Introduction

Since the mid-2010s, a culture war has been raging in the Anglosphere and beyond. Culture war narratives have travelled from the fringe to the center of the mainstream public discourse. Now separated from its roots in niche online spaces and activist environments at American universities, the current culture war has become a household narrative resource in legacy media, political debates, popular culture, and on social media. Conceptual battlelines are typically drawn between “woke” and “anti-woke” on the one hand and “cancel culture” and “free speech” on the other. Key positions coalesce around these concepts, despite their vagueness and their fleeting nature.

Like previous culture wars, the current conflict is often portrayed as a fight between progressivists and traditionalists. While this may truthfully reflect the rudimentary dynamic of most culture wars (see Hunter, 1991), such depictions are bound to reduce the complexity of the struggles for several reasons. Firstly, the definition of central concepts like progress, marginalization, and the locus of power is a matter of perspective (Kelsey, 2020). Secondly, identity between political labels and the actors to whom they are attached cannot easily be assumed because different actors make different claims to the same position, even declaring their opinions and narrating their actions in similar terms (e.g., debates over who are “true” liberals). Thirdly, there are countless positions in between, and diverging claims to the center position, that are equally important to the dynamic of culture wars.

Therefore, any description of the positions involved in an ongoing culture war is characterized by a necessary simplification; it is impossible to make a representation that is widely satisfactory across academic disciplines while also encompassing all nuances and complexities of the perspectives involved.

Nevertheless, elucidating nuances and complexities is an important task for researchers aiming to improve scholarly understanding of the culture war terminology. This essay reflects on the linguistic dynamics of the contemporary culture war, focusing specifically on the “natural language” of the struggle—that is, the observable dominant terminology used by the actors involved and spread through (social) media to impact the public imagination.

The goal is neither to settle the discursive struggles, to introduce new terms to fix the quarreling positions, nor to explain why the culture war came about and pass judgment on the positions involved. Rather, the goal is to challenge conceptual oversimplifications and address the complexity of categorization, which is often overlooked in culture war research due to strict dichotomy-thinking and moralistic perspectives. The essay aims to unfold some of the conceptual nuances of the culture war by highlighting the intersections between its key terms and discussing the relationship between different positions and ideologies to which the terms refer. By engaging analytically with key terms already in circulation in the culture war discourse (in the media and in academic research), the essay encourages an observational and descriptive approach to studying the culture war phenomenon. This perspective is a much-needed contribution to the cross-disciplinary field of culture war research, as it may be a useful tool to mitigate political tribalism, polarization, and neo-campism both inside and outside academia.

Accordingly, the essay departs from the following research question: What are the linguistic dynamics of the current culture war, and how may it be studied in a way that discerns inherent complexities and recognizes the polytomous rather than dichotomous nature of culture wars?

Through a “descriptive criticism” (Sivado, 2011, p. 118) of existing culture war terminology, the aim is to understand—not judge—the culture war debate and its linguistic dynamics. To do so, the essay first addresses the crucial role of media in defining the main culture war positions. Secondly, the notion of terminological contamination is developed to explain the fundamental challenge of defining the primary battles and positions of the culture war. Thirdly, to counteract the reductive effects of contaminated words, key culture war terms are discussed and summarized in a “culture war matrix,” which may be used as a navigational tool in future studies. Finally, the essay offers a way out of dichotomy-thinking by addressing the notion of heterodoxy, which appears to be a characteristic impulse and source of authority for several influential actors in the current culture war.

Culture War Is Media War

Nagle (2017, p. 8) gave one of the first detailed accounts of the current conflict, referred to as “the online culture wars,” claiming that the main battle line is drawn between a liberal call-out culture “emanating from Tumblr-style campus-based identity politics” and a backlash of “irreverent mockery and anti-PC’Footnote 1-sentiments.” The trajectory and mainstreaming of this cultural struggle, which developed in relatively small circuits, has been highly dependent on social media (Mounk, 2023). Part of it grew out of an elite space at the university, while another part emanated from niche online imageboards like 4chan and the microblogging platform Tumblr (Hagen, 2023). Thus, the culture war was not initially waged by the usual suspects of politicians, institutional media, think tanks, religious leaders, and public intellectuals, albeit all these actors eventually caught on, one case at a time, from #Gamergate online and new anti-discrimination laws in Canada to Brexit in the UK/EU and the election of Donald Trump in the USA (Johansen, 2022).

