Western Culture Wars

The Western Culture Wars were an ideological struggle that occurred over much of the West that had its origins early in the 21st century, but truly escalated in 2016 with the 2016 presidential elections. The Culture Wars were fought between two large ideological coalitions, both of which fought each other in increasingly more aspects of the culture. Some historians have labelled the culture war as a kind of secular religious war, between two opposing ideological religions which sought to take control of the hearts and minds of the people of the West. The Western Culture Wars were considered to have ended with the victory of the Cortezian Conservatives in the 2040's, with a near total right wing victory in the United States. Smaller "culture wars" would continue to be fought in Britain, Canada, and Argentina up until the 2050's, before the label faded out of relevance.

## Ideological Coalitions

The culture wars were fought by two broad coalitions, which were themselves made up of smaller special interest groups. One coalition was informally known as "the Left". An alliance of the socially progressive, the working class, environmentalist, ethnic minorities, and later on neoliberals and free trade advocates. They sought to create a borderless global identity, and ensure the rights of sexual and ethnic minorities. The left was primarily defined by change, and a desire to reconstruct the old system in the pursuit of a better world. The left generally held a blank slate view of human nature, believing that humans were capable of being engineered to create this utopia.

The other coalition, informally known as "the Right" was an alliance of traditionalist and conservative factions within Western society. It was an alliance of the socially conservative, the religious, the nationalists, the militarists, the dominant monoculture, and later on, populists and anti-elitist figures. They largely stood for the preservation and continuation of the old status quo, and the nation as it currently existed. The right was primarily defined by tradition, a desire to preserve the values that had allowed them to survive up until this point. The right generally had an essentialist view of human nature, seeing it as unchanging, and that tradition was a bulwark which protected them from a chaotic world.

Over time, these two ideological coalitions diverged, and they began constructing their own worldviews and dogmas around themselves. By the 2020's, each had a fundamentally different way of viewing the universe, to the point that later historians would frame the culture wars in the way of a religious war. But one fought with words and arguments, as opposed to one of guns and bullets.

## Pre-Unravelling

Before the Unravelling, the left had managed to capture the main centers of culture and bureaucracy. Under the guidance of the writings of Antonio Gramsci, the left had captured much of the media and educational institutions, dictating morality and the "correct" way of viewing things to the rest of society. Gramsci had called for a Long March through the Institutions, in order for the far left to gain large-scale influence in Western society. By the left's capturing of the Cathedral and the establishment institutions, the right by default would become the rebels and the counterculture. The right was in a disadvantageous position, though the right was not void of their own set of institutions. The military, the businessmen, the church, and the police.

Despite the advantage held by the left, the institutions of the West were decaying by the 2020's, with the left's hold on the institutions declining. Fewer and fewer students were willing or capable of paying the outrageous costs needed to attend the universities, traditional media was dying, and populist sentiment against the government had decayed much of the people's trust in the academic experts. These feelings were only further accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Meanwhile, the dissemination of the internet allowed the right to begin creating counter-hegemony, but this was blocked by the formation of Silicon Valley, a new institution which had belonged to the left. Waging ideological warfare, they sent the most radical of the right wing leaders into exile, but kept a certain amount, allowing right wing opinions to continue to spread through the internet, much to the warning of those to the further left.

## The Unravelling and its Aftermath

In 2022, the Unravelling hit, breaking the global trade system, and further decaying the institutions of the left. The Silicon Valley bubble burst, with the venture capital needed to fund them having gone bankrupt, and the internet as a whole decaying due to the rise of artificial intelligence and massive bot attacks. The right had built rival institutions in the form of alternative tech and their own parallel economy. The university system was in chaos, as foreign students returned home with the Unravelling, within a few years, it would decline significantly, with various online and private alternatives having grown in their absence.

The left, which had fractured into ideological purity spiraling become less cohesive to deal with the resurgence of a united right, now strong enough to wage open cultural warfare. The right, more willing to hijack and subvert the communications of the left, spread its influence into broader online culture, while the left, more concerned about being inoffensive, was largely on the retreat. In an age when discontent against the institutions was at an all time high, the right's position as the underdog was greatly to their favor, and the left found themselves in a unenviable position as the occupiers of the current institutions. Trust in academia, the media, and the government collapsed, while trust in conservative institutions such as the military, the police, and the church stayed relatively stable. The religious population had finally stopped bleeding in the United States, and a mental health epidemic had increased interest in traditional religion. With the left realizing its grip on the institutions was slipping, they armed themselves for cultural warfare, and the conflict further escalated. The right wing conservative movement was greatly radicalized by the assassination of Jordan Peterson in the year 2027, which was seen as marking the end of the moderate wing of the conservative right, adopting a "win or die" attitude.

### The De-Digitalization Movement

One of the first shots fired by a now highly contested culture, one of the first widely successful cultural movements to emerge out of the new right was the De-Digitalization movement. First spearheaded by neo-traditionalist thinkers who urged society to "reject the sinful ways of modernity", one of the first actions from the right was to distance themselves from social media, and later ween off the over-digitalization of their culture. This coincided with the maturing of Generation Z, and their desire to distance their children from online social media. This led to the further weakening of the Silicon Valley tech giants, though it also led to the mass creation of decentralized forums, which were generally smaller and therefore less targeted targets for rampant bot farms. Individual verification and "whitelist" forums became popular, vetting members one at a time to contain the influx of new people. This put a natural cap on the upper ceiling of the size of social media forums. As constant moderation was now needed, and there was no force large enough to moderate a site of millions.

