A culture wars scholar from Bloomington-Normal says the current political furor is not the first time this pattern has come up in the U.S.
Illinois State University Professor Andrew Hartman, author of A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars, says what's happening today is its own repeat of battles from 50 years ago.
In an interview with WGLT's Lyndsay Jones, Harman says his studies at first led him to believe such matters had been moved to the back burner, or at least were changing in their iterations. A shift in national rhetoric around 2015, he said, proved that point wrong.
WGLT: What does it mean to have a culture war?
Andrew Hartman: So, there have always been culture wars in American history and maybe in a lot of other nations as well, but I think this is particularly true in the United States because the nation has always been composed of a diverse group of people who have come from all over the world.
… A whole host of different people with different identities, different ethnicities, different races, different religious backgrounds, have come into the nation, have made claims to being an American and there have long been debates about that.
But the term culture wars only began to be used in the 1980s and 1990s, in particular. So in my research, I was mostly focused on those culture wars because during that time period… that seemed to be one of the defining issues in the nation.
I was interested, as a historian, in what caused them and I really looked at the 1960s and the social movements that emerged in the 1960s: civil rights, Black Power, feminism, gay rights, the list goes on. (Those) really challenged all of these assumptions about what it means to be an American in the United States.
And various people didn't like those challenges, and so people sort of got polarized from the 1960s going forward around these two camps — you might say liberal-conservative, progressive-traditionalist, left-right. …At the core, it boiled down to what it means to be an American and this really changed dramatically after the 1960s.
There used to be that normative idea of what it meant to be an American, to think like an American — does that exist today?
I think it's less clear than it was for people say 40-50 years ago because a lot’s happened. But, I think the conservatives who reject a lot of things that are happening, say in the public schools, might not be able to definitively say, ‘This is what it means to be an American,’ but they know what it isn’t.
The hyper focus on race in the curriculum, the hyperfocus on gender relations in the curriculum — to the degree that there is a hyper focus; I think that can be debated — they think that is un-American. They seem to, at the rhetorical level, believe in meritocracy, that we’re all created equally and that we have to earn our way without wanting to realize that we aren’t all born equally.
Some of us, to use a baseball metaphor, we’re born on third base even if we think we hit a triple. This notion that there (are) stark inequalities in our society — they don’t want to see it, they don’t want to believe it, and they think it’s un-American to focus on it.
Those identity movements kind of emerged in the 60s — is that correct?
Yes, and by the 1980s, they had sort of become solidified in universities and other cultural institutions — such that it seemed like… what you might call liberal or progressive movements or identity movements had really won in terms of gaining control of cultural institutions. At least, that's the way it was interpreted by a lot of conservatives.
Beginning in the 1980s — really beginning in the 70s, but this really became a mainstream thing in the 80s — you had massive revolts against what was being taught in the public schools, you have massive revolts about core curriculum reading lists at universities, people coming out against multiculturalism, against the focus on race and sex against women's studies programs in the universities, against African American Studies programs in the universities. … Education was always sort of at the core of the culture wars.
In regards to what we're seeing today at school board meetings and things like that, it just seems like we're traveling ground that's already been well-traveled.
Undoubtedly. So, fights over schools go back to the early part of the public school movement in the 19th century. …But in the 1960s, things really started to sort of pick up steam, in part because of these identity movements that I talked about. Also, in part, because by then, the Supreme Court had ruled that prayer in school was unconstitutional.
It seemed like the schools were increasingly secular, increasingly liberal, and conservatives — religious conservatives, in particular — got organized and they started protesting school board meetings, they started running for school boards. So these sort of angry outbursts at school board meetings that we've seen recently? These were a very, very common feature in the 1970s (that) persisted through the 80s and 90s. Sometimes, violence broke out.
For example, in 1974 in West Virginia — Kanawha County, which is where Charleston is — the county had issued a summer reading list that was a lot of multicultural sort of readings, so same thing we're seeing now: School districts trying to respond to issues about race and sex, more broadly speaking, and conservative groups were alarmed by this. They organized against it. A third of the student population boycotted the opening of schools in September of 1974 in this county in West Virginia. A school administration building was firebombed. Windows and buses were shot out. So, it got violent. And what we're seeing now is very similar to what happened almost 50 years ago.
Do you think it's something that's cyclical in nature?
As a historian, I don't think history works that way. It feels that way at times, like there's kind of like a rhyme to it. I think it's different in its own specifics, but I definitely think that in American history, these debates about school are always going to pop up. Ultimately, public school, one of the main sort of premises upon which it was based is that society at large… should have some say in how children are raised. Now, if you're a parent who believes in that mission, or if you're a parent those values are consistent with what you think is happening in schools, you're fine with that.
