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Nothing surprising has happened, Koppel continued. Nothing surprising is anticipated.

Surprise was an interesting metric for assessing value. Not significance. Not importance. Not expectation that reporters report. Just a demand for surprise, like a 7-year-old might make after giving a grudging kiss to Great Aunt Mary.

Its painful to think what Koppel and his viewers might have learned, the foreshadowing of foreshadowings, had he not grabbed his condenser mic and gone home. Would Koppel have been able to connect the language of the 1996 platform with the rhetoric of the 1992 Republican Party convention, a platform which now not only demanded full constitutional rights for the unborn, but denied them to the just-born? Could he have seen the significance of the platforms proposed constitutional amendment denying automatic citizenship to infants whose parents who are either not legally present or not long-term residents of this country? Could he have projected that far forward, and imagined implications for 2016 or 2020?

After all, it was in 1992 when the Republicans met in Houston and heard failed candidate and very successful influencer Pat Buchanan warn of the dangers that lay ahead in what was framed as his Culture Wars speech.

My friends, this election is about more than who gets what. It is about who we are, cautioned the future Patron Saint of Hanging Chads. It is about what we believe and what we stand for as Americans.

There is a religious war going on in this country, " Buchanan continued. It is a cultural war this war is for the soul of America. And in that struggle for the soul of America, Clinton & Clinton are on the other side.

Its 1992, and Pat Buchanan has already painted an indelible bulls-eye on Hillary Clintons back. Its 1996, and the sound of silence is 15,000 credentialed media not following Ted Koppel out the door.

I get the need for pageantry, the need to distract from such grim messengers. I have seen my share of balloon drops. (Indeed, I was once caught in a blind corner in the Astrodome during the balloon drop when an overhead net of balloons got stuck, relentlessly dumping its entire load in one spot. When the high tide mark passed 5 feet with no end in sight, a woman from the Michigan delegation took a deep breath, dived into the balloons, and emerged moments later, waving her shoe victoriously over her head. She then proceeded to methodically puncture each balloon with a swift swack of her stiletto. Years before Romneycare, Mitts sister-in-law saved my life.)

And I get the need for excitement.

My first convention was Detroit in 1980. I was only 23, and by the time the Republican convention was gaveled into order, Ronald Reagan still hadnt picked his running mate. During pre-convention negotiations, an unorthodox proposal emerged: Former president Gerald Ford would join the ticket as Reagans vice president, but with unspecified expanded powers. Fords representatives in these negotiations reportedly included Henry Kissinger, who would become secretary of state in the co-presidents Cabinet. Rumors of the possible deal began to leak did I mention Henry Kissinger was involved? but in those pre-cell phone days, the best delegates and reporters could do was try to puzzle out the body language as Ford and Walter Cronkite settled down in the CBS skybox for a friendly chat.

In the end, of course, it was George H.W. Bush, but not before there were some spectacular multi-reporter pileups as people ran back and forth through the narrow corridor connecting Joe Louis Arena with the media workspace in Cobo Hall.

Conventional wisdom among the regulars reporters, campaign staff, and consultants who have inhabited the same bubble long before COVID is that this will be the year that the nominating conventions are finally finished off.

No business gets done at a national convention that couldnt be done remotely, Steve Grossman, a former chair of the Democratic National Committee, told the Globe recently, a sure sign hes getting a bit socially distant from reality.

This has been a hard year. Social distancing has exposed the limitations of social networking. We need to gather. Four years from now, when the parties must select their nominees, there will still be much rebuilding to be done. To do that, people need to come together all the people who see a chance to be part of something bigger than themselves. That includes the protesters, the true believers, and the T-shirt vendors. The numbers crunchers and the no-free-lunchers. The retired and the dead tired. And of course that guy with the boot on his head.

Individuals without community are without substance, while communities without individuals are blind, observed the great 19th century philosopher Josiah Royce. It will be as true in 2024 as it is today.

Margaret Doris is a Boston-based writer.

See the article here:
The community of political conventions - The Boston Globe

Arp, too, saw the issue through the lens of Trump-era polarization. Theres something in the ethos or the zeitgeist of the country currently, in which people have decided theyre going to be on one side or another of some sort of, you know, great woke divide, Arp told me, adding: Anything thats patriotic is automatically evil in some peoples eyes. Its automatically aligned with some sort of ism or phobia, without any discussion of merits or actual history.

