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Notes -
The 21st century escalation of the culture war is largely driven by social media. So a large part of the answer is "People engage in culture war because a small number of for-profit businesses show them that all the cool kids are engaging in culture war." Note show, not tell - social media algorithms curate your feed in a way which is optimised for engagement and ad revenue, and as part of that they are going to give you a potentially misleading impression of the kind of content your peers are posting.
Mark Zuckerberg burned the democratic commons in order to get people to click on more adverts. I actually believe this.
He certainly wasn't alone in this: Reddit and Twitter also made out like bandits, and I'm probably forgetting a few.
But it did seem a bit inevitable: the seeds were already there. Skirmishes had been ongoing for decades, even, in public fora. The Internet was the modern industrialism to the Culture War's WWI. But lots of people were happy to get rich as arms dealers.
Also, how do we get the equivalent of a treaty of Westphalia, not Versailles?
The reason why the treaty of Westphalia was able to put to rest the religious conflict was the underlying framework created by the Augsburger Religionsfrieden in the 16th century, later summarized as "cuius regio, eius religio", i.e., the secular ruler of a given place gets to choose its official faith. This was feasible for formal, organized religion in an illiberal feudal system, but is untenable for controversial memeplexes in modern western demcoracies as far as I can see.
I know I'm partially ignoring the metaphor here, but I think we should keep in mind that while the treaty of Westphalia may have concluded the Thirty Years' War, it neither prevented the increasingly large-scale wars that followed across Europe, nor did it keep the Germanies out of them.
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Not commenting on you in either way but I think believing:
vs.
is the primary division that makes somebody either 'centrist' or 'populist/far-/alt-/whatever-you-want-to-call-it'.
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