(EVEN WHEN THEY LOSE ELECTIONS), subtitled “The Battles That Define America from Jefferson’s Heresies to Gay Marriage”
(HarperOne, Oct 2016, 326pp, including 62p acknowledgements, notes, and index.)
I’ve mentioned this book a few times, the first time even before it was published (in Dec 2014), and I finally sat down to read it closely a few weeks ago. Well, a portion of it closely. The book consists of a framing argument, and five chapters of examples covering over 200 pages. I read the framing argument, and the fifth example, totaling about 100 pages. Much of the framing argument was already there from the video I linked in 2014 (though the link has changed to this.)
The gist of the book, in my own terms, begins with the recognition that change is ongoing and inescapable. (At least since the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, and the expansion of humanity around the globe that has brought previously isolated groups and cultures into contact with one another and so forced them to learn how to get along. This dovetails with my comments two days ago under the “what does this say about us?” article.)
So the gist is that, given continuous change, and the conservative part of human nature that prefers that nothing change, there will always be cultural disputes such as those we call culture wars. Prothero claims two things: 1) while liberals are generally on the side of change, it’s conservatives who start the cultural wars, despite their an inescapable disadvantage: once changes are underway, they’re difficult to reverse. And 2) So the issues of culture wars turn out to be won by liberals, in the sense that what were once controversial topics (women’s suffrage, gay marriage) become cultural norms. This has happened over and over, and will keep happening, despite temporary attempts at reversals, like the current MAGA movement and its Project 2025.
Now a closer summary of the sections of the book I read, in Prothero’s terms.
Introduction: The Culture Wars Cycle
⦁ Prothero’s first point is that culture wars are not new. They go all the way to the beginning of the Republic; Thomas Jefferson was accused of being Muslim!
⦁ A culture war begins as a public dispute; they extend beyond economic issues and appeal to moral, religious, and cultural concerns; they give rise to questions about what is really means to be an American; they are driven by the rhetoric of war and the conviction that one’s enemies are also enemies of the nature. (p10)
⦁ Haidt characterizes cultural conservatism as anxiety about forms of life that are passing away; a commitment to restore them; and effort to exclude from full cultural citizenship those responsible for the loss. Cultural liberalism involved an eagerness to embrace new forms of culture; a belief in progress; and a determination to include more and more groups in the public life of the nation. (p12)
⦁ Author, in his research, made two discoveries. First, conservatives think that liberals start things, but it is conservatives who fire the first shots, claiming victimhood. Conservatism isn’t simply anti-intellectual; it’s driven by nostalgia, or something deeper, and is related to evangelicalism and Biblical narratives.
⦁ Second, culture wars are won by liberals. Conservatives causes are usually lost from the start. Fighting is fiercest when the cause is almost lost.
⦁ So here’s the cycle. It begins on the right, “with conservatives anxious about some cultural change they are experiencing as a loss.” 18.4. The right strikes out; the left strikes back, either by defending the change as good, or appealing to liberty. Then, some sort of accommodation is attempted. Finally, liberals win. What were liberal causes become standard American values. The arc of history. Conservatives pick fights they were already losing. To defend the idea that a glorious past is being lost. They can be martyrs. They move on to the next cause, sure that America is going to hell. As each new battle appears, we can predict: this, too, shall pass.
The five chapters forming the bulk of the book cover these topics:
Ch1, The Jefferson Wars
Ch2, Anti-Catholicism
Ch3, The Mormon Question
Ch4, Prohibition and Pluralism
Ch5, The Contemporary Culture Wars
I read Chapter 5, beginning page 183. The chapter is basically a history of issues since the 1960s, when conservatives over-reacted to protests addressing social injustices. Culture wars grew in the 1970s and ’80s with Reagan and the Religious Right, nostalgia for “good fifties,” and got worse with the Internet and 24-hour news. Evangelicals had laid low ever since Scopes and the Prohibition repeal, then re-emerged in the ’70s.
Topics include:
⦁ Under Jimmy Carter, the IRS challenged the tax-exempt status of religious “segregation academies”; this galvanized evangelicals, and the IRS backed down.
⦁ Jerry Fallwell and the Moral Majority, and Anita Bryant’s “Save Our Children” campaign against gays. Religions realized they could meddle in politics after all, and discovered they had positions on everything. Against big government; family values; government is the problem, said Reagan. Focus on the Family, the AFA. Reagan endorsed the religious right. Roe v. Wade. All of these triggered by that IRS rule.
⦁ Reagan understood the conservatives were about “nostalgia for a golden age” 195.5. He had once been a Democrat, and had many personal shortcoming that Christians overlooked.
⦁ Matters of race, like the racist policies at Bob Jones University, became issues of religion, i.e. the religious liberty to discriminate. Christians claimed to be victims of bigotry rather than bigots themselves. Then a pivot from race to family: society exists to support the family. Thus abortion, homosexuality, feminism and the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) were all wrong. They claimed America had always been a Christian project.
