The suspension of a common rational standard of judgment to allow for the toleration of deception, abuse, violence, and hypocrisy—so long as it is committed on one’s own side of the culture war divide—conforms neatly to the definition of doublethink: “To know and not to know . . . to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them.”8 This is, of course, one of the few remaining things that can bring the Left and the Right together in perfect harmony.

To many Americans, such comparisons will be nothing short of blasphemous. To imply that the political tribes are engaged in a mutually beneficial racket and to suggest that politics would be better served by reorganization around strictly material economic questions would be to deny or unduly trivialize what for them are the very real moral stakes involved. So long as issues are defined in such Manichaean terms, the thought of diverging in any way from the culture war paradigm is inevitably met with one of the following retorts: “So, do you support racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, etc.?” or, “Do you support critical race theory, vaccine tyranny, and the chemical castration of children?”

But, of course, a reflexive and reductive tribalism that precludes any prospect of programmatic change is the whole point. As dramatic material disparities increasingly separate and cordon off the country’s uppermost elites from everyone else, the ensuing discontent can only find expression in the inadequate symbolic vocabulary of the culture war, that is, through mostly aesthetic and performative gestures that have no power to move the levers of economic policy.

https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2022/02/victory-is-not-possible-a-theory-of-the-culture-war/