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REPORTS OF GRASSROOTS outrage have been greatly exaggerated. Bankrolled anger is a big business, often weaponized for money, power, or both, and cancel culture, as it is often described, has become an increasingly complicated political football in the digital age. However, there is one area where outrage culture has always been a potent forcepopular culture. Kliph Nesteroffs new book, Outrageous: A History of Showbiz and the Culture Wars, details the evolution concept within, and levied against, film, television, radio, music, and comedy. Nesteroff shows us the importance of sharing the history of fear and intimidation surrounding popular culture so that we can be more informed when we see it today, as the issues facing the moral crusaders of yesteryear are not unlike what we find in 2023.

In the class that I teach on censorship, I regularly welcome our campus librarian to discuss book banning. Her relationship with popular culture outrage became terrifying when she was a small-town librarian and the pushback against certain books led to death threats targeting members of her occupation. Understandably, several resignations followed. Stories like hers show the real life, local impact of defending literacy (not to mention those pesky First Amendment rights) in some communities.

Last semester, she brought a stack of regularly banned childrens books from the local library for our students to analyze. In Mary Hoffman and Ros Asquiths The Great Big Book of Families (2010), for example, one of my students found the line Some children have two mummies or two daddies carefully taped over. These college-age digital natives, who rarely bat an eye at viral outrage, were appalled and surprised to see this poorly implemented real-world example. These local instances are products of national debates and controversies. In 2009, religious fanatics near University of WisconsinMilwaukees West Bend campus wanted Stephen Chboskys The Perks of Being a Wallflower (1999) removed and replaced by books written by ex-gays. This same community just got rid of Orson Scott Cards 1985 novel Enders Game for eighth graders. Even more confusing is the case of the Texas teacher who was recently fired for instructing her students to read from an illustrated adaptation of Anne Franks diary.

Comedy (and the larger scope of popular culture) has always pushed boundaries and, therefore, has been designed to offend. Though Nesteroff is careful to avoid any showbiz controversy in the 21st century, he recognizes that so many national conversations are intentionally composed to incite and manipulate the reader. While this may feel like a new phenomenon to some, sadly it is not. Nesteroff quotes historian Richard Hofstadters 1964 The Paranoid Style in American Politics to establish continuities with the present: The paranoid spokesperson sees the fate of this conspiracy [to upend a specific way of life] in apocalyptic terms [] [H]e constantly lives at a turning point: it is now or never in organizing resistance. This paranoid style of outrage and fearmongering has been at work in our society for well over a century.

Outrageous starts by showing us that American show business essentially begins in the 1830s with the blackface minstrel show. Ever since that time, writes Nesteroff, audiences have complained. Though Outrageous makes very minimal connections to today, these minstrel controversies persist, most commonly relating to digital blackface and white peoples use of GIFs featuring African Americans. However, as Nesteroff chronicles, not all outrage has aged as well. Many people disapprove of blackface todaythough perhaps not as many as youd think. There was also a time when the Twist sent shock waves through the nations prudes, but today the dance raises very few eyebrows. Same goes for the Beatleswhat was once the Devils music is now classic rock playing at your local department store.

Attacks on mass popular culture first peaked with outrage over the nascent art of cinema. Fearing federal censorship, the film industry decided to self-censor. Outrageous includes some history of film controversy, featuring the technologically influential but socially reprehensible Birth of a Nation (1915). Its director, D. W. Griffith, was raised in the postbellum South, his childhood draped in the Lost Cause legends that plagued the region and circulated throughout the country via films like his. (Importantly, Birth of a Nation, controversial then as now, brought a fledgling NAACP to national attention.)

Nesteroff also highlights the Roscoe Fatty Arbuckle scandal, as it lit a fire for antipop culture crusaders looking to paint Hollywood as a sanctuary of vice and debauchery. When sound movies came in, Mae West had an all-too-brief peak of fame for her sexually suggestive comic roles; when censorship strictures were tightened in 1934, Wests career took a major hit. Even with the decline of the Motion Picture Production Code and the rise of the ratings system in the United States, fear and intimidation over movies have persisted.

