Archive for the ‘Culture Wars’ Category

The Election Day lessons of Polis, Youngkin and Coffman | HUDSON – coloradopolitics.com

If you dont believe American politics has become a spectator sport, you werent listening to the cable bloviators on Nov. 7. Speculation about the 2023 election's implications for 2024 dominated their analysis of voter results. This is, of course, something like reading tea leaves at the bottom of your mug for predictions of the future. We are experiencing a Mad Max episode where global turmoil threatens to erupt into another World War. The explosions we are witnessing in Ukraine and Gaza may sound far away, yet for the worlds remaining superpower they could prove the thunder before the storm. Both an ailing Ayatollah in Iran and the Russian czar in Moscow are hellbent to rearrange central Asia before they exit the world stage. For them, violence is Gods will.

An aspiring China would like nothing better than to watch the United States let itself become entangled in those disputes. Whether Joe Biden can navigate his way past these conflicts without putting American boots on the ground will be a far better predictor of his chances in 2024 than anything voters had to say last week. Its easier to identify the losers than the winners in 2023. We can start with a pair of governors, Glenn Younkin of Virginia and our own Jared Polis. Each of them has been a ghost dancer in their respective partys just-in-case auditions for the 2024 presidential race. Undeclared candidates, theyve been taking steps to prepare to jump into the arena should their respective and presumptive presidential candidates suddenly be sidelined by illness, death or incarceration.

Youngkins credentials as an authoritarian-lite, MAGA-wannabe were badly damaged as his brand took a beating at the polls in Virginia. He was the never-Trump Republican candidate-in-waiting visible behind the glass marked "break in case of emergency." The fulsome geniality that led to his surprise election as governor two years ago has apparently exceeded its expiration date. If he had delivered majorities in both chambers of the Virginia legislature, Glenn would have been on his way to designation as the dark-horse favorite for the GOP nomination. Instead, he will be occupied in squabbles with Democratic majorities about every line in the state budget, as well as nasty battles regarding the definition of parental rights in public education, abortion decisions and related culture wars. All good news for Nikki Haley.

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Colorados governor did not suffer as fatal a blow from the defeat of Proposition HH. But the loss of his signature fix for property tax increases, which dwarf those that triggered the Prop 13 revolt in California 30 years ago, is not a good look especially when you are attempting to send out the message you're prepared and ready to run the entire country. The legislative clean-up ahead will be challenging. Villains will have to be tossed under the bus, both Senate President Steve Fenberg of Boulder and Denver Sen. Chris Hansen have been nominated for this privilege depending on whom you speak with. Gov. Polis was well advised Thursday to accede to the Republican request for a special session, thereby displaying his bipartisan cred. Still, some kind of compromise must be cobbled together no small trick.

If successful, the governor can probably maintain his standing as a promising short list possibility for vice president a good match, say, for Gretchen Whitmer. Forget the top of the ticket for now. Polis will also have to abandon the attempt to better fund public schools using a raid on TABOR refunds. Truth be told, Proposition HH was never primarily about property tax relief so much as it was a backdoor gimmick to fund public schools. The good news is even Republicans have acknowledged Colorados teachers are underpaid. During the sole debate on the merits of HH, opponent Mike Fields noted his mother, a career teacher, deserves a better salary. The legislature can probably tackle this challenge during next years regular session, although Republicans are likely to insist any additional revenue be reserved for classroom teachers rather than additional assistant principals.

It was intriguing to see Mike Coffman cruise to an easy re-election as mayor in Aurora where changing demographics make it increasingly difficult for Republicans to win. Mike has held office, more or less continuously, for 30-plus years. There is a lesson for Republicans in his success. As I once noted, pundits, many of them Republicans, have predicted Mike would lose his next election for most of this period. And, indeed, he did finally lose his congressional seat to Jason Crow but not before knocking off Democratic heavyweights like Morgan Carroll and Andrew Romanoff. Coffman has proven a dedicated, persistent and honorable public servant. Though I have not and would not agree with him on every public policy, I would harbor no reservations about having him represent me. It appears Im not alone in this assessment.

