Reevaluating The Culture Wars - American Affairs Journal

5/2/2019 Reevaluating the Culture Wars - American Affairs Journal
November 20, 2017
Reevaluating
the Culture
Wars
by Timothy Crimmins
https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2017/11/reevaluating-culture-wars/ 1/42
REVIEW ESSAY
A War for the Soul of America:

A History of the Culture Wars
by Andrew Hartman
University of Chicago Press, 2015, 384 pages, $30
I
n America, “culture war” is a term of surprisingly recent
origin. It dates from the early 1990s, and the conflict it
signified was declared over almost as soon as it was named.
“In his convention speech, Pat Buchanan referred to the
‘culture wars,’” Irving Kristol wrote in 1992, “I regret to inform
him that those wars are over, and the Left has won.” Despite
occasional conservative successes, the Left “completely
dominates the educational establishment, the entertainment

industry, the universities, [and] the media.” Reminiscing about his
notorious Republican convention speech twenty-five years later,
Buchanan admitted Kristol had been right.
Even so, the conflict over sex, gender, curricula, and religious
expression dragged on into the 2000s, lending a certain
coherence to American politics. James Davison Hunter’s Culture
Wars (Basic Books, 1991)—a blend of sociological analysis and
frontline reportage that popularized the term—noted that
sectarian hostilities between Catholics, Protestants, and Jews had
been replaced by orthodox and progressive cleavages cutting
across the major religions. For more than a decade, Hunter’s
analysis served as a reliable guide to the cultural terrain.
This decade, however, social critics have largely caught up with

Kristol. The legalization of same-sex marriage, especially, struck
what seemed a note of finality. New York Times reporter
Jonathan Martin wrote that historians could remember 2015 as
the year “when deeply divisive and consuming questions of race
[and] sexuality . . . were settled in quick succession, and social
tolerance was cemented as a cornerstone of American public
life.” Andrew Hartman’s A War for the Soul of America (2015)
was published two months before Obergefell v. Hodges, but it
partakes of the same spirit. As a historian of the culture wars,
Hartman offers not just an account but an epitaph. “This book
gives the culture wars a history,” he writes, “because
they are history. The logic of the culture wars has been
exhausted. The metaphor has run its course.”
Today, however, these premature judgments have been reversed,

and Hartman’s book unwittingly helps explain why. Alongside
his argument that the culture wars have ended, his major claim is
that the rise of identity politics since the 1960s is an essential
part of the story, equal in significance to the rift between
orthodoxy and progressivism. These arguments cut against each
other. Religious conflict has subsided dramatically, but identity
politics remains potent, throwing off more cultural sparks than it
did a decade ago. As the country becomes more diverse, less
religious, and more aware of the economic valences of group
identity, cultural conflict has increased, with expectations of
more strife on the way.
That presents a deeper challenge to the culture war’s supposed

victors than at first may appear. It is trouble enough that history
has disobeyed the Left yet again. Worse still, the fault may not lay
with history at all, and not simply with a resurgent Right, but to a
large extent with the Left and the party politics of the
Democrats. The disagreements dominating the Left today over
what counts as good and true cultural change, and who gets to
decide, undermine the whole idea of a coherent, uniform shift in
American culture. With the goalposts in flux, liberals and
progressives have become deeply unsure of how to assess the
strength of their cultural politics.
Who Started the Culture Wars?
Who caused the culture wars in the first place? A firm consensus
on the question—if it ever existed—has been lacking for over a
decade. Hartman, for instance, set out to debunk the answer put
forth by Thomas Frank in What’s the Matter with Kansas?: How
Conservatives Won the Heart of America (Metropolitan Books,
2004). In one sense, Frank—who doubled down on putting
economic politics above cultural ones in Listen, Liberal: Or,
What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? (Metropolitan
Books, 2016)—has been stuck arguing from the margins. On his
telling in Kansas, culture clashes are “forgettable skirmishes.”
Republican operators stir them up to benefit material interests
running counter to those of their so-called base. Supply-side tax
cuts, deindustrialization, de-unionization—these are the terrible
achievements of our time, and the Left, drawn into the trap of
cultural politics, has surrendered its power to stop them. Frank

believed even Republican voters would themselves resist, absent
the “hallucinatory appeal” of wedge issues like guns and
abortion. He took for granted that working-class Americans were
“getting their fundamental interests wrong.” Frank reintroduced
the Left to the idea of false consciousness, this time as Midwest
populism, not continental philosophy.
George W. Bush’s victory over John Kerry seemed to confirm

