It seems to me that the term "progressive" in the context that it's being used here is mostly redundant.
A liberal, to my way of thinking, is a person with an ideological commitment to a program of left leaning ideas. Lets take welfare as an example. A liberal has a sympathy for the victims of our capitalist society, for the folk who fall down on the way, for the handicapped, the mentally damaged, those who never had a chance, those who had commitment to others that superseded their own personal ambitions, the circumstance disadvantaged., those to whom we should refer to as the there but for the Grace of God.
But this noble and profoundly sacred notion is lacking in psychological understanding, and conservatives know this. They represent the winners of our society, generally, those who were raised to be aggressively competitive, for whom winning is everything, Sunday Christians who believe only in their own private charity, the vicarious pleasure they get only from voluntary giving. These winners depend on the sense they have won the game out of personal worthiness, not because our system is structured so that a few people will always win. These are the greed is good people who believe in their own superiority as a means to deny what they actually feel, totally worthless.
But they understand one thing that liberals generally fail to see. They won by doing something, by achieving something, by building up personal capacity, by working at something, having goals and dreams. They believe not only in self sufficiency but have also achieved it. They know that without this element of personal drive people will fail in the world we have created, the world of hate expressed as competition. They don't want their money confiscated by liberals to be given as government charity, thrown in the pit of endless appetite of the worthless and lazy.
A progressive understands both of these things and resolves them with wisdom and understanding at a higher level of comprehension.
To feed people you need to teach them to fish. In shout it is them crippled mentality of the disadvantaged, their negative attitudes about self that need to be addressed. You create no sense of self worth in people you help for free. At that stage they are simply takers, untransformed by the charity deal.
What needs to happen is for people who are beaten to be healed.
Mental health is reacquired in two ways if it is lost. People who are beaten need to see it's not their fault. They need to remember their own story and feel their self destruction to reverse the lie they carry that they are worthless people. And externally, there needs to be personal change in the form of positive feed back, baby steps that create a sense of success. Every act of rehabilitation of the damaged once basic survival is assured, is to couple every act of charity as a payment for some sort of positive work. It doesn't matter at first if there is any real contribution, only that some personal effort is involved that simulates the fact that positive actions generally produce positive rewards.
The entire world is sick because everybody alive has been put down. All that pain makes some of us saints, breaks others, and created massive numbers of abusers who keep the sickness going by transferring the pain they hide from to the next generation.
You can do nothing real in the world to cure its ills if you do not know those ills are within us. It is my idea of what a progressive is who know these things.
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