9 March 2004, James Carroll, Boston Globe
Politicians who spark a culture war for the sake of their own power are playing with fire, and journalists who exploit a culture war for the sake of its unleashed furies are throwing gasoline on the flames. At the beginning of the presidential election contest, that is history's warning to America.
Ever since the graphic designers of television networks began splitting the states into blue and red factions on election night, the impression of a radically divided nation has defined the conventional wisdom. Yet the conflicts of the culture war do not concern such essential questions as the war in Iraq, the war on terrorism, tax reform, trade policy, deficit spending, jobless recovery, the overburdened health care system, or the sorry state of public education. On these complex matters Americans' responses are not readily pigeon-holed, and politicians across the political spectrum are no more able to offer easy solutions to such problems than anyone else. The nation is less divided on the momentous issues than it seems. The culture war rages less around policy than "values."
Thus when George W. Bush advocates a constitutional amendment to prohibit marriage between persons of the same sex, for example, he is not so much seeking to resolve the necessary and normal conflict over the new meaning of sexuality in an age of reproductive revolution as he is identifying himself with an imagined core constituency that is presumed to oppose gay marriage. Pundits and pollsters reinforce the impression that most Americans have hard and fast positions on such questions of moral values, but is that true?
On the wedge issue of gay marriage, the American population has recently shown itself to be extraordinarily open-minded, and that is reflected in Bush's own position. A year ago, so-called "civil unions" -- state-sanctioned domestic partnerships as reflected in Vermont's ground-breaking law -- were widely denounced as a threat to moral values, but now civil union represents the conservative alternative to gay marriage. Pundits and politicians who labeled that first licensing of homosexual partnership as unacceptable to the broad population proved to be wrong. There is reason to believe that similar common sense flexibility -- and fair-mindedness -- in public attitudes will soon lead to widespread rejection of the dubious distinction between civil union and marriage.
But not if the issue is made a matter of the culture war. When quasi-hysterical fearmongering replaces reasonable debate, dark forces can be set in motion that outrun anyone's intentions, and that is especially true when the question involves a segment of society that has long been subject to irrational bigotry. To define the wish of homosexuals for equal access to marriage rites and rights as a mortal threat to the social order, as Bush does, is to put gay people themselves in an unprecedented position of jeopardy. Bush and a conservative punditry, out of crude self-interest, are working hard to reverse the evolution of attitudes that has blurred the boundary between blue America and red. Bush wants that boundary bright. In an election year, it may work. But it is dangerous.
The phrase "culture war" comes from "Kulturkampf." That word was coined in the 1870s when Germany's George W. Bush, Otto von Bismarck, launched a "values" campaign as a way of shoring up his political power. Distracting from issues of war and economic stress, the "Kulturkampf" ran from 1871 to about 1887. Bismarck's strategy was to unite his base by inciting hatred of those who were not part of it.
His first target was the sizable Catholic minority in the new, mostly Protestant German state, but soon enough, especially after an economic depression in 1873, Jews were defined as the main threat to social order. This was a surprising turn because Jewish emancipation had been a feature of German culture as recently as the 1860s. By 1879, the anti-Jewish campaign was in full swing: It was in that year that the word "anti-Semitism" was coined, defining not a prejudice but a public virtue. The Kulturkampf was explicitly understood as a struggle against decadence, of which the liberal emancipated Jew became a symbol. What that culture war's self-anointed defenders of a moral order could not anticipate was what would happen when the new "virtue" of anti-Semitism was reinforced by the then burgeoning pseudo-science of the eugenics movement. Bismarck's defense of expressly German values was a precondition of Hitler's anti-Jewish genocide.
One need not predict equivalence between the eventual outcome of Bismarck's culture war and the threat of what Bush's could lead to. For our purposes, the thing to emphasize is that a leader's exploitation of subterranean fears and prejudices for the sake of political advantage is a dangerous ploy, even if done in the name of virtue. No, make that especially if done in the name of virtue.
