The Cultural Divide
It's commonly stated that in America we are living in a divided country. This divide dramatically separates us into two parallel, conflicting, and competing cultures.
One paradigm embodies traditional American values, including respect for authority, patriotism, and for the most part religion. The other is a manifestation of progressivism, believing that society is on a grand trajectory toward betterment. If traditional values are abandoned by the wayside, that's good, because newer values - or indeed the absence of values - are inherently better.
The article Discussing the Agenda by Kruptos (American Mind, 11 October 2022) does a good job of illustrating how leftists / progressives are immune to understanding the values of the other half of the country.
Kruptos begins by stating that talking with liberals can be instructive - if you can handle it. In the article he recounts his discussion with a liberal friend. He writes that:
The basic thrust of his argument... was essentially that the culture war is over. He argued that it must be over because so many corporations support the LGBQT/Diversity, Equity, Inclusion/White fragility agenda... let's just call it "the Agenda."...
I offered a rejoinder, explaining to him the concept of "The Cathedral": a distributed, open network of professionals and experts, university educated, sharing the same values, taking their cues from one another, imposing this agenda on the rest of the population whether they want it or not....
My friend honestly believes that the Agenda is organically bubbling up from an underlying change in society. From his perspective, it is the result of genuine progress....
Even explaining to him that this kind of social change just does not happen this quickly on its own, that it was manufactured through deliberate propaganda campaigns and sophisticated political operations leaves him completely unfazed.... This is what you have to do when you are intent on making society better.... Sometimes you have to impose it on people...
He is simply no longer able to see and think "cross-culturally."...
It is like having two countries within one contiguous border, where the politically dominant group just thinks that as long as they talk slowly and loudly enough everyone will understand them.... Everyone should support it. Anyone who doesn’t is a bad person. The only question is the form of their punishment.
In other words, liberals / progressives are living in a closed ecosystem - an unquestioning tautology.
I've encountered this psychological barrier when discussing politics with liberal friends. They simply cannot fathom how someone can entertain a world view that differs from their progressive utopian vision, and how such a person would not immediately recognize themselves as blatantly uninformed, stupid and downright evil. Such individuals deserve to be forced to think like progressives, and punished if they don't.
Thus, leftists / progressives exhibit not only an aura of righteousness, but also a strong desire to impose their belief system on others. As David Horowitz succinctly observed:
Three essays published by Front Page Magazine illustrate this statement. A few excerpts follow:
Inside the Progressive Mind, by N. A. Halkides, 22 March 2013:
... The Progressive believes in precisely two things: his own magnificence and the constructive power of brute force... As naked power-lust is a rather ugly motive, the Progressive rationalizes his desire to rule as a concern for human welfare, seeing himself as a great humanitarian, far superior morally to the lesser beings who pursue merely "materialist" ends such as their own prosperity and who frequently object to his program for achieving Utopia....
Inside Every Liberal Is A Totalitarian Screaming to Get Out (II), by Oleg Atbashian, 23 March 2022:
... The trait that unites this diverse demographic is their [the elites'] smug and prejudiced belief in the superiority of their own ideology, often accompanied by malice and hatred towards those they deem inferior....
In this sense, the best key to unlocking the mystery of the Progressive Chauvinist mind, breaking the leftist code, and discerning their collectivist morality is a statement attributed to Karl Marx, which, regardless of whether he wrote it or not, is perfectly aligned with the moral philosophy of Progressive Chauvinism:
"The meaning of peace is the absence of opposition to socialism"...
The scowling tyrant behind the smiling face, by Daniel Greenfield, 23 May 2013:
... The nanny state has a short term purpose and a long term purpose. Its short term purpose is to educate us out of our selfish freedom of choice. Its long term purpose is to incrementally "civilize" or "evolve" a free people into collectivism through smaller measures undertaken in the name of the public good....
Instead of one great revolution, there are a million smaller revolutions stripped of overt ideology and pretending to serve the public good....
Health care is nationalized. Gun control is implemented. Education is centralized. Environmental panic is used to enforce rationing...
Each of these is a miniature revolution. A string of these revolutions over time transforms the soft tyranny into a hard tyranny....
Thus it seems the progressive arc towards betterment notably coincides with the trajectory toward collectivism and tyranny. A lot of people don't want our country to move in that direction.