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Herodotus writing in the 5th century BC contended more than once that a solar eclipse changed the entire course of history. First, the Medes and the Lydians were encouraged to broker a peace treaty under an inauspiciously darkened sky; and again, the Persian general Xerxes took an eclipse as a good omen for his planned invasion of Athens. The New Testament says the sky turned dark as Jesus was crucified. The Aztecs believed eclipses were a warning shot from the jaguar god; the Incas, meanwhile, were terribly concerned about the wrath of their own sun god.

If we think we have progressed past such primitive attempts to rationalise and understand the stars, we are very wrong. Mondays eclipse displayed no more intellectual sophistication than our Persian forebears, no more cool-headed rationality. In fact, there was perhaps no greater reminder of human atavism than Americans gathering outside to stare at the sky. The eclipse is as compelling to us now as it always has been and so, naturally, it quickly became a point of politics, a vehicle for the culture wars, a contemporary example of our base instinct for mythology.

The last total solar eclipse before Mondays happened on August 21st, 2017. Donald Trump and his wife Melania stood outside the White House to watch. Against the advice of all medical experts Trump looked up, pointed his finger, and stared directly into the sun. It was a humanising moment for those of us who know they couldnt resist the threat of a burned retina out of primal curiosity. But, more than that, it was a political statement.

Donald Trump looks up at the solar eclipse of August 21st, 2017 from a balcony in the White House. Photograph: Mark Wilson/Getty Images

Meanwhile, this week Joe Biden took a different approach. In a clip shared on social media, Biden is standing in the same spot where Trump and Melania stood seven years ago, but he is wearing protective eclipse goggles. An eclipse is worth marvelling at. But dont be silly, folks play it safe and wear protective eyewear, the post read. It immediately and purposefully conjures 2017 Trump.

In the middle of the pandemic Hillary Clinton used the same image of a squinting Trump. Please do not take medical advice from a man who looked directly at a solar eclipse, she said. And so the eclipse (both in 2017 and now) became no mere celestial event but a symbol of moral fortitude, a lesson on how to vote, a display of values, an augury for Covid-19. Xerxes looking to the sun for advice on when to attack Athens made him no fool. Humans havent changed.

Trump foolishly peering at the sun strikes a rather different figure to Bidens dorky public safety announcement. It is perfect shorthand for the Trump voter: one mans virility versus anothers frailty. For the Democrat, it is a clear display of the wanton recklessness of Trump versus the cautious sense of Biden. It doesnt really matter which interpretation is closer to the truth. The contrasting images are just a simple metaphor, ready to be warped into the shape of long-held prejudice, ready to be adopted as a symbol for something that extends far beyond the realm of astronomy. Which politician can be trusted? When should we invade Athens?

[Great American eclipse was, like, wooaahhh, writes Keith Duggan ]

I used to think mistakenly that these kinds of culture wars were a distraction from the substance of real politics; that serious minded people did not get caught up in the frivolities of things like the colour of a passport, the alleged race politics of Harry Potter, Joe Rogan and Russell Brand. I thought these things were deliberate ploys to divert attention from important matters of trade policy and infrastructure spending. I thought things could somehow fall victim to the culture wars. Mea culpa.

I have since come to realise via a rather robust correction afforded to me by the historian Dominic Sandbrook that this was wrong. Culture wars are no distraction from the substance of politics they are the substance of politics, he argues. The eclipse was neat evidence of this fact as it became a metaphor far more powerful and captivating than any taxation manifesto could ever aspire to be, as it revealed our culture-war instincts are as ancient as the Persians.

If anything should have disabused us of the idea that there is no meaningful distinction between culture and politics, perhaps it is the pandemic. Follow the science was an adage as much about political allegiance as any statement of policy. Mask-wearing in the US is still a dividing force between certain coastal liberal elites and the rest of the country. Lockdown policy was as much a reflection of a countrys values as anything else Jacinda Arderns New Zealand versus Boris Johnsons Britain a stark example of this fact.

