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One author says for the Left to engage in culture wars means:

Whether dealing with matters of race, age, region, sex or sexuality, this is a framing of politics that essentially punches sideways rather than upwards.

As against this Finding common cause on a class basis is how reactionary ideas within the working class can be challenged[1]

Similarly, a curious editorial in the Morning Star, under the title A Culture War is No Substitute for Class Politics, takes John McDonnell to task for suggesting the Left needs to wage an online culture war against the Right, saying that:

McDonnell argues for a culture war which we can win with leading edge creativity. But that is no substitute at all for challenging the actual existing mechanisms by which corporate power is exercised.[2]

Which is a spectacular example of false counterposition.

But the essential argument of the down with culture wars Left is that finding common cause on class issues is the way that reactionary ideas can be defeated. This is simplistic and one- sided, and does not address the real situation in Britain or many other countries including the United States.

That reality is that culture wars have been imposed on the working class and the Left by the Right and the extreme right. This is not a new process, of course, but one that has been heightened recently by the surge of anti-immigrant xenophobia, which ensured the victory of the Yes vote in the 2016 referendum and the final conquest of the Conservative Party by its most right-wing faction. And that while of course trying to unite workers in struggle is a crucial background to defeating reaction, it is not enough.

In the era of Trump, Farage, Salvini and Johnson, the crucial weapons that have been used to divide the working class are anti-immigrant racism and xenophobia, as well as misogyny, homophobia and reactionary hyper-masculinity, some of which have gone deeply into sections of the working class. Fighting against these things is the specific form of the culture war that the Left has to wage. It would be much better if we did not have to, but this is the situation we face.

An anecdote. In 2001 I went to a Globalise Resistance conference in Hammersmith Town Hall. This was the period in which the global justice movement was surging internationally. A speaker from the American organisation Global Exchange said, to huge applause Were winning this one. Soon after, a giant global justice march, with hundreds of thousands expected, was scheduled for Washington on 15 September. But four days before it happened, the 9/11 attacks took place. In the atmosphere that followed, the organisers were compelled to cancel the march. What followed was a huge war drive and Islamophobic offensive by the Bush regime and the Right internationally.

This rightist offensive had a mixed effect in Europe. The 2002 European Social Forum in Florence was preceded by a giant march around anti-war and anti-neoliberal themes. The march was warmly welcomed by local people, who cheered and hung banners from blocks of flats on the route, something hard to imagine in Italy today.[3] In 2002 and 2003 a formidable international anti-war movement was built, not least the Stop the War Coalition in the UK which mobilised up to two million people in London the eve of the war.

But tragically even this level of opposition could not prevent war in the Middle East, especially given the near-unanimity of the Republican and Democrats in the United States. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq set the scene for a giant Islamophobic campaign by the Right and the extreme Right, which became the cutting edge of racism in many countries, feeding into the anti-immigrant racist wave.

The wars also created hundreds of thousands of refugees, especially as the crisis without end for the people of Iraq, Afghanistan and then the people of Syria led to an inevitable attempt by many thousands to get to European countries.

At the same time massive poverty, combined with right-wing and drug gang violence, drove hundreds of thousands of Central Americans towards the US border. These immigrants were seized upon as a target by the extreme Right to generate mass racism, in Europe and the United States: this anti-immigrant xenophobia created the basis for Trump and the Brexit yes vote. Neither Obama, who deported three million illegal immigrants, nor New Labour figures like Gordon Brown (British jobs for British workers), fought the racist tide. Today Islamophobia remains the centre-piece of racism and xenophobia in Britain and throughout Europe especially in Italy. The Italian extreme right Lega party and its fascist allies in the Brothers of Italy have added anti-Roma racism, something that has gone widely across Europe from France to Hungary, and in the latter case a large dose of anti-Semitism has been added.[4]

Ten years ago many people on the Left thought that the battle against racism and for multiculturalism had been won, and that multiculturalism was becoming the dominant outlook of people in the UK.[5] But in 2020 that view must be challenged, especially after the upsurge of xenophobia around the Brexit vote. Recent opinion poll results show some alarming trends, for example that 47% of white people who voted Remain in the 2016 referendum say that wanting to reduce immigration to ensure white dominance is racist.[6] But only 5% of those who voted Leave agree. Overall 66% of voters who generally favour immigration say wanting to preserve white dominance is racist: just three per cent of anti-immigrant voters agree. These figures are reflected in similar opinion polls in the US. What do they tell us?

First, that voting Leave in the EU referendum strongly correlates with being anti-immigration, and that most often corresponds to being in favour of maintaining a white majority. But we knew that anyway. Contrary to what is imagined by Lexiteer tendencies, the 2016 referendum and its mobilisation of anti-immigrant, anti-European xenophobia, set the scene for the eventual takeover of the Conservative Party by the hard right, and then the Tory victory in the 2019 general election.[7]

Second, anti-immigration voters are increasingly comfortable with wanting to defend what they see as the special interests of the white majority, i.e. being more or less openly racist and openly repudiating multiculturalism.

But there is worse to come. White self-interest (aka racism) is increasingly seen in elite right-wing circles as perfectly respectable. For example, a recent report by Eric Kaufmann, Professor of Politics at Birkbeck College, published by the pro-Conservative Policy Exchange think tank, insists that racial self interest is not racism.[8] Apply that to white South Africans under apartheid or white Americans in the Deep South during the civil rights battles, and see what you get. A cover-up for racism, pure and simple. Kaufmans own research shows that white self-interest racism strongly correlates to voting Leave in 2016, or voting for Donald Trump in the same year. Why are we not surprised? Eric Kaufmans recent book incidentally is called Whiteshift.

