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Look, there’s nothing wrong with that. Sometimes she doesn’t feel like polishing your spear.
Anyway. Let’s imagine that your enemies aren’t purely cynical operators, scrounging for facts to hold up their worldview. Can you think of a principle that might lead to similar conclusions? A reason to decide that both gay and trans people deserve support?
Wild. Well, only half, apparently. Which raises some other questions about what she means by “other contexts.”
I think your construction is a much more realistic principle. Centering conservatives doesn’t match the way people justify progressivism. Underdog support might not be specific enough, though. It’s a popular tack across societies.
The pre-war Progressives campaigned for collective (government) action against business interests and entrenched politics. Communism attempted to harness underdogs via class consciousness. Postmodernists asked whether the narratives and structures underpinning the modern world had any rational basis, or were merely fictions. There was always an idea that the underdogs were temporarily embarrassed millionaires. More importantly, there was an excuse for any non-embarrassed millionaire to remain a good leftist, so long as he or she was awoken to the plight of the underdog.
Strategically speaking, this is very useful. It also suggests a broader progressive principle: one’s circle of concern can (and should) be very large. Race, creed, nation are not supposed to be barriers to empathy. “Workers of the world, unite.”
But that phrase retains one caveat, because no ideology survives if it cannot defend itself. A hostile ideology is the one remaining target for discrimination. For the Soviets this was nominally decided by class. Modern progressivism updates it to account for a more liberal concept of free will. The circle of concern does not have to include those who have chosen to reject it.
That caveat is what sneaks in most of the modifiers and exceptions. It’s defensible on classical-liberal grounds, which makes it very familiar for Americans and our cultural umbrella. I think this definition—a broad but selective circle of concern—best fits the modern progressive philosophy.
You're probably right. "Underdog" does a better job of covering the nominal choice for power dynamics. For making predictions about who gets the benefit of the doubt. The "circle of concern" covers a lot of the ifs/ands/buts, though it is not unique to progressivism.
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...But then you are forced, if you are honest, to admit that you are not in fact doing anything fundamentally different than the system you've replaced. You haven't actually made a world without discrimination, only changed who gets discriminated against. All the same postmodern and materialist and nihilist critiques apply equally as well to your new system as they did to the old one, and your values are exactly as arbitrary and ultimately pointless.
And once you've admitted that, we can agree that you have nothing to offer but might makes right, foreclose the moral arguments, and get down to the mightying.
Perhaps.
Theories derived from liberalism do tend to pick up speed until they hit the ski ramp that is “coercion.”
There is a loophole. Should everyone choose progressivism, the circle gets to cover all of them. No discrimination necessary. Also, poverty and violence are ended forever, and the Age of Aquarius is upon us. We did it, Reddit.
I assume most every American thinks something similar about their ingroup, mind you. It’s the natural intersection of tribalism with our civic religion. And tribalism is really, really adaptive. The catch is that cooperating in this game has huge advantages. There is an equilibrium where progressives tear themselves apart trying to draw a very careful circle of concern. Call me an optimist, I guess.
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