What you just described is in fact how liberalism has responded to the popularity of its challengers; it’s how it colonizes. Liberal historical narratives subscribe to progressivism, the idea that society is inevitably on a path toward equality, the end of scarcity, any “good” that is necessary to justify its existence. They disarmed African American Liberationist movements by adopting the Civil Rights Act and situating the deterimination and condemnation of racism within the legal framework of a fundamentally racist system, which turned out predictably. Jasbir Puar coined the term “homonationalism” to describe the specific kind of pro-imperialist queerness that emerged following the legal acceptance of queer property and marriage rights in a period of US military expansion into Iraq and Afghanistan. The AIDS genocide and subsequent necessity of establishing property rights for widowed spouses functioned similarly to disarm gender and marriage abolition movements within queer critiques of liberalism, which established a privileged class of queer people who promptly betrayed the rest of us for material comfort.
This isn’t to say there was no value in these concessions – obviously, we have to use whatever tool we have at our disposal including the incidental cooperation of the liberal state – but that the consequences of these developments teaches us that this is an existential conflict. There is no world where a liberal state exists without genocidal violence and the longer it exists, the more violence it will execute.
What you just described is in fact how liberalism has responded to the popularity of its challengers; it’s how it colonizes. Liberal historical narratives subscribe to progressivism, the idea that society is inevitably on a path toward equality, the end of scarcity, any “good” that is necessary to justify its existence. They disarmed African American Liberationist movements by adopting the Civil Rights Act and situating the deterimination and condemnation of racism within the legal framework of a fundamentally racist system, which turned out predictably. Jasbir Puar coined the term “homonationalism” to describe the specific kind of pro-imperialist queerness that emerged following the legal acceptance of queer property and marriage rights in a period of US military expansion into Iraq and Afghanistan. The AIDS genocide and subsequent necessity of establishing property rights for widowed spouses functioned similarly to disarm gender and marriage abolition movements within queer critiques of liberalism, which established a privileged class of queer people who promptly betrayed the rest of us for material comfort.
This isn’t to say there was no value in these concessions – obviously, we have to use whatever tool we have at our disposal including the incidental cooperation of the liberal state – but that the consequences of these developments teaches us that this is an existential conflict. There is no world where a liberal state exists without genocidal violence and the longer it exists, the more violence it will execute.