Earlier quoted context omitted.
All these recent events involving censorship and left aligned tech companies eerily reminds me a passage the Unabomber wrote in his manifesto back in the 1990s. " Some leftists may seem to oppose technology, but they will oppose it only so long as they are outsiders and the technological system is controlled by non-leftists. If leftism ever becomes dominant in society, so that the technological system becomes a tool…
Exactly. I don't share the Unabomber's directional disdain for leftists, but most people are simply too dim to understand the concept that liberalism/illiberalism exists on an axis independent of leftism/rightism. If you're planning to burn down liberal norms for short-term partisan gains, you better understand the long view, but that's simply beyond the capacity of the majority of people. To be clear, there are left…
And of course when it does, the now-illiberal faction rationalizes it with some manner of, "liberalism, except when..."
The problem with liberalism is that—while it is the most sane mode of structural organization—it is extremely brittle in the face of illiberalism.
Liberalism—and its ancestors/influences—never ate itself, unlike illiberalism. But it does always fall to barbarism. It's like having an argument with an insane person: you may be right, but you'll never win that fight.
That is a seriously concerning weakness, because when liberalism is threatened, the default modes of self preservation are either: roll over and get beaten (as a matter of principal) or reject some (or all) liberalism in order to fight back. In either case, liberalism goes away.
I'm not sure that anyone has ever come up with a reasonable defense. (And maybe there is none.) Humanity seems to prefer pendula. The grass is always greener...