5

So what was the actual history? Like many other arguments in the Trump era, that question would soon boil over.

One of the first people it started to scald was Geoff Paddock, the other Democrat on the city council. At first he had little interest in the debate. Whereas Hines had vehemently objected to the Wayne Day resolution, Paddock had not spoken up during the meeting, and then he joined the majority who voted for it. In the moment, Paddock later told me, his only thought was that it would look bad for the city if its council spurned its namesake.

But a few days later, a retired pastor in Paddocks district, John Gardner, asked him for a copy of the resolutionwriting that from what he had heard, it appears to express the sentiments and work of a white nationalist, according to emails I obtained under a public records law.

Paddock, who also ran a nonprofit organization that developed a riverside park near downtown, passed on the request to the councils administrator, Megan Flohr, telling her he would try to convince the pastor that he was no white nationalist.

Theres no win on this one, Flohr wrote back. If it failed, you all would have gotten dragged for not supporting history. But passing it is bringing up these points. No win.

Yes, Paddock wrote. I knew that when it was introduced. Hopefully, we will get by this one.

Gardner later told me that he had been stewing about Wayne Day since first hearing about it, seeing it as a bully move that, in his view, seemed to reflect the same toxic racial animus behind 2017s Unite the Right rally by white nationalists in Charlottesville, Virginia. But after receiving a copy of the resolution, Gardner decided to read a biography of Wayne.

What he learned in the book about Waynes actual life, he said, caused him to become even more enraged.

6

As I sorted through this debate myself by studying books and interviewing historians, it struck me how sanitized my childhood exposure to my hometowns past had been. In the period after Fort Wayne was built and before the natives were forced to leave, it could be an ugly place.

The government used the fort to distribute annual treaty payments it had promised the natives in exchange for giving up their lands. The money attracted white traders who sold them manufactured goods and liquor, turning annuity days into exploitative bacchanals, contemporaneous accounts show.

Beset by rising alcoholism and dependency on annuities, tribes in the region like the Miami declined, able neither to adapt to the new culture of private property and yeoman farming, as an aging Little Turtle urged, nor to preserve their way of life. Between annuity days, the traders encouraged the tribes to buy on credit, running up debts that their existing payments could not cover. The government leveraged this dynamic to continually push Miami leaders to sell ever more reservation land, and then to agree to the tribes eventual removal.

Read more:
When the Culture Wars Hit Fort Wayne - POLITICO

The debate over wearing masks was never part of a culture war, and when we refer to it as such we miss the depth and danger of its significance. The debate was, instead, another marker flashing red on the march toward authoritarianism in the days of Donald Trump.

Mercifully, when Trump reversed his stance and recommended mask wearing at a press conference last Tuesday, he lost. It was a significant setback for him. But what he lost has nothing to do with culture. It had to do with his power over America's reality.

Words mean things, and in these confusing times it's critical that we use our words precisely. We should take special care with words that have to do with two most urgent matters in our country the coronavirus, and Donald Trump's presidency.

Culture wars are not just any fight between Donald Trump and his followers and the rest of they country, they are arguments over values. A culture war is won once a critical mass of the population has reached a consensus on one side of a debate or another, then that value is generally accepted. Most Americans move on after that, some never do.

This is not what is happened in the mask debate. In fact, it's imprecise to even call what happened a debate. It was an attempted imposition of reality.

To begin, public health is not a value judgement, it is scientific. It has nothing to do with what is right or wrong. It has to do with what is dangerous and what is not dangerous for the human body. Unlike most battles in America's culture wars, it is concerned not with one's perception based on religious affiliation or political party, but only with objective fact.

It is Trump's treatment of public health facts his desire to bend them to his will that makes his stance on masks not another attempt to start a culture war, but rather an attempt at petty despotism.

In a perfect totalitarian regime there is no objective fact, there is only reality imposed by the leader and the regime. Trump was recalcitrant about wearing masks even as the consensus among an overwhelming number of Americans was that masks help slow the spread of coronavirus, and that we should wear them in public.

