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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsThe Culture Wars Are Over—And They Aren’t Coming Back
http://inthesetimes.com/article/18022/culture_wars_andrew_hartmanWhen we think about neoconservatives, we think about the most recent iteration of the neo-cons, which supposedly had all this influence in the Bush administration and whose ideological impulse was to reshape the world, especially the Middle East, in our image. But the neoconservatives in their origins were people like Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Nathan Glazer, who were at various times in their life on the Left. But by the 1960s, most of them were Cold War liberals. And they moved to the Right in reaction to the New Leftin reaction to cultural and domestic policy issues like welfare, crime, affirmative action.
During the 60s and 70s, they did not write much about foreign policy, and when they did, it was pretty standard Cold War stuffthey were intensely concerned with Soviet power, only tangentially worried about Israel. And even when they did voice concerns about Israel, like during the wars of 1967 and 1973, it was often through a domestic lens. For example, neoconservatives fretted that black American activists like Stokely Carmichael sided with Palestinians out of anticolonial solidarityan alignment that they saw as consistent with a growing black-Jewish rift over domestic issues like affirmative action. This is not necessarily the way we now think about neoconservatives.
So my argument is that the neoconservatives, more than even the Christian Right, gave Conservatives the language of the culture warsespecially over the major issues of race and gender.
Take a figure like Irving Kristola secular Jew, never very religious. But he came to the conclusion that Americans needed Christian values in the middle of the 1970s when the America he understood seemed to be crumbling around him. He came to this conclusion on this bedrock of republican notions that democracy only worked if people were subjected to checks. For him, the best kind of checks were those of culture, like the constraints of Christianity.
You argue, pretty provocatively, in your conclusion that the culture wars are largely over.
To me, the logic of the cultural wars seems largely exhausted. The Christian right in many ways is kind of a lost cause. You have an increasing number of conservative religious figures who are arguing the need to withdraw from public culture and create their own autonomous cultural zones, where they can prepare for when the U.S. is once again ready for its ideals.
Many conservative Christians, for example, still believe that homosexuality is not only an abomination in the eyes of God but also a threat to national values. But they are less likely to make that argument publicly and politically; instead their main tactic is religious freedom. To me, this is a recognition that they are losing the national battle, and they're trying to create smaller zones in which they can discriminate in the name of religious freedom.
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The Culture Wars Are Over—And They Aren’t Coming Back (Original Post)
eridani
Jun 2015
OP
'largely over' but not quite. the religious right is lashing out like a wounded animal
KG
Jun 2015
#2
The culture wars will never be over so long as someone can make a nickel from them
Fumesucker
Jun 2015
#6
enough
(13,270 posts)1. One huge glaring issue not addressed in the article: abortion rights.
Maybe the "culture wars are over," but not for women.
Nay
(12,051 posts)7. I noticed that, too. Women are certainly losing abortion rights, whether through
laws restricting the weeks when you can get one, all the way to getting rid of abortion clinics so the service is legal, but not available.
Maybe because we are still easy targets? It's pretty hard to live your life feeling like you have a bull's eye on your back . . .
KG
(28,753 posts)2. 'largely over' but not quite. the religious right is lashing out like a wounded animal
KittyWampus
(55,894 posts)3. Then why are more and more states passing anti-woman policies?
geek tragedy
(68,868 posts)4. The abortion clinics Texas is forcing out of business
would disagree.
sufrommich
(22,871 posts)5. Seriously? Abortion rights are being degraded daily
in this country.
Fumesucker
(45,851 posts)6. The culture wars will never be over so long as someone can make a nickel from them
Starry Messenger
(32,342 posts)8. Um, no.
MisterP
(23,730 posts)9. the neocons also gave us the Frankfurt School conspiracy theory
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfurt_School#Conspiracy_theory
so any talk of race or gender was a plot to Marxify and then conquer America; back in the 50s their Bircher forefathers were saying that race-mixing and dancing were surefire signs of Communist infiltration; in the 60s it was drugs and disobedience to parents
so any talk of race or gender was a plot to Marxify and then conquer America; back in the 50s their Bircher forefathers were saying that race-mixing and dancing were surefire signs of Communist infiltration; in the 60s it was drugs and disobedience to parents
Solly Mack
(90,803 posts)10. I'm not convinced.