From its early stages until the present day, the culture war has been driven by a “‘mosaic’ of communities” online (Hagen, 2023, p. 18), whose growing influence is supported by the simultaneous loss of authority of traditional media gatekeepers. As Nagle puts it (2017, p. 3):

As old media dies, gatekeepers of cultural sensibilities and etiquette have been overthrown, notions of popular taste maintained by a small creative class are now perpetually outpaced by viral online content from obscure sources, and culture industry consumers have been replaced by constantly online, instant content producers.

In other words, some of the power to define reality and frame public debates, which generally resides with the institutional elites (Clark, 2020), has been transferred to the anonymous online masses and social media influencers, particularly on issues related to socio-cultural identities. In the mid-2010s, the online culture war agenda was moving faster than that of the establishment media, and YouTube and Twitter soon became the main culture war arenas from which shifts in the Overton window were increasingly likely to derive. Although the influence of elite universities and broadcast media was necessary for the culture war to enter the mainstream, phenomena like cancel culture were made possible by social media—and so was the diffuse and aggressively sardonic backlash of trolling, mockery, and ridicule (Nagle, 2017).

While both specific online vernaculars and the more general shifts in the media landscape outlined above are crucial factors in the culture war, five coincident, underlying socio-cultural trends are also important to note: (1) the rise of a new media-savvy generation of students with a strong political consciousness, engaged in activism and protest online as well as offline (D’Orazio, 2020); (2) the reported popularity of (and backlash against) certain academic theories like critical race theory, postcolonialism, and gender theory (Mounk, 2023); (3) the relative success of previously marginalized social groups in claiming greater visibility in the broader public culture (Cammaerts, 2022); (4) the commercial breakthrough of wokeness (Sobande et al., 2022)—i.e., the incorporation of progressivist ideas into the “capitalist rationales” of big corporations (Phelan, 2023, p. 17); and (5) a multifaceted response to these trends beyond hardcore online mockery, including increased free speech advocacy among intellectuals (Benn, 2021).

In an attempt to pinpoint the positions crystallizing from the above trends, Benn (2021, p. 4) identifies three positional nodes to navigate by claiming that the culture wars are being fought “between what may be called identity politics, old-fashioned liberalism, and the cultural right.” While this tripartition holds some truth, it is important to note that the concept of identity politics in fact transcends the left-right spectrum, although it is frequently used synonymously with the left (Heyes, 2020). This illustrates how, in culture wars such as the current one, words become increasingly ambiguous.

Terminological Contamination

Beyond identity politics, battle lines have been drawn around concepts and phenomena like (anti-)racism, cancel culture, feminism, free speech, political correctness, social justice, and wokeness, all of which are still contested and highly politicized terms, some used pejoratively, others congratulatorily, while still others are in the process of (re-)appropriation across political divides or rejected altogether.

While both oppose racism, public intellectuals Ibram X. Kendi and John McWhorter disagree so profoundly about its definition that they occupy adversarial positions in the culture war (see Kendi, 2019; McWhorter, 2021). The collective act of cancelling was a necessary component of the #MeToo movement (Ng, 2020), and few would argue that Harvey Weinstein should be uncancelled, but many intellectuals from both sides of the political divide have serious concerns about the free exchange of ideas in a cancel culture (see Harper’s Magazine, 2020; Hays, 2020). “Feminism” may refer to four different (and often opposing) waves, and while some perceive “free speech” to be threatened, others do not. “Political correctness” is mainly used as a punching bag by critics, while negligibly few culture war actors lay claim to the label in their advocacy. Similarly, the term “social justice” is more often than not collocated with “warrior” to ridicule feminists and others as “a whiny collection of weak ‘snowflakes’” (Massanari & Chess, 2018, p. 528). Finally, “woke” has long lost any connection to its roots in African American culture and is now being used as a “polarizing catch-all for wide-ranging concepts such as activist, feminist, liberal, anti-capitalist, and […] antiracist” (Sobande et al., 2022, p. 1579).

