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Notes -
Ironically enough, the woke succeeded partially by making this very argument. There was a long tradition in the Frankfurt School of actively trying to undermine liberalism, their explicit rationale being that "liberalism has failed before, therefore it can fail again; and we need to put in [authoritarian system] to maintain social order".
The example they loved to use in all of their writings was the liberal Weimar Republic being usurped by the illiberal Nazi Party, and they used this to argue that the liberal system was obviously insufficient to guard against such abuses. Their claimed solution to this problem was that the information environment needed to be selectively seeded with
propaganda"emancipatory" ideas which liberated people from their false consciousness, not terrible oppressive reactionary ones which maintained preexisting power structures and produced things like Nazism. Herbert Marcuse in particular loved using this argument, and it was so successful that it resulted in the domination of all of our major institutions by wokeness. They have become the "hegemonic power structure" they once criticised despite the fact that they are still masquerading as a subversive grassroots movement, their deep will-to-power makes them fail to abide by their own standards and instead suppress any kind of counter-narrative thought which might act as a check and balance to their worst impulses, and I think we both agree this was not a good thing in the slightest.I'm very aware of the many failure-modes of liberalism - they've been discussed here at length, and I think they have credence. My counter-question is "if we get rid of the woke, what do you propose to replace it with, and if you've discarded liberalism as an idea how do you plan not to fall into the same trap the woke did?" Because there's a real risk of that, and using the fact that authoritarian systems have managed to succeed in some places as a reason for why an illiberal ideology should be introduced is the root of many of the harmful social trends that are occurring today. The woke obviously thought they were doing good - virtually everybody who does harm thinks so. What kind of self-correction mechanism would this new proposed hypothetical system have to prevent false dogmas from going unchallenged? Because while the left's unhinged dogmas are most salient in today's environment, dogmatism is not the exclusive preserve of the left.
Of course, some very doomer part of me does indeed think all this debate is pointless and that people have an inherent bent toward constructing sacred cows and adopting them in a quasi-religious manner, so we're doomed to swing from dogmatic idea to dogmatic idea and the idea of constructing an environment meant to guard against any given ideology's worst tendencies is a utopian abstraction that will never materialise in the long run. As always, the only thing that ultimately matters in this dynamic is making sure you're the one on top.
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