Grand narratives of history too often focus on all the ways humanity has progressed but just as interesting is all the ways we do not change. The lure of mythology is a perfect example: astrology, organised religion, Republicanism, belief in national foundation stories, the flag, the monarchy. And the eclipse now is no different, not just in its ancient appeal but in its lessons: how to vote in November 2024; whether to wear a mask indoors; whether to broker a peace deal with the Medes.

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Finn McRedmond: Nothing is new under the sun: the solar eclipse became the latest shiny object in the culture wars - The Irish Times

Abbreviated Pundit Roundup is a long-running series published every morning that collects essential political discussion and analysis around the internet.

The New York Times:

Abortion Jumps to the Center of Arizonas Key 2024 Races

Democrats quickly aimed to capitalize on a ruling by the states highest court upholding an 1864 law that bans nearly all abortions.

Democrats seized ona ruling on Tuesday by Arizonas highest courtupholding an 1864 law that bans nearly all abortions, setting up a fierce political fight over the issue that is likely to dominate the presidential election and a pivotal Senate race in a crucial battleground state.

Even though the court put its ruling on hold for now, President Biden and his campaign moved quickly to blame former President Donald J. Trump for the loss of abortion rights, noting that he has taken credit for appointing the Supreme Court justices who overturned a constitutional right to abortion. Just a day earlier, Mr. Trump had sought to defang what has become a toxic issue for Republicans bysaying that abortion restrictions should be decided by the statesand their voters.

But remember,abortion is fading in saliency as an issue, say umpteen anonymous male Republican consultants.

Dan Balz/The Washington Post:

The Arizona Supreme Court just upended Trumps gambit on abortion

On Monday, Trump declined to support a national abortion ban, seeking to neutralize the political issue. A day later, Arizonas ban gave it new life.

On Monday, the former presidentdeclined to supportany new national law setting limits on abortions. Going against the views of many abortion opponents in his Republican Party, Trump was looking for a way to neutralize or at least muddy a galvanizingissue that has fueled Democratic victories for nearly two years. He hoped to keep it mostly out of the conversation ahead of the November elections.

On Tuesday, the Arizona Supreme Court showed just how difficult it will be to do that. The courtresurrected an 1864 lawthat bans nearly all abortions, except to save the life of the mother. The law also imposes penalties on abortion providers.

Trump had said let the states handle the issue. The Arizona court showed the full implications of that states rights strategy.

Put another way: Arizona Supreme Court destroys news organizations plans to declare the abortion issue neutralized).

Marc A Caputo/ The Bulwark:

MAGA Takes Aim at RFK Jr.: Radical Fing Kennedy

They turned on him overnight once they realized hed be a threat to Trump and not only to Biden.

TRUMP ADVISERS QUIETLY acknowledge they and the right helped build up RFK Jr., especially after the pandemic when Kennedys anti-vaccine activism gained broader attention and support among conservatives.

For more than two years, Kennedy was on more conservative media than any of the Republicans who ran for president, so hes partly a monster of our own making, said one adviser in Trumps orbit. But the same conservative media apparatus that built him up is starting to tear him down. Its easy. Hes a liberal.

That cocksure sentiment pervades Trumps campaign, where they view Kennedy more as an opportunity than a danger.

[]

Matt Bennett, executive vice president of Third Way, said Kennedy has benefited from his famous last name, hissavvy social mediause, and his lack of a political record. Bennett doesnt think the candidate will be able to withstand the scrutiny thats coming now that the threat he represents has become clearer.

Kennedy is in for a rough ride. We need to make sure lower-information voters dont somehow think, Oh, its his dad. Or that hes a safe pair of hands, Bennett said. Hes a lunatic. He lies. Hes a bad person.

Will Bunch/The Philadelphia Inquirer:

Is Team Trump meddling in the Middle East?