⦁ The left did strike back, attacking the presumptions of the religious right, that rejected pluralism and different sets of belief.
⦁ This led to education and the “canon wars”. William Bennett, under Reagan, issued a manifesto to reclaim education for a “common core” of western ideas. E.D. Hirsch Jr. published a list of 4000 items he felt important for “cultural literacy.” Harold Bloom published THE CLOSING OF THE AMERICAN MIND attacking the left and higher education, on charges of relativism, and the loss of a shared culture.
⦁ A liberal backlash accused Bennett of wanting a return to a time when men were white, and ruled, and women and personal of color were not to be seen. (Bloom, to give him credit, was no conservative; his aim was to deliver people from dogma.) And so schools like Stanford did revise their curricula. Some “classics” were questioned.
⦁ Meanwhile controversies raged in the arts, with attacks against the NEA for funding Robert Mapplethorpe. Jesse Helms wanted to defund it; conservatives felt all art should be judged by their own standards.
⦁ Televangelists suffered various scandals; Fallwell shut down the Moral Majority in 1989. Pat Buchanan delivered a culture wars speech in 1982, and Gingrich promoted his “contract with America,” but eventually Clinton won in 1996. Pat Buchanan, Pat Robertson, Jesse Helms and others thought AIDS was what gays deserved.
⦁ Then Bush won in 2000 and the Islam Wars began, as conservatives blamed Islam for 9/11. Ann Coulter wanted to invade and convert them to Christianity. But Bush disappointed conservatives; a liberal tide was washing over American culture.
⦁ Obama had little interest in the culture wars, so conservatives attacked him for being Muslim; Obama endured more personal attacks than even Jefferson. New issues emerged: gay marriage; creationism in public schools; immigration. Homosexuality was the cultural issue of the 2000s, yet in 2015 the Supreme Court made “marriage equality” the law of the land. The left had won again.
Conclusion: Will the Culture Wars Ever End?
⦁ Conservatives had isolated victories — they defeated the ERA, turned “liberal” into a dirty word — but they lost the culture wars badly. Republicans are increasingly out of touch with ordinary voters, e.g. opponents of gay marriage are now criticized as bigots. “Religious liberty” is now seen as aligned with discrimination and bigotry.
⦁ Individual culture wars end for various reasons. Some political parties disappear. Concessions are made. Demographics shift.
⦁ Yet many persist. Evangelicals pursue their wars to the point where they include everyday matters, like taxing and spending. Culture wars continue to be racially coded, reflecting deep racism. Capitalism disrupts traditional culture — it only concerns the bottom line — but conservatives persist in maintaining hierarchies. Which are falling away.
⦁ Conservatives continue to dwell on perceived losses, and thus a “revolt on reality” in the words of Michael Gerson. Culture wars endure to drum up votes for election day. The “religion of the lost cause” endures.
⦁ Richard Hofstadter famous 1964 essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” suggests that conservatives are upset not at perceived conspiracies, but at a sense of loss, of things being out of place, a rejection of things that don’t fit easy classification. Some of those Leviticus rules; how long hair on men flouted the easy rule that long hair was only for women. These are struggled between purity, and ambiguity and subjectivity.
⦁ Culture wars surface cultural disagreements, some of which cycle around into consensus, i.e. victory for liberals. Example of immigration: now it’s about Hispanics. In the past it was about Asians…
⦁ As long as the US remains deeply religious and obsessed with sin and righteousness, the culture wars will endure. Perhaps the rise of the “nones” will temper things. Old white men will die off. The GOP will weaken with its focus on homosexuals and immigration. Perhaps evangelicals will just give up and go home. That happened with previous examples.
⦁ Should liberals press for surrender? Not necessarily. Some kind of bargain, perhaps, at the risk of leading to a polarized nation. Thoughts from David Frum and Andrew Sullivan.
⦁ There will always be disagreements; there will always be gays and bigots. There is arguing for argument’s sake, and arguing to get closer to the truth. … the arc of American cultural politics bends toward more liberty, not less. We vote for the politicians who stoke these wars. We can debate instead of fight. Listen less to the extreme voices. There are traditions on both sides. Making the nation a little less imperfect.
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So I see this book as an expansion of part of one of my Provisional Conclusions:
Wherever the race might land in the next century, there will always be change. (Even religions that have lasted for a couple millennia might fade away to other religions, in another couple millennia; thousands of other religions throughout human history have similarly disappeared.) Even in a utopia, unless every person is utterly like every other person, there will be differences, and differences will lead to those who want change, and those who are happy enough and resist change. This is perhaps the ultimate dynamic of human history.
An underlying assumption of Prothero’s book, that there will continue to be change, is a key premise and interest of science fiction too. Conservatives would like to zip their village or their nation into a sealed bubble against outside influences, and prohibit anything different from their revered traditions by fiat, but that never works. And they never learn that.
