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When President Donald Trump declared a national emergency last month, as the coronavirus outbreak worsened, he deployed language familiar and perhaps oddly comforting to many Americans. Designating himself a wartime president, Trump likened the countrys COVID-19 response to the U.S.s mobilization during World War II. Every generation of Americans has been called to make shared sacrifices for the good of the nation, Trump insisted.

This rhetorical maneuver reflected the long American history of declaring war on any conceivable enemy whether physical, abstract, domestic or foreign. But as familiar and ubiquitous as war might be for many Americans, at least figuratively, that same history also shows that it is a poor framework through which to understand complex social problems such as poverty and public-health emergencies like the novel coronavirus or drug addiction.

War has been a permanent condition and the governing metaphor for American life since at least the Second World War. Instead of reining in its military and defense infrastructure at the end of the war and the beginning of what is ironically known as the postwar period the U.S. opted to go in the opposite direction, bolstering the national security state in the hopes of thwarting the perceived Soviet and Communist threat. A massive expansion of federal power, the National Security Act of 1947 formed the skeleton of our modern national defense apparatus. The Act established the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Council (NSC), a cabinet-level body that would help formulate military and foreign policy on the presidents behalf.

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Drafted and circulated in 1950, the councils NSC-68 report cast the young Cold War in stark, severe terms. It declared that the cold war is in fact a real war in which the survival of the free world is at stake and argued that Americans must be willing to give up some of the benefits which they have come to associate with their freedoms. In other words, though World War II had ended in victory, Americans would continue seeing the world through a wartime lens and indefinitely so.

In many ways, the assumptions underlying NSC-68 would guide U.S. foreign policy through the end of the Cold War and beyond. Even after the collapse of the Soviet Union and thus the end of the Cold War, the U.S. [f]reed from major challengers remained committed to military action, although it often couched these interventions in terms of human rights.

It is therefore no surprise that Americans have long understood challenges far from the battlefield (such as COVID-19) through the lens of war. Beyond the actual experience of war as combat, as historian Michael Sherry has shown, the United States obsession with war has meant imagining many things in terms of it from President Lyndon B. Johnson depicting incidents of urban unrest as a war within our own boundaries to President Richard Nixon declaring a war on cancer in 1971 (as the Vietnam War raged), from LBJs War on Poverty to Pat Buchanans war for the soul of America (i.e., the culture wars) to the interlocking wars on crime and drugs. The band Wilco lamented this war fetish in their 2001 song War on War, in which frontman Jeff Tweedy sings that, in such a conflict, Youre gonna lose.

Americans know war, theologian Stanley Hauerwas notes, and when we are frightened ironically war makes us feel safe. Michael Sherry concurs building on the work of the late historian Marilyn B. Young when he calls the United States a nation deeply wedded to and defined by war, though maddeningly reluctant to admit it.

Still, real war remains distant and abstract for the overwhelming majority of Americans. As scholar Andrew Bacevich indicated in 2011, approximately half of 1 percent of our citizens bear the burden of service and sacrifice meaning 99.5% of Americans are not personally attached to the military or the national security state. The physical and emotional distance separating most Americans from the battlefield allows them to glorify war while knowing nothing of its unspeakable horrors or the sacrifice it entails.

War is destructive, violent and annihilative. But the nations commitment to war (both as reality and metaphor) has a tendency to take other policy approaches off the table. What has been called the troopification of everything generates financial and political support for any activity conducted under the umbrella of war. And so Americas over-reliance on the blunt, imprecise instrument of war hinders its ability to respond to myriad other problems, from public-health emergencies to chronic issues such as hunger. The infrastructure needed to address such concerns doesnt mesh well with war. Its use as a rhetorical and framing device within our present crisis therefore represents a dismal failure of imagination.

