The Conservative Cultural Comeback

By Stanley Kurtz

Tuesday, August 05, 2025

 

Is woke dying? Are conservatives actually winning the culture wars? Questions like these have been kicking around since President Trump’s reelection, and they’ve only grown more compelling with the Democrats polling so pathetically since then. Now that woke’s victory is anything but inevitable, the arc of history has bent into a question mark. Obama’s “coalition of the ascendant” has broken apart, and the future is up for grabs. Fear of cancellation has largely evaporated as a result. William F. Buckley Jr. worked to halt what even he presumed to be a default progressive direction to history. But could history itself now be going into reverse?

 

Let’s consider an optimistic, but I think entirely plausible, scenario. What if the current Trump administration were to be followed by a two-term Republican presidency? We saw a twelve-year Republican streak like this when Ronald Reagan’s two terms were followed by a single term of George H. W. Bush. Another triple Republican streak would likely yield an eight-to-one Supreme Court advantage for conservatives. And President Trump’s recent flurry of executive orders would have remained in effect for 12 years, whether Congress converted them into law or not.

 

For well over a decade, Lyndon Johnson’s executive order establishing affirmative action would stand repealed, as would all federal support for DEI. The government would still be doing all in its power both to keep men out of women’s sports and to end gender-reassignment surgeries on minors. Federal museums and galleries would have been shaped by traditional conceptions of American history for twelve years. America’s colleges and universities would, at minimum, be under policies like those recently agreed to by Columbia University, and perhaps would have submitted to significant additional reforms as well.

 

It can plausibly be argued that eleven and a half more years of what’s already happened during Trump’s first six months would suffice to break the back of woke. And this is not to mention a continued flurry of anti-woke legislation in the red states.

 

If all this happens, it would have been for largely the same reason that we got three consecutive Republican terms in the 1980s and early 1990s, not to mention Republicans alternating with moderate Democrats from Richard Nixon through George W. Bush. The center-right presidencies of 1968 through 2007 were reactions to the excesses of the late 1960s, as embodied in the presidential candidacy of George McGovern.

 

It isn’t hard to imagine that we might now get at least three consecutive Trump-style presidential terms, all in response to the woke madness that gripped the country after the death of George Floyd.

 

But here’s a sobering question. What actually happened to the culture from the presidencies of Richard Nixon through George W. Bush? Slowly but surely, what was then called “political correctness” actually cemented its domination of academia, government-run schools, the news media, and Hollywood. The radicals of the 1960s completed their long march through the institutions right under the noses of the center-right political class. Is there any reason to expect a different outcome this time?

 

I think there is. Richard Nixon, for example, despite some of his rhetoric, actually advanced Lyndon Johnson’s policy of affirmative action. Ronald Reagan considered revoking Johnson’s executive order on preferences, but defenders of affirmative action, both outside and inside Reagan’s administration, prevented this. Nothing much changed under either H. W. or W. Bush, except that the courts continued to entrench preferential treatment. The heroic efforts of William Bennett and Lynn Cheney certainly advanced the education culture wars under Presidents Reagan and H. W. Bush, but their exertions were largely rhetorical. Ultimately, those tactics proved insufficient. And when it came to higher education, W. Bush didn’t even bother to fight rhetorically.

 

President Trump, by contrast, has uprooted Johnson’s original affirmative action EO and for the very first time has linked a conservative program of higher-education reform to the continued receipt of federal dollars. Federal levers of power have also been used across the entire range of culture-war issues, often for the very first time on behalf of conservative goals. Trump’s transformation of the Republican Party has largely been driven by voters furious at the failure of establishment Republicans to fight these cultural battles. The party base is little short of ecstatic over Trump’s willingness to aggressively push back on woke policies.

 

It is thus now virtually inconceivable that Trump’s Republican successors could attempt anything less. On top of that, a newly conservative Supreme Court has turned sharply against practices like affirmative action — a policy without which the entire program of DEI is difficult to sustain. In short, Trump has transformed the Republican Party on cultural issues for the foreseeable future. Henceforth, Republican voters will expect their representatives to aggressively prosecute the culture wars. This means that political dominance will have far greater implications for the culture than it did in earlier decades.

 

But are conservatives actually winning the culture wars, or have they simply turned back the most egregious excesses of a decade of woke? After all, transgenderism’s cultural moment may be passing, but gay marriage seems entrenched. History may have slowed down a bit, but has its course actually reversed? Let’s go back to the early days of the culture wars to see what, if anything, has changed.