Kaufmans report, warmly welcomed by Policy Exchange, parallels extreme right identarian ideas, as expounded by the small fascist group Generation Identity. The shocking thing is not that lots of Tories and other right-wingers hold effectively white supremacist ideas, but that they can be openly paraded and championed, giving an elite Conservative green light to all those who want an all-white Britain.

Identitarian ideas closely parallel the clash of civilisations theory put forward first by Bernard Lewis and popularised by Samuel Huntington.

Culture wars take place because in liberal democracies, however circumscribed civil liberties have become, the capitalist class and reactionaries in general want their ideas to be dominant. Indeed for the hard right to come to power and stay in power reaction has to have a mass base. The term culture war is just one way to describe the inevitable ideological clashes which the hard-right offensive internationally generates. As we have described above, racism and xenophobia have been key to the ascent of the hard right and fascists in the United States, Europe and beyond. But the grip of reactionary ideology on the outlook of millions of people involves much more than racism.

Divisions in the working class are constantly reproduced by misogyny and homophobia. The extent and precise configuration of these reactionary outlooks differs across different societies. For example, the rash of LBGT-free zones in Poland is based on a mobilisation of traditional Catholic culture, as is that countrys constant war against abortion rights. In the United States, it is much more for difficult for mainstream politicians to be openly anti-LGBT rights, although the Christian churches are. But anti-abortion sentiment is rampant on the right, and has led to the passing of anti-abortion legislation in 30 states. Donald Trump attended this years national pro-life demonstration, probably not because he has strong views on the issue, but because he wants to keep the Christian so-called moral majority onside in an election year.

To be labour movement or socialist activists in the United States it is impossible to merely try to unite workers around immediate issues and punch upwards. A specific fight has to be conducted on the issue of abortion rights, and in colliding with sections of the masses who hold reactionary ideas, will inevitably punch sideways. If this is part of a culture war, then it is one the Left has to wage.

How popular culture reinforces reaction was demonstrated by the success of Clint Eastwoods 2014 movie American Sniper, starring Bradley Cooper. The movie celebrates a US Marine sniper Chris Kyle, a psychopathic killer who was said to have shot 255 people in Iraq. The film merges anti-Arab racism, gun culture, militarism, misogyny and hyper-masculinity in a toxic, hate-filled orgy of American nationalism. Kyle was eventually shot dead by a fellow military vet suffering from post-traumatic stress at a shooting range in the US.

American Sniper had huge success in cinemas in the United States and elsewhere and afterwards on Amazon Prime. It eventually grossed more than half a billion dollars in box office receipts, with one of the most successful opening weekends ever.

The Guardians Phil Hoad reported on how the movie hit its target audience:

Whats clear from audience analysis is that distributor Warner Brothers hit a target-demographic bullseye one that has proved largely resistant to Iraq-war material thus far. Red-state America (i.e. states that vote Republican -PH) has been lapping up American Sniper, with eight out of the 10 top markets for the film in the south or midwest, like San Antonio, Oklahoma City, Houston and Nashville an unusual state of affairs for the average studio film. Fifty-seven per cent of the weekends audience was male, 63% was over 25. Specialist marketing lionising Chris Kyle, the most lethal sniper in American military history, drummed up an appetite for the subject matter via outlets like Fox News, military blogs and?Soldier of Fortune magazine.[9]

Figures which show a majority male, over-25 audience are very revealing. All over the advanced capitalist world extreme right and fascist parties appeal especially to older men although of course parties with a mass appeal get millions of votes not in that demographic.

Henry Giroux has described the kind of culture in American Sniper as a glorification of cruelty a society filled with violence and racism, mass shootings, contempt for and cruelty to the poor, militarised policing, and never-ebbing violence towards women, the Black population and LBGT+ people.[10]

Fighting this kind of culture involves numerous political and ideological fronts and political campaigns. The irreducible background to overcoming reaction is the struggle of the working class and its allies, often on economic and social questions directly associated with living standards and access to basic services like health and social care. But the Right has to be fought on its chosen terrains, even if it means fighting from a minority or unpopular position.

This is not something new in the socialist movement. In one of the founding texts of Bolshevism, Lenin insisted that social democrats i.e. revolutionary socialists had to confront every type of oppression and tyranny in order to develop the political consciousness of the masses. His words have a decidedly modern ring about them:

Is it true that, in general, the economic struggle is the most widely applicable?means of drawing the masses into the political struggle? It is entirely untrue. Any and every manifestation of police tyranny and autocratic outrage, not only in connection with the economic struggle, is not one whit less widely applicable as a means of draining in the masses. The rural superintendents and the flogging of peasants, the corruption of the officials and the police treatment of the common people in the cities, the fight against the famine-stricken and the suppression of the popular striving towards enlightenment and knowledge, the extortion of taxes and the persecution of the religious sects, the humiliating treatment of soldiers and the barrack methods in the treatment of the students and liberal intellectuals do all these and a thousand other similar manifestations of tyranny, though not directly connected with the economic struggle, represent, in general, less widely applicable means and occasions for political agitation and for drawing the masses into the political struggle? The very opposite is true. Of the sum total of cases in which the workers suffer (either on their own account or on account of those closely connected with them) from tyranny, violence, and the lack of rights, undoubtedly only a small minority represent cases of police tyranny in the trade union struggle as such. Why then should we, beforehand, restrict the scope of political agitation by declaring only one of the means to be the most widely applicable, when Social-Democrats must have, in addition, other, generally speaking, no less widely applicable means?[11]

In other words, we fight all oppression, everywhere. Not just things immediately able to unite the class.

Culture war is not only waged by reactionary mass media newspapers, TV shows, the Internet and films but is intertwined with a huge push on the intellectual front. Reaction wants to stamp out progressive, left-wing, feminist and above all socialist-Marxist thought in the colleges and universities. It understands that cadres won for the Left in universities and schools are invaluable resources for the future. It wants those young intellectual cadres for itself. And to this end it has created hundreds of think tanks and magazines devoted to pumping out reactionary theories. They are massively funded by billionaires like the Koch brothers.

