by Yesterday I did a lunch workshop here at U. San Diego, talking about the school prayer decisions as contributing to the “culture wars.” This is a phenomenon that worries me a lot. I look out and see an increasingly polarized culture– polarized more or less along the lines that James Davison Hunter described some years back in his book Culture Wars. A few years ago, Hunter and Alan Wolfe did a sort of debate-reprise in a book entitled, if I recall, Is There a Culture War? My recollection is that Wolfe focused mostly on the general public and said no: there aren’t huge divisions. Hunter focused more on vocal spokespersons or representatives and said yes. My own sense is that in the years since that book was written, the general public has itself tended to become more politically and socially conscious, and hence to polarize around the positions articulated by the more vocal advocates. I lie awake nights worrying about how the country is going to survive.
But this is all pretty impressionistic, and I might very well be wrong. Yesterday one of my colleagues responded to my talk, basically, with “What are you so worried about?” With respect to school prayer itself, he said, the statistics are that although a majority of Americans favor school prayer, by now they mostly just mean something like a “moment of silence.” Court decisions allow that anyway. On abortion, he said, most Americans favor a middle ground, with restrictions on some of the more gruesome forms, such as “partial-birth abortion,” but without any complete or severe prohibitions. Increasingly Americans are okay with at least civil unions for same-sex couples. No one favors prohibition of contraceptives. In short, there is no serious polarization going on about these social-cultural-religious issues. Swear off watching FoxNews and life will be good.
So I wonder, is my colleague right? Am I worrying about nothing?
It has been my contention for some years that the culture war was a minor phenomenon caused by the nationalization and commercialization of culture. This minor phenomenon was disruptive to local cultures, but only created socio-political divides when public figures deliberately agitated the populace artificially for their own political gain (I’m sure they felt justified in doing so).
There are many organizations, all sides/all issues, that have long ceased to exist for their original purpose but have devolved into maintaining their own relevancy in the face of marginal successes. Any social-political movement has one of two options when they at least marginally succeed (1) accept that they’ve obviated themselves or (2) become more extreme.
When’s the last time you saw an institution of people with the collective will to disband after initial success? In fact, isn’t there a sort of American heresy in the idea that you’ve achieved “enough”?
No they become more extreme and have to invent ever more absurd bogeymen to motivate the faithful to continue in “the fight”.
I find the culture wars to be very real and very troubling. Hunter’s book long ago documented that the two sides have divided up America’s cultural institutions, academia on one side, talk radio on the other, etc. My guess is that Steve’s colleague who does not see a culture war does not know anyone who voted for Reagan or Bush (well, maybe he knows one).
All I see is a thick, young bully standing over a thin twitching old man and repeatedly smashing his already bloody weeping face with masochistic delight, but not a culture war. The most generous characterization would be that we are in the final stages of a mop-up campaign by the left that’s ending whatever war there once was.
Prof. Cochran’s review of the “front” is revealing. The left has the entire elite culture (the entire university system, elite culture, government bureaucratic culture, large media) and conservatives have talk radio.
There is no culture war because the war has been decisively won by them. The only danger to America comes from the obviously destructive social consequences of the reigning radical culture. America is dissolving, rotting from within, not splitting from cultural warfare.
James Q. Wilson reviews the empirical evidence re the culture wars in several essays now gathered in his book American Politics Then and Now. To his dismay he finds polarization to be growing and not just among the elites.
Wilson’s book sounds like one I need to look at. Thanks.
A lot to think about in what Eric says. I’ve never been accused of being a Pollyana, but my own perspective isn’t nearly as grim as his. Maybe there’s material here for a follow-up post or two, as time permits.
I suppose my understanding of the culture war is very different than what’s revealed in comments here. What passes for the left in academia and the bureaucratically entrenched in America is tame compared to what one would rightly call left in the rest of the world politic. How does one call Obama a socialist while watching real socialists on the news daily set fire to Greece?
And what’s on talk radio is at best sensational nationalism mixed with classical liberalism. Not really conservative to my Burkean ears. Sure, I feel a strong sense of commonality in these post-Buckey/Fusion/Neo-Conservative times. But as often as not I cannot endure the reckless theatrics and ideological purity that accompanies it. How do we get from strong national defense to the acceptance of indefinitely prolonged foreign military engagements?
I see revealed more and more the very ancient divide between urban and rural life. If you look at the county-by-county in elections the strongest indicator of your political persuasion is the density of the local population.
Most of the people who call themselves conservatives hold only a thread of what was common to conservatives prior to the rise of communism. Our “conservative” preachers twice divorced complain about the impending collapse of the institution at the hands of liberals. My friend, marriage is already civically dead; whatever little life it had left was killed by no fault divorce.
