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Depends on what you mean by "show up", and what you're expecting to get out of it.
There was no conceivable act of individual heroism that could have shattered the power of the Catholic church at the height of the Inquisition, or hastened the fall of Soviet communism during the reign of Stalin. There was no "war", just those with power enforcing their will on their powerless, with very few meaningful avenues for rebuttal. Only through the accumulated weathering of decades (or centuries) did a change of conditions eventually become possible.
I certainly think it's virtuous to not be afraid of the censors. Do what you want to do, and don't let them stop you. But don't have delusions of grandeur either. If the only reason you're waging the culture "war" is because you think you can change the course of world history, then you should consider if there are better ways you could be spending your time.
Bad history. The Inquisition was set up precisely to stop idiot rubes out in the sticks from freaking out about nonsense like "witches making the cows' milk dry up" and burning people. The Spanish crown then won a political struggle with the Papacy, asserted control over the office in the area under its secular jurisdiction, then started using it as a secret police against perceived fifth columnists and as a revenue source.
Unexpectedly.
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If the Inquisition was started to prevent witch hunts, then why is it that we now conflate Inquisitors with witch-hunters and torturers?
Because the actual history is messy and embarrassing to every-one.
The early medieval church was clear enough that belief in witch-craft-as-real-magic was superstition left over from the bad old days (think 800 AD). Witch-craft-as-baseless-superstition was heresy and subject to punishment, but you could get in trouble both ways. You committed heresy if you put yourself forward as a witch who could really do the magic. You committed heresy if you tried to protect society against some-one who you asserted was a threat because they could really do the magic.
Then, starting around 1400 AD (but slowly at first) mankind regressed, becoming afraid of witchcraft-as-real-magic.
This is obviously embarrassing to the Catholic Church, who knew the truth and lost it. But it is embarrassing to Enlightenment thinkers too. First, the deterioration happens late; the early stirrings of modernity are making people less rational. Second, the Enlightenment could have taken witch burning as showing the fragility of human knowledge and a case study in losing truths once known. But instead it just ignored the real and troubling story in favour of bashing the Church as always in error.
Recall the story that Columbus met opposition to sailing West to China from people who believed that the Earth was flat. It originated in a "biography" that changed the story to make it more dramatic. Then anti-Catholics took it up, because the flat earth myth was a convenient stick to beat the Catholics. There is a problem with anti-religious campaigners just making stuff up.
I find this disillusioning. As a young man I believed that the 18th Century Enlightenment guys were the good guys who were opposing the Catholic Church (who were the bad guys because they just made stuff up). Now I find that every-one is just making stuff up. And twisting the witch craft story to bash Catholics isn't the only example, so I cannot excuse it as "just once".
I'll caveat that this is a little more complicated than the quick summary -- you can find some Catholics being very skeptical and treating the accusers as heretics into the height of the early modern witch trials, and there's a controversial claim of an English witch-execution as early as the 900s. It's not clear how much the earlier Church was free of witch-hunting among the laity because they didn't believe in it (or were told to not believe in it), and how much because the records weren't made to start with.
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Hunting heretics/Muslims/Jews gets conflated with hunting witches.
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Because the sales pitch of the inquisition wasn't "we will stop witch hunts", it was "we will do witch hunts the proper way". Granted though, this did reduce insane witchery nonsense substantially, and it probably was the most pragmatic way of doing so.
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Voltaire and anti-Catholic propaganda pervasive from the French Enlightenment through the Spanish Civil War, mostly.
I would have thought that Britain and the Protestant anti-Catholic propaganda, considerably preceeding the French Enlightenment, would have played an even larger part.
Oh sure. I'm just less familiar with that than with the French stuff.
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We see people who also dissuade actions under much different arguments. You would have noticed people who argue that this isn't a big deal. It can't be the case where on such issues there are enough people who argue inaction because they see it as uncool, or unnecessary, that what is happening isn't a big deal, but also inaction is the best because it is hopeless.
You use the terms waging the culture war which are highly negatively charged here and associated with censorship, insults, bans etc. It could be said that is carries connotations of unfairness and impropriety, at minimum. So you are being somewhat contradictory with your language. You are saying it is hopeless but also your language is carrying some connotation that it is bad independently of that. That it is ethically superior to not take part. Which would have you share ground with those who favor no opposition because they don't think it should be opposed. Which is still taking part because demoralization preached at one side goes further than even an attitude of general disengagement.
I don't think inaction is chosen as the best, because it is the only choice available, but because it is the preference of those promoting it. The woke have been winning because they have been willing to more aggressively push their agenda through. It becomes a self fulfilling prophecy if one's reaction is that there is nothing to be done, while in other issues this fatalism is absent. There is in fact plenty of energy of those who could act and don't. Just like the more extreme progressives started influencing a society that was more hostile to their ideology, it is possible to win over and change the minds of others. Discouragement and demoralization of those who could have opposed it and still can be an opposition is a key aspect to the changes in the progressive intersectionality direction and its victories.
Communism and Catholicism didn't dominate in the way they could have, because there was opposition. And it isn't the Stalin situation yet. It isn't as if you supporting here regulations against the woke would get your life ruined. Of course it is completely impossible to take a genuine stand against woke/progressive intersectionalists and not be hated and vilified by their broader political faction. Or to be disliked by those who sympathize with them and oppose the opposition. There is pressure related to being seen by some as cringe to take stronger positions. But this is a different issue than having no choice. There are also those willing to like and support such opposition.
There are dynamics involved that relate to this idea of the holy left and how it is cringe and symbolically bad and symbolically far right to have a strong position against its excess. These dynamics of underestimating the dangers of far left extremism or the dangers of aligning with it, are part of the reasons that it grew in influence. So I would paint the situation as different than people being afraid of dying as in the case of the Soviet Union. Afraid of being labeled negatively and other things of that nature? Maybe. Some level of sympathy and wrong attitude to have? That too.
History isn't fixed but changes, and moreover it also is the case that even if not all can be won, some of it can be won. So my general point is that demoralized attitude is a self fulfilling prophecy. Just like communists who had remarkable successes found obstacles that stopped their continued victory, the same can apply here. And in the communists, some of their fellow travelers and even some non communists also promoted the idea of the inevitability of their complete victory. The meme of inevitability and hopeless of opposition isn't new but is probably over a century old at this point. If people had this demoralized attitude, the communists would have totally succeeded and those suffering under their boot would be living in dread until that inevitable day. Hope and courage are virtues necessary for positively changing things but are necessary also to give greater meaning with how one engages with such problems in the present.
I will say that even with people who are very busy as is very understandable with other things and don't prioritize this, they still have a choice to have more or less decisive positions on the issue, when they do engage with it. I actually am not some kind of activist, so I certainly could be doing quite more. I am against the nirvana fallacy. I just want to argue that an attitude of superiority of disengagement is the wrong attitude to have and not the morally superior attitude. It is only the perspective that helps the more aggressive party that is successfully changing things to continue escalating.
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