Excerpt: "CULTS OF THE CULTURE WARS. (PART 1)" – JANUARY 09, 2021. A.GLASS
"...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 War/s” 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-conservationism 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 neo-cons 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 American’s on going 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, Murry Rothbard..."
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