Reevaluating the Culture Wars
And what caused them in the first place? A firm consensus on the question — if it ever existed — has been lacking for over a decade.
By Timothy Crimmins
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
In 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…
