USA’s 40-Year-Old Cultural War: The End?
There are people, within and outside the USA, who view the Nixon era as the beginning of a conscious effort to divide the country, and launching of ‘a civil war’ that would be politically advantageous to the ruling side. Are there now signs that the war may be coming to an end after four decades?
“There is genuine reason to hope that 2008 will bring at last an armistice — maybe even a lasting peace — in America’s Forty Years War, the internal conflict more commonly known as the Culture Wars, which began in 1968,” says historian Robert S. McElvaine, who is Elizabeth Chisholm Professor of Arts and Letters at Millsaps College. His latest book, Grand Theft Jesus: The Hijacking of Religion in America, has just been published by Crown.
“The charge of ‘elitism’ is one that Republicans have heaved at Democratic candidates to great advantage since the Sixties. Indeed, the Republican Party has been running as the anti-Sixties party for four decades now. That has been the main casus belli in America’s Forty Years War.
“It was left to George W. Bush…to carry the cultural warriors to the point of complete smashup.
“How fitting — even how poetic — it is that Barack Obama has clinched the Democratic presidential nomination during the week in which we mark the fortieth anniversary of the death of Robert F. Kennedy. This harmonic convergence has deep significance.
“These events may come to be seen as the bookends of the second American civil war, a war that has divided the nation and been a dominant force in our politics for four decades…”
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