The Culture Wars Go In One Direction

For years, it was fashionable among certain “class-first” or “class-reductionist” leftists to dismiss the culture wars as a distraction — a way of keeping the proles fighting with each other and therefore unable to forge the class solidarity needed to foment some sort of revolution that would overthrow the capitalist status quo. This is a nice idea, but the broad sweep of American history doesn’t support that thesis: long before George Washington won the first presidential election, there have been two tribal agglomerations that seized upon various issues — some economic ones, certainly, but mostly cultural baggage. Today that cultural baggage swarms your timeline: JK Rowling is either a heroic defender of women’s rights or a cruel TERF (she can’t merely be a writer of dull stories for children and midwit grown-ups), books are sacrosanct unless your team wants them out of the library, school curriculum is something to be decided by parents unless those parents don’t want to get rid of curriculum (America-First social studies, CRT) your team has decided has to got to go.