It would be one thing if progressives understood their universalistic moral and political convictions to constitute one legitimate partisan position among many. But they don’t understand them in this way. They believe not only that their views deserve to prevail in the fullness of time, but also that they are bound to prevail.

It is this faith in the inevitability of progressive triumph that has led so many commentators to respond so intensely to the rise of Donald Trump. I don’t mean reactions that focus on Trump’s personal, temperamental shortcomings. Those are real and worthy of serious concern. I mean reactions that take the form of moral indignation and outrage — as if the very fact that millions of voters have cast ballots for a candidate who strongly opposes immigration and free trade is some kind of moral and theological betrayal, or an offense against capital-H History itself.

The progressive response to the outcome of the Brexit vote is remarkably similar.
It’s easy to understand its sources. The European Union may well be the purest and most ambitious experiment in progressivism ever attempted — a transnational economic and political entity founded entirely on the moral premises of humanitarian universalism, which is to say on the negation of particularistic attachments.