"Progressive" is a bad term.

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I agree with the left on many issues but I refuse to call myself "progressive". If you call yourself "progressive" then you are basically saying "I know how the future will turn out and I am just supporting what will happen anyway."

There Are Two Problems With This:
1. "Progressives" tend to support a few things that are not going their way. They tend to be anti-Zionist even though Israel was smaller in the Fifties and support environmentalism even though there were certainly more forests on this planet hundreds of years ago.
2. The future is unpredictable. In medieval Europe there was feudalism instead of capitalism but they were more religious. The ancient Athenians had full gay rights but they owned slaves. Were they ahead of us or behind us? Sometimes the direction of "progress" changes.

I don't like the term "progressive". I know too much about history to use it.

Does anyone here understand what I am saying?

I think I get you, dude.

Personally, I don't like the term 'progressive' because the word in itself entails the concept 'progress' which is generally understood to be a positive advancement of a current situation.

However, you could have a progressive position on an agenda and it turns out that you are doing nothing but damaging the credibility of what you set out to improve. How, in any way, is that progressive?

The only reason people on the center and left of center adopted the term was because conservatives turned "liberal" into a bad word through the classical conditioning that's so prevalent on right wing talk radio. Its anachronistic too, as it was used by Teddy Roosevelt supporters. They use "progressive" (change/progress) in the sense that its an antonym to "conservative (conserving/keeping the same). I don't really buy into the paradigm for different reasons, though, because I think conservation and progression are relativistic. Sometimes things need to change fast, like ending Jim Crow or discrimination against gays. and some things need to be conserved as they are, like the environment or the social safety net. Change for changes sake and keeping things the same for its own sake is a really dumb way of looking at things. What should be contextual positions to any rationally minded person have some how been transformed into team labels that appeal to caveman, chest thumping portion of our psyches.

I'll even argue that so-called conservatives are really not conservative on everything. The one's that want to do drastic things, like privatize medicare are not really conservative. They believe in rapid, possibly socially destabilizing, changes too, just as you pointed out that "progressives" contradict their selves and aren't always progressive in the true sense of the term. They should be relativistic terms that depend on situation and context, not tribal labels.

They're only words, boys. They're only words.

Are you auditioning to be a radio talk show host, marketandchurch?