if you thought the culture wars of the 90s were over, you were wrong. they're just getting started. what's changed is that the lines have blurred, and in some sense the parties are re-aligning around them.

i'm about as hard left as you can define, in terms of 90s culture war alignment. but, your average self-identified hard leftist nowadays is a champion of religious rights, and doesn't really believe in free speech. they talk about muslims more or less the same way that the religious right talks about christians, leaving what was an understood cultural left as a sort of an outlier. it's two different strains of conservatism that are actually fighting it out on the ground.

for right now, the bourgeois left parties are still holding to the cultural left around things like queer rights and abortion, but what i'm drawing attention to is that how long that holds depends on how strongly it embraces religious rights. in the long run, you can't have religious muslims and rabid feminists under the same tent. the policies will clash. it's not sustainable.

if the movement on the bourgeois left is clearly towards the religious right, it's less clear that the bourgeois right is moving in the other direction on cultural issues; as much as trump went hard after union voters, he's been as bad or worse than any other recent republican on the cultural stuff. contrast that with the conservative party in canada, which avoids queer issues but isn't afraid to run pro-choice feminist candidates. if it's easy enough to imagine a republican party that swings left on cultural issues to attract white voters that are fed up with organizing with right-wing immigrants as a corollary rather than a contradiction, there's not any evidence on the ground of it happening - even as the liberal and ndp vote are both caving in canada, and their support for this kind of stuff isn't irrelevant in it happening. i'm not abstractly philosophizing; this is happening right in front of me.

so, it's not clear how this works out. but, it's clear enough that this is at the fulcrum of the future, and more so in canada, as we have larger groups of religious minorities - and a growing atheist youth population for them to clash with.