Culture Wars

Culture Wars is the term used by William Strauss[?] and Neil Howe[?] in their book Fourth Turning to describe the historical period from 1984 to approximately 2005. The preceding era is the Consciousness Revolution; the succeeding era in Strauss and Howe's system is the predicted upcoming Crisis of 2020.

The period opened with triumphant "Morning in America" individualism and drifted toward pessimism as time wore on. Personal confidence remained high and in the 1990s few national problems demanded immediate action. But, the public reflected darkly on growing violence and incivility, widening inequality, pervasive distrust of institutions and leaders, and a debased popular culture. People feared that the national consensus was splitting (http://jkalb.freeshell.org/web/culture_wars) into competing "values" camps.

The Boom Generation, who had control of the culture at the beginning of the era, came under attack from their next juniors, Generation X, who had a distinctive anti-Boom crossculture. These two generations are like oil and water: aggressive moralizers on one side, survivalists on the other.

Age Location in History:

• The Silent Generation was entering elderhood.
• The Baby boomers were entering midlife, now fully transformed from hippie to yuppie and beyond to a bunch of parents firmly intent on denying the young the same mind-expanding drugs the Boom had in its youth in a pitiless, Scrooge-like, moralistic campaign.
• Generation X was entering rising adulthood, looking at a Boom-built culture in need of the one thing missing at Woodstock: ice-water realism.
• Generation Y was entering childhood.

Did the acts of September 11, 2001 herald the end of the Culture Wars era?

Some say yes, some say no: So far, the destruction of the World Trade Center has produced a sobering reaction from the American populace. If the Culture Wars era ended then, the national mood would be akin to the mood at the time of the start of the Great Depression. The American military took over Afghanistan, but that has not had the same feeling among the populace as, say, V-E Day. It seems, however, that President George W. Bush is trying to take up the mantle of the warrior-priest waging righteous wars against less godly opponents such as Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.