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The last culture war, often pitting movement conservative figures against artists, was fought over whether culture was, or should be, decent. Concerns about decency could be broadly defined, but they often cropped up in reference to culture that reflected changing norms of family and sexual life.

In 1989, American Family Association founder Donald Wildmon, who had condemned shows like Threes Company, threatened a boycott of Pepsi over a commercial the soft drink company cut with Madonna after the release of her Like a Prayer album, which Wildmon criticized as immoral and anti-Christian.

The year after that, Vice President Dan Quayle took a swipe at Candice Bergens Murphy Brown, the central figure of the eponymous CBS TV show, for becoming a single mother. Quayle suggested that the mass media were contributing to a decline of family values, to which he attributed a role in the 1992 Los Angeles riots, sparked by the acquittal of the Los Angeles police officers charged with beating Rodney King.

Even Bart Simpson was a target. Schools banned T-shirts emblazoned with his snotty catchphrases, and he was seen as a worrisome beacon of disrespect for authority and academic achievement, condemned by a figure as powerful as Secretary of Education William Bennett.

Culture warriors concerned by decency were anxious that culture was changing too fast and introducing too many ideas, voices and means of expression to a population vulnerable to the power of suggestion. (These concerns also marked debates about whether the classics were being unfairly devalued in favor of multicultural and feminist literature.)

This position might have been rhetorically powerful in certain political settings, but the war for decency ended in failure. The message was radically misaligned with the entertainment industrys basic incentives for testing certain boundaries, particularly those around sexuality and violence. Artists such as Madonna and networks such as MTV thrived even with, and often because of, the disapproval of decency groups.

The rise of the fight over marriage equality diverted decency crusaders resources and attention from cultural campaigns to bruising state-by-state legislative and legal battles. And new distribution models gave decency-oriented consumers more options if they wanted to opt out of mainstream secular culture entirely.

The 2004 Super Bowl, when Justin Timberlake ripped off part of Janet Jacksons costume during the halftime show, revealing her nipple and prompting Congress to boost broadcast indecency fines, now seems like an end point to this epoch in the culture wars. The settlement between the two sides meant that the federal government would levy fines, and not small ones, for extreme incidents. But the culture industry factored those costs and viewers disapproval into its business model and forged ahead.

Today, decency-oriented groups may be able to muster large volumes of complaints when Miley Cyrus twerks on a teddy bear, but they have little impact on her bottom line or creative decisions once the news cycle moves on.

Now we are in the midst of a new culture war, one in which fans and creators battle one another and sometimes themselves. It is being waged over whether culture is political, and if so, what its politics ought to be and how they might be expressed. That conflict has also diffused beyond the academic, religious and political institutions that were major players in earlier convulsions. Today it is wildly fragmented in a way that suggests vigorous and ongoing debates rather than an easy resolution.

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Alyssa Rosenberg: Meet the faces of Americas new culture wars