Culture Wars Everywhere

David Hopkins and I are working on a new book, Culture Wars Everywhere: The Politics of American Popular Culture.

Top elected officials and leading figures in the political media have become increasingly likely to devote substantial attention to the musical entertainment at a football game and other subjects that may inspire water-cooler talk among regular Americans but remain well beyond the traditional scope of government affairs. National partisan debates have erupted in recent years over the marketing campaign for a brand of light beer, the lyrics to a country music hit, and the logo design of a chain restaurant. These ostensibly non-political topics can easily acquire a larger meaning, just like the current popularity of Bad Bunny’s music has been interpreted as reflecting broader social developments—such as growing multiculturalism, demographic diversity, and generational change—that liberals welcome and conservatives distrust. The lifestyle choices of ordinary Americans, from the aesthetic styles they favor to the food they eat to the ways they spend their leisure time, have increasingly acquired a political valence that marks them as either left-leaning or right-of-center. Because social trends make politics emotionally legible, Americans can develop strong political attachments without mastering the details of public policy debates or closely monitoring the actions of formal institutions.

Culture Wars Everywhere presents a wide-ranging exploration of the relationship connecting political conflict to the broader world of popular culture and social life in the United States. Its analysis is founded on the premise that politics is indeed “downstream from culture,” in the words of the late political commentator Andrew Breitbart, such that political actors often gain attention and support by invoking and mobilizing citizens’ existing cultural predispositions and antipathies—even on subjects that do not directly involve normal governmental responsibilities. Though Donald Trump has earned the reputation of being uniquely effective at stoking contemporary social tensions for electoral gain, the cultural battles that fueled his rise to power (and the ferocious oppositional response it provoked) long preceded his political career and are poised to outlast it.

The Trump era has inspired intense scholarly focus on the political importance of cultural divisions in the American public. But political scientists remain insufficiently attentive to the broader social context that creates and reinforces these conflicts. Salient political differences are not merely limited to policy debates over immigration or affirmative action, or attitudes towards specific social groups defined by ethnicity, gender, or religion. They also extend to movies, television, music, and video games; sports, fashion, travel, and food; and even dating, workplaces, and civic associations. Across the cultural landscape, partisans on both sides exhibit distinct preferences and behavior that now serve as fertile ground for political disputes.

Understanding mass politics requires understanding mass culture. Even in a polarized age, many Americans regularly tune out the world of public affairs. They find the operations of government excessively complicated or emotionally unpleasant and instead spend their time on work, family, community, recreation, and entertainment. Citizens also adopt personal interests and tastes prior to, or alongside, their political coming-of-age, beginning in adolescence. The development of a political identity occurs in the presence of cultural signals that provide information about which kinds of people and sensibilities line up on each side of the ideological divide. Cultural battles over art, language, health and fitness, parenting, gender roles, or national memory can reveal the same opposing social alignments that later appear in electoral contests or other forms of explicitly partisan competition. They are also especially well-suited to gain political dimensions in a digital age that encourages citizens to define themselves and their relationships to others in terms of preferred social activities and content consumption.

Culture Wars Everywhere presents a broad survey of cultural topics that have provoked recurrent popular debate, finding a consistent overarching pattern that explains their increasing connections to the world of politics. Most cultural differences and controversies set the allure of novelty against the comfort of familiarity. They are repeatedly instigated by a perceptible change in the social environment that is welcomed by some citizens while alienating others, producing an affective rift along the fault lines of mass ideology and partisanship. The segments of the population that are most attracted to new ideas, styles, identities, and practices—including younger generations, the well-educated, and creative professionals—are also more likely to develop liberal political predispositions, while those who prize convention and tradition in the cultural realm find their worldview affirmed in the political arena by the values of conservatism. The constant procession of cultural battles in contemporary public life works to educate citizens about their proper place on the political spectrum, to identify their allies and antagonists, and to reinforce their loyalties as one conflict gives way to the next. But cultural behavior also evolves over time; novel fashions can subsequently become familiar traditions, shifting their political association from the left to the right.

Culture Wars Everywhere synthesizes a broad array of topics that are often examined in isolation into a single coherent account of the ways in which contemporary political competition has become defined by a perpetual struggle between social novelty on the left and social convention on the right. The book moves beyond political science’s traditional focus on specific issue attitudes and group identities to encompass a broader set of influences and predispositions in the mass public. It also integrates evidence and discussions of individual topics covered frequently in the mass media—including comedy and cancel culture, sports and protest, social media and polarization, campus politics, online shaming, corporate and industry wokeness, racial and religious identities, and the political effects of technological change—to identify and explain the common dynamics uniting them. We aim to provide readers with an ambitious but digestible guide to the ways in which citizens find social meaning in their politics and political meaning in their lives.