Culture Wars

Although the concept of culture wars is yet to be developed within the discipline of International Relations, it is undeniable that the term cannot be ignored in most political conversations nowadays. Given the transnational ramifications of several culture wars (for example on climate change or LGBTQIA+ rights), they deserve attention from an international theory perspective. It was a sociologist, James D. Hunter, who first worked on the concept in the early 1990s. Hunter defined a ‘cultural conflict’ as a ‘[...] political and social hostility rooted in different systems of moral understanding. The end to which these hostilities tend is the domination of one cultural and moral ethos over all others. […] Because this is a culture war, the nub of political disagreement today on the range of issues debated—whether abortion, child care, funding for the arts, affirmative action and quotas, gay right, values in public education, or multiculturalism—can be traced ultimately and finally to the matter of moral authority. By moral authority I mean the basis by which people determine whether something is good or bad, right or wrong, acceptable or unacceptable, and so on.’ (Hunter 1991).

At the time, Hunter was addressing the cultural conflict between two sectors of the US population that identified as ‘orthodox’ or ‘progressive.’ His enquiry was directed towards finding: what kind of country were the United States? Who were the people of the US at that time, before, and what the nation hoped to become. Nowadays, ‘culture wars’ seem to embrace just about any set of ideas that clashes against another set of ideas.

Hunter argued that a ‘culture war’ was far more than a disagreement but in fact defines a set of irreconcilable worldviews on ‘what is fundamentally right and wrong about the world we live in, [and an irreconcilable issue between] our most fundamental ideas about who we are as Americans’ (Hunter 1991).

In 1992, conservative grandee Patrick Buchanan spoke to the Republican National Convention, and made reference to the idea of ‘a culture war’ and ‘a struggle for the soul of America.’ For him the nation was at risk of losing its soul regarding matters linked to abortion, homosexuality, school choice, and radical feminism. After this speech, the media popularised the term.

Furedi argues the culture wars are defined and fought over issues such as ‘[…] abortion, gay marriage, multiculturalism, national sovereignty – to name a few – [that] are often far less susceptible to compromise than differences on social and economic matters. Conflicts over values touch on moral issues to do with good and evil, and in such conditions, the different parties of a debate are all too ready to ascribe the worst possible motives to one another. […] In this respect, the current Culture Wars over values resembles the religious wars that afflicted Europe in the early modern era.’ (Furedi 2018).

Grunwald has argued that under president Trump just about any mainstream polity issue becomes part of a culture war, which he has packaged into a ‘perpetual culture war.’: President Donald Trump has pioneered a new politics of perpetual culture war, relentlessly rallying his supporters against kneeling black athletes, undocumented Latino immigrants and soft-on-crime, weak-on-the-border Democrats. He reverses the traditional relationship between politics and governance, weaponizing policy to mobilize his base rather than mobilizing his base to change policy. And in the Trump era, just about every policy issue is a wedge issue, not only traditional us-against-them social litmus tests like abortion, guns, feminism and affirmative action, or even just the president’s pet issues of immigration and trade, which he has wielded as cultural cudgels to portray Americans as victims of foreign exploiters. These days, even climate change, infrastructure policy and other domestic issues normally associated with wonky panels at Washington think tanks have been repackaged into cultural-resentment fodder’ (Grunwald 2018).