So much of the “culture war” is, at base, a disagreement over James Baldwin’s view of history:

“History, as nearly no one seems to know, is not merely something to be read. And it does not refer merely, or even principally, to the past.”

On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do.”

“It could scarcely be otherwise, since it is to history that we owe our frames of reference, our identities, and our aspirations.”

From my perspective as a social scientist, I take Baldwin’s view to be empirically correct, with the evidence coming from psychology, sociology, economics, and other data-oriented fields.

And having come to this view without much of any knowledge of critical race theory, it would take more than a bunch of books ridiculing Foucault and Derrida to convince me otherwise.