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If there was still any doubt, recent political reconfigurations suggest the culture wars are now over. The conflict of values has migrated onto a different register, of a super-structural scale: On Valentines day US Vice-President JD Vance strutted around the Munich Security Conference bemoaning the “appalling setbacks” that afflict the European right, how there must be a change of “course and take our shared civilisation in a new direction”. He wields the word civilisation (the defining adjective of ‘Western’ is implied) like a crusaders sword through the populations of migrants and refugees that are Europe’s guests. The image that barbarians are at the gate has been gifted to the right by soft liberal complacencies – the weak consciousness of David Camerons casual determination of ‘swarms’ being a threshold moment in the UK – and now ‘civilisation’ is being tooled up, again. To be civilised is literally to be socialized, to take what is a legal or criminal matter and make it into a civil or social one. Ergo if you are not socialized you are criminalised. Obviously the culture wars of the last decades were about much more than spats over salad spinners. What is now at stake, what is proposed is the bifurcation of civilisation and culture – the distinction between a socialising regime, the immutable historical process of refinement (and all the violence that dialectic implies), and a tending to an acculturation, the organic unfolding of the social. Or, to bring it back to comfortable Romantic territory, as Coleridge put it ‘the harmonious development of those qualities and faculties that characterise our humanity’ is about to be put on hold.

Strap in, folks.