When he was satisfied, Brooks walked over to the desk of Massachusetts’s Republican senator Charles Sumner, who was busy writing and barely even looked up. Between the two men there was no love lost. Brooks, who walked with a cane after having being injured in a youthful duel, was a passionate defender of slavery. Sumner, by contrast, was one of the nation’s most outspoken abolitionists. Only days earlier he had delivered a blistering speech mocking Brooks’s cousin, Senator Andrew Butler, as a hapless Don Quixote-style knight devoted to “the harlot, Slavery”.

To Brooks, the speech seemed an intolerable affront. At first he had considered challenging Sumner to a duel, but decided against it on the grounds that the Massachusetts politician was no gentleman. But he remained determined to take his revenge. And now, as Sumner glanced dismissively up, Brooks spoke. “Mr Sumner, I have read your speech twice over carefully,” he said quietly. “It is a libel on South Carolina, and Mr Butler, who is a relative of mine.”

At that, Sumner tried to rise, but Brooks was too quick for him. He lifted his thick gutta-percha cane, with its heavy golden top, and brought it savagely down on Sumner’s head, again and again. Sumner fell. Blood trickled down his face. He was trapped behind his desk; he could not get up. Still the blows rained down, Brooks lashing away like a man possessed. Sumner was unconscious now. At last, some of Brooks’s colleagues managed to pull him off. A pool of blood spread across the floor of the Senate.

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Stop pretending Britain is America

By Dominic Sandbrook

Although Charles Sumner didn’t die that afternoon, the sheer violence of the assault struck many Americans, even at the time, as a terrible harbinger of the horror ahead. But while thousands of anti-slavery Northerners joined rallies in Sumner’s support, the reaction in the South was very different.

Ordinary people sent Brooks hundreds of new canes to replace his own shattered weapon; one was inscribed “Hit him again”. Many Southern politicians insisted that Sumner had exaggerated his injuries, dismissing the fake news of the abolitionist media. And on the fire-breathing wing of the Southern press, there was no doubt about who was really in the wrong. Brooks’s attack was “good in conception, better in execution, and best of all in consequences”, declared the Richmond Enquirer. Ideally, it said, the “vulgar abolitionists in the Senate” should be “lashed into submission”.

Today, historians see the Brooks-Sumner confrontation as a milestone on the United States’ road to the Civil War, encapsulating the collapse of civility, the triumph of tribalism and the disappearance of the political middle ground. I’ve been thinking about it a lot over the past couple of years. And I thought about it again this week amid the frenzied reaction to the FBI’s raid on Donald Trump’s home in Mar-a-Lago, Florida, where he is alleged to have taken — and even tried to destroy — confidential government documents.

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By Park MacDougald

Put aside, if you can, your own views about the rights and wrongs of the FBI raid. Perhaps it really is a sign of the overreach of the deep state, determined to smear and undermine a decent American patriot. Or perhaps it’s a welcome reminder that nobody, not even a former president, is above the law. Perhaps you think Donald Trump isn’t the kind of man who would trample roughshod over rules and conventions; perhaps you simply can’t imagine him making off with classified records and trying to flush them down the toilet. Or perhaps you think he is — and you can.

But this isn’t really the issue. Does anybody really see the fate of Donald Trump’s paperwork as the most pressing challenge facing the American republic? The more interesting question — as with the caning of Charles Sumner in 1856 — is what the whole imbroglio tells us about the health, or otherwise, of American politics.

As soon as news of the FBI raid broke, Republicans almost unanimously rushed to denounce the agency’s abuse of power, and to defend the former president as the victim of a witch-hunt. Would they, I wonder, have said the same thing if, say, the FBI had raided Hillary Clinton’s house in search of her controversial private emails? I doubt it, somehow.

And it works the other way around, too. The same Democrats glorying in Mr Trump’s embarrassment today would have been appalled if the FBI had applied the same tactics to Mrs Clinton yesterday. You don’t hear many liberal Democrats wondering if the FBI was a bit heavy-handed, just as you don’t find many conservative Republicans insisting that nobody must be above the law. And you didn’t find many pro-slavery Southerners in 1856 rushing to condemn Preston Brooks. In the 2020s, as in the 1850s, the tribalism is total, and partisanship is all.

