6 - The past is prologue

Summary

The birth of a movement

“Culture Wars” is the term generally applied to the intense and often violent discourse that erupted during the years between Richard Nixon's reelection in 1972 and the end of the millennium. The period was marked by an unprecedented alliance between conservative political activists who abhorred the growth of the federal government, and fundamentalist Christians who claimed that the liberal political agenda of the previous decade had generated a serious moral decline. Together they formed a coalition that waged a cultural revolution designed to recreate a putative American Golden Age. As political revolutionaries, they preached a doctrine that called for a return to isolationism, larger national defense budgets, smaller human service programs, protection of private property, and support for free enterprise. As cultural revolutionaries, they demanded that American society resurrect the fixed moral code that dominated the ideology of the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Specifically, they demanded a hierarchical arrangement ruled by white heterosexual males and supported by white heterosexual wives all of whom lived within a traditional family structure. It was a paradigm that defined itself by what it rejected, and it indicted homosexuality, promiscuity, divorce, and interracial unions as perversions that had shredded the moral fabric of American society.

This alliance waged several successful high-profile battles including the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment and the weakening of abortion rights.