Being an actual conservative, it didn't take me very long to learn the HUGE differences between conservatives & republicans.
Back when I called myself a democrat, "progressives" weren't really a thing. In fact, I don't really member any democrat politician calling themselves a progressive.
But to day, they're everywhere.
On political forums like this, the two get confused. Say something about a liberal, and someone else will correct you and say it's a progressive. Or visa versa. But not much anymore. Since the MSM fails to make note of the difference, the two get lumped into the same column. Just like they do conservatives. I can't tell you how many times I've heard hannity or maddow call McConnell a conservative.
I have the general idea about their difference of liberal and progressive. My problem is, liberals just don't do much to disassociate themselves with the whacko thinking of the progressives.
Where as true conservatives will tell you flat out, they wouldn't piss on Trump if he was on fire.
Maybe the liberals are a dying breed, much like conservatives. Maybe the progressives are pushing them out. It seems that when the DNC get's a decent liberal candidate, he/she get's thrown under the bus because he/she doesn't align themselves with the new progressive way of thinking. Obama may have been the last liberal to be elected president.
That is, unless the liberal voters stand up to this new age BS. Young liberals aren't bad. You can talk to them. Like us true conservatives, they listen to all the information, and make a decision based on their own way of thinking. And not how they're supposed to think. Whereas progressive will believe even facebook headlines and share that propaganda 1 million times, before someone points out to them that it's not true.
If there's any actual liberals on this forum, I'd like to hear from you and your idea's about this new progressive BS that's being force into your party.
It's OK to stand up and be heard. I didn't when I left the GOP because I was a conservative and realized there was no room in the GOP for actual conservatism.
Having studies a lot of American history and political science, here are the best definitions I have heard:
The core of our ideological split is between liberal and conservative views, even if we didn't always call them that. Describing someone as liberal simply means that they prefer to make changes to society in order to fix social problems; for example, if a factory is dumping its waste into the river, a liberal view would be to require the company to limit its pollution, or close. By contrast, a conservative prefers to resist excessive changes to society in the name of issues that they consider to be less harmful than the change would be; so, in the same instance, a conservative might argue that the pollution would be less harmful to their town than the potential inflation, loss of service, or unemployment brought by regulation on the factory.
The term "Progressive" originally meant those from around the early 20th century who focused on limiting or regulating runaway big industry on order to move our society from an agricultural base to a fair and functional industrial one. Over time, its use more or less merged with 'liberal,' but by now it is largely used to mean the extreme left. There are a gajillion different ways to define 'left wing' and 'right wing' as well, but in practice they mostly line up with liberal and conservative. None of this correlates in a straight line to Democrats and Republicans, though, which are political parties and not ideologies at all.
I think there is truth in what you say about how the voices of liberals and conservatives—if we define them as the non-extreme center-left and center-right—are being drowned out by shouts from the fringes. It's a genuinely disturbing trend that makes me think we are heading for a Great Depression or Civil War-level catastrophe at best, if we don't change course. From my perspective, though, the demands of the so-called "Progressive" American far left are far from the extreme; there are no calls for nationalization of multiple industries, there is no potential autocrat challenging the law, and their greatest champion has just gotten convincingly smacked down for two Primary seasons in a row. On the other hand, the extreme has a stranglehold on the right; center-right conservatives such as Liz Cheney are getting whipped out of the party, and the next two elections at least are shaping up to be contests to see who can be the most Trumpian of them all.
What all of that tells me is that the reason you don't see liberals rejecting progressives with the same vitriol that you see remaining conservatives reject Trumpism is because the far left simply isn't the existential threat to our democracy that the far right is. Whether it's through instinct or experience or book knowledge, I get the sense that most people (far left, center left, midfield, and center right alike) just know how much of a danger the far right is these days, not only to their own ideologies and way of life, but to the entire American system, so they crank it up in response.