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      Best of Enemies review – James Graham’s superb study of media and politics

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      Best of Enemies review – James Graham’s superb study of media and politicsYoung Vic, LondonDavid Harewood and Charles Edwards go head-to-head as William F Buckley Jr and Gore Vidal respectively in an enthralling play based on a 1968 TV debate James Graham specialises in pivotal political moments. This House recreated the parliamentary divisions leading to the Thatcher premiership in 1979, and Ink previewed the electoral significance of Rupert Murdoch’s 1969 takeover of the Sun newspaper.Best of Enemies examines another end-of-decade cusp: the TV debates on the ABC network during the 1968 US presidential nominating conventions, between mutually detesting American essayists: on the New Right, William F Buckley Jr and, on the New Left, Gore Vidal.In a play inspired by Morgan Neville and Robert Morgan’s 2015 documentary about the encounters, Graham suggests that these ideological antler-locking head-to-heads were influential on multiple levels – popularising bitter, unbridgeable gulfs between conservative and liberal America that still endure; making TV, rather than legislatures, the national debating chamber; and, through ABC’s Buckley-Vidal ratings triumph, creating a US peak-time triopoly – with NBC and CBS – lasting until the protagonist of Ink launched Fox News.At one very enjoyable level, Best of Enemies is – in the line of earlier Graham work and Peter Morgan’s Frost/Nixon – historical karaoke, recreating verbatim choice ideas and insults from the studio duels. The roar of complex thoughts and challenges to orthodoxy is so enthralling that it makes Radio 4’s Today programme sound like CBeebies.But Graham and director Jeremy Herrin (with characteristic pace and clarity) crucially give this media archaeology a contemporary framing. The most striking modernity is casting. Charles Edwards’ Vidal delivers a near-perfect soundalike and acceptable lookalike, while Buckley, who can be seen as the epitome of a privileged white right-winger, is portrayed by the black British actor David Harewood. He exactly captures every aspect – drawl, lolling posture, facial tics – of the Republican’s awkward broadcasting persona, except for one element in the room.As a means of equalising opportunity for actors, there is no reasonable argument against racially fluid casting. But in plays that aim elsewhere for photo-realism – the show’s Andy Warhol, Aretha Franklin and Bobby Kennedy reliably match the archives – audiences are asked to make an adjustment in how they visually read a production. When Buckley and the novelist James Baldwin are on stage together, white racism and African-American pride are simultaneously being represented by actors of colour.Apart from Harewood’s electrifying stage presence, a justification for this pictorial revisionism is that Buckley did experience a form of prejudice and institutional isolation; in a Republican party of entitled white Protestants, he was Roman Catholic. Vidal throws one jibe about the Vatican, but Graham might have made more of how the Democrat’s haughty disdain for his rival came from viewing him as a social and religious inferior and establishment interloper. Each man was, by the standards of the time, in the “wrong” party for his background: a political trend that has continued.As has another. A time-jumping epilogue suggests that the 1968 debates may have made televisual visibility such an asset to candidates that it led to hosts of Have I Got News for You? and the US version of The Apprentice running major democracies.Parts of the second half, set at the Democrat convention in Chicago, may seem over-familiar to viewers of Aaron Sorkin’s film The Trial of the Chicago 7, but Graham proves that he stands with Sorkin as our best dramatic interpreters of the interplay of media and politics.TopicsTheatreYoung VicJames GrahamDavid HarewoodGore VidalUS politicsreviewsReuse this content More

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      To Rescue the Republic review: Grant, the crisis of 1876 … and a Fox News anchor reluctant to call out Trump

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      To Rescue the Republic review: Grant, the crisis of 1876 … and a Fox News anchor reluctant to call out Trump Brett Baier has an eye on unity as well as compelling history. So why not say Trump refused to face the truth as Grant did?For a group of TV anchors and reporters, the team at Fox News are keen scribblers. Often with co-writers, former host Bill O’Reilly writes of assassinations and Brian Kilmeade authors histories. Bret Baier is chief political anchor but has also written several books as a “reporter of history”. Now comes a biography of Ulysses S Grant which focuses on the grave constitutional crisis following the disputed election of 1876.A disputed election, a constitutional crisis, polarisation … welcome to 1876Read moreMagnanimous in civil war victory, Grant was elected in 1868 on the theme of “Let us have peace”. By the nation’s centennial eight years later, Americans had wearied of scandals, economic troubles and federal troops in the south, seeking to enforce to some degree the new civil rights of Black Americans, notably the vote. In 1874, Democrats took the House. Now they wanted the presidency.They nominated the New York governor, Samuel Tilden, a moderate nevertheless supported in the south. The Republicans picked Rutherford Hayes of Ohio. It was a bitter campaign, filled with threats of violence, each side playing to its base.Tilden performed surprisingly well in the north, winning his home state and four others. Hayes winning Indiana and Connecticut alone would have prevented the subsequent controversy. He did not, but he did win Louisiana, South Carolina and Florida, southern states with Republican governors.Hayes needed all three states to win. “Self-appointed Democratic counters”, however, submitted results for Tilden. As Grant said: “Everything now depends on a fair count.”Tensions ran high, with rumors of southern militia marching on Washington and US troops on standby. Baier writes that Grant “had influence, and he decided to use it to expedite a fair result – even if that result required sacrificing his own achievements”.Grant knew that to be seen to be fair, the result must “appeal to [the people’s] sense of justice”. For that, both parties had to agree – and the south had to support Hayes. At Grant’s insistence, an electoral commission was formed, the deciding vote given to the supreme court justice Joseph Bradley. Bradley chose to support the states’ official electoral certifications. Hayes won. Tilden did not pursue extraordinary means to ensure victory, stopping a bribery effort in his favor.But the battle was not over. Grant believed Louisiana’s certificate was probably fraudulent, and there was bedlam in Congress. Grant favored compromise and Edward Burke of Louisiana effectively proposed a trade: Hayes for the presidency, Democrats for the disputed governorships of Louisiana and South Carolina.A separate group of Republicans – acting without Grant – then promised Democrats Hayes would withdraw troops from the south. In return, Democrats would agree that Hayes was duly elected, along with vague and worthless promises to respect Black rights. At this point, Baier writes, “the nation breathed a sigh of relief”.Baier clearly admires Grant – and there is much to admire. Though betrayed by false friends, as president Grant exercised his office with firmness where necessary and with a passionate desire to inspire Americans towards greater unity. Political