Q: What Forces Are Driving the Culture Wars?

• Date: 01 August 2022
• Published date: 01 August 2022

ANDREW HARTMAN

Historian and author of A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars

In U.S. history, the culture wars have been a struggle to define what it means to be American against a backdrop of radical shifts in the way we think of identity, citizenship, human nature, and, more broadly, the "good life."

The phrase "culture wars" became widespread in the late 1980s, but it seemed more like a comment on the legacy of the 1960s. The culture wars had transformed into a fight between those who aligned with the various liberation movements of that decade and those who rejected them for earlier American norms regarding race, gender, sexuality, and religion.

Our current culture wars exist...