Progressivism is just a label for people who believe in things like science and humane, fact-based policy. There’s no continuum between that thinking and conservativism, it’s a binary. Either someone is ready to accept the truth about any given issue as its revealed or they’re not. They’re either able to admit when something doesn’t work or they’re not.
Conservativism is, fundementally, trying failed ideas over and over in the hopes they’ll work. It’s an ideology that’s constantly falling behind reality, and as it falls behind and gets out of sync with the real world your average conservative becomes more extreme and more detatched from the reality around them until a breaking point is reached and either they finally accept reality or they try to implement fascism so they can try to force reality to conform to what they think should true, to validate their old failed notions.
You can’t have a democracy run under the idea that things can always stay the same. Because what are conservatives actually trying to conserve in the US? The 1950s was not some golden era of democracy, it was actually a period of severe disenfranchisement and if we successfully conserved that system the civil rights era would’ve never come to be because conservativism does not improve anything. There was no benefit to thinking “We need to be conservative about this whole giving people voting rights thing.”
Conservativism is dead weight that becomes malignant naturally as part of its regular life cycle, it’s not a counter balance.
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Progressivism is just a label for people who believe in things like science and humane, fact-based policy. There’s no continuum between that thinking and conservativism, it’s a binary. Either someone is ready to accept the truth about any given issue as its revealed or they’re not. They’re either able to admit when something doesn’t work or they’re not.
Conservativism is, fundementally, trying failed ideas over and over in the hopes they’ll work. It’s an ideology that’s constantly falling behind reality, and as it falls behind and gets out of sync with the real world your average conservative becomes more extreme and more detatched from the reality around them until a breaking point is reached and either they finally accept reality or they try to implement fascism so they can try to force reality to conform to what they think should true, to validate their old failed notions.
You can’t have a democracy run under the idea that things can always stay the same. Because what are conservatives actually trying to conserve in the US? The 1950s was not some golden era of democracy, it was actually a period of severe disenfranchisement and if we successfully conserved that system the civil rights era would’ve never come to be because conservativism does not improve anything. There was no benefit to thinking “We need to be conservative about this whole giving people voting rights thing.”
Conservativism is dead weight that becomes malignant naturally as part of its regular life cycle, it’s not a counter balance.
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Inherent to democracy, no. Inherent to a well-functioning society in a world where changing circumstances are inevitable, yes.
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I think it’s safe to assume that a person wants their society to function smoothly. But yes, I suppose it is technically different.