More thoughts on the ‘progressive’ debate

After doing some thinking last night about our debate between The Big Stick and The Barefoot Bum I wanted to advance one other hypothesis for the root of our disagreement.

It is fairly obvious from reading his posts that The Barefoot Bum sees the word ‘change’ as the primary force behind his progressivism. This opening line in his blog seems to confirm that:

We can make a very useful distinction in politics just by looking at how much one wants to change things, and on what basis, without considering the actual substance of those changes. 

As he himself admits though, nearly everyone, even those dreaded conservatives, advocate change of some kind. Until society conforms to every level of their ideals, folks of any political leanings are going to advocate change.

So do we focus on how much change they advocate, as he suggests? I suppose we could but that seems a bit hard to quantify. Personally, I would prefer to focus on the substance of those changes (which I realize directly contradicts his statement that we can learn much without considering substance).  

While we can rely on his broad definition of progressive and happily use it to label anyone seeking change, I feel we must differentiate between lower case progressives and upper case Progressives. The former generically denotes someone seeking change, as The Barefoot Bum has defined it, while the latter denotes someone adhering to a particular ideology that was framed by those leaders of the early 20th century.

Instead of arguing about the semantics of what the word ‘progressive’ means and whether or not it is correct to attach it to conservatism, I’d like to get to the root of just what The Barefoot Bum sees as a Progressive (capital P) goal and if he even shares a belief in those goals. My guess is that he shares no more affinity for Progressivism (capital P) than he does for conservatism or organized religion. I base my assumptions on the following exhange between us in the comments section:

(TBS) It could be argued that the mentality of liberal = progressive is flawed because liberals do not adhere to all traditionally progressive ideals.

(TBB) So what? Things change. The original “progressive” movement was religious, anti-science and anti-technology. (William J. Bryan, of Scopes trial notoriety, was a notable early progressive.)

My request of him in the last blog to elaborate on his ideals for specific Progressive goals will hopefully shed light on this debate. If I am proved correct, then there is really no need to continue a discussion of progressivsm when we talking about two separate things (his progressivism vs. my Progressivism).  

The mission for the Big Stick will always be to advocate for the ideals of the early Progressive Movement but with a modern and conservative refinement.