A consensus like the one we see in this case would settle any culture war, but this was not a culture war. It was a battle between reality and an autocrat, Donald Trump. This has nothing to do with reaching consensus.

Trump has a myriad of reasons for wanting to impose a reality in which coronavirus is not a danger to Americans. For one thing, in his invented reality, he isn't responsible for this mess. In his reality kids can go back to school, the economy is fine, and out of work Americans can just go out and get a job if they want one.

Instead of doing the actual work to make the country safe for people to move around in, Trump and his allies at the highest levels of government, like Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp who is trying to outlaw mask mandates in his state are using their power to enforce a fantasy. This obtrusive game of pretend comes directly from the dictator's handbook. It's how Russia's Joseph Stalin hid an empire-wide famine from 1932-1933, for example.

Of course, this isn't Russia, this is America a place where we are very uncomfortable with our long flirtation with facsism. We collectively cringe when the words associated with totalitarianism are applied to our politics, so we tend to ignore its influence.

Historically, we do not like to accept that the Confederacy was a fascist nation born within our democracy, or that the Ku Klux Klan, a fascist organization, wielded immense political power in large swaths of the country within the last century. This autocratic undercurrent is not included in the song of America we teach our children. We almost never call it by its right name. This denial makes us vulnerable as Masha Gessen, author of the book "Surviving Autocracy" pointed out in an interview with Slate.

"I think one of the weaknesses that Trumpism taps into is American exceptionalism and is what some scholars have called the American civil religion, this religious belief in the Constitution, in the perfection of the structure and this republic," Gessen said. "And this structure is deeply imperfect, and I would also argue that it hasn't been very well tended to in the last few decades. It has become more imperfect, more rickety."

When we reduce Trump's stance on masks to a simple "culture war" it is in part because of our blindness to the imperfection of the American experiment.

While politicians wax superficially about whether or not the founders intended us to cover our faces, Trump thinks only of how he can use his power to bend reality for his benefit, and how he can impose that on us. That is what fascists do. But instead of acknowledging that and what it says about what's happening to us we ignore it and try to call Trump's reality-bending something more familiar, more palatable for our democratic society, like a culture war.

This mask debate also has nothing to do with identities like Republican or Democrat. They are irrelevant if we are to take those words to mean what they've meant for the last few decades.

In the past, a disagreement between those two parties would mean a disagreement between two democratic (little d) parties. That's not what this is. That old distinction was rendered meaningless when Republicans abandoned reality, the rule of law and consensus. Instead Republicans must accept reality as it's handed down by Donald Trump, and their caterwauling over masks is simply another example of that. It has nothing to do with "liberty."

America is in the throes of what Hungarian sociologist Blint Magyar calls an "autocratic attempt." It is the first stage on the way to totalitarianism. In his framework the autocrat tries to bend rules and norms until they break. The attempt is followed by an "autocratic breakthrough" and then "autocratic consolidation." The transition is not a "slide," which implies that it moves at a steady, predictable clip. It is a tug of war.

That is to say these sort of autocratic attempts don't come without some pushback from within the institutions that are being broken . At times we see the GOP struggling with its transition from its old democratic self. And that struggle is especially difficult during the coronavirus because it is such lethal force of reality.

Last week, Trump was was pressing Republicans to subvert reality in his favor by leaving funding for more testing out of the upcoming coronavirus aid bill. Thankfully that attempt failed.

That failure was the moment when Trump lost his crusade against masks. It was because of a lack of raw political power, not because he has any respect for public health or society's consensus. If he senses his power returning, do not be shocked if he reverses course on masks again.

Trump firmly believes he is entitled to control reality, to assert himself and his followers above all else. His politics are not the politics of seeking accord, because fascism is not about accord, it's about domination. It is not a debate. It is a demand. But we do not have to accede.

Link:
Mask debate is not culture war, its Trump trying to distort reality, facts - Business Insider

Americans are living in an era when efforts to forge a new national identity what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. characterized as a "beloved community" free of racial injustice are directly confronting deeply entrenched national myths rooted in white supremacy. We are in the midst of what amounts to America's Third Reconstruction.

