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As with all national crises, COVID-19 has stimulated calls for unity and sacrifices for the common good. And millions of Americans have responded magnificently. Health care professionals, first responders, and police officers have put their lives on the line. Unsung heroes include the 8,000 volunteers at Invisible Hands, an organization founded by two 20-somethings, who deliver groceries and supplies to people who are confined to their apartments or homes.

But, alas, there is considerable evidence as well that the fight against the novel coronavirus is also becoming a Hobbesian war of all against all, as individuals and groups compete with one another to survive. And, along with the virus, these (un)civil wars may well get worse before they get better. Unless we do a lot more to flatten their curves.

The generational divide: Politicians and public health officials are redoubling their efforts to get young people who believe they can shrug off the virus to practice social distancing. They have not yet been entirely successful. Dan Patrick, the Lt. Gov. of Texas, did not help matters when he suggested to Tucker Carlson of Fox News that senior citizens should be willing to put themselves at greater risk to open up the nations economy. My message, Patrick declared, is lets get back to work, lets get back to living... and those of us who are 70 plus, well take care of ourselves.

Competition and conflict between states: Because the federal government is playing catch-up and has declined to assume the responsibility for the manufacture and distribution of supplies, states have been forced to compete with one another, driving up the price of N95 masks, PPE, and ventilators. The competition is likely to intensify as coronavirus hot spots appear in more states if the federal government continues to drag its feet.

At the end of March, Gina Raimondo, the Democratic governor of Rhode Island, directed police to stop cars with New York State license plates and force drivers to self-quarantine for 14 days. Andrew CuomoAndrew CuomoOvernight Health Care: Trump calls report on hospital shortages 'another fake dossier' | Trump weighs freezing funding to WHO | NY sees another 731 deaths | States battle for supplies | McConnell, Schumer headed for clash Overnight Defense: Navy chief resigns over aircraft carrier controversy | Trump replaces Pentagon IG | Hospital ship crew member tests positive for coronavirus NRA reportedly lays off dozens of employees amid coronavirus MORE, the Democratic governor of New York, declared, I dont believe it was legal. I dont believe it was neighborly and threatened to sue. Raimondo replaced the directive with an executive order compelling visitors from any state arriving in Rhode Island by any mode of transportation for non-work purposes, to self-quarantine for 14 days.

Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor of Florida, issued a similar order for people entering his state from New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Louisiana. Checkpoints along Interstates 10 and 95 were reportedly backed up for many miles.

Because the virus is now present in every state, with community spread, these measures, which are difficult to enforce, may not do much good. But they will almost certainly be enacted by other states.

Exacerbating partisan polarization: When dealing with national disasters, political leaders usually set aside partisan differences. President TrumpDonald John TrumpCDC updates website to remove dosage guidance on drug touted by Trump Trump says he'd like economy to reopen 'with a big bang' but acknowledges it may be limited Graham backs Trump, vows no money for WHO in next funding bill MORE, however, has exacerbated partisan polarization during the coronavirus crisis. During a recent press briefing, Trump cited the complaints of three Democratic governors that he had not responded quickly enough to the crisis or federalized the production of ventilators and masks, and told Vice President Pence not to return their calls, demanding that state officials be publicly appreciative if they want help from the federal government.

Trump said he did not believe that N.Y. Gov. Andrew Cuomo really needed 40,000 or 30,000 ventilators. He made fun of Washington State Gov. Jay InsleeJay Robert InsleeCalifornia to send 500 ventilators to national stockpile Juan Williams: Governors lead as Trump flounders Feds send ventilators to coronavirus hot spots around country MOREs constant chirping about the shortage of testing kits and medical supplies. He blasted Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, who had pushed for quick delivery of PPE, ventilators and an unfulfilled order of 225,000 masks. Trump seemed to tie his decision on granting Michigan national emergency status to the governors attitude. And in a tweet, he told Michiganders, Your governor, Gretchen Half Whitmer, is way in over her head, she doesnt have a clue. Likes blaming everyone for her own ineptitude!

This episode, reinforced by a multitude of similar comments from the president, raised concerns that he will play a partisan game of red and blue in determining who gets what and when, who lives and who dies.

Rekindling rural-urban culture wars: Culture wars between farmers and city-dwellers are as old as the republic. Think Thomas Jefferson. And William Jennings Bryan. Recall that in 1961 Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-Ariz.) opined that the United States would be better off if we could just saw off the Eastern seaboard and let it float out to sea. And that in 1983, the Rev. Jerry Falwell declared that AIDS is not just Gods punishment for homosexuals, its Gods punishment for the society that tolerates homosexuals.

Know as well that a survey conducted in 2016 before Donald Trump was elected found that 58 percent of Americans believe big cities are the least like the real America and 38 percent of Republicans believe New Yorkers have worse values than people in the rest of the country.

