No one with at least a passing interest in the United States can be unaware of the thesis that Americans are battling over the idea of what America is. Progressive, secular, multicultural liberals are arrayed against traditionalist, religious, monocultural conservatives. According to Patrick Buchanan in his 1992 GOP convention speech, it is a “war for the soul of America,” a quote which Hartman borrows for his book title. Given the culture war's importance, it is unsurprising that many people are thinking and writing about it. It has been and continues to be the focus of much journalistic and popular commentary. For example, many early accounts of George W. Bush's 2004 reelection victory were framed in a culture war narrative about so-called “values voters.” The feverish and sometimes ferocious reaction to Barack Obama's presidency is often explained via the culture war prism, as is the alleged defection of white working-class Democratic voters to the Republican Party. The culture war has also drawn the attention of academic scholars, with a good number of sociologists, geographers and, most prolifically – at least from my biased knowledge of the literature – political scientists contributing to the debate.

What is currently missing from the long list of books, papers and commentary is a serious and detailed history that tackles the culture war's origins, battles and, potentially, demise. Hartman is the first historian to offer such a work. He has written an ambitious, largely successful and always fascinating text that fills a very large gap in our knowledge and will likely become the reference point for subsequent historical analyses. To be sure, many historians before Hartman have engaged with the culture war, but as participants rather than observers; Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States (1980) and Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s The Disuniting of America (1991) are notable examples. Indeed, the “history war” between traditional scholars and upstart social and cultural historians is rightly given its own chapter by Hartman. His analysis of the conflagrations engendered by the National History Standards and the Smithsonian's The West as America and Enola Gay exhibitions makes for absorbing reading.

A key aim of the book is to locate the roots of the culture war and to trace its development over time. The first chapter places the war's origins firmly in the 1960s. Radicalized by the civil rights movement and Vietnam, the counterculture revolution led by young, educated and relatively affluent New Left radicals such as Tom Hayden challenged the cosy postwar consensus, deference to authority and respect for mainstream values, arguing instead that America was racist, sexist, homophobic and warmongering.

The 1960s also saw the rise of identity groups, including women's, gay liberation, Chicano and, most notably, black power. These groups would, according to Hartman, pose the greatest challenge to conservative, monocultural America. They started to write new histories, based on a belief in the importance of identity in the struggle for liberation and on an increasingly sophisticated approach to epistemological questions in knowledge production. Hartman's own history of the culture war similarly and deftly weaves the events of history (such as the establishment of black, ethnic and women's studies programmes in the nation's universities) with the production of historical knowledge (how such programmes responded to but also influenced new thinking about identity, oppression and liberation). Indeed, this book is as much historiography as history, and is stronger for it, because it reveals to the reader the intellectual positions and development of the culture war's participants as they struggle to define what America is.

The 1960s is the key decade in the early development of the culture war because the rise of the counterculture and identity politics inspired a backlash from culturally conservative Americans. Hartman's deconstruction of the conservative reaction to the rise of the New Left and its countercultural revolution is insightful and thorough. He does not take “conservatives” to be a homogeneous bloc, instead breaking conservatism down into its constituent parts, and showing how each responds at different times and in different ways to the perceived progressive threat. Hartman tells a nuanced story of the New Left facing off against early neoconservatives. The intellectual journey of Jewish neocons from hard left to Humphrey-supporting to McGovern-hating reactionaries is well known, but Hartman's telling puts some real meat on the story's bare bones. It is a fascinating narrative involving characters such as Irving Kristol, his wife Gertrude Himmelfarb, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Norman Podhoretz and Paul Goodman; publications such as Commentary, The Public Interest and even London-based and CIA-subsidised Encounter; and debates about the meaning of and appropriate responses to the counterculture, the Watts riots, black poverty and the welfare state.

A second conservative group horrified by the rise of the New Left, its threat to family values and apparent success in secularizing the state and its schools was white evangelical Christians. As the Bible and God retreated from classrooms, driven out in large measure by the Supreme Court's Engel and Abington decisions in 1962 and 1963 respectively, they were, in the eyes of the Christian right, replaced by secular humanism, a belief system that incorporated moral relativism, multiculturalism and sex education. Some fought the changes, others took their kids out of public school, many did both. The IRS's 1978 announcement that it would prosecute Christian day schools that did not meet a 5 percent quota for minority students only outraged evangelicals further and convinced many that they were now outsiders. Roe v. Wade was even more pivotal in alienating evangelicals from the state. Their America, God's chosen nation, was now a cesspit of immorality. And Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority, founded in 1979, provided a timely vehicle for the offended to take up arms.

