British columnists send a competitor to Coventry in the latest culture-wars skirmish

Never the twain shall meet may have been on Matthew Parris’s mind, The Spectator, October 27:

I feel sad about the paper Ms (Nes­rine) Malik writes for. The Guardian took (a) historic wrong-turning when in 2010 it decided not to be interested in the possibilities for centre/centre-left co-operation. These days the paper often sounds like the voice of the Labour left: rasping and angry rather than the open-minded and ­inquisitive liberal voice it once was. Malik and her fellow Guardian columnist Gary Younge last week removed themselves from the nominations for this year’s Comment Awards on the grounds that they didn’t want to be on the same list as my Times colleague Melanie Phillips. This is the first time I’ve seen “no-platforming” invading mainstream Fleet Street and it’s a baleful development.

Stephen Fry lets fly at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas, November 3:

Classical liberalism and its post-war ideology of social democracy are dead. It’s over, it’s had its day. We’ve woken up to find ourselves uprooted and displaced. We are the ones cowering down in the ravine while the ­armies clash above. No one cares what we think.

Bob Deutsch goes contemplative, Forbes website, November 2:

It would be helpful to consider culture wars from a more accurate level of causation, especially now, when everything is changing so quickly in our digital age, and when America ­itself is Between Mythologies: We are not what we once were and we don’t yet know what we will become. In this liminal stage, complexity is increasing at a pace that outstrips our imagination. Under such stress, it’s common, but counter-productive, to reduce everything to black-or-white extremes. In this land once known as the home of the brave and the land of the free, we now exist in an environment not only threatened by global warming, but by a context of “too”: too fast, too competitive, too complex. Complexity heats up everything. In this habitat the absolutist mind can prevail, just at a time when we need artful thinking.

Michael Grunwald, Politico website, November 3:

President Donald Trump has pioneered a new politics of perpetual culture war, relentlessly rallying his supporters against kneeling black athletes, undocumented Latino ­immigrants and soft-on-crime, weak-on-the-border Democrats. He ­reverses the traditional relationship between politics and governance, weaponising policy to mobilise his base rather than mobilising his base to change policy. And in the Trump era, just about every policy issue is a wedge issue, not only traditional us-against-them social litmus tests like abortion, guns, feminism and affirmative action, or even just the president’s pet issues of immigration and trade, which he has wielded as cultural cudgels to portray Americans as victims of foreign exploiters. These days, even climate change, infrastructure policy and other domestic issues normally associated with wonky ­panels at Washington think tanks have been repackaged into cultural-resentment fodder.

Back to her abstruse best, Elizabeth Farrelly, The Sydney Morning Herald, November 3:

Although the term “solar system” usually refers to our heliocentric colloquium of planets, asteroids, comets and assorted gravity-tethered junk it could equally designate the arrangement of wires, batteries and photo­voltaic panels that hover above my head as I write. I can’t tell you how much I love it, my little solar system.