You’ll get no defense from me of wokeness or political correctness. I regard these as feminizing, infantilizing cults and symptoms of neo-aristocratic decadence. In my writings on politics, though, I try to see through the conventional political labels because they obfuscate. I understand your distinction between classical and progressive liberals, but I don’t think it gets to the heart of the problem.

Take your classic liberal solution to education of the poor. The classic liberal tendency is to appeal to the market in the libertarian manner, to shrink the size of government, privatize as much as possible, and let the market’s magic sort it out. That’s what’s happened in the American public school system at large. The problem, of course, is that there’s little profit to be made in building schools for the poor because they can’t afford excellent services. So, the money goes to richer neighbourhoods, and the rich kids get better educations than the poor. Government funding dries up because the taxes are insufficient (because as Ronald Reagan said, government is the problem.)

Now, you’d disagree with this because you take as axiomatic that ‘classical liberals believe in equal opportunity and the goal is to try to fix “the system” to provide that…progressives believe in equal outcomes and so they “cheat” by using racism to achieve that.’ But we disagree there. Early modern liberals didn’t believe in establishing equal opportunities. They left women and minorities out of their picture of personhood. The fact is that our opportunities are naturally unequal.

I’ve argued at length in my political writings that so-called classical liberalism/libertarianism reduces to social Darwinism. The key dichotomy, then, is between humanists and animalists. Progressives are humanists who think all people have rights to be happy, to find love, and to have a good life. The progressive humanist thinks it’s a horrific tragedy when anyone’s left behind. If the market ignores anyone’s plight, government must step in.

By contrast, animalists or social Darwinians (effectively all so-called conservatives and libertarians, regardless of their rhetoric) think there are no such equal rights so we should let nature or the will of the gods take its course in society, sorting us into castes, masters and slaves, and dominance hierarchies as the case may be.

The rotting away of schools for the poor is thus a sign of success in conservative or classic liberal terms because that’s nature’s will as determined by the free (wild, pitiless, uncoordinated) market. These paleoliberals or conservatives are opposed to equal outcomes not just because they think government is an imperfect mechanism, but because they’re secretly social Darwinian, or what I call “animalists.” They don’t believe in the rights of personhood. If they did, they’d be appalled by the grotesque social inequalities thrown up by evolution and by the free market that’s supposed to ape natural selection.

I don’t think humanism entails that everyone should have exactly equal possessions or outcomes, as in communism or some draconian dystopia. Instead, equal opportunities should be preserved to prevent or to mitigate total failures, so that no people should have to live like animals in the limited time they have as living beings. Capitalistic egoism would let losers pay for their failures not out of some sense of justice, but because that kind of competition is animalistic. It reduces people to selfish, unenlightened animals that are blind to our shared existential condition.

If so-called progressive culture warriors are currently crazy cultists, that’s a response to the crazy cult of libertarian, neoliberal, laissez-faire capitalism which has predominated in the US since the 1980s. Wokeness is a desperate, toxically feminine reaction to the wild follies of toxic masculinity, of the predatory sociopathy and myopic greed that drive capitalistic competition and growth.