The Problem with "Progess"

And the precarious hollowness of the label "progressive"

There are many in the US who call themselves progressive. There’s a vague sentiment of left-leaning values implied by it. But it seems to me that when pressed to answer what progressive means, people struggle to offer a coherent answer. There’s no specific set of principles attached to it, at least not in any broadly understood and agreed upon definition.

And that is the central problem with the entire idea of progress, that we don’t actually all agree on what it means. The term is vague, hand-wavy, vibey. It tells us nothing about what values inform the vision that we are allegedly progressing towards. To the modernists who drove the Enclosure Movement, that was progress. To me it’s a crime against humanity. So it’s a term whose implications are entirely beholden to who gets to define it (if it gets concretely defined at all) and their vision of what that means, and who gets included in that “progress” and who gets trampled by it.

That makes it a label vulnerable to cooption and bad faith use. Like John Fetterman’s original beard of progressivism (I sincerely hope Graham Platner is not sporting the same beard, but I remain skeptical). Like the label coopted by a host of corporate democrats, who consistently throw far more support behind policies I find antithetical to progress than they do to ones that even nudge the needle in the right direction.

This is why I would urge people to use more specific labels, and avoid nebulous ones like “progressive”. Telling me that you are, for example, a social democrat or a democratic socialist tells me a lot more about your specific values, and how “progressive” I might personally find them to be in practice (e.g. DSA > social democrat). Telling me that you are a progressive without further elaboration will leave me with the feeling that you may have just vibed your way into that position, and may not have a clear sense of what actual values and principles you do support (or oppose).

We (in the US) live in a country where our Overton Window has been dragged so far to the right that Bernie Sanders can be successfully characterized as a radical far-leftist instead of the moderate centrist he very much is and always was. And the implication of this is that real leftists are mostly left out of frame entirely (until recent DSA victories), or mischaracterized, if not outright caricatured, and frequently slandered, demonized, or criminalized. The common sense, truly not radical ideas that DSA candidates are bringing to the table have both MAGA and corporate democrats shitting their pants, clutching their pearls, and painting these well-earned victories as some sort of conspiratorial communist invasion (predicated, of course, on the idea that communism and anything related to it is automatically bad). I think we have to counter this extreme skew and the vagueness of the terms “progress” and “progressive” with clarity, specificity, and transparency, within ourselves and with one another. And I think that also means challenging this vagueness where we encounter it, encouraging others to be more specific about what kind of principles and policies they actually value.

I can anticipate some pushback about purity testing, or needing to focus on solidarity, on bringing us together, rather than dividing us. But I don’t think we can have any justified confidence in whatever “solidarity” we build from a vague sense of agreement. Knowing where we disagree can help us organize. Recognizing what we agree and disagree on allows us to agree to focus on solidarity in areas we are in agreement on first. It allows us to be confident that we truly are in agreement, and that there’s little chance of later spoilers, or of defections due to disagreements that could have been forestalled if we were at least on the same page about our differences from the beginning. I don’t think a move in this direction could do anything other than strengthen solidarity, and demonstrate to us where we haven’t yet achieved it, as well as where we can’t achieve it without diving much deeper into the specifics of our differences and trying to find some plateaus of common ground.