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By Pat Buchanan Creators Syndicate

As the culture war is about irreconcilable beliefs about God and man, right and wrong, good and evil, and is at root a religious war, it will be with us so long as men are free to act on their beliefs.

Yet, given the divisions among us, deeper and wider than ever, it is an open question as to how, and how long, we will endure as one people.

After World War II, our judicial dictatorship began a purge of public manifestations of the "Christian nation" that Harry Truman said we were.

In 2009, Barack Obama retorted, "We do not consider ourselves to be a Christian nation." Secularism had been enthroned as our established religion, with only the most feeble of protests.

One can only imagine how Iranians or Afghans would deal with unelected judges moving to de-Islamicize their nations. Heads would roll, literally.

Which bring us to the first culture war skirmish of the Trump era.

Taking sides with Attorney General Jeff Sessions against Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, the president rescinded the Obama directive that gave transgender students the right to use the bathroom of their choice in public schools. President Donald Trump sent the issue back to the states and locales to decide.

While treated by the media and left as the civil rights cause of our era, the "bathroom debate" calls to mind Marx's observation, "History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce."

Can anyone seriously contend that whether a 14-year-old boy, who thinks he is a girl, gets to use the girls' bathroom is a civil rights issue comparable to whether African-Americans get the right to vote?

Remarkably, there was vigorous dissent, from DeVos, to returning this issue to where it belongs, with state and local officials.

After yielding on the bathroom question, she put out a statement declaring that every school in America has a "moral obligation" to protect children from bullying, and directed her Office of Civil Rights to investigate all claims of bullying or harassment "against those who are most vulnerable in our schools."

Now, bullying is bad behavior, and it may be horrible behavior.

But when did a Republican Party that believes in states rights decide this was a responsibility of a bureaucracy Ronald Reagan promised but failed to shut down? When did the GOP become nanny-staters?

Bullying is something every kid in public, parochial or private school has witnessed by graduation. While unfortunate, it is part of growing up.

But what kind of society, what kind of people have we become when we start to rely on federal bureaucrats to stop big kids from harassing and beating up smaller or weaker kids?

While the bathroom debate is a skirmish in the culture war, Trump's solution send the issue back to the states and the people there to work it out may point the way to a truce assuming Americans still want a truce.

For Trump's solution is rooted in the principle of subsidiarity, first advanced in the 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum by Pope Leo XIII that social problems are best resolved by the smallest unit of society with the ability to resolve them.

In brief, bullying is a problem for parents, teachers, principals to deal with, and local cops and the school district if it becomes widespread.

This idea is consistent with the Republican idea of federalism that the national government should undertake those duties securing the borders, fighting the nation's wars, creating a continental road and rail system that states alone cannot do.

Indeed, the nationalization of decision-making, the imposition of one-size-fits-all solutions to social problems, the court orders emanating from the ideology of judges to which there is no appeal that is behind the culture wars that may yet bring an end to this experiment in democratic rule.

Those factors are also among the primary causes of the fever of secessionism that is spreading all across Europe, and is now visible here.

Consider California. Democrats hold every state office, both Senate seats, two-thirds of both houses of the state legislature, 3 in 4 of the congressional seats. Hillary Clinton beat Trump 2-to-1 in California, with her margin in excess of 4 million votes.

Suddenly, California knows exactly how Marine Le Pen feels.

And as she wants to "Let France Be France," and leave the EU, as Brits did with Brexit, a movement is afoot in California to secede from the United States and form a separate nation.

California seceding sounds like a cause that could bring San Francisco Democrats into a grand alliance with Breitbart.

A new federalism a devolution of power and resources away from Washington and back to states, cities, towns and citizens, to let them resolve their problems their own way and according to their own principles may be the price of retention of the American Union.

Let California be California; let red state America be red state America.

Pat Buchanan (contact: LindaMuller@Buchanan.org) is an author, cable news political analyst and former presidential adviser and candidate. He writes for Creators Syndicate.

Read the rest here:
Buchanan: Is secession a solution to cultural war? - Opinion - The ... - The Ledger

As award season reaches its climax with the Oscars on February 26th, it is impossible to overlook the largely leftist political edge of award acceptance speeches. While the entertainment media industry leans left and would have some criticism of any Republican president, the current president, Donald Trump, differs greatly from a usual Republican. Consequently, celebrities have focused on criticizing the divisive nature of his rhetoric more than usual conservative policies. In her Golden Globe speech lambasting Trump, Meryl Streep most clearly demonstrated this kind of criticism, pointing out that without outsiders and foreigners, [wed] have nothing to watch but football and mixed martial arts, which are not the arts.

