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I've spent a not-insignificant amount of time around "music people", and for the most part they are much the same. I happen to be one myself, but don't feel particularly "attacked" because I don't feel it describes me well - a generalisation doesn't necessarily apply to every individual member of a group.
The first problem is that many of these people don't look at societies as large emergent entities which are governed and shaped by forces that are outside of anything we would consider as "humanistic values" (example: Scott's Moloch), rather they tend to see societies as being almost solely a product of ideology. When that is the primary lens through which you view things, you end up adopting this incredibly airy-fairy idea that you can shape society into anything you want and IF ONLY you could get enough people on board we could live on Heaven On Earth. Most "artsy people" really don't tend to develop very complex thinking about societies and why they operate the way they do, and it doesn't matter how much history or anthropology or evolutionary theory or whatever they learn, most of them in practice tend to remain stuck in this mindset.
The second problem is that their cognition is in large part governed by aesthetics (unsurprisingly so, perhaps). Their political thinking and what they like/dislike are basically determined by what resonates with them on the most aesthetic and superficial of levels, and a huge amount of their political criticisms amount to implying that their opponents' optics are bad and distasteful to them instead of actually engaging with the meat of the arguments being made. Again, knowledge doesn't seem to change this because it's a fundamental, deeper problem with their mindset and personality that's independent of how much one knows.
These two things seem to predispose them to adopting revolutionary, utopian leftist ideologies (e.g. communism) and clinging hard to these beliefs even when they observably break apart on contact with reality.
This is a critical part of whatever the full answer is here. Progressive art is unbound by the need to work, hold up to logical scrutiny, or make literally any sense at all. It's pure aesthetics. Dig into the lyrics of the average punk song, or celebratory ghetto anthem, or vaguely progressive pop hit and they are fucking retarded, Gringott's with it's fixed precious metals exchange ratios stamping on the human sense-making organ forever. It's a vibe and a glib line and never ever having to worry if the underlying mechanics will function on any level.
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Interesting, I wonder how much this connects with something I started noticing ~8 years ago and continues to be en vogue now among many people on the left, which is calling political things they disagree with "gross" or "not a good look." Both of which are obviously subjective aesthetic judgments rather than any sort of meaningful criticism, though they're always stated as if they're supposed to be taken as meaningful criticisms. I've written about the "gross" before, but I recall being absolutely befuddled by seeing other leftists use it to describe right-wing behavior in a negative way, because much of our activism in the prior decade had been about getting society to accept gay marriage and homosexuals in general, and one of the key arguments for the case had been that someone's personal disgust reaction should have absolutely zero bearing on the ethical correctness of that thing - i.e. just because you're viscerally disgusted by the idea of 2 men kissing, it doesn't make a romantic/sexual relationship between 2 men any less beautiful or less worth tolerating, if not celebrating, than one between a man and a woman.
This then connects with one theory that I had, which is that many of the fellow "liberals" fighting for gay marriage weren't fighting for liberalism at all, but rather was using it as a vehicle by which to push forward something that they themselves didn't find disgusting - theater and the arts are well known to have a very high proportion of gay people relative to the broader population, and as such one would expect that people in those groups would tend to have less of a disgust reaction, if any, towards their friends, coworkers, and other direct peers.
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