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A review by gregbrown
A War for the Soul of America, Second Edition: A History of the Culture Wars by Andrew Hartman
4.0
A pretty good, textbooky look at the culture wars from the 1970s through to the middle of the 1990s. It's pretty evenhanded with treatment of the various disagreements, trying really hard to treat conservative complaints as if they were presented in good faith.
Unfortunately, the same impulse kind of keeps it from presenting a compelling theory of why the culture wars happened the way they did, other than being echoes of the tumult of the 1960s. And that sort of shines through in the conclusion, where he comes up with a muddled argument that the culture wars are gradually on the way out.
It's kind of funny because he did the same conclusion for the first edition in 2015 and for the second he has to go "ok so Trump happened but I still believe this because X, Y, and Z." But here we are in 2022, and we've got conservatives bleating about "cancel culture" nonstop—helped along by squishy, decorum libs—and people calling in bomb threats to children's hospitals over imagined transgender ideology. That's not even to mention the still-reverberating freakout over masks during the pandemic.
I guess the argument I'd make—one that points to a continued heightening of the culture war as opposed to the cooling he posits—goes something like this: The culture war is a release valve for political conflict in times of policy and electoral stasis. And with the current political setup dominated by an unrepresentative, minoritarian Senate with veto power along with a Supreme Court set to be conservative and nakedly-partisan into the future, it's hard to see any future where the culture war goes away. And when the conservative media ecosystem is self-contained enough to perpetuate an illusionary majority to its adherents, they'll gladly join in—especially if it hits the same ur-fears of their family and power.
As much as I hope we'll get to the class conflict point that Hartman predicts towards the end, as Matt Christmas said at Trump's inauguration in 2017: "This is the stupidest day in American history, a record that will be broken by every subsequent day in American history."
Unfortunately, the same impulse kind of keeps it from presenting a compelling theory of why the culture wars happened the way they did, other than being echoes of the tumult of the 1960s. And that sort of shines through in the conclusion, where he comes up with a muddled argument that the culture wars are gradually on the way out.
It's kind of funny because he did the same conclusion for the first edition in 2015 and for the second he has to go "ok so Trump happened but I still believe this because X, Y, and Z." But here we are in 2022, and we've got conservatives bleating about "cancel culture" nonstop—helped along by squishy, decorum libs—and people calling in bomb threats to children's hospitals over imagined transgender ideology. That's not even to mention the still-reverberating freakout over masks during the pandemic.
I guess the argument I'd make—one that points to a continued heightening of the culture war as opposed to the cooling he posits—goes something like this: The culture war is a release valve for political conflict in times of policy and electoral stasis. And with the current political setup dominated by an unrepresentative, minoritarian Senate with veto power along with a Supreme Court set to be conservative and nakedly-partisan into the future, it's hard to see any future where the culture war goes away. And when the conservative media ecosystem is self-contained enough to perpetuate an illusionary majority to its adherents, they'll gladly join in—especially if it hits the same ur-fears of their family and power.
As much as I hope we'll get to the class conflict point that Hartman predicts towards the end, as Matt Christmas said at Trump's inauguration in 2017: "This is the stupidest day in American history, a record that will be broken by every subsequent day in American history."