Culture war
Based on Wikipedia: Culture war
In 1992, Pat Buchanan stepped up to the microphone at the Republican National Convention during prime time and declared war. Not against a foreign enemy, but against fellow Americans. "There is a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America," he thundered. "It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we will one day be as was the Cold War itself."
It was a dramatic moment—and a revealing one. Buchanan wasn't describing an existing conflict so much as calling one into being. This raises an uncomfortable question that scholars have wrestled with ever since: Are culture wars real conflicts arising from genuine disagreements? Or are they manufactured battles, deliberately created by political actors to divide people for strategic advantage?
The answer, it turns out, is complicated. And understanding it helps explain why your Facebook feed feels like a battlefield.
The German Origin of an American Obsession
Before we dive into the American culture wars, it's worth noting that the term itself is borrowed. "Culture war" is what linguists call a calque—a word-for-word translation—of the German word Kulturkampf, meaning "culture struggle."
The original Kulturkampf was a very specific historical event. In the 1870s, the German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck launched a campaign to reduce the influence of the Catholic Church in the newly unified German state. It involved laws restricting religious education, banning Jesuit orders, and requiring civil marriage. The conflict lasted about a decade before Bismarck largely backed down.
The term first appeared in English as early as 1875, in a British book review of a German pamphlet about this struggle. But it would take more than a century for "culture war" to become the loaded phrase it is today.
The Man Who Named the Phenomenon
In 1991, a University of Virginia sociologist named James Davison Hunter published a book with a provocative title: Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America. Hunter argued that American society had undergone a dramatic transformation. On issue after issue—abortion, gun control, the separation of church and state, drug use, homosexuality, censorship—Americans were dividing into two distinct camps.
What made Hunter's analysis interesting was his claim that these divisions didn't follow the lines you might expect. The split wasn't primarily between Catholics and Protestants, or rich and poor, or even Republicans and Democrats. Instead, Hunter saw the conflict as fundamentally about worldview—what he called "Progressivism" versus "Orthodoxy."
Orthodox Americans, in Hunter's framework, believed in fixed, transcendent moral truths—rules handed down by God or tradition that don't change with the times. Progressive Americans believed that moral understanding evolves, that society should adapt its values as knowledge and circumstances change.
These two worldviews, Hunter argued, had become so dominant that they were reorganizing American politics around themselves. A traditional Catholic and an Evangelical Protestant might have profound theological disagreements, but if they shared an orthodox worldview, they would increasingly find themselves on the same side of political battles. Meanwhile, a liberal Catholic and a secular humanist would find common cause despite their different starting points.
But Is It Real?
Hunter's framework was influential, but not everyone was convinced. Political scientist Alan Wolfe spent the 1990s and 2000s arguing the opposite case. Americans, Wolfe claimed, were actually more united than polarized. The culture war was an elite phenomenon—a battle fought by activists, commentators, and politicians that most ordinary citizens wanted no part of.
This debate—is the culture war real or manufactured?—has never been fully resolved. But research published in the American Political Science Review in 2012 offered a fascinating twist. The researchers analyzed twenty years of opinion data and found something surprising: people's views on culture war issues actually shaped their political and religious affiliations, not the other way around.
In other words, it wasn't that joining the Republican Party made you pro-life. It was that being pro-life made you more likely to become a Republican. The researchers called culture war attitudes "foundational elements in the political and religious belief systems of ordinary citizens."
This finding suggests the culture war is real—but perhaps not in the way political strategists would have you believe.
The War That Creates Itself
Here's where things get interesting. Even if culture war attitudes are genuine, there's substantial evidence that political actors deliberately amplify and exploit these divisions.
Political commentator E. J. Dionne put it memorably: the real cultural division is "between those who want to have a culture war and those who don't."
Sociologist Scott Melzer has studied how organizations like the National Rifle Association, or NRA, deliberately constructed culture war narratives. The NRA, Melzer argues, intentionally united conservative groups—particularly white men—by promoting a sense of victimization. In this narrative, liberals had run amok, granting "special rights and privileges" to immigrants, gay people, women, and the poor. The culture war frame transformed a debate about gun policy into something much larger: a battle for the soul of America, with virtuous traditionalists under siege from a hostile liberal establishment.
