Brink Lindsey wrote an article for NR titled “A Farewell to Culture Wars”; I responded; Lindsey defended his thesis; and then I got in my last word. Now Peter Wood has added his two cents’ worth.

Wood leans to my side of the debate: “I come out on Ponnuru’s side of this argument because his account seems the more capacious of the two. He presents a picture of a continuing struggle over ideals, in contrast to Lindsey’s view that the real debates are concluded, except for the stammering of die-hard reactionaries.”

I appreciate the support! But I wouldn’t characterize my position as that “the Culture War continues” so much as that the phrase “culture war” is not a productive way of characterizing the overlapping cultural conflicts it means to describe. It does not account for the ambivalence most people feel about those conflicts, or the (limited but real) discreteness of the issues involved, and it lends itself to the kind of reductive thinking that I find in Lindsey’s account.