First of all, this is a great post. To be perfectly honest I kind of think posts like this are wasted being hidden away on a little subreddit dedicated to probably the dumbest battleground of the internet 'culture war'. You really should start a blog or something.

Part of it is also the ongoing project of crafting conceptual tools ... to argue that de minimus issues are "connected" in some way to broad societal harms.

There's a whole system of rhetoric out there to drill into people the idea that good human beings have a moral imperative to be at battle stations at all times.

In particular there's this view of demographic power struggles as a battle between these holistic entities where every individual act impacts the larger war, combined with the idea that not acting against injustice implicitly supports the status quo,

I can see how this is a seductive line of reasoning. It's hard to quantifiably disprove either way, and it pushes everyone into picking a side with an implicit judgement against anyone who doesn't immediately jump on board.

The problem is, this mentality values winning small personal fights instead of pinpointing and achieving actual tangible objectives.

It doesn't take into account that, in the big picture, turning every slight into a fight probably isn't going to likely to win over anyone who aren't already 100% on your side and tends to make enemies of people who might otherwise be sympathetic.

Not to mention that a war against anyone who doesn't share your specific worldview can never actually be 'won', so there has to be a certain amount of compromise somewhere along the line.

A lot of this might sound like a load of sweeping generalisations, but I couldn't invent a clearer example of this stuff in action than progressives making a pariah of Germaine Greer of all people for not perfectly toeing the ever-evolving party line for every one of her 76 years.

Today's radical protesters are tomorrow's reactionary filth.

This reminds me of the phenomenon following 9/11, where you'd occasionally see a certain breed of strident leftist snap and turn into an equally strident hawkish neocon. In fact I'd say seeing this happen in real time was a formative political experience for me.

I wouldn't be the least bit surprised to see a similar switch eventually happen with many in the youthful progressive crowd, because while they may be opposites in term of policy and who their friends and enemies are, in terms of mentality there is much common ground with right conservatives.