Instead, the progressive vision of government is simple: government is the entity most responsible for ensuring equality of opportunity.Never mind that, as it happens, I quite like the idea of ensuring equality of opportunity, especially if you construe the words as, uh, liberally as I think you should. Indeed, an earlier post of mine attempting to define the fundamental philosophy of liberalism reaches a conclusion that can be viewed as nearly identical to this statement above. But I have a rather severe problem with this way of phrasing the liberal vision, namely that it isn't really a complete political philosophy, by which I mean that it does not address the idea of why we ought have government in the first place.
Some political philosophies are basically liberal-democratic, which is to say they believe in government of/by/for the people subject to reasonable limits, and some aren't. I have very little interest in those that are not. Among liberal democratic philosophies, however, the way I see it there are three broad categories: conservative, liberal, and socialist. And the way you distinguish between those three brands of liberal democracy is by seeing why their adherents think we ought to have government in the first place.
A conservative's answer is that government is a necessary evil because anarchy, though it has some appealing features like a lack of intrusion on individual liberty, has some massively pressing problems. Primary among those problems is the utter lack of any security apparatus, which will logically lead to epidemic crime and violence and the life of man becoming solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. That's a problem, and it's the kind of problem that can't even be justified by the pure preservation of some kind of natural liberty. So we need government, at the very least for the police/military. And there are, perhaps, a few other things that need doing by a central government as well. But it's all something we should be suspicious of, and keep to an absolute minimum.
A liberal says, instead, that the government is there to redress the many ills of the world. Yes, one problem with anarchy is the Hobbesian war of all against all, but you also have more subtle social wrongs like rampant inequality, disease, famine, etc. Therefore you need a government strong enough and robust enough to counteract all of these assorted problems with the world. To put it in slightly Lockean terms, without government there are all sorts of ways that our natural human rights get infringed upon, and the point of government is to prevent those infringements while doing as little damage of its own to those same rights.
A socialist probably agrees with the liberal, but goes further still. To a socialist, government is most fundamentally a way of organizing the power of the people so that it can become a positive force for good. The idea is not merely to correct the obvious wrongs of a so-called state of nature, but to create a better world still. To a socialist a properly liberal-democratic government is a thing to be trusted and viewed as good. That doesn't mean, as some American conservatives allege, that you go around with an agenda of having the government interfere in everything, because the thing that makes socialists socialists is not "government interference." It's having the government do stuff on its own, ideally in areas that the rest of society wouldn't have been doing anyway.
There are two different dividing lines that separate one of these three philosophies from the other two. One is the basic big/small government divide: conservatives like their government small, while both liberals and socialists want a bigger government. In that sense there is a natural alliance between liberals and socialists, and I think this is what one observes in general. But in a more philosophical sense there's more of a commonality between liberals and conservatives: both view the point of government as being to solve certain problems with the world that rise to the level of requiring communal-level solutions, it's just that liberals think there are a lot more of those problems than conservatives. For a socialist, however, government should go beyond that basic task, and is not something to be generally viewed with suspicion.
Obviously, these three ideologies blend into one another to a rather significant degree. There's a neat continuum of how much stuff you think requires governmental correction that runs from conservative to liberal, and the line between something that should be done to rectify a problem with the world and something creatively good that it is therefore undesirable not to do is more than a little blurry. But the definition given by this poster at Daily Kos is distinctly on the liberal/conservative side of the basic "necessary evil"/"positive good" dividing line between socialists and everyone else. Government should ensure equality of opportunity. That's great, but it's emphatically a "fix the problems with the world" mindset. If you construe the phrase "equality of opportunity" broadly, as I recommend in my post about Maslow and Jefferson, then you arrive at a liberal worldview. If you construe it narrowly, you get a conservative worldview. At no point does the idea of the government, as the embodiment of the polity, simply going around looking for ways to make the world better arise. Unless, that is, you want to read "equality of opportunity" so broadly that you end up encompassing everything good, in which case the above definition of progressivism translates to "government should do good things."
The word "progressive," in other words, does not really do much to evoke a fundamental theory of why government should exist. Maybe, taking the word literally, governments exist to drive progress in society. But if this is so, one must ask, progress toward what? So I don't often describe myself as a progressive, with the exception of the bigotry vs. diversity issues (currently represented largely by the whole nexus of LGBT issues), because I basically buy MLK's line about the arc of history bending toward justice in those areas. I'm basically a socialist myself, in that I like government (at least, I like good government) and am not generally mindful of government activism. But that socialism includes a healthy dose of the liberal idea of individual rights which the government ought not violate (because if it does so it becomes bad government), as I think most democratic socialism does. And I don't find the word "progressive" particularly useful in describing that philosophy.
(As an aside, during the actual Progressive Era the word had a very particular connotation, namely the idea that technocratic experts could drive social progress by making modernizing, efficiency-improving reforms in most/all areas of life. Part of what it conveyed was a kind of non-ideological nature, the idea that science would simply show us the unambiguous path toward a better world. I don't really think that's what today's progressives mean. I think the word got borrowed from the kind of diversity issue I mention above, where it is appropriate, to take over for "liberal" when that word became unpopular during the Bush years. Notably, however, I think that what the Progressive Era did was to combine the liberal and the democratic factions in American politics, and pit their combined forces against the entrenched, wealthy interests who became the new conservative movement. In many ways that's the dynamic we still have today, where the powerful defend themselves against those who wish to reduce power inequalities; this is a dynamic that does not match up well with the conservative/liberal/socialist division I outline above, because the "conservatives" in this scenario aren't really playing the game in good faith, but rather just trying to preserve their own power on an almost factional basis. See my prior writings here and here.)
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