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The enemy of the nation was no longer beyond its geopolitical borders, but instead could be identified from the comfort of countless movie theaters, university classrooms, and living rooms the country over. These subjects remained relevant in this period for obvious reasons, yet they were no longer the predominant concerns of the media, federal government, or political parties by the late 1960s.
No longer could politics be understood in the traditional fashion, namely, as a venue of legislation and deliberation in regard to the nation’s economic forecast or foreign policy concerns. What had changed by the 1960s, however, was the content of such disparate visions. This new America signaled yet another contentious moment in American history when various constituencies debated the virtues of competing visions over the idea of America itself.
Compared to the America that many in “normative America” sought to enact and defend-one that touted personal responsibility, individual merit, and social mobility as its creed-the “new America” that emerged during the 1960s possessed its own language, culture, and way of knowing the world that fundamentally challenged the more thickly rendered notions of community and individuality of America’s mid-century, as historian Daniel Rodgers has argued in his award-winning monograph, Age of Fracture (2011). This alone is reason enough to engage Hartman and his many insights into American history since the 1960s.įor Hartman, the beginnings of our politically fraught moment can be found not in the debates over the implementation of the New Deal or the battles over temperance as other historians have argued, but rather in the raucous decade of the 1960s. Not only is Hartman’s accomplishment an original one, but it also gathers together in one place some of the best material and writing on the culture wars that others have been working on over the past decade. Topics in the latter chapters-curricula, art, and the National Endowment for the Humanities-have been written about extensively elsewhere, so I will not spend much time on them. As a result, I will focus on the original contributions of the text instead of chronicling the chapters individually.
My reading of Hartman is selective and thematic in light of space constraints and the audience of this review (scholars of American religion and culture). Lucky for us, the academic study of the culture wars has found its most comprehensive text to date in Andrew Hartman’s A War for the Soul of America. A consideration of America’s recent past is essential to understanding why polarization defines the character of our contemporary moment and how such division has reached its fever pitch.
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As a result, the notion of self-segregation along racial lines also applies to the manner in which Americans decide where to live, where to shop, and how to vote according to a particular ideological position. Researchers at the Pew Research Center have contributed empirical evidence to confirm these claims, concluding that polarization is the defining characteristic of American politics. Criticisms of “the media” and its role in this division have even begun to target cable programs, such as The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, for their own contributions to a cynical and politically apathetic country. Journalists, academics, and political pundits have commented on this phenomenon in a variety of media settings from Sunday morning network talk shows to New York Times op-eds. The American electorate is more divided than at any point in recent memory. You Can't Endorse Me, But I Endorse You: American Religion and Politics in the Age of the Culture Wars A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars.Ĭhicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015.
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