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Progressivism is the ideology of the PMC centre-left in the Anglosphere. You can see a certain commonality of thought, as well as an unbroken lineage of individual progressives, back to the turn-of-the-century capital-P Progressives like Teddy Roosevelt and Bob La Follette. The key constant ideas as I see it are:
Society is improving over time both materially and morally because of technocratic elites making correct decisions. We should strive to be on the right side of history.
Planning is possible and desirable.
Educated people should rule. Decisions which can be reduced to technical questions should be left to appropriately-qualified technical experts, decisions which have an unavoidable political component should be made by people with a broad education in morally correct thinking.
Education is good. More education is better.
There is too much economic inequality in the US c. 1900 or 2000. Slightly less economic inequality would be better, but not so much equality that the upper-middle-class can no longer enjoy an upper-middle-class lifestyle. 1950s US or modern Scandinavian levels of inequality are fine.
Separately from the inequality issue, real material deprivation (starvation/homelessness etc.) is very, very bad and we should try to eliminate it, first in our own countries and then globally.
Political violence (including war between countries) is very, very bad and we should try to eliminate it. (Lots of intra-progressive disagreement about the best way to do this)
Highbrow art is a public good and should be subsidised. Lowbrow art and the preferred intoxicants of the working class are corrupting and should be banned if possible. (Also lots of intra-progressive disagreement about what is possible)
Traditional religion is bad.
Bigotry is bad. (Lots of intra-progressive disagreement over which discrimination is bigoted and which is justified - pre-WW2 progressives being pro-eugenics is the most famous example)
These ideas are culturally universal and good people all over the world are already American progressives, even if they don' t know it yet.
Because Marxist socialism never managed to build a mass working-class movement in the Anglosphere, Marxism in the Anglosphere is a weird sub-sect of progressivism. (This isn't true in Continental Europe, where most countries had nominally Marxist parties with mass working-class memberships organised through the unions.) There is clearly a correlation between weird sectarian progressivism (including, but not limited to, being a Marxist in the Anglosphere) and weird lifestyle experimentation such that Orwell as able to say, correctly, that
and still be mostly correct a century later. (He also includes teetotallers and vegetarians in the list in other writings). But most progressives wear suits to their boring middle-management job and listen to NPR/Radio 4 while commuting from their suburban homes where they raise 1.6 children in a monogamous traditional family.
Wokism is the specific hobby-horse that organised progressivism has taken up in the 2010's.
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