[Billthedrill]

It's honestly easier to think of the more rabid denizens of the left as religious fanatics because that's what they really are. The left has long taken on a blueprint for the future that involves increasing collectivism, group identities, and deliberate antagonism to groups deemed unacceptable to their doctrine of the moment. Their belief in this blueprint, the "progress" in progressivism, has replaced the emotional role formerly filled by formal religion. They are secular and proud of being so - but are they really?

We see this in their expressions in every picture taken of them in action - violent emotion, condemnation, hysteria, rage, pathological hatred. These are not the earmarks of someone who is convinced of the intellectual soundness of his or her position, they are the signs of someone whose failing belief cannot be subject to examination. They are the signs of a True Believer in a false creed.

What drives them all nuts is that their march to an impossible utopia is not running the way their dearest hopes imagine it should, and someone must be to blame. And all of the frustration for the failure of the "inevitable" progress of history must find a focus.

And so their political opponents must be accorded superpowers, for no ordinary individual may stay the course of history. And inasmuch as the progressives have laid claim to all noble ideals, their opponents must therefore be the mirror image, all things evil. This is genuine insanity.

[SaxxonWoods]

Thanks, you saved me a lot of typing, nice work.

[Publius]

We see this in their expressions in every picture taken of them in action - violent emotion, condemnation, hysteria, rage, pathological hatred.

Modern day Wagnerians. The same sense of self-dramatization, too.

[Nathan Zachary]

"We see this in their expressions in every picture taken of them in action - violent emotion, condemnation, hysteria, rage, pathological hatred. These are not the earmarks of someone who is convinced of the intellectual soundness of his or her position, they are the signs of someone whose failing belief cannot be subject to examination. They are the signs of a True Believer in a false creed."

Perhaps that's why they support Islamic terrorism, and see nothing wrong with the teachings of the hadith (life and ways of Mohammad) and Koran.
They share a similar disability which is instilled in them by their respective doctrines, the inability to think independently and rationally, and examine a statement and test its soundness. They must instead blindly believe.

[AmericanExceptionalist]

What drives them all nuts is that their march to an impossible utopia is not running the way their dearest hopes imagine it should, and someone must be to blame. And all of the frustration for the failure of the "inevitable" progress of history must find a focus.

An excellent observation! I have long maintained that today's leftism is merely warmed-over Hegelianism: the doctrine of historical inevitability (we must not "turn back the clock" or wind up "on the wrong side of history"--as though all final outcomes were preordained).

And, of course, it is no coincidence that Hegel was a forerunner of Marx...

[My2Cents]

Well-said, and true.

[MonicaG]

Well said.

[maica]

Good comment, with which I agree completely.

Baltimore's Mayor (who now is running for governor of Maryland), initiated a campaign to improve the city by having giant banners with the letters BELIEVE in huge letters, hung on every public building - firehouses, schools, etc - and bumper stickers put everywhere.

The message was apparently to "believe" that Baltimore could be a great city, but in reality, nothing was ever defined. To me it was a prime example of the leftist kind of magical thinking.