But there have, at various points in American history, been both parents and people who don't like the values they think are being represented in the schools, and they reject it. That's where these conflicts come into being.
As long as… there's public education, I think we're going to have these types of conflicts.
I think a phrase or a sort of refrain that you hear often is, ‘Oh, well, we've never been so polarized!’ but that's kind of not true, right? We've seen polarization.
No, it's not true. Take, for example, the Civil War: 500,000 dead Americans fighting each other. Maybe that's some low-hanging fruit, in terms of a comparison. But I think if you go back to the 1960s, and some of the protests and counter-protests around issues like the Vietnam War, (then) yes, the U.S. has been as polarized as we are now at various points.
You combine the political or cultural polarization we see now with various economic crises since 2008, with a pandemic, with the various wars in the Middle East, with a Congress or political system at times that seems incapable of accomplishing much and I can understand why people feel like it's more polarized or things are worse, politically, more dysfunctional now than ever before.
Is it also in part because we have access to so much information that we can see all of these things going on at once?
Perhaps that. Perhaps, more so, that our technologies that we use to gather information have changed and are much more channeled in terms of silos. If you're liberal, it's rare that you're going to be reading conservative sources and vice versa is true. I think our sources of information have narrowed around our own identities and political views, and I think this makes polarization seem worse than ever.
You mentioned, also, I think it was in…the second edition of the book that you had thought the culture wars… were going to be fought on a different register, so to speak. What did you mean by that?
When I wrote the first edition of my book on the culture wars, I was finishing it up in 2014. I was not arguing that the cultural conflict of the type that I had documented was over, but it seemed like we had moved on to different issues.
At that time, I was thinking that we were still primarily focused on trying to overcome the recession of 2008-2009 and there was more of a focus on economic issues.
But then in 2015, Donald Trump announced… that he was running for president and his campaign was very much rooted in culture wars-style rhetoric. I think that really stoked the culture wars and returned us to a type of rhetoric that was much more common, say between the late 1960s and 2001.
And we're still there, as you can see with all that's going on now — with the controversies over the 1619 project, critical race theory and school board, rampages, debates about sex education — the culture wars have really sort of revived themselves ever since 2015.
Were you surprised by that?
A little. We can never predict the future but I thought we were moving towards different grounds.
You mentioned (in the book) also that it feels like there's a new class struggle going on. Do you mean socioeconomic class when you say that?
Yes, for sure. Socioeconomic inequality has been growing at a rapid clip for a very long time — at least since the 1970s, but it’s been exacerbated in the last 10 or 15 years. There have been a growing number of strikes across the nation, a growing number of movements for a living wage, and the fact that so many people have not returned to work since the early parts of the pandemic or workers who are being much more selective about where they work, is all part of that.
I think, maybe, that gets overshadowed by the culture wars — or maybe the stark economic inequalities exacerbate our frazzled nerves such that the culture wars come to seem that much more existential.
Other than (Trump), kind of bringing these things to the forefront, what is different about how these culture wars are being waged today?
I think that in the 1980s and 90s, there were religious and political leaders who were true believers in the debates. Take, for example, William Bennett, who was (Ronald) Reagan's secretary of education: He fought hard to maintain a core curriculum, both at the public schools and at the university level, that was dedicated to what he believed was canon of Western civilization.
Critics called it “books written by dead white men,” but he really truly believed in these issues. I think a lot of politicians now are just much more cynical. They recognize that this will help win elections, raise money, defeat their opponents politically.
I think this is why a lot of Republican politicians have latched onto issues like critical race theory: It seems to animate a base that they really need to win elections. It’s not to say that this wasn’t always the case with politicians, but there were political leaders previously who just seemed more authentically behind the issues than there are now.
Do you think that's due, in part to a concern about the bottom line of campaigns, being in office, staying in office and financially what that takes?
Yeah, I think so. That was true in the 1980s, but not to the same degree that it is now. Politicians are just 24/7, on the campaign trail now, raising money. That’s kind of the main thing they do: raise money.
And I think one of the reasons why so many political leaders want to focus on the culture wars is because they don't have to deal with what I think is the elephant in the room: Growing class divisions.
So, where do we go from here? I know you can't predict the future, but is there going to be a climax point, or is this just going to be something that simmers on low indefinitely?
Probably, if I had to predict, this will persist for some time. … It's not going to go anywhere because there's still a lot of Americans, probably not a majority, but maybe 30%, 40% of Americans, who really dislike the direction of the way we talk about things in schools, the way the media talks about things, the way issues like race and sex are dealt with in movies.
They really dislike the general direction of our mainstream culture and they're going to continue to put up a fight about that.
