How White Men Won the Culture Wars

"A book of incandescent insight—a clear and persuasive account of how the misuse of wartime service has been coopted into a mythos of whiteness that ultimately threatens American democracy. This is required reading for anyone who wants to understand contemporary politics or the history of the recent past."—Kathleen Belew, author of Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America

"An illuminating study of the whiteness of war culture, How White Men Won the Culture Wars deftly illustrates how stories about the Vietnam War transformed the Vietnam vet into a vessel for a post–civil rights white racial countermovement that appeared, on the surface, color-blind and race neutral."—Yen Lê Espiritu, author of Body Counts: The Vietnam War and Militarized Refuge(es)

"Highly original, inventive, and even generative, this is one of the best books I have read in the past twenty-five years. It achieves impressive coherence around its provocative and forthright argument, but with no hint of moral grandstanding."—David Roediger, author of The Wages of Whiteness and Working toward Whiteness

"Joseph Darda is an incisive critic of the complex ways race and empire emerge in the figure of the veteran. How White Men Won the Culture Wars reveals how the 'Vietnam vet' was enlisted—and sometimes volunteered—to unite liberals and conservatives behind an aggrieved and universalizing white masculinity, reinscribing white supremacy as patriotism under the sign of trauma. An urgent and necessary work."—Roy Scranton, author of Total Mobilization: World War II and American Literature