Why I Don't Like the Word "Progressive"

At a certain time in the past, the world's most powerful nation was caught in the middle of a culture war. One side thought that relaxed sexual mores were perfectly fine, and that there was nothing wrong with youngsters gallivanting about having fun with one another. The other side was aghast at this idea, insisting that it was sinful and could not be allowed. One of these sides was the progressive side. One of them was the conservative side. Tell me, which was which?

Well, as written, I don't think you can tell me which is which. You see, I could be referring to one of two conflicts (that I know of). The first is the United States of America, during roughly-speaking the second half of the 20th century. In that conflict, the moralizers were the conservatives, and the permissivists were the progressives. But I could also be talking about England during the mid-1600s, when it was the Puritans who had burst onto the scene with reforming zeal, taking aim at the prevailing loose sexual norms. In that struggle the Puritans were the progressives, and the defenders of the practice of, for example, maying, were the conservatives.
This, to me, is the problem with the term "progressive." It the only thing that the word progressive connotes to my mind is a sort of anti-status-quo-ism, a kind of being inherently pro-change. I myself am not always pro-change. I could easily imagine that in Europe someone might say something like, "I'm a progressive. I believe that excessive government bureaucracies and regulations are hampering economic progress, and we should therefore shrink our government." Is their use of the word progressive wrong? I can't see how it is.

I prefer a word like "liberal," or "social democrat." Those words have a distinct meaning which is not defined by what the status quo happens to be. If I am a liberal in a society which is not very liberal, I will favor making it more liberal; I will therefore favor change, and should call myself a progressive. If I am a liberal in a society which is very liberal, I will presumably favor not making it less liberal; I therefore will tend to oppose change, and should I not therefore call myself a conservative? A conservative, in favor of the established social welfare state? In favor of the established national health service? Of the established relatively egalitarian distribution of wealth?

As it happens, I think the word conservative has considerably more inherent content than the word progressive. It connotes, I think, a favoring of not just the status quo but of the powerful, and of their right to use their power as they wish. A liberal will never favor that. But it is also entirely possible that the word conservative has that connotation only because the world has never really been in a state where there weren't considerable power imbalances and in which the powerful weren't reasonably free to push their weight around on something close to a might-makes-right basis. I'm not sure I want to say that I think the word conservative should always be bound up in the "ideology" of favoring the currently powerful, should a more truly egalitarian world eventually emerge.

Now, perhaps I am being a trifle unfair to the word "progressive." Perhaps a defender of that word might at this point argue that until we reach that more egalitarian state it will always be clear that that world is the goal toward which we are progressing. But I'm not sure about that. It's always clear where we are, or at least reasonably so. It's also usually rather apparent where we have recently been; thus, the word "reactionary" will tend to have a rather definite content in any given situation. But it is not always clear where we are going, or where on our current trend we ought to keep going. Therefore, the word "progressive" isn't just context-dependent, it's also highly malleable. Perhaps we might rule out favoring the current state of affairs or favoring the state of affairs that prevailed in the recent past, consigning those two positions to the words conservative and reactionary, but that still leaves a great number of directions in which someone could reasonably claim to advocate progressing.

So I am not, primarily, a progressive. As it happens, in 2011 America and, I think, in most of the 2011 liberal democratic world, my desires for how society ought to change are those that most people who call themselves progressives desire as well. But I don't like the word, and I will continue to call myself a liberal or a social democrat as long as those words have any appreciable relevance at all.