Reading discourse from the last culture war (the 1990s), it’s evident (1) what has changed and (2) how badly the participants on both sides of that battle misread the phenomena that were emerging. It wasn’t about “relativism” (one argument is as good as another), but the rise of a situation (on both sides of the political spectrum) where the existence of opposing viewpoints are unbearable. The disappearance of dialectical thinking. The impulse to content label and ban.

The new keywords equity, diversity, and inclusion replacing the old managerial languages of efficiency, cost effectiveness, and value for money. The metricising logics of accounting and management receiving a series of moral system updates to enable their ongoing functionality. Now that pure monetarism has lost its coercive edge, new forms of value and legitimacy must be found. The language of social justice provides a perfect template, enabling managers and institutions to justify their decisions as moral necessities and delegitimise the opposition.

Open borders and the delegitimising of place-based national identities. The tendency here is not in any way an anti-colonial or anti-imperialist one. It is instead a new form of the old "settler ideology," one that permits no objection to the absolute right of free movement. The old nationalisms (the freedom to identify as "post-settler," which survived as late as the 2000s) have been withdrawn. Only indigenous peoples now have a right to believe they are "connected with the land," and this is usually recognised only on the symbolic level.

Alongside the global uptake of social media platforms, Teams, Zoom, and health apps—a corresponding array of new digital epistemologies and networked ways of understanding identity and the self. Thinking we can have the first without the latter becoming ultimately impossible. Among the new digital epistemologies is a radical intensification of guilt by association logic. Folk devils and out-groups proliferate within local information networks, their symbolic importance greatly outstripping their actual numbers or influence (which may be tiny).