Religion scholar Susan B. Ridgely tells a similar story about Focus on the Family, the Christian organization founded by James Dobson. Focus on the Family produced what Ridgely calls "alternative news"—media that promoted a particular vision of the "traditional family" while depicting that tradition as under constant liberal attack. By bifurcating American media consumption, the organization helped make culture war possible by creating two separate information ecosystems with different facts, different villains, and different visions of America.
The Asymmetry Theory
Political scientists Matt Grossmann and David A. Hopkins have proposed an intriguing theory about why culture wars seem to favor one side. They argue that America's two major parties are fundamentally different creatures.
The Republican Party, in their analysis, is primarily an ideological movement—it's built around shared beliefs and designed to wage political conflict. The Democratic Party, by contrast, is a coalition of social groups (unions, minority communities, professional women, environmentalists) that struggles to impose ideological discipline on its diverse membership.
This asymmetry has consequences. Republicans are well-equipped to fight culture wars because they can quickly mobilize around ideological issues. Democrats, trying to hold together a coalition with different priorities, find culture wars more difficult to prosecute—and some on the left have argued these battles are merely "distractions" from the "real fight" over economic issues.
Whether you find this theory convincing probably depends on your own politics. But it does help explain a curious pattern: conservatives often seem more enthusiastic about culture war battles than liberals, even when polls suggest liberal positions are more popular.
The Long Prehistory
Although Hunter's 1991 book brought "culture war" into mainstream political vocabulary, the underlying conflicts had been brewing for decades.
The 1920s saw the first major clash between urban and rural American values. This was the era of the Scopes "Monkey Trial," when a Tennessee teacher was prosecuted for teaching evolution. It was also a time of mass immigration, rapid urbanization, and cultural modernization—the Roaring Twenties, with its jazz music, short skirts, and loosening sexual mores.
The conflict came to a head in 1928, when Al Smith became the first Catholic to win a major party's presidential nomination. Smith was a New York City politician who opposed Prohibition—the constitutional amendment that had banned alcohol nationwide. His campaign laid bare the cultural divide between cosmopolitan cities and the Protestant heartland. He lost in a landslide.
Historian Matthew Dallek argues that the John Birch Society, founded in 1958, was an early promoter of culture war ideas. The John Birch Society was a far-right organization that saw communist conspiracies everywhere—in the civil rights movement, in fluoridated water, even in Republican President Dwight Eisenhower. Scholar Celestini Carmen has traced how John Birch Society members like Tim LaHaye (who would later write the bestselling Left Behind novels) and Phyllis Schlafly (the anti-feminist activist) helped found the Moral Majority in 1979, carrying apocalyptic culture war rhetoric into mainstream conservative politics.
The Cold War's Shadow
The Cold War shaped American culture wars in ways we're still untangling. For four decades, the United States defined itself against Soviet communism. This external threat provided a unifying enemy—but it also created a template for seeing the world in stark, us-versus-them terms.
Historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez makes a fascinating argument about Evangelical Christians in particular. She writes that many Evangelicals viewed a specific Christian masculine ideal—strong, protective, warrior-like—as America's defense against communism. When the Cold War ended in 1991, that perceived threat vanished. But the framework remained.
Du Mez argues that Evangelical leaders simply transferred their anxieties from foreign communism to domestic changes in gender roles and sexuality. The enemy was no longer in Moscow; it was in San Francisco, in Hollywood, in the universities. The culture war, in this telling, was partly a search for a new enemy to fight.
This helps explain the timing. Hunter published Culture Wars in 1991—the same year the Soviet Union collapsed. Pat Buchanan gave his famous speech in 1992. The culture war erupted into mainstream politics precisely when the Cold War ended.
The Nineties: Peak Culture War
The 1990s were the decade when culture war moved from academic concept to daily political reality. And the consequences were significant.
The Christian Coalition of America, founded by televangelist Pat Robertson, became a powerful force in Republican politics. Some historians argue their rhetoric actually hurt President George H. W. Bush's reelection chances in 1992—the culture war messaging was too extreme for moderate voters. Bush lost to Bill Clinton.
But two years later, that same rhetoric helped Republicans take control of Congress for the first time in forty years. The culture war was proving to be a double-edged sword: it could mobilize the base, but it could also alienate swing voters.