Frank’s thesis. The specter of same-sex marriage drew so many
evangelicals to the polls, Americans were told, that it tipped
battlegrounds states like Ohio into Bush’s column. It was what
many on the left—and the right—wanted to hear. “Almost
everybody I encounter in politics is familiar with Frank’s
bestseller,” wrote the columnist Robert Novak. Soon candidate

Barack Obama, the authoritative voice of his party, was recorded
at a San Francisco fundraiser giving a now-infamous variation on
the Frank thesis. “You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania
and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been
gone now for twenty-five years and nothing’s replaced them,” he
said. “And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to
guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them
. . . as a way to explain their frustrations.”
Political scientists were less impressed than the future president.

A year after Kansas, Larry Bartels argued that white voters in the
bottom third of the income distribution “have actually become
more reliably Democratic in presidential elections over the past
half-century.” In fact, what pundits and historians

condescendingly refer to as “symbolic” cultural issues become
increasingly important to voters the more money they have.
Andrew Gelman showed that Kansans had consistently voted 10
percent more Republican than the national average for a very
long time, making Frank’s false-consciousness theory what the
experts call “overdetermined”—unnecessary to explain the
phenomenon. Even if economic issues were important, cultural
ones were too, and not simply because they were “roundabout”
expressions of class-based anger.
Hartman’s critique of Frank is different—qualitative, not

quantitative. He takes a long view of the culture wars, seeing
them as repercussions of “the sixties,” that mythologized time of
troubles which came late in that decade and stretched into the
next. Contra Frank, events like the 1965 Moynihan Report, the
fight over the ERA, and even Dan Quayle’s attack on Murphy
Brown are not exactly “forgettable.” Beyond that, however, they
draw our attention to something more than the sum of their
parts: a deep and protracted public argument about how much of
our traditional culture ought to be retained and honored.
Hartman describes that culture, or really a version of it, as

“normative America,” meaning “an inchoate group of
assumptions and aspirations shared by millions of Americans
during the postwar years.” These were bourgeois values like hard
work and personal responsibility, social mobility and delayed
gratification, sexual restraint and defined gender roles. But they
also included “racist, sexist, homophobic, and conservative

religious norms.” The key for Hartman is that social
“normativity” did not give way on its own. While, in Frank’s
telling, the characters with agency are the Right’s market-driven
profit-seekers, who subvert mainstream values because it’s good
business, Hartman subscribes to Corey Robin’s theory of “the
reactionary mind,” which defines conservatism as “a meditation
on—and theoretical rendition of—the felt experience of having
power, seeing it threatened, and trying to win it back.”
Conservatives cannot be prime movers, or leading agents of
change; they can only be counterrevolutionaries, responding to
stimuli. The culture wars, therefore, are not attributable to the
Right but to the Left. Intriguingly, this means Hartman at least
partly agrees with the populist conservative interpretation of the
past fifty years that Frank derides. But where Frank is concerned
with restoring economic liberalism to its pride of place on the
left, Hartman locates political agency with the cultural
radicals—what he calls the “New Left.”
From Culture War to Culture Wars
But is the New Left a discernable entity? Or is it an idea that

attributes agency to a thing that doesn’t exist? The early
historians of the New Left tended to restrict the term (in an
American context) to Students for a Democratic Society (SDS),
the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC),
several kindred groups and journals, and maybe some
prototypical intellectuals like C. Wright Mills and Paul
Goodman. Hartman follows a historiographical trend that

broadens the scope of the New Left beyond white college
students like SDS spokesman Tom Hayden. His usage may be the
broadest of all: the New Left becomes an amorphous zeitgeist
packing in the sexual revolution, all of the “sixties liberation
movements,” and most of the varieties of identity politics to
emerge in the second half of the twentieth century. In fairness,
the temptation is strong to throw all these cultural changes under
a single heading, and an argument could be made in Hartman’s
defense. I am partial, however, to the New Left historians who
reject this baggy-pants approach. “Some sympathetic scholars are
reluctant to acknowledge the limits of the New Left’s political
success,” writes Douglas Rossinow in The Politics of
Authenticity (Columbia University Press, 1998). They give it “as
much credit as possible by conflating the categories of ‘New

