The cultural confrontation of the 1980s and 1990s era is often depicted as one between descendants of America's New Left and the New Right. The New Left coalesced as a movement in the 1960s and 1970s era of student protest, rallying around civil rights and opposition to the Vietnam War. As the students of yesteryear became active and often affluent citizens by the 1980s and 1980s, the open rebellion of earlier years was replaced by political activism, but with the continuation of many of the same themes, which included civil rights, feminism, and environmentalism. Meanwhile, the New Right is usually depicted as a sort of response to the popular liberal ferment of the 1960s and 1970s. Its adherents sought to combat what they perceived as declining morality, which included rampant drug use, civil unrest, and increasing crime. The Reagan presidency can be seen as a sort of New Right ascendancy.

There is substantial evidence to suggest that the culture wars of that era were not as binary as usually depicted. There was both common ground between the New Left and the New Right and differences between those within each tendency or group. Another way of putting it is that the New Left was not quite as radical as sometimes depicted and the New Right not quite as fundamentalist, and both were diverse with many individual opinions that defy easy categorization.