During the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s, left and right shared a commitment to the value of the humanities as a crucial element of American higher education. What the antagonists then disagreed upon, often ferociously, was how to define the humanities. Conservatives contended that all American college students should read the Western canon as they defined it—limited to a core group of texts typically authored by dead white men. In contrast, academic leftists sought a more inclusive, multicultural humanities curriculum.

But now, a humanities education—designed to inculcate intellectual curiosity and humanistic empathy—serves no purpose, especially beside such plainly better-compensated and culturally respectable real-world pursuits as vocational and managerial training. In other words today’s neoliberal order is fine with revised canons, and with more inclusive, multicultural understandings of the world—but not with public money supporting something so seemingly useless as the humanities. In the age of neoliberalism, conservatives have briskly abandoned their traditionalist defense of the Western canon in favor of no canon at all. Culture warriors on both sides have been overtaken by events. A bipartisan neoliberal consensus that emphasizes job training as education’s sine qua non now dominates the landscape.

When young people flocked to the Bernie Sanders campaign, they responded enthusiastically to his offer to make free higher education a priority. But this ardor didn’t only stem from the ruinous impact that ballooning student debt will visit on their life prospects. They also yearn for a more human existence that transcends the soul-crushing neoliberal order. This new division, between the technocratic rulers of a deeply unequal society and the idealistic young Americans who want something better, hardly resembles the culture wars of yesteryear. It feels, rather, like a new kind of class struggle—and finds a strong echo of the Parkland survivors’ implacable dedication to a new approach to the politics of gun ownership, in defiance of the bitter fatalism of all too many of their political elders. Although the outcome of these inchoate struggles is far from certain, they furnish more than a modicum of hope to the exhausted culture-war conscientious objectors who are looking for a way out of the pinched and dispiriting trench-warfare of the American Kulturkampf.