In the United Sates, right wing think tanks like the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, the American Enterprise Institute and many others dispose of multi-million-dollar budgets and employ hundreds of faculty staff researchers and writers. In Britain this role is played by organisations like the Adam Smith Institute, the Social Market Institute and the Centre for Policy Studies. Think tanks try to reach out not only into the universities, but especially the media and the government itself.

This is a culture war that cannot be evaded by the Left. It is aimed at undermining Marxism, feminism and multiculturalism, catching social democracy and Keynesianism in the cross-fire.

The culture war against social reaction is not something designed to divide the working class, but on the contrary is aimed at creating the preconditions for long-term unity in the working class and the oppressed in general.

11 March 2020

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Culture Wars and Class Wars - International Viewpoint

If youre not part of the political or chattering classes, you might have missed two recent tempests that erupted in tiny teacups on the devils banquet of the coronavirus pandemic. Last week, the President insisted on calling the virus that causes COVID-19 the Chinese virus. And this week, hes insulted a number of reporters at his press conferences. For days, the media couldnt stop talking about the incidents (yours truly was not exempt). But while the media obsessed over the Presidents nomenclature and attacks against themselves, no one else seemed to care. As of this writing, 60% of Americans approve of his handling of the COVID-19 crisis, according to a new Gallup poll. His approval rating is the highest of his entire presidency.

It was a stark reminder of how little the medias concerns reflect those of the nation more widely. Its a gap thats only growing, reflected in the incredulous and disgusted tweets of major media figures when they come across the presidents polling numbers. In fact, the true polarization in American life is not between Republican and Democratic voters, but between the American electorate and its representatives in government and in the media, who exist in a radically polarizing feedback loop that has disconnected them from the American people like two moons orbiting each other that have lost the centripetal pull to the planet they once circled.

Of course, this is hard to see if youre on one of those moons. So its no surprise that media personalities think that the polarization thats happening in their class is representative of how Americans feel. Thus, Ezra Kleins new book Why Were Polarized. The we in the title is presumably America, though the question in Kleins title is not the one he ultimately answers. This is not a book about people, Klein admits in the introduction. Instead, he focuses on braiding together the insights of two other sources of information politicians, activists, government officials and political scientists, sociologists, historians to make the case that politics has become more polarized to appeal to a more polarized public, effectively polarizing the public further in a feedback loop.

The book explores the history of American politics, showing how the two parties used to be a lot more similar to each other, resulting in a large percentage of Americans splitting their votes between Republicans and Democrats. This essentially kept politics from being too polarized because peoples identities werent bound up in it; the parties were just too similar to allow for that kind of investment. Klein argues that as the parties differentiated themselves, different kinds of Americans began sorting themselves into the parties, merging racial, religious, geographic and cultural identities with political ones and making politics more personal, more urgent, and crucially more defined against the other side.

But Kleins argument is undercut by a number of facts, some of which are his own observations. Take the fact Klein mentions that less than half of Republicans or Democrats think the other party is a threat to the nations well-being, a statistic the Pew Research Center found as recently as 2016. Or consider another fact Klein brings up: the era in which Washington was least polarized, when the Dixiecrats reigned across the Jim Crow South, political consensus rested on a foundation of racial bigotry that most would find abhorrent today, a political system far more ideologically extreme than the one we have today, even as it was less polarized. Polarization begets polarization, he writes. But it doesnt beget extremism.

In fact, what Klein is describing is not so much polarization as sorting: He hasnt shown that Americans have migrated to two distant poles on a spectrum, so much as that they have formed two distinct camps, neither of which is at an extreme. When polarization is driven by allegiance to political parties, it can be moderating, Klein admits. In other words, just as the Dixiecrats and the Republicans of pre-Civil Rights America were more or less united in their racism, todays Republicans and Democrats are more or less united in their opposition to it. (I guess Why Were Sorted is a worse book title.)

One wonders: If polarization is correlated with an America moderating itself away from racism into two less-racist camps, what makes it a crisis? And weare getting less racist something that polling shows and that Klein, too, admits throughout the book. Despite arguing that there is a growing sense of white racial solidarity, the logical endgame of a national politics based on identity, researchers have found that most feel this solidarity without an accompanying sense of racial hostility, writes Klein. In fact, Trump himself is a mix of more and less popular versions of white identity politics, and even his ardent base objects to outright racism, writes Klein: The president combines a focus on protecting native-born whites from both immigrant competition and foreign competition popular with the base with unpopular displays of racism and bigotry.

The idea that politics is about identities rather than ideas or policies is Kleins central thesis. Its an argument that erases the political sphere altogether, rooting all politics in the body (Hannah Arendt would not approve; she believed that humans natural tendency towards prejudice and hatred and our natural state of inequality were precisely the things the political realm was designed to help us escape). But here, too, the argument doesnt quite stand up to a crucial counterexample. Klein contends that Democrats and Republicans are sorting themselves by religion and race. He cites research by the Pew Research Center from 2002 which found that 50% of Republicans and 52% of Democrats said it wasnt necessary to believe in God to be a moral person. By 2017, it was 47% of Republicans but 64% of Democrats. But Democrats are hardly a collection of atheists; African Americans are actually more likely than the overall public to be Christian, while remaining the Democrats most reliable base of voters. And while 13% of Democrats say they dont believe in God, compared to just 5% of Republicans, that means that 87% of Democrats are in agreement with 95% of Republicans hardly a sign of polarization.

