Culture war

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The culture war (or culture wars) in American usage is a metaphor used to claim that political conflict is based on sets of conflicting values. The term frequently implies a conflict between values considered traditional or conservative and those considered progressive or liberal. The "culture war" is sometimes traced to the 1960s and has taken various forms since then.

Origins

The phrase culture war is a literal translation of the German Kulturkampf, the name given the struggle between the government of the German Empire under Otto von Bismarck against the power of the Catholic Church from 1871-1878.

Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci in the 1920s argued that the reason the proletarian revolution had not advanced in Europe as fast as many Marxists had expected it would was due to cultural hegemony. The theory of cultural hegemony states that a diverse culture can be dominated by one class because of that class's monopoly over the mass media and popular culture. Gramsci therefore argued for a culture war in which anti-capitalist elements seek to gain a dominant voice in mass media, education, and other mass organizations.


The expression was introduced[citation needed] again by the 1991 publication of Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America by James Davison Hunter. In that book, Hunter described what he saw as a dramatic re-alignment and polarization that had transformed American politics and culture.

He argued that on an increasing number of "hot-button" defining issues — abortion, gun politics, separation of church and state, privacy, homosexuality, censorship issues — there had come to be two definable polarities. Furthermore, it was not just that there were a number of divisive issues, but that society had divided along essentially the same lines on each of these issues, so as to constitute two warring groups, defined primarily not by nominal religion, ethnicity, social class, or even political affiliation, but rather by ideological world views.

Hunter characterised this polarity as stemming from opposite impulses, toward what he refers to as Progressivism and Orthodoxy. The dichotomy has been adopted with varying labels, including, for example, by commentator Bill O'Reilly who emphasizes differences between "Secular-Progressives" and "Traditionalists".

In 1990 paleoconservative commentator Pat Buchanan mounted a campaign for the Republican nomination for president of the United States against incumbent George H.W. Bush in 1992. After doing surprisingly well in the New Hampshire Primary, where he drew 37% of the vote, his campaign faded. He received a prime time speech slot on the opening night of the Republican National Convention. His keynote is sometimes dubbed the "'culture war' speech".[1]

During his speech, he said: "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." [4] In addition to criticizing "environmental extremists" and "radical feminism," he said public morality was 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 — 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.[2]

A month later, Buchanan elaborated that this conflict was about 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 talk of a culture war received was itself evidence of America’s polarization.[3]

When Buchanan ran for president in 1996, he promised to fight for the conservative side of the culture war:

I will use the bully pulpit of the Presidency of the United States, to the full extent of my power and ability, to defend American traditions and the values of faith, family, and country, from any and all directions. And, together, we will chase the purveyors of sex and violence back beneath the rocks whence they came.[4]

In a 2004 column, Buchanan said the culture war had reignited and that Americans no longer inhabited the same moral universe. He gave such examples as gay civil unions, the "crudity of the MTV crowd," and the controversy surrounding Mel Gibson's film, Passion of the Christ. He wrote,

Who is in your face here? Who started this? Who is on the offensive? Who is pushing the envelope? The answer is obvious. A radical Left aided by a cultural elite that detests Christianity and finds Christian moral tenets reactionary and repressive is hell-bent on pushing its amoral values and imposing its ideology on our nation. The unwisdom of what the Hollywood and the Left are about should be transparent to all.[5]

Campus culture wars

From the point of view of American academia, the "culture wars" and their alignments were nothing new — rather, they were perceived as an extrapolation of some conflicts that had been simmering in university life since the 1960s. Positions had been taken up on a number of issues: alleged ethnocentricity of traditional studies such as philosophy and literature; feminism; postmodernism; and homosexuality as a topic in the humanities. Cruder debates in more emotive terms were expected on the curriculum, popular culture, political correctness, affirmative action as it applies to admissions, and allegations that teaching was too centered on so called "dead white males."

The campus culture wars reflected a change in the demographics of the student population, as well as social change in society at large. Public intellectuals have sometimes blurred the distinction between "culture war" in this sense, and in national politics.[citation needed]

The 1992 book Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education by Gerald Graff took a positive line on the campus culture wars.[specify]

In Australia

The concept of a "culture war" is also current in Australia, particularly in the area of Australian historiography. The so-called history wars concern how to interpret the country's history, especially regarding Indigenous Australians.[6]

References

  1. ^ "Not since Pat Buchanan's famous "culture war" speech in 1992 has a major speaker at a national political convention spoken so hatefully, at such length, about the opposition."
    "Dogs of War". New. 2004-09-02. Archived from the original on 2005-03-08. Retrieved 2006-08-29.
  2. ^ Buchanan, Patrick (1992-08-17). "1992 Republican National Convention Speech". Retrieved 2007-11-03.
  3. ^ [1]
  4. ^ [2]
  5. ^ [3]
  6. ^ Debates on Genocide - Part One Debates on 'Genocide' in Australian History, Australian Government Department of Education Science and Training

Further reading

  • Buchanan, Patrick J., State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America (August 22, 2006) ISBN 0-312-36003-7
  • Buchanan, Patrick J., The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization, New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 2002 ISBN 0-312-30259-2
  • Fiorina, Morris P., with Samuel J. Abrams and Jeremy C. Pope, Culture War?: The Myth of a Polarized America, London: Longman, 2004 ISBN 0-321-27640-X
  • Gerald Graff. Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education (1992)
  • Hunter, James Davison, Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America, New York: Basic Books, 1992 ISBN 0-465-01534-4
  • Jay, Gregory S., American Literature and the Culture Wars, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997 ISBN 0-8014-3393-2 ISBN-13: 978-0801433931
  • Jensen, Richard. "The Culture Wars, 1965-1995: A Historian's Map" Journal of Social History 29 (Oct 1995) 17-37. online version
  • Jones, E. Michael, Degenerate Moderns: Modernity As Rationalized Sexual Misbehavior, Ft. Collins, CO: Ignatius Press, 1993 ISBN 0-89870-447-2
  • Strauss, William & Howe, Neil , The Fourth Turning, An American Prophecy: What the Cycles of History Tell Us About America's Next Rendezvous With Destiny, 1998, Broadway Books, New York
  • Webb, Adam K., Beyond the Global Culture War, Routledge, Jan 2006 ISBN 0-415-95313-8
  • Zimmerman, Jonathan, Whose America? Culture Wars in the Public Schools, Harvard University Press, 2002 ISBN 0-674-01860-5

See also

Battleground issues in the "culture wars"

Australia

References

External links

United States

Australia

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