Again, this is true so far as it goes, but the notion that the culture wars are more about national identity now than in the 80s and 90s is plain wrong. The culture wars of the 80s and 90s were over nothing if not over what it means to be an American. Dionne’s problem, in part, is that he is too reliant upon Hunter, who focused too much on religion in his explanation of the culture wars. Religion was crucial, of course. But religion gets overstated, as I make clear in my book, where I argue that secular neoconservatives play an even larger role than the Christian Right in setting the parameters of the culture wars. It was the neoconservatives who taught the rest of conservative America how to fear and loathe the sixties.

Moreover, for many religious conservatives, particularly white evangelicals, religion expressed a larger national identity. Christianity was crucial to a normative framework of Americanism. One of the primary aspirations of the Christian Right was to re-establish, in the words of philosopher Charles Taylor, an “understanding that used to define the nation, where being American would once more have a connection with theism, with being ‘one nation under God,’ or at least with the ethic which was interwoven with this.”

...

Neoconservatives argued that the cultural radicalism of the sixties made for both bad culture and bad economics. The movements of the sixties, in their eyes, were both hostile to traditional American values and dangerously anticapitalist. In this, like Dionne but from a different vantage point, neoconservatives tapped into a powerful American political language that separated those who earn their way from those who do not. During the Populist uprisings of the late nineteenth century, or during the great union drives of the 1930s, a rapacious corporate elite was assigned the role of leeches. Neoconservatives, in reverse, argued that sixties movements enabled a parasitic culture.

More: http://s-usih.org/2015/01/the-culture-wars-are-dead-long-live-the-culture-wars.html

I would argue that the Culture wars never ended, but the battlefield shifted: rather than a debate about a common culture, which was the first wave, the current conflict is about secessionist spaces where cultures can be enacted without interacting with competing visions. Private schools, homeschooling, politically dedicated media outlets, conservapedia….