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Olympic gold medal winner Jessica Ennis-Hill suffered rape threats on Twitter after saying she wanted her name removed from one of Sheffield Uniteds stands if the club allowed convicted rapist Ched Evans to play for it again. Photograph: Graham Hughes/Observer

These days, if I spend too long on the internet, I feel like crawling back into the sea and trying to de-evolve my limbs. We have created an incredible tool for consolidating all human knowledge, connecting us across time and space, and we use it to Photoshop Benedict Cumberbatchs face on to otters and make politicians resign for tweeting a picture of a house.

Why do online spaces often feel so fractious? Because unlike our everyday lives, the internet never demands a rest from the culture wars. In the 1991 book that popularised that term, the sociologist James Davison Hunter recorded a European friend expressing surprise that Americans typically conduct their lives in private and with little controversy. He pointed out that issues such as the role of religion in public life seemed bloodlessly abstract only until they intersected with peoples everyday lives: their daughter wanted an abortion, a cousin revealed herself to be gay, or their local school changed its curriculum. The contemporary culture war touches virtually all Americans, wrote Hunter. Nearly everyone has stories to tell.

There is one big change since Hunter wrote his book. If everyone has stories to tell, now they have access to an audience, too. Through blogs and social media, they can easily find others who share their rage and express it together, perhaps directly to the person or organisation that caused it. On the internet, you can always find someone who is up for a ruck. The culture wars have been reborn as a 24-hour rolling soap opera where millions of us have a walk-on part and the unlucky few end up as villain of the week.

We live in a culture obsessed with offence, which is not in itself a bad thing most of us would agree that we would prefer not to anger or upset other people if we can help it. But we also swim in a sea of words: utterances that would once have flickered into life for a moment are now recorded for ever, parsed and picked over. Social media and the ubiquity of smartphones mean that almost any thought, no matter how small its intended audience, has the potential to go viral. Almost any of us can be dumped in front of the court of public opinion and put on trial for stupidity and thoughtlessness. An argument on a bus ends up on Buzzfeed; the rugby club song makes page nine of the Sun; a celebritys gaffe is replayed endlessly on 24-hour news.

Social scientists call this context collapse the idea that everything we say on Facebook or Twitter is potentially addressed to everybody, ever. The fact that for the vast majority of the time, no one outside your mum and your friends will read it makes it all the more disorienting if your musings are wrenched out of their original context and held up for public discussion.

One of the hallmarks of the early culture wars was that both sides were equally alert to minor slights. This is worth remembering today, when political correctness is usually diagnosed as a leftwing complaint an overdose of right-on trendiness causing spontaneous outbreaks of Winterval and trigger warnings.

The right is just as susceptible to hair-trigger outrage, however witness the brouhaha over what Emily Thornberry, the shadow attorney-general, did or didnt mean to say about working-class people when she tweeted a photograph of a flag-draped house. For the left, the inflammatory accusations are sexism, homophobia and racism alongside the newer charges of transphobia and whorephobia. For the right, its metropolitan snobbishness, a lack of patriotism, disrespect to the monarchy, and denigration of our boys in the armed forces. Any of these combustible subjects can spark a week-long orgy of backlash and counter-backlash, with arguments so convoluted they would leave medieval theologians reeling.

In the last month alone, weve discussed whether a comedian called Dapper Laughs should have had his ITV2 show cancelled once everyone realised his career was based entirely on witless sexism. Weve wondered whether Sam Pepper, a YouTube star who likes to be filmed grabbing womens bodies, is simply a misunderstood joker. Weve debated whether pickup artist Julien Blanc, who recommends seducing women with a choke opener, should have been refused a visa to enter Britain. And weve had South Yorkshire police investigating rape threats sent on Twitter to Jessica Ennis-Hill after she warned Sheffield United against re-signing convicted rapist Ched Evans. Its also been at least two months since Jeremy Clarkson said something deliberately crass, so expect another gate suffix over Christmas.