This weekend, the endless gusher of petrodollars from Riyadh left their oily mark on the dim jewel of Trumps fast-fading empire, the Trump National Doral course outside of Miami. There, the Saudi-funded LIV Golf tour brought yet another televised and star-studded tournament to a resort owned by the 45th presidents business arm.

We dont how much the LIV tour largely a creation of the massive sovereign wealth fund controlled by the Saudi dictator Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) paid the Trump Organization for the three-day event. The LIV people insist the money is nominal, but no one would argue that the widely seen tournaments are propping up Trumps coffers at a time when his hotel brand is in the loo, and the established PGA golf tour is avoiding the ex-POTUS and his 88 felony charges.

David Gilbert/WIRED:

Inside the Election Denial Groups Planning to Disrupt November

Groups like True the Vote and Michael Flynns America Project want to mobilize thousands of Trump supporters by pushing baseless claims about election fraudand are rolling out new technology to fast-track their efforts.

As the most consequentialpresidential electionin a generation looms in the United States, get-out-the-vote efforts across the country are more important than ever. But multiple far-right activist groups with ties toformer president Donald Trumpand the Republican National Committee are mobilizing their supporters in earnest, drawing on one baseline belief:Elections in the US are rigged, and citizens need to do something about it.

All the evidence states otherwise.But in recent weeks, these groups have held training sessions about how to organize on a hyperlocal level to monitor polling places and drop boxes, challenge voter registrations en masse, and intimidate and harass voters and election officials. And some are preparing to roll out new technology to fast-track all of these efforts: One of the groups claims theyre launching a new platform for checking voter rolls that contains billions of data elements on every single US citizen.

Jennifer Rubin/The Washington Post:

Dont overlook these five aspects of Trumps N.Y. trial

Trumps first impeachment seems like ancient history. ButHouse impeachment investigatorsinterviewed Hope Hicks and Michael Cohen, anddelved into the factsconcerningpayment to womento silence them before the 2016 election. The hush money scheme was grist for impeachment becauseprocuring officeby corrupt means can be a sufficient basis for impeachment.

Philip Bump/The Washington Post:

How much time and money will the GOP waste chasing imaginary election fraud?

Fox host Maria Bartiromo has proved to be one of the most credulous members of the right-wing media universe. This was understood by her own employers in 2020 whenone executive warned anotherthat she had GOP conspiracy theorists in her ear and they use her for their message sometimes. In the wake of the 2020 election, she flirted withthe most ridiculous fraud theoriesthen circulating; more recently, she wasa constant promoterof the discredited idea thatJoe Bidenhad been bribed by a Ukrainian businessman.

Yet she also remains one of the most prominent voices on Fox News and Fox Business. One need not engage in conspiracy-theorizing to guess some reasons for that.

The exclamation point on an amazing college hoops season:

Candace Buckner/The Washington Post:

Connecticut unlocked the overwhelming beauty of a team game

More than other team sports, basketball thrives on individual talent. Singular stars fuel intrigue. They make us sit up and pay attention. And the superstars make us believe that one vs. five maintains pretty good odds. Then a night such as Monday comes along and wrecks the belief that you need a superstar to win.

Somewhere in the Purdue locker room sat [Perdues center Zach] Edey,his season having ended in disappointment, with a lonely shower awaiting. Meanwhile, the Connecticut Huskies were busy changing clothes on the court. Their new shirts read: 2024 Mens Basketball National CHAMPS that word more prominent than the others.

Cliff Schecter on Gen. Mark Milleys opinion of Donald Trump:

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Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: Arizona embraces the culture wars on the losing side - Daily Kos

To that extent, it is a parable for the West, where life can be too good for our own good. Consider another problem that has received the Haidt treatment: the culture wars.

Where did the woke movement take hold? America, more or less the richest nation on Earth. When? In the economic expansion between the 2008 financial crash and the 2020 pandemic.

