Lionel Shriver (a female writer), writing from the vantage of a former progressive, offers a sharp diagnosis of the contemporary Left's temperament. Progressives, she argues, are driven less by a constructive vision than by the need for an enemy, the pleasure of tearing things down, and the comfort of perpetual adolescence. Their protests are angry and punitive; their policy instincts favour restriction and control over abundance; their moral displays of guilt and solidarity function mainly as status signals among themselves. A completed utopia, free of targets, would leave them purposeless. They are most at home in opposition.
That account captures the psychology of many rank-and-file activists and voters. A subset of them still genuinely believe that human nature can be remade sufficiently for a communist or near-communist society to work; equality of outcome, the withering of coercion, the end of scarcity through collective ownership. Historical failures are treated as implementation errors rather than evidence against the project. For this group the ideology is sincere, even if the path they endorse repeatedly produces the opposite of the promised abundance and liberty.
A different stratum operates above them. Higher elites: political operators, foundation funders, academic and media gatekeepers, and the more sophisticated elements within the administrative state, treat the same ideology instrumentally. They do not expect, and in many cases do not desire, the classless society advertised to the base. The language of equity, decolonisation, climate emergency, and anti-capitalism supplies the moral cover and the organisational energy needed to displace rival elites, reallocate status and resources, and entrench their own networks. Tribal and class advantages are secured under the banner of universal justice. When the policies produce disorder, lower growth, or institutional decay, the same elites are often insulated by credentials, geography, or private resources.
The two layers are mutually reinforcing. The true believers supply the fervour and the street-level pressure. The instrumental elites supply the institutional capture, the funding, and the narrative management that keeps the project viable longer than pure enthusiasm would allow. Neither group is primarily interested in the functional requirements of a complex, high-trust, high-productivity society: enforceable property rights, competence-based selection, energy abundance, and the rule of law applied without regard to identity. Those requirements are treated as obstacles or as relics of the order being dismantled.
The observable result is not a transition to utopia but a measurable erosion of the capacities that sustain advanced civilization. Rule-of-law indices decline even in long-stable countries as judicial and administrative constraints weaken. Energy and industrial policy prioritise restriction over reliability. Educational and professional standards are subordinated to demographic or ideological targets. Fertility falls while migration and welfare systems expand without corresponding gains in cohesion or productivity. Crime, disorder, and selective enforcement become normalised in jurisdictions that once maintained high levels of public order. These are not temporary costs on the way to a better equilibrium; they are the equilibrium produced when the incentive structure rewards the destruction of constraints and the elevation of loyalty over competence.
Shriver's insight that progressives are most comfortable failing helps explain the durability of the pattern. For the sincere, each new failure can be blamed on insufficient purity or residual opposition, preserving the project. For the instrumental elites, managed decline or controlled chaos can be preferable to a restoration of competence that would threaten their position. In either case the cumulative effect is civilisational breakdown: the progressive loss of the material, institutional, and cognitive surplus that once distinguished the societies in which the ideology first took hold. The ideology continues; the civilisation that hosts it does not.
https://dailysceptic.org/2026/11/07/what-do-progressives-really-want/