Morning Comrades and welcome back to the concluding part on this special series this week. Thank you for sticking around and being interested and also thank you to the patreons of this project who sort of missed out on their special gift this week, only because I got carried away.
In the previous two essays we touched on the subjects of what “culture wars” are and how to engage with them to the early history and foundations of what we now call “culture wars”.
As the manufacturing of these “conflicts” moved from Europe to the U.S. after WW2 so will the attention of this last part be mostly on the U.S. - Obviously, whilst some of the topics that are manufactured within these Culture Wars change depending on what part of the NATO empire they take place, they usually are quite similar, coordinated and stem from the various and nefarious conservative U.S. infrastructures.
The US experience is useful context to where we are now in the rest of the NATO empire and where we may be heading. Many researchers trace the genesis of this conflict in the US to the cultural transformations that began in the 1960s, with liberation movements calling on historically marginalised groups to reclaim and celebrate their heritage and identity and demanding recognition of injustices faced, as well as challenging norms around sex, family, patriotism and war. But, certainly in the decades since, shifting cultural debates cannot be seen solely as a simple bottom-up movement, led by public opinion, beliefs and expression.On the contrary, whilst these movements are still steam charging ahead, their language and ideas are quickly co-opted and turned around by the agents of Capitalism to start such “Culture Wars”. The way that political parties and the media engage in these debates also plays a role in growing division. There is a clear interaction between how the national conversation is set and how the public react.
From Cultural Marxism to 9/11
The language of “culture wars” was first popularised by the sociologist James Davison Hunter in the early 1990s. Hunter used it to describe the deep-seated tension that had emerged in the US between “orthodox” and “progressive” worldviews. For him, the term not only captured a political struggle over cultural issues, but a conflict “over the meaning of America, who we have been in the past, who we are now, and perhaps more important, who we, as a nation, will aspire to become.” Whilst a correct analysis it, purposely lacks a class analysis in that in fails to acknowledge the capitalists class stranglehold on the so-called “orthodox” aka “conservative”, minority of U.S. society.
The story of culture wars in the US
A culture war narrative quickly took hold in the US after a speech by the political advisor Pat Buchanan at the 1992 Republican National Convention. Buchanan framed the “cultural war” as a “struggle for the soul of America”, and the term entered more widespread use in the media from that point on.
He argued: "There is a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we will one day be as was the Cold War itself." In addition to criticizing environmentalists and feminism, he portrayed public morality as a defining issue:
“The agenda [Bill] Clinton and [Hillary] Clinton would impose on America—abortion on demand, a litmus test for the Supreme Court, homosexual rights, discrimination against religious schools, women in combat units—that's change, all right. But it is not the kind of change America wants. It is not the kind of change America needs. And it is not the kind of change we can tolerate in a nation that we still call God's country.”
All of which, amazingly in hindsight was attributed to secularism, satanism and communism. Whilst I genuinely doubt that Buchanan actually believed this, he resorted to the 100 year old trope of attributing the above to communism and a Jewish Conspiracy to destroy the “values that America” - only problem there is that there are no values other than protecting the core essence of capitalism: the nuclear family, exploitation of all reproductive care work by women and assigning women the only role they play in this equation: producing fresh offspring that accumulates and consumes.
The US experience however also illustrates that culture war issues come and go: once consensus is built, such as on women working – an issue that was salient in 1960s but now largely resolved – other issues, such as same-sex marriage and then gender identity, take their place. In this sense, the culture wars can be seen as inevitable flashpoints in a process of culture change.
The culture war had significant impact on national politics in the 1990s. The rhetoric of the Christian Coalition of America may have weakened president George H. W. Bush's chances for re-election in 1992 and helped his successor, Bill Clinton, win reelection in 1996. On the other hand, the rhetoric of conservative cultural warriors helped Republicans gain control of Congress in 1994.
The culture wars influenced the debate over state-school history curricula in the United States in the 1990s. In particular, debates over the development of national educational standards in 1994 revolved around whether the study of American history should be a "celebratory" or "critical" undertaking, one that we are seeing again, now under the pretext of Critical Race Theory.
2001–Today: Post-9/11 era & Anti-Wokeness
A political view called neoconservatism shifted the terms of the debate in the early 2000s. Neoconservatives differed from their opponents in that they interpreted problems facing the nation as moral issues rather than economic or political issues. For example, neoconservatives saw the decline of the traditional family structure as a spiritual crisis that required a spiritual response.
During the 2000s, voting for Republicans began to correlate heavily with traditionalist or orthodox religious belief across diverse religious sects. Voting for Democrats became more correlated to liberal or modernist religious belief, and to being nonreligious. Belief in scientific conclusions, such as climate change, also became tightly coupled to political party affiliation in this era, causing climate scholar Andrew Hoffman to observe that climate change had "become enmeshed in the so-called culture wars.
