Culture Wars and the Political Unconscious

This introduction outlines the main argument of the book and summarizes the focus of each chapter. In analyzing the works of politicians, professors, and pundits, I show how the interpreters of culture wars often produce and replicate the irrational social dynamics they are seeking to critique. Thus, the centrist critics bemoaning the polarizing of our political and social lives utilize a polarizing rhetoric just as the Right-wing politicians attacking the Left’s political correctness deny and project their own form of cancel culture. Moreover, as others have remarked, culture wars are often themselves a mode of displacement and substitution bent on replacing concerns for class conflict and economic exploitation with a focus on competing cultural norms and identities. However, instead of simply dismissing the importance of class or culture, I seek to show how it is necessary to think both at the same time without giving priority to one force. Thus, concerns over racism, sexism, and homophobia need to be attached to the way prejudices and stereotypes serve to enable and maintain economic forms of exploitation and privilege.