Most damningly, perhaps, Americas recent wars whether directed at targets physical, abstract, domestic or foreign have mostly failed. The United States excels at war, Sherry observes, though no longer at winning it. In just the past 50 years or so, the U.S. has failed to win the War in Vietnam, the war on cancer (despite many notable achievements in research and treatment), the War on Poverty (although LBJs campaign slashed poverty rates), the war on crime (which did much to terrorize and imprison poor and working-class black and brown people but little to actually curtail crime), the war on drugs (given the persistent reality of drug addiction) and the seemingly endless global war on terror.

This track record does not bode well for the nations war against COVID-19. We need an efficient, coherent public-health response coordinated by a competent federal government. What we dont need is another war.

Paul M. Renfro is an Assistant Professor of History at Florida State University and the author of Stranger Danger: Family Values, Childhood, and the American Carceral State (Oxford University Press, 2020).

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War Has Been the Governing Metaphor for Decades of American Life. This Pandemic Exposes Its Weaknesses - TIME

Meghan vs. Kate. Taylor Swift vs. Katy Perry. Jennifer Lopez vs. Mariah Carey. Famous female feuds are easy to list off, being, as they are, the bread and butter of tabloid media and bad television. As Sheryl Sandberg, for all her many flaws, has correctly observed, everyone loves a fight and they really love a catfight.

It'd have been tempting, then, for a miniseries like FX's Mrs. America, which premieres Wednesday, to have milked the tension between the conservative firebrand Phyllis Schlafly and feminist leaders like Gloria Steinem and Bella Abzug in its retelling of the fight over the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) during the culture wars of the 1970s. It'd have even admittedly made for compelling television; catfights aren't a pervasive TV trope because they're dull. But to its credit, Mrs. America circumvents the seductively easy narrative about powerful women at each other's throats for a more nuanced one that pits their ideas and organizing strategies against each other, with illuminating results.

There's no ignoring the natural binary at the center of the series: that you were either for ratifying the ERA, or against it. In the latter camp, played by two-time Academy Award winner Cate Blanchett in her first U.S. television role, was Schlafly, "the sweetheart of the silent majority" who led a successful grassroots campaign to thwart the ratification of the ERA on the grounds that it threatened the traditional family. On the other side were the feminist activists during what was arguably the height of the movement's political influence, a diverse group headed by the National Women's Political Caucus co-founders Steinem (Rose Byrne), Abzug (Margo Martindale), Shirley Chisholm (Uzo Aduba), and Betty Friedan (Tracey Ullman).

To be clear, the ideas represented by the opposing sides of the ERA fight are mutually exclusive. There is no coexistence between the world desired by Phyllis Schlafly whose platform involved describing husbands as the "ultimate decision makers" in a marriage, whose "history of racism" is downplayed by the show, and whose final work was the posthumously-published Conservative Case for Trump and the world pursued by the feminists, who, while not a monolith, generally advocated for women's reproductive freedom, LGBT rights, and anti-discrimination protections. Mrs. America, however, wisely allows these ideologies to exist outside of symbolic character figureheads; Schlafly and Steinem, say, are not embodiments of their arguments, but people whose ideas are fiercely in conflict.

In other words, Feud: Phyllis and Gloria this is not. Schlafly and Steinem are the show's two most prominent characters, but despite their ideas being in conflict they never actually confront each other or even meet, much less share a frame (in real life, they occasionally exchanged barbs in the press). There are no narrowed eyes or spat insults, no tears, screaming matches, or petty remarks over the phone all usual staples of the catfight trope. Instead, the two women leaders are shown in many ways as almost being alike; both have followed an easy path to national celebrity because they are white, attractive women, and both face the same struggle to be taken seriously by the powers-that-be the men by virtue of their sex, too. Even their flaws can be parallels: Steinem is blind to her own tokenism at Ms. magazine, and Schlafly is only able to pursue her political ambitions because of the black cooks and nannies running her home in her absence.