 

Our contemporary use of the phrase “culture wars” derives from James Davison Hunter’s 1991 book, Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America. Hunter opened his book with vignettes describing six culture warriors on opposite sides of three issues: gay domestic partnerships, abortion, and school choice. The school-choice section began with a description of a related controversy, a 1980s court case called Mozert v. Hawkins County Board of Education (popularly dubbed “Scopes II”), in which Evangelical Christian parents in Tennessee sought to opt their children out of lessons they say violated their religious convictions. The readings in question advocated values such as feminism, situational ethics, and one-world government. While the district court found for the parents, that finding was reversed by an appellate court, a decision that the U.S. Supreme Court let stand. The Mozert case helped kick off the movement for homeschooling. And the school-choice advocate profiled by Hunter believed that, rather than opt-outs, breaking the government’s de facto education monopoly was the real solution to the problem of public-school indoctrination exposed by Mozert.

 

Well, just a couple of months ago the Supreme Court, in its transformative Mahmoud v. Taylor decision, approved the same religiously based opt-out rights it had effectively denied in 1987. Not coincidentally, after decades of relative stasis, the movement for school choice has truly taken off. By the start of 2025, 12 states had enacted universal school-choice programs. And just this year, at least 18 more states passed pro-school-choice bills. The proportion of American students who have access to state-level school-choice programs is now nearing 50 percent. And the One Big Beautiful Bill Act contains a modest amount of federal aid for school choice as well, perhaps only the beginning of sustained federal efforts in this area. All this is a sea change.

 

Hunter touched on many issues in his first book on the culture wars, but arguably, gay partnerships, abortion, and the school wars were his big three. These were also the issues emphasized by Pat Buchanan in his famous speech at the 1992 Republican national convention announcing that America was fighting “a cultural war . . . for the soul of America.” It was Buchanan’s use of Hunter’s phrase that put the term “culture wars” into general use.

 

So, what has happened to Hunter’s original big three culture-war issues in the intervening decades: gay partnerships, abortion, and school choice?

 

Results so far are mixed, but far from discouraging for conservatives. True, court-imposed gay marriage is now the law of the land. This has given rise to the transgender movement, and until recently, to a general sense of inevitability for the left side of the culture war. Yet the trans crusade has of late been exposed as an overreach. Not only is the movement facing significant defeats on girls’ sports and childhood gender-transition surgery, but its radicalism has softened support for gay marriage itself. As for abortion, in a judicial earthquake, Roe v. Wade was overturned by the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs decision. It’s true, however, that popular support for the pro-choice camp remains strong (albeit, such sentiment has softened a bit lately). To a greater extent than conservatives would like, the battle over life remains a struggle. Yet the Trump administration is scoring wins here as well. Meanwhile, as noted, school choice and parental opt-outs have broken heavily in the direction of conservatives.

 

Hunter tended to focus his culture-war coverage on religiously inflected struggles, to some degree slighting battles over racial preferences, multiculturalism, and higher education. But we’ve already seen that the comprehensive losses that conservatives have suffered in these areas over the years have recently begun to be reversed. Trump’s upending of Johnson’s 1965 affirmative-action EO, and the Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, are in the process of undoing decades of race-based preferences, along with the DEI culture built around them.

 

Going back to the culture war’s classic battles, then, it’s evident that, gay marriage notwithstanding, conservatives are very much back in the game.

 

Add to this the expansion in the scope of the culture wars. While the original issues remain important, we’d be making a serious mistake to ignore contemporary cultural controversies that few in 1991 could have imagined. Immigration has a long history as an issue, but cities as sanctuaries for illegal immigrants and effectively open borders only recently became default Democratic positions. Defunding or “reimagining” the police, no cash bail, and refusal to prosecute low-level crime are largely post–George Floyd positions. Thoroughgoing opposition to fossil fuels, while it swept through universities in the 2010s, barely broke into national policy debate under Obama. It wasn’t until students of the Obama years became older voters under Trump I and Biden that the Green New Deal turned into a major cultural controversy. Advocates now treat these issues, not as complex policy puzzles, but as moral absolutes.

 

When it comes to these newer cultural battles — open borders, aggressively anti-enforcement crime policy, and hostility to fossil fuels — the right would appear to hold the advantage over the left. That goes double for men in women’s sports and childhood gender-transition surgery. And this is not to mention the vibe shift on sexual politics, as Democrats strain to disown attacks on “toxic masculinity,” while Republicans throw a spotlight on the left’s Sydney Sweeney madness.

 

When you put it all together, then, are conservatives now actually winning the culture war? You can certainly make a case that they are. And to the extent that it’s true, leftist overreach has been the secret of conservative success.

