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“No, there is no culture war. There is only the Republicans’ unilateral mastery of the cultural strategy. The Democrats consider any attention to the practices and prejudices of everyday living a mendacious diversion from the “issues,” ...

A way over-hyped armchair psychology read on the campaign.

He totally ignores the Lefts obvious assault on the culture and claims that the Republican's attempts to fight back are essentially nothing but politics.

This analysis might work for confused “moderates” who find them-self on the left by osmosis from the media, but in ignoring the far Lefts obvious and intense efforts to win by taking over the “institutions” and changing the culture, it is fatally flawed.

WSJ:"Still, the Christian perspective had to be tempered and made more inclusive. Enter Allan Bloom. In 1987, Mr. Bloom published his bestselling "The Closing of the American Mind," an attack on what he perceived as coarse popular culture and a destructive political correctness at the universities. Taking up the Christian right's banner in his cosmopolitan intellectual's hands, Mr. Bloom married the religious right to the mostly secular neo-conservatives. He began the work completed by William Bennett in the latter's sensationally popular "The Book of Virtues." Mr. Bloom redefined culture as "values."

Mr. Bloom gave the impression that it was hopeless to fight for his beloved Great Books because the Great Books had been driven to extinction by angry left-wing professors and vulgar forms of diversion. High culture was irretrievably lost to the average person. "

It still is. Probably even more so after the dumbing-down of Generation X and Y in the 1990s. What Bloom did in the 1980s was write in a way in which his Straussian Platonism appealed to the intellectual vanity even of some lukewarm liberals who wanted to be associated with cultural sophistication and intellectual superiority, while missing the esoteric part. Buckley's fusionism at National Review had already created an environment for this discussion during the Reagan years.

A lot of the boomers who bought the book missed the real argument and just wanted to clobber students ovder the head, as if they had caused the problem. The situation in the colleges is even worse now, if that is possible. The problem goes much deeper and has to do with estrangement from normal Western Christian culture. But since the deaths of Reagan and Buckley conservatives have not been on the offensive intellectually. The Bush-Cheney years were missed opportunities for conservatives.

If hearing the word "culture" makes you think of Rossini, the latest translation of "Anna Karenina," the Guggenheim Museum or "The Wire," then you're probably a liberal -- or, at least, an unreconstructed "cosmopolitan" conservative. But if the word culture means for you forms of courtship, or sexual preference, or the relationship between parents and children, or the set of rituals that revolve around the ownership and use of a gun, or, most passionately of all, ways of living, and believing, and rejoicing, and suffering, and dying that are hallowed by the religion you practice and embodied in the church you belong to -- if for you, culture does not primarily signify opera or HBO, then you are probably celebrating Sarah Palin's ragged, real-seeming life. In that case, you are what might be called either a heartland or a Bloomian conservative.

The author holds a reductionist view of culture. Conservatives never thought Veemer or Wagner is not part of 'culture'. They consider culture as the whole package. When they listen Handel's Messiah, they found it touching their lives, not simply arousing their 'cultural' experience or feeling.

Still, the Christian perspective had to be tempered and made more inclusive.

The Christian perspective has not changed one bit. It was always inclusive of all walks of life. If "sinners" were excluded every church would have zero people in them. The "making Christian perspective more inclusive", in reality is the culture war in a nut shell. It was when government became so much a part of defining Christianity and culture instead of serving that culture that we became oppressed by all these thought control laws.

Our government has become a religion, the religion of secular humanism. Christians when they founded this nation knew from history that Governments must never become religious or they become oppressive. So when this nation was formed, it was a Christian nation, but one that was balanced with the freedom of religion. Now it has become a humanistic religion that has the "freedom FROM religion".

We were not as wise as our founding fathers, we have allowed our government to narrowly define what religion is, and become slaves to the deacons of the religion in control, the Judicial Rulers in the Supreme court.