Brandon Balsirow
American Diversity: Red and Blue America
Professor Lee
October 29th, 2017
The Conflict of American Values: The Culture War Before the rise of Donald Trump, it would have appeared as if the “culture wars” had all but diminished. In fact, cultural concerns took a backseat to economic ones as America dealt with the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression in 2008. Now that the economy is relatively stable and healthy, it seems that American values are back in the spotlight as highlighted with Trump’s slogan “Make America Great Again”. A similar slogan (“Let’s Make American Great Again”) was used by Reagan during his presidential campaign in 1980. The era that which both presidents refer to as being great is the 1950’s.
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The debate over the topics of abortion, affirmative action, art, censorship, evolution, family values, feminism, homosexuality, intelligence testing, media, multiculturalism, national history standards, pornography, school prayer, sex education, and the Western Canon, would consume politics of the course of the culture wars. The New Left, which consisted of the Anti-War, Civil Rights, Black Power, Gay Liberation, American Indian and Women’s Liberation movements, challenged the social norms that have long defined American life introducing different interpretations of the American way. However, feeling that their values were being threatened, normative America began to …show more content…
The neoconservatives believed that “schools were failing to provide American children with a basic education”. The Coleman report found that funding did not really affect educational performance. The neoconservative solution to this was to have standardized tests. These tests would be used to judge the performance of the school and allows the teachers to have some accountability. The major split between the two conservative groups was the role of the federal government in the education reform. The religious conservatives disliked the notion of having any type of federal intervention in education because every time there was an intervention by the government it was a result not in their favor. The neoconservatives were more successful in education reform than the religious conservatives because the standard for education is now based upon countless standardized
A Not So 50:50 Nation Culture Wars? The Myth of a Polarized America: Book Review The book Culture Wars? The Myth of a Polarized America by Morris P. Fiorina, Samuel J. Abrams, and Jeremy C. Pope is a persuasive text regarding America and its division on political topics. In chapter one, Fiorina begins with a powerful quote from Pat Buchanan’s 1992 speech at the Republican National Convention, “There is a religious war…a cultural war as critical to the…nation…as the cold war…for this war is for the soul of America” (Fiorina et al. 1).
Increasingly over the past two decades and in part thanks to the publication of James Davison Hunter’s book, Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America, the idea of a culture war in American politics has been gaining attention. While the tension between conservatives and liberals is palpable, it’s intensity has proven hard to measure. However, it doesn’t seem that many Americans are polarized on the topic of polarization as most would agree that the culture war is real (Fiorina, 2005). This thinking is what prompted Morris Fiorina to write the book Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America. In it, Fiorina outlines an argument against the idea of a culture war by looking at party affiliation by states, how public opinion on hot button issues changed over time and various explanations for why Americans are so hung up on the topic of polarization. While Fiorina makes a good argument, the evidence supporting the culture war is too powerful to explain away.
The Movements of the New Left by Van Gosse documents the events that shaped America’s lives during the 1960s and 1970s. In these 45 documents, Gosse touches on topics of race, antiwar, gay rights and nonviolent demonstrations. The Civil Rights Movement and the Feminist Movement both shared the idea of equal rights for everyone. Both movements relate to mainstream liberalism, share similar goals or differences, evolved in the 1970s, and still have an impact on America’s to this day. Both of these movements related to mainstream liberalism in a sense that they both wanted change in a social advancement rather than through rebellion.
Whenever an author is creating an argument, they must appeal to whatever grabs his or her selected audience’s attention.When given the topic of Michael Fay, an 18 year old American citizen who was punished in Singapore for vandalism by being caned, two sources appealed to their audience in two contrasting ways. In “Time to Assert American Values,” published by The New York Times, the author tries to capture his or her audience by stirring up emotion. In “Rough Justice: A Caning in Singapore Stirs up a Fierce Debate about Crime and Punishment,” Alejandro Reyes presents factual evidence throughout the entire article to support his claims. After carefully analyzing both texts, it is apparent that Alejandro Reyes gives a more convincing and sufficient
Takaki, Ronald T. A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America. Boston: Little, Brown &, 1993. Print.
Rundblad, Georganne and Peter Kivisto. Multiculturalism in the United States. Thousand Oaks: Pine Forge Press, 2000.
Another major criticism of the “No Child Left Behind” deals with the implications of using a standardized test as means of assessing achievement.
Culture Wars: The Stuggle to Define America? New York: Basic Books, 1991. "Republican Party Platform." 2013. The.
Takaki, Ronald T. A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America. New York: Back Bay /Little, Brown, 2008. Print.
prosperous from its diversity, epitomizes the "American Melting Pot". It is complicated to relate such different backgrounds, but with an overview of history, culture, religion, and integration on a small scale, a reader is capable of applying the values to the American culture as a whole.
In the text, “The American Cultural Configuration” the authors express the desire of anthropologists to study their own culture despite the difficulty that one faces attempting to subjectively analyze their own society. Holmes and Holmes (2002), use the adage “not being able to see the forest through the trees” (p. 5) to refer to how hard it is for someone to study something they have largely taken for granted. The Holmes' article focuses predominately on paradoxes within our own culture, many of which we don't notice. In a paradox, two contradicting statements can appear to be true at the same time. This essay looks at two paradoxes commonly found in everyday life: the individual versus the family and religion.
Takaki, Ronald T. A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America. Boston: Little, Brown, 1993. Print.
The decades following World War II were often portrayed by scholars as a time of deep and well-grounded unity of American people and their agreement about the nation’s core values. The Great Depression intensified social divisions, then Roosevelt’s New Deal reunited American citizens. In this book, Wendy Wall challenges this image of perfect consensus. Wall argues that Americans were united by a shared idea of the “American Way”, rather than identical beliefs. Reinforcing this common “American Way” was essential to building this nation for the future. Wall also suggests that this consensus originated during the turbulent years of the Great Depression, as this economic and social chaos along with the rise of fascism and communism led to a sense
In 2002, President George W. Bush passed the “No Child Left Behind Act” which tied in schools’ public funding to standardized tests and enforced the tests in elementary and high schools every year by state education departments. This law also began to put more emphasize on standardized tests which has diminished our level of education and the law “made standardized test scores the primary measure of school quality” (Diane Ravitch 28). Bush hoped this law motivated more students to do well on these exams and teachers to help them prepare better, but it ended up hurting many schools in the process. These exams like the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS) should not play such a prominent role in schooling and the government should not make tests the main focal point.
Today, American society has been dealing with a diversity of ethnicities ranging from African Americans, Mexican Americans, and Asian Americans for many years. In the beginning of America, there was distinguish hierarchical structure of ethnic group brought upon by de-facto segregation and de-jure segregation. However, in the turn of the mid twentieth century, America became unified under a principle of cultural pluralism. The abolishment of slavery, the desegregation of public facilities and intuitions, and the Equal Rights Act of 1964, which gave all minorities including women an equal opportunity, gave rise to the so-called “melting pot” of cultural, languages, and customs. In cultural pluralism, all the various ethnicities are unique in their own way, but not one ethnic group is higher than another. This notion of a hierarchy ethnic group has disappeared during the mist of the civil rights movement through the 1960s. Today,