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Tribalism has come to the West

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

To get a sense of what today’s successors to those antebellum Southern editorialists are thinking, I turned to Fox News. First up was the conservative classical historian Victor Davis Hanson. “Biden Administration is Using Soviet-Style Tactics to Crush its Political Opponents” read the banner at the bottom of the screen. Hanson was in no doubt: the FBI raid was a plot by the Democrats running the “national security state”. “They believe they’re morally superior to America and therefore any means [are] necessary or justifiable for their morally superior ends,” he said grimly. “Right now, we don’t have the rule of law in Washington.”

That, I thought, is a pretty bleak thing to say about your own government. An odd thing, too, since the director of the FBI, Christopher Wray, is an avowed, card-carrying Republican. I had a quick look at his biography. It turns it out he went to the same New York private school as Donald Trump, Jr., then the same Massachusetts boarding school, Phillips Academy, as the two Bush presidents. He served in George W. Bush’s administration and was appointed to run the FBI by… Donald Trump himself!

I suppose it’s just plausible that Wray has been playing a very long game, and has been a radical leftist all along. Or it’s possible that despite his long Republican service, he’s a man of such careerist self-interest and deep moral spinelessness that in the last two years he’s allowed himself to become a puppet for the sick neo-Stalinists running the Biden Administration. Possible, but not terribly probable.

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By James Billot

Anyway, back I went to Fox News. Maybe the conservative talk show host Greg Gutfeld would add a bit of perspective, or at least lighten the mood? Not a bit of it. The FBI raid had been cold-bloodedly planned, Gutfeld said, to provoke Mr Trump’s supporters, inciting them into “another January 6th”. They — the deep state — “want an excuse to track down more Republicans and people in red hats… Walls are closing in. Tick, tick, tick. Boom. This is it.”

Once again, dark territory. You could easily forget that at the heart of all this is basically an argument about some paperwork. But of course the paperwork isn’t the point; the point is the existential, apocalyptic, all-or-nothing conflict between right and wrong, good and evil, blue and red — which, as we are always being told, is a “struggle for the soul of America”.

Another Fox host, Will Cain, put it very starkly. “A day after the FBI’s raid on former president Donald Trump,” he told his viewers, “we are starting to see what a permanent national split looks like. A divorce. Nobody wants to say it out loud, but it’s true. And this is not simply a break between Democrats and Republicans. No, that’s too simple. What we are seeing is a divide between people who are willing to use the power of the state to silence their opponent and those who are unwilling.”

Put aside the exaggeration of that final sentence, and is he wrong? There are tens of millions of Americans who don’t follow politics closely, don’t spend their time shouting at their opponents on social media and certainly don’t see themselves as foot-soldiers in some future civil war. But in many ways the reaction to the FBI raid feels like precisely the kind of thing you’d see in the early chapter of some book subtitled “How the Second Civil War Began”. The partisanship. The distrust. The belief that your adversaries are part of a giant, malevolent conspiracy. The dismissal of facts that don’t fit. And above all, the sense, as in the late 1850s, that the stakes just could not be higher. “Walls are closing in. Tick, tick, tick. Boom…”

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This is not how civil wars start

By James Pogue

Is talk of a new civil war so ludicrous? The Oxford history professor Adam Smith, one of the shrewdest observers of American politics I know, recently sketched out a scenario for the Sunday Times, suggesting that “red America and blue America would become increasingly antagonistic entities, competing for the allegiance of a clutch of divided ‘purple’ states.” In this scenario, he writes, “it is easy to imagine that with the Republican majority on the Supreme Court baked in for decades, and an electoral system that gives an advantage to rural Republican states, the big Democratic states such as California and New York will push for more and more autonomy.” And if the federal government pushed back, who knows what might happen?