In the wake of the Civil War, the architects of Reconstruction (1865-1877) made a valiant attempt to create a new interracial democracy. It faltered in the face of brutal violence, legal decisions that assaulted Black citizenship, and a political system that reinforced racial divisions thought to have been eradicated after the war. In the years that followed, segregationists erected Confederate monuments, massacred Black towns, and imposed a version of American history rooted in vicious racist myths that became part of our national culture.

Movies such as "Birth of a Nation" (1915) and "Gone With the Wind" (1939), racist memorabilia such as lawn jockeys, and everyday items such as Aunt Jemima syrup and Uncle Ben's rice reflected not only personal indignities but wider injuries related to policies and systems of racial oppression.

America's Second Reconstruction, the civil rights movement's heroic period in the 1950s and 1960s, attempted to combat the symbols and substance of white supremacy and anti-Black racism, but its mission -- despite watershed legal and legislative victories like Brown v. Board of Education and the Civil Rights, Voting Rights and Fair Housing Acts -- remains incomplete.

America's Third Reconstruction began with the soaring promise of Barack Obama's 2008 presidential election and the victory of a campaign that millions took to be a definitive symbol of historic racial progress.

Dreams that a Black president could prove transformative to national race relations proved short-lived, and the emerging Black Lives Matter movement during Obama's second term exposed the limited impact of a Black First Family on entrenched systems of oppression.

This year has ushered in the most dynamic social movement for racial justice in American history as Black Lives Matter 2.0 awakened the entire nation to a reality of White supremacy -- made more legible to millions of White Americans who, in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, shelter-in-place orders and mass unemployment showed new layers of empathy in taking the streets to protest against the killing of George Floyd.

If 2008 reflected hopes that one Black leader could transform racial injustice from the inside out, 2020 bears witness to the power of millions of Americans seeking fundamental transformation of systems of racial injustice from the bottom up.

The 1619 Project, the New York Times' multimedia history of racial slavery and democracy since the arrival of the first enslaved African in Jamestown Colony, Virginia, has become the latest battleground in our long running cultural war over the very meaning of freedom, democracy and citizenship.

Conceived by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, the project sought to uncover the deep and broad roots of racial slavery and its aftermath on American democracy in ways that have been forgotten, ignored and distorted.

The project brilliantly explored slavery's relationship with capitalism, the creation of a racial caste system and the perpetuation of disparities in wealth and health care that are based on systems rooted in bondage.

Readers of the 1619 Project come away with a better and historically sophisticated understanding of how slavery fostered supply chains of power and privilege for Whites and misery and grief for Blacks -- in ways that have received dedicated scholarly attention but comparatively scant public debate.

Tom Cotton, the US senator from Arkansas who publicly called for the use of military troops to route racial justice protesters in the spring, has introduced legislation designed to prevent the teaching of the 1619 Project in public schools.

The poverty of Cotton's historical explanation is surpassed by the mendacity of his description of racial slavery -- a practice which slaughtered, maimed, killed, raped and crushed the bones, but not the spirits, of generations of Black human beings.

The Civil War's gruesome death toll of more than 600,000 Americans obliterates his assertion that the founders realized that slavery would one day be removed from the face of the republic.

Parts of America still remain divided against itself. Cotton's efforts to impugn the 1619 Project form the latest effort in a war over the narrative that began as soon as the Civil War ended.

While the North won the physical battle, the South proved victorious in retelling the story of racial slavery to future generations. The "Lost Cause" has proven tenacious enough that even 21st century schoolchildren are frequently taught that the Civil War was fought over "states' rights" instead of racial slavery.

The 1619 Project refutes this hollow narrative victory with a national history that reflects the bitter fruits of racial slavery and violence as well as the beauty of generations of Black Americans who helped reimagine democracy with an indefatigable will.

Slavery represented an incomprehensible moral and political evil, one that the founders, subsequent presidents, abolitionists and enslaved Black Americans wrestled and debated -- but it was never a necessary one.

Suggesting otherwise perpetuates the acceptance of slavery's legacy. To believe otherwise is to endorse the continuation of a seemingly unbroken chain of wrong turns and bad choices made collectively by a nation that has remained, until as recently as a few months ago, willfully blind to the racial sins of the past.

