From the Chiasmus archive: "Cults of the Culture Wars. (Part 1)" - (A.Glass January 09, 2021)
In light of Donald Trump possible return as the President of the United States, which by its definition is not only an absurd reality, it seems unbelievable. Yet, these political events, within its absurdity, are indeed a uniquely American affair, that one of the most dangerous Presidents America has ever seen, could end up sitting in the Oval Office once again. This is testament to how powerful digital media is and how it can influence not just public opinion, but instigate misinformation and conspiracy theories in steering a voting majority towards extreme Right Wing beliefs. And we have seen this with the so called Culture Wars of the last decade that were essentially created by an ad hoc contingent of far Right neoconservatives and their 'cherry picking' Paleolibertarians via podcasts and Fox news. And it seems this bunch are stirring again, despite some of their, at times, muddled flip flop commentary after Trump's fall from grace in 2021, are trying to have Trump re-elected in 2024. Using the same old scapegoats with their conspiracy laced mania, that the left wing are trying to reshape American Christian values. "Cults of the Culture Wars" was written at the start of 2021, when Donald Trump created a fervor of conspiracy theories on why he lost the election to Joe Biden.
(A.Glass 2023)
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On the 18th January 1871, after three major war victories, the German Empire was founded by the North German state of Prussia, ruled under a constitution created four years before the Empire emerged by Prussian prime minister Otto von Bismarck. Germany, at the time, as a mostly rural landmass, put in place a constitution that was designed to represent the rural workers and strengthen Bismarck’s staunch conservative beliefs. The overall rule of power was left to the King of Prussia William I, yet von Bismarck had, within the newly created constitution allowed a token political house called the Reichstag that was to represent the people, with the upper house Bundesrat as the primely decider on law and rule, to which the 25 states and the monarchs of the German Empire adhered too. The issue, which compiled the problems within the German Empire and von Bismarck’s constitution, was that from the Reichstag, drawn from the male-suffrage system of voting, would be the educated and wealthy element of German society, which was of a small percentage (women could not vote), continued to ensure that a Conservative majority would maintain rule under the newly founded Empire. Yet, by 1870, newer parties began to form in the Rienstag, more so the Left Wing and so called “Progressives” began to attract the attention of the rural populace, also the Center Party which was a Roman Catholic political party and the Social Democratic Party. To which Bismarck issues a verbal degree that the newer parties gaining populace in Germany at the time were Reichsfeinde “Enemies of the Empire”. And with his new constitution in place, Bismarck also began a campaign called Kulturekampf “Cultural Struggle”, an attempt at sparking a necessary semantic in defining the struggle between the German cultural divides. Portraying the mostly Protestant German populous as being under threat by a growing Roman Catholic influence. But, what Bismarck was more concerned about was the growing discord against German conservatism by left political elements. Bismarck attempted, but failed in trying to create a populous divide of what he thought could be attained as a cultural struggle. The Germans at the time, should very little interest in defining this struggle as a way of polarizing themselves in reference to Bismarck’s “enemies of the empire” sloganeering campaign.
However, it was in all retrospect one of Bismarck’s greatest failure’s as a high ranked statesmen of the newly formed German Empire, as the chief architect in its creation of a constitution which ironically allowed for smaller parties to participate in political discussion. Yet, Bismarck’s failed “Kulturekampf” over the two centuries that followed, had struck a resonation in America. And by the 1920s, had embraced the cultural divide with a widespread fervor between liberal and conservative idealisms, thus was the beginning of an Americanization of Bismarck’s Culture Struggle, renamed: “Culture Wars” by sociologist James Davison Hunter who coined the term many decades later in 1991 in his book “Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America”. But, it would be neoconservative Irving Kristol who would, in a symbolic gesture after attending an East German conference “The Cold War and After” in 1993, that defined the nomenclature four years after the German Wall had come down. Kristol in the same year of the conference penned an article titled “My Cold War”, who offered an insight into his transformation from a “Anticommunist Liberal” in the late 1940s and throughout the 50’s, fully embracing a terminology which was created in the 1960s of neo-conservatism to which Kristol began to believe that the real threat facing American culture is liberalism, not communism as he famously quoted from his “My Cold War” essay: “American life has been ruthlessly corrupted by the liberal ethos. It is an ethos that aims simultaneously at political and social collectivism on the one hand, and moral anarchy on the other. They cannot win, but it can make us all losers…”
Kristol’s “My Cold War” essay maybe the imprint to a modern American Culture War or at least a template of the multitude of arguments that circulate back and forth in disputing the roots of American democracy, but regardless of the social, intellectual and political aspects of this modern day Cultural Struggle , Kristol offered some clues to his own personal discord in relation to the mistrust of liberalism and to an extent aspects of Right Wing libertarianism – that at any point could descend into a full blown Marxist takeover of American values which he felt could occur at any point. And these fears that neocons like Kristol have, regardless of their Christian beliefs or view points, became intertwined with political and social concerns. The issue that crosses over into variants of conservative and Right Wing thinking is the belief that economic freedom or ‘free’ markets will be crimped and stifled with over regulation by ‘big’ government. To understand one of the core aspects of America’s ongoing culture wars particularly in relation to capitalism and ownership is to study one of the most important and controversial economic theorists of the 20th Century, Murray Rothbard.
Murray Rothbard was born in 1926 the Bronx, New York City of Jewish Immigrants from Poland and Russia. As a young man, he was greatly influenced by his father David Rothbard a chemist, encouraging his son to appreciate the idealisms of conservative philosophy entailing that small government, meritocracy and freedom of the individual to be paramount as a societal and economic base. He then went onto study at Colombia University, graduating with a degree in mathematics in 1945 at the age of twenty, Rothbard in 1956, now thirty years old, completes his Ph.D. in economics. And it is in this period of a very gifted young man, who was already attracted to the ideas of right wing political philosophy begins to gravitate towards the more libertarianism theory of American politics, whilst prescribing to the viewpoint of The Austrian School of Economics, that individual choices or what is perceived as a freedom of choice in capital markets is the truism of economic foundations. This free market, non intervention viewpoint of economic modeling was mostly taught by the Austrian school economist Ludwig von Mises, who became a mentor to Rothband throughout the 1950s, 1960’s.
Murray Rothbard gained his academic credentials at a time when America was transitioning away of its 1950's conservatism of its middle class pragmatic spending and consumption, into a turbulent political time of the 1960's and 1970's, in what was deemed by a growing interest in socialist ideals within American society and discord against a new found imperialism, based intensely of an aversion against the spread of Communism throughout Europe and Southeast Asia. Rothbard, although fiercely believing in the Right Wing foundations of libertarianism, was also against all forms of interventionism, he was very much anti-war, inscribing his own theory of Anarcho Capitalism in which sovereignty and property ownership is paramount under privately owned structures. Invasions and military intervention of countries fell into his viewpoint of rapid statism, that he perceived would ultimately affect the rights of individuals, which Rothbard decreed should be upheld at all times, of even an aggressor country. But it was his historical revisionist viewpoints of war and conflict, that offer more of an insight into his controversial and more far right leanings which included his thoughts on race, civil and women’s rights, that at the time became heated topics topics throughout America. Rothbard’s ferment distrust that any form of social political structure, which he believed would be detrimental to the plight of human freedom and ingenuity, was maintained over the years before his death in 1995, as a vitriol criticism that was solely aimed at the left of politics.
Cults of the Culture Wars. (Part 1) – January 09, 2021. A.Glass
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