The original liberal progressive future insisted that any traits of circumstance, race, or geography would cease to meaningfully matter: your biology and ethnicity would be interesting or compelling, but essentially “meaningless.”
Your character and humanity would matter to such a degree that traits you could not control would not control you.
Yet, seen structurally, and then post-structurally, the environment determines your/our reactions, and “proper character” is proliferated by the powerful, and others’ reaction to you shapes you. Thus your character is made by appearances and normalcy: externally, not internally, despite your vaunted subjective, phenomenal truth.
The initial argument of liberalism releases abstract logic to counter uncontrollable factors, which was circled back into dependence on uncontrollable factors (the luck of birth traits and location) as primary motivating signifiers; that is, labels rehung after a brief dream of freedom.
Dumb dependence is easier to signify, so freedom consumes itself and yet still calls itself liberal.