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I've heard this "liberalism doesn't work" idea before, but never really been convinced by it. Equality of opportunity doesn't need to be taken so literally that you toss it all away when one person is born with 1 IQ point less than another. Treat people equally before the law, and generally socially and culturally. Treat people according to the content of their character, not the color of their skin. Most of the "counterarguments" I've heard are that if people are born with different talent or even just different inherited wealth from their parents then this doesn't work because they don't really have equality of opportunity, but... so what? If people are born with different circumstances then equality of opportunity doesn't inevitably lead to equality of outcome and that's okay. Set up a society in which everyone has an opportunity to thrive and carve out a happy healthy life for themselves, and let them sort themselves out. Maybe the 70 IQ person have a small apartment and a job at a fast food place while the 130 IQ person lives in a fancy manor and works at Google. Let them. I don't see how liberalism or the enlightenment prevent this. Instead, it is the regression from this ideal that wokeism represents that is the problem. We went from "people of the same skin color should share the blame and credit for each other's actions" to "people should be treated according to their own actions" back to "people of the same skin color should share the blame and credit for each other's actions". Wokeism is explicitly illiberal, not a failing of liberalism.
Are we pursuing equality, where in the case where there's an easily-predictable bimodal distribution of anti-social behaviors, imposing a law grants massive advantages to the group whose anti-social behaviors are less legible?
Or is the goal equity, where we acknowledge that legal equality is, in aggregate, going to create a power imbalance (and thus seek to install guardrails to limit that)?
I strongly disagree.
The entire goal of liberalism is to destroy the fact there's a distribution in the first place. That's why we impose equality before the law when this when the distribution splits across, say, sexes- we subsidize the high-performers in the [in aggregate] less productive sex at the cost of the [in aggregate] more productive one by permitting more mayhem by the low-performers in the [aggregate] less productive sex. Same with race, same with religion, same with everything else that's generally accepted as a consequence of the role of the cosmic dice.
Wokeism is the natural expression of the now-uncontrolled moral hazard created by this regime under the same banner of subsidizing the high-performers in the disadvantaged group (Exhibit A: "women in STEM", used as an excuse to have more women than men going to college for worthless degrees).
That's why the people who have a mind for equity find themselves drifting closer to the traditionalists, who for all their failings at least had a solution to the moral hazard- traditionalism finds itself more compatible with a surviving society by induction, but by its nature cannot inform how a thriving one should behave.
The woke can only be considered explicitly illiberal if they're aware the moral hazard exists and are trying to expand it. (Simply taking advantage of the fact it exists is only illiberal in the fact that the resultant untaxed [social] pollution causes [social] climate change to a point where the average member of society feels that the underlying cause of that pollution must be addressed before it destroys that society's ability to exist.)
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And what happens when a hugely disproportionate percentage of the people ending up with unfavorable outcomes are part of the same racial/cultural population? The ones who also coordinate culturally and politically with each other, and who just happen to all be directly descended from the people who were enslaved, and then after that legally shut out of higher education and positions of power? When those people start to notice this, which they will, do you expect them to take “so what?” as a satisfactory answer as to why no illiberal measures need to be pursued in order to redress their grievances?
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My rejoinder to that is how do you keep “equality before the law” and “judgement by content of character” and meritocracy? That’s where it all started. How do you keep untalented people who just happen to be minorities from crying “discrimination” when they’re passed over for promotion or don’t get into the college they want to etc.? How do you keep the government run by politicians running for office from turning directly to the racial spoils system and promising all kinds of set asides, promising to appoint a given group into high positions? How do you prevent those given high positions in government using that power to help their communities?
The seeds of such things are planted in the ideas of the liberal enlightenment. As is the eventual triumph of Islam, a religion that’s riding our religious neutrality straight to domination by the simple ploy of demanding we live up to religious tolerance while not giving us the same because they don’t actually believe kin that. I’m expecting Shariah to come to government Europe within a generation simply because secular state atheism coupled with liberal tolerance gives the west zero immune system for an ideology that uses their liberalism against them.
It requires belief in oneself, a firm hand, and commitment to the ideal.
You don't prevent them from crying discrimination. They're allowed to speak. And then you investigate in a fair and unbiased manner that neither privileges them nor disprivileges them in comparison to other races, and upon finding a lack of discrimination you dismiss the matter. If they keep whining you ignore them. They're allowed to whine, you're allowed to ignore their whining. Same way the law does when white people whine now. There are no exceptions to the rules.
In principle, you continue to hold to the ideals. Racial spoils are discriminatory and racist. Don't do that. In practice, it seems hard, but no harder than it would be in any other kind of system. How do you prevent the pre-enlightenment government from doing the same to their preferred demographic? I'm not sure how pointing to a flaw where the current system is being illiberal and say "see, liberalism doesn't work". Obviously we need more color-blindness not less. There are no exceptions to the rules.
Islam is especially illiberal and discriminatory and bad. The solution is to call them out and push them back instead of treating them as special victims who can do no wrong. Liberalism doesn't mean never being harsh to anyone, it means being harsh to someone if and only if the content of their character demands it. There are no exceptions to the rules.
The problems with wokeism are the abandonment of liberal ideals, not their continuation. I don't think this was inevitable, I don't think the seeds were planted long ago, and I don't think it's unavoidable. You simply do what liberalism actually says to do and don't be a hypocrite or a grifter. Now in practice convincing and/or forcing other people to go along with this is hard, but no harder than convincing and/or forcing people to go along with anything else that isn't immediately self-serving. So unless your proposed alternative is anarchy or some Randian "everyone act according to their own self interest at all times", it will run into the same problems of people trying to defect and exploit it for personal gain.
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