UK prime minister will likely remain in power for now

Significance As many as a dozen lockdown parties are now alleged to have been held at Downing Street, significantly damaging Johnson’s support among the public and his Conservative Party. His position as party leader and prime minister is gravely threatened. Impacts Johnson’s domestic troubles, coupled with rising economic concerns, increase the chance of an agreement with the EU over Northern Ireland. Disillusionment with Johnson, opposition to net-zero and culture wars open the door for Nigel Farage’s Reform Party to revive its appeal. Rising inflation threatens to undermine consumer confidence and slow the economic recovery over the coming year.

The Secret Listener

From the time she was a girl, Yuan-tsung Chen had had a literary dream, and in 1950 she embarked on a literary career, a journey filled with thrilling and dangerous adventures. She went to Beijing and got a job in the Scenario Department of the Central Film Bureau, where she found herself in a front-row seat during China’s culture wars as Mao Zedong demanded that literature and art serve the Party, while writers wanted culture to be distinguishable from propaganda. Hence she became a secret listener. Purges ensued. She narrowly escaped the Anti-Rightist Purge of 1957 by marrying Jack Chen, who, because of his connections, had avoided political trouble so far. Mao’s “class war” continued. His Great Leap Forward caused the plunge in agricultural production and the greatest famine of the twentieth century. It led to Mao’s last and most violent purge, the Cultural Revolution. His hitmen, the Red Guards, viciously attacked Jack. Yuan-tsung went secretly to ask Zhou Enlai, the prime minister, for help. Zhou tried but failed to protect them. They were sent out of Beijing and consigned to a rural backwater village, cut off from all recourse to friends. But Yuan-tsung figured out a way to get in touch, right under the noses of the Red Guards, with Jack’s American brother-in-law and asked him to arrange a speaking tour for Jack. He did, and thus Jack was able to accept an invitation to lecture on Canadian and American campuses. After a tense wait, on the prime minister’s personal order Jack and Yuan-tsung got permits to leave the country.

Human Rights and Structural Inequality in the Shadow of COVID-19—A New Chapter in the Culture Wars?

This article takes as its starting point the convergence of two rights-related grassroots movements given momentum by the pandemic’s manifestly discriminatory impact: the push to recognise and address racism as a public health crisis, and the global influence of the Black Lives Matter (‘BLM’) movement. It considers the relevance of this moment to international human rights law, the adequacy of the response from its key institutions, and the conservative backlash, framed within the rhetoric of rights, that is challenging the very idea of structural racism. In doing so, it argues that we are witnessing a new stage of the culture wars around the language, method and assumptions of human rights law with which the discipline must engage pragmatically and strategically.

Catholicism and the Frankfurt School

The paper traces the development from the medieval, traditional union, through the modern disunion, toward a possible post-modern reunion of the sacred and the profane. It concentrates on the modern disunion and conflict between the religious and the secular, revelation and enlightenment, faith and autonomous reason in the Western world and beyond. It deals specifically with Christianity and the modern age, particularly liberalism, socialism and fascism of the 2Oth and the 21st centuries. The problematic inclination of Western Catholicism toward fascism, motivated by the fear of and hate against socialism and communism in the 20th century, and toward exclusive, authoritarian, and totalitarian populism and identitarianism in the 21st. century, is analyzed, compared and critiqued. Solutions to the problem are suggested on the basis of the Critical Theory of Religion and Society, derived from the Critical Theory of Society of the Frankfurt School. The critical theory and praxis should help to reconcile the culture wars which are continually produced by the modern antagonism between the religious and the secular, and to prepare the way toward post-modern, alternative Future III - the freedom of All on the basis of the collective appropriation of collective surplus value. Distribution and recognition problems are equally taken seriously.

Red-baiting in tooth and claw

Throughout the twentieth century, Carl Weinberg explains in Red Dynamite: Creationism, Culture Wars, and Anticommunism in America, American antievolutionists regularly attempted to vilify evolution through its supposed association with communism. His book is a splendid chronicle of the deployment and development of their claims.

Dying under a Description? Physician-Assisted Suicide, Persons, and Solidarity

Debates over physician-assisted suicide (PAS) comprise a small portion of broader culture wars. Their role in the culture wars obscures an under-acknowledged consensus between those who support PAS and those who oppose it. Drawing insights from personalism, this essay situates PAS within larger moral obligations of solidarity with the dying and their caregivers. The contributions of Roman Catholic personalism relocate debates over PAS and allow us to harness shared moral impulses.

In Practice: Teaching Environmental American Studies in a Time of Crisis

I have been thinking a lot about environmental pedagogy in American studies, especially since I started teaching a third-year interdisciplinary course, Climate Change & Culture Wars, which focusses on the post-1970s US. I wanted to know more about how others are approaching the topic as we face up to looming climate and ecological collapse. University teachers and learners across disciplines are reckoning with it, but what's going on in American studies in Britain, and what can we learn from each other and from teachers elsewhere? How is the crisis impacting on the framing of our disciplinary fields and how are we incorporating its intellectual and practical demands into pedagogic spaces and syllabi?