You are putting quite a lot of meaning into my sentence that isn't there, projecting is never useful in a discussion.
Do they believe in climate change? Do they vote for Trump? Do they think universal health coverage is more efficient? etc. What kind of concrete things do they support/oppose?
The word "Liberal" and it's various derivations are all over the place generally though for weird historical reasons.
With the little letters, the split between conservative and liberal normally comes down to how the "rules of the game" are seen. Little-c conservatives are willing to cheat and change the rules of the game and do whatever necessary for their tribe to win. Little-l liberals are not willing to cheat, and see the 'rules' being fair as more important than whether their tribe rules supreme or not. There's lots of research supporting a notion that this sort of divide is very real in people, potentially even biological in origin (though I do not personally believe we are even capable of determining something like that yet), and active successful exploitation of the idea by advertisers, politicians, and others seeking to influence the public for one reason or another.
I've got a degree in political science, and I would not agree that it captures the historical or current import of those terms well either in terms of overt ideology or underlying motivation. Both conservatives and liberals have (classically and currently) seen their views as vindicating the proper view of individual rights, advancing the best interest of the common society, and advancing the best interest of the individual; of course, liberals and conservatives have very different views of what individuals rights are and what the good of the individual and community consist in; the liberal view favors flatter, broader distribution of political and economic power, and detachment of power from inherited station; the conservative view favors a narrower concentration of power in those viewed as best equipped to apply it, and views inherited traits as often central to that qualification.
Okay.
>I said that currently the progressive-left is sacrificing reason and that it will lead to a rise to the right.
No they're not. How is it that you think the 'progressive-left' is sacrificing reason?
To broaden the discussion a bit, I think that generally there is a trend of the 'progressive-left' censoring things they don't agree on.
But, reason supports freedom of speech and of ideas. It does not support censorship. It supports even the free expression of even the most odious ideas, so that they may be addressed rationally. The only exceptions to this are very few and involve our human weakness of certain speech in close physical quarters or when packed into physically close groups being able to rise above speech to reach the level of overriding the rational faculties of the listener. That's where things like not shouting 'fire' in a crowded theater lie. It results in a biological disabling of the forebrain when immediate physical mortal danger is at play. That can never, ever, ever happen when a statement is read. Not from a poster, paper, book, pamphlet, and certainly not from a screen.
There is an interesting argument to be made, though it is not really being made by any significant number that I've encountered, that the psychological manipulations of social media - the intentional things they do to optimize driving people to more extreme opinions and inundating people with false information in order to maximize engagement at the expense of absolutely anything else - might need to be treated differently, but even there the issue is not the speech. It's the manipulative analysis and other practices.
I don't even think the real primary motivation of most censorship of repugnant ideas online is motivated by a belief like "these ideas are wrong and we must not expose people to them, else they may adopt them". I think the mindset is more along the lines of "these ideas are wrong... I feel. But I cannot actually justify. And I fear if someone challenges me to dispute them, I will fail."
Reason also supports an absolute hard line distinction between the real and the fictional, a line which is increasingly ignored, though I chalk that up to factors that mostly go across political divisions. Both sides attribute the negative traits and consequences of real examples of things to images of those things without a second thought, conflating imagery and reality to a degree that it really makes me wonder if they could even explain what the difference is... or if they believe there is any difference.
Where do you want to start?
- They actively contributed to an increased homicide rate and made neighborhoods more dangerous for minorities by pushing a false anti-police narrative, engaged in anti-police protests, sentiment, and actions. Their actions resulted in a pullback in policing in dangerous neighborhoods and massive spikes in crime rates. This is a view shared by many minorities, who wish for the police to return to their neighborhoods, so that they can feel safe. Source? How about the right-wing rag NPR:
https://www.npr.org/2017/12/31/574824963/baltimore-residents...
- They actively push pseudo-social science into fields where rigor, exactness, and soundness is most important, such as engineering, where errors can have catastrophic consequences:
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19378629.2017.14...
- They viciously attack on ideological grounds any attempts at objective assessment when the statistics do not fit their narrative. Examples? There are hundreds, but how about professor David Gillhorn at the University of Birmingham, who says math serves "white interests" and:
“frequently encode racist perspectives beneath the facade of supposed quantitative objectivity.”
- They have, particularly on college campuses, collectively lost their minds. Please see the Evergreen State College incident, along with dozens of others.
- Most of their social science experiments are absolute junk:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis
Do you want me to keep going?
Yes, I'd really like to gather all this up and look into it.