So, with Fetterman rejecting the label "progressive", and a lot of lefties ripping on him for it, and given I have experienced a lot of gatekeeping over the term in the past, I figured that I would define what I mean by "progressive" when I use the term.
For me, being a progressive generally means for being for "progress." What is progress? Generally trying to make society better, in which people are wealthier, healthier, live longer, work less, have equal rights, etc.
I don't think there's any one metric of what progress is, but I'd generally say that a good baseline would be that we try to improve human lives in some meaningful way, and to make the next generation's life better than the last generation's.
I would also say that the term is relative. It's like driving a car. You know the snarky phrase that you hit D to go forward and R to go in reverse? Yeah. It's basically that. I believe that there are three core groups in American society, and, well, any society. You got progressives, conservatives, and regressives. Progressives want to bring society forward, regressives bring it backwards, and conservatives try to keep things relatively the same.
I also think that in American society, these labels are different than they are typically used. Like Trumpers, and what we call conservatives in the US. They're not conservatives. Third way dems are largely "conservative" by my metric as they largely try to maintain the status quo. Biden said "nothing will fundamentally change" when he got into office, that's a conservative sentiment. What actual conservatives are, are regressives. They want to bring society backward to some previous era they perceive as better. For some conservatives, that is 1789. For some that is the 1920s, or the 1950s, or the 1980s. The point is they think that better days were behind us and we need to go back. Progressives think we havent improved society enough and we need to go forward. Actual conservatives, which we call "moderates" in our society, are the ones who largely like the status quo.
As such, i think the terms are relative. Thomas Jefferson, in the era of his time, was progressive AF. He was full of enlightenment ideals like those of John Locke, and in opposing the monarchy, he was massively progressive. But now "conservatives" (ie regressives) think we should all live like it's still 1789 which is...well...dumb. Abe Lincoln was progressive in freeing the slaves. Except now actual progressives rip on him for wanting to deport freed slaves to Africa. FDR was progressive in his time, except now he looks backwards socially and a lot of social progressives hate him for his lack of purity. On economics a lot of his views are still quite progressive, in part because he never implemented his economic bill of rights and in part because american society has regressed since then.
I would argue that every progressive will eventually become a conservative, and every conservative MAY eventually become regressive. Politics and public policy is all about solving problems. The public policy cycle defines problems, outlines policies to fix them, and then it implements them.
I also dont think all progressives are on the same page. Progressives might differ in how much progress they believe needs to be made, and what those changes are. Progress is multi dimensional and relatively subjective, and this is where I tend to differ with so called "progressives" in American politics, and why I might be aligned with fetterman more than many are.
I mean, take israel. To a left wing "progressive", they typically defend palestine. Why? Because their metric of progress is defined by postmodernism and identity politics. They seek to improve the lives of the palestinians, an underprivileged group oppressed in their eyes by the israelis. To them, progress is stopping the killing of palestinian civilians and pushing for a two state solution.
For me, I would disagree. The fact is, when I see palestine, I actually see a group of dangerous regressives. many of them are religious radicals who have views that make our so called "christofascists" look moderate. Hamas is, itself, a genocidal organization who wants to remove all israelis from the land of israel, which is something that amounts to genocide. And I see nothing but barbarity and brutality from their cause and way of life. I look at them like I look at barbarians.
So to me, does helping palestine serve progressive ends? No. If anything it actually seems to be working against a more developed, liberal progressive state against a bunch of psychotic theocrats who want to drag the region back into the dark ages.
