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This seems to be what would happen by default for any long-lived political movement that is actually winning enough that the losses on objectives that don't get dismissed in the churn can be written off as an exception in the style of "unless they hold onto it and try to bring it up again later on". Do modern Christians admit the end of witch trials as a defeat? What about Mormons and polygamy? Outside of an edgy fringe, are US conservatives admitting defeat on their erstwhile goal of preventing women's suffrage?
I don't quite understand what would even be the intended purpose of getting progressives to own alcohol prohibition and eugenics and "admit defeat" on those goals.
My trad-cath friend kind of does, in that he believes quite firmly that there were genuine witches at Salem, and that Tituba at the very least had a literal pact with Satan.
The FLDS come to mind.
For the record, so does Arthur Miller, explicitly according to the editorial material in the version of The Crucible I read in GCSE English, and in my view implicitly in the text. Both the witches and the witch-hunters thought (incorrectly in that timeline) that witchcraft was effective.
The point made by The Crucible is that both Hathorne-Danforth and Senator Joe McCarthy moved rapidly from using witchhunting to suppress actual witchcraft (which Miller thought was mostly harmless, but the Venona transcripts make clear was effective in our timeline) to using witchhunting to attack their political opponents, and then to using witchhunting to settle their supporters' personal beefs.
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No, but keeping these failures in the popular consciousness and closely-tied to the respective ideologies plays a major part in stripping them of moral authority and discrediting their challenges to the moral narrative of liberalism.
To knock them off their moral pedestal and assumption that their moral instincts will always result in "justice" and people who have different instincts are necessarily evil.
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I wish progressives would internalize this. I know most won't, but we'd all be better off if they did.
I that does happen, except that the people it happens to are no longer progressives. I think a plurality of people on this forum are ex-progressives, for example.
Guilty as charged. I was excitedly a progressive when I moved to Seattle 12 years ago and moving there to be at one of the epicenters was cool. I even donated to Bernie... It turns out that living in a city that is so one-sided in beliefs as well as politics was a real eye-opener. The backlash from when Trump was first elected and doing nothing but just about literally doing the opposite of whatever Trump was for was maddening. You could almost see people ignore their own underlying beliefs to show to their neighbors they aren't Trump supporters.
I left Seattle five years ago as a conservative and moved to a rural outskirt of Nashville. I was equally excited to move this last time.
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Genuinely having good faith belief that XYZ is right and then fighting for XYZ is how someone takes orders from a hivemind, though, whether that be progressive or conservative or any other ideology or way of thinking. And this, to me, is the sticking point of the issue I have as a progressive with the movement that's called progressive; the point of progressivism is progress, which means moving forward, not just moving in some direction and then declaring the direction as forward. In order to do the former instead of doing the latter while honestly but mistakenly believing that it's the former requires actually acknowledging this risk and finding ways to mitigate the risk. A risk which can never be reduced to zero or even all that close to zero, but which can still be reduced through things like empiricism and discourse.
As you say, though, this is useless unless progressives are convinced that they actually took orders from a progressive hivemind, or at least acknowledge the very real risk that that they are taking such orders, which seems about as likely as a snowball's chance in hell right now. The fact that this is the state of things seems pretty insane to me, akin to a world in which, say, Muslims can't be convinced that there is only one god who is called Allah or Christians can't be convinced that Jesus Christ is the son of God and died for our sins.
You seem like as good a person to ask as any, and I've been wanting to for a long time: What is the pole star here? What is the point upon which principles should converge? I have my opinions as an outsider, but I'd love to know how the matter occurs to you.
Presumably there should be some consistency in the notion of 'forward'. What is the end goal which, if moved toward, tells you that the motion is progressive rather than lateral or regressive?
I wish I had a simple answer, but I think there isn't a pole star to follow other than the vague notions of making things "better" in some real sense by increasing prosperity and reducing suffering for each and every individual. One obvious problem there is that these things are highly idiosyncratic and difficult to measure, but I think e.g. getting rid of anti-sodomy laws or making gay marriage a thing helps to achieve that better by benefiting gay people, or having progressive taxes and welfare and socialized health care helps to achieve that better by benefiting poor people. I think stuff like "equality" or "freedom" are decent enough slogans for supporting bringing up people who were considered lesser than others or who were granted fewer rights than others, but only exist as end goals in some far flung future where we have so much prosperity that each individual is equally free to create a literal heaven in reality for themselves. In the here and now, I think the immediate goals include figuring out which of existing systems can be dismantled for easy gains (I think treating individuals on the basis of group identity is one such system that needs dismantling, which is where I diverge greatly from the modern progressive movement), or figuring out how to maintain economic growth so as both to uplift the poorest of us and to bring about that scifi post-scarcity future, or figuring out how better to advance knowledge so that we can build the tech needed to free us from our physical constraints (this, too, is where I disagree heavily with modern progressivism, as they seem all too happy to play-act at knowledge generation through a cargo cult of academics).