These whitelist forums became one of the largest disseminators of alternative media, which was rising rapidly in response to the decline and destruction of trust in traditional news media. The internet, in many ways regressed to the Web 1.0 days, when websites were simply places to withdraw information from, and large-scale social networks were rendered impossible by the influx of bot traffic. A shortage of microchips caused by the breakdown in global trade further accelerated this trend, leading to the death of many "smart devices", and a return to a smaller amount of devices per household. Microchip manufacturing slowly moved back to the United States in order to keep up with consumer demand, though this was falling as the De-Digitalization movement continued.

## World War 3

The beginning of the 3rd World War saw many members of Generation Z drafted into the front lines. The outbreak of the war seemingly completely disproving the idea of a collaborative global monoculture, and seemingly proved a theory of brutal great power struggle and competitive spheres of influence. An entire generation was sent to die in the front lines around the world, and in the high stress environment, many had turned to alternative media as well as religion to cope. Talking points about the moral degradation of America, and alternative media sites would become incredibly popular among the trenches, as the military tilted further right as the pacifist left and Red Spring protests alienated the military. And increase even more as the United States began losing the war to foreign powers like Russia and China, with many preachers blaming it on American moral degradation.

This reached a fever pitch when the United States actually lost the war, and all fingers were pointed towards progressive Democratic president Kevin Buchanan. As the soldiers from the 3rd World War came home, they brought with them their religion. These soldiers would end up becoming creating the core of a conservative firebrand that would help push the country ever rightwards.

## 5th Great Awakening

The 5th Great Awakening refers to an explosion in religious fervor that began in the United States before spreading out to the rest of the world. It began with the return of soldiers home from the 3rd World War, many of which had used religion as a coping mechanism during the conflict. A longing for meaning and purpose, the return of a highly religious soldier population to their homes, the proliferation of religious talking points, as well as proliferation of Christian media and preachers would culminate in the 5th Great Awakening.

The 5th Great Awakening was marked by an extreme rise in conservative religious fervor. The Evangelicals or groups like them increased immensely in power, the Mainline churches had halted their decline and were retaken by storm by the theologically conservative soldiers coming back from the front lines. Pentecostalism spread like a blazing fire, with missionaries carrying off their fiery message to Africa and South America, and Mormonism expanded across the American interior. This was further increased by the election of Republican President Victoria Cortez, who had been elected into power by vote splitting between the Progressive and Democratic Parties.

### American Cultural Revolution

The most important legacy of the 5th Great Awakening in terms of the Western Culture War was the American Cultural Revolution instituted by Victoria Cortez to reforge the American culture in her image. The rise of the Cortez Presidency nearly flipped the roles of left and right in terms of institutional dominance. Cortez helped create a new generation of tech giant known as Silicon Prairie in Texas, as well as taking control of the schools with so-called "patriotic education". The infiltration of academia with Christian nationalism and the establishment of religious academic institutions solidified the right as the dominant player in American institutions, on top of their existing dominance of the military, law enforcement, and the now extremely powerful church. With the left breaking down into moderate and progressive factions, the right is classically seen to have "won" the culture wars by the late 2040's, with future iterations of the Democrats heavily swinging to the right.

By the 2048 elections, the election between the Democrats and the Republicans was really more of a power struggle within the right for control of the movement, while the Progressives had mostly absorbed the former left.

## Conservative Power Struggles (2048-2056)

Even after the generally acknowledged "victory" of the right in the broader culture wars, with conservative birthrates consistently higher than liberal ones, and the country swinging radically to the right, there continued to be an internal power struggle for control of the right. The Evangelical Christians had gained an enormous amount of power and had taken de-facto control of the Republican Party. Meanwhile, the Democrats, under the Winstonian administration had become a cobbled together alliance of moderate Christians, nationalists, militarists, and secular voices. Both parties by this point were essentially right wing parties fighting for the control of the right. The Evangelical Republicans had seized control of the media institutions, as well as the universities and much of big tech, and the Democrats found themselves in small decentralized cells of resistance media and political groups.

The bombshell of the 2056 L Leaks and exposure of widespread corruption within the Republican Party, as well as the fading effects of the 5th Great Awakening led to the Evangelicals being reduced significantly in power, though still remaining a powerful force in American culture and politics. The rise of the semi-technocratic Futurist movement began eating into their hold on the institutions, and a broad alliance of many different factions finally defeated the Evangelicals in a prolonged power struggle. It was at this point the right began to dissolve, with formerly allied factions delinking from one another, and the left-right binary largely breaking down. This is widely considered the end of the Western culture wars, as the post-2056 aftermath broke down the idea of a left-right binary in general.

### Jacksonism

From the chaos of the 2056 elections was a 6 way chaotic race between the Progressives, the Democrats, the Futurists, the Republicans, the Patriot Party, and the Libertarians. The election was chaotic enough to force the United States to pass runoff voting laws and abolish first past the post. The ideologies of both sides would eventually emerge somewhat in the form of Jacksonism. Originally part of the Patriot Party, it adopted several left-leaning economic policies, generally neutral to progressive social policy, but was also heavily assimilationist, and also had a very aggressive nationalistic and militaristic defense and foreign policy.