Culture War as Class War
28th July 2018
The ongoing uproar after the election of Donald Trump led the sociologist James Davison Hunter to reflect in a fresh way on the engines driving political conflict and social division. Back in the early 1990s, he popularized the phrase “culture war,” the now-indispensable term to describe the struggle for the political and cultural power to define the future of the United States. In the second decade of the twenty-first century, he sees that this struggle has “evolved and metastasized into a class war.” Of course, the culture war has always been a class war. Thirty years ago, when Hunter first began studying it, the culture war was a fight within the broad American middle class, a contest over which of its wings would prevail over the other. Then as now, it pitted a new, economically ascendant class of professionals and “creative industry” managers against a downwardly mobile bloc of “old economy” elites and the middle and working classes tied to them. Our politics are enflamed because this struggle is ongoing, and the stakes are high. It is a battle not just for prestige but for supremacy and rule in every domain of social life—culture, economy, state.