inexperience cost him dearly.But what of the big issue? Did Grant really put an end to Reconstruction and consign Black Americans to nearly a century under Jim Crow?Hayes had shown a willingness to end Reconstruction. Tilden would certainly have done so. Grant strongly supported Black suffrage and kept troops in the south to ensure the rights of people increasingly threatened by armed violence. He sent troops to an area of South Carolina especially marked by Klan violence and vigorously promoted and enforced an anti-Klan act. He sent troops to Louisiana to enforce voting rights and secured passage of the 1875 Civil Rights Act.Nonetheless, the supreme court reduced Black rights, and as Baier writes, “the country no longer supported the use of federal troops”. Grant had his army but had lost his people.He promoted a compromise in 1877 not from any desire to abandon the Black community but from the painful realization that America had tired of the journey. Whether Hayes or Tilden had been elected, Reconstruction was over and a more painful era in the south was about to begin.The problem wasn’t Grant, but that America was not ready to live up to its promises.Baier begins and ends his book with the events of 6 January 2021.“What happens,” he asks, “when the fairness of an election is in doubt, when the freedom of the people is constrained, and when the divisions on the public square strangle the process?“What can we learn from the healing mission of our 18th president that might show us a path towards union?”Baier answers the second question only implicitly. He echoes the historical consensus that the “sad and inescapable truth is that there was no way of knowing the right verdict”.True in 1877. Clearly not in 2021.After Appomattox, the Confederate general James Longstreet, a friend of Grant, asked “Why do men fight who were born to be brothers?”Liberty is Sweet review: an American revolution for the many not the fewRead moreThe answer frequently involves failures of political leadership. Baier writes that Grant “knew that in times of great national conflict there are only two choices – to stand for division or to stand for peace”.Grant used his power for good, to promote national unity. Donald Trump did not say the words or take the actions that Grant did during an equally if not more severe challenge to democracy. Baier misses an opportunity for Grant-like firmness in not asking why Trump failed to call on his supporters to accept the result. Rather than simply speaking of America’s strength and resilience, why not point out directly the contrast with a president who stood for division?In 2021, the national sigh of relief did not come until after noon on inauguration day, as President Biden took the oath.The danger persists, and not every president is Gen Grant.
      To Rescue the Republic is published in the US by Custom House
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      Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show by Jonathan Karl review – a tyrant’s last stand

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      Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show by Jonathan Karl review – a tyrant’s last stand The ABC News correspondent offers a sobering glimpse of a man unfit to govern and the chaos wreaked by an ego unable to grasp its own ineptitudeA statue in the US Capitol honours Clio, the marmoreal muse of history. Floating above the political fray, she rides in a winged chariot that allegorically represents time and has a clock for its wheel. Looking over her shoulder as she writes in a stony ledger, she tracks events in serene retrospect. The journalists who nowadays report on happenings in Washington work at a more frantic, flustered tempo, racing to catch up with the chaos of breaking news. Jonathan Karl, a correspondent for ABC News, seems to be permanently breathless. In Betrayal, he runs for cover during an emergency lockdown at the White House, with grenades detonating in the distance. He is roused after midnight by the announcement of Trump’s Covid diagnosis; later, he has to rush to the hospital, ditch his car and scramble into place before the presidential helicopter lands on a strip of road that is suddenly “the centre of the broadcast universe”. And on 6 January Karl keeps up a live commentary as the Capitol is invaded by a mob determined to lynch Vice-President Mike Pence – reviled as a “pussy” by Trump because he refused to overturn Biden’s victory – on a makeshift gallows.‘Pence was disloyal at exactly the right time’: author Jonathan Karl on the Capitol attackRead moreThe Capitol was designed as a classical temple consecrated to democracy, which is why Clio is at home there: picture the Parthenon on steroids, topped by the dome of Saint Peter’s Basilica. In Betrayal, however, it is the set for a mock-heroic battle between thugs in horned helmets wielding fire extinguishers as weapons and politicians who prepare to fight back with ceremonial hammers torn from display cases and a sword left over from the civil war. Aghast and incredulous, Karl exhausts his supply of synonyms; this final act of the expiring Trump regime is nuts, weird, crazy, kooky and bonkers.Worse follows when crackpot conspiracy theorists gather to explain to Trump how the election was rigged. One sleuth contends that wireless thermostats made in China for Google reprogrammed voting machines in Georgia. A shadowy figure called Carlo Goria blames an Italian company and its “advanced military encryption capabilities”; Trump had two government departments investigate this claim, although the picture in Goria’s Facebook profile identifies him as the deranged scientist played by Peter Sellers in Dr Strangelove. Numerous high-level functionaries shiftily justify themselves by telling Karl that the main concern of the administration was to control or at least frustrate its chief executive. During the Black Lives Matter unrest, Trump ordered out the troops to impose martial law on Washington. His wily secretary of defence, Mark Esper, deployed an army unit, but confined it to a fort outside the city. The ruse was a pacifier; rather than calming the streets, Esper’s aim was “to quell the dangerous and dictatorial urgings of his commander in chief”. Our prime minister may be a clown, but for four years the US had an outright lunatic as its president.Like all reality TV, what Karl calls “the Trump show” is the product of fantasy and fakery; its star is an existential fraud who admits his unease by referring to himself in the third person. “You must hate Trump,” says Trump when Bill Barr, his previously compliant attorney general, rebuffs his lies about a stolen election. He then says: “You must hate Trump” a second time, making it an exhortation as much as an accusation. He can’t command love and suspects that he doesn’t deserve it: will hatred do as a second best? Elsewhere, Trump re-enacts for Karl an exchange with his sullen adolescent son. “Do you love your dad?” he wheedles, as needy as a black hole. “Uh, I don’t know,” grunts Barron. “Too cool,” remarks the paterfamilias, frozen out.Karl’s anecdotes offer some sharp insights into Trump’s compulsions. He fawns over autocratic thugs such as Putin because he is himself a weakling. While demanding “total domination” of demonstrators outside the White House, he is hustled to safety in a fortified basement, which prompts an internet wit to nickname him “bunker bitch”. As a populist, he cares only about popularity and purchases it with tacky giveaways; while in hospital with Covid, he sends lackeys to distribute “cartons of M&M’s emblazoned with his signature” to the fans outside. When Karl prods him to denounce the riot at the Capitol, he