Excerpt: "CULTS OF THE CULTURE WARS. (PART 1)" (A. Glass 2021)

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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 mostly a 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 could not vote), continued to ensure that a Conservative majority 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 that he felt was a necessary semantic in defining, a 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 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”.

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Full article:  Cults of the Culture Wars. (Part 1) 

A.Glass (2021)