The Rise of the Regressive Right

Bfgrn

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Apr 4, 2009
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Progressives believe in openness, equal opportunity, and tolerance. Progressives assume we're all in it together: We all benefit from public investments in schools and health care and infrastructure. And we all do better with strong safety nets, reasonable constraints on Wall Street and big business, and a truly progressive tax system. Progressives worry when the rich and privileged become powerful enough to undermine democracy.

Regressives take the opposite positions.

Eric Cantor, Paul Ryan, Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann and the other tribunes of today's Republican right aren't really conservatives. Their goal isn't to conserve what we have. It's to take us backwards.

They'd like to return to the 1920s -- before Social Security, unemployment insurance, labor laws, the minimum wage, Medicare and Medicaid, worker safety laws, the Environmental Protection Act, the Glass-Steagall Act, the Securities and Exchange Act, and the Voting Rights Act.

In the 1920s Wall Street was unfettered, the rich grew far richer and everyone else went deep into debt, and the nation closed its doors to immigrants.

Rather than conserve the economy, these regressives want to resurrect the classical economics of the 1920s -- the view that economic downturns are best addressed by doing nothing until the "rot" is purged out of the system (as Andrew Mellon, Herbert Hoover's Treasury Secretary, so decorously put it).

In truth, if they had their way we'd be back in the late nineteenth century -- before the federal income tax, antitrust laws, the Pure Food and Drug Act, and the Federal Reserve. A time when robber barons -- railroad, financial, and oil titans -- ran the country. A time of wrenching squalor for the many and mind-numbing wealth for the few.

Listen carefully to today's Republican right and you hear the same Social Darwinism Americans were fed more than a century ago to justify the brazen inequality of the Gilded Age: Survival of the fittest. Don't help the poor or unemployed or anyone who's fallen on bad times, they say, because this only encourages laziness. America will be strong only if we reward the rich and punish the needy.

The regressive right has slowly consolidated power over the last three decades as income and wealth have concentrated at the top. In the late 1970s the richest 1 percent of Americans received 9 percent of total income and held 18 percent of the nation's wealth; by 2007, they had more than 23 percent of total income and 35 percent of America's wealth. CEOs of the 1970s were paid 40 times the average worker's wage; now CEOs receive 300 times the typical workers' wage.

This concentration of income and wealth has generated the political heft to deregulate Wall Street and halve top tax rates. It has bankrolled the so-called Tea Party movement, and captured the House of Representatives and many state governments. Through a sequence of presidential appointments it has also overtaken the Supreme Court.

More

Those who don't know history are destined to repeat it.
Edmund Burke
 
Am glad to see that this is a blogger's opinion and not actual fact.
 
Progressives believe in openness, equal opportunity, and tolerance. Progressives assume we're all in it together: We all benefit from public investments in schools and health care and infrastructure. And we all do better with strong safety nets, reasonable constraints on Wall Street and big business, and a truly progressive tax system. Progressives worry when the rich and privileged become powerful enough to undermine democracy.

Regressives take the opposite positions.

Eric Cantor, Paul Ryan, Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann and the other tribunes of today's Republican right aren't really conservatives. Their goal isn't to conserve what we have. It's to take us backwards.

They'd like to return to the 1920s -- before Social Security, unemployment insurance, labor laws, the minimum wage, Medicare and Medicaid, worker safety laws, the Environmental Protection Act, the Glass-Steagall Act, the Securities and Exchange Act, and the Voting Rights Act.

In the 1920s Wall Street was unfettered, the rich grew far richer and everyone else went deep into debt, and the nation closed its doors to immigrants.

Rather than conserve the economy, these regressives want to resurrect the classical economics of the 1920s -- the view that economic downturns are best addressed by doing nothing until the "rot" is purged out of the system (as Andrew Mellon, Herbert Hoover's Treasury Secretary, so decorously put it).

In truth, if they had their way we'd be back in the late nineteenth century -- before the federal income tax, antitrust laws, the Pure Food and Drug Act, and the Federal Reserve. A time when robber barons -- railroad, financial, and oil titans -- ran the country. A time of wrenching squalor for the many and mind-numbing wealth for the few.