Another battle was fought over race. Despite the civil rights revolution, vast racial inequalities persisted, with African Americans far more likely to be poor and poorly, unemployed and incarcerated, drug-addicted and ill-educated than white Americans. In the search for solutions to persistent inequality, progressives moved from colour-blind to colour-conscious policies such as busing and affirmative action, but these created a tinderbox of smouldering resentments across the political spectrum. Discussions over race grew increasingly toxic as they intersected with debates on crime and welfare, and as some conservatives began to push ugly arguments about IQs and genetic determinism.

But not all issues fed straightforwardly into the culture war. While feminism and equality for women generally posed a problem for the conservative dream of nuclear families and traditional gender roles, pornography united many feminists and conservatives, and the discipline of women's studies generated a backlash that also cut across the usual battle lines. While Hartman documents these unholy coalitions with precision, he does not discuss in similar detail what they mean for our understanding of the culture war when such allegedly fierce enemies unite in pursuit of common objectives. These alliances raise the possibility that the culture war narrative is overblown, as does public-opinion data collected by Morris Fiorina and his various coauthors which show that American public opinion is generally not polarized or polarizing on even the most hot-button culture war issues. Indeed, on most issues, American opinion is normally distributed (in a bell curve). Yes, Democratic Party supporters are more homogeneously liberal and Republican supporters more conservative than in the past, but this may well be a feature of what Fiorina calls party “sorting” rather than value change, as liberals who may once have identified as Republican realign with the Democratic Party and Democratic-supporting conservatives realign with the GOP. Hartman's history does not dwell on such evidence and wider debates within American political science about how deep the cultural fissures run. His story is, perhaps with the exception of education and various battles over the public-school curriculum, focussed mainly on political, social, cultural and intellectual elites.

Given this, it is somewhat strange that he concludes this erudite book by arguing that the culture war is waning. Class and capitalism are now more important than culture, we are told. Feminism won many battles but women now compete with men in a deregulated postindustrial labour market, where employment is insecure and income inequality at record levels. Fights over the public-school curriculum continue in an attenuated form, but anyway seem relatively unimportant next to efforts to privatize education. In universities, rarefied but once seemingly critical debates over the merits of relativism and identity are obscured by a fight to save the humanities. Gay Americans enjoy an equal right to marry, but their new family units will end up shouldering many new costs and risks as the welfare state atrophies further. These examples are thought-provoking, but are discussed only en passant in a frustratingly brief final chapter. And there is considerable evidence, not discussed, that American elites continue to do battle. Congress is more polarized than at any time in the postwar period. Then Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell declared that “the single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.” Elite debates on health care, immigration, the environment, federal funding for abortion clinics as so on are as vitriolic and ideologically polarized as ever. And conservative media personalities (Beck, Limbaugh, Coulter) still draw deeply on culture war rhetoric and ideas. But maybe Hartman is right, and these disputes are just “lingering residues” (285) of the culture war. Or maybe not. It may take several more decades – and several more books – for historians to discern this tide of history.

A search for the term “culture wars” in contemporary American media reveals two things. First, that with recent battles over Obamacare, same-sex marriage, government prayer, and abortion, the term has come to the forefront again in general discussions of American politics and political culture. Second, that the American media regularly uses “culture wars” as shorthand to describe the fractures on political and policy issues that divide Americans along religious lines. As Andrew Hartman's new book shows, however, the culture wars were never only about religion and to see them that way is to miss a great deal about what made the culture wars significant.

