I don't really see the progressive movement as being nihilistic. Sure, you can point to the zero population people or climate change doomsayers, but they're the liberal version of those Christian sects that keep predicting the rapture over and over again. Loonies.
The mainstream progressives are more utopian in nature. They think they can legislate and henpeck all the ills of society away in order to reach something like the Federation in Star Trek: No money, everyone provided for, no racism or sexism, everyone happily doing their job no matter how low status out of some philosophy of contributing to the greater good.
The problem isn't that they want everyone to die choking on their own carbon dioxide, it's that their end state of society requires people to act completely out of line with human nature (new socialist man), and they perceive the ills of society incorrectly by using their social construction theories to make the cause of every problem some nebuluous "culture of rape/violence/misogyny/hemorrhoids" that lacks any solution beyond setting up a strawman villain of an evil capitalist with a top hat and cigar plotting against them.
The mainstream progressives are more utopian in nature. They think they can legislate and henpeck all the ills of society away in order to reach something like the Federation in Star Trek: No money, everyone provided for, no racism or sexism, everyone happily doing their job no matter how low status out of some philosophy of contributing to the greater good.
The problem isn't that they want everyone to die choking on their own carbon dioxide, it's that their end state of society requires people to act completely out of line with human nature (new socialist man), and they perceive the ills of society incorrectly by using their social construction theories to make the cause of every problem some nebuluous "culture of rape/violence/misogyny/hemorrhoids" that lacks any solution beyond setting up a strawman villain of an evil capitalist with a top hat and cigar plotting against them.