I don’t think there’s a single, easily expressed lens that sums up either mainstream liberalism or conservatism, so I don’t think it’s easy to draw a contrast between the social justice movement and mainstream liberalism which holds across every issue. But I think that on many issues where a person involved in the Social Justice Movement would see a case of oppression by one group against another as a moral wrong to address, a more mainstream liberal might see as a case of harms caused by self perpetuating forces which should be corrected by deliberate intervention. In the specific case of racial inequality, for example, where a Social Justice Movement advocate might see a case of wrongful oppression of black people by white people, the view I understand as being more mainstream would be something like “historical circumstances put black people in a disadvantaged position, and the Matthew Effect ensures that things will continue to stay shitty for black people unless society makes a concerted effort to rectify this.”
I can’t say with any confidence that I have representative enough experience to describe the ideological demographics of progressives in general, but most people under the broad “liberal” umbrella aren’t involved in the social justice movement, and while some people certainly have more ideological investment in certain political issues than others, most people have a substantial cluster of political values that they care strongly enough about that, whether or not it has much bearing on their daily activities, they can still get mindkilled over them when matters touching on them are raised. So I think in a meaningful sense very few people are “not ideological.”
I don’t think there’s a single, easily expressed lens that sums up either mainstream liberalism or conservatism, so I don’t think it’s easy to draw a contrast between the social justice movement and mainstream liberalism which holds across every issue. But I think that on many issues where a person involved in the Social Justice Movement would see a case of oppression by one group against another as a moral wrong to address, a more mainstream liberal might see as a case of harms caused by self perpetuating forces which should be corrected by deliberate intervention. In the specific case of racial inequality, for example, where a Social Justice Movement advocate might see a case of wrongful oppression of black people by white people, the view I understand as being more mainstream would be something like “historical circumstances put black people in a disadvantaged position, and the Matthew Effect ensures that things will continue to stay shitty for black people unless society makes a concerted effort to rectify this.”
I can’t say with any confidence that I have representative enough experience to describe the ideological demographics of progressives in general, but most people under the broad “liberal” umbrella aren’t involved in the social justice movement, and while some people certainly have more ideological investment in certain political issues than others, most people have a substantial cluster of political values that they care strongly enough about that, whether or not it has much bearing on their daily activities, they can still get mindkilled over them when matters touching on them are raised. So I think in a meaningful sense very few people are “not ideological.”