“Since the principles undergirding America’s founding are beyond mortal law, they are beyond the reach of the progressives and the administrative state. Hence the war on the founding values, beliefs, and traditions was and is intended to, among other things, stop legitimate inquiry into and teaching of first principles or purposes. They are to be made intellectually and culturally off-limits. Consequently, what is left is only one acceptable and overarching agenda — the progressive agenda.” —Mark Levin, from his book, “Rediscovering Americanism: And the Tyranny of Progressivism”

Perhaps nothing is more toxic than a progressive ideology that has become the default position that millions of unwilling people are expected to oblige. And nothing facilitates that forced subservience more than political correctness.

Yet what, precisely, is political correctness? It is totalitarianism — promoted as morality.

Thus one is not merely wrong for challenging the progressive status quo on same-sex marriage, transgenderism, “white privilege,” illegal immigration, global warming, “hate speech,” or a host of other leftist causes. One is evil, and the “appropriate” label defining what particular evil is applied: homophobic, transphobic, racist, nativist, anti-science, fascist, etc.

Labeling one as evil as opposed to wrong is critical. Wrong leaves room for debate. Evil makes debate unnecessary — and entrenches the progressive default position as a result.

It is an ever-expanding entrenchment. “Words can have a powerful effect on your nervous system,” insists Northeastern University psychology professor Lisa Feldman Barrett. “Certain types of adversity, even those involving no physical contact, can make you sick, alter your brain — even kill neurons — and shorten your life.”

What to do? “The scientific findings I described above provide empirical guidance for which kinds of controversial speech should and shouldn’t be acceptable on campus and in civil society,” Barrett asserts. “In short, the answer depends on whether the speech is abusive or merely offensive.”

And who gets to define which is which? “There is a difference between permitting a culture of casual brutality and entertaining an opinion you strongly oppose,” she states. “The former is a danger to a civil society (and to our health); the latter is the lifeblood of democracy.” Thus, Barrett insists, it’s “reasonable” to completely prevent “provocateur and hatemonger” Milo Yiannopoulos from speaking on campus because he’s “abusive,” while political scientist Charles Murray is acceptable because “you might find his view to be repugnant and misguided, but it’s only offensive.”

In other words, what Barrett and her fellow progressives define as abusive must be rendered “intellectually and culturally off-limits.”

Attacks on the First Amendment are merely the tip of the progressive spear. Reality itself must also be aligned to suit progressive sensibilities. In Wales, the Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL) is demanding that higher education teachers undergo gender diversity training, warning that the failure to use proper pronouns to address “non-binary” persons could precipitate legal action.

Jasper Williams, LGBT+ officer for NUS Wales, reveals the unbridled arrogance behind the effort. She singles out a teacher who “couldn’t get anything that wasn’t male or female,” telling BBC News he made comments “making it sound like non-binary genders [are] made up and like a fantasy idea.”

Thus by implication, biological and chromosomal realities are now “fantasy ideas” that must be rendered inoperable by force of law. The same force of law the Obama administration unilaterally imposed on schools around the entire nation when it insisted Title IX of the 1964 Civil Rights Act gave transgender students the right to use restrooms and locker rooms matching their gender “identities” — using the threat of withholding federal education funds as a hammer to enforce its “guidelines.” The Trump administration rescinded the directive, but there is no doubt progressives will reinstate it if they regain power.

As far as progressives are concerned, the transgender science is “settled.”

And they’ve got the documentation to “prove” it. “The evidence is clear — the American Left succeeded in lobbying the American Psychiatric Association (APA) to eliminate some of the sexual identity disorders from their Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM),” columnist Mark A. Hewitt explains.

The end game is also clear. “If you get enough votes,” he adds, “you can negate, soften, redefine, and ultimately legitimize any of the mental disorders.”

Toward what end? To achieve a “radical break from America’s heritage,” Levin asserts, further explaining progressive ideology is “an elitist-driven counterrevolution to the American Revolution, in which the sovereignty of the individual, natural law, natural rights, and the civil society — built on a foundation of thousands of years of enlightened thinking and human experience — would be drastically altered and even abandoned for an ideological agenda broadly characterized as ‘historical progress.’”

As Victor Davis Hanson explains, such “progress” has brought the nation to a “dangerous climax” in which “the consequences of globalization, the growth of the deep state, changing demographics, open borders, the rise of a geographic apartheid between blue and red states, and the institutionalization of a permanent coastal political and culture elite — and the reaction to all that — are tearing apart the country.”

And yet again, the progressive default position dominates, irrespective of the consequences. “It does not matter that the ossified European social model does not work and leads to collective decline in the standard of living,” Hanson states. “The world knows that from seeing the implosion of Venezuela and Cuba, or the gradual decline of the EU and the wreckage of its Mediterranean members, or the plight of blue states such as Illinois and California.”

Despite this plethora of evidence, Hanson believes the “near-religious idea of egalitarianism” progressives cherish “has all but won the war against liberty.”

Hanson is somewhat in error. Egalitarianism is a means to an end. The end is suppression of the masses by all-knowing elitists who grant themselves the “near-religious” power of enforcing equality of outcome — and enjoying the unequal bounty engendered by their “noble” tyranny. Elitists who come to a unanimous conclusion regarding a historical record replete with ossified social models, collective declines and societal wreckage:

The wrong people were in charge.

And the war is not over. “Far from progress, the trajectory of progressives toward indolence, malice, violence, and unrestrained sexuality is as old as society,” columnist E.M. Cadwaladr asserts. “It is just paganism with cell phones added.”

It is paganism that may ultimately be fatal. “Through some process of increasing entropy, failed memory management, or unanticipated side effects, the status quo — the one dominated by the Left — is collapsing,” writes PJ Media’s Richard Fernandez.

Fernandez attributes that collapse to a higher power. “God killed the Left,” he asserts. “Of course one could legitimately use some other term. ‘Reality,’ ‘consequences,’ the ‘laws of nature,’ ‘economics,’ even ‘truth’ will do.”

So will terms like natural law, natural rights and civil society, all of which will prove far more enduring than progressive ideology.

Why? Because “only God is God,” Cadwaladr explains. “Politicians, pundits, and opinion makers are not.”

Thus, progressive efforts to create “utopia” are nothing more than monumental hubris. And when that hubris is rejected by a horde of “deplorables,” it explains why so many formerly “tolerant” progressives are now full of anger and hate — and why Liberty and first principles will ultimately prevail.