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Wouldn't the obvious stance be "we aren't the progressives of the past?" Residential schools have plenty of evidence towards their existence in Canada, and were certainly pushed by what would've been a progressive mindset back in the day.
I think by their very nature, conservatives are more tied to the past of their movement than progressives are. I don't think it'd be memory holed - it would simply be treated as "how awful that society did this - good thing we are making progress to change the horrors of the past"
Yup. There is some irony there considering how in vogue collective responsibility is right now for those with a progressive proclivity. Progressives in 20 years will feel no responsibility for a tired, irrelevant movement of yesteryear that, thankfully, didn't succeed. If it plays out that way. People's hearts were in the right place, after all. Until we grow enough time that we can well and truly consider the past as ignorant and backwards as any other.
It's not necessary to scrub the Internet Archive. Unless we get the really bad ending.
Let society make history. Irrelevant, old, and forgotten. The progressive drive and impulse maintains direct connection, but the cause of day in the future won't be directly related. Except maybe transhumanist stuff. It is not as if we can't go read Days of Rage today. Perhaps if conservatives take the cultural reins they can bring up the historical excesses of progressivism more frequently. There will be no introspection at scale and nobody should expect any-- and that is the good ending.
Learning from history is not a commoner's interest, but learned men are meant to know how we got where we are. We are all too great and unique and, for progressives, too sophisticated to repeat mistakes or learn from the inferior past.
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My rejoinder would be "you are making the same mistakes they did."
One problem is that when Progressives win they write the history to make it seem that the victory was inevitable. When they lose it just gets quietly ignored, and conservatives likewise get no credit for holding the line against them for the greater good.
Oh, sorry, I may have been unclear - I am not a progressive. My comment was simply a model of how I think they would respond in this circumstance.
I think your model is on point, I'm mostly just considering the point and seeing what seems like a solid 'rebuttal.'
My main point is that progressives are consistently convinced they're in the right at all times, and dismiss any arguments that might disprove that belief. So even after they've been 'proven' wrong, they don't have to admit it. So yeah "we aren't like those old progressives, we're smarter and we won't make the same mistakes" is an argument I can believe they'd make.
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The issue is that "we aren't the progressives of the past" is the stance of the progressives of today. So saying that doesn't escape one from repeating the mistakes of the past; it's how you repeat the mistakes of the past.
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