A progressive is someone who cares about the other guy. It's as simple as that!! (Lawrence F. - San Francisco, CA)
A progressive is someone who realizes that she did not get where she is completely on her own. She had help along the way ... and wants to make sure others have the same opportunities, no matter where they started. (Colleen R. - Silver Spring, MD)
A progressive ... believe[s] in liberty balanced with responsibility, economic opportunity balanced with just and open structures, and peace based upon being a global partner not a benevolent empire. (Norman B. - Cambridge, MA)
A progressive is a person who thinks the best is yet to come ... (Craig S. - Fort Collins, CO)
Disclaimer: I do not - DO NOT - mean to suggest that there is no difference, or no meaningful difference, between a 'progressive' and a 'liberal' or a 'radical' or whatever, or that the language used to describe a political ideology is unimportant. On the contrary, in some ways it's all about the language. Politics is talk. If "money is the mother's milk of politics," as the old saying goes, then language is the air. Most of it polluted.
Yet I don't buy the labeling conventions of being a liberal, being a conservative, being a progressive, being a radical, etc. My apologies to those who have patiently heard me harp on this theme before. I'm due for my annual rank on "Them's fightin' words where I come from." I've got issues, obviously, and this plays heavily into one that goes way back with me, at least as far as my very big, very bad graduate-school writing project, which took the onerous title Movement and Discourse in Educational Practice.
One of the arguments in that paper went something like this: a reciprocal relationship exists between the way people use language and the way they use movement. While language is primarily a medium of information and messages, it is also a way of doing things, making things happen. And while movement is primarily a means of gettin' it done and achieving results, it is also a medium of conveying information. Long dissertation short, there is some 'task content' in every verbal message, and there is some 'message content' in every physical task.
My point (and I do have one) is that in politics, the content is heavily loaded on the side of making something happen, leaving about 0.1 percent actual information. So, for example, the inspiring definitions of progressive above have a purpose - to make you want to be like them, to join the movement, and get with the program. If I'm being paid to sell something, of course I want to give it that kind of vibe. To borrow my engineer-manager brother's mantra, You're always selling.
If the salesperson can get you to buy the major premise - such as "Of course I'm a progressive, who the hell isn't?" - he or she is poised to carry out the remainder of their wedge strategy and get you to accept anything they package under the 'Progressive' label. I have run into plenty of well-meaning, nice folks who openly adopt whatever position they believe is the 'liberal' stance, just because they see themselves as a 'liberal', and by simply deduction, whatever other liberals are doing, it logically follows, must be right. Professed 'conservatives' do the same thing. Bill Frist or some other lying blowhard piously declares that conservative Americans want this or that, and people who like the sound of 'conservative' fall into line with the rhetorical call to arms. "Well, yeah, since I see myself as a conservative, I guess I'll let Doctor Bill do my thinking for me."
What was my point again?
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