Progressives are nearly always right. Conservatives are nearly always wrong. It’s built into the language of politics. Progressives want progress. Progress heavily implies improvement. In political terms that improvement is across a large swath of the population. They do not currently ‘have’.
Conservatives don’t want progress. They want to conserve what they have because it’s better for them if things never change. They already ‘have’.
From there you can plot the entirety of the political landscape. Conservatives take a position that the way things used to be is better than the way things are now. Despite all evidence that that is not true now and has been true so rarely in all of human history that it’s not worth mentioning. I’ve said it before but will say it again. You can go back to any decade in the past century and compare it to modern times and at every level, life is better for the people in our society than it ever has been before.
Womens rights? Better. Minority rights? Better. Health Care? Better. LGBTQ+ rights? Better. Child Labor? Better. Religious Rights? Better. Environmentalism? Better. Basic equality? Better.
As a progressive, that’s good. But I can also see how much farther we have to go. Every one of those topics has only gotten a tiny fraction of the way they should be, in my opinion.
Conservatives are a boat anchor on society. In a desperate attempt to maintain the power they have on others, they will lie, cheat, bribe, steal, misdirect, and censor anything and everything they can. They try to convince the population that their childhood was better than it was. They want us to remember life as ‘Leave it to Beaver’ and not the reality with oppressed women and minorities.
Conservatives have a majority of the power in the country, but a minority of the population. This has also always been true. Those conservatives got rich off the poor, they structured the nations’ mechanisms to maintain that power and wealth and they made it very hard to change that design.
Conservatives have always feared the progressive. There are more ‘have not’s than there are ‘have’s. That is a requirement so that each ‘have’ can take the share of more and more ‘have not’s. But the risk is that if you go too far, a bunch of ‘have not’ people will get fed up, and then decide it’s easier to put your back up against the wall before they start fresh.
So, they accept that they are slowly losing their grip on things. It’s a balance of control that deep down they know but refuse to acknowledge. But they resist and resist to the point where a progressive must pull each tiny finger off a level of power and control. Incremental gains of equality, justice, and societal gains.
It was never better the way it was. It will always be better when the progressive moves society forward. And the conservative is almost always wrong.