The trajectory of the word “woke(ness),” in particular, illustrates what might be termed the dynamic of terminological contamination. In the 1940s, Jean-Paul Sartre wrote about “the wartime distortion of language” and how words could get sick from ideological contamination (Mikkonen, 2006, p. 195). In culture wars, as in actual wars, words fall ill fast. In less than 5 years, “woke” has slipped out of the embrace of activists and into the vocabulary of critics. During this time, the term may even have become obsolete in the sense that “anybody who talks about identity politics or describes an activist as woke is liable to be perceived as an old man yelling at the clouds” (Mounk, 2023, p. 9).

The logic of the contamination dynamic is similar to the “euphemism cycle,” where words can fall from an initial state of neutrality to become depreciatory terms and therefore culturally unacceptable (Taylor, 1974). Many of the key terms of the culture war appear to fluctuate between neutrality, approval, and disapproval. Even “culture war” is contested and sometimes handled with a fair amount of reluctance, as indicated by adding “so-called” to it (see Phelan, 2023; Sobande et al., 2022). This reluctance is based on the notion that the anti-democratic far-right gains most from an antagonistic view of politics. However, this point is not convincing, since culture wars historically have also been waged (and won) by the far-left. Hence, the use of the culture war metaphor in a neutral, descriptive way is certainly defensible.

The contamination dynamic poses a special challenge to culture war researchers who wish to avoid unnecessary reproduction of partisan constructions without drowning in caveats in the process, for if ever fewer culture war actors want the woke label attached to them because it has been hijacked by the opposition, how can they be described without playing directly into the hands of either side of the war? Might it be safer to use the term “left” instead, since woke is usually a leftist position? The short answer is no: just because woke often means the left side of the culture war, left does not mean woke (Neiman, 2023). Similarly, using the term “right” to describe the relatively diverse range of backlashes against wokeness is misleading. While it is true that extreme movements like the alt-right, or alt-lite, are fueled by anti-woke or anti-political correctness sentiments (Finlayson, 2021), other anti-woke actors mainly express concern over threats to intellectual freedom, which may in itself qualify as an “objectionable right-wing political stance” in a highly charged culture war discourse (Benn, 2021, p. 1). The point is that anti-woke does not mean right, either, although it appears to be a widespread misconception in academia.

For instance, in a recent study of anti-woke discourses in the UK, Cammaerts (2022, p. 4) claims to analyze a text corpus characterized by “a diversity of genres,” reflecting “the variety of actors” engaged in anti-woke discourses. Nonetheless, the mentioned corpus is comprised exclusively of right-wing sources, including “voices from the Conservative party,” “journalists from rightwing media,’ an explicitly anti-woke broadcaster, and “an ideological document entitled ‘Conservative Thinking for a Post-Liberal Age’” (Cammaerts, 2022, p. 4). While anti-woke sentiments are likely more common on the right, it does not mean that left-leaning or centrist anti-woke sources should be disregarded altogether. This type of biased sampling further deepens the cleavages of the culture war, undermining the aim to understand its positional dynamics better.

One cannot disregard the fact that many anti-woke actors, such as free speech advocates and critics of cancel culture, self-identify as left-wingers (Phelan, 2023). For instance, liberals and left-leaning thinkers like Noam Chomsky, Mark Lilla, Gloria Steinem, and Cornel West all signed an anti-cancel culture petition, “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate,” in Harper’s Magazine (2020). In addition, several members of the much-debated intellectual collective, the Intellectual Dark Web, including Sam Harris, Coleman Hughes, Joe Rogan, Christina Hoff Sommers, and Eric Weinstein, refer to themselves as leftists or Democrats (Johansen, 2022). Nevertheless, the group is often portrayed as right-wing because it also comprises conservative culture warriors like Douglas Murray, Jordan Peterson, Dave Rubin, and Ben Shapiro (Brooks, 2021; Finlayson, 2021; Munger & Phillips, 2020).

In culture wars, nuances and ambivalence are often sidelined. If actors fit more than one category, the antagonisms of the culture war narrative may be mislocated, and the plot becomes too complex to communicate. How is it possible that Stephen Fry both identifies as a leftist and appears on the same team as Jordan Peterson in a debate against political correctness (TheMunkDebates, 2018)?

