The Republican Party divide is not about politics. It’s about culture.

Yet Greene appears to have faced less opposition from her colleagues than did Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), whose vote to impeach President Donald Trump for inciting the violence at the Capitol last month threatened her position among the party’s House leadership. Cheney’s position is both defensible and has been defended — but more than 60 of her colleagues voted Wednesday night to strip her of her role. Republicans will be asked Thursday whether Greene should be booted from congressional committees for her comments, a vote for which Republican support is likely to be far more robust.

There are a lot of threads winding through all of this. Speaking to the caucus Wednesday, Cheney was unrepentant, while Greene was to some extent contrite. That Greene’s most controversial comments came before she took office gives her party the same sort of out it’s leveraging for Trump’s impeachment trial: How can one hold an elected official to account across the public-private boundary? The party is also happy to outsource the accountability effort to Democrats who are pushing for the committee ouster. They get to say that Greene paid a price but blame Democrats for exacting it.

All of this has been framed broadly as a debate over how Trumpian the Republican Party will be over the immediate future. It’s an appealing and comprehensible structure that aligns nicely with the debate itself: Will the party be angrier at the representative critical of Trump’s behavior or the one who emulated it, with Trump’s support?

But that framing is incomplete. The real fight is over what the GOP will become: a party that focuses on a political ideology or a party that focuses on a cultural one?

Cheney and Greene are simply proxies for these positions. A poll from Axios conducted by SurveyMonkey shows that a plurality of the country has no opinion of either member. More than half of Republicans say they don’t know enough about Greene to have an opinion of her. Democrats have strongly negative opinions of Greene, probably a function of the attention her comments have gotten on the left. (This isn’t abnormal: A poll in March 2019 found that Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) was much better known by Republicans given the attention paid to her in conservative media.)

When Republicans were asked whose views they found more appealing, Cheney’s or Greene’s, 8 in 10 either had no preference or didn’t know enough to say — suggesting a broad lack of familiarity with the debate that’s underway.

So let’s back up.

Trump won the Republican nomination in 2016 largely because he, unlike the Republicans he was running against, was eager to embrace the cultural feuds that were the currency of conservative media. He wasn’t a politician with proposals for fixing the country; in fact, he actively scoffed at the idea that voters cared about policy papers. Instead, he pledged to fight the Democrats tooth and nail where policy and culture met: immigration, the ever-looming threat of terrorism, abortion. His presidency delivered on that promise, leveraging the power of the office to undermine and goad the left, even while he paid little attention to actual governance.

“Trumpism” is best seen as being less about Trump than about the cultural fight that he moved to the forefront of Republican politics. This approach holds a lot of appeal for a lot of people, particularly members of Congress who have little hope of passing legislation even if they wanted to. Why not then use your position to camp out on Fox News, a la Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), or to build a name for yourself as a gun advocate in the manner of Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.)?

If you look at the defenses of Greene, you see how this culture war runs as an undercurrent. Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) was on Fox on Wednesday, not defending Greene specifically but instead rolling criticism of her into the broader right-wing narrative about “cancel culture,” this loosely formed idea that people will be targeted and oppressed by the powerful for holding aberrant views. According to Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.), who was in the room at Wednesday’s private meeting with the House Republican steering committee, Greene herself made a similar pivot when she apologized for the things she had said.

In other words, the long-term problem isn’t that Greene had once claimed that a laser controlled by a Jewish cabal had caused forest fires in California to build a high-speed rail system. The problem, instead, is that Republicans might be forced from the public sphere for offering such opinions.

Cultural fights are a sugar rush. It’s hard to pass legislation, particularly when you’re in the minority, but it’s also hard to evaluate political subjects and derive consensus approaches to problems which can be fixed through legislative action. It is, however, very easy to tweet, and it is very easy to get on Fox News to decry what liberals are up to.

For Fox News, the same calculus applies. It’s a lot easier to have an opinion on cancel culture than it is to have an opinion on the merits of a coronavirus relief package. Particularly when facing surging competition from the right that is entirely predicated on fighting over culture, it would be hard for Fox to avoid joining in. So, as Media Matters’s Matt Gertz pointed out Thursday, Fox has spent 40 percent more time debating cancel culture since Biden took office than it has the federal budget deficit, once a mainstay of its coverage.

This is the fight. Is the party a party that looks askance at a president who lies repeatedly about the results of an election in an effort to hold power and which then leads to violence? Is it a party where there can be a difference of opinion on such subjects? Or is it a party where the fight is always about what the left is doing and how the opposition is a cabal of socialists hellbent on destroying the country?

Greene won national attention and then her seat not despite her focus on cultural fights but because of how earnestly she engaged in them. Her campaign featured an ad in which she held a rifle while pledging to “take our country back” from those who want to “rip our country apart” — including images of Ocasio-Cortez and Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.).

As she faced criticism for her past comments this week, Greene disparaged the Democratic caucus in virulent terms. Democrats, she wrote, “are only set out to destroy Republicans, your jobs, our economy, your children’s education and lives, steal our freedoms, and erase God’s creation.”

This, one assumes, wasn’t part of her contrition. Instead, it is the Republican Party’s apparent chosen path forward.