The most important populist breakthrough, Donald Trump in 2016, happened in a super-rich country, seven years into an economic expansion.

Pronoun protocols, statue-toppling: this is what happens when the brain has nowhere to go, no material crisis to solve or fret about.

If woke is the howl of the dispossessed, why didnt it take hold in southern Europe after the euro crisis? Why arent Americas minorities all sold on it?

It is, in the end, a winners dogma. It is an insiders code.

To describe something as a problem of success isnt to minimise it. Rather the opposite.

Problems of success are harder to fix because, almost by definition, you wouldnt want to remove the underlying causes of them. The most effective answer to the culture war is, after all, induce an economic depression.

On the same principle, the most effective answer to low birth rates is undo modernity.

Parents no longer need to have three children to ensure that one survives. Medicine has seen to that.

They neednt even have one as a source of income support in old age. State pensions have seen to that.

More people have access to birth control, and fewer are credulous enough to believe that using it is a ticket to hell. From something precious (the Enlightenment), something bleak (demographic decline).

And even this, the baby bust, isnt the ultimate problem of success. No, that is populism. The best explanation for the strange turn in politics over the past decade is too much success, for too long.

Few voters in the West can remember the last time that electing a demagogue led to total societal ruin (the 1930s). The result? A willingness to take risks with their vote, as a bank that has forgotten the last crash starts to take risks with its balance sheet.

What the economist Hyman Minsky said of financial crises, that stability breeds instability, could be the motto of modern politics too.

The challenge is to persuade Western intellectuals of this. Social democratic in their biases, most continue to believe that an anti-establishment voter must be an economic loser.

It is a hopeless account of the past decade.

The most important populist breakthrough, Donald Trump in 2016, happened in a super-rich country, seven years into an economic expansion.

The Brexit campaign won most of Englands affluent home counties.

Populism cant, or cant just, be the result of scarcity. It cant be solved through more and better-distributed wealth. In fact, to the extent that it liberates people to be cavalier with their vote, material comfort might make things worse.

Faced with problems of failure disease, illiteracy, mass unemployment Western elites are supremely capable. When it comes to even apprehending problems of success, less so.

Notice that, in discussing artificial intelligence, they dwell on the challenge of scarcity (What if all the jobs disappear?) and not the challenge of abundance (What will people do with all that leisure?).

If smartphones were enough to cause a wave of neuroses, imagine a world without work, that rare source of structure and meaning in the secular age.

It is a conservative insight, I suppose, that if you change one thing about society, even for the better, dont count on the rest of it remaining the same.

Modernity a world in which most people live in cities, have freedom from clerics and communicate across great distances at low cost came along about five minutes ago in the history of civilisation.

Economic growth was itself an almost unknown phenomenon in the three millennia before 1750.

It would be strange if such abrupt and profound change hadnt had some unintended consequences.

The story isnt phone-induced stress or even low birth rates. The story is that we havent experienced much worse.

We are always interested to hear your views on current topics.

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Financial Times

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Smartphone addiction, culture wars and low birth rates are all byproducts of the Western world's modern success. - The Australian Financial Review

What is cultural identity and why is it so important?

We're grappling with that question in the United States, and the implications of our national culture wars are being felt in every sector -- from politics to labor to entertainment.

The latest example of this intensifying strife came after the publication of "White Rural Rage," a book taking aim at white rural voters, who the authors call a threat to democracy itself. The writers say white rural citizens feel irrational anger at immigrants, progressives and minorities, and say that conservative politicians weaponize that hatred to fuel electoral gains. They argue that despite Democratic policies intended to help rural communities, rural anger fuels a rise in authoritarianism and sympathy for politicians like Donald Trump who show authoritarian leanings.

But in a powerful counterargument published in Politico by a political scientist whose findings were used in the book -- or misused, as he says -- Nicholas Jacobs points out the inconvenient fact that even female and nonwhite male rural voters are turning to the GOP in greater numbers. If bigotry -- racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia -- were the sole, or even the main, driver of the Republican Party's increasing hold on rural America, why are the oppressed siding with their oppressors?