In short, juxtapositions and recognizable dichotomies are usually among the most effective positioning tools for intellectuals in a culture war (Baert & Morgan, 2018). Certainly, public intellectual culture warriors, many of whom have been mentioned hitherto, use polemical rhetoric to make their position easier to decode (see Posner, 2001). However, it is not the task of researchers to repeat polemics and further reductionist dichotomies; if the goal is to understand the positional dynamics of the current culture war better, polemical partisanship is counterproductive. Nor is it the task of researchers only to focus on nuances and ambivalences, since this would impair their ability to make consequential analytical statements. It may not be possible, let alone desirable, to escape dichotomy-thinking completely, as juxtapositions are crucial to culture wars. Nonetheless, the culture war matrix, outlined below, offers some flexibility to counter a rigid one-dimensional dichotomy perspective.

The Culture War Matrix

The culture war matrix is not a decisive move away from dichotomy-thinking since it merely adds a vertical dichotomy to the horizontal one (Fig. 1). However, the matrix is a prism through which some of the culture war nuances, overlaps, and ambivalences may be elucidated. As a heuristic navigational tool for empirical analyses, the matrix may be used as a grid of coordinates to locate key culture war actors in relation to each other.

Fig. 1
figure 1

The culture war matrix

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Despite the complex and dynamic nature of culture wars, four keywords recur as relatively stable juxtapositions in the public framing of the struggles: woke versus anti-woke and cancel culture versus free speech. Bearing in mind the aim to engage descriptively with words already in public circulation, the point is not to capitulate to the contamination dynamic. Insisting on a descriptive analytical position within the language used, not outside, enables future studies to engage with empirical material of the culture war in a more direct way. Thus, avoiding the addition of an intermediate terminological layer serves the purpose of analyzing the culture war on its own terms.

The opposing poles on these axes are not to be perceived as essential opposites in normative or ontological terms. Rather, the matrix is based on social media ethnography and observations of how the positions are usually framed in the public discourse and in academic literature (see Kelsey, 2020; Postill & Pink, 2012). Above all, the matrix is descriptive, not prescriptive. And while it is true that the notion of spectrum politics is an inherently reductive abstraction based on dualist assumptions, using it as a navigational tool does not automatically mean promoting the idea that “culture must be composed of sides in perpetual conflict” (Jersak, 2018, p. 686). The matrix is not reductive in a normative sense but in a necessary, descriptive sense. All terms in the matrix are umbrella terms. Hence, all are potentially controversial from one perspective or another.

On the x-axis, the two ends of the spectrum encompass a wide range of opinions in practice. As previously indicated, “woke” is a catch-all phrase for a broad range of ideas and phenomena related to activism, feminism, liberalism, anti-capitalism, and anti-racism (Sobande et al., 2022, p. 1579). It is, among other things, a “political metaphor for being anti-racist, anti-sexist, [and] pro-LGBTQ rights” (Cammaerts, 2022, p. 6). As a rhetorical construct in culture war debates, wokeness is often associated with yet another vague and contested term, identity politics, which is typically used to:

[…] signify a wide range of political activity and theorizing founded in the shared experiences of injustice of members of certain social groups […] identity political formations typically aim to secure the political freedom of a specific constituency marginalized within its larger context. Members of that constituency assert or reclaim ways of understanding their distinctiveness that challenge dominant characterizations, with the goal of greater self-determination. (Heyes, 2020, Introduction, para. 1)

Identity politics are “based in claims about injustices done to particular social groups” (Heyes, 2020, History and Scope, para. 1, emphasis added). In philosophical terms, this translates into particularism; hence, the exact opposite would be universalism (McGowan, 2020). However, woke is not necessarily synonymous with particularism, nor is anti-woke synonymous with universalism, because the actors involved have vastly different reasons for taking an anti-woke stance. Since “woke” and “identity politics” signify “loose collection[s] of political projects,” both are often used as strawmen for a broad range of critics (Heyes, 2020, History and Scope, para. 2).

