Regressives verses Progressives
There are at least two types of leftists and there are significant differences between them.
Over the last few years, I noticed the right referring to SJWs, MAPS, anti-free speech advocates, and other assorted trash as liberals, progressives, or simply “the left”. This is not entirely accurate as there are at least two very distinct types of leftists: Progressives and regressives, more importantly, it is the cause of unnecessary division between left and right, so I thought it was important for right-wingers to know what separates regressives(bad ones) from progressives(good ones)
Here is the TLTR:
My general definition of American Progressives:
Progressives are non-authoritarian leftists who believe in free speech and a generous welfare state and purport to believe in economic and social equality. They are generally anti-war, anti-imperialism, anti-colonialism, and pro-choice.1
Progressives as a rule are not anti-white, anti-male, anti-Christan, anti-American, or anti-Western Civilization, they are not against free speech, they are not promoting child/adult sex and they are not promoting the trans agenda to kids. Stop claiming that they are. Please.
The original definition of the regressive:
The regressive left (also called regressive liberals or regressive leftists) is a term for a branch of left-wing politics that is accused, notably by some on the political right, of being accepting of or sympathetic to views that conflict with liberal principles, particularly by tolerating Islamism.
The British political activist Maajid Nawaz, American political talk-show hosts such as Bill Maher and Dave Rubin, and New Atheist writers like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins are among those who have used the term.
The more recent definition:
Regressives are left-wing authoritarians who prioritize identity politics and intersectionality over traditional politics; they are nasty dregs of little intellect, crude understanding, and a mean-spirited nature which they project into their enemies, almost every accusation against them is a self-report; their lack of empathy and abstract thought makes it impossible to place themselves in the minds of their opponents, they must fill in the gaps of what might motivate someone with their own insecurities, fears, and frame of mind.
Regressives are impetuous, emotionally immature, and emotionally fragile; they childishly lash out at any slight real or imagined, and the punishment for the slight is typically out of proportion for what the slight was, for they believe the world revolves around their feelings. If you are the cause of any emotional pain they endure, you committed an objective wrong and need to be punished regardless of intent.
Ressgrivess are amoral; right and wrong are completely dependent on how they feel insofar as they acknowledge right and wrong exist. They value nothing but their own feelings, not only is nothing sacred to regressive, they enjoy trampling on what is sacred to others, and they take a perverse satisfaction from profaning the good, the true, and the beautiful. 2
Does this behavior sound familiar? The infantile and radical behavior the right has been complaining about for the last few years is mostly from them. When you hear screeches of waycism, transphobia, and white supreeeemacy it is not coming from rank and file leftists - it isn’t coming from progressives, it’s coming from regressives.
If you see a right winger lumping leftists in the same group, set them straight. We are divided enough.
End of the TLTR. If you want the horny details, stick around.
Differences between the progressive and the regressive
Progressives are left-wing non-authoritarian
Progressives are in the 3rd quadrant of the political compass; they believe in the autonomy of the individual especially when it comes to free speech. Progressives believe in a large government that should act as a benevolent nurturing mother figure and enforce “economic and social equality “.3
Progressives believe in the management of the economy to varying degrees depending on their location on the political compass and they support progressive taxation.
Regressives are left-wing authoritarians
Regressives dwell in the 1st quadrant of the political compass.; regressives believe in a dominant centralized federal government with the individual possessing little to no autonomy; in their ideal world the state takes an active role in the lives of individuals and acts as an overbearing mother figure; this mother figure distributes resources as she sees fit and forces the social conformity these cretins believe in. The authoritarian left wants this mother figure to use the power of the state to protect “marginalized” classes and hurt feelings; this protection includes cancellation, fines, and imprisonment for the offender, but given their vindictiveness and history, it will not be limited to those thing provided they have enough power. 4
Regressives possess all the negative attributes the right associate with the left dialed up to 11. The self-aggrandizement, the infantilism... it’s all exaggerated to a cartoonish degree - you can even predict what NPC nonsense is going to come out of their mouths by imputing particular stimuli:
Input: J.K Rowling
Output: Bigot!!, Homophobe!!, Transphobic!!
Input: Trump
Output: Fascist!!, White Supremacist, Russian asset!!
Yet the output won’t be “war criminal”, the Ministry of Truth5 didn’t program that one in.6
The average right winger may ask, “wait, aren't you describing the far left?”
My answer is the term has virtually no meaning. The right used it as a blunderbuss to beat any leftist over the head, it may not be the catch-all “far right is”, but the term simply does not provide specific information.
