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Increasingly, it seems that the progressive solution to any problem (problems we might consider their own rather than general) is to remove their political opponents from public life.
It's something I've become increasingly interested in over the past few years - how many self-styled 'liberal', 'tolerant', 'moderate', 'centrist' types become pretty severely authoritarian when their grip on power seems to be threatened.
The more I've thought about it, the more important the 'progressive' aspect seems to be in driving this authoritarianism. For, as they argue it, authority should follow from knowledge. Their (progressive) knowledge of the future cannot be contradicted cos it hasn't happened yet.
And this means that their authority on where history is going cannot be adequately challenged almost by definition. In Karl Popper's terms, their knowledge is 'unfalsifiable', just as long as they keep it vague enough and not time-specific. It's a political trick.
Of course, it's a trick that many of them themselves don't realise they're practising. That would require serious engagement with what they're talking about and would remove the belief. So, unsurprisingly, you don't find much of that around.
