Culture wars in America

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Culture wars in America

Introduction

According to Chapman, “culture wars” is a term referred to a social and political polarization - that is confrontation of ideas and values - in American society that has taken place from the end of World War II to the present. Battleship of this culture war was intellectual society and this war was expressed “within a democratic framework, involving public debate, election campaigns, legislative politics, lobbying, legal proceedings and court cases, agenda setting by interest groups and think tanks, religious movements, protests and demonstrations, media events, partisan media commentary, politicized popular culture, and academic discourse”(2010: 27).

Chapman provides us with the origin of the term “culture wars” which is European, specifically the German Reich's Kulturkampf (literally, “culture struggle”) of the 1870s. Chapman writes that “the Kulturkampf was a political and ideological confrontation between Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, a modernist reformer, and the Roman Catholic Church. As Bismarck sought to unite his newly formed empire, comprised primarily of Protestants, he saw the Catholic Church as hindering his political aims. Indeed, the Kulturkampf was precipitated by the formation of a Catholic political party called the Center” (2010: 27). With the cooperation of the national legislature, Bismarck was attempting to decrease the social influence of the Catholic Church by “placing parochial schools under state control, expelling the Jesuits, forbidding clerics from expressing political views from the pulpit, and mandating civil marriage ceremonies” (2010: 27).

These repressive efforts at bringing about cultural unity ultimately failed, however, as they caused strong conservative and popular opposition. Finally, after the death of Pope Pius IX in 1878, Bismarck ended his Kulturkampf and enlisted the Center Party to help him oppose the growing danger of socialism.

In America “by the late 1980s, some in the United States were relating the political and cultural divisiveness of their society to what had occurred in Bismarck's Germany” so the tensions in American society during the 1980s were labeled as “culture wars” (2010: 27).

Chapman states the one defining feature of the culture wars that is a labeling and classification of issues that suggests a moralistic either/or sensibility. In most cases, issues and players in the culture wars are presented as pairs of polar opposites and irreconcilable differences. Consequently, the battles are characterized as” liberals versus conservatives, red states versus blue states, the left versus the right, theists versus secularists, fundamentalists and evangelicals versus religious progressives, radicals versus moderates, constrained versus unconstrained, relativism versus absolute truth, traditionalists versus modernists, secular-progressives versus traditionalists, urban versus rural, suburban versus urban, metro versus retro, the masses versus the elitists, libertarian individualists versus liberal collectivists, “strict father morality” versus “nurturant parent morality,” textual theists versus nontextual theists, modern values versus Victorian virtues, morality versus permissiveness, loose constructionists versus strict constructionists, postmodernism versus objective reality, patriarchy versus women's liberation, prochoice versus prolife, neoconservatives versus isolationists, multiculturalists versus universalists, the nuclear family versus the extended family”(2010: 27), and so on.

However, Chapman states that while such framing serves as convenient shorthand it tends to oversimplify issues and in reality a majority of Americans position themselves somewhere in the middle of the political spectrum. However, one could claim that such thing as cultural war has a long history in American history so we should observe historical background of this phenomenon.

1. Historical roots of Culture wars

Chapman notes that numerous events preceded the onset of the culture wars and cultural conflict in America has a long history. Anyhow Chapman considers the starting point for cultural wars the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal of the 1930s. That's why we will start our observance with this period.

According to Julia L. Foulkes the 1930s began with examinations of the era just passed (2008: 214).

Commercial culture emerged as an element in the late nineteenth-century maturation of modernity which, according to Charles F. McGovern, starts with the second industrial revolution of the late nineteenth century (Giddens 1990). Mass production, new technologies, and urbanization produced by the industrial capitalism provided the modern city with the infrastructure and the thousands of goods of its economy; spread waves of migration as people left villages and towns for new urban lives and jobs; in those cities these people encountered unprecedented circulation and association of people and things (Simmel 1990 [1907]). Most critical were the successful deployment of technologies of production and distribution. Antonio Gramsci dubbed the American system “Fordism” after its most visible and famous innovator, consumer culture and mass culture automobile manufacturer Henry Ford (Gramsci 1971). Fordism involved highly specialized, repetitive tasks performed on assembly lines by a largely unskilled labor force according to rigid standards without variance or individual freedom. So in general capitalism generated, in Singer's description, “[A] social order, and frame of mind, shaped by an economic life based on universal competition, a money economy, contractual relations, wage labor, the commodification of goods and services and a profit-motivated system of exchange among totally independent and self-interested parties” (Singer 2003: 33). And as McGovern postulates the new consumer culture in the USA was a production of modernity. “Americans created a mass consumer culture only with widespread access to such goods” (2008: 187). And between 1880 and 1930 powerful new institutions and methods of mass distribution and communication provided by capitalism brought an expanding array of goods to all corners of the nation.