 

The left has been winning the culture war for decades. That is precisely their problem. They got so used to winning that total victory seemed inevitable. The battle over gay marriage felt decisive. If we can make it there, we’ll make it anywhere, the left concluded. Internal restraints evaporated. Nothing was off the table, even “transitioning” children against the wishes — and the knowledge — of their parents.

 

Leftist overreach is why parental opt-outs and school choice are now winning. The parental complaints in Mozert v. Hawkins County were a mixed bag. Not even all Evangelicals agreed that every classroom reading assignment cited was objectionable. In contrast, the storybooks that led to parental demands for opt-outs in Mahmoud v. Taylor were plainly pushing for approval of gay marriage and transgenderism, causes that traditionally religious parents of the 1980s could barely have imagined. Traditionalist Christians, Jews, and Muslims, as well as some secularists, all shared objections to the readings cited in Mahmoud. The radicalism of the current cultural left likewise has everything to do with the changing positions of state legislatures on school choice — and with the first election of President Trump, who appointed several of the justices in the majority on Mahmoud.

 

So, if conservatives are winning the culture war now, it’s because we were losing it before. But are conservatives in fact winning the culture war right now?

 

Actually, I’d say that the culture war is now about tied. Although conservatives may be winning on a majority of controversies, the left still controls the levers of cultural power. If, for example, Trump were to force all universities to abandon DEI and admit students strictly based on merit, faculties would continue to tilt far left. There are ways to address that problem, but we certainly aren’t there yet.

 

The Washington Post is replacing a goodly number of its regular op-ed writers, but that is only one newspaper, we haven’t seen the replacements, and the news staff is as yet untouched. True, the media’s ever-more obvious bias has undercut its ability to persuade. Nonetheless, the leftist tilt of those who run our key cultural institutions constitutes a formidable barrier to any full-blown conservative cultural comeback.

 

But the most important bulwark of leftist cultural power is rarely remarked upon. The true secret of the culture war is its grounding in the way we live. The sexual revolution, combined with extended years of educational preparation and consequent delays in marriage and childbearing, means that many more Americans than in the past live single for extended periods. Nothing turns people conservative — or religious — more powerfully than married parenthood. Extended singlehood, on the other hand, tends to foster liberal sexual mores and reliance upon abortion. Support for gay marriage is a kind of symbolic endorsement of those anti-traditional mores. Identity politics, meanwhile, provides a way of achieving solidarity in a world otherwise made up of isolated individuals.

 

In other words, the left side of the culture war is an expression of a peculiarly modern way of life — a way that shows no signs of abating. The median age of first marriage for women has risen from 20.3 in 1950 to 28.6 in 2022. These figures increase significantly at higher levels of educational attainment. This is why the culture war will not be resolving anytime soon.

 

Despite considerable weakening, traditional marriage, family, religion, and community remain potent and prevalent. Society can scarcely reproduce itself without them. The sexual revolution, technological advances, extended education, and the new extended singlehood these innovations have produced, on the other hand, continue to raise formidable challenges to traditional ways of life. A restoration of the 1950s may be out of reach, yet the cultural revolution of the 1960s has produced no stable or comprehensive alternative.

 

The 1960s never quite rose above negation. The hippie communes dissolved under the contradiction of the demands for total equality and total freedom. The Students for a Democratic Society collapsed in leftist factionalism. Drug-addled dropouts burned out. In our woke era, Seattle’s CHAZ dissolved in anarchy and BLM in corruption. Meanwhile, far-left cities are being hollowed out by their unwillingness to enforce elementary moral order. In short, the left provides no true alternative social template. Over time, its cultural solutions collapse.

 

Twenty-five years ago, in an essay on our enduring culture war, I wrote: “We are living at the conjunction of two contradictory moral modes, neither of which can gain ascendancy over the other, and each of which tends to bring about its opposite.” I still think that’s true.

 

That is not to say, however, that an extended period of relative conservative dominance might not be on the way. It may not end our culture war, but it could certainly tilt our endemic battles in a new direction. I think the scenario of a triple-term Republican presidency is perfectly plausible, and I do think it would be highly consequential culturally this time.

 

The point is not that it must or will happen, but that it easily could happen. The ability to envision a significantly more conservative future is important, as well as novel. The left has lost its certainty about the future, and this by itself has had huge consequences for its ability to intimidate and silence others. Knowing that a more conservative future is perfectly possible is a victory for freedom. That, in the end, may be the most important outcome of the conservative cultural comeback.