THE TOOLS OF INTELLECTUAL INQUIRY FORGED BY THE SCOTTISH ENLIGHTENMENT ARE POWERFUL INDEED.

Texas historian Steven Mintz argues that proposition.

I, for one, am struck by how today much of today’s cultural debates takes place within the confines of liberal discourse. The most forceful critics of “woke” ideas almost invariably draw on the language of liberalism: that their adversaries do not tolerate free speech and diversity of opinion, that their emphasis on equity and diversity is at odds with equality before the law, and that their desire to use the administrative state to advance their agenda violates individual rights and threatens the freedom of civic institutions.

If the humanities are not only to persist but to thrive, these humanities disciplines must speak more forthrightly to the issues of our time—yet with the breadth of perspective that history, philosophy and political theory offer.

A multidisciplinary approach to liberalism and its critics is truly essential today, when we do need to do more to examine how this nation’s political and legal institutions actually function, to understand how social change takes place, and to find ways to instill the civic values and forms of conduct that make democratic self-government possible, including tolerance, civility, respect for nuance, complexity and perspective, and a willingness to engage in respectful dialogue.

What he does not write, but what he easily could argue, is that it is those tools of inquiry that structure the wokist criticisms.

And, perhaps most important of all, how liberalism shapes public discourse.

The so-called consensus school of historians that dominated the history profession during the two decades following World War II was often accused of downplaying the profundity of the conflicts and the depth of the inequalities within American society. In fact, many of the most prominent consensus historians were anything but blind to this society’s divisions and conflicts, but they argued that these controversies and struggles largely took place within the broad contours of a dominant liberal ideology.

This ideology attached extraordinary emphasis upon freedom, personal and economic and individual rights, including the sanctity of property rights, and tolerated exceedingly high levels of inequality even as the society professed a belief in a kind of democratic egalitarianism in which all citizens were endowed with certain inalienable rights.

If you don't use Enlightenment tools of inquiry to argue that some kinds of tolerance are repressive, whatever you are using will sooner or later go off on your arguments.