Left,’ ‘the movement,’ and ‘the sixties.’” Postwar feminism, for
example, sprang up among mainstream liberals, and its less
important radical strain was more of a backlash against the male-
dominated New Left than an allied movement.
The New Left’s politics shook out into two varieties, one of
procedure and one of solidarity. On the procedural front, its
members believed that bureaucratic organizations had grown so
large that they outstripped the reach of democratic
accountability. The New Left followed the sociologist C. Wright
Mills, who argued in The Power Elite (Oxford University Press,
1956) that the federal government, the military establishment,
and many giant corporations formed an “intricate set of
overlapping cliques,” which were defined not so much by

conspiratorial partnership but by an unprecedented convergence
of interests between them. Academics, of course, often found
themselves lumped right in. The New Left’s solution to corporate
power was “participatory democracy,” where voluntary
associations would connect the public as directly as possible with
those who made decisions. It was an attempt to kill what SDS
president Carl Oglesby called “the colossus of history, our
American corporate system,” with a thousand paper cuts in the
form of endless local meetings.
This was itself a culture war (against “corporate liberalism” rather

than conservative mores), but it was so unsuccessful that
Hartman mostly ignores it. He is more interested in the New
Left’s solidarity with marginalized groups, and in the identity-

based movements that replaced the New Left and managed to
gain footholds in the universities. The story of that
transformation has been told many times, often in tones of
threnodic despair. “What was . . . distinctive about the [SDS’s]
Port Huron Statement (1962), what excited student activists
around the country,” Todd Gitlin wrote, “was its rhetoric of total
transfiguration. In a revival of the Enlightenment language of
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, SDS spoke self-consciously . . . about the
entire human condition.” This appeal to commonality, to
universal humanism, did not survive the end of the decade. The
participatory ethos, with its emphasis on decentralization,
interacted with the politics of racial solidarity in unforeseen
ways. Expectations, moreover, rose faster than conditions could
change. The result, as Gitlin explained in The Twilight of

Common Dreams (Metropolitan Books, 1995), was a bleakly
centrifugal politics:
If society as a whole seemed unbudgeable, perhaps

it was time for specialized subsocieties to rise and
flourish. For this reason . . . the universalist impulse
fractured again and again. In the late 1960s, the
principle of separate organization on behalf of
distinct interests raged through “the movement” with
amazing speed. On the model of black demands
came those of [radical] feminists, Chicanos,
American Indians, gays, lesbians. One grouping after
another insisted on the recognition of difference and
the protection of their separate and distinct spheres.
Gitlin saw this as a tragedy. A New Left based on “universalist

hope” dismembered itself into a post–New Left politics of
“separatist rage.” The retreat to the university, meanwhile, was a
retreat from relevance. The culture wars amounted to the Right
occupying the heights of power as a miscellany of interest groups
identified with the Left marched on the English department.
Twenty years ago, this was a conventional view. While the
Democrats were busy making concessions to the Republicans,
the Left had become sullen, arcane, and merely observant. It had
become Henry Adams with tenure and a ponytail. “Leftists in the
academy have permitted cultural politics to supplant real
politics,” the philosopher Richard Rorty wrote in the mid-
nineties. “They are spending energy which should be directed at

proposing new laws on discussing topics . . . remote from the
country’s needs.”
Hartman’s A War for the Soul of America rejects this distinction

