I don't understand how I was arguing with a strawman, when your entire argument is explaining WHY the left is illiberal. I said that the illiberal left differs

I don't understand how I was arguing with a strawman, when your entire argument is explaining WHY the left is illiberal. I said that the illiberal left differs from liberals in that they don't, for example, find color-blindness to be a reasonable strategy for eliminating racism. You go on to explain why the illiberal left doesn't find color-blindness to be a reasonable strategy for eliminating racism. No strawmanning was done, nor was a moral judgment. To address some of your points. You say > The thesis is that those things don't exist in the real world. And it goes further than that, by saying that those things cannot exist in our society unless major changes happen Liberalism doesn't make a claim regarding whether or not things exist or not. It is a fixed compass of procedural principles. Completely consistent of means, independent of ends, and independent of the state of things. You can't say that "free speech doesn't exist in the real world," when free speech is a procedural description of the way the system should run. If there is a failure of free speech to be applied unilaterally, that isn't a failure of liberalism, so much as an implementation error, and a failure to actually run the system as described. Your argument is like saying that "habeas corpus doesn't exist because the Japanese were interned in WW2." Habeas corpus is a procedural description of a process. What happened in WW2 wasn't habeas corpus not existing, but an implementation failure where habeas corpus was not implemented. Much of the liberal ethos was present in the country since the get-go, and the failures of the country were actually failures of implementation. How can you have slaves, how can you treat people differently in accordance with their race, how can women not vote, in a country whose espoused ethics describe systems that would in no way tolerate these failings? The strongest leaps forward in progress have come from making the claim "this is what the liberal ethos describes, and this is how you're failing at it." MLK or the suffragettes are making the case that they're being denied their ability to act as individual actors, being denied equality under the law. Now, compare this to the modern left. > If you didn't notice, the conclusion of the lefitst project after gender equality became progressive weakening and then almost abolition of gender - and I mean this in the strictest sociological sense of gender as the perception of a set of social attributes related to sex. You have described the exact opposite of what the modern left is. In the 60s-00s, the movement regarding gender equality was primarily what I would have described as a liberal movement. One that is hyper focused on individualism, and asserting that identity could exist as independently from sex or race as one wanted. If you are a girl, and you have short hair, and you like fighting, and skateboarding, and you're sexually attracted to women, that is as valid an expression of what it means to be a female as any other variant. This is an anti-collective, purely individualistic position, and is spot on with the liberal assertions of individualism and (gender)-blindness. The modern leftist position is a complete inversion of this. If you are a girl, and you have short hair, and you like fighting, and skateboarding, and you're sexually attracted to women, are you sure you're not a boy? Your gender presentation is rather male, you must at least be non-binary? Do you see how this is a complete inversion? It goes back to making the assertion that these gender expressions are actually fundamentally to be associated with fixed collectives. I find it to be a much more powerful expression for a man to have long hair, wear dresses and makeup, love whoever they want to love, and say "I'm a man, and this is what being a man means to me." I don't take any issue with that same person asserting that they're a woman, I just think, again, that it could not stand in starker opposition to what is clearly the extension of the liberal movement regarding gender identity. I'd keep discussing more of your points, and I'd be happy to continue later, but I'm honestly slightly apprehensive by your tone that you might not actually be interested in a conversation. Like I said, though, if you're looking to continue the conversation genuinely, then I'd be happy to. In summary, I think the illiberal left DO think that universality under the law, free speech, individualism, color-blindness, equality of opportunity shouldn't exist. Your argument is that they do think that they should exist, but believe that they don't exist. My case against this is that, not only do I virtually never see any of these things espoused as values by leftists, but often see them ridiculed. And as I said, these are all descriptions of procedural means, they are not ends. So you literally cannot believe in those things if the procedures you want to see implemented are done so in pursuit of corrective ends. I can't say I believe in free speech, but then restrict the speech that I think that is harmful to the equitable outcomes I want. Controlling speech in pursuit of outcomes is itself the opposite of what free speech is. The desired outcomes are irrelevant. To then say that leftists "don't believe these shouldn't exist," is not correct. They very much don't believe that these procedural systems should exist, because none of the procedures they design or implement remotely resemble any of these systems.