For the past five decades, Americans have waged what has been commonly referred to as a “culture war.” A number of authors have examined the culture wars from philosophical, historical, and sociological standpoints, especially since the early 1990s—Charles Murray, Robert Putnam, James Davison Hunter, Philip Gorski, and Andrew Hartman to name a few. It is tempting to see the culture wars as being the defining characteristic of American history since the 1960s. How central are the culture wars to American life at the beginning of the twenty-first century, and is there anything unusual about the presence of cultural conflict in America when we think historically about the subject?

I argue that there is not much qualitatively unique about the culture wars of the last fifty or so years, especially as long as Americans have the intellectual resources from which to draw in order to bridge the partisan divides—and I think that they do. I also argue that it is necessary to broaden the accepted paradigm of “culture wars”—a paradigm useful only to contemporary history—to what I think is a more sustainable historical understanding of domestic social and political conflict over time. Alexis de Tocqueville gives us important guidance as we...