The Culture War and Its Political Effects Inside the United States and Across the Globe

Dr Khidr Haroun
The sharp polarisation between the Right and the Left in the United States of America—where the term Left in the American context denotes an extreme form of liberalism hostile to tradition—is commonly described as a culture war. Some clarification is necessary here.
The Right refers to conservatives, represented by the Republican Party, the party of Abraham Lincoln, which fought the southern states that seceded in 1860–61: North and South Carolina, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, Texas, Tennessee, Arkansas, and Virginia. These states established what became known as the Confederacy, with its capital in Richmond, the capital of the state of Virginia. The cause of secession was the South’s refusal to abolish slavery. The North, led by the Republican Party and President Abraham Lincoln, opposed slavery and called for its abolition, issuing the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. Consequently, the federal government declared war to reintegrate the eleven seceding states into the Union, in what became the brutal American Civil War, which claimed more than 600,000 lives and ended with the Union’s victory in 1865. At that time, the Democratic Party dominated the South and supported the continuation of absolute slavery on economic grounds, as enslaved people worked without wages, sustained only by food and shelter, under the racist belief that Black people were inherently inferior and merely property.
With the election of President Franklin Roosevelt in 1932 and his response to the Great Depression that struck America and the global economy in 1929—through what became known as the New Deal—the Democratic Party underwent a major transformation. It shifted from a minority party into one embraced by minorities (Catholics, Jews, Black Americans, and southern whites), as well as intellectuals, labour unions, and centres of enlightenment. This shift was driven by the New Deal’s support for the poor, the strengthening of the presidency, and the adoption of civil rights advocacy. These changes enabled the party to win repeated presidential and congressional victories over the following three decades.
In the 1950s, the Civil Rights Movement emerged to end racial segregation in the American South, prompting resistance from white communities there. This period marked the beginning of the Republican Party’s transformation—from the party that ended slavery to one that swept the South after Democratic President Lyndon Johnson led the effort to end segregation. The Vietnam War followed in the 1960s, sparking youth protests, within which emerged the sexual revolution, extreme liberalism, homosexual movements, and hippie culture. These currents later coalesced into what became known as progressive Democrats—a broad spectrum encompassing racial and religious minorities, sexual freedom movements including homosexuals and transgender individuals, gender reassignment through surgery and hormones, the empowerment of minors to change their sex without parental consent and to receive hormone treatment, the redefinition of the family to treat men and women as interchangeable, and the teaching of explicit sexual details to children under the banner of absolute freedom without limits.
This extremism alarmed large segments of Americans in the Midwest, the South, the Rocky Mountain states, and other conservative pockets—communities whose ancestors had come to what they saw as the Promised Land in order to preserve their Christian beliefs. Their fears were compounded by accelerating racial diversity and the projected decline of white Christians by the middle of the current century, in favour of what they viewed as unruly minorities. These conservatives formed groups and associations nostalgic for an earlier era—the era of the dominant white Christian cowboy, defined by toughness and masculinity, in contrast to what they perceive as a soft, feminised, alien world.
This conservative current rose to prominence on the back of Donald Trump, who has no real ties to religious conservatives or their moral values, but shares with them a rhetoric of white racial pride and disdain for people of colour. They rallied behind him and succeeded in taking control of the Supreme Court, which interprets the Constitution when disputes arise, as well as both chambers of Congress, and in filling government departments with loyalists whenever opportunities arose. Thus emerged what became known as Project 2025. Although Trump did not formally endorse it and stated that he disagreed with some of its provisions, many of its elements have been implemented since the first day of his presidency on 20 January 2025.
The project—a conservative blueprint titled Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, drafted by the Heritage Foundation in over 900 pages in alliance with one hundred conservative organisations—aims to strengthen the executive branch and consolidate presidential control at the expense of the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. It includes the creation of an online registry of conservatives eligible for federal appointments, the reinstatement of a regulation known as Schedule F, allowing the dismissal of civil servants on the grounds that they are political appointees, replacing them with loyalists; the abandonment of renewable energy programmes in favour of oil and its derivatives; large-scale deportations of undocumented migrants; the abolition of birthright citizenship; border closures; banning transgender individuals from military service; cutting support for abortion clinics; dismantling the Department of Education; encouraging religious education institutions; criminalising pornography; and promoting marriage in accordance with Christian religious teachings.
