Tag: culture wars
Book Review: War! What Is It Good For? As A Metaphor, A Lot

Book Review: War! What Is It Good For? As A Metaphor, A Lot

A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars by Andrew Hartman; University of Chicago Press (384 pages, $30.00).

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Blame it on “the Sixties.” So Andrew Hartman argues at the start of A War For the Soul of America, his thoughtful survey of the so-called culture wars. In the United States during the 1980s and 90s, liberals and conservatives not only clashed over issues of economic inequality or political rights, but also over symbolic representation: whether the federal government should sponsor scandalous avant-garde art or censor obscene popular music; what children should be taught in public schools or whether or not they should be encouraged to pray in the classroom; what the standard American family should look like; whether abortion was moral; how films should portray Jesus; and how to remember American history. These were a few of the controversies that took center stage.

The claim that the Sixties fundamentally shaped the culture wars is not new. Hartman’s position is that, “The Sixties gave birth to a new America, a nation more open to new peoples, new ideas, new norms, and new, if conflicting articulations of America itself.” Many invoked all this Sixties newness, rupture, and transformation during the culture wars themselves. Even the very idea of a domestic war over culture perhaps comes from Lyndon Johnson’s use of the term in his war on poverty programs during that tumultuous decade. More daring is Hartman’s contention that the culture wars are now over. Hartman, an intellectual historian who teaches at Illinois State University and has written previously about education during the Cold War, seeks to distinguish the culture wars of the 1980s and 90s from the divisive atmosphere of America in our own times. (Full disclosure: We are acquaintances and have worked together on projects for the Society of United States Intellectual History). In his view, a break has occurred: the victories of the cultural left in recent years—the election of an African-American to the presidency, the legalization of gay marriage and marijuana, the incursions of women into the workplace—are substantive; so too is the resurgence of struggles between right and left over more material matters such as income inequality. 

Yet at a time when the nation is collectively aflutter over figures who change genders or identify across racial classifications, contentions that the culture wars are over will raise eyebrows. Many Americans continue to filter issues of economic justice, police violence, and international affairs through cultural notions of race, gender, and regional identity. So too, symbolic icons such as flags become proxies for much larger disagreements. Perhaps culture matters as much as it did during the 1980s and 90s. Nonetheless, Hartman’s much-needed historicization points to how the culture wars did not end so much as mutate. If the original culture wars are over, we live with what is no doubt a very uneasy truce. It might even be the case that as the United States moves from clear distinctions among culture, economics, and politics to a far more murky interplay between symbolic representation and material, governmental concerns, it is a nation in which a new and even more disturbing war is afoot: not a cultural one, but a new kind of civil war. In the 1980s and 90s, Americans battled over whether it was appropriate for the African-American rap group N.W.A. to sing “F*** tha Police”; today, the concern is whether the police are now literally waging war on African-Americans. In the 1980s and 90s, Americans debated whether sex-ed should be taught in the classroom; these days, it seems like the war is over the very existence of public education at all. A certain kind of culture war may be in the past, but that does not mean peace reigns over the American kingdom. If anything, things have gotten more extreme, more polarized.

Reading Hartman’s book suggests as much because he is more keen on catching the complexities of the culture wars in the 1980s and 90s than emphasizing their cartoonishness. A War for the Soul of America, which takes its title from an overwrought speech by Pat Buchanan at the 1992 Republican National Convention, is itself quite careful and balanced. It does not lampoon sides in the culture wars but rather tracks the twists and turns of alliances that often cut across political and cultural divisions. This makes for a funny kind of war, not the hardening of lines between left and right so much as a period of quite sophisticated debate—and, at times, even strange alliances and intersections. 