During the rise of television, the continued backlash against Amos n Andy produced enough pressure to end the mediums use of blackface altogether. Predictably, comments flew regarding the death of comedy. Taboos have killed off most sources of American humor, complained one newspaper column at the time. Nesteroff shows how, as public taste changed, previous generations of comicsincluding West and the legendary Lucille Ballscoffed at televisions increasing inclusion of profanity. Organizations of moral crusaders came out of the woodwork. Conservative activist group Morality in Mediawhich, as Nesteroff shows, was funded by the Coors fortunefought to get Playboy magazine banned from stores and went after screenings of The Godfather (1972) and anything else that was going to push the United States into barbarism. The irony of a beer company funding the morality police may have been lost on this group.

One of the books greatest strengths is how it outlines the origins of outrage, tracking its evolution (and stasis) historically. What was once anger expressed by religious groups became lavishly funded outrage machines stemming from the Cold Warera John Birch Society, an organization which continues to impact the nation. Among the founders was candy and conspiracy solicitor Robert W. Welch Jr. One of the Societys bookstores was operated by Charles Koch (whose last name should ring a few bells). The Society propagated anti-integration views, held book burnings, and kept pressure on Hollywood and the media for liberalizing the country. Some members of Hollywood were recruited by the Society, such as screenwriter Morrie Ryskind, who authored some marvelous comedies of the 1930s, including Animal Crackers (1930) and My Man Godfrey (1936). Ryskinds son Allan, it is worth noting, published Hollywood Traitors: Blacklisted Screenwriters; Agents of Stalin, Allies of Hitler in 2015, a book carrying evaporated water and decrying Hollywoods communist-infiltrated Golden Age. The John Birch Society was lampooned by comedians in every medium. Original Tonight Show host Steve Allen received death threats for his jokes about the Birchers.

Later profiled is Paul Weyrich, co-founder of the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank funded by a multimillion-dollar donation by Joseph Coors. The name of the foundation may sound scholarly, but all it did on its founding in 1973 was provide a new veneer for Bircher beliefs. The organization sparked a growth of other similar groups, all Christian-affiliated, working toward the dismantling of popular culture. By the 1980s, such groups attracted televangelists like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, and stoked public fears around music and entertainment, resulting in the burning of hip-hop and heavy metal records.

Enter the Parents Music Resource Center, or PMRC, the heart and soul of moral crusading against music in the 1980s. Spearheaded by Tipper Gore and a string of other government-affiliated spouses, the PMRC sought to silence musicians whose music they didnt like. The PMRC, like previous outrage organizations, was endorsed by radical religious groups like Focus on the Family, which endorsed conversion therapy, and rejected the theory of evolution. Such outrage led to the Moral Majority, a collective of Christian conservative groups that regularly stuck their neck into the culture wars. Though not mentioned in the book, the only thing to come out of the PMRC is the often-ignored Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics label still found on some albums. Some stores, including Wal-Mart, refused to stock albums featuring the advisory.

Just about all fearmongering over popular culture is justified as a means of protecting the children. Nesteroff argues that this is a constant reminder that concern for children was [and is] a cover for bigotry. History shows how kids are used as an excuse to attack any popular culture phenomenon that has aided social and racial integration. The John Birch Society insisted they were just looking out for the kidsa very specific subset of kids, it was clearas they fought desegregation in schools.

And today, the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), with which Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett and Senator Josh Hawley are connected, works to fight abortion, ban contraceptives, and criminalize homosexualityall to provide a hypocritical interpretation of family values about saving the children. In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis has cultivated an atmosphere of fear and judgment leading to nearly 1,500 book bans in the last year. Like nearly everything covered in Outrageous, book banning across the country is tied to groups like Moms for Liberty, yet another deceptively titled organization that hides behind an ostensible love of those most in need of protection.

Nesteroff covers an impressive amount of ground, but besides the opening chapter, in which he frames the history of outrage, his narrative stops short of our current moment. Nesteroff writes cogently on documentaries and on podcasts, and therefore about the presentevidently, he has the commentary chops to go there. Perhaps a reason for his hesitation is the fact that contemporary outrage passes so quickly that by the time he finished writing the discussion, his examples had moved on. The last thing any author wants is for their commentary to look stale, an adjective I dont think could ever describe Nesteroffs work.