When Mayor Coffman decided to go undercover and spend a few nights at several Denver homeless encampments he came in for a barrage of criticism. Perhaps there were grounds for questioning conclusions he reached regarding drug use. But I felt sympathy for him. In 1983 I was working as a telephone repairman during a strike at Mountain Bell where I was an installation manager. Tipped by someone, my picture appeared on the front page of the Rocky Mountain News hanging from a pole in Lakewood. When I asked a Denver Democratic captain what he thought rank-and-file Democrats thought of their chairman working during a strike, he replied, I suspect they were surprised you could actually climb a pole. I was surprised Auroras Mayor was willing to sleep on the sidewalk.

Miller Hudson is a public affairs consultant and a former Colorado legislator.

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The Election Day lessons of Polis, Youngkin and Coffman | HUDSON - coloradopolitics.com

Around Town: siblings reunite, an electricity milestone and a … – Palo Alto Online

A group from Bloomington, Indiana takes a tour of the Stanford University d.school in November 2022. Courtesy Alain Barker.

In this week's Around Town column, read about siblings reuniting, an electricity milestone and a Stanford student's book deal.

STARR STRUCK ... Palo Alto and its newest sibling city, Bloomington, Indiana, have many things and people in common: Tara VanDerveer, Stanford University's legendary women's basketball coach who hooped it up for Indiana University as a student; the renowned physicist Douglas Hofstadter, who took the opposite route and graduated from Stanford before becoming a professor at Indiana University; and Palo Alto City Council member Vicki Veenker, a former Hoosier who spearheaded the "sibling city" program that brought the two cities together. Earlier this fall, Veenker moderated an author talk with Hofstadter that took place in Bloomington and was simulcast at both cities. At one point, Hofstadter was asked by an audience member about how to maintain humility while moving into the future. He responded by making the case for humanities education, which he suggested fosters international unity and humility. He lamented the recent cuts to humanities departments in universities across America and the renewed emphasis by colleges on STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) courses. He argued that the country should be trying to instead preserve LAMP, an acronym he coined that includes literature, art, music and philosophy. "That should be what we should be trying to preserve," he said during the Sept. 7 event. "STEM is dehumanizing in many ways." The next joint event took place this Sunday, Nov. 12, and focused on the topics of race and belonging. The conversation focused on another person that the two cities have in common: former Stanford University president and notorious eugenicist David Starr Jordan, whose name was struck from a Palo Alto middle school and replaced with Frank S. Greene. "Both communities faced similar issues dealing with the legacy of David Starr Jordan and the renaming process," Veenker said.

A new all-electric heating, ventilation and air conditioning unit is lifted by a crane during its installation process on the rooftop of the Peninsula Conservation Center in Palo Alto on Jan. 25, 2023. Photo by Magali Gauthier.

OUT OF GAS ... For decades, the Peninsula Conservation Center has been known mostly for the eco-conscious nonprofits that fill its spaces, a list that currently includes (among others) Canopy, Acterra, and the Sierra Club Loma Prieta Chapter. Now, the building itself is taking on some of its tenants' personality. On Nov. 2, Mayor Lydia Kou came by the center at 3921 East Bayshore Road to help the nonprofits ceremonially flip the "off" switch on natural gas. The move came shortly after the 53-year-old center replaced its traditional gas-fired space heaters with Bryant heat pumps, making it the first existing commercial building to achieve this conversion to all-electric infrastructure, according to Phil Bobel, who serves as vice chair at the Peninsula Conservation Center board. (Several buildings in Palo Alto, including the headquarters of the Weekly's parent company at 450 Cambridge Ave., have been all-electric since their inception.) The center is not done with adding environmentally friendly infrastructure, Bobel said. Next on the list: replacing two older electric-vehicle charger ports with six more modern ports. He noted that a city of Palo Alto rebate program will fund about half of the $85,000 project.

FROM NEWSROOM TO PRINTING PRESS ... When former Stanford University President Marc Tessier-Lavigne stepped down earlier this year, it was then-Stanford freshman Theo Baker who was partially behind it. Baker wrote a series of stories for the Stanford Daily, the school's student newspaper, calling into question the validity of research that Tessier-Lavigne did prior to becoming president at Stanford. But now, the youngest-ever George Polk Award winner is on track to publish a book about his experiences, according to Page Six. Baker, whose parents are Susan Glasser, a staff writer at the New Yorker, and Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent for the New York Times, signed the book deal with Penguin Press according to Page Six. Baker's book will be titled "How to Rule the World: Yacht Parties, Culture Wars and the Downfall of a President at Stanford," according to Deadline. Warner Bros and producer Amy Pascal who has also produced several Spider-Man movies won the rights to the book, Deadline also reported.