Forsaking chronological drama for thematic investigation, Hartman delves into the nuances of how anti-pornography feminists teamed up with religious fundamentalists to try to quash businesses that both viewed as smutty and immoral. He examines how liberal university professors fell in line with neoconservative politicians in efforts to preserve traditional liberal arts education against relativism. He documents the ways in which home-school Christian fundamentalists eventually identified themselves as another marginalized identity group right alongside the minorities and women they viewed as ruining public education. And he notices the surprising switches of figures such as Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, who started out as a conservative Reagan appointee, but eventually endorsed quite liberal notions of sexual education in response to the AIDS crisis. The more Hartman inspects details below the hyperbolic rhetoric, the more it seems that the culture wars did not consist of two distinct enemies exchanging ideological artillery fire across a clearly drawn line; rather, they become a blurry tale of shifting coalitions and concepts in which politics made for strange bedfellows (especially when it came to matters of the bed).

Historian Daniel Rodgers, chronicling much the same period as Hartman, named this era the “age of fracture.” Rodgers located this social fragmentation in the triumph of the free-market model, whereas Hartman pays more attention to the many cultural events of the 80s and 90s themselves. We learn of Senator Jesse Helms’ outrage over NEA funding of Robert Mapplethorpe’s work. (Hartman humorously notes that Helms kept a small print of one of Mapplethorpe’s more shocking images in his pocket). Senator Al D’Amato rips up a photograph of Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ sculpture in the chambers of Congress. Vice President Dan Quayle critiques the single-mother protagonist of Murphy Brown in the aftermath of the Rodney King riots. Tipper Gore tries to place warning labels on popular music recordings with risquĂ© lyrics. Secretary of Education William Bennett and Chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities Lynne Cheney politically maneuver over the reform of educational curriculum. Philosopher Allan Bloom receives surprising publicity for his cantankerous conservatism while cultural critic Camille Paglia gains notoriety for her pagan theories of sexuality. Molefi Kete Asante uses Afrocentrism to repudiate objectivity while Charles Murray advocates for the return of racist Social Darwinism. And the outcry over Martin Scorsese’s earthy, concupiscent Jesus in The Last Temptation of Christ generates lots of revenue for a rather mediocre film. 

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Just below the surface of these skirmishes, Hartman implies, the Enlightenment idea of the social contract gave way to a far more Hobbesian view of the world. This time, however, culture as well as nature resembled a state of war. Whether one blamed the situation on the market or government, on those in power or those vying for that power, it was every man for himself, even if that man could now become a woman.

The collision of culture with metaphors of war put me in mind of Italian communist Antonio Gramsci, a figure who first gained popularity among the Anglo-American New Left of the 1960s and went on to become influential among certain conservative political strategists as well. Gramsci famously distinguished between “wars of maneuver,” or direct conflicts, and “wars of position,” which are efforts to control the social terrain by more subtle symbolic means. The latter is the kind of war that Hartman describes in his book: not a Manichean battle between good and evil but a guerrilla war among a continually evolving plurality of factions. 

To characterize the culture wars in this manner, Hartman almost always goes for the astute qualification over the exaggerated polemic. This makes for a study quite different than, say, What’s the Matter With Kansas?, Tom Frank’s best-selling book that bemoaned how conservatives substituted meaningless cultural issues of “family values” for economic realities to dupe white working-class voters into voting against their interests. In Hartman’s history, there are no dupes or suckers who swap cultural Pyrrhic victories for economic misery. Instead, there is the sense that while social norms have fundamentally shifted toward the left, no real victor has emerged from the culture wars. The left continues to squabble over distinctions between culture and economics—one wing substitutes advancements in cultural diversity for the maintenance of a social safety net; the other refuses to recognize the legitimacy of cultural issues at all when it comes to economics or politics. Conservatives (as distinguished from the super-rich) have not fared much better. While once they could command attention with wars on crime, drugs, and finally, terror, now they mount far more feeble outcries over things like a secular “war on Christmas.” This does, as Hartman contends, seem like the dying gasps of breath by the final combatants on the fields of the culture wars.

Which does not mean that the legacies of the culture wars are not still troublingly alive. Turning to our contemporary moment, Hartman wonders about an American culture that has become more tolerant and inclusive yet also, oddly, has developed a much thinner middle ground of commonality. Many Americans place a premium on the ceaseless search for individual self-realization, but they done so at the expense of forging a sense of national belonging. They demand the right to be culturally free, but many are wary of the obligations and commitments necessary to support these freedoms. While there is acceptance of difference in some quarters, the fading of a culture of conformity has also unleashed an intensification of rage and violence by both official and vigilante entities. Meanwhile, the culture wars may be over, but the political gridlock between left and right has not been broken.

