders, whether its Europe after World War I, the former Soviet Union today, or the U.S. in Frenchs imagined future, is always minorities. People dont usually live together in fully homogenous divisible units. Wherever you draw a new line, someone is going to be on the wrong side of it.

One of the main reasons that French thinks the U.S. is ripe for secession is that, as in the years prior to the American Civil War, red and blue states tend to be geographically clustered with Democrats in control of the Pacific Coast and the Upper East Coast and Republicans dominating the states of the Southeastern Conference.

But while these red and blue clusters are apparent on a state-by-state election map, things look very different when you break it down further. A district-by-district map shows America as a sea of red interspersed with tiny but densely populated splotches of blue. There is a geographical divide in the U.S. today, but North vs. South and coasts vs. heartland are often less relevant than urban vs. rural. Breaking the country up into chunks would leave a lot of stranded citizens. For this reason, I dont think secession is very likely, and if it did happen, it would involve more violence, border conflicts, and massive population exchanges than French is anticipating.

Frenchs solution to the problem is essentially more federalism: devolving more political power from Washington to the state level. If we just let California be California and Tennessee be Tennessee, the argument goes, every presidential election and every Supreme Court vacancy wont feel like a life-or-death blood struggle.

French says that his awakening about the dangers of American factionalism came after he witnessed sectarian violence in Iraq, where he was deployed as a reserve JAG officer. So, theres some irony in the fact that his solution to Americas cultural conflicts has some similarities to Joe Bidens much-derided 2006 plan for a soft partition of Iraq into semi-autonomous Sunni, Shiite, and Kurdish zones.

The argument is appealing in many ways. But minorities are also why the soft partition strategy seems unlikely to address many of the problems French is concerned about. Would a gun-owning, anti-abortion resident of Allegany County, New York, which went 68 percent for Trump in 2016, really be more accepting of laws they view as illegitimate and immoral if they were being written in Albany rather than Washington? What about a Latino Democrat in Starr County, Texas79 percent for Clinton? More state-level federalism seems likely to accelerate the big sort (the geographical clustering of like-minded voters) and to move life-or-death political struggles down to 50 separate capitals. Perhaps we could go farther and devolve everything down to the local or community level, but then youre getting pretty close to anarchist theory, and it doesnt seem like French is heading in that direction.

Its on the question of civil rights where Frenchs otherwise scrupulous neutrality starts to break down. He acknowledges that for many Americans, the notion of states rights brings to mind Southern senators filibustering civil rights laws, but he seems to find these concerns outdated and feels that the Bill of Rights will prevent outright discrimination. He quotes a thoughtful progressive friend saying, Its hard to give up on the notion that embracing federalism doesnt also mean abandoning African Americans in Mississippi, to which he responds, What kind of place do you think modern Mississippi is? His friend could have pointed to the racial makeup of Mississippis prison population or its absurdly restrictive election laws, but French doesnt give him the chance.

French sees the Obama administrations suit to block Arizonas draconian 2010 immigration law as executive overreach (to be fair, he also opposes the Trump administrations efforts to stamp out Californias sanctuary cities) without acknowledging that many Americans viewed that law as a violation of undocumented immigrants human rights, not just a matter of local preference.

Many contentious issues also cross state lines. Gun laws meant to keep firearms off the streets of Chicago wont be very effective if you can buy them 30 miles away in Gary, Indiana. French notes that conservative Americans feel disrespected by a popular culture dominated by secular liberals. But even if power is returned to the states, theyre still going to be seeing NFL players kneeling on Sunday, and their kids will still be streaming WAP.

Likewise, French doesnt acknowledge environmental issues at all except to sneer at plastic straw bans. Climate change is the textbook example of a borderless problem. Blue states can pass all the emissions caps they want, but if North Dakota continues fracking, emissions will keep increasing. Conversely, the reason the Trump administration is suing California over its auto emissions standards isnt because Republicans are intolerant of Berkeley lefties environmentalist lifestyles. Its because, given Californias size, the state can effectively mandate standards for the entire country.

Some of these are just fights were going to have to have out, and given the stakes, it will have to get heated.

An alternative view of a politically riven future America is provided in the 2019 novel Fall by cyberpunk author Neal Stephenson. In Stephensons future, Americans consume social media at all times via goggles. Liberal urbanites pay editors to curate the information they receive and put out, and zip from liberal enclave to liberal enclave via self-driving electeic cars. They rarely if ever turn off the interstate into Ameristan, where residents have been Facebooked out of reality by misinformation and QAnon-like conspiracy theories, and where armed militias and religious extremists dominate. Algorithms keep the two sides from talking to each other, and they have little interest in doing so anyway.

Stephensons vision often feels like a snobbish, blue-state fever dream, and hes far less respectful than French of those with whom he disagrees politically. But what Stephenson does pick up on is that while Americans are too entangled at this point for either formal secession or Frenchs federalist soft partition, its very possible for us to share the same physical space while increasingly living in very different countries.

By David French. St. Martins Press.

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Originally posted here:
David Frenchs New Book Arguing That the U.S. Will Break Apart Is Too Optimistic - Slate