Aiming to formulate a more precise criticism, Mounk (2023) suggests the term “the identity synthesis” to describe a position in the culture war from which the world is first and foremost viewed through the prism of group identities and based on “a rejection of the existence of objective truth” and a firm belief in the idea that “universal values and neutral rules merely serve to obscure the ways in which privileged groups dominate those that are marginalized” (Mounk, 2023, pp. 76, 288). Mounk (2023, p. 76) criticizes the identity-oriented position for its “deep pessimism about the possibility of overcoming racism or other forms of bigotry” and “skepticism about the ability of members of different groups to communicate with each other.” While the identity synthesis is a useful term to explain the many different academic and activist traditions that come together in the woke position, the term primarily describes the origin of a certain spirit of the times, formulated as a criticism and therefore a contribution to the culture war. The term “identity synthesis” operates on another level of perspective than what is of interest when conceptualizing the positioning spectra of the culture war.

Put differently, viewed as part of a matrix, the opposite term would be “the identity antithesis,” which would require elaboration beyond the present scope of describing the basic culture war positions, effectively complicating matters more than is necessary. In addition, “the identity synthesis” is in part conceived to avoid the likely controversy or rejection generated by using “woke,” which may be strategically understandable but not necessarily beneficial in this context of purposefully insisting on avoiding or resisting the suppressing and confusing capacities of the contamination logic. Finally, and most importantly, “the identity synthesis” does not reflect the rhetorical reality of the discursive space of the culture war in which “woke” is far more widespread and recognizable.

On the other side of the spectrum, “anti-woke” also represents a loose collection of sentiments. The prefix “anti-" arguably implies a reactionary element. To some degree, this is true because the position basically takes shape as a reaction to wokeness. However, whether the anti-woke position is in fact reactionary in the political sense of the term depends on the arguments used.

For instance, the anti-woke side of the war is recurrently tied to a mobilization around anti-feminist views. In the context of online discourse, this was most clearly exemplified in the #Gamergate controversy where users on 4chan, 8chan, Twitter, YouTube, and Reddit made a campaign of “systemic harassment of female and minority game developers, journalists, and critics and their allies” (Massanari, 2017, p. 330). During #Gamergate, right-wing provocateurs like Milo Yiannopoulos criticized feminist views and promoted anti-woke sentiments, but so did self-declared liberal feminist Christina Hoff Sommers (D’Orazio, 2020; Nagle, 2017).

On a range of other issues, the anti-woke position has been represented by the Donald Trump movement (Merrin, 2019), and while many right-leaning opinionators generally criticize wokeness and political correctness, so do well-known left-wing intellectuals like Slavoj Žižek (Big Think, 2017). Similarly, the oppositional stance toward establishment media shared by many anti-wokes constitutes a common point of reference for both #Gamergaters, the alt-right/alt-lite, the Trump movement, the Intellectual Dark Web, and Noam Chomsky and the anti-capitalist left (see Herman & Chomsky, 1994).

This illustrates how positions in the culture war overlap on certain issues (Finlayson, 2021). Also, whatever positions and ideologies qualify as left and right changes over time (Lewis & Lewis, 2023); anti-woke sentiments are promoted by the left and the right, but for dissimilar reasons. The same goes for particularism and identity politics: it exists, and is lamented, on the left as well as on the right (McCall & Orloff, 2017).

There is an implied tension along the x-axis between reform and reactionism. In turn, this tension might be described in terms of progress versus regress, collectivism versus individualism, liberalism versus conservatism, all of which seem to permeate culture war narratives in general. However, labeling wokes as the progressives and anti-wokes as the reactionaries would not only imply a bias; it would clearly be misleading due to the many overlapping impulses and diverse motivations involved in both positions. Despite the many alternative binaries available in the public discourse, as well as the flawed nature of both terms, “woke” and “anti-woke” are the most precise terms to navigate by because they are widely used, intuitively recognizable, and the most period-specific and characteristic positional descriptions of the culture wars of the late 2010s and early 2020s.

The y-axis of the matrix focuses on means rather than ends. Cancel culture can basically be defined as:

[…] the withdrawal of any kind of support (viewership, social media follows, purchases of products endorsed by the person, etc.) for those who are assessed to have said or done something unacceptable or highly problematic, generally from a social justice perspective especially alert to sexism, heterosexism, homophobia, racism, bullying, and related issues (Ng, 2020, p. 623).

