Culture Wars The Struggle to Define America by James Davison Hunter (z-lib.org)

friends. The truth, it would seem, is that on all of these issues it is virtually impossible to sustain a disjunction between public convention and private reality. The sociological tendency is always toward continuity: what is permissible in one sphere cannot be eschewed in the other and vice versa. In this we see that the distinction between public and private culture is ultimately artificial. The boundaries separating the two spheres are porous. What happens in one sphere inevitably has an impact in the other.

Education is a meaningful territory not because of its formal charge to pass on the basic skills and socially relevant knowledge necessary for adolescents and young adults to eventually participate responsibly in society. Rather, education is strategic in the culture war because this is the central institution of modern life through which the larger social order is reproduced. Together, the curriculum, the textbook literature, and even the social activities of the school convey powerful symbols about the meaning of American life-the character of its past, the challenges of the present, and its future agenda. In this way the institutions of mass education become decisive in socializing the young into the nation's public culture. Public education is especially significant territory in this regard, primarily because it reflects the will and power of the state vis-a- vis the nation's public culture.

The popular media in its various forms-television, film, art, music, and so on-are salient in part because they reflect the aspirations and ideals of communities and the nation. Naturally, in the present conflict there are sharp disagreements over which aspirations and ideals should be reflected. Perhaps a more pressing reason is the fact that these media comprise the single most important instrument of cultural warfare. The mass media not only reflect ideals but actually define reality in a societyby selecting which events "deserve attention" and are, therefore, "important," and which events are ignored and, therefore, unimportant; by depicting individuals and communities in particular ways; and by presenting what is acceptable and unacceptable.

Law is a decisive symbolic territory because it represents the patronage of the state. It is often said that the ultimate foundation of any social order is violence or the threat of violence enacted by the various mechanisms of the state. The ultimate guarantee that laws will be obeyed, then, is the formidable force exercised by the police, the national guard, the armed services, and so on. The debate.over law-which laws will be enacted; whose interpretations will be endorsed-is not simply an eso-

teric quarrel among highly paid attorneys but a conflict over the ultimate sanction of the state and the rules it will enforce.

Finally, electoral politics is extremely significant symbolic territory, but not for the reasons one might think. Quite naturally' most people view electoral politics as the process by which lawmakers and government officials are popularly chosen. It is this, of course, but much more is involved. Electoral politics can be alternatively viewed as a collective ritual regularly enacted whereby certain symbols .of national life are either embraced or rejected. Political candidates themselves are central to this process. Candidates may attempt to sway the voting public. about their own competence, experience, or integrity, as compared to their opponent's ineffectiveness and corruption, yet ultimately the candidates themselves become symbols of different national ideals, opposing visions of what America is and should be. As we shall see, this is particularly true at the most powerful levels of political appointment. How· political candidates define themselves, in their public rhetoric vis-a-vis the larger cultural conflict, becomes a decisive factor in casting their political fate.

Far from placid, then, each of these five spheres of activity is a locus of deep and bitter antagonism between the alliances on each side of the cultural divide. What happens on each of these fronts makes the contemporary culture war both concrete and consequential for the direction of American public life. Moreover, far from just reflecting the natural tensions of a shifting pluralism that will eventually balance itself out, these antagonisms represent the quest of different alliances for cultural domination. But how do these antagonisms actually take shape within a particular .institution? The starting point is the family.

7

_Family

In many ways, the family is the most conspicuous field of conflict in the culture war. Some would argue that it is the decisive battleground. The public debate over the status and role of women, the moral legitimacy of abortion, the legal and social status of homosexuals, the increase in family violence, the rise of illegitimacy particularly among black teenagers and young adults, the growing demand for adequate day care, and so on, prominently fill the. headlines of the nation's newspapers, magazines, and intellectual journals. Marches and rallies, speeches and pronouncements for or against any one of these issues mark the significant events of our generation's political history. One might be tempted, then, to say that this field of conflict is the beginning and end of the contemporary culture war, for the issues contested in the area of family policy touch upon and may even spill over into other fields of conflicteducation, the arts, law, and politics. In the final analysis there may be much more to the contemporary culture war than the struggle for the family, yet there is little doubt that the issues contested in the realm of family life are central to the larger struggle and are perhaps fateful for other battles being waged.