Even at a grassroots level, you can see signs of trouble. Writing for UnHerd in January, the essayist James Pogue reported that in his rural northern California county, “there is a very totalising war of worldviews, touched off by the pandemic and resistance to expert advice and state action, led by a militia-aligned faction that thinks the local government betrayed the county’s free-living values by participating in California’s Covid protocols”. There haven’t, Pogue noted, “been any bombings or shootings, but there have been fights, and much of the local police force is more or less openly sympathetic to the radical faction. The Right in the county is now almost entirely alienated from the other structures of government, and it is hard to see how this situation could change.”

Too bleak? Perhaps. When I visited America before Easter, it didn’t feel like a country on the brink. The sun shone. The shops were busy. People wandered happily about, as friendly and hospitable as ever. In two weeks, I didn’t hear a single remark about politics. Nor did I see a single MAGA hat, or a Trump T-shirt — and this in Florida.

But I would probably have said similar things in the summer of 1856, too. The sun often shines, before the storm.

Yet at the same time, there’s still some part of me that hankers after integrity. That is, if I choose a particular value, I want to hold it across the board. I don’t want to affirm it in one place and deny it in another, recall it here and forget it there. That’s why I find myself also repelled by tribalism in politics.

For the bundling up of myriad moral issues into ideological “package deals” has meant that my coveted acceptance by one tribe has become conditional upon my automatically accepting all manner of other positions, positions I can’t reconcile with my deepest convictions, and even — when I really examine them — theirs.

For example, when I went off and tried to make friends with conservatives, I thought I would be an attractive, indeed ideal, candidate. When it comes to the family, I am prepared to bite the bullet and say that family structure is crucial and marriage does matter. I believe that while there are critical exceptions — cases of psychological and physical abuse, for example — when family breakdown is the norm, children fare worse than they do in home where parents struggle through.

Whether it is being subject to the merry-go-round of changing relationships, or being constantly on the move — not knowing how long their dresses and trousers will hang in the wardrobes, not knowing whether their suitcases will or will not gather dust under their new beds — I think the ideal of the married two-parent family is worth fighting for. That is a fairly standard, orthodox conservative position.

Yet when I divulged these convictions, to my surprise I found they weren’t sufficient. “Family Values” apparently stood for a wider bundle of beliefs, and there was other baggage I had to carry, other commitments I had to approve. If I believed that intact families to be a condition of flourishing, I had also to accept that family breakdown was a main cause of poverty.

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What would you sacrifice for integrity?

By James Mumford

Now on one level it is obvious that there is some truth to this. When family breakdown entails the loss of a second income, and a previous partner’s alimony payments are insufficient, parent and child will be worse off. The question, however, is what is causing that family breakdown in the first place?

The conservatives whose company I craved explained it as “cultural trickle-down”. According to that story, it was the lamentable behavioural change resulting in the nosedive of marriage among the elite, the rise of “expressive divorce” as the chance to “make oneself from the inside out, to refurbish and express the inner self” (in the words of sociologist Barbara Whitehead). Their assumption was that the persistence of such behaviour explains the concentration of family breakdown in the poorest communities today.

But try as I did to absorb it, that conclusion grated with me. What it overlooked, I felt, was the profound effect of scarcity on “intellectual bandwidth”. As sociologists Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir posit in their book Scarcity: “When we function under scarcity, we represent, manage and deal with problems differently.” Not well, that is, since pressure does not focus the mind, as we might like to think. No, it affects people’s fundamental “orientations” — that is, their concern with the future as well as the present; it erodes their sense of agency — all crucial to sustaining a marriage.

The longer I cavorted with conservatives the more clearly I saw how the insistence on the “culture of poverty” thesis — the belief that family breakdown causes poverty, and not the other way round — sustains a larger package deal in which fidelity to the family is wrapped together with a commitment to unfettered capitalism fundamentally at variance with it. Bluntly, if it is not lack of financial resources that affects the stability of marriage, then fixing an economic system which punishes the working poor need not be a priority if you want to tackle family breakdown.