between self-indulgent cultural politics and “real” politics. Its goal
is to recast the culture wars so that they seem important in their
own right. It is not that Hartman has revelations to make about
Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ or, say, the 1986 assault on
Stanford’s “Western Civ” curriculum. His point is that these
episodes now look less like distractions from one grand struggle
and more like harbingers of another. They appear more
significant now that the host of every awards show makes
nervous jokes about the whiteness of the nominees, the CEO of a
major corporation is forced to resign for having a view of

marriage that was nearly universal twenty-five years ago, and even
a liberal lion like Stephen Colbert is attacked within days of his
first show because of the racial makeup of his writing staff.
Hartman is right that elements of the New Left goaded us in this
direction. So did mainstream liberalism. But A War for the Soul
of America does not sufficiently explain the relationship between
the two. In his chapters on feminist politics, race relations, and
higher education, Hartman brings on liberals in supporting roles,
though it is sometimes hard to integrate them with an opening
schema emphasizing the “immeasurably influential” New Left.
(We get one page on the McGovern campaign and brief
assertions that the New Left “reshaped . . . to some extent, the
Democratic Party.”) When Hartman declares that “the sixties
gave birth to a new America,” he is ascribing the maternity above

all to the New Left. However, it is possible to flip the emphasis.
As Louis Menand wrote in 1988,
The ’60s was not a crisis of liberalism. It was in a

sense the epitome of life in the liberal society. . . .
For procedural victories the ’60s is nearly unrivaled
in our history. It produced the series of Supreme
Court cases, beginning with Mapp v. Ohio (1961),
that applied federal due process requirements to the
states via the 14th Amendment; the criminal rights
cases—Escobedo v. Illinois (1963), Gideon v.
Wainright (1963), Miranda v. Arizona (1966); the
Civil Rights Act of 1964, with the sweeping anti-
discrimination provisions of Title IX; the
[Economic] Opportunity Act of 1964, with the
mandate for “maximum feasible participation” in its
Community Action Programs; Reynolds v. Sims

(1964)—one man, one vote; the Voting Rights Act of
1966; the free speech cases Times v. Sullivan (1964)
and Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969); the privacy cases
Griswold v. Connecticutt (1965) and Roe v. Wade
(1973); the Fair Housing Act of 1968.
“These acts and decisions,” Menand continued, “for better or

worse, and more decisively than anything associated with the
New Left or the counterculture, define the society we live in
today.” Almost thirty years later, this remains a compelling
argument. The New Left was not responsible for the enduring
conflict over abortion, to take one especially striking example. In

large part, the culture wars were the public’s sulky adjustment to
a concentrated burst of liberal reforms.
Gravitational Forces
With the role of mainstream liberalism de-emphasized,

Hartman’s history has three major players. If the New Left was
the cultural Big Bang, then the Christian Right and secular
neoconservatives were the gravitational forces checking its
expansion. Hartman labors to be fair, but his politics are
apparent even in the selection of material. While he happily
recounts the fundamentalist opposition to evolutionary biology,
he neglects to inform his readers that there was also a culture war
against Darwinian explanations of human behavior. The storm of

controversy provoked by E. O. Wilson’s Sociobiology led to an
August 1977 cover story in Time. Several months later, a group of
protesters seized the stage as Wilson was about to give a lecture
and dumped a pitcher of ice water on his head. As he noted in
1994, “The ice-water episode may be the only occasion in recent
American history on which a scientist was physically attacked,
however mildly, simply for the expression of an idea.”
Hartman is nevertheless right to distinguish conservative

Christians and neoconservatives, and since the Christian
backlash has received the most attention, he deserves credit for
giving “the neocons”—Irving Kristol, Daniel Patrick Moynihan,
Nathan Glazer, James Q. Wilson, and the rest—the prominence
they deserve. These men were influential well beyond their

numbers. (“To complain that the dominant intellectual voice in
public life today is neoconservative is to register a perfectly
legitimate gripe,” said the New Republic in 1987.)
Neoconservatism became notorious for its hawkish foreign