fondly recalls that “magnificently beautiful day” and grumbles that the fake news didn’t give him “credit” for attracting such a large crowd. Negotiating with Karl over his attendance at the White House correspondents’ dinner, where the president usually delivers a jocular speech, Trump asks: “What is the concept? Am I supposed to be funny up there?” Yes, the psychotic shtick of this would-be dictator is dictated by whatever audience he is playing to.When the counting of electoral votes resumed late at night on 6 January, Karl notes that the senators picked their way into the chamber through splintered wood, shattered glass and a surf of ransacked documents, with the stink of pepper spray lingering in the air; the bust of President Zachary Taylor had been smeared “with a red substance that appeared to be blood”. In a poem about the statue of Clio written in 1851, President John Adams regretted that she had to listen to “the conflicting jar/ Of ranting, raving parties”. Adams didn’t know the half of it. Perhaps Clio’s marble pallor reflects her state of mind: she must be appalled by what she has recently had to record in her open book.TopicsHistory booksObserver book of the weekUS Capitol attackDonald TrumpUS politicsreviewsReuse this content More

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      Justice on the Brink review: how the religious right took the supreme court

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      Justice on the Brink review: how the religious right took the supreme court Linda Greenhouse does a fine job of raising the alarm about the conservative conquest and what it means for the rest of us – it’s a pity she does not also recommend ways to fight backLinda Greenhouse’s byline became synonymous with the supreme court during the 30 years she covered it for the New York Times. She excelled at unraveling complex legal riddles for the average reader. She also had tremendous common sense – an essential and depressingly rare quality among journalists.The Agenda review: how the supreme court became an existential threat to US democracyRead moreBoth of these virtues are on display in her new book, which chronicles “12 months that transformed the supreme court” after the death of the liberal lion Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the obscenely rapid confirmation of her conservative successor, Amy Coney Barrett.As others have pointed out, Barrett’s ascension was the crowning achievement of a decades-long project of the American right, to pack the highest court with the kind of people who delight in telling graduating students things like the proper purpose of a legal career “is building the kingdom of God”.Barrett is also the sixth Catholic appointed to the court. Another, Neil Gorsuch, was raised Catholic but now attends the church of his wife, who was raised in the Church of England.Greenhouse describes the Federalist Society as the principal engine of this foul project. Founded in the second year of the Reagan administration to change the prevailing ideology of the leading law schools, its 70,000 members have become the de facto gatekeepers for every conservative lawyer hoping to serve in the executive branch or the judiciary.Most students of the judiciary know that all 226 judges appointed by Donald Trump were approved by the Federalists. But until I read Greenhouse’s book I never knew that every one of the 500-plus judges appointed by the two Bushes also earned the Federalist imprimatur.“Its plan from the beginning was to … nurture future generations of conservative law students” who years later would form the pool from which “conservative judges would be chosen”, Greenhouse writes.She also adds the telling detail that makes it clear that this situation is even worse than it appears. After Gorsuch thanked a Federalist banquet “from the bottom” of his heart, after his confirmation to the supreme court, the then White House counsel, Don McGahn, told the same gathering it was “completely false” that the Trump administration had “outsourced” judicial selection to the Federalists.“I’ve been a member of the Federalists since law school,” said McGahn. “So frankly, it seems like it’s been in-sourced.”Greenhouse’s main subject is the impact on the law of the replacement of a celebrated progressive, Ginsburg, with the anti-abortion and anti-contraception Barrett. A meticulous examination of the most important cases decided during Barrett’s first term demonstrates how the new justice contributed to Chief Justice John Roberts’ determination to “change how the constitution” understands race and religion.The centuries-old wall between church and state is being eroded and government efforts to promote integration – or prevent resegregation – are under steady attack.Roberts’s opposition to important sections of the 1965 Voting Rights Act goes all the way back to his service in Ronald Reagan’s justice department in the early 1980s. As chief justice he made his youthful scorn for the virtues of integration into the law of the land, writing a majority decision invalidating the plans of Seattle and Louisville to consider race to prevent resegregation of public schools. By a vote of 5-4 the court ruled the consideration of race violated the constitution’s guarantee of equal protection.Roberts’s opinion declared that the school systems’ “interest in avoiding resegregation was not sufficiently ‘compelling’ to justify a racially conscious remedy”.For most of the country’s history, the establishment clause of the constitution has prevented the government from “endorsing or coercing a religious practice or viewpoint”, Greenhouse writes, while “the free exercise clause requires the government to leave believers free to practice their faith”.But Roberts and his allies have thrown things upside down, turning the free exercise clause “from its historic role as a shield that protected believers from government interference into a sword that vaulted believers into a position of privilege”.Greenhouse is a woman of convictions. Even as a reporter, she was famous for taking part in a march supporting abortion rights. In a previous book she bragged of contributions to Planned Parenthood. But none of her critics could ever find any evidence that her stories in the Times were slanted by her personal beliefs.That objective stance was entirely appropriate when she was a daily reporter. But book writing is different. After doing such a good job of describing the decades-long rightwing campaign to produce a court whose views are increasingly at odds with the majority of voters, Greenhouse doesn’t endorse any ideas about how to remedy the situation.Supreme Ambition review: Trump, Kavanaugh and the right’s big coupRead moreShe shows no enthusiasm for the idea of expanding the number of seats on the court, which was championed by Pete Buttigieg and others during the 2020 election, and she doesn’t even support the idea that 83-year-old Stephen Breyer should feel any pressure to retire during the current Congress, to make sure Joe Biden can appoint, and a Democratic Senate confirm, a liberal successor.Similarly, Greenhouse never suggests Ginsburg was wrong to stay in office until her death, rather than retire during Barack Obama’s time in office so that she wouldn’t be replaced by someone like Barrett.Unwilling to regulate dark money’s vicious role in our politics, and happy to eviscerate the most basic protections of the Voting Rights Act, the court is increasingly tethered to religious rightwing orthodoxy.Greenhouse does a superb job of describing how we got here. What she lacks is the passionate imagination we need to re-balance an institution which poses an urgent threat to American democracy.