But, as Julia L. Foulkes states, although not as drastic as it has become in memory, the stock market crash did accelerate changes and a number of books published between 1929 and 1931 focused on the social and cultural changes that underlay the more dramatic economic and political ones. The dramatic economic ups and downs of the 1930s and 1940s marked the era.(2008: 214) “The struggles of the poor and the working classes, the appeal of socialism and communism, and the continued striving to become part of the middle class in the face of even greater obstacles dominated cultural activities” (2008: 251).

Author writes that books such as “Recent Economic Changes in the United States” (1929), “Recent Social Trends in the United States” (1933), Lynd & Lynd's “Middletown: A Study in American Culture” (1929), and the more colloquial “Only Yesterday” (1931) by Allen surveyed contemporary American society with the aim of understanding the daily lives of “average” Americans in all their habits. They also “reveal a society attuned to changes in the roles of men, women, immigrants, and African Americans; the relationship between government and its citizens; the increasingly visible economic and social importance of consumption; and the role of culture in shaping behavior and values” (2008: 214). During this era new ideologies and ideas got their development.

At the beginning of the era, due to Depression and changes in the life that it caused communism began to grow its strength. As Foulkes writes the John Reed Clubs, begun in 1929 by the Communist Party in the USA (CPUSA), captured the idealism and commitment to broad social change that had motivated John Reed in his short life to travel around the world and immerse himself in the Mexican and Russian revolutions. The clubs became attractive for young artists and intellectuals, “providing a platform for young writers such as Richard Wright and an audience for more established writers such as Kenneth Burke” (2008: 215). Many intellectuals and artists concerned with these ideas spent part of the 1920s in exile in Europe and returned to the USA in the late 1920s and early 1930s were inspired with the possibilities of revolution.

Another popular term of the era, “The American Way”, had as its main goal and purpose in finding and defining what made the United States unique. Although not new, but according to Foulkes, this quest gained momentum with the proliferation of anthropology, which upheld the idea that different societies had distinct habits and values that made up a particular worldview. Two bestselling works - “Patterns of Culture” (1934) by Ruth Benedict and “American Humor” (1931) by Constance Rourke - exemplified this urge to explain the country to itself. Comparative work on the Americas reinforced the effort to define America to itself. Stuart Chase's “Mexico: A Study of Two America”s (1931) depicted the northern part of the Americas as dominated by technology, in contrast to the thriving folk traditions of the southern part of the hemisphere (2008: 218).

The development of the ideas in America during that era was not caused only by great changes of life but also because the Americana impulse of the era received “a significant boost from the federal government, particularly with the passage, in 1935, of the Works Progress Administration, which involved a $4.8 million appropriation for federal arts programs in Art, Music, Writers, and Theatre” (2008: 220). Like many of the programs of the New Deal, the WPA was immediately pressured to build up its bureaucracy, hire people off the relief rolls to provide a weekly paycheck, and produce results within a few months.

In common, during this 1930s and 1940s era public attention was directed mostly to class and poverty however while the development of a larger welfare system may be the most longlasting political achievement of the New Deal, the focus on inequalities also opened up debates about who did and did not participate fully in the possibilities of the USA. “Women, African Americans, gay men and lesbians, Jews, Latino/as, Asians, political radicals and conservatives: whose America was it?” (2008: 224) This question was revived again after the World War II in 1950s and 1960s.

