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Notes -
I recently read Hanania's year old post - The Problem with White Male Liberalism. Hanania steelmans the far-left ("woke") position:
meaning that the white male liberals that dominate liberal spheres have two positions:
They can bend over backward for diversity, which often means compromising their principles to achieve the right demographic balance.
Or they can ignore the issue, having no good answer to the question of why people should join a movement in which white males predominate.
Ignoring the gender issue and focusing solely on ethnicity, I'd counter that this isn't even historically true. Liberal movements have always been very welcoming to ethnic minorities. The original Enlightenment Thinkers were primarily Christian-raised-- and somehow years later you see liberal movements having a significant overrepresentation of Jews. I have no doubt that other outperforming minorities, such as Indians, will continue to punch above their weight in these movements as well. But somehow this fact gets ignored (even by liberals seeking to defend their inclusiveness) and to add to the complexity, any minority group that successfully assimilates into the elite just becomes viewed as "white" themselves (yes, I've even noticed immigrants to Silicon Valley referring to Asians and Indians as "white"), making white dominance of elite movements self-fulfilling.
More to the point, why is this even an effective attack (on the members)? Universal political and intellectual movements aren't going to be reflective of the overall population - they are going to skew toward intelligence, high class, and assimilation away from ethnic tribalism. Growing up in 2nd generation Asian majority schools in the Bay Area, there wasn't much surprise that (in the minority) white kids were the more liberal ones (e.g. more supportive of say gay marriage) -- they didn't have the same connection to conservative social values the 2nd gen immigrants had. And frankly, it really never seemed that important -- different demographic balances existed and if you were so weak-minded that you still were using activity participants' ancestral balance as a predictor for what you should be doing, you probably weren't going to be a non-conformist movement leader anyway.
This doesn't strike me as a steelman because it puts words in the mouths of the male liberals in question. Its only bending backwards if you assert that "Free speech, academic freedom, and colorblindness" are principles that they actually hold, or that subsuming those principles is in any way contrary to their world view. The liberals in question aren't "bending over backwards" at all.
Their answer is that everyone should join them and "progress" to the communist utopia at the end of the rainbow.
Because both sides of the argument are a part of the same religion and the attack operates on faith and emotion, not on logic or reasoning. The "moderates" here already accept all of the priors and share the ultimate goals of the woke. The woke are just calling the moderates out for being insufficiently faithful and the moderates are choosing to capitulate rather than become apostates.
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