In a way, I'm not surprised that the persecution angle is so effective.  Let's face it, a lot of the progressive social agenda really does involve telling people how to behave and ultimately how to think.  This isn't a bad thing.  If you want to combat racism you have to make it unacceptable.  You start with rules barring racism in the public sphere, particularly with regards to government services, employment and commerce.  You hope that over time (and because most people are not racists deep down) that people realize that not only are these rules not onerous but that the underlying problem was ridiculous in the first place and that we're way better off without it.  Over time, society even shuns those who continue the old practices.  That's progress.

But people don't like to be told what to do and how to think.  A lot of people will react by saying "I'm not a racist anyway, so why are you telling me what to do?"  Others will say "I've never been a racist, my family came to this country long after slavery was abolished and I am being victimized by affirmative action."  So there you have two "I'm being persecuted" arguments that are rhetorically compelling.

Now add the slippery slope part into it.  If they want to tell me how to behave and how to think, then what else do they want to tell me?  If they will interfere in the college admissions process or in the competition for jobs, what else will they interfere with?

So why do they get to define the debate?  I think it's more accurate to say that any time one of these issues comes up there's a big struggle to define the debate.  One example I can think of is the now pretty much over debate over politically correct language.  This was a debate over what constituted offensive speech.  Well, offensive is pretty subjective, right?  The Pro-P.C. side of the debate basically argued that the aggrieved group got to define what was offensive and in what context.  The anti-P.C. side, which was basically the conservative side, argued the opposite, that only the user of the language, the one with intention, could make that determination.  Ironically, as the argument wears on, the conservative side becomes the victim.  "You're accusing me of racism, sexism, homophobia," they say.  "You are making a damaging accusation against my character."  Why is it a damning accusation?  Because we are now, because of progressive policies and ideas, a society that shuns racists, sexists and homophobes.  There are actual negative consequences, including negative financial consequences, for being seen that way.  Well, it seems the pro-P.C. side was right.  The victim does have greater leeway to decide what's offensive.  But what if you fervently believe, as many on the right do, that you were falsely accused of racism.  You're a victim too and you inherit the victim's power to frame the conversation.  "Don't you dare call me a racist, I'm friends with Juan Williams!"

As for question 3, why didn't we see this coming and head it off at the pass?  Can't be done.  The same forces that we have marshalled to achieve substantial social progress are the same forces our opponents marshall to oppose us.  We stand up for victims and underdogs.  So do they.  But first they cast themselves in those roles.

I find myself wondering when, why and how did we become a society in which now everyone competes politically to define, and be, the deserving victim?  It's as though whatever else the right and left disagree about they seem to agree that getting yourself defined as the victim, the percecuted "side", is the way to go.  (Tom Engelhardt wrote a book called The End of Victory Culture, about changes in US culture from the post World War II period up to the present.  I've not read it but others here may have.  He may make some points that are pertinent here.)

Why is that?  Which of these factors has contributed to this most?  Are there others even more important?

*the Right witnessed the stunning successes of the civil rights movement, which were based on winning the sympathy fight in the public eye, and concluded that was the way to go 

*changes in the economy (coinciding roughly with the period of the modern-day ascendency of the organized Right).  Even those not already negatively effected are anxious about whether they are next, and soon, and how they are going to survive that. 

*events on the ground created a climate of negativity, with few successes to balance these out.  One could cite the multi-pronged disaster of Vietnam, the aftermath of the '60s race riots, the Kent State shootings, Nixon's stoking of the fires of zero-sum resentment, and Watergate and the cynicism that led to it and resulted from it. 

*for those who believe there is no substitute for a common, compelling adversary when it comes to such glue as can hold a society like ours together, the end of the Cold War 

So one doesn't even have to have a view of human nature as inherently very jealous and resentful to identify stuff that's gone on over the last 40 years that may help account for where we are now.

Maybe a mistake is to view the 25 years after World War II, which is still a frame of reference for many alive today, as the norm, instead of an aberration.  Wasn't it inevitable that the US would fare well compared to a lot of other countries that had been destroyed in the War or were industrializing at a slower pace than we were?  Isn't it inevitable that in a world where communication and transporation barriers are falling away, where knowledge is more accessible/harder to monopolize for profit, and just about all countries are working their asses off to improve their educational systems, what was once overwhelming US dominance was going to fall by the wayside?  Even if we weren't also doing so much to hasten that process along? 

The integration of the schools was experienced by many who resisted the change as an expulsion from the Social Contract. The way I heard it expressed at the time was that secular institutions had abandoned them, not the other way around. The loss of power that occurred was not just about losing privileges and the right to replicate a form of life, it was a moral indictment of their character as people. The sense of being persecuted preserves and replicates the feeling of the initial insult. Remembering the insult makes things personal that might otherwise be seen as the result of a changing world. The ensuing arguments about intentions tend to hide the common practice of both "seclurists" and "non-seclurists" to diagnose what is missing in the other. The nation is more divided by forms of psychological perception than it is by disagreements over policy (and the latter are significant). It is like that short story by Carver, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, but with Zombies instead of Love.