Klein does an excellent job exposing the underbelly of 21st century media operations, and the way Trump worked essentially as a marketer not just for himself, but for the media he loves to hate. And if the book had been titled, How Media and Political Elites Are Polarizing Each Other, it would have been an extremely successful and convincing argument. But the second half of the thesis, which argues that this phenomenon carries over from these elites and the American electorate, simply doesnt stand up.

He cites the work of political scientists Christopher D. Johnston, Howard G. Lavine, and Christopher M. Federico in Open versus Closed: Personality, Identity, and the Politics of Redistribution, to argue that the least-engaged voters tend to look at politics through the lens of material self-interest (what will this policy do for me?) while the most-engaged look at politics through the lens of identity (what does support for this policy position say about me?). Left unsaid is that the majority of American voters are not very engaged politically; 54% hold a roughly equal mix of conservative and liberal positions, or dont follow the news at all.

Klein realizes this. We talk a lot about the left-right polarization in the political news, he writes. We dont talk enough about the divide that precedes it: the chasm separating the interested from the uninterested. But just a few pages later, he cites a study of Twitter users to make the case that Americans are unpersuadable (I could have told you that Twitter users are unpersuadable) when just 22% percent of Americans use Twitter, and they tend to be younger, wealthier and more educated than the nation at large. In fact, the effects predicted by the Twitter study were undercut by another study Klein cites just after it, which found that when you allowed people who didnt want to be watching the news to flip the channel, the polarization effect dissipated entirely. Thats because the uninvested, who dont spend their time raging on Twitter, actually are persuadable, a fact Klein seems close to realizing before he returns to his thesis.

In other words, Klein goes from an obvious observation that political elites and party activists are addicted to cable news and Twitter to a much more contentious claim, that they have polarized the electorate. But he doesnt actually prove this second half. And theres much evidence to suggest its not the case.

Its not just the many, many Americans who are disengaged and thus much less polarized. Nor is it the 8.4 million voters who went from Obama to Trump, unaccounted for in Kleins model (you read that right: 8.4 million), or the Republicans who voted for Joe Biden in Virginia. Its that the poles dont seem to exist at all anymore.

Take the Democratic primary. Kleins argument that the polarization of the media and politicians bleeds out to the electorate would have predicted certain victory for Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, a democratic socialist with a radical leftist agenda. And yet, Sanders has been all but vanquished by the moderate Joe Biden, despite outspending him by millions of dollars. This is hard to square with Kleins analysis.

And on the other side of the aisle, Klein casts Trump as Sanders mirror image in the Republican Party, proof of the party moving to a rightward extreme. And yet, Trump just doesnt represent the apotheosis of Republican ideology or policy at all. The Republicans have long stood for American exceptionalism, endless war, free market economics and an aversion to Russia. President Trump stands for just the opposite.

Take, for example, the trade agreement with Mexico, the USMCA, that Trump pushed to replace NAFTA and signed into law. By all accounts, its the most pro-labor, environmentally friendly trade agreement the U.S. has ever entered into. In addition to new environmental provisions, 40% of car parts must be made by workers who earn at least $16 an hour, and cars must have 75% of their parts made in North America to qualify for zero tariffs. Yet it was Trump who pushed for the deal aggressively, instructing Republicans to capitulate to the Democrats on all of their conditions, causing Pennsylvania Republican Patrick Toomey to complain that it seemed to be just a one-way direction in the direction of Democrats.

Its not just the USMCA. In his trade war with China, Trump took up actions that labor unions and other liberals have long demanded. And these policies have paid off as Democrats correctly believed they would. Until the Coronavirus sent the markets into freefall, the US was enjoying the longest period of growth in its history. Speaking of which, the Senates $2 trillion stimulus package includes $1,200 checks to many Americans something Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin had already decided on before negotiations with the Democrats.

Trump doesnt represent the apotheosis of extreme Republican views so much as the scrambling of American political categories of right and left.

Klein admits that Trump doesnt have traditional Republican values. But he suggests that it was elites politicians like Cruz endorsing Trump that convinced the Republican electorate to vote for him, when it is certainly the case that it was the opposite: Trumps polling convinced Cruz to endorse him, despite what is an avowedly liberal economic platform.

But the scrambling of the parties priorities goes beyond the economy. President Trumps First Step Act is a criminal justice reform bill has already helped free thousands of prison inmates, 91% of whom were black. And hes not the lone Republican to have taken on the cause; red states like Oklahoma, Georgia and Idaho have been quietly releasing prisoners and reforming their criminal justice systems for the better part of a decade.

The truth is, despite losing at the ballot box, the left has won the culture wars; though the Republicans are helmed by a man who makes a habit of racist and misogynistic invective, conservatives have by and large disavowed racism and sexism, and even homophobia. Support for gay marriage has skyrocketed on the right, from 23% in 2001 to 44% in 2019, just like support for interracial marriage, with 88% of Republicans saying either that interracial marriage is good or, more commonly, that it doesnt make a difference what race the person you marry is. The House just passed a near unanimous bill outlawing lynching, a bill that had bedeviled previous generations.

And on other culture wars issues, our sorting has, as Klein predicted, moderated us. Nearly 90% of Americans favor increased mental health funding to screen and treat people trying to buy a gun. 83% favor background checks, and 72% favor red flag laws. As recently as 2018, Republicans and Democrats were equally likely to say they were satisfied with their healthcare costs (60% vs. 61%). And with the majority of Democrats holding strong to the belief that abortion should only be legal in the first trimester, there just isnt that much that divides us anymore.

The true mystery of American life is not why were polarized but why we arent, despite the fact that our politicians and media so desperately want us to be. Its something we should take deep pride in. If those in the media and the government who purport to represent us actually did so, they would focus less time in a self-radicalizing call and response with the President, and more time focusing on what unites us.

Batya Ungar-Sargon is the opinion editor of the Forward.

