Declaring War on Culture

Review by Bill Doughty

U.S. Army General Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, defended reading, education and critical thinking in testimony to Congress last month when some members of Congress seemed to question his and his military’s intellectual curiosity.

Milley said,"I've read Mao Zedong. I've read Karl Marx. I've read Lenin. That doesn't make me a communist. So what is wrong with understanding — having some situational understanding about the country for which we are here to defend?" Milley said.

Like former Secretary of Defense Marine Gen. Jim Mattis, Milley realizes that great leaders need to be well-read and open to understanding competing ideas. Milley defended the military’s efforts to understand white nationalism and extremism in the context of critical race theory and other theories.

Hundreds of white insurrectionists who waged war on the Capitol Jan. 6 in an attempted coup are part of a long line of culture warriors who feel impelled –– and were compelled –– to fight to overturn an election and subvert the Constitution.

Milley said, ”I want to understand white rage, and I'm white, and I want to understand it.”

“A War for the Soul of America” by Andrew Hartman (University of Chicago Press), published in 2015 on the eve of the Trump presidency, seeks to explain the rise of white rage in modern history.

The book’s title comes from neoconservative iconoclast Patrick Buchanan, who called for “a war for the soul of America” at the 1992 Republican National Convention in Houston. But when people declare war on the Constitution, there may be no common ground.

"Leave it to Beaver"

While the 80s and 90s were pivotal to the rise of white nationalism, the first shots in the modern culture wars were heard in the 1960s, according to Hartman, as backlash to the civil rights movement, and as nonwhites, especially blacks, gained equality and political power.

“Normative American” families of the simple 1950s, as depicted in “Leave It to Beaver,” gave way to Archie Bunker’s complex 1960s “All in the Family” liberation and confrontation. Battle lines were drawn between the right and left: neoconservative vs. new leftist, traditional vs. progressive, color-blindness vs. color-consciousness, states’ rights vs. federal assistance, punishment vs. prevention, self-sufficiency vs. social safety net, etc.

The civil rights movement, first supported at the presidential level by Harry S Truman, accelerated under Navy WWII veterans John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson with pressure led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Then, with LBJ’s signing of the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act in the mid-60s, black Americans could finally participate fully in American democracy.

"All in the Family"

But as public schools became desegregated, many white Americans turned to segregated private schools, Christian day schools, and homeschooling. “The drama of white Americans resisting desegregation was played out again in the 1970s in struggles over busing across the nation,” Hartman says.

Thus began a “holy war” against secular schools as self-described “fundamentalists” “successfully enacted laws that mandated reading the King James Bible in schools and outlawed the teaching of evolution. Such activism sprang from a desire to reassert religious control over a society that was becoming increasingly modern and secular.”

“By the 1970s, conservative white evangelicals were confronted with a perfect storm of secular power that they deemed a threat to their way of life and to the Christian nation they believed the United States once was and ought to be again. This realization, more than anything else, led religious conservatives to take up arms in the culture wars. Worldly activism became more imperative, so much so that conservative evangelicals formed an uneasy political alliance with conservative Americans from different theological backgrounds. Even fundamentalists, whose insistence upon correct doctrine meant that minor differences in biblical interpretation often led to major schisms, reluctantly joined forces with conservative Catholics, Jews, and Mormons. This was all the more remarkable given that many fundamentalists viewed the 1960 election of John F. Kennedy, a Catholic, as a sign that the end times were fast approaching.”

The so-called Moral Majority was led by right-wing Christians like Buchanan, Phyllis Schlafly, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Tim LaHaye, and James Dobson. The Moral Majority declared war on cultural relativism, secular humanism, feminism, and the teaching of evolution.

Andrew Hartman

Hartman show how and why black studies evolved on college campuses. “A variety of theories emerged in the 1980s and 1990s to explain why the civil rights revolution had failed to relegate racial inequality to the dustbin of history.”

Harvard University law professor Derrick Bell developed Critical Race Theory to explain how resistance to power-sharing, true equality, and even identity as an “American” acted as a plexiglass ceiling. Do cracks in that ceiling over time threaten a historically predominant white hierarchy (and patriarchy)? Is that the cause of the white rage that General Milley seeks to understand?

As painful as it may be, there is great value in confronting the realities of the past to prevent future problems. 

W. E. B. DuBois

In “The Souls of Black Folks,” W. E. B. DuBois writes, “The United States, after all, was founded on the dispossession of indigenous nonwhites and made rich by the enslavement of African blacks.”

