I’ve noticed something important about how I experience political ideology.

For most people, it seems, the primary significance of political ideology is its intentions. What can we expect this political movement to do? What kind of society does it seek to bring about? How will it change our lives if it gains power? Seen this way, ideologies are most important for how they help us predict future behaviors.

For me, political ideologies are an intrinsic part of a person’s practical philosophy and, by extension, their personality, which includes not only their immediate thoughts, feelings, perceptions and responses but what they make, and what they choose to use and to surround themselves with.

For me philosophy is an immediate, tangible reality that is very much present in the people around me.

And I have experienced the spread of progressivism in my social circles as an enormous loss of humanity. Wherever it takes root, there is less room for personal uniqueness, and only for what can be encapsulated by identity and invested with power to force acknowledgement. This is the consequence of believing that “the personal is political.” Progressivism imagines itself as attacking large powerful groups, but its real target is the unique person — persons identical to others only in the fact of their uniqueness.

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I hate progressivism not because of what it will someday do, but because of what it does right now to people possessed by it.