In his 2017 book “The Benedict Option,” Rod Dreher proclaimed that the culture war was over and people of faith had lost. That view has not been universally accepted. With the reelection of Donald Trump this year, some people have said that social conservatives won the culture war.
And the man who coined the term, University of Virginia sociologist James Davison Hunter, said earlier this year that the culture war has, in fact, intensified and isn’t going away.
The culture war is “now within our DNA as a nation,” Hunter said in a conversation with Albert Mohler Jr., president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.
“I oftentimes use the metaphor of the weather and the climate,” Hunter told Mohler. “This is not just happening in the patterns of the weather. This is deeply climatological and it will continue, I’m sure, for generations to come.”
While the triumphant mood permeating the political right is largely due to President-elect Donald Trump’s victory in November, there is evidence that even before then, social conservatives had the upper hand in the culture war in 2024. This was clear in what seemed to be a growing recognition that embracing progressive ideology at the expense of half of the country who oppose it was not a sustainable way to do business, even though “go woke, go broke” boycotts weren’t as big a deal in 2024 as they were in 2023.
At the same time, a report on culture war issues released by the Polarization Research Lab showed that one issue frequently depicted as a culture-war battleground is actually more an area of agreement than is commonly depicted. More than 60% of Americans oppose allowing athletes to compete as a different gender than they were assigned at birth, with majorities of Democrats, Republicans and independents expressing this view.
Here are the top five culture war battles in 2024, and how they played out.
DEI
As early as April, Axios was reporting on the decline of diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives that had proliferated in the aftermath of the 2020 murder of George Floyd. A backlash began after the Supreme Court ruled against affirmative action policies in 2023, and by the fall of this year, the momentum had switched to the point where some companies were announcing that they were shedding these programs shortly after they received inquiries about their policies.
The change happened, in part, because in their rush to join the trend, some companies had established superficial DEI programs that were easily mocked, as in The Daily Wire’s film “Am I Racist?” released this fall.
“I think some organizations will just, you know, rush to implement a kind of one-off, you know, unconscious bias training or something and not really think deeply about the design of the program. You know, who’s running it? Is this research backed or not? And so there’s a lot of, you know, quality variance,” David Glasgow, executive director of the Meltzer Center for Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging at the NYU School of Law, told NPR.
He added: “I’m sure a lot of your listeners have sat through, you know, some terrible diversity trainings in their time. So I think that kind of slapdash and unrigorous approach to DEI is one component of it.”
More changes are yet to come. Bloomberg reported that “in another setback for DEI, a federal appeals court last week struck down a Nasdaq rule that required listed companies to either have a diverse board, or explain publicly why they couldn’t do so. Nasdaq said it won’t appeal the ruling.” And efforts by anti-DEI activist Robby Starbuck have contributed to a growing list of companies that have dropped or modified these policies, including Walmart, Southwest Airlines, Boeing, Lowe’s, Home Depot, Harley-Davidson, Microsoft, John Deere and Tractor Supply.
Marketing
While there are still companies that fail to read the room when it comes to advertising strategies — Jaguar was the biggest fail in this regard this year, with Neiman Marcus a runner-up — a number of companies surprised and pleased social conservatives with advertising that overtly promoted children and families.
Chief among them were widely praised commercials by Volvo and Apple.
And Apple’s marketing badly needed a win, after a video ad depicting destruction was widely criticized earlier this year.
While it’s too early to say if this sort of marketing will become more prevalent — the 2025 Super Bowl ads will give us some clues about that — there is speculation that pushback against “woke” advertising by Bud Light and Target in 2023 had a long tail and many companies have gotten the message.
“In the aftermath of the Bud Light controversy, many consumer brand marketing departments have become acutely aware of the potential pitfalls of taking stances on controversial social issues and have become fearful of experiencing a similar backlash and the accompanying financial and reputational costs,” Jura Liaukonyte, Anna Tuchman and Xinrong Zhu wrote for Harvard Business Review earlier this year.
Entertainment
Disney, a combatant in the culture war for the past several years, appears to be retreating from its “woke” nadir in which it did battle with popular Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis before reaching a point of truce in the spring of 2024. The company this week confirmed that it was pulling a transgender storyline from a forthcoming Pixar series called “Win or Lose.”
