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