Incidentally, I never did find the time to properly answer a question of yours from a while ago.... I wrote something incomplete, so I'll post it now. If I don't do it now, I likely never will. It isn't particularly focused, but maybe it goes someway to an answer. Since writing this I read Why Liberalism Failed by Patrick J. Deneen which if I had time I would incorporate as that was on this area as well.
I'll also say that the scope of this is too broad for me to commit to defending here. I'm happy to point you in the direction of more detailed explanations if you want them.
I'm really going to need more than your bare assertion on this. You've essentially taken the position that liberalism inevitably leads to regressive dehumanization and the removal of rights... which I'm not seeing.
It's a tough question.
I think the best answer I can give you is just a bit of a narrative account of what I think. There are probably big chunks of it you aren't going to agree with. I'm not sure that I am able to dive into defending this along with the happiness thing, but I feel like I owe you an attempt at an answer. I'm going to cover a lot and try and write this from memory in one sitting, so please go easy on me. This is just postit notes in my head that I'm pulling together.
IN THE BEGINNING....
Before the Enlightenment gave us liberalism, you had feudalism. Ordinary people were bound to the land and had for a thousand years or so specialised in particular occupations that tended to be handed down. There was social mobility, but it was slow and limited. There were a number of hierarchies, one of them had the king at the top with various barons below him and levels of minor gentry below them until you got to the villains who were bound to the land and the free men below them. There were other hierarchies like the church running at the same time. All this was justified by religion - the king has been sanctified by God, or the Pope and by analogy to the hierarchical of the family. The idea of property rights were and handing on your land in some great unbroken chain dates back to pre-history of ancestor worship and is the underlying spiritual justification for the dynastic monarchy.
The workings of the family and the duties and responsibilities are the origins of the great chain of being and the idea of the peasant having duties to his lord, and the lord having responsibilities to the peasant. Again, it's a direct analog to the hierarchical responsibility of the son to the father and the father to the son.
As I said, that system survived for a loooong time. Parts of it go back to the bronze age at least. That model of the family and then extending out like a fractal to manage society was super stable.
THE COMING OF LIBERALISM
So, the barons and the king and the church and the peasants and so on formed different groups that were played off against each other in a kind of game of thrones. The king needed the barons because they controlled the peasants, and the king needed the peasants so he could raise taxes and armies. If we are talking about England, then another group that became important were the financier/money lending class that were brought in after the conquest. I mention them because they are important later, but they allow the king to raise money without having to to raise taxes, but of course once the king is in debt to you, maybe you have some power over the king. Anyway.... towns start to appear on the edges of these baronial lands as a way of draining power away from the barons. In the country you are bound to the land and can only leave it with the permission of the lord. If you lived in the town for a year and a day you were free. Various laws were past that built up the towns as commercial centers thus bringing in wealth independent of the barons and encouraged by the king.
What all this leads to is a banking and merchant class slowly forming and becoming increasingly powerful. First in medieval Florence and places like that, then spreading across Europe. Liberalism comes out of the interests of this class. Since they are speculating, and trading goods between regions controlled by different Lords, or even different Kings.... much more formal property rights start to become important. They want to collapse the social hierarchy... they are richer than the barons, why are the barons above them... so appeals to equality are made.... they want to be free to trade and conduct business without all this feudal nonsense, so liberty comes in. Every ruling elite needs some self justifying set of beliefs to legitimate their rule, it's no coincidence that liberalism appeared at just the time when the financial/banker class needed exactly those values.
At first this was a shift in power away from the barons to the king, now supported by the merchants and bankers. However, the more complicated world that all this trade and industry created meant that a complicated administrative infrastructure was needed around the king. What eventually happens is that this administrative infrastructure realises it doesn't need the king, and the power of the king begins to fade.
What I am effectively saying in a very long winded way is that liberalism is the political philosophy of capitalism.
TWO FORMS OF LIBERALISM
I have mixed feelings about Thomas Sowell, but one of the things from him I do like is the idea of the constrained and the unconstrained vision. You see this in different ideas of the nature of man. Some traditions see man as fallen and necessarily given to all sorts of temptations and sins and that we are very limited in terms of what we can do about that and that everything is a compromise. They tend to be keener on organic development over time, incremental change, finding out what works empirically and are suspicious of theory. Then you have the unconstrained vision who believe man is perfectible, you don't really have to compromise and problems that have dogged man for millenia can be fixed if we only set our mind to it and follow this theory they are convinced of. The American Revolution is an example of one with a lot of constrained vision, and the French Revolution is one with a lot of unconstrained vision.