Most who observe the contest over the family, however, tend to grasp the controv~rsy as a disagreement over the relative strength of this institution. One observer, for example, has described the co~troversy as one between optimists and pessimists.. Both sides, he argued, agree that the family is changing yet they disagree sharply over the scope,

FAMILY

meaning, and consequences of those changes. The pessimists view rising trends in divorce, single-parent families, dual-income couples, couples living out of wedlock, secular day care, and the like, as symptoms of the decline of a social institution. The optimists, on the other hand, regard the changes as positive at best and benign at worst and, therefore, they believe that social policy should reflect and accommodate the new realities. The Amencan family is not disintegrating, the optimists say, but is adapting to new social conditions. The resilience of the family, therefore, signals that the family is "here to stay."1

Observations such as these provide interesting perspective and insight on the matter, forcing us to consider the concrete social and economic circumstances of family life. But they miss what is really at stake.

the Opening Observations, then the task of defining what the American family is becomes integral to the very task of defining America itself. For this reason it is also a task that is, on its own terms, intrinsically prone to intense political contention.

DEFINING THE FAMILY

But what is new in all of this? The family, as many have observed, has long been a social problem that has engendered heated political debate. One can observe, for example, profound anxiety about the well-being of the family in America and fears of its impending decline well into the nineteenth century. This was a time when industrialization was considered to threaten the cohesiveness of the family by severing its traditional ties to extended kinship, community, and church networks; when urbanization was viewed as threatening the moral development of the young and as brutalizing the integrity of family bonds. As a report to the National Congregational Council put it in 1892, "Much of the very mechanism of our modern life ... is destructive of the family."2

Yet, as tangible as these problems were, there was still a general cultural agreement about what exactly it was that was being threatened and, therefore, what it was that needed defending. The nature and contours of the family were never publicly in doubt. Not so anymore:

178 THE FIELDS OF CONFLICT

as with so many other aspects of American life, the nineteenth-century consensus about the character and structure of family life has collapsed, leaving the very viability of the institution as traditionally conceived in question. The divisive issue now is in what form or forms contemporary families will ·remain viable.

Signs that the family would become an explicit public policy issue subject to polemical controversy appeared before the 1980s. The social science establishment began to raise the issue as a subject of national policy concern as early as the mid- l 960s. Research and writing on the problem expanded through the 1970s.3 The abstract rhetoric of intel-

. lectual discourse, however, soon translated into the push and pull of real political debate. In 1973, for example, the United States Senate held headngs on "American Families: Trends and Pressures." "Family experts" offered their views of problems faced by the family and suggested how the government might deal with them. Then in 1977, the Carnegie Council on Children (founded in 1972) published a report recommending that "the nation develop a· family policy as comprehensive as its defense policy."4 In the words of the report, "Our nation's professed belief in the importance of the family has not been matched by actions designed to protect the family's integrity and vitality. Although the sanctity of the family is a favorite subject for Fourth ofJuly orators, legislators rarely address the question of how best to support family life or child development."5 The call for concerted policy action would soon be answered.

Within the policy establishment itself, there were a wide range of perspectives about what problems actually plagued the family as well as how they should best be addressed. Among these "experts/' a consensus was emerging that there was no one family type to which a national policy would be oriented. Rather than viewing families that were not nuclear, patriarchal, or self-sustaining as somehow deviant-families that were caught in what Daniel Patrick Moynihan called, in 1965, a "tangle of pathology"-public policy would now have. to recognize a diversity of families. It was generally recognized _that families differed in size, economic status, national origin and custom, and, not least, structure and composition.

During the 1980 White House Conference on Families, the quandary over how to define the American family was elevated to a permanent component of the national family policy debate. Indeed, in the early stages of organization and preparation, the conference title itself was changed from the singular "family" to the plural "families" because the

organizers could not agree on what the American family was supposed to be.6

The conference, promised by President Carter during his 1976 presidential campaign, pledged the power and prestige of the White House to explore the ways in which public policy might strengthen U.S. families. Its outcome was mixed. That the conference succeeded in becoming an event of national scope there is little doubt. Statewide hearings and conferences took place in all fifty states, along with five national hearings, culminating in three White House conferences-in Baltimore, Minneapolis, and Los Angeles. But instead of generating a coherent set of policy recommendations serving to strengthen American families, the primary substantive accomplishment was to further crystallize and politicize, on a national scale, differences of opinion over the nature, structure, and composition of the family.

