Culture war
The researchers view culture war attitudes as "foundational elements in the political and religious belief systems of ordinary citizens.
[18][19] Historian Matthew Dallek argues the John Birch Society (JBS) was an early promoter of culture war ideas.
[21] James Davison Hunter, a sociologist at the University of Virginia, introduced the expression again in his 1991 publication, Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America.
[24] During the 1992 presidential election, commentator Pat Buchanan mounted a campaign for the Republican nomination for president against incumbent George H. W. Bush.
He named abortion, sexual orientation and popular culture as major fronts—and mentioned other controversies, including clashes over the Confederate flag, Christmas, and taxpayer-funded art.
[4] The rhetoric of the Christian Coalition of America may have weakened president George H. W. Bush's chances for re-election in 1992 and helped his successor, Bill Clinton, win reelection in 1996.
In particular, debates over the development of national educational standards in 1994 revolved around whether the study of American history should be a "celebratory" or "critical" undertaking and involved such prominent public figures as Lynne Cheney, Rush Limbaugh, and historian Gary Nash.
[35] Palin's defeat in the election and subsequent resignation as governor of Alaska caused the Center for American Progress to predict "the coming end of the culture wars," which they attributed to demographic change, particularly high rates of acceptance of same-sex marriage among millennials.
[43] In 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, North Dakota governor Doug Burgum described opposition to wearing face masks as a "senseless" culture war issue that jeopardizes human safety.
[44] This broader understanding of culture war issues in the mid-late 2010s and 2020s is associated with a political strategy called "owning the libs."
Conservative media figures employing this strategy emphasize and expand upon culture war issues with the goal of upsetting liberals.
During President Donald Trump's inauguration celebrations on January 20, 2025, tech billionaire Elon Musk sparked controversy by making a gesture that resembled a fascist salute.
While addressing supporters at the Capital One Arena in Washington, D.C., Musk placed his right hand on his chest before extending his arm in an upward diagonal motion.
A memo from the Office of Personnel Management ordered agency heads to place DEI workers on administrative leave, with plans to permanently dismiss them by the end of January 2025.
President Trump attributed the accident to DEI policies within the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), suggesting that diversity hiring compromised air traffic control standards.
Trump repeatedly framed fact-checking initiatives as tools of the "woke left," arguing that they disproportionately target conservative viewpoints while allowing progressive misinformation to spread unchecked.
By removing fact-checkers and implementing a community-driven moderation system, Meta's decision was seen by many on the right as a victory for free expression and a rejection of perceived ideological bias in tech platforms.
According to Mark McKenna's analysis for the Australian Parliamentary Library,[59] John Howard believed that Paul Keating portrayed Australia pre-Whitlam (Prime Minister from 1972 to 1975) in an unduly negative light; while Keating sought to distance the modern Labor movement from its historical support for the monarchy and for the White Australia policy by arguing that it was the conservative Australian parties which had been barriers to national progress.
In 1999, following the release of the 1998 Bringing Them Home Report, Howard passed a Parliamentary Motion of Reconciliation describing treatment of Aborigines as the "most blemished chapter" in Australian history, but he refused to issue an official apology.
Keating has argued for the eradication of remaining symbols linked to colonial origins: including deference for ANZAC Day,[61] for the Australian flag and for the monarchy in Australia, while Howard supported these institutions.
[citation needed] Also in 2006, Sydney Morning Herald political editor Peter Hartcher reported that Opposition foreign-affairs spokesman Kevin Rudd was entering the philosophical debate by arguing in response that "John Howard, is guilty of perpetrating 'a fraud' in his so-called culture wars ... designed not to make real change but to mask the damage inflicted by the Government's economic policies".
[66][67] Subsequent to the 2007 change of government, and prior to the passage, with support from all parties, of the Parliamentary apology to indigenous Australians, Professor of Australian Studies Richard Nile argued: "the culture and history wars are over and with them should also go the adversarial nature of intellectual debate",[68] a view contested by others, including conservative commentator Janet Albrechtsen.
[69] Climate change in Australia is also considered a highly divisive or politically controversial topic, to the point it is sometimes called a "culture war".
[70][71] According to political scientist Constance G. Anthony, American culture war perspectives on human sexuality were exported to Africa as a form of neocolonialism.
American conservatives export their culture wars to Africa, Kaoma says, particularly when they realize they may be losing the battle back home.
[73] North American and European conspiracy theories have become widespread in West Africa via social media, according to 2021 survey by First Draft News.
[74] A 2021 report from King's College London argued that many people's views on cultural issues in Britain had become tied up with the side of the Brexit debate with which they identify, while the public party-political identities, although not as strong, show similar alignments and that around half the country held relatively strong views on "culture war" issues such as debates on Britain's colonial history or Black Lives Matter; however, the report concluded Britain's cultural and political divide was not as stark as the Republican–Democratic divide in the US and that a sizeable section of the public can be categorised as having either moderate views or as being disengaged from social debates.
[82][83] Several politicians, such as Poland's Law and Justice party,[84] Hungary's Viktor Orbán, Serbia's Aleksandar Vučić, and Slovenia's Janez Janša,[85] have been accused of fomenting culture wars in their respective countries by encouraging dissent, resistance to LGBT rights, and restrictions on abortion.
[88] Ukraine also experienced a decades-long culture war pitting the eastern, predominately Russian-speaking, regions against the western Ukrainian-speaking areas of the country.
In the region, in passing a law to criminalize negative interpretations of the country's collaborationist nationalist movements during World War II, Poland is not alone,[94] and Poland–Ukraine relations have suffered as a result of a similar law in Ukraine that was criticized in Poland for deflecting blame away from the Ukrainian Insurgent Army and their massacres of Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia.