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Around Town: siblings reunite, an electricity milestone and a ... - Palo Alto Online

Last year’s Kansas elections previewed results this year. Voters … – Kansas Reflector

Kansas showed the way.

A year ago in August, the Sunflower State stunned the nation by voting down a proposed constitutional amendment that would have allowed the Legislature to ban abortion. A year ago this month, voters in this Republican-dominated state re-elected Democrat Laura Kelly to her second term as governor. In both cases, we offered a preview of 2023s elections, in which Ohio voters enshrined the right to reproductive health care in their state constitution and Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear was re-elected to lead Kentucky.

As famed Emporia editor William Allen White wrote back in 1922: When anything is going to happen in this country, it happens first in Kansas.

Ive often noted that even the reddest states contain an incredible diversity of political opinion. Heck, 42% of Kansans voted for Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election, the largest percentage support for a Democratic presidential candidate here since Michael Dukakis in 1988.

Across the country, folks support the right of women to make their own reproductive health choices. Weve now seen voters in a staggering seven states turn out to make that very clear. Similarly, folks will vote for leaders who support mainstream, old-school values such as strong public education, affordable health care and an economy that benefits everyone, not just the wealthy. That means that centrist Democrats such as Kelly and Beshear rack up victories.

National pundits might want to beware, though.

You can read already hot takes about this weeks elections that suggest these high-profile wins (along with Democratic victories in the Virginia legislature) mean that Democrats should fret less about President Joe Bidens 2024 prospects. The party can cheer another string of victories as it chugs toward the title bout.

Democrats should still worry. Recent polling from the New York Times and CNN suggests Biden would lost against former President Donald Trump if their rematch were held today. Trump, as he never fails to remind us, has only ever had a loose affiliation with the Republican Party. Hes been careful to distance himself from extreme anti-abortion advocates. And for better or worse, the public appears to recall his four shambolic years in office through the rosy lenses of nostalgia.

Abortion-rights victories in red states don't prove their deep, abiding love for Nancy Pelosi. They instead demonstrate that, when voters can separate the issue from candidates and culture wars, they support a long-established constitutional right.

As I also wrote last year, abortion-rights victories in red states dont prove their deep, abiding love for Nancy Pelosi. They instead demonstrate that, when voters can separate the issue from candidates and culture wars, they support a long-established constitutional right.

Similarly, Kellys wins in Kansas show how one politicians determination to plot a low-key, moderate path can reap dividends. Important to understand, yes, but not earth-shattering.

When you go out to rural Kansas, they are not talking about all of the divisive social issues, Kelly told Politico last week. Whats on their mind is are you going to fund my schools? Or are you going to build my roads, fix my roads?

Before we wrap today, I would like to note that far-right conservative candidates appear to have fallen short in Johnson County and Baldwin City school board races. According to the Game on for Kansas Schools group, It was a very good election (though not perfect) for traditional candidates and a very bad election for extremists across the state.

Can we now finally put to rest the ridiculous idea that a vast majority of Kansans are clamoring for drastic changes to their public schools?

Far-right ideologues see public education as a Trojan Horse to inject their poisonous ideas into mainstream discourse. They want schools to stop teaching about the pernicious effects of racism and the fact that LGBTQ people exist. They want to install a statewide voucher program that would destroy K-12 education as we know it.

Kansans dont want that. They dont agree with that. Their votes on Tuesday proved it.

If state politicians do anything in regard to our schools, they ought to fully fund them and finally spend the required amount on special education services. The public doesnt want dramatic change; it wants elected officials who will do their jobs and make this a better state.

Nationally, I think thats the message voters sent as well. Most of us find our lives generally acceptable. No one enjoyed the pandemic, and the subsequent inflation didnt help. Yet when it comes to our families and friends, our neighborhoods and communities, we dont want disruption or turmoil. We want officials who will fix the problems that arise, steer us through any unexpected turbulence, and otherwise avoid messy drama.

They can manage that, right? Right?

Clay Wirestone is Kansas Reflector opinion editor. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.