policy, but it began as a strain of thought among journalists and
social scientists who were preoccupied with domestic issues. It
began, in fact, as an upgraded form of mid-century American
liberalism. In the first half of the twentieth century many
American conservatives, especially those of a pious bent, took a
long view of cultural decay, regarding a spiritual corruption like
nineteenth-century Darwinism as continuous with a secular
corruption like the New Deal state. Hartman rightly notes that
the neoconservatives, in contrast, believed our decline “resulted

from much more recent phenomena.” In the mid-1960s, most of
them were satisfied with the course of liberal civilization—up to
and including its New Deal reforms. It needed defending from
Communists and extending to African Americans. Then three
related domestic developments shook their faith in liberalism and
turned them into heretics: first, the authority of academia was
overthrown on campus; second, the authority of morals was
overthrown in family and sexual life; third, the authority of the
law was overthrown in our major cities, where neoconservatives
were “mugged by reality” in the most literal sense.
Unfortunately, Hartman doesn’t explain why the liberal neocon

reaction against New Left radicalism was so influential and
enduring. If A War for the Soul of America has a refrain, it’s that
the sixties were “liberating to some, frightening to others,” a
phrase that Hartman repeats several times. It encapsulates his
view that the sixties were a mind freak—an exogenous shock to
the traditionalist psyche. He neglects that “progressive” post-
sixties developments caused large groups of people to regress in
ways both material and psychological.
Take the issue of crime. Hartman’s treatment of the post-1965

crime wave is his book’s greatest failure. An uninformed reader
would be left with no indication of the underlying sociological
trends which fueled the culture wars. In one characteristic line,
Hartman writes that crime was an issue “that aligned the

neoconservative imagination with white working-class
sensibilities.” The language here—imagination,
sensibility—relegates crime to the realm of symbolism. In fact,
violent crime soared 367 percent in the twenty years after 1960,
and neoconservatives seized control of the discourse because
they treated the problem with the seriousness it deserved. “It was
the condition of the Upper West Side of Manhattan under liberal
rule,” Adam Gopnik wrote in the New Yorker, “far more than
what had happened to Eastern Europe under socialism, that
made neocon polemics look persuasive.” Chicago made
international headlines in 2012 after reaching the dubious
milestone of 500 homicides. In 1974, the figure was almost
double that—970. The following year, in the midst of the deepest
economic slump since the Great Depression, city residents told

Gallup pollsters that their biggest problem was crime, naming it
more often than unemployment or the high cost of living.
The cultural consequences were manifold, but Hartman is not

interested in exploring them. It is telling that the rise and fall of
violent crime almost perfectly mirrors his chronology of the rise
and fall of the culture wars. Crime was a pervasive menace for a
wide class of city-dwellers in the thirty years after 1960 (to an
extent that it is not for as wide of a class today). Fear of crime
profoundly influenced elections and bled into many areas of
culture—particularly into cinema, where futuristic visions
routinely and mistakenly projected the crime spike as continuing,
exponentially, into the twenty-first century. One of the best
books on mass incarceration after 1980, William Stuntz’s The

Collapse of American Criminal Justice (Belknap, 2011), blames
“an excess” of leniency for the partisan bidding war that led to
putting millions in prison. You cannot shirk the basic task of
government (protecting citizens from violence) without courting
an ugly popular backlash. The damage to liberal credibility
festered for decades afterward.
Hartman’s coverage of the sexual revolution is better but still

seriously inadequate. The pages on Phyllis Schlafly’s campaign
against the Equal Rights Amendment are some of the most vivid
and sophisticated in the book. But again, a clear explanation of
the trends culture warriors were responding to is lacking. The
book does not stress nearly enough the remarkable paradox of
the sexual revolution—the reality that, as Bill Wasik has written,

