“It is clearly part of the same populist wave. People are very concerned about migration and cultural change. People do feel that the economy is not working for them,” says Bale. “They are fed up with and distrustful of mainstream parties.” He adds that it remains to be seen if Farage will align himself with Europe’s far-right movements, or whether this would make him more of a pariah in the eyes of average Brits.

In Mr. Bardella’s telling, always delivered in a level tone, Mr. Macron has brought France to the abyss through rampant immigration, a lax approach to lawlessness and violence, the loss of French identity, and “punitive” ecological change that makes life unaffordable.“Everything is going from bad to worse,” said Alain Foy, a concierge who attended Mr. Bardella’s rally in Paris. “Sometimes I can’t believe what is happening, whether on immigration, purchasing power, insecurity, everything.” His sister, Marie Foy, added, “France is falling apart.”

I was a senior writer for National Review at the time, and when I wrote pieces critical of Trump, members of the alt-right pounced, and they attacked us through our daughter. They pulled pictures of her from social media and photoshopped her into gas chambers and lynchings. Trolls found my wife’s blog on a religious website called Patheos and filled the comments section with gruesome pictures of dead and dying Black victims of crime and war. We also received direct threats.The experience was shocking. At times, it was terrifying. And so we did what we always did in times of trouble: We turned to our church for support and comfort. Our pastors and close friends came to our aid, but support was hardly universal. The church as a whole did not respond the way it did when I deployed. Instead, we began encountering racism and hatred up close, from people in our church and in our church school.The racism was grotesque. One church member asked my wife why we couldn’t adopt from Norway rather than Ethiopia. A teacher at the school asked my son if we had purchased his sister for a “loaf of bread.” We later learned that there were coaches and teachers who used racial slurs to describe the few Black students at the school. There were terrible incidents of peer racism, including a student telling my daughter that slavery was good for Black people because it taught them how to live in America. Another told her that she couldn’t come to our house to play because “my dad said Black people are dangerous.”

When we moved to Tennessee in 2006, we selected our house in part because it was close to a P.C.A. church, and that church became the center of our lives. On Sundays we attended services, and Monday through Friday our kids attended the school our church founded and supported.We loved the people in that church, and they loved us. When I deployed to Iraq in 2007, the entire church rallied to support my family and to support the men I served with. They flooded our small forward operating base with care packages, and back home, members of the church helped my wife and children with meals, car repairs and plenty of love and companionship in anxious times.Two things happened that changed our lives, however, and in hindsight they’re related. First, in 2010, we adopted a 2-year-old girl from Ethiopia. Second, in 2015, Donald Trump announced his presidential campaign.

For all its singularity, Belgium tells a quintessentially European story. Against a backdrop of ailing public services, precarious labor markets, waning traditional parties and intractable regional divisions, a far right is readying itself for power. In Brussels, the seat of the European Union, rising crime, pollution and decaying infrastructure symbolize a continent in decline. With unusual clarity, Belgium shows what Europe has become in the 21st century: a continent subject to history rather than driving it.

still building the Culture Wars politicalteleology.

The ascent of a far-right prime minister did little to prevent the virulent, anti-government strain inside the settler movement from spreading. A new generation of Kahanists was taking an even more radical turn, not only against Israeli politicians who might oppose or insufficiently abet them but against the very notion of a democratic Israeli state. A group calling itself Hilltop Youth advocated for the total destruction of the Zionist state. Meir Ettinger, named for his grandfather Meir Kahane, was one of the Hilltop Youth leaders, and he made his grandfather’s views seem moderate.Their objective was to tear down Israel’s institutions and to establish “Jewish rule”: anointing a king, building a temple in place of the Jerusalem mosques sacred to Muslims worldwide, imposing a religious regime on all Jews. Ehud Olmert, who served as Israeli prime minister from 2006 to 2009, said in an interview that Hilltop Youth “genuinely, deeply, emotionally believe that this is the right thing to do for Israel. This is a salvation. This is the guarantee for Israel’s future.”

You only win against these Congressional Republicans by refusing to play their game.

“Fundamentally, this story is about something having gone horribly awry in our school community,” said Rhea Mokund-Beck, a parent who supports Mr. Sanchez. “There has been such a breakdown of trust. Such a breakdown of good will. Such a breakdown of even understanding what public education is for. And then one layers that with all of the dynamics of race and class, and, you know, this is about a real maelstrom that we’ve made for ourselves.”

Not only does this criticism vastly overrate the power of the written word or the moving image, but it looks past the real forces sending the United States toward ever-deeper division: inequality; a hyperpartisan duopoly; and an antiquated and increasingly dysfunctional Constitution.

