Neoconservatives like Irving Kristol (left) and Midge Decter challenged expanding definitions of American identity and championed a more traditional citizenry.
The culture wars: It’s a phrase that recalls the charred conflicts of the 1980s and 1990s, with their battles over abortion, evolution, and school prayer. And yet these struggles still linger today, as evidenced by the recent controversy over Indiana and Arkansas’s “religious freedom” laws.
At their core, the culture wars — both past and contemporary — have always appeared to pit two sides against one another: the religious and the secular. But in a new book “A War for the Soul of America,” Andrew Hartman reveals that these clashes began as a more secular debate — and that this debate took off much earlier than we might remember.
Hartman, a history professor at Illinois State University, has written the first systematic history of the culture wars, and his book details some of the conflict’s most heated episodes. (“Can we believe that God will spare the United States,” Jerry Falwell preached on national television, “if homosexuality continues to spread?”)
But Hartman also shows how the conflict began — not as a tug-of-war between pastors and gays but as an argument between neoconservatives and the New Left. In the 1960s, the New Left — which pulled together movements such as feminism, Black Power, and gay liberation — tried to expand the definition of what it meant to be an American. The fiercest challenge to this expansion came from the neoconservatives, former liberals who championed a more traditional citizenry. “Most people, when they think of neocons, think of hawkish foreign policy,” Hartman says. “But in its origins, neoconservatism was more about cultural issues.”
The culture wars’ 1960s roots ultimately led to the more religiously charged rifts in later decades. But Hartman’s book reminds us that at the center of these conflicts rest questions not just of tolerance and faith but of national identity — questions we’re still puzzling through today.
Hartman talked to Ideas by phone from his home in Bloomington, Ill.
IDEAS: Is there something about America that makes it uniquely hospitable to the culture wars?
HARTMAN: Yes — because the United States never had a feudal or a monarchical history, and because the United States defined its national identity through the Declaration of Independence. If you look at the Declaration, it’s sort of an invitation to debate national identity. All men are created equal. Well, “all men” eventually, in fits and spurts, has come to include African-Americans, women, homosexuals, and disabled people. But that took a lot of debate. And you can add to that the fact that America was founded mostly by people who wrapped up their national identity in a Christian sense of themselves and their nation.
IDEAS: As you point out, though, the culture wars didn’t always turn on that Christian identity.
HARTMAN: It was not just about religion. The main challenge to our national identity in the 1960s came from the New Left, and the pundits giving the best response to the New Left . . . were the neocons. The way they conceptualized the New Left as a threat to American norms and American capitalism became a model for how conservatives would debate the culture wars in later decades. Jerry Falwell didn’t give us a new understanding for how to talk about these issues. Irving Kristol did.
IDEAS: So how did those earliest debates play out?
HARTMAN: Here’s an example most people, including historians, aren’t aware of. Maybe the first articulation of an opposition to gay rights came from Midge Decter, a neoconservative intellectual who wrote two short books in the 1970s and serialized several chapters in magazines like Commentary. Decter said that homosexuals, and specifically gay men, were giving up on their duties to the nation, since committing to the family was what made the American nation what it was. She argued that this represented the crumbling of all standards, that it was a threat to American culture as we’d known it. That argument then became the bedrock for a lot of the Christian right’s rhetoric going forward, though they added to it a psychological analysis of homosexuality as an abnormality.
IDEAS: Eventually, the neocons’ methods spread to the other cultural conflicts.
HARTMAN: One of the first places the New Left’s ideas gained traction was in the public school curriculum. . . . There was a federal mandate that, in order to get government funding, school boards had to assign multicultural readings to their students. In Kanawha County, W. Va., they created a new curriculum that included texts like “Soul on Ice,” by [prominent Black Panther] Eldridge Cleaver. But conservative Christians revolted, with help from the Heritage Foundation. A woman named Alice Moore got elected to the school board — her platform had been anti-sex education — and she organized a boycott among the West Virginia churches. Close to a third of the students didn’t show up to school that fall, and the protests turned violent. . . . Pretty much every state in the union had some sort of debate like this in the 1980s and 1990s.
IDEAS: In your book, you show that people like Alice Moore weren’t backward bumpkins. What did it feel like for many Americans to encounter the New Left?
HARTMAN:I tried to demonstrate some empathy, because these cultural shifts happened seemingly overnight. If you were an intellectual, you were aware of, for instance, W. E. B. Du Bois — you’d known about these ideas for a long time. . . . But for most white, middle class Americans, these threats to traditional concepts of nation and identity didn’t become a force until the 1960s. It was shocking to the majority of Americans. They couldn’t make sense of their nation in this new way.
IDEAS: By considering the longer history of the culture wars, you found some fascinating ironies. How have the left and right flipped in their ideas about the power of pop culture?
HARTMAN: Many on the left never gave up the idea that culture was power — especially in universities, where you had people arguing for transforming the canon, for making it reflect a more modern and multicultural America. . . . But once liberals started gaining success in the national culture, some of them stopped thinking in such stark terms about that culture’s importance. In the pop culture debates and in the art debates — Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs, Andres Serrano’s ‘Piss Christ’ — the liberals who defended those pieces did so less in terms of their power to define a culture, which is what they would have said back in the 1960s. Instead, they defended them in terms of their freedom of expression. Now it was the conservatives who were increasingly arguing that cultural forms could change the culture. You had Patrick Buchanan claiming that “culture is the Ho Chi Minh Trail to power.”
IDEAS: What do the culture wars look like today?
HARTMAN: That’s a tough question. The Christian right seems less interested in or less capable of asserting a national argument. Instead, they’re interested in pushing a separatist argument — we can create states where we define the rights of citizenship, or we can create schools where we teach our values.
IDEAS: Indiana seems like a recent example of that.
HARTMAN: Right. At the national level Indiana looks foolish, but that might not have been the case ten or fifteen years ago.
IDEAS: Ten years seems like a rapid shift for a new national consensus. Did the earlier culture wars clear the way?
HARTMAN: You might take race out of the equation — there’s been activism on that front since before slavery ended, and yet there’s still so much more to be done. But when it comes to feminism and gay rights and a general acceptance of secular, multicultural America, I would argue that, in the arc of American history, change has come rapidly and relatively nonviolently. . . . The 1980s and 1990s was a time to come to terms and to adjust to the new America, even for conservatives. Conservatives often didn’t agree with that new America, but they at least began to understand it.
Craig Fehrman is working on a book about presidents and their books. E-mail craig.fehrman@gmail.com.
Related:
• Q&A: America, the religious?
• 2013: How Boston powered the gay rights movement
• 2012: How to change a culture
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