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Coronavirus exposed a huge gap between the media and the American people - Forward

AUSTIN, TX In the midst of a battle against the new coronavirus, the state's attorney general on Monday ignited a skirmish in ongoing culture wars by stressing that the governor's new ban on elective medical procedures meant to accommodate the growing numbers of patients felled by the pandemic includes abortions.

"We must work together as Texans to stop the spread of COVID-19 and ensure that our health care professionals and facilities have all the resources they need to fight the virus at this time," Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said in a prepared statement. "No one is exempt from the governor's executive order on medically unnecessary surgeries and procedures, including abortion providers. Those who violate the governor's order will be met with the full force of the law."

Paxton made the thrust of his messaging clear in his news advisory's lengthy headline: "Health Care Professionals and Facilities, Including Abortion Providers, Must Immediately Stop All Medically Unnecessary Surgeries and Procedures to Preserve Resources to Fight COVID-19 Pandemic."

Don't miss the latest coronavirus updates from health and government officials in the Austin area. Sign up for Patch news alerts and newsletters for what you need to know daily

Gov. Greg Abbott issued an executive order Saturday stating that "all licensed health care professionals and all licensed health care facilities shall postpone all surgeries and procedures that are not immediately medically necessary to correct a serious medical condition of, or to preserve the life of, a patient who without immediate performance of the surgery or procedure would be at risk for serious adverse medical consequences or death, as determined by the patient's physician."

Don't miss the latest coronavirus updates from health and government officials in the Austin area. Sign up for Patch news alerts and newsletters for what you need to know daily.

The order is designed to accommodate patients in the midst of a growing number of cases of COVID-19, a respiratory ailment caused by a member of the coronavirus family that's a close cousin to the SARS and MERS viruses triggering outbreaks in the past. To date, 352 positive cases of the illness have been confirmed throughout Texas, including eight fatalities.

Related story: Coronavirus: Texas Halts Elective Surgeries, Eases Hospital Rules

Paxton a conservative Republican who has often voiced his pro-life stance, as has his party's standard-bearer, Abbott framed his press advisory as having "... warned all licensed health care professionals and all licensed health care facilities, including abortion providers, that, pursuant to Executive Order GA 09 issued by Gov. Greg Abbott, they must postpone all surgeries and procedures that are not immediately medically necessary."

The governor's ban itself includes "... scheduled health care procedures that are not immediately medically necessary such as orthopedic surgeries or any type of abortion that is not medically necessary to preserve the life or health of the mother." Failure to comply with an executive order, Paxton added, is punishable by up to 180 days in jail and a $1,000 fine.

Those at the other end of the ideological spectrum took Paxton to task for the move, seeing it less as a public service announcement than one rooted in his political party's pro-life political stance.

MJ Hegar, who is seeking to unseat U.S. Sen. John Cornyn in Texas, is among those decrying the inclusion of abortions in an executive order meant to save the lives of COVID-19 patients. "I refuse to stand quietly by as politicians exploit a global pandemic to ruthlessly attack Texas women's reproductive rights," she said. "With millions of women and their families facing very real threats to their health and economic livelihood, we will not allow our politicians to further put their health and potentially their lives in jeopardy."

Hegar said such divisive rhetoric amid a pandemic is antithetical to unity. "At a time when elected officials should be focused on finding bipartisan, commonsense solutions to keep our families safe as we face COVID-19, Republicans in Texas are weaponizing this as an opportunity to ban legal abortions."

District 51 state Rep. Eddie Rodriguez, who represents a large swath of Austin and the southeastern portion of Travis County, also took Paxton to task for his advisory related to abortion procedures.

"Attorney General Ken Paxton is wrong to threaten reproductive rights," Rodriguez said. "Through this guidance, he is seeking to unilaterally end millions of Texas women's access to abortion for an indefinite period of time."

Calling a woman's decision to have an abortion "intensely personal," Rodriguez noted that the right to the procedure has been enshrined by past Supreme Court action. The decision to undergo the procedure can only be made by the person in consultation with their physician, he added.

"To be clear, Attorney General Paxton is using the current public health emergency to impose abortion restrictions that Republicans have been unable to achieve through the Texas Legislature or the courts. AG Paxton's guidance is unacceptable, and it must not stand. Attorney General Paxton is also potentially complicating the implementation of an otherwise uncontroversial and medically necessary executive order by introducing such a consequential and politically divisive issue into the conversation."

Rodriguez called instead for an esprit de corps to fight the pandemic with unity rather than divisiveness. "In this time of crisis, Texans are coming together to fight COVID-19. The spirit of solidarity is crucial to our coordinated response. There is an overwhelming amount of work to be done, decisions to be made and logistics to be organized, and we cannot afford to be divided at this time."

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Abortions Among Elective Procedures Texas Stops Over Coronavirus - Downtown Austin, TX Patch

Two things become evident early on in Tanking to the Top: The Philadelphia 76ers and the Most Audacious Process in the History of Professional Sports. One is that Sam Hinkie, the Sixers former general manager who served as the brains behind the entire operation, wasnt all that interested in talking about his time with the franchise, which abruptly came to an end in April of 2016 by way of a 13-page letter that includes a whole lot of references to things that are not basketball. The other is that the Sixers really didnt want this book to happen.

Me inferring, I dont think they were ready for this story to be put into form, Yaron Weitzman, the books author, told me over the phone prior to its release. Again, Im guessing there. I think part of it Im guessing, but this is an educated guess but I think the history with The Process and Sam Hinkie is not necessarily something that theyre proud of, just trying to go away from that, which is funny, because then theyll trademark Trust The Process, they did that already, so I guess thats kind of having it both ways, but who am I to say?

