What happened to Ross Douthat? The youngest and yet most archaically conservative of The New York Times’ opinion columnists, Douthat appears to have gone rogue. In a series of posts this month, he has taken aim at cultural misogyny, an odd tack from a traditionalist like Douthat. Add this to his April 20 column, “Marx Rises Again,” in which he muses hopefully about the future of communism, and if this were the 1950s, he would be awaiting his summons from the House Un-American Activities Committee. But Douthat’s transformation isn’t just a matter of personal conscience; it’s a sign that the 20th century culture war — between liberals and conservatives — is over, and a new one is just beginning.

Some liberal commentators don’t believe in the veracity of Douthat’s turn, but a close look at his writing shows a definite change in his thinking on gender relations. In a 2009 column, he praised director Judd Apatow as the great white hope of American cultural conservatism: “By marrying raunch and moralism, Apatow’s movies have done the near impossible,” he wrote then. “They’ve made an effectively conservative message about relationships and reproduction seem relatable, funny, down-to-earth and even sexy.” Movies such as “Knocked Up” and “The 40-Year-Old Virgin” propagated the Douthat-approved idea that unappealing men stuck in extended adolescence could still choose marriage, family and responsible citizenship. Five years later, Douthat is furthering the notion that Apatow’s films are not only misogynist, but also part of a culture that’s directly responsible for Elliot Rodger’s murder of six people in Isla Vista, California. “A ‘strident’ and ‘scolding’ feminism is often straightforwardly correct,” he wrote in a follow-up blog post. What changed?

The most important difference between 2009 and today is that conservatives officially lost the culture war. In the past few years, public support for both marijuana legalization and same-sex marriage has surpassed 50 percent, with no indication that these trends are likely to reverse. Women make up more than half of the professional and technical workforce. It’s a midcentury Christian conservative’s worst nightmare: The country has been overrun by pot-smoking gays and women’s libbers. Cultural liberalism won, and there’s nothing Douthat or his pious brethren can do about that.

But there are discontents still; portions of the radical left have long pursued their own case against liberalism. Instead of the “permissiveness” that Douthat constantly gripes about, the left sees an oppressive consumer culture of compulsory sexuality, where you can buy anarchy and peace, but only as sickly sweet body sprays. It’s a culture that tells women they can wear anything, as long as they stay on the sexual market — so it had better not be a hijab. It’s a culture that tells men they can have anything they want — attention, validation, sex, free labor — as long as they learn to take it from women. This is not our shining sexual liberation, this is a culture that reflects and reinforces the brutal economy beneath it.

That is the terrain where the left will fight the new culture war, and the realignment is already started. Pope Francis has — at least rhetorically — rejected his office’s past cultural conservatism in favor of attacking the rich and the vicious global order they impose on the poor. “If every action has its consequences, an evil embedded in the structures of a society has a constant potential for disintegration and death,” he wrote — not about homosexuality or abortion or divorce, but about capitalism. “It is evil crystallized in unjust social structures, which cannot be the basis of hope for a better future.” The pope himself has declared capitalism to be in contradiction with the commandment “Thou shalt not kill.”