In 1976 I bought The Dark Side of the Moon album, played it to death, and decided that Pink Floyd was my favorite group of all time. Almost 50 years later, that hasn’t changed. But at the time, I didn’t think too much of the songs The Big Gig in the Sky and Us and Them (they were the songs I had to endure to get back to the good stuff). Today, I consider them among the best songs on the album.

In 2022 I had a chance to see Roger Waters perform at the Tacoma Dome and he performed a powerful version of Us and Them. The combination of his passion and graphic imagery created an experience forever imprinted in my mind.

The song is foremost about war, but like most of their music, has deeper layers of meaning. It is these deeper meanings that have me thinking about this song today. The US is very divided and those divisions are growing deeply every day. Our tribalism is reaching new levels.

For those unfamiliar with the song:

As a “melting pot”, the US has always struggled with culture, but the rise of the modern US culture war is often attributed to a speech made by Patrick Buchanan during the 1992 Republican National Convention, where he argued:

“There is a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we will one day be as was the Cold War itself.”

Over the next month, he criticized environmentalists, feminism, abortion, sexual orientation, and argued that public morality was the biggest single issue facing America. He also drew on other controversies such as clashes over the Confederate flag, Christmas, and publicly funded art.

The debate intensified around whether American history should be taught as “celebratory” (focusing primarily on the good) or “critical” (also including the bad) and involved figures like Lynne Cheney, Rush Limbaugh, and historian Gary Nash.

Both sides blame the other side for the culture war – the right says that the left moved much further left, while the left argues that the right has moved much further right. Both sides have contributed to it, but the drum beat was mostly led by Fox News and Rush Limbaugh. The Democrats mostly ignored it at first – for example, Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton were either against gay marriage or avoided the subject until the polls showed that most Americans supported it.

I used to think of the political spectrum as linear, where the further you go in one extreme, the further you are from the other side. But now I realize that it’s really more like a circle where both extremes start looking like the other.

So “it’s only round and round, and round” seems much more appropriate today.

That’s not to say that the left hasn’t contributed to the culture war. In the 2010s the left pushed further against established social norms. Social media quickly broadened the war and “cancel culture” (which happens on both sides, but is most often associated with the left) added fuel to the fire in what has been called the “great awokening”.

Jonathan Haidt argues that both sides define fairness and justice differently. One side wants it for everybody, and the other side wants to follow more historical patterns where certain populations naturally have more access to fairness and justice than other populations.

I’ve heard many people salivate over the thought of the culture war becoming a real civil war, with guns, bombs, executions, gulags, and the whole bit.

Recently, the primary motivation of the right has morphed from “make America great” to “own the libs” and to “drink liberal tears”. Many people seem fine with hurting themselves or their family as long as it hurts the other side more. This is the very nature of war – both sides take damage and people are OK with that as long as the other side takes more damage. 

Today, many Americans not only desire a real civil war, but they want trade wars and in some cases they want real wars against Canada, Greenland, Mexico, NATO, and whoever else raises their ire at any particular moment.

I hope that we figure this out soon, because we all know how it ends.