Mrs. America further protects itself from sexist clich by emphasizing coalition building and the diversity of opinion within those coalitions. Schlafly and Steinem might both be leaders and expert organizers, but they're orbited by allies with whom they don't always see eye-to-eye. Schlafly makes concessions to southern chapter leaders who want to center pro-life arguments as part of the STOP ERA fight; Bella Abzug, meanwhile, invites Betty Friedan, who is outspokenly anti-lesbian, to be a "delegate-at-large" at the national women's convention despite disagreeing with her stance. "That's politics," both sides say at various points, a resignation to their own hypocrisies.

The show also never lets Schlafly and the housewives nor Steinem and the activists "win" or "lose," at least in those terms. Avoiding a battle between the women means neither leader can be seen as coming out on top. This is, admittedly, confusing. "Do We Need a Biopic Celebrating America's Preeminent Anti-Feminist?" wrote Vogue, while a Washington Examiner article written by Schlafly's niece blasts Mrs. America's "caricature of Phyllis Schlafly" as "pure propaganda." For both of these to be takeaways from the same show is a testament to its hazily-drawn battle lines. Who really wins? Who really loses?

After all, the great knife-twist of Mrs. America is that all women however enlightened or liberated or contentedly at home they may be are oppressed by the system they believe to have beaten in their own way. It is no mistake that many of the "strong female leads" in the show are depleted and homebound in Mrs. America's final shots. It's telling, too, that Mrs. America has not one but two major references to the 1975 feminist film Jeanne Dielman, which today remains a seminal depiction of stifling domesticity. The movie is played in the background in one scene and is subject of a direct homage in another, where the camera unwaveringly watches as Schlafly peels apples in her kitchen. To reference such a classic portrait of suffocating womanhood, one that still resonates today, is to cement the fact that these battles rage on even now.

Mrs. America doesn't need to pit women against each other for cheap narrative tension. Because even on opposite sides of the war, some uphill battles are always the same.

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Mrs. America resists the urge to pit women against each other - The Week

Some right-wing media personalities are encouraging Americans to protest stay-at-home orders, arguing it is time to start to re-open the economy.

Fox News host Laura Ingraham on Wednesday tweeted approvingly of people in Michigan demonstrating against Gov. Gretchen Whitmer's order. "Time to get your freedom back," Ingraham declared. "Soon Marylanders, Virginians, etc will stand for their right to work, travel, assemble, socialize and worship? Massive long lasting damage is piling up day after day as many 'experts' continue to get the virus analysis wrong," Ingraham wrote in another tweet.

Ingraham wasn't the only Fox personality to express such a sentiment. Jeanine Pirro told Sean Hannity Wednesday night that the health officials "overblew what was going to happen in terms of the number of people who were going to die" and now are telling people to stay home. "No," she said. Pirro later added, "The American spirit is too strong and Americans are not going to take it. And what happened in Lansing, [Michigan], today, God bless them, it's going to happen all over the country."

Fox also spent the day spotlighting the protests. It was the top story on FoxNews.com for a fair amount of time, with the headline, "NO TO THE 'NANNY STATE.'" And it received airtime on shows where hosts appeared to somewhat agree with the protesters.

Outside Fox, others in right-wing media have also started speaking out. A prominent Infowars host is organizing a Texas rally for later this week. "Are we in martial law right now?" the host asked Wednesday. "Because we're acting like it."

The far-right blog The Gateway Pundit framed the protests as people protesting a "tyrannical governor" who had implemented "police state policies." And Candace Owens tweeted this week she was going to the grocery store every day, expressing outrage at the fact that she was asked to wear a mask. "WTF is going on?" Owens wondered.

"We can't be careless"

I thought I'd ask Jason Miller, the former Trump comms adviser, what he thinks of right-wing media stars saying such things. Along with Steve Bannon and Raheem Kassam, Miller has co-hosts "War Room Pandemic" -- a daily radio show that has covered the coronavirus for weeks.

Miller said that he believes right-wing media personalities encouraging Americans to protest stay-at-home orders are "on the outskirts of sensible voices on this topic." Miller added, "We all want the U.S. to reopen as soon as possible, and there's plenty of room for debate for how best to do that, but we can't be careless in how we go about doing it."