Still, despite the aversions by perhaps its main character and the organization at the center of it all, Weitzmans book came out last week. Tanking to the Top is the deepest dive into The Process that we have, giving a glimpse inside the years leading up to the teams controversial tear down, The Process itself, and where the Sixers stand now.

As for whether or not the current iteration of the franchise is at the top, Weitzman who, in the interest of transparency, used to be a colleague of mine at SLAM and its former football site, TD Daily admits that the most accurate title would have sounded a bit more cumbersome.

You can feel free to use my joke that Tanking to Two Straight Second Round Playoff Series doesnt sound as good for anybody, he says. I love when people on Twitter respond, The Top? What top did they get to? Like, ok, relax, its a book title, alright? Come up with a different alliteration.

If The Top means a franchise with legitimate championship aspirations, then the Sixers window is open. Weitzman made it clear that defining this exact version of the team as a contender might be a bit difficult, and concedes that winning a ring takes a fair amount of luck. But with all that said, Philadelphia has a pair of young superstars who can serve as the faces of the franchise for the next decade. After finding themselves in basketball purgatory for years, and then going through a process that hurt like hell for a while, Philly is in a position where theyre consistently playing important basketball games for the first time in a long time.

They traded a few bad years for a few more really good ones, and if youre a Sixers fan, the games matter, and theyre a championship contender, and the Sixers matter, Weitzman says. And whether you win or not, thats a luck thing, its about being at this level. From there, its a separate conversation.

Dime caught up with Weitzman prior to the books release to discuss some of its main characters, whether or not The Process is over, how the Sixers gave the NBAs various culture wars an opportunity to play out, and much more.

Im glad you mentioned what you did about The Process as an experiment. As you went into this and as you did some learning, Im sure you had an idea of the emotional response people had to this, but what do you think it is about The Process that still touches a nerve regardless of what side people were on?

I think it just came to represent a lot of different things, which I guess makes it a good story. If youre writing a story, the thing that makes the story good is that the story is really about bigger picture Why? And The Process hits that very well. It kind of came to represent and were seeing these arguments still, the nerds vs. the athletes, analytics, whats the proper way to build a team, blogs vs. old school media, kind of all these different sports/NBA culture wars just became embodied through The Process, I feel like. And then what happens is people get entrenched in their positions and the words, back-and-forth, become a even more inflamed a little bit. So if youre someone who is anti-Sam Hinkie when he first came in, youre gonna say even more so now, Oh, it never worked, you see? We were right. And then if youre somebody who thought it was right, you say, No, look, the Sixers are a contender every year.

And then Sam was just such a unique personality. I guess its the mystique, right? Because people dont know him and he didnt speak a lot and he came and he let other people sort of decide what he represented some probably were, some probably were not so correct. He became this figure in the middle of all of this, and then you mix in a million different things, you throw in Joel Embiids big personality, and Ben Simmons just becomes this monster that everyone has an opinion on.

There are six people who I think outside of [principal owner] Josh Harris, because I wanna keep this on basketball but six major players in here, for me, who kinda caught my attention, and I wanna know what you learned about them that you may not have known going in. The first one I have to start with is Sam Hinkie.

I learned that he is very much, a lot of the cliches that people have of him, theyre very much true. Were all three-dimensional, and theres a story, I think Chris Ballard wrote that great profile and he had some stuff in there about Sam loving basketball. I think he was the first one to describe him this way, Sam loves basketball and he squats 500 pounds, but also, if you speak to Sam Hinkie, if you talk to people about Sam Hinkie, some of the assumptions you make about him without even knowing, theyre true. The way he thinks, the way he talks.

Its sad, but I did not know his older brother committed suicide when he was a kid. Later on I learned and heard that he doesnt like talking about that, hes probably not thrilled its in the book, but its just one of those things that, like, it sucks, this profession and the stuff that we talk about, I dont have a responsibility to do it. I have a responsibility to put it in there because its an important detail in someones life, but its not like an altruistic thing to be putting in there. Is it a responsibility to the truth? Yeah, sure, but its one of those times that you put something in there that he doesnt let his kids tweet about, and its unfortunate it had to go in there, because I dont have a good response.

But yes, I learned that, and I learned that in that moment, that basketball as you see in the book, after his brother killed himself, Sam talked about this once on a podcast or he alluded to it, that a friends father brings him outside and brings him to shoot some hoops and he finds some semblance of sanctuary there. And I do think, for all the stuff with Sam, we talk about Sam in terms of being Mr. Analytics and Silicon Valley and all that, I do think he believes in the magic of sports a little bit, I do think theres something there to that. Hes somebody who truly loves and believes in sports.

Next up would be Brett Brown.

Brett Brown was a fun dude in high school and college. Brett liked his beer, theres some good stories, if I may say so myself, about him pranking teammates, I like the one at Boston College where they had something with a cab driver. That, but Bretts really good with the media and being front-facing, and hes had to deal with a lot of being the teams spokesman, and hes really good at that. Behind the scenes, Bretts got a little bark to him, whether its cursing or temper, things like that.

Joel Embiid.

The eating thing is true. I dont care what anyone says, he eats a lot. I guess we kinda knew that before, but the Chick-fil-A thing that he tried pushing back on, I dont buy that. I was most proud of myself about getting the stuff on his backstory about learning more about his story and how he actually ended up here and how he had an uncle who emailed a scout. I dont mean this as a criticism of Joel Embiid, I think his story has been told often in kind of a fairy tale way he was discovered, he came, everyone was happy, and theres some people who feel, like his uncle, a coach, agent, theres some people who feel like they helped him get there and were left behind. I think that happens with lots of people, its hard when you make it to the one percent of one percent, not everyone is gonna make it there with you, it can be difficult. I just like when stories get more human and realistic, and theres more layers to it. That doesnt mean Joel did anything wrong, its just more interesting when you hear the full story.