At the close of his book, Andrew Hartman asks a poignant question: “Can we have both cultural revolution and social democracy?” He has no immediate answer to the dilemma of whether Americans can have both radical individuality and a shared commitment to economic and social justice. His historical survey does suggest, however, that culture continues to matter to the project of defining what it means to be American. If the culture wars are indeed over, it does not mean that culture is now irrelevant. If anything, the links between symbols and substance, meaning-making and material factors, will become even more intertwined in whatever new wars are on the horizon.

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Michael J. Kramer teaches history and American studies at Northwestern University. He is the author of The Republic of Rock: Music and Citizenship in the Sixties Counterculture (Oxford University Press, 2013) and is at work on a new book that explores what the folk music revival can teach us about technology and culture, as well as a biography of the poet Carl Sandburg and a study of anarchism in America. He blogs about art, history, politics, and more at culturerover.net.

‘The Culture War’ — A Battle The GOP Can’t Win

‘The Culture War’ — A Battle The GOP Can’t Win

The argument is over and conservatives have lost. Some of them just don’t know it yet.

That’s the takeaway from the remarkable events of last week wherein the states of Indiana and Arkansas executed high-speed U-turns — we’re talking skid marks on the tarmac — on the subject of marriage equality. Legislatures in both states, you will recall, had passed so-called “religious freedom” laws designed to allow businesses to refuse service to same-sex couples. In Indiana, the governor had already signed the bill and was happily dissembling about the discriminatory nature and intent of the new law.

Then reality landed like the Marines at Guadalcanal.

Indiana Gov. Mike Pence made a fool of himself on ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos,” five times refusing to answer a simple yes or no question about whether the bill would protect a business that refused to serve gay people. Angie’s List, which is headquartered in the state, delayed a planned expansion. NASCAR, the NCAA, the NFL, the NBA, the WNBA, and a host of businesses condemned the law. Conventions pulled out and some states and cities even banned government-funded travel to Indiana.

Down in Arkansas, where similar legislation awaited his signature, Gov. Asa Hutchinson was no doubt watching with interest as Pence was metaphorically shot full of holes. Then he received a tap on the shoulder from a very heavy hand. Walmart, the largest retailer on Earth, born and headquartered in Arkansas, urged a veto, saying the bill “does not reflect the values we proudly uphold.”

Both governors promptly got, ahem, religion. Hutchinson sent the measure back to legislators for revision. Pence signed a measure to “fix” a law whose glories he had spent so much time touting.

And here, a little context might be instructive. Twenty years ago, you recall, we were essentially arguing over the right of gay people to exist. The debate then was over whether they could serve in the military, adopt children, be fired or denied housing because of their sexuality, Ten years ago, public opinion on most of those issues having swung decisively, we were fighting over whether or not they could get married. Ten years later, that point pretty much conceded, we are arguing over who should bake the cake.

The very parameters of the debate have shifted dramatically to the dreaded left. Positions the GOP took proudly just 20 years ago now seem prehistoric and its motivations for doing so, threadbare. This is not about morality, the constitution or faith. It never was.

No, this is about using the law to validate the primal sense of “ick” that still afflicts some heterosexuals at the thought of boys who like boys and girls who like girls. And the solution to their problem is three words long: Get over it.

Or, get left behind. Consider again what happened last week: Put aside NASCAR, the NBA and Angie’s List: Walmart is, for better and for worse, the very embodiment of Middle-American values. To rephrase what Lyndon Johnson said of Walter Cronkite under vastly different circumstances, if you have lost Walmart, you have lost the country.

On gay rights, conservatives just lost Wal-Mart.

The adults on the right (there are some) understand that they are out of step with the mainstream, which is why they’d just as soon call a truce in the so-called “culture wars.” The fanatical, id-driven children on the right (there are far too many) would rather drive the GOP off a cliff than concede. Somebody needs to sit them down and explain that when you have taken an execrable stand and been repudiated for it as decisively as the right has been, you only have two options: Change your stand, or shut your mouth.

