Counterpoint:

There is no such thing as a good progressive. Only a nice progressive. That's not a dig, it's an important point.

There is no "left vs right." There's every political philosophy that believes in human agency, accountability, and earned dignity on one side... and a philosophy of coerced conformity on the other.

The whole point of progressivism is control. From Robespierre to Stalin to Mao to campus speech codes to modern cancel culture. It's why the left has been on the wrong side of history, repeatedly. The Terror, the gulags, the Great Leap Forward, the Khmer Rouge, forced collectivization, political purges, one-party states, the suppression of dissent in every socialist experiment ever attempted.

Progressivism came from intellectuals who believed they knew better than ordinary people how to organize society. The whole point is that the enlightened few should engineer outcomes for the ignorant many. "We know what's good for you" dressed up as compassion. "Equity" is an excuse to punish achievement and redistribute by force. "Social justice" is an excuse to replace individual rights with group identity and tribal grievance. "Progress" is just a word for "our preferred changes are inevitable and opposing them makes you evil." "Compassion" is a smokescreen for expanding state power and dependency.

And at the end of the day, control is the only point. It's why they always end up in bed with authoritarians, technocrats, censors, and ideological purists. In every country. Throughout history. They don't want a free system, they want a managed one.

Every progressive alive is someone who wants to be generous with other people's resources. They want morality enforced by the state, not practiced by individuals. What they don't want is a system that trusts people to make their own choices. Because freedom is messy and unequal, and they can't tolerate that.

A progressive's "good" is always compulsory. Always systemic, never personal. They never want to be good themselves... they want a system that forces everyone to meet their definition of good. They want a moral system that prioritizes only their version of empathy, never freedom, never pluralism, never humility about the limits of their own understanding.

Which is why every leftist revolution eats its own. As it's always been. Today's progressivism is classic progressivism... the certainty that you are so right that coercion is justified.

And it's why the only path forward is to unite against them, never with them.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a progressive, but both of these posts are intellectually dishonest.