Meanwhile, culture war battles spread into unexpected territory. Education became a major front. In 1994, a fierce debate erupted over national history standards for schools. Should American history be taught as a "celebratory" story of progress and achievement? Or should it be a "critical" examination that included the perspectives of marginalized groups and acknowledged the nation's failures?
Prominent figures weighed in. Lynne Cheney, who had chaired the National Endowment for the Humanities, attacked the proposed standards. Rush Limbaugh made it a topic on his radio show. The debate presaged conflicts over curriculum that continue today.
The 2000s: Religion and Science
The early 2000s saw two significant developments in the culture wars.
First, religious belief became more tightly aligned with political party. It had always been somewhat correlated—Republicans were more likely to be churchgoers—but the relationship intensified. Voting Republican began to correlate strongly with traditionalist religious belief across diverse faiths: Evangelical Protestants, traditional Catholics, Orthodox Jews, even Mormons found common political cause. Voting Democratic became associated with liberal religious belief and with being nonreligious.
Second, scientific questions became culture war battlegrounds. Climate change is the most prominent example. The overwhelming scientific consensus holds that human activities are warming the planet. But belief in this consensus became tightly coupled with political party affiliation. Climate scholar Andrew Hoffman observed that climate change had "become enmeshed in the so-called culture wars."
This was a new development. Scientific questions had occasionally been politicized before—think of the evolution debates—but the wholesale transformation of a scientific consensus into a partisan issue was striking. It suggested that the culture war framework was expanding, swallowing up topics that had nothing to do with traditional morality or religion.
The Brief Lull
The 2008 election seemed, for a moment, like it might mark the end of the culture wars. Traditional culture war issues barely featured in media coverage. Barack Obama ran on hope and change, not on abortion or gay marriage. Even his opponent, John McCain, largely avoided culture war territory.
The exception was Sarah Palin, McCain's vice presidential pick. Palin leaned hard into culture war themes—her conservative Christian faith, her opposition to abortion, her skepticism of climate science. She created what one might call a "performative climate change denialism brand."
But Palin and McCain lost. When Palin subsequently resigned as governor of Alaska, the Center for American Progress predicted "the coming end of the culture wars." They pointed to demographic change: millennials, who were coming of age politically, showed much higher rates of acceptance of same-sex marriage than older generations. The culture war, the thinking went, was being won by the progressives through generational replacement.
This prediction proved spectacularly wrong.
The Great Awokening and Its Backlash
Something happened around 2012-2014 that reignited and transformed the culture wars. Scholars and commentators are still debating exactly what it was.
Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, author of The Coddling of the American Mind, identifies a rise in what critics call "cancel culture" among young progressives, particularly on college campuses. Enabled by social media, students began demanding the removal of speakers, professors, and ideas they found offensive. Haidt and others have called this phenomenon the "Great Awokening"—a surge in progressive activism around issues of race, gender, and identity.
From one perspective, this was overdue attention to injustice. From another, it was ideological overreach. What's clear is that it provoked a fierce backlash.
The 2010s saw a series of culture war conflicts in unexpected places. In 2014, Gamergate erupted—ostensibly a controversy about ethics in video game journalism, but quickly revealing itself as a battle over the inclusion of women and minorities in gaming culture. Participants in Gamergate harassed women game developers and critics, while framing themselves as defenders of gaming against politically correct infiltration.
Similar conflicts emerged in comic books (Comicsgate) and science fiction (the Sad Puppies campaign). In each case, the pattern was similar: a traditionally male-dominated space was changing to include more diverse voices, and some incumbents fought back by framing diversity as an attack on their culture.
Journalist Caitlin Dewey described Gamergate as a "proxy war" for a larger culture war. She was right—and the proxy warriors were about to enter electoral politics.
The Trump Era: Culture War as Governing Philosophy
Donald Trump's political rise was, in many ways, a culture war phenomenon. Trump emerged from the "birther" conspiracy theory—the false claim that Barack Obama was not born in the United States. He announced his presidential candidacy with a speech describing Mexican immigrants as rapists and criminals. His campaign was less about policy than about tribal identity: who is a real American, and who threatens American greatness?
Journalist Michael Grunwald has written that Trump "pioneered a new politics of perpetual culture war." Under Trump, the list of culture war issues expanded dramatically. Black Lives Matter. Athletes kneeling during the national anthem. Climate policy. Healthcare. Even infrastructure—traditionally the most boring and bipartisan of topics—became a culture war battleground when Democrats proposed a "Green New Deal."