Topics traditionally associated with culture war were not prominent in media coverage of the 2008 election season, with the exception of coverage of vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin, who drew attention to her conservative religion and created a performative climate change denialism brand for herself. Palin's defeat in the election and subsequent resignation as governor of Alaska caused the Center for American Progress to predict "the coming end of the culture wars," which they attributed to demographic change, particularly high rates of acceptance of same-sex marriage among millennials. This era lays the foundation of what we today can see, especially in the radicalization of the proponents of capitalism, that is, especially in the U.S. increasingly interwoven with conspiracy theories from the far-right ( from QAnon to Breitbart and so on ) anti-semitism and neo-nazi violence.
Here in Europe one such most violent consequence was Anders Breivik.
Andrew Breitbart, alongside the infamous Steve Bannon, who ran articles on his Big Hollywood site in 2009 headlined "Political Correctness is Cultural Marxism" and who appeared that year on Sean Hannity's Fox News show to declare that "cultural Marxism is political correctness, it's multiculturalism, and it's a war on Judeo-Christianity," was one of the major modern vectors of belief in the conspiracy. While subterranean cultural trends are difficult to pinpoint precisely, his media empire was likely one of the main incubators.
Despite Breitbart's efforts at spreading the idea, it hasn't really been widely adopted by more mainstream conservative politicians and media personalities up until Trump became President. One potent exception is the psychologist and lifestyle guru Jordan Peterson, who seems to be alluding to the same general idea when he uses his preferred phrase, postmodern neomarxism.
The cultural Marxism conspiracy cultist who made the most hideous public impact was Anders Breivik, who murdered 77 people in Norway in 2011. Breivik wrote in his 1,500-page manifesto that "you cannot defeat Islamization or halt/reverse the Islamic colonization of Western Europe without first removing the political doctrines manifested through multiculturalism/cultural Marxism."
Google Trends shows an uptick in internet searches for the phrase since the dawning of the Trump age in late 2015; they essentially doubled over the previous decade. The fever also infected the administration itself: Trump national security official Rich Higgins insisted in a 2017 memo that "Islamists ally with cultural Marxists because…they properly assessed that the left has a strong chance of reducing Western civilization to [Islam's] benefit."
One of the more recent adherents to the theory—a more surprising one, since his public persona during his recent presidential campaigns sensibly avoided such cultural resentments—is the libertarian-leaning former Texas congressman Ron Paul.
In July, Paul's Facebook page featured a brief post attacking cultural Marxism. The argument offered was weak, even for the genre, while hinting at the general idea that progressive cultural trends were communist infusions: "Marxists just shifted their 'exploitation' schtick to culture: — women exploited by men; — gays exploited by heterosexuals — The old exploited by the young — and vice-versa — This list goes on and on."
But the post drew attention far beyond its intellectual merits because of the cartoon that accompanied it. Following the familiar trope of blaming negative cultural change on an invading nonwhite Other, the cartoon lined up classically offensive stereotypes of Jewish, black, Asian, and Hispanic characters punching out Uncle Sam. Their shared fist was branded with a hammer and sickle, and they were united in a shout of—you guessed it—"CULTURAL MARXISM."
Fast forward to today we are now at the point where these initially fringe concepts attacking the sensical progression of society have fully and truly gripped most, if not all proponents of capitalism and notably, for the first time, publicly also the capital class itself. Granted Henry Ford was an exception in the past but you get the point.
As mentioned earlier, once certain conditions have been settled, the focus on amplifying certain “buzz words” changes, with the withdrawal of the U.S. military from the Middle East ( partly ) and Afghanistan the focus shifted from Anti-Islam to Anti-Wokeness. Essentially, any idea and movement to calls for inclusion and accountability, sustainability and ant-growth ( in the broadest of terms ) is branded as a “woke”, “cultural marxism” and sold as a threat to the foundations of our society, going as far as relating it back to the supernatural by aligning these movements to anti-spiritual in the sense that they are threatening the “soul” of any nation.
Of course, we have to understand these narratives that are now spewed from everyone right of AOC ( in the sense of the political class ) in the U.S., to oligarchs such as Bezos and Musk to hacks such as Ye and Dave Chappelle to name a few more famous instances, as nothing more than what we have discussed already: attempts at diversion and division.
It matters little if it is the Capitalist Class itself or their many pawns that stokes these fires, amplified by social and the mainstream media, the facts remain: culture wars are engineered “movements” that exist solely to protect the continued exploitation of you and me, the working classes around the world. Culture wars are designed to divert attention away from the increasing oppression and suffering that Capitalism requires to function in an ever increasing volatile world. It is designed to divide the working classes alongside fault lines that often do no exist in the broad masses to avoid working class unity at all costs. That is their biggest fear and they will use whatever means available to them to stop that.
This concludes this weeks, semi-spontaneous special series. Next week will be a short one to wrap up the year, look forward to one special patreon-only dispatch and two regular newsletter.
Thank you for your time, attention and continued support of this work. Please feel free to share these essay with anyone, the more people are here the merrier we can work together.
Yours, warmly,
V.