We are working on a redesign of this website. Subsequently, this class will be available for registration by August 6.
Instructor: Les Adler
Mondays, October 13, 20 and 27, 3:00 – 5:00 PM, Berger Center
3-week session. Cost: $45
Course Description:
“America First,” “The Deep State,” “Alternative Facts,” “MAGA,” “Identity Politics,” “Cancel Culture,” “Wokeness,” “DEI.” This three-session course will explore the history and deeper significance of these and other battle cries in America’s long and often contentious struggle to define itself. Additionally, the class will provide insight into how multiple existing fractures in the cultural fabric have been manipulated and exploited to produce this increasingly dangerous moment in American political and social life.
Course Detail:
Cultural conflicts in America have evolved over time, reflecting transformational social and economic shifts in American life and identity, inevitably shaping and reshaping American political life itself. Tension over issues of race and ethnicity, religious belief and secular policies, women’s rights, gun regulations, and in recent decades debates over immigration, gender and sexuality, free speech and political correctness have been dominant themes. If, as one scholar has written, ”culture provides the context within which political beliefs and attitudes exist,” what are we to make of the dangerously divided condition of American politics in the first decades of the twenty-first century? Have we, in fact, allowed our cultural and political warfare to pass the point of no return? Or do the ‘ties that bind us’ as Americans remain strong enough to overcome our multiple divisions?
Week One: Defining America, or “Why Can’t We All Get Along?”
What are “Culture Wars?” Why and how and under what conditions are they fought? What features make American Culture Wars distinctive? And how and why have the issues they reflect become the “red meat” of current day politics?
Week Two: Great Awokenings or The Past as Prologue
Focuses on revealing pre-Civil War and early and mid- twentieth century culture war conflicts characterized by heightened social and political activism by those disturbed or challenged by perceived deficiencies in the shifting social and moral order of their times.
Week Three: Poles Apart: Divided We Fall or “Fifty Shades of Grey”
“Democracy, in my view, is an agreement that we will not kill each other over our differences, but instead we’ll talk through those differences….Obviously, on January 6, we not only saw an act of violence…but one that the people who were involved were capable of justifying. That’s an extraordinary thing .”
Culture Wars author, John Davidson Hunter
This third lecture deals first with the cultural legacy and impact of the 1960’s, and the reactive emergence of a potent blend of religious and moral politics by the century’s end. It concludes by exploring the consequences and dangers of increasingly combustible Culture War conflicts in the context of a current age of terrorism, war, recession, social change and technological transformation.
Instructor Biography:
Les Adler is Emeritus Professor of History in the Hutchins School at Sonoma State University. A specialist in Twentieth Century American history, his research and teaching has focused on the origins and consequences of the Cold War, and more recently on the post-Cold War world. He taught at Oakmont in 2015 and at OLLI programs at SSU and at Dominican University.
