When the sociologist James Davison Hunter popularised the term “culture war” in the early 1990s, his chief concern was the conflict between the evangelical right and the progressive left in the United States. Back then, abortion was the pre-eminent issue, and the conflict was primarily within the white middle and upper-middle classes. Three decades on, the battleground has got bigger, as has the number of combatants.
In a recent interview, Davison Hunter suggested that the Great Recession of 2008 has driven an economic wedge between the upper middle class – composed of university-educated professionals – and the lower-middle and working classes, “basically” as he puts it, “between the top 20 percent and the bottom 80 percent”.
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