Political scientist Jeremiah Castle has identified two "new fronts" in the culture war: transgender rights and the role of religion in lawmaking. Public opinion on these issues shows the same polarized pattern as older culture war topics like abortion. And the trans rights debate in particular has become extraordinarily heated, involving questions about bathrooms, sports, children's medical care, and pronoun usage that would have seemed outlandish a decade ago.
In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic became a culture war issue. Wearing a face mask—a simple public health measure—became a political statement. North Dakota's Republican governor, Doug Burgum, called opposition to mask-wearing a "senseless" culture war issue that jeopardized human safety. It didn't matter. The masks had been absorbed into the tribal conflict.
"Owning the Libs"
To understand the modern culture war, you need to understand the concept of "owning the libs."
This phrase describes a political strategy centered not on advancing conservative policy goals, but on upsetting liberals. Conservative media figures employing this strategy emphasize and expand culture war issues specifically because they provoke outrage from progressives. The liberal outrage, in turn, delights conservative audiences.
Nicole Hemmer of Columbia University argues that "owning the libs" is a substitute for the coherent conservative ideology that existed during the Cold War. Back then, anti-communism provided a unifying principle. Today, with no Soviet Union to oppose, conservatism has become more about opposing liberals than about any particular policy vision.
This has consequences. If the goal is provoking liberal outrage, then the most extreme and inflammatory positions are the most valuable. Moderation is boring. Compromise is betrayal. The incentive structure pushes toward ever-escalating conflict.
The Disinformation Connection
Here's where the culture war meets our information crisis. A 2023 study on the circulation of conspiracy theories on social media found something troubling: disinformation actors deliberately insert polarizing claims into culture war debates by taking one side or the other.
The mechanism is clever. When you believe you're in a war, you're not very careful about your ammunition. You'll share claims that support your side without checking whether they're true. You'll repeat talking points that "destroy" your opponents without verifying the underlying facts.
Disinformation actors exploit this by creating or amplifying claims tailored to culture war audiences. The claims spread because partisans on both sides are eager to share rhetorical ammunition against their enemies. The culture war, in other words, is a distribution channel for false information—and both sides are susceptible.
So What Is a Culture War, Really?
After all this history, we can attempt a definition.
A culture war is a form of political conflict in which different social groups struggle to impose their values and ideologies on mainstream society. It's fought through what political strategists call "wedge issues"—topics designed to split the electorate along value lines rather than economic ones.
But here's the crucial insight: a culture war is also a frame—a way of seeing political conflict. When an issue becomes a culture war issue, it transforms. It's no longer a policy question with costs and benefits to be weighed. It becomes a battle between good and evil, us and them, the real Americans and the enemies within.
This frame is extremely useful for certain purposes. It motivates base voters. It creates clear tribal identities. It generates engagement on social media and ratings on cable news. It makes compromise impossible, which is helpful if you don't actually want to govern—you just want to fight.
The frame is less useful for actually solving problems. Climate change is a policy challenge with technical solutions; as a culture war issue, it becomes unsolvable. Pandemic response requires trust in public health authorities; as a culture war issue, trust becomes impossible. Education works best when communities agree on shared goals; as a culture war issue, schools become battlegrounds.
The Eternal Question
We're left with the question we started with: Are culture wars real, or are they manufactured?
The honest answer is: both.
Americans do have genuine disagreements about values, morality, and how society should be organized. These disagreements are real, and they matter. A secular progressive and a traditional Evangelical really do see the world differently, and those differences have political consequences.
But the culture war as a phenomenon—the perpetual state of conflict, the tribal sorting, the elevation of symbolic battles over practical governance—this is at least partly a construction. It serves the interests of media companies, political consultants, activist organizations, and politicians who benefit from conflict.
The culture war is real in the sense that people really do fight it. But it may not be inevitable in the way that fighting over scarce resources is inevitable. It may be more like a fire that needs fuel to keep burning—and there are people who profit from adding fuel.
E. J. Dionne's observation remains the most piercing: the real cultural division is "between those who want to have a culture war and those who don't."
The question for each of us is: which side of that divide are we on?