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The botched assisted dying debate

By James Mumford

And so, finally finding myself unable to make a home on the Right, I assessed my options. Maybe I’d been knocking on the wrong door, courting the wrong team? I started thinking seriously about the alternative tribe: the liberal-Left. But no sooner had I started to take soundings, then I found myself facing exactly the same problem: yet another package deal.

What I thought might endear me to the Left was the two years I spent leading a review into the conditions of life for the poorest older people. What had confronted me at every juncture was the depth of marginalisation, the realisation that despite the phenomenal rise in life expectancy, Britain is for many no country for old men.

I visited care homes where residents told me, “the outside world never comes in here”. I met carers in circumstances so isolated that they and the parent they were caring for had become “each the other’s world entire”. I conducted a telephone poll revealing that 40% of those older people who were going to be home alone for Christmas had children living in the same country. And I found that marginalisation expressed itself most frequently in older people’s fear of being a burden — upon the state, upon society and upon the family.

Inspired by the Left’s historic value of inclusion of the elderly — most notably, the campaign by the Fabians and Liberal Party to provide pensions to older people left high and dry by industrialisation — I assumed that I would feel at home with their attempts to transform the lives of the elderly. Instead, however, I found that for many the next great reform was assisted suicide.

Again, this grated with me. For in a society where older people increasingly fear becoming burdensome, it struck me that putting the assisted suicide option on the table would prove disastrous. Having learnt so much from the Left about power, and the way coercion can operate subtly beneath the cover of consent, I found questionable the assurances of assisted suicide advocates that no one would ever be pressured to die. How are doctors really going to know that, at the deepest level, a terminally-ill older person has not been put under pressure?

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Brexit is going to drive us all mad

By Ed West

Where, then, have I ended up? Have I found a home, an ideology to underwrite my existence? One towering temptation I’ve felt is to renounce the culture wars altogether and insist that ultimate ethical questions are kept out of political discourse. We should focus on building a common political life together, many contend, and for the sake of that we should set aside trying to resolve vexed moral quandaries.

The problem with this solution, however, is that there are actual lives at stake. Sexual consumerism, family breakdown and the mindlessness of marijuana are real threats to human flourishing. How we think of the beginning and end of life, about the entrances and exits of human beings in the world, has lasting consequences.

Instead, as I argue in my book Vexed: Ethics Beyond Political Tribes, an etch-a-sketch approach to ideology is called for. We need to start from first principles and decide, undetermined and undeterred by our historic political identifications, which positions on the weightiest moral questions align with the good.

We need to be prepared to concede that our historic ideological enemies, whichever tribe they come from, may have got it right when it comes to a particular controversy. This pick-n-mix approach is very different from carving out some amiable middle ground; it means taking substantive positions on specific issues, but from across the political spectrum. For difficult though this may be, failing to do so ensures a kind of moral stagnation we should all find unacceptable. The deals may give us mates, but they cannot deliver genuine progress.

There is something totalitarian about package deals, and having our thinking governed by the constellations of opinions which are but the product of historically contingent coalition-building. And because of this, I find inspiration in the Vaclav Havel  essay The Power of the Powerless and the Czech playwright’s exhortation that “the primary breeding ground for what might be understood as an opposition in the post-totalitarian system is living in the truth”. It is, he wrote, a drama “originally played out in the theatre of the spirit and the conscience of society”.

Deciding where we stand as individuals on moral questions, irrespective of political parties, may not be the terminus. But it is the place to begin.

James Mumford’s Vexed: Ethics Beyond Political Tribes is published by Bloomsbury on 5 March

Well, thanks to my seven year old daughter, I’ve just reread all one million words of the Harry Potter novels, and I can tell you that Lord Voldemort is not defeated by facts, reason or elite education. He’s defeated by love. Call this saccharine, by all means. Call it derivative. But don’t call it neoliberalism.

I count seven occasions when love – or an allied emotion like compassion, or loyalty – is instrumental in saving Harry and undermining the noseless supervillain. And zero occasions on which facts or reason are the deciding factor – and don’t contradict me by mentioning the puzzles the children solve to reach the Philosopher’s Stone, because those were put there by the teachers. When it comes to defeating evil, it’s emotion that matters.