      Justice on the Brink is published in the US by Random House
      TopicsBooksUS supreme courtUS constitution and civil libertiesLaw (US)US politicsPolitics booksReligionreviewsReuse this content More

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      The big idea: are we really so polarised? | Dominic Packer and Jay Van Bavel

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      The big idea: are we really so polarised? In many democracies the political chasm seems wider than ever. But emotion, not policies, may be what actually divides us In 2020, the match-making website OkCupid asked 5 million hopeful daters around the world: “Could you date someone who has strong political opinions that are the opposite of yours?” Sixty per cent said no, up from 53% a year before.Scholars used to worry that societies might not be polarised enough. Without clear differences between political parties, they thought, citizens lack choices, and important issues don’t get deeply debated. Now this notion seems rather quaint as countries have fractured along political lines, reflected in everything from dating preferences to where people choose to live.Sign up to our Inside Saturday newsletter for an exclusive behind the scenes look at the making of the magazine’s biggest features, as well as a curated list of our weekly highlights.Just how stark has political polarisation become? Well, it depends on where you live and how you look at it. When social psychologists study relations between groups, they often find that whereas people like their own groups a great deal, they have fairly neutral feelings towards out-groups: “They’re fine, but we’re great!” This pattern used to describe relations between Democrats and Republicans in the US. In 1980, partisans reported feeling warm towards members of their own party and neutral towards people on the other side. However, while levels of in-party warmth have remained stable since then, feelings towards the out-party have plummeted.The dynamics are similar in the UK, where the Brexit vote was deeply divisive. A 2019 study revealed that while UK citizens were not particularly identified with political parties, they held strong identities as remainers or leavers. Their perceptions were sharply partisan, with each side regarding its supporters as intelligent and honest, while viewing the other as selfish and close-minded. The consequences of hating political out-groups are many and varied. It can lead people to support corrupt politicians, because losing to the other side seems unbearable. It can make compromise impossible even when you have common political ground. In a pandemic, it can even lead people to disregard advice from health experts if they are embraced by opposing partisans.The negativity that people feel towards political opponents is known to scientists as affective polarisation. It is emotional and identity-driven – “us” versus “them”. Importantly, this is distinct from another form of division known as ideological polarisation, which refers to differences in policy preferences. So do we disagree about the actual issues as much as our feelings about each other suggest?Despite large differences in opinion between politicians and activists from different parties, there is often less polarisation among regular voters on matters of policy. When pushed for their thoughts about specific ideas or initiatives, citizens with different political affiliations often turn out to agree more than they disagree (or at least the differences are not as stark as they imagine).More in Common, a research consortiumthat explores the drivers of social fracturing and polarisation, reports on areas of agreement between groups in societies. In the UK, for example, they have found that majorities of people across the political spectrum view hate speech as a problem, are proud of the NHS, and are concerned about climate change and inequality.As psychologist Anne Wilson and her colleagues put it in a recent paper: “Partisans often oppose one another vehemently even when there is little actual daylight between their policy preferences, which are often tenuously held and contextually malleable.”This relative lack of divergence would, of course, come as a surprise to partisans themselves. This is the phenomenon of false polarisation, whereby there is widespread misperception of how much people on the left and the right are divided, not only on issues but also in their respective ways of life. When asked to estimate how many Republicans earn more than $250,000 a year, for example, Democrats guessed 38%. In reality it is 2%. Conversely, while about 6% of Democrats self-identify as members of the LGBT community, Republicans believed it was 32%. New research from Victoria Parker and her colleagues finds that partisans are especially likely to overestimate how many of their political opponents hold extreme opinions. Those overestimates, in turn, are associated with a disinclination to talk or socially engage with out-party members, avoidance that is likely to prevent people from forming more accurate impressions of the other side.What drives these misperceptions? And why do citizens so dislike one another if they aren’t necessarily deeply divided on policy matters? Politicians certainly have incentives to sharpen differences in order to motivate and mobilise voters, rallying support by portraying themselves as bulwarks against the barbarians on the other side. Divisiveness also plays well on social media, where extreme voices are amplified. Moral outrage is particularly likely to go viral.In a recent project led by Steve Rathje and Sander van der Linden at Cambridge University, we examined more than 2.5m posts on Twitter and Facebook. We found that posts were significantly more likely to be shared or retweeted if they referenced political opponents. Every word about the out-group increased the odds of a post being shared by 67% – and these posts were, in turn, met with anger and mockery.In this increasingly toxic environment, reducing false polarisation and affective polarisation are major challenges. It is often suggested, for example, that if people were only to expose themselves to perspectives from the other side, it would breed greater understanding and cooperation. Yet this intuition turns out to be flawed.The big idea: Is the era of the skyscraper over?Read moreSociologist Christopher Bail and his colleagues offered sets of Democrats and Republicans money to follow a bot that would retweet messages from politicians, media companies and pundits every day for a month. Importantly, the messages always came from the other side of the political spectrum. Far from promoting harmony, it backfired. After a month of being exposed to conservative talking points, Democrats’ attitudes had become, if anything, marginally more liberal. And Republicans became more conservative following their diet of liberal views. When what you see from the other side strikes you as biased or obnoxious, it doesn’t endear you to their perspectives.In this regard, the behaviour of elites matters. Political scientist Rasmus Skytte showed people messages from politicians that were either civil or rude. Interestingly, aggressive and unkind messages didn’t reduce trust in politicians or increase affective polarisation. It seems that incivility is what people have come to expect. But when they saw polite and respectful messages, they subsequently felt more trust towards politicians and became less affectively polarised.These results suggest that we should expect better from our leaders and those with large platforms. Don’t reward divisive rhetoric with “likes”. Instead, follow politicians and pundits who embody norms of respect and civility, even when they disagree on policy matters. In fact, many of us might be better off if we took a break from social media altogether. When economists found that whenpeople who were encouraged people to disconnect