As various groups of moderates in my life come to terms with their current political surroundings, I keep seeing them lament the existence of a culture war—and imply that it didn't exist before somebody else started it a relatively short time ago. I think this is ahistorical.

In the U.S., the reason civil rights icons are revered (and the reason we try to trap their accomplishments in amber) is that they knowingly fought a culture war. The contemporary crusade against communism (or "communism") was explicitly framed as a culture war, too.

But in periods before that, once you start looking closely at any other set of great political debates, you'll find a culture war there, too—often a very explicit one.

Here, for example, is a Presbyterian minister's sermon on the culture war—in 1850. This is the proslavery minister James Henley Thornwell in South Carolina:

Many examples from other points in U.S. history are more subtle than the antebellum crisis, of course. But the point is, Side X didn't suddenly invent culture war in the 1960s, which is usually when moderates seem to think it happened.

I mean, a main reason a figure like Andrew Jackson or Thomas Jefferson resonates with some groups so strongly right now is that he was a polarizing culture war figure in his own time.

Small-d democratic politics has always involved large-scale and bitter cultural politics.

The great illusion here is that *if* you start your account of modern American cultural politics around the end of World War II, you're likely to perceive a period of relative cultural consensus that then shatters by the late 1960s. But the consensus is the anomaly.