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Can't appeal to the dead white patriarchs , they're racist. Can't appeal to a defense of Christendom (even if that weren't verboten, Russia is still Christian), the only civilizational throughline left are platitudes we get from cultural consumption of deliberately watered down and simplistic media.
You could argue it the other way: those personalities didn't exist because they were far less adept at social engineering.
The increase in modern state capacity has dovetailed quite well with the Rousseauian/early liberal impulse that society is responsible for many of man's ills and these ills can be cured with more intervention and the general optimistic view about the perfectibility of man.
The state today is ludicrously more powerful and has aided along major changes in daily life, so the thinking goes: why could it not just fix all those other endemic social ills like inequity in dating? Beyond that, modern systems' tolerance for deviance may allow these people to fit more appropriate niches than before*
I think this is silly for a variety of reasons, but I imagine that's a major factor in making people like the above who blithely assume enough "raising awareness" or "activism" will resolve any issue they don't like.
* It's hard to determine how much freedom merely releases people to do what they always would have wanted or creates new impulses they then mistakenly see as immovable
His appeal includes William Wallace, though. Read literally, this would be an appeal to a dead white patriarch. Of course it's not meant to be read as referring to William Wallace the actual historical figure but William Wallace played by Mel Gibson in a Mel Gibson movie, but Mel Gibson is a living white patriarch, an outspoken Christian and, outside of his movie career, often remembered for getting plastered and going off about the Jews while resisting arrest.
Most of the movie figures he's referring are white guys created by white guys, too, apart from some of the Avengers, the non-specifically indigenous Na'vi, and JK Rowling as the creator of Harry Potter (and of course even in that case we're hardly talking about a creator beloved by the woke people, to put it mildly).
Sure, you might argue that it's "watered down and simplistic", but the reference is still to a certain kind of watered down and simplistic material (and it's not like history's appeals to dead white patriarchs or Christendom were particularly complex, either.
Scotland got snuffed out as an independent nation before it could do any imperialism.
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Fair enough. I will say you've touched on part of the difference (another important one being that apparently people don't see it as part of their project - as they do with American founding fathers - to undercut the hagiographic and anachronistic view put forward by Gibson because...it's not a live American issue)
There I have to say: meh, less convincing. It's not the same as appealing to Ben Franklin or Thomas Jefferson. I edited it from "dead white men" to "patriarchs" specifically to emphasize I meant the founders or central figures in the national myths (which, in America, seems forever subject to "problematization")
Harry Potter and Churchill are both famous, but in different ways.
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