To move forward, we need to distinguish more clearly between people saying things with which we disagree, and those who make threats or advocate and incite violence. Blanc falls into the latter camp, and it is right that he should have been refused entry to Britain. Clarkson, on the other hand, is merely the price we have to pay for living in a democracy. (A democracy that is bizarrely enthralled by middle-aged men shouting POWER!!! as they drive round corners.)

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A Tea Party demonstration in Washington: These kinds of cultural arguments are regularly taking the place of what used to be the bread-and-butter fare of UK political dispute. Photograph: Michael Reynolds/EPA

Emily Thornberry may be the first politician to quit over a single tweeted photograph that was not physically intimate, but she is not the first to get into trouble over flags and vans. In 2003 the US presidential hopeful Howard Dean said, I still want to be the candidate for guys with Confederate flags in their pickup trucks adding that Democrats like him could not hope to win the White House if they did not appeal to poorer, southern voters as well as those in affluent, liberal cities and suburbs. His Democratic rivals turned on him, furious that he had embraced the most racially divisive symbol in America. The row passed, Dean lost, and he is now best remembered for the bizarre roar he let out on the night of a key defeat: the Dean scream.

Of course, the two episodes are very different. The English flag may carry a residual association with the far-right, but it bears nothing like the stain of slavery attached to the badge of the Confederacy. More importantly, Dean was trying to woo those blue-collar voters his party had lost. Even Thornberrys defenders do not pretend she was trying to recruit white van drivers who fly the English flag from their homes. At best, she appeared to express the fascination of a visiting anthropologist for the natives of Rochester and Strood with their curious cultural customs. At worst, she was dissing them, her tweet tacitly asking: Can you believe these people? Chalk that up as another first for Thornberry, felled for posting an offensively implicit photograph.

In the US moments like this happen every day of the week. They are often what politics there is all about. They come under the heading of culture wars and usually relate to matters of identity, race or sexual equality, with politicians or institutions faulted for words or conduct that have, one way or another, given offence. Here such moments used to strike rarely. But no longer. Britain is now waging a culture war of its own.

To see how far weve come, consider the year 1992. As it happens, that was the year I covered both my first UK general election and first US presidential contest. The contrast was striking. In Britain the battle was all about tax and public services, with accusations of a Labour tax bombshell and an NHS unsafe in Tory hands. In the US Bill Clintons aides may have insisted Its the economy, stupid, but day-to-day combat frequently focused elsewhere: on Hillary Clintons apparent swipe at stay-at-home mums who bake cookies, on Bills evasion of military service in Vietnam, on the maverick candidate Ross Perots addressing a black audience as you people.

And that difference held good for many years. While one British election after another was dominated by tax rates and the like, US elections routinely raised questions that went to the heart of the nations identity. Witness Barack Obamas unguarded remark in 2008, suggesting that poorer voters cling to their guns or religion when times are hard.

Obama was slammed at the time for showing precisely the sort of snobbish disdain towards his partys core voters attributed to Thornberry. Which illustrates the extent to which what was once a feature of US political life has made it here (minus the guns and religion). But this goes far beyond an apparent jibe at the habits of the English working class. For these kinds of cultural arguments are regularly taking the place of what used to be the bread-and-butter fare of UK political dispute: namely, clashing economic interests and competing visions of the size of the state. Todays Britain is less fixated on How to spend it? than on Who do we think we are?.

Just look at the two surging movements in UK politics, the Scottish National and UK Independence parties, the latter now buoyed by winning its second MP in Rochester. The SNP insists that it represents a kinder, gentler, more civic nationalism than Ukip. But both mine national solidarity and the rising sense that a hated and distant capital Westminster in one case, Brussels in the other is thwarting the peoples true destiny. The context of each is different, to be sure, but the nagging question is the same. As the Washington Posts Fareed Zakaria wrote recently, observing this same trend around the world, including Americas own Tea Party, the question posed is Who are we? and, more ominously, Who are we not?

What explains this shift, pushing the British public argument away from the old disputes over pounds, shillings and pence into the more searching terrain of identity? A glib answer would point the finger at social media, citing Twitters role as Thornberrys executioner. It certainly acts as an accelerant, turning what would once have been a stumble into a collapse.

