It seems like the “Culture War” is here to stay. The lines between the religious-traditional conservatives and the secular liberals have hardened and neither side is about to give up. Pro-lifers won’t stop fighting to ban abortion, pro-choicers won’t stop trying to block them. Gays won’t stop agitating for marriage rights, religious conservatives won’t stop trying to block them. Etc. I don’t see how either side can decisively win – they’re too evenly matched in numbers and in zeal. Nor do I see any prospect that the public will simply lose interest in the whole thing. Very good (or very bad) economic times might make cultural issues appear less salient, but even then the culture warriors won’t go away, they will maintain their institutions and their presence in the political parties, and they will revive cultural politics at the earliest opportunity. The only way it’s going to end is through massive demographic changes favoring one side or the other, but that kind of change happens only on a generational time scale.
Are we going to be dealing with this strident cultural divide for the rest of our lives?
[Limbaugh mode]Well, those secular liberals keep aborting their children and using birth control. The problem should take care of itself eventually![/Limbaugh mode]
Alternatively, we could wait for all the old people to die off. Would that help things much?
Time heals all wounds. It also inflicts new ones. Look again in ten generations, and the intractable conflicts of our era will be so firmly settled our descendents will wonder what we were arguing about in the first place. Meanwhile, they’ll be engaged in equally fierce debates about Martian clone rights, or whatever the new issues are in their time.
So, no, the culture war won’t ever end. Conflict is an integral element of human culture. It’s just the battlegrounds that keep changing.
This kind of drama (both political and social) seems to have been around for a very long time. (Looking at the political cartoons in the 19th century newspapers is kinda entertaining.)
Every generation of people living in the US has had to figure out ways to live with (or ignore) their neighbor.
Unfortunately, there is much money to be made keeping the fires stoked. (By politicians, by newspaper or TV moguls, political commentator/authors, and so on.)
Sadly, “live and let live” type thinking is now portrayed as “weak” or “dangerously naive”.
Well, we’ve had such culture wars in the past. Slavery. Votes for women. Populism. Prohibition. The Jewish Question. Anti-communism. Civil rights for non-whites. And often one side or the other won decisively, without “demographic change”. Slavery literally ripped this country apart. Once upon a time segregation was a hot issue, now we have a hard time imaging how anyone could keep a straight face and support government mandated segregation.
I suppose the “culture war” over abortion rights won’t be over unless Roe v. Wade is repealed, then we’ll find out that although most people are pro-life, they don’t really want abortion criminalized. Republicans nowadays can call themselves pro-life and no one cares. No Roe v. Wade and suddenly you’ll find a lot more pro-choice Republicans.
The war over gay rights will be over in a generation, in the same way that the war over civil rights is over nowadays. And we’ll wonder why anyone made such a fuss over it. Of course there will still be holdouts, but they’ll keep their mouths shut in polite company.
Anyway, I have the feeling that the power of the religious right crested about a year ago. They are so shrill because they know deep in their bones that they’re losing. The next couple of elections should prove telling.
No way. I suspect we will see a few more states legalizing SSM, but it will be more than 20 years before we ever see it legalized on a national level. Maybe 50, but not before then.
1 : The religious/conservative factions succeed in dragging us back to the Dark ages, destroying civilization and most of humanity in the process.
2 : Species wide genetic engineering to remove the human tendencies towards religiousity, xenophobia, and authoritarianism. Or, genetically engineering all people for religiousity, xenophobia, and authoritarianism.
3 : Seperatism; the conservatives go off and live in Dark Age enclaves, persecuting each other to their heart’s content and pretending the outside world doesn’t exist, while everybody else takes the rest of the universe. You’d need to have a selection mechanism to keep new people assigned to their proper area, or genetically hardwire their attitudes to maintain this, however.
4 : Everybody dies; either replaced by something we’ve created, or killed in a world war.
Conflict may be a constant, but cultural conflict is not. In the '40s and '50s, there was no culture war, except WRT segregation and civil rights; otherwise, there was an American cultural consensus few challenged loudly or publicly, and politics focused on economic and foreign-policy issues. Drastic challenges to the cultural consensus emerged in the '60s, and conservatives have been reacting to them ever since.
That’s rather like saying Earth has no atmosphere, if you don’t count all that nitrogen and oxygen. There was certainly conflict in that time over the roles of women. Teenagers began to be recognized as a group with some economic power. The newfangled “television” was accused of dumbing down America. “Restricted” hotels and golf courses were commonplace. There were many issues of major contention, I think you’re citing two of the biggest and ignoring the rest.