I think the unconstrained vision won out. We are talking about Feminism, so lets go with that, but it's only one of a number of these unconstrained vision programmes of the 20th century. All these are attempts to fundamentally re-engineer society based on liberal principles and an idea that society is failing to live up to some ideal. We aren't being like Burke on the French Revolution and being sceptical about re-engineering society to conform to abstract principle.
THE MARXISTS
Back in the 1920s/30s you had a bunch of disgruntled Marxists in Europe. The Marxist revolution hadn't happened like it was supposed to - contradictions in capitalism arising in the advanced industrial economies causing organized labour to rise up. It had happened in one of the most backward countries in Europe, had been effectively a top down coup rather than some great bottom up thing.... and it wasn't going how they had hoped. Plus the revolutionaries that they had supported had turned against them. What had gone wrong?
They hit on the idea that the problem was that the liberal capitalist system was making the poor too happy, and worse in ways they didn't approve of. There were movies, and dance halls.... products were getting cheaper and so, all be it in small ways, the poor were beginning to enjoy enough nibbles of the fruits of capitalism to make them stick with the status quo. This was a disaster.
The theory was that what was happening was that capitalism had all sorts of ways of manipulating the minds of the members of society to make them support the system. Movies, newspapers, education, laws, social norms etc... all of it tended to reinforce the idea that you should want the things that capitalism produced, you should be made happy by those things, you should behave in a way that supported the system. What they very explicitly said was that they needed to gain control of the means by which society was propagandised in order to make them unhappy with it. I think the expression is something like that they needed to make it "taste bitter in their mouths". So to save the poor, the poor needed to be made to feel how unhappy they really were rather than being tricked into thinking they were happy.
There is a whole story about the successes of this group, but I'll not add another thousand words to this. Anyway, theirs is the model of activism and social change that gets adopted by university intellectuals. They are very influential in all of the excitement on campuses in 1968. As economic issues fade into the background everything moves towards groups that are socially oppressed. Their ideas about making the "oppressed" feel their oppression then gets picked up by all these other causes. Today I think the expression you see is that we need to "problematise" something. People are taught to find ways of viewing situations that they would previously have been happy with and understanding how they were actually being oppressed and shout be unhappy and angry.
THE PROBLEM WITH PROBLEMATISING OR SOCIAL MORGELLONS DISEASE
There is a disease called morgellons where the sufferers skin becomes itchy and sensitive. As they scratch it lesions form. Within the lesions they find tiny fibres. They pull the fibres out and the wounds get worse... more fibres. It's entirely psychosomatic. The fibres are from their clothes. The lesions are from the compulsive scratching. It is a form of delusional parasitosis
Intentionally looking at the world through problem glasses where you search for ways that situations can be interpreted in terms of some oppression narrative is like morgellons. Everything can be interpreted as oppressive if you only look hard enough and a good at the game.
Once enough people decide that there is some kind of systemic parasite in society that can be identified by discovering ways in which something can be seen as oppression, you have a feedback loop. As I say, anything can be turned into an example of oppression if you only have the will to interpret in that way. The more you do this, the better you get at finding oppression narratives. The tiny fibres in your skin make you itch so you scratch more and more. Partly I think this comes from an unconstrained vision way of looking at the world where people compare society to some idea of how it should be, and insist that what ever it is can and should be fixed.
Another analogy I sometimes think of is pareidolia - where your brain finds patterns, maybe a face in some random squiggle, where there is none. We are very good at finding patterns in random everyday meaningless events, particularly if we are primed for them.
This obviously isn't to say that there isn't genuine oppression in the world, but I think in the world of microaggressions, maybe we have gone past that.
DIDN'T HE MENTION CAPITALISM SEVERAL PAGES AGO?
The form Capitalism has been in in the west for a long time now is all about globalism. Barriers to trade need to be broken down, whether they are political, legal, cultural whatever.... Differences between nations and peoples needs to be flattened. If different people in different countries like radically different things, it makes everything harder and less efficient. There is a natural desire in capitalism to want to flatten everything out.
Capitalism always has to be moving forward. Capitalism continually needs to grow. It is always hungry. It needs to keep moving into new markets, putting people to work who didn't work before, turning people into consumers who weren't consumers before. Women didn't work, now they work. Some aspect of femininity isn't commercialised so that for a price you can acquire it, not a problem. Capitalism can't not behave in this or it will die.
Again, liberalism is the social ideology that justifies capitalism and allows capitalism to spread.
FFS, have you ever had to clean the house, do the dishes, the shopping, the cooking, the laundry, the planning for the day, AND care for a child? And not merely for a third of your day, but from when you get up to when you go to bed.