I keep trying to explain the "Hegelian religion" thing. It's so important. You have to hear it. You have to see. It's why this is happening.

Hegel's ideas have been boiled down to a belief that true freedom is only possible through the State, which must be perfected.

The people who are taking over and their wide base of support religiously believe that by empowering the State and making sure it only has the right politics, you get to true freedom. Everything else is oppression. Everything else. Liberalism, freedom, reason, everything.

For Hegel, this was an evolution of the "ideas of the world," toward the self-realization and actualization of the Absolute Spirit. This got turned material and political by Marx and then the neo-Marxists, who made it cultural. Identity was the weakest spot, so it's used now.

Most of the people who believe this faith don't know Hegel (or Marx, or Gramsci, or Horkheimer, or Marcuse (or Fanon), or Crenshaw, etc.). They believe religiously that the State and the fight for State Power is what provides freedom (liberation) from oppression.

It's the ideas. Not the people. The spirit, the method. They don't have to have read a damn one of those people to have adopted the fundamental belief structure, just like most Christians have never read more than a page or two of the Bible.

The chief tenets of this faith are (1) that the Utopia will exist when the State controls everything and (2) when the state becomes perfected (by means of the "dialectical process" of pointing out all of its contradictions and shortcomings, relentlessly and purging wrongpolitik).

That is, these people (broadly, the zealous left and those captured by it) believe religiously that they must "transform society" through a process of empowering and "perfecting" the state, and that anyone in their way is a "fascist" who creates oppression and must be stamped out