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To reply to both you and @RandomRanger, I concede that CW about power. What I was arguing was that it is not primarily about the allocation of resources, money.
I would still argue that the term zero-sum has all the wrong connotations. It vaguely implies rational actors competing over finite resources to maximize some utility function, like me bidding on a coconut you are selling.
In most cases, CW is not like this. The energy spent on fighting the bathroom wars is wildly out of proportion of the actual importance of that issue over the natural state of affairs (if you can somewhat pass and behave normally, you are fine, if you can't pass and/or spy on people, you get treated as a sex pest). The point of fighting the CW is not to achieve a grand strategic victory for your side, but to be seen by your peers fighting the CW. It is mostly performative.
Often, the behavior displayed is not about scoring a win for your side at the expense of the other side (zero sum), but purely on punishing the other side (negative sum). Getting someone for some tweet by doxxing them is a classic CW past-time, after all.
Consider abortion. Depending on whose side holds the majority, some states might allow all abortions up to birth, and some might ban all abortions. I propose that this is a lot worse in satisfying the aggregate preference of the Americans than a compromise solution based on a term limit.
Israel/Palestine is theoretically zero sum (only one side can control a given square meter of land, after all), but in practice it is vastly negative for both sides.
If the point of the CW was to achieve strategic victories for your side, e.g. a power struggle, then one would expect that it would be mostly fought over stuff which actually mattered, and money would be a central angle. People would try to build broad coalitions which would gain them small policy victories. This is not what we are seeing. Instead, we see an outsized focus on small but very emotionally charged theaters, and a trend to prefer the humiliation of members of the other side to actual policy victories.
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