Culture war

America's longest war has just come home. Last week, Fox News’s All-American Christmas Tree, standing merrily outside the channel's headquarters in New York, was set on fire and destroyed. The arsonist was quickly arrested upon which he was subjected to the fearsome rigor of our justice system: released without bail as he cussed out reporters. We should pause here to note just how banal and predictable much of the late-night jesting about the blaze has been. It isn't that the likes of Trevor Noah and Stephen Colbert shouldn't joke about the fire — crack all you like, and the Daily Show's "Pine Eleven" was pretty funny.

'A lie will gallop halfway round the world before the truth has time to pull its breeches on.’ So said Cordell Hull, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s secretary of state, long before the internet. Now we live in the virtual age. What’s true is barely relevant. No sooner has a man shot 10 people dead and been taken into custody than his suspected motives are shoved into the great culture-war grinder and splatted out of a million social media accounts. So we saw this week with the arrest of Ahmed Al Aliwi Alissa, who was presumed white as quickly as he was guilty after pictures of his arrest yesterday in Boulder, Colorado circulated online. Alissa made the mistake of looking a bit pale in the grainy images.

The bodies of the victims hadn’t gone cold, the families had barely begun grieving, when the familiar cottage industry of activists and journalists jumped in to speculate and spread misinformation on social media. What drove someone to slaughter eight people in three Asian massage parlors in Atlanta on Tuesday? A clear storyline took hold: this was white supremacy at work. A young, white man murdered six Asian women and two 'others' made the framing a foregone conclusion. Not even new information from the investigators could slow down the risk to judgment. Atlanta police chief Rodney Bryant said that it was too early to classify the shooting as a hate crime and FBI director Christopher Wray affirmed that it 'does not appear to be racially motivated’.

If the first month of 2021 is anything to go by, the American culture wars show no sign of abating. The country’s institutions withstood the orgy of violent destruction on Capitol Hill, led by a minority of Trump loyalists. What had been a scene of near anarchy on January 6 was just three weeks later the setting for a peaceful, albeit safely cordoned off, transfer of power. Nevertheless, the riots of that day have badly scarred the American body politic, not least by providing the country’s liberal establishment with a convenient pretext for a Big Tech clampdown on conservative opinion.

Let’s be real, the warm-up acts are never the draw. For every Jimi Hendrix opening for the Monkees (true story) there’s, well, every other opening act you’ve ever sat through to get to the main event. But the Republican National Convention has, for better or worse, managed to flip that on its head. The most memorable speakers, so far, have not been the stars. On Monday, Nikki Haley and Tim Scott did great. But Monday night’s most important moments came from Rep. Vernon Jones and Mark and Patricia McCloskey. Jones talked about supporting Donald Trump and what kind of havoc that wreaked in his own life. The McCloskeys spoke of being ordinary people who had been threatened at their home by the mob we see on our TVs.

If we’ve confirmed anything in 2020, it is that liberal-progressives really do control the major influencers in America. This puts them at odds with a large number of Americans.The entertainment industry has long belonged to the Michael Moores and Barbra Streisands of the world. A few conservatives like Tom Selleck and Kelsey Grammar managed to scratch out careers by largely remaining silent about their political beliefs, but Hollywood inundates Americans with messages largely antithetical to faith, family and free markets.Donald Trump’s arrival made clear, too, that most major media organizations in America are far more hostile to conservatives than even the most ardent Fox News fan believed.

If the coronavirus were as deadly as the bubonic plague, which killed about a third of the population of Europe in the 1340s, there would be no doubt about the need for extreme measures. But this virus spares far more people than it kills, and is sometimes mild to the point of invisibility, even as it proves lethal to others. It’s almost as though nature had calibrated the virus exactly to the point where risk-avoiders saw the lockdown as vital for survival while risk-accepters saw it as so economically destructive as to be worse than the disease itself. America is polarized not just politically but in its attitude to risk.

For three years, we have been told what Donald Trump is. We have been told that he is a racist, a xenophobe, a misogynist, a white supremacist, a demagogue, a Russian spy. The charges vary from extreme, unproven and serious to the bizarrely particular and trivial. We have for instance been repeatedly told that it is important that he has tiny hands, or silly hair, or eats McDonald's. Whether or not you agree with the many criticisms of Trump, there is one charge that supporters and detractors admit the truth of: Trump is divisive. But what does that mean? It does not necessarily mean, as the mainstream media always tell us, that he should be hated or considered dangerous. It could just mean that he reveals the deep faultlines in contemporary politics.

Do Democrats want to win the 2020 election? Do they understand why they lost in 2016? I’m increasingly unsure. It seems like every time a relatively reasonable candidate or undeclared candidate gets a little buzz, the Democratic base tries to derail any possible momentum. It happened with Amy Klobuchar who is apparently a hardworking hard-ass. So what? I want a president who is tough enough to run the country. Being nice isn’t a qualification for the job. Neither is being in tune with the most recent sensitivities of the tribe of the politically correct. Throughout his many years in public service, we’ve all seen the myriad photos and videos: Joe Biden is touchy. Very touchy. Sometimes bizarrely so.