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  2. Culture Wars and Enduring American Dilemmas

Culture Wars and Enduring American Dilemmas

Irene Taviss Thomson 2010 Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license This open access version made available with the support of libraries participating in Knowledge Unlatched.
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"Irene Taviss Thomson gives us a nuanced portrait of American social politics that helps explain both why we are drawn to the idea of a 'culture war' and why that misrepresents what is actually going on."

---Rhys H. Williams, Professor and Chair, Department of Sociology, Loyola University Chicago

"An important work showing---beneath surface conflict---a deep consensus on a number of ideals by social elites."

---John H. Evans, Department of Sociology, University of California, San Diego

The idea of a culture war, or wars, has existed in America since the 1960s---an underlying ideological schism in our country that is responsible for the polarizing debates on everything from the separation of church and state, to abortion, to gay marriage, to affirmative action. Irene Taviss Thomson explores this notion by analyzing hundreds of articles addressing hot-button issues over two decades from four magazines: National Review, Time, The New Republic, and The Nation, as well as a wide array of other writings and statements from a substantial number of public intellectuals.

What Thomson finds might surprise you: based on her research, there is no single cultural divide or cultural source that can account for the positions that have been adopted. While issues such as religion, homosexuality, sexual conduct, and abortion have figured prominently in public discussion, in fact there is no single thread that unifies responses to each of these cultural dilemmas for any of the writers.

Irene Taviss Thomson is Professor Emeritus of Sociology, having taught in the Department of Social Sciences and History at Fairleigh Dickinson University for more than 30 years. Previously, she taught in the Department of Sociology at Harvard University.

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Series
  • Contemporary Political and Social Issues
ISBN(s)
  • 978-0-472-90091-6 (open access)
  • 978-0-472-05088-8 (paper)
Subject
  • American Studies
  • Sociology
Citable Link
  • Table of Contents

  • Stats

  • Cover
  • Title
  • Copyright
  • Dedication
  • Contents
  • 1.  CULTURE WARS AND WARRING ABOUT CULTURE
    • The Culture Wars
    • Warring over Culture
    • The Culture Warriors
    • American Culture
  • 2.  RESPECT FOR RELIGION BUT UNCERTAINTY ABOUT ITS ROLE
    • The Public Sphere and Civil Religion
    • Dilemmas of Church-State Relations
    • Religious Belief and Secularization
    • Conclusions
  • 3.  MORAL BUT NOT MORALISTIC
    • Through the Lenses of Morality
    • Abortion and Homosexuality
    • Moral Decline and Relativism
    • Moralizing and Legislating Morality
    • Conclusions
  • 4.  INDIVIDUALISM BUT NOT TO EXCESS
    • Celebrating Individualism and Community
    • American Individualism: Complexities and Controversies
    • Critiquing Multiculturalism
    • Multiculturalism in Relationship to the Individual, the Group, and the Society
    • Conclusions
  • 5.  PLURALISM WITHIN ONE CULTURE
    • Historical Perspectives
    • Contemporary Images of Pluralism
    • Multicultural Education and the Canon Wars
    • The Difficulties of Tolerance
    • Conclusions
  • 6.  ANTIELITIST BUT RESPECTING ACHIEVEMENT
    • Who Are the Elites, and What Is Elite Culture?
    • Elitism and Funding for the Arts
    • Ambivalence toward Elites
    • Elitism in the Feminist and Gay Rights Movements
    • Conclusions
  • 7.  MODERATION, PLAIN AND SIMPLE
  • 8.  CULTURE, CLASS, AND AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM
    • Cultural Politics
    • American Exceptionalism?
    • The Continuing Significance of Class, Race, and Gender
    • A Polarized Population?
    • Sarah Palin and a Renascent Culture War?
    • A Multitude of Internal Divisions
    • Conclusions
  • 9.  CONCLUDING COMMENTS
  • Methodological Appendix
  • References
  • Index
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