Nesteroff doesnt explicitly tell us what to do with the knowledge hes shared, and maybe he doesnt have to. But I would argue that one thing we need to do is continue sharing the history of the culture wars. Its why I teach the aforementioned class and am considering my own book on the subject. We need to expand conversation outside of the social media black hole where algorithms privilege the most idiotic content, and books like Outrageous give us a tool to share with others. Information, especially good information, is an undervalued commodity in todays data-driven economy. If we are going to cut through the fearmongering around so-called dangerous popular culture, we first need to show that we can fight the outrage machine by exposing the hypocrisy of save the childrentype rhetoric.

This book should spark useful conversations, even debate, by offering a template for discussing the relevance and origins of historic outrage culture. Nesteroff argues that outrage against popular culture often comes from a place of religious bigotry, is a generously funded venture, and is usually launched purely out of the desire to exercise political power. The fact remains that outrage is often funded and organized from above, is rarely centered on the artifact in question rather than the feelings around it, and remains just as important now as it was 100 years ago.

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Endless Culture Wars: On Kliph Nesteroffs Outrageous - lareviewofbooks

Although it has only been a few decades deemed the worlds hyperpower, the history and cultural developments driving its current slide towards political and economic sclerosis are rarely discussed. Instead, Americas troubles are explained by particulars, like Donald Trumps tweets and Joe Bidens dementia. I am therefore grateful to have the opportunity to present a few high points from my book, Radical Betrayal: How Liberals & Neoconservatives Are Wrecking American Exceptionalism. It goes beyond the banalities of Trump haters, media bias, and academic prejudice, to explain todays crisis through the (cracking) lens of American Exceptionalism.

Because my analysis deals withU.S. nationalism, it is best to begin by recalling that national narratives have been a political force since Antiquity. However, most of these proto-nationalisms focused on the kings who maintained them, not the common people. Thus, they didnt develop into forces strong enough to sustain national identities through periods of conquest and weakness. As a result, states rose and fell at a breathtaking rate, and peoples like the Jews, Athenians, and Spartans continued to define themselves as members of small tribes rather than larger nations. There were some exceptions, of which the Romans are the best known. By extending citizenship, they created a sense of community and gave people in conquered areas a vested interest in the empires well-being.

During the Middle Ages, European rulers reverted to a king-oriented state ideology. In England, however, a proto-nationalist narrative emerged after King John signed the Magna Carta in 1215. This document created a number of English freedoms encouraging the development of a new type of society marked by, for example, personal rights for to all freemen of our kingdom, and power sharing between Parliament, the King, and courts. Later, this ethos merged with the Puritan view of North Americaa New Israel settled by God-fearing people who were destined to create a model nationforming the embryo of American Exceptionalism in the process.

In 1776, the colonists desire to protect their English freedoms triggered the American Revolution. Through the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, Christian beliefs, English realism, and Enlightenment idealism combined in the worlds first full-blownand so far, most successfulmodern nationalism. However, to grasp the full scale, scope, and influence of this original form of exceptionalism, two episodes of early U.S. history must be considered.

First, Alexander Hamiltons viewthat U.S. markets needed to be protected by tariffs outlived Thomas Jeffersons ideal of America being an Empire of Liberty. As the country grew large enough to escape the snags of protectionism, that outcome preserved a small government and free market regime that rapidly made America the richest country in the world. It also cemented the American inclinations towards personal freedom, local resolution of social issues, and more.

The second event was George Washingtons decision in 1789 not to support the French Revolution in an active role. This created a non-interventionist tradition that, with some exemptions, endured until World War II. In other words, America settled on being a model, rather than a creator, of freedom in other lands. As John Quincy Adams put it in 1821, We Americans do not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy.

Bolstered by exceptionalist sentiments, these episodes formed a unifying worldview strong enough to hold the Union together despite growing ethnic, social, and cultural differences. Moreover, principles like limited government, states rights, low taxes, and a non-interventionist foreign policy, formed a super-ideology embraced by nearly everybody. Nineteenth-century U.S. politics overall accordingly became an ideologically dull affair, punctuated only by serious clashes about particulars such as the need for a federal bank, the continuation of slavery (that even led to a Civil War), and the level of tariffs.

