Are there "PC hive minds"? definitely. But right now, they most assuredly don't have the level of power that the old-guard conservatives do.

I don't see a good reason to believe that's true - or at least, whether "conservatives" hold power is strongly function of what place you're talking about, and of what you mean by "power". Remember, not everybody here lives in the US like I assume you do (I live in France, as a first approximation it looks like you're all crazy over there).

The impression I get is that both liberals and conservatives enjoy whining about how they are oppressed by their all-powerful opponents, and if you add the right caveats (what kind of oppression and where), they might both be right.

In this thread, I've seen some distasteful justifications of "lying for the Greater Good" (or even just to defend "people in my coalition"), and in one (heavily downvoted) case, someone claiming they'd rather see the world destroyed rather than seeing it continue to exist with the current value systems ... all of that under the flag of feminism or LGBT advocacy. That has done very little to convince me that the biggest threats are from "old guard conservatives". It may be the case in some crapholes in Alabama, but probably not among the bright and educated.