Hartman sees the roots of the politics of the last two decades of the twentieth century embedded in the fundamental changes to American society that began much earlier, echoing much of the recent scholarship on American religion, particularly the recent history of American evangelicalism. In the 1960s, the rise of the New Left, identity politics, and the counterculture, and the response by defenders of an older, more traditional “normative America,” effected a “genuine transformation to American political culture” (2) against which the battles over the culture wars would be fought. In effect, the culture wars were the new face of an old issue: what did it mean to be American? As the politics of the 1960s offered new answers to that question, the nation struggled over which vision of the nation would win out. “In this light,” Hartman concludes, “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” (285).

A War for the Soul of America traces the nature of those struggles. Hartman is not interested in taking sides, but in exploring the intellectual, political, emotional, and cultural roots of the issues. Religion is clearly part of this debate (chapter 3), but the fact that it is not the primary consideration in this discussion is reinforced by the fact that the liberal political movements of the 1960s (chapter 1) and the rise of the neoconservatives (chapter 2) are covered first and provide much of the intellectual framework within which the later debates of the culture wars occurred and are discussed. In fact, religion fits effectively with two subsequent chapters, addressing the politics of race (chapter 4) and gender (chapter 5), which develop in some detail Hartman's interest in the way in which identity politics fundamentally shaped the politics and political culture of the United States in the 1960s and afterwards.

Having established these key dimensions, the book then turns to some of the major debates of the culture wars themselves. It is here that the book clearly challenges the dominant popular narrative that even the best-known of the culture wars debates can be understood solely by reference to religion. Hartman weaves a complex, compelling tale of multiple religious and secular concerns that brought people together to fight for their understanding of American culture that just as often led to surprising and unexpected alliances as to those that are more familiar. Brought together into chapters which roughly address popular culture (chapter 6), schools (chapter 7), higher education (chapter 8), and public history (chapter 9), the book covers a broad range of topics from abortion to the debate over the work of artist Robert Mapplethorpe, from the divisions over the Smithsonian Institution's proposed exhibit on the Enola Gay to discussions about literary criticism and what constituted literary canon, from school prayer and the controversy over teaching evolution to the debates about rap and heavy metal. The breadth of the discussion reveals the important role played by those of faith but, even more significantly, shows that many of the major debates of the culture wars were not about religion at all; to equate the culture wars with religion is to miss a significant part of the debate.

Given this, it is perhaps surprising that religion largely disappears from the book's conclusion. “The metaphor has run its course,” argues Hartman (285), asserting that as most Americans have moved towards acceptance of, or at least reluctant resignation towards, the changes in society and culture wrought by the 1960s, the notion of the culture wars as previously understood is no longer relevant. Yet states continue to pass ever-stricter abortion laws under the guise of protecting women's health, actively supported by conservative religious leaders; religious business owners and nonprofits seek exemption from key provisions of Obamacare; and religious individuals, groups, and businesses criticize same-sex marriage and seek “protections” via arguments about religious freedom, all regularly drawing on culture wars rhetoric and, in some cases, achieving significant legislative success. Perhaps these are only “lingering residues” (285) of the older debates, their legislative success little more than carving out exceptions to a broader culture, but to women who find access to abortion increasingly restricted or same-sex couples who can now legally marry and have those marriages recognized throughout all fifty states, the consequences of these debates are just as significant, real, and poignant as the debates discussed throughout the book. While a lengthy discussion of these issues would undoubtedly have taken the book's conclusion away from its central premise, the complete absence of any mention of contemporary religious debates and their ongoing significance seems jarring after the careful intertwining of the religious and the secular elsewhere.

But this is a minor quibble. A War for the Soul of America is an important and engaging book. It encourages historians of the culture wars to think about those battles more broadly in the context of post-World War II American politics. It makes a strong case for the central importance of the secular aspects of the culture wars and the need to remember that religion was not the only cleavage in American political culture. It also encourages historians of the US in the second half of the twentieth century to pay careful attention to the impact of the culture wars in their broadest sense and not simply to dismiss them as “a mere tempest in a teapot, fought out by equally hysterical partisans” (223). And it does all this in a clear, thoughtful manner which offers just as much to the newcomer to the culture wars as to the seasoned academic steeped in the literature. This is an impressive achievement.

Perhaps the most important reflection found in Andrew Hartman's excellent new book comes at the very end. He writes, “This book gives the culture wars a history – because they are history. The logic of the culture wars has been exhausted. The metaphor has run its course” (285).

