Situating Social Attitudes toward Cultural Pluralism: Between Culture Wars and Contemporary Racism

Abstract

This research situates attitudes toward cultural pluralism between two bodies of research on socio-political conflicts with a symbolic emphasis: one addressing the culture wars and the other addressing contemporary racial attitudes. Analysis uses data from the 1994 General Social Survey (GSS) "multicultural module" to test a range of discrete claims emerging from each perspective in several thematic areas: attitudinal distribution/polarization; patterns of support/opposition and issue salience; political alignment and crystallization; and the attitudinal gap between principles and policy implementation. A recurring pattern in the data is the association of central theoretical variables with attitudinal extremity rather than (or in addition to) an association with support for or opposition to pluralism. Discussion links that pattern to the symbolic character of conflicts over pluralism and suggests how it impacts both our understanding of cultural pluralism and of symbolic conflicts.