Listen carefully to today's Republican right and you hear the same Social Darwinism Americans were fed more than a century ago to justify the brazen inequality of the Gilded Age: Survival of the fittest. Don't help the poor or unemployed or anyone who's fallen on bad times, they say, because this only encourages laziness. America will be strong only if we reward the rich and punish the needy.

The regressive right has slowly consolidated power over the last three decades as income and wealth have concentrated at the top. In the late 1970s the richest 1 percent of Americans received 9 percent of total income and held 18 percent of the nation's wealth; by 2007, they had more than 23 percent of total income and 35 percent of America's wealth. CEOs of the 1970s were paid 40 times the average worker's wage; now CEOs receive 300 times the typical workers' wage.

This concentration of income and wealth has generated the political heft to deregulate Wall Street and halve top tax rates. It has bankrolled the so-called Tea Party movement, and captured the House of Representatives and many state governments. Through a sequence of presidential appointments it has also overtaken the Supreme Court.

More

Those who don't know history are destined to repeat it.
Edmund Burke

You might want to get your ideas from somewhere other then "The View".


Bet you think metal can't melt ether.
 
Fern, isn't this about the fifth time you've posted something like this.

The GOP is tapping into the fact that voters are angry that while they are having to make cuts, they are working until May to pay a tax burden for lazy government workers who make more than they do and have gold-plated benefits, and they still get shitty service whenever they have to deal with a government bureaucracy.

They are angry that half of us are pulling the wagon while the other half are riding in it..

NOw, I think there is a valid argument that can be made that there's a disparity in wealth in this country and that the working class has declined. But the "progressives" who put spotted owls before property rights and let the useless sue for imaginary discrimination have done just as much to kill jobs.
 
The USA started going backwards )socially speaking, I mean) when they elected Ronald Reagan.

I don't think RR was the worst POTUS ever, (in fact he did some great things while in office) but his message was that of a social reactionary and a lot of Americans liked it and still like it, too.

Well 40 years later and the effects of that reactionary thinking (when placed in policies and laws) have melted down the world's economy.
 
Don't forget folks, PROGRESSIVE is a pretty name for, socialist, Communist, Fascist=The Democrat party.

And I had to laugh
Progressives believe in openness, equal opportunity, and tolerance. Progressives assume we're all in it together: We all benefit from public investments in schools and health care and infrastructure. And we all do better with strong safety nets, reasonable constraints on Wall Street and big business, and a truly progressive tax system. Progressives worry when the rich and privileged become powerful enough to undermine democracy.

SIX of the top Ten Richest members of Congress are=DEMOCRATS-Progressive..:lol:
 
Thankfully, bfgrn maintains his record of posting other people's opinions in his steadfast refusal to form his own.

And you continue to be unable to address any issues. Knowledge does not magically ascend upon us Cali Girl, it is gained, developed and increased by reading and comprehending. The issues the author makes should be the topic. Are you able to make an intelligent reply?
 
The USA started going backwards )socially speaking, I mean) when they elected Ronald Reagan.

I don't think RR was the worst POTUS ever, (in fact he did some great things while in office) but his message was that of a social reactionary and a lot of Americans liked it and still like it, too.

Well 40 years later and the effects of that reactionary thinking (when placed in policies and laws) have melted down the world's economy.

The liberal era from the New Deal through the Great Society was America's finest moment. It was an era with huge economic growth and shared wealth, fantastic successes in technology, vast expansion of citizen freedoms and liberties and the growth of a middle class that defined this country and made America the 'city upon the hill', the envy of the world.

That era ended at the close of the 1960's, due to a weak and splintered Democratic party caused by the Vietnam War and political assassinations. It ushered in a conservative era that has continued ever since. It has been a total failure of governance based on a regressive ideology. It has been a disaster, a negative mirror image of the liberal era. Ronald Reagan was the biggest socialist in history. He is the pied piper on the road to serfdom. He began a systematic dismantling of all the gains the middle class had secured. Reagan transferred wealth from the poor and the middle class to the opulent. He looted Social Security to cover the shortfalls of his tax cuts for the wealthy. And the whole 'small businessman is the engine of growth' was cruel rhetoric. The self-employment tax jumped as much as 66 percent under Reagan.

Conservatives have built nothing in 30 +years...NOTHING. They have only destroyed and torn down everything our grandparents and parents built together as ONE nation, one people.

