Culture Wars

Culture Wars

Culture Wars is the term used by William Strauss and Neil Howe in their 1996 book Fourth Turning to describe the historical period from 1984 to approximately 2005. The preceding era is the Consciousness Revolution; the succeeding era in Strauss and Howe's system is the predicted upcoming Crisis of 2020.

The period opened with triumphant "Morning in America" individualism and drifted toward pessimism as time wore on. Personal confidence remained high and in the 1990s few national problems demanded immediate action. But, the public reflected darkly on growing violence and incivility, widening inequality, pervasive distrust of institutions and leaders, and a debased popular culture. People began fearing that the national consensus was splitting into competing "values" camps.

Causes of the Split

Though society had been turning away from tradition and the transcendent for centuries, technology had by this time enabled the decoupling of many biological functions from their respective social functions - sex from its social function of producing the next generation, etc.

The Various Camps

The Boom Generation, who had control of the culture at the beginning of the era, came under attack from their next juniors, Generation X, who had a distinctive anti-Boom crossculture. These two generations are like oil and water: aggressive moralizers on one side, neo-hedonists on the other.

Age Location in History:

The Silent Generation was entering elderhood.
The Baby boomers were entering midlife.
Generation X was entering rising adulthood, looking at a Boom-built culture in need of the one thing missing at Woodstock: ice-water realism.
Generation Y was entering childhood.

Did the acts of September 11, 2001 herald the end of the Culture Wars era? The destruction of the World Trade Center produced only a temporary sobering reaction from the American populace. If the Culture Wars era had ended then, the national mood would have been akin to the mood at the time of the start of the Great Depression. The American military took over Afghanistan and Iraq, but that has not had the same feeling among the populace as, say, VE Day.

Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America is a 1991 book by James Davison Hunter.