Hartman is absolutely right. When I began my historical studies in the US back in 2004, the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s still seemed contemporary. George W. Bush won reelection partly with the help of evangelical and Catholic voters, aided by his reputation as a religious conservative. But it now looks like this wasn't the future but the last hurrah of Reagan-style cultural politics. Barack Obama's victory in 2008, the embarrassment caused to Mitt Romney by ultra-pro-lifers in 2012, the Supreme Court's 2015 ruling on gay marriage and even the reluctance of the GOP establishment to defend the Confederate battle flag after the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church shooting all point to a profound change.

To return to the pre-Bush era, Hartman does historians a tremendous service. He draws together the various strains of right-wing thinking that emerged from the late 1960s and shows how they coalesced to form an alliance against cultural change. In essence, all these movements were defending the 1950s ideal of Americanism. At its heart was a straight, white male raising a wife and family on a good income – patriotic and religious. The American nuclear family, which certainly existed in large numbers for a while, was undone by a mix of cultural revolution (feminism, gay rights, etc.) and economic restructuring (globalization, inflation, etc.). And yet the right tended to pin blame exclusively on the cultural revolutionaries rather than acknowledge faults within the capitalist system to which they were emotionally tied.

There were exceptions to this rule, and Hartman could have found a little more room to detail them. George C. Wallace's presidential movement was racist in appeal but also economically populist and at one point urged the abolition of tax exemptions, even on churches. Likewise, Pat Buchanan's campaigns for the presidency certainly fretted about abortion and pornography. But he also bemoaned the death of blue-collar jobs caused by offshoring. He envisaged a “conservatism of the heart” that would have given the state huge powers to regulate not only culture, but also the economy in the interests of a declining blue-collar class. This part of his platform was despised by many regular Republicans and highlights the tension between a conservatism that seeks to preserve communities and one that puts the utilitarian needs of the free market first. Norman Mailer once joked that US conservatives profess to love trees but – if the money is right – think nothing of cutting one down to run a road through it.

Nevertheless, as Hartman states, US conservatives may have broadly embraced libertarianism in economics but they still pushed the 1950s American ideal in social policy. That ideal was patriarchal, but the author reminds us that many women felt invested in it, too. In his chapter on the right's response to feminism, Hartman notes that gender liberation gave way to possible exploitation – as, say, through cheap labour in the workforce or by reducing women to objects in pornography. There were points of potential alliance between feminists and the right on these issues, as demonstrated by their mutual dislike of porn. But, crucially, they had “vastly different explanations of how pornography had become a problem of such magnitude” (144). To the right, porn was proof that the cultural revolution had gone too far and that women needed special protection under law. To some on the left, it was part of the antifeminist backlash that reasserted patriarchy through sexual domination. Even in moments of apparent agreement between right and left, sharp differences remained over their interpretation of the 1960s. The conservatives continued to insist that it was a shameless, libertine decade that ruined the Edenic paradise of the 1950s.

Hartman concludes that as popular memories of the 1950s have faded away, so the right's defense of its values has become irrelevant, even “farcical” (288). I would frame the change this way. Up until the George W. Bush years there did exist a commonly agreed standard of “normal” in American life. It was frequently contested and challenged, but even its opponents conceded that it remained the dominant ideology of Middle America. Since Bush that “normal” has not entirely gone away. But it is now regarded as one identity among many – rather than orthodoxy. The old “normal” looks like becoming a lifestyle choice.

The response of today's conservatives to that change is complex. Some still insist that they represent a silent majority, but are rather bitter about the majority's refusal to speak up. They blame it on cowardice or betrayal by moderate politicians; their anger was articulated through the Tea Party revolt. Other conservatives, such as Charles Murray, suggest that the old “normal” is still around and is superior to alternative ways of living – but is increasingly the preserve of the wealthy as opposed to the welfare-dependent poor. Both these views reek of the jeremiad. It is typical for conservatives today to see themselves as, in the words of right-winger Samuel Francis, “beautiful losers.”