The social distancing culture wars

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Some in right-wing media egg on protests against stay-at-home orders - CNN

That #YouClapForMeNow video is a passive-aggressive blast against a country that does not exist.

So, its finally happened someone has managed to turn the Covid-19 crisis into an opportunity to call British people racist. A video in which various key workers of migrant backgrounds read out a poem about how Covid has proven anti-immigration people wrong has gone viral, along with its accompanying hashtag, #YouClapForMeNow.

In the clip, the workers ranging from doctors to Deliveroo riders to that comedian Tez Ilyas, for some reason basically stick two fingers up to the people who might have once told them to go home and stop stealing our jobs but are now relying on migrant workers to get them through this crisis. Theres also a random reference to Malala and Greta Thunberg, for reasons that arent immediately clear. Still, the implied sentiment of the overall clip is well summed up by identitarian commentator Dr Shola Mos-Shogbamimu.

You see, social-media campaigns like this are not really about celebrating migrant workers and ethnic-minority Brits and the work many of them are doing to keep us safe and well. They are about bashing an imagined bigoted populace. To retweet something like this is not to show your solidarity with migrants, but to show you are better than the conjured-up anti-migrant bogeyman the poem alludes to.

The tiny problem with all this is that this video is trying to land a blow against a country that doesnt exist. Britain is the most pro-immigration society in Europe. Attitudes to immigration have actually become more liberal here since the Brexit vote. No one outside of a bigoted fringe wants to pull up the drawbridge and / or shudders when they think of hardworking migrant-descended Brits in the health service.

It all goes to show that Covid-19 really hasnt killed off the culture wars.

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The myth of bigoted Britain - Spiked

Even in the face of this crisis, the identitarians are doubling down.

In early March, more than 300 employees at the Guardian signed an open letter to the editor Katharine Viner to protest against the publication of supposedly anti-trans material. The catalyst was Suzanne Moores article on the deplatforming of Professor Selina Todd at Oxford University, an action that had been justified by the organisers on the grounds that Todd had previously spoken at a meeting of Womans Place UK (a group that campaigns for separate spaces and services for women). The signatories to the open letter argued that by publishing Moores views, the Guardian was no longer a safe and welcoming workplace for trans and non-binary people. To complain to ones employer about feeling unsafe has become a standard manoeuvre among those who have little tolerance for the opinions of others.

Many are now asking whether in the midst of a global pandemic in which the notion of safety has been temporarily restored to its original definition such tactics can still be effective. The problem has never been with the cry-bullies of the social-justice movement who disingenuously claim that their safety is compromised by alternative viewpoints, but rather with those in authority who capitulate to their demands. When activists called for the removal of the statue of colonialist Cecil Rhodes at Oriel College, Oxford, part of their strategy was to insist that it was a form of violence to expect black students to walk in its vicinity. The statue remains in place because the university authorities had the courage not to defer to this kind of entitlement. The same cannot be said for the plaques commemorating the visit of King Leopold II of Belgium to Queen Mary University in London, which were removed because of his tyrannical reign in the Congo after a student outcry about 130 years too late.

It should go without saying that nobodys safety is being threatened by atrocities committed by long-dead historical figures. The language of physical harm is a rhetorical device intended to strengthen the case for ideological submission. More generally, the lexicon of social justice has a tendency to reduce individuals to their corporeal substance; we hear this in phrases such as female bodies, black bodies or queer bodies, a strangely dehumanising choice of words. Similarly, those who challenge the content of LGBT sex education at schools are accused of erasing gay people and somehow denying their very existence. Even the phrase brothers and sisters can be reframed as genocidal. As one activist put it, When you say brothers and sisters, youre erasing non-binary, two-spirit, and gender-expansive trans folks who live beyond the binary. Constantly being erased is exhausting.