From a high level view, perhaps you can say that the goal is bootstrap our way into figuring out what the metaphorical pole star is, since we've been forced to contend with the reality that the pole stars that our civilization used to follow - and still follow to a great extent - were merely mirages that happened to be useful in certain contexts but also greatly harmful in certain others.
I've also said before that a progressive is someone who read Brave New World by Huxley and thought, "Hey, this seems like a pretty cool society to live in" like I did, and I think that's generally true, though that specific world probably isn't a realistic end state goal.
Well, thank you for the thoughtful reply. We disagree on many things but inasmuch as I wasn't asking to argue with you about it, I won't.
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The goal of progress is equality. True, absolute equality, not just de jure equality before the law but to stand alone before the state on the same terms as one stands alone before God.
That metaphor is not a coincidence: progressivism is thoroughly Protestant in its view of liberalism. Liberal conservatism tends to have a more Catholic view wherein intermediating institutions are a good way, perhaps the best way, to interface with the state.
To this end, progressivism tends to be quite hostile to intermediating institutions because the goal is to produce denuded and atomized individuals so that equality before the leviathan is the only option; the prayers of the saints cannot protect you so they shouldn't be allowed. And, due to the impossibility of this aim, perpetual revolution is the only way to maintain progress because asymptotic rest states are an inherently unstable equilibrium- if you aren't going forwards, you're going backwards. There's a quote in De Maistre, 'the counter revolution is not the revolution against but the opposite of the revolution' not running the revolution results in corporatism- the human norm- which undermines majestic equality before the leviathan.
See I'd take it farther and suggest that progressivism -- the flattening of all hierarchies -- is literally just Satanism dressed up in nice intentions. This is also why pride is such a key component. Pride being the sin of Satan, who decided that he could do just as well as his own God rather than submitting to God himself who dares say that actually some things are better and higher than others, and that rightness, beauty, goodness, happiness etc. are found embracing one's role and proper place.
In my church we teach that demons have no hierarchy because hierarchy is orderly and points to God. With this in mind the connections are obvious. And yes, the desire to replace God with the state is paramount, even when the state is transparently prone to possession by evil powers and principalities.
But I'm interested in the response of the person I asked.
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I think that its clearly taught that way across society? Like, the general consensus is that it was at best a case of social hysteria and at worst a church-sanctioned terror campaign. There are a some well-known novels and plays on this topic.
Indeed, using a clear example of where Progressives 'won' and Conservatives lost, desegregation of schools is a topic I think almost all conservatives will 'accept' defeat on and aren't trying to bring back at any level.
Like, my point is that Progressives 'win' mainly because they do have narrative control, and that narrative control allows them to actually write the widely believed account of history. So when they claim they're on 'the right side of history' or they argue that the conservatives are just trying to stop inevitable progress, what they're really basing that on is "we'll either turn out to be right and will write the story of our victory, or if we're wrong we write it off so you won't get credit for stopping us."
I'd like them to temper their ambition with the knowledge that maybe they could possibly be WRONG about something and every time they 'win' it isn't necessarily going to make things better.
"progressives" (and their alternative, "reactionaries") don't really exist. "Progressive" is really just the label used to describe the people with narrative control. If progressives ever lose in a more than temporary fashion, in short order they will be the ones harkening back to an idealized past while the former "reactionaries" will style themselves as the faction pushing ahead towards a glorious future.
"Accelerationists" and "conservatives" actually exist (relative to each other) but they can be anywhere on the political spectrum. It's just, "fast, reckless change" versus "slow, measured" change.
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Well, the dodge that seems to be pretty universally used in both secular and Christian circles is that most of the people burned as witches were not in fact actual practitioners of black magic knowingly and intentionally in league with Satan. They were just innocent randoms convicted on sketchy evidence. This allows Christians to avoid thinking about whether burning people alive for heresy is justified, and it allows secularists to avoid having to support people who are engaging in human sacrifice in an attempt to hex and curse innocent third parties.
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