Progressives have values, Regressives and stances and positions.
Leftists aren't blatantly inconsistent in their positions, regressives are:
Progressive:
That bakery must bake that sodomite a cake.
Youtube can’t ban a user for political reasons.
Regressive:
That bakery must bake that sodomite a cake.
Youtube can ban a user for political reasons or any reason, after all, it’s a private company.
To a non-regressive, this is a contradiction, if a private business can be compelled to make a cake, a publicly traded corporation can’t ban a user arbitrarily.
To a Regressive, this may or not be a contradiction, it doesn’t matter because these cretins have no values or principles. They feel a baker must bake a cake, therefore the law should compel the baker to do so. They feel Youtube can ban a user for speech they don’t like, therefore Youtube has the legal right to do so.
During Russiagate Right wingers noted that “the left” suddenly supported the FBI and CIA. This was only partially true.
Do you know why?
You guessed it!
Regressives were the ones who adulated government institutions that Progressives were always wary of; regressives believed the CIA and FBI wanted to harm their enemy - they have little to no foresight - so the CIA / FBI became the good guys. Praising government spooks also makes sense seeing how regressives are authoritarian; they love the idea of using raw force to impose their will on others. The cretins don’t worship police officers like the authoritarian right, but they love and covet power.
After Barry Satono was handed the torch a few right-wingers noted that “the left” became pro-war or dialed back their anti-war attitudes.
You know where this is going…
Progressives never changed their anti-war, anti-imperial values, regressive never had them, they along with shitlibs supported the war, war crimes and torture.
Paul “prison lips” Watson has a video called The Truth About the Regressive Left with the following title: Why have liberals abandoned liberal principles by refusing to criticize Islam - the most illiberal doctrine on the planet?
The answer is simple: “liberals” didn’t abandon anything. Regressives are not liberals or progressives.
Progressives are hesitant to criticize Islam because of the association between Islam and middle easterners, this, may give regressives trepidation as well, but regressives have no principles, if Don Lemon being tossed off a roof doesn’t cause them emotional pain they wouldn’t care unless told to by the goblin zeitgeist.
Regressives are Parsons
Regressives are beholden to the official narrative, and they will always eat the chocolate rations served up by the Powers That Be; there are plenty of progressives who buy the official narrative of the OKC bombing, 911, Syrian gas attacks, covid1984, etc., but virtually all regressives support these narratives and ridicule anyone who questions them as “conspiracy theorist”.
Progressive-run media such as The GrayZone and The Jimmy Dore Show constantly speak truth to power and take the counter-narrative position, regressive run media and regressive personalities do not. There can never be a direct regressive equivalent of Jimmy Dore, Max Blumenthal, or Aaron Maté because the regressive will only assimilate and digest the information provided by the Ministry of Truth.
Here is a comment from Quran:
This is something that a lot of people noticed a long time ago and just didn’t have the words for. I went to college in the 60s when people were marching for racial equality, when we believed Dr. King’s words that there would be a world where we were judged on the content of our character rather than the color of our skin. We wanted to be one big happy family, so to speak. We welcomed everyone who wanted to be a part of that - we didn’t require people to be a certain age, or race, or sex, or sexual orientation, or education level, or income level, or any other of the artificial descriptions we use for other people. Those were the days of real liberals.
I don’t know what happened, but suddenly the left became obsessed with pigeonholing people. Women go into this box, gays go into this box, people of color go into this box. You can’t just be ‘people’ any more.
Now there is a hierarchy of victimhood. I get victim points for being a woman. My son gets victim points for technically being a minority. My daughter gets victim points like crazy for being female, lesbian, AND a minority - even if her minority is just an Indian card from the Cherokee Nation and her amount of Indian blood is negligible.
There is also a hierarchy of villainy. Men get villain points. My son’s villain points are offset by his minority points. White people get villain points. Mine are offset by my female status. My brother gets TONS of villain points because he is a white male. He even got booted out of a food bank when he was homeless because of it.
It gets a lot more complicated than that when we factor in approved and disapproved pigeonholes. If you’re affluent, you lose points - UNLESS you live on one of the coasts. If you live in the middle of the country, you lose points. You can gain a few back if you have the correct education, but if you are a white working class man your points are in the negative and there is nothing you can do to redeem yourself. If you live on the coasts and have no education, you still have points because you do not live in the middle of the country.
The reason the people who practice this system are called regressive is that the original intent of liberals was to bring people together. Liberals now want to take us back to the feudal days where they are the elites and the rest of the world is peasants who live or die at their whim
The authoritarian left(regressives) and the authoritarian right were always with us, people didn’t make a distinction until recently.