With the coronavirus death toll rising, and the NHS struggling to cope with the rate of infections, claims that mainstream opinions are tantamount to erasure, violence and a threat to peoples safety now seem more absurd than ever. Leftist identitarians who have spent the past five years having conniptions brought on by fantasies that we are living in a state of near-fascism, and insisting that thousands of relatively affluent people are nonetheless oppressed, are now being confronted with a glimmer of actual hardship. Might it be the case that intersectional identity politics will be fatally undermined by the spread of Covid-19?

Much as I would like to believe that the pandemic will put matters into perspective, I am also aware that the agents of the culture war are already well inoculated against the concerns of material reality. Even as governments around the world are imposing draconian restrictions to citizens liberty in order to curtail the spread of the virus, social-justice activists are busy claiming the impact will be most keenly felt by disenfranchised groups. An article in Salon declares that the pandemic has been accelerated by white male privilege and the racist white voters responsible for the Trump administration. A writer for Vice bewails the postponement of trans surgery in favour of coronavirus victims. Rolling Stone explains how social distancing could lead to a spike in white nationalism. CNN criticises Donald Trumps coronavirus task force for its lack of diversity. Australian senator Mehreen Faruqi calls it a gendered crisis that carries a disproportionate risk to women, in spite of the fact that men are statistically more likely to die. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez claims that deaths are spiking in ethnic-minority communities, and that Covid relief should be drafted with a lens of reparations.

Closer to home, the Metropolitan Police are urging members of the public to be on the lookout for hate crime related to the Covid-19 pandemic, and academics at Queen Mary University are calling for an intersectional view of the coronavirus pandemic. Not to be outdone, the African-American Policy Forum has just hosted a webinar to explore the intersectional failures that Covid lays bare. One participant, Professor Dorothy Roberts, even went so far as to argue that the spread of the virus had been caused by the current racial-capitalist system and that prisons with their disproportionate number of black inmates should therefore be abolished. It has become all too apparent that it would take an apocalyptic event of Biblical proportions to put an end to the culture war, and even then there would always be commentators available to denounce the plague of locusts for their heteronormativity.

This widespread reassertion of the values of intersectional activism is just one example of how the coronavirus pandemic is being interpreted as an opportunity to win ideological battles. Depending on who you read, the crisis either vindicates socialism or advances the case for capitalism. It either proves that the European Union is a failed enterprise or that Brexit was a mistake and must now be reversed. It will either bring us together and prove the inherent benevolence of humanity, or drive us apart and expose us as the self-interested creatures we always were. Somehow, this disease conveniently ends up proving whichever political or philosophical point wed prefer to make.

It is in our nature to see confirmation of our existing biases in the world around us. This is why, for the time being at least, we would be well advised to hold back on our prognostications. I make no secret of my hope that the cult of social justice will lose its stranglehold on our media, our arts, and our major educational, political and law-enforcement institutions. In a post-coronavirus world, is it conceivable that English faculties at top universities would yield to student demands to decolonise the curriculum of white male authors? Or that thousands of British citizens would be investigated by the police for non-crime? Or that art and literature would be judged primarily on the basis of their fealty to identitarian bugbears?

Although institutionally powerful, the agents of social justice have always been in the minority, and have been indulged largely because of their intimidatory tactics. I would like to think that in the wake of an actual crisis their more hysterical grievances will be treated with the insouciance they deserve, and that this seemingly interminable culture war will draw to a close. But in this respect I am probably as guilty as everyone else of assuming that the effects of the pandemic will confirm the views I have long advocated. Certainly in the short term, the clout of these culture warriors will be diminished. But I fear that it is wishful thinking to suppose that they wont find a way to turn this crisis to their advantage, and emerge more determined and vitriolic and authoritarian than ever before.

I hope Im wrong.

Andrew Doyle is a stand-up comedian and spiked columnist. He is doing a live tour with Douglas Murray in the spring, called Resisting Wokeness. Get tickets here.

To enquire about republishing spikeds content, a right to reply or to request a correction, please contact the managing editor, Viv Regan.

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Coronavirus wont kill the culture wars - Spiked