How the culture wars poisoned American politics — and how to fix it

America’s culture wars have metastasized so that many groups believe they are in a maximalist battle against their own extinction. Whether it’s far right natalists panicking over the declining white birth rate, or academic theorists popularizing the belief that words are violence, and that the very existence of disagreeable opinions constitute doing harm.

Hunter says that culture wars have so completely poisoned American politics that they’ve made authoritarianism dangerously attractive to too many. So what’s the alternative? That’s the question he explores in his new book, Democracy and Solidarity on the Cultural Roots of America’s Political Crisis.

And he joins us now. Professor Hunter, welcome to On Point.

JAMES DAVISON HUNTER: Thanks very much. Thanks for having me.

CHAKRABARTI: I feel like I talk on this show, we talk a lot about cultural issues. And I’ve never actually had a guest define what they mean by culture in America. So in the context of these culture wars, how would you define what culture is?

HUNTER: There are different ways of understanding culture, but I understand culture primarily as the frameworks of meaning and understanding that orient a person’s life, and that guide the building and evolution of institutions. So it’s both individual and collective. And out of those interpretations of the world around us, there are strategies of action. There are artifacts that are created. But it all comes down, I think, originally to the symbolic and expressive elements of a civilization. And how they provide, again, the frameworks for meaning, for understanding, for individual and collective life.

CHAKRABARTI: So can you give me an example or two of what you think the important symbolic elements of American cultural life or the project that is America would be?

HUNTER: I think the American project was a project embedded in the national motto of E pluribus unum, out of many. There was one diversity difference, not only racially and ethnically, but in terms of competing different religious beliefs, philosophical points of view, competing interests, difference constitutes our nation. And there was this not only a belief, but a hope and an aspiration that across our differences and in spite of our differences, there would be things that would hold us together, that would function as a kind of glue or an adhesive binding us together in that common project, a project of freedom, of equality.

Of toleration. That was the aspiration.

CHAKRABARTI: That is an aspiration that I fully believe in as a proud American. But the immediate, one of the immediate responses to the belief that this is one of the key ties that bind us together as citizens. Is that perhaps even though E pluribus unum was a founding idea of this country, we have never fully reached that, right?

It’s still just an idea, right? That the whole project of America in fact, has been the slow and hard and painful work in bringing more people into that unum. And so in that case, though, how can we actually say that there’s been this foundational belief in equality and solidarity in this country, if so much of the history of this nation has been pushed from the people from the outside who have been relegated to the fringes of society, trying to get into the center of American life.

HUNTER: That’s right. The cultural sources of that vision, that aspiration, that out of many, there would still be one, and a kind of unity or solidarity around the ideals of freedom and equality, those cultural resources and the ideals themselves were plagued by inconsistencies and contradictions from the very beginning. It was an ethical vision for the reconstitution of public life in ways that would again, aspirationally, expand freedom, expand equality, toleration and so on. And yet those contradictions were present at the beginning. We promised freedom but denied freedom to huge swaths of the American public. We promised equality and yet denied equality.

Those contradictions were present from the very beginning, and the story of American political history and of our public life is in large part a story of working through those contradictions in ways that took a long time, that were painful, that were difficult, that were sometimes violent, but that ultimately were moving toward. A more complete and perfect union. So what’s implied there is that any society, any civilization, any government depends upon a certain kind of solidarity, certain kind of adhesive that binds us together. And yet all solidarity defined by certain boundaries of who is in and who is out, who is included and who is excluded.

And in some respects, the argument I’m making is about the conflict over the course of American history, over those boundaries. Who is included and who is excluded. And I think what makes this story historically and ethically compelling is the fact that these boundaries are constantly evolving, they’re constantly changing, and they’re constantly contested, so that those who early in American history saw themselves included, now are beginning to feel excluded.

And so and groups that we never even imagined in public life is being part of the diversity of American society, are now arguing and claiming a space for themselves to be included. So the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion is part of the underlying history of American political life.

And those boundaries and the contestation of those boundaries are what defined so much of the American culture wars today.

CHAKRABARTI: Thinking through American history, I have to say that it’s a little sobering that at least examples that I can think of in our past, our collective past, where those contests have been resolved, but not easily and frequently not without violence.

HUNTER: That’s right.

CHAKRABARTI: And I want to talk with you about that in a moment, but we have about a minute or so before we have to take our first break here. I’m wondering, what do you think is different now? In terms of the intensity of America’s culture wars, than in times past where those boundaries, as you were saying, were contested.

