The Prospect editorial: Fog of war

When the question is the “culture wars,” as it so often is these days, the standard liberal homily mourns the passing of a shared public sphere and appeals to everybody to step outside the echo chamber. How often, however, do we really do it ourselves? That was nagging at me as we put to bed this issue about the “new American civil war.” Could it just be that the “war” framing is one that progressive Europeans apply precisely because we never engage with those from the cultural right, and the American right in particular? Is the whole notion, in other words, a creation of my own echo chamber?

With that in mind, I decided to take stock of the (so-called) “debate” in Ohio between Donald Trump and Joe Biden not with my usual go-to news sources, but instead with the help of American conservative podcasts. Within minutes of tuning in to Steve Deace’s post-match analysis, I had heard several phrases that seemed to belong not only to another tribe, but also an entirely different era—“the reds are taking off the masks.” One thing, however, was entirely familiar: analogies from military conflict flowed through the discussion. The shouting match had been, Deace suggested, much like it would have been “if Lincoln had debated Jefferson Davis,” leader of the old Confederate South. We heard, at different points, that a civil war would soon be coming—and also that one was already raging.

So if talk of the United States coming violently unstuck still strikes you as wild and over-heated, pause and consider the fact that such talk is now emanating from both sides of a great cultural divide. It is a divide whose potential to translate into street violence can only have been elevated by the President urging an obscure band of black shirted-wearing thugs to “stand by,” presumably for action after a contested election result. In a magisterial state of the Union survey, Sam Tanenhaus highlights the abject disdain with which Trump and his noisily patriotic tribe have come to regard vast tracts of their own country. A hard right sets itself up as defending a mythical American past even as it radically disrupts the American present.

The President’s self-serving destruction of America’s belief in the very possibility of a fair election, pursued in all the ways Dahlia Lithwick warned about in the last issue, is the single most salient example of that, amid the chaos and loathing of the current campaign. Potentially of more enduring significance, however, is the increasing fixation of partisan enmity on the US Supreme Court and the rules of the political game. Look at the lopsided operation of the Senate and the Electoral College (Speed Data) and you can see why liberals as well as conservatives are now also focusing so much energy here. But there can be no hope of restoring anything like politics as it used to be until the discourse of each side shifts back to the substance of what the other side has said. Instead, all discussion risks being consumed by disputes about what winning involves.

The reason it makes sense for a British magazine to give so much space to the US is not merely the grisly fascination of its current election, but also because, however much we might regret it, the idea of a culture war is becoming increasingly useful as a prism to make sense of our own public affairs. Whether we are talking about the new BBC Director-General’s in-tray (Jean Seaton), the controversies that have to be navigated by museum directors (Tristram Hunt) or, indeed, the technical policy choices and even—absurdly—the interpretation of the epidemiological data in the Covid-19 pandemic (Tim Harford), arguments are coalescing around rival sets of wearyingly predictable conclusions.

A monthly magazine can hardly hope to turn that round by itself, but we can do our bit by making room for a fresh look at figures who have determinedly thought for themselves, and followed their minds to wherever they went—see Hadley Freeman on Germaine Greer half a century after The Female Eunuch, and Jesse Norman on whether John Rawls’s grand liberal philosophy will survive the “safety-first” mood of the pandemic—or indeed the rest of the 21st century.

The challenges that will confront public policy in the wake of the virus, such as eye-watering debt (Barry Eichengreen) and the lethal inadequacies of the English social care system (Nicholas Timmins), are formidable. And while there may be no fruitful way to engage with the finger-jabbing certainties and libels of the angriest chauvinists, none of these problems are going to be easier to sort out amid the fog of war.