[jfengel]

It's interesting that you put it that way. I see the term "virtue signaling" as one aspect of the culture war. It's a blanket ad hominem attack: "They don't really believe X. They just want everybody else to believe that they believe X. X is actually so bad that nobody really believes it." Thus allowing them to sidestep any discussion of the validity of X; they just assume it's false and attack the person.

In practice, I find that the term is mostly just used as "vice signalling". It's not really an argument at all, but rather a call to other subscribers to their ideology that they're all in this together, as indicated by the use of the common buzzword.

The term is used only along ideological lines, and I do believe that those ideological lines are turning increasingly hostile. Calling it a "war" is always going to have weird connotations, but the terminology used for hostility is always subject to escalation.

I do believe the divisions are growing louder and more angry, if not always violent (though there's a good case to be made that they have gotten more violent over the last 40 years or so). Is that where your disagreement is, or is it elsewhere?