Cultural Reformation

why is Kulturkampf German, anyway?

By J. L. Bastiat ⋅ May 7, 2008 ⋅  Email This Post ⋅  Print This Post ⋅ Post a comment

J. Wesley’s recent post The “Christian Right” and Political Activism: Looking at the Big Picture rings a bell with me–especially right at the end, where he says, “Roe vs. Wade, which in a single day struck down protections for the unborn in all fifty states, was the cultural equivalent of Pearl Harbor. If there truly is a culture war in America, we didn’t start it.”

Although I’m a dissenter from the evangelical identity politics associated with “Religious Right” and “Religious Left” alike, and don’t much care whether Mike Huckabee or Jimmy Carter get the worse billing in Political Oblivion, so long as they get there–as I say, not being much of a “culture warrior” in the current sense, I still know one thing for sure: the prevailing myth of a “reactionary right” is a truth wrapped in a lie. Social conservatives aren’t conservative because they’re “reactionary”; but because they’re conservative, they do react. What is often ignored in such things is the most obvious part: the “reactionary” didn’t start the struggle.

Now, if you’re convinced that Progress is morally impeccable and historically inevitable, then you might well be forgiven for the logical blind spot that treats the “reactionary” as innovating against it. Moreover, if you’re Stalin looking for a convenient label that keeps you in the middle of Revolutionary authenticity and Marxist march-of-history self-invention, while you consolidate power in a thoroughly fascistic tyranny, then “reactionary” and “fascist” become quite convenient labels for the enemies you put through the Lubyanka. Of course, if you’re convinced of such Progressive mythology, who could blame you with impunity? They’d all be practicing “the politics of personal destruction,” wouldn’t they?

OK, I hope I’ve tipped my hand by now. If you’ve been reading “the right books” then I have. Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism is a first-rate work on this and other subjects. Quoth the sage:

It is common among educated liberals to use the term “Kulturkampf” in referring to the supposed efforts of the right to impose its values on the rest of the country by demonizing liberals. The Germanic overtones are obviously meant to evoke a Hitlerian parallel. Quite the contrary, however, the original Kulturkampf was not a right-wing crackdown on liberal dissenters or imperiled minorities but an onslaught from the left against the forces of traditionalism and conservatism. Ostensibly, the Kulturkampf was a war against German Catholics, absorbed for the first time into greater Germany. Bismarck feared they might not be sufficiently loyal to a Germany led by Prussia[.] (362)

It didn’t end there, of course. Goldberg describes in some useful detail the multiple senses and purposes of “culture war” (Gramsci’s argument in favor of the “long march” as taken up by the New Left provides the English translation of Kulturkampf), including its central effort to displace the influence of religion on culture with a civic religion or sacralized politics:

Why belabor this point about religion? Because it is impossible to understand liberalism’s cultural agenda without understanding that modern liberalism is building its own railway bridge, replacing the bricks and beams of traditional American culture with something else. I do not claim that everything in the new liberal structure is bad or wrong. But I reject the clever argumentation of liberals who claim that their effort is merely “pragmatic” or piecemeal. [. . .] Nor should conservatives believe it is merely a slippery slope. That image suggests forces outside of our control pulling us in a direction not of our choosing. If society is moving in a direction not of its choosing, it is often because it is being pushed by the self-appointed forces of progress. (366-7)

And it is when, and to the extent, we can identify the “push” (by careful understanding of the history of ideas and attention to the actual arguments and changes taking place) and join with our compatriots as fellow recipients of the common grace of our national heritage, that I am least inclined to criticize, and most likely to sign up for, efforts to resist being pushed.

When we become the pushers, however; when our Whiggish tendencies turn Progressive and our compassion turns rancid and comes out as “compassionate conservatism” for lack of faith in any but the State’s civic religion; then we have become the problem. We have become the problem, less for the State, which can easily bear our petty corruptions in its much larger concentrations of depravity; and more for ourselves, and our claims to be the Body of Christ, claims He will make good through us, in us, and in spite of us, where necessary.

Peace be unto you, friends, in the midst of Kulturkampf!