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I'm not sure what the alternative is. It seems to me like all of the problems with liberalism amount to "what if people try to impose not-liberalism?" Which, sure, difficulty practically implementing a set of ideals is a form of criticism against it. We should try to uphold liberalism, and when people try to tear it down and create unfair and unequal laws and norms we should oppose them and maintain the liberal order. That's how you uphold any order. The solution to "people trying to stop liberalism" certainly isn't "voluntarily stop liberalism", that's just surrendering immediately.
And even if you make some other order, it doesn't escape "what if people complain" unless you suppress them somehow, like if the alternative is "uphold a brutal dictatorship where we genocide anyone who opposes our regime" which tries to prevent dissidents from organizing that way. But that seems like a bad society that I don't want to live in, even if the dictator happens to share my skin tone.
But the problem is that any ideology or system of government has to survive contact with actually-existing human beings. People are telling you that the problem with liberalism is that it requires a population that is pretty much 100% virtuous, and you’re saying, “Well, that’s a problem with people, not with liberalism!” But of course liberalism is (ostensibly) designed to govern humans! Not angels.
So, if our historical experience with liberalism has (for the sake of argument) shown us that liberalism is particularly vulnerable to manipulation by coordinated illiberal campaigning by groups claiming victimhood, that is actually potentially a major flaw in the system as designed.* Your system has to have sophisticated ways built-in to identify when such a thing is happening and to muster resources in a coordinated way to prevent it. And if one of liberalism’s central flaws is that it makes it difficult for a government to do that (because it assumes everyone will act like rational individuals maximizing their own well-being, and it in turn seeks to give them the maximal freedom to do so) then it seems like zealous supporters of liberalism are simply resigned to the fact that their society will go through period cycles of the same pattern, without a way to stop it. (Because to do so would be illiberal.)
Liberalism is just an abstraction, created by specific people at a specific time. It’s not imbued with some divine essence that makes it the best of all possible models for society. If it has serious flaws and failure modes which keep recurring, that seems to be a good reason to reassess it with a critical eye. If liberalism is proving unequipped to deal effectively with the specific issues facing a specific population, then why is it so bad to consider replacing it with another model which might be better for the historical and political moment in which we actually find ourselves?
The alternative, of course, is finding some way to actually alter humans in a comprehensive way such that they become more suitable citizens for a liberal government. One could point to eugenics (coercive or otherwise), mass cultural reprogramming via media and censorship, or mass incarceration of criminals. But, of course, those would all be illiberal means in order to remake humanity in liberalism’s image — and I know that many devoted acolytes of liberalism such as yourself will balk at them for this reason.
These are some good points, and I notice some parallels to arguments against Communism that I definitely agree with when applied there. If your thing can't be implemented then it's pointless to try, as the expected value of trying is equal to the weighted sum of the outcomes that probabilistically occur. But I'm slightly more skeptical when applied here, mostly because we observe the actual historical track record of it and its alternatives. Capitalism when implemented leads to mass prosperity for most people, but also mass inequity (though the poor tend to be much richer than they were before the new development), while Communism leads to genocide and mass poverty (and also moderate inequity).
Meanwhile, liberalism seems to mostly work most of the time, with comparatively manageable bugs. For hundreds of years since the enlightenment, we have (usually) not had wars of Protestants and Catholics murdering each other in the streets. We have mostly not had Jihads and Crusades of Muslims and Christians running around America slaughtering each other en masse. We have mostly not had lynchings and race wars, in the most literal sense of fielding armies with generals and battlefields. Collectivist illiberal violence is measured in the ones or tens instead of the thousands or millions. When you look at illiberal societies like the Nazis or the Colonial Monarchies or all of the Old pre-enlightenment civilizations you see wars and bloodshed and slavery and oppression on huge scales, justified largely on the basis of illiberal intolerance. Almost certainly secretly motivated largely due to economic demand for more land, but morally justified to the people and thus enabled on the basis of intolerance.
