| Chapter : | Introduction |
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“You lie,” as President Obama addressed a joint session of the U.S. Congress in the chambers of the House of Representatives in September 2009. The vision of a future filled with cultural and political peace, or at least a respectful truce, rather than a continued tug-of-war between both dissipated just as quickly into the vapor, and it became clear that the culture wars that many had hoped to put behind them were still driving political discourse in America. With the election of an African American man to the presidency, a battle might have been won in the war, but the war raged on.
Much has been written and said in the name of the “culture wars” in America for at least three decades. The battle for the control of the culture, with the ultimate goal being control of the nation’s future, has provided fodder for dozens of scholarly studies and even larger numbers of popular literary tomes and critiques. James Davison Hunter, in his 1991 seminal work Culture Wars, writes,
Hunter uses the terms orthodoxy and progressivism to broadly identify the participants. Hunter’s characterization of the opposing sides and views has held strong for the past twenty years and has been at the core of much of what has been written about the culture wars.2
Hunter deemphasizes class in his argument. He notes that these culture wars are founded on specific views of the world as it is and how it should be, and thus they often cross class lines, particularly when hot social issues such as abortion or gay marriage are the subjects. But, whereas the culture wars are clearly not solely about class, class surely plays a significant role in this struggle for control over the future of America. For that reason, I believe it is important to examine how both the working class and the broad “counterculture” have been defined during this period of culture wars, primarily because these two groups have most