Leftists should call them regressives as well, It wouldn’t hurt to put distance between you two.
In “Don't Talk to Tucker Carlson!” Jodi Shaw relays her experience after appearing on Tucker Carlson's show:
Anyway, although I had somehow managed to grow the moral cajones necessary to publicly challenge my workplace and alma mater, I found that I had to grow an even bigger pair to withstand the backlash I faced after showing up on Tucker Carlson Tonight. After I appeared on his show, the predictions of the well-meaning people who had reached out to me to warn me not to do so came true.
It was not surprising to me that Smith College received dozens of emails (and those are only the ones I know about) demanding they terminate my employment because I had appeared with a “known white supremacist.”
Examples of Progressives.
Examples of Regressives
This is not a cherry-pick of the best progressives and the worst regressives, regressives are just the worst of the left.
Help me get the word out. Give people this link when people lump leftists together.
It should be noted that they are capable of acknowledging that a life is being taken, they simply prioritize the antonymy of the woman over the life of the child. Regressives are the ones who claim the baby is “just a lump of cells.”
What makes one a progressive or a regressive operates on a sliding scale, there are progressives who have more regressive traits while some regressives have more progressive traits, and there are people who live in the middle.
It should be noted that the Authoritarian left is not simply a left-wing version of the authoritarian right. The authoritarian right also believes in a dominant centralized federal government but they reject Big Sister and embrace Big Brother; in their ideal world the state only acts as an overbearing father figure that protects the masses from outside threats and their own vices; the state is a rigid disciplinarian that maintains order with punitive punishments for criminals and enemies. The authoritarian left embraces Big Sister and Big Brother; they want the overbearing mother figure to provide succor and protect their feelings but they also want the overbearing disciplinarian to punish thought criminals and dissenters.
The authoritarian-leftist doesn’t want the long arm of the law to be unleashed for the same offenses as the authoritarian right, but they do want the law to be unleashed with prejudice against “the other”.
The Ministry of Truth is the amalgamation of corporate media and media influenced by special interest(NPR, Democracy NOW! Media Matters)
Conservatards claim the media was out to get Trump, but the media didn't attack him on issues that would cost him his base or even hurt him at all. It’s almost as if he was deliberately attacked on relatively superficial issues while his real crimes were ignored…
Obviously you're in the States, and I'm in Europe (thus come from a different philosophical tradition I guess), and I think in the States you have different definitions, or perceptions, or understandings of 'left' and 'right' and certainly 'liberal'. The latter word, 'liberal' no longer bears any relation to the actual meaning of the word, as in 'freedom' and 'permission'. In America I get the impression it actually means the opposite, judging by those who call themselves 'liberal' - to me they seem like the worst kind of regressive bigots.
As regards your definition of 'the left' - there is clearly such a world of difference between what you define as the 'progressive' left and the 'regressive' left that, in fact the 'regressive' have nothing whatsoever to do with 'socialism' - in fact, the type you are describing here are, in actual fact, fascists.
The best example of this is of course Marx and his cult. These people are 'fascists pretending to be socialist'. Or fascists in 'left' clothes. But they are still fascists in the sense of 'a small minority group controlling everything and telling people what they can and cannot think, feel, do and believe.'
And that's got fuck all to do with socialism. Socialism, in fact, is inseparable from liberalism - because providing security to everyone in terms of 'all their basic needs are met' essentially liberates them. They are then no longer dependent on IngSoc or the state, meaning the official narrative doesn't get them anymore - they are free to think and believe and ask questions and pursue higher order needs.
This state of affairs is obviously the true enemy of those in power, and that explains their tactics throughout the ages. But that's an entirely different essay. But I would do this reminder, that Marx was an agent of the bankers & industrialists (the oligarchs, the 'cabal' etc.) whose sole purpose was to 'capture' the socialists, discredit and destroy the genuine socialist opposition, and then become the honeypot and 'controlled opposition'. Unfortunately, Marx has done his work well. Now in America in particular, whenever an American hears the word 'socialist' they have been conditioned to see visions of Stalinist Russia - which, as I say, was a fascist state pretending to be socialist. Stalinism had nothing to do with socialism.
'If Marx had not existed, it would have been necessary for the Establishment to have invented him'
Here is the Political Compass Test: https://www.politicalcompass.org/test
Here is "Libertarian Municipalism", which I consider to be the political foundation of left-libertarianism (which Gandhi was). https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/murray-bookchin-libertarian-municipalism-an-overview