Cancel culture represents a way of enforcing the demand for social justice, while free speech, at the opposite end of the spectrum, indicates an inclination not to limit freedom of expression, or to avoid retaliatory measures, notwithstanding the particular reason behind such measures.

Once again, the two ends of the spectrum are not absolute opposites: they merely indicate circulating narratives regarding the inclinations and priorities of each side. Similar to the use of the term “woke,” cancel culture is often understood as a construct of negative connotations made up by the free speechers at the opposite end (see Clark, 2020). However, while cancel culture is “a monstruous ideological abstraction,” “insisting it ‘doesn’t exist’ is a political dead end” (Phelan, 2023, p. 8). The point is that, like woke, cancel culture is a vague catch-all with which few culture war actors wish to be associated. Nonetheless, both concepts exist, at least as discourses or narratives, in the public culture.

The free speech position in the culture war matrix is perceived by some as a weapon of the right, abused to normalize extremist opinions (Cammaerts, 2022). In contrast, proponents of the “snowflake thesis” occupy the free speech position based on the experience that “expressive freedom is degenerating on campus because of increasingly intolerant, censorious and (sometimes) violent students and the timid administrations that enable them” (D’Orazio, 2020, p. 756). Regardless of which perspective is attached to the free speech position, and no matter who utters the term “cancel culture,” the two are unmistakably some of the most widespread positional concepts of the culture war to be situated opposite each other.

To be clear, the goal of using the terms in the matrix is not to judge the positions to which they refer. Critics might object that this goal is naïve because far-right talking points are already dominating the public discourse, supported by social media algorithms (Bryant, 2020), and because right-wing culture warriors are the most aggressive and creative in their terminological appropriation, I end up corroborating a far-right agenda by using the terms “woke” and “cancel culture.” But if the reactionary right is already dominating the mainstream use of labels, then any label used instead of “woke” could be a repetition of its agenda.

The possibility that anti-wokes (right-wing or not) are currently more efficient at labeling their opponents should not discourage researchers from using terms that circulate in the mainstream discourse in a critical way. Reluctance to own terminologies, or actively re-appropriate lost terms, combined with the equivalent lack of terminological creativity of the “anti-right,” implied by the almost mechanical comparison of positions that are not woke with fascism (see Cammaerts, 2022), does not leave researchers with much choice other than to use the contaminated words. Anyway, this approach of engaging with concepts “in the wild” is to be preferred by researchers with an observational and descriptive ambition.

To summarize, the culture war matrix by no means settles the reductionist problem of over-dichotomizing the culture war once and for all. However, it does provide a two-dimensional rather than a one-dimensional view of the positional dynamic of the culture war. To be able to study the culture war and avoid the intellectual stagnation caused by succumbing to the pressures of terminological contamination, it is necessary to use and scrutinize the keywords of existing narratives despite their shifting contexts, connotations, and appropriations. Moreover, the heuristic nature of the culture war matrix allows other concepts to replace the ones presently highlighted. Put differently, the terms juxtaposed are, as indicated, not the only ones at odds with each other in the public discourse. Other narrative tensions exist between rationality and emotionality (Johansen, 2023) and between orthodoxy and heterodoxy. On a final note, I shall reflect on the latter tension.

Beyond Dichotomies: Heterodoxy as a Third Impulse

One of the most common dichotomies used to describe culture wars appears in James Davison Hunter’s principal work on the topic, Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America (1991). Hunter (1991, p. 43) defines two polarizing impulses, one toward the progressive and one toward the orthodox. While both impulses are also key drivers of the current culture war, a third and less defined impulse is equally important: the impulse toward heterodoxy. Heterodoxy is not the same as dissent, which is often idealized as part of the progressive stance. Rather, the impulse toward heterodoxy is an impulse toward non-conformity, regardless of the specific (presumed) affiliation of one’s position. Some call it contrarianism, while others see it as an important democratic value representing diversity of thought and opinion. The impulse toward heterodoxy may not be the dominant force of all culture wars, but it is certainly crucial in the current one in at least two ways.