According to D. Belgrad, the rise to prominence of the “white ethnics” - particularly Irish and Italian Catholics, and Jews - was a defining feature of postwar American culture, as those descendants of nineteenth-century immigrant groups challenged the historical ascendancy of the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) elite (2008: 234). As example Belgrad uses Will Herberg's published in 1955 “Protestant-Catholic-Jew”, in which he described “mid-century America as a “triple melting pot” where ethnic distinctions among those of European origin were discarded in favor of these equally liberal and equally American religious categories” (2008 234). As Belgrad believes, in retrospect, Herberg's work reads as wishful thinking on the part of an assimilated Jew: in fact, the mutual acceptance of WASPs and white ethnics was only skin-deep, and old prejudices surfaced regularly in politics and literature, universities and country clubs. Another example that Belgrad proveds us with are the bestselling novels about World War II - including Norman Mailer's “The Naked and the Dead” (1947), James Jones's “From Here to Eternity” (1951), and Harriette Arnow's “The Dollmaker” (1954) - which portrayed both the battlefield and the home front as sites of internecine ethnic rivalries. “An ethnic dimension also colored the fight between the federal government and organized crime, which pitted the FBI's all- American “G-men” against the “un-Americanism” of crime syndicates and local political machines associated in the public imagination - and often in fact - with Irish, Italian, and Jewish ethnic groups” (2008: 234). White-ethnic rivalries were also played out through anti-communism: for if organized crime was the skeleton in the closet of Catholic politics, past communist affiliations were the albatross of the Jews (Bloom 1986).

Sometimes intersecting with this cultural power struggle among WASPs and white ethnics was one between “highbrows” and “middlebrows” (2008: 235). “While the general affluence of the postwar period obscured class divisions, the proliferation of mass culture that accompanied it prompted a reinscription of social distinctions in cultural terms, as a cultural elite defended its “higher” tastes, whether modern or genteel, against the onslaught of the new mass culture” (2008: 235).

The cultural impact of the black Civil Rights movement during this era was extremely far-reaching, because it served as a model for other political identity movements including the Chicano movement, the American Indian movement, feminism, and gay rights. As V. Gosse in his book “Rethinking the new left” published in 2005 states these series of social movements surged across America, radically changing the relationship between white people and people of color, how the U.S. government conducts foreign policy, and the popular consensus regarding gender and sexuality. He claims that together these movements redefined the meaning of democracy in America and a commitment to a radical form of democracy, and “power to the people,” is what linked them together. He believes that all these movements constituted a New Left, a “movement of movements” that was considerably greater than the sum of its parts. In the 1970s, however, New Left movement came to its last phase. According to Gosse, after 1970, it included a slow-motion revolution within higher education. “Much of the New Left had grown out of the colleges and universities, and many activists now returned as graduate students and assistant professors determined to institutionalize a new radical scholarship, training young people to be critical thinkers rather than quiescent white-collar workers” (2005: 190). Gosse considered, however, that this project to take over the academy was notably successful. Whole sectors of the humanities and social sciences were radically reformed from inside, as scholars with left-wing backgrounds achieved commanding positions.

So as we can see the cultural wars were logical consequence of cultural conflicts and revolts of previous decades. And now we are going to discuss what culture wars represent in the present.

2. Culture wars in contemporary world

culture war american political

Chapman offers two opinions on culture wars presented by two authors.

The first one is sociology professor James Davison Hunter from the University of Virginia who wrote the following publication of “Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America” (1991), a book which major topic of debate became culture wars. According to Hunter, a division developed between the holdovers of the old culture, comprising conservative Judeo-Christian values, and those who approach the challenges of the day from a more contextual, “spirit of the time” perspective. In the context of historical religious communities, members are divided between the orthodox and progressives -- a situation in which denominational doctrine and religious rituals are no longer glue that binds (2010: 29). While acknowledging that political elites are the ones who have been orchestrating the culture wars, Hunter maintains that the general public is nonetheless caught up in the struggle, which he calls “a war of moral visions.” Even though “most Americans occupy a vast middle ground between the polarizing impulses of American culture,” he insists that they, too, are participants in the culture wars because each individual has an “impulse” to lean toward either the orthodox or the progressive (2010: 29).

Continuing his thesis, Hunter argues that America's cultural cleavage is ultimately about “how we are to order our lives together” (2010: 29). In other words, as reflected in the subtitle of his book, the crux of the conflict is about the future of the nation. In his broad outline of the culture wars, Hunter identifies five “fronts” on which the future will be played out: the family, education, the media, law, and politics (2010: 29).

