|
Culture Wars and the Architecture of Authoritarianism
How Symbols, Rituals, and Everyday Life Scaffold Authoritarianism in the United States
|
| |||||||||||||||
When I first heard the phrase “culture wars,” I assumed it was simply another front in identity politics — a way of dividing Americans into camps. But when Donald Trump began openly flirting with authoritarianism — declaring he would be a dictator “on day one,” assuring Christian nationalists they might never have to vote again, and promising to dismantle the “deep state” — I realized I had missed something.
Culture wars weren’t just about mobilizing voters by appealing to values. They were about discrediting democratic institutions themselves, hollowing out trust in elections, and laying the groundwork for authoritarian rule. What seemed like noisy distractions — fights over school curricula, pronouns, or statues — were deliberate scaffolding for something larger: a long-term strategy to reshape meaning in everyday life.
This did not arise out of nowhere. The origins stretch back to the 1960s, when conservative strategists recognized that their economic agenda — deregulation, tax cuts for the wealthy, opposition to labor protections — lacked broad popular appeal. By investing in think tanks, media outlets, and grassroots organizations, they reframed politics around cultural grievance rather than material inequality. The Powell Memo of 1971 urged business leaders to mobilize against progressive institutions; the Moral Majority of the 1980s fused Christian nationalism with Republican politics; [1] Fox News and right-wing radio created parallel information ecosystems. Billionaires and corporate networks bankrolled these efforts, understanding that outrage over symbols could distract from policies that redistributed wealth upward. Donor networks — from the Koch brothers to Leonard Leo and other wealthy patrons — supplied the structural resources: shaping courts, funding think tanks, underwriting the machinery of outrage. This wasn’t philanthropy; it was a cultural investment designed to embed power through story, ritual, and perception.
From the start, culture wars worked less like debate and more like ritual. Institutions of daily life became stages for symbolic conflict, where belonging was performed and outsiders marked. My own grandson’s high school graduation illustrates this well. The ceremony, on its surface, celebrated student achievement. Yet the flags arrayed across the stage and the Pledge of Allegiance recited by all normalized patriotism, religiosity, and conventional respectability. No one shouted partisan slogans; there was no explicit politics. But through repetition and performance, students absorbed a framework of belonging that linked legitimacy to nation and conformity. Indoctrination here is quiet, almost invisible — ideology embedded into a rite of passage.
Other settings show the more overt side of culture wars. My neighbor’s yard, crowded with flags, banners, and partisan signs, performs allegiance daily. Each display is a mini-campaign, a visible assertion that this is “our” territory. From a political ecology perspective, these landscapes reshape local meaning: dissent feels alien when the terrain itself insists on loyalty. What was subtle at the graduation becomes explicit here — culture wars rely on both normalization and assertion, immersion and signaling.
Sometimes, the performance is hostile. One evening at a Mexican restaurant, my wife and I overheard two men loudly joking about deportations and praising mass removals. Surrounded by Mexican staff and diners, the performance was unmistakable: a declaration of dominance in someone else’s cultural space. It was not just talk, but a public act of exclusion, embedding hostility into the everyday. This, too, is how culture wars work — by making exclusion normal, by repeating it until the sting dulls and resistance seems futile.
The mechanisms are consistent. Symbols condense conflict into shorthand: a flag in the yard, a gun on the hip, a mask during COVID. Myths supply narrative weight: the “lost America” to be restored, the “silent majority” under siege. Rituals make these stories lived reality, enacted in schools, churches, stadiums, and even restaurants. Psychologists call it the “illusory truth effect”: repeat a claim, however false, and people begin to accept it as common sense. Culture wars exploit this, embedding narratives through news cycles, entertainment, memes, and everyday banter. They bypass reason and work through emotion, identity, and repetition.
This is where the media feedback loop becomes critical. Conservative outlets — talk radio, Fox News, and later social media influencers — did not just report news. They curated reality, amplified grievances, and reinforced symbols. Every story about trans kids, critical race theory, or drag shows became a referendum on national identity. Cultural narratives were recycled, reinforced, and looped back into political strategy. The repetition magnified the impact of rituals, symbols, and scripts, making the performance of belonging feel omnipresent and inevitable.