from Facebook for a month spent less time online and were less politically polarised. They also experienced improved psychological wellbeing.No one these days is worried that our societies are insufficiently polarised. But because so much of the polarisation is about emotions and identities rather than issues, it is still not clear that citizens are presented with good choices or that important issues are being deeply debated. Here again, we must expect better. Demand that politicians and pundits get into policy specifics. Let’s focus more on actual ideas for solving actual problems, where we, as citizens, may well turn out to agree on more than we realise. Dominic Packer and Jay Van Bavel are psychologists and the authors of The Power of Us. To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.Further readingUncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity by Lilliana Mason (Chicago, £19)Breaking the Social Media Prism: How to Make Our Platforms Less Polarizing by Chris Bail (Princeton, £20)The Wealth Paradox: Economic Prosperity and the Hardening of Attitudes by Frank Mols and Jolanda Jetten (Cambridge, £19.99)TopicsBooksThe big ideaSociety booksSocial trendsSocial mediaDigital mediaPsychologyUS politicsfeaturesReuse this content More

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      Historian Timothy Snyder: ‘It turns out that people really like democracy’

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      InterviewHistorian Timothy Snyder: ‘It turns out that people really like democracy’Tim Adams The author of On Tyranny on the lack of historical literacy, how local news has been replaced by Facebook, and why novels matter to himTimothy Snyder is a professor of history at Yale University and the author of books about the 20th-century history of central Europe, including Bloodlands, which examined the devastating consequence of Hitler and Stalin’s simultaneous reign of terror over civilian populations, and won the 2013 Hannah Arendt prize for political thought. In 2016, after the election of Donald Trump, Snyder wrote a short book, On Tyranny, which provided 20 brief lessons – “Defend Institutions”, “Remember Professional Ethics”, “Read Books” – from the 20th century that might help readers protect democracy against dictatorship. It topped the New York Times bestseller list for nonfiction in 2017. A new edition of the book, with illustrations by the German-American Nora Krug, whose graphic memoir Belonging confronted Germany’s Nazi past, has just been published.What prompted you to want to make this graphic version of On Tyranny?It came out originally in this extremely simple, accessible form. I always had the idea that it could take a different form, but that only became concrete once I read Nora Krug’s Belonging. I cold-called her and said: “Could you please do this?” Part of it was also to renew it. I changed the text a little bit, removed some of the stuff that was specific to 2016 and added some lines that recall what happened in 2020.You wrote the original in the immediate aftermath of Donald Trump’s inauguration. Was it intended as a call to arms for yourself as well as to others?Yes, it was like something snapped in me where I thought we should all do the things that we can. In writing the book I was putting myself out there, so it was something I had to live by. I’m glad I did that. As a writer, you have to make yourself vulnerable sometimes.Looking back, it seemed important to say that being outraged on social media about Trump probably wasn’t going to be enough?Exactly. I think the lesson that maybe people reacted to the most is number 12: “make eye contact and talk to people” in the corporeal world. And then number 13, which was to actively get involved in politics, to get our physical bodies into unfamiliar situations. The book is a frontal attack on that idea that it is never enough to accept the world as it is and just comment on it.One of the things that the book is alarmed by is a lack of historical literacy. The fact that terms such as “America first” or, in the UK, “enemies of the people” could be employed with so few alarm bells ringing among people about their history in fascism. Do you still see that kind of illiteracy even in some of your students?History has been seriously devalued in the US, I would say, since 1989 and that very unfortunate idea [“the end of history”] that history was now over. “America first” and “enemies of the people” are words that are consciously applied by people who wish to destroy democracy. If people don’t know how those words have been applied in the past, then that is dangerous. Part of the backwash of the Trump coup attempt is all of these laws in various states are designed to make history uncontroversial – which, let’s be clear, means: uncontroversial for white people.At the time you wrote the book, people were being criticised for making comparisons with what was happening in 2016 and the 1930s. Did you feel any trepidation about doing that?I don’t remember having that feeling. When people refuse to make comparisons with events that have happened before, what they are really saying is: “I don’t want to look at either the past or the present.”You grew up in Dayton, Ohio. How much did that firsthand knowledge of the midwest and those declining industrial heartlands inform your understanding of the forces that produced Trump?It certainly affected it. In 2016, I spent some time going door to door there and talking to people about the forthcoming presidential election. That helped me to see how important social media was. I asked one guy a question and he went back and checked Facebook before answering. Where my parents are from and still live had become entirely Trumpland.The demise of local news is not mentioned often enough in these kind of conversations…I think a lack of local news may be the single greatest source of the problem. Most American counties are now news deserts; they have no reporters covering local politicians at all. People have no way of being active citizens; they go on reading but the stuff they read drives them upwards to national politics, into obsession and conspiracy. They bring the trust they had for local news to Facebook.One of your antidotes to that is “read books”; who have been the writers that you’ve turned to most in the past five years?I always go back to Roger Penrose, the physicist. He is important to me because he has a view about unpredictability in quantum mechanics, which has implications for politics. And then some of the people who confronted these questions in the last century in different ways: Hannah Arendt, Václav Havel, Victor Klemperer. In addition to that, it’s really important to me to read novels, because they prepare you for scenes in the real world you haven’t yet confronted. I’ve just started rereading Les Liaisons Dangerouses. But I also get excited when I hear Julian Barnes has a new novel out.It seems to me that the opposite of tyranny is not freedom, but something more active: creativity, engagement. Do you think artists and writers have lately stepped up to that challenge?I think it’s true that freedom cannot be the opposite of anything. But I’m not going to criticise artists and writers – the main problem is often the way that their work has trouble getting viewed. One of our big problems at the moment is that we find it hard to imagine a viable future. Art and literature enable us to flex those imaginative muscles.Where do you place your optimism?I prefer hope to optimism. One thing is, it turns out that people really like democracy. It has been heartening to see that so many people care enough about democracy to take personal risks to defend it.TopicsHistory booksBooks interviewUS politicsinterviewsReuse this content More

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      Jon Ronson and Adam Curtis on the culture wars: ‘How has this happened? Where is the escape hatch?’

