What exactly is meant by “culture wars”?

Peter Warski
Peter Warski
Published in
6 min readMay 9, 2022

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Large crowd of protestors, some holding signs and banners, with the U.S. Capitol in the background.
The Women’s March on Washington, January 2017. Photo by me.

Back in the 1960s, President Lyndon B. Johnson somewhat famously observed that “if you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”

Much more recently, columnist Paul Krugman aptly reinforced this same idea by musing that conservatives have long followed an age-old playbook: “When the people are suffering, you don’t try to solve their problems; instead, you distract them by giving them someone to hate.”

When we talk about “culture wars” that have long been a centerpiece of American society, we should suffer no illusion that these battles actually have anything to do with “culture.” To the contrary, they are carefully, strategically, and successfully orchestrated tools of mass distraction.

Why does this tactic work so brilliantly, and why do the American people fall for it so readily? Well, in part, I suspect it’s because it’s simple—and seductive. Solving complex problems is hard; channeling shared rage over those problems into something much more primal is easy. You might not understand or care about tax policy that screws you over, but you do know that you don’t trust the immigrant family that just moved in on your street.

It’s almost like an addiction: Instead of working through my difficult emotions or confronting my tangible, real-life crises and fostering something redemptive from them, I continually just reach for the bottle, which makes me feel better for a fleeting moment even as my problems only get worse and eventually I hit rock bottom (as indeed we are perilously close to doing as a country).

And what exactly are our problems? Well, just to pick a sampling…

America doesn’t have health care; it has profit care for medical providers and corporations, and we’re the only wealthy, developed nation on earth that has maliciously chosen not to establish universal coverage for its citizens, sticking instead with a monstrosity of a so-called “system” that continues to destroy lives. But instead of fixing that, we’re talking about whether sexual orientation or gender identity should be discussed in schools—or how much of a badass Ron DeSantis is for facing off against Disney.

America is alone on the international stage in offering precisely zero weeks of paid parental leave—but instead of rectifying this disgraceful embarrassment, we’re evidently content to bicker about whether transgender children should be allowed to participate in sports, or whether mask mandates or vaccination requirements are the last exit on the highway to outright fascism.

The state of Mississippi, a national leader in the right-wing crusade against abortion rights, ranks like a Third World country on virtually all human rights measures; it has, for instance, a maternal death rate twice that of the rest of the United States, which itself ranks worst among developed countries for maternal mortality. Texas, which is similarly zealous on the abortion issue, has the highest percentage of residents with no health insurance.

Both states have maliciously chosen not to expand Medicaid coverage for their residents in need. But in both states—as everywhere else—adherents of the pro-lie movement are eager to do nothing more than sanctimoniously rage and scream about how abortion is “murder.”

Meanwhile, inequality in this country grows more extreme by the day, in part because the wealthiest among us continue to freeload thanks to a tax system rigged in their favor. Oligarchs are buying up our media outlets—traditional, social, and otherwise—so that they literally own a monopoly on our information. Large corporations continue to merge and acquire one another, leaving consumers with fewer choices and these companies with more leverage to price gouge and profiteer.

The United States incarcerates more people than any other nation in the world—even China.

But instead of talking about those myriad social and economic injustices, we’re laser-focused on the ostensible evils of “wokeness” and “cancel culture.” Interesting side note: If you had mentioned either of those terms to me 10 years ago, I likely wouldn’t have had a clue what you were talking about. They just weren’t a thing then the way they are now.

Why is that? Well, because for the most part, so-called “culture wars” are just fabrications. In other words, they aren’t real or serious issues. Again, they are nothing more than distractions—and the intertribal battles that are used for this purpose in 2022 may be supplanted by some entirely different or new manufactured outrage a decade from now.

And in virtually every case, it’s worth noting that they involve casting someone else as the evil one who is worthy of hate, disdain, judgement, or revulsion. We are the virtuous ones; they are the ones who are out to harm or destroy us and our morals and way of life. The New York Times recently did a brilliant series on how white nationalist and right-wing propagandist Tucker Carlson uses this framework to keep his audience hooked to his poisonous messages.

That audience, I am sure, has reason to be angry about something. For instance, this report documents the alarming increase in unemployed men ages 25–54, particularly in America’s Heartland, along with hardening regional disparities in economic opportunity across the country.

Imagine you’re a 40- or 50-something-year-old white man in the rural Rust Belt. You can’t find steady work because there are no decent jobs available. Your medical bills are through the roof; perhaps so is your student debt, which paid for an education that didn’t get you nearly as far as you’d expected. You see people on the coasts or even in your own town—people who don’t look like you, think like you, act like you, or have the same background as you—who are doing better than you are.

And because you’re unemployed, or underemployed, you have plenty of time to watch Tucker Carlson tell you exactly who is your enemy and thus should be the target of your rage and resentment. It’s like a drug you can’t get enough of—because it assures you that you are the righteous one who is being cheated and persecuted, and your rightful place in society is being stripped away from you by them.

This is the genius of a propagandist like Tucker Carlson: He has successfully bamboozled his followers into blaming and raging at everything and everyone other than the people and institutions that actually bear some responsibility for their problems. He casts himself as an ally of those who faithfully tune in for his toxic garbage each night, but in reality oligarchs couldn’t possibly have found a more effective champion for their cause.

That’s because he—and others just like him—has successfully framed the enemy not as billionaires who cheat on their taxes, or profit-hungry corporations that have decimated Middle America, or politicians who are paid off by lobbyists to vote against the well-being of their constituents; instead, the enemy is the poor woman of color who seeks an abortion, or the refugee who comes here fleeing violence in their homeland, or the transgender child who simply wants to participate in extracurricular activities at school.

Lyndon B. Johnson’s sage comment about pockets being picked may have been made decades ago, but sadly it’s as true today as it was then. Americans continue to be swindled, and we’re mad as hell, but we’re mad at all the wrong people and things. Because now, as then, oligarchs constantly distract us with someone to look down on.

That’s what so-called “culture war” is really about.

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