Nothing turns out to be so oppressive and unjust as a feeble government.
Edmund Burke
 
The USA started going backwards )socially speaking, I mean) when they elected Ronald Reagan.

I don't think RR was the worst POTUS ever, (in fact he did some great things while in office) but his message was that of a social reactionary and a lot of Americans liked it and still like it, too.

Well 40 years later and the effects of that reactionary thinking (when placed in policies and laws) have melted down the world's economy.

Actually, what has melted down the world economy is globalism. When you have 1 billion first world people living high and 6 billion third world people willing to do anything for money, you get the expected results once the barriers start falling.

We were able to afford the big Keynesian dreams of people like Fern because between WWI and 1976, we exported more manufactured goods than any other nation. We ran trade surpluses, which meant there was plenty of money to keep the system fluid. This accelerated after WWII, when we came out with an intact industrial infrastructure while the rest of the world was in ruins and empires were collapsing on their own weight.

Despite wars and space programs and huge public works projects, we ran up 600 Billion in debt in our first 200 years.

After 1976, we started importing more than we exported. Industries from other countries started lapping our own in quality and efficiency.

The regressiveness that Fern bemoans is based on the fact that there isn't money coming in to fund these things.
 
Progressives believe in openness, equal opportunity, and tolerance. Progressives assume we're all in it together: We all benefit from public investments in schools and health care and infrastructure. And we all do better with strong safety nets, reasonable constraints on Wall Street and big business, and a truly progressive tax system. Progressives worry when the rich and privileged become powerful enough to undermine democracy.

Regressives take the opposite positions.

Eric Cantor, Paul Ryan, Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann and the other tribunes of today's Republican right aren't really conservatives. Their goal isn't to conserve what we have. It's to take us backwards.

They'd like to return to the 1920s -- before Social Security, unemployment insurance, labor laws, the minimum wage, Medicare and Medicaid, worker safety laws, the Environmental Protection Act, the Glass-Steagall Act, the Securities and Exchange Act, and the Voting Rights Act.

In the 1920s Wall Street was unfettered, the rich grew far richer and everyone else went deep into debt, and the nation closed its doors to immigrants.

Rather than conserve the economy, these regressives want to resurrect the classical economics of the 1920s -- the view that economic downturns are best addressed by doing nothing until the "rot" is purged out of the system (as Andrew Mellon, Herbert Hoover's Treasury Secretary, so decorously put it).

In truth, if they had their way we'd be back in the late nineteenth century -- before the federal income tax, antitrust laws, the Pure Food and Drug Act, and the Federal Reserve. A time when robber barons -- railroad, financial, and oil titans -- ran the country. A time of wrenching squalor for the many and mind-numbing wealth for the few.

Listen carefully to today's Republican right and you hear the same Social Darwinism Americans were fed more than a century ago to justify the brazen inequality of the Gilded Age: Survival of the fittest. Don't help the poor or unemployed or anyone who's fallen on bad times, they say, because this only encourages laziness. America will be strong only if we reward the rich and punish the needy.

The regressive right has slowly consolidated power over the last three decades as income and wealth have concentrated at the top. In the late 1970s the richest 1 percent of Americans received 9 percent of total income and held 18 percent of the nation's wealth; by 2007, they had more than 23 percent of total income and 35 percent of America's wealth. CEOs of the 1970s were paid 40 times the average worker's wage; now CEOs receive 300 times the typical workers' wage.

This concentration of income and wealth has generated the political heft to deregulate Wall Street and halve top tax rates. It has bankrolled the so-called Tea Party movement, and captured the House of Representatives and many state governments. Through a sequence of presidential appointments it has also overtaken the Supreme Court.

More

Those who don't know history are destined to repeat it.
Edmund Burke

Progressives believe in openess, unless its about shaky solar company loan guarantees, or suspect gun running operations.

Progressives believe in equal opprotunity, as long as you are part of some special oppressed class.

Progressives beleive in tolerance, as long as your views dont consist of religous based morality, oppose the leftist groupthink, or involve a belief in indivudual liberty over deference to the State:

Progressives assume we are all in this together, but only want certain people to pay for things, and for those people to have no voice in HOW thier money gets spent by others.
 
The USA started going backwards )socially speaking, I mean) when they elected Ronald Reagan.