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      As Ronson’s BBC podcast Things Fell Apart begins, the documentary-makers and old friends discuss conspiracy theories, the problem of ‘activist journalists’ and what happened to Ceaușescu’s socksby Fiona SturgesJon Ronson and Adam Curtis became friends in the late 1990s, having bonded over their shared interests in power, society and the stories we tell about ourselves. Curtis, 66, is a Bafta-winning documentary film-maker whose credits include The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear and HyperNormalisation. His most recent six-part series, Can’t Get You Out of My Head, draws on the history of psychology and politics to show how we got to where we are today. Ronson, 54, is a US-based Welsh writer and journalist whose books include 2015’s So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, about social media brutality and the history of public shaming. In recent years, Ronson has turned to podcasting, investigating the porn industry in The Butterfly Effect and its follow-up The Last Days of August.Sign up to our Inside Saturday newsletter for an exclusive behind-the-scenes look at the making of the magazine’s biggest features, as well as a curated list of our weekly highlights.His forthcoming BBC podcast, Things Fell Apart, is about the roots of the culture wars and the ways the present is echoed in the past. Over eight episodes, he talks to individuals caught up in ideological conflicts, conspiracy theories and moral panics. These include Alice Moore, the wife of a fundamentalist minister and unexpected culture war instigator who campaigned to remove textbooks containing liberal material from schools, and Kelly Michaels, a daycare worker and victim of the “satanic panic” who was wrongfully imprisoned in 1988 by a New Jersey court for child abuse (the verdict was overturned in 1993).We are on: Curtis is talking from his office in London while Ronson is at home in New York. By way of preparation before their chat, Curtis has binged on Ronson’s new series. No sooner are cameras switched on than the reminiscences begin.Jon Ronson Do you remember that time we went to an auction of [the late Romanian dictator Nicolae] Ceaușescu’s belongings?Adam Curtis Yes, now that was exciting.JR It was. We went on a minibreak to Romania together.AC I bought Ceaușescu’s cap, and a pair of socks.JR I also got a pair of socks. There was some very heavy bidding from a mysterious gentleman who got all the ornaments. The prices were getting pretty high so I stuck with the socks. I don’t even know where they are now. I bet you know where your stuff is.AC I do, actually.JR We have had many conversations over the years and generally I find I’m asking you questions because I’m trying to get ideas. I always think of you as a fantastic source of insights into the future. In the early days of social media, you were the very first person to say to me: “Don’t think of this as a utopia. There are some problems here.” There are two or three people in my life where, when they talk, I really want to listen to what they have to say, and you are one of those.AC That is completely not true. What actually happens is that I bollock on about theories which you completely ignore and then you go off on your stories. Anyway, I’m trying to remember when we actually met.JR I think the first time I met you was when I made the [1997] documentary Tottenham Ayatollah and you came to the screening.AC And your wife Elaine invited me to meet you in a cafe off Tottenham Court Road. She said: “Can you come and talk to him? Then you could take some of the pressure off me by talking about his film.”JR She probably said: “I can’t take it any more. He won’t stop agonising.”AC But when we met you didn’t agonise at all. I think what we recognised in each other – and it’s been the professional bond between us – is that we’re both interested in what happens outside those normal areas that most political journalists examine that involve politics and power. We want to look at things like psychology and how a conspiracy theory plays out and how feelings work through society.JR I’m really surprised at how frequently the things that we tell stories about overlap. But the way we go about it is so different. I think your brain works better thinking about theories and my brain works better thinking about stories.AC I think you and I are creatures of our time. I got interested in this idea that power now works not through traditional forms but through the idea of individualism; it says you should be allowed to do what you want to do, but we will serve you to get that. You and I both know what it’s like to be an obsessive individualist, but we’ve become intrigued by how that plays out in a society in which you’ve got lots of people wanting to be individuals. I’ve always had this theory that self-expression is the conformity of our age. The most radical thing you can do is something extraordinary like walking naked around the world, and not tell anyone that you’ve done it. You can’t post anything online. When you say that to people, they can’t conceive of it.JR I really like that idea.AC The other thing that we both do when we’re interviewing people is not follow a list of questions. You go into a situation where you have questions in your head but suddenly they’ll say something which is either funny or unexpected and you just learn to go with it. It’s like suddenly a little piglet swerves off from the herd, and you go with it up and over the hill.JR One positive thing that has been said about what I do is that there’s a sincerity to it. I never go into something with an idea of how it will turn out.AC We’re talking about sincerity? Don’t go there, Jon! You’ll be writing poems next.JR [Laughs] Well it’s really to do with trying to figure out what I think from my research without being told what to think by other people. I think people appreciate the fact that I’ve worked hard to come to the thoughts I’ve come to.AC Yes, I agree with that.JR I guess what we have in common is we’re not ideologues. We don’t go into a situation with a set of agendas. We’re more willing to be a twig in the river of the story and just go where it takes us. By doing that we’re forced to keep an open mind. I don’t even have a list of questions in my head when I’m interviewing somebody. I’m literally a tightrope walker with no safety net, and I have, on many occasions, plummeted to my death like in Squid Game.AC I think that open-mindedness is clear in your podcast. And it’s absolutely the right time to examine the roots of what we’re calling the culture wars, which is such a difficult and sensitive area. So much journalism, when it goes back into the past to see why something happened, always interviews the people who are defined as the actors, the people who consciously set out to [create conflict]. What I’m increasingly intrigued by is the people who were acted upon by that thing or idea. Because the way ideas or concepts play out in society are