What to read about America’s culture wars

JAMES DAVISON HUNTER, an American sociologist, popularised the term “culture wars” in his book of the same name (its subtitle was “The Struggle to Define America”). It appeared in 1991, during a period of heated disagreement over cultural and social issues. Although Americans have become less religious, polarisation between conservatives and progressives on issues such as abortion and sexual mores has increased. This suited politicians: it is easier to whip up anger and fear about cultural issues than it is to fix problems. Social media have deepened divisions even as the issues under dispute have changed. These days gay marriage is barely controversial. But Donald Trump thinks there are votes to be gained from saying that parents who drop off their sons at school in the morning risk driving home daughters in the afternoon. One battle—between “wokeness” and its critics—may be , but woke attitudes are still strong in schools and universities. And other fights are flaring up. America’s arguments about immigration, guns and climate change are in part clashes between identities. We recommend four books that explain why Americans’s biggest battles are culture wars.By Yascha Mounk. People have long oppressed and marginalised particular groups, chiefly women, gays and ethnic minorities. In the past decade the idea has taken hold that the best way to fight discrimination based on group identities is to shift the balance of power between groups. That has been a terrible mistake, argues Yascha Mounk, a professor of international relations at Johns Hopkins University, in “The Identity Trap”. The “identity synthesis”, Mr Mounk’s term for identity politics, was inspired by academic theories, such as critical-race and queer theory, that focus on ascriptive categories like race and sexual orientation. It encourages members of some groups to think of themselves as victims and ignores much of the progress against discrimination that has been made in the past half-century. An obsession with identity makes it hard for societies that are diverse to flourish, Mr Mounk argues. Only shared liberal values can achieve that.By Ibram X. Kendi. To get a sense of what Mr Mounk and others in this reading list are reacting against, read “How to Be an Antiracist”, a book that is part polemic, part memoir. Ibram X. Kendi, its author, doesn’t acknowledge the progress that Mr Mounk sees. He is a leader of the movement that ascribes America’s ills to a power imbalance between ethnic groups, a message that many Americans have accepted as true. His unsparing book, published in 2019, helped him to win a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant and get at Boston University that he had founded. Hardly anyone escapes judgment in “How to Be an Antiracist”, including the author. Mr Kendi’s parents, he writes, brought him up to be “a racist [against black people], sexist homophobe” (he got better). He contends that ideas, opinions and actions are either racist or its opposite. There is no in-between. “Every policy in every institution in every community in every nation is producing or sustaining either racial inequity or equity,” he writes. Because, he believes, racism is allied to capitalism and “capitalism is essentially racist” (one of the book’s least convincing assertions) there seems to be little hope that many people will learn. “People are racist out of self-interest, not out of ignorance,” he writes. Mr Kendi’s book is for the minority who can overcome that.By Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay. In 2017 and 2018 James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose, liberal academics, submitted (along with Peter Boghossian, a philosopher) bogus papers to academic journals on critical social theory, which criticises how society is organised. Journals published several, including “Human reactions to rape culture and queer performativity at urban dog parks in Portland, Oregon”. The book that followed asks how such theories and their accompanying ideologies came to dominate universities and cultural institutions in America and Britain. Part of the reason, the authors suggest, is that social-justice movements had already achieved their aims; activists needed new material. After laws made it harder to be sexist, homophobic and racist, “all that remained to tackle were sexist, racist and homophobic attitudes and discourses”, they write. Thus new transgressions were dreamt up: “microaggressions”, cultural appropriation and unsafe spaces. The problem is that belief in these notions is often accompanied by punishment of those who don’t conform. Like Mr Mounk, the authors argue that only traditional liberal values, like respect for all individuals and the free exchange of ideas, will make things better. By Douglas Murray. How did such ideologies escape out of academia into business, politics and the media? The effect has been disastrous, writes Douglas Murray in “The Madness of Crowds”, which was published in 2019. “In public and in private, both online and off, people are behaving in ways that are increasingly irrational, feverish, herd-like and simply unpleasant. The news is filled with the consequences. Yet although we see the symptoms everywhere, we do not see the causes.” Mr Murray does, though. In four sections—Gay, Women, Race and Trans—he describes how “oppressed identities” have stoked anger both among people who have those identities and those who do not. A gay man himself, he is open-minded about homosexuality, challenging the notion that it is always innate. Trans is the identity he seems angriest about: trans activism is a movement that “does not challenge social constructs about gender, but reinforces them”. Almost all literature on the subject is unreadable, he reckons. Activists’ “writing has the deliberately obstructive style ordinarily employed when someone either has nothing to say or needs to conceal the fact that what they are saying is not true”.Read our , which uses data to demonstrate that America is becoming less woke, and listen to our on the same theme. Almost any issue can become something to fight over in the culture wars. Some examples: ,, , and . Obviously, history is another, but in 2021 our argued that squabbles about statues can be a sign of healthy debate.