We’re Not in a “Culture War” Anymore

“He who controls the language controls the masses.” – Saul Alinsky

I often tell friends that I regularly check in to MSNBC’s YouTube page “so (they) don’t have to.” (Seriously, it IS hazardous to your health. But how can you know how the enemy thinks if you don’t study him?) At any rate, on Friday morning, the sun rose, MSNBC began transmitting their ruling class propaganda again, and Mr. and Mrs. Brzezinski (I’ll leave it to you to decide who’s who) brought on yet another conniving ruling class jagoff…in this case, trough-feeding Illinois governor JB Pritzker. Not content to let Pritzker plug his own recent oped in Politico (as if he EVER waits to be fed), Mr. and Mrs. B threw him a line he had used in the oped title to get him going: “culture war”.

Ah yes…the authoritarians of the American Left accuse their opponents of a “culture war”, for the 18,764th time. Whether it’s “cruelty”, a “war on democracy”, a “war on history”, a “war on rights”, a “war on decency”, or a “war on America”, the peaceniks of our ruling class live to accuse their opponents of what they themselves are doing. But if we’re being totally fair, they’re not the only ones who use the term; a number of Fox contributors and conservative personalities have used it recently also. And if the applicability of language does in fact matter, the term doesn’t apply to what’s being done by either side.

How can that be, you ask? Because we’re not in a “culture war” anymore.

The term “culture war” has been in use for so long that we completely take its ubiquity for granted. Many know it dates to the early ’90s, but it didn’t start with Pat Buchanan; Buchanan picked it up from a UVA sociology professor and author named James Davison Hunter. (I expand on its origins in the video you see in the link above.) In The Fourth Turning, Strauss and Howe referred to the entire third turning that began in the mid ’80s as “The Culture Wars”; whether the years preceding Davison Hunter’s and Buchanan’s use of the label merit the designation also is a matter of debate. But what seems clear, is that the term “culture war” was far more appropriate for the third turning, as such, than for the fourth turning we are living through today.

One of the principal hallmarks of the period when the term “culture war” came into common use, was that arguments over politics in America were seen as fundamentally low in stakes. (Remember that?) In 2023, people aren’t arguing over right and wrong or over purely symbolic meanings anymore. When our ruling class invokes the term “culture war” and various related iterations today, it’s to preempt debate and defame the opposition while pretending not to; it’s fundamentally passive-aggressive. It’s not about argument and persuasion; it’s about denunciation and force. And as the intelligence agencies, the Department of Justice, the Pentagon, the blue state governors, the blue city mayors’ and DAs’ offices, and the White House continue to beat the drum to indoctrinate unconverted Americans in wokeness and trample what remains of popular and political resistance, they’ll no doubt continue to call every front of opposition to them a “culture war”, as if the cultural side of their agenda isn’t being imposed on the other side through political means.

Don’t be fooled. There is no “culture war” in America anymore. Call it “woke tyranny”, “the fall of Rome”, or whatever you wish. But we’re living through something else, and the end is nowhere on the horizon.

Paul Zimmy Finn

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