HUNTER: The earliest years of the culture war were operating within a cultural framework that I describe as the hybrid enlightenment. All of the great democratic revolutions of the 18th and 19th century were the offspring of the enlightenment. But in the United States, in America, it was a hybrid enlightenment that was every bit as religious as it was secular.

And it drew from these resources historically. Today I would say that there’s largely been an abandonment of those resources, both on the right and on the left, in ways that I think are deformations of their own highest ideals. So that’s one difference. Another difference, I think, is that the culture war has increasingly become a class war, as well. Economic resentments and alienation felt by the right is compounded by a cultural alienation. So those are two, I think, important differences.

Part II

CHAKRABARTI: Professor Hunter, I actually just want to go back for a second, for a moment to the analysis that you put forth in 1991 in your book, Culture Wars, where you talked about how the United States had basically since the ’60s, but definitely through the ’80s and early ’90s entered this period where there was a divide in beliefs between two groups that you called the orthodoxy belief or those who believe in some kind of transcendent truth and progressive beliefs in terms of the ever evolving sense of what truth is.

And those two camps didn’t necessarily fall neatly along party lines, which I thought was very important. But what I think is really fascinating is I’ve seen in interviews that you’ve given subsequently that you were surprised by how thoroughly culture wars have taken over American politics.

Why did that surprise you? Because it seemed that your 1991 analysis was pretty trenchant

HUNTER: Understood culture wars primarily against the backdrop of the sweep of 20th century politics. For most of the 20th century, we understood political conflict through the lens of political economy, and by that I mean through the lens of social class.

Through the lens of the conflict between labor unions and business interests, between corporations and the working class. Left and right defined themselves along those lines, but in the last third of the 20th century, conflict was being defined differently. And you would see these conflicts emerge.

As discreet issues, the conflict over abortion, of course, is the most important, but the conflict over funding for the arts, conflict over public education, what’s taught and what’s not taught. Conflict over the canon in higher education and so on. And I understood the culture war to be fairly comprehensive, and part of the goal of that book was to show how these discreet issues, in fact, were woven together.

In a conflict over what America has been, what it is, or at least understood to be now, and what it will become. It was a conflict over the meaning of America, but I mainly understood that in terms of the major institutions of public life, the media, of higher education and education more broadly, of the arts, of government itself, of law.

I think part of what has surprised me is that it was even more comprehensive than that. It spilled out of public life and into private life. I’ve seen articles about the culture war over gardening. I’ve seen reports about the culture war over food and restaurants and dog walking, and these conflicts at one level just seem trivial, but to the people who are involved, it feels like war.

It really does. These are not marginal experiences. These are, and again, it’s because culture is ultimately about how we understand the nature of a good life and the nature of a good society. And when you have competing visions of a good life, and a good society, conflict almost always emerges from that, unless there’s some kind of common assumptions.

CHAKRABARTI: But to me, it seems like the critical thing is that it’s not that people just have competing visions of what constitutes a good life, but that there’s almost this universal belief now that anyone, if your vision is different than mine, your vision is de facto wrong and evil and de facto a threat to my vision of what a good life is.

I think that’s the extreme that we’ve come to, it makes it hard to even have one particular value that we can all rally around, which is, you know, a diversity of opinion, for example.

HUNTER: That’s right. It is the cultural conflict goes so deep that the mere presence of someone with a different opinion or contrary opinion is viewed as an existential threat.

What do you do when you’re in the presence of an existential threat? You cancel them. You want them gone. They are viewed as an intolerable presence and intolerable enemy. And I think those kinds of dynamics are present.  I argue that the authoritarian impulse in our society becomes manifest in the attempt to address the absence of solidarity. If solidarity can’t be generated organically, if it can’t be found, and the warp and wolf of community life and of public life, if solidarity can’t be generated in those ways, it will be imposed coercively.

And I’ll just call to mind an observation made over a hundred years ago by Oliver Wendell Holmes, who said, between two groups of people who want to make inconsistent kinds of worlds, I see no remedy but force. Again, if you perceive the world in such a way that the very presence of someone who holds different opinions, contrary opinions, who is willing to and eager to argue against what you believe, it creates an incendiary environment for politics. And so what we do is we hold those people in contempt and we refuse to even engage them, and I think that’s part of the story right now.

In the early 1980s, early 1990s, people were still willing to engage each other. I’m not sure that the arguments got very far, but the very process of engaging each other was important. I think we’ve largely given up. There’s an exhaustion. And that spells some trouble.

CHAKRABARTI: I’m trying to, I’m thinking of, what am I trying to say here about solidarity? Because like you were saying in the early, in the ’80s and ’90s, perhaps people were still willing to engage with each other.