While criticism like Streeps are direct and rhetorically powerful, it does little more than galvanize the lefts approval and the rights disdain. Streeps message and conservative reactions highlight the redrawing of the culture war. Whereas the old culture wars were fought on matters of religion and sexuality, Trump has redrawn the battle into one of populism and nationalism versus cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism. With the culture wars reset and reignited, the question remains: what is pop cultures role?

Although the fantasy of a post-racial America after Obamas election was quickly dashed, his term oversaw the diversifying of pop culture and the rise of multiculturalism. Voices and narratives from marginalized perspectivesparticularly women and people of colorgained prominence in national discourse. Beyonces proclamation of her feminism as a black woman made her the subject of conversation and admiration. With examples ranging from Steven Universe to Ms Marvel to Transparent, television and comics have also been telling a stories from a wider range of perspectives and identities. While movies were slow to catch up by comparison, this ethos is embraced in films from Moonlight and Hidden Figures to even Mad Max: Fury Road.

This trend towards diversity coincided with the growing value of inclusivity and intersectionality on the political left. As a result, the cultural and political left became more closely entwined, especially due to the Obamas effective use of pop culture as a political platform. This synthesis is perhaps best embodied by Hamilton: An American Musical.The musical quickly garnered national attention for its cast of racially diverse Founding Fathers and hip-hop score. Yet, it let its leftist flag fly with the young, scrappy, and hungry idealism of 2008 Obama and the belief that a strong executive is needed for general prosperity.

This growing inclusion and respect of minority voices was matched by a growing backlash to political correctness. This backlash was first manifested with Gamergate in the summer of 2014. Originally a controversy over ethics in games journalism, Gamergate soon devolved into harassing female game developers and commentators. They were villainized as unwanted invaders whose perspectives politicized and attacked their media, their entertainment, their culture. With its rejection of diversity and its use of social media, Gamergate can be seen as the herald of the alt-right.

Two years later, those who resented the cultural elite and its politically correct hegemony would join those who resented economic and political elites to vote Trump into the presidency. When then VP-elect Mike Pence was addressed by the cast of Hamilton, imploring the Trump administration to heed the worries of the minority communities, Trump claimed that Pence was harassed and demanded that the cast apologize. The war against multicultural pop culture thus began.

With the values represented by Hamilton rejected under Trumpian pop culture, what will pop culture look like? Gamergates premise that culture should be apolitical, while understandable on the surface, is ultimately impossible. Narratives are political because they are drawn from societaland thus, politicalexperience. The desire to be apolitical is really a desire to return to what was not noticeably political: to default to the status quo that is in itself political. A prime example of this is the backlash to Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. As the film neared its release, the alt-right charged that it was anti-white propaganda; a politicized defiling of the pure, original trilogy. However, made in a time when fascism was considered morally wrong on principle, the original Star Wars itself was political: its antagonists fascist tendencies were sufficient to demonstrate their villainy.

If art cant be apolitical, then maybe pop culture will now be less focused on racial diversity and return to focusing on white working class protagonists. One narrative regarding Trumps win was that he was supported by the white, working class voters who felt economically abandoned by the elite. Regardless of how accurate this narrative actually is, there have been hints of its resonance in culture. J.D. Vances memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, briefly caught national attention for its depiction of the despair surrounding the collapse of white working class culture. Hell or High Water, a crime thriller rooted in that same despair, is up for several Oscars, including Best Picture.

One could argue that this is for the better. By appealing to minorities through their concerns regarding their race, gender, and other markers of identityhence the term identity politicsone could argue that the left have equated straight white males as oppressors in the process, encouraging them to act and think according to concerns regarding their identity. The white nationalist alt-right, fighting against diversity and white genocide, can be thus seen as identity politics from the right. Should pop culture try to dial down identity politics on the left in the hope that it will matched on the right?

I dont quite think so.

As tactical rallying cries and mere appeals to ones identity, identity politics are a definite cause for concern. Casting Trump supporters as a basket of deplorables without considering their reasons for supporting him not only cuts any attempt at conversation short, but also risks pushing those supporters to more tribalistic extremes. Streeps aforementioned speech falls into this exact trap by casting herself and her audience as cosmopolitan, pro-art heroes and Trump as a nationalist, anti-art villian.