If anything, my entire approach to foreign policy ranges from conservatism to progressivism. I seek to conserve the liberal world order with the US in charge, because I see the west as progressive and the rest of the world as regressive. If anything, my hawkish pro west direction in the past two years is due to my wanting to protect my way of life and that of our friends and allies from regressive forces like russia, or china, or religious nutcases in the middle east. Those guys are full on regressives, and dangerous ones at that. If America is Rome, then those guys are the barbarians at the gates and we need to keep protecting ourselves lest we get taken over by them. And this is why I think american progressives and their anti west mentalities have fricking lost the plot. Is America and the west perfect? Hell no. But are we better than the rest of the world? Hell yes. I can't understand, other than left wing brainrot, why people would want to defend china, or russia, or north korea, or cuba, or venezuela, or hamas. It seems absolutely psychotic to me. But they're not progressive. They're not even conservative. They're full on regressive in a way that makes our trumpers look tame by comparison.
What about immigration? Well, it generally is accepted that progressivism leads to more humaneness on immigration. But honestly I'd classify my views as only mildly progressive on this front, or even "conservative" by my own metrics. I dont really seek massive changes to immigration policy and dont care about it in practice. I might be mildly progressive, but not as much as the left is.
And that's the rub. Keep in mind what I said about progressives becoming conservative. Once progressives reach the amount of progress they find acceptable, where they oppose any more, they become relatively conservative. And this is where I am on social issues. I dont want to go backwards like trumpers and what we CALL conservatives want to do, but I also ain't really interested in massive changes, especially in regards to the identity politics nonsense. My idea of progress is in a liberal sense, not a postmodernist sense.
Really, like, I tend to draw on the utopian visions of the 21st century put forward by people living in the mid 20th century. ya know, the ones where we had flying cars, and we abolished poverty and hunger and explored the stars, and we had 9 hour work weeks, if we had work weeks at all. Like in star trek apparently a lot of people just sat around doing holodeck/video games all the time. And you know what? That's fine.
But it's like reagan onward broke our brains. We fell into capitalist realism. We abandoned our utopianism. We kind of adopted this end of history narrative as communism fell. And if anything, we regressed and backslid, and now we dont even have a utopian ethos in politics any more. And instead of getting the good old dream of fully automated gay space communism, everything is this identity politics nonsense. And hating the rich to the point that rather than using the wealth of the rich to make everyone else's life better, its more important to punish them out of principle. Which is why we cant give bill gates or jeff bezos a UBI. And we need to only help the poor, or at least the segments that we care about. And POC should be helped more than whites. And women more than males. And we should be obsessed with LGBTQ+ people for some reason. And we need to fixate on this nonsense.
I didn't sign up for THAT. And on THAT stuff, thats where i start being conservative. Only conservative, not regressive. I support a liberal framework of rights and liberties for all, and I do believe my policies would help address some socioeconomic issues related to various dynamics of race and the like in the US, but all in all, I'm kinda pro status quo to being mildly progressive in the sense that I want more rights and more equality and i want to defend the left's gains from conservatives.
But, I mostly think that for all of the modern left's flaws, we largely made most of the changes that had to be made. If anything, we just gotta undo the damage of the far right and their regressivism on issues like abortion, but otherwise play defense against their regressive impulses. So I guess on social issues im not majorly progressive. Im a conservative/mild progressive, like most liberals are. I'm just a lib.
And on economics, yes, I am progressive. I call for major changes. But these changes differ somewhat from the left. The left is ironically more conservative in some ways. Because their ideologies are a bit more old and backwards. They want jobs programs a la FDR. They want socialism a la Marx and the like. A huge issue I have with the modern left is that they are stuck in the flawed ideologies and policies of past liberals that they refuse to embrace a truly 21st century ethos and support going after topics like UBI, and trying to reduce the work week and take aim at work itself. It baffles me. The entire perspective takes work and growth as a granted (well aside from some leftists who seem regressively degrowth for environmental reasons), and here I am like "yo this is nice and sure it is progressive, but maybe we'd have more progress if we redistributed wealth and income, freed the wage slaves, and cared more about work life balance." It baffles me there hasnt been a major movement to reduce the work week in a meaningful way since the 40 hour work week. 40 hours used to be progressive, and if anything its kinda conservative today. We should strive to reduce our hours to 30-32 hours and IMO, eventually to 24-25ish hours. And maybe less from there but let's accomplish those two steps first.