Around 1900, this unity began to crumble. One reason for this was that, as the U.S. became affluent, so also grew the strength of the missionary impulse implicit in viewing America as a model society of freedom. In other words, as people realized that the U.S. had the means, they felt obliged to start spreading freedom and their values more vigorously. So, with the Spanish-American War in 1898, the U.S. began expanding its international role, such as by acquiring outposts in the Caribbean and the Pacific.

Simultaneously, the Democrats started moving politically leftward. The reason for that change was because, since the Civil War, the party had faced a precarious electoral position due to its support for slavery and its association with the Ku Klux Klan. Subsequently, in an effort to rebrand itself, by nominating populist firebrand William Jennings Bryan for president in 1896, 1900, and 1908, it began to depart from its traditionally libertarian program, adopting more statist-market intervention stances instead.

In 1912, these developments coalesced when Woodrow Wilson became president. Elected with only 42%t of the vote (as the Republican vote split between President William H. Taft and ex-President Theodore Roosevelt) and as a figurehead of the Progressive Movement, he held several views that were alien by American standards. For example, he regarded the U.S. Constitution as outdated, believed in human perfectibility, and thought that the U.S. Government could be used as a force for good. Thus, the Democrats view of America and its role began to oppose the original belief in exceptionalism.

Nonetheless, by expressing himself vaguely and by redefining traditional terms, Wilson managed to push through his policies. At home, he signed bills creating the Federal Reserve and introducing a federal income tax. And in 1917, using exceptionalist-sounding rhetoric, he dragged the U.S. into World War I with the goal of creating a New World Order. The Treaty of Versaillesbased on Wilsons personal beliefs rather than exceptionalist valuesset the stage for World War II. By then, the transformation of America from a free republic into a full-blown welfare-warfare state had begun, yet radicals would continue to drape non-American policies in exceptionalist-sounding rhetoric.

For example, Franklin D. Roosevelt sold parts of the New Deal as temporary deviations aimed only at resolving the Great Depression and preserving the American way of life. And after John F. Kennedy mastered the art of boxing liberal policies in exceptionalist wrapping paper, Lyndon B. Johnson pushed through both a tax cut and his Great Society program, promising to fix everything: from addressing the lack of local libraries to the eradication of fear, want, poverty, and racism. And the budget deficit this created was only one effect; the federal apparatus turning into a true Leviathan, set at fixing everything from potholes to global warming, was another.

However, the Great Society made the difference between exceptionalist-sounding rhetoric and liberal policies too stark to resolve and, after 1970, many liberals began to sound more like European than American politicians. This dual rhetorical-policy departure from American tradition triggered the Cultural Wars, a series of conflicts between conservatives and progressives over issues of identity, values, and morality that has become so bitter that it today threatens the survival of the Union.

Certainly, the Right is partially to blame for Americas current problems. Even if the GOP has remained committed to low taxes, few regulations, and individual freedom, the party hasunder the influence of so-called neoconservativesdeviated from its earlier principles in other areas, the most important of which are foreign policy and budget discipline. In a word, neocons have bested the Democrats advocacy for an aggressive foreign policy and, by uncritically adopting supply-side economics, have contributed to todays chronic budget deficit and a national debt of $33+ trillion.

Much more could be said about these and other matters. However, these considerations alone show how badly flawed is the established narrative about modern America, its characteristics, and its policies. As just one example, for more than 50 years the cultural wars have falsely been blamed on the GOP taking a hard right turn under Ronald Reagan. More serious is that both parties have distanced themselves from the ethos of American Exceptionalism. This has created a gap between popular and elite discourses about what the U.S. is and what its goals should be, blurring peoples sense of community, and weakening exceptionalisms role as a glue that holds the country together.

Furthermore, even if both sides do share blame for these developments, the Democrats nevertheless bear the principal responsibility. By adopting European tax, welfare, and other policies, they have given roughly half the population a schizophrenic view of what it means to be an American. Over time, they have effectively offered provisions for purely anti-American views and sentiments stemming from within media and academia.

