Schlesinger’s successors today want to organize for power. Accumulating power involves creating friction between people and institutions, but that is alright because there is no other way for society to move forward toward the ideal advocates say is best for humanity. Observers outside of the progressive consciousness criticize advocates for being pessimistic, but the opposite is actually the case: the activists’ fight—and they do consider it a fight—is for the future and what they consider a better world, which is a more cooperativist world.

Conservative observers also criticize the polarized style as being non-rational, but the progressive consciousness sees the future as being brought about precisely through the conflict of opposites. Progressives know the polarized style when they see it, and they take it for the instrument of cognitive persuasion that it is.

Although President Obama could fit into Schlesinger’s description of an imperial president, no progressive will ever talk of him in these terms. Although Obama’s and his Secretary of State John Kerry’s foreign policy of internationalism could fit into Schlesinger’s description of an ideological foreign policy, no progressive will ever mention this, either.

What is surprising is that so many independent and conservative commentators can think of Obama as a conventional American president. Despite seeing the polarized style at play in discourse over and over again, more than a few observers situated outside of the progressive consciousness prefer to see politicized analyses as matter-of-fact, and enjoy discussing them as though they are real.