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The confusion comes from the fact that the word mostly gets used by far-leftists to refer to people like Hilary Clinton, which gives everyone else the impression that the term means something like "deep Democrats who want to regulate everything to death". I basically never see it used for people like Reagan or Thatcher except in exactly this scenario of explaining what neoliberal really means.
I always got the impression that the dissident right thinks of neoliberals as "socially liberal, economically conservative". Ergo, allowing corporations more latitude to exploit workers and push for stuff like LGBT, abortion, etc. because "they want the labour force completely atomised from traditional social relations and derive all its identity from its career and place in the firm". This is a very common line among right coded tankies. I suppose there's some truth to it, but I suspect the "real reason" why wokeism is pushed so hard is no single reason at all. There is no Machiavellian scheme behind any of this, just some people (especially from the urban middle class) with whom there is legitimate purchase of wokeness because they see it as the next wave of progressivism which has already been the dominant ideology for decades, companies and public figures that parrot whatever's the most fashionable in elite consensus, activist types who will themselves to believe in this, casuals who just about believe the first thing they see in the headlines, and dissidents who are frustrated with it all.
I suspect the exact opposite. No one was seeing wokeness as the next wave of progressivism at the beginning, even pointing at it would get you accused of weak-manning or nut-picking. Even if you were paying attention to nothing other than /r/ssc /r/themotte, you could see wokeness bubbling up towards the top, the attempts to hand-wave it away going from "it's just a couple of crazy kids on tumblr" -> "it's just a couple of crazy kids on university campuses" -> "it's just some Karens in HR (but Damore had it coming, BTW)" -> "it's just a couple of cynical CEOs insincerely mouthing woke slogans" (<-- you are now here), you could see it seizing the reins of power, and imposing itself on the masses.
I think the only reason people come up with these mundane non-Machiavellian explanations, is that it allows them to position themselves as non-supporters of wokeness, without becoming it's opponents. It's the most comfortable spot for a lot of people, as declaring yourself as a supporter requires you to commit to some amount of self-flagellation (not to mention having to answer for all the crazy stuff being pushed by governments, companies, ngo's and activists), but coming out as an opponent gets you branded as a rightoid, even if you're otherwise an outright communist, and there's nothing worse than being a rightoid.
I suppose a counterpoint to the 2nd paragraph would be that it's also comforting to blame a select few groups for the cultural crisis, but it's much more black pilling to believe that a sizable chunk of the masses isn't merely being misled, but is very much within its own agency when it demands more wokeness. And to some extent, what's most fashionable among the woke urban middle class does seem to direct the conversation. For instance, throughout the last decade, it was all feminism that was pushed so aggressively as the centrepiece of woke. Culminating into MeToo which went on until 2019. It's still being pushed of course, but the spotlight is on BLM since the George Floyd protests and the whole "Defund the police" campaign. I just cannot rationalise such a scheme without making it seem even sillier. There does seem to be some pressure from below.
Well, you're a bit behind the times, because even BLM fell out of fashion post-Rittenhouse, it's all about trans issues now, which will also fall out of fashion because of the medical scandal around transgender care for minors.
I sympathize with the pushback against being psychologized, since as you rightly point out this is something anyone can do to anyone, but in my opinion the mundane theory just doesn't hold water. If there was pressure from below, you shouldn't have seen accusations of of nut-picking in the past. If there was pressure from below you shouldn't see wokeness having to rely on censorship, shadow-banning, and algorithmic supression. If there was pressure from below, you should see that Harry Potter game bomb in terms of sales, and fuddy-daddy game journos struggling to explain it. Everything about these mundane explanations flies in the face of observable reality.
It seems pretty brilliant from where I sit. It's like fighting a hydra, for every head you chop off, two new ones take it's place.
What is the end goal of all this, in your view? Culture wars to avoid a class war? If so, why now and not, say, 20 years ago?
The end goal, or the likely outcome?
The end goal is obvious. A prosperous, equitable society free of injustice, poverty and oppression.
The likely outcome is a very large pile of skulls, when society passes some critical point and abruptly and catastrophically decoheres. Most, perhaps all of the precursors for that eventuality are already baked in to our social reality; we're now just rolling the dice until we hit snake-eyes.
Why not twenty years ago? Because that's how policy starvation works. Twenty years ago, or fifty for that matter, the easy, palatable solutions hadn't been discredited yet, so people overwhelmingly went with them rather than with the ravings of the extremists. After decades of effort those moderate solutions all failed and were discredited, so now consensus is falling in behind the radicals. The radicals are likewise failing, and so soon it will be the super-radicals and so on. Since their goal isn't actually possible, it will simply go on in this fashion until the system as a whole runs out of capacity to absorb the strain.
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Answering that would require greater insight into society, and how it's run, than any of us can plausibly get, but something like avoiding class war does feel plausible to me. But the question of "why now" doesn't feel that relevant to me. Maybe they just didn't get the idea yet? Maybe it's a question of logistics - for certain things to happen, certain other things have to have happened before, and we weren't at that point yet? Maybe in the past class war itself served the same function that wokeness does now, but it got a bit out of hand, and had to be replaced?
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