If you paid any attention to what the talking heads driving the culture war discourse in the US have openly said about what they have been doing, it's obvious that the "culture war" is about as much the fault of progressives as the Ukraine war is the fault of Ukraine. "DEI" and "wokism" is just the current designated battleground after drag queens, "CRT", "BLM" and masks/vaccines. The goal is to frame non-issues as apocalyptic imminent threats in order to create political momentum for otherwise unpopular politics of rolling back civil justice advancements (e.g. gay rights, reproductive rights, Black rights, women's rights).
War does not lead to technological progress. War accelerates technological progress. A majority of groundbreaking research happens outside the private sector and war economies usually see more direct state control of the economy and more state involvement in R&D, supported by heavy public spending. If you want to take a lesson from war driving technological progress, you could just do this in peace times.
It sounds like the peace time decadence is not kerfuffles over pronouns but entertaining a privatized economy concerned more with ROI for investors than contributing to a shared public effort.
