A topic of interest amongst many crime-thinkers, as well as some mainstream writers who secretly read crime-thinkers for column material, is why Progressives can never come to terms with the fact that they have been in charge of most of society for generations. It’s as if they have been asleep for the last fifty years or were taught an alternative history.

Detroit collapses in on itself and Progressive are out in the streets protesting as if the city was run by a secret cabal of Free Masons. They demand change and the implementation of their preferred solutions. Left out is the fact they were the ones in charge for fifty odd years and they had implemented all of their preferred polices, causing the collapse.

Race is the most obvious big social issue which has been totally controlled by Progressives. Since the 1950’s, the Left has had a free hand in trying tonmake the races get along. They even control the definition of “getting along.” Despite this, the last few years has been a non-stop campaign to “fix” race, as well as a cynical effort to cause a race war.

After the church shooting, every member of the Cult was out in the streets claiming nothing has changed since the last time a white guy killed a bunch of black people, which was fifty years ago. Normal people would look at the near total absence of white on black crime in the South, relative to the bad old days, as an amazing development. To the Left, this has not happened and it is still 1955.

My theory for why Progressives have a folded timeline is that their religion is synchronic versus diachronic and it is emotional. The Western tradition, informed by the Catholic scholarly traditions, is diachronic and dispassionate. History is a series of events, each influencing the other. The French Revolution, for example, led to Napoleon, the latter being the result of the former.

The Progressive sense of history is synchronic and emotional. The Civil Rights Movement has enormous emotional resonance with the left so it is of constant interest and talked about as if it happened yesterday. On the other hand, the near total domination of America urban centers by Progressive politicians has no emotional resonance so may as well have happened ten thousand years ago or not at all.

This jumps out when talking with millennials, who have been marinated in the New Religion throughout their schooling. Even those who ostensibly reject the one true faith have this emotional timeline baked into their thinking. They divide the past into two parts. There are those events that happened a long time ago before they were around and those events that happened in their time, which are all consuming.

For instance, I recently was talking with a millennial about mobile phones. He made the comment that life must have been rough before Steve Jobs invented the iPhone. He just assumed that this thing important to him, was a seminal moment in history. When I explained to him that I had a mobile phone in the 1980’s, I may as well have told him I lived in the age of dragons. He was incredulous.

I think this explains the current moral panic over the Confederate flag. In the Progressive timeline, the Civil War looms large, casting a shadow over everything. Their emotional response to the flag is the same as abolitionists felt in the 19^th century. It’s why plagiarists like Doris Kearns Goodwin try so hard to make Lincoln into a Progressive Democrat.

It’s also why after half a century that we are still treated to JFK retrospectives around the anniversary of his death. Kennedy was an insignificant figure in American history, but he looms large in the Progressive imagination, even larger than FDR. The reason is he was “martyred” and then turned into a saint in the Cult of Modern Liberalism. The real JFK would have been revolted by modern liberalism, but the mythological one is the Brigham Young of the faith.

A strange little book I read a long time ago is The Man Who Folded Himself, by Star Trek writer David Gerrold. The premise is that the timeline can be folded on itself so that points separated by eons can appear to be moments apart. That’s the mind of the Progressive. Events of great emotional import are clustered together on their timeline in the near past. Everything else is scattered in the distant past, many beyond the event horizon.

The result of this folded timeline is a historical amnesia. It is, perhaps, a defense mechanism to deal with disconfirmations. When the prophesies do not come true, those events quickly recede into the distant past so the believer can maintain their faith. Think about how chronic gamblers never remember their loses, but remember every cent they won.

Those events that fit the narrative are always in their minds as if they just happened. Sometimes, they confuse the imaginary events like the Mathew Shepherd murder with real events. Just the other day a moonbat brought this case with me. When I pointed out that he was not, in fact, a victim of homophobia, the moonbat was incredulous. I had to provide proof and they were still insisting it could have happened.

Oddly, the Dark Ages are described as the period when the barbarians snuffed out the light of Rome. That’s not exactly true, but it is useful. What will we call the period when the fanatics turn out the lights on the past, disconnecting us from material reality? Maybe in  the future, our time will be known as the start of the Blind Ages.