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…”
6 Responses to “USA’s 40-Year-Old Cultural War: The End?”
Considering that less than 50% of the children in kindergarten are white, the culture wars will become much worse. It will be the rich and the poor against the middle class. The Rich will try to keep the middle class from moving up and the poor will want to pull the middle class down to their level. Look at the politics of South America if you want to see the future of the U.S.
It's a pity so many people allowed themselves to be bamboozled over the past few decades. Imagine if we'd had the good sense to work together during those times instead of buying all the divisive snake oil. What a waste. This may well be an opportunity to start getting back on the path – IF people chose to take it. I know some folks wax cynical (almost reflexively) when they hear about hope and change, but the fact is, any worthwhile endeavor is going to start with those messages.
Jspencer,
If you think that that modern America can really work together, I suggest you begin reading Robert Putnam, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Putnam#Dive…
as diversity increases, the culture wars will probably get worse.
SD, I don't disagree with the points made by either Putnam or you, and the matter if income disparity becoming the greater motivator in class/culture wars is one the R's used to accuse the D's of using in an exploitive way, while the R's seemed to deny the whole thing even mattered. In any case, I still maintain that the problems we face can be surmounted IF there is sufficient knowledge and inspired enough leadership to avoid the pitfalls of embracing the status quo. Granted, the latter would be the easier course.
Racism died as an issue among serious people decades ago in the USA. (A rough timeline is racism began to die rapidly by 1970 and was gone as anything that could be called “systemic” by 1970 and certainly by 1980; sexism died even before 1970 and was gone even earlier than racism as anything “systemic”; the claims of such systemic “oppression” are delusional and propagandisctic now.) The “cultural war” began in the later 1960s and consists of the constant political and cultural “war” conducted by the radical Left (which has permeated and badly tainted the rest of the Left) ever since. (This includes a retrograde, retarded, reactionary, revanchist trait that surfaces whenever the public repudiates not merely liberalism's modern failures but anything particularly radical or strident; the worst miscreants loathed Reagan and Reagan's election and they hated the 1994 normal response to the Clintons' leftism and arrogance and conceit, and they have hated Bush with even more derangement of their behavior and what is arguably called “thinking,” as evidenced time after time in what they express.)
The cultural war isn't particularly “hot” right now but it's still there and we may see it made more hot during the rest of the election, because many may see in the public's disenchantment with Bush and the Republicans the wrong message, namely an opportunity and even a desire (which is not there) for regression to the 1960s and an acceptability of radicalism in addition to trying to resume “progress” of failed older liberalism, in this year's election.
If the idiots get too wacky as they back Obama, McCain will get more votes among the normal people by presenting himself by default(!) as the reasonable, rational person's choice. “McCain, Safe and Sane” will be a creation of leftist excess if it happens.
DLS, based on some of your previous characterizations, I don't assume your personal definitions of racism and sexism to be very universal, much less your personal defnitions of left and right. I believe the main problem with respect to the “culture wars” has to do with an “us or them” mindset (division) and also a low expectations approach to the whole business.