Is it fair to say that most of the culture wars that take place in American politics are merely fights between the petite-bourgeoisie (small business owners) and the PMC?
The ruling class doesn't seem to care about the cultural bullshit since they're not really affected by it. Likewise, the working-class doesn't care about cultural issues all that much either and really only cares about short-term economic stuff like the price of gas. Many of the conservative cultural attributes that are thrown on to the working-class are actually the traits of the petit-bourg (being anti-abortion and anti-queer, for instance).
Right now, in the era of social media, it seems like culture wars and "symbolic crusades" are at an all-time high. Interestingly though, much unlike the culture wars of the 80s-2000s which were lead by the right, these contemporary culture wars seem to be mostly lead by snarky white liberals who overwhelmingly make up the PMC. Take, for instance, something like the backlash against Olivia Rodrigo's babydoll dress: for decades liberals pushed "choice feminism" and told people to stop attacking what women wear, yet now seem very concerned about what women wear. Olivia's dress is an issue for them because they associate it with pedophillia, which of course they link to Trump and Epstein (never mind the fact Olivia is a proud liberal herself who works with Planned Parenthood and pro-Palestine organizations). On an almost identical note, multiple liberal women have raised hysteria over big retail chains like Target and Nordstrom selling milkmaid dresses, calling it "tradwife coded" and saying it's indicative that women's civil rights will be taken away. Obviously, this is bullshit. How could something as petty as a milkmaid dress destroy the decades of feminist struggles in America? We also see this very clearly with the "clean girl" aesthetic being demonized as right-wing or "eugenics-coded" with the heavy makeup/blue eyeshadow look being championed for being (allegedly) progressive. For a leftist, all of these things are simply a case of consumer identity vs. consumer identity.
But that's not the point. The real issue in these contemporary examples is that snarky liberal white women fear the decline of their social and cultural status. Jill from Manhattan is mad that Fynnleigh the Mormon tradwife has more TikTok followers than her, even though what Fynnleigh does in her home in Utah has no effect whatsoever on Jill. Women's
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