But that’s when we hear, but that’s also when we hear the language or the beginnings of the language of this existential attack, right? Particularly from Christian conservatives who had a sense that their very beliefs, their way of life were under attack by an increasingly secular America.

And the thing is I think If we look back in time in the United States, and I know you won’t disagree with this, but that there have always been Americans who rightfully have thought that their existences were under attack. It’s just that they didn’t, they did not possess the dominant voices in this country.

And so I think it is really just the biggest difference now, or one. … And I’m not actually making light of this because it’s important, but the difference now is that the people who previously were the arbiters of the institutions that brought the solidarity that you’re talking about, are the ones who are feeling under attack.

No question about it. Much of the story of American public and political life over the course of the last 150 years or so is a story of the marginalization of conservative, but more broadly Christianity in general, but of conservative religion and conservative Christianity in particular, from the culture defining institutions of public life.

There was a time, of course, when Christianity infused not only our politics and our law, but our philanthropy, education, all of the major institutions of American public life. And again, the story is a story of increasing marginalization from very powerful institutions and I think that story can be told, the story of the scopes trial is a story where, in fact, William Jennings Bryan defending creationism won the case, legally.

But lost the case culturally, and from that the Christian understanding of the origins of humanity and of the world was ridiculed. It lost ground as something intellectually serious. And from the intellectual life, it moved to family values in the 1980s, in a way, family values were held in common through much of the 20th century, until the 1980s. And now even the conservative view of family life, of marriage, of how to raise children, even that was being marginal, and that Christian view is being marginalized. And so much of the current culture war was a response. A defensive response to the pluralization, to the diversifying view of these values of intimate life.

CHAKRABARTI: In that sense, were the culture wars and the extremist version that we are experiencing now in this country, were they almost inevitable? Because the United States, I see the United States as this glorious anomaly in terms of human history, right? This long term, right?

This long-term attempt to really form a cohesive, diverse, not just racially, but religiously and take your pick of beliefs diverse democracy, which fights against what I see as what had previously been the sources of solidarity in other human societies, right? Whether it’s race or religion or a belief in a certain kind of government, we were trying to throw all that together here.

So were we doomed to have to enter these culture wars?

HUNTER: I don’t know if we were doomed to the culture wars. I do think that there is something unique about America as a nation, we did not inherit a deep national identity. We didn’t inherit deep class interests and a kind of class structure. We had to make it up as we went along, and the founders of the new republic understood America in those terms. All things were new. It was a new order for the ages, and they understood it as an experiment in freedom. And I think in some respects, we’ve become too complacent.

We simply came to the conclusion, I think for a long time, that things were moving along just fine, that we could solve. Look, Americans are pragmatic people. They’re committed to fixing things, and yet America is far more diverse culturally, religiously, in identitarian ways, than the founders could have possibly imagined.

We live in a far more technologically complex society. And in a way, the experiment continues. And yet we’ve given up on working through those new challenges. Look, at the end of the day, whatever else democracy is, it’s an agreement not to kill each other over our differences.

Rather, it’s an agreement that we’re going to talk those differences through, as deep as they may be. This is why political violence is so anathema within a democracy. Part of what makes our current moment so incendiary, and I think so challenging, is that we see not only within the American public, but within the political leadership, an unwillingness to do the hard work of talking through those differences. In a way, they’ve said, look, the only way forward is for the other side to just disappear.

And that’s the one that touches on the existential issues that you’ve raised a number.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah, because I guess what I’m trying, what I’m struggling with is trying to find an example in U.S. history where this ideal of being able to talk through differences to reach a kind of consensus was ever truly realized.

In previous interviews, for example, I’ve heard you talk about how what did it take in U.S. history to actually resolve the terrible Dred Scott decision, right? It took, eventually it took a Civil War, it took failed reconstruction, it took Jim Crow, it took the Civil Rights Movement, it took 100 years.

That is not a process of constructive conversation leading to consensus. It involved terrible destruction, didn’t it?

HUNTER: It did. Yeah. And the Civil War was, one way of seeing the Civil War was the end of any kind of conversation about it. And it highlights a point that there was a 30 years culture war that preceded the Civil War.

And it was when they decided to stop talking, when certain states seceded from the union, they, and the word union is important here. They seceded from the solidarity of the United States that signaled that the conversation was over. And the only way to preserve the union was through war.

Yeah. And it was the bloodiest war in our history. And destruction was promiscuous. It was just, it was awful. So yeah … it’s a different moment. And we would never divide the nation in ways that are North and South or regional in that sense, because violence doesn’t manifest itself that way in a late modern society.