This is a good article on the contemporary left, ie, progressives (although, I would argue that the left is chasing dystopias, rather than utopias—hence the language of absolutes, and authoritarianism leading to totalitarianism). When you stand for everything, you stand for nothing. Ideologues try to shoehorn reality into their ideology. It seems a form of stunted intellectual growth. It’s painful to watch them try to contort and twist reality, while prostrating themselves before their ideology, like some unfortunate soul having a seizure. It’s more painful when the rest of us suffer from their delusions. One has only to look at the great isms of the 20th century to see the inevitable conclusion: reality always comes back to bite you in the ass. See Roger’s great essay, The Myth of Human Perfectibility.
Although much is made of the political and cultural left, few realize that this creature is long extinct. Once it stood for stronger unions, economic equality, better working conditions and organized labor. Such was its root, its reality, from which it has fully severed itself.
This means that the left now chases utopias — from multiculturalism to environmentalism and green initiatives, from the “rights” industry and intersectionality to gender-fluidity, from anarchism and communism to ever-morphing liberalism, from abortion and euthanasia to the cult of Trump-hatred by self-styled sophisticates. In each case, the logic is the same: Shoehorn reality into theory, and mold humanity into the confines of ideology.
And, because it is now rootless, the left is all things to many agendas, and thus stands for nothing. The only coherence it possesses is progressivism, whereby all that ails society is to be cured by economics and technology, whose anodynes are doled out by politicians in thrall to “experts,” who in turn cannot help but contradict each other.