However, striving for diversity and the inclusion of marginalized voices should not be a means to political power, but a universal ideal, monopolized by neither the left nor the right. At its core, diversity reinforces the dignity of all individuals regardless of their race, gender, class, or creedincluding the white working class which has been marginalized over the years. While the technocratic political elite have lost the ability to articulate why core values, such as diversity, are important on a visceral level, art and entertainment retain that ability by emotionally investing us in the lives of the characters on page or on screen regardless of how similar or different we are from them. Rather than rejecting those who feel economically marginalized and therefore are beginning to devalue racial diversity, we must take their perspectives into the fold before it is too late.

This is not to ask that all of pop culture be reduced to condescending fables or leftist drivel. Rather, this is an urgent call for entertainment media to reinforce the value of diversity by presenting subjects of all identities as complex characters rather than simple caricatures, especially in the face of an administration whose rhetoric has stridently otherized minorities and whose policies look to do much worse.

Hansy D. Piou 18, a Crimson editorial writer, is an applied mathematics concentrator living in Quincy House.

Originally posted here:
Culture Wars: The Empire Strikes Back | Opinion | The Harvard ... - Harvard Crimson

As the culture war is about irreconcilable beliefs about God and man, right and wrong, good and evil, and is at root a religious war, it will be with us so long as men are free to act on their beliefs.

Yet, given the divisions among us, deeper and wider than ever, it is an open question as to how, and how long, we will endure as one people.

After World War II, our judicial dictatorship began a purge of public manifestations of the Christian nation Harry Truman said we were.

In 2009, Barack Obama retorted, We do not consider ourselves to be a Christian nation. Secularism had been enthroned as our established religion, with only the most feeble of protests.

One can only imagine how Iranians or Afghans would deal with unelected judges moving to de-Islamicize their nations. Heads would roll, literally.

Which bring us to the first culture war skirmish of the Trump era.

Taking sides with Attorney General Jeff Sessions against Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, the president rescinded the Obama directive that gave transgender students the right to use the bathroom of their choice in public schools. President Donald Trump sent the issue back to the states and locales to decide.

While treated by the media and left as the civil rights cause of our era, the bathroom debate calls to mind Marxs observation, History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.

Can anyone seriously contend that whether a 14-year-old boy, who thinks he is a girl, gets to use the girls bathroom is a civil rights issue comparable to whether African-Americans get the right to vote?

Remarkably, there was vigorous dissent, from DeVos, to returning this issue to where it belongs, with state and local officials.

After yielding on the bathroom question, she put out a statement declaring that every school in America has a moral obligation to protect children from bullying and directed her Office of Civil Rights to investigate all claims of bullying or harassment against those who are most vulnerable in our schools.

Now, bullying is bad behavior, and it may be horrible behavior.

But when did a Republican Party that believes in states rights decide this was a responsibility of a bureaucracy Ronald Reagan promised but failed to shut down? When did the GOP become nanny-staters?

Like the reporting you see here? Sign up for free news alerts from WND.com, Americas independent news network.

Bullying is something every kid in public, parochial or private school has witnessed by graduation. While unfortunate, it is part of growing up.

But what kind of society, what kind of people have we become when we start to rely on federal bureaucrats to stop big kids from harassing and beating up smaller or weaker kids?

While the bathroom debate is a skirmish in the culture war, Trumps solution send the issue back to the states and the people there to work it out may point the way to a truce assuming Americans still want a truce.

For Trumps solution is rooted in the principle of subsidiarity, first advanced in the 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum by Pope Leo XIII that social problems are best resolved by the smallest unit of society with the ability to resolve them.

In brief, bullying is a problem for parents, teachers, principals to deal with, and local cops and the school district if it becomes widespread.

This idea is consistent with the Republican idea of federalism that the national government should undertake those duties securing the borders, fighting the nations wars, creating a continental road and rail system that states alone cannot do.

Indeed, the nationalization of decision-making, the imposition of one-size-fits-all solutions to social problems, the court orders emanating from the ideology of judges to which there is no appeal that is behind the culture wars that may yet bring an end to this experiment in democratic rule.

Those factors are also among the primary causes of the fever of secessionism that is spreading all across Europe, and is now visible here.

Consider California. Democrats hold every state office, both Senate seats, two-thirds of both houses of the state legislature, 3 in 4 of the congressional seats. Hillary Clinton beat Trump 2-to-1 in California, with her margin in excess of 4 million votes.

Suddenly, California knows exactly how Marine Le Pen feels.

And as she wants to Let France Be France, and leave the EU, as Brits did with Brexit, a movement is afoot in California to secede from the United States and form a separate nation.

California seceding sounds like a cause that could bring San Francisco Democrats into a grand alliance with Breitbart.

