Progressives have always been collectivists (i.e. socialists, Marxists and communists). Until the fall of the USSR, collectivists generally followed the Stalinist/Orwellian model , the central premise of which is that the government is God, whatever it says goes without question and you will be forced to act as if it is true – even if it isn’t – because to do what the government needs to do, 5 must be the answer.
2+2=5 because we say it is, comrade.
But inherent in Stalinist/Orwellian collectivism is the epidemic of cognitive dissonance it creates. Cognitive dissonance is a serious, debilitating mental illness in which mental discomfort (psychological stress) is experienced by a person who simultaneously holds two or more contradictory beliefs, ideas, or values.
In short, no matter how many times a government tells you that the answer is 5, you can hold up your fingers and prove that is false.
Then came the Frankfurt School, postmodernism and the invention of cultural Marxism – and out of that was born postmodernist progressivism.
Postmodernist progressives looked at the strength and resilience of the human mind and its inherent default position of common sense and logic and realized that forcing people to believe something demonstrably falsifiable created resistance, not compliance. They gave up on trying to force people to believe 2+2+5 and began redefining and teaching that 2+2=5 was a mathematical fact.
And the amazing thing is that postmodern progressives have learned that they do not have to prove to you that 2+2=5, they just have to make you doubt that 2+2=4 and that perhaps now humans are so enlightened that they can see other possibilities other than the certainty that exists right before our eyes.
Progressivism, when taken individually, can be defeated (history has proven it will fail on its own). Postmodernism is a similar affliction – but combined, progressivism and postmodernism is a mutated virus – together, they represent a potentially incurable disease.
Simply defined, postmodernist progressivism is that movement which seeks to take the psychosis of extreme minorities (gender fluidity and others) and make it into a broad societal neurosis. It is a process analogous to creating a pandemic by infecting an entire population with an incurable disease rather than isolating the early few who with the contagion, simply because you don’t want the patient zero group to feel lonely.
Thankfully, there is always an answer to be found in nature.
Our greater society is a living organism – and living organisms get sick and rather than isolating the contagions, postmodernist progressives have decided the best way to handle our diseases is not to isolate and cure them, it is to infect the entire population.
This is why our society seems to constantly court unhappiness, dissatisfaction and conflict. It is sick with a pandemic of cognitive dissonance.
All it takes for a cure to be discovered is for one little boy to say the Emperor is naked.
The Rio Norte Line 
Good summation !
Remember…. progressivism started in its second phase as Fabian Socialism in England….. gaining strength in the 1880s ( Edith Nesbit and all that..). They were the only ones at Marx’s little funeral. The proto-phase were a mix of the Hegelian school in the 1820s-30s in German universities and the various English Utopian socialists such as Robert Owen and the like circa late 1830s -1850s. Their inroads in America started as early as the 1830s with the transplanted German Skull and Bones at Yale ( Russell et al ).
Woodrow Wilson of course was progressive ( Socialist) as early as the 1880s in America.
You and Joe had some excellent articles on Progressivism on here in the past.
For perspective….. there is a small ….teensy weensy bit of Postmodernism that is acceptable… ;- )