The Culture Wars Redux
Since retiring from a position that required a wide range of reading – from the history of science to feminist poetry, Sigmund Freud to Margaret Atwood and just about everything in between – I’ve been slowly and methodically culling a personal library of significant proportions. It hasn’t’ been an easy process, because every time I remove a long-neglected book from the shelves I engage in an inner debate regarding its possible future utility.
Thus, it happened that the other day, while perusing the section on sociology my attention was drawn to Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America, a 1990 study by the now celebrated James Davison Hunter of the University of Virginia. I drew material from that book for several sermons back in the day, and I now wondered whether, thirty-four years later, any of its propositions were still relevant. As it turns out, much of what one hears and reads about today’s disconcerting culture wars merely reprises what Dr. Hunter had put his finger on two generations ago.
We can begin by noting that the term itself – “culture war” – appears to have been Hunter’s invention. He pointed out that while religious identification (Catholic, Protestant, Jew) had once split Americans into rival, and sometimes antagonistic factions, now it was hot-button issues like homosexuality, abortion, school vouchers, affirmative action, and multiculturalism. These, he argued, made the old divisions largely irrelevant. “Cultural conflict is taking shape along new and in many ways unfamiliar lines,” Hunter observed.
In Hunter’s opinion, the United States hadn’t experienced divisions this wide and unbridgeable since the Civil War. The adamancy with which rivals in this new conflict defended their positions was truly remarkable. On one side, we had a figure like Mae Duggan of St. Louis who declared that the fight is “between the God-centered view of life and the secular humanist view which rejects God…Western civilization is at stake.” Harriet Woods, also from Missouri, demurred, telling Hunter that people who invoke a “Higher Authority” to justify their aims seek to be “…unaccountable to the democratic process.” Theirs is a closed-mindedness “that can lead to tyranny.”
Hunter warned that such a culture war could have a deleterious effect on our civic polity. “On political matters,” he suggested, “one can compromise.” But because the culture war is contested on moral grounds, compromise is equated with betrayal and can’t be countenanced. “Cultural conflict is ultimately about the struggle for domination…it is about power – the struggle to achieve or maintain the power to define reality.”
Hunter concedes that most Americans hadn’t (yet) been captured by the “polarizing impulses” roiling society. Thus, our politics still functioned much as they should, with ample opportunities for across the aisle give-and-take. Sadly, for most purposes this is no longer the case. Morally tinged issues are now being fiercely contested in every jurisdiction and at every level from school boards to the U.S. Congress.
To listen to the rhetoric, emanating primarily (but not exclusively) from the ideological Right, is to realize just how much the situation has deteriorated in thirty-four years. Like Mae Duggan, a hefty segment of the voting public now describes their “woke” fellow citizens as subversive agents bent upon destroying the America they know and love. No recitation of facts, nor any review of historical realities, can put even the slightest dent in that ironclad certainty.
Still, one has to wonder how many MAGA conservatives in Congress, or in the Wisconsin legislature for that matter, are true culture warriors. Have they really bought into the “Great Replacement” narrative that seems to animate many members of the anti-immigrant crowd? Or are they merely posturing for the purpose of preserving their power and privilege? But whether authenticity or cynicism is at play here, in the end it probably doesn’t make much difference: the results, unhappily, are still the same.
For now, at least, one party in our two-party system has been fully captured by what was, at the time “culture war” entered our lexicon, still an emerging trend. The rift has widened, and now threatens to swallow whatever is left of our common civic life. If there’s any antidote other than the polling place, I don’t know what it is.
