Culture Wars – Part I

Written by Classical Liberal

Nigel Farage has repeatedly stated that we find ourselves defensive in a culture war started by Wokists. They have focused on using schools and universities to indoctrinate young people with cultural Marxist poison and thereby destroy our future — and theirs. Nigel’s warning made me want to learn more about what precisely a culture war is?

A culture war is a cultural conflict between social groups and the struggle for dominance of their values, beliefs, and practices. It commonly refers to topics on which there is general societal disagreement and polarisation in societal values.

The term is commonly used to describe aspects of contemporary politics in Western liberal democracies where there is significant political cleavage. Issues such as abortion, homosexuality, pornography, transgender rights, multiculturalism, racial viewpoints, and other cultural conflicts based on values, morality, and lifestyle.

The term culture war is a loan translation of the German Kulturkampf (‘culture struggle’). In German, Kulturkampf, a term coined by Rudolf Virchow, refers to the clash between cultural and religious groups in the campaign from 1871 to 1878 under German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck against the influence of the Roman Catholic Church.

In American usage, ‘culture war’ may imply a conflict between those values considered traditionalist or conservative and those considered progressive or liberal. This usage originated in the 1920s when urban and rural American values came into closer conflict. There followed several decades of immigration to the US by people who earlier European immigrants considered ‘alien’. It was also a result of the cultural shifts and modernising trends of the Roaring ’20s.

The expression would join the vocabulary of US politics in 1991 with the publication of Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America by James Davison Hunter, a sociologist at the University of Virginia, who redefined the American notion of ‘culture war’. Tracing the concept from the 1960s, Hunter perceived a dramatic realignment and polarisation that had transformed US politics and culture, including the issues of abortion, federal and state gun laws, immigration, separation of church and state, privacy, recreational drug use, LGBT rights, and censorship. The perceived focus of the American culture war and its definition have taken various forms since then.

Hunter argued that there existed two definable polarities on an increasing number of ‘hot-button’ defining issues. Furthermore, not only there were several divisive issues. But society had divided along essentially the same lines on these issues. Constituting two warring groups. They were defined primarily not by nominal religion, ethnicity, social class, or even political affiliation but by ideological world-views.

Hunter characterised this polarity as stemming from opposite impulses toward what he referred to as Progressivism and Orthodoxy. Others have adopted the dichotomy with varying labels. For example, Bill O’Reilly, a conservative political commentator and former host of the Fox News Channel talk show The O’Reilly Factor, emphasises differences between ‘Secular-Progressives’ and ‘Traditionalists’ in his 2006 book Culture Warrior.

During the 1992 Presidential election, Pat Buchanan mounted a campaign for the Republican nomination against incumbent George H. W. Bush. In a prime-time slot at the 1992 Republican National Convention, Buchanan gave his speech on the culture war. He argued: ‘There is a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we will one day be as was the Cold War itself’. In addition to criticising environmentalists and feminism, he portrayed public morality as a defining issue.

The agenda [Bill] Clinton and [Hillary] Clinton would impose on America—abortion on demand, a litmus test for the Supreme Court, homosexual rights, discrimination against religious schools, women in combat units—that’s change, all right. But it is not the kind of change America wants. It is not the kind of change America needs. And it is not the kind of change we can tolerate in a nation that we still call God’s country.

A month later, Buchanan characterised the conflict as power over society’s definition of right and wrong. He named abortion, sexual orientation, and popular culture as major fronts—and mentioned other controversies, including clashes over the Confederate flag, Christmas, and taxpayer-funded art. He also said that the negative attention his ‘culture war’ speech received was itself evidence of America’s polarisation.

The culture war had a significant impact on national politics in the 1990s. For example, the rhetoric of the Christian Coalition of America may have weakened President George H. W. Bush’s chances for re-election in 1992 and helped his successor, Bill Clinton, win re-election in 1996. On the other hand, the rhetoric of conservative cultural warriors helped Republicans gain control of Congress in 1994.

The culture wars influenced the debate over state-school history curricula in the United States in the 1990s. In particular, disputes over the development of national educational standards in 1994 revolved around whether the study of American history should be a ‘celebratory’ or ‘critical’ undertaking and involved such prominent public figures as Lynne Cheney, Rush Limbaugh, and historian Gary Nash.

Neoconservatism shifted the terms of the debate in the early 2000s. Neoconservatives differed from their opponents in that they interpreted problems facing the nation as moral issues rather than economic or political issues. For example, neoconservatives saw the decline of the traditional family structure as a spiritual crisis that required a spiritual response. Critics accused neoconservatives of confusing cause and effect.

During the 2000s, voting for Republicans began to correlate heavily with traditionalist or orthodox religious belief across diverse religious sects. Voting for Democrats became more correlated to liberal or modernist religious faith and to being nonreligious. Confidence in scientific conclusions, such as climate change, also became tightly coupled to political party affiliation in this era. Causing climate scholar Andrew Hoffman to observe that climate change had ‘become enmeshed in the so-called culture wars’.

Topics traditionally associated with culture war were not prominent in media coverage of the 2008 election season, except coverage of Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin, who drew attention to her conservative religion and created a performative climate change denialism brand for herself. However, Palin’s defeat in the election and subsequent resignation as Governor of Alaska caused the Center for American Progress to predict ‘the coming end of the culture wars’, attributed to demographic change, particularly high rates of acceptance of same-sex marriage among millennials.

While traditional culture war issues, notably abortion, continue to be a focal point, the problems identified with culture war broadened and intensified in the mid-late 2010s. Journalist Michael Grunwald says that ‘President Donald Trump has pioneered a new politics of perpetual culture war’. He lists the Black Lives Matter movement, US national anthem protests, climate change, education policy, healthcare policy Obamacare, and infrastructure policy as culture war issues in 2018. In addition, the rights of transgender people and the role of religion in lawmaking were identified as ‘new fronts in the culture war’ by political scientist Jeremiah Castle, as the polarisation of public opinion on these two topics resembles that of previous culture war issues. In 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum described opposition to wearing face masks as a ‘senseless’ culture war issue that jeopardises human safety.

(To be continued tomorrow with Part II)