Cultural or ideological wars?

The murder of theinfluencer The pro-Trump Charlie Kirk—be warned that the article does not focus on this specific fact—has led to the expressions "culture war" and "ideological war" being used interchangeably, both in the media and in other contexts. Do they mean the same thing? Obviously, they are related terms, but this does not mean that they are strictly interchangeable. This juxtaposition may seem unimportant, but in fact, it ends up leading to confusing analyses. Although, in my humble opinion, the concept of "culture war" is already foreshadowed between the lines in the first volume of The Decline of the West (1918) by Oswald Spengler, the expression "culture wars"It was popularized by sociologist James Davison Hunter in 1991. It's worth paying attention to the date: in the early 1990s, once real socialism had been shamefully dismantled, it was very difficult to talk about ideological confrontations: defending the virtues of Ceausescu or Enver Hoxha was very complicated. It implied it. In the United States, Republican and Democratic intellectuals began to fight over other things. As time went on, Steve Bannon, advisor to Donald Trump, said that what was at stake was not capitalism or the like, but "the soul of America," that is, its values in theme, national identity, the practice of religion or gender. The traditional ideological wars of the 20th century, on the other hand, were focused above all on the notion of political system and the economy. casus belli during the Cold War, and this is just one example among many others.

The second issue that separates the concept of ideological warfare from that of cultural warfare is that the goal of the former was to change the political or economic system, while the latter aims to influence the way society thinks, lives, and expresses itself. In other words, the objective is to gain, secure, or bolster cultural hegemony, primarily—but not only—through language. In this sense, it is significant how the political correctness movement has ended up generating such a large number of antibodies that, in fact, they are now the basis of the extremely incorrect language of Trumpism and the MAGA movement in general. Exactly the same thing is beginning to happen in Europe.

Third, there is the issue of the actors in the confrontation. The ideological wars of the 20th century were linked to states, political parties, and unions—to more or less stable and easily identifiable movements. In contrast, the actors in culture wars can be groups that, for one reason or another, with more or less justification, suddenly reinterpret themselves. Then there are individuals in the conventional media or on social networks—the influencers– who wage war on their own, with all that this entails: erratic and ephemeral voices, great fanfare, and scandals that sometimes only last a few hours, if at all. This dialectical ecosystem is, with a few exceptions, self-referential: each one lives tied up in the puppets that appear on their respective screens. Of the other puppets, they only receive negative and ridiculously biased caricatures.

It is often said that the ideological wars of the 20th century generated numerous armed conflicts and unprecedented levels of destruction, while culture wars are limited to pseudo-public debates in which no one listens to anyone, to legislative changes based on reactive U-turns, to blow-up battles over trivial nuances on social media (and, professional journalists). In part, this is true, but this does not mean that in the long or even medium term, culture wars cannot morph into something else. If many Asian and African countries have aligned themselves with Putin and Xi, it is because they are very clear about what a family is, and what it is not, which for them represents something very important. The person who has best explained this specific fact based on quality empirical data has been the French demographer Emmanuel Todd. I don't know if it was by chance or not, but Todd was also the first to predict in detail the fall and decomposition of the USSR in The final shot (1976). Cultural wars, therefore, must be distinguished from ideological wars, but that does not mean they are harmless.