Many observers have declared that America's cultural crisis is rooted in the problems that have inevitably arisen as our society moves from an industrial to an information-based economy. Others have emphasized the destructive growth of relativist and nihilist attitudes among both elites and the population at large. In addition to the very real problems associated with both technological economic change and the spread of relativism and nihilism, however, there remain further normative issues at the center of our cultural crisis.
This essay will argue that one of the greatest challenges to American cultural renewal is normative. At the heart of this challenge are philosophical, intellectual, and moral arguments about what our culture is, and what it should be. Foremost is this question: should American culture- its first principles, primary values, habits, customs, and institutions - be transmitted or be transformed?
The cultural renewalists (Tocquevillians) believe that the decline of American culture must be reversed and that our culture's core mores and first principles need to be revitalized and restored. The ultimate goal of this movement is to transmit a renewed culture to future generations of Americans. These cultural renewalists are opposed by cultural transformationists (Gramscians), whose goal is to transform rather than to transmit America's core mores and first principles. The terms "Tocquevillian" and "Gramscian" were chosen because, while the nineteenth-century Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville is the intellectual and spiritual godfather of the cultural renewalist movement, the twentieth-century Italian thinker Antonio Gramsci is the great theorist for the cultural transformationist argument.