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There is, in fact, an American legal theorist whose name escapes me that argued something along the following lines: All judicial/legal decisions have no basis in reason or rationality, they are simply the product of the dominant ideology. He notes that this would mean people can do whatever they want if they are responsible for doling out legal rulings.
My apologies, I meant that he championed the idea of doling out politically desirable legal rulings under this reasoning. He was unrepentantly the kind of leftist a stereotype might be made about: that of the power-hungry kind who doesn't care what they destroy as long as it suits their political goals.
This, in my opinion, is why you will lose if you try using Critical Theory against its progressive users. They are already aware that you can use their rhetorical tools against them, and they are quite good at using their own power to ensure you can't challenge them effectively in this manner. Go ahead and publish your piece or blog post that details their own failings under Critical Theory and see how far that gets you.
The mistake in your argument, I think, is thinking that they care at all how much they are subject to Critical Criticisms. The people you are talking about have a goal in mind: install progressive thoughts about race, gender, sex, sexual relations, etc. across the minds of the population. Critical Theory is not a rationalist project seeking to be maximally truth-seeking, it was founded by activists very much trying to generate an academic "theory" for convincing people of their ideology.
Does this make them bad people? Only to the extent that people who earnestly believe in an ideology want to convert others to it are also evil.
I've written a set of posts about Critical Race Theory that you may find interesting if you want to know more, as there is some discussion about Critical Theory in the posts and comments.
I appreciate the link, I'll have to spend more time digging through the previous sections but the page you linked helps me understand where you're coming from.
There are a few threads that interest me that I think expose weaknesses in CRT related to your reply here.
If you accept the capture of French philosophy and academic elites by communism in the 60's as analogous to CRT, its collapse could point to similar ways CRT could collapse in the future. And part of that was surely the political situation, but I'm also curious how much of that was Foucault, who possibly gave the academics something to "chew on", a less obviously activist, more wide-ranging theory. I'm sure that's a simplification, but I do think there was this kind of new breed with him and others of something more sophisticated that allowed communism to be kind of moved on from, something passe.
As far as the abusers go of critical theory, like that legal theorist, I'm curious how much that is a kind of perversion or simplification of something that is more useful when treated with maturity, and not just useful to the left, but against the left's power. And it doesn't necessary have to be useful in a sense of persuading them, but instead of disillusioning its sort of fair-weather followers potentially.
The other thing is something that I've had a hard time expressing, but I feel like CRT can't escape it's intellectualist roots, which is a point of failure it shares with communism. It wants to be pure activism, all about changing minds, but its identity demands that it take an intellectual root, and it sort of has to assume that the most effective activism is intellectual (or even pseudo-intellectual) activism, which I think is far from true, because I think you can argue most people bounce off that kind of thing, if not now then after it outstays its welcome.
Anyway I'll read your other posts but those are the threads of thought I've been pursuing
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