Acceptance or rejection of an intersectional mindset is a fault line in Culture War 2.0. Specifically, the dividing line defining sides in this culture war arises along one’s answers to what role intersectionality should play in how we understand reality and how we design legal, economic, and educational systems.

This is where it gets bizarre.

For six decades or more, America’s political history has been driven by cultural warfare. This is usually traced to the social revolutions of the 1960s, but it began earlier. Culture War 1.0 began in the 1950s as religious enthusiasts sought to win hearts, minds, and souls for Christ in a society that was rapidly liberalizing and secularizing. That is the war that drifted to a whimpering end as recently as 2013, when the Supreme Court handed down culturally significant rulings bolstering the case for same-sex marriage. In 2015, the Court gave same-sex marriage its full endorsement, ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges that restrictions on same-sex marriages were unconstitutional. By this point, Culture War 1.0 was over.

This first culture war was mostly fought over issues of religious faith and morality, such as whether creationism was a viable alternative to the theory of biological evolution and whether limits should be placed on institutionalizing Christian values in the public sphere. In Culture War 2.0, the supernatural, metaphysics, and even religion more broadly have become irrelevant. The demands of Christian faith and morality have been replaced by something far more threatening to a society founded on Enlightenment principles.

Culture War 2.0 rotates around three axes: 1) the new rules of engagement, 2) the correspondence theory of truth, and 3) the role intersectionality ought to play in everyone’s worldview. Let’s examine each of these features to see how Culture War 2.0 has made allies out of former ideological enemies. Call this The Great Realignment.

Rules of Engagement

The rules of engagement relate to how we deal with our disagreements. In Culture War 1.0, if an evolutionary biologist gave a public lecture about the age of the Earth based on geological dating techniques, creationist detractors would issue a response, insist that such dating techniques are biased, challenge him to a debate, and ask pointed—if unfairly loaded—questions during the Q&A session.

In Culture War 2.0, disagreements with a speaker are sometimes met with attempts at de-platforming: rowdy campaigns for the invitation to be rescinded before the speech can be delivered. If this is unsuccessful, critics may resort to disrupting the speaker by screaming and shouting, engaging noise makers, pulling the fire alarm, or ripping out the speaker wires. The goal is not to counter the speaker with better arguments or even to insist on an alternative view, but to prevent the speaker from airing her views at all.

Today’s left-wing culture warriors are not roused to action only by speakers whose views run afoul of the new moral orthodoxy. They combat “problematic” ideas anywhere they’re found, including peer-reviewed academic journals. In 2017, Portland State University Political Science Professor Bruce Gilley published a peer-reviewed article titled “The Case for Colonialism” in Third World Quarterly. Many academicians were enraged, but rather than write a rebuttal or challenge Gilley to a public debate (as they might have done in the era of Culture War 1.0), they circulated a popular petition demanding that Portland State rescind his tenure, fire him, and even take away his Ph.D. “The Case for Colonialism” was eventually withdrawn after the journal editor “received serious and credible threats of personal violence.”

Christian organizations have a long history of censorship, and this has continued to some extent even in recent decades. All the same, such an attempt to suppress an academic article would have been almost unthinkable during Culture War 1.0. There were some analogous attempts on the part of Christians during precursors of this culture war, as for example in the incidents surrounding Tennessee’s Butler Act of 1925 and the subsequent “Scopes Monkey Trial.” And religious would-be censors during Culture War 1.0 did occasionally make attempts on novels and movies interpreted as blasphemous or obscene, such as The Last Temptation of Christ (1988). But for the most part, Creationists in the first Culture War didn’t want evolutionary biologists to lose their tenure and their doctorates. They wanted to debate and prove them wrong.

One common theme running throughout Culture War 2.0 is the idea, endorsed by many well-meaning activists, that speech is violence. And if speech is violence, the thinking goes, then we must combat speech with the same vigor we use to combat physical violence. This entails that we cannot engage supposedly violent speech, sometimes referred to indiscriminately as “hate speech,” merely with words. If someone is being punched in the face, it’s futile to say, “Would you kindly stop?” or “This is not an ethical way to behave.” You need to take action. The rules of engagement change if speech cannot be met with speech—with written rebuttals, debates, and Q&A sessions. If speech is violence, it must either be prevented or stopped with something beyond speech, such as punching Nazis, throwing milkshakes, or using institutional mechanisms to smother unwanted discourse.

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