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I've shared my view of the unbalanced conflation of micro and macro aggressions, and that cancellation is conditioned by punitive competitiveness. But I've little doubt centrist liberals mainly want protection of their own autonomy and better elite managed and controlled speech.
Decades in liberal academia taught me the most powerful liberalism is the one capable of erasing any fingerprints of authoritarian agenda setting and post-deliberative censoriousness. That's the liberalism reeling and in shock, and mostly because its kingdom is shrinking.
Restoring that type of liberalism (not saying that should be the goal) means restoring conditions of economic growth and trusted meritocratic mechanisms that fund and staff ideological state apparatuses. Short of that, our longstanding, multiform legitimacy crisis will fester.
A lot of what we are dealing with stems from the collapse of the Reagan-Clinton synthesis which sought to stabilize opposition between colorblind conservatism and elite multiculturalism under neoliberal policy. I began writing about this almost 20 years ago in Black is a Country.
The blueprint from that period was pretty clear: limited ethno-racial diversification of professional spheres, fictitious, debt funded pathways to class mobility (via home ownership and tertiary education), and deepening immiseration and coercion of the multiracial poor.
