The answers offered by progressives are that ignorance clouds the understanding of others and that social privilege blocks their human responses. In the eyes of progressives, their conservative opponents are prisoners of a false consciousness that prevents them from recognizing human possibility. In other words, opposition to progressive agendas grows naturally from human selfishness, myopia, and greed. To progressives, theirs alone is the vocation of reason and compassion.
Progressives have a false consciousness of their own.
But this blindness also springs from an insularity created by their contempt for those not gifted with progressive sight. As a result, radicals are largely innocent of the ideas and perspectives that oppose their agendas. This is one reason for the vitality of contemporary conservative thought outside the academy. Following the collapse of the socialist empire the marginalization of conservative ideas in the academic culture has been so pervasive that even those conservatives whose analyses were dramatically vindicated by the events continue to remain hopelessly obscure. As far back as 1922, Ludwig von Mises wrote a 500-page treatise predicting that socialism would not work.