I wouldn’t be the first conservative to question the ascendancy of free-marketeers in the movement either; these destroyers of small towns and up-rooters of local cultures and customs. I hear Huzzahs! for state’s rights and condemnation for towns attempting to keep out WalMart through zoning laws, from the same lips. This to me is both fresh and bitter water coming from the same well.
For someone like myself the culture war was lost long ago (maybe never properly fought). Your TV is full of porn in prime time, your banks and currency are controlled by those outside the bounds of your sovereignty, your citizenry vote money for themselves out of the public coffers, sprawlled McMansions pave over country landscape and hometowns alike, you will have to visit your children by plane, fewer if any will attend the church of their birth and more adults will live alone or unattached in defiance of the collected history of the human race.
I was thinking about my politically aware lifetime. I was young when Regan got elected, but from 1980-2008, nearly 28 years the vast majority of it “conservatives” controlled the White House and almost as much at least one of the houses of Congress. For all the culture-war sermons and high language, all the fundraising and pledge-writing. How did we walk away from that with the single most important issue I know of to every conservative “Roe v Wade” left untouched? Makes you think that those in charge have a very different idea of what conservative means.
My mother has always voted Republican and will always vote Republican. She donates small amounts from her meager retirement to support candidates that oppose abortion. Does anyone seriously believe that in her grandchildren’s lifetime her dedication will have yet been rewarded?
Culture war? What culture war? I see a bunch of smoke, but no fire.
David, I don’t see any difference in our general outlooks.
To summarize, there is presently no meaningful political or elite resistance to U.S. cultural radicalism: no culture war.
The values of Revolution (French and Communist) have prevailed in the institutions. The U.S., as such, has lost the ancient inheritance and there is no serious, coordinated defense of the shreds that remain in its political or social institutions.
It is, accordingly, wrong to look to the ordinary operations of those institutions as a source of restoration.
Steve called my (our?) perspective “grim.” It may be that, as well as “true,” but I am not grim. God and His Truth prevail. The apparent success of the Left around the world cannot but end in ultimate humiliating failure. Indeed, the “humiliation of the nations ” is the most suggestive explanation to me for this phase of world history. Contemporary idolatry will meet its regular and ancient fate; the global coordination of this idolatry under the temporarily victories banners of the modern ideologies will simply make that regular fate harder to misinterpet.
Thank you Eric.
I must confess, I allowed myself to indulge in a bit of rhetorical hysterics (though not so far as to distort my position, I hope). I felt a zest for this topic, particularly in disturbing the dust around the feet of some conservatives that have failed to appreciate their own complicity in the devolution of civics though modernity.
These folks don’t see the connection between the “Johnny washes behind his ears” or more seriously “Duck and Cover” movies of the 1950s and the political correctness of today. They do not want to abandon the Prussian model of social engineering through the educational system, they just want to turn that weapon against their cultural enemies.
Everyone reaches for the levers of federal power when it suits them. On another blog I frequent we’ve been having a great discussion about the breakdown of federalism into subsidiarity. Like populism, it seems a convenient ally in times of need, such that we cannot resist the temptation.
It is indeed grim to recognize that realpolitik is a factor in the thinking of leading conservative (and liberal) voices in America. When you’re full of illusions, reality seems grim. It appears static and hard, unforgiving. It does not shape at the speed our passions would desire.
But it is reality. And as you point out, once the veil is stripped away (and the forgetfulness of God with it) something more glorious than our empty machinations develops.
An essential element, it seems to me of a discussion on law, religion and ethics as on a blog like this must always give pause to the teleological supersession of cultural-political circumstance. Religious persons of serious consideration, have frameworks of existence which transcend the ethical boundaries of the particular place, yet must effectively exist (we aren’t Gnostics or Neo-Platonists after all) in that same place. (Here I must resist eluding to the two natures of Christ, the God-Man.)
For my dime this means an older flavor, a classical anthropology, a Burkean conservation, a rejection of the French revolution in favor of the American one. We overthrew not a King (not even Monarchy), but a radicalized British Parliament (in fact unfettered democracy).
This leads me to think that the machines of power can only be operated by conservatives today (without corruption) in a way which protects our ability to preserve our communities, Churches, families and few remaining cultural institutions which have not experienced lethal levels of progressive infiltration.
We cannot “win back” the White House, because there is nothing for us to win there. But holding the reins of power as far away from those who would further the cause of utopian/progressive modernism seems a sacrificial role worthy of the right person.