A small but growing minority of conservatives, however, believe that it is necessary and possible to reach beyond their social base. Hence Rand Paul's libertarians tend to be privately religious but want to leave others alone to decide their own future. And some moderate Republicans even think that the future lies in appealing to Latinos, married gay couples and other hitherto excluded groups who just want their chance to be as American as Pat Buchanan and his blue-collar brethren. My own suspicion is that some form of cultural conflict will continue – just in a very different form.

A roundtable dedicated to my book in this journal is a huge honor. I am particularly flattered that three such smart scholars favorably review it. It seems impolite to take issue with their criticisms. Alas, here goes.

Andrew Wroe makes an astute observation: nowhere in my book do I address the argument that most Americans are not culture warriors. Making use of poll data, the political scientist Morris Fiorina argues that most Americans are not nearly as polarized as the elites who take center stage in my book. To drive home his point about “the possibility that the culture war narrative is overblown,” Wroe emphasizes an instance when political alignment did not follow culture war script – when feminists joined religious conservatives in the fight against legalized pornography. For Wroe, this strange alliance, in which “allegedly fierce enemies unite in pursuit of common objectives,” suggests that the culture wars are not nearly as polarizing as my book would have it. To this point I have two responses.

First, the culture wars were a struggle to define American identity in the wake of the 1960s revolutions that shattered a previous normative America. Sometimes this struggle took the form of debates over human nature. That feminists and conservatives agreed that pornography was a bad thing does not then entail that they agreed on questions of national identity or human nature, or how pornography related to national identity or human nature. Timothy Stanley quotes me to this effect in his review: feminists and conservatives had “vastly different explanations of how pornography had become a problem of such magnitude.” Stanley continues in his own words:

This is exactly right and highlights why the dynamic of the culture wars shaped even this ironic alliance.

My second response to Wroe's point about how I might overstate the significance of the culture wars: perhaps it is my disciplinary bias, but I think political scientists like Fiorina put a narrow type of empiricism to work – relying almost exclusively on poll data – to dismiss the culture wars. Such a characterization amounts to truism. In Fiorina's attempt to explain away the culture wars, he discounts that politicians and intellectuals necessarily tap into popular discontent, which is not always expressed in filtered responses to pollsters.

Emma Long focusses on how my book expands the terrain of the culture wars beyond the realm of religion, which I appreciate. But then she criticizes my conclusion – where I provocatively argue that the logic of the culture wars has been exhausted – on the ground that I ignore religion. In making this critique, Long highlights two contemporary political developments: (1) the passage of “ever-stricter abortion laws” by right-wing politicians whose antichoice positions are presumably informed by religious beliefs, and (2) the attempt by religious conservatives to avoid compliance with same-sex marriage laws on the ground that compulsory recognition of such laws represents a violation of their religious liberty.

Abortion is a culture war issue that has not experienced a large swing in public opinion one way or another in the past thirty or so years. About 60 percent of Americans believe that abortion should be legal in the first trimester of pregnancy. Increasingly restrictive abortion laws, then, are not a product of a surge in religious conservative sentiment. Rather, such laws are a product of right-wing politicians in gerrymandered districts taking advantage of the fact that Roe v. Wade’s constitutional rationale was based on the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which denoted that a woman could not be barred from obtaining an abortion, instead of on the Equal Protection Clause, which would have ensured a woman equal access to an abortion. In short, the struggle for access to safe and legal abortion will persist, but as to whether this fact has some larger historical meaning about the culture wars is open to debate.

Regarding recent conservative efforts to fend off liberal and secular shifts in American political culture by invoking the right to “religious liberty”: this development seems like evidence of my conclusion that religious conservatives have lost. Instead of arguing that their own particular religious identity represents the nation – which is how they framed the debate in the 1980s – religious conservatives have conceded defeat. They now seek autonomous zones, such as the state of Indiana, where they can express their cultural identities free from government compulsion.

This defense of my controversial conclusion notwithstanding, I agree with Wroe's concluding sentence: “It may take several more decades – and several more books – for historians to discern this tide of history.” Certainly Donald Trump's rise to the presidency should give us pause. Stanley critiques my book for ignoring the nationalist strain of conservatism that shaped George Wallace and Pat Buchanan – a conservatism that embraces both cultural and economic nationalism. Had my book taken that strain seriously it might have better equipped us to understand Trumpism. I will leave that to future historians of the culture wars.