But the answers lie deeper. Tonight Labours Douglas Alexander is due to argue in a speech in Stirling that, The character of 21st century politics isalready defined by contests about both identity and insecurity, rather than simply economic interests. In a previous generation, people formed their identities in part out of those economic interests, through a trade union or on the factory floor. Now those organised class allegiances have faded. In much of the country, church membership has plummeted too.

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The Emily Thornberry affair proves it: US-style culture wars have come to Britain

Digital norms are making the culture wars worse.

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Sometimes, when an Internet debate is degenerating into anger and madness, I imagine two people striving to be calm and charitable as they air their differences. This happened during the controversy over Matt Taylor, the fantastically talented scientist who helped the team that landed a spacecraft on a comet. After he appeared on television in a gaudy shirt depicting scantily-clad women, the web degenerated into a debate about whether he, the people criticizing his shirt, or the people criticizing those people are history's greatest monsters. Profane insults were hurled. Death threats were issued. At least one man cried.

To safeguard my mental health, I repaired to a location without Internet access, opened a text editor, and tried to imagine a civil exchange of opposing viewpoints. What follows is wholly a figment of my imagination and isn't meant to reflect the beliefs of any of the individuals who've actually argued about this story online. In fact, I began writing with only the haziest idea of who was involved.

A: Wow! Congrats to Matt Taylor! He's clearly a brilliant scientist. And probably a good guy too. I do wish he'd worn a different shirt. That one reinforces the perception a lot of women have about being unwelcome in science. A friend or colleague should've told him to change before going on television.

B: I agree that scientific fields ought to be as welcoming to young women as to young men. But I wish you wouldn't have chosen this of all moments to highlight the issue. Landing on this comet is a stunning accomplishment unique in history. We're witnessing the crowning achievement of this man's life. We've lost perspective if, at this of all times, we're focused on a dumb shirt he was wearing.

A: Yes, his scientific achievements ought to be the world's focus. Sure enough, television stations and newspapers are dedicating significant coverage to the comet landing. I hardly think that my noting the inappropriate shirt as a footnote to the story on Twitter at all obscures his accomplishment.

B: But the subject was raised precisely to shift at least some attention from this man's accomplishment to his shirt. It would be as if a woman won the Nobel Peace Prize, wore diamond earrings during her acceptance speech, and was heckled for being complicit in the conflict-jewelry industry. It isn't that I object to talking about making science friendlier to women, but there is a time and a place. Must we evaluate every event based on its implications for gender equity? Can't we grant that's an important issue, but also that it isn't appropriate to raise in every possible circumstance, or at least this one?

A: There are, in fact, lots of times I see affronts to gender equity and let them pass unremarked upon. All women do. Here, the very impressiveness of Matt Taylor's achievement meant that he was speaking to an audience much larger than scientists normally reach. He was unusually prominent in shaping the impressions young people have of the scientific community. If one is concerned with women facing obstacles in scienceif an obstacle is that they feel unwelcome in the male-dominated culture of scienceof course one would find an unusually high-profile illustration of that culture's pathologies an apt moment to speak up! Doing so hardly implies a belief that the guy's shirt should overshadow his achievement. I made one critical observation!

B: Fair enough. But was it really aimed at a significant illustration of the scientific community's pathologies? Would any young woman actually decide against becoming a scientist because some old spacecraft dude wore a naked-lady shirt instead of a white lab coat? I highly doubt that the dress of scientists is responsible for the dearth of women in the field. And I wonder if by focusing on what's basically a sui generis offense against good taste you aren't obscuring the real factors that keep women underrepresented. I don't know what they are. But consider other fields, like entertainment, where women are objectified far more frequently and prominently, often with images more graphic and demeaning than anything on that tame shirt. Yet women continue flocking into all parts of the entertainment industry, even women critical of how other women are treated in it. You're making women in science seem like they're unusually delicatelambasting a scientist for his clueless fashion sense even as America's girls are being raised on, e.g., virulently anti-woman raps you've never condemned.

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Why a Shirt With Scantily-Clad Women Caused an Internet Fight