I wasn't exactly self-aware when it was going on, but in retrospect, the "culture war" that the conservatives made some effort to wage in the early nineties was rather silly. A "culture war" requires separate subcultures (which there were) and separate cultural drivers (which there weren't). Essentially, the so-called culture war was, fundamentally, a political exercise, and did not accurately reflect on the subcultures of the United States.
Personally, I find the left- and right-wing "cultures" fairly irrational. Neither side really represents an integrated philosophy. The left advocates control over ones economic decisions, and freedom over ones body (except for a list a longer than the Appalachian Trail). The right claims to be all about economic freedom, but does love its cronyism, and is completely inconsistent about personal freedoms.
Really, I think the only "culture war" in this country, and in the whole of the western world, is reason versus feeling. The left and right both use different forms of feeling, and direct it at different things. But really they're the same.
Now there's probably someone out there who reads this an immediately thinks I'm some unemotional monster. You're funny. It's a typical argument: if you don't recognize the absolute supremacy of unintegrated feelings you're evil. That's insane. There's nothing wrong with rational emotions, that is, emotional states that do not conflict with reason. And it's exceedingly easy to live entirely with rational emotions. It just requires knowing oneself.
To return to my theme, though, we've got two cultures in America. There's the rational culture, focused on science, productivity, rational dialogue. That's the minority. The vast majority is the emotional culture, which doesn't worry about the sanity of what it's feeling. The feeling is more important than the cause of that feeling.
Emotionalism is impotent in the face of reality, but the emotionalists command such numbers they have political power. Wrestle politics away from them, and they'll be able to see the error of their ways soon enough.
That's the culture war in America.
