They are missing some instinct that allows them to use common sense to see through ideas that are fashionable and high status, but clearly false.

From Why Do I Hate Pronouns More Than Genocide? by Richard Hanania.  Subtitled Self-reflection on what drives moral outrage and why I am not an effective altruist.

Having come out of academia, I’ve known many liberals, and I’m also an observer of our political culture. Following Kahneman and Tversky, we can say that there is a “System 1” (instinctive) and “System 2” (analytic) morality. I’m sure if you asked most liberals “which is worse, genocide or racial slurs?”, they would invoke System 2 and say genocide is worse. If forced to articulate their morality, they will admit murderers and rapists should go to jail longer than racists. Yet I’ve been in the room with liberals where the topic of conversation has been genocide, and they are always less emotional than when the topic is homophobia, sexual harassment, or cops pulling over a disproportionate number of black men.

[snip]

Among academics, I’ve seen many who do serious work and others who write the kind of nonsense that gets featured on the New Real Peer Review account. It has always frustrated me that the real scholars don’t seem to have much dislike or animus towards the “studies” types. I imagine that if shamans were given medical degrees and allowed to work in hospitals, real doctors would see that as an insult to their profession. Those in construction I’d like to think would hate it if people in their industry were building houses that always collapsed and giving everyone else a bad name. A System 1 morality that leads a profession to maintain some quality control among its own can be a very good thing, even when it is driven by ego gratification, as all System 1 morality is.

[snip]

It’s possible not to understand that markets are better than central planning because you are lazy or dumb. Lazy and dumb, I can live with. But that’s not why people believe in gender blank slatism. Rather, they are missing some instinct that allows them to use common sense to see through ideas that are fashionable and high status, but clearly false. 

[snip]

An individual concerned with truth – and whose self-esteem is based on thinking of himself as the kind of person concerned with truth – naturally finds wokeness uniquely offensive regardless of how damaging he thinks it is. This should be even more true when the individual belongs to the same profession as the wokes, for the same reason you’d expect pilots who take themselves seriously to be the group most angry at a new generation of aviators that is always crashing planes. Pilots, one assumes, take seriously the ostensible purpose of their profession, which is getting aircraft safely from one location to another. Most academics, unfortunately, do not, and are therefore comfortable with the absurdity in their midst.

A long and meandering piece but with lots of interesting ideas.