What is generally referred to as the “culture wars” in the United States is in historical and practical terms a misnomer. It comes from the Kulturkampf conducted by the great German statesman and unifier of Germany, Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, against the large Roman Catholic minority in the newly united Germany, and to a lesser extent, against the other Episcopal Church in Germany, the Lutherans. This was one of the very few serious errors that Bismarck committed in his 28 years as prime minister of Prussia (1862–1890), including 19 years as the founding chancellor of the German Empire. As a dogmatic, though not overly pious, low church Protestant, Bismarck completely misread the proclamation of papal infallibility at the First Vatican Council in 1870. All that was proclaimed was that the pope was correct in asserting what had always been asserted on major points of principle and doctrine in the Roman church. It was a symbolic consolation prize arranged for Pope Pius IX (pope from 1846–1878), as a consolation for the Pope’s loss of secular control of the papal states in the reunification of Italy, which was concluded concurrently with Bismarck’s unification of Germany. Bismarck mistakenly saw that as a challenge to secular authority. Subsequently, he assaulted religious freedom in Germany, sharply diminished the Catholic and Episcopal Churches’ influence in schools, and harassed those churches with a lot of petty officious irritation and censorship. He offended not only the 40 percent or so of Germans in those denominations, but also many others.
Bismarck should have ignored sectarian matters entirely and prepared to take over the crumbling Austro-Hungarian Empire, which, though it was overwhelmingly Roman Catholic, could have been better governed by the Germans than by the failing hands of the Habsburgs in the extreme twilight of their 700-year government in Vienna. It was 40 years since the great Austrian chancellor Clemens von Metternich, a mentor of Bismarck’s, had referred to the Austro-Hungarian Empire as “a costume party in a dilapidated country house.” With a little patience, Bismarck could have absorbed all the non-Slavic parts of that empire into a greater Germany peacefully, while making some concessions to Russia’s masquerade as the protector of the Slavic world. The phrase “culture wars” has been taken up, in the United States especially, to describe sharp political and social differences between large blocks of the American public. The so-called “progressives” are contesting the moderate status quo. “Progressive” is another massive misnomer, as no sane person could describe the orchestrated societal self-hate of wokeism—with all the accompanying claptrap about critical race theory, white privilege, systemic racism, colonization, and the ardent campaign for the self-abasement of all of Western civilization to the apostles of fraudulent or wildly exaggerated victimhood of vaguely defined minorities claiming centuries of oppression at the hands of so-called white exploiters and despots—as “progress.” |
Historians will examine in detail how it happened that the two major American political parties bifurcated so sharply in the aftermath of the greatest and most bloodless strategic victory in the history of the world, to which the bipartisan government in the United States led the West in the Cold War. The containment strategy that ultimately caused the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the collapse of international communism without a shot being fired between the United States and the USSR was devised by the strategic team assembled by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and maintained by his successors, including Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, and Ronald Reagan. Bipartisan agreement was reached to depart from the American tradition of isolationism and lead a defensive alliance accompanied by an unprecedentedly bountiful American-backed program of postwar reconstruction to douse the fires of political discontent in places that might have been vulnerable to communist exploitation.
After the end of the Cold War, the Bush and Clinton families dominated respectively the Republican and Democratic parties and had similar domestic and foreign policy agendas. Donald Trump, one of the most famous people in the United States, used his celebrity and his advocacy on behalf of the very large number of Americans whom he detected were dissatisfied with the distribution of benefits of U.S. economic growth and resented the flow of manufacturing jobs overseas and what they saw as the preferments of Wall Street, Silicon Valley, Hollywood, and professional sport elites. He gained control of the Republican Party and became the only person in the history of the United States to be elected president without ever having sought or held public office—elected or unelected—or high military command.
The intervening years before Trump’s second term saw the quintupling of the inflation rate, the sharp rise of taxation levels, and the frequent embarrassing of America in the world, especially in Afghanistan. Approximately 12 million mainly destitute and unskilled people, including at least half a million convicted violent criminals, were permitted to enter the country illegally. The artificially bloated electorate grew 22 million votes from 2016 to 2020, yet when COVID subsided and many states restored proper vote-counting safeguards, that total sank by 5 million in 2024, and despite an unprecedented campaign of spurious criminal indictments of Trump, he was re-elected with a clear mandate to dismantle the previous program. The president and his entourage believe that the nearly $20 trillion that has been arranged to be invested in the United States, as well as the effects of his tax cuts, will cause the voters to ratify his program next year. Trump has ended illegal immigration, rolled back the anti-capitalist green pursuit of unsubstantiated alarm about climate change, shaped up the NATO alliance so that the allies pay their way, and has negotiated a ceasefire in the Middle East that promises the removal of the terrorist government in Gaza. These so-called culture wars will be decided in favor of moderate conservatives, as long as the Trump economic program is reasonably successful in the balance of his second term.
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