Duncan wonders about the "culture wars". Here's my take, for what it's worth.
If you go back in American history, the dominance of European culture over our art, our story-telling, our music, our drama is astounding. In the 1920's, academic musicologists wondered if America would produce a vital, native music, even as various strands of folk musics were even then creating blues, jazz, country, and gospel. As recently as the 1990's, in reading an academic overview of British progressive rock, there is still a consensus among academics that, despite both its popularity and sophistication, contemporary popular musics are still "inferior" to the European art music tradition on any number of levels. This point-of-view, steeped in a blind cultural supremacy that is laughable in its smallness, can be extended to treatments of African-American literature, various strands of southern and eastern European culture (song, drama, literature), and the Scots-Irish folk music tradition that, along with the African-American folk music tradition, is the rich vein for so much of our popular culture today.
The kind of cultural hegemony that could sneer at jazz in the 1920's and 1930's, turn a blind eye to Jackson Pollack in the 1940's, and dismiss the writings of Richard Wright and Countee Cullen became less and less tenable after the Second World War. The onrush of various popular art forms rooted more in folk traditions than "high art" traditions was only controversial precisely because of a combination of racism and an elitist disdain for the common experience of the working class (consider the hubbub over A Streetcar Named Desire as archetypal). Yet, for all the chest-thumping and head-shaking, it was precisely the visceral connection popular art made with its audience that made up its appeal.
This same combination of racism and elitist disdain for the folk tradition created, by the mid-1960's, what was known as "the generation gap". It wasn't really a gap created by age; it was one created by various conceits and prejudices brought on by a kind of cultural supremacy that was blind to its own racism and classism. That the same generation that learned to dance to Little Richard and Elvis would, in their young adulthood, burn the US flag and demand an end to an illegal and unjust war, proved for the elder generation that the mores and sensibilities of the children of the post-war era were corrupt by exposure to "base" art forms. The reaction of the right, which continues to this day, to so much of our popular (and increasingly "high" - consider the outrage that toni morrison received a Nobel Prize) art, is rooted in racist disdain for African-American musics, poetry, and literature, and Scots-Irish musics, story telling, and folkways.
Of course, one issue I have left out is the sexism that boils over to pure misogyny on the issue of abortion. With the introduction of a safe, effective contraceptive pill in the mid-1960's, the final barrier to women enjoying the kind of sexual freedom and license previously considered solely a male prerogative became a focal point of controversy. One wonders at times where all these folks fuming over the pill thought all the men who were free to have sex at will were getting it, to be honest. Yet, by the early 1970's, as the feminist movement found its legs, its voice, various images (burned bra, anyone?), the kind of visceral fear many men direct at independent, sexually powerful women became a shrill cry of outrage with the Supreme Court decision Roe v Wade. Rather than consider the issue of abortion as an issue of women's health and independence, the right continues to focus on the fetus.
With the rise of Republican political dominance, first with Nixon's "silent majority" and the hard hats beating up anti-war protesters, then the victory of Ronald Reagan in 1980 right on through the 2006 mid-term elections, issues of culture became a focus of political debate and conflict even though most people understand that these are, in reality, separate spheres. Politics deals with power; culture is nothing more than the way a society expresses itself. No exercise of political power absent wholly illegal statutory restrictions can effect a change in American culture; thus the on-going nonsense about Hollywood liberals, country-music conservatives, the attempt by many Republicans to hijack NASCAR as some kind of right-wing cultural symbol, and on and on.
Few folks outside die-hard racists and cultural imperialists (Pat Buchanan representing the former; Victor Davis Hanson and the late Alan Bloom representing the latter) really pay much attention to these issues anymore, with the one exception being abortion. Even here, however, the rough and uneasy consensus we have reached nationally, while hardly popular with extremists on either side, has stabilized that issue. That's why the anti-abortion folks are resorting to violence, intimidation, and (of course) murder.
In general, people argue over all sorts of things. The mistake right-wing culture warriors made - and continue to make - is to believe that the realm of political power is either an effective or even legitimate forum for deciding issues of culture. My guess is they will continue to make that mistake, even as our culture, both popular and high, develops naturally.