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By Henry Olsen

As for celebrating the power of elite education, well, I accept that the books are mostly set at a school, and a selective one at that. But two of our three heroes are bad at their lessons and get pretty shocking grades. Harry, who saves the world, is a dreadful student. He cheats at Potions. He is hopeless at Occlumency. He flunks Divination.

And all three of them – even super-brain Hermione – literally drop out of school a year before graduation to save the world. Even the musical Grease pushes the establishment view that your life will be a disaster if you leave school early. Harry Potter says dropouts can save the world.

And of course, it is wandlore – the impenetrably complex interactions between wands, and their relationships with their masters – that finally defeats Voldemort. This is put forward as an area of magical study in which the word “guess” is as good as it gets: a magic so deep it is beyond the reach of study or education, no matter how elite.

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By Graeme Archer

RJ goes deeper, though. He argues that the very concept of magic is a neoliberal fantasy of meritocracy: an elite have access to a special power, which gives them the right to rule.

Now I have never met JK Rowling but I’m guessing she’s at least dimly aware of this, given that the central conflict of her stories is the question of whether magical power confers the right to rule. The bad guys think it does. The good guys say it doesn’t. And just in case you don’t get the message that elites shouldn’t oppress others, there’s endless detail about how wrong it is for wizards to subjugate other magical creatures, from giants to goblins.

The most important thing to recognise is that the politics of these books is laid on with a trowel. They’re children’s books, so it’s no surprise, but the morality lessons come thick and fast, and they’re barely more subtle than an Aesop’s fable. It ought to be impossible to read Harry Potter novels and say they portray “facts” and “elite education” as the answer to all problems.

And yet it isn’t impossible. RJ, and all those who widely shared and loudly cheered his article, prove it can be done, not just once but by thousands of people. And that’s because partisanship rots the brain.

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By Andrew Watts

The hard Left has decided that it hates JK Rowling because she doesn’t support Jeremy Corbyn. Not supporting Jeremy Corbyn is essentially the same thing as being a neoliberal. And, therefore, the works of JK Rowling must be neoliberal propaganda.

This skewing of the mind to be biased against an author you hate is not conscious. The neuroscientific work of Drew Westen showed that politically aligned people use their emotions, not their reason, to respond to politics. When presented with contradictory statements by their own ‘side’, the partisans explained them away, with fMRI scans showing activity only in the emotional parts of the brain. As Westen says “partisans twirl the cognitive kaleidoscope until they get the conclusions they want.”

And this matters. It matters when one side can’t even read a work of fiction by its opponent without disconnecting the basic functions of logic in their mind. No wonder everyone believes the BBC is biased against them, when the moment a political opponent is up on screen, their rational brain switches off. No wonder we can’t resolve the problem of Brexit, when both sides assume everything said by the other is malicious and wrong.

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Why should a life without faith be without meaning?

By Polly Mackenzie

Our instincts make mistakes all the time. We shouldn’t be ashamed to use facts and reason to question the judgement of our eyes or our guts. Use your eyes and the world looks flat. Use reason and you’ll accept that it is not.

I’ve even used facts and reason here to prove that Harry Potter isn’t a celebration of facts and reason. And I’m unashamed to say that my argument is better than RJ’s because I could write a 19-page version of this article with footnotes to spare, where he’d be stumped to go beyond ‘because I said so’.

I don’t care how much you like Harry Potter. I don’t care how much you like JK Rowling. I care only that you recognise they are not the same thing. Our inability to look beyond the messenger and consider the value of the message is destroying our political system. How can you achieve anything but deadlock when you won’t even listen to your opponent’s ideas with an open mind?

Perhaps you’re one of the good guys. You try to get out of your bubble and read ideas by people with whom you disagree. Well next time, do yourself a favour. Stick a picture and a byline of your favourite writer at the top. Maybe then you’ll be able to trick your brain into giving an opponent’s idea a fair chance.