How sure are you that your enemy is committed to total war?

Because even if he’s not, once you start waging total war “in response,” he will be. 

For reasons I don’t totally understand, this kind of basic not-even-game-theoretical modeling-of-counterparty-incentives seems to have gone out of fashion, at least in the realm of culture war.  If I had to pick a culprit, I guess I’d go with the instant gratification that we’ve all gotten used to in the Diamond Age.  You try playing nice, and a week later it hasn’t totally changed the way your enemy does things, so you sigh and decide that it’s useless and that he’s just totally implacable. 

But culture does change, and it changes in response to things that happen in the discourse.  It even changes reasonably fast, in these hyperaccelerated days.  It’s just that even “reasonably fast” culture shifts take place on the scale of years or at least months.  (And, needless to say, they tend not to involve splashy satisfying victories where your enemies grovel in atonement.)