The answer, Jacobs argues, is in culture.

Jacobs lays out, quite convincingly, that the reductionist attitude among progressive and Democratic elites that mislabels all rural outrage as bigotry makes liberals unable or unwilling to see that rural American culture is more geographic than demographic. It is their rural identity that informs their political choices, not their racial, sexual or gender identity.

It's GOP understanding of that rural culture -- not an appeal to bigotry -- that has done the heavy lifting in winning over voters. The GOP understands rural Americans' tendency to see themselves as independent, self-reliant and, most importantly, abandoned by an out-of-touch political class that is increasingly corrupt and entrenched.

"On immigration, [changes to Democratic viewpoints on rural America] would mean accepting the fact that, in some communities, particularly those with financial challenges, concerns about the social burden of immigration is not always an expression of hate," Jacobs writes. "It would look at a data point on distrust in media and seek out a reason -- perhaps a self-critical one -- for why rural people are the most likely to feel like news does not portray their communities accurately."

In the stories liberals tell themselves about the way our country works, Democrats are the superheroes fighting for Black people, for women, for transgender and gay people while the GOP merely uses hatred as jet fuel. What rural voters have seen, though, is that governmental intervention (from either side) has done little over the years to raise anyone in this country out of desperate straits, to make schools better or to improve anyone's physical or financial health.

Whether they vote Republican or Democrat in the presidential elections, rural residents' lives remain the same.

Meanwhile, over the years, the GOP has been busy learning rural American culture, at its root, a fierce desire for freedom from manipulation at the hands of Congress and educators and Hollywood. Like anyone else, rural Americans believe in their choices, and they resent being told that the only reason they don't vote Democratic is that they're too stupid to do so. There's outrage, yes, but it's at the continued insistence from liberals that rural people are ignoramuses who don't understand the value of Democratic policies and who are too stupid to even realize how bigoted they are.

As it turns out, "Let politicians make all the decisions, you racist jerks," is a message doomed to fail.

To succeed, liberals must come to terms with the fact that rural culture cannot be changed by pressure from outside forces. They must see that prejudice co-exists with rural (and small-town and religious) culture but does not define it.

Most importantly, Democrats must display an honest respect for rural Americans' desire for independence.

We, as liberals, can get there. We can arrive at that respect, if we travel the road we've made for ourselves. We are liberals becauseof our respect for diversity -- of beliefs, lifestyles, experiences.

Awaiting us now is only our desire to travel that road to reach our enemies.

When we respect their differences, then they become our compatriots. And then we may find that they were never enemies at all, merely friends who spoke a different language.

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Georgia Garvey: The ultimate culture clash at the root of rural rage - Northern Virginia Daily

Its harder here in this very secular society, with this trajectory that is quite strong in terms of increased acceptance of it, he says.

Most of the public opinion is quite happy with the status quo, according to Anthony Wells, director of YouGov's political and social opinion polling, who has studied domestic public opinion.There isnt any clear drive to restrict abortion rights in the U.K., and the topic has largely not become politicized, he argues.

Brits appear to be more accepting of abortion than their U.S. counterparts, polling suggests.

A report by Duffys Policy Institute last year found 47 percent of those who took part in a world values survey believed the procedure justified behind only Sweden, Norway and France, and well ahead of the United States where the figure was just 30 percent.

And polling by YouGov last year, in the wake of Fosters high profile imprisonment, found that by a margin of 52 percent to 21 percent people believed women who have abortions outside of the rules should not face criminal prosecution.

Labour MP Stella Creasy, however, tells POLITICO that pro-choice MPs should take heed from the U.S. and warns they cannot be complacent as activists looking to increase restrictions on abortion step up their "behind-closed-doors" organizing in the U.K.

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On abortion culture wars, Britain takes a different path - POLITICO Europe