The modern Republican culture war has roots that reach back more than half a century, yet its ideological core stretches even further, to the unfinished business of the American Civil War.
What began in the 1970s as a strategic push to mobilize voters around issues of race, religion, and morality has, by the rise of Donald Trump, evolved into an existential clash over the very definition of the nation.
The culture war has become not merely a contest of policies, but a continuation of an older conflict that reshaped the country once and now threatens to unravel it again.
In the aftermath of the Confederacy’s defeat in 1865, Southern leaders cultivated a mythology known as the “Lost Cause.” By portraying the Civil War as a noble fight for states’ rights rather than the preservation of slavery, this narrative allowed former Confederates and their sympathizers to maintain political and cultural legitimacy even as they lost military control.
The impulse to resist federal authority while preserving racial hierarchy survived Reconstruction and shaped Jim Crow segregation. This history underpins the modern Republican reliance on cultural battles to define party identity, particularly in the South but increasingly across the entire nation.
By the 1970s, the United States was undergoing major shifts. The civil rights victories of the previous decade had dismantled legal segregation, but they also triggered a backlash among White voters who felt displaced by federal intervention in local affairs.
The Republican Party seized this sentiment through what came to be known as the “Southern Strategy.” By emphasizing coded appeals to “law and order” and “local control,” Republicans aligned themselves with voters resistant to integration, without overtly invoking race. The strategy reshaped the party’s base, making the South a Republican stronghold while introducing culture as a central battlefield of American politics.
Religious conservatives became a driving force in this transformation. The rise of groups such as the Moral Majority in the late 1970s marked a deliberate fusion of evangelical identity with Republican electoral strategy. Leaders like Jerry Falwell mobilized congregations around issues such as abortion, school prayer, and opposition to LGBTQ rights.
While framed as moral imperatives, these battles were deeply intertwined with the defense of traditional social hierarchies that had been disrupted by desegregation and feminist movements. Political rhetoric increasingly cast the federal government as an adversary to “family values,” echoing the Confederate suspicion of centralized authority.
Through the 1980s and 1990s, culture wars became an indispensable Republican tool. Ronald Reagan’s presidency leaned on religious conservatives while pursuing policies of deregulation and tax cuts. Later, under Newt Gingrich’s House leadership in the 1990s, Republicans weaponized moral outrage and partisan polarization to consolidate power.
Wedge issues dominated campaigns: disputes over welfare, immigration, school curricula, and gay rights became flashpoints that drew sharp lines between “traditional” America and a supposedly liberal elite. These fights distracted from widening economic inequality while deepening cultural divides.
The persistence of Confederate symbols within this period underscored the continuity between past and present. Confederate flags became rallying points at protests, football games, and political events, defended as symbols of heritage even as they communicated exclusion and defiance. Monuments to Confederate leaders remained prominent across the South, preserved not as neutral history but as reminders of an unfinished struggle.
By defending these symbols, Republicans linked themselves to a lineage of resistance against federal power and racial progress. This dynamic accelerated in the 21st century.
The election of Barack Obama in 2008 marked both a milestone in American history and a spark for intensifying cultural backlash. Opposition to the nation’s first Black president often extended beyond policy into conspiracy theories about his birthplace, religion, and loyalty.
Such narratives carried echoes of the Civil War-era insistence that certain Americans could never be legitimate leaders of the nation. At the same time, conservative media outlets amplified culture war themes, portraying the United States as under siege from internal enemies, like immigrants, secularists, and multicultural advocates.
Donald Trump’s rise transformed this simmering conflict into a central political force. Where earlier Republican leaders had cloaked their appeals in coded language, Trump stripped away subtlety. His 2016 campaign launched with denunciations of Mexican immigrants as criminals and threats, and his presidency repeatedly spotlighted racial and cultural grievances.
By calling for a ban on Muslim immigrants, attacking Black athletes who protested police brutality, and defending Confederate monuments after the 2017 Charlottesville rally, Trump embraced the symbolism and rhetoric of the Confederacy more openly than any modern president.
January 6, 2021, crystallized that toxic connection. When rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol to overturn an election defeat at Trump’s insistence, Confederate flags were carried through the halls of Congress — an image that drew a direct line from 1861 to the present.
The insurrection was not only a challenge to a specific election but to the legitimacy of federal authority itself, echoing the Confederate rejection of Union sovereignty. Trump’s continued claims of election fraud and his refusal to accept institutional limits further aligned his movement with the Confederate tradition of resistance to national unity when it conflicts with cultural dominance.
The Republican embrace of culture wars under Trump has turned what was once a regional rebellion into a national ideology. What began in the South now defines the party’s national identity: a fusion of religious nationalism, White grievance politics, and contempt for federal oversight. This transformation has left the country deeply polarized, with partisan divides extending beyond policy disagreements into fundamental disputes about democracy, legitimacy, and truth itself.
