The Trans Movement Just Hit Home.......

[CJD]

(05-04-2023, 11:05 PM)Dill Wrote: Just as a historical sidebar, this is not really true. Especially if you are using current (liberal) definitions of "progressive."

E.g., in 20th century Europe, Fascist regimes worked deliberately to oppose progressive gender and race politics, pushed women
out of the professions and back into the home, etc.

I'm not sure how the term "progressive" would apply to the ancient Mediterranean world at any point--maybe Athens between 600 and 340 BCE? Rome for the first 250 years of the Republic? If we follow the Old Testament prophets, each seems to think his generation is less godly than the previous--maybe "less godly" is what we'd call "progressive"?  

Looking at Asian civilizations, there are periods we Westerners approve of--Asoka's reign in India, Baghdad under the Abbasids--but whatever
we thought "progressive" about them wasn't carried forward by succeeding generations.  

Anyway, I think you are on to something in the sense that, in the U.S. there has always been a dialectical movement from liberal to conservative and back again, but as decades and centuries pass it seems "progressive" values increasingly win out and become permanent. Conservatives eventually identify with them too. What conservatives previously opposed become what conservatives have always supported. 50 years from now I would not be surprised if conservatives were arguing that conservatism always supported trans surgery because it always supported "choice" and "freedom." 

Admittedly, I don't have a lot of experience in ancient culture and how their politics shifted over time. I will say that things like fascism were "blips" on the graph. Like, if you can imagine a line graph where the X axis is time and the Y axis is "progressiveness," you may see it go up, up, up, up, up, then take a sharp turn down for a certain period of time before continuing to ascend back up. If you zoom in onto that downward turn, it may appear as though progressivism did not continue indefinitely but, if you zoom out far enough, it once again becomes a straight line sloped upward.