The funny thing is, "progressive liberals" are a dying breed. The left has almost entirely been taken over by regressive crybullies and "social justice" warriors who with each passing moment are letting their inner Mao or Pol Pot come out. It's now they that are pushing censorship, deranged conspiracy theories, and divisive politics that are damaging social cohesion, and ruining the lives of ordinary people for daring to deviate from their increasingly insulated and also increasingly incoherent groupthink.
A guy named James Howard Kunstler, who is an excellent social commentator when he isn't going too deep into the Peak Oil wilderness, recently wrote a post about how these leftist cultural elites, obsessed with virtue signaling, are attempting to institute a kind of intellectual martial law and
I recommend you read it.
Dave Rubin of course made a well-received video about this too back in January.
People see this and are rebelling against it even as the "intellectual yet idiots" and their feral leftist activists ("Antifa" being the worst of them) are attempting to push further into madness with it, especially in the wake of Trump's win. I expect them to get worse as the public continues to reject them (case in point, after over 40 years, my mom left the Democratic Party this year, because it ain't the party of FDR and Kennedy anymore, that's for sure).
Things tend to burn brightest just before they collapse, so this is basically how I'm viewing the modern left - they're going to collapse soon, but will try to go out with as big a bang as possible with the increasing derangement. I recently wrote a post on my blog about the psychology behind why this is happening, how leftists' major goal is now to overturn the prevailing social order and replace it with nothing, which is the fundamental thing that's needed to understand
the pathos of the modern left and why it can be so irrational and self-evidently self-destructive.
Rebelling against these trends has basically become the new counterculture, the new fun, the new thing that all the cool kids are doing, because the proponents of leftist orthodoxy have essentially become the uncool puritans - witness CNN hunting down the guy that made the Trump meme a few weeks ago, which was hilarious to everybody who wasn't them. In a way it's almost like a larger cultural Attitude Era, where cool, edgy things happen which offend the sensibilities of "polite society," which is a big reason why it's so cool. That's perfect fodder for a scrappy babyface dynamic versus the dominant heel faction.
Cornette is basically thinking in labels only, and he attaches the word "progressive" to something without fully comprehending the nuances. Once that happens, all further inquiry shuts down and confirmation bias takes over. He can't see the opposite argument because it is almost outside of his perception of reality at this point. "Progressives" of the past are a critically endangered species, but because he slaps that word on it I don't think he realizes it and is just swept up by the trends.
