Culture wars

Working Definition

Culture wars are sustained political conflicts whose primary stake is not the distribution of material resources, but whose understanding of moral authority, family, religion, national history, and personal identity will be codified by law, schools, and public institutions. In the technical sociological sense introduced by James Davison Hunter (1991), a culture war is a structural cleavage between two competing impulses of moral authority: an “orthodox” impulse that locates moral truth in an external, transcendent, and unchanging source, and a “progressive” impulse that treats moral norms as historically evolving and revisable in light of human experience. In everyday media usage, the phrase refers loosely to any noisy public controversy over symbols, gender, monuments, or speech. Keeping the two distinct matters: Hunter diagnoses a deep institutional realignment that cuts across historic denominations, political parties, and social classes, whereas journalistic usage treats “culture war” as a label for any political fight that is not explicitly about taxes or wages.

Genesis and Global Lineage

The English phrase culture war is a direct calque of the German Kulturkampf—the term coined in January 1873 by the liberal pathologist and politician Rudolf Virchow to describe Otto von Bismarck’s state campaign against the Catholic Church in Prussia over school inspection, civil marriage, and clerical appointments (a campaign that in Prussian-ruled Poland simultaneously functioned as forced Germanization). The concept was reinvented for contemporary sociology by James Davison Hunter in Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America (1991), which showed that conservative Protestants, traditionalist Catholics, and Orthodox Jews—groups that had spent a century distrusting one another—had forged a common political bloc against the liberal-progressive wings of their own religious and civic traditions. One year later, Patrick Buchanan’s fiery address at the 1992 Republican National Convention in Houston proclaimed a “cultural war… for the soul of America” as fateful as the Cold War, launching the term’s double life as both an analytical category and a partisan battle cry. From American battles over school prayer, abortion, and the literary canon in the 1970s–1990s, the framework was exported globally after 2010 through transnational media, religious networks, and political consultancies to Europe, Latin America, and Australia.

Central European Lineage

We found no documented link between this concept and the intellectual history or historical experience of Central Europe.

Why Now

Between 2018 and 2026 culture wars ceased to look like an American domestic peculiarity and became a primary operating mode of democratic and illiberal politics across Europe and the Americas. In Poland, local-government resolutions declaring “LGBT-free zones” in 2019–2020 and the Constitutional Tribunal’s ruling of October 22, 2020 imposing a near-total ban on abortion triggered the largest street protests since the fall of communism in 1989. In Hungary, a June 2021 law restricting the depiction of homosexuality and gender reassignment in materials accessible to minors sparked a formal infringement battle with the European Commission, while legal scholars such as Kim Lane Scheppele documented how culture-war mobilization was used to mask the institutional capture of courts and universities (placed under loyalist public-trust foundations in 2021). In the United States, the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision (June 2022) overturning Roe v. Wade, state-level school-curriculum and library-book bans, and the 2025 federal executive campaign against DEI turned cultural conflict into direct state coercion. Meanwhile, in Ukraine after Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, the rapid de-Russification of street names, monuments, and school canons demonstrated that disputes over language and historical memory in Eastern Europe can be simultaneously cultural and existential.

Explanatory Power

The concept makes three political dynamics intelligible that classical class-based models of left versus right struggle to explain. First, it accounts for the great electoral realignment of the past three decades: why lower-income religious and non-degreed voters increasingly back right-wing parties that cut taxes on capital, while affluent, secular university graduates vote for center-left parties that propose taxing them more heavily. When the perceived stake of politics is the moral definition of a legitimate way of life, material trade-offs become secondary and symbolic compromise feels like betrayal. Second, it explains the escalatory grammar of local incidents: in a culture war, a dispute over a single school textbook, museum exhibition, or theater performance is read by both camps as a proxy battle for the entire normative order, drawing national media and party leaders into local school boards. Third, it explains why ostensibly neutral institutions—constitutional courts, universities, public broadcasters, museums—become the primary prize of politics: whoever controls the institutions that certify what counts as “normal” and “factual” does not need to win every election.

Axes of Debate

Underappreciated Angle

The most corrosive effect of culture wars lies in what they do to the institutional machinery of democratic compromise. Modern representative democracies were engineered around divisible goods—budgets, tax rates, wage tariffs—where splitting the difference at 50% leaves both bargaining partners with half a loaf. Moral and ontological claims about when human life begins, what constitutes a family, or which historical figures are heroes versus criminals are structurally indivisible: splitting the difference looks to orthodox and progressive purists alike not like pragmatism, but like moral capitulation. A second overlooked dynamic is temporal asymmetry: a cultural camp that senses it is losing the long-term demographic and generational tide in everyday life has a powerful incentive to shift the struggle out of civil society and into counter-majoritarian state institutions with long time horizons—constitutional courts, electoral districting, and university boards—seeking to lock in by law what it can no longer sustain by cultural consent. That is why culture-war legislation often reaches its highest pitch precisely when the underlying social norm has already shifted in the opposite direction among the younger generation.