[Added July 6, 2013: There is massive confusion on what the culture wars are about. Bill O’Reilly pits “traditionalists” against “secular progressives” as if either group was internally coherent; while David Horowitz views [anti-Western] whiteness studies as making a “melodrama” that may explain the George Zimmerman-Trayvon Martin debacle ( http://tinyurl.com/l5wgmrl).
This essay tries to unpack the culture wars by analyzing the confusing and unsettled sociology that has polarized America. Some of my questions interrogate both sides in the “culture wars,” rejecting the emphasis on culture to the exclusion of history, political science, and social theory. (My own views tend toward the classical liberal: thus I am one of those “secular progressives” denounced as enemies to Easter Bunnies and Christmas trees.)]
It is true that politics are messy, by contrast, sociology as the product of German Idealism, is not. Look back to Herder, Goethe and their successors who promoted a rooted cosmopolitanism. Their…
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