I think saying liberalism doesn't work is an overreaction to wokeism as a temporary phenomenon. It's a cancer, but I don't think it's a terminal case. Liberalism as defined by the enlightenment has kind of sort of worked for hundreds of years, gradually getting better and more refined, and most of the things it has caused have improved the world. There are bugs and issues and overreaches that have made things worse, but only in comparison to a hypothetical better liberalism that keeps 90% of its features and discards the 10% bad ones, not some brand new overhauled system that tosses it all away and starts from scratch.
In the end, I think your arguments about practicality work against you here. Hypothetically a totalitarian regime with eugenics, mass cultural reprogramming, mass incarceration etc led by a perfectly benevolent AND perfectly competent god-king who used them for the greater good would be better than what we have now. But in practice trying to implement that would be rolling a d20 and hoping for a nat 20, while all other results will lead to corruption, abuse, and most likely genocide (of the more violent sort, not mere sterilizations). Liberalism's got the better track record here.
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If it's not-liberalism, why does it have such a huge backing from people calling themselves liberals?
Because the entire tactical advantage of wokeism is that instead of the old style of racism, which everyone agrees is bad, it's racism which is really really really good at camouflaging itself. Which means pretending to be "liberals" while condemning the actual liberals who have existed for decades.
I'm afraid you'll step me through that one. What's so good about the camouflage? It seems to consist of saying blatantly racist things, and screaming until anyone who objects gets fired.
I thought it was something more like centuries?
I'm not entirely sure, I'm mostly making this claim on the basis of observation. A lot of people are convinced by it, therefore by definition it is very convincing. I don't think I fully understand it, but I think a large part of it is a mastery of Motte and Bailey tactics. There's a subset of aggressive lunatics who use fully woke ideas to cancel people and commit violence, a subset of humanities academics and mainstream media who are really good at manipulating language and public consensus who launder woke ideas as liberal ideas, a large subset of moderates who think mostly reasonable liberal thoughts but don't think very hard and believe the laundered ideas. And there's also a complementary set of classical racists and sexists who get outraged at all of the woke ideas but voice their outrage in very awful ways so the media have a scapegoat to point at. Whenever the woke do something outrageous the more principled liberals and the racists both get upset, and the media can just point at the latter as examples of people being upset at wokeism.
I'm not entirely sure why wokeism in particular is so good at this as opposed to any other movement in the present or past. Maybe it is a unique failing of liberalism that allows for this exploit. "Pretend to be tolerant and falsely portray your enemies as intolerant so you can justify your intolerance against them" only works in a society that values tolerance. But if we generalize it further, maybe it's not so unique. The camouflage of "Pretend to be X which is seen as good so you can tarnish your opponents as not-X and therefore evil, even if they're actually more X than you" is a strategy that has been tried and worked many times in the past. Inquisitions allowed evil and cruel people pretending to be good Christians to persecute and do very un-Christian things to people they didn't like. The Red Scare allowed people to accuse others of being communists do very authoritarian and un-American things to people they didn't like. The Pharisees pretended to be good Jewish followers of God and persecute people they didn't like. The esteem given to the Catholic Priesthood allowed pedophiles to slip in and molest children, relying on the high esteem to keep them above question. Any time you have a class of people generally considered "good", bad people will want to camoflage themselves under that label to avoid criticism for their misbehavior. So wokeism might just be the most recent example of this succeeding. But I call it really really good at it because unlike some examples (like the Catholic Priest one), it can get called out and noticed for what it's doing and still get away with it by opposing its detractors directly instead of merely relying on stealth alone. You can point out exactly what they're doing and how, a moderate but naive liberal can read literally everything I just wrote and still not really believe what's going on because it's complicated enough that they either don't understand or are not convinced by the evidence. For some reason. I'm don't fully understand it myself because from my perspective it's clear. But it's not merely a lack of intelligence, because lots of smart people are similarly unconvinced. Whatever the woke are doing, it works to convince lots of people, otherwise it would not have gotten away with so much for so long, it would have died shortly after people noticed.
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