I don't think RR was the worst POTUS ever, (in fact he did some great things while in office) but his message was that of a social reactionary and a lot of Americans liked it and still like it, too.

Well 40 years later and the effects of that reactionary thinking (when placed in policies and laws) have melted down the world's economy.

Actually, what has melted down the world economy is globalism. When you have 1 billion first world people living high and 6 billion third world people willing to do anything for money, you get the expected results once the barriers start falling.

We were able to afford the big Keynesian dreams of people like Fern because between WWI and 1976, we exported more manufactured goods than any other nation. We ran trade surpluses, which meant there was plenty of money to keep the system fluid. This accelerated after WWII, when we came out with an intact industrial infrastructure while the rest of the world was in ruins and empires were collapsing on their own weight.

Despite wars and space programs and huge public works projects, we ran up 600 Billion in debt in our first 200 years.

After 1976, we started importing more than we exported. Industries from other countries started lapping our own in quality and efficiency.

The regressiveness that Fern bemoans is based on the fact that there isn't money coming in to fund these things.

No, the regressive era began with Nixon.

During three decades from 1947 to 1977, the nation implemented what might be called a basic bargain with American workers. Employers paid them enough to buy what they produced. Mass production and mass consumption proved perfect complements. Almost everyone who wanted a job could find one with good wages, or at least wages that were trending upward.

During these three decades everyone's wages grew -- not just those at or near the top.

Government enforced the basic bargain in several ways. It used Keynesian policy to achieve nearly full employment. It gave ordinary workers more bargaining power. It provided social insurance. And it expanded public investment. Consequently, the portion of total income that went to the middle class grew while the portion going to the top declined. But this was no zero-sum game. As the economy grew almost everyone came out ahead, including those at the top.

The pay of workers in the bottom fifth grew 116 percent over these years -- faster than the pay of those in the top fifth (which rose 99 percent), and in the top 5 percent (86 percent).

Productivity also grew quickly. Labor productivity -- average output per hour worked -- doubled. So did median incomes. Expressed in 2007 dollars, the typical family's income rose from about $25,000 to $55,000. The basic bargain was cinched.

The middle class had the means to buy, and their buying created new jobs. As the economy grew, the national debt shrank as a percentage of it.

The Great Prosperity also marked the culmination of a reorganization of work that had begun during the Depression. Employers were required by law to provide extra pay -- time-and-a-half -- for work stretching beyond 40 hours a week. This created an incentive for employers to hire additional workers when demand picked up. Employers also were required to pay a minimum wage, which improved the pay of workers near the bottom as demand picked up.

When workers were laid off, usually during an economic downturn, government provided them with unemployment benefits, usually lasting until the economy recovered and they were rehired. Not only did this tide families over but it kept them buying goods and services -- an "automatic stabilizer" for the economy in downturns.

Perhaps most significantly, government increased the bargaining leverage of ordinary workers. They were guaranteed the right to join labor unions, with which employers had to bargain in good faith. By the mid-1950s more than a third of all America workers in the private sector were unionized. And the unions demanded and received a fair slice of the American pie. Non-unionized companies, fearing their workers would otherwise want a union, offered similar deals.

Americans also enjoyed economic security against the risks of economic life -- not only unemployment benefits but also, through Social Security, insurance against disability, loss of a major breadwinner, workplace injury and inability to save enough for retirement. In 1965 came health insurance for the elderly and the poor (Medicare and Medicaid). Economic security proved the handmaiden of prosperity. In requiring Americans to share the costs of adversity it enabled them to share the benefits of peace of mind. And by offering peace of mind, it freed them to consume the fruits of their labors.

The government sponsored the dreams of American families to own their own home by providing low-cost mortgages and interest deductions on mortgage payments. In many sections of the country, government subsidized electricity and water to make such homes habitable. And it built the roads and freeways that connected the homes with major commercial centers.

Government also widened access to higher education. The GI Bill paid college costs for those who returned from war. The expansion of public universities made higher education affordable to the American middle class.