A new federalism a devolution of power and resources away from Washington and back to states, cities, towns and citizens, to let them resolve their problems their own way and according to their own principles may be the price of retention of the American Union.

Let California be California; let red state America be red state America.

The Golden State has abandoned liberalism for total insanity read Jack Cashills Whats the Matter with California?

The rest is here:
Is secession a solution to cultural war? - WND.com - WND.com

As award season reaches its climax with the Oscars on February 26th, it is impossible to overlook the largely leftist political edge of award acceptance speeches. While the entertainment media industry leans left and would have some criticism of any Republican president, the current president, Donald Trump, differs greatly from a usual Republican. Consequently, celebrities have focused on criticizing the divisive nature of his rhetoric more than usual conservative policies. In her Golden Globe speech lambasting Trump, Meryl Streep most clearly demonstrated this kind of criticism, pointing out that without outsiders and foreigners, [wed] have nothing to watch but football and mixed martial arts, which are not the arts.

While criticism like Streeps are direct and rhetorically powerful, it does little more than galvanize the lefts approval and the rights disdain. Streeps message and conservative reactions highlight the redrawing of the culture war. Whereas the old culture wars were fought on matters of religion and sexuality, Trump has redrawn the battle into one of populism and nationalism versus cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism. With the culture wars reset and reignited, the question remains: what is pop cultures role?

Although the fantasy of a post-racial America after Obamas election was quickly dashed, his term oversaw the diversifying of pop culture and the rise of multiculturalism. Voices and narratives from marginalized perspectivesparticularly women and people of colorgained prominence in national discourse. Beyonces proclamation of her feminism as a black woman made her the subject of conversation and admiration. With examples ranging from Steven Universe to Ms Marvel to Transparent, television and comics have also been telling a stories from a wider range of perspectives and identities. While movies were slow to catch up by comparison, this ethos is embraced in films from Moonlight and Hidden Figures to even Mad Max: Fury Road.

This trend towards diversity coincided with the growing value of inclusivity and intersectionality on the political left. As a result, the cultural and political left became more closely entwined, especially due to the Obamas effective use of pop culture as a political platform. This synthesis is perhaps best embodied by Hamilton: An American Musical.The musical quickly garnered national attention for its cast of racially diverse Founding Fathers and hip-hop score. Yet, it let its leftist flag fly with the young, scrappy, and hungry idealism of 2008 Obama and the belief that a strong executive is needed for general prosperity.

This growing inclusion and respect of minority voices was matched by a growing backlash to political correctness. This backlash was first manifested with Gamergate in the summer of 2014. Originally a controversy over ethics in games journalism, Gamergate soon devolved into harassing female game developers and commentators. They were villainized as unwanted invaders whose perspectives politicized and attacked their media, their entertainment, their culture. With its rejection of diversity and its use of social media, Gamergate can be seen as the herald of the alt-right.

Two years later, those who resented the cultural elite and its politically correct hegemony would join those who resented economic and political elites to vote Trump into the presidency. When then VP-elect Mike Pence was addressed by the cast of Hamilton, imploring the Trump administration to heed the worries of the minority communities, Trump claimed that Pence was harassed and demanded that the cast apologize. The war against multicultural pop culture thus began.

With the values represented by Hamilton rejected under Trumpian pop culture, what will pop culture look like? Gamergates premise that culture should be apolitical, while understandable on the surface, is ultimately impossible. Narratives are political because they are drawn from societaland thus, politicalexperience. The desire to be apolitical is really a desire to return to what was not noticeably political: to default to the status quo that is in itself political. A prime example of this is the backlash to Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. As the film neared its release, the alt-right charged that it was anti-white propaganda; a politicized defiling of the pure, original trilogy. However, made in a time when fascism was considered morally wrong on principle, the original Star Wars itself was political: its antagonists fascist tendencies were sufficient to demonstrate their villainy.

If art cant be apolitical, then maybe pop culture will now be less focused on racial diversity and return to focusing on white working class protagonists. One narrative regarding Trumps win was that he was supported by the white, working class voters who felt economically abandoned by the elite. Regardless of how accurate this narrative actually is, there have been hints of its resonance in culture. J.D. Vances memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, briefly caught national attention for its depiction of the despair surrounding the collapse of white working class culture. Hell or High Water, a crime thriller rooted in that same despair, is up for several Oscars, including Best Picture.