Viewing the matter through a psychological frame permits looking at the differences without immediately dealing with the claims of who has the ethical highground. Another advantage of the frame is that talking about hysteria in a psychological context is not a zero sum game. Or maybe I should say it doesn't have to be one. In other words, references to right wing and left wing hysteria are often made with the suggestion that they both express the same underlying structure. These references are more about laying down assumptions than they are the products of analyses.

Without further preamble, let me quote from that famous British psychologist, Margaret Thatcher:

There is no such thing as society: there are individual men and women, and there are families.

A provocative statement, to be sure. It is not actually denying the existential status of social institutions, it is saying that they do not have a life of their own. In this context, the personal is not an enclosure that is surrounded by objective relations, the objective order is surrounded by personal relations. As an empirical horizon, the statement establishes its own ground for the secular that undercuts the language of the "liberals" object world.

Goldwater was articulating this idea when he talked about the State "living your life for you". For him the matter was not only about restraining the power of central authority but a condition of the individual. Reagan expanded on the idea of bad intentions by saying that Liberals didn't understand that they had them. They were well meaning in their idealism but were actually agents of degeneration.

This suggests to me that the real message behind the "They Want to Kill Christmas" shtick is not about getting people to believe a sudden increase in hatred has occurred but that a chronic disease has made further progress. Have a lovely day.

Genghis, I strayed off in my comments above but I wanted you to know how perceptive and original I thought Chapter 2 was--very important and foundational. I don't know of anyone else who has connected these dots the way you have done. 

In some ways to answer in part the three questions (along with much of what has been said here already), I would go back 6 decades to find significant roots to the persecution politics (of course, as pointed out we can trace everything back as far as we want to go, even to ancient Greece).  The 1950s saw the beginning of the rise of mass media along with a youth culture which, youth being youth, was attracted to things in music and the arts their parents weren't necessarily approving of.  Elvis' hips were a threat to the social moral fabric of the society.  In 1957, San Francisco authorities put a bookseller on trial for trying to sell Howl which supposively was illegal because it was obscene and had no redeeming social value.

The difference then was these liberal threats to the status quo were by and large outsiders to the establishment.  Moreover, they weren't overtly political.  Yet over time as we moved into the sixities, music and the arts both popular and avant-garde became more and more anti-establishment, whether political or social.  In the process, rightly and wrongly, these expressions were associated with the liberal political agenda.  At the very least, it was a mainstay of the liberal view that not only freedom of expression that shook up the prevalent view of things in and of itself a good thing, it should be actively encouraged. To embrace the idea that times are indeed changing is by its nature confrontational to those who don't want things to change.  Unfortunately, in the minds of many conservatives, there was little difference between Dylan singing protest songs and Alice Cooper singing about going to hell.

And slowly and surely as the sixities ended, these folks who would have everyone reading poems like Howl and were talking about a revolution of one sort of another (from Mao to women's liberation) began to move into positions in the establishment.  Moreover, they were very prevalent in the entertainment industry as well as the publishing industry.  It wasn't that hard of a sell to convince people of the liberal mainstream media conspiracy when in those people's mind the same folks responsible for the sex, drugs, violence and general debauchery in the movies and tv were also reporting on the news.  Nor it was hard to convince them these youth under the sway of the dark forces in the fifties and sixites were now the professors at the universities, who in turn were now trying to corrupt their children to the dark side. 

One of the significant threads in this is that the liberal side had spent a number of decades pushing its own brand of persecution politics (gotta fight the Man because the Man is out to get ya).  In many cases there was a legitimate concern for the persecution politics on the left (the civil rights movement in the fifties and going forward). But sometimes it was just shallow non-ideological anti-establishment for anti-establishment's sake.  Tradition became dirty word and many in the arts were seemingly out to shock for the sake of shocking the status quo (a tradition itself in the arts that goes way back in modern times) with nothing much else to say.  Making the case for the war on Christmas is made easier when there is someone out there doing art pieces like Piss Christ.  And rightly or wrongly, because of this long history of the arts in the country as it has been beamed into the living rooms of the conservatives whether they like or it not, what they perceive as the intentions behind work such Piss Christ or the music of Marilyn Manson (etc etc) lurk behind the intentions of anyone who claims to be a political liberal, regardless of whether their favorite music is Yo Ma Ma or their favorite paintings are from the 19th century Hudson River School movement.

Since those on the left in the arts when it is being serious don't see going after the establishment as persecution (but the oppressed rising up against the oppressor), they don't see themselves as doing anything wrong in perpetuating the confrontational dynamic.  And while I don't think this is a right or wrong issue, the issue is that divisions that we see politically are pertuated by those who may or may not profess any political agenda.  At the same time, because of the association already in people's minds that these artists are part of the liberal horde, and because they have more channels of communication to the public at large than many others, they tend to drive much of the definition of what liberal is or isn't, regardless of what others like Rush do or say about liberals. 

Which is all a way of saying that you may fight for the right of Marilyn Manson to express himself however he feels compelled to (which I would), but one also understand as he does he is defining liberals in the minds of many, as well as perpetuating the confrontation that divides us.  For better or for worse.