Might it then be appropriate to ask some hard questions which no one can now answer with certainty? How are Americans in the hinterlands responding to the carnage now being visited by the coronavirus on hotspots, all of which are in cities? How do they think it is being handled? Do they think that President Trumps claim that staff in New York hospitals are stealing masks is credible? If and when the virus descends on their communities, will they react differently? Who, if anyone, will they blame?

Glenn C. Altschuler is the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Professor of American Studies at Cornell University. He is the co-author (with Stuart Blumin) ofRude Republic: Americans and Their Politics in the Nineteenth Century.

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Is the coronavirus igniting a war of all against all? | TheHill - The Hill

Cooped up in my own little WFH lazaretto, Im spending too much time on Twitter. Then again, its all some of us have left after the pubs were cordoned off and normal human social interaction was replaced by something called Zoom.

It has its uses, though, Twitter, and I am struck by how many of the same vicious tribal divisions we suffered during the Brexit crisis are being reproduced in this Covid-19 crisis. The Leave and Remain armies havent been demobbed; they are regrouping to fight new battles, prosecuting the never-ending culture war in new theatres of combat.

To take a rather extreme example, I offer yesterdaysMail on Sunday spread I discovered it via Twitter, of course under the headline Did Barnier Infect BoJo? This is what my colleague John Rentoul calls a question to which the answer is no, or QTWTAIN. It referred to a meeting between Barnier and the UKs Brexit negotiating team, supplemented by a flowchart and no clinical or other evidence whatsoever.

Sharing the full story, not just the headlines

I suppose the answer to the question might better be: Maybe, but he might also have got it when he was shaking hands with everyone on a Covid-19 ward. In fact the writers surpassed themselves with a supplemental QTWTAIN in the opening paragraph: Could this be the ultimate revenge for Brexit?

It is indicative and telling in the easy conflation of Brexit and an entirely apolitical microorganism.

So what do we see now? Like Brexit, each tribe has its own dogma, heroes and experts. For the corona-sceptics the heroes are, once again, Boris Johnson and Donald Trump. The corona-sceptic dogma is that we should not sacrifice personal liberty and the economy in the name of what is probably an overstated threat best dealt with via herd immunity.

It has its favourite scientists and studies: the ones that are upbeat about finding cures and minimising the excess death toll, arguing that coronavirus is merely bringing deaths of those with underlying conditions forward a bit (so thats sort of all right then, it is implied). They like the studies such as the Oxford analysis that suggests many of us have had the disease without realising it.

There are outriders in this gang too, familiar to us from past arguments including Tim Martin who has implied that you cant get Covid-19 in a Wetherspoons pub. These people blame China for the Chinavirus, wanting a reckoning later on; they mock Brussels difficulties in coordinating EU member states. Their allies in the press write articles (such as that one in the Mail on Sunday) and think pieces entitled The self-pitying woke generation needed a war and in coronavirus theyve got one.

The other side, the corona-istes, criticise Johnson and Trump for being complacent, pointing to the better records of Germany and Korea in tackling the outbreak. They stress the deadly nature of the pandemic and point to Imperial College scientists who suggested that there would be maybe 250,000 deaths if the government didnt change course (which of course it did).

This tribe claim the trillions spent on rescuing the British economy during this unprecedented time shows that Jeremy Corbyn was right all along (he agrees), and that the wicked Tories left the NHS too weak to cope. They regret that the British didnt join the joint EU ventilator procurement programme, and their heroes are the clinical staff who speak out about shortages of masks and gloves.

The divisions cultural and generational are as visceral as they were under Brexit, but, so far, much less evenly matched. Unlike the painful irreconcilability of the 48-52 split, recent polls suggestthat Johnson is enjoying the support of three out four voters during this crisis, with a vast lead over his opponents. That is one reason why you shouldnt pay too much attention to social media, I suppose.

The irony is that the politicians themselves are, this time round, far more collegiate and consensual than the Brexit leaders ever were, and the two cultural tribes still are. The Tory Matt Hancock and Labours John Ashworth are like brothers in arms, constructively battling to defeat a common enemy.

Johnson, going out on the biggest spending spree since the Second World War, semi-nationalising the economy, has dropped the Venezuela socialism jibes against Corbyn. John McDonnell is not so far away from Rishi Sunak these days. Party politics has in effectbeen suspended, and the Brexit argument shelved.

Our political leaders, remarkably, seem to want to work together, stop the bickering and call a truce in the culture wars. Maybe they should point out to their various followers in the press and the keyboard warriors on social media that theres a ceasefire on?

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Coronavirus is the new Brexit another battlefield in the never-ending culture war - The Independent

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."

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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."

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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