And yet instead of a hard pivot from progressive to conservative, something stranger has followed. Suddenly both sides of the culture war are appearing onscreen — only in deeply artificial Grand Guignol fashion, their messages issuing from characters who feel like gauche parodies. The culture war, in other words, has gone camp. Hollywood now makes frothy, delirious shows, for bipartisan audiences, in which political causes that once seemed life-or-death are taken up as easy targets. Ideas that once felt incendiary become punchlines or dizzy memes. In many cases, it is hard to tell whether the left-wing talking point issuing from the character onscreen is actually the product of an irony-poisoned right-wing writer — or, inversely, whether right-wing dialogue comes from a meanspirited member of the Democratic Socialists of America. These are camp aesthetics in the old sense: They take the exterior trappings of once-serious beliefs and produce chintzy knockoffs with deadpan solemnity.