Thread by @wesyang

Ruy Teixeira interviewed in Persuasion on the "boutique social liberalism that is much more common in elite circles":

"They don't want to defund the police -- but they're against police brutality."

The Successor Ideology has never been popular -- it has always been a free rider on broader trends toward tolerance and egalitarianism.

It is an avant-grade that, like other avant-gardes, has pushed into cannibalizing its own professed values in its zeal to dictate outcomes

The ideology seeks control of elite spaces and is very good at obtaining it by morally blackmailing liberals into acquiescence -- even within the "elite", a supermajority dislike it, but effectively none can resist it.

But it seeks, and is on the cusp of obtaining, the ability to shape the new generation in its image by starting with the young, first in elite private schools, where the succession has already happened, tomorrow in urban public schools.

Virtually no one who "opposes police brutality but doesn't want to defund police" supports the panopoly of other transformations that they tacitly lend their support for when they vote for the party in which the woke are structurally embedded

This is not necessarily a reason to vote against Democrats -- but it is a reason to support the forces promising a pushback against the Woke within that party.

We'll see if such a pushback emerges. I am skeptical it will, but open to the possibility that those privately assuring me it would happen weren't bullshitting me.

I consider "boutique social liberalism" to be a prettifying euphemism for a doctrine rooted in the teachings of Foucault, Fanon, Paolo Freire, Catherine MacKinnon, and the social thought of the Weather Underground, all of which openly abjure liberalism.

But there is a grim fascination in the way such adversary doctrines have been retconned into a new social gospel that has hijacked the traditional moral gatekeeping class

There is something peerlessly funny about it -- one must maintain one's sense of irony and the absurd, and all the more so in the face of those who have absolutely none about themselves...

One thing is clear: the purely "concern trolling" approach -- "you won't win this way" will be insufficient.

The truth is "the total victory you are working tirelessly in pursuit of would be a practical and moral calamity" is closer the truth that we must be willing to say.