Scott Madin

as you dig down you find they basically believe it's not possible for anyone to see the world differently than they do, let alone to genuinely and sincerely think that changes to the way things are would make things better.

everyone is either intimidated by, or cynically ("politically") pandering to some other group, with no end, never any constituency who actually want the thing, because the antiwokeist imagination cannot conceive of anyone sincerely thinking bigotry is per se bad.

they see society as a zero-sum power struggle between and among identity groups, and literally can't imagine white people sincerely wanting things to be better for Black people, or men for women, or hets for queers, or cis people for trans people, etc.

(this zero-sum view is also where the fear comes from: they [and obviously "they" in all of this mainly means cishet white "conservative" Christian men] feel an urgency to opposing anything that helps another group, because they assume all other groups will want revenge.)

there's also a, probably even deeper, fear, a fear of not understanding/not being in control, involved in the insistence that everything about the way they believed the world was when they were kids, is good and true and should stay that way forever.

if as a child you learn that everything is clean-cut and clear and neatly categorizable, and that you can understand the whole world by Rules, it might feel very threatening to hear people say the Rules you learned were wrong, because then what if _all_ Rules are wrong?

what if it destabilizes the entire _concept_ of Rules, and in fact the world is complicated and messy, and nothing stays inside the lines we draw for it, and all our labels and categories and ways of understanding are just approximations built on shaky foundations?

which is of course the truth of the universe, everything is quantum chaos ultimately, all our categories are socially constructed, porous, and mutable over time.