If you want to experience a disagreement with your fellow progressive that has enough nitroglycerin in it to explode in your face, have a discussion about education.

I was a member of a cult in my youth, a believer in what came to be described as Progressive Education. As a lifelong pacifist, since my earliest childhood, based on anger, fear, and a belief that we are tasked with putting war out of business, I fell into a belief in progressive education in my 20's upon reading A.S Neill's, Summerhill. At the time, the Vietnam War was raging and becoming more insane, more corrupting, more violent, more threatening to life on earth every day. So perhaps I felt education was part of the conditioning of Americans to accept such behavior on the part of our government. That's as close as I can come to explaining why I believed children playing all day was better than for them to be learning all day.

At the same time, I thought the point of progressive education was to tell the truth about Christopher Columbus, not to just stop teaching about him. That is, I thought the idea was to tell the truth that he was not just an "explorer" who proved the earth was round, but also that he killed and enslaved indigenous people in order to exploit the new world for the Spanish king.

In the 1970's I began to agree with critics of progressive education because I witnessed the fact that many children I knew appeared to know very little about history and that teachers I had contact with were blaming poverty for their ignorance. This frame of reference went with the persistence of tracking systems in public schools based on income, not "ability."

So I became a conservative on education. E.D. Hirsch and Diane Ravitch wrote compellingly about the need to include subject matter in public education, and the Reading Wars and the Math Wars consumed much of my attention. I am a reformed escapee of the cult of progressive education and an ardent proponent of curricula full of information. Knowledge is power.

The hysterical behavior on the part of voters for Hillary Clinton that manifests itself in the belief that Vladimir Putin is the cause of all our problems, seems similar to the belief that poverty causes the Achievement Gap, that information-free progressive education has no responsibility for the fact that so many of our children, rich and poor, are ignorant of history, science, and the realities of the world we live in.

It would be absurd for me to assert that all American public education has been information-free during the era in which progressive education has been the standard. But in districts and regions in which an Achievement Gap persists, and in which even the most advantaged students need remedial education upon reaching college, there are practices that I believe need reforming.

The response that I have experienced to a belief in the need for reform has been similar to the disturbingly hysterical denial seen in the Putin-caused-the-election-results reaction, a denial about responsibility, not only on the part of the Democratic party, but on the part of liberal thinking and behavior with respect to poverty, opportunity, social programs, and war itself, especially in its effects on American students, high school graduates, and dropouts from our public schools.

Affirmative Action is a subject very significant to conservatives who question liberal programs. Nothing exemplifies the point I am trying raise here more than a YouTube video of a California public school teacher, as part of an organization called BAMN, By Any Means Necessary, physically assaulting a participant in a peaceful demonstration questioning Affirmative Action.

I'm conflating too much and I'm over-simplifying, but when I see decent progressives freaking out and believing Vladimir Putin caused the failure of the Democratic party, I see the same denial of racism, classism, and ignorance of world realities on the part of these good people that I have seen in good teachers who advocate substance-free education. It goes very deep, and for many of these people it questions everything they've believed for their whole lives.