Cotton's words remind us that a "narrative war" continues in our own time. The culture wars of the 21st century, like past conflicts, centered around public interpretations of history as a tool to make sense of the present in service of envisioning the country's political future.

The choice ahead of us is as stark now as it was on the eve of the Civil War. America can choose a liberated future that acknowledges past racial sins in a generational effort at atonement and repair -- or we can double down on the same willful blinders that got us in this mess, aided by rationalizations that describe incomprehensible evil as the cost of doing business.

Read more from the original source:
America is on a brink like none since the Civil War - CNN

IN A fascinating essay inUnherd, Matthew Goodwin explains why, despite the seemingly interminable bungling, the endless hysteria and push-me-pull-you nature of Covid policy, the nannying fat taxes, the idiocies of HS2 and on and on and on, Boris Johnsons popularity remains sky high: it is values that lie at the root of it all.

Goodwin writes: What unites Boris Johnsons voters is not so much their economic experience as their values. They prioritise the nation and the national community . . . they cherish Britains history, heritage and collective memory and are more sensitive to attempts to deconstruct them.

Indeed, and it is his and the wider Tory failure to fight for those values that will one day see Johnsons electorate turn savagely against him.

Matthew Parris once explained superbly why some leaders seem to levitate above the day-to-day misfortunes and disasters of political office. Changes in public opinion, he wrote, are like tipping gravel into a swamp: for a long time, nothing registers on the surface, but all the time the swamp is getting shallower. One day that gravel will break the surface. So it is with swings in political popularity: it isnt that people are stupid and apathetic that explains the supposed Teflon-like qualities of leaders such as Tony Blair or Boris Johnson.Yes, both benefit from having charisma, but people alsounderstand change takes time and there are bound to be mistakes and disappointments along the way. Furthermore, given the strong overlap between the demographics who voted for Brexit and Johnsons values-based electorate, the governments seemingly hard-line Brexit negotiating position is no doubt a significant factor in its continued popularity. However, to many, I would argue, Brexit was not just about sovereignty or immigration but a springboard, a chance for a complete cultural reboot, and they still see in Johnson a jolly, charismatic, can-do figure who can deliver it.

Unfortunately, the Tories are psychologically ill-equipped to fight a culture war. Cultural change is much more difficult than economic change: it requires a holistic vision, coherent strategy, tenacity and endless reinforcement. You are also fighting on territory the Left has made its own for several decades. In contrast, the Tory Party is in its very nature cynical and opportunistic, geared to short-term pragmatism, tactical-level thinking and much happier implementing a settled agenda determined by thezeitgeistrather than leading from the front.

We saw this, of course, with Johnsons response to the Black Lives Matter movement: for days he hid in his bunker, and when he finally emerged it was only selectively to condemn the attacking of Winston Churchills statue and the Cenotaph, iconic monuments whose defence was uncontroversial. That is an absolute classic of Tory cynicism: Johnsons response was not to think of the long-term national interest but to minimise the potential loss of political capital; not for him the response of Frances President Macron who came out all guns blazing. By fighting on so narrow a front, Johnson left the field open for yet another significant Left-wing cultural victory. Our decadent institutions duly surrendered and the Left saw their chance, with hundreds of commissions and reviews now launched that will see our history swept away. Who can doubt that those areas controlled by Labour will now see widespread replacement of our history with more appropriate figures?As many of these areas are among the most culturally and ethnically diverse, what we may see is the cultural balkanisation of the country, with parallel histories rooted not just in the public space, but far more dangerously along ethnic lines.

Although it may not register in the polls yet, I am willing to bet that, to return to Parriss simile,substantial quantities of gravel have already been tipped into the swamp. After Brexit is delivered, Johnsons electorate will expect serious action when it comes to theKulturkampf.

They will not get it: tragically for this country, the Tories have already surrendered the battlefield.As the statues come down, ton after ton of Parriss gravel will be added.As popular as Johnson is today, one day it will stand like an alp above the political fray, and there will be no hiding place for the Bottler Blond.

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The Tories' surrender in the culture wars will bring them down - The Conservative Woman