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At the end of this wide-ranging survey, Hartman writes, “This book gives the culture wars a history—because they are history. Today, however, these premature judgments have been reversed, and Hartman’s book unwittingly helps explain why. Hartman points to changing attitudes about homosexuality to support his contention that the culture wars are finished. Any time the Left wins any victories whatsoever, there’s going to be a backlash from the Right. (Books like Larry Schweikart’s Hartman’s evocative book title comes from Pat Buchanan’s 1992 Republican National Convention speech. (MSNBC, on the Left, serves a similar, if less influential and pugnacious, function.)
Religious freedom bills in Indiana and Arkansas cause a If historian Andrew Hartman is right, all of these recent developments are merely “lingering residues” of the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s, leftover skirmishes from a battle that has officially ended.The culture wars “are history,” Hartman emphatically declares in the conclusion to his lively new book, Hartman’s conclusion is especially jarring given that he does such a fine job demonstrating that the culture wars were much more than “one angry shouting match after another.” There were “real and compelling” issues behind the incendiary debates about hot button issues such as abortion, affirmative action, and homosexuality as well as evolution, censorship, and the Western canon.
But he came to the conclusion that Americans needed Christian values in the middle of the You see this especially with changing conceptions of race that came out of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. The logic of the culture wars has been exhausted. And you see this in the rhetoric not just of conservatives and the Christian Right, but also in neoconservatives. And if there was one guarantee to generate controversy, To me, the logic of the cultural wars seems largely exhausted. I consider you a traitor to your sex, an Aunt Tom.”We should pay attention to Friedan’s remarks for three reasons, Hartman says: First, they anticipated the nasty spirit of future culture wars exchanges. But the neoconservatives in their origins were people like Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Nathan Glazer, who were at various times in their life on the Left.