This extremism appears to be a reaction to the Democratic Party’s own excesses, which cost it the presidency and both chambers of Congress. The party overreached, alienating religious elements within its traditional support base—among Catholics, Muslims, Black church communities, and others—many of whom abstained from voting for it or cast their votes for Trump. The party failed to learn from the experience of its presidential candidate George McGovern in the 1970s, when it had not yet reached its current level of extremism but had leaned towards the eastern Left’s positions on social justice, resulting in a catastrophic defeat: he won only one state, Massachusetts, out of fifty, in addition to the District of Columbia, which is not a state.
Conservative currents also shape Donald Trump’s international policies. Conservatives view the United Nations with suspicion, seeing it as a vehicle for a global government steeped in anti-religious liberalism. Extreme American conservatives have historically rushed to the UN’s Third Committee on Social, Humanitarian, and Cultural Affairs to coordinate with conservative Islamic states such as Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Iran in opposing UN social policies that clash with religiously derived social norms, including certain interpretations of CEDAW concerning women’s freedoms.
America remains a Christian country in a civilisational sense, particularly in relation to many social customs rooted in religion. Reckless leaps over social stages and the abandonment of praiseworthy moderation—which avoids provoking sensitivities—reflect poor politics and a lack of prudence.
Those who accompanied the change that occurred in Sudan in April 2019 and rose to power failed to read their society correctly. They had witnessed young men and women—including the sons and daughters of figures from the former Islamist regime—participating in the sit-in for weeks, praying, reading the Qur’an in circles, fasting during Ramadan, and spending their nights in tarawih and night prayers. They stood alongside others seeking reform of governance, not a war on religion, morality, or Islamic values.
That alignment could have been a historic opportunity for Sudan to reach a minimum national consensus to address its chronic problems and agree on a broadly acceptable formula for governing the country. Instead, the opposite occurred. Once in power, the new rulers marginalised these groups and targeted institutions led by Islamists. These institutions should have been preserved with leadership changes, as they belong to the Sudanese people. Islam is not the exclusive property of Islamists. Institutions such as the Holy Qur’an Society, the Islamic Call Organisation, and the University of Africa International brought Sudan respect and a positive reputation.
Religion has always been present in Sudanese consciousness—from pre-Islamic times, as evidenced by pyramids and temples, through the Christian era, and into the Islamic era. Numerous religious orders—Khatmiyya, Ansar, Ansar al-Sunna, Qadiriyya, Idrisiyya, Tijaniyya, and Sammaniyya—focus on Qur’anic education and the observance of Islamic rites. They may differ with Islamists on details or methods of governance, but not on the broader Islamic question. These groups were deeply troubled by the demolition of Islamic institutions and the elevation of individuals with no connection to religion or religiosity into positions of power under the banner of “civility”.
This fierce assault on all that symbolised religion frightened people and portrayed the new government as having come to destroy faith itself. This was one of the reasons for the maze in which Sudan has been trapped ever since. Had this flaw been absent, outcomes might have been better. No form of civil governance is entirely detached from cultural heritage, including religion—not even European models, from which people have turned away when political parties strayed too far.
Sudanese politicians must understand this reality. Islamists, too, must correct their course and seek moderation—the phrase borrowed from a Prophetic hadith meaning balance and restraint.
In the final paragraph of Letters of Memory and Longing, I wrote:
“Every Friday we used to attend the mosque of the venerable Sheikh Mudathir al-Boushi—may God shower his grave with mercy—where his calm voice would reach us in his unchanging second sermon:
‘Indeed, this religion is firm, so enter into it with gentleness.’”
I added: it was as though he had read the fervour stirring within us—fervour bordering on recklessness—and chose to pour cool water upon it all, returning our youthful souls to a measure of balance and contentment.

Shortlink: https://sudanhorizon.com/?p=10914