The reasons for the Culture War itself are not mysterious. First and foremost, it is a counterrevolution seeking to bridge the cultural chasm of the 1960s, the fissure that separates post-Sixties America from the 1950s. That long decade, from the Brown decision in 1954 to the resignation of Richard Nixon as President in 1974, was a flamboyant mixture of nobility and self-indulgence. The Civil Rights Movement and the other social justice movements transformed the monochromatic mainstream into cultural technicolor; but the Civil Rights Movement eventually was shattered by the excesses of black nationalism; the New Left dissolved amidst delusions of revolutionary violence; the anti-war movement, while morally correct, also unsettled America’s view of itself as indomitable and righteous. Furthermore, the counterculture created its own opposition by identifying the culture itself as the threat to human freedom, imagining the enemy to be all the verities of middle-class life: the sanctity of the nuclear family, chastity, sobriety, cleanliness, respect for authority, postponed gratification, hard work, and responsibility toward others. Not only have we not yet fully integrated the results of the 1960s into our habits of thought and our daily lives, we are still sorting through the rubble of that decade and arguing about which bricks we want to use to build our new house. Politics in the 1990s were about the attempted transvaluation of America in the 1960s by the forces of change.
Politics, of course, are still about tax codes, the regulation of commerce, and how many public dollars are going to be spent for what purposes in whose district. Aside from domestic security against terrorism, which is not a partisan matter, there are still large and real issues that claim our attention: health care, campaign finance reform, restructuring social security, protecting the environment, and the wisdom and social justice of tax cuts. Still, to an unusual degree, the public arena in the 1980s and 1990s was full of arguments about such things as the Mapplethorpe photographic exhibit that was canceled at the Corcoran Gallery in 1989, the Enola Gay exhibit that was recast at the Smithsonian in 1995, the proposed national history standards that were ambushed in 1996-97, the “Sensation” exhibit of contemporary British art at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in 1999, the Confederate flag flying over the state capitol in South Carolina in 2000, and such continuing controversies as school prayer, abortion rights, school vouchers, gays in the military, and hate-crime laws. In short, values-in-conflict have been competing with the politics of resource allocation.
One of the ironies of the rise of the New Republicans is that the Cultural Right has successfully copied tactics employed in the 1960s and 1970s by the Cultural Left. The culture, of course, is constantly in motion, pushed and pulled this way and that by innumerable influences, some of them large and impersonal, such as changing technology, but some of them quite self-conscious. For example, the extraordinarily successful women’s movement, since its rebirth with Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique in 1963, proceeded along two fronts at once.[3] One front was public policy. It advocated new laws that were designed to prevent discrimination against women in hiring and in pay, and that were intended to protect women from harassment in the workplace. The notion was that laws would change behavior and behavior would change the culture, an approach pioneered by the Civil Rights Movement.
At the same time, however, the movement assaulted patriarchal biases in the culture directly by attacking the language in which those biases were encoded, and by confronting the manners that were the reflection of the cultural biases. It may have seemed silly to have to use gender-equal “him/her” rather than the privileged “him,” and it was a nuisance to learn to use the neutral salutation “Ms.” in order to avoid the culturally loaded “Miss” or “Mrs.,” but those tactics had the desired consciousness-raising effects. Behaving as if “the personal is political” struck many as bad manners, but it worked. The culture changed in the intended direction. That is why conservatives have anathematized as “politically correct” such linguistic subversion of the existing order.
The Religious Right is following a course similar to the women’s movement by seeking to capture the government for some of its purposes (prevention of abortion; teaching creationism in school; protecting prayer in schools; character education), and by waging at the same time cultural warfare in the non-governmental public square over powerful symbols (prayer at public events; the invocation of religiously derived values in public policy debates; respect for the flag; recitation of the pledge of allegiance).
The counterculture of the 1960s, on the other hand, did not trust the government, and disdained the political movements of the Left in the 1960s as well. It simply ran a large-scale cultural demonstration project by turning almost every middle-class virtue upside down, and then singing and living the new lifestyle. “Let your culture be your politics,” it said, and bombarded the public with a long string of slogans: “do your own thing”; “if it feels good, do it”; “never trust anyone over thirty”; “tune in, turn on, and drop out”; “make love, not war.”
We should not be surprised, therefore, when the counterrevolutionaries of the current Culture War focus upon universities, dedicated as those cultural warriors are to rolling back the cultural changes initiated in the 1960s by feminism, the Civil Rights Movement, the other social justice movements, the anti-war movement, and the counterculture. The revolutionary army seemed to be bivouacked on college campuses in those turbulent years, and universities today are suspected of harboring sixties fugitives who fled the scene of the accident.
Against its will, then, the university is an actor in the Culture War. I use the term “actor” deliberately, because the Culture War is a kind of theater, a theater in which the players plot scenes and follow scripts designed to send cultural messages to various audiences. Just as we spoke of the European Theater and the Pacific Theater in World War II, we now have the campus theater in the Culture War. The objective is to pull the culture to the Left or to the Right. The tactic pursued relentlessly by the cultural warriors of the Right is to demonize universities as the breeding ground of the evil forces of liberalism that are undermining “American civilization.”
The Culture War is a contest for the minds and hearts of the public. Consequently, it must be waged through the communications media. It is no secret that journalism has been changing, that the proliferation of modes of communication has driven journalists to ever more inventive ways of capturing the public’s attention. Entertainment values intrude on the news, sound bites muscle aside thoughtful commentary, and ever shorter news cycles cause a rush to publication without verification. One of the major themes of my story is the difficulty of dealing with complex issues in a media environment that rewards simplicity, one in which the desire for good copy overwhelms the dictates of good sense.
Like all other liberals, I believe that a free press is the bulwark of liberty and democracy. Like anyone who has ever been covered by the press, I am painfully aware that journalists are fallible. Too frequently, reporters don’t get the context right, and commentators don’t get the facts right. Journalists, I fear, are just as subject as other humans to incompetence, venality and self-deception. It is frequently difficult to know which of those failings is the culprit when a story goes awry.
Those intimations of mortality, however, do not worry me very much; they do not threaten the republic. I am more concerned about a different and more subtle phenomenon in the media world. Here is a simple illustration. In the winter of 1994, after I had been at the National Endowment for the Humanities for about six months, the NEH announced that the Jefferson Lecturer for that spring would be Gwendolyn Brooks, the Chicago poet who, in 1950, became the first African American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize. The Jefferson Lectureship carries a $10,000 stipend and is the most significant award that an American humanist can win. The roster of Jefferson Lecturers is a Who’s Who of humane letters. The New Republic, edited then by the right-leaning controversialist, Andrew Sullivan, had opposed my nomination. It greeted the news that Brooks would be the Jefferson Lecturer with a full column of sarcasm and ridicule. Charging that Gwendolyn Brooks was not good enough for the honor and that she had been selected only