If anything, the '40s and '50s were when the culture war got started in a big way, what with millions of demobilized veterans taking advantage of the GI Bill to go to college and gaining a better understanding of the world and a willingness to challenge its established values.
But – from what I know of the period’s history – none of those things produced strident conflict that became a subject of political campaigns, or public demonstrations or riots, or organized pressure groups, or any of the other features of “culture war” that we’ve lived with, off and on, since the mid-'60s.
No – those changes were not elements of culture war, they merely prepared the ground for the culture that emerged later.
Conservatives talk a lot about moral values, personal responsibility, and believe things are going to hell because of a lack of belief in absolutes and authority. Liberals could counter this by engaging conservatives in a “put your money where your mouth is” cultural debate. What are moral values we can agree on? Exactly why is there a need for absolutes? What is the proper role for personal responsibility and authority in a large corporatist state?
These and many other questions could be asked from a liberal POV that still assumes government must help people, not just control society. However, liberals (except the odd blogger perhaps) are still mostly unable or unwilling to engage and challenge the basic premises of the conservative culture war, instead of just focusing on sound-bite, hot-button issues.
Is this unclear, naïve, or frivolous? I don’t think so. I’m mad as hell that such a sizable portion of “Hard America” (to use Michael Barone’s term) has their hearts set on bringing about a day where militarism, corporatism, masculinity, and Christianity are all locked together in a mutually defining mindfuck that will be forced down our collective throat to save the country from supposed effeteness, decay and decline.
Well, you’re conveniently defining “culture war” to exclude anything you think doesn’t constitute a culture war. There have been quite serious riots in the U.S. well before the 40s and 50s. Heck, the Suffragettes mixed it up on occasion, plus numerous labour unions, and if that whole “prohibition” thing (it was in all the papers) isn’t a cultural conflict, I’m not sure what is.
Americans are a fairly contentious lot and there was never a time when all of them were content. In relatively recent decades, a combination of more middle-class people going to college (which I reiterate started in a big way with the G.I. Bill) and a huge increase in an individual’s access to electronic media has made the culture war seem more intense, but it’s not a new creation.
It was a different time in certain important respects. There was a sense - at least among moderates - that we really were one country, all pulling on the same oar. WW2 had taught us to ignore, although not quite respect, our differences.
Couple that with the growing Cold War animosity against anyone who took unusual political stands, and I imagine a hot culture war in the 50s was pretty unlikely - although the cold culture war was raging, fierce and mostly one-sided.
Wait…are you saying there weren’t public demonstrations, riots, or organized pressure groups during the civil rights era? Then what were all those firehoses and police dogs about?
How about Communism, anti-Communism, and anti-anti-Communism? The blacklists, the Hollywood ten?
Or how about the 30s? Hoovervilles, bonus marchers, wobblies, labor riots, the spectre of fascism?
And before that the Progressive Era…votes for women, temperance, free coinage of silver, stuff like that.
And then we go back to the Granddaddy of the culture wars. Slavery, abolition, the Civil War, reconstruction.
I think part of the problem is that people take the 1950s as a “normal” era for America, and everything afterwards some sort of abberation. But I contend that the 50s were noteworthy because they were an UNUSUAL period of consensus and exhaustion. We had gone through the Great Depression and WWII, and the economy was going through the roof. And all the political movements and ideologies of the 30s just collapsed under the weight of the success of the American status quo. After starving through the 30s and fighting through the 40s, the average guy came home to an America of high-wage jobs, social and geographic mobility, home ownership, cars for everyone, labor saving devices and on and on. Small wonder that they considered the political wranglings of the 30s and 40s to be settled. All that was in the past, and Truth, Justice and the American Way had triumphed. And when those whining kids came along complaing about “conformity”, well, that stultifying middle class life looked damn good after fighting the goddam Japs across the Pacific for 4 years. Kids today, they don’t know how good they have it! And that horrible “music”!
Well, when the current generation of old people dies off, the common rooms of retirement homes all over the Sunbelt will be filled with pot smoke and Hendrix music!
No, cultural conflict is a constant throughout all human cultures, in all time periods. And the fifties in this nation were no exception. This was a decade that saw the KKK at the height of its power, the HUAC hearings, the Beat movement, the Korean war, plus the seeds of most of the debates that are currently in full flower, as well as a few that we’ve only recently settled: women’s rights, gay rights, abortion rights. All of these issues were in play in the fifties, although they were largely overshadowed by civil rights, which had been the single biggest cultural divide in this nation for over a century. No cultural conflict in the fifties? To the contrary, today’s political climate is down-right prosaic by comparison.
