Conclusion: American Culture, Satire, and The Simpsons

Abstract

As noted in the introductory chapter, the early 1990s debate over the “culture war” has carried on in the new millennium, largely among the concept’s progenitor, James Hunter, and the political scientists Alan Wolfe and Morris Fiorina. This was made most evident with the publication of Is There a Culture War? A Dialogue on Values and American Life (2006), which Hunter and Wolfe coedited and to which Fiorina contributed. Although Hunter has continued to use the culture war metaphor, he now concedes that the divisions among people within the nation are not as stark or as binary as the culture war thesis once made it seem. Nevertheless, Hunter and many other scholars remain convinced that a battle still exists. As I have tried to demonstrate in the preceding chapters, I do as well. The powerful clash of worldviews evident in American society today is part of an ongoing struggle, one concerned not only with which worldview will predominate—the more conservative or the more progressive—but also with how the various skirmishes in the culture war will shape the very definition of “American” identity for the future. In a recent essay on this topic, James Hunter accurately notes that there is some common ground in the culture war: both sides of the debate, for example, embrace the “symbolic identity of America as e pluribus unum”; what the opponents differ on, Hunter notes, has to do with the limits and range of the pluralism implied by that famous phrase.2 Hunter continues, In our time, what does exist of a dominant culture is attenuated. Indeed, if there is a center in American culture and politics today, it is certainly not “the vital center” that Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. described and hoped for at mid-century. In fact, it is probably fair to say that Schlesinger’s “vital center” and the WASP consensus that underwrote it may have begun to erode the moment he declared its triumph.3