Legislation followed the cultural scripts. Bills targeting gender identity, reproductive rights, and school curricula often share identical language across states. This “copy-paste” approach, coordinated by advocacy groups like ALEC and Alliance Defending Freedom, ensured that outrage translated into policy efficiently and strategically. Symbolic battles were converted into concrete governance — the culture war was scaffolded into law.
Progressives often miss the point. Treating culture wars as noise or distraction, they lean on facts and policy briefs, believing evidence will prevail. But culture is not peripheral; it is the terrain of politics itself. The right invests in stories, symbols, and emotion; the left too often retreats to spreadsheets. Where progressives do engage in symbolic politics, victories can feel hollow or alienating, reducing complex realities to slogans. The imbalance is stark: one side tells stories of belonging, while the other hands out white papers.
Meanwhile, culture wars clear the ground for other projects. While outrage is channeled toward immigrants, transgender youth, or schoolteachers, legislatures roll back regulations, privatize schools, expand fossil fuel development, and weaken labor protections. The noise of symbolic conflict shields the consolidation of power.
This playbook is not uniquely American. Viktor Orbán in Hungary fuses nationalism with family values; Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil mobilized evangelical masculinity; Narendra Modi in India wields Hindu nationalism. Across continents, authoritarian movements borrow from one another, refining tactics of spectacle, repetition, and cultural performance to make extreme positions feel normal and safe. Transnational networks threaten democracy by sharing media strategies, legal frameworks, and propaganda techniques, illustrating how culture is the battlefield and democracy the obstacle.
The stakes, then, are nothing less than democracy itself. Authoritarianism thrives not only on violence or repression but on meaning-making. When culture is ceded, the architecture of authoritarianism is built brick by brick in everyday life.
Yet culture also holds the key to resistance. The way forward requires reclaiming stories, rituals, and symbols for democracy. Belonging must be linked to dignity, inclusion, and freedom, not fear and exclusion. Local spaces — schools, libraries, town halls — are arenas where inclusive rituals of belonging can take root. Democracy cannot be defended by facts alone; it must be lived and felt.
That means progressives must become cultural storytellers. Policies need to be framed in narratives that resonate with everyday experience: economic justice as family security, climate action as stewardship of home, pluralism as strength. It also means listening and humanizing difference. Polarization feeds authoritarianism; mutual recognition strengthens democracy. Leaders like Rep. Greg Casar emphasize connecting cultural values to material realities, while Minnesota Governor Tim Walz reframes progressive policies as pragmatic, family-first solutions — demonstrating that hope and optimism, rather than mere outrage, can reclaim narrative power.
Above all, hope must be central. Culture wars thrive on fear and resentment; democracy thrives on aspiration. Leaders and citizens alike must tell stories of possibility, cultivating rituals of inclusion where everyone can see themselves. The graduation, the yard, the restaurant — these are arenas of contestation, but they can also be reclaimed as sites of renewal, places where democracy is felt in daily life.
Culture wars are not background noise. They are the battlefield on which authoritarianism is advancing — but also the field on which democracy can be renewed. Meaning is never fixed. The stories we tell, the symbols we elevate, and the rituals we practice will decide whether culture becomes a weapon of division or the foundation of shared democratic life.
Endnote
[1]: Lewis F. Powell, Confidential Memorandum: Attack on American Free Enterprise System, August 23, 1971, Library of Congress, Manuscript Division.
Suggested Readings
Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.
Amlinger, Carolin, and Oliver Nachtwey. The Authoritarianism of the Liberal Era. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2020.
Berger, Nancy. Post-Truth. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2018.
Binder, Amy, and Kate Wood. Becoming Right: How Campuses Shape Young Conservatives. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013.
Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books, 1973.
Hunter, James Davison. Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America. New York: Basic Books, 1991.
Levitsky, Steven, and Daniel Ziblatt. How Democracies Die. New York: Crown, 2018.
McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1964.
Scott, James C. Seeing Like a State. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998.
Wolf, Eric. Envisioning Power. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.
Thanks for reading James’s Substack! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.