What Is the Real Culture War?

by Dr. Gerard Emershaw

What is the Culture War? Bill O’Reilly of “The O’Reilly Factor” on Fox News is viewed by many as the authority on it. However, as I argue in my new book The Real Culture War: Individualism vs. Collectivism & How Bill O’Reilly Got It All Wrong, O’Reilly is completely mistaken in viewing the Culture War as a battle between so-called traditionalists and secular-progressives. The following is an excerpt from the Introduction of my new book, which is now available on Amazon in both print and Kindle formats:

The concept of a Culture War was first given tangible linguistic form in the guise of the German Kulturkampf. The Kulturkampf was a campaign of totalitarian discrimination waged by Prussian Prime Minister Otto von Bismarck against German Catholics circa 1871–1887. Bismarck, displaying the paranoia typical of authoritarian despots, became convinced that Catholicism was a threat to his empire. In order to combat this perceived threat, Bismarck instituted the Kulturkampf (“culture struggle”) against Catholicism by depriving German Catholics of their political voice and by transforming Catholic parochial schools into government-run schools.

The concept of a Culture War entered the realm of American scholarship in 1992 with the publication of Culture Wars: the Struggle to Define America by University of Virginia sociologist James Davidson Hunter. Professor Hunter defines “culture conflict” in the following manner:

I define cultural conflict very simply as political and social hostility rooted in different systems of moral understanding. The end to which these hostilities tend is the domination of one cultural and moral ethos over all others. Let it be clear, the principles and ideals that mark these competing systems of moral understanding are by no means trifling but always have a character of ultimacy to them. They are not merely attitudes that can change on a whim but basic commitments and beliefs that provide a source of identity, purpose, and togetherness for the people who live by them. It is for precisely this reason that political action rooted in these principles and ideals tends to be so passionate.

Professor Hunter more specifically identifies the American Culture War as an intellectual and moral struggle between orthodoxy and progressivism. He defines orthodoxy as the worldview by which there is “commitment on the part of its adherents to an external, definable, and transcendent authority.” This objective and transcendent authority “defines, at least in the abstract, a consistent, unchangeable measure of value, purpose, goodness, and identity, both personal and collective.” This objective and transcendent authority also “tells us what is good, what is true, how we should live, and who we are.” He defines progressivism as the worldview in which “moral authority tends to be defined by the spirit of the modern age, a spirit of rationalism and subjectivism.” Politically, he says, “it nearly goes without saying that those who embrace the orthodox impulse are almost always cultural conservatives, while those who embrace progressivist moral assumptions tend toward a liberal or libertarian social agenda.”

Hunter’s concept of an American Culture War was transformed from an academic concept to a political call to action by Patrick J. Buchanan in his 1992 Address to the Republican National Convention:

Friends, this election is about more than who gets what. It is about who we are. It is about what we believe and what we stand for as Americans. There is a religious war going on in this country. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as the Cold War itself. For this war is for the soul of America. And in that struggle for the soul of America, Clinton & Clinton are on the other side, and George Bush is on our side. And so to the Buchanan Brigades out there, we have to come home and stand beside George Bush.

In this call to battle to his “Buchanan Brigades” in the Culture War, the paleo-conservative Buchanan rants against “the amoral idea that gay and lesbian couples should have the same standing in law as married men and women” and against “the raw sewage of pornography that so terribly pollutes our popular culture.” Twelve years later, Buchanan would succinctly characterize the Culture War as “a radical Left aided by a cultural elite that detests Christianity and finds Christian moral tenets reactionary and repressive is hell-bent on pushing its amoral values and imposing its ideology on our nation.”

Several months after Buchanan’s famous speech, Fox News pundit and blowhard Bill O’Reilly, host of “The O’Reilly Factor,” “reinvented” Hunter and Buchanan’s concept of the Culture War. He castigated the network television news departments for their “core liberal philosophies” and accused them of not serving “traditional and conservative Americans”:

There is no question that the daily headline service provided by the big three networks is valuable. But it is a random, often timid, reportage. The intense culture war in America is often ignored or presented in a one-sided manner. Even network news supporters would have to admit that the presentations are extremely politically correct. For example, the joke in the industry is that the only time you hear a pro-life point of view is when some nut blows up an abortion clinic.