In a statement to NBC News, a Disney spokesperson echoed what many conservatives have been saying for years when it comes to hot-button cultural issues, saying, “When it comes to animated content for a younger audience, we recognize that many parents would prefer to discuss certain subjects with their children on their own terms and timeline.”
That’s a major win for social conservatives in the culture war, on the heels of controversy earlier this year about a forthcoming remake of “Snow White,” which replaces the seven “dwarves” with seven “magical characters.” This and other reported changes to the film prompted David Hand, the son of one of the directors of the original film, to blast Disney earlier this year, saying. “I know my dad and Walt (Disney) would also very much disagree with it,” Hand said, per The Hollywood Reporter.
He added: “Their thoughts are just so radical now. They change the stories, they change the thought process of the character … they’re making up new woke things and I’m just not into any of that. I find it quite frankly a bit insulting [what] they may have done with some of these classic films. … There’s no respect for what Disney did and what my dad did.”
Health
This was a year in which many conservatives went “full crunchy” in their embrace of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s agenda for improving Americans’ health. “Make America Healthy Again” became a rallying cry in the Trump campaign, and suddenly questioning toxins in everything from food to vaccines moved from conspiracy theory to a legitimate topic for debate on conservative talk shows.
The ascendence of RFK Jr., Trump’s nominee to lead Health and Human Services, stands to squelch some of the “fat acceptance” and “fat positivity” initiatives that have become part of the culture war in recent years. While many conservative health activists agree that processed foods are addictive and contribute to the rise in severe obesity in America, they reject the idea that obesity should be celebrated, and some have argued that obsession with health and fitness has become politically charged.
“Getting fit is great, but it could turn you into a rightwing jerk,” read one headline in The Guardian earlier this year, with the writer positing that too much success on the fitness front makes people insensitive to people who struggle with their weight.
“The mechanism is incredibly simple: you embark on this voyage of self-improvement, and more or less immediately see results. You feel stronger and more energetic, probably your mood lifts, and pretty soon you think you are master of your own destiny. You’re still not, by the way: destiny does not care about your step count. But until that fact catches up with you, which it may never, there you are, high on self-righteousness. You can tell this has happened to you when you start inhaling performatively, like the hero of an Ayn Rand novel,” Zoe Williams wrote.
It was reported by multiple news outlets this week that the San Francisco Department of Public Health has hired a consultant to help the city destigmatize overweight and obesity and promote “weight neutrality,” a move that was widely mocked by conservatives on social media and was met with genuine disbelief by Trump adviser Elon Musk, who asked “This is real?”
Higher ed
It was not business as usual in the realm of higher education in 2024, as fallout continued from the Israel-Hamas protests of 2023, enrollment continued to decline and alternatives to traditional universities emerged. In May, Harvard University announced that it would follow a policy of “institutional neutrality” when it comes to political issues, joining at least 23 other schools that did so this year.
Freshman enrollment at colleges and universities in the U.S. fell 5% this year, which one analyst told Inside Higher Ed is a number that is “very large and very discouraging.” At the same time, Jordan Peterson unveiled an online school, Peterson Academy, with the objective of providing a university education free of ideological bias, and the University of Austin seeks to do the same thing with in-person classes. While these endeavors aren’t likely to seriously disrupt traditional higher ed, efforts like the End Woke Higher Education Act, passed by the U.S. House of Representatives in September, and Trump’s vow to cut funding to “woke” K-12 schools in his second term, are giving educators reason to stick to the basics when it comes to teaching kids.
There are even calls for “viewpoint diversity” in higher ed to counter faculties that lean left or are passionately progressive. “There is now much greater interest on campus in getting this right,” social psychologist and author Jonathan Haidt told The New York Times. “For the first time, we are seeing wide and deep and sincere interest in having more viewpoint diversity, in training students to engage in dialogue.”
The Times article also noted, “Calls for viewpoint diversity have been written into education laws proposed or passed in at least seven states, including Florida and Texas. In March, Indiana passed a law that curtailed diversity, equity and inclusion programs, while mandating that professors be regularly evaluated on whether their courses promote ‘intellectual diversity.’ Failure to do so can be a firing offense, even for tenured faculty.”