“of all the mass utopian notions of the twentieth century, the
sexual revolution was both the most spectacularly successful and,
in the end, the most thwarted.” Hartman is more apt to write
with the sweeping finality of a Mr. Sammler. The traditional
family, he says, suffered its “dissolution” in the 1970s, when
family values became “passé.” The fruits of the sexual revolution
were much more ambiguous. New Left propaganda
notwithstanding, as Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam have noted,
“the very women who have benefited most from their newfound
freedoms, the well-off and the well educated,” are also the most
likely to accept “a conservative understanding of what marriage is
and ought to be—a lifelong commitment that predates
childbearing and exists in large part for the benefit of children.”
White women with college degrees have a nonmarital birth ratio

that is not very different from the overall figures of the
Eisenhower era. The sexual revolution had “ramifications” in a
very precise sense: it led to different consequences for different
socioeconomic cohorts. Hartman seems vaguely aware of this,
but he cannot bring himself to analyze it. He writes at one point
that class increasingly determines access to abortion “and a
whole lot more.” Those last five words shy away from an
essential truth about why culture-war arguments keep coming
back.
The neoconservatives, by contrast, were alert to these

developments from the beginning. The neocon urtext is the 1965
Moynihan Report, a Johnson administration paper warning that
increasing rates of out-of-wedlock childbearing among African

Americans would vitiate the promise of the civil rights revolution.
Hartman gives a fair description of the controversy surrounding
this report, although he chides Moynihan for being “cagey” about
the relative importance of cultural and economic factors in
driving up illegitimacy. Hartman’s own inclination is to blame
the negative consequences of the sexual revolution on economic
changes such as deindustrialization. It is a curious bias for
someone trying to reclaim the significance of the culture wars.
(One wonders how Hartman would explain the sturdiness of the
American family during the Great Depression.) But as sociologist
Andrew Cherlin has written, “Neither cultural change nor
economic change would have been sufficient by itself to produce
a group of non-college-educated young adults who now have a
majority of their children outside of marriage.” The truth is that

social science has not progressed beyond the need for
Moynihan’s “caginess,” which is to say his muddled causation.
And that goes double for our cultural historians.
The Soul of American Liberalism
The coda to A War for the Soul of America takes a curious step
back to Thomas Frank, arguing that capitalism, more than the
state, has brought about cultural revolution. As Hartman writes,
“Capitalism sopped up sixties liberation and in the process
helped dig the grave of normative America.” He could have put a
finer point on the historical irony. The thesis that the New Left
kicked off a culture war which is now decisively over ought to
leave liberals decidedly unsettled if, as is the case, a left-wing

guerrilla campaign against “corporate liberalism” ended with
corporations as the most powerful of liberal culture warriors.
The point shines through in Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter’s
illuminating Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became
Consumer Culture (HarperBusiness, 2004). Hartman notes it
only sardonically, at book’s end.
One could write an updated version of Frank’s own The

Conquest of Cool (University of Chicago, 1997), in which
corporations engage in progressive (rather than transgressive)
culture-warring, to distract from widespread discontent with
rising inequality and dwindling opportunities. In the absence of
Hartman’s Normative America, there is money to be made in
Woke Consumerism. As Tara Isabella Burton has noted, the

public has to find some outlet for an “affirmation of values,” and
capitalism increasingly fills the void through “inclusive” yet quasi-
tribal branding and consumption.
Whether or not corporations have effectively ended the culture

wars, Hartman is surely correct that we need a new terminology
to speak adequately of the post-Obergefell era. Descriptive
categories often mutate into historical periodizations: literary
“modernism” ended in the 1930s, “alternative rock” is
synonymous with the mainstream music of the 1990s. “Culture
war” is falling victim to the same fate. It evokes the paisley ties,
loose-fitting suits, double-bridge eyeglasses, and bleary C-SPAN
videos of the Clinton years. It reflects a time when social
conservatism was not a token sound bite at a prayer breakfast but

a formidable power on the national stage, one in which
Democrats like Tipper Gore often played as outsized a role as
Quayle Republicans. As Peter Beinart wrote in an Atlantic essay,
the decline of organized religion has not stopped Americans
from viewing politics in terms of “us” and “them.” It has led
Americans to define us and them “in even more primal and
irreconcilable ways.” As cultural conservatives become more
secular, “they tend to redraw the boundaries of identity, de-
emphasizing morality and religion and emphasizing race and
nation.” Identity politics on the left, meanwhile, is stronger than
a decade ago. Today, the goal is statistically equivalent outcomes
for every race, gender, and social group. Recognition of the
massive emotional force behind this and similar objectives was
missing from the spate of election postmortems which counseled