what was Hgnded as a newly galvanized "pro-famjly" mgyem£nt made up of predominantly conservative Catholics and Evangelical Protestants. Only a few months earlier, conservative Senator Paul Laxalt had introduced the Family Protection Act, which among other things, eliminated the "marriage tax," protected parental rights, required informed1consent of parents for minors seeking abortions, and allowed for discrimination against homosexuals in employment.7 At the Minneapolis conference, 150 conservative activists staged a formal walk-out; dozens of conservatives in Los Angeles engaged in ballot tearing; and in Washington, D.C., less than a month after the Baltimore meeting, an orthodox alliance staged a counter-conference called the "American Family Forum." Of the latter,'columnist James Kilpatrick said, "It was as one-sidedly conservative as the Baltimore affair was one-sidedly liberal."8 Polarization was also seen in the balloting over ·the conference recommendations. There was little controversy over such issues as child welfare and maternal health, but on such issues as the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment, abortion policy, and "variant family life-styles," the conferees generally took the extreme opposite positions-either strongly in favor or strongly opposed.9

National and regional media reports of the White House Conference on Families reflected the antagonism in the meetings. An article in Newsweek, for example, called it "the biggest political battleground between conservatives and liberals since the National Women's Conference in

Houston in 1977."10 The Nashville Banner reported that "during the first three hours of the conference's forums, divorce, homosexuality, violence on television, sex education in public schools, welfare and prayer came up, rose to debate, then fell into the boiling pot of controversy."11 The Washington Post observed the "uproar [created] by the 'pro-life' lobby, the abortion rights lobby, the gay rights lobby, the pro-family lobby and all the rest," and commented that these "single-interest groups ... approached [the conference] as a forum in which either to press their views or to defend them against assault from other quarters."12 The New Mexican concluded that "the feelings produced by these [meetings] are more appropriate to a buffalo stampede than they are to an enlightened, growing experience."13 One observer writing in the New Republic was not at all surprised. As she put it, the discord generated from the White House conference merely reflected the futility of "construct[ing] a family policy when we have neither a generally accepted understanding of what a family is nor of what such a policy should accomplish."14

THE FATE OF THE TRADITIONAL FAMILY

The White House Conference on Families was an important event in the history of the family policy debate in its own right; however, its story is recounted here because it displays the level and intensity of discord over how Americans define the family. Obviously, more is at stake than a dictionary definition of "the family." The debate actually takes form as a political judgment about the fate of one particular conception of the family and family life. The rhetoric of the activists, however, misses the mark. Leaders within the orthodox alliance call it the "traditional" family, by which they mean persons living together who are related either by blood, marriage, or .,adoption. But the family type they envision is "traditional" only_ in a limited sense. What is in fact at stake is a certain idealized form of the nineteenth-century middle-class family: a male- 'dominated nuclear _family that both sentimentalized childhood and motherhood and, at the same tiine, celebrated domestic life as a utopian retreat from the harsh realities of industrial society. Although such bourgeois families were central in many ways to the flourishing of the early modern society, their fate is now in serious doubt. The political debate asks whether this family type should be preserved or abandoned.

One could make numerous qualifications about the ideological differences that exist among otherwise compatible activists (on either side

of the cultural divide). Down to the essence, however, the posture of each alliance is so well known that the presentation of either viewpoint is almost a caricature of itself. Conservative Catholics, Mormons, and Evangelical Protestants generally view the survival of the bourgeois family as essential, not just because it was believed to be established in nature and ordained by God, but because it is believed to foster social harmony. "Much of the conflict in the modern family," wrote one Evangelical, "is caused either by misunderstanding of or by the refusal to accept the role each [family] member was designed by God to fulfill." For this reason, "it is essential to family harmony that the wife submit to her husband's leadership." The writer continued, "The man has yet to be married who wouldn't enjoy coming home each day to a wife with a song in her heart, a thanksgiving attitude and a submissive spirit."15

By contrast, the general consensus within the progressivist alliance is that the bourgeois family is not only the symbol but the source of inequality and oppression for women in society. "'The central values of the modern family stand in opposition to those that underlie women's emancipation," one activist argued. "Where the women's movement has stood for equality, the family historically has denied or repudiated equality.... Where the women's movement has called for a recognition of individualism, the family has insisted upon subordination of individual interests to those of the group...."16 Thus, the demands of progressives are not just for civil rights, "reproductive rights," and equal opportunity for women, but for a fundamentally new conception of the family. "We believe," asserted NOW's founding statement of purpose, "that a true partnership between the sexes demands a different concept of marriage, an equitable sharing of the responsibilities of home and children and of the economic burdens of their support." To that end progressive voices call for a change in the nuclear family structure and in society as a whole. The more moderate within the movement call for the reform of the bourgeois family through the equal division of domestic and public labor; the more extreme view the oppression of women as rooted in their biological role in reproduction and demand the total abolishment of all forms of traditional and patriarchal authority. In either case, the net effect within this alliance is to define the family not in terms of a particular configuration of biological relationships but more broadly as companionship. Such a definition recognizes the "validity of different family types" not accounted for by the nuclear family ideal-single parents, nonmarital cohabitation, homosexual and lesbian unions, and so on.

