The Culture Wars Are Over—And They Aren’t Coming Back

http://inthesetimes.com/article/18022/culture_wars_andrew_hartman

When we think about neoconservatives, we think about the most recent iteration of the neo-cons, which supposedly had all this influence in the Bush administration and whose ideological impulse was to reshape the world, especially the Middle East, in our image. But the neoconservatives in their origins were people like Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Nathan Glazer, who were at various times in their life on the Left. But by the 1960s, most of them were Cold War liberals. And they moved to the Right in reaction to the New Left—in reaction to cultural and domestic policy issues like welfare, crime, affirmative action.

During the ‘60s and ‘70s, they did not write much about foreign policy, and when they did, it was pretty standard Cold War stuff—they were intensely concerned with Soviet power, only tangentially worried about Israel. And even when they did voice concerns about Israel, like during the wars of 1967 and 1973, it was often through a domestic lens. For example, neoconservatives fretted that black American activists like Stokely Carmichael sided with Palestinians out of anticolonial solidarity—an alignment that they saw as consistent with a growing black-Jewish rift over domestic issues like affirmative action. This is not necessarily the way we now think about neoconservatives.

So my argument is that the neoconservatives, more than even the Christian Right, gave Conservatives the language of the culture wars—especially over the major issues of race and gender.

Take a figure like Irving Kristol—a secular Jew, never very religious. But he came to the conclusion that Americans needed Christian values in the middle of the 1970s when the America he understood seemed to be crumbling around him. He came to this conclusion on this bedrock of republican notions that democracy only worked if people were subjected to checks. For him, the best kind of checks were those of culture, like the constraints of Christianity.


You argue, pretty provocatively, in your conclusion that the culture wars are largely over.

To me, the logic of the cultural wars seems largely exhausted. The Christian right in many ways is kind of a lost cause. You have an increasing number of conservative religious figures who are arguing the need to withdraw from public culture and create their own autonomous cultural zones, where they can prepare for when the U.S. is once again ready for its ideals.

Many conservative Christians, for example, still believe that homosexuality is not only an abomination in the eyes of God but also a threat to national values. But they are less likely to make that argument publicly and politically; instead their main tactic is “religious freedom.” To me, this is a recognition that they are losing the national battle, and they're trying to create smaller zones in which they can discriminate in the name of religious freedom.