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Last year's Kansas elections previewed results this year. Voters ... - Kansas Reflector

Educators Celebrate Reelection of Kentucky Governor Andy … – National Education Association

National Education Association President Becky Pringle released the following statement celebrating the reelection of Governor Andy Beshear and Lieutenant Governor Jacqueline Coleman:

Tonight, the people of Kentucky delivered a resounding victory for Governor Andy Beshear and Lieutenant Governor Jacqueline Coleman herself a public school educator - rewarding their efforts to strengthen the Bluegrass States public schools.

For the last four years, Governor Beshear has put Kentuckys students - no matter their race, place, or background - at the top of his priority list. He has partnered with parents, families, and educators across the Commonwealth to expand learning opportunities for students, invested in mental health supports for students, started addressing educator shortages by paying educators the professional compensation they deserve, and worked to ensure students are learning the skills they need to be successful in life.

Governor Beshear has respected public school educators and ensured they have a seat at the table when making education policy.

Beshears opponent, Daniel Cameron, ran his campaign promising to drag right-wing culture wars into classrooms and onto campuses. Cameron made this election a referendum on his push to divert public school funding into unaccountable and discriminatory private schools through vouchers.

Voters once again rejected right-wing culture wars. They rejected efforts to privatize public schools. Voters explicitly rejected extremist politicians that attack our educators and public schools, while offering nothing to help our students and communities thrive.

Across Kentucky, parents, grandparents, and educators together made their presence felt in this election in support of Governor Beshear. They went door-to-door, speaking to their friends and neighbors. They spent their nights and weekends speaking to their communities. And they turned out to vote, knowing that Kentuckys public schools and students futures were on the ballot.

On behalf of the 3 million members of the National Education Association, I would like to congratulate Governor Andy Beshear and Lieutenant Governor Jacqueline Coleman on their re-election.

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The National Education Association is the nations largest professional employee organization, representing more than 3 million elementary and secondary teachers, higher education faculty, education support professionals, school administrators, retired educators, students preparing to become teachers, healthcare workers, and public employees. Learn more atwww.nea.org.

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Educators Celebrate Reelection of Kentucky Governor Andy ... - National Education Association

The culture war over the Gaza war – The Economist

The imagery is enticing, the rhythm and rhyme are propulsive. From the river to the sea, runs the popular slogan, Palestine will be free! In recent days that couplet has resounded in squares from Toronto to Berlin. Wearing chequered keffiyeh scarves, Californian pupils declaimed it as they swept down school corridors. Activists projected the words onto a wall of a university in Washington, DC.

What do they mean? Superficially an idealistic vow of liberation, the decades-old expression also contains a threat: the river is the River Jordan, the sea is the Mediterranean and freedom, in this case, implies the destruction of the state of Israel. That is certainly the sense in which Hamas uses the phrase. The children chanting it at the base of Nelsons column in London on October 21st, during a big pro-Palestinian march, may not have grasped the menace. But several marchers who were yelling the words, or bearing them on placards, seemed aware of it, clamming up defensively when asked to explain them.

Anyone whos paying attention knows exactly what that means, says Jonathan Greenblatt of the Anti-Defamation League, an American anti-hate group which, like watchdogs in Britain and elsewhere, has documented a steep rise in antisemitic incidents since Hamass bloody raid on Israel on October 7th. (Islamophobic incidents have multiplied in several countries, too.) The ubiquity of this deceptively hardline mantra points up an important shift in Western attitudes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Three related forces are driving it: technology, demography and ideology.

The Western left once sympathised with Zionism. That changed markedly after the six-day war of 1967 and the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. Especially since the end of apartheid in South Africa, the Palestinian cause has been a talismanic issue for left-leaning Westerners. Why it acquired this status is a matter of debate. In some analyses, Israel serves as an avatar for American power, or for bygone colonial struggles. Jewish groups and others have wondered why the casualties in, say, Syria or Afghanistanwhere the perpetrators as well as the victims are Muslimstir less bien-pensant concern.

After a period in which the issue receded in prominence in Western diplomacy and headlines, Gazas plight is now inspiring protests and disputes as never before. A glut of open letters by artists and other luminaries have decried Israels bombardment and Western leaders acquiescence to it. (Counter-petitions mourn the atrocities of October 7th and affirm Israels right to self-defence.) Pro-Palestinian rallies have been held in many cities, including some where they were notionally banned.

