Why conservatives start culture wars and liberals win them

For a time, it was fashionable to declare that America’s culture wars were over. “Culture wars issues not only had a very low profile in the [2008] campaign,” the Center for American Progress’s Ruy Teixeira wrote in 2013, “but, where conservatives did attempt to raise them, these issues did them little good. . . . There will be diminishing incentives for politicians to take up these causes for the very simple reason that they are losers.”

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And yet here we are, in 2016, with the culture wars still going strong. Gun control, religious liberty, Black Lives Matter and funding for Planned Parenthood are all high-profile issues in the presidential campaign. Perhaps the most intense battle, though, is the one over immigration, which National Review’s Reihan Salam correctly identifies as a “fight over the future of American national identity in the face of rapid and accelerating demographic change.”

As a historian, I’m not optimistic that our culture wars will end anytime soon. These angry disputes about the meaning of America, and who is a true American, have been raging since the early days of our nation. We’ve lurched from one cultural conflict to the next. A loss in one battle further convinces culture warriors that our society is going to hell. So they cast about for another grievance — another “them” to blame for what is happening to “us.” In this way, the culture wars are perpetually rising from the dead.

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