Sydney Sweeney, Cracker Barrel, and the Culture War That Won't End | The Walrus

"T hroughout the culture war flareups of the last fifteen years or so, liberals and conservatives have periodically traded fire over matters that are fundamentally symbolic and often negligible to meaningless at the level of actual political substance. In their own different (and often quite cynical) ways, both factions have been adept at converting cultural issues into the language of political grievance and, in turn, into supposed forms of political engagement-and even activism-that have often amounted to little more than new kinds of shopping"

"There has always, of course, been a fair share of cynical opportunism at work too. Political elites who functionally agree on the basic contours of the system as a whole need endless fodder for their partisan spectacle. Cable networks and engagement-farming websites similarly need their eyeballs and their clicks, and where better to find them than in endless cycles of quasi-manufactured outrage over the shows and ads people happen to be seeing on TV or the cereals they are choosing to eat for breakfast?"

Liberals and conservatives repeatedly clash over cultural issues that are largely symbolic and negligible to substantive politics. Both factions translate cultural consumption into political grievance and recast shopping and media choices as forms of engagement or activism. Political elites and media platforms exploit these controversies to generate partisan spectacle, clicks, and sustained outrage. The resulting dynamics often produce performative activism that substitutes for material political action. Both sides share the premise that politics flows from culture, making media preferences and consumer behavior perceived sites of consequential political struggle.

Read at The Walrus