never the way that the people who started them think. What you’ve done in these programmes is follow individuals who are acted upon by these forces, because it shows you the real dimensions of what these things called culture wars are.JR Well, I realised that I would watch people become overconsumed by these cultural conflicts, to the extent that it was impacting their mental health and tearing families apart. But every show that’s about the culture ends up a part of the culture wars, and I didn’t want to do that. So I thought the way to do it was by focusing on a moment and a human story and tell that story in as unexpected a way as possible. In the end we found eight stories about the complexity of human life and they all happen to be origin stories. These are the pebbles being thrown in the pond and creating these ripples.AC Yes, these people have got caught up in the great tides of history that have come sweeping over them. It feels real. If you follow people who are acted upon, you start to understand, in a much more sympathetic way, why people do things that you might not like or approve of. You see how someone is led to something, with no idea of the consequences. In the first two episodes, you talk about how the evangelical movement up until the early 1970s had been completely detached from any involvement in the moral, political or social questions of American society. And what you trace is how two people got sucked into a particular issue, which then acted like a fuse to reawaken the evangelical movement.JR For decades the Christian right were silent: they consumed their own media, they went to their own churches and they listened to their own radio shows, and they were totally unengaged with what was happening. But then a few things happened that finally galvanised them into becoming soldiers in a culture war, and one was a new diversity of thought in school textbooks. In the series I talk to Alice Moore, who is in her 80s now and was one of the earliest cultural warriors for the evangelical right. She was a church minister’s wife in West Virginia who discovered there was going to be a new sex education lesson taught in schools, and she wasn’t having that. So she got on to the school board, and then the new curriculum arrived in 1974 that was full of all these multicultural voices, and things got so heated over just one semester that school buses were shot at – in fact, shots were fired from both sides – and a school was bombed. And I discovered while talking to Alice that one of the reasons for the intensity of the anger was a misinterpretation of a poem [that appeared in one of the new school textbooks].AC By Roger McGough!JR Yes. It was a poem [1967’s At Lunchtime: A Story of Love] that featured a spontaneous orgy that takes place on a bus, because the passengers thought the world was about to end at lunchtime in a nuclear war. So Alice was reading out this poem to me and I was thinking: “I don’t think this is in favour of spontaneous orgies on buses. I think this poet is agreeing with you, to an extent.” So then I went off to talk to Roger about it.AC And then you went back to Alice, and she was quite grumpy about it, which was funny. But I think this is a beautiful example of what we were talking about. As I was listening to that episode I was thinking: “Hang on, this isn’t quite as bad as she thinks it is.” And then, Jon’s brain is thinking the same thing, but without judgment.JR I like to steer clear of conflict as much as I can.AC Which is good and also rare. Most people would pursue her with their agenda. Right now, everyone is judged as either being good or bad. It’s good versus evil – that’s where journalism has got to now. But yours doesn’t do that.JR I’m interested in everybody as a human being and I’m quite startled by the myriad examples of the media being a part of the culture wars. It seems to happen everywhere, this mistelling of a story so it fits into a particular ideology a little more clearly. It happens on all sides. I get very disheartened when CNN lies to me or is biased or omits certain aspects of the truth to tell a certain version of the story. During the Trump years I really felt that with CNN. I felt like I was in QAnon and my Q was Anderson Cooper.AC I would read the New York Times all about the close friendship between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump. And I know enough Russian journalists who I trust to know that it’s just complete rubbish. So hysteria happened on both sides. I mean if you go back over reports even from my own organisation, the BBC, about how Trump was actually an agent of Putin, it’s extraordinary. It’s a conspiracy theory. That’s as much of a panic as anything else you get on the right.JR I also think a lot of journalists are, like: “Oh my God. All this time I’ve just been a liberal but look at these things that are happening: Trump’s election, George Floyd.” So they think it’s not enough to be a liberal journalist, they have to be an activist journalist. And I think it’s completely understandable and, in some cases, it’s a great thing. But then in other cases, it’s really troublesome because journalism now has pre-existing ideologies.AC And then journalism lifts off from Planet Real and goes off into the realms of histrionic personality disorder. I actually think histrionic personality disorder describes most of the progressive classes in western societies, in that they’ve given up on their progressivism and retreated into a histrionic attitude to the world.JR I do think these stories tell us an awful lot about the way we live our lives today. In the satanic panic episode, which is about moral panics in the 1980s, you think it’s going to be about the parallels today with QAnon. But it becomes clear that there are also parallels with the panics on the left today, and that we all have these cognitive biases. I tell this story in which daycare workers are being accused of satanic activity, which clearly never happened, and where people actually went to jail. Suddenly it wasn’t just the Christian right worried about satanic cults at the end of your street, but mainstream America. When the flame is burning hot, we can all act in irrational, brutal or inhuman ways, and you see it across the spectrum.AC The series did make me think: how has this happened? Not just the culture wars but their ferocity. And where is the escape hatch? Because I think all sides now feel that there’s something not quite right. If you examine the years since Trump and Brexit, there has been this enormous hysteria in newspapers and on television about it. But actually the politicians have done nothing to change society. It’s almost been like a frozen world. So, I think the real answer to why this is happening is because politics has failed. It’s become this dead area, this desert surrounded by thinktanks, and someone’s got to get in there and regenerate it. The new politics is waiting to come. And I think it will happen.Jon Ronson’s Things Fell Apart continues Tuesday, 9am Radio 4 and BBC Sounds. It will be available in the US and Canada exclusively on BBC Podcasts Premium on Apple Podcasts. Adam Curtis’s Can’t Get You Out of My Head is on BBC iPlayer.TopicsJon RonsonAdam CurtisPodcastsPodcastingUS politicsfeaturesReuse this content More

