One thing I don’t understand (I say rhetorically) about many modern Barthians is: how they square their progressive socio-politicism with Barth’s radical stance against natural theology. Socio-political progressivism typically takes a few forms: 1) 
Fascism, 2) Communism, 3) National or International Socialism. But these ideologies are posited out of the horizontal, albeit, at points, dialectical world of materialisms. There is nothing unilaterally given by God, like Revelation, that grounds these ideologies. It is purely a naturalist pursuit. Indeed, there are revisionist renderings of Barth’s theology wherein God’s Being is grounded in its becoming; as such God’s being becomes immanentized by its material grounding in the concretum of Christ’s resurrection. From this immanentized frame it is possible to see how these types of Barthians construct a progressivist theo-politik. But this is to the point: this thinks from a revisionist rendering of Barth’s theology, and not the textual Barth.
I have many former contacts with Princeton Barthians, of the McCormack school. Indeed, McCormack’s reading of Barth is the revisionist one I (along with George Hunsinger) am referring to. But hang on, even George Hunsinger’s politics are very radical and progressive. Maybe there is something to Barth’s theology, beyond just revision, that lends itself to the sort of socio-political progressivism I am referring to. For Hunsinger, rather than revisionism, it might be attributed to the Disruptive nature of God’s grace in Christ. Indeed, this might be the hook for McCormack and students as well; albeit I still think McCormack’s revisionism of Barth provides for an even more robust theological plane upon which his progressivism can land. That said: in Barth’s theology he places total emphasis on God’s act to be for the world in Christ. This act confronts and contradicts the world, afresh and anew (actualism), in the event of God’s continuous Self-revelation in Jesus Christ as He stands with us by the Spirit. This disruptive, or others might say Apocalyptic in-tervention of God’s life into the world through the humanity of Christ, might cohere with a certain stylized reception of Marx’s, or even more pointedly, Hegel’s dialecticism. In this framework history is simply a dialectic of being and becoming through the interaction of the natural and transcendent that obtains within an immanentized frame.
The answer to my question, I’m almost sure of it, comes down to the matrices we find in neo-Kantianism, Hegelianism, and to a lesser extent plain old Marxism. The Barthians I am referring to (cause I am one in my own sense) might argue that Barth’s theology coheres with these other systems of philosophical dialecticism insofar that that they find correspondence in their ultimate Logos as secular parables. I still need to pursue Barth’s thinking on ‘secular parables’ further, but this is probably where the progressive Barthians go, and come from. The idea of God’s commandeering Word in Christ with His capability of reifying the secular in such a way that it is taken up and re-created by the miracle and power of His resurrection life.
This is a complex. But it is possible, when pressed down deeper, to see how Barthians can take Barth’s theological themes and work them into some form of progressive political theory. But it is also not a necessary move with Barth. His theological themes do not require that the theologian become a Democratic Socialist (as understood currently), a Communist, Marxist, or Hegelian. There is always room to appropriate, in constructive fashion, any theologian. Some just have greater “constructive imaginations” than others; or at least some have maybe extraneous factors impinging on the way they appropriate someone like Barth. I’d say this is the case with the Princeton Barthians I have been referring to. They are all academics, in a very 21st century academic setting; which by now we all know is the center for cultivating young minds into the ways of Marxism, neo-Marxism, and other forms of progressive ideology. I would say this the primary context that informs these particular Barthians constructive appropriation of Barth. So, while Barth’s theology itself might be open to this sort of appropriation, thematically, it is not a necessity of it. My tentative conclusion is that the greater factor is that these Barthians have been formed more by their academic settings rather than Barth himself when it comes to their progressive theological activism. An early example of this would be one of Barth’s students: Helmut Gollwitzer. But then again, maybe not. Barth after all was known as the Red Pastor of Safenwil; and he was a Democratic Socialist (albeit in his context this would have been considered conservative rather than radical left). Does Barth’s theology actually fund his own form of democratic socialism? Or maybe, rather, does Barth’s theology contradict himself, in his own political activism? Maybe.