After Wilson, FDR, and LBJ, the main culprit in creating this state of affairs was Barack Obama. He concluded the Democratsmutation into a full-scale left-wing party focused on giving entitlements to strategic voter groups and keeping the countrys borders open, rather than helping struggling people improve their situations. Also, in his bid to create a new electoral majority of youth, women, unionized workers, immigrants, LGBT, and college-educated liberals, he exacerbated the culture wars and reversed decades of progress by deliberately stirring social, racial, cultural, and other forms of mistrust.

Moreover, Obamas failed policies led to a depressed new normal that Donald Trump turned out to be a master at challenging. His pledge to stand up against the globalist cabal in D.C. and to make the country great again went hand in glove with the concerns of disgruntled Americans. And by (e.g.) focusing tax cuts on working- and middle-class people (instead of important voter blocs and special interests) and renegotiating unfavorable trade deals, he succeeded. Almost, for at the last minute, Democrats and the media managed to use the COVID-19 hysteria, along with some creative voter collection methods, to derail his reelection.

Now, the Biden administration has reversed most of Trumps successful policies and implemented new ones that have added to the vilest part of the old order. It has increased federal spending to a new record level, which in turn has led to both a rise in inflation and the national debt; it has raised popular expectations of what the government can do in the realm of welfare by promising things like a student loan forgiveness program that would be extremely expensive and destructive to fostering a sense of personal responsibility; and it has promised infinite amounts of military and economic aid to Ukraine and Israel, which has tied up the country in two new endless wars in faraway countries (next to Syria and other current conflicts).

In summary, America must bridge its economic, cultural, and other divides by reinvigorating American Exceptionalism. Otherwise, the U.S. will fall, which would not only be historically poignant but also dangerous, since powers like Russia, China, and Iran would gain immensely from such a disaster. And, because the Democrats bear the principal responsibility for todays situation, they must back away from the brink and once again embrace more exceptionalist rhetoric and policies. If they do not, the political, social, and cultural tensions in America will continue to increase until the nation rips itself apart. The only alternatives to such an outcome would be to split the Union peacefully beforehand, or for the federal level to become more autocratic. Unfortunately, given events such as U.S. intelligence agencies mass surveillance of U.S. citizens, the White Houses efforts to censor free speech online, the hiring of 10,000 new and armed IRS agents, and the legal maneuvers designed to jail Donald Trump ahead of the 2024 election, the latter is where things seem to be going.

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Sclerotic America The European Conservative - The European Conservative

Ohio lawmakers have failed, at least for now, to pass a bill that would exert control over discussion of controversial beliefs about climate policies in college classrooms.

Ohio House Speaker Jason Stephens, a Republican, said this week that the bill doesnt have enough support to pass the House, where it has sat for months following passage in the Senate.

Senate Bill 83 contains a wide-ranging set of rules for public colleges and universities, including bans on most diversity training and new requirements that alternative viewpoints on such topics as climate policies, immigration and abortion are discussed. Its main sponsor, Sen. Jerry Cirino, a Republican, said he was taking on the woke fiefdom of higher education.

The bill faced intense opposition from faculty, students, environmental groups and unions, leading to hours-long hearings over several months. Supporters of the bill made many changes to attempt to find a version that could pass, including the removal of language that banned strikes by higher education unions, but it wasnt enough.

A provision dealing with controversial beliefs or policies remained in the bill, which helped to inspire resistance from people who teach and study science; they warned that Ohios public colleges and universities would be impaired in their ability to teach climate science.

So many people have come out against this bill and have pushed back and have rallied, not only against this bill, but so much other harmful legislation, that I think its given me hope, said Keely Fisher, a Ph.D. student in the School of Environment and Natural Resources at Ohio State University.

She spoke to Inside Climate News in May about how the bill made her wonder if she belonged in Ohio. Now she feels pride in the way her faculty and classmates and those at other universities defended their ability to do research unfettered by this regulation, she said.