The recriminations flow both ways. In Britain the BBCs reluctance to refer to Hamas as terrorists led to an outcry and a partial climbdown. Dave Chappelle, an American comedian, reportedly had a spat with punters at a gig in Boston after he lamented the crisis in Gaza. Some American students have been hounded for their stridently anti-Israel views; talks by Palestinian authors have been cancelled. Palestine Legal, which supports pro-Palestinian activists in America, says they are facing a wave of McCarthyite backlash targeting their livelihoods and careers.

Silence is violence, runs another popular protest slogan, a position taken by some on all sides. A range of institutions, from universities to unions, have been berated for the wording of their public statements, or for failing to issue one. Calls for peace have been likened to appeasement. And supporters of both Israel and Palestine make analogies with Ukraine to demonstrate the supposed hypocrisy of the opposing camp. Backers of the Palestinians see Gaza as the victim (like Ukraine) of invasion by a bullying neighbour. Pro-Israelis point to Hamass incursion and liken its barbarity to Russian war crimes.

The polarised passions and viral slogans are in part a sharp manifestation of the echo-chamber effect of social media. Millions of people have watched footage of Hamass depredations in horror. Many others are transfixed instead by images of Gazas agony. In Germany, for instance, where a synagogue has been firebombed and stars of David daubed on Jewish homes, some Islamists exist in parallel societies, relying on digital and overseas news, says Felix Klein, the federal commissioner for antisemitism. So, he adds, do many on the far right, which commits most of the countrys antisemitic crimes. (There, as in America, the two groups have made common cause online.)

Worse, the heart-rending clips and pictures sometimes come from the wrong country or the wrong war, or even from video games. Like the echo-chamber effect, online disinformation is a familiar problem that has seemed as acute as ever in the ongoing crisis.

The blast at the Ahli Arab hospital on October 17th was a supreme example of the reach and clout of falsehoods. Swiftly picked up by major news outfits, misleading reports contributed, in short order, to the cancelling of a summit between Arab leaders and President Joe Biden. Demand for disinformation, reckons Peter Pomerantsev of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, is an even bigger problem than supply. In wartime, people are looking for reasons to confirm their biases, he says glumly. It isnt about the facts.

Screen habits encourage another striking feature of reactions to the war: the gamification of news, whereby irony and taboo-busting are prized, even amid the gravest calamities. The paragliders on which some Hamas murderers flew to Israel were, for a few onlookers, irresistibly meme-worthy. Black Lives Matter Chicago briefly posted an image ofa paraglider with the words, I stand with Palestine. From Chicago to Gaza, runs another of its messages, from the river to the sea.

As for demography: immigration is one factor skewing the culture war in the West over the tragic one in the Middle East. Muslim populations in Western countries are both growing and changing in composition. In the past, notes Yunus Ulusoy of the Centre for Turkish Studies and Integration Research in Essen, the Muslim population in Germany was of predominantly Turkish origin. Now, he says, around 2.1m Muslims in the country have roots in Syria, Iraq and other places that are hostile to Israel. They brought their views of the conflict with themshaped, says Mr Ulusoy, by a sense of solidarity with the ummah, or global Muslim community.

Awareness of Nazism and the Holocaust, meanwhile, which for decades coloured German attitudes to Israel and antisemitism, is waning. Some Muslims, says Professor Julia Bernstein of the Frankfurt University of Applied Sciences, think this awful past is not our history, and that they are now the real victims of prejudice in Germany.

France, notes Dominique Mosi, an eminent French commentator, is home to both the largest Muslim population in western Europe and the biggest Jewish one. It has a traumatic recent history of Islamist terrorism, and a more distant one of collaboration with the Nazis, both of which tend to bolster support for Israel. But it also harbours contrary strains of anti-Americanism and guilt over French colonialism in the Arab world. The result, says Mr Mosi, is a conflict of memories that plays out in politics and on the streets.

In America, the most influential depiction of Israel in popular culture is probably Exodus. A novel by Leon Uris published in 1958, it dramatises the birth of the state and became a film starring Paul Newman. (As a piece of propaganda, said David Ben-Gurion, Israels first prime minister, Exodus was the greatest thing ever written about the country.) Overall, Americans remain much more supportive of Israel than are Europeans. Polls conducted since October 7th show a hardening of support for it among Democrats in particular.

But there is an important demographic wrinkle. As Tim Malloy, a polling analyst at Quinnipiac University in Connecticut, says, younger Americans are much less inclined to back Israel than are their elders. They also think more favourably of the Palestinian people. According to surveys by Pew, this gap in sympathy between American generations is widening (see chart).

