The Origins of America's Deadly Culture War

In her 2017 book, Democracy In Chains: The Deep History Of The Radical Right’s Stealth Plan For America, Nancy MacLean (history Professor, Duke University) describes the concerns that ultimately led to widespread resistance among radical hard core conservatives (RHCCs) to social changes in America. Those changes were being reflected in society at large and how the rights of citizens were coming to be seen. Sometimes those social changes were being reflected in Supreme Court decisions that RHCCs viewed as an all-out war on their sacred way of live, their sacred vision of proper governance, and their sacred values and freedoms. They viewed social change with a mix of terror, rage and hate. They were not going to accept it and they were going to fight it tooth and claw. This really was a culture war.

MacLean writes this about the second Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision in 1955 that ordered public schools to be desegregated “with all deliberate speed.”

“At a minimum, the federal courts could no longer be counted on to defer reflexively to states’ rights arguments. More concerning was the likelihood that the high court would be more willing to intervene when presented with compelling evidence that a state action was in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of “equal protection” under the law. State’s rights, in effect, were yielding in preeminence to individual rights. It was not difficult for either Darden [President of the University of Virginia] or Buchanan [chairman of the economics department at UVA] to imagine how a court might rule if presented with evidence of Virginia’s archaic labor relations, its measures to suppress voting, or its efforts to buttress the power of reactionary rural whites by underrepresenting the moderate voters of cities and suburbs of Northern Virginia. Federal meddling could rise to levels once unimaginable.

James McGill Buchanan was not a member of the Virginia elite. Nor is there any evidence to suggest that for a white southerner of his day he was uniquely racist or insensitive to the concept of equal treatment. And yet, somehow, all he saw in the Brown decision was coercion. And not just in the abstract. what the court ruling represented to him was personal. Northern liberals -- the very people who looked down on southern whites like him -- were now going to tell his people how to run their society. And to add insult to injury, he and people like him with property were no doubt going to be taxed to pay for all of the improvements that were now deemed necessary and proper for the state to make. What about his rights? Where did the federal government get the authority to engineer society to its liking and then send him and those like him the bill?Who represented their interests in all of this? I can fight this, he concluded. I want to fight this.

Find the resources, he proposed to Darden, for me to create a new center on the campus of the University of Virginia, and I will use this center to created a new school of political economy and social philosophy. It would be an academic center, rigorously so, but one with a quiet political agenda: to defeat the “perverted form” of liberalism that sought to destroy their way of life, “a social order,” as he described it, “built on individual liberty,” a term with its own coded meaning but one that Darden surely understood. The center, Buchanan promised, would train a “new line of thinkers” in how to argue against those seeking to impose an “increasing role of government in economic and social life.”

He could win this war, and he would do it with ideas.”

This is one of the origins of the culture war that is tearing America apart. Today, those arguing to get the federal government out of their lives would no doubt say that they are not racist or bigoted, but instead argue they are simply fighting for personal freedom and the sacred Constitutional right of states to be left alone to do as they wish. This helps explain the roots of modern voter suppression that most RHCCs seem to favor. It seems that there may be millions of adult Americans who wish to replace the Constitution with the failed Articles of Confederation. That would be the end of the American experiment.