Based Camp: Were Progressives Good/Benign Before They Went Woke?

​Welcome to our robust discussion, 'Redefining Progressivism: A Dialogue Between Malcolm and Simone'. In this episode, we delve into the evolution of progressive movements from the eighties and nineties to the present day. Our intention is to identify the core values that shaped these movements and to examine how they have evolved or deviated from their initial principles.

We discuss the interplay between progressivism and conservatism, the goal of removing emotional pain in current movements, and the ways in which this aim is influencing societal norms. We also examine the role of Christianity in shaping ideas about equality and how these ideas have been integrated into both progressive and conservative philosophies.

Our discussion ranges from the impact of standardized testing in schools to the Healthy At Every Size (HAES) movement, from the influence of the internet on societal ideologies to the growing acceptance of polyamorous relationships. Through it all, we keep coming back to one central question: What was the true objective of the progressive movements of the past and how does it differ from today's progressivism?

This video is a must-watch if you're interested in exploring societal and cultural changes through the lens of political ideologies. Don't forget to hit the subscribe button and the bell icon for regular updates on our engaging and thought-provoking discussions.This is a terrible AI transcript of the episode:

Hi, Malcolm. Hello

Simone, my wonderful wife. It's beautiful to be here with you today.

I'm glad to be talking. What are we gonna talk

about? So on a recent podcast you had brought up something where I disagreed with you, and whenever we disagree on something, we like to hash it out so that we can get on the same page with the topic.

So we both agree that right now progressivism in the far left has been eaten by this. Super virus that has hollowed out the old predominant ideologies and just wears them like a skin suit. And we agree that this super virus is primary objective or like the objective ideological function of it.

It's to remove in the moment emotional pain from people. That's what it optimizes most of its decisions around. So those two things being agreed, where we disagreed was the movements that it ate, what the progressive movements were in the eighties and nineties, before the age of the internet, before the supervisor arose, what was their real objective and what were they optimized around?

This. Yeah, I, my, my position and the general impression that I'm under is progressivism is the move fast break things approach, whereas conservatism is the, hold on, wait, things are okay the way they are. Let's not. Let's not change things so quickly. And so I don't see progressivism as inherently bad.

I can see it as risky, obviously, because things do break when you move fast and when you're not careful. But it is just one philosophy and ultimately both progressivism and conservatism must work in concert because if you don't have advancement, if you don't have people moving fast and breaking things, you don't.

Deal with new existential threats, you don't advance. But if you only advance, if you only try new things and constantly change, you both lose a lot of value collectively and a lot of efficiency. And also subject yourself to maybe more existential risks than you're building solutions too, if that makes sense.

Do you have a differing definition of these things? I

do. Yeah, so I think the progressive movement always. Had an aesthetic element to it that contained what you're talking about and has always professed to care about that for a long time. It's professed to care about that. But I think we need to remember that, something could be called the Patriot Act and be totally unpatriotic, right?

Like just cuz something professes something doesn't mean it doesn't. And I think that when we're talking about

When we talk about conservatives, modern or even older conservatives, they'll often say that their movement, one of the big things they care about is small government, right? And yet they almost never do anything that actually makes the government smaller or that really, de consolidates executive power or that, and so just because a movement says, and a lot of members believe that this is something that they do, I don't think that we should take that to mean that's actually what they're optimizing around. So when I look around progressive policy pushes in the nineties, in the eighties They all really seem to me, based around optimizing equality, specifically equality of outcomes, and the more equality you had, the more equality you had in the way people were treated, in the opportunities people had access to in sort of everything, the better.

And this is not what it optimizes for anymore. An example of how much it doesn't optimize for equality now can be seen an insane thing to has said recently. So as a lot of people, they might not agree with our original premise that it's been eaten and now it does something entirely different.

So if you look at what progressivism does now, so you have Simone's vision of progressivism and my vision of progressivism, and we can talk about why each of those visions might be negative in some ways and we can get to that. And I think that the equality drive is actually. A pseudo communist drive and that it's driven with the long-term plan to a communist like society, but or very socialist like society, like as close to communism as you can get.

But if we go back to the Maining claim that we made at the beginning, which is that progressivism today, isn't that anymore? So when we look at something like the recent fight in California which was to have kids like not take tests or remove the amount of testing that kids get because some kids get bad grades on tests and that hurts their feelings.

So let's remove this saying that's hurting people's feelings. Now, obviously, In the long term, if you remove testing that testing was primarily motivating. The kids who didn't have parents who were motivating them, the rich kids parents still send them to s a t prep. They're still sending their kids to, to forced environments where they are in some way, socially or economically or emotionally.

Punished for not continuing to achieve, to not continuing to do well. Whereas when you have less socioeconomically advantaged people often they don't have as much time to spend on their kids in those ways. They don't have as much time to engage those kids on those things. So the people who are vastly, disproportionately hurt by removing things like that are going to be the economically less fortunate.

So you are increasing inequality, but removing in the moment suffering. And you see this across the board, Again, I always come back to the Hayes movement as being a great example of this, but I really think it is the healthy and every size movement saying that it is, bigoted to teach or published research that shows that it might be unhealthy to be severely overweight.

That causes in the moment emotional pain and therefore it is bad regardless of whether or not it is true and might help people in the long run. That's just you then rework what is true and what is being communicated. To be the thing that hurts people less.

Another area where you see this progressive. Policy of not at all being like, what progressives used to be is these drug programs, where they're giving hard drugs to people on the streets really at high levels because not having your drug when you want it causes emotional pain.

Therefore, it is evil. Therefore, we should give it to people, even if it causes more long-term suffering and exasperated it's social inequality caused by things like mental disorders.

And you can see this in, polyamory, like the social movements that y