Culture War

Fox News Anchor Bill O'Reilly has popularized the term "culture war," which he presents as a foundational conflict between traditionalists and secular progressives. Mr. O'Reilly claims himself to be a Sun-Tzu-style culture warrior on the side of the traditionalists.

The article on Culture War (retrieved May 22, 2008) presents a longer history of the term which notes Otto von Bismarck's Kulturkampf against the influence of Catholocism and calls by Antonio Gramsci (1891 – 1937) for Marxists to gain cultural hegemony by infiltrating and gaining hegemony in the media and schools.

O'Reilly's Culture War is primarily a reactionary movement.

Reactionary efforts tend to carry an imprint of the thing people are reacting against; So I think O'Reilly's declaration of the Culture War will ultimately be counterproductive. Even worse, reactionary efforts allow the "secular progressives" to project their methods back onto the "traditionalists."

The act of fighting the radical elements seeking hegemony in a cultural war style battle generally accellerates the process of radicalization. The radicalization/reactionary process simply gives the public a choice between two evils.

I see some merit in pointing out that the Western World has been in a culture war since the day that Hegel and Marx penned their hate-filled ideologies; However, the ultimate response to the culture war must come in the form of shoring up the foundations of our systems of reasoning and not in a Sun-Tzu-style reactionary movement.

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