Political labels vs. political decisions

A few weeks ago, I was talking with someone who knew me from an organization that I might have joined, except that the organization subsequently imploded after several of its leaders were elected to office and could no longer participate, and there weren't enough people involved to hold it together. This person felt that the organization performed a valuable function in terms of bringing Progressives together across issues. Thinking about that conversation, I'm realizing that I don't know what it actually means to be Progressive. Maybe there are, in fact, good definitions out there that I haven't seen, but, to me, it seems like kind of a slippery term that can mean whatever someone thinks that it means. "Conservative" feels like a similarly slippery term that has become disconnected from the idea of conserving. It cannot be said, for instance, that Progressives want to see change, while Conservatives want to keep things the way they are. In practice, any given person will advocate or accept change in some contexts but not others, and, in fact, this is unavoidable, since we must sometimes make a choice between changing one thing vs. accepting change somewhere else. Rather, in the American context, Conservative is synonymous with "Republican," which implies generally holding the positions that Republicans hold, and "Progressive" is similarly associated with a subset of Democrats. I want to draw a distinction between ways of looking at issues vs. the labels that people would use to characterize themselves, since they are not the same thing. So, in this post, I will write terms such as "conservative" and "progressive" in lower case when discussing the former and use upper case for the latter. Given this landscape, it is worth exploring how we think about things and how we want to be thinking about things when making decisions.

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