Lived experience anecdotal comment:

Over the past decade I’ve lived in the bluest of the blue and the reddest of the red. From being surrounded by trans flags to being surrounded by Trump flags.

MAGA: There are two varieties - the cult members, who are still on board, and the ones who actually wanted Trump to make good on his campaign promises. Those folks are not so thrilled anymore. Regardless of which variety you choose, however, neither one will hate you for not agreeing with them. Some of them are dumb. Some of them aren’t. Most of them are just people that our system threw overboard decades ago. People who don’t want an unearned leg up but simply a fair fight.

Auth progressives: Again, two varieties - cult members, and liberals who keep their lips buttoned about the cult members. Some of them are dumb. Some aren’t. These people have no fixed ideology at all. Their positions, and outrage, are driven by opposition, full stop. They choose the people they don’t like and work tirelessly toward becoming the opposite. These people do hate you for disagreeing with them. Many, if not most, of these people have a level of privilege they’re utterly oblivious to. College grads. Middle to upper class live at home adult children. Wine moms (lots of wine moms). These people want both an unearned leg up and a fight that’s rigged in their favor.

There is a fundamental difference between the two that makes the latter far more threatening than the former. MAGA doesn’t care if their policies coming to fruition help those who oppose them. In fact, they’re fine with it. The majority of them don’t think that their opposition (we’re talking normal folks right now, not politicians) are bad or evil - just incorrect and misinformed. The A in MAGA is America, and most of them mean it. Make them great again. Make you great again. Make us great again. You might think they’re idiots, but at least their version of America includes you.

Conversely, modern progressives have determined their opposition to be evil. As such, they despise anything that might help their opposition. In fact, they’d prefer policies that hurt their opposition. This is part of why they now hold America in such distain: the opposition has identified with that word, America, and they want nothing to do with it anymore. They hate America, because they hate the people who identify as American.

MAGA is a group that would be easy to satisfy. They have coherent concerns. You don’t have to agree with those concerns, but they’re understandable and - outside of the cult members - about as consistent as people can be. Throw them a couple of bones and they’ll be fine.

Progressives are impossible to satisfy. Their concerns aren’t coherent - they’re predicated on their enemies. They don’t actually stand FOR anything. They stand against things. And all it takes for them to stand against something is for their enemies to embrace it, no matter what it is. Short of half the country vanishing you’ll never be able to sate these people (and even then they’d just turn on each other). They are zealots in a way that MAGA simply is not.

Someone will bring up January 6th in response, I’m sure. But no matter what you think that was - insurrection attempt (it wasn’t), riot or manufactured - what it wasn’t was an attack on their opposing populace. It was directed at people in positions of extreme power, full stop. They did not throw a brick through a independent restaurant window or attempt to burn down a police station or set fire to private citizen’s cars or loot neighborhood stores. They did not take their anger out on regular people - they took it straight to power. Because, if nothing else, they correctly perceive where the problem lies, and it isn’t with the democrat in their neighborhood or the coffee shop with the trans flag sticker in the window.

Progressives, on the other hand, never seem to actually stand up to power anymore. All of their attacks are focused on the individual. Even for those who understand that the system is the problem, their wrath is meted out on the powerless. For them the root of the problem isn’t the powerful who enable the system - it’s the neighbor who doesn’t see things exactly as they do. To them, somehow, that person is responsible. And that makes them far more frightening. They want to punish you for what they’re unhappy about.

A long time ago a good dude on the left named Michael Brooks said “Be kind to people. Be ruthless to systems.” Brooks died in 2020, and the last whispers of his version of leftist ideology all but died with him.