Culture war is over? Hardly.

E.J. Dionne says this political cycle proves that the culture war has finally ended. We're not fighting about abortion and gay marriage anymore -- or at least those fights have receded. Daniel Larison, in a penetrating analysis, says the culture war continues, though in a changed form. Excerpt:

The culture wars are not only continuing, but they are arguably intensifying and the belligerents are become more hardened in their opposition. At this point Dionne will reply that this only represents the “extremes” and not the majority, but the “extremes” are where the energy and activism are. Milquetoast moderation does not mobilise very many.

Even Obama’s campaign and the movement building around the campaign are described all the time with religious language, whether half-jokingly, accusingly or out of admiration, and if his agenda is secular his progressivism nonetheless participates in the tradition of the Social Gospel of liberal Protestantism to which he personally belongs. Likewise, the harshest and most unfair attacks on Obama have been aimed exactly at two things, patriotism and religious faith, that ought not to be gaining any traction in an electorate that is less receptive to culture war politics. Clearly, it has gained some purchase, or else the campaign would have felt no compulsion to combat the falsehoods being spread about the candidate. This election cycle is simply overflowing with issues of cultural symbolism, and Obama’s supporters have made no secret that they find his candidacy attractive because of its symbolism. We are using a very denuded definition of culture and religion if we think that these are not prominent in the current campaign, and it would be a major mistake to assume that these issues are not important in this contest simply because traditional “hot-button” questions have momentarily receded from the center of the debate.

He goes on to cite examples of the changing nature of the culture war, and concludes with this perceptive observation:

The “polarisation” so many people complain about is part of our social life and is based on, among other things, the significantly divergent interests of married and religious voters on one side and unmarried and secular voters on the other. Also, you cannot have ever-greater cultural fragmentation aided by consumer capitalism and increasingly specialised social networks geared towards connecting you to people who are mostly like you and have a new era of amity and collaboration at the same time.

Smart point. Why is it, I wonder, that cultural liberals who are downright evangelical about the virtue of diversity programs can't quite seem to grasp that a philosophy (if that's what it is) based on making people more conscious of the differences among members of a group is going to exacerbate tensions within that group? "Diversity is our strength" is a line you hear a lot, but nobody really explains it. I think diversity can be a strength, or it can be a weakness. It all depends on context. But it seems to me to be common sense to expect diversity to lead to conflict, major or minor. As we become more culturally diverse (including racially and economically), we shouldn't be surprised to see more conflict, and to see that conflict expressed in our politics. Like a lot of people, I'm weary of the trench warfare from left and right that we've lived with for so long in American political culture, but I think (alas) that we're always going to have it.

The near-religious passion many have for Obama, as Larison observes, reflects a deep desire to transcend the grubby conflicts that are part of ordinary politics (in this sense, Hillary Clinton represents our collective shadow self). As I've noted on this blog, I used to be really hopeful that an Obama presidency would be good for the country if for only one reason: it would transform the national conversation on race, taking it out of the Civil Rights-era rut represented by Jackson and Sharpton, and on to higher ground. It's pretty clear by now, though, that that's not going to happen under an Obama presidency, and partly for reasons outside of Obama's ability to control. Obama is not a confrontational figure, but the principles he believes in regarding the race issue and how best to address the country's racial divide are by no means settled in our politics. We're going to argue about them whether we'd like to or not, not because we're all bad people, or some of us are bad people, but because we're people who believe different things. Diversity, you know.

The class differences strike me actually as more interesting. Last night we got a surprise visit from a Dallas friend who is now working in Europe for a multinational company, but who was back in town on business. We talked at length about the differences between life in the US and in Europe, and he spoke at one point about how insulated the professional class in Europe is from the wider society. "You definitely feel the political correctness among the people I hang out with," he said.

In his country, there was a recent case of a security camera catching a group of thuggish immigrant teenagers beating up an old man. Some politicians responded by saying the thugs ought to be deported. My friend said that among his European co-workers, natives of this country, there was shock and horror that anybody could believe or say such things. It wasn't just that the politicians were wrong, in the eyes of their critics; it was that they were seen by these lawyers and executive types as shockingly immoral for holding that opinion.

Thus, a culture war.

Of course, members of the professional class in western European countries don't have to live, as a general matter, with the criminal class at their doorstep, so they can afford to indulge their multicultural pieties. A few years back, Dutch supermarkets serving inner-city immigrant neighborhoods in Rotterdam, I believe, planned to close some shops, or at least close early, because crime from Moroccan teenage boys was killing their business. That kind of thing doesn't have much resonance where the professionals live.

Similarly in this country, we will certainly have a culture war because of the clashing views and interests of our people along class and professional lines. I mentioned to my friend last night something I've brought up on this blog before: that it discomfits me to realize how much easier it is for me to talk to and identify with professional-class people from other states and even other countries than with people who share my city, and even with whom I grew up, who do not live in my virtual world. Professionals today, whether they're liberal or conservative, tend to live in more or less the same information environment, and are focused (generally) on the same things. My friend pointed out last night that he was at a recent conference in Italy, and at his table during a meal were professionals from all over Europe and Russia, all talking to each other in English. And of course this is common in the globalized age.

And it's not surprising that from this social and professional milieu develops a certain cosmopolitan way of seeing the world and one's place in it. I have it too, simply because of my own interests, education and experiences. Most readers of this blog probably have it to some extent. And look, it's not necessarily a bad thing, not all the time. But the professional-class worldview values different things than, say, your average working-class worldview, and as I told my friend last night, I don't think people in our class think nearly enough about the lives and worldviews of our working-class countrymen. Our loyalties naturally gravitate toward certain cultural ideals, practices and institutions that are not only not shared by many others of a different class, but which can operate against the interests of that class.

This is not something we talk about much in America, because class consciousness is supposed to be forbidden. But there it is. Of course we are defined by much more than social class. People are complex. Our social and professional class helps shape our opinions, as does our race/ethnicity, our sex, our religion, and so forth. We are, as Larison says, moving toward a society that is more heterogeneous, and in which we are encouraged by both the establishment and (more powerfully) the market to think of our differences, and identify with what makes us dissimilar more than what we share. I think, again, that the enthusiasm with which many people greet Obama's campaign is based in part on a deep sense that things are unraveling, and that Obama can hold us together. But this will fall apart once people stop projecting their hopes onto Obama, and start looking at his record, and what he stands for. He can't be all things to all people; no one can.

The larger point I want to make here, though, is that Larison is right: if you define the culture-war issue solely in terms of the "sex stuff" (gay marriage, abortion), then yes, the culture war looks to be receding. But immigration is a culture-war issue, not only because it involves a clash of cultures between immigrants and natives (and among cultures: blacks vs. Hispanics in the inner-city; immigrant Hispanics vs. whites in inner-ring suburbs, etc.), but also because it involves a clash between cosmopolitan/globalizing values of the professional class and those classes lower down the economic scale, whose lives large-scale immigration impacts in a different way. Race will continue to be a culture-war issue, as many working-class and middle-class whites will remain unconvinced that they should disadvantage themselves and their children in the name of affirmative action policies favored by professional-class whites who are more economically secure. And so forth.

The culture war isn't dead; it's just shifting fronts.