Ohio Rep. Casey Weinstein, a Democrat, said he is not surprised to see the bill has failed to pass based on his conversations with Republican colleagues who were uncomfortable with various parts of it. Republicans hold large majorities in both chambers of the Ohio General Assembly.

In Ohio, we love our universities, so the fact that theyre attacking and potentially striking blows against our beloved public universities that are so critical to our workforce and our economy, that was a tough hill to climb, he said.

Cirino, the lead sponsor, testified before a House committee in May and faced questions from Weinstein, who asked how the measure would affect the teaching of the Holocaust. While Cirino didnt endorse inaccurate views of how the Holocaust should be taught, Weinstein said he is troubled that the bill seems to open the door to treating Holocaust denial as just another point of view.

I dont think he did himself any favors by, unfortunately, being honest about his bill and saying that he was trying to both sides slavery, 9-11 and the Holocaust, Weinstein said.

Cirino did not respond to a request for an interview.

The bill says faculty and staff shall allow and encourage students to reach their own conclusions about all controversial beliefs or policies and shall not seek to inculcate any social, political, or religious point of view.

The bill then lists examples of controversial topics, including climate policies, electoral politics, foreign policy, diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, immigration policy, marriage, or abortion.

A previous version of the bill referred to climate change instead of climate policies. Cirino changed it in response to concerns that the measure would regulate the teaching of climate science, but opponents said the bill would continue to impair teaching about climate change even with the new wording.

ICN provides award-winning climate coverage free of charge and advertising. We rely on donations from readers like you to keep going.

Glenn Branch, deputy director of the National Center for Science Education, has been monitoring the Ohio legislation and is pleased to see that it doesnt appear likely to pass. His organization, based in California, opposes threats to the accuracy of science education in K-12 schools and higher education.

The Ohio bill is trying to sweep up higher education into the culture wars that Cirino and his supporters want to pursue, he said. Climate change is a fairly minor battlefield for them in the culture wars, but it is, indeed, part of what they want to fight about.

He said attacks on science education at public universities are much less common than what he sees happening in K-12 schools.

For example, his organization has been working to oppose efforts before the Texas State Board of Education to restrict the use of textbooks that accurately describe climate change and evolution.

Branch said the Ohio bill was so brazen and it offended so many interest groups, including labor unions, people of color and science educators, that it was not difficult to defeat. Other threats to science education are harder to fight.

But policy ideas can always come back in new forms, so there remains a possibility that Cirino or some other Ohio lawmaker could pursue aspects of this bill again. Senate President Matt Huffman, whose chamber passed the bill in the spring and still supports it, said this week that he will continue to push for the measure.

If that happens the coalition that opposed it will be ready to respond.

Fisher, the Ohio State student, said she welcomes not having to worry about the legislation for a while.

It is this weight off my shoulders that I didnt know I needed, she said.

Dan Gearino covers the midwestern United States, part of ICNs National Environment Reporting Network. His coverage deals with the business side of the clean-energy transition and he writes ICNs Inside Clean Energy newsletter. He came to ICN in 2018 after a nine-year tenure at The Columbus Dispatch, where he covered the business of energy. Before that, he covered politics and business in Iowa and in New Hampshire. He grew up in Warren County, Iowa, just south of Des Moines, and lives in Columbus, Ohio.

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Ohio Fails to Pass Restrictions on College Teaching About Climate ... - InsideClimate News

But in other important ways, OConnor eschewed a facile ideological template that would lend itself to easy forecasting. For her critics, her approach to the law could seem erratic and unpredictable. For those looking more closely, however, her decisions and her reasoning demonstrated a constant attention to the proper role of the Supreme Court as a nonpartisan arbiter of hot-button issues in American life, to the actual facts about the actual parties, and to the way in which the benchs rulings would be experienced by the American public.

Hers was a humane, pragmatic jurisprudence qualities that are too often lacking in todays Supreme Court. These values were embodied in her approach not just to high-salience issues such as abortion, but also in somewhat less noticed disputes about the Fourth Amendment and the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. Its a legacy worth spotlighting.

