The conservative culture war arose at the moment when American innocence was challenged by the civil rights movement and the various sets of legislation in the 1950s and 1960s. White nationalist Southern segregationists immediately circled their wagons in the form of “massive resistance,” attempting to defy the constitutional rights of Black Americans. Less known, in the North and West civil rights legislation had also provoked white resistance across the same postwar decades, as civil rights activists unveiled the non-Southern forms of white nationalist infrastructure, exposing, among other things, the racist policies surrounding the government’s subsidizing of suburban expansion, union resistance to women and people of color, corporate racism, and the ingrained practices of police brutality. Out of the white struggles against social equality with African Americans, emerged a new rhetorical politics which converged with the interests of conservatives, the wealthy, and business, who sought to fuse their anti-welfare state (soon-to-be anti-Big Government) sentiments with the populist conservative groundswell from white Americans who detested government intervention in social equality. Thus, the birth of the culture war.
James Davison Hunter defines the culture war as a “competition to define social reality” resulting from the history of “America’s uneasy pluralism.” In short, prior to the 1960s, the United States was both a legislatively and culturally a white nationalist nation, with the prosperous welfare state—immortalized in the fond memories of 1950s prosperity—guiding the way for postwar white families. Significantly, constitutional rights were limited to only white people, and primarily to white men. For conservatives, this core demographic would be vital in their decades-long struggle against the New Deal welfare state: they could not appeal to this group through economic arguments, but perhaps culture could provide a wedge if the right opportunity arose?
In the wake of social equality legislation in the 1960s, the culture war unfolded as white men, especially white men with property, were legislatively forced into social equality with women and people of color. An epochal existential crisis, this moment witnessed for the first time in the nation’s history the granting of the same constitutional rights to groups of historically marginalized people, many of whom white men formally subjugated, controlled, and enslaved as a matter of right and civic duty—from slave patrols to lynchings to race riots to policing community social boundaries. Thus, the conservative culture war sought to retain the pre-civil rights era white male “advantage in defining the habits and meaning of American culture,” and this meant attacking any set of information which infringed upon the traditional innocence of American history—the present needed to quarantine the white nationalist horrors of the past from intruding upon the political arguments of the present. To write or speak of slavery and its aftermath, or the treatment of Native Americans, or the exploitation of Mexican Americans—let alone the unquestioned centuries of violent patriarchy—would be coded as unpatriotic in its offence to American innocence.