Culture Wars Can Never be Won

It’s a metaphor gone bad. We have declared war on too many things: terror, drugs, crime, you name it. The word “war” has lost all meaning.

Pat Buchanan declared culture war, but he didn’t invent the vocabulary or the idea. He actually borrowed the term from Otto von Bismarck, who declared “Kulturkampf” in the 1870s.

(Kulturkampf. I like that much better than “Culture Wars”…it sounds so academic, I can almost take it seriously.)

Bismarck was distracting Germans from the end of a war, a recession, and his own imperialism. Buchanan gave his speech the same year Francis Fukuyama declared The End of History; the First Gulf War had just ended, the economy was in recession, and the Soviet Union’s collapse had everyone wondering: “What now?” Both rallied their beleaguered conservatives with Kulturkampf.

According to them, the “real” battle was not yet won; the domestic enemy remained. Indeed, the other party was an even greater, more insidious threat than the foreign one. Buchanan declared: “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.” His words have been echoed by family-values conservatives ever since.

In the mathematics of Kulturkampf, liberals are equally dangerous as 20,000 Soviet nuclear warheads. Kulturkampf presents itself as rational and common-sensical, but is never based on reason or sense.

However, it does come with a large dose of hypocrisy. Buchanan’s speech railed against the Usual Suspects, including feminists and gays, while scores of female business leaders and Log Cabin Republicans stood on the convention floor. Separated from their radical era, these groups were letting go of a militant past and gaining acceptance into the mainstream. That only made them all the more “dangerous” in the eyes of culture warriors.

Kulturkampf is never a call to conversation; Kulturkampf stops all conversation. Kulturkampf is not a call to debate; it is The End of Debate. Negotiation and resolution are impossible — all that remains possible is annihilation of the other side. The only thing left to say is that “they” are wrong.

Clausewitz famously called war “the continuation of politics by other means,” but Kulturkampf is war by political means. Two sides dig trenches and mark their progress in inches. Supreme Court nominations and obscure state referendums replace the “domino theory.” Two heads yell at each other between commercial breaks.

Always, there are two sides, never three. At its most successful, Kulturkampf divides cleanly: No matter what the issue, we all get exactly two choices. Ask for a separate peace, and you will find yourself in No Man’s Land.

Of course, polling data shows that most of us are there with you. Is abortion wrong? About half of America says yes. But is abortion always wrong, all the time? Only about 12% say so. But the culture warriors will always declare themselves the majority — victimized of some “elitist” minority.

Mind you, the purpose of Kulturkampf isn’t resolution, it’s conflict. And as demonstrated by the, um, “achievements” of the GOP Congress from 1994-2006, the purpose of Kulturkampf is simply to win, that the spoils might be divided another way. The purported “social” or religious goals of Kulturkampf can never actually be fulfilled for the same reason there can never an armistice. Culture Wars are an example of Orwellian politics, wherein Peace is War:

In accordance with the principles of double-think it does not matter if the war is not real. For when it is, victory is not possible. The war is not meant to be won, but it is meant to be continuous.