Where are all these leftist Christian values? I don't see them anywhere.
If you know how hard it is to get people to take those things seriously versus just pandering to them while worshiping power (like liberals, for example) then you should be able to understand why that same problem has plagued people inspired by Jesus.
The truth is humans are stuck in generational cycles of trauma that make us vulnerable to authoritarian thinking in ways that feel "normal" and despite the lies of the evangelical church, Jesus's name isn't a magic word that makes all that go away with one prayer. You have to seek that transformation with all of your heart.
Whether we frame that as "repenting" in a spiritual sense or we frame it as "healing" in a secular sense the deep inner work required to actually unpack all those bags is laborious and seemingly neverending.
We start implanting the ways of empire in infants before they even have language to encode the memories and those deeply rooted ways of being are compounded by years of indoctrination and exposure to punitive abuse before we ever develop the vocabulary to begin unlearning it all.
This kind of work is unpopular and the commodified form of therapy for an hour every two weeks is woefully inadequate for the continuous effort of mindset shifting and self reflection, disciplined behavior changes, etc... that it takes to really get to the core of one's own psyche is not something most people are willing to do.
Most people just stare at me in disbelief or tune out like I'm infodumping when I try to persuade them they might want to grab a pen and start journaling, or grab a tarot deck and do some shadow work, or set a timer and start meditating. So that's where all those values are - locked away in people who think justice is staying mad at people they don't like.