Kinda going off of Joel, next up has to be Ben Simmons.

How about this, Ben and Joel, I learned about the relationship between the two of them. I tweeted something today, I saw Michael Rubin at Sloan (Sports Analytic Conference) said it was bullsh*t that there was ever worries about their relationship. Thats just patently false, people have worried about it, and they were not best of friends, thats for sure. But I also think some of it was overblown. My understanding is there was never a screaming match, they never had anything major. I think it was more just like two kids growing up and theres passive-aggressive stuff.

The thing about their relationship, its funny when people talk about it, because it seems like often people on both sides are wrong from the way I read it. People say, This is a non-story, its nothing, how dare you mention it, who can think that these two dont get along? when they see a picture of them high-fiving, thats just being ignorant. But if people think that these two are doomed forever and cannot play with each other I shouldnt say play with each other, because I think the on-court question is a legitimate won but these two cannot be in a locker room with each other, they cant stand each other, that part is false.

I dont know how you could have learned something about this guy because we learned about him in a very weird way, and that is Bryan Colangelo.

I learned that the Andrea Bargnani thing was something that hung over him, the missed Andrea Bargnani pick. He thought he was railroaded in Toronto a little bit, and I think I have a quote in there somewhere about somebody telling me he thought the Bargnani pick was actually a good one and he should be proven right in that, that hung over him. Fultz was his big gambit to put his imprint on the Sixers, his own career, things like that.

I think the context of Bryan Colangelo is interesting, some of his background with his father, I found some quotes I felt were pretty interesting about him when he was hired in Phoenix telling local newspapers that the charges of nepotism were something that worried him and bothered him and he wanted to prove them wrong, and I do think all those different whims were what led to him saying, Im gonna go for it with Markelle Fultz, thats gonna be my guy, Im gonna show that Im validating myself, Im not just Jerrys kid, Sam wasnt responsible for this, I can build this championship team. I think that pushed his aggression a little bit.

For me, the most interesting guy in any Process thing, Markelle Fultz.

Theres a lot more to his story than just a simple shoulder injury, right? No matter what he wants to say, doesnt mean A+B=C. For example, I learned that his mother, two people told me his mother forced him to fire his best friend, who was his trainer, because she was upset about how he was handling him, or that local kids were leaving Chick-fil-A sandwiches at his house in Cherry Hill, I believe, where he lived. And she wanted to send out flyers saying stop doing this, and she didnt like how the flyers were sent out, and she made Markelle, how it was relayed to me, choose between him or me, which is not really a choice. And I think things like that, there was just a lot going on for a 19-year-old kid to deal with.

Is there anyone in your reporting on this book who turned into a bigger piece to this entire puzzle than you expected going in?

The main guys are the main guys, right? Brett and Joel are kind of my main people, and Sam. And then you have Markelle and Jahlil I guess Okafors whole story played more of a role in this than I thought, in terms of him being on TMZ that night essentially was the final straw with Hinkie and being pushed out. In context, how Okafor, it was a combustable situation, this guy who came in and sort of he saw his mother die in front of him and blamed himself a little bit, which I guess I knew that story, but not really, or I had forgotten it or never connected the dots. That doesnt mean A happened because of B, because of C, but its sort of like the randomness. Jahlil Okafor sort of represents that this person with this backstory was thrown in this situation and that kind of led to the undoing of all of that.

So Ill say that, and to be honest, Josh Harris a little bit, too. As funny as it sounds, the owner of the team, but I found his arc interesting, how hes here when he buys the team and at his introductory press conference, talking about how this is a good business opportunity. Hes at Sloan Conference now talking about how hes an NBA GM, or hes sitting in the middle of the press conference where they announced Tobias Harris and Al Horford and all those guys, and Josh Harris is there next to Elton Brand explaining why he thinks theyre gonna help from a basketball standpoint. I found that interesting and surprising, and learning about private equity a little bit and what Josh Harris business background was, it kind of gave more insight into, yes, Hinkies the architect but its very obvious he was hired by somebody who wanted him to do exactly that.

I should have thrown Scott ONeill in there, too. His whole story is interesting in terms of someone who played more of a role than I thought, someone I didnt really know before.

You mention how Philly served as this basketball culture war in all this, is there anything unique about the city and the fans of Philadelphia that you thought made it possible to go all-in on all of this for as long as the franchise did?

Thats kind of the funny thing, Ill say this, thats where they blew it in a way, and not Sam Hinkie. But just that if youre gonna do a tear down, the hardest thing in sports I always compare it to the Knicks because Im a New Yorker, theyve been losing for 20 years without a plan to lose in sports, use one consistent plan. They had a consistent plan, and they had actually got a big chunk to buy in, and thats almost the hardest part when you do a tank, or you do a rebuild, its getting people to buy in.

I put it in my book, I do find that the Rights to Ricky Sanchez guys had a really big role in all this, I really do, in terms of being able to galvanize a fan base into one coherent voice, or organize a fan base into one coherent voice, and galvanize them behind this plan. I think that helped, I really do, and they became spokesmen, they were the leaders and people listened to them. It was almost like they were pitchmen for it without being on the teams payroll. If youre a team, thats the best thing you can have, influencers like that. And the flip side is, they were already there and they were so mobilized, the group represented by those guys, when you push out Sam Hinkie, youre gonna have a loud, organized voice coming against you as well and making everything seem louder.

I dont know about Philly the city. Honestly, I dont know, I was an interloper there. I was in Philadelphia a lot, but it was mostly the Marriott, the arena, or Camden at the practice facility, its not like I was walking the streets. I cant pretend to know a city like that, but I do think that the way this played out with the fan base, it did make things louder and more intense on both sides for sure.