Author Toni Morrison writes, “The people who invented the hierarchy of ‘race’ when it was convenient for them ought not to be the ones who explain it away, now that it does not suit their purposes for it to exist.”

And speaking of a glass ceiling, the culture wars also include fights over gender. “For conservatives, gender differences were sacred,” Hartman writes. “Working women threatened the traditional family model …” and “conservatives were threatened by female economic autonomy.” Some state legislatures attempt to restrict women’s rights, including the right to terminate an early pregnancy, even in the case of rape or incest.

Critical Gender Theory now considers the role of socialization in determining sexual orientation. As for homosexuality, where did nature end and nurture begin? How can being gay be a sin, as Moral Majority fundamentalists (as well as ISIS and Al Qaeda) insist?

Culture wars continue to be fought six years after Hartman’s book: abortion restrictions, transgender discrimination, voter suppression, election interference, anti-vaccination conspiracies, and battles over school curriculum regarding “the contested American past.”

The result is a continual bipolar chasm in schools: divisive ethnocentrism vs. egalitarian cultural pluralism. Hartman explains the history of division as well as attempts at finding compromise.

“The History-Social Science Framework” put into effect in California in 1988, came close to closing the chasm, at least in schools. Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. called for a “vital center” bridge that included the California Framework. Hartman writes:

“Although the new California history curriculum recognized the legitimacy of multiculturalism as one factor among many that shaped the nation’s historical narrative, some conservatives supported the Framework because it also accentuated that which bound Americans together in common cause. Students were to ‘realize that true patriotism celebrates the moral force of the American idea as a nation that unites as one people the descendants of many cultures, races, religions, and ethnic groups.’ Due to such language, Schlesinger believed the California approach, unlike the later New York plan, resolved ‘the conflicting commands of our national motto, E Pluribus Unum. Out of many, one.’”

Schlesinger had been critical of any ideology that “belittles unum and glorifies pluribus.”

Navy readers may be interested in certain people and issues highlighted by Hartman in “A War for the Soul of America.” For example: 

• how then-circuit court judge Robert Bork rejected a case brought by an enlisted sailor in Dronenburg v Zech in 1984, 
• what Adm. William Leahy said were “ethical standards common to barbarians in the dark ages,” and 
• how veterans groups and Lynne Cheney teamed to prevent a display of Enola Gay at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum (a display that was planned to present a contextualized explanation of Hiroshima that helped bring an end to WWII).

Enola Gay at Smithsonian

I was particularly interested in Hartman’s insightful discussion of Murray and Herrnstein’s “The Bell Curve,” a book that fostered racist theories, slammed by evolutionary biologist Stephen J. Gould in his fascinating “The Mismeasure of Man.” Gould republished his “Mismeasure” with a devastating critique of “The Bell Curve.” Nurture AND nature!

It is critically important to understand how people are led to believe falsehoods in the wake of the insurrection and attempted coup of Jan. 6.

In last month’s testimony to Congress at the Capitol last month Milley asked: “So what is it that caused thousands of people to assault this building and try to overturn the Constitution of the United States of America? What caused that? I want to find that out.”

Gen. Milley’s role –– not only preventing an actual coup but also blocking Trump’s authoritarian attempt to deploy the military against U.S. citizens during Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020 –– is revealed in a new book, “I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump's Catastrophic Final Year” by Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig.

Hodgkins

We are reminded of Milley’s mea culpa following Trump’s march against protesters in Lafayette Square June 1, 2020, and of Milley’s frequent refrain that military service members take an oath to the Constitution, not to an individual or party. We are also reminded of a great communicator from the last century, Edward R. Murrow, who said, "I simply cannot accept that there are, on every story, two equal and logical sides to an argument."

As this Navy Reads blog is posted, Paul Allard Hodgkins, 38, of Tampa, Florida, has become the first Trump-supporting rioter to be sentenced for his role the Jan. 6 insurrection. Hodgkins pleaded guilty and expressed shame and remorse. He was sentenced to eight months in prison.

A view of the U.S. Capitol before the 57th presidential inauguration in Washington Jan. 21, 2013. President Barack H. Obama was elected to a second four-year term in office Nov. 6, 2012. More than 5,000 U.S. service members participated in or supported the inauguration. (U.S. Army photo by SSgt. Christopher Klutts)

TOP PHOTO:

NORFOLK, Va. (July 15, 2021) – Gen. Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, gives remarks during the ceremony to declare Joint Force Command (JFC) Norfolk’s Full Operational Capability aboard amphibious assault ship USS Kearsarge (LHD 3) on July 15. (U.S. Navy Photo by MC2 Kris R. Lindstrom)