I think you are largely right on this issue – the culture wars are not going away, but are intensifying, and things are heading for a greater crisis somewhere down the line.

I got the sense from Dione’s article that he was basing his ideas to some degree on the works of Strauss and Howe in “The Fourth Turning”, which I thought was a pretty good attempt to look at the generational cycles in American politics. If so, he’s mangled their ideas pretty badly. In brief, the “fourth turning” thesis is that there are four generational cycles of roughly 20 years in an 80 year “turning”, the each of which comes to a conclusion in a transformative crisis that completely changes the landscape, and begins a new cyclce of conflicts and resolutions. The last three ended with the American Revolution, the Civil War, and WWII. In their schemata, the conflicts of the 1960s represented the “defining” of the news set of conflicts we face in this cycle, which then were played out in the “Culture Wars” of the last 20 or more years. Their book was written in 1997, so they didn’t know when exactly the period of “culture wars” would end, and when the “millennial period” would begin, but they guessed a transition of about 2006. My sense is that Dione is to some degree speaking this language, and assuming that we are transitioning out of the culture wars and into a period of “millennial crisis”, in which he thinks the culture wars will take a back seat to more important issues.

I think that’s a misunderstanding of the “fourth turning” thesis, which does not suggest that the underlying conflicts of the culture wars will be swept aside by some greater issues, but precisely the opposite: that the conflicts of the culture wars will manifest themselves even more profoundly and intractably than before, at a level which virtually ensures an enormous transformative event of some kind that finally resolves those issues. And based on the history, that transformative event is usually a major war of some kind which so transforms our country, and the very definition of “who we are” as a people.

In other words, the conflicts leading up to the American Revolution did not get pushed aside by the revolution, the Revolution was the ultimate manifestation of those conflicts. Similarly, the conflicts of early American democracy did not get pushed aside, they led to the Civil War. And similarly, the conflicts within the newly federalized nation and big business economy of the post-civil War era did not get pushed aside by the Great Depression and WWII, they came to a head there. So the idea that the social and economic conflicts of the post-WWII era are somehow just going to go away because we are entering some kind of “millennial crisis” is sheer nonsense, or at least not supported by the theory, which points in exactly the opposite direction: that the millennial crisis we are entering into some time over the next 20 years is the result of our current conflicts reaching such a great pitch of disturbance that they cannot avoid all-out war of some kind. The only difference is that this conflict will so overshadow our recent “culture wars” as to make them seem petty in comparison.

So basically I think you are right that our culture wars are not going away, but are on the road to increasing so dramatically as to make a peaceful resolution impossible. On a host of issues I see this coming to a boiling point over the next 20 years. I can’t say how it will work out, but I don’t expect it to be pretty.

Btw, here’s a link to the Fourth Turning Website:

http://www.fourthturning.com/

I suppose that would put me in the Independent Republic of Ohio, at some point in the future.