America’s culture wars as theater of the absurd

Sydney Sweeney didn’t set out to become the latest trench in America’s culture war. She just posed in denim for American Eagle. But in 2025 America, denim is never just denim. Overnight, jeans became a battlefield.

One camp praised her as the All-American girl. Another derided the ad as reactionary cosplay, even a flirtation with white supremacy. A commercial that should have been forgotten in a week turned into a national referendum. Absurd, yes. Predictable, absolutely.

Only in America can a pair of jeans become an ideological fault line. A coffee cup at Starbucks. A bathroom door at Target. Each becomes an existential crisis, amplified by algorithms, weaponized by politicians, monetized by media. America’s culture wars operate like a machine that takes the ordinary and spits it out as an existential crisis. 

Consider Cracker Barrel. The restaurant quietly refreshed its brand, a minor design tweak most would overlook. Hours later, President Donald Trump blasted the change, demanding the old logo back.

The company soon surrendered, and the stock price jumped. Wall Street rewarded a restaurant not for better food or service, but for preserving a symbol. It was treated as if typography itself were tradition, as if the serif on a logo carried the weight of national survival.

These fights feel uniquely American in their intensity and their insanity. Europeans might argue about immigration or farming subsidies. But they don’t turn coffee cups, bathroom signs or corporate logos into symbols of spiritual warfare.

In the United States, male cheerleaders in colleges or debates about unisex bathrooms often attract more outrage than federal deficits or overseas wars. Why?

Part of the reason is that America has always loved symbols more than substance. The country was founded not only on land and law but on ideas—liberty, equality, opportunity—that were abstract enough to require constant performance.

In such a setting, anything can be turned into a stage for virtue signaling. A denim ad, a chain restaurant, a bathroom door. Each one becomes a canvas where Americans act out their anxiety about who they are and what kind of nation they live in.

This dynamic isn’t new. The American flag has been a weapon since the Revolution, when flying it marked you as loyal and failing to do so branded you suspect. The Pledge of Allegiance, penned in 1892, was less devotion than cohesion. A way to bind a fractured nation through a few memorized lines.

By the 1960s, even hair and hemlines signaled allegiance or defiance. Today, the stage is TikTok and Super Bowl ads, but the script remains the exact same. In America, appearance is never just appearance; it’s a performance of belonging.

The culture war also thrives because it distracts. It is easier to argue about whether a logo offends tradition than to reckon with ballooning national debt or a broken healthcare system.

It is easier to scream about male cheerleaders than to fix stagnant wages. These debates become pressure valves, allowing people to vent without touching the structural problems that actually govern their lives.

Take the bathroom wars of the past decade. America has been riven with conflicts over who gets to use which stall. Lawsuits have been filed. Boycotts threatened. Companies have weighed in with hashtags and rainbow logos.

And yet, while millions of dollars and endless hours of attention went into the “bathroom debate,” the country’s infrastructure continues to crumble, medical bankruptcies have soared and life expectancy has stagnated. Toilets, it seems, matter more than mortality.

The irony is that both sides of the political spectrum benefit. Politicians thrive on distraction because it rallies the base. Media outlets profit from outrage clicks. Corporations love symbolic fights because they’re cheap. It costs nothing to issue a press release about “values” or swap out a logo.

It costs everything to raise wages, invest in safety or produce durable goods. So the culture war grinds on—profitable for those who provoke it, draining for those trapped inside it.

To dismiss it as meaningless, though, would miss the point. The battles are absurd but they expose something vital about the American condition. They reveal a nation uneasy with itself, a people who no longer share common truths and instead turn every purchase, every logo, every ad into a tribal marker.

Buy the wrong beer, wear the wrong jeans, eat at the wrong chain restaurant, and suddenly you’re part of “the other side.”

It’s no accident that many of these fights play out through brands. America is a consumer society; purchasing has always served as a form of signaling.

Cars, clothes, even fast food have long been enlisted in political theater. Think of how the Prius became shorthand for progressive piety, while the pickup became shorthand for conservative power.

Now, with social media amplifying every ad, every logo, every celebrity endorsement, the smallest marketing choice becomes a referendum on national character.

But there’s another reason why America, more than any other country, obsesses over symbols. For centuries, Americans have been asking a question most other nations never ask: What does it mean to be American?

For France, being French is tied to language and culture; for Japan, to history and bloodlines. For America, the answer has always been less certain, built on a patchwork of ideals, immigration and myth.

That uncertainty creates space for constant anxiety—and constant performance. Even pronouns have turned into a stage where Americans audition their version of national identity.

This dynamic is destructive because it devours oxygen. While symbolic skirmishes consume attention, real crises multiply. Artificial intelligence is reshaping the labor market with little oversight. Housing is increasingly unaffordable. The national debt grows, public trust shrinks, and foreign powers advance.

Yet none of these existential challenges can compete for attention with a denim ad or a Cracker Barrel logo. The trivial triumphs over the consequential.

There is, of course, a cost to this. A nation that cannot focus on its real problems eventually loses the capacity to solve them. Outrage is finite. Spend it on jeans and logos, and there’s little left for deficits, disease or decline.

America risks becoming a place where the battles are loud but the victories are completely hollow. Where the culture war rages endlessly while the foundations quietly crack.