O’Reilly, former joke writer for “Uncle Ted’s Ghoul School”—a 1970s late night B-movie horror show on a local station in Scranton, Pennsylvania—and former host of trashy tabloid news show “Inside Edition,” ran with this borrowed idea and published the book Culture Warrior in 2006. Rebranding the adherents of Hunter’s orthodoxy as traditionalists and adherents of Hunter’s progressivism as secular-progressives, O’Reilly attempts to make the case that secular-progressives—or SPs as O’Reilly likes to “opine”—are destroying the very fabric of the United States and that traditionalists must unite and rally to defeat them. However, O’Reilly’s SPs are bogeymen that do not actually exist. O’Reilly simply lumps all those which he wishes to vilify—progressives, socialists, secularists, civil libertarians, etc.—into one straw man under a unified banner. In reality those under this SP banner are as likely to be in opposition to one another as they are to be fellow travelers. With the bully pulpit of his popular television program “The O’Reilly Factor,” he was able to popularize the notion of a Culture War in a way that Hunter and Buchanan were not.

O’Reilly—following Hunter and Buchanan—is correct in stating that there is a Culture War raging in the United States. However, he does not dig deeply enough. The Real Culture War has been raging for thousands of years. It is probably as old as human civilization itself. The Real Culture War pits individualism versus collectivism. Individualism is the view that the basic metaphysical unit of social analysis is the individual. Individualism states that human beings have intrinsic value and possess the natural rights to life, liberty, and property. This view was held by the Founding Fathers. Collectivism is the view that the basic metaphysical unit of social analysis is the collective—society. Collectivism states that human beings only have value in virtue of their relationship to the collective. This view was held by Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, and Mao as well as American leaders Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Hoover, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Al Gore, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama. Such collectivist dictators historically view themselves as being “Philosopher-Kings” (PKs) in the Platonist mould. However, unlike Plato’s model of enlightened leadership by which leaders must possess esoteric knowledge, these PKs are nothing but tyrants who wish to exempt themselves from the totalitarian collectivism that they seek to force upon the people. It is these PKs and their minions—and not SPs—that are the true enemy of freedom.

In characterizing the Culture War as a struggle between traditionalists and SPs, O’Reilly oversimplifies the battle. Ultimately, traditionalism and secular-progressivism—at least the coherent progressivist elements of it—are two forms of collectivism. His account of the Culture War is akin to writing a book about World War II and describing it as a battle between fascism and communism by conveniently ignoring the important role that democratic nations such as the United States and the United Kingdom played in the war. In effect, O’Reilly blindly ignores one side of the conflict and instead focuses entirely on an internal battle being waged within one side of the war.

In what follows, Bill O’Reilly’s conception of the Culture War will be analyzed and critiqued. It will be argued that he gets the concept of the Culture War totally wrong. The true parameters of the Real Culture War—historical and intellectual battle lines between individualism and collectivism—will be presented in detail. The intellectual foundations of individualism and collectivism will be examined, and it will be argued that individualism is the superior worldview because individualism leads to peace, prosperity, and freedom whereas collectivism invariably leads to war, poverty, and tyranny. First, specific formulations of collectivism—communism, fascism/Nazism, progressivism, environmentalism, neoconservatism, racism, religionism, corporatism, and labor unionism—will be fully exposed and critiqued. Next, an alternate conception of the individual state will be developed and defended while building the night-watchman state from first principles. Finally, modern threats to individualism within the United States will be described in detail, and a plan of action for what individualists can do to win the Real Culture War will be recapitulated.

(More details about The Real Culture War: Individualism vs. Collectivism & How Bill O’Reilly Got It All Wrong can be found at my website.)