I've mostly agreed with your postings on critical theory, but I'm not so sure about this one.

Full-fledged actual critical theory does not, I think, support the status quo in any meaningful sense. The best it can do is, if it's honest, shoot itself in the foot and hop around impotently, recognizing that the very criticisms it levels about the establishment and about perspectives being limited by the existing social order apply even more strongly to itself.

(Edit: it is particularly ironic that Horkheimer, despite being a great proponent of reason and scientific study, nonetheless recommended an approach that completely guts reason of its power and scientific study of its effectiveness--and he was perhaps the one who most embraced the Enlightenment values of reason and the value of objective knowledge.)

Likewise, your charges of elitism are what critical theory would use to shoot itself down (Horkheimer especially spends a great deal of breath supporting the proletariat, of which he is not), but I don't think that elitism has been shown to be wrong. Quite to the contrary, elitist economists have illuminated how economies actually work; elitist philosophers and social thinkers have illuminated how to organize politically (e.g. the Enlightenment was an elitist movement); elitist social psychologists have illuminated how we organize ourselves. Non-elite movements tend to end in chaos and bloodshed; populism is too dumb, too non-elite, to get things right enough to craft a workable society most of the time. Elitism alone isn't the problem. Being wrong is the problem.

I do agree that fundamental liberal ideals are extraordinarily important and are cast aside by critical theory in general to some degree, and yet more by critical race theory with its hyper-focus on groups. It is, in fact, the social psychologist elites who show most clearly why this is wrong: group identity is tremendously seductive and powerfully distorts people's sense of reality. Even if the distinctions are real (socially-constructed or not), when our problem is that there are problems across the borders between groups, the strategy of emphasizing the group boundaries is highly counterproductive. People who focus on identity--even class identity!--have failed to show that the increased friction and conflict and decreased dialog are offset by a correspondingly larger gain, outside of cases where the identity provokes a profound society-backed discrimination (e.g. Jim Crow laws).

So I agree that more than anything we need a re-embrace of actual Enlightenment values and traditional liberalism. But I think your criticisms are a little off the mark this time.