Culture Wars Guide, Meaning , Facts, Information and Description
The term Culture Wars has been used to describe ideologically-driven and often strident confrontations typical of American public culture and politics since the 1980s.The expression gained wide use with the publication in 1991 of Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America by James Davison Hunter. In that book, he described the dramatic polarized re-alignment that had transformed American politics. The observation is that on an increasing number of "hot-button" defining issues — abortion, gun control, separation of church and state, privacy, homosexuality, censorship — there are two definable polarities in American culture. These are not defined by their nominal religion or even by their political affiliation, but rather by an ideological world view. Hunter characterised this polarity as stemming from the impulses toward Progressivism and toward Orthodoxy.
During the same period, paleoconservative commentator Patrick J. Buchanan mounted a campaign for the Republican nomination for President of the United States against incumbent George H. Bush in 1992, mostly based on Bush's decision to raise taxes after the latter's famous pledge, "Read my lips, no new taxes". After doing surprisingly well in the first Primary in New Hampshire, drawing 37% of the vote, his campaign faded. However, he received a consolation prize, the keynote speech at the 1992 Republican National Convention. The speech played well amongst the hard-line Republicans, but some consider that its effect may have cost the party swing votes and alienated moderates. That is, it was adjudged to have been polarizing. Buchanan 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." Buchanan's campaign is credited to some extent with allowing Independent Ross Perot to emerge as a major figure in politics; Perot received 19% of the vote that year.
The term Culture Wars was adopted by William Strauss and Neil Howe in Fourth Turning (1996), to describe the historical period from 1984 to approximately 2005. The preceding era they termed the Consciousness Revolution; the succeeding era in Strauss and Howe's system is the predicted upcoming Crisis of 2020.
In the Culture Wars, public morality was a defining issue.
The period opened with triumphant "Morning in America" individualism and drifted toward pessimism as time wore on. Personal confidence remained high and in the 1990s few national problems demanded immediate action. But, the public reflected darkly on growing violence and incivility, widening inequality, pervasive distrust of institutions and leaders, and a debased popular culture. People began fearing that the national consensus was splitting into competing "values" camps.
Though society had been turning away from tradition and the transcendent for centuries, technology had by this time enabled the decoupling of many biological functions from their respective social functions — sex from its social function of producing the next generation, etc.
The Boom Generation, who had control of the culture at the beginning of the era, came under attack from their next juniors, Generation X, who had a distinctive anti-Boom crossculture. These two generations are like oil and water: the early generation was defined by their neo-hedonism, while their disillusioned children, having lived through the rise of the AIDS epidemic and their own parents' broken marriages, craved restored boundaries on behavior and a return to traditional morality.
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: feminism, homosexuality as a topic in the humanities, postmodernism being some of those attracting attention in the arts faculties. Cruder debates in more emotive terms were expected on the curriculum, popular culture, supposed enforcement of political correctness, affirmative action as it applies to admissions, and allegations that teaching was too centred on DWEMs and WASP interpretations. The campus culture wars reflect a change in the demographics of the student population, as well as social change in society at large. Public intellectuals have sometimes been content to blur the distinction between 'culture war' in this sense, and in national politics.
Some argue that the destruction of the World Trade Center produced only a temporary sobering reaction from the American populace. If the Culture Wars era had ended then, the national mood would have been akin to the mood at the time of the start of the Great Depression. The American military took over Afghanistan and Iraq, but that has not had the same feeling among the populace as, say, VE Day.
Other critics dispute this. Instead of comparing September 11 to the end of the Second World War, they see it as similar to the beginning. Many argue that the 9/11 Attacks were "a new Pearl Harbor" that heralded the beginning of a culture shift. Some right-wing and left-wing intellectuals see a post-9/11 United States as being more assertive, more militaristic, more unilateral, and more patriotic. This perceived change has been both applauded and criticized.
Text of Culture Wars speech via Wikisource This is an Article on Culture Wars. Page Contains Information, Facts Details or Explanation Guide About Culture Wars Suggested causes of the split
The various camps
Age location in history
Campus culture wars
Did the September 11 Terrorist Attacks herald the end of the Culture Wars era?
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