Government paid for all of this with tax revenues from an expanding middle class with rising incomes. Revenues were also boosted by those at the top of the income ladder whose marginal taxes were far higher. The top marginal income tax rate during World War II was over 68 percent. In the 1950s, under Dwight Eisenhower, whom few would call a radical, it rose to 91 percent. In the 1960s and 1970s the highest marginal rate was around 70 percent. Even after exploiting all possible deductions and credits, the typical high-income taxpayer paid a marginal federal tax of over 50 percent. But contrary to what conservative commentators had predicted, the high tax rates did not reduce economic growth. To the contrary, they enabled the nation to expand middle-class prosperity and fuel growth.

The Middle-Class Squeeze, 1977-2007

During the Great Prosperity of 1947-1977, the basic bargain had ensured that the pay of American workers coincided with their output. In effect, the vast middle class received an increasing share of the benefits of economic growth. But after that point, the two lines began to diverge: Output per hour -- a measure of productivity -- continued to rise. But real hourly compensation was left in the dust.

It's easy to blame "globalization" for the stagnation of middle incomes, but technological advances have played as much if not a greater role. Factories remaining in the United States have shed workers as they automated. So has the service sector.

But contrary to popular mythology, trade and technology have not reduced the overall number of American jobs. Their more profound effect has been on pay. Rather than be out of work, most Americans have quietly settled for lower real wages, or wages that have risen more slowly than the overall growth of the economy per person. Although unemployment following the Great Recession remains high, jobs are slowly returning. But in order to get them, many workers have to accept lower pay than before.

Starting more than three decades ago, trade and technology began driving a wedge between the earnings of people at the top and everyone else. The pay of well-connected graduates of prestigious colleges and MBA programs has soared. But the pay and benefits of most other workers has either flattened or dropped. And the ensuing division has also made most middle-class American families less economically secure.

Government could have enforced the basic bargain. But it did the opposite. It slashed public goods and investments -- whacking school budgets, increasing the cost of public higher education, reducing job training, cutting public transportation and allowing bridges, ports and highways to corrode.

It shredded safety nets -- reducing aid to jobless families with children, tightening eligibility for food stamps, and cutting unemployment insurance so much that by 2007 only 40 percent of the unemployed were covered. It halved the top income tax rate from the range of 70 to 90 percent that prevailed during the Great Prosperity to 28 to 35 percent; allowed many of the nation's rich to treat their income as capital gains subject to no more than 15 percent tax; and shrunk inheritance taxes that affected only the top-most 1.5 percent of earners. Yet at the same time, America boosted sales and payroll taxes, both of which took a bigger chunk out of the pay the middle class and the poor than of the well off.
 
Ferny-boy, blah, blah, blah.

Do you really think slathering bullshit makes your point?

The fact is, we fell behind because we lost our manufacturing base to other countries. And liberals were every bit as responsible for that as conservatives. Got to save that snail darter.

Yes, private wages went down. But government wages went up, and that's the problem. You hear about a pedophile teacher pulling down six figures for 14 years of no work because the union makes him impossible to fire, and you realize how out of whack the thing has gotten.
 
Fern, isn't this about the fifth time you've posted something like this.

The GOP is tapping into the fact that voters are angry that while they are having to make cuts, they are working until May to pay a tax burden for lazy government workers who make more than they do and have gold-plated benefits, and they still get shitty service whenever they have to deal with a government bureaucracy.

They are angry that half of us are pulling the wagon while the other half are riding in it..

NOw, I think there is a valid argument that can be made that there's a disparity in wealth in this country and that the working class has declined. But the "progressives" who put spotted owls before property rights and let the useless sue for imaginary discrimination have done just as much to kill jobs.

Government workers don't have the gold-plated benefits. Ours are going away (if we ever had them in the first place). Our pay has been frozen and they're talking about freezing it for another 2 years.

It's the unions and union workers that are getting all of these great benefits. Auto workers, teachers, police, and firefighters that are getting the great taxpayer paid benefits.
 
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Progressives believe in openness, equal opportunity, and tolerance. Progressives assume we're all in it together: We all benefit from public investments in schools and health care and infrastructure. And we all do better with strong safety nets, reasonable constraints on Wall Street and big business, and a truly progressive tax system. Progressives worry when the rich and privileged become powerful enough to undermine democracy.

Regressives take the opposite positions.

Eric Cantor, Paul Ryan, Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann and the other tribunes of today's Republican right aren't really conservatives. Their goal isn't to conserve what we have. It's to take us backwards.