One could argue that this is for the better. By appealing to minorities through their concerns regarding their race, gender, and other markers of identityhence the term identity politicsone could argue that the left have equated straight white males as oppressors in the process, encouraging them to act and think according to concerns regarding their identity. The white nationalist alt-right, fighting against diversity and white genocide, can be thus seen as identity politics from the right. Should pop culture try to dial down identity politics on the left in the hope that it will matched on the right?

I dont quite think so.

As tactical rallying cries and mere appeals to ones identity, identity politics are a definite cause for concern. Casting Trump supporters as a basket of deplorables without considering their reasons for supporting him not only cuts any attempt at conversation short, but also risks pushing those supporters to more tribalistic extremes. Streeps aforementioned speech falls into this exact trap by casting herself and her audience as cosmopolitan, pro-art heroes and Trump as a nationalist, anti-art villian.

However, striving for diversity and the inclusion of marginalized voices should not be a means to political power, but a universal ideal, monopolized by neither the left nor the right. At its core, diversity reinforces the dignity of all individuals regardless of their race, gender, class, or creedincluding the white working class which has been marginalized over the years. While the technocratic political elite have lost the ability to articulate why core values, such as diversity, are important on a visceral level, art and entertainment retain that ability by emotionally investing us in the lives of the characters on page or on screen regardless of how similar or different we are from them. Rather than rejecting those who feel economically marginalized and therefore are beginning to devalue racial diversity, we must take their perspectives into the fold before it is too late.

This is not to ask that all of pop culture be reduced to condescending fables or leftist drivel. Rather, this is an urgent call for entertainment media to reinforce the value of diversity by presenting subjects of all identities as complex characters rather than simple caricatures, especially in the face of an administration whose rhetoric has stridently otherized minorities and whose policies look to do much worse.

Hansy D. Piou 18, a Crimson editorial writer, is an applied mathematics concentrator living in Quincy House.

Go here to read the rest:
Culture Wars: The Empire Strikes Back - Harvard Crimson

We learned how strong wed become from the force of the opposition that rose against us.

OK, are we going to count the people that come in then, as a blessing or a curse?

These children are among 6,000 of Texas most vulnerable patients whose lives may have been put at risk by the states effort to cut Medicaid costs, their parents say.

I dont think theres any guarantee for the family of the 6-year-old boy.

Despite Horthys WWII-era legacy wearing the medal was not necessarily seen as an endorsement of that leaders anti-Semitic views.

Bild apologizes expressly for the untruthful article and the accusations made in it.

Everybody makes mistakes.

You wont see the KKK charged with domestic terror even though thats what they do.

The status of ethics in an administration tends to reflect the character of the chief executive, regardless of the rules in place at the time.

What was Flynn talking about with the Russians during the campaign?

Here, in convenient list form, are the 30 small questions and three big ones about Donald Trump and Russia.

The American military has failed to publicly disclose potentially thousands of lethal airstrikes conducted over several years in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, a Military Times investigation has revealed.

It is particularly focused on demonizing people who are refugees.

The rally took place at the Canada Christian College, an evangelical institution Id never heard of before.

The [more than 50] bomb threats occurred against a backdrop of rising anti-Semitic hate crimes in the nation and the refusal of President Trump to address the issue or to disavow the anti-Semites who say they are invigorated by his electoral victory.

As is, Mosenkis finds that the districts with the fewest white students are currently shortchanged according to the formula by almost $2,000 per pupil, while the districts with the most white students get about $2,000 more per pupil than what the formula says is their fair share.'

The agents apparently detained the woman Feb. 9 after receiving a tip, possibly from her alleged abuser.

It is one of the most serious examples of governmental misconduct that I have come across in my 40 years of practice.

The future of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau continues to remain in question with yet another attack being lobbed at the Bureau this week as [Republican]lawmakers introduced new legislation both in the House and Senate that would abolish the agency.

He had also violated federal regulations around wage theft with his own employees, and threatened to replace workers with machines since, as he put it, theres never a slip-and-fall, or an age, sex, or race discrimination case.'

At the same time that it is Trumps biggest known creditor, Deutsche is in frequent contact with multiple federal regulators.

During Obama, for eight years, I suffered, was unemployed, dependent on my wifes income, he said. Trump got him a job. He is still unemployed now, but he just enrolled in Liberty University to study divinity. Its just a matter of time.

If businesses are forced to pay women the same as male earnings, that means they will have to reduce the pay for the men they employ.

What I call them is, is youre a host.

The Trump administration, it seems, wasnt altogether impressed with the site or its awards.

Youre going to see a lot of love. OK?

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Postcards from the class & culture wars (2.21.17) - Patheos (blog)