Firstly, in the current debate culture, the social background of the speaker is intertwined with the overall topic of group identity and affiliation. When speakers engage in debates about gender, their own gender might also be drawn into the conversation, either by themselves or by an opponent. The same goes for religion, age, and race. The point is that belonging or not belonging to a certain social group influences the range of arguments and counterarguments available in a debate about social identity and justice. In this context, intellectual culture warriors increasingly construct heterodox narratives. This is illustrated by Christina Hoff Sommers, who brands herself “the factual feminist” to criticize the perceived myths of contemporary feminism. Similarly, Coleman Hughes, Glenn Loury, and John McWhorter represent black voices against Black Lives Matter and contemporary notions of anti-racism. In short, these intellectuals are characterized by speaking out against what might intuitively be recognized as “their own.” In this way, a heterodox stance in terms of socio-cultural background may serve as a positioning tool and new source of authority beyond the quality of the argument, institutional affiliations, charisma, superior knowledge, etc.

Secondly, the heterodox positioning strategy challenges dichotomy-thinking at its core. By definition, heterodox actors have one foot out of the door at all times. Even the most orthodox, traditionalist culture warriors like Jordan Peterson invoke the heterodox narrative time and again. Peterson uses his professor ethos to speak out against the perceived left-wing doxa at the university. Similarly, an intellectual like Hughes can unsettle typical categorizations in an often-deadlocked US political environment by declaring himself a Democrat but testifying before congress against reparations for slavery as a Republican witness because Ta-Nehisi Coates was cast as the Democrat pro-reparations witness. This polemical ambiguity points to the fact that being outside one category only means being inside another. As heterodoxy becomes a value in its own right, dichotomies are much harder to maintain.

Conclusion

In this essay, I have reflected on the linguistic dynamics of the current culture war. With special emphasis on what I term the dynamic of terminological contamination, I have offered an explanation as to how certain linguistic processes may increase the complexity of culture wars, both as empirical phenomena and as research domains. In addition, I have highlighted strict dichotomy-thinking as a central challenge to culture war researchers. To avoid the pitfall of reproducing reductive dichotomies, the culture war matrix may be used as a heuristic tool in future studies to recognize the polytomous nature of culture wars.

I have advocated an observational stance and a descriptive approach to studying the culture war. Critics might object that this perspective is in fact furthering an “anti-political doxa” (Phelan, 2023, p. 12). However, the approach advocated here is not so much anti-political as it is non-moralistic, open-ended, and nonpartisan, all much-welcomed academic values that enable a more nuanced investigation of the current culture war and its positional dynamics.

In conclusion, the argument presented in this essay may be summarized in four overall points. Firstly, the most dominant dichotomy of left versus right cannot contain the many different motivations actors might have when positioning themselves and others in the culture war landscape. The current culture war is polytomous rather than dichotomous in nature, since key conflicting positions such as “woke” and “anti-woke” are in fact stretched across the traditional left and right positions.

Secondly, dichotomies and juxtapositions are not problematic in and of themselves. Rather, they are both inherent components in culture wars and useful analytical tools insofar as researchers are alert to overlaps and coexisting dichotomies. Thus, when studying them, one should be open to the possibility that dichotomies typically intersect and change over time.

Thirdly, terminological contamination is not only a challenge to the stability of dichotomies but may also trick researchers into avoiding terms like “woke” because its connotations may change. It is useful to resist the contamination dynamic and to stay as close to the natural language as possible. The scholarly engagement with culture war narratives and positions does not necessitate the use of terms other than the ones already in public circulation. Researchers should resist the temptation to introduce new terms because it essentially risks changing the conversation. While “woke,” “cancel culture,” and even “culture war” may be contested terms, they are nevertheless widely used in the public discourse. Circling around them in academic studies to avoid controversy risks jeopardizing the observational stance, ultimately turning researchers into culture warriors themselves.

Finally, heterodox positioning practices make dichotomies even less stable and more reductive. Along with the culture war matrix, directing attention to heterodox positioning strategies might help culture war researchers to understand better the most central processes of culture wars: the dislocation of previously stable positions, the dissolution of old contrasts and the emergence of new ones, and the possible inversion or suppression of the left-right dichotomy.