They'd like to return to the 1920s -- before Social Security, unemployment insurance, labor laws, the minimum wage, Medicare and Medicaid, worker safety laws, the Environmental Protection Act, the Glass-Steagall Act, the Securities and Exchange Act, and the Voting Rights Act.

In the 1920s Wall Street was unfettered, the rich grew far richer and everyone else went deep into debt, and the nation closed its doors to immigrants.

Rather than conserve the economy, these regressives want to resurrect the classical economics of the 1920s -- the view that economic downturns are best addressed by doing nothing until the "rot" is purged out of the system (as Andrew Mellon, Herbert Hoover's Treasury Secretary, so decorously put it).

In truth, if they had their way we'd be back in the late nineteenth century -- before the federal income tax, antitrust laws, the Pure Food and Drug Act, and the Federal Reserve. A time when robber barons -- railroad, financial, and oil titans -- ran the country. A time of wrenching squalor for the many and mind-numbing wealth for the few.

Listen carefully to today's Republican right and you hear the same Social Darwinism Americans were fed more than a century ago to justify the brazen inequality of the Gilded Age: Survival of the fittest. Don't help the poor or unemployed or anyone who's fallen on bad times, they say, because this only encourages laziness. America will be strong only if we reward the rich and punish the needy.

The regressive right has slowly consolidated power over the last three decades as income and wealth have concentrated at the top. In the late 1970s the richest 1 percent of Americans received 9 percent of total income and held 18 percent of the nation's wealth; by 2007, they had more than 23 percent of total income and 35 percent of America's wealth. CEOs of the 1970s were paid 40 times the average worker's wage; now CEOs receive 300 times the typical workers' wage.

This concentration of income and wealth has generated the political heft to deregulate Wall Street and halve top tax rates. It has bankrolled the so-called Tea Party movement, and captured the House of Representatives and many state governments. Through a sequence of presidential appointments it has also overtaken the Supreme Court.

More

Those who don't know history are destined to repeat it.
Edmund Burke

One of the key traits of the Progressive is that they are pathological liars. What is a "Progressive"? What do they feel is necessary to hide their economic and political philosophy behind the misnomer "Progressive"? They are Statist, Fascist and Marxist but think they are clever by calling themselves "Progressives".

Mao was a Progressive, so was their Uncle Joe Stalin, how did the Chinese and Soviets progress under them?

Progressive = Liar

In so far as the 1920's. Yes it's the last time Conservatives rules the USA. Thanks to Harding and Mellon they dropped unemployment from 12% to 4% in 18 months. How did Progressive FDR do? How is Progressive Obama doing? That they mentioned the 1920's at all is grudging acknowledgement that they've lost they media monopoly and so they are forced to talk about the 1920's and when they do, they lie.

Big Surprise
 
So, now it's regressive to follow the Constitution, eh?


Man, these so-called 'progressives' show their communist slips more and more.

The irony is too thick. Today's 'conservatives' are the closest thing to the communists that infested the Soviet Union. Their worship at the alter of capitalism is as misguided as the communist worship at the alter of government. If we follow their agenda, we will become a failed state. Unless you believe Medieval blood letting saves lives?

Justice is itself the great standing policy of civil society; and any eminent departure from it, under any circumstances, lies under the suspicion of being no policy at all.
Edmund Burke
 
So, now it's regressive to follow the Constitution, eh?


Man, these so-called 'progressives' show their communist slips more and more.

The irony is too thick. Today's 'conservatives' are the closest thing to the communists that infested the Soviet Union. Their worship at the alter of capitalism is as misguided as the communist worship at the alter of government. If we follow their agenda, we will become a failed state. Unless you believe Medieval blood letting saves lives?

Justice is itself the great standing policy of civil society; and any eminent departure from it, under any circumstances, lies under the suspicion of being no policy at all.
Edmund Burke
You are a bit confused. The Constitution specifically limits the power of the federal government to prevent totalitarian oppression, like the Soviets were.

Try to wrap your cute little head around that simple fact.
 
So, now it's regressive to follow the Constitution, eh?


Man, these so-called 'progressives' show their communist slips more and more.

Progressive = Progressing toward the Marxist Utopia that never existed anywhere, not ever
 

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