,The socialand ideological reaction is entirely predictable. Because

cultural conservatives assume that the traditional family is mandated by both nature and God, a pluralistic model of family life can only be regarded as organized hostility toward the "traditional" family; "a total assault on the role of the American woman as wife and mother, and on the family as the basic unit of society."17 And so it is that contenders in this cultural contest square off to determine which definition and ideal of family life will finally hold sway.

POLICY BRAWLS

The struggle to define the American family-whether public policy should embrace or reject tqe nineteenth~century middle-class family ideal-is practically enjoined not in its totality but in terms of its component parts. The clash, in other words, takes shape over specific concepts that underlie various policy proposals under debate-components that together make up a definition of the American family.

Authority

Families, however they are practically imagined, are a social unit that cooperates to carry out collective tasks-providing for the members' basic material and emotional needs, nurturing children to acceptable levels of social and moral responsibility, and so on. But who is responsible for these tasks and who will have the final say when difficult decisions need to be made? The issue here is one of authority. Should it rest with husband and father, as the orthodox and their culturally conservative allies prefer? Or should authority and responsibility be shared on egalitarian principles, as progressives and their liberal allies favor?

The issue of authority is implicit within several policy debates. Perhaps the most important, because it has been debated for the better part of the twentieth century, has been the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). This amendment to the Constitution initially was introduced in Congress in 1923 through the efforts of the National Women's party. It finally was passed by Congress in 1972, yet it failed to be ratified by a sufficient number of state legislatures by a 1982 deadline. Reintroduced in 1983, the proposal lay largely dormant through the 1980s and early 1990s. Even so, the goal of the ERA has remained a central aspiration of the women's movement and of political progressives in general.

Advocates argue that the amendment guarantees equal protection

under the law without regard for a person's gender. Conservatives claim that such protections are already guaranteed under the Constitution and that an amendment would be redundant. The deeper significance of the amendment, however, is symbolic. For progressivists, the Equal Rights Amendment symbolizes the formal recognition by the state (through the instrumentality of law) that women are autonomous from and therefore economically and politically equal to men. For those on the orthodox side, the amendment symbolizes a forsaking of the inherited structure of social reliltionships in the family and society as a whole. The ERA, claimed one conservative Illinois legislator, was "really an attack on the home. It [was] an attack on motherhood. It says that for a woman to have to be a mother and have to be a housewife is somehow degrading."18

Moreover, many activists with orthodox commitments may als9 have mobilized against the ERA because it was viewed as a way of "smuggling" legal protection of homosexual rights into a Constitutional amendment. One Fundamentalist opponent to the amendment put it this way: "If effective laws to help women are already on the books, who needs the ERA? Not women as a sex but lesbians and homosexuals need the ERA; and believe me, that's what it'sreally all about! Homosexuals and lesbians, who number perhaps 6 percent of the population, recognize their unpopular status. They decided early that the feminist movement and the ERA provided them with a handy vehicle to ride piggyback upon 'women's rights' and achieve homosexual rights. Fortunately, citizens who suddenly realized how close we were to the city limits of Sodom and Gomorrah successfully resisted the ERA." 19 Other symbolic issues were at stake as well, such as the role of women in the military and the fate of single-sex institutions (such as Catholic seminaries and OrthodoxJewish schools) which discriminate according to gender for religious reasons. These issues remain key symbolic landmarks on both sides of the cultural divide.

The ERA is, of course, only one of the ways in which the issue of authority in family and society is played out in public policy. The identical arguments emerge in policy debates over such ideas as an "Equal Rights Act" and "comparable worth" or "pay equity."20 Though the latter issue technically deals with gender bias in wage setting, the symbolic meaning of the proposal is clear. Its advocates contend that the issue involves more than ·~ust money," it involves "the esteem of half our population."21 Opponents insist that; among other things, pay equity "requires us to close our eyes to innate sexual differences which affect job preferences."22 The matter of authority is also contested in our very language.