the Democratic Party to move beyond “identity liberalism.”
Critics such as Mark Lilla ignored the central grievance of the
ideology they were attacking, preferring to treat identity politics
as a near-disorder cured by better pedagogy and a recommitment
to citizenship.
Both of those things would help, but it is hard to see how Lilla
can win the argument. When “identity” actors lack concrete
options to achieve equity, they tend to shift to the broader and
more abstract realm of culture, taking comfort in symbolic
victories. “The age of identity liberalism must be brought to an
end,” Lilla declared in the New York Times. The only way that
would happen is if our elites decided to roll back the politics of
race, sex, and gender, and our corporations decided to stop using
identity as a marketing strategy. For better and for worse, the
soul of American liberalism remains at once too optimistic and
too eschatological for that to happen anytime soon.
This article originally appeared in American Affairs Volume I, Number 4

(Winter 2017): 87–99.

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5/2/2019 Reevaluating the Culture Wars - American Affairs Journal

November 20, 2017

A War for the Soul of America:

dominates the educational establishment, the entertainment

This decade, however, social critics have largely caught up with

Today, however, these premature judgments have been reversed,

That presents a deeper challenge to the culture war’s supposed

Who Started the Culture Wars?

cultural politics, has surrendered its power to stop them. Frank

George W. Bush’s victory over John Kerry seemed to conﬁrm

bestseller,” wrote the columnist Robert Novak. Soon candidate

Political scientists were less impressed than the future president.

half-century.” In fact, what pundits and historians

Hartman’s critique of Frank is different—qualitative, not

Hartman describes that culture, or really a version of it, as

also included “racist, sexist, homophobic, and conservative

From Culture War to Culture Wars

But is the New Left a discernable entity? Or is it an idea that

Goodman. Hartman follows a historiographical trend that

much credit as possible by conﬂating the categories of ‘New

overlapping cliques,” which were deﬁned not so much by

This was itself a culture war (against “corporate liberalism” rather

Left’s solidarity with marginalized groups, and in the identity-

change. The result, as Gitlin explained in The Twilight of

If society as a whole seemed unbudgeable, perhaps

Gitlin saw this as a tragedy. A New Left based on “universalist

nineties. “They are spending energy which should be directed at

Hartman’s A War for the Soul of America rejects this distinction

major corporation is forced to resign for having a view of

gave birth to a new America,” he is ascribing the maternity above

The ’60s was not a crisis of liberalism. It was in a

Community Action Programs; Reynolds v. Sims

“These acts and decisions,” Menand continued, “for better or

conﬂict over abortion, to take one especially striking example. In

With the role of mainstream liberalism de-emphasized,

against Darwinian explanations of human behavior. The storm of

Hartman is nevertheless right to distinguish conservative

they deserve. These men were inﬂuential well beyond their

Neoconservatism became notorious for its hawkish foreign

the neoconservatives, in contrast, believed our decline “resulted

Unfortunately, Hartman doesn’t explain why the liberal neocon

Take the issue of crime. Hartman’s treatment of the post-1965

Hartman writes that crime was an issue “that aligned the

economic slump since the Great Depression, city residents told

The cultural consequences were manifold, but Hartman is not

books on mass incarceration after 1980, William Stuntz’s The

Hartman’s coverage of the sexual revolution is better but still

the sexual revolution—the reality that, as Bill Wasik has written,

White women with college degrees have a nonmarital birth ratio

The neoconservatives, by contrast, were alert to these

increasing rates of out-of-wedlock childbearing among African

majority of their children outside of marriage.” The truth is that

The Soul of American Liberalism

leave liberals decidedly unsettled if, as is the case, a left-wing

One could write an updated version of Frank’s own The

Woke Consumerism. As Tara Isabella Burton has noted, the

Whether or not corporations have effectively ended the culture

conservatism was not a token sound bite at a prayer breakfast but

missing from the spate of election postmortems which counseled

This article originally appeared in American Affairs Volume I, Number 4

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