But...again, a lot of "progressives" are only selectively so and are fixated on the concept of equality and privilege and other weirdo ideas that can sometimes be important but miss the point of progressivism in my flavor of it. The left really seems to be drawn together by all of the political correctness, intersectionality, identity politics nonsense these days and IMO that needs to go. It's not really helpful at all, and on those issues, again, I'm more conservative. My progressivism is again, more in the typical futurist sense. Again, flying cars, jetsons, star trek. That's my idea of what progress looks like. And that ideal has been lost over the past half century or so.
But yeah. All in all, I still am progressive, but not in the way progressives often use the term. We want different things. And to a lot of progressives, im relatively conservative, because again, sometimes people can push boundaries so much that people who used to be progressive are now relatively conservative as they push back against the changes others propose and want to make. And that's what I think actually happens as we get older. You know the whole if youre not liberal at 20 you have no heart, if you're not conservative at 40 you have no brain? I think what actually happens is that those who are liberal at 20 become conservative at 40 not because their ideas change, but because now the new 20 year olds are pushing boundaries again and now the older generations are like wtf.
Like, when I was 20, george w bush was in office, people were shifting left on gay marriage, and we just started falling into the great recession. And my ideas are shaped by that. We grew up in an area where gay rights werent really a thing, and now they are. We grew up thinking america were the good guys in the world and we realized things are complicated and that our invasions in iraq and afghanistan were actually kinda bad. We grew up thinking the economy worked and then the great recession showed us it didn't.
But now, as Im in my mid 30s and will be 40 in a few years, now we got these zoomers and their tiktoks and being pro palestine, and pro cancel culture, and pretty much full marxist in economics and its like WHOA WTF, THIS IS THE KIND OF CRAP RUSH LIMBAUGH WAS WARNING PEOPLE ABOUT BACK IN THE 90S AND THE 2000S, I DIDNT SIGN UP FOR THIS CRAP.
Like, take it from someone who was conservative at 20, shifted left in my 20s, and am now starting to settle more in the middle in my 30s. The shift of the overton window in the past 10-20 years has led to some pretty wicked whiplash. My generation shifted left of where it started, sure, but we stopped at a point realizing that we needed to be you know, sane about it. We didn't want to literally be the weirdo marxist SJWs who hate america like the far right talked about. And now...that's what a lot of zoomers are. They literally are the strawmen we wanted to avoid being.
So yeah. That's my take on that. Still mildly progressive, but slowly becoming more "conservative" in the "moderate" sense. I still hate the people we call conservatives as they're regressives, but on a lot of social and foreign policy issues i would consider myself more a conservative liberal, in the sense that i want to conserve liberal values. Im not a regressive or a reactionary, but im also not as progressive as a lot of the modern left as i disagree with what goals the modern progressive left often has. Im more an old school progressive, which is now just....a status quo conservative.
My progressivism is on economic policy, and i am progressive, but once again, my metrics differ from the actual left on those issues. I think they are still stuck in outdated ideologies and that my views are actually more progressive in some ways, although i admit our metrics vary.
As for fetterman, well its still to early to say. He has some history as a progressive democrat but hes governing a lot more moderate and while i cant complain some people seem to be despising that. Me, im okay with it because i dont see supporting palestine as progressive at all (but instead regressive), and on the border, im more "conservative" on the issue, maybe leaning mildly progressive as i support amnesty and crap.
All in all if I had to break my views down, I'm probably 40% progressive, 50% conservative (in a liberal sense), and 10% regressive (or what we call conservative in our society). Something like that.
Or, put another way, 40% left, 50% liberal, and 10% conservative using the traditional words we use to define those factions. Because keep in mind liberals are actually conservatives and conservatives are actually regressives in my view.
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