Culture Wars Will Endure

By David Paul Kuhn

Americans were consumed through the 1920s with debates over prohibition, the role of women, evolution and immigration. The Great Depression brought that era to a close. And in the rhyme of history, this Great Recession has eclipsed the culture wars of our time--for now.

Wars don't always end when one side hopes. Liberals have generally won the liberalization of our culture. Social conservatives now champion a working mother, Sarah Palin.

But the counter to the counter culture was the more powerful force in politics. And from Bill Clinton to Barack Obama, top Democrats of recent decades have attempted, and at times failed, to avoid those politics.

So we witness a president apprehensive about pushing for the end of "don't ask, don't tell." Earlier this year, Obama termed abolishing restrictions on abortions "not [his] highest legislative priority." They were campaign promises. But Obama fears the cost of those cultural fights.

Some leading liberals argue he need not. We are told that when economic recovery comes and the war is long over, cultural politics are not to return with our new normalcy.

History instructs otherwise. Our culture wars are less over than in détente. There is debate over an affirmative action case and a Supreme Court nominee. But the debate hardly enraptures the nation. It's not the Scopes Monkey trial.

The Great Recession remains the news. But in the years after our recession ends, we will surely see new cultural debates come to the fore.

At their core, the values disputes of the early and late 20th century derived from the same divide. To the sociologist James Davidson Hunter, who brought the "culture wars" into America's lexicon, debates over abortion or gay marriage were rooted in a contest of two mental archetypes.

Morality is the adherence to external doctrine. It's bible and Wednesday bible study. On the other side, morality is to be discovered through personal experience. We each can find our own subjective moral code from our backgrounds or pop-Buddhism or our flirtation with Descartes in college.

Values are either found in a turkey and mash potatoes or a multi-cultural buffet.

But last week's Center for American Progress report, titled the "Coming End to the Culture War," argues we will all soon be eating at buffets. The report was a lesson in a common misanalysis of cultural politics--one that mistakes symbols for substance.

Younger Americans are more socially liberal. Minorities vote less on cultural issues. And therefore, as both populations become more of our population, the culture wars shall end.

That's the case made by the report's author Ruy Teixera. Teixera is not alien to arguments that please his political sphere. (See this 50-page report on the "New Progressive America;" it argues long-term demographic change but ignores the stock market crash's immense impact on that change, as exhibited in tracking polls.)

Teixera's declaration of the end of the culture war presumes that debates over abortion or guns are over, because we are currently not consumed by that debate.

One reason we are not involved in those debates, of course, is Democrats' reticence to engage. They have learned the downside of values debates the hard way. Consider McGovern, Dukakis and Kerry.

The report also takes minorities' votes for granted. One consequence of a minority-majority America may be that minorities vote less on ethnic-class identity than culture. Consider the narrative of ethnic-white Catholics from the early to mid 20th century.

But in this case, the big picture is the picture. When a diverse affluent society suddenly encounters threats to that affluence, the society's concerns shift from culture to more basic concepts of survival and economic stability.

Immigration and generational change are also factors. The tension between Protestants and Catholics, Anglo and non-Anglo whites, between urban and rural, calmed in the early 20th century. But our debates are sometimes eerily similar.

Recall the 2004 ad against Howard Dean. As the Iowa caucuses neared, an older married couple tells Dean to: "Take his tax-hiking, government-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading, body-piercing, Hollywood-loving, Left-wing freak show back to Vermont."

In the 1928 campaign, evangelist John Straton framed Democrat Al Smith as a purveyor of: "Card playing, cocktail drinking, poodle dogs, divorces, novels, stuffy rooms, dancing, evolution, Clarence Darrow, overeating, nude art, prize-fighting, actors, greyhound racing, and modernism."

What was "acid, abortion and amnesty" in 1972 became "God, guns, and gays" by the early 1990s. But each slogan was rooted in enduring divisions. And those divisions define the American experience.

But the nature of those divisions can change. Today, one side espouses economic populism. The other side espouses cultural populism. The former wins in hard times. And the two have not always been separate. Democrat Williams Jennings Bryan embodied both populisms a century earlier.

Not all moral change is also congruent. Today's youth are more liberal on gay rights but they are also slightly more conservative on abortion.

But the defining fact of moral politics may be its place in our politics. Back in 1840, the newly culturally populist Whigs characterized Martin Van Buren as an elitist.

"Wherever you find a bitter, blasphemous Atheist and an enemy of Marriage, Morality, and Social Order," it was said to be "one vote for Van Buren," wrote historian Sean Wilentz in "The Rise of American Democracy."

It would be foolish for Democrats to presume the culture behind our democracy is suddenly different.

Issues change far more rapidly than principles and peoples. This is a nation with an enduring religious strain, a brief history and an image constantly remade with immigration. It's principles that define the American idea. And for this reason, contests over those principles will continue to define our politics.

David Paul Kuhn is the Chief Political Correspondent for RealClearPolitics and the author of The Neglected Voter. He can be reached at david@realclearpolitics.com and found on Twitter and RSS