Would you say that The Process is over or is it something that, as long as Embiid, as long as Simmons, as long as those links to the absolutely garbage Sixers teams are there, theyre always going to be in The Process?

I dont know. I mean, yes, no. I guess if I were to do it, its a three-part play. Part one was the tanking, part two was from Simmons rookie year to now, and now where do you go from here, this is the first dip in it. Yes and no, how about that? Hows that for a clear answer?

This interview has been lightly condensed and edited for clarity, and was made possible by Dime receiving an advanced copy of the book.

More:
'Tanking To The Top' Brings Readers Inside The Process - UPROXX

Mar 26th 2020

Editors note: The Economist is making some of its most important coverage of the covid-19 pandemic freely available to readers of The Economist Today, our daily newsletter. To receive it, register here. For more coverage, see our coronavirus hub

IN THE PAST few weeks politics has retreated to its core function: protecting the tribe from death and destruction. The government has adopted the slogan Save lives along with Protect the NHS and Stay home. The army is on standby. In the coming weeks thousands of people will die before their time; those who survive may confront a 1930s-style depression.

The atmosphere in the Westminster village reflects these grim facts. Boris Johnson gets through 20-hour days by munching vegan food, perhaps in the belief that plants are good for the immune system. Aides are sleeping on sofas and old camp beds. Having restricted the number of MPs allowed into the chamber so that they could sit two metres apart, the House of Commons has risen early and will remain closed for at least a month. The mother of parliaments is now a sepulchre.

Covid-19 is changing the way Britain governs itself in broader ways, too. Two kinds of politics that have dominated the country for the past decade have vanished. The first is the politics of revolution. Britain has been turned upside down by the successful campaign, driven by activists such as Dominic Cummings, the prime ministers chief aide, to wrench Britain away from Europe. Since his election victory in December, Mr Johnson has set about implementing his grand ambitions to rewire the country for a post-Brexit future, shifting power from London to the provinces, pouring money into infrastructure and completing Brexit negotiations in double-quick time.

The second is politics as performance or spectacle. Politics has always been performance art to some degree: look at the weekly bear-pit that is prime ministers questions or the humiliating rituals of general elections. But performance has triumphed over substance in recent years. Leading politicians have become celebrities. Mr Johnson built his political career by appearing on television and turning his first name and blond hair into a global brand. Politics has also been supercharged by the culture wars. Can people with penises reasonably be described as women? Should student groups be allowed to prevent luminaries from voicing controversial opinions at universities? These were the great issues that got peoples blood boiling only a few weeks ago.

The abrupt change of political direction has produced a bad case of whiplash, with Britain adjusting to these new circumstances more slowly than most continental countries, and old habits surviving, discordantly, into the new era. Politics suddenly requires a different sort of personhence the disappearance of Mr Cummings and the appearance by Mr Johnsons side of medical and scientific experts. And it requires a different style of presentation from the one that Mr Johnson was comfortable with, focusing on statesmanship rather than celebrity and reassurance rather than disruption.

Downing Streets communications operation has been particularly slow to adjust: messages have sometimes been confused (Mr Johnson told people to stand two metres apart while obviously standing closer than that to his neighbour) and have been couched in high-falutin language about herd immunity and social distancing. Mr Johnson has also indulged in his natural exuberance by, for example, suggesting that the search for more ventilators should be christened Operation Last Gasp. But things are improving. Isaac Levido, the campaigner who won the election for Mr Johnson, has been brought in to impose more discipline in Downing Street messaging. The prime minister rose to the seriousness of the occasion in announcing a lockdown to the nation on March 23rd. His address was watched by 27m people.

If Mr Johnson is to come out of this well, he will need to make further changes. There is growing support for creating a national governmenta veritable covid-coalitionmodelled on Winston Churchills national government during the second world war, making Sir Keir Starmer deputy prime minister if he wins the Labour leadership as expected and drawing on talented MPs from across the political spectrum. The risk is that the prime minister would sacrifice the tools of party discipline and might find himself presiding over a cabinet of big egos and discordant voices. A national government may be a step too far, but there is a strong case for replacing Mr Johnsons Brexit government with a One Nation Tory government.

The current cabinet is one of the weakest in post-war history precisely because its members were chosen for their enthusiasm for pushing through the Brexit project. Some of themsuch as Dominic Raab, the foreign secretary, and Priti Patel, the home secretaryare far too divisive to command national respect. The fact that Mr Raab, an abrasive Brexit ultra, is currently Mr Johnsons designated survivor should he fall victim to covid-19 is particularly worrying. Otherssuch as Gavin Williamson, the education secretary, and Liz Truss, the trade secretaryare over-promoted. Mr Johnson needs to draw on all the talents within his party: it is foolish that Jeremy Hunt, Britains longest-serving health secretary, doesnt have a cabinet position. The prime minister also needs to choose a more acceptable figure to replace him if he becomes illperhaps the chancellor, Rishi Sunak, whose performance has been exemplary, but who may already have enough on his plate, or perhaps a newly promoted Mr Hunt, who, after all, came second in the Conservative Party leadership race.

Mr Johnsons career has always been defined by his powerful sense of history (hence his obsession with Churchill) and his ruthlessness in achieving his goals (hence his willingness to break with friends and even family in order to achieve Brexit). He needs to realise that covid-19, not Brexit, will determine how he goes down in history. And he needs to apply the same ruthlessness to clearing out the Brexit cabinet that he applied to clearing out the government that he inherited from Theresa May. He should not try to fight todays battles with yesterdays weapons.

Dig deeper:For our latest coverage of the covid-19 pandemic, register for The Economist Today, our daily newsletter, or visit our coronavirus hub

This article appeared in the Britain section of the print edition under the headline "The new politics"

Continued here:
Politics in the time of covid-19 - The Economist