Another perspective on cultural war presented by Chapman is the one of Patrick Buchanan, a Roman Catholic political conservative and media commentator, is credited with popularizing the concept of the culture wars (2010: 29). On August 17, 1992, at the Republican National Convention in Houston, Texas, Buchanan gave an address in which he famously (or infamously) declared, “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” (2010: 29). Buchanan touched on the major culture wars issues of the day: abortion, feminism, school choice, homosexual marriage, environmentalism, women in combat, school prayer, pornography, and federal judges “who think they have a mandate to rewrite our Constitution” (2010: 30). Buchanan characterized Democrats, who had held their convention the previous month, as “radicals and liberals” who deceitfully disguised themselves before voters as “moderates and centrists” (2010: 30). After referring to “the failed liberalism of the 1960s and '70s”, including the “days of malaise” under President Jimmy Carter, Buchanan spoke glowingly of President Ronald Reagan and the revival of the economy and collapse of the Soviet Union under Republican leadership. The clear implication was that if Republicans were able to win the Cold War, they would also be able to win the culture wars as well (2010: 30).

But, as Chapman concludes, despite the considerable media attention focused on the culture wars since Buchanan's speech; many scholars have dismissed the culture wars as a myth. The argument supporting this opinion is that the majority of Americans are not so deeply divided. Chapman notes that what some of Hunter's critics have argued is what he himself has said all along: most Americans are political moderates. Even so, just as a nation can be at war while a majority of its citizens remain civilians, so the culture wars can be waged by a few partisan actors who control organizations and institutions that are capable of rallying a diehard base of supporters. The fact remains that there are political actors, orthodox as well as progressive, who perceive an ongoing culture war and act accordingly (2010: 31).

However, D. McKnight believes that culture wars are still significant in contemporary politics. He refers to modern role of culture war in policies as following: “In the short term, the culture war is about shaping and mobilizing certain values in the community in order to win elections. In particular, it is about dividing your opponents on the basis of issues about values” (2005: 136). But he also states that the culture war is also about giving the Liberal government a moral legitimacy. He believes that it's true that governments sometimes get public respect when they are perceived to be doing what's right, rather than what's advantageous. What causes a new hunger for what is called “conviction politics” (2005: 137). To prove his statements McKnight provides examples on Australian policies when one of the most ideological members in the Australian government, Tony Abbott, attacked the “chattering classes” and the “politically correct establishment” at a conference of Young Liberals. To most of its critics, “the Howard government is not just mistaken but morally illegitimate” he said (2005: 137). He responded that “moral courage is doing what's right when people who should know better declare you're wrong” (2005: 137). He maintained that the Howard government had demonstrated such courage on tax reform, East Timor, work for the dole, stopping refugee boats and joining the war on Iraq.

But this situation, McKnight considers, marks a change in the way governments and oppositions conduct political discourse. He states that it is rare for politicians to openly debate their success in terms of morality. “Most politicians conceive of government in terms of the material benefits, resources and policies it produces, rather than the shaping of culture and values” (2005: 137).

Conclusion

Culture wars have a long history in America and we can say that it is not only cultural phenomenon but it also has a great impact on politics and social life. But even though culture wars are still actual in politics and cause many disputes in academic circles, however, many of these disputes nowadays concern questions of how much this phenomenon is relevant if the majority of American population is not involved in these “wars”, being politically moderate. But as we know the term of “culture war” has European origins so should we study this phenomenon only within American boundaries or may be culture wars have already gone beyond them?

References

1. Chapman, R. (ed.) Culture wars: an encyclopedia of issues, viewpoints, and voices. New York: M.E. Sharpe, Inc., 2010.

2. Buchanan, P.J. The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization. New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2002.

3. Hunter, J.D. Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America. New York: Basic Books, 1991

4. Halttunen, K. (ed.) A companion to American Cultural history. USA: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2008.

5. Giddens, A. The Consequences of Modernity.Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990.

6. Gramsci, A. Hoare, Q. & Smith, G.N. (ed.) Selections from the Prison Notebooks. New York: International Publishers, 1971.

7. Singer, B. Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its Contexts. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003.

8. Gosse, V. Rethinking the New Left: an interpretative history. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005.

9. McKnight, D. Beyond right and left: new politics and the culture war. Australia: Allen & Unwin, 2005.

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