The culture war framework has intensified to the point where it no longer functions simply as an electoral strategy but as a governing philosophy. Under Trump, cultural battles are not limited to campaign rhetoric but actively shaped policy. They include restrictions on immigration, attempts to roll back transgender rights, and efforts to influence how schools teach history became pillars of his administration.
Each initiative has reflected a conviction that American identity is fixed, fragile, and under siege. By framing every policy question as a defense of that identity, Trump transformed governance into an extension of the Confederate mindset — a fight against the forces of federal oversight and social pluralism.
The consequences for American society have been profound. Institutions that once served as stabilizing forces — the courts, the press, universities — are now framed by culture warriors as illegitimate.
Trump repeatedly casts mainstream media as “the enemy of the people,” echoing earlier rhetoric that depicted Reconstruction governments as corrupt occupiers. Courts that rule against his policies are denounced as partisan rather than independent.
Education became a particular battleground, with conservative lawmakers pushing for restrictions on how schools teach about slavery, racism, and gender, arguing that such instruction undermines patriotism. The Confederate-era effort to control narratives about the past has reemerged in the 21st-century classroom.
Meanwhile, social fragmentation has accelerated. Surveys consistently show that Americans are more polarized than at any point since the Civil War, with political identity increasingly determining social networks, geographic choices, and even family relationships.
This divide is not simply ideological but epistemological. Groups of citizens inhabit entirely different realities, informed by separate media ecosystems and irreconcilable views of history.
Just as the Confederacy insisted on a version of the past and future incompatible with Union ideals, Trump-era culture wars sustain a vision of America that cannot coexist with pluralistic democracy.
Economically, the culture war serves as both a distraction and an accelerant. The Republican emphasis on identity-based grievances has deflected attention from structural inequality and the consolidation of wealth.
Yet cultural polarization also fuels economic instability, as businesses navigate boycotts, consumer activism, and state-level crackdowns on corporate policies related to diversity or environmental goals.
This instability mirrors the Confederacy’s reliance on an economic system that was unsustainable outside of slavery, revealing once again how cultural rigidity can undermine broader prosperity.
Internationally, the impact has been just as destabilizing. Allies accustomed to U.S. leadership based on democratic norms now face uncertainty about the nation’s direction. Trump’s hostility toward NATO, climate agreements, and multilateral institutions signaled a retreat not only from global engagement but from the principles that emerged after World War II.
The Confederacy sought foreign recognition to legitimize its cause. Trump’s America First posture similarly isolates the United States by rejecting shared norms in favor of cultural self-preservation. The result is a weakening of international trust in American stability, even as domestic turmoil escalates.
The trajectory raises urgent questions about the future of the United States. If the Civil War was resolved militarily but not culturally, today’s conflict represents the price of that unfinished resolution.
The Confederacy may have been defeated on the battlefield, but its worldview endures in the insistence that federal authority is illegitimate when it enforces equality, and that cultural dominance must take precedence over democratic compromise.
Trump’s rise has exposed how deeply that worldview remains embedded in American politics, now amplified by media ecosystems and digital platforms that can mobilize millions instantly, and incentivized for profit.
The social implosion now visible — in rising political violence, distrust of elections, and breakdowns in basic governance — reflects a Union under strain similar to the 1850s. Then, as now, compromise failed because the underlying conflict was not about policy but identity.
One side demanded the preservation of racial and cultural supremacy, the other insisted on expanding the definition of citizenship. That divide proved irreconcilable in the 19th century, and today’s continuation suggests the nation never fully resolved the contradiction between its democratic ideals and its exclusions.
Whether this conflict leads to an open fracture or slow erosion remains uncertain. What is clear is that the Republican culture war has evolved into more than a campaign strategy. It is the modern vehicle for the Confederate cause, nationalized through Trump and entrenched in institutions from state legislatures to school boards.
The battles over abortion, education, immigration, and voting rights are not isolated skirmishes but fronts in a longer struggle over the meaning of the United States. For millions, the war that was supposed to have ended in 1865 is still being fought. Not with armies, but with ballots, laws, and narratives.
The implications for democracy are stark. If large segments of the population no longer recognize the legitimacy of elections or the authority of federal institutions, the foundation of self-government erodes.
The Confederacy sought to secede from a Union it refused to accept. Trump’s movement seeks to transform the Union into one where its authority rests on cultural conformity rather than constitutional equality. That shift, if successful, would mark not only the continuation of the Civil War but its effective reversal, reshaping the United States into a republic defined less by pluralism than by exclusion.
For now, the nation stands at a crossroads where past and present collide. The Confederate flags once carried into battle now fly at political rallies, and the rhetoric of resistance once confined to the South has become national orthodoxy for much of the Republican Party.
The unfinished struggle of 1861 continues to reverberate, shaping debates, elections, and identities. As the culture wars deepen and the social fabric strains, the United States confronts the possibility that the Civil War never truly ended. It only changed its form, and now, under the weight of Trump’s authoritarian political movement, it threatens to define the future as much as it has haunted the past.
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Julia Demaree Nikhinson (AP) and Mark Schiefelbein (AP)