What all of these issues had in common was that the left, especially the academic left, had pushed far enough to trigger a backlash. And more than any other politician, Mr. DeSantis was the conservative politician who rose with that backlash against “woke” and coronavirus restrictions. The broad range of anti-woke and anti-pandemic politics meant that there were many moderates and conservatives who thought they agreed with Mr. DeSantis. They imagined him as a politician much like themselves, much in the same way that both antiwar progressives and centrist Democrats saw themselves in Mr. Obama in 2008.

But sometimes Alter’s comments seem exactly wrong. Alter calls Proverbs 29:2 “no more than a formulation in verse of a platitude,” but Daniel L. Dreisbach’s Reading the Bible with the Founding Fathers devotes an entire chapter to that single verse, much loved at the time of the American Founding: “When the righteous are many, a people rejoices, / but when the wicked man rules, a people groans.” Early Americans “widely, if not universally,” embraced the notion that—as one political sermon proclaimed—“The character of a nation is justly decided by the character of their rulers, especially in a free and elective government.” Dreisbach writes, “They believed it was essential that the American people be reminded of this biblical maxim and select their civil magistrates accordingly.” Annual election sermons and other political sermons often had Proverbs 29:2 as “the primary text.” Far from being a platitude, this single verse may contain a cure to the contagion that is contemporary American political life.

Dixon’s standards were variable: he was happy for Murray to include ‘cunt’ but drew the line at ‘cundum ... a contrivance used by fornicators, to save themselves from a well-deserved clap; also by others who wish to enjoy copulation without the possibility of impregnation’.

He used the chance to declare “cultural war” for the “soul of America,” against an enemy of radicals “cross-dressing” as moderate Democrats, who were preaching “abortion on demand” and “radical feminism” while working-class Americans watched their jobs disappear and a “mob”—the Rodney King riots—looted and burned Los Angeles. The liberal columnist Molly Ivins memorably wrote that the speech “probably sounded better in the original German,” but its themes would form the founding document of today’s Republican Party. Indeed, when I mentioned the speech to a former Trump Administration official, he immediately recited several lines by heart.

Cultural hegemony is therefore used to maintain consent to the capitalist order, rather than the use of force to maintain order.

Meme wars are culture wars, the authors write — “accelerated and intensified because of the infrastructure and incentives of the internet, which trades outrage and extremity as currency, rewards speed and scale, and flatten the experience of the world into a never-ending scroll of images and words.”

His topics include the rhetoric and impact of culture wars in American political life and the relationship between politics and culture in the United States.

Short-lived victories, however, came at a long-term cost. Evangelical leaders set something in motion decades ago that pastors today can no longer control. Not only were Christians conditioned to understand their struggle as one against flesh and blood, fixated on earthly concerns, a fight for a kingdom of this world—all of which runs directly counter to the commands of scripture—they were indoctrinated with a belief that because the stakes were getting so high, any means was justified.

I think another very important thing is what has been dividing the West over the several years now, it’s what people term the “culture war”. The culture war between left and right, between conservatives and liberals. And I think this war can be an opportunity to end the culture war within the West, to make peace in the culture war. 00:15:59 First of all, because you suddenly realize we are all in this together. There are much bigger things in the world than these arguments between left and right within the Western democracies. And it's a reminder that we need to stand united to protect Western liberal democracies. But it's deeper than that. 00:16:22 Much of the argument between left and right seemed to be in terms of a contradiction between liberalism and nationalism. Like, you need to choose. And the right goes with nationalism, and the left goes more liberalism. And Ukraine is a reminder that no, the two actually go together. Historically, nationalism and liberalism are not opposites. 00:16:47 They are not enemies. They are friends, they go together. They meet around the central value of freedom, of liberty. And to see a nation fighting for its survival, fighting for its freedom, you see it on Fox News or you see it in CNN. And yes, they tell the story a little differently, but they suddenly see the same reality. 00:17:14 And they find common ground. And the common ground is to understand that nationalism is not about hating minorities or hating foreigners, it's about loving your compatriots, and reaching a peaceful agreement about how we want to run our country together. And I hope that seeing what is happening would help to end the culture war in the West.

it isn’t simply the case that much of what is distinctive about American evangelicalism is not essential to Christianity; it is that now, in important respects, much of what is distinctive about American evangelicalism has become antithetical to authentic Christianity. What we’re dealing with—not in all cases, of course, but in far too many— is political identity and cultural anxieties, anti-intellectualism and ethnic nationalism, resentments and grievances, all dressed up as Christianity.