I agree with your observation, but I'm not sure about the cause. I do agree with you on the culture struggle, or culture wars, as it's sometimes known in Marxism. How these are intentional abstractions to basically halt democracy.

I can't think of a single person who actually cared all that much about gay marriage in the way news depicted the "silent majority" for instance. Even those opposed had a very mild opposition, nobody was stockpiling weapons and preparing for the great marriage civil war.

Some might say "I don't like it" or "I don't recognise it as a real marriage", but had the legislation passed earlier, people would have accepted it either enthusiastically or reluctantly, it wasn't a wedge issue in any intuitive sense.

So I do think abstractions is the liberal credo. You can do anything you want, as long as it doesn't affect the bottom line. You have infinite political possibilities, but also a zero budget.

So you can have your rainbow flags, your diversity workshops, your flowery rhetoric and counterculture, just as long as the infrastructure keeps crumbling, endless resource wars carry on, private prisons stay overcrowded, ghettos are populated with an underclass, and so on.

One wonderful quote I remember is from Anatole France "The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich and poor alike from sleeping under bridges, begging in the streets and stealing bread."