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Notes -
The progressive today is not the progressive of yesteryear, just as the cause to be championed changes from year to year. Yet the patterns repeat because the lessons are never learned, for This Time It Is Different.
The pattern OP rightly observes is that a disenfranchised group is championed by a vanguardist element (the vanguardist is typically a member of an elite class unable to function within elite society due to scarcity or more likely incompetence) as a morally righteous party whose interests must be advanced no matter the cost to current society, with the vanguardists administering said advancement and adjudication of costs/benefits. The whole point, now as in the past, is to allow the vanguardists a permanent hand on the lever of power, and the championed must be incapable of replacing the vanguardists hands with their own.
This is where the break point normally lies. It is easy to champion a group when said group is incapable of exercising their own agency and simply act as a formless mass to be grafted onto the vanguardist agenda, a silent blob that is asspuppeted for the vanguardist utopian dream. It is much less useful for the vanguardist when the blob finds its voice and says they actually like old system except with them on top, or that they like a new system but with the vanguardist removed.
@anti_dan below (above?) is right. The hated group is the animating force vanguardist progressives are trying to act against, not acting on behalf of a new downtrodden to be raised up. If progressives truly gave a shit about downtrodden marginalized oppressed you'd see much more support for copts, middle eastern jews, dayaks in East Malaysia, hindus in Bali, dalits in India... the list goes on. The progressives only seem to champion disenfranchised criminal minorities in their local sphere who need the guiding hand of the progressive, and this serves only to expand the list of groups who are the Hated Group. JK Rowling was the crazy woman who kept inserting weird racial minorities in Harry Potter long after she got her bag, now she's UltraTERF because she refuses to let men exploit womens only groups.
Progressives now, as in the past, fail to consider that the groups championed have their own agency, and can bite the hand on the leash as easily as choosing a new leash to be attached to based on their own preferences. The ANC suppressed necklacings primacy as a weapon only briefly under Nelson Mandela, with the EFF now looking longingly to restarting the practice. The SDS allied with the Black Panthers and were already suffering from internal splits thanks to Black Panthers eschewing socialist theory in favor of afrocentricism. The Iranian and Egyptian socialists joined hands with the Islamists only to be brutally suppressed by the Imams. The progressives of Europe opened the floodgates to refugees only to (continue failing to) discover that muslims love welfare, love raping nonmuslims, hate working and hate nonmuslims.
Whether progressives are aware that their ideas are not actually that popular or that their pets can and will rise up to advance their own interests is irrelevant. So long as an unsatisfied elite feels that they can exploit a wedge to upend the current hierarchy to put themselves on top, they will use that tool to the hilt. Right now the meta of Disparate Impact is still effective as a tool to be exploited to the hilt for DEI managers to continue creaming off the fat. Lets see if this state of affairs can continue.
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