At this point, either one will do.

(Leonard Pitts is a columnist for The Miami Herald, 1 Herald Plaza, Miami, FL, 33132. Readers may contact him via email at lpitts@miamiherald.com.)

Photo: The Searcher via Flickr

Culture Wars, Old And New

Culture Wars, Old And New

WASHINGTON — The old culture-war politics is dying but new culture wars are gathering force. The transformation of the battlefield will change our public life.

The idea of a “culture war” was popularized by Pat Buchanan in his joyfully incendiary 1992 Republican National Convention speech, but it was introduced into the public argument a year earlier by James Davison Hunter, a thoughtful University of Virginia sociologist.

In his 1991 book Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America, Hunter described a raging battle between the orthodox, committed to “an external, definable and transcendent authority,” and progressives, who could be “defined by the spirit of the modern age, a spirit of rationalism and subjectivism.”

It was a fight, in other words, between those whose deepest commitments were to God and the sacred, and those who believed that human beings evolved their own value systems through a process of steady enlightenment. The first group feared we were moving away from commitments that made us decent and human. The second welcomed more open attitudes on questions ranging from sexuality to racial equality to women’s rights.

This culture war created the religious right and also a backlash among more secular Americans — who happen to be one of the fastest growing groups in the country. Their skirmishes focused especially on the legality of abortion, society’s view of homosexuality and, more generally, the public role of religion.

That this culture war is receding is most obvious in our rapidly changing responses to gays and lesbians. The turnaround in public opinion on gay marriage is breathtaking. According to the Pew Research Center, only 27 percent of Americans favored gay marriage in 1996; by 2014, that proportion had doubled, to 54 percent.

Not for nothing did President Obama declare in his State of the Union address last week: “I’ve seen something like gay marriage go from a wedge issue used to drive us apart to a story of freedom across our country.”

Abortion is a different matter because public opinion on the question has been quite stable. Over recent decades, Americans have generally supported abortion rights by margins of between 5-4 and 3-2. And many hold somewhat ambivalent views, resisting black-and-white certainty. Rachel Laser, a close student of the issue, has called these middle-grounders the “Abortion Grays.”

But the politics of abortion have become more complicated for its opponents. This was evidenced by the decision of House Republicans to pull a bill to ban abortion after 20 weeks because the exception for rape victims — it required them to report the crime to the police — was seen as far too onerous. A group of House Republican women forced the bill off the floor.

Notice, however, that House Republicans were able to pass without much difficulty a remarkably restrictive bill that would overturn Obama’s executive actions on immigration. It was aimed not only at his measures to keep families together but also at a highly popular provision for the “DREAMers” brought to the United States as children.

This is the new culture war. It is about national identity rather than religion and “transcendent authority.” It focuses on which groups the United States will formally admit to residence and citizenship. It asks the same question as the old culture war: “Who are we?” But the earlier query was primarily about how we define ourselves morally. The new question is about how we define ourselves ethnically, racially and linguistically. It is, in truth, one of the oldest questions in our history, going back to our earliest immigration battles of the 1840s and 1850s.

The other issue gaining resonance is often cast as economic, but it is really about values and virtues: Why is the hard work of the many, those who labor primarily for wages and salaries, rewarded with increasingly less generosity than the activities of those who make money from investments and capital?

Politically, this could be explosive. What is at heart a moral battle could rip apart old coalitions, since many working-class and middle-class social conservatives are angry about our shifting structures of reward. If issues such as abortion and gay rights split the New Deal coalition, this emerging issue could divide the conservative coalition. The rise of Pope Francis could hasten the scrambling of the moral debate, since he links his opposition to abortion with powerful calls for economic justice and compassion toward immigrants.

Politicians, like generals, often fight the old wars. (So, by the way, do columnists.) Recognizing how the theater of combat is changing is the first step toward mastering it.

E.J. Dionne’s email address is ejdionne@washpost.com. Twitter: @EJDionne.

Photo: Speaker Boehner via Flickr