Many young voters do not have direct memories of the attacks of September 11th 2001, a calamity which shaped older Americans views of Islamist terrorists such as Hamas. Their diverging outlook also reflects the third force swaying Western attitudes: a binary ideology that emerged from American universities to win converts far and wide.

Seeing the world in Manichean terms can be comforting. It turns confounding issues into simple clashes of good and evil, conferring a halo of virtue on those who pick the right side. As Yascha Mounk, author of The Identity Trap, argues, the emerging ideology offers just this form of comfort, sorting the world into opposing categoriescoloniser and colonised, oppressors and oppressedoften along racial lines. In essence it transposes the terms of American debates over race onto other places and problems. The American brand of anti-colonialism, quips Mr Mounk, is astonishingly colonialist.

In a polarised age, lots of people infer their opinions from their political allegiance rather than the other way round. This, thinks Mr Mounk, is part of the new ideologys appeal: it furnishes an all-purpose vocabulary to apply to any conflict. In this schema, the powerless can do no wrong, least of all to the powerfuland nobody can be both. Liberation movements of all kinds are linked, as communist insurgencies purported to be during the cold war. As flares in the colours of the Palestinian flag were set off at Piccadilly Circus, a protester in London holding a Queers for Palestine sign explained that All the struggles are connected.

This philosophy is tailor-made for the posturing and character-limits of social-media posts, perhaps one reason it is gaining adherents. But it prohibits the balance and nuanced judgments that intractable real-world hostilities demand. In particular, because the Palestinians are cast as powerless, and Israel is classed as powerful, it follows that Israelis cannot qualify as victims. Never mind the exile of Mizrahi Jews from Arab countries to Israel. The Holocaust is ancient history.

The schema shows up glaringly in references to Hamass crimes as a form of resistance or decolonisation, and in the statement by some Harvard students that held Israel entirely responsible for the slaughter of its own citizens. Many Jews, in Israel and the diaspora, perceive a wider disregard for Israels sufferingnot just less sympathy than it received during, say, the Entebbe hostage crisis of 1976, but a void. If the issue is morally simple, meanwhile, for many Western activists the remedy is blunt and drastic: not the two-state solution of yore, but a Palestine that stretches from the river to the sea.

In the left-leaning political elite, the picture is starkly different. Both Mr Biden and Sir Keir Starmer, leader of Britains opposition Labour Party, have offered Israel staunch support. All the same, the escalation in some rank-and-file attitudes to the war may have a lasting falloutboth in the Middle East and in the West.

Mr Biden, Sir Keir and other leaders have been lambasted by some in their parties for declining to call for a ceasefire. This disapprovaloften motivated by natural compassion for Palestinian civilians rather than ideologymay cost them votes, Muslim and otherwise, in what may be tight elections next year. (Mr Biden may have weighed that risk against the potentially higher cost of supporting a ceasefire.)

That may not be the only form of political blowback. Plenty of liberal voters are dismayed by the responses of people with whom, in the past, they felt broadly aligned. Their coalition with more radical voters was already under pressure; for some liberals, the bedrock of common values that they thought underpinned it seems to have crumbled. If the debate over Gaza has been a symptom of polarisation in the West, it may yet prove to be a cause of realignment, too.

The consequences for Israel and the Middle East are unpredictable. At least in the short term, revulsion for Hamas seems to outweigh any qualms Americans might have had before the war over Israels rightward lurch under Binyamin Netanyahu. Most Americans, including most Democrats, tell pollsters that supporting Israel is in American interests. How far and how long that remains the case depends on a series of unknownsstarting with the conduct and outcome of a ground invasion of Gaza, and the new dispensation that may follow. Developments in domestic politics will matter, including the fervour of the Republican embrace of isolationism.

From an Israeli point of view, though, the long-term trajectory of opinion in America is worrying. And in Europe, as the second world war recedes from living memory and the clout of Muslim voters grows, support for Israel may continue to soften, especially on the left.

Even as the disaster in Israel and Gaza unfolds, one of its morals is already clear. Amid the unchecked flow of images and ideas, Western public opinion and geopolitical conflicts are entangled in new and explosive ways. Culture wars and real wars are no longer separate struggles.

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The culture war over the Gaza war - The Economist