of history in elementary schools to the injustices of the justice system. But the liberating democratization of information made possible by the internet not only spurred breathtaking innovation and entrepreneurship; it also led to a cascade of misinformation and relativism, as evidenced by today’s fake news epidemic.
Central to the breakdown of official narratives in academia was the constellation of ideas falling under the broad umbrella of postmodernism, which arrived at American universities in the second half of the twentieth century via such French theorists as Foucault and Derrida (whose ideas, in turn, were indebted to the German philosophers Heidegger and Nietzsche). In literature, film, architecture, music, and painting, postmodernist concepts (exploding storytelling traditions and breaking down boundaries between genres, and between popular culture and high art) would prove emancipating and in some cases transformative, resulting in a wide range of innovative works from artists like Thomas Pynchon, David Bowie, the Coen brothers, Quentin Tarantino, David Lynch, Paul Thomas Anderson, and Frank Gehry. When postmodernist theories were applied to the social sciences and history, however, all sorts of philosophical implications, both intended and unintended, would result and eventually pinball through our culture.
There are many different strands of postmodernism and many different interpretations, but very broadly speaking, postmodernist arguments deny an objective reality existing independently from human perception, contending that knowledge is filtered through the prisms of class, race, gender, and other variables. In rejecting the possibility of an objective reality and substituting the notions of perspective and positioning for the idea of truth, postmodernism enshrined the principle of subjectivity. Language is seen as unreliable and unstable (part of the unbridgeable gap between what is said and what is meant), and even the notion of people acting as fully rational, autonomous individuals is discounted, as each of us is shaped, consciously or unconsciously, by a particular time and culture.
Out with the idea of consensus. Out with the view of history as a linear narrative. Out with big universal or transcendent meta-narratives. The Enlightenment, for instance, is dismissed by many postmodernists on the left as a hegemonic or Eurocentric reading of history, aimed at promoting colonialist or capitalistic notions of reason and progress. The Christian narrative of redemption is rejected, too, as is the Marxist road to a Communist utopia. To some postmodernists, the scholar Christopher Butler observes, even the arguments of scientists can be “seen as no more than quasi narratives which compete with all the others for acceptance. They have no unique or reliable fit to the world, no certain correspondence with reality. They are just another form of fiction.”
THE MIGRATION OF postmodern ideas from academia to the political mainstream is a reminder of how the culture wars—as the vociferous debates over race, religion, gender, and school curricula were called during the 1980s and 1990s—have mutated in unexpected ways. The terrorist attacks of 9/11 and the financial crisis of 2008, it was thought, had marginalized those debates, and there was hope, during the second term of President Barack Obama, that the culture wars in their most virulent form might be winding down. Health-care legislation, the Paris climate accord, a stabilizing economy after the crash of 2008, same-sex marriage, efforts to address the inequities of the criminal justice system—although a lot of essential reforms remained to be done, many Americans believed that the country was at least set on a progressive path.
In his 2015 book, A War for the Soul of America, the historian Andrew Hartman wrote that the traditionalists who “resisted the cultural changes set into motion during the sixties” and “identified with the normative Americanism of the 1950s” seemed to have lost the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s. By the twenty-first century, Hartman wrote, “a growing majority of Americans now accept and even embrace what at the time seemed like a new nation. In this light, the late-twentieth-century culture wars should be understood as an adjustment period. The nation struggled over cultural change in order to adjust to it. The culture wars compelled Americans, even conservatives, to acknowledge transformations to American life. And although acknowledgment often came in the form of rejection, it was also the first step to resignation, if not outright acceptance.”
As it turns out, this optimistic assessment was radically premature, much the way that Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 essay “The End of History?” (arguing that with the implosion of Soviet Communism liberal democracy had triumphed and would become “the final form of human government”) was premature. A Freedom House report concluded that “with populist and nationalist forces making significant gains in democratic states, 2016 marked the eleventh consecutive year of decline in global freedom.” And in 2017, Fukuyama said he was concerned about “a slow erosion of institutions” and democratic norms under President Trump; twenty-five years earlier, he said, he “didn’t have a sense or a theory about how democracies can go backward” but now realized “they clearly can.”
As for the culture wars, they quickly came roaring back. Hard-core segments of the Republican base—the Tea Party, birthers, right-wing evangelicals, white nationalists—had mobilized against President Obama and his policies. And Trump, as both candidate and president, would pour gasoline on these social and political fractures—as a way to both gin up his base and distract attention from his policy failures and many scandals. He exploited the partisan divides in American society, appealing to the fears of white working-class voters worried about a changing world, while giving them scapegoats he selected—immigrants, African Americans, women, Muslims—as targets for their anger. It’s no coincidence that Russian trolls—working to get Trump elected while trying to undermine faith in the U.S. democratic system—were, at the same time, using fake social media accounts in efforts to further amplify divisions among Americans. For instance, it turned out that Russian trolls used an impostor Facebook account called “Heart of Texas” to organize a protest called “Stop the Islamization of Texas” in May 2016 and another impostor Facebook account called “United Muslims of America” to organize a counterprotest at the same time and place.
Some of the most eloquent critics of Trump’s politics of fear and division have been conservatives like Steve Schmidt, Nicolle Wallace, Joe Scarborough, Jennifer Rubin, Max Boot, David Frum, Bill Kristol, Michael Gerson, and the Republican senators John McCain and Jeff Flake. But most of the GOP rallied behind Trump, rationalizing his lies, his disdain for expertise, his contempt for many of the very ideals America was founded upon. For such Trump enablers, party trumped everything—morality, national security, fiscal responsibility, common sense, and common decency. In the wake of stories about Trump’s alleged affair with the porn star Stormy Daniels, evangelicals came to his defense: Jerry Falwell Jr. said “all these things were years ago,” and Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, said he and his supporters were willing to give Trump a pass for his personal behavior.
It’s an ironic development, given where conservatives stood during the first wave of the culture wars in the 1980s and 1990s. Back then, it was conservatives who promoted themselves as guardians of tradition, expertise, and the rule of law, standing in opposition to what they saw as the decline of reason and a repudiation of Western values. In his 1987 book, The Closing of the American Mind, the political philosophy professor Allan Bloom railed against relativism and condemned 1960s campus protests in which, he said, “commitment was understood to be profounder than science, passion than reason.” And the scholar Gertrude Himmelfarb warned that the writing and teaching of history had been politicized by a new generation of postmodernists: in viewing the past through the lenses of variables like gender and race, she argued, postmodernists were implying not just that all truths are contingent but that “it is not only futile but positively baneful to aspire to them.”
Some critics unfairly tried to lump the pluralistic impulses of multiculturalism together with the