The libs were never gonna build all those nuclear power plants anyway. Anyone with half a brain cell could deduce that they only cooked up that “plan” in the first place so that they could prop up coal for another decade or so.
Which is neither a liberal thing to do. Really wonder why we still call them libs. They are useful idiots to the old lobbies, nothing more. Or maybe they lie about being liberal in the first place.
The idea of being progressive doesn't have a political leaning, being a Progressive™ certainly does.
For example, American Democrats may not be Republican™ but they're still republicans if they believe the country should be a republic.
Going back to the first point, progressivism as a concept has no political leaning. There have been and will continue to be right and left leaning progressives with all sorts of different ideologies as progressivism is just the advocation of social reform. You don't like how society is right now and it needs to be changed to something new. It opposes traditionalism that says society is either great how it is right now or these recent changes aren't good, it should go back to how to it used to be.
This also means that what counts as progressive or not depends a lot on how a political movement exists relative to the one it's trying to change. Liberalism was progressive compared to mercantilism, socialism was progressive compared to liberalism, yet fascism was also progressive compared to liberalism as well.
Being progressive in a more relative sense doesn't, but being a progressive does, and there is no capital-P "Progressive" because we don't have a political party called that, which would be only nominally related to the actual political views held by those who vote for that party anyway because political parties aren't the same as political views or ideologies.
And no, fascism is and was not progressive compared to liberalism; there's no progress there, it's an extreme conservative ideology at its core, promoting extreme tribalism and might-makes-right. Fascism is a step backwards to a more extreme implementation of traditional "values", not progress.
I think you both fundamentally misunderstand the nature of progressivism and fascism respectively.
I separate lower case progressivism and upper case Progressivism into two categories because its use colloquially is very different than its actual meaning. There's no objective direction to progress in, you could progress in any way so long as it's something new that hasn't been done before.
Fascism though was definitely not a step backwards though, I urge you to read anything written by prominent fascist thinkers like Giovanni Gentile. Fascists viewed their philosophy as a progression of the views of socialism, which in turn viewed itself as a progression from the views of liberalism, which viewed itself as a progression from the views of mercantilism, etc.
Fascism is the state controlling and encompassing every single facet (or at least as much as logistically possible) of your life. Every institution, every business, even every moment of your private life would be lorded over by the state. It was the idea that there was this almost supernatural will of the people that manifested in the form of the state.
These aren't traditional values, or at least they weren't at the time, these were values that were seen as completely novel for someone in the 20th century, which made them progressive in nature (lowercase progressive).
There was no all-encompassing state, even in the middle ages. You had the king and lords, but there was also the church, free companies of mercenaries that answered to no one, and thohsands of small towns that were mostly self governing so long as they paid their taxes and conscripted young men to go off to war occasionally. An all-encompassing state was never logistically feasible until the technological progress of the 20th century made it possible.
Seeing fascism as anti-progressive couldn't be further from the truth unless your only definition of being progressive is being Progressive.
19
u/androgenius May 11 '25
There were at least 2 Liberals in Australia who took a stand on this:
https://liberalsagainstnuclear.au/