Quote:
Originally Posted by CliffFletcher
That progress came about because of liberalism, not identity politics.
Society wasn't Woke to the dogma of a bunch of Marxist preaching about the structural power disparities maintained by the dominant group. People didn't compare women and men collectively, or heteros and gays collectively, and decided that imbalances needed to be corrected collectively.
What happened was conservative society treated women and gays and people of color differently that they treated men and white people and heteros. And by our liberal values we eventually came to see that was wrong. So we reformed our laws and societies to say it doesn't matter whether you're a women or a man, you can go to medical school. It doesn't matter whether you're white or black, you can get a bank loan and marry who you like. It doesn't matter if you're straight or gay, you can get married.
And people didn't have to like these changes. They only had to recognize that they had no right to legally suppress something just because they didn't like it. Because then society might come down on them for some identity or value or behaviour where they were in the minority.
This is the really important part that the illiberal left utterly fails to understand. Social conservatism isn't just bad because of the particulars of its credo. It's bad when it tries to impose its own values on others. And laws that treated whole groups of people badly weren't bad because those groups were marginalized. They were bad because they treated group identity as more important than individual identity.
The things that are most threatening to liberal democracy from the progressive left and the socially conservative right are the things they have in common: the pious, conformist group-think that subordinates individual freedom and choice to the will of the moral majority.
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Is that what happened,
Or did early activists obtain rights by fighting the power structures that were oppressing them. Once these initial disruptions occurred liberalism slowly allowed support for these ideas to spread. But the initial movements were ones of ideological purity intent on disruption of the status quo.