Sep 20, 2026 · 39 min · 13 segments
This week Mark, Marzi and Claudia talk about the culture wars. Are they real or just a beat up, and why do academics not spend much time talking about them?
Mark DavisHost
Kali YungPanelistMarci MahmoodiPanelist
Um, I'm really interested in the culture wars because, partly because scholars have stopped being interested in the culture wars.
There's kind of this, there was this big burst of activity in the 1990s, in the early 1990s when Pat Buchanan made his big culture wars speech at the Republican convention.
And then there was a book by a guy called James Davison Hunter called Culture Wars, The Struggle to Control the Family, Art, Education, Law and Politics in America.
And then a whole bunch of people came out and said, oh, yeah, well, let's do some empirical research and see if it holds up.
about six months ago, where I did a big historical Google search around the use of the term in the scholarship declining and then the use of the term in the journalism ascending.
going on here? Why aren't scholars talking about the culture wars in the way they used to? And some are, but, you know, it's kind of a fringe topic.
Yeah, it seems to me that You think about the world today, highly polarised, lots of resurgent extremism going on, hyper-politics, all sorts of things happening.
And I'm not saying the culture wars are real because I want to come back to that in a minute because this is part of the problem.
It's because scholars know that there's something dodgy about this term whereas journalists tend to take it at face value.
But I'm still really interested in this idea in this idea that there's been this discourse that's been flooding popular culture and commentary and, you know, this podcast called Politics as Culture, a lot of it is about how political debates are now, political issues are now spoken about through the lens of culture and identity.
You know, it might be cultural wars in the way that people are talking about it, but there is something going on here.
And this is what journalists are referring to, I think, when they talk about cultural wars, this shift.
Um, I'm really interested in the culture wars because, partly because scholars have stopped being interested in the culture wars.
There's kind of this, there was this big burst of activity in the 1990s, in the early 1990s when Pat Buchanan made his big culture wars speech at the Republican convention.
And then there was a book by a guy called James Davison Hunter called Culture Wars, The Struggle to Control the Family, Art, Education, Law and Politics in America.
And then a whole bunch of people came out and said, oh, yeah, well, let's do some empirical research and see if it holds up.
about six months ago, where I did a big historical Google search around the use of the term in the scholarship declining and then the use of the term in the journalism ascending.
going on here? Why aren't scholars talking about the culture wars in the way they used to? And some are, but, you know, it's kind of a fringe topic.
Yeah, it seems to me that You think about the world today, highly polarised, lots of resurgent extremism going on, hyper-politics, all sorts of things happening.
And I'm not saying the culture wars are real because I want to come back to that in a minute because this is part of the problem.
It's because scholars know that there's something dodgy about this term whereas journalists tend to take it at face value.
But I'm still really interested in this idea in this idea that there's been this discourse that's been flooding popular culture and commentary and, you know, this podcast called Politics as Culture, a lot of it is about how political debates are now, political issues are now spoken about through the lens of culture and identity.
You know, it might be cultural wars in the way that people are talking about it, but there is something going on here.
And this is what journalists are referring to, I think, when they talk about cultural wars, this shift.
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