From Liberal Humanism’s Lost World by Michael Knox Beran:
Trilling cataloged the self-deceptions of the progressives. First, they mistook their desire for power — an “impulse toward moral aggrandizement” — for virtue. Second, they pretended that their effort to rethink American culture was constructive. In their “growing intellectuality — or rather, intellectualism,” they put every “aspect of existence” under a microscope. “Not only politics, but child-rearing, the sexual life, the life of the psyche, the innermost part of existence was subject to ideation,” to a rationalizing effort to make culture conform to abstract ideas.
In preferring, at every turn, the enlightened policy of the moment to experience — to wisdom weighed in the balance of time and reality — progressives deceived themselves about the nature of the rational. Culture, an intricately woven tapestry of custom and time, poetry and tradition, often possesses a reasonableness that eludes our surface rationality, or so Trilling argued in a 1965 essay, “The Two Environments,” in which he defined culture as “the style of life” a society fosters, a creation that “we judge as a whole, rather as if it were a work of art.” The “psychic grace” of style is not necessarily irrational: it has a crucial place, “as I have tried to suggest, in the process of {the rational} intellect.”
In deceiving themselves, cooperationist liberals deceived others. All political systems rest on culture; in dissecting American culture — to avert, they claimed, the “extreme and apocalyptic” consequences of inaction — progressives weakened American political institutions. They acted, they said, to reform the republic; but in reality, Trilling believed, they sought to “transcend” it. In their deepest deception, they portrayed as liberating a program that “meant an eventual acquiescence in tyranny.”