The Culture Wars of the Twentieth Century

“The culture wars have ended in America in a near-universal victory of the left. Many of those appointed as the guardians of Western culture will seize on any argument, however flawed, and any scholarship, however phony, in order to denigrate their cultural inheritance. We have entered a period of cultural suicide, comparable to that undergone by Islam after the ossification of the Ottoman Empire.” ~ writes Roger Scruton in his book Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands. 

There are two ways by which the left acquires political power in a country: first, through a proletarian revolution (Russia, China, Cambodia, Cuba); second, through the subversion of culture (the UK, the USA). In the early decades of the twentieth century, the USA didn’t possess a poor and powerless proletariat, so there was no possibility of organizing a communist revolution here. The only way by which the left could have conquered this country is by subverting its culture. American culture turned into a battleground between the left and the capitalist establishment which was being intellectually defended (in a feeble way) by the conservatives.

Between the 1930s and 1990s, the left had managed to conclusively defeat the conservative intellectuals and gain control of American culture. When the conservatives were celebrating the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, they didn’t realize that in the battle for culture, they had lost.