Inevitably, the decision that will be most recalled today is the plurality opinion OConnor penned along with Justices Anthony Kennedy and David Souter in Planned Parenthood v. Casey. In Casey, the Republican-appointed judges decided not to use their sheer force of numbers to overrule Roe v. Wade, and it stands in stark contrast to the work of President Donald Trumps three appointees in Dobbs v. Jacksonville Womens Health.

Casey matters not only because of its effect on reproductive freedoms, but for what it says about how the justices choose either to sustain or undermine the rule of law. OConnor understood how important it was that citizens didnt perceive their rights to turn on the impenetrable uncertainties of who got elected, who died, who resigned, and who could get through the Senate.

OConnor explained why she would not just vote her own politics in the (much maligned) first line of her Casey opinion: Liberty finds no refuge in a jurisprudence of doubt. Here, she echoes thinking about the rule of law going back to Aristotle. Simply put, a legal system diminishes liberty by the sheer fact of being unpredictably open to the whims of particular officials. OConnor would later go on to champion the rule of law, but her insight into how the court must behave if legality is to be preserved is most powerfully on display in Casey.

At the same time, OConnor was capable of profound empathy for the actual litigants before the court. Consider a little-noticed case that, in practice, deeply shapes Americans experience with police. Atwater v. City of Lago Vista asked whether a police officer could spitefully take advantage of a minor traffic misdemeanor (failure to wear a seat belt) to arrest a woman, separating her from her minor children. The court said yes, over a vigorous dissent by OConnor.

Atwater is one of those minor cases that, on the ground, is incredibly consequential: It surely matters to many people whether they can be locked up because they fail to use their seat belt. The courts ruling gave police a startling and destabilizing new power over citizens. OConnors eloquent and passionate dissent captured the far-reaching way in which the courts ruling shook the life not just of Gail Atwater but of millions of Americans on the road.

Finally, when it came to the First Amendments Establishment Clause and the separation of church and state, OConnor was no less sensitive to peoples direct experiences with the law. In her view, the government violated religious neutrality by taking sides improperly in the religion-inflected culture wars if an objective observer would perceive a state endorsement of faith.

Here, OConnor took seriously the idea that government favoritism between religions, and between the devout and the secular, can be destabilizing. She understood the potential for people to feel stigmatized and excluded by such religious partisanship. And her approach to the law centered those concerns by literally demanding that judges take the perspective of the citizen facing a seemingly biased state.

The strategy of the Roberts Court, however, has been strikingly different. There is no case during the Roberts Court in which the Establishment Clause has provided the necessary basis for invalidating a government practice. Rejecting claims under the Clause, the Roberts Court has also played fast and loose with facts in ways that would have seemed quite alien to OConnor. The overall effect, a leading scholar of the First Amendment recently wrote, is that the court is disestablishing that part of the First Amendment making it, in effect, a second-class right.

There is, of course, much in OConnors record with which a person on the left or the right will disagree: Thats perhaps the inevitable result of being open to the facts of each new case, and empathetic to the experiences of their litigants. Yet if unpredictability is the cost for such fidelity to law and seriousness about justice, its hard to see why the price is not worth paying.

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What Sandra Day O'Connor Could Teach Today's Supreme Court - POLITICO

There is nothing new under the sun. So goes the adage which conveys the tendency for history to repeat itself.

Its this unstated premise that drives Kliph Nesteroffs latest book, Outrageous: A History of Showbiz and the Culture Wars. In it, Nesteroff artfully seeks to demonstrate how current catchphrases like cancel culture and political correctness are just variations of the same generational and ideological divides which have undergirded American society throughout Hollywoods history.

Nesteroff turns his attention to comedians in particular, citing the ways in which they have historically been unique targets of the culture wars.

His arguments are cogent and his histories entertaining how is it possible that vaguely defined spirit of the times is not a quote about wokeness, but instead a denunciation of critiques levied on comedians more than half a century ago?

Still, its worth noting that Nesteroff began his career as a comedian, which perhaps betrays an inherent sympathy for the prophetic martyrs who have frequently been subjected to unjust censorship and criticism throughout the history of showbiz.

___

AP book reviews: https://apnews.com/hub/book-reviews

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Book Review: 'Outrageous: A History of Showbiz and the Culture Wars' argues history repeats itself - AOL