History of a notion. “America is in the midst of a cultural war (…) The end to which these hostilities tend is the domination of one cultural and moral ethos over the other. “ In 1991, James Davison Hunter, American sociologist, exposes in his book Culture Wars. The Struggle to Define America (Basic Books, untranslated) a political theory whose name borrows from Bismarck’s Kulturkampf – his policy intended to sever ties between Rome and the Catholic Church in Germany and place the latter, seen as a threat to the national unity, under the supervision of the State. The cultural war opposes, according to Hunter, two groups transcending religious affiliations, “Orthodox” and ” progressive “, which are torn apart by the controversies of the time – abortion, the union of homosexuals, the distribution of condoms in schools, etc. Far from constituting “Flashes of madness” Venus “Politicized margins”, these battles would reveal “Fundamentally opposed visions of what America means: what it has been, what it is and what it should be”, each camp seeing itself as the legitimate embodiment of national values.
The expression found a second youth under the presidency of Trump, who, after the pacified era – at least in appearance – of Barack Obama, reopened bloody battles around new fronts – #metoo, the rights of transgender people, the Black Lives Matter movement, abortion always – polarizing the country. In the line of the thinkers of the new French right, whom he admires, Steve Bannon, Trump’s adviser, claimed to be a “Extreme right gramscism”. In the 1920s, Antonio Gramsci, Italian communist philosopher, theorized cultural hegemony, the idea that political power is backed up by cultural power. “Politics is dowstream from culture”, “The political arises from the culture”, is the very Gramscist slogan of Breitbart News, the “information” site at war against the “Cultural Marxism” liberals.
Control of popular culture
“Even in their moments of maximum electoral influence – the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, the early years of Donald Trump’s turbulent reign – conservatives often lament that they have won the political battle but lost the culture. They’re right “, writes Ronald Brownstein in Rock Me on the Water (HarperCollins, 2021, untranslated), a book about the year – 1974 – when the Liberals would have definitively established their control of popular culture. “Cultural wars are a strategy of the conservatives, in reaction to the fight for civil rights and minorities, partly won”, explains the historian of ideas François Cusset. They seize various facts like that of the “Welfare Queen”, an African-American fraudulent with social aid who drove in Cadillac, which will become the incarnation of “the assistantship”, the story of such an artist burning a flag. American in an installation that will cause a national debate, or the censorship of rap lyrics, “So many subjects which fall short of what we identify as political, which Reagan will use to defend the homeland, family values, etc. “, notes the philosopher Yves Citton.
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