“Culture wars” content is, in many respects, a symptom and instrument of deeper economic processes. It functions as both a distraction and a displacement — a kind of bait and switch that channels structural anxieties into moralized spectacle. Let’s break that down a bit.
1. The economic substrate
Over the past several decades, the economic structure of Western democracies has shifted:
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Deindustrialization, financialization, and precarity hollowed out stable livelihoods.
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Inequality widened dramatically.
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Public services were privatized or degraded.
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Media itself was concentrated into fewer corporate hands, reliant on advertising and attention metrics.
This creates a mass of chronic social insecurity and anger without clear representation — fertile ground for symbolic battles.
2. Culture as the new site of displacement
Instead of directly addressing the economic sources of despair or exploitation, political and media systems often translate material conflict into cultural idioms:
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questions of identity, morality, or belonging
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“us vs them” narratives
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anxieties about gender, race, immigration, or national pride
These become proxy arenas — emotionally charged, endlessly renewable, and easily commodified. They feel participatory and moral, but they rarely threaten the underlying economic order.
3. The bait and switch mechanism
It works roughly like this:
| Step | Process | Outcome |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Economic dislocation (stagnant wages, inequality, debt, precarity) | Discontent builds |
| 2 | Media & politics reframe this discontent as a cultural grievance | People locate enemies in symbolic rather than structural domains |
| 3 | Outrage content drives engagement → advertising revenue, electoral mobilization | The economy of attention profits from polarization |
| 4 | Real structural power (ownership, capital, rent extraction) remains untouched | The system reproduces itself |
That’s the bait and switch: material insecurity gets rebranded as cultural crisis, and the energy that might have fueled economic reform is siphoned into tribal moral combat.
4. Why it’s self-reinforcing
The cultural antagonisms are profitable:
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They sustain click-based revenue models for media outlets.
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They simplify politics into binary moral drama, which is cheaper to produce and easier to consume.
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They create psychological coherence for people who feel economically powerless — identity replaces agency.
So, culture wars are not just a distraction from economics; they’re also a secondary economy — an entire industry built atop structural discontent.
5. The hidden cruelty
The cruelest feature of this arrangement is that it makes people feel active and righteous while actually neutralizing their capacity to challenge economic power.
Every symbolic victory (a statue removed, a pronoun banned, a boycott, a meme) is a small moral performance that leaves capital untouched.
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