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The 1950s and 1980s were different eras, and you haven’t argued at all why we should see them as identical to today. Americans, even the progressive ones, used to have a healthy amount of trust in white identity and white civilization. Post-2010 progressivism does not. I mean assuming we are conflating liberalism with progressivism as everyone does today, then —
is incorrect. There is nothing the modern liberal hates more than the neutered ghost of WASPs and their perceived control over institutions which, statistically, does not exist. The current liberal fable is more like: Anglo-Saxons have ruined the country that black slaves mostly created, are predisposed to racism, and they will be saved by people of every race and nation unless we happen to stop liking Asians.
The new fable of the white Liberal is born from the same impulse that birthed the old ones. They just periodically update the flavor text to maintain social respectability. White liberals still believe that they are needed to save the world. The utopian ideal for a white liberal is a world ruled by POC that happens to conform to every single preference the white liberal has. They can't help it.
How is this not a typical white liberal daydream? They believe they have the answer to save the world. A multi race coalition. They imagine how it will function, what race will be the captain of the ship so on.(hint: it's a black woman with vitiligo) They get deep emotional glee from imagining themselves as a slightly lower rank person within a multi racial hierarchy. An advisor who, in the coalitions time of need, is the only one the captain can trust... or something.
I don’t think this makes sense when you factor in the confession of privilege, the insulting and denigrating of the privileged, and the guilt that the white liberal possesses. If the white liberal were motivated by status seeking and dominance, they would not accept being lowered in status and denigrated for their characteristics. This literally loses them social points, opportunities, resources, accolades. You would also, then, see more men rather than women become liberal, because men more than women are motivated by the pursuit of dominance.
And the explanation also doesn’t make sense because “self-aggrandizing fantasy” applies even more so to the conservative worldview. Conservatism in America boosts white status simply by not denigrating them. The only way to salvage the argument would be to claim that the white liberal is actually competing in status against the white conservative, but this is definitely not the case on college campuses where white liberalism flourishes. They are competing, in essence, against non-white liberals.
I find a much better explanation in, “they have genuinely been conditioned to dislike themselves because of incessant repeated negative association involving their characteristics”. This also explains why the “group favorability” survey shows that white liberals rate white people lower than other races. Then it explains why Jews are resilient to this, because so much of their religion is about ethnic pride and ethnic resilience.
I dispute your first point. The white liberal is still motivated by status seeking and dominance, but within their own ingroup. They are seeking status and dominance amongst other white liberals. They're not surrounded by non-whites and they see those people as powerless, what's the loss in status? As far as they're concerned, non-whites aren't even at the table, and they don't engage with them anyway so what's the point.
You can see this same phenomenon among Catholic flagellates who see it as a demonstration of piety and it was called out as status-seeking behavior among Jews in the Bible (Matt 6:2 - "when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on the street corners so they may be seen by men").
White liberals self-select. Go to any woke convention or conference and it's as white as the driven snow - this is especially ironic when comparing to the rainbow of diversity seen at /pol/ meetups.
Men more than women are motivated by the pursuit of dominance, true. But social dominance is, and has been, historically the arena of women.
To an extent, every subculture’s members compete over status and social dominance, even if they are at the lowest rung of society. Prisoners after all continue to compete over status. So while white liberals will compete amongst each other over who is more virtuous in relation to their ideology, it is still possible that the origin point of their ideology is informed more by actual belief rather than dominance. They belong to a subculture based upon a belief and “compete” over how well they measure up against each other. But what informs the belief first?
You see such a dynamic play out in the royal courts of kings. Those of lower rank compete against each other over approval by the higher rank. But they are not trying to dismantle the higher rank, and neither did they instantiate the higher rank themselves. In cases of extreme white progressivism, whites see themselves as eternally at a lower rank, similar to an ancient class system involving kings or nobles; they have internalized this, and now they compete for favorability. So they donate their money away, they will step down from their position if it means a minority can take their place (or they won’t accept it), they lobby against their own interests, they want their leaders to be non-white including in their own organizations.
They believe that white racism needs to be over-corrected, possibly forever. Minorities at the table aren’t enough.
Right but for another Catholic example, the social competition in the religion is over humility re God. (“The least among you shall be the greatest.”) In antiquity, those who were considered the most humble were seen as holy and praiseworthy, and martyrs (the most self-denying of the community) were said to have a “crown of victory” and were immortalized forever. This is a good demonstration of the complexity at play in ideological belief and peer conpetition. Humans cannot help but to pursue status because it’s in their deepest evolutionary nature, but they can also adapt their status-seeking according to an ideological framework which actually denies them power. For early Christians, the highest status in the community was the least status in the “world” (power, riches in the world). For white progressives, the highest status is to be a self-denying white and to promote minorities. That earns them status in their peer group, but the ideological presuppositions are motivated via indoctrination rather than status seeking (similar to religious indoctrination, just with the rigorous conception of the Good).
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