[rcktmrtn]

> As a social conservative, I disagree with this. Opportunity and will to make use of opportunity are two separate things and usually originate separately. But this will is NOT innate.

I'd go further and say that the reason any aristocracy has ever survived for more than a generation is because at the core of all its elaborate culture is a machine built to aggressively indoctrinate its next generation to be extremely moderate and conscious of its use of privileges.

There is a progressive ideological strain that banks its legitimacy on the belief that poverty can be one day eliminated, while traditional varieties of aristocrats believe that concentrated privileged is an inherent part of nature that needs to be managed. A "pure" progressive ideology would rise or fall with its apparent success -- it's also possible to imagine also an impure progressive ideology is a barbershop pole of which the real aristocrats are the ones working to maintain the illusion, stringing everyone else along.

That's how I see it anyway, not that I know what's really going on.

[kardianos]

I think we are using the same word "progressive", but have a different definition. When I say "progressive", I mean someone who believes history marches forward to a destination. "God" to such a progressive could be "The Eyes of History", that is, an imagined future where people look back and judge them, to see if they were on "the right side of history". Such progressives believe they have Gnosis, some type of knowledge that grants them insight into how the world should be, and that the world should be transformed to match this vision, not incrementally changed to what is good.

The "progressive" label stems from the vision that they have foreknown vision of what the world should look like and they want to transform the world to look like that.

This type of progressive isn't held back from apparent failures. The response to a failure by a progressive, is "It failed because you weren't doing it right" (that wasn't real communism) or "It failed because you weren't doing enough of it" (you only spent 2% of revenue on DEI training, we need to commit more to the goal of equity, an administered council dedicated to force equal outcomes).

[drewcoo]

> When I say "progressive", I mean someone who believes history marches forward to a destination.

Doesn't check out.

https://www.britannica.com/topic/progressivism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressivism_in_the_United_St...

Maybe you're confusing it with philosophical historical progress, then comparing that somehow with your own stated social conservativism.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/progress/

All I'm trying to say is that you have a very special definition of progressive and you're going to talk past everyone if you're only equipped with that.