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      Betrayal review: Trump’s final days and a threat not yet extinguished

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      Betrayal review: Trump’s final days and a threat not yet extinguished ABC’s man in Washington delivers a second riveting and horrifying read about how close America came to disasterTrumpworld is in legal jeopardy. The 45th president’s phone call to Brad Raffensperger, urging the Georgia secretary of state to “find 11,780 votes”, may have birthed a grand jury.‘A xenophobic autocrat’: Adam Schiff on Trump’s threat to democracyRead moreIn Manhattan, the outgoing district attorney, Cyrus Vance Jr, has empaneled one of those, to look at Trump’s business. As a Vanity Fair headline blared, “The Trump Organization should be soiling itself right now.”In Washington, the Department of Justice ponders the prosecution of Steve Bannon, chairman of Trump’s 2016 campaign and a pivotal figure in the “Stop the Steal” movement second time round.For Trump, out-of-office has not translated into out-of-mind. He thrives on all the attention.Amid it all, Jonathan Karl dives once again into the Stygian mosh pit, this time with Betrayal, a sequel to Front Row at the Trump Show, a New York Times bestseller.In that book, in the spring of 2020, ABC News’ chief Washington correspondent prophesied that “Trump’s war on truth may do lasting damage to American democracy”. Sadly, he wasn’t wrong. Front Row preceded by months a coup attempt egged on by a defeated president. Looking back, Trump’s embrace of birtherism, “alternative facts” and crowd violence were mere prelude to the chaos that filled his time in power, his final days in office and all that has come and gone since then.In his second book, under the subtitle The Final Act of the Trump Show, Karl gets members of Trump’s cabinet to speak on the record. They paint a portrait of a wrath-filled president, untethered from reality, bent on revenge.Karl captures Bill Barr denouncing Trump’s election-related conspiracy theories and criticizing his election strategy. Appearing determined to salvage his own battered reputation, Trump’s second attorney general tells Karl his president “was making it too much of a base election. I felt that he had to repair the bridges he had burned [with moderate voters] in the suburbs.”By that metric, Glenn Youngkin, Virginia’s governor-elect, has a bright future, a politician who puts suburban dads and rural moms at ease. No wonder Republicans think they have found a star, and with him a winning formula.As for Trump’s claims about rigged voting machines, Barr “realized from the beginning it was just bullshit” and says “the number of actual improper voters were de minimus”. No matter, to Trump: he continues to demand Republican legislatures carry out post-election audits.Karl delivers further confirmation of Mitch McConnell’s fractious personal relationship with Trump, a man the Kentucky senator reportedly repeatedly mocked. According to Karl, McConnell, then Senate majority leader, sought to formally disinvite Trump from Joe Biden’s inauguration. Kevin McCarthy, the chief House Republican, leaked the plan to the White House. In turn, Trump tweeted that he would not attend.McConnell attempted to thread the needle, placating Trump while keeping the GOP’s Koch brothers wing onside. But once he acknowledged Biden’s victory, the damage was permanently done. McConnell was an object of Trumpian scorn.That the senator jammed Amy Coney Barrett on to the supreme court days before the 2020 election and before that played blocking back for Brett Kavanaugh is now rendered irrelevant. Trump wants McConnell out of Senate leadership. Adding insult to injury, Trump recently told the Washington Post McConnell wasn’t a “real leader” because “he didn’t fight for the presidency”, and said he was “only a leader because he raises a lot of money”.“You know,” Trump said, “with the senators, that’s how it is, frankly. That’s his primary power.”He’s not wrong all the time.Betrayal also documents a commander-in-chief who scared his own cabinet witless. After Trump junked the Iran nuclear deal, for example, Tehran thumbed its nose back. Drama ensued, because Trump wanted to know his options.Chris Miller, then acting defense secretary, tells Karl that to dissuade Trump from ordering the destruction of Iran’s uranium enrichment program, he chose to play the role of “fucking madman” – his words, not Karl’s – which meant advocating that very course of action. According to Karl, not even Mike Pompeo, then secretary of state and an Iran hawk, played along.“Oftentimes with provocative people, if you get more provocative than them, they then have to dial it down,” Miller explains to Karl. “They’re like, ‘Yeah, I was fucking crazy, but that guy’s batshit.’”Here, the reader might pause to imagine a campaign slogan for Trump in 2024: “Fucking crazy, but not batshit”.On a similar note, Karl depicts Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s crony and attorney, as a walking timebomb. Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and chief adviser, avoided the former New York mayor. Mark Meadows, Trump’s last chief of staff, saw him as a corrosive force.“I’m not going to let Rudy in the building for any more of these,” Meadows reportedly told Chris Christie, New Jersey’s former governor, and Bill Stepien, Trump’s campaign manager, as they prepared for debates with Biden.These days, Giuliani is suspended from the bar, reportedly under investigation and unable to persuade Trump to pay his bills. Christie and Trump are at loggerheads too, over sins real and imagined, past and present.In Trump’s Shadow: David Drucker surveys the Republican runners and riders for 2024Read moreAs for Meadows and Stepien, they are in the crosshairs of the House select committee focused on the US Capitol attack. From the looks of things only Kushner and his wife, Ivanka Trump, have so far remained intact, ensconced in Florida, sufficiently distanced from Big Daddy.Despite such fallout, Betrayal concludes with words of warning. Karl rightly contends that Trump’s “betrayal” of American democracy highlighted “just how vulnerable” the system is.“The continued survival of our republic,” he writes, “may depend, in part, on the willingness of those who promoted Trump’s lies and those who remained silent to acknowledge they were wrong.”In a hypothetical rematch, Trump leads Biden 45-43. Among independent voters, he holds a double-digit lead. Don’t hold your breath.
      Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show is published in the US by Dutton
      TopicsBooksDonald TrumpTrump administrationUS elections 2020US Capitol attackUS politicsRepublicansreviewsReuse this content More