Identity Politics and the New Culture Wars: Causes and Effects
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Identity Politics and the New Culture Wars: Causes and Effects Primal Screams: How the Sexual Revolution Created Identity Politics, Mary Eberstadt, Templeton Press, 2019, pp. 179, $17.23 hardbound. The Problem with Everything: My Journey Through the New Culture Wars, Meghan Daum, Gallery Books, 2019, pp. 225., $27.00 hardbound. Matt Stewart # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Mary Eberstadt is an eminent chronicler of the sexual revolution of the sixties and seventies, which she sees as destructive of healthy traditions and beneficent institutions. In a series of books, she has examined the sexual revolution’s consequences, first focusing on the effects on children of divorce, broken homes, and out-of-wedlock births (HomeAlone America, 2004); then on the social and gender role changes Matt Stewart is associate professor of humanities and rhetoric at Boston University and the author of Modernism and Tradition in Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time (BOYE6, 2009); [email protected]
wrough t by re adily a vailable contraceptives and the simultaneous (or consequent) loosening of sexual mores (Adam and Eve After the Pill, 2013); and on the sequelae for traditional religious practices and the decline of the church (How the West Really Lost God, 2014). The subtitle of her newest volume Primal Screams: How the Sexual Revolution Created Identity Politics announces unmistakably that she is continuing work in this vein. While the study periodically acknowledges that the rise of identity politics has been propelled by other causes, it is every bit the thesisdriven work that the subtitle indicates. The reader is meant to understand the sexual revolution in a broad sense, including the loosening of traditional sexual mores, the removal of stigma traditionally applied to LGBTQ lifestyles, and probably not least the appearance of the pill and the ready availability of safe and effective birth control. What many would see as forces of liberation, Eberstadt sees as the primum mobile of negative feedback loops that continue to rend the social fabric. She coins the phrase “the Great Scattering” to indicate “the unprecedented familial dispersion” of recent decades, which includes “skyrocketing rates of abortion, fatherless homes, family shrinkage,
M. Stewart
family breakup, and other phenomena” that have undermined sustaining cultural traditions and left people feeling unmoored, dislocated, freefloating, poorly socialized. (9) “A great many human beings live,” she writes, “as if we are not the intensely communal creatures that we always have been; and systemic consequences of that profound shift are now emerging.” (10) In short, then, identity politics have emerged as a substitute for the grounded sense of self previously nurtured by family, with its comforting structures, its inculcation into rules, and its sen se o f be lon ging : “Our macropolitics have become a mania about identity, because our micropolitics are no longer familial.” (37) In back of it all is the sexual revolution. While Eberstadt overp
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