In the abstract, then, culture wars describe the contest over the question of how a people--a society--ought to order its life together. Hunter contended that by the early 1990s the national debate over the language people used to describe themselves, their opponents, and their nation had utterly broken down. Thus the rhetoric of war aptly described the impasse reached in this national conversation. For our own Andrew Hartman, the culture wars describe the messy assembling of new conversations in the wake of the demise of the kind of common culture that Hunter seemed to mourn. For Hartman, culture wars operate on many levels, rhetorically, philosophically, politically, and socially. In this way, he offers the term as the defining narrative of postmodern America.
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