Of course, there is an irony here in that as a liberal, I'm just as much about generalizing my rules to everyone. But at least my rules mostly consist of leaving people alone. That just seems inherently safer - if someone wants people to interfere with them, this is easy to set up even if liberalism wins completely, whereas if someone wants to be left alone, this is basically impossible to set up if wokism wins completely. I think the prog left is a kind of liberalism that forgets that it can do damage, and so attempts to reorganize behavior on a society-wide scale. This can only end in backlash; then this backlash is used to create an outgroup.
I think that's right. I'd actually go one step further: it doesn't just forget it can do damage, it forgets it can have any effect at all.
That sounds strange, since most of what it does is identify problems and propose changes in the name of addressing them. But in practice, such proposals often seem to take for granted that (1) nothing anyone has done to address the problem in the past has had any effect, (2) nothing anyone else is doing to address it in the present is currently having an effect, and (3) the proposal in question will only be a partial solution at best.
For example, in a past life, some coworkers admitted that when they interviewed candidates, they illegally gave higher ratings to people from certain "underrepresented" groups. This was, nominally, meant to "correct for" discrimination against those groups, the existence of which they inferred from the company's diversity stats.
But they didn't think about whether any hypothetical past discrimination (which is what would've shown up in the present stats) had already been cleaned up by past efforts. They didn't think about whether anyone else in the hiring pipeline was also applying the same "correction" and making their efforts redundant. And they didn't think about how much "correction" they needed to apply to fit the amount of discrimination, or when they'd know it was time to stop.
I think they see themselves as Sisyphus, pushing a boulder up a mountain but doomed